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More "Motley" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... for these people would give you no rest, would observe no rules of war, and were desperately earnest in their desire by hook or by crook to do you an injury. I began to realise how odious was our task as I looked upon the motley but ferocious groups who were gathered round the watch-fires in the garden of the Convent of the Madonna. It was not for us soldiers to think about politics, but from the beginning there always seemed to be a curse upon ...
— The Adventures of Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... sickened as he contemplated the motley mass of humanity that presented itself with such eagerness for the attainment of so degrading an office; and as he listened to their vulgar boastings and brutal language, he blushed to think that such men were ...
— The Garies and Their Friends • Frank J. Webb
... into the saloon. His five feet eleven inches and one hundred and eighty pounds were more noticeable there, and it was part of his plan to attract attention to himself. No one, however, appeared to notice him. The pool-players were noisily intent on their game, the same crowd of motley-robed Mexicans hung over the reeking bar. Gale's roving glance soon fixed upon the man he took to be Rojas. He recognized the huge, high-peaked, black sombrero with its ornamented band. The Mexican's face was turned aside. He was in earnest, ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... come!' said Beletski, without the least surprise. 'But isn't it a pretty picture?' he added, pointing to the motley crowds. ...
— The Cossacks • Leo Tolstoy
... sweet Dawn on brighter fields afar Has walked among the daisies, and has breathed The glory of the mountain winds, and sheathed The stubborn sword of Night's last-shining star. In Bathrolaire when Day's old doors unbar The motley mask, fantastically wreathed, Pass through a strong portcullis brazen teethed, And enter glowing mines of cinnabar. Stupendous prisons shut them out from day, Gratings and caves and rayless catacombs, And the unrelenting rack and tourniquet Grind death in cells where jetting gaslight ...
— Forty-Two Poems • James Elroy Flecker
... authority, which, as subsequent events and later researches have shown, was the real intention in issuing the passport. Entirely unsuspecting any ulterior motive, however, in a few days after his arrival he convoked a motley gathering of Filipinos of all grades of the population, for he seems to have been only slightly acquainted among his own people and not at all versed in the mazy Walpurgis dance of Philippine politics, and laid before it the constitution for a Liga Filipina (Philippine League), an organization ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... Garden, he had come upon a sculptor's shop, oddly crowded in among Cockney carters and decaying vegetables. Faces of Greece and Rome gazed at him suddenly from a broad window, and for a few moments he forsook the motley beauty of modern London for the ordered ...
— The Worshipper of the Image • Richard Le Gallienne
... the plenteous supply of drink and free feeding;[1] and partly impelled by their savage fury against the "Hirish" or the "Fenians,"—suddenly become convertible terms with English writers and speakers—a motley mass of several thousands, mainly belonging to the most degraded of the population, were enrolled. All the streets in the neighbourhood of the prison were closed against public traffic, were occupied by police or "specials," and were crossed at close intervals by ponderous wooden barriers. ...
— The Dock and the Scaffold • Unknown
... motley crew was this first German party landed at Melbourne. I fear they were not all vinedressers. But the difficulty was to get them to describe themselves as such, even when they were so. This was almost as hard upon them as for an Indian Brahmin to write himself down a low-caste Hindoo. Upon any pretence ...
— Personal Recollections of Early Melbourne & Victoria • William Westgarth
... Cal!" cried Eddring, suddenly. "Open the gates! Let 'em out! I want to hear 'em holler!" The pack poured out, motley, vociferous, eager for the chase, filling the air with their wild music, with a riot of primeval, savage life. "Get me a horse saddled, Cal, quick," cried Eddring. "I want to feel leather under me again. I want to feel the air in my ears. I've got to ride, ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... Commandant Eloff, their leader, were then being marched through the town to the Masonic Hall, followed by a large crowd of jeering and delighted natives. Two of the nurses and myself ran over to look at them, and I never saw a more motley crew. In the dim light of a few oil-lamps they represented many nationalities, the greater part laughing, joking, and even singing, the burghers holding themselves somewhat aloof, but the whole community ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... recollection. At our feet flowed the Vire under its old stone bridge. On the middle of the bridge lay the figure of Shrove Tuesday on a litter of leaves, surrounded by scores of maskers dancing, singing, and carrying torches. Some of them in their motley costumes ran along the parapet like fiends. The rest, worn out with their revels, sat on the posts and dozed. Soon the dancing stopped, and some of the troop, seizing a torch, set fire to the effigy, after which they ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... an absorbing play in which a man loses the world but remains captain of his soul; actually he ends his life rather than exhibit himself as motley to the multitude. As a foil for the idealist Hetman—who is a sort of inverted Nietzsche; also a self-portrait in part of the dramatist—there is the self-seeking scamp Launhart who succeeds with the very ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... woods! thou motley fool! Who shall thy gay buffoonery describe? Thine ever-ready notes of ridicule Pursue thy fellows still with jest and gibe. Wit—sophist—songster—Yorick of thy tribe, Thou sportive satirist of Nature's school, To thee the palm of scoffing we ascribe, Arch scoffer, and mad Abbot ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... hesitated before enlisting them. They were a mosaic of whites and blacks, men and boys, their clothes tatters, their equipments burlesques on military array, their horses—for they were all mounted—parodies on the noble war-charger. At the head of this motley array was a small-sized, thin-faced, modest-looking man, his uniform superior to that of his men, but no model of neatness, yet with a flashing spirit in his eye that admonished the amused soldiers not to laugh at his men in his presence. Behind his back they laughed ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... in what he knew at once to be the garb of a jester. A tall scarlet velvet cap, with three peaks, bound with gold braid, and each surmounted with a little gilded bell, crowned his head, a small crimson ridge to indicate the cock's comb running along the front. His jerkin and hose were of motley, the left arm and right leg being blue, their opposites, orange tawny, while the nether stocks and shoes were in like manner black and scarlet counterchanged. And yet, somehow, whether from the way of wearing it, or from the effect of the gold embroidery meandering over all, ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... men generally took the form of half-lengths with the simplest backgrounds. His subjects were of all kinds—Tennyson and Browning, Rossetti and Burne-Jones, Gladstone, Mill, Motley, Joachim, Thiers, and Anthony Panizzi.[34] His object was a national one, and the foreigners admitted to the company were usually closely connected with England. Sometimes the pose of the body and the hands helps the conception, as in Lord Lytton and Cardinal ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... near enough to deliver the legs of mutton which had been ordered; the lumbering coal-carts 'still stopped the way.' A crowd—the easiest curiosity in the world to collect—soon gathered round the motley mob of butchers, bakers, candlestick-makers, and makers and sellers of everything else that mortal can want; the mob thronged the pavement, the carts filled the road, and soon the carriages of the noble of the ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... new regiments came a motley mixture of veterans of volunteer organizations, newly released slaves, and some freedmen of several years' standing but without military experience. They were eager to learn, and soon showed the same traits which distinguish the black regiments to-day,—loyalty ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... A motley company have here performed their parts: Savages of the mound-building age, rearing upon these banks curious earthworks for archaeologists of the nineteenth century to puzzle over; Iroquois war-parties, silently swooping upon sleeping villages of the ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... came back again, this time as king, with a motley army of mercenaries gathered to crush the two brothers De Lacy, who for the moment dominated all Ireland—the one, Hugo, being Earl of Ulster, and Viceroy; the other, Walter, Lord of ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... were found to be but a momentary protection, for I think in the first mile the last one went overboard, all having their covers burnt off from the frames, when a general melee took place among the deck passengers, each whipping his neighbour to put out the fire. They presented a very motley appearance on arriving at the first station." Here, "a short stop was made, and a successful experiment tried to remedy the unpleasant jerks. A plan was soon hit upon and put into execution. The three links in ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... of my brave dragoons. This was a most popular movement—the men, the very horses, evidently rejoiced. The fatigue of our hard riding was past in a moment—the riders laughed and sang, the chargers snorted and pranced; and, when we trotted, huzzaing, into the baggage lines, half their motley crowd evidently conceived that some sovereign prince was come in fiery haste to make the campaign. We were received with all the applause that is given by the suttler to all arrivals with a full purse ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... a bigoted or militant type; heresy had been wide-spread there since the thirteenth century, and the inhabitants had not the horror of it that was felt in some more orthodox countries. [Footnote: Motley, Rise of the ...
— European Background Of American History - (Vol. I of The American Nation: A History) • Edward Potts Cheyney
... pressed the knight's hand, caressed Bevis, who received his kindness graciously, and went home to dreams of happiness, which were realized, as far as this motley world permits, within ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... our party, who were younger and lighter of foot than we sober married folks, ran on before; so that when the blanket, that served the purpose of a door, was unfastened, we found a motley group of the dark skins and the pale faces reposing on the blankets and skins that were spread round the walls of ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... 'The motley crew, in vessels new, With Satan for their guide, sir, Pack'd up in bags, or wooden kegs, Come driving down ...
— The Old Bell Of Independence; Or, Philadelphia In 1776 • Henry C. Watson
... Quixote the "poetry of comedy," "the age of gold in self-mockery,"—pays a more reserved tribute to Calderon, ventures on the assertion that Cortes was "as great as Alexander," and gives a sketch, so graphic that it might serve as a text for Motley's great work, of the way in which the decayed Iberian chivalry, rotten through with the Inquisition, broke itself on the Dutch dykes. After a brief outline of the rise of the German power, which had three avatars—the overwhelming of Rome, the Swiss resistance to ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... that thing which is least, why take ye thought for the rest?" I got my worsted and sat down stairs at my work, to be ready to see the doctor when he should come. Mrs. Sandford took post at the window; and so we waited. The weather to-day was clear and bright; the street full yet of motley groups, returned soldiers and gathered civilians, looking however far less dismal than the day before. Mrs. Sandford from the window detailed all she saw; while my worsted needle went in and out to an interrupted refrain ...
— Daisy in the Field • Elizabeth Wetherell
... but how about practice? I am exasperated! there is the simple fact. And is it not enough? What a scene I have just witnessed! A motley crew of thousands of low people of all colors parading the streets with flags, torches, music, and all other accompaniments, shouting, screaming, exulting over the fall of Port Hudson and Vicksburg. The ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... unsubstantial in fact, but in appearance brilliant and pompous, had failed in his undertaking, and exposed himself to ridicule: but now, when he was going to commence the war a second time, taught by experience he concentrated his powers in a real and effectual preparation. Rejecting those motley numbers and many-tongued threats of the barbarians, and arms ornamented with gold and precious stones, which he considered to be the spoils of the victors, and to give no strength to those who possess ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... sermon. For the clerical virus was strong in Emerson, and it was not for nothing that he was descended from eight generations of preachers. His concern was primarily with religion and ethics, not with the tragedy and comedy of personal lives, this motley face of things, das bunte Menschenleben. Anecdotes and testimonies abound to illustrate this. See him on his travels in Europe, least picturesque of tourists, hastening with almost comic precipitation past galleries, ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... lightning-quick intelligence and heavy heart, and these are the Hamlet qualities which were not brought into prominence in the youthful Romeo. Passages taken at haphazard will suffice to establish my contention. "Motley's the only wear," says Jaques, as if longing to assume the cap and bells, and Hamlet plays the fool's part with ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... the seals might charge 'em in a herd, bein' angered by the loss of their mates. In this way they pretty well cleared out the cave—all but one great beauty that old Leggo had sworn to take alive. For, instead of bein' yellow or motley-brown like the rest, this fellow was white as milk all over, besides bein' powerful as any other two. He seemed to know from the first that the three men didn't mean to shoot him. The lanterns and the firing never hurried him a bit, and he never threw himself into a rage over the ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... the coast, and on we went, steaming, smoking, and splashing, after the most orthodox fashion of fire-boats in general. I had now time and opportunity to look around me. Every available spot of the deck and paddle-boxes of the small, flat-bottomed iron steamer, was crowded with as motley a set of passengers as ever sailed since the days of Captain Noah. Sepoys returning from furlough to join their regiments; lascars, or enlisted workmen belonging to the different civil branches of the army; and camp-followers in all their varieties, were everywhere ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various
... with its echoes. The Russian general came rushing from the north upon the right flank of our expiring column, and he brought back with him the winter which had quitted us at the same time with Kutusoff. The news of his threatening march accelerated our steps, and our motley array of from forty to fifty thousand men, women, and children hurried through the forest as rapidly as their weakness and the slipperiness of the ground, from the frost ...
— The Two Great Retreats of History • George Grote
... However, after I left the room the Duke arrived, and said the King [Footnote: The Duke of Clarence now became William IV] intended to appear in uniform, so the Duke, Lord Bathurst, Rosslyn, and Sir J. Murray, who were there, put on their uniforms. The group at the Council was most motley. Lords Grey, Lansdowne, Spencer, Tankerville, Sir J. Warrender, and some others being in black full dress. Lord Camden and some more in uniform, which several sent for after they arrived, as Salisbury and Hardinge. The mass, however, in plain black, some in ...
— A Political Diary 1828-1830, Volume II • Edward Law (Lord Ellenborough)
... of the vestibule, and the brilliantly lighted theatre flashed its colours and splendours upon them. The floor of the pit had been levelled to that of the stage, which, stripped of the scenic apparatus, opened vaster spaces for the motley crew already eddying over it in the waltz. The boxes, tier over tier, blazed with the light of candelabra which added their sparkle to ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... text and authorities by which the Papal Church defends its doctrine of Purgatory. That entailed a long and, no doubt, erudite reply, which lasted not only through the rest of the dinner, but till Mrs. Motley, edified by the discourse, and delighted to notice the undeviating attention which Darrell paid to her distinguished spouse, took advantage of the first full stop, and retired. Fairthorn finished his bottle of port, and, far from convinced that there was no Purgatory, but inclined to advance ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... lackeys, with smoking dishes and, full jugs, passed and repassed continually, although it was long past midnight. On entering the hall, they found Sir Randal at the head of a vast table, surrounded by a fiercer and more motley collection of individuals than had congregated there even in the time of Sir Rollo. The lord of the castle had signified that "it was his royal pleasure to be drunk," and the gentlemen of his train had obsequiously followed their master. Mercurius was delighted ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... group of dirty, disreputable-looking buildings containing the saloons, gambling houses and dance halls. He had little need of a guide, for, before the shabbiest and most disreputable of the entire lot, was gathered a motley crowd, gazing with awestruck curiosity at the building in which had been enacted the tragedy of the night before. It was a saloon with gambling rooms in the rear. Here Morgan had played his last game,—just to see what luck he would have,—as ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... parties, while La Rousseil, recently converted, howled a hymn, Durtal, sitting in a corner having a quiet smoke, had been struck by the physiognomy and bearing of Des Hermies, who stood out sharply from the motley throng of defrocked priests and grubby poets packed into Chantelouve's library ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... Kirk that nursed, The Brownists and the ranters' crew; Foul error's motley vesture first Was oaded (98) in a northern blue; And what's th' enthusiastick breed, Or men of Knipperdolin's creed, But Cov'nanters ...
— Cavalier Songs and Ballads of England from 1642 to 1684 • Charles Mackay
... velvet plumage gay, With many an amorous dame, Fierce strutted o'er the way; And motley ducks Were waddling seen, And drake with neck Of ...
— Cottage Poems • Patrick Bronte
... also a tragedy, was first published under the title of The Discontented Colonel, in 1639, as a satire on the Scottish insurgents. The Goblins, a comedy in five acts, is enlivened by the presence of a motley crew of devils, clowns, wenches, and fiddlers; and an unfinished piece, entitled The Sad One, may also be classed as a tragedy, as it opens briskly with a 'murder within' in the very first scene, which undoubtedly ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... with their motley crews of Negroes and Indians, the vultures soaring overhead or walking lazily on the beach, and the crowds of swallows on the churches and housetops, all served to occupy our attention till the custom-house officers visited us, and we were allowed to go on shore. Para contains about ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... an unused room in the village hotel there began to accumulate a motley collection—a clock, a marble-topped table, a cradle, a patchwork quilt, a bureau, a hair wreath, a chair worn with age and use. And as this collection grew in size and fame, only that family which could not add to it counted itself abused and unfortunate, so great ...
— Across the Years • Eleanor H. Porter
... with the motley throng, my ears alert for any spoken opinions. I had seen the flying-belt thrown from the machine and the stoppage of the engine. I wanted now to learn something of the hot breath of the people who had set it in motion eleven months and ten ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith
... with thy motley coat, That from thy vaulted, wiry dungeon singest, Like thee I am a captive, and, like thee, I have ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... pressings, and rubbings; The varying madness of the crew, The anthill's ravings bring to view; But thou shalt see all this express'd, As though 'twere in a magic chest. Write these things down for folks on earth, In hopes they may to wit give birth."— Then she a window open'd wide, And show'd a motley crowd outside, All kinds of beings 'neath the sky, As in his writings one ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... honour; but we were not ashamed. Weak if we were and foolish, not thus we failed, not thus; When that black Baal blocked the heavens he had no hymns from us. Children we were—our forts of sand were even as weak as we, High as they went we piled them up to break that bitter sea. Fools as we were in motley, all jangling and absurd, When all church bells were silent our cap and bells ...
— Poems • G.K. Chesterton
... certain. She counted the days that must elapse before he would return from Opar and discover what had transpired during his absence. After that it would be but a short time before he had surrounded the Arab stronghold and punished the motley crew of wrongdoers who ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Sinnett move mysteriously in the performance of their wonders; and the wealthy tourist from America, the botanist from Berlin, and the casual peer from Great Britain, are not wanting to complete the motley crowd. There are no roads in Simla proper where it is possible to drive, excepting one narrow way, reserved when I was there, and probably still set apart, for the exclusive delectation of the Viceroy. Every one rides—man, woman, and child; and every variety ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford
... two horribly-ugly, black-faced pugs, underneath the driving seat of his vehicle; and you may generally hear his approach, when distant more than a mile, through the chirping, and squeaking, and squalling, of his motley cargo. ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... various tobacco stores close, and their thousand of employees turn out into the streets. They form a motley yet effective feature among the wayfarers. The Malay girls are usually very pretty, with languishing eyes, shaded by long lashes, and supple figures, whose graceful lines are revealed by their thin clothing. In fine weather their bare feet ...
— The Boys of '98 • James Otis
... was full. It was a motley crowd, as all classes of Winsted were represented. The would-be Smart Set in rather elaborate hats and gowns, mingled with the quieter Three R's, and their own maid servants and the "gentlemen friends" ...
— The Wide Awake Girls in Winsted • Katharine Ellis Barrett
... a fine creature!" thought the captain. "I don't mind how much I see of her—but as to the rest of this motley herd, my mother is quite right in not letting the girls have anything to do with them. I suppose I put my foot in it bringing them here to-night. Well, that can't be helped now. I hope Miss Beatrice will soon come back. Her eyes flashed when I said even a word against those terrible little friends ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... gentle, superstitious, ignorant race, devoutly subject to their priests and trained to the letter of their religious rites, came in from the mountains and the neighboring villages in numbers but rarely seen in the city: a motley throng—yet no shepherd among them was too poor to wear the boot of dark-green leather reaching to the knee—the bodine roughly fashioned and tough enough to protect them from the bites of the serpents ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... noted so many times before, the motley appearance of the army, but with involuntary motion he began to straighten and smooth his own shabby uniform. He was about to enter the presence of a woman and he was young and so ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... They run to escape the fearful storm. They leave arms, ammunition, tents, blankets, trunks, clothes, books, letters, papers, pictures,—everything. They pour out of the intrenchments into the road leading to Dover, a motley rabble. A small steamboat lies in the creek above the fort. Some rush on board and steam up river with the utmost speed. Others, in their haste and fear, plunge into the creek and sink to rise no more. All fly except a brave little band in ...
— My Days and Nights on the Battle-Field • Charles Carleton Coffin
... Holy Ghost, he goes his way Wisdom his motley, Truth his loving jest; The mills of Satan keep his lance in play, Pity and innocence his ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... custodian, "and 'is lordship does not entertain, unless it be the new fool 'is lordship sent down 'ere to-day, who has been mopin' and moonin' in the corridors, as is ever the way of these wittol creatures when they are not heeded. He was 'ere in a rare motley of his own choosing, with which he thinks to raise a laugh, a moment ago. Ye see him not—not 'avin' the gift that belongs by right to my dread office. 'Tis a weird privilege I have—and may not be imparted ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... sixty, all told; of whom, however, Jack Keene, midshipman, and Tasker, the gunner's mate—who in his new ship held the rank of gunner—were the only individuals with whom I had already been shipmate; the rest were a motley crowd indeed, collected out of the gutters and slums of Freetown. The Dolphin, it was arranged, was to act in the first instance as tender to the Eros; but, later, might perhaps be detached for certain special work which was just then beginning to attract ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... perhaps, never held a more motley crowd of revelers than on the night of the Famous Fiction masquerade. The faculty, who had been particularly interested in the idea of the masquerade, declared that for originality it was in line ...
— Grace Harlowe's Fourth Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... with the crowd who waited on the human hyena to be cured of their hurts. It was a motley crowd that filled the dreaded pro-consul's ante-chamber—men, women and children—all of them too much preoccupied with their own troubles to bestow more than a cursory glance on the stranger who, wrapped in a dark mantle, quietly awaited ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... way of seeing Venice: but I would much rather sit at a little table on the Riva degli Schiavoni, with a plate of bread and cheese and a mezzo of Chianti before me, watching the motley crowd in the street and the many-coloured sails in the harbour; or spend a lazy afternoon in a gondola, floating through watery alley-ways that lead nowhere, and under the facades of beautiful palaces whose names I did not ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... a start and an exclamation of amaze. Seated at the table within the recess, his chin resting on his hand, and his face cast down in abstracted revery, was a young man. So still was his attitude, so calmly mournful the expression of his face, so estranged did he seem from all the motley but brilliant assemblage which circled around the solitude he had made for himself, that he might well have been deemed one of those visitants from another world whose secrets the intruder had wished to learn. Of that intruder's presence he was evidently unconscious. Recovering ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... wandering disposition, romantic characters many of them, resembling the rovers and adventurers in the Caribbean or representing some of the many activities prevalent in England at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Thomas Weston, former ally of the Pilgrims, settled with a motley crew of rude fellows at Wessagusset (Quincy) and there established a trading post in 1622. Of this settlement, which came to an untimely end after causing the Pilgrims a great deal of trouble, only ...
— The Fathers of New England - A Chronicle of the Puritan Commonwealths • Charles M. Andrews
... sweat-streaked, motley-dressed homeseekers would straggle up to this end of the long trail. Their thoughts went back to their old homes, or to the loved ones that they had laid away tenderly in the shifting sands of the Plains. Most of them ...
— Ox-Team Days on the Oregon Trail • Ezra Meeker
... the clown had, at first, pretended to join in the pursuit of the nimble runaways, but only pretended. Then he suddenly perceived that they were growing breathless and had almost fallen beneath the feet of a mighty Norman horse. The man beneath his motley uniform rose to the emergency. Catching the bridle of a near-by pony, he flung the monkey from its back, scooped the babies up from the ground, set them in the monkey's place and, mounting behind them, triumphantly ...
— Dorothy's House Party • Evelyn Raymond
... Among all these unfamiliar sights and sounds I ranged disconsolate, awed by the vast concourse, deafened by the universal uproar, and not a little disgusted by the coarse humour and rough horse-play of this truly motley throng. ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... just such cravings, impossible of realization, and therefore all the more tantalizing. She had been a year in the wilderness, and the wilderness had not only lost its glamour, but had become a thing to flee from. Even the rude motley of Hazleton was a welcome change. Here at least—on a minor scale, to be sure—was that which she craved, and to which she had been accustomed—life, stir, human activity, the very antithesis of the lonely mountain fastnesses. She bestowed ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... gangway, and when presently it was raised to the side of the steamer, he still kept his position, so that he could instantly catch sight of his father as he passed down. I stood close behind him, and watched the motley procession of passengers; most of them had the dull colourless skin which bespeaks long residence in India, and a particularly yellow and peevish-looking old man was grumbling loudly as he slowly made his ...
— Derrick Vaughan—Novelist • Edna Lyall
... Sepulchre gazed down upon the city of my longing eyes with silent emotion and prayer. Every Christian bared his head; every Moslem and Jew saluted. We rode towards the Jaffa Gate, outside of which were stalls of horses and donkeys, and a motley crowd, including lines of hideous-looking lepers. I went to the Damascus Hotel, a comfortable and very quiet hostel, with no tourists or trippers, of which I was glad, for I had come on a devotional ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... clear enough line. Two such examples in real life as Rousseau and Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, one such demonstration of the same moral in fiction as Werther, were enough to discourage the man of feeling. Therefore, when he still exists, he takes to motley, the only wear for the human race in troublesome circumstances which beset it with unpleasant recurrence. When you cannot exactly believe anything in religion, in politics, in literature, in art, and yet neither wish nor know how to do without it, the safe way is to ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... its origin in a laicising of the irreverent celebration of the Feast of Fools, or in that parade of fools which sometimes preceded a Mystery, it was essentially a farce, but a farce in which the performers, arrayed in motley, and wearing the long-eared cap, distributed between them the several roles of human folly. Associations of sots, known in Paris as Enfants sans Souci, known in other cities by other names, presented the unwisdom or madness of the world ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... London, this morning; now, I knowing of this hunting-match, or rather conspiracy, and to insinuate with my young master (for so must we that are blue waiters, and men of hope and service do, or perhaps we may wear motley at the year's end, and who wears motley, you know), have got me afore in this disguise, determining here to lie in ambuscado, and intercept him in the mid-way. If I can but get his cloke, his purse, and his hat, nay, any thing to cut him off, that is, ...
— Every Man In His Humor - (The Anglicized Edition) • Ben Jonson
... help me untie this rope, I b'lieve the crockery's in here," said Mrs. Nichols to 'Lena, who soon opened the chest, disclosing to view as motley a variety of ...
— 'Lena Rivers • Mary J. Holmes
... front, with its neat farm-houses at the eastern point, and its high bluff at the western extremity, crowned with the telegraph—the middle space occupied by tents and sheds for the cholera patients, and its wooded shores dotted over with motley groups—added greatly to the picturesque effect of the land scene. Then the broad, glittering river, covered with boats darting to and fro, conveying passengers from twenty-five vessels, of various size and tonnage, which rode ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... distinguished people of whom I could now record nothing interesting but their names. Still, it is a privilege to have known such men as John Lawrence, Guizot, Thiers, Landseer, Merimee, Comte de Flahault, Doyle, Lords Elgin and Dalhousie, Duc de Broglie, Pelissier, Panizzi, Motley, Delane, Dufferin; and of gifted women, the three Sheridans, Lady Seymour - the Queen of Beauty, afterwards Duchess of Somerset - Mrs. Norton, and Lady Dufferin. Amongst those who have a retrospective interest were Mr. and Lady Blanche Balfour, ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... heard Sir John Johnson slandered because he uses the Iroquois. But do not the rebels use them, too? My kinsman, General Haldimand, says that not only do the rebels employ the Oneidas, but that their motley congress enlists any Indian who will take ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... Highness were his brother Prince Alfred, the Duke of Cambridge, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Earl Russell and the Earl of Derby. In 1867 and in 1870 he also spoke and on the latter occasion the speakers included Mr. J. Lothrop Motley, the American Minister, and Charles Dickens. At the banquet in 1871 the Prince spoke and at that of 1874 he drew special attention to the picture, "Calling the Roll," which afterwards made Miss Elizabeth Thompson so famous, and to a statue by J. E. Boehm ...
— The Life of King Edward VII - with a sketch of the career of King George V • J. Castell Hopkins
... brown-haired goats driven by milkmen through the streets; and, assembled near the dock around a group of English Salvation Army lads and lasses who were singing familiar hymns accompanied by cornet and drum, we saw a motley crowd of men, many of whom from their diverse and peculiar costumes were evidently sailors from various ports of the world. Then, having completed our hurried tramp through the city in the time allotted for that purpose, we ...
— A Trip to the Orient - The Story of a Mediterranean Cruise • Robert Urie Jacob
... Motley's John of Barnveld, you have always been inclined To speak,—well,—somewhat frankly,—to let us know your mind, And the Mynheers would have told you to be cautious what you said, Or else that silver tongue of yours ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... follies of which he could be capable. He considered himself as an inexhaustible quarry of humours, vanities, jealousies, whims, absurd enthusiasms, absurd mortifications. He was able, as he said, to sit at his ease in the side-scene and see himself jigging on the stage in motley or the tragic sock—see himself as a lover, and cry aloud in delight at the mad persistence of the fool he appeared; see himself directing the affairs of the nation, and be ready to die of laughing at himself for pretending to be serious, and at his countrymen for thinking him ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... fable, is unpleasingly broken. The spectators cannot bear to be so suddenly tossed from the serious to the mirthful, and from the mirthful to the serious. In short, such an heterogeneous adulteration has all the absurdity reproached to the motley mixture in tragi-comedy, without any thing of that connection which is preserved in that kind of justly exploded dramatic composition. How easy too to avoid this defect, by adapting the subjects of the dances to the different exigences of the different ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... few minutes the page came back, followed, close at his heels, by a man in motley dress, with a viol hung over his shoulders, Count Pierre, without waiting to greet the latter, thrust the parchment into his hands ...
— Gabriel and the Hour Book • Evaleen Stein
... claim to genius, if not to greatness. It is curious to observe how at this early period of Carlyle's life, when all the talent and learning of England bowed at these levees before the gigantic speculator and dreamer, he, perhaps alone, stood aloof from the motley throng of worshippers,—with them, but not of them,—coolly analyzing every sentence delivered by the oracle, and sufficiently learned in the divine lore to separate the gold from the dross. What was good and productive he was ready to recognize and assimilate; ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... making the ends of the earth contribute to his pictorial guazzetto;[L] and the certainty, that unless the composition of the latter be regulated by severe judgment, and its members connected by natural links, it must become more contemptible in its motley, than an honest study of ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... as the fog broke away before the waving plume, he saw that the sun was rising. Issuing with its bright beams through the passes of the snowy mountains beyond appeared a strange and motley crew. Instead of the dark and romantic visages of his last phantom train, the Father beheld with strange concern the blue eyes and flaxen hair of a Saxon race. In place of martial airs and musical utterance, ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... minutes afterwards the two Indians entered the defile, and the goats and sheep, which had been spread widely over the open valley, scampered, crowded, and overleaped one another as they closed into the narrow way. There seemed to be fully two thousand of them, intermingled with a motley herd of horses, mules, asses, and kine of all sizes and descriptions, numbering three hundred or more, all driven by a party ...
— Captured by the Navajos • Charles A. Curtis
... boyish mind a bundle made of scores of different sorts of black pieces rolled together is anything but expressive. On first opening it, Donald looked hopelessly at the motley heap; but the kind woman helped him somewhat by rapidly throwing piece after piece aside, with, "That can't be it—that's like little Tom's trousers;" "Nor that,—that's what I wore for poor mother;" "Nor that—that's ...
— Donald and Dorothy • Mary Mapes Dodge
... copies, where he could not, certificates and journals, catching at every gossipping story he could hear of in any quarter, supplying by suspicions what he could find no where else, and then arguing on this motley farrago, as if established on gospel evidence. And while expressing his wonder, 'at the age of eighty-eight, the strong passions of Mr. Adams should not have cooled '; that on the contrary, 'they had acquired the mastery of his soul,' (p. 100 ;) that 'where these were enlisted, no ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... to show is that the search for consistency and connection in the manifold impressions of the moment is a deeply rooted habit of the mind, and one which is retained in a measure during sleep. When, in this state, our minds are invaded by a motley crowd of unrelated images, there results a disagreeable sense of confusion; and this feeling acts as a motive to the attention to sift out those products of the dream-fancy which may be made to cohere. When once the foundations of a dream-action are laid, new images must to some extent fit ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... "Fret not thyself because of evil-doers" (Psa. 37:1) "Be not thou afraid when one is made rich, when the glory of his house is increased" (Psa. 49:16). But go thou into the sanctuary of thy God, read His Word, and understand the end of these men-(Mason). Often, as the motley reflexes of my experience move in long processions of manifold groups before me, the distinguished and world-honoured company of Christian mammonists appear to the eye of my imagination as a drove of camels heavily laden, yet all at full speed; and each in the confident ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... patiently for the motley train of Hard-Heart to disappear. When his scout reported that the last straggler of the Indians, who had joined their chief so soon as he was at such a distance from the encampment as to excite no jealousy by their numbers, had gone behind the most distant swell of the prairie, he gave forth ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... keepers and their families, and when cases of suffering come to their knowledge, as lately, when a keeper at the South was burnt out and lost all his possessions, are prompt with their assistance. In this instance they helped to sort and arrange the motley piles of donated literature, which was then bound up nicely, in uniform volumes, at the Government Printing Office, and a neat little library-case of strong oak wood was made, fitted up with shelves and having heavy metal clasps and handles; and just so many volumes, ...
— Illustrated Science for Boys and Girls • Anonymous
... a motley regiment, Some young in the war of life, Some chiefs in the Royal Army, Some old and sick with strife, Some limped in the sacred pathway, Some were foot sore and worn, Some had their lances all shivered, ...
— Victor Roy, A Masonic Poem • Harriet Annie Wilkins
... which, though not luxurious, was tolerably comfortable. After the fatigue of his journey, Ben enjoyed a good supper and a comfortable bed. The evening, however, he spent in the public room of the inn, where he had a chance to listen to the conversation of a motley crowd, some of them native and residents, others strangers who had been drawn to Centerville ...
— The Store Boy • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... residence at Nicomedia. As to the sentiment of patriotism of which you vaunt, was it not destroyed by your own emperors? When they had made Roman citizens of Gauls and Egyptians, Africans and Huns, Spaniards and Syrians, how could they expect that such a motley crew would remain true to the interests of an Italian town, and that town their hated oppressor. Patriotism depends on concentration; it cannot bear diffusion. Something more than such a worldly tie was wanted to bind the diverse nations together; they have found it in ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... well-dressed mob have thronged the sight to greet, And motley figures throng the spacious street; Majestical and calm through all they stride, Wearing the blanket with a monarch's pride; The gazers stare and shrug, but can't deny Their noble forms and blameless symmetry. If the Great ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... thither for bathing and flirtation in the season. When July's sun turns its tranquil mirror to hues of amber and gold, the slender mosquito sings Hum, sweet Hum, along its margin; and when Autumn hangs his livery of motley on the trees, the glassy surface breathes out a mist wherefrom arises a spectre, with one hand of ice and the other of flame, to scatter Chills and Fever. Strolling beside this picturesque watering-place in the dusk, ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 16, July 16, 1870 • Various
... critics of the day, and that was satirical writing. They could not tolerate that style—no, not for a moment; and many an author has had his cap and bells, aye, and the lining too, severed from the rest of his motley, simply because he would go and play with Satyrs instead of keeping company with plain ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... sang of war in the warm wet shires, Where rain nor fruitage fails, Where England of the motley states Deepens like a garden to the gates In the purple walls ...
— The Ballad of the White Horse • G.K. Chesterton
... Jean at once classed them—had ever seen Jean, but they knew him and knew that he was expected in Grass Valley. All but the one who had spoken happened to have their faces in shadow under the wide-brimmed black hats. Motley-garbed, gun-belted, dusty-booted, they gave Jean the same impression of latent force that he ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... undertaking proved how surely he had deserved and won the confidence of his superior officers. In those days railroad travelling was far from pleasant. The train upon which Lieutenant Chalaron embarked at Knoxville was a motley affair,—perhaps a single passenger-car, rough and dilapidated (crowded with those who, though ill, made shift to sit up or recline upon the seats), box-cars and cattle-cars filled with suffering men helplessly sick. In order that these might ...
— Memories - A Record of Personal Experience and Adventure During Four Years of War • Fannie A. (Mrs.) Beers
... Under this motley ceiling the room showed plainly it was the living-room of the house. There was a large cooking-stove that shone so you might have seen your face in it, a row of wash-tubs, leaning bottom side up against the wall, two wooden ...
— Miss Ashton's New Pupil - A School Girl's Story • Mrs. S. S. Robbins
... Total Abstinence from Tobacco, as well as from Ardent Spirits. Thus, no report of modern times equals the good Squire's summing-up, which he gives on these occasions, from the great farm-wagon tribune, to the multitudinous and motley congregation assembled under his park trees. This year it was unusually rich and piquant, from the expanded area of events and aspects. In presenting these, as bearing upon the causes of Temperance, Peace, Anti-War, Anti- Slavery, Anti-Tobacco, ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... the storm that they might be at that dinner, and some had traversed a thirty mile trail that they might honor the old man and share his generous cheer. It was a remarkable and, perhaps we may say, a motley company that the Trapper looked upon as he took his place, knife and fork in hand, at the head of the table, with a hound on either side of his great chair, to perform the duty of host and ...
— Holiday Tales - Christmas in the Adirondacks • W. H. H. Murray
... Caucus, Causerie, there's an aim Which many know and some might even name; But see yon motley muster, Like shades in Eblis wandering up and down! Types there of every 'Show Class' in the Town Elbow and glide ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, January 25th, 1890 • Various
... Headlong Hall, Esquire, a young Welsh gentleman of means, and of generous though rather unchastened taste, finding, as Peacock says, in the earliest of his gibes at the universities, that there are no such things as men of taste and philosophy in Oxford, assembles a motley host in London, and asks them down to his place at Llanberis. The adventures of the visit (ending up with several weddings) form the scheme of the book, as indeed repetitions of something very little different form the scheme of all the other books, with the exception of The Misfortunes of ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... person presented was to be. Well pleased the little magician hastened away to prove the powers of the spectacles in the theatre; no place seeming to him more fitted for such a trial. He begged permission of the worthy audience, and set his spectacles on his nose. A motley phantasmagoria presents itself before him, which he describes in a few satirical touches, yet without expressing his opinion openly: he tells the people enough to set them all thinking and guessing; but in order to hurt ...
— Andersen's Fairy Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... of the beach, shaded by trees, and crossing a gentle stream. Along this avenue was all the life and commerce of Tai-o-hae. Two traders' shops, empty offices, a gendarme, a handful of motley half-castes lounging under the trees—this was all that was left of former greatness. Only nature had not changed. It flung over the broken remnants of the glory and the dream its lovely cloak of verdure and of flower. ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... hanging lamps, and Rathburn looked about through a haze of tobacco smoke at a cluster of crowded gaming tables, a short bar, cigar counter, and at the motley throng which ...
— The Coyote - A Western Story • James Roberts
... origin in England is confessedly obscure. Prior to the second half of the 16th century, there was little trace of that flood of unorthodox speech which, in this year of grace eighteen hundred and ninety-six, requires six quarto double-columned volumes duly to chronicle—verily a vast and motley crowd! ...
— Musa Pedestris - Three Centuries of Canting Songs - and Slang Rhymes [1536 - 1896] • John S. Farmer
... pleasures. He seemed to know a great deal both about the fishing and the books, though of these not the most edifying; he spoke five or six languages, though chiefly the slang of each. He had evidently lived in varied cities and very motley societies, for some of his cheerfullest stories were about gambling hells and opium dens, Australian bushrangers or Italian brigands. Father Brown knew that the once-celebrated Saradine had spent his ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... mediaeval name and forms of the Holy Roman Empire. The members of this so-called Empire were, however, a multitude of independent States; and the chief of these States, Austria, combined with its German provinces a large territory which did not even in name form part of the Germanic body. The motley of the Empire was made up by governments of every degree of strength and weakness. Austria and Prussia possessed both political traditions and resources raising them to the rank of great European Powers; but the sovereignties of the second order, such as ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... treated like a sans-culotte was guillotined four days before Robespierre, whose death would have saved him. His young widow left prison, reduced to extreme want, and took refuge with her father-in-law, at Fontainebleau; then she made her appearance in the motley society which, first showed itself in the drawing-room of Madame Tallien, then at the Luxembourg under Barras. Rivalling Madame Tallien and Madame Recamier in popularity, she smiled through her tears, like ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... engine, as it approached, was switched upon a side-track, but the cars, from which it had been detached, kept on their course until the brakes brought them to a stand in the depot. The passengers now swarmed forth by hundreds—a curious and motley crowd of men, women, and children; good-looking people, and ill-looking ones; the fine lady in silk, and the rough backwoods-man in homespun; the middle-aged woman in black, with three trunks and four bandboxes, and the smooth-faced dandy, whose sole baggage was ...
— Oscar - The Boy Who Had His Own Way • Walter Aimwell
... lover of virtue of that stamp as any other whatever), if he had listened and laid his ear close to himself and he did so no doubt—would have heard some jarring note of human mixture, but faint and only perceptible to himself. Man is wholly and throughout but patch and motley. Even the laws of justice themselves cannot subsist without mixture of injustice; insomuch that Plato says, they undertake to cut off the hydra's head, who pretend to clear the law ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... belief that Howe aimed at Philadelphia. He therefore gathered his forces and marched south to meet the enemy, passing through the city in order to impress the disaffected and the timid with the show of force. It was a motley array that followed him. There was nothing uniform about the troops except their burnished arms and the sprigs of evergreen in their hats. Nevertheless Lafayette, who had just come among them, thought that they looked like good soldiers, and the Tories woke up sharply ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... neither recover one that he had lost nor summon a fresh one from the border of obscurity that surrounded a centre of almost intolerable brightness into which his mental images glided as into a brilliantly lighted chamber. Into this brightness a troop of hallucinations darted suddenly like a motley and ill-assorted company of players. He saw first a grotesque and indistinct figure, which he discerned presently to be the goblin his nurse had used to frighten him in his infancy; then the face of his uncle, ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... Hurriedly and without changing her dress she had her hair done up and stuck white roses in her chignon and at her bosom. The little room was littered with the drawing-room furniture, which the workmen had been compelled to roll in there, and it was full of a motley assemblage of round tables, sofas and armchairs, with their legs in air for the most part. Nana was quite ready when her dress caught on a castor and tore upward. At this she swore furiously; such things only happened to her! Ragingly she took off her dress, a very simple affair ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... burnished broadsword dangling from his leathern belt. On this occasion they acted as rangers for beating up the thickets and rousing the game. These attendants filled up the court of the castle, spacious as it was. On the green without, you might have seen the motley assemblage of peasantry convened by report of the splendid hunting, including most of our old acquaintances from Tewin, as well as the jolly partakers of good cheer at Hob Filcher's. Gregory the jester, it may well be guessed, ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... lay beneath his glance, a vivid exposition of the vast, half-tamed valley's bounty, spoils, and promise; of its motley human life, scarcely yet to be called society, so lately and rudely transplanted from overseas; so bareboned, so valiantly preserved, so young yet already so titanic; so self-reliant, opinionated, and uncouth; so strenuous and materialistic in ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... all was new and strange. She had a keen, quick eye for character, and a human interest in humanity, even though those around her did not belong to her "set." Therefore it was with appreciative eyes that she watched the motley groups of her fellow-passengers waving handkerchiefs and exchanging farewells with equally diversified ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... stars. Merman and mermaid, nereid and triton, were there, rejoicing in the sunbeams thus poured upon them through this subtle conduit of ocean, as do the motes of summer in her rays; but soon these disappeared, a motley crowd, confused and joyous, leaving the vision free to pierce the depths, glowing with golden light, in search of ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... rather a motley band. Among them, besides those of our friends already mentioned, there were our hero's mother and all the Leather family. Captain Stride's daughter as well as his "Missus," and Mr Crossley's housekeeper, Mrs Bland. That good ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... took the initiative. A number of papers editorially called for a convention, which was really a mass meeting, for there were no accredited delegates, and could be none. This met in Decatur on Washington's birthday, 1856. It was a motley assembly, from a political standpoint. It included whigs, democrats, free-soilers, abolitionists, and know-nothings. Said Lincoln: "Of strange, discordant, even hostile elements, we gathered from ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... Aleksandra?" asked Foma, somewhat deafened by the loud speech of this tall, frank, red-faced fellow clad in a motley costume. ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... the soft clay floor, while the only light, save that of the fire, was furnished by three torches stuck in sockets on the wall, which flickered and crackled, giving forth a strong resinous odor. All this was novel and strange to the cloister-bred youth; but most interesting of all was the motley circle of guests who sat eating their collops round the blaze. They were a humble group of wayfarers, such as might have been found that night in any inn through the length and breadth of England; but to him they represented that vague world against which he had ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... occasion with Mrs. Moffat's assistance. A sewing-school had hitherto been uncalled for, the women's work having been that of building houses, raising fences, and tilling the ground; now Mrs. Moffat met those who desired to learn as often as her strength would permit, and soon she had a motley group of pupils, very few of the whole party possessing either a frock or a gown. The scarcity of materials was a serious impediment to progress, but ornaments, which before the natives had held in high repute, were now parted with to purchase the skins of animals, which being ...
— Robert Moffat - The Missionary Hero of Kuruman • David J. Deane
... the most interesting portion of the exercises had been concealed from view. The butterflies, while naturally the most conspicuous element, were now seen to be in a small minority among the insect gathering, the bramble leaves being peopled with a most motley and democratic assemblage of insects. Class distinctions were apparently forgotten in the common enthusiasm; the plebeian bluebottle and blowfly now consorted with Aphrodite and sipped at the same drop. Many a leaf was begemmed with the blue ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... would, arm in arm, each with his cigar in his mouth, saunter, for hours together, along the leading streets and thoroughfares, making acute observations and deep reflections upon the ever-moving and motley scenes around them. Most frequently, however, they would repair, at half-price, to the theatres; for Snap had the means of securing almost a constant supply of "orders" from the underlings of the theatres, and also from reporters to the Sunday Flash, (with which Messrs. Quirk and Gammon were ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... eyes when he rode into that construction camp. The place was a bedlam. A motley horde of men appeared to be doing everything under the sun but work, and most of them seemed particularly eager to board a long train of box-cars and little old passenger-coaches. Neale made a dive for the train, and his sojourn ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... quarter. An American adventurer, named Ward, a man of considerable military ability, organized a small force of foreigners, which he led to such purpose against the T'ai-p'ings, that he rapidly gathered into its ranks a large if motley crowd of foreigners and Chinese, all equally bent on plunder, and with that end in view submitting to the discipline necessary to success. A long run of victories gained for this force the title of the Ever Victorious Army; until ...
— China and the Manchus • Herbert A. Giles
... has yet appeared upon this continent; Longfellow, with his tender touch; Holmes, with his three o'clock wit, as some one has called it, the man who was always awake; Lowell, with his rich culture and his passionate loyalty to all that was best in life and art; and the historians of the country, Motley, Prescott, Bancroft, and Francis Parkman, with his splendid record of patient and tireless energy. And then we have the New England writers of the second generation in Edmund Clarence Stedman, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Charles Dudley Warner, John Fiske, and Henry James; ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... the Derby Day. Special trains carry thousands, and the field presents a gay picture framed in a quadrangle of equipages. It is sometimes difficult, even by charging large admission-fees, to keep the number of spectators within convenient limits. Notwithstanding the motley assemblage which a match always attracts, so unobjectionable are the associations of the cricket-field that clergymen do not feel it unbecoming to participate in the diversion, either as players, umpires ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... characterizes love; I knew that it was the aureole which crowned the well-beloved. But that she should excite such heart-throbs, that she should evoke such fantoms with nothing but her beauty, her flowers, her motley costume, and a certain trick of turning she had learned from some merry-andrew; and that without a word, without a thought, without even appearing to know it! What was chaos if it required seven days ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... a few of the expressions that came from a motley assemblage of persons as they stood in a train shed in Hoboken, one June morning. Motley indeed was the gathering, and more than one traveler paused to give a second look at the little group. Perhaps a brief list of them may not ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Oak Farm - or, Queer Happenings While Taking Rural Plays • Laura Lee Hope
... madam of a Peoria street resort, the listeners, a motley crowd of women gathered in the rear of a popular saloon and gambling house not far from the corner of Green and Madison streets, on the seething, congested West Side of Chicago. These women had assembled in that screened back ...
— Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls • Jean Turner-Zimmermann
... two hours was employed in clearing the lists, and preparing the ground for the juego de la sortija,[9] which was peculiarly gratifying to the queen. This intermediate time was devoted by the assembled and motley crowd, to the rational, and provident purpose of ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... and Tom went into the beer hall. At the far end was a stage, and on it stood the minstrel, dimmed by intervening tobacco smoke. The floor was covered with damp saw-dust. The place was thronged with a motley crowd, sailors, gamblers, with here and there a sprinkle of wayward respectability. Painted girls attended the tables and everywhere was the slopping of beer and the stench ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... charm for her wild and restless spirit. But from many of the associations of the stage, from nearly all actors and actresses, and from all green-room loungers, she instinctively recoiled, and held herself haughtily aloof from the motley little world behind the scenes,—apparently by no effort, but as sphered apart by the atmosphere of refinement and superiority which enveloped her. Yet she almost constantly accompanied her husband to rehearsal and play, where, for a time, her presence was grateful both to the pride ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... back. Good fortune loosened the poor soprano's tongue, and as soon as the canonesses' litter was a safe distance ahead he began to beguile the way with fragments of reminiscence and adventure. Though few of his allusions were clear to Odo, the glimpse they gave of the motley theatrical life of the north Italian cities—the quarrels between Goldoni and the supporters of the expiring commedia dell' arte—the rivalries of the prime donne and the arrogance of the popular comedians—all these peeps into a tinsel world ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... The longed-for wisdom of to-day shows a kaleidoscopic front, in which are turning the slum-dweller and the millionaire; the white man, the yellow, and the black; the town and the territorial possession. The slave-colony, garbage-laws, magistrates, and murderers are mixed in motley, and there are whirling vacant-lot schemes abroad, potato-patches, wood-yards, organized charity, Wayfarers' Lodges, resounding cries of municipal reform, and various other ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... that part of his growing importance. It would have done Na-tee-kah's proud heart good to have seen him in particular, and it would have been well worth the while of almost anybody else to have had a good look at the whole affair, as the motley array poured out into the moonlight from under the shadowy ...
— Two Arrows - A Story of Red and White • William O. Stoddard
... delayed the beginning of their Lent a whole week after it had been ordained by authority; and they had the pleasure of fasting seven days, while meat was exposed for sale by the command of the emperor. The Samaritans of Palestine [88] were a motley race, an ambiguous sect, rejected as Jews by the Pagans, by the Jews as schismatics, and by the Christians as idolaters. The abomination of the cross had already been planted on their holy mount of Garizim, [89] but the persecution ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... lightened as she left the cabins and the intolerable red sands upon which they were situated. It was not the first time she had seen the uncouth faces and forms of the motley group who had been vengefully regarding her; but their appearance had seemed doubly appalling when viewed in the light of being her associates for life. Out of their sight she breathed freely again, and coming shortly into the main road, a feeling almost ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... Claudio's life. Isabella, perceiving in this conduct only a further proof of the hypocrite's villainy, breaks out once more into a tempest of agonised despair. Upon her cry for immediate revolt against the scoundrelly tyrant, the people collect together and form a motley and passionate crowd. Luzio, who also returns, counsels the people with stinging bitterness to pay no heed to the woman's fury; he points out that she is only tricking them, as she has already tricked him—for he still believes in her shameless infidelity. Fresh confusion; increased despair ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... night, when my custom invites A stroll in old London for curious sights, I am likely to stray by a devious way Where goodies are spread in a motley array, The things which some eyes would appear to despise Impress me as pathos in homely disguise, And my battered waif-friend shall have pennies to spend, So long as I've got 'em (or chums that will lend); And the urchin shall share in my joy and declare That there's beauty and good in the ...
— Songs and Other Verse • Eugene Field
... souvenir in Mr. Stone's motley collection is a cotton print handkerchief, upon which are recorded scenes from the career of the emperor; the thing must have been of English manufacture, for only an Englishman (inspired by that fear and that hatred of Bonaparte which only Englishmen had) ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... She was clad in a russet gown, much the worse for the wear, and a scarlet cloak, or rather a cloak that had once been scarlet, but was now completely faded from its original color. It had been broken here and there, but was pieced with different colored cloths, so as to appear a motley and strange garment; and her bony feet were bare and unprotected. Nanny, from different circumstances, was unanimously elected the witch or bugbear of the village; and though the brats were then so busy annoying her, at night, or in a lonesome place, they would fly like lightning even at her ...
— Ellen Duncan; And The Proctor's Daughter - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... Berkeley, with the motley crowd of sailors, longshoremen, freed slaves, and such as he could collect, sailed for Jamestown and reached it safely September 7th, 1676. The news of his approach reached Jamestown long before he did, and Colonel Hansford, one of ...
— The Real America in Romance, Volume 6; A Century Too Soon (A Story - of Bacon's Rebellion) • John R. Musick
... in 1848, made acquaintance with the fashionable world. He preferred the livelier and less strait ways of the Congressional boarding-house table, the Saturday parties at Daniel Webster's, and the motley crowd at the bowling-alley, as well as the chatterers' corner in the Congressional post-office. Still, as chairman of a committee, and by reason of his being a wonder from the hirsute West, he was invited to the receptions and feasts of the ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... whose volcanic peaks rose two miles in the air, and here a town duly laid out with canals and bridges, and trim gardens and stagnant pools, was baptized by the ancient and well-beloved name of Good Meadow, or Batavia, which it bears to this day" (Motley, ...
— A Visit to Java - With an Account of the Founding of Singapore • W. Basil Worsfold
... symbols of the power and majesty of death in the world. For the involuntary honour paid to death even by the ignorantly busy, and happy, he kept ever a grateful and a jealous eye; and as some funeral cortege passed like a dream, Charon's barge amid all the motley craft of merchandise and pleasure, he would watch sternly to see if the fat and prosperous moment would do honour to the carriages of the king. For a bowed head or a doffed hat he felt a personal gratitude. And, since Jenny died, he seemed to be always meeting that phantom procession ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... tasseled ends. Her arms were bare to the elbows, and gay with bracelets; her hair fell from her forehead and temples, dropping over her shoulders in two ribbon bound braids. A tall, gray-cowled monk, whose military bearing gave the lie to his cassock, a Spanish grandee, and a fool in motley saw her at the same moment and hurried to intercept her, but with a slide which carried him a quarter of the way across the floor the Bedouin arrived first, and before the others had come up he was drifting away with her in the tide of ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... cordiality to be found in no colder latitude, the cosy breakfasts that prefaced days of real enjoyment—the midnight revels of the bal masque! And then the carnival!—those wild weeks when the Lord of Misrule wields his motley scepter—leading from one reckless frolic to another till Mardi Gras culminates in a giddy whirl of delirious fun on which, at midnight, Lent drops ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... which our adventurers were now associated was composed of a motley crew of Red River half-breeds, out for the great spring buffalo hunt. It consisted of nearly 700 hunters, as many women, more than 400 children, and upwards of 1000 carts, with horses and draught oxen, besides about 700 buffalo-runners, or trained hunting-horses, ...
— The Red Man's Revenge - A Tale of The Red River Flood • R.M. Ballantyne
... lunching with "Streff," he became again his old whimsical companionable self. Once or twice she tried to turn the talk to his altered future, and the obligations and interests that lay before him; but he shrugged away from the subject, questioning her instead about the motley company at Violet Melrose's, and fitting a droll or malicious anecdote to each of the people ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... rapidly down, and Brother Shoveller conducted his young companions between the overhanging houses, with stalls between serving as shops, till they reached the open space round the Market Cross, on the steps of which women sat with baskets of eggs, butter, and poultry, raised above the motley throng of cattle and sheep, with their dogs and drivers, the various cries of man and beast forming an incongruous accompaniment to the bells of the churches ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... most enjoyed by the pupil was the narrative of Alexander. Books about that hero were easy to come by long before the invention of printing, though Alexander would have had difficulty in recognising his identity under the strange mediaeval motley in which his namesake wandered over the land. No single man, with the possible exception of Charlemagne, was so much written about or played so brilliantly the part of a hero to the Middle Ages and after.[18] The simplicity and universality ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam
... was safely housed. It was evidently a gala day, for flags and streamers were flying from every window of the Lower Town, and the narrow, crooked streets were filled with wanderers having no apparent business but enjoyment. Never had I viewed so motley a throng, and I could but gaze about with wide-opened eyes on the ...
— Beyond the Frontier • Randall Parrish
... had to be abandoned. With the German retirement the Americans abandoned their positions facing west and rushed down to safety below. It cannot be said that the Americans are afraid; they have merely realised from the beginning what a few of us have understood. The motley crowd gathered in the British Legation, as well as our commander-in-chief, were much stirred by the American retirement, for they already saw themselves directly bombarded from the menacing height of the city walls—a prospect ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... seen. The patients wore costumes designed and made by themselves, in marked contrast to their stylish keepers. Among the guests the county families were well represented, and garrison officers from a neighbouring depot formed a motley group which a looker-on, viewing the scene as in a kaleidoscope, would laugh at. One turn, and the next moment some incident might occur which an imaginative brain could easily work into a ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... the page came back, followed, close at his heels, by a man in motley dress, with a viol hung over his shoulders, Count Pierre, without waiting to greet the latter, thrust the parchment into his hands with the ...
— Gabriel and the Hour Book • Evaleen Stein
... three common looking fellows began to smoke their segars, but when it was suggested that this might incommode the ladies on the other side of the curtain, they with genuine politeness ceased directly. Through this motley and picturesque assemblage I have to make my way to my bed-room in a few minutes—I will take another look at them, ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... feel a certain glow of enthusiastic sympathy as the vanguard passes by—women earnest in aim and effort, artists, nursing-sisters, poetesses, doctors, wives, musicians, novelists, mathematicians, political economists, in somewhat motley uniform and ill-dressed ranks, but full of resolve, independence, and self-sacrifice. If we were fighting folk we confess we should be half inclined to shout for the rights of woman, and to fall manfully into the rank. As it is, ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... 21st, the English ships commenced their attacks upon their unwieldy antagonists. "The Spanish ships," says Motley, "seemed arrayed for a pageant in honor of a victory won. Arranged in the form of a crescent whose horns were seven miles asunder, those gilded towers and floating castles, with their brilliant standards and martial music, bore ...
— Ten Great Events in History • James Johonnot
... men have lived and are dead. La Noue, the Huguenot Bayard, now exists only in a dusty memoir and a page of Motley. Madame de Montpensier is forgotten; all of her, save her golden scissors. Mayenne, D'Aumale, a verse preserves their names. Only Henry—the "good King," as generations of French peasants called him—remains a living figure: his strength and weakness, his sins and virtues, as well known, ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman
... and hue of turban and appointments. A number of these were Sikhs; and magnificent-looking men they were, with their flowing dress and fiercely-twisted whiskers and mustachios. The nach-girls, too — a motley group — were attired in all the hues of the rainbow, and with the white-robed musicians behind them, awaited in patience the signal to commence. In singular contrast to this glittering throng, which formed the court, ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight
... the rule of conversation, but meaneth to sputter and prate anything without judgment or wit; that his invention is very barren, his fancy beggarly, craving the aid of any stuff to relieve it? One would think a man of sense should grudge to lend his ear, or incline his attention to such motley ragged discourse; that without nauseating he scarce should endure to observe men lavishing time, and squandering their breath so frivolously. 'Tis an affront to good company to pester it ...
— Sermons on Evil-Speaking • Isaac Barrow
... would be difficult to find a more motley and diversified company than sat down to the ungarnished fare which Katty laid before them. There were first Fathers Philemy, Con, and the Auxiliary from the far part of the diocese; next followed Captain Wilson, Peter Malone, and Father Philemy's two nephews; ...
— The Station; The Party Fight And Funeral; The Lough Derg Pilgrim • William Carleton
... and all the motley swarm of women and children caught themselves mounts—some already loaded with the gipsy baggage, some with saddles, some without, some with grass halters for bridles. In another minute Fred and I were riding surrounded by a smelly swarm of them, he with big fingers already on the keys of his ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... the wear, and a scarlet cloak, or rather a cloak that had once been scarlet, but was now completely faded from its original color. It had been broken here and there, but was pieced with different colored cloths, so as to appear a motley and strange garment; and her bony feet were bare and unprotected. Nanny, from different circumstances, was unanimously elected the witch or bugbear of the village; and though the brats were then so busy ...
— Ellen Duncan; And The Proctor's Daughter - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... society as that of Florence in those days, is the enormous quantity of the names which turn the tablets of memory into palimpsests, not twice, but fifty times written over!—unpleasant, not from the thronging in of the motley company, but from the inevitable passing out of them from the field of vision. One's recollections come to resemble those of the spectator of a phantasmagoric show. Processions of heterogeneous figures, almost all of them connected in some way or other ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... much for Latin art. Christophe remembered the shock of his impact with that brutal genius, which smacked of earth and the musty smell of the heroic beasts that it had summoned forth. His eyes, seared by the raw light, used to the frantic motley of that drunken savage, could hardly adapt themselves to the half-tints, the dainty and mellifluous harmonies ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... people there were employes of the mines of less note, clerks of the comerciantes, young farmers of the valley, gambucinos, vaqueros, ciboleros, and even "leperos" of the town, shrouded in their cheap serapes. A motley ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid
... were younger and lighter of foot than we sober married folks, ran on before; so that when the blanket, that served the purpose of a door, was unfastened, we found a motley group of the dark skins and the pale faces reposing on the blankets and skins that were spread round the walls ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... gentility in tatters. Often retaining a scholarlike or clerical air, you might have taken us for the denizens of Grub street, intent on getting a comfortable livelihood by agricultural labor; or, Coleridge's projected Pantisocracy in full experiment; or Candide and his motley associates, at work in their cabbage-garden; or anything else that was miserably out at elbows, and most clumsily patched in the rear. We might have been sworn comrades to Falstaff's ragged regiment. Little skill as we boasted ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... country can, a national importance. Broadly it may be said that the stirring intellect of America old and young was with the Republicans—it is a pleasant trifle to note that Longfellow gave up a visit to Europe to vote for Fremont as President, and we know the views of Motley and of Lowell and of Darwin's fellow labourer Asa Gray. But fashion and that better and quite different influence, the tone of opinion prevailing in the pleasantest society, inclined always to the Southern view of every question, and these influences were nowhere more felt ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... resumed his breathless pace to the rear. At Newtown I was obliged to make a circuit to the left, to get round the village. I could not pass through it, the streets were so crowded, but meeting on this detour Major McKinley, of Crook's staff, he spread the news of my return through the motley throng there. ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... newspaper offices, and welcomed in the pleasure haunts of pressmen. This life, whose dreary superficiality is covered by the glitter of universal blague, like the stupid clowning of a harlequin by the spangles of a motley costume, induced in him a Frenchified—but most un-French—cosmopolitanism, in reality a mere barren indifferentism posing as intellectual superiority. Of his own country he used to say to his French associates: "Imagine ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... high in a cloudless sky when he bade farewell to the good-natured ruffian with whom, until two months previously, he had had the distinction of serving as supercargo. The village wherein Captain Bully Hayes and his motley rum-drinking crew had established themselves was six miles from Leasse, on the shores of the Utwe Harbour, at the bottom of which lay the once shapely Leonora, with her broken fore-topmast just showing above the water. For reasons that need not here be mentioned, Denison and the captain had ...
— Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories - 1898 • Louis Becke
... full of Murphy's gang, a motley crew, mostly French Canadians and Irish, just out of the woods and ready for any devilment that promised excitement. Most of them knew by sight, and all by reputation, Macdonald and his gang, for from the farthest reaches ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... clumsy gaiters, give him more the air of a Yorkshire gentleman-farmer of the old school than of a man whose home since his earliest youth has been in France. He is one of the most original figures in the motley scene as he goes his rounds in the paddock, mysterious and knowing, very sparing of his words, and responding only in monosyllables even to the questions of his patrons, while he whispers in the ears of his jockeys ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... Into this motley but splendid assemblage Judge Merlin led his beautiful daughter. At first her entrance attracted no attention; but when one, and then another, noticed the dazzling new star of beauty that had so suddenly risen above their horizon, a whisper arose that soon grew into ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... many kinds of grain, including that peculiarly Yankee "institooshun" pop-corn. The bazaar was held out of doors in a public square, with a few shops of dry goods around, and a most terrible din arose from the motley crowd there assembled. In one place a number of soldiers from the cantonments were bidding on some glassware offered at auction, and in another mothers of families and khansamahs were bustling about engaging their necessary household supplies. Here was a wretched beggar, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... humiliating flush of unreasoning wrath—came over Dry Valley. For this child he had made himself a motley to the view. He had tried to bribe Time to turn backward for himself; he had—been made a fool of. At last he had seen his folly. There was a gulf between him and youth over which he could not build a bridge even with yellow gloves to protect his hands. And the ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... went, steaming, smoking, and splashing, after the most orthodox fashion of fire-boats in general. I had now time and opportunity to look around me. Every available spot of the deck and paddle-boxes of the small, flat-bottomed iron steamer, was crowded with as motley a set of passengers as ever sailed since the days of Captain Noah. Sepoys returning from furlough to join their regiments; lascars, or enlisted workmen belonging to the different civil branches of the army; and camp-followers in all their varieties, were everywhere ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various
... said—built in a lane leading out of the principal street. This lane was almost blocked up with play-goers of all ranks and in all sorts of equipages, from the coach-and-six to the sedan-chair, mingled with a motley crowd on foot, all jostling, fighting, and screaming, till the place became ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... cane, he rushed into the cavalcade of Isis, and smote out full lustily. Pandemonium broke forth. No battle-field was more rich in groans; no revue chorus produced so much noise. It took a quarter of an hour to obtain quiet. But at last a motley crowd sat down ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... captured Jake and his horses, filled the bottom of the hay-wagon with baskets and pails, and were borne up to the fields, where they were hailed with cheers. Under a tall elm, at one side of the scene of operations, they spread the lunch, and a motley crowd was presently encamped around it. Their entertainers thought they had never seen a happier lot of youngsters. They were of all sorts and sizes, but in one point they were alike: their ignorance of the country and their delight ...
— Strawberry Acres • Grace S. Richmond
... asters in Autumn, are found The tents all bestrewing the carpeted ground; The din of a camp, with its stir and its strife, Its motley and strange, multitudinous life, Floats upward along the brown slopes, till it fills The echoing hollows ...
— Beechenbrook - A Rhyme of the War • Margaret J. Preston
... session, the rotunda presented a busy and motley scene every morning prior to the convening of the two houses. It was a general rendezvous, and the newspaper correspondents were always in attendance to pick up the ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... confined; here, the lovable, rash-tempered Essex; here, the noble Sir Henry Vane, who had once trod the rocky coast of my own New England. Everywhere stood on the watch or paced about the Beef-eaters in their brilliant fifteenth-century motley. I have never since then passed the portals of the Tower, nor seen again the incomparable gleam of the Koh-i-noor—if it were, indeed, the Koh-i-noor that I saw, and not a glass model foisted on ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... ought not to give these worldly objects less of our time, let us endeavour at least to give them less of our hearts: striving that the settled frame of our desires and affections may be more spiritual; and that in the motley intercourses of life we may constantly retain a more lively sense of the Divine presence, and a stronger impression of the reality of unseen things; thus corresponding with the Scripture description of true Christians, ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... STRIPES reporter who had made his way up right behind the fighting lines, to see the engineers at their work of running supply trains for the French. "Well, sonny, take a good look. We ain't much on clothes"—indicating his motley garments—"but believe me, bo, we're there on work! Y'see, the Boche's birdies make things pretty hot for us at times, flyin' over our perfectly good right of way and tryin' to beat us where the stack shows up bright in the dark. So we have to lay ...
— The Stars & Stripes, Vol 1, No 1, February 8, 1918, - The American Soldiers' Newspaper of World War I, 1918-1919 • American Expeditionary Forces
... I was dragged out of our dark prison and brought into the presence of Neptune, who was seated on a throne composed of a coil of ropes, with his court, a very motley assemblage, arranged round him. In front of him his valet sat on a bucket with two assistants on either side, who, the moment I appeared, jumped up and pinioned my arms, and made me sit down on another bucket in front of ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... have presented a curious contrast. The Roman legions and their allies, amounting in all to seventy-six thousand men, wore helmets and cuirasses and carried swords and short throwing-spears. In front, the Carthaginian troops looked a mere motley crowd, so various were the dress and weapons of the different nations. It is true that the black-skinned Libyans might at first sight have been taken for deserters from the Roman camp, as they, like their enemies, were clad in the same armour and ...
— The Red Book of Heroes • Leonora Blanche Lang
... rangers of the West. On an elevation overlooking the rapids, around which modern enterprise has built two ship-canals, St. Lusson erected a cross and post of cedar, with the arms of France, in the presence of priests in their black robes, Indians bedecked with tawdry finery, and bushrangers in motley dress. In the name of the "most high, mighty, and redoubted monarch, Louis XIV. of that name, most Christian King of France and of {178} Navarre," he declared France the owner of Sault Ste. Marie, Lakes Huron and Superior, ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... the main lecture-room whose large seating capacity was already well taken with a motley crowd of students ...
— Mr. World and Miss Church-Member • W. S. Harris
... should outmoralize Hamlet on the nothingness of sublunary things: and if these expectations are disappointed, as they can never fail to be, the dew is sure to rise into his eyes, and he will turn his back on the whole motley scene ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... the time, of my trial sermons. Therefore did I convert my car into a study and my unsteady knee into a desk, giving myself to the rehearsal of those discourses by which I was to stand or fall. Every weak hand thereof I laboured to strengthen, and every feeble knee I endeavoured to confirm. And what motley hours were those I spent on that fast-flying train! All my reflections tended to devotion, but yet my ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... kept in safety. Poling and rowing through a maze of junks, our little floating caravan, with the two magnates on board, and their picul of rice, their curry and their sugar, and slenderest outfits, bowled along under plain sail, the fore-deck packed with a motley team of somewhat dirty and ill-fed trackers, who whistled and halloed the peculiar hallo of the Upper Yangtze for ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... been given to genealogical investigation, the name Van Dyke might have recalled to this descendant of many hidalgos that foggy battle-field in the Netherlands on which her ancestor and his took pot-shots at each other with the primitive cross-bow. Motley records that on that day far-gone Holland laid low the Spaniard. The present historian is forced to chronicle the final triumph of Spain. The only bow used in this last encounter was in the hands of a mythological ...
— Stanford Stories - Tales of a Young University • Charles K. Field
... the crew, The anthill's ravings bring to view; But thou shalt see all this express'd, As though 'twere in a magic chest. Write these things down for folks on earth, In hopes they may to wit give birth."— Then she a window open'd wide, And show'd a motley crowd outside, All kinds of beings 'neath the sky, As in ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... That oft hast heard the death-axe sound. As on the noblest of the land Fell the stern headsmen's bloody hand,— The dungeon, block, and nameless tomb Prepare—for Douglas seeks his doom! But hark! what blithe and jolly peal Makes the Franciscan steeple reel? And see! upon the crowded street, In motley groups what masquers meet! Banner and pageant, pipe and drum, And merry morrice-dancers come. I guess, by all this quaint array, The burghers hold their sports to-day. James will be there; he loves such show, Where the good yeoman bends his bow, And the tough wrestler foils ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... Bolognese, and a doctor of the University. Brighella and Arlecchino are both of Bergamo. The one is a sharp and roguish servant, busy-body, and rascal; the other is dull and foolish, and always masked and dressed in motley—a gibe at the poverty of the Bergamasks among whom, moreover, the extremes of stupidity and cunning are most usually found, according to the popular notion ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... This motley conglomeration is for the most part arranged against the inner wall of the hut, and opposite the entrance, so as to be observable by any one looking in at the door, or even passing by it. For its purpose is to impress the superstitious victims ...
— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid
... nations. For compendious short histories, the "Story of the Nations" series, by various writers, should be secured, and the more extensive works of Gibbon, Grote, Mommsen, Duruy, Fyffe, Green, Macaulay, Froude, McCarthy, Carlyle, Thiers, Bancroft, Motley, Prescott, Fiske, Schouler, McMaster, Buckle, Guizot, etc., should be acquired. The copious lists of historical works appended to Larned's "History for Ready ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... head hall-porter and the head night-porter and the girl in the bureau. It was a quarter to nine, and the head hall-porter was abdicating his pagoda to the head night-porter, and telling him the necessary secrets of the day. These two lords, before whom the motley panorama of human existence was continually being enrolled, held a portentous confabulation night and morning. They had no illusions; they knew life. Shakespeare himself might have ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... months and enduring privation, suffering and toil, they came in at last with their women and children to buy rifles, ammunition and clothing. Here mingled the Miami, the Potawatomi, the Ottawa and the Wyandot; a motley gathering of all the tribes. In the end the result was always the same, and always pitiful. The traders came with the lure of fire water, and when they departed the Indians were left drunken and destitute and often with death, disease and ...
— The Land of the Miamis • Elmore Barce
... the list, as it was of any list, of any scheme, whether of charity or fun. The English were invited, and the Russians were invited; the Spaniards and Italians, Poles, Prussians, and Hebrews; all the motley frequenters of the place, and the warriors in the Duke of Baden's army. Unlimited supper was set in the restaurant. The dancing-room glittered with extra lights, and a profusion of cut-paper flowers decorated the festive scene. Everybody was present, those ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... grizzled warrior had taken his seat on his cross-legged, round-backed chair, and a boy of some twelve years old stood before him, in a sullen attitude, one foot over the other, and his shoulder held fast by a squire, while the motley crowd of retainers ...
— Grisly Grisell • Charlotte M. Yonge
... The calm, the blissful, and the enduring mighty! Lo there! the soldier, rapid architect! Builds his light town of canvas, and at once The whole scene moves and bustles momently. With arms, and neighing steeds, and mirth and quarrel The motley market fills; the roads, the streams Are crowded with new freights; trade stirs and hurries, But on some morrow morn, all suddenly, The tents drop down, the horde renews its march. Dreary, and solitary as a churchyard; The meadow and down-trodden seed-plot lie, And the year's harvest ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... procession approached, headed by the pope in his vestments, and surrounded by the village dignitaries, venerable, grey-bearded patriarchs." A wide space in the procession was left for "a strange and motley band of gnomes and sprites, fairies and wood-nymphs," who, as the peasants believed, had been caught by the holy singing and the sacred sign on the waving banner. The chanting still went on as the ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... They were a motley company, all welcome, and all in the best of humour. Chiefs and head men were receiving directions from the missionary, transmitting them to the workers, and seeing that everything was done. Happy busy women, under the loving guidance ...
— On the Indian Trail - Stories of Missionary Work among Cree and Salteaux Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young
... amphibious breed, Motley fruit of mongrel seed; By the dam from lordlings sprung. By the sire exhaled from dung: Think on every vice in both, Look on him, and see their growth. View him on the mother's side,[2] Fill'd with falsehood, spleen, and pride; Positive and overbearing, Changing still, ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... a prouder or happier girl in all Old Detroit than Jeanne Angelot? The narrow, crooked streets with their mean houses were glorified to her shining eyes, the crowded stores and shops, some of them with unfragrant wares, and the motley crowd running to and fro, dodging, turning aside, staring at this tall, imposing man, with his grand, free air and his soldierly tread, a stranger, with Jeanne Angelot hanging on his arm in all the bloom and radiance of girlhood. ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... came. Nea and Maya, walking side by side. Behind them were half a dozen women, playing fifes and horns. One was carrying a tattered flag. Behind the musicians came a motley crowd. Old women, young women, half-grown children, and dozens of old men. All were armed. And they came forward like the wrack of a surviving army ...
— Hunters Out of Space • Joseph Everidge Kelleam
... classed them—had ever seen Jean, but they knew him and knew that he was expected in Grass Valley. All but the one who had spoken happened to have their faces in shadow under the wide-brimmed black hats. Motley-garbed, gun-belted, dusty-booted, they gave Jean the same impression of latent force that he had encountered ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... to those who followed the litter—a motley dozen of street idlers, chiefly boys. One of these in whispers explained to him that the man was one of Jerry Madden's workmen in the wagon-shops, who had been deployed to trim an elm-tree in front of his employer's house, and, being unused to such ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... of the cliffs for a considerable distance. The ground was rolling and tree-dotted and covered with grazing animals, alone, in pairs and in herds—a motley aggregation of the modern and extinct herbivore of the world. A huge woolly mastodon stood swaying to and fro in the shade of a giant fern—a mighty bull with enormous upcurving tusks. Near him grazed an aurochs ...
— The People that Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... that, intimidated by their just remonstrances, the offensive headsman had shrunk, unperceived, from the crowd, and that they were at length happily relieved from his presence. The annunciation of the welcome tidings drew much self-felicitation from the different members of the motley company, and all eagerly embarked, for Baptiste now loudly and vehemently declared that a single moment of further delay was entirely out of ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... time that motley group of bandits stood in the light, as if intimidated by the great dignity of the house, by the mysterious prestige of the Casa whose interior, probably, none of them had ever seen before. They gazed about silently, as if surprised ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... of Scientists, officially known as Conference No. 2, had been sitting, but not progressing, in the large lecture hall of the Smithsonian Institution, which probably had never before seen so motley a gathering. Each nation had sent three representatives, two professional scientists, and a lay delegate, the latter some writer or thinker renowned in his own country for his wide knowledge and powers of ratiocination. They had come together upon the appointed day, although the ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train
... removed the early restrictions upon voting, and the new States carved out of the West had written manhood suffrage into their constitutions. This new democracy flocked to its imperator; and Jackson entered his capital in triumph, followed by a motley crowd of frontiersmen in coonskin caps, farmers in butternut-dyed homespun, and hungry henchmen eager for the spoils. For Jackson had let it be known that he considered his election a mandate by the people to fill the ...
— The Boss and the Machine • Samuel P. Orth
... across Union Square with a pitying look at the hundreds that lolled upon the park benches. They were a motley lot, he thought; the men with stolid, animal, unshaven faces; the women wriggling and self-conscious, twining and untwining their feet that hung four inches ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... unsteadiness; anger and fear and relief in quick succession had left her rather weak. Once through the motley crowd of loungers, she saw an old gray stage-coach and four lean horses. A grizzled, sunburned man sat on the driver's seat, whip and reins in hand. Beside him was a younger man with rifle across his knees. Another ...
— The Man of the Forest • Zane Grey
... It is easily earned repetition to state that Josephine St. Auban's was a presence not to be concealed. Even such a boat as the Mount Vernon offered a total deck space so cramped as to leave secrecy or privacy well out of the question, even had the motley and democratic assemblage of passengers been disposed to accord either. Yet there was something in the appearance of this young woman and her companion which caused all the heterogeneous groups of humanity to make way for them, as presently ...
— The Purchase Price • Emerson Hough
... met us a large party of gipsies—known, among other tokens, by the women's black hair being combed, which that of the Bedawi women would not be. What a motley meeting we formed—of Moslems, Greek-Church dragomans, Protestants, and Fire-worshippers, as the gipsies are always believed in ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... drifted away down the creaking narrow stairs and into the open sunny air, where their motley vehicles stood among the stumps waiting, they could not at once shake off the impression of those earnest words. In amidst their talk of fall wheat, and burning fallow, and logging-bees, would glide thoughts from that sermon, arresting the worldliness ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... state that they have been as far as the Place de la Bourse, where they saw a scene of the utmost confusion. The populace had assembled there in great force, armed with every kind of weapon they could obtain, their arms bared up to the shoulders, and the whole of them presenting the most wild and motley appearance imaginable. They had set fire to the Corps-de-Garde, the flames of which spread a light around as bright as day. Strange to say, the populace evinced a perfect good-humour, and more resembled a mob met to celebrate a saturnalia than to ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... 1892, the centenary of Shelley's birth was celebrated at Horsham, where it is intended to found a Shelley Library, if not a Shelley Museum. The celebrants were a motley collection. They were all concealing the poet's principles and paying honor to a bogus Shelley. A more honest celebration took place in the evening at the Hall of Science, Old-street, London, E.C. Six or seven hundred ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... loose, Cal!" cried Eddring, suddenly. "Open the gates! Let 'em out! I want to hear 'em holler!" The pack poured out, motley, vociferous, eager for the chase, filling the air with their wild music, with a riot of primeval, savage life. "Get me a horse saddled, Cal, quick," cried Eddring. "I want to feel leather under me again. I want to feel the air in my ears. I've got ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... mortal gaze to revel in the stars. Merman and mermaid, nereid and triton, were there, rejoicing in the sunbeams thus poured upon them through this subtle conduit of ocean, as do the motes of summer in her rays; but soon these disappeared, a motley crowd, confused and joyous, leaving the vision free to pierce the depths, glowing with golden light, in ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... from Richardson: "Homer, Plutarch, Herodotus, and Plato; Virgil, Livy, and Tacitus; Dante, Tasso, and Petrarch; Cervantes; Thomas a Kempis; Goethe and Schiller; Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Bacon, Sir Thomas Browne, Bunyan, Addison, Gray, Scott, and Wordsworth; Hawthorne, Emerson, Motley, Longfellow, Bryant, Lowell, Holmes, and Whittier. He who reads these, and such as these, is not in serious danger of spending his time amiss. But not even such a list as this is to be received as a necessity by every reader. One may find Cowper more profitable than ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... swarming multitude, composed of the inhabitants of Moguer, of Huelva, and the neighboring plains and mountains. The open esplanade in front of the edifice resembles a fair, the adjacent forest teems with the motley throng, and the image of our Lady of La Rabida is borne forth ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... unnoticed man of prompt decision, resource, and confidence, will take the command, whatever his position. Hope, as well as timidity and fear, is infectious, and one cheery voice will revive the drooping spirits of a multitude. Paul had already established his personal ascendency in that motley company of Roman soldiers, prisoners, sailors, and disciples. Now he stands forward with calm confidence, and infuses new hope into them all. What a miraculous change passes on externals when faith looks at them! The circumstances were the same as they ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... a nickname for a jester (Chapter XX), from his motley clothes, is also sometimes a variant of Pash. And the dim. Patchett has become confused with Padgett, from Padge, a rimed form of Madge. Pentecost is recorded as a personal name in Anglo-Saxon times. Michaelmas is now Middleman ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... laid him down with the embalmed dead, and felt within their dust the expectation of another life, mingled with cold and suffocating doubts—the children born of long delay. He has walked the ways of mighty Rome, has seen the great Caesar with his legions in the field, has stood with vast and motley throngs and watched the triumphs given to victorious men, followed by uncrowned kings, the captured hosts and all the spoils of ruthless war. He has heard the shout that shook the Coliseum's roofless walls when from the reeling gladiator's ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... undertaking is no less pronounced than the rigour of its obligations. Mark Twain began his career as a professional humorist and fun-maker; he frankly donned the motley, the cap and bells. The man-in-the-street is not easily persuaded that the basis of the comic is, not uncommon nonsense, but glorified common-sense. The French have a fine-flavoured distinction in ce qui remue ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... shrugged her shoulders impatiently. I think I was a little disappointed in her. I expected then people to be more of a piece than I do now, and I was distressed to find so much vindictiveness in so charming a creature. I did not realise how motley are the qualities that go to make up a human being. Now I am well aware that pettiness and grandeur, malice and charity, hatred and love, can find place side by side in ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... as lookers-on, or merely to breathe the salt air and enjoy the ocean view. When she came to scrutinize the bathers, whether they were disporting themselves in the sea or standing or lying about on the sand, she found it would be almost impossible to recognize anybody in that motley crowd. ...
— The Girl at Cobhurst • Frank Richard Stockton
... the secondary interests of the book, the incidental characters. Guido, Caponsacchi, Pompilia, the Pope, and, in a lesser degree, Violante and Pietro, are the chief characters, and the main interest contracts around them. But, through all they say and do, as a motley crowd through a street, a great number of minor characters move to and fro; and Browning, whose eye sees every face, and through the face into the soul, draws them one by one, some more fully than others in perhaps a hundred lines, some only in ten. Most of them are types of a class, a profession ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... Everywhere along the route he was greeted with jeers or pitying words, as his appearance excited the mirth or commiseration of the passers-by. When he reached the entrance to the Daily News office he was followed by a motley crowd of noisy urchins whom he dismissed with a grimace and the cabalistic gesture with which Nicholas Koorn perplexed and repulsed Antony Van Corlear from the battlement of the fortress of Rensellaerstein. Then closing the door in their astonished faces, he mounted the two flights of ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... which lies dead at their feet. This arouses their keenest indignation, for the rules of the order forbid any deed of violence within sight or hearing of the sacred edifice containing the Holy Grail. Gazing around in search of the culprit, they soon behold the youth Parsifal, clad in the rough and motley garments of a fool, and when Gurnemanz angrily reproves him, and questions him concerning his name and origin, he is amazed by ...
— Stories of the Wagner Opera • H. A. Guerber
... Masha, the deacon, the Cossack-thief, all his neighbours, the whole world, himself? His brain was giving way. The last card was trumped! (That simile gratified him.) And he was again the most worthless, the most contemptible of men, a common laughing-stock, a motley fool, a damned idiot, an object for jibes—to a deacon!... He fancied, he pictured vividly how that loathsome pig-tailed priest would tell the story of the grey horse and the foolish gentleman.... O damn!! In vain Tchertop-hanov tried to check his rising passion, in vain he tried to assure ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... picanterias. These places are divided by partitions into several small compartments, each of which contains a table and two benches. The restaurateur, usually a zambo or a mulatto, prides himself in the superiority of his picantes and his clicha. The most motley assemblages frequent these places in the evening. The Congo negro, the grave Spaniard, the white Creole, the Chino, together with monks and soldiers, may be seen, all grouped together, and devouring with evident relish ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... a part of our lineage. It is true that the old type predominates, and that we have the virtues and the vices of the Anglo-Saxons in us; but we are far too individual at present, Celt and Dane and Spaniard and Teuton, and all the rest of our motley humanities, will have to be fused into one great Anglo-American race, before we can call ourselves a distinct nation. It took England many centuries to accomplish this work, and fashion herself into the plastic form and comeliness ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... about practice? I am exasperated! there is the simple fact. And is it not enough? What a scene I have just witnessed! A motley crew of thousands of low people of all colors parading the streets with flags, torches, music, and all other accompaniments, shouting, screaming, exulting over the fall of Port Hudson and Vicksburg. The "Era" will call it an enthusiastic demonstration of the loyal citizens of the ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... match. As soon as it is in a blaze, it is shouldered by a man, who proceeds to carry it at a run, flaring and dripping melted tar, round the old boundaries of the village; the modern part of the town is not included in the circuit. Close at his heels follows a motley crowd, cheering and shouting. One bearer relieves another as each wearies of his burden. The first to shoulder the Clavie, which is esteemed an honour, is usually a man who has been lately married. Should the bearer stumble or ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... regardless of his body and his fortunes. He is the prince of philosophical idlers; his only passion is thought; he sets no value upon anything but as it serves as food for reflection. He can 'suck melancholy out of a song, as a weasel sucks eggs'; the motley fool, 'who morals on the time', is the greatest prize he meets with in the forest. He resents Orlando's passion for Rosalind as some disparagement of his own passion for abstract truth; and leaves the Duke, as soon as he is ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... half the men in London find the way to live, one would stand amazed. Life is not the dreadful thing; it is the living of it. Life in the abstract is a gay pageant, the passing of a show, caparisoned in armour, in ermine, in motley, in what you will. But see that man without his armour, this woman without her ermine, these in the crowd without their motley and the merry, merry jangling of the bells, and you will find how slender are the muscles that the armour ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... John Motley, the great-grandfather of the subject of this Memoir, came in the earlier part of the last century from Belfast in Ireland to Falmouth, now Portland, in the District, now the State of Maine. He was twice married, and had ten children, four of the first marriage ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... the four hundred of her own select New York circle have said could they have seen Hazel Radcliffe standing serene, in her simple gown, with her undecked golden hair, in the midst of that motley company of men, with only three curious slatternly women in the background to keep her company, giving herself away to a man who had dedicated his life to work in the desert? But Hazel's happy heart was ...
— The Man of the Desert • Grace Livingston Hill
... hearts should by the loveliness of earth be estranged from heaven. I do not think that Russian priests or pilgrims incur any such danger. When they are neither praying nor eating they are sleeping; in short, I did not among the motley multitude see a single eye open to the loveliness of colour in the sky above, or to the beauty of form in the earth beneath. It is singular how obtuse these people are; I have noticed in a crowded railway ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... witnessed carnivals. Here are all our harlequins and columbines of the spoken and written drama. They flash to and fro, they thrill us with expectancy. Then, presto! What a dreary lot they are when the revellers lay aside the motley! ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... composed of excellent material, men from the wilderness of creek and island that extends along the Illyrian and Dalmatian shores, fishermen and coasting sailors, many of them so lately joined that instead of uniform they still wore their picturesque native costume. The crew looked a motley lot, but, to use Farragut's phrase, "there was iron ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale
... fail. It is difficult, sitting around a comfortable board at a public dinner, to make men realize what their forefathers suffered that the heritage of priceless liberty should be their children's pride. But read Motley, or the recent and remarkably well-written volumes of Douglas Campbell, and you will see that every atrocity that Spanish hatred, religious intolerance, and mediaeval bigotry could invent, every horror that ever followed ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... favored hour, I can climb the starry galaxy with Newton, and pace along the celestial coast to the great harmony of numbers and unlock the mighty secret of the universe? When of a winter's night, I can pass through all the belts of climate, and all the grades of civilization on our globe; scan its motley races, learn its diverse customs, and hear the groaning of lonely ice-fields and the sigh of Indian palms? When, with Bacon, I can explore the laboratory of nature, or with Locke, consult the mysteries of the soul? When Spenser can lead me into golden visions, or Shakespeare smite me with ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... fluctuating sound of the regimental drum. In this ludicrous doggrel, with phrases and figures of a correspondent cast, homely, ridiculous, graphic, these men of service paint their hopes and doings. There are ranks and kinds among them; representatives of all the constituent parts of the motley multitude, which followed this prince of Condottieri. The solemn pedantry of the ancient Wachtmeister is faithfully given; no less so are the jocund ferocity and heedless daring of Holky's Jaegers, ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... spectacles on her nose and a quiet smile, had seats arranged and a supper laid out for the visitors, masters and servants alike. She looked straight in the face of each in turn, recognizing no one of the motley crew—neither the Rostows, nor Dimmler, nor even her own children, nor any of the clothes they ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book I - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... 2. We have a rather motley-looking set. A good many look like broken-down schoolmasters or ministers who have excellent dispositions but not much talent. As the kind of talent required where we are going is rather peculiar, the men may be useful, but I don't believe ...
— Letters from Port Royal - Written at the Time of the Civil War (1862-1868) • Various
... come to Katherine in Kimbolton. Bottom is in homespun, Lysander is distinguished from Oberon by his wearing an Athenian dress, and Launce has holes in his boots. The Duchess of Gloucester stands in a white sheet with her husband in mourning beside her. The motley of the Fool, the scarlet of the Cardinal, and the French lilies broidered on the English coats, are all made occasion for jest or taunt in the dialogue. We know the patterns on the Dauphin's armour and the Pucelle's sword, ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... up to the gate and rattled the latch. Within arose the barking of dogs; but the motley-haired pack ran back, wagging their tails when they saw the well-known face. Ivan Ivanovitch traversed the courtyard, in which were collected Indian doves, fed by Ivan Nikiforovitch's own hand, melon-rinds, vegetables, broken wheels, barrel-hoops, ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... twenty thousand dollars a year by writing "sensation stories," and have nothing to do with literature as an art. But to devote one's life to perfecting the manner, as well as the matter, of one's work; to expatriate one's self long years for it, like Motley; to overcome vast physical obstacles for it, like Prescott or Parkman; to live and die only to transfuse external nature into human words, like Thoreau; to chase dreams for a lifetime, like Hawthorne; to labor tranquilly and see a nation imbued with one's thoughts, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... assume the character of a colony till 1811, when Lord Selkirk sent out a number of emigrants to form a settlement in the wild regions of the North-West. Norwegians, Danes, Scotch, and Irish composed the motley crew; but the great bulk of the colonists then, as at the present time, consisted of Scotchmen and Canadians. Unlike other settlements in a wild country inhabited by Indians, the infant colony had few difficulties to contend with ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... on one side, and beneath it, of course, the everlasting black silk handkerchief, with the corners dangling over the neck behind. Following him was his servant, in slouched hat and spangled garters, carrying an old Spanish musket over his shoulder, and casting somewhat timid looks at the motley assemblage of Indians and trappers, who every now and then jostled against him. Beyond these, there were a score or two of go-ahead Yankees—"gentlemen traders," I suppose they called themselves—with a few pretty Californian women, ...
— California • J. Tyrwhitt Brooks
... little China Coast steamer marched up Manila Bay, Trask stood under the bridge on the skimpy "promenade deck" and waited impatiently for the doctor's boat to come alongside. He was the only white passenger among a motley lot of Chinese merchants and half-castes of varied hues, and he was glad the passage was ...
— Isle o' Dreams • Frederick F. Moore
... surrender, and others, deserting their posts, tried to escape from the castle. Many threw themselves from the walls into the moat, and such as escaped drowning, flung aside their distinguishing badges, and saved themselves by mingling among the motley crowd of assailants. Some few, indeed, from attachment to the Bishop's person, drew around him, and continued to defend the great keep, to which he had fled, and others, doubtful of receiving quarter, or from an impulse of desperate ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... the Mermaid Inn, One dark May night, Fiddling a tune that quelled our motley din, With quaint delight, It haunts me yet, as old lost airs will do, A phantom strain: Look for me once, lest I should look for you, ...
— The New Morning - Poems • Alfred Noyes
... and there—the whole divided by a lovely river bestridden by an old seven-arch bridge. I picked my way through the narrow streets, scattering ragged Kurds right and left; past part of the covered bazaar, until I came to a house with a large courtyard, thronged with a motley array of Kurdish irregulars, armed with every sort of weapon. It was there that Soane administered his stern but practical justice, for he thoroughly understood how ...
— War in the Garden of Eden • Kermit Roosevelt
... man the chief actor, and the source from which the dramatist must cull his choicest beauties, painting up to nature the varied scenes which mark the changeful courses of her motley groups. Here she opes her volume to the view of contemplative minds, and spreads her treasures forth, decked in all the variegated tints that Flora, goddess of the flowery mead and silvery dell, with many coloured ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... nobility, all without exception, inheriting from their forefathers Ishmail or Johtan that air of studied calm, that seldom smiling, never restless attitude, which expresses the height of dignity and gravity. There were many of them in this motley station crowd, also Bedouins, smaller of stature, and the members of the many other tribes which go to populating the great Egyptian desert. But not one of all the men, magnificent though some of them were, could compare ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... only with the pigs: they were to be brought in the same ingenious manner by which Isaaco had tied them for transit. In this fashion then, with the swine, like peace-offerings, suspended in advance, Isaaco's motley company, begrimed with eight months' travel, came ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... passing to and from the mainland. The insignia of royalty were ostentatiously displayed, and the captains and leaders within the fortress fulfilled the duties of this mimic and motley court in ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... nursery pictures, toys, and decorations in Germany to-day, and each big city has its own school of artists who produce them: friezes where the birds and beasts beloved of children solemnly pursue each other; grotesque wooden manikins painted in motley; mysterious landscapes where the fairy-tales of the world might any day come true. Dream pictures these are of snow and moonlight, marsh and forest, the real Germany lying everywhere outside the cities for those who have eyes to see. Even the ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... discussion of various subjects; his opinions of Thiers and others, conversation on travel; his opinions of England and Englishmen; curious reminiscences of his own life; kindly recollections of Bancroft, Bayard Taylor, and Motley. Visit to him with William D. Kelly; our walk and talk in the garden. Bismarck's view of financial questions. Mr. Kelly's letter to the American papers; its effect in Germany. Bismarck's diplomatic dinners; part taken in them by the Reichshunde. ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... public drinking-place I drank up close to the right side of the handle of the cup, as I thought that would be the spot least contaminated. In order not to breathe any more germs than I could possibly avoid, I kept away from theatres and places where motley crowds assemble and shunned dust and impure air as I would a leper. I had read that there was on the market a sanitary mask to be worn when going to places where there was the greatest danger of coming into contact with germs, ...
— Confessions of a Neurasthenic • William Taylor Marrs
... and for them. And yet it seems to me that if Shakespeare could be born again he would have no cause to retract his Hamlet, his Lear. His searching glance would discover nothing new in human life: still the same motley picture—in reality so little complex—would unroll before him in its terrifying sameness. The same credulity and the same cruelty, the same lust of blood, of gold, of filth, the same vulgar pleasures, the same senseless sufferings in the name... why, in the ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... were engaged in pleasant conversation a different kind of a crowd had met not far away. They were moonshiners. Their rendezvous was a cave near the top of a hill about one mile back from the Cumberland River. A motley company of about a dozen men they were, dressed in cheap trousers supported by "galluses," coarse shirts, ...
— The Kentucky Ranger • Edward T. Curnick
... the rebels streamed unresisted into the town, a motley crew of many sorts and conditions: Rough, weather-beaten, determined frontiersmen, bent on having the commission for their leader; poor planters, sunk deep in debt, denouncing the government and demanding ...
— Virginia under the Stuarts 1607-1688 • Thomas J. Wertenbaker
... Franche-Comte, the property of their son's victim. This was to reverse the old saying, "Happy is the child whose father goeth to the Devil!"—for the happiness of the father was made by the child's taking the downward road. "At a later day," says Motley, "when the unfortunate eldest son of Orange returned from Spain, after twenty-seven years' absence, a changeling and a Spaniard, the restoration of those very estates was offered to him by Philip II., provided he would continue to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... ordering prayers and ringing the Turkish bells, as they were called. The people were as supine as their princes. He did, however, succeed, by the aid of his earnest eloquence, in gathering a force of a few thousands of peasants, priests, scholars, and the like; a motley host who were chiefly armed with iron flails and pitchforks, but who followed him with an enthusiasm equal to his own. With this shadow of an army he joined Hunyades, and the combined force made its way in ...
— Historical Tales, Vol 5 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality, German • Charles Morris
... loyal a lover of virtue of that stamp as any other whatever), if he had listened and laid his ear close to himself and he did so no doubt—would have heard some jarring note of human mixture, but faint and only perceptible to himself. Man is wholly and throughout but patch and motley. Even the laws of justice themselves cannot subsist without mixture of injustice; insomuch that Plato says, they undertake to cut off the hydra's head, who pretend to clear ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... drew up to the sandy landing-beach, I looked at the motley array of paddlers, and my mind went back hundreds of years to the first Spanish crew which landed here, and I wondered whether these pirates of early days had any fewer sins to their credit than Case's ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... I had spent in India I had seen a good deal of both sides of that motley, amazing fabric which we call life. I had felt the throbbing of its great loom. I had touched with my own shrinking hand the closeness of the texture, had marked the interweaving of the alien strands, ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... of the American's quiet drawl are heard everywhere as he strolls round the tables; Roumanian boyards, Parisian swindlers, Austrian soldiers, Hungarian plutocrats, flashy and foolish young Englishmen—all gather in a motley crowd; and the British bookmaker's interesting presence is obtrusive. His very accent—strident, coarse, impudent, unspeakably low—gives a kind of ground-note to the hum of talk that rises in all places of public resort, and ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... up to her. True, her father and mother hardly shared in her pleasure; Mr. Copley's taste was blunted, I fear, for all noble enjoyment; and Mrs. Copley cared mainly to be comfortable in her home quarters, and to go out now and then where the motley world of fashion and of sight-seeing did most congregate. Especially she liked to go to the Pincian Hill Sunday afternoon, and watch the indescribable concourse of people of all nationalities which is there to be seen at that time. But there ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... cats—as great a nuisance here as at Aden—and ate for breakfast lumps of boiled beef with peppered holcus-scones. We were kindly looked upon by one Sultan, a sick and decrepid Eunuch, who having served five Amirs, was allowed to remain in the palace. To appearance he was mad: he wore upon his poll a motley scratch wig, half white and half black, like Day and Night in masquerades. But his conduct was sane. At dawn he sent us bad plantains, wheaten crusts, and cups of unpalatable coffee-tea [40], and, assisted by a crone more decrepid than himself, prepared for me his water- pipe, a gourd fitted ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... party exchanged glances of dismay as they alighted from their cars in the great cobbled courtyard or patio, to find themselves stared at by a motley crew of men, women and children, and to see pigs, dogs, asses and ...
— Bandit Love • Juanita Savage
... life-power of inspired genius. In the former each part is separately conceived, and then by a succeeding act put together;—not as watches are made for wholesale—(for there each part supposes a pre-conception of the whole in some mind),—but more like pictures on a motley screen. Whence arises the harmony that strikes us in the wildest natural landscapes,—in the relative shapes of rocks, the harmony of colours in the heaths, ferns, and lichens, the leaves of the beech and the ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... wide Winnipeg station, there gathered on the platform beside Lady Merton's car a merry and motley group of people. A Chief Justice from Alberta, one of the Senators for Manitoba, a rich lumberman from British Columbia, a Toronto manufacturer—owner of the model farm which the party was to inspect, two or three ladies, among them a little English girl with fine eyes, whom Philip ...
— Lady Merton, Colonist • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... these men?" I inquired, indicating the motley crew who were to accompany me. "Are they to ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... great court-yard, where most of the inhabitants of the fortress, and those who, under recent circumstances, had taken refuge there, were drawn up, in order to look, for the last time, on their departed lord. Among these were mingled a few of the motley crowd from without, whom curiosity, or the expectation of a dole, had brought to the castle gate, and who, by one argument or another, had obtained from the warder ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... pressure of the hand that secretly clasped hers, "'tis no jest. If thou art pained, indeed I am sorry, but if thou choosest to banish me, then this night will I go gladly with him I have chosen to be my lord. The true heart which Heaven has sent for me beats beneath his motley, and with him I must go. Dear father," cried Elaine, piteously, "do not ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... owners of large collections have their chief anxiety about the binding and the type. Take down the whole set of Walter Scott's novels, and find that only one of them has been read through. There are Motley's histories on that shelf; but get into conversation about the Prince of Orange, and see that Motley has not been read. I never was more hungry than once while walking in a Charleston mill amid whole ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... that no President was ever confronted with such a motley crowd of visitors as the members of that delegation—between seventy and eighty in number—as they formed in line around three sides of the East Room in the White House. Their garments were a sight! Some of the men were in full ...
— The Abolitionists - Together With Personal Memories Of The Struggle For Human Rights • John F. Hume
... out, what was he but a fine gentleman—- never had put his hand to a pick, nor a blasting-iron; and as to his Italian, he told me it was the Italian of Alfieri and Leopardi. Leopardi's Italian it might be, for it was a very mottled or motley tongue, but he might as well have talked English or Double-Dutch to our hands, or better, for they had picked up the meaning of some orders from me before I got used to their lingo. And then he says 'tis office work and superintendence he understands. How can you superintend, I told him, what ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... sends men into battle for foolish causes. I wanted to hurry the fall of the blow. I even protested against my parents and Mr. Pound driving with me to the railroad, and they did not understand. I had to meet their last embraces under the eyes of the motley crowd who had come to the station to see the train, and under such conditions I dared not show emotion. Again they did not understand and were a little hurt by my coldness. I sprang up the car steps jauntily. To show my independence I stood by the smoker door and waved a smiling farewell ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... stallion wandered up-wind from the rest and another, younger horse, was on the other side of the herd. Between was a raggedly assembled group of mares old and young, with leggy yearlings, deer-footed colts, and more than one time-worn stallion. It was a motley assembly. The colors ranged from piebald to grey and there was a great diversity in stature. Presently the black stallion neighed softly, whereat the rest of the herd bunched closely together, the mares with the foals on the side, and all heads turning towards the black ...
— Alcatraz • Max Brand
... surely he had deserved and won the confidence of his superior officers. In those days railroad travelling was far from pleasant. The train upon which Lieutenant Chalaron embarked at Knoxville was a motley affair,—perhaps a single passenger-car, rough and dilapidated (crowded with those who, though ill, made shift to sit up or recline upon the seats), box-cars and cattle-cars filled with suffering men helplessly sick. ...
— Memories - A Record of Personal Experience and Adventure During Four Years of War • Fannie A. (Mrs.) Beers
... the rows of benches were packed with a motley crowd of Poles, Russians, Slavs, Italians, Greeks, Lithuanians—a crowd made up of fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles, neighbors, friends, and enemies of the boys and girls whose fate was in the hands of ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... crossed the court, lackeys, with smoking dishes and, full jugs, passed and repassed continually, although it was long past midnight. On entering the hall, they found Sir Randal at the head of a vast table, surrounded by a fiercer and more motley collection of individuals than had congregated there even in the time of Sir Rollo. The lord of the castle had signified that "it was his royal pleasure to be drunk," and the gentlemen of his train had obsequiously ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... There are men, again, with initiative but no endurance, and others with endurance but no initiative. Lastly, there are men, and a great many of them, who appear to be quite incapable of coherent thought, yet can handle machinery or any mechanical device to a marvel. Yes, we are a motley organisation. ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... a singer in the street, He has an audience motley and meet; Above him lowers the London night, And around ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... second time, overborne by hopeless and incurable evils. An interval of motley feelings, of specious artifice and contemptible imposture, had elapsed since my meeting with the stranger at Wilmington. Then my forlorn state had led me to the brink of suicide. A brief and feverish respite had been afforded me, but now was I transported to the verge ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... in her motley history, an old-clothesman, one Domenico— he and his "Compagnia del Bruco," his Company of the Worm[1]— reigned over Siena and gave to her people a taste for blood. It was bloodshed on easy ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... situation which poor Mrs. Carr could not accept. In the bottom of her heart, she fully believed that they would never again see one of those boxes. The contents of some which she had herself packed were of a most motley description. In the beginning of the breaking up, while Mercy was at her wits' end, with the unwonted perplexities of packing the whole belongings of a house, her mother had tormented her incessantly by bringing to her every few minutes some utterly ...
— Mercy Philbrick's Choice • Helen Hunt Jackson
... Snake Indians. It consisted of about sixty men, thirty women, and as many children of various ages,—about a hundred and twenty souls in all. Many of the boys were capable of using the gun and setting a beaver-trap. The men were a most motley set. There were Canadians, half-breeds, Iroquois, and Scotchmen. Most of the women had Indian blood in their veins, and a few ...
— The Dog Crusoe and his Master • R.M. Ballantyne
... the chief actor, and the source from which the dramatist must cull his choicest beauties, painting up to nature the varied scenes which mark the changeful courses of her motley groups. Here she opes her volume to the view of contemplative minds, and spreads her treasures forth, decked in all the variegated tints that Flora, goddess of the flowery mead and silvery dell, with many coloured ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... mulattoes, nondescript desperadoes from the old band of Lafitte, and militia and regulars from all the Southern States, forms no part of the naval annals of the war. It is enough to say that the flower of the British army, led by a veteran of the Peninsula, recoiled before that motley crew of untrained soldiers, and were beaten back, leaving their gallant leader and thousands of their brave men dead upon the field. The navy was not without some share in this glorious triumph. On the 23d of December the schooner "Carolina" dropped ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... up smiling, one and all comforted by their protector, either Turk, child, or fond mother. The fathers invariably showed the most distressed concern. It was a comical sight; outside the rails a motley crowd of interested spectators and waiting children, and in the inclosure the doctor pricking his patients one after the other in a most indifferent manner. His clerk noted the names, and we, with some of the local grandees, drank tiny cups of coffee ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... and many kinds of grain, including that peculiarly Yankee "institooshun" pop-corn. The bazaar was held out of doors in a public square, with a few shops of dry goods around, and a most terrible din arose from the motley crowd there assembled. In one place a number of soldiers from the cantonments were bidding on some glassware offered at auction, and in another mothers of families and khansamahs were bustling about engaging their necessary household supplies. Here was a wretched beggar, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... people were to be allowed to rule. In Upper Canada the governing party, known as the 'Family Compact,' composed chiefly of representatives of the Crown and men who had inherited position or caste from their Loyalist fathers, had been attacked by a motley and shifting opposition, sober Whig and fiery Radical, newcomers from Britain or from the States, and {19} native-born, united mainly by their common antagonism to clique rule. In Lower Canada the same contest, on account of the monopoly of administration ...
— The Day of Sir Wilfrid Laurier - A Chronicle of Our Own Time • Oscar D. Skelton
... might not be wronged. Each found that the existing system required very important alterations to check its excesses and supply its defects. Numa's reforms were all in favour of the people, whom he classified into a mixed and motley multitude of goldsmiths and musicians and cobblers; while the constitution introduced by Lykurgus was severely aristocratic, driving all handicrafts into the hands of slaves and foreigners, and confining the citizens to the use of the spear and shield, as men whose trade was war alone, ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... And what a motley collection of stuff they did bring, to be sure! Beds and mattresses, bedding, chairs, tables, a big cook stove for the kitchen, pots and pans, china and glass, knives and forks—everything that ...
— The Camp Fire Girls on the March - Bessie King's Test of Friendship • Jane L. Stewart
... a venerable letter-writer at a small table, spectacles on nose and pen in hand, with two women whispering to him what he was to write for them. She made her way up the steep lane, through the busy, motley, malodorous crowd, until she reached the corner pointed out to ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... fountain by expectorating playfully at selected intervals. Theatre audiences were on their several ways home, and as Paul passed by the entrance to a Tube station he found a considerable crowd seeking to force its way in, a motley crowd representative of every stratum of society from Whitechapel to Mayfair. Women wearing opera cloaks and shod in fragile dress-shoes stood shivering upon the gleaming pavement beside Jewesses from the East-End. Fur-collared coats were pressed against wet working raiments, white ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... round the room as she took her seat. There were a couple of forms, notched and cut and inked all over; a small deal desk perched on four legs, at which no doubt the master sat; a few dog's-eared books upon a high shelf; and beside them a motley collection of peg-tops, balls, kites, fishing-lines, marbles, half-eaten apples, and other confiscated property of idle urchins. Displayed on hooks upon the wall in all their terrors, were the cane and ruler; and near them, on a small ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... the little wharf, where a motley collection of men were gathered, with a quick-beating heart. Which of them could be Uncle Richard? Would he give him a kind welcome? The boy's spirits began to rise somewhat under the influence of the broad, cheerful glow of sunshine and ...
— Culm Rock - The Story of a Year: What it Brought and What it Taught • Glance Gaylord
... beautiful valley in which it lies. The United States government has been lavish in its expenditure upon a handsome building for court, custom, and post-office purposes; and to it flock, especially when court is in session, as motley an assortment of our race as ever assembled at legal mandate. Moonshiners, and those who regard whiskey-making, selling, and drinking as things that ought to be as free as the air of the mountain and licenses as unheard-of impositions of a highly oppressive government, that would ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various
... huge inn, filled from garret to cellar with a motley crowd—an acquaintance, whom I chanced to meet, informed me that a recent disturbance had induced the belief of the existence of a new plot for assassination, and an order had been published forbidding ...
— Destruction and Reconstruction: - Personal Experiences of the Late War • Richard Taylor
... altogether curious personages came into the house at times and ludicrous, motley events arose. The police would appear suddenly together with disguised detectives and arrest some seemingly respectable, irreproachable gentlemen and lead them off, pushing them along with blows in the neck. ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... liberty: Away, away, I'd rather hold my neck By doubtful tenure from a Sultan's beck, In climes where liberty has scarce been named, Nor any right, but that of ruling, claimed, Than thus to live, where bastard freedom waves Her fustian flag in mockery o'er slaves; Where (motley laws admitting no degree Betwixt the vilely slaved, and madly free) Alike the bondage and the licence suit, The brute made ruler, and ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... the edge of the village aroused attention. Its walls already felt the regard of scores of suspecting eyes. The motley wings of rumor hovered restlessly ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... a disapproving eye upon the rather motley congregation of native Anchurians, and made his way at once toward Goodwin, who was the most conspicuously Anglo-Saxon figure present. Goodwin greeted ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... {271c} Motley's Works are available in 9 volumes of a Library Edition published by John Murray. A cheaper issue of the Dutch Republic is that in 3 volumes of the World's Classics, to which I ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... heap of motley traits, Half gay, half sad, half false, half real, Half every-day, yet half ideal, The careless fruit of idle days, Of sleepless nights; slight inspirations Of unripe years, of wasted art— The reason's frigid observations, And sad conclusions of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... still in its flower, and Nicias appears fortunate, avail yourselves to the utmost of the services of us both. Neither rescind your resolution to sail to Sicily, on the ground that you would be going to attack a great power. The cities in Sicily are peopled by motley rabbles, and easily change their institutions and adopt new ones in their stead; and consequently the inhabitants, being without any feeling of patriotism, are not provided with arms for their persons, and have not regularly established themselves on the land; every man ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides
... Carnival week again—the mad blaspheming week of revelry and devilry. The streets were rainbow with motley wear and thunderous with the roar and laughter of the crowd, recruited by a vast inflow of strangers; from the windows and roofs, black with heads, frolicsome hands threw honey, dirty water, rotten eggs, and even boiling ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... disposition, romantic characters many of them, resembling the rovers and adventurers in the Caribbean or representing some of the many activities prevalent in England at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Thomas Weston, former ally of the Pilgrims, settled with a motley crew of rude fellows at Wessagusset (Quincy) and there established a trading post in 1622. Of this settlement, which came to an untimely end after causing the Pilgrims a great deal of trouble, only a blockhouse and stockade remained. Another irregular ...
— The Fathers of New England - A Chronicle of the Puritan Commonwealths • Charles M. Andrews
... the most orthodox fashion of fire-boats in general. I had now time and opportunity to look around me. Every available spot of the deck and paddle-boxes of the small, flat-bottomed iron steamer, was crowded with as motley a set of passengers as ever sailed since the days of Captain Noah. Sepoys returning from furlough to join their regiments; lascars, or enlisted workmen belonging to the different civil branches of the army; and camp-followers in all ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various
... light-hearted sketchers? I often recall those homely Saturday evening concerts; the long, shabby saal with its faded out-of-date decorations; its rows of small tables with the well-known groups around them; the mixed and motley audience. How easy, after a little while, to pick out the English, by their look of complacent pleasure at the delightful ease and unceremoniousness of the whole affair; their gladness at finding a public ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... renter of boats, having seen the disaster first, had already put out for the scene of trouble, rowing lustily. Nobody could beat him to his garlands now; that was clear; clear, too, that there really wasn't much peril, after all. So the motley gathering of idlers became content to stand upon the edge of the boat pavilion, gazing most eagerly, ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... him were as ill-looking a quartet as Duke William's motley host could show. One, the leader, was an unfrocked priest of Rouen; one was a hedge-robber from the western marches who had followed Alan of Brittany; a third had the olive cheeks and the long nose of ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... the roughest-clad of pioneers—rusty slouch hat, flannel shirt, coarse trousers slopping half in and half out of heavy cowhide boots, this was his make-up. Energetic citizens did not prophesy success for him. Often they saw him leaning against an awning support, staring drowsily at the motley human procession, for as much as an hour at a time. Certainly that could not ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... of spring's promise of plenty, with fruit in abundance. Autumn lingers in red and yellow motley, stoutly resisting winter's attack until boisterous winds from east and north send the last leaves shivering to the ground and spread out the city's winter garb. Then Prague assumes a severer aspect; reds and warm greys have vanished, castle, churches, palaces stand ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... the dawn 'Aurora,' or say that 'Flora decks the enamelled meads.' But there are some nice touches in the poem, and it is pleasant to find that tramps have their harmless moments. On the whole, the volume, if it is not quite worth reading, is at least worth looking at. The fool's motley in which it is arrayed is extremely ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... are all-too sternly contrasted with this day! Danton, Camille, Herault, Westermann, and the others, very strangely massed up with Bazires, Swindler Chabots, Fabre d'Eglantines, Banker Freys, a most motley Batch, 'Fournee' as such things will be called, stand ranked at the Bar of Tinville. It is the 2d of April 1794. Danton has had but three days to lie in ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... journey had been a series of tragedies. Not his own. There were two hundred of them, officers and men, on the boat across the Channel. Blind, maimed, paralysed, in motley garments, they were hilariously happy. Every throb of the turbine engines was a thrust toward home. They sang, ...
— Love Stories • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... presented itself to his view, as he approached the grove. A motley company, composed of the settlers of every grade and condition for miles around, had collected there. Men, women, and children in various costume—the scarlet and crimson shirt, or tunic, carrying it high above all other fashions—were standing, or walking ...
— Adele Dubois - A Story of the Lovely Miramichi Valley in New Brunswick • Mrs. William T. Savage
... the rivers in the interior. Hunting for weeks and months and enduring privation, suffering and toil, they came in at last with their women and children to buy rifles, ammunition and clothing. Here mingled the Miami, the Potawatomi, the Ottawa and the Wyandot; a motley gathering of all the tribes. In the end the result was always the same, and always pitiful. The traders came with the lure of fire water, and when they departed the Indians were left drunken and destitute and often with death, disease and ...
— The Land of the Miamis • Elmore Barce
... portion of the exercises had been concealed from view. The butterflies, while naturally the most conspicuous element, were now seen to be in a small minority among the insect gathering, the bramble leaves being peopled with a most motley and democratic assemblage of insects. Class distinctions were apparently forgotten in the common enthusiasm; the plebeian bluebottle and blowfly now consorted with Aphrodite and sipped at the same drop. Many a leaf was begemmed with the blue bodies closely set side ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... sensations of pleasure and pain are experienced with great vivacity in our dreams; and hence all that motley group of ideas, which are caused by them, called the ideas of imagination, with their various associated trains, are in a very vivid manner acted over in the sensorium; and these sometimes call into action the larger muscles, which have been much associated with them; as appears ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... Among the motley crowd which had made the studio a home in the days of Kirk's bachelorhood had been an artist—one might almost say an ex-artist—named Robert Dwight Penway. An over-fondness for rye whisky at the Brevoort cafe had handicapped Robert as an active force in the world of New ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse
... earth contribute to his pictorial guazzetto;[L] and the certainty, that unless the composition of the latter be regulated by severe judgment, and its members connected by natural links, it must become more contemptible in its motley, than an honest study ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... of 1869 father sold his timber land in Missouri, and paid the last of his debts. He had some money left, and the first thing he did was to go into a book store, and spend forty dollars for "Barnes' Notes," and "Motley's United Netherlands," and "History of the Dutch Republic." He remarked as he did so, "I have felt the need of these books for years, and this is the first money I ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... length of the beach, shaded by trees, and crossing a gentle stream. Along this avenue was all the life and commerce of Tai-o-hae. Two traders' shops, empty offices, a gendarme, a handful of motley half-castes lounging under the trees—this was all that was left of former greatness. Only nature had not changed. It flung over the broken remnants of the glory and the dream its lovely cloak of verdure and of flower. Man had almost ceased to be a figure ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... which had been rising for some time, now gave very unequivocal notice of an approaching storm. The rain began to fall, and the decks were quickly cleared of their motley groups. ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... was coaxing her Lady Vincent was looking over the balustrade down into the hall below, which was filled to suffocation with a motley crowd, who were pressing around some object extended upon the table, and which Claudia could only make out in the obscurity by the gleam of the white cloth with which ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... the motley crowd were laughing at the strange, ungirlish freak, And the boy was scared and panting, and so dashed he could not speak; And, "Miss, I have good apples," a bolder lad did cry; But she answered, "No, I thank you," from the ...
— Poems of American Patriotism • Brander Matthews (Editor)
... conspiracy of Dr. Fian. Dr. Fian was nothing less than a Scottish Dr. Faustus. He was a schoolmaster by profession. After a dissolute youth he was said to have given soul to the Devil. According to the story he gathered around him a motley crowd, Catholic women of rank, "wise women," and humble peasant people; but it was a crew ready for evil enterprise. It is not very clear why they were supposed to have attacked the king; perhaps because ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... by the very rules and regulations of the society, as well as by its spirit. The individual is the creature of his feelings of all sorts, the sport of his vices and his virtues—like the fool in Shakespear, 'motley's his proper wear':—corporate bodies are dressed in a moral uniform; mixed motives do not operate there, frailty is made into a system, 'diseases are turned into commodities.' Only so much of any one's natural or genuine impulses can influence him in his artificial capacity as formally comes home ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... anything without judgment or wit; that his invention is very barren, his fancy beggarly, craving the aid of any stuff to relieve it? One would think a man of sense should grudge to lend his ear, or incline his attention to such motley ragged discourse; that without nauseating he scarce should endure to observe men lavishing time, and squandering their breath so frivolously. 'Tis an affront to good company to pester it with ...
— Sermons on Evil-Speaking • Isaac Barrow
... essential elements is palpable, we pardon, we ignore, the euphuism. But should the quality of substance fail, then we repudiate it and despise it. Therefore Marino, who is certainly not more euphuistic than Shakespeare, but who has immeasurably less of potent stuff in him, wears the motley of his barocco style in limbo bordering upon oblivion, while the Swan of Avon parades the same literary livery upon both summits of Parnassus. So true it is that poetry cannot be estimated apart from intellectual and ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... by partitions into several small compartments, each of which contains a table and two benches. The restaurateur, usually a zambo or a mulatto, prides himself in the superiority of his picantes and his clicha. The most motley assemblages frequent these places in the evening. The Congo negro, the grave Spaniard, the white Creole, the Chino, together with monks and soldiers, may be seen, all grouped together, and devouring with evident relish ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... trading-post many years ago on its banks; but it did not assume the character of a colony till 1811, when Lord Selkirk sent out a number of emigrants to form a settlement in the wild regions of the North-West. Norwegians, Danes, Scotch, and Irish composed the motley crew; but the great bulk of the colonists then, as at the present time, consisted of Scotchmen and Canadians. Unlike other settlements in a wild country inhabited by Indians, the infant colony had few difficulties to contend with at the outset. ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... Past opened up to her. True, her father and mother hardly shared in her pleasure; Mr. Copley's taste was blunted, I fear, for all noble enjoyment; and Mrs. Copley cared mainly to be comfortable in her home quarters, and to go out now and then where the motley world of fashion and of sight-seeing did most congregate. Especially she liked to go to the Pincian Hill Sunday afternoon, and watch the indescribable concourse of people of all nationalities which is there to be seen at that time. But ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... feel like the sailor who steps on shore and hears the people speak a language which is new to him. It seems like a jumble of meaningless sounds until he learns, not only to understand the words, but also to distinguish the sentences. Temples and palaces, statues and columns appear everywhere in motley confusion. Each one, if you separate it from the whole and give it a careful examination, is worthy of inspection, nay, of admiration. Here are light, graceful creations of Hellenic, yonder heavy, sombre ones of Egyptian art, and in the background the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... perceiving in this conduct only a further proof of the hypocrite's villainy, breaks out once more into a tempest of agonised despair. Upon her cry for immediate revolt against the scoundrelly tyrant, the people collect together and form a motley and passionate crowd. Luzio, who also returns, counsels the people with stinging bitterness to pay no heed to the woman's fury; he points out that she is only tricking them, as she has already tricked him—for he still believes in her shameless infidelity. Fresh confusion; increased despair ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... behind one of the tiers of lighters. To my untrained eyes it was incredible that in the labyrinth of craft, amid the darkness, we should be able to pick our way. Yet deftly, unerringly, the inspector moved the tiller, while two constables kept keen eyes on the motley assembly of vessels. ...
— Scotland Yard - The methods and organisation of the Metropolitan Police • George Dilnot
... their heads, and scattering silver and smiles and apologies he crowded past the motley line to the window and fairly snatched the miles of green ticket from the ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... did not agree with John Adams that Attucks led "a motley rabble," but a band of patriots. Their evidence of the belief they entertained was to be found in the annual commemoration of the "5th of March," when orators, in measured sentences and impassioned eloquence, praised the hero-dead. In March, 1775, ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... transparent muslin of their chemises, make a bouquet of colors, with their gay sarafani, their many-hued cashmere caps attached to pearl-embroidered, coronet-shaped kokoshniki, and terminating in ribbons which descend to their heels, and are outshone in color only by the motley assemblage of ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... see the last of her beloved nephew, but to try to speak to some one who could give her more definite news of the seven hundred British soldiers who had arrived in town and were drawn up in formidable array against the motley company of colonists. The British officers at once commanded the colonists to lay down their arms and disperse. Not a single man obeyed. All stood in silent defiance of the order. Then the British regulars ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... "The Strand is, perhaps, the finest street in Europe." Charles Lamb said: "I often shed tears in the motley Strand for fulness of joy at ...
— The Strand District - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... still harder to keep them at once without fighting and without plundering. What William had done in this way in two invasions of Normandy, he was now called on to do on a greater scale. His great and motley army was kept during a great part of August and September, first at the Dive, then at Saint Valery, waiting for the wind that was to take it to England. And it was kept without doing any serious damage to the lands where they were encamped. ...
— William the Conqueror • E. A. Freeman
... doings of the Newport summer, concerning which he had heard all the gossip during the last few hours, the prospect of Madame Patti in opera during the coming season, horses, dogs, and mutual friends—all the motley array of subjects permissible, desultory, and amusing. Suddenly, as they bowled out on an open road by the sea, ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... collie seems to preedominate as a strain. The trooth is thar's not that dog a-whinin' about our hosses' fetlocks who ain't proudly descended from fifteen different tribes, an' they shorely makes a motley mass meetin'. Still, they're good, zealous dogs; an' as they're going to go for'ard an' take most of the resks of that panther, it seems invidious ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... the trade and whaling ships, trappers, hunters and the motley populace of Yerba Buena made a colorful and strangely varied picture, as they gathered with the ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... one which was human and casual, one which would readily appeal to every passing man. If a man is genuinely superior to his fellows the first thing that he believes in is the equality of man. We can see this, for instance, in that strange and innocent rationality with which Christ addressed any motley crowd that happened to stand about Him. "What man of you having a hundred sheep, and losing one, would not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness, and go after that which was lost?" Or, again, "What man of you if his son ask for bread will he give him a stone, or if he ask for ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... definite information has it otherwise. To learn of the prodigious industry of the youthful Mill, the perseverance of Darwin, the heroic struggle of Scott, the gentleness of Stevenson, the modesty of Browning, the lifelong consecration of Motley,—is not the leaven of inspiration made of knowledge ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... Of this motley gathering "Ruffle-shirt" Tomlins, the swell; "Fog-horn" Cranch, the auctioneer; "Walrus" Waller, the sheep-painter; "My Lord" Cockburn, the Englishman; Fred Stone and Cornelius McFudd, not only occupied ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... at themselves in the brilliantly lighted mirrors which repeated their reflections several times. Now this same room was dimly lighted by two candles. On one small table tea things and supper dishes stood in disorder, and in the middle of the night a motley throng of people sat there, not merrymaking, but somberly whispering, and betraying by every word and movement that they none of them forgot what was happening and what was about to happen in the bedroom. Pierre did not eat anything though he would very much have liked to. He looked inquiringly ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... of nature are sternly at their work. Indolence benumbs his feeble intellect, and inflames his passions. Poverty and want are creeping on him. Temptation is surrounding him; and vice, with all her motley train, is winding fast her deadly coils around his very soul, and making him the devil's slave, to do his work upon the earth. Thus, the blossoms of his paradise are fine words, and ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... would have been well. Now her only hope was that liberal-minded woman, Miss Mergle, who, a year ago, had sent her out, highly educated, into the world. Miss Mergle had told her at parting to live fearlessly and truly, and had further given her a volume of Emerson's Essays and Motley's "Dutch Republic," to help her ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... body of troops gradually debouched into view upon the plain—a motley crowd of infantry clad in rags so effectually bleached and discoloured by exposure to rain and sun that it would probably have puzzled their own officers to name the various regiments to which they belonged; about one hundred cavalry; and three batteries ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... it strange. Your house is grown a nuisance to its neighbours, Where twice in every week, if not more frequent, A motley crowd at midnight hour assembles; Whose ruffian-like attendants in the street, Alarm the peaceful, ...
— The Female Gamester • Gorges Edmond Howard
... up their household in the old Penn mansion (long since torn down) on a scale of magnificence in no way warranted by Arnold's means. Their great coach-and-four was seen thundering back and forth through the streets of the quiet little town, and a motley throng of guests, Whig and Tory, were entertained at a table where nothing was thought too choice and costly for their delectation. Matters were carried with such extravagance that debt soon pressed upon the thoughtless pair, and prudent people began to inquire curiously into Arnold's ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... which, as subsequent events and later researches have shown, was the real intention in issuing the passport. Entirely unsuspecting any ulterior motive, however, in a few days after his arrival he convoked a motley gathering of Filipinos of all grades of the population, for he seems to have been only slightly acquainted among his own people and not at all versed in the mazy Walpurgis dance of Philippine politics, and laid before it the constitution for a Liga Filipina (Philippine League), an ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... 'watch'. So too t and d are easily exchanged; as in 'clod' and 'clot'; 'vend' and 'vent'; 'brood' and 'brat'{112}; 'halt' and 'hold'; 'sad' and 'set'{113}; 'card' and 'chart'; 'medley' and 'motley'. Or there has grown up, besides the rigorous and accurate pronunciation of a word, a popular as well; and this in the end has formed itself into another word; thus is it with 'housewife' and 'hussey'; 'hanaper' ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... turned, and, as the fog broke away before the waving plume, he saw that the sun was rising. Issuing with its bright beams through the passes of the snowy mountains beyond, appeared a strange and motley crew. Instead of the dark and romantic visages of his last phantom train, the Father beheld with strange concern the blue eyes and flaxen hair of a Saxon race. In place of martial airs and musical utterance, there rose upon the ear a strange din of harsh gutturals and singular sibilation. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... Meanwhile the motley crowd that had started in pursuit from the White Horse had become appreciably thinned upon the road. For one was no rider, and was promptly pitched over his horse's head. Another, in his haste, had but imperfectly saddled ...
— A Boy's Ride • Gulielma Zollinger
... raided the Dutch coast under commission of the prince of Orange. This event, which took place on the 1st of April 1572, was the first blow in the long war of Dutch independence, and was followed by a general outbreak of the patriotic party (Motley, Rise of the Dutch Republic, part iii. chapter vi.). "The Brill" was one of the four Dutch towns handed over to Queen Elizabeth in 1584 as security for English expenses incurred in aiding the Dutch. Brielle is the birthplace of the famous admiral Martin van Tromp, and also of Admiral van Almonde, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... professors, until an approaching storm drives us in-doors. Within the "shooting box", as the young man who has traveled christens the house,— thinking that an appropriate title for a domicile where so many members of the Hunt family are collected,—there is a motley assembly, as they gather around the sitting room table. There are Portuguese, Michiganders, Pennites, Illinoisyones, Bangorillas, and other specimens of natural history such as would have puzzled Agassiz himself; and the question arises, "What shall we do to amuse ourselves this rainy evening?" ...
— Over the Border: Acadia • Eliza Chase
... battle must have presented a curious contrast. The Roman legions and their allies, amounting in all to seventy-six thousand men, wore helmets and cuirasses and carried swords and short throwing-spears. In front, the Carthaginian troops looked a mere motley crowd, so various were the dress and weapons of the different nations. It is true that the black-skinned Libyans might at first sight have been taken for deserters from the Roman camp, as they, like their enemies, were clad in the same armour and bore the same arms, the spoils ...
— The Red Book of Heroes • Leonora Blanche Lang
... Jabez, ranged back and forth before the mighty rock portals of the Cave of Terrible Things, like some magnificent tigress hedged with foes. Beyond those portals Red Jabez, Sultan of pirates, arbiter of life and death over the motley community, lay at grips with the grim specter to whom he had consigned scores far more readily than he now yielded up his own red-stained soul. Red Jabez was dying a death as hard as ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... those most in favor at court; but they seemed to me to present a constrained figure, as I saw them soberly ranged in the stalls of the canons, clad in a costume of no particular epoch, wrapped in long mantles of motley color, and following, with a distracted air, the phases of a ceremony to which they were so little accustomed that they were constantly rising, sitting down, and ...
— The Duchess of Berry and the Court of Charles X • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... popular liberty no homage paid to his genius by the class whose admiring welcome is most seductive to scholars has ever spoiled; our fellow-citizen, the historian of a great Republic which infused a portion of its life into our own,—John Lothrop Motley. ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... and forms of the Holy Roman Empire. The members of this so-called Empire were, however, a multitude of independent States; and the chief of these States, Austria, combined with its German provinces a large territory which did not even in name form part of the Germanic body. The motley of the Empire was made up by governments of every degree of strength and weakness. Austria and Prussia possessed both political traditions and resources raising them to the rank of great European Powers; but the sovereignties of the second order, such as Saxony and Bavaria, had neither ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... agony," all for one thing—to teach the oppressor that his cause must fail. It is difficult, sitting around a comfortable board at a public dinner, to make men realize what their forefathers suffered that the heritage of priceless liberty should be their children's pride. But read Motley, or the recent and remarkably well-written volumes of Douglas Campbell, and you will see that every atrocity that Spanish hatred, religious intolerance, and mediaeval bigotry could invent, every horror that ever followed in the train of war, swept over and desolated Holland. ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... been in the Cabinet of General Jackson, and upon his defeat in this contest, retired from public life in North Carolina to receive the appointment of territorial Governor of Florida. In the Gubernatorial contest, two years later, John Motley Morehead, of Guilford, as the nominee of the Whigs, likewise defeated the Democratic leader, Judge ...
— School History of North Carolina • John W. Moore
... "Dupe, cozen, jockey the trustful young creature. Do. There 's a great-hearted gentleman. You need n't fear my undeceiving her. I know my place; I know who holds the purse-strings; I know which side my bread is buttered on. Motley's my wear. So long as you pay my wages, you may ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... amazement. Besides these, there was a long row of boys waiting, with countenances of no pleasant anticipation, to be treacled; and another file, who had just escaped from the infliction, making a variety of wry mouths indicative of anything but satisfaction. The whole were attired in such motley, ill-assorted, extraordinary garments, as would have been irresistibly ridiculous, but for the foul appearance of dirt, disorder, and disease, ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... and fit, others thin and badly cared for. Some have long unkempt manes and tails, others are bedecked with beads and shells and long scarlet tassels. Saddle cloths of brilliant hue are numerous, while the riders are a curious and a motley assembly. Some bare-foot, some booted and spurred (and a spur is a spur with an Arab, something after the implement mother marks the pastry with). Others are in long flowing robes with the burnous and kafeia of the ...
— Through Palestine with the 20th Machine Gun Squadron • Unknown
... the best blood of the North African Moors, Tartar bowmen, Negro wrestlers, Indian divers, and Turks, who generally accompanied the Cardinal on his hunting expeditions. When he was overtaken by an early death (1535), this motley band carried the corpse on their shoulders from Itri to Rome, and mingled with the general mourning for the open-handed Cardinal their medley of tongues ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... spent in India I had seen a good deal of both sides of that motley, amazing fabric which we call life. I had felt the throbbing of its great loom. I had touched with my own shrinking hand the closeness of the texture, had marked the interweaving of the alien strands, had marvelled ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... a gentle, superstitious, ignorant race, devoutly subject to their priests and trained to the letter of their religious rites, came in from the mountains and the neighboring villages in numbers but rarely seen in the city: a motley throng—yet no shepherd among them was too poor to wear the boot of dark-green leather reaching to the knee—the bodine roughly fashioned and tough enough to protect them from the bites of the serpents ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... he could be capable. He considered himself as an inexhaustible quarry of humours, vanities, jealousies, whims, absurd enthusiasms, absurd mortifications. He was able, as he said, to sit at his ease in the side-scene and see himself jigging on the stage in motley or the tragic sock—see himself as a lover, and cry aloud in delight at the mad persistence of the fool he appeared; see himself directing the affairs of the nation, and be ready to die of laughing at himself for pretending to be serious, ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... the public balls without fear of being recognised; whereas concealment at private masquerades can seldom be preserved to the last. It is most usual for ladies who visit the theatres to see the masked balls only to remain in a box with their party, and from thence to view the motley group; there are however some females even of rank who cannot resist the charm of going entirely incognito, to puzzle and perplex different persons whom they know will be there, only confiding to one or two dearest friends their little enterprise, ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... piquancy of the later is not yet apparent; but its absence implies, and is more than compensated by, the concomitant absence of those airs and flings, those interludes as of an academic jester, in cap and gown and liripipe instead of motley, which have been charged, not quite unjustly, on the Arnold that we know best. There is hardly in English a better example of the blending and conciliation of the two modes of argumentative writing referred ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... port, crowded with ships, and passed warehouses stored with merchandise, the Red Hall of the Flemings resounding with the noise of artificers, the wealthy religious houses which kept alive the flame of ancient learning, and dispensed befitting charities, the streets presented a motley assemblage of seafaring men, monks, warriors, and soldiers; the wives and daughters of the burghers, all in holiday attire, crowded the housetops or gazed from the windows and balconies; and the burghers themselves, leaving ...
— The Boy Crusaders - A Story of the Days of Louis IX. • John G. Edgar
... patriots of Holland, that he hopes his young friends will not complain of the proportion in which he has mingled his material. It would be a very great happiness to him to have excited a sufficient degree of interest in these countries to induce the boys and girls to read Mr. Motley's inimitable works, "The Rise of the Dutch Republic," and "The History of the United Netherlands." The writer is confident that young people will find these volumes quite as attractive as the ...
— Dikes and Ditches - Young America in Holland and Belguim • Oliver Optic
... around it the three generations of men who issued from the three subdivisions of the diligence, and presented that motley and mixed assemblage of ranks, ages, and countries, which forms so very amusing a part of ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... of shawls, skull-caps, toys, shells, sugar-cane, and various other commodities; but to enumerate the extraordinary diversity of goods exposed for sale, or to describe the Babel of tongues which confound the visitor as he wanders through the motley crowd, would ...
— A Journey to Katmandu • Laurence Oliphant
... of Luxembourg, he went into Germany, tarrying at Heidelberg, Nuremberg, Munich, and Vienna. He then passed down "the beautiful blue Danube" to Buda-Pesth, where, having been given letters and commendations from J. L. Motley, the historian of the Netherlands and our minister at Vienna, he saw the glittering pageant which united the crowns of Austria and Hungary. This was performed in the parish church in Buda, an edifice built ...
— Charles Carleton Coffin - War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman • William Elliot Griffis
... rope-making, the manipulations of the smith and of the agriculturist, and not only the useful arts, but even the amusements and luxuries of a great metropolis may be witnessed from the spot in which we stand; that motley crowd is collected round a policinello, and those smaller groups that surround the stalls are employed in enjoying the favourite food and ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... way from Downing-street to the House of Commons, on the night of an important debate, pause like a truant boy until the whole performance was concluded, to enjoy a hearty laugh at the whimsicalities of the 'motley hero.'"] ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... cause has lost an ardent supporter in Mrs. Browning; and did we dare rebel against God's will, we should grieve deeply that she was not permitted to glorify the Right in America as she has glorified it in Italy. Among the last things that she read were Motley's letters on the "American Crisis," and the writer will ever hold in dear memory the all but final conversation had with Mrs. Browning, in which these letters were discussed and warmly approved. In referring to the attitude taken by foreign nations with regard to America, she said,—"Why ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... the eye of Yates and Renmark. Both were astonished to see the number of men that O'Neill had under his command. They found a motley crowd. Some tattered United States uniforms were among them, but the greater number were dressed as ordinary individuals, although a few had trimmings of green braid on their clothes. Sleeping out for a couple of nights had given the gathering the unkempt appearance of a great ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... whose volume of sketches, "A Motley," is now in process of being reviewed, is just finishing another novel, which will no doubt be published in the autumn. That novels have to be finished is the great disadvantage of the novelist's career—otherwise, as every one knows, a bed of roses, ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... certainly maintain it was—it received the unreserved sanction of the Home Authorities, and the relations of Sovereign and subject, with all the many and mutual obligations involved in that connection, were established between the Queen of England and every individual of the motley population of the Transvaal. Nor was this change an empty form, for, to the largest proportion of that population, this transfer of allegiance brought with it a priceless and a vital boon. To them it meant—freedom and justice—for where, on any portion ...
— Cetywayo and his White Neighbours - Remarks on Recent Events in Zululand, Natal, and the Transvaal • H. Rider Haggard
... left the Governor, to rest upon the woman beside me; had he pointed to her with his hand, he could not have more surely drawn upon her the regard of that motley throng. By degrees the crowd had fallen back, leaving us three—the King's minion, the masquerading lady, and myself—the centre of a ring of staring faces; but now she became the sole target at which all eyes ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... theatrical exhibitions. According to the best authorities, when theatrical exhibitions were first given, an old cart was the stage, the chief actor was a coarse mimic or clown, the music was discoursed by itinerant singers, and the poem itself was a motley combination of serious and ludicrous ideas. These performances were first given in honor of the god of wine, Bacchus, which accounts, I suppose, for the fact that a theatre cannot live without a bar. On certain ...
— The Bobbin Boy - or, How Nat Got His learning • William M. Thayer
... was formally sold for cash to a provincial slave- dealer, named Olynthides. In a slave-barrack which he had hired for the month only I found myself with a motley crew, but kept apart from them and comfortably lodged, well fed and considerately ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... endowed with the eloquence of Peter the Hermit, traversed Germany, displaying the cross and rousing Christians to defend Europe from the infidels. He soon collected a motley mass of forty thousand men, rustics, priests, students, soldiers, unarmed, undisciplined, a rabble rout, who followed him to the rendezvous where Hunniades had succeeded in collecting a large force of the ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... us as finished men; the desired "unity with life" can be attained only upon its stage—the world—in the motley throng of fellow-men, but minds and bodies were carefully trained according to their individual peculiarities, and I might consider myself capable of receiving higher lessons. True, my character was not yet steeled sufficiently to resist every temptation, but I no longer ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... looked up. It seemed to me, as he eyed me, that he had addressed it particularly to me. I blushed. Some strange country girls on either side of me began to titter. I blushed more decidedly. The motley chap in the ring must have seen it. He grinned from ear to ear, walked up to the very edge of ...
— The Blunders of a Bashful Man • Metta Victoria Fuller Victor
... to it a set of riotous and extravagant young men; officers in the guards and mousquetaires. The Commander de Nonant, chevalier to all the girls of the opera, was the daily oracle, who conveyed to us the news of this motley crew. M. du Plessis, a lieutenant-colonel, retired from the service, an old man of great goodness and wisdom; and M. Ancelet, an officer in the mousquetaires kept the young people in a certain ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... had, at first, pretended to join in the pursuit of the nimble runaways, but only pretended. Then he suddenly perceived that they were growing breathless and had almost fallen beneath the feet of a mighty Norman horse. The man beneath his motley uniform rose to the emergency. Catching the bridle of a near-by pony, he flung the monkey from its back, scooped the babies up from the ground, set them in the monkey's place and, mounting behind them, ...
— Dorothy's House Party • Evelyn Raymond
... Mrs Cutts is a most kind motley woman," Harry said. "But it isn't the Back Kitchen, neither," he added, ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... It did not take long to move away the stones and to transfer the plates from the floor to the table, after which three much flustered hostesses opened the door and gushed a welcome to their guests. It was rather a motley group who entered: Irene as a nun in waterproof and hood; Agnes as a Red Cross Nurse; Esther a Turk, with a towel for a turban; Joan a sportsman in her gymnasium knickers; Sheila, in a tricolor cap, represented ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... It was a motley group which gathered later at the club for the hunt breakfast. There were fox-hunting farmers born on the land, of sturdy yeoman stock, and careless of form. There were the lords of newly acquired acres, who ...
— Mistress Anne • Temple Bailey
... transport dies away: Some more refin'd transcribe their Opera-loves On Iv'ry Tablets, or in clean white Gloves: Some of Platonic, some of carnal Taste, Hoop'd, or un-hoop'd, ungarter'd, or unlac'd. Thus thick in Air the wing'd Creation play, When vernal Phoebus rouls the Light away, A motley race, half Insects and half Fowls, Loose-tail'd and dirty, ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... to the conductor of the train, and standing in the aisle with his arm across the seat, screened her from the gaze of a motley crew of men and boys who rushed in to stare at the prisoner, whose arrival had been impatiently expected. On the railway platform and about the station house surged a sea of human heads, straining now ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... driving into the hurly burly of the new city of Chicago. It had recently received a charter. But what a motley of buildings it was! Frame shacks wedged between more substantial buildings of brick or wood. Land speculators swarmed everywhere; land offices confronted one at every turn; lawyers, doctors, men of all professions and trades had descended ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... unknown lands of the Snake Indians. It consisted of about sixty men, thirty women, and as many children of various ages—about a hundred and twenty souls in all. Many of the boys were capable of using the gun and setting a beaver-trap. The men were a most motley set. There were Canadians, half-breeds, Iroquois, and Scotchmen. Most of the women had Indian blood in their veins, and ...
— The Dog Crusoe and His Master - A Story of Adventure in the Western Prairies • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... the last guests left the Casino. Without exception, liberal indulgence in champagne and brandy had done its work, and the motley crowd that left the building thus "early" was in a decidedly boisterous mood, and the limits of decency and good manners had been passed by ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... province. They suspended their feuds when the surveying battalion came into their broken country, and looked with curious interest upon all that pertained to the distinguished foreign mathematicians. Around their camp of tents and pack-mules, peddlers and preachers called together their motley congregations, and the sound of axes clearing the timber was accompanied by fiddling and haranguing, the fighting of dogs, and the coarse tones of religious or business oratory. It was in the height of the era of the great period of the Dissenters ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... hastily moved back behind the scenes, for at the moment the entire chorus rushed out in a gallop: a throng of women, chiefly young women, but with painted faces, faded and blighted by their feverish life. There were blondes and brunettes, small and tall, thin and stout a motley gathering from all spheres of life. There were among them the faces of madonnas with defiant glances, and the smooth, round faces, expressionless and unintelligent, of peasant girls. And all were boredly cynical, or, at least, ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont
... weather-worn, standing in some bleak corner of New York or New Hampshire; through whose closed windows the passer-by catches the confused hum of recitation, or at whose door he sees children of all conditions mingling in motley play. Of all conditions, so far as external peculiarities go; for the laws of nature and the ordinances of Providence cannot be dispensed with even here; but of one condition as the recognized possessors of immortal mind. Those who have helped mould the Republic have ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... 12th October, and was at Volksrust in the evening, with the forces of Generals Kock and Lukas Meyer thrown widely forward on his right and left flanks respectively. Kock, coming through Botha's Pass with his motley foreign levies,[89] halted for the night at the mouth of the defile, whilst the units of the left horn of the invading crescent, reinforced this day by the commandos of Middelburg and Wakkerstroom, lay under Meyer some forty miles eastward, some in Utrecht, some ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice
... channel through which Bacon's plays reached the stage, for the pretended author of these masterpieces. Shak—was not the man to do all the troking, bargaining, lying, going here and there, and making himself a motley to the view for 0 pounds, 0s, 0d. If he were a sham, a figure-head, a liar, a fetcher-and-carrier of manuscripts, HE WOULD BE PAID FOR IT. But he did not deal with Henslowe in his bargainings, and THAT is why ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... a man was seen advancing toward them, who, observing their approach, fell back a few steps, and threw himself on the ground at the foot of a large old apple-tree. Around this were clustered a motley group of men, women, and boys, who opened and made way for the stranger. He advanced, and bowing gracefully took off his forage cap, from beneath which a quantity of soft curling flaxen hair fell over his brow and cheeks. Every eye was now fixed on him, ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... dress. The floor of the dancing-room is usually the mother earth, which is frequently sprinkled with water to keep down the dust. The men are in their everyday habiliments, with the addition of any clean thing they may chance to possess; but, usually they are a motley crowd, a glance at whom at first leaves the impression that they are far from being refined. Except when dancing, they cling to their blankets, and at the least pause in the proceedings, they at once draw forth the materials and make their cigarettos. Both men and women indulge ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... the pond again, and Fred might have smeared her with the bread and butter. The stupidest lads under the sun may often win the love of girls of seventeen, and even men with only an apology for a heart are sometimes successful, but alas for the young fellow who has ever condescended to wear motley, he can never hope to win his lady's affection, for nothing is so destructive to young love as a hearty fit ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... a bitterly cold night, and the dark street in front of the restaurant was crowded with a motley array of rickshaws, Peking carts, and motors, through which we made our way by the light of a bobbing lantern. We entered a crowded, noisy kitchen, filled with rushing waiters and shouting cooks bending over charcoal fires. In contrast to the freezing wind ...
— Peking Dust • Ellen N. La Motte
... passed through the streets of the capital, and the region near the harbor, his mind was so engrossed by his recent experiences and his anxiety concerning the runaway youth, that he paid little attention to the throng of vessels lying at anchor, the motley crowd of ship owners, traders, sailors, and laborers, representatives of all the nations of Africa and Asia, who sought a livelihood here, and the officials, soldiers, and petitioners, who had followed Pharaoh from Thebes ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... to save their sons; they concentrated on the daughters. It was pitiful to see how in their ignorance they were unaware of the strongest forces working against them. The talk of all this motley humanity—of "good" no less than "bad" women, of steady workingmen, of political heelers, thieves and bums and runners for dives—was frankly, often hideously, obscene. The jammed together way of living made modesty ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... we have given the best. In comparison with the Frenchman, he might be described as an angel; and, compared with the other wretches on the raft, he was, perhaps, the least bad: for the word best could not, with propriety, be applied to anyone of that motley crew. ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... secret for the camp of the Arabian Emir, Muza ben Nozier. The camp was spread out in one of those pastoral vallies which lie at the feet of the Barbary hills, with the great range of the Atlas mountains towering in the distance. In the motley army here assembled were warriors of every tribe and nation, that had been united by pact or conquest in the cause of Islem. There were those who had followed Muza from the fertile regions of Egypt, across the deserts of Barca, and those who had joined ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... I have gone here and there, And made myself a motley to the view, Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear, Made old offences of affections new; Most true it is that I have look'd ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... wear, and a scarlet cloak, or rather a cloak that had once been scarlet, but was now completely faded from its original color. It had been broken here and there, but was pieced with different colored cloths, so as to appear a motley and strange garment; and her bony feet were bare and unprotected. Nanny, from different circumstances, was unanimously elected the witch or bugbear of the village; and though the brats were then so busy annoying her, at night, or ...
— Ellen Duncan; And The Proctor's Daughter - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... grand state on his journey westward, escorted by his body-guard, and with his motley and innumerable horde of singers, dancers, poets, actors, and mountebanks in his train. He brought with him the prizes which he had won in the various cities of Greece. The number of these prizes, it was said, was more than eighteen hundred. On his way through Greece, ...
— Nero - Makers of History Series • Jacob Abbott
... brain of the writer to the sheet before him flows an unbroken Pactolian stream. Lamb, at his best, ranges with Shakspearian facility the gamut of human emotion, exclaiming, as it were at one moment, with Jaques, "Motley's the only wear!"—in the next probing the source of tears. He is as ejaculatory with his pen as other men are with their tongues. Puns, quotations, conceits, critical estimates of the rarest insight and suggestiveness, ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... ship's side the departing chieftain fired his pistols in the air as long as their charges lasted, while the motley desperadoes of the Revenge gave him many a parting yell. Then all the boats of the Revenge were lowered, and every man who could crowd into them left their ship for the shore. Black Paul tried to restrain them, ...
— Kate Bonnet - The Romance of a Pirate's Daughter • Frank R. Stockton
... midst of their affected strangeness, a sickliness about his melodies despite their evidently FORCED unlikeness to familiar phrases, an utter ignorance of design everywhere apparent in his lengthened works...The entire works of Chopin present a motley surface of ranting hyperbole and excruciating cacophony. When he is not THUS singular, he is no better than Strauss or any other waltz compounder... such as admire Chopin, and they are legion, will admire these Mazurkas, which are supereminently ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... Creusa perished, you know, in the robe of magic presented to her as a wedding gift from Medea, and designed to burn the wearer to ashes! Yes, decidedly it is Creusa, in her death robe of fire!" persisted the 'gentle Desdemona,' who had just joined the motley group. ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... making its way into my throat and eyes; at least one pig reposed on the floor of the hut, and I heard a faint clucking of poultry roosting in some remote and dusky corner of the chamber. It really was a relief to get away from the motley group, and under Spira's guidance I soon reached the clean little inn of Cetigna. Here, in the bright, low kitchen, I found Mr Popham on his knees, toasting bread, and at the same time giving our Cattarese ...
— The Grateful Indian - And other Stories • W.H.G. Kingston
... Alexandria, with four or five Orientals on board. They come on shore, and proceed to saunter along the Riva toward the Grand Piazza, while their dark faces and brightly-colored garments add an element to the motley scene which is perfectly in keeping with old ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... arise on earth, With cheerful wisdom and instructive mirth; 50 See motley life in modern trappings dress'd, And feed with varied fools the eternal jest: Thou who could'st laugh where want enchain'd caprice, Toil crush'd conceit, and man was of a piece: Where wealth, unloved, without a mourner died; And scarce a sycophant was fed by pride; ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... to have made an appointment on this piazza: the multitude thronging it was so great as to overflow into all the neighbouring streets, which started from this centre like the rays of a star. The crowds of people, looking like a motley moving carpet, were climbing up into the basilica, grouping themselves upon the stones, hanging on the columns, standing up against the walls; they entered by the doors of houses and reappeared at the windows, so numerous and so densely packed that one might have ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... first time, have walked through the ranks of the Carlist army, would have found much that was curious and interesting to note. The whole disposable military force of what the Christinos called the Faction, was there assembled, and a motley crew it appeared. Had stout hearts and strong arms been as rare in their ranks as uniformity of garb and equipment, the struggle would hardly have been prolonged for four years after the date we write of. But it would be difficult to find ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... went up to the gate and rattled the latch. Within arose the barking of dogs; but the motley-haired pack ran back, wagging their tails when they saw the well-known face. Ivan Ivanovitch traversed the courtyard, in which were collected Indian doves, fed by Ivan Nikiforovitch's own hand, melon-rinds, vegetables, broken wheels, barrel-hoops, ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... patience; but how about practice? I am exasperated! there is the simple fact. And is it not enough? What a scene I have just witnessed! A motley crew of thousands of low people of all colors parading the streets with flags, torches, music, and all other accompaniments, shouting, screaming, exulting over the fall of Port Hudson and Vicksburg. The "Era" will ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... explorers. Why, here they could subsist for weeks! The rebels might spy them, might surround them, but they need not starve—the buds were food, the bushes refreshment, the pellucid pools drink and life. Barney stared in speechless amazement at the unseemly gambols of the motley mass. ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... the stairs was another door, which Santiago opened and entered. It was a sort of ante-room, much like the entrance into a lodge room. Around the walls was a motley collection of firearms, swords, spears and ...
— The Broncho Rider Boys with Funston at Vera Cruz - Or, Upholding the Honor of the Stars and Stripes • Frank Fowler
... word, conducted the visitors between the flower-beds upon narrow, winding paths which traversed the garden like a lovely labyrinth. The graceful ease of her gait showed that she was enjoying the chance of showing others the motley splendors of her garden. As if she had determined to make her guests giddy, she moved on faster and ever faster like the leader of a lively folk-dance. Then, quite suddenly, so that Casanova seemed to awaken from a confusing dream, they all found themselves in the parlor ...
— Casanova's Homecoming • Arthur Schnitzler
... the cellar walls, is a motley throng, curious, eager, expectant; among the faces peering down may be seen that of the portly gentleman; his diamond pin glistening as he turns this way and that; his great coat blown back by the gusts of wind, and a natty umbrella clutched firmly in his plump, gloved hand. Not far distant is ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... is there for the Volucella to disguise herself as a wasp? Any fly, whether clad in drab or motley, is admitted to the burrow directly she makes herself useful to the community. The mimicry of the bumblebee fly, which was said to be one of the most conclusive cases, is, after all, a mere childish ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... motto and superscription on their portals—"This is the gate of the Lord, into which THE RIGHTEOUS ONE shall enter!" Jesus refused and disowned none of these gratulations—He spurned no voice in all that motley Jerusalem throng. There were endless diversities and phases, doubtless, of human character and history there. The once proud formalist, the once greedy extortioner, the hated tax-gatherer, the rich nobleman, the child of penury, ...
— Memories of Bethany • John Ross Macduff
... good man prayed for all the world And all its motley crew, For pagan, Hindoo, sinners, Turk, And unbelieving Jew,— Though the congregation doubtless thought That the cowboys as a race Were a kind of moral outlaw With no ...
— Cowboy Songs - and Other Frontier Ballads • Various
... names. Still, it is a privilege to have known such men as John Lawrence, Guizot, Thiers, Landseer, Merimee, Comte de Flahault, Doyle, Lords Elgin and Dalhousie, Duc de Broglie, Pelissier, Panizzi, Motley, Delane, Dufferin; and of gifted women, the three Sheridans, Lady Seymour - the Queen of Beauty, afterwards Duchess of Somerset - Mrs. Norton, and Lady Dufferin. Amongst those who have a retrospective interest were Mr. ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... of being recognised; whereas concealment at private masquerades can seldom be preserved to the last. It is most usual for ladies who visit the theatres to see the masked balls only to remain in a box with their party, and from thence to view the motley group; there are however some females even of rank who cannot resist the charm of going entirely incognito, to puzzle and perplex different persons whom they know will be there, only confiding to one or two dearest ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... Medina-Sidonia, Duke of Mediterranean, command of the Mends, Dr. Stilon —— Admiral Sir W. Merchant Service, foreign seamen in our; historical relations of the navy with the; its exemption from impressment (see alsounder Commerce) Minorca Mischenko, General Mortality from disease in war Motley, ...
— Sea-Power and Other Studies • Admiral Sir Cyprian Bridge
... escape from this confinement, and are then frizzed and curled, like a mop or a poodle's coat. Leonard Harper and I returned in this boat, Tahitian steering, Samoan, Futuman, and Anaiteans making one motley crew. The brisk trade soon carried us to the beach in front of Mr. Inglis's house, and arrived at the reef I rode out pick-a-back on the Samoan, Leonard following on a half-naked Anaitean. We soon found ourselves in the midst of a number of men, women and children, ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... an easy victory that evening. She had furnished for the occasion her keenest wit, her sweetest laughter, her finest derision, her most sparkling sarcasm; and as she and her escort joined the motley throng who were patiently making their way into the packed doorway she whetted ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... smote at him with swords, or made feints at his eyes with spears, or burned sulphur under his nose, or displayed before him scrolls of poetry or learning, or shrieked blasphemies in his ears, or surveyed him from a little distance with glances of leering affection; while a motley crowd of goblins, wearing the heads of boars or lions, or whisking the tails of dragons, winged, or hoofed, or scaled, or feathered, or all at once, incessantly jostled and wrangled with each other and their betters, mopping and ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... year round; for she couldn't afford to sit idle through the long summer months—well, I should say not!—with eight small brothers and sisters at home, and a rather incompetent father, and sixteen dollars a month rent! The experiences of a score of shops, and the motley crew of people she had worked with in these busy years, Bessie in her careless, simple narrative had the power to invest with ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... the train stops, out get all the passengers, and a very motley assemblage they form as they pace up and down on the platform. Uniforms of all sorts predominate, from the modern-coated, richly-laced officer of the Emperor's guard, to the sombre-dressed rank and file of the line. There were Circassians and Georgians, and Cossacks ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston
... bearing himself proudly, riding at their heels; a negro following on, also mounted, with a huge bundle in his arms before him, and a shivering, yellow-haired lad of about my own age on a pillion behind him; clustering about these, a motley score of poor people, young and old, some bearing household goods, and all frightened out of their five senses—this is what ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... "Homer, Plutarch, Herodotus, and Plato; Virgil, Livy, and Tacitus; Dante, Tasso, and Petrarch; Cervantes; Thomas a Kempis; Goethe and Schiller; Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Bacon, Sir Thomas Browne, Bunyan, Addison, Gray, Scott, and Wordsworth; Hawthorne, Emerson, Motley, Longfellow, Bryant, Lowell, Holmes, and Whittier. He who reads these, and such as these, is not in serious danger of spending his time amiss. But not even such a list as this is to be received as a necessity by every reader. One may find Cowper more profitable than Wordsworth; to another the reading ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... was beginning for the next dance, and people passed in couples, laughing and talking gaily, a motley procession, on ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... craven cur, that licks the hand that lashed him!—a poor court fool that thinks it joy enough to carry his bauble, and marvel at his motley coat and his silvered buttons! That he should be my ...
— The White Lady of Hazelwood - A Tale of the Fourteenth Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... Mary out of her sense of bereavement. Subsequent letters still occasionally admit 'low spirits'. But the entries in the Journal make it clear that the year 1819-20 was one of the most pleasantly industrious of her life. Not Dante only, but a motley series of books, great and small, ancient and modern, English and foreign, bespoke her attention. Not content with Latin, and the extemporized translations which Shelley could give her of Plato's Republic, she started Greek in 1820, and soon came to delight ...
— Proserpine and Midas • Mary Shelley
... affected strangeness, a sickliness about his melodies despite their evidently FORCED unlikeness to familiar phrases, an utter ignorance of design everywhere apparent in his lengthened works...The entire works of Chopin present a motley surface of ranting hyperbole and excruciating cacophony. When he is not THUS singular, he is no better than Strauss or any other waltz compounder... such as admire Chopin, and they are legion, will admire these Mazurkas, which are supereminently Chopin-ical; that ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... neighbourhood, were prepared to resist our advance on Aligarh, and that they expected to be aided by a large number of mutineers from Delhi. We came in sight of Aligarh shortly before daybreak on the 5th October. Our advance was stopped by a motley crowd drawn up before the walls, shouting, blowing horns, beating drums, and abusing the Feringhis in the choicest Hindustani; but, so far as we could see, there were no sepoys amongst them. The Horse Artillery coming up, these valiant defenders ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... and interested, and what a bustle and movement there was! The banging of the guns on the men-of-war began again as the motley, fascinatingly interesting crowd, cavalry outriders, Sikhs, Parsees, Gourkas, Hindoos, and Mussulmen, sped away down to the Apollo Bundar to see the Prince go off to the flagship. H. and I went with the tide, a jolly cheery medley of coloured races, waddling, ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... his fingers through his crisp hair, pulled it into a peak, stepped to the seat and sitting on the railing, he lifted his elbows, tilted his head, and began a motley outpouring of half-spoken, half-whistled trills and imploring cries. There was enough similarity that the Girl instantly recognized the red bird. Out of breath the Harvester dropped to ...
— The Harvester • Gene Stratton Porter
... had noted so many times before, the motley appearance of the army, but with involuntary motion he began to straighten and smooth his own shabby uniform. He was about to enter the presence of a woman and he was young ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... ran the length of the beach, shaded by trees, and crossing a gentle stream. Along this avenue was all the life and commerce of Tai-o-hae. Two traders' shops, empty offices, a gendarme, a handful of motley half-castes lounging under the trees—this was all that was left of former greatness. Only nature had not changed. It flung over the broken remnants of the glory and the dream its lovely cloak of verdure and of flower. Man had almost ceased to be a figure in the scene he had ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... later he came back again, this time as king, with a motley army of mercenaries gathered to crush the two brothers De Lacy, who for the moment dominated all Ireland—the one, Hugo, being Earl of Ulster, and Viceroy; the other, Walter, Lord of the Palatinate ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... characterize all great literature. Has any text-book in history ever appealed to you as a work of literature? What literary qualities have you noticed in standard historical works, such as those of Macaulay, Prescott, Gibbon, Green, Motley, Parkman, and ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... up to date, And do your best to multiply Your sheep by next subtracting votes From over-suffraged Tory goats. By Registration Law perplexed, Take "qualifying periods" next, And at one swoop reduce with glee Twelve months, or more, to only three. Add labour to your motley crew, Subtract (from life) a church or two. Produce, with geometric skill, The lines of many a promised bill. But state—the Unionists to vex— That Home Rule always equals x. Raise, in a rash, disastrous hour, Campaigning Ireland to a power. And thus, to prayers and protests ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, July 30, 1892 • Various
... his uncle's woods; but who were those long-legged, lank fellows who took just as much care of their rifles and knapsacks as the Indians did? They were hunters, and Tom could not resist the temptation to turn his eyes away from the fore-castle back to the main-deck to take a second survey of the motley group of men he had seen there. They were cowboys all of them, and their clothing, especially their hats and boots, were as nearly perfect as money could buy. They were all young fellows, from twenty to twenty-five years of age, and wore their six-shooters ...
— Elam Storm, The Wolfer - The Lost Nugget • Harry Castlemon
... quiet early dawn 320 British regulars and 400 Canadian militia were in readiness to embark; and, as sunrise coloured the sky, a motley fleet pushed off from the Canadian shore. The war vessel Queen Charlotte and the batteries at Sandwich opened fire, while the wooded shores re-echoed to the savage yells of 600 painted braves. Brock ...
— Tecumseh - A Chronicle of the Last Great Leader of His People; Vol. - 17 of Chronicles of Canada • Ethel T. Raymond
... be difficult to find a more motley and diversified company than sat down to the ungarnished fare which Katty laid before them. There were first Fathers Philemy, Con, and the Auxiliary from the far part of the diocese; next followed Captain Wilson, Peter Malone, and Father ...
— The Station; The Party Fight And Funeral; The Lough Derg Pilgrim • William Carleton
... world, seeks for his creations a like seclusion. He writes to Raczynski: "As you are wishing to send my picture to the public exhibition in Berlin, I cannot refrain from expressing my anxiety. Paintings of this kind appear to me not fitted to be seen by the motley multitude usually gathered together in exhibitions. The general public are almost sure to measure wrongly works like this, for as the eye is attracted to outward means and is engaged on technical splendours, pictures in which ...
— Overbeck • J. Beavington Atkinson
... The motley crowd of vendors, clamouring, gesticulating, are chiefly distinguished by their hats—the Arabs in white turbans, the Turks in dingy fezes jauntily cocked over dark, unshaven faces, some fezes swathed in bright silk scarves; ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... rapidly gaining ground for women to have some pet scheme of reform. A few of them have such ambition for publicity they take their pet scheme, and the platform, and go trailing over the land like comets. Now I do not wish you to join this motley crowd, though your heart does burn over the unacknowledged perfections ...
— Medoline Selwyn's Work • Mrs. J. J. Colter
... converse of the professors, until an approaching storm drives us in-doors. Within the "shooting box", as the young man who has traveled christens the house,— thinking that an appropriate title for a domicile where so many members of the Hunt family are collected,—there is a motley assembly, as they gather around the sitting room table. There are Portuguese, Michiganders, Pennites, Illinoisyones, Bangorillas, and other specimens of natural history such as would have puzzled Agassiz himself; and the question arises, ...
— Over the Border: Acadia • Eliza Chase
... black Baal blocked the heavens he had no hymns from us. Children we were—our forts of sand were even as weak as we, High as they went we piled them up to break that bitter sea. Fools as we were in motley, all jangling and absurd, When all church bells were silent our ...
— Poems • G.K. Chesterton
... little, skiffs, with a layer of coal dust on their pretentious, freshly-painted names, tied to the pier and rocking to the slightest motion of the water. From her windows Sidonie could see the restaurants on the beach, silent through the week, but filled to overflowing on Sunday with a motley, noisy crowd, whose shouts of laughter, mingled with the dull splash of oars, came from both banks to meet in midstream in that current of vague murmurs, shouts, calls, laughter, and singing that floats without ceasing up and down the ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... and striving, Elsie contrived to secure for herself and her grandchild stations in the piazza in front of the church, in the very front rank, where the procession was to pass. A motley assemblage it was, this crowd, comprising every variety of costume of rank and station and ecclesiastical profession,—cowls and hoods of Franciscan and Dominican,—picturesque headdresses of peasant-women of different districts,—plumes ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... sor," replied Mick, with a broad grin, as he cuddled the monkey up to him in his arms; Jocko taking off Mick's cap the while, and carefully scattering its motley contents to the winds. "Oi call him, sure, a Saint Michael's ...
— Young Tom Bowling - The Boys of the British Navy • J.C. Hutcheson
... had spent in India I had seen a good deal of both sides of that motley, amazing fabric which we call life. I had felt the throbbing of its great loom. I had touched with my own shrinking hand the closeness of the texture, had marked the interweaving of the alien strands, had marvelled ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... England or Ireland, are wrong. We are not sure whether Mr. Kemble, who, as an excellent critic has observed, is always seeking for novelty and always running into error, may not lately have added that patch to his motley garb of new readings; but his authority is disallowed. Even Garrick, whose claims were of a very superior kind, when he attempted to render the English language, already too unstable, more so, by his innovations, was ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... semi-lunatic," George Francis Train. She published his letter in The Revolution with an answer by Mrs. Stanton which not only pointed out how often the Republicans had failed women but reminded Garrison how he had welcomed into his antislavery ranks anyone and everyone who believed in his ideas, "a motley crew it was." She recalled the label of fanatic which had been attached to him, how he had been threatened and pelted with rotten eggs for expressing his unpopular ideas and for burning the Constitution which he declared sanctioned slavery. With such a background, ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... the prospect of success, had certainly given the lady's complexion a fine tint. Her dainty profile offered a striking contrast to the motley crew of negroid Arabs who surrounded her. And she came to meet them in a buoyant spirit, though the fierce sun was scorching her delicate skin through the thin ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... 'amidst this motley crew Of Georgians, Russians, Nubians, and what not, All ragamuffins differing but in hue, With whom it is our luck to cast our lot, The only gentlemen seem I and you; So let us be acquainted, as we ought: If I could yield you any ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... North African Moors, Tartar bowmen, Negro wrestlers, Indian divers, and Turks, who generally accompanied the Cardinal on his hunting expeditions. When he was overtaken by an early death (1535), this motley band carried the corpse on their shoulders from Itri to Rome, and mingled with the general mourning for the open-handed Cardinal their medley of tongues ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... must have been, for the Pinto thrilled, and bounded double strong. The white man yelled and spared not lash nor spur. Red Rover flinched, then sprang as he had never sprung before. But the demon pony in the motley coat swung faster, faster, faster yet; his nostrils flared; his breath was rushing—snorting—his mighty heart was pounding, the song of the wind and the flying wings seemed to enter into his soul. He double-timed his hoofbeats ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... shadow than if it were clothed in green. But, perchance, a gleam of sun falls on a certain spot of distant shrubbery or woodland, and we see it brighten with many hues, standing forth prominently from the dimness around it. The sunlight gradually spreads, and the whole sombre scene is changed to a motley picture,—the sun bringing out many shades of color, and converting its gloom to an almost laughing cheerfulness. At such times I almost doubt whether the foliage has lost any of its brilliancy. But the clouds intercept the sun again, and lo! old Autumn appears, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... David's advice, "Fret not thyself because of evil-doers" (Psa. 37:1) "Be not thou afraid when one is made rich, when the glory of his house is increased" (Psa. 49:16). But go thou into the sanctuary of thy God, read His Word, and understand the end of these men-(Mason). Often, as the motley reflexes of my experience move in long processions of manifold groups before me, the distinguished and world-honoured company of Christian mammonists appear to the eye of my imagination as a drove of camels heavily laden, yet all at full speed; and each in the confident expectation of passing ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... Congregated together were about fifty sunburnt laborers, arrayed in coarse woollen shirts. To their despondent-looking trousers the blue tenacious prairie mud clung like glue. Several nationalities were represented in the motley assembly, for it was the time of the great North-West boom, and men had been drawn ...
— A Lover in Homespun - And Other Stories • F. Clifford Smith
... sheltering canopy, among the luggage of the fur-clad gentleman, sat and reclined four travellers, whom the owner of the vehicle had gradually picked up, and who formed a motley company. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... something terrible had happened, he sprang to his feet, buckled on his cutlass, and, snatching up a pistol in one hand and a lamp in the other, hurriedly stepped out of the cabin to investigate. He was just in time to encounter at the foot of the companion-ladder a motley crowd of swarthy-skinned strangers, who, with bared daggers and sword-blades, were making their way down to the cabin. That they were enemies was so instantly apparent that George unhesitatingly levelled his pistol at the foremost man and fired. The bullet struck the man in the shoulder, ...
— The Voyage of the Aurora • Harry Collingwood
... look too much at the outward landscape, lest their hearts should by the loveliness of earth be estranged from heaven. I do not think that Russian priests or pilgrims incur any such danger. When they are neither praying nor eating they are sleeping; in short, I did not among the motley multitude see a single eye open to the loveliness of colour in the sky above, or to the beauty of form in the earth beneath. It is singular how obtuse these people are; I have noticed in a crowded railway carriage that not a face would be turned to the glory of the setting sun, but if a church tower ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... her shoulders impatiently. I think I was a little disappointed in her. I expected then people to be more of a piece than I do now, and I was distressed to find so much vindictiveness in so charming a creature. I did not realise how motley are the qualities that go to make up a human being. Now I am well aware that pettiness and grandeur, malice and charity, hatred and love, can find place side by side in ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... observant man once wrote of the hand being subdued to what it works in. The man who wrote that surely never tramped along the Haworth road as the bell rang for twelve o'clock. From out the factories poured a motley mob of men, women and children, not only with hands dyed, but with clothing, faces and heads as well. Girls with bright-green hair, and lemon-colored faces, leered and jeered at me as they hastened pellmell ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... his Cabinet were in accord in regard to the controversy with Great Britain as to the Alabama Claims. Mr. Sumner advocated a more exacting policy. Mr. Motley appeared to be following Mr. Sumner's lead, and the opposition to Mr. Sumner extended to Mr. Motley. It had happened that the President had taken on a prejudice to Mr. Motley at their first interview. This I learned when I said something to the President in the line ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 2 • George S. Boutwell
... above the grass, and by far the most interesting portion of the exercises had been concealed from view. The butterflies, while naturally the most conspicuous element, were now seen to be in a small minority among the insect gathering, the bramble leaves being peopled with a most motley and democratic assemblage of insects. Class distinctions were apparently forgotten in the common enthusiasm; the plebeian bluebottle and blowfly now consorted with Aphrodite and sipped at the same drop. Many a leaf was begemmed ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... was to crack the best joke, and sing the best song,—he could. Unluckily, however, this functionary was for the present obliged to absent himself from St. Ronan's; for, not recollecting that he did not actually wear the privileged motley of his profession, he had passed some jest upon Captain MacTurk, which cut so much to the quick, that Mr. Meredith was fain to go to goat-whey quarters, at some ten miles' distance, and remain there in ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... "'A motley crew' we are!" cheerfully announced Doctor George, and all the children radiantly clapped their hands at his joke. Even the White House baby, which had been carried to the feast, gurgled and crowed loudly ...
— A Big Temptation • L. T. Meade
... who manifested this violent emotion, was a young man, dressed in a mean and tattered garb, his face begrimed corresponding with that of the motley crew by which he was surrounded. He was a perfect stranger to the others present, and had not participated in their previous conversation, nor been personally ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... doctors, crying sacrilege and blasphemy, sprang forward in a transport of fury to fall upon the Jew; and a troop of monks, in motley dresses of black and white, advanced with a standard on which were painted pincers, gridirons, lighted fagots, and the words Justice, Charity, Mercy.* "It is necessary," said they, "to make an example of these ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... a fantastic shape. As they drove through the gateway, a green lizard scampered down from the top of one of the posts, where he had been sunning himself, and a rattlesnake lying in the path lazily uncoiled his motley brown length, and sounding his rattle, wriggled slowly off into the rank grass and weeds that bordered the ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt
... about from one to the other of the passers-by who had crowded in, and the grave gentlemanly Turks bowed and left in the most courteous manner, while the others, a very motley assembly, showed some disposition to stay, but were eventually persuaded to go outside, ...
— Yussuf the Guide - The Mountain Bandits; Strange Adventure in Asia Minor • George Manville Fenn
... left by some of these rich men was a curious conglomeration of almost every stamp, showing the results of a mixed assemblage of customers. There were Spanish pistoles, guineas, Arabian coin, bank dollars, Dutch and French money—a motley assortment all carefully heaped together. Without doubt, those enterprising pirate captains, Kidd and Burgess, and their crews, were good customers of these accommodating and undiscriminating merchants. It was a time when money was triply valued, for little of it passed in circulation. ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... was ever ready to show them acts of kindness. He for a considerable time used to visit the green room, and seemed to take delight in dissipating his gloom by mixing in the sprightly chit-chat of the motley circle then to be found there. But at last—as Mr. David Hume related to me from Mr. Garrick—he denied himself this amusement ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... of this so-called Empire were, however, a multitude of independent States; and the chief of these States, Austria, combined with its German provinces a large territory which did not even in name form part of the Germanic body. The motley of the Empire was made up by governments of every degree of strength and weakness. Austria and Prussia possessed both political traditions and resources raising them to the rank of great European Powers; but the sovereignties of the second ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... fell from her forehead and temples, dropping over her shoulders in two ribbon bound braids. A tall, gray-cowled monk, whose military bearing gave the lie to his cassock, a Spanish grandee, and a fool in motley saw her at the same moment and hurried to intercept her, but with a slide which carried him a quarter of the way across the floor the Bedouin arrived first, and before the others had come up he was drifting away with her in the ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... waiting for it; Merryman in his plain clothes, and so forth; during which contemplation the joke was uttered and laughed at, and Mr. M., resuming his professional duties, was tumbling over head and heels. Do not suppose I am going, sicut est mos, to indulge in moralities about buffoons, paint, motley, and mountebanking. Nay, Prime Ministers rehearse their jokes; Opposition leaders prepare and polish them; Tabernacle preachers must arrange them in their minds before they utter them. All I mean is, that I would like to know any one of these performers thoroughly, ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the Americans was not due to special training; for the British service was better trained in gunnery, as in everything else, than the motley armies and fleets that fought at New Orleans and on the Lakes. Critics constantly said that every American had learned from his childhood the use of the rifle; but he certainly had not learned to use cannon in shooting birds ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... for a long time in Aliva's armory—that contained, besides weapons of the date, a motley assortment of the tools of war that would have done great credit to a museum of antiquities—produced two pistols. He handed, one to the missionary and one to Miss McClean, advising her to hide hers underneath her clothing. "You know what they're for?" he asked. ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... was a motley crowd of Russian officers all talking and gesticulating together. I came nearer to Vera and at once I said to myself, "Lawrence is here somewhere." She was standing, her head up, watching the doors, her eyes glowed with anticipation, her lips were a little parted. ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... notified, they assemble at the girl's hogan fairly early in the evening. When dusk has settled, the medicine-man begins his songs, singing first the twelve "hogan songs" of the Bahozhonchi. After he has finished, anyone present who so desires may sing songs taken from the ritual of the same order. This motley singing and hilarity continue until well toward sunrise, when the mother brings in a bowl of yucca suds and washes the girl's hair. Her head and hair are dried with corn-meal, after which the girl takes her last run toward the east, this time followed by many ...
— The North American Indian • Edward S. Curtis
... words, MR. G. LLOYD says, "It is also stated, I do not know on what authority, that the old and lamented warrior, Sir Charles Napier, wrote on the conquest of Scinde, Peccavi!" The author of Democritus in London, with the Mad Pranks and Comical Conceits of Motley and Robin Good-Fellow, thus alludes to this saying in that work. I presume he had good authority ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 215, December 10, 1853 • Various
... outer ward, a strange scene presented itself to the view. Motley groups were scattered about—most of the persons composing them being clad in threadbare doublets and tattered cloaks, and wearing caps, from which the feathers and ornaments had long since disappeared; but there were a few—probably new coiners—in ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 2 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth
... distinguished American and British historians would be even more calamitous than that of their Continental brethren. If the touchstone of impartiality were applied, Prescott might perhaps pass unscathed through the trial. But few will deny that Motley wrote his very attractive histories at a white heat of Republican and anti-Catholic fervour. He, as also Bancroft, are classed by Mr. Gooch amongst those who "made their histories the vehicles of political and religious propaganda." ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... the Rebel camp—clerks, teamsters, employer, negros, hundreds of white and colored women, in all forming a motley crowd of between one and two thousand, were gathered together in a group between the end of the rifle pits and the Star Fort. They had a good view from there, but a still better one could be had, a little farther to the right, and in ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... As on the noblest of the land Fell the stern headsman's bloody hand— The dungeon, block, and nameless tomb 555 Prepare—for Douglas seeks his doom! —But hark! what blithe and jolly peal Makes the Franciscan steeple reel? And see! upon the crowded street, In motley groups what maskers meet! 560 Banner and pageant, pipe and drum, And merry morris dancers come. I guess, by all this quaint array, The burghers hold their sports today. James will be there; he loves such show, 565 Where the good yeoman bends his bow, And the tough wrestler foils his foe, ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... him is so full of interpolations and corruptions, introduced by his transcribers, and particularly by a simpleton who is called Samuel, or his master Beulanus, or both, who appear to have lived in the ninth century, that it is difficult to say how much of this motley production is original and authentic. Be that as it may, the writer of the copy printed by Gale bears ample testimony to the "Saxon Chronicle", and says expressly, that he compiled his history partly from the records of the Scots and Saxons (8). At the end is a confused but very curious ...
— The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle • Unknown
... check brought confusion, and some man in his excitement fired a pistol. The battle had begun, and although the camp was taken by surprise, and drink made many heavy sleepers, the drums beat quickly to arms and the peasant warriors had little advantage. Grey's motley cavalry was scattered in a moment, and Lord Rosmore, who was amongst those who charged upon them, laughed aloud. This was ...
— The Brown Mask • Percy J. Brebner
... her motley history, an old-clothesman, one Domenico— he and his "Compagnia del Bruco," his Company of the Worm[1]— reigned over Siena and gave to her people a taste for blood. It was bloodshed on easy terms they had; for ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... makes existence happy or bitter, deep and human, remains a closed book. Neither religion nor morality, neither science nor art, exists for him. Instead of a real and ardent faith, he feels in himself a motley array of feelings. His habitual veneration of religious rites mingles with mean superstitions. He is not courageous enough to deny God, not strong enough to believe in Him. He does not love his fellow-men, and cannot ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... from the reputation of its author; but as a mannerism becomes increasingly disagreeable by repetition, we suspect that, without having less merit, this work will have less popularity than its predecessors. The style is the same "motley wear," and has the same jerking movement—seems at times a thing of shreds and patches hung on wires—and is so full of brief allusions to his own previous writings, that to a reader unacquainted with these it would be scarce intelligible. With all this it has the same vigour, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... her companions, loving Phoebe like a parent, and the other two like a nurse, and really liking the brother. All took delight in the winter paradise of Hyeres, that fragment of the East set down upon the French coast, and periodically peopled with a motley multitude of visitors from all the lands of Europe, all invalids, ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... multiplicity of parties was as nothing in comparison to that of private interests, which so crossed each other and in so many different ways, which turned with such mobility, that, in the ignorance which prevailed of the secret motives of the principal actors in that drama so vivid, motley, and turbulent, nothing could be predicated of what they would do, and a looker-on might have been disposed at times to have pronounced them as insensates, who were rather their own enemies ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... of these men, numbering between sixty and seventy, advanced upon Red River Colony. They were a motley crew, all mounted on horseback and armed with guns, spears, tomahawks, bows, and scalping-knives, besides which they were painted and plumed a la sauvage, and were in the habit when rushing to battle, of yelling like the Red-men whose blood mingled with that of the White-man ...
— The Buffalo Runners - A Tale of the Red River Plains • R.M. Ballantyne
... arm, each with his cigar in his mouth, saunter, for hours together, along the leading streets and thoroughfares, making acute observations and deep reflections upon the ever-moving and motley scenes around them. Most frequently, however, they would repair, at half-price, to the theatres; for Snap had the means of securing almost a constant supply of "orders" from the underlings of the theatres, ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... smoking, and splashing, after the most orthodox fashion of fire-boats in general. I had now time and opportunity to look around me. Every available spot of the deck and paddle-boxes of the small, flat-bottomed iron steamer, was crowded with as motley a set of passengers as ever sailed since the days of Captain Noah. Sepoys returning from furlough to join their regiments; lascars, or enlisted workmen belonging to the different civil branches of the army; and camp-followers in ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various
... subject-monarchs of the subdued nationalities that were gathered round the tyrant's standard were used, with the wicked craft of conquerors in all ages, to bring still other lands under the same iron dominion. 'The kings were assembled'—we see them gathering their far-reaching and motley army, mustered from all corners of that gigantic empire. They advance together against the rocky fortress that towers above its girdling valleys. 'They saw it, they marvelled'—in wonder, perhaps, at its beauty, as they ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... cried Adrian. "Dupe, cozen, jockey the trustful young creature. Do. There 's a great-hearted gentleman. You need n't fear my undeceiving her. I know my place; I know who holds the purse-strings; I know which side my bread is buttered on. Motley's my wear. So long as you pay my wages, you ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... gorgeously dressed official may be seen, with a long line of attendants, wending his steps towards the river's front. Infirm old men and little children, crazy-looking devotees and comely youths, boys and girls, people of all ages and degrees, are represented in the motley groups who come to these muddy waters for moral purification. There is a singular mingling of races also, for these people do not all speak one tongue. They are from the extreme north and the extreme south of India, while the half-starved vagrants seen among them, and who come from Middle ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... over the trampled bodies and trampled standards of England's bravest sons; had a French general dictated to the English capital, and a French army been quartered in Hyde Park; had Paris poured forth its motley population, and the wealthy bourgeoise of every French trading town swarmed to London; crowding its squares; filling its streets with their equipages; thronging its fashionable hotels, and places of amusements; ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... the conversation of so motley an assemblage lack a certain pictorial quality, a somewhat fantastic opulence of reference and allusion. Of what might its members speak while they waited for the drawing aside of the piece of baize which hung between them and an ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... beer-garden; among the rhododendron trees Madame Blavatzky, Colonel Olcott and Mr. Sinnett move mysteriously in the performance of their wonders; and the wealthy tourist from America, the botanist from Berlin, and the casual peer from Great Britain, are not wanting to complete the motley crowd. There are no roads in Simla proper where it is possible to drive, excepting one narrow way, reserved when I was there, and probably still set apart, for the exclusive delectation of the Viceroy. Every one ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford
... As Belllounds opened it there came a pattering rush of many padded feet, and a chorus of barks and whines. Wade's surprised gaze took in forty or fifty dogs, mostly hounds, browns and blacks and yellows, all sizes—a motley, mangy, hungry pack, if he had ever ...
— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey
... venturesome mind, must needs attempt all manner of tricks upon this motley company of soldiers. He would dig a pit with Little John and Much, and hide it up with branches and earth, so that Master Carfax might stray into it and haply break ...
— Robin Hood • Paul Creswick
... not mean to apply the latter part of these observations to Lady Lillycraft, for whose simple kindheartedness I have a very great respect, and who is really a most amiable and worthy being. I cannot refrain, however, from mentioning some of the motley retinue she has brought with her; and which, indeed, bespeak the overflowing kindness of her nature, which requires her to be surrounded with objects ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... Puerperal Fever Currents and Counter-currents in Medical Science Border Lines of Knowledge in Some Provinces of Medical Science Scholastic and Bedside Teaching The Medical Profession in Massachusetts The Young Practitioner Medical Libraries Some of My Early Teachers A Memoir of John Lothrop Motley A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson Our ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... sit apart from the crowd, just under the shadow of the tree, or in some favourite corner where you can smoke, and contemplate the motley guests, formed into calm and solemn groups, who wish to hold no communion with the Giaour. There is ample food here for the observer of character, costume and pretension: the tradesman, the mechanic, the soldier, ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... personages came into the house at times and ludicrous, motley events arose. The police would appear suddenly together with disguised detectives and arrest some seemingly respectable, irreproachable gentlemen and lead them off, pushing them along with blows in the neck. At times brawls would spring up between the drunken, trouble-making ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... was no sooner concluded, than your worship burst into a horse-laugh, and stamping your foot on the floor, the room was instantly filled with as motley a group as ever giggled decorum out of countenance at a masquerade: among whom I recognized a zany, with a blue perriwig, bestriding a large goose, and brandishing a golden egg, whilst your worship was clapping your hands in all the raptures of ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... looked out at us, only raising their heads from their crossed arms; grave Turks, smoking their nargiles in front of the cafes that open on the Marina, turned their chairs round to look at us without stopping their hubble-bubbling; and all about us, where nothing else was, a line of motley humanity—Greek, Turk, Egyptian, Nubian, Abyssinian, under hats, caps, tarbouches, turbans, hats Persian and ecclesiastical, and no hats at all—half circled us with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... treaty was formally announced to the British Government through Mr. Motley, who succeeded Mr. Johnson as Minister in London. Mr. Fish, in his letter of instructions, suggested to Mr. Motley the propriety of suspending negotiations for the present on the whole question. At the same time he committed the Government ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... would be very unfair to a man like Mr. Wells to suggest that in his vision the Englishman and the American are to embrace only in the sense of clinging to each other in terror. He is a man who understands what friendship is, and who knows how to enjoy the motley humours of humanity. But the political reconstruction which he proposes is too much determined by this old nightmare of necessitarianism. He tells us that our national dignities and differences must be melted into the huge mould of a World ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... found for the most part silent and empty. There were a few omnibuses, filled with National Guards and men en blouse, and heavy ammunition-wagons under the disorderly escort of men in motley uniforms, with guns and bayonets. Here and there were groups of "patriots" seated on the curbstones, playing pitch-farthing, known in France by the name of "bouchon." Their guns were resting quietly against the wall behind them, with, in many instances, a loaf of bread stuck on the bayonet. ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... Adams, assured me that the government of Austria was especially desirous of not being regarded by the United States as responsible in any manner for the attempt to establish an empire under the Austrian archduke in Mexico. Mr. Motley thought a visit by me to Vienna while the Mexican question was pending might produce undue excitement. Hence I limited my tour in that ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... was to find a vessel suited for their purpose. After inspecting a number, a beautiful little Spanish schooner, of about eighty tons, which had just come into the harbour, was purchased, and a motley crew engaged. The crew consisted of one Englishman, who had been twenty years from home, a negro, a Tahitian, and a native Indian; but still they all pulled wonderfully well together. Charley Blount was captain; Elton, first ...
— Washed Ashore - The Tower of Stormount Bay • W.H.G. Kingston
... Oswald sails without definite destination. The ship's prospective course is unknown. This "tramp" steamer has an oddly assorted cargo. Her officers and crew are a motley mixture of different nationalities. Cabin and steerage passengers hail from many ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... forty years had passed since the ex-private secretary landed at New York with the ex-Ministers Adams and Motley, when they saw American society as a long caravan stretching out towards the plains. As he came up the bay again, November 5, 1904, an older man than either his father or Motley in 1868, he found the approach more striking than ever — wonderful ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... an operation. As the metropolitan trains load and unload in a morning, what does one see? Gross upon gross of steel pens, a few quills, whole carriages full of bricklayers' trowels, and how strange it seems to watch all the bank-books sorting themselves out from the motley, and arranging themselves in the first classes, just as we see them on the shelf in the bank! It is a curious sight. The little shop-girl there, what is she but a roll of pink ribbon?—nay, she is but half-a-yard. And the poor infinitesimal porters ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... brown, and green coral, rising from the mass below. Before us, on the shore, there spread the rich growth of tropical vegetation, shaded by palms and cocoa-nuts, and enlivened by the presence of native women in red, blue, and green garments, and men in motley costumes, bringing fish, fowls, and bunches of cocoa-nuts, borne, like the grapes brought back from the land of Canaan ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... heads, and scattering silver and smiles and apologies he crowded past the motley line to the window and fairly snatched the miles of green ticket from the Copt's ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... Mark the intellectual history of Northampton. During its history this town has sent out 114 lawyers, 112 ministers, 95 physicians, 100 educators, 7 college presidents, 30 professors, 24 editors, 6 historians, 14 authors, among whom are George Bancroft, John Lothrop Motley, Professor Whitney, the late J.G. Holland; 38 officers of State, 28 officers of the United States, including members of the Senate, and one President.[1] How comes it that this little colony has raised up this great company of authors, statesmen, reformers? No mere chance is working here. The ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... is easily earned repetition to state that Josephine St. Auban's was a presence not to be concealed. Even such a boat as the Mount Vernon offered a total deck space so cramped as to leave secrecy or privacy well out of the question, even had the motley and democratic assemblage of passengers been disposed to accord either. Yet there was something in the appearance of this young woman and her companion which caused all the heterogeneous groups of humanity to make way for them, as presently ...
— The Purchase Price • Emerson Hough
... noble, rich, and great, From Levite, Pharisee and Priest, Down to the lowest dregs of fate, From mightiest even to the least; Yes, in this motley throng we find The palsied, sick, ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... richer collection of love-songs than Scotland. We have a song for every phase of the motley-faced passion,—from its ludicrous aspect to its highest and most rapturous form. Every pulsation of the heart, as moved by love, has had its poetic expression; and we have lovers pouring out the depths of their souls to all kinds of maids, and in all kinds of situations. And maids are represented ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... constituents, every politician of every grade who thought he had the party in his debt, every adventurer who on any pretext could make a showing of party service rendered, poured into Washington. It was a motley horde. ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... was one way of seeing Venice: but I would much rather sit at a little table on the Riva degli Schiavoni, with a plate of bread and cheese and a mezzo of Chianti before me, watching the motley crowd in the street and the many-coloured sails in the harbour; or spend a lazy afternoon in a gondola, floating through watery alley-ways that lead nowhere, and under the facades of beautiful palaces whose names I did not even care to know. Of course I should like to see a fine ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... frequently attended by the Greegree men, or sorcerers, who, on account of the fantastic dress which they wear, form a most motley group; the Greegree men, trying to outvie each other in the hideous and fantastic style of their dress, and the more frightful they make themselves appear, the greater they believe is the effect of their sorcery. The principal festivals are those of circumcision and of funeral. Whenever former ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... whitewashed streets lined with little shops, gaily decorated with gold and bright colours, form a fitting background to the smartly dressed groups moving about among them. We did not pause to make any purchases, but stopped the carriage at many points to admire the motley crowd and the curious and beautiful mosques ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... of the newcomers went over the bright pattern of the grazing cattle. A motley bunch they were, red, black and white, with here and there descendants of the yellows which none but John Dement had ever owned in Lost Valley. Dement, riding near the head of the line saw this and muttered in ...
— Tharon of Lost Valley • Vingie E. Roe
... prompter, touch the bell! Children of mirth and midnight, fare ye well! The vision melts away, the motley crowd Is veiled by Prospero in a passing cloud; Like his dissolving pageantry they fade, The vap'ry stuff whereof our dreams are made; No more malignant winter to beguile, Nor start the virgin's tear, the judge's smile; Save when some annalist, ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... perfection in affectation, when we were obliged to bid adieu to these interesting copper and coal-skinned ladies, as the ship was reported ready for sea, and the following morning we weighed and stood out of the harbour. As we passed the point we saw handkerchiefs without number waved by our dear, motley-coloured damsels as a farewell. We beat up to St. Domingo and anchored in Cape St. Nicholas mole, where we found the Leviathan, Raisonable, Sampson, and several frigates. We remained a week, and sailed with the above-named ships on a cruise round the island. On the third night after ...
— A Sailor of King George • Frederick Hoffman
... questions of the day, were the philosophers, in the garb of their several sects, ready for any new question on which they might exercise their subtlety or display their rhetoric." If there were any in that motley group who cherished the principles and retained the spirit of the true Platonic school, we may presume they felt an inward intellectual sympathy with the doctrine enounced by Paul. With Plato, ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... from the stage-lights, to the right, as we look down towards the audience, Gustavus the Third was assassinated at a masquerade; and he was borne into that little chamber there, close by the scene, whilst all the outlets were closed, and the motley group of harlequins, polichinellos, wild men, gods and goddesses with unmasked faces, pale and terrified crept together; the dancing ballet-farce ...
— Pictures of Sweden • Hans Christian Andersen
... five inches are suffered to escape from this confinement, and are then frizzed and curled, like a mop or a poodle's coat. Leonard Harper and I returned in this boat, Tahitian steering, Samoan, Futuman, and Anaiteans making one motley crew. The brisk trade soon carried us to the beach in front of Mr. Inglis's house, and arrived at the reef I rode out pick-a-back on the Samoan, Leonard following on a half-naked Anaitean. We soon found ourselves in the midst of a number of men, women and ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... I found myself a part of that motley throng of keen-faced, fearless American life then pushing out over the frontiers. About me were men bound for Oregon, for California, for the Plains, and not a few whose purpose I took to be partisanship in the border fighting between slavery and free soil. ...
— The Way of a Man • Emerson Hough
... success, it was recognized that a twofold change of system was necessary: in internal and in external affairs. To strengthen the state internally a complete revolution of its administration was begun under the auspices of Count F. W. Haugwitz (1700-1765); the motley system which had survived from the middle ages was gradually replaced by an administrative machinery uniformly organized and centralized; and the army especially, hitherto patched together from the quotas raised and maintained by the various diets and ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... of virtue of that stamp as any other whatever), if he had listened and laid his ear close to himself and he did so no doubt—would have heard some jarring note of human mixture, but faint and only perceptible to himself. Man is wholly and throughout but patch and motley. Even the laws of justice themselves cannot subsist without mixture of injustice; insomuch that Plato says, they undertake to cut off the hydra's head, who pretend to clear the law of ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... sitting as usual on our piazza, when, suddenly, I saw a flash of fire in the woods, followed by the report of a rifle, then others in quick succession. Rushing to the scene I found a few Southern whites armed with repeating rifles, facing a large band of negroes carrying a motley array of pitchforks, scythes, razors, clubs, and a few ancient shotguns. Yelling: "Hold up!" I sprang between the embattled hosts, and demanded to know what was ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... free traders say what they please on the subject, success has accompanied Bismarck's genius on this novel field, as well as on the older fields where all mankind acknowledges his superiority. For the coffers of the empire are filling. A motley majority in the Reichstag not only accepts, but improves upon his protectionist demands. He has become the demigod of the bloated manufacturing, mining, and landlord interests throughout the country. He is now about to win the last of the great industries, and ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... the house of Kantor. Attuned to the intimate atmosphere of the tenement which is so constantly rent with cry of child, child-bearing, delirium, delirium-tremens, Leon Kantor had howled no impression into the motley din of things. Isadore, already astride his chair, well into center-table, for first vociferous tear at the four-pound loaf; Esther Kantor, old at chores, settled an infant into the high chair, careful of tiny fingers in ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... broken. The spectators cannot bear to be so suddenly tossed from the serious to the mirthful, and from the mirthful to the serious. In short, such an heterogeneous adulteration has all the absurdity reproached to the motley mixture in tragi-comedy, without any thing of that connection which is preserved in that kind of justly exploded dramatic composition. How easy too to avoid this defect, by adapting the subjects of the dances to the different exigences of the ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... formed rather a motley band. Among them, besides those of our friends already mentioned, there were our hero's mother and all the Leather family. Captain Stride's daughter as well as his "Missus," and Mr Crossley's housekeeper, ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... was "among the captives by the river Chebar" that Ezekiel lived and prophesied, and it was on Chebar's banks that he saw his first vision of the Cherubim.(3) He and other of the Jewish exiles may perhaps have mingled with the motley crowd that once thronged the streets of Nippur, and they may often have gazed on the huge temple-tower which rose above the city's flat roofs. We know that the later population of Nippur itself included a considerable Jewish element, for the ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... again—the mad blaspheming week of revelry and devilry. The streets were rainbow with motley wear and thunderous with the roar and laughter of the crowd, recruited by a vast inflow of strangers; from the windows and roofs, black with heads, frolicsome hands threw honey, dirty water, rotten eggs, and even boiling oil upon the pedestrians and cavaliers below. Bloody tumults broke out, ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... I think in the first mile the last umbrella went overboard, all having their covers burnt off from the frames, when a general melee took place among the deck passengers, each whipping his neighbor to put out the fire. They presented a very motley appearance on arriving at the first station. Then rails were secured and lashed between the trucks, taking the slack out of the coupling chains, thereby affording us a more steady run to the top of ...
— The Railroad Builders - A Chronicle of the Welding of the States, Volume 38 in The - Chronicles of America Series • John Moody
... the works of John L. Motley may wish to see if their favorite passages are listed in this selection. The eBook editor will be glad to add your suggestions. One of the advantages of internet over paper publication is the ease of ...
— Quotations From John Lothrop Motley • David Widger
... having ordered the best dinner that the landlord was capable of serving, and a couple of bottles of wine. Over this they became so exhilarated as to attract a good deal of attention. A village tavern is always haunted by idle clerks, and a motley crowd of gossips, on the Sabbath, and to these the irruption of two young bloods from the city was a slight break in the monotony of their slow shuffling jog toward perdition; and when the fine gentlemen began to get drunk and ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... medicate, blend, cross; alloy, amalgamate, compound, adulterate, sophisticate, infect. Adj. mixed &c v.; implex^, composite, half-and-half, linsey-woolsey, chowchow, hybrid, mongrel, heterogeneous; motley &c (variegated) 440; miscellaneous, promiscuous, indiscriminate; miscible. Adv. among, amongst, amid, amidst; with; in the midst of, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... old-fashioned windows, the ceiling, panels, and chimney-piece of grim black oak—the latter elaborately but not very tastefully carved,—with tables and chairs to match, an old bookcase on one side of the fire-place, stocked with a motley assemblage of books, and an elderly cabinet piano on ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... Loud the motley crowd were laughing at the strange, ungirlish freak, And the boy was scared and panting, and so dashed he could not speak; And, "Miss, I have good apples," a bolder lad did cry; But she answered, "No, I thank you," from the ...
— Poems of American Patriotism • Brander Matthews (Editor)
... man at work. It was a motley crowd. Creoles, Frenchmen, Spaniards, prison convicts, negroes, and even Lafitte, the far-famed "Pirate of the Gulf," and his crew of buccaneers, answered Jackson's call. The people cheerfully submitted to martial law. The streets ...
— Hero Stories from American History - For Elementary Schools • Albert F. Blaisdell
... examples in real life as Rousseau and Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, one such demonstration of the same moral in fiction as Werther, were enough to discourage the man of feeling. Therefore, when he still exists, he takes to motley, the only wear for the human race in troublesome circumstances which beset it with unpleasant recurrence. When you cannot exactly believe anything in religion, in politics, in literature, in art, and yet neither wish nor know how to do without it, ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... their crew. The captain, while a competent seaman, was a brute in his treatment of his men. He knew, or at least he used, but two arguments in his dealings with them—a belaying pin and a revolver—nor is it likely that the motley aggregation he signed would have ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... comparatively passive for a time, and allowed himself to be hauled, by the united efforts of the crew, some three or four fathoms towards the brig, when, annoyed by the restraint imposed upon him, or disliking the wild and motley appearance of the ship's company, he took a broad sheer to starboard, the hook snapped like a pipestem, and the hated monster swam off in another direction, wagging his tail in the happy consciousness that he was "free, untrammelled, ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... Browning; and did we dare rebel against God's will, we should grieve deeply that she was not permitted to glorify the Right in America as she has glorified it in Italy. Among the last things that she read were Motley's letters on the "American Crisis," and the writer will ever hold in dear memory the all but final conversation had with Mrs. Browning, in which these letters were discussed and warmly approved. In referring to the attitude taken by foreign nations ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... journalists, made free of a few newspaper offices, and welcomed in the pleasure haunts of pressmen. This life, whose dreary superficiality is covered by the glitter of universal blague, like the stupid clowning of a harlequin by the spangles of a motley costume, induced in him a Frenchified—but most un-French—cosmopolitanism, in reality a mere barren indifferentism posing as intellectual superiority. Of his own country he used to say to his French associates: "Imagine an atmosphere of opera-bouffe in which all the comic business of stage statesmen, ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... fair and our station on the parapets at Grotta-Ferrata. Opposite us is a penthouse, (where nobody peaks and pines,) whose jutting fraschi-covered eaves and posts are adorned with gay draperies; and under the shadow of this is seated a motley set of peasants at their lunch and dinner. Smoking plates come in and out of the dark hole of a door that opens into kitchen and cellar, and the camerieri cry constantly, "Vengo subito" "Eccomi qua"—whether they come or not. Big-bellied flasks of rich ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... International Assembly of Scientists, officially known as Conference No. 2, had been sitting, but not progressing, in the large lecture hall of the Smithsonian Institution, which probably had never before seen so motley a gathering. Each nation had sent three representatives, two professional scientists, and a lay delegate, the latter some writer or thinker renowned in his own country for his wide knowledge and powers of ratiocination. ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train
... the throng outside the gate covers the road leading off to Joppa. Turning from the Pharisee, we are attracted by some parties who, as subjects of study, opportunely separate themselves from the motley crowd. First among them a man of very noble appearance—clear, healthful complexion; bright black eyes; beard long and flowing, and rich with unguents; apparel well-fitting, costly, and suitable for the ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... monks have chaunted mass, And clown's and gossip's laughing face Is turned unto the porch,— For now comes mime and motley fool, Guarding the dizened Lord Misrule With mimic pomp and march; And the burly Abbot of Unreason Forgets not that the blythe Yule season Demands his paunch at church; And he useth his staff While the rustics laugh,— And, still, as he layeth his crosier ...
— The Baron's Yule Feast: A Christmas Rhyme • Thomas Cooper
... that he found himself at last, under the escort of a slave-party, on the way to Ujiji. Mr. Waller has graphically described the situation. "At last he makes a start on the 11th of December, 1868, with the Arabs, who are bound eastward for Ujiji. It is a motley group, composed of Mohamad and his friends, a gang of Unyamwezi hangers-on, and strings of wretched slaves yoked together in their heavy slave-sticks. Some carry ivory, others copper, or food for the march, while hope and ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... applause followed this announcement. The breaking up of a camp is always joyous news to men whose trade is war. It seemed to have a like effect upon this motley ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... winding mountain path See the long-drawn column go; Himalayan aftermath Lying rosy on the snow. Motley ministers of wrath Building better than they know, In the rosy aftermath ...
— Songs Of The Road • Arthur Conan Doyle
... respects, however, the advantage lay wholly with the enemy. They had ninety guns, while the allies had but fifty-one; while out of the 60,000 troops under Marshal Tallard 45,000 were the best troops France could produce. The allied army was a motley assembly, composed of nearly equal numbers of English, Prussians, Danes, Wurtemburghers, Dutch, Hanoverians, and Hessians. But although not more numerous than the troops of other nationalities, it was felt by all that the brunt of the battle ...
— The Cornet of Horse - A Tale of Marlborough's Wars • G. A. Henty
... No. 20 looks out on the narrow yard wherein ordinary captives are allowed to disport themselves for three half-hours daily. It is a very motley crowd. There are no Confederate soldiers here; all these are confined in the Old Capitol; but of every other ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... met a fool i' the forest, A motley fool;—a miserable world!— As I do live by food, I met a fool, Who laid him down and bask'd him in the sun, And rail'd on Lady Fortune in good terms, In good set terms,—and yet a motley fool. 'Good morrow, fool,' quoth ...
— As You Like It • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... who are living not by years nor by weeks, but by breaths. They are motley enough, for the most part, sitting upon a long bench with their backs against the wall,—ill-shaved, haggard, anxious, and the dungeon door at their left opens now and then to show behind it a moving bayonet. There are women within the court proper, edging upon the reporters, ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... afternoon, comfortable in a rim of shade in the courtyard, the men were arranging for the start the next morning. The sun beat fiercely on the square opening roofed by the blue of the sky and cut by the black shadow of walls. In the cooling shade the motley company lay sprawling on the ground or propped against the doors of the store rooms. The open space was brilliant with the blankets of Indians, the bare limbs of brown children, and the bright serapes of the Mexicans, who were too lazy to move out of the sun. In ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... a monkey. It was very common for his companions to make bets with him: for example, that he would not be able to climb up the ceiling of a room, or scramble over a certain house-top. Grimaldi, the famous clown, used to say, "Colonel Mackinnon has only to put on the motley costume, and he would totally ...
— Reminiscences of Captain Gronow • Rees Howell Gronow
... them voters if they would adopt it. That is, Total Abstinence from Tobacco, as well as from Ardent Spirits. Thus, no report of modern times equals the good Squire's summing-up, which he gives on these occasions, from the great farm-wagon tribune, to the multitudinous and motley congregation assembled under his park trees. This year it was unusually rich and piquant, from the expanded area of events and aspects. In presenting these, as bearing upon the causes of Temperance, Peace, Anti-War, Anti- Slavery, Anti-Tobacco, Anti-Capital ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... the highest officials of the Provisional Government, so the others were forced to wait outside in the gathering dusk. And those Ministers, those secretaries of departments, those generals and colonels, what a motley crowd they formed! There was scarcely a whole garment among them. They were sunburnt, wind-browned, earnest men, the old ones grayed and grizzled from worry, the younger ones wasted from hardships in the field. ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... of it. He told me (but I am sure this is not known to any out of our own family) that as Dr. Lindhorst was returning home after his second long absence, he entered a small village near Turin, just as a detachment of 'The Army of Italy' were leaving it. The rear presented the usual motley collection of baggage-wagons, disabled soldiers, sutlers, camp-women, and hangers-on of all sorts, who attend in the steps of a victorious troop. As Paul Lindhorst stopped to view the spectacle, and while the wild strains of music could be heard echoing and re-echoing as ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... the captain of the Guard that the motley caravan in the avenue was made up of loyal, representative citizens from the important villages of the realm. They were admitted to the grounds ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... lilies rear them in the watery mead; From early dawn the livelong hours she told, Till late at silent eve she penn'd the fold. Deep in the grove, beneath the secret shade, 15 A various wreath of odorous flowers she made: Gay-motley'd[12] pinks and sweet jonquils she chose, The violet blue that on the moss-bank grows; All sweet to sense, the flaunting rose was there; The finish'd chaplet well adorn'd ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... to neither class; my persuasion is, that they originate in some brain now far distant; that that brain had no distinct volition in anything that occurred; that what does occur reflects but its devious, motley, ever-shifting, half-formed thoughts; in short, that it has been but the dreams of such a brain put into action and invested with a semisubstance. That this brain is of immense power, that it can set ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... memory. He stood with his hand resting on the rail of the gangway, and when presently it was raised to the side of the steamer, he still kept his position, so that he could instantly catch sight of his father as he passed down. I stood close behind him, and watched the motley procession of passengers; most of them had the dull colourless skin which bespeaks long residence in India, and a particularly yellow and peevish-looking old man was grumbling loudly as he slowly made his ...
— Derrick Vaughan—Novelist • Edna Lyall
... Brennoralt, also a tragedy, was first published under the title of The Discontented Colonel, in 1639, as a satire on the Scottish insurgents. The Goblins, a comedy in five acts, is enlivened by the presence of a motley crew of devils, clowns, wenches, and fiddlers; and an unfinished piece, entitled The Sad One, may also be classed as a tragedy, as it opens briskly with a 'murder within' in the very first scene, which undoubtedly would have culminated in wholesale horrors had ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... in, the sweeps being worked by the motley crew of scoundrels on board with a regularity which drew rough compliments from the men, and made ...
— Mother Carey's Chicken - Her Voyage to the Unknown Isle • George Manville Fenn
... couple of huge elephants, surrounded by camels, horses, and mules, while on trollies stood cages of wild beasts, lions, tigers, jackals; one of the elephants was trumpeting, the camels were groaning, the carnivora roaring; mixed with their din were the voices of a motley crew, men and women, having the same appearance in dress and manner as that of the two men he had followed. Dene saw that it was a travelling menagerie and circus, and he looked on it with an amusement which predominated over ...
— The Woman's Way • Charles Garvice
... to gaze out over the mysterious, foreign motley array of roofs and obtruding skyscrapers of ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... ordinary masked ball. Numbers of artists had arranged to go, accompanied by a whole cohort of models and pupils, who, by midnight, began to create a tremendous din. Raoul climbed the grand staircase at five minutes to twelve, did not linger to look at the motley dresses displayed all the way up the marble steps, one of the richest settings in the world, allowed no facetious mask to draw him into a war of wits, replied to no jests and shook off the bold familiarity of a number of couples who had already become a trifle too gay. Crossing the big crush-room ...
— The Phantom of the Opera • Gaston Leroux
... Wind tumultuous thousands pour. With these I enter'd a stupendous Hall, The scene of some approaching festival. O'er the wide portals, full in sight, were spread Banners of yellow hue, bestrip'd with red, Whereon, in golden characters, were seen: THE ANNIVERSARY OF FOLLY'S QUEEN! Strange motley ornaments the Building grac'd, With every emblem of corrupted Taste. No stately Column rose to meet the Dome, No Sculpture borrow'd from the Arts of Rome; No well-wrought Frieze crept graceful on the walls, Th' Acanthus weav'd no splendid Capitals; Nor did the Attic elegance supply ...
— The First of April - Or, The Triumphs of Folly: A Poem Dedicated to a Celebrated - Duchess. By the author of The Diaboliad. • William Combe
... part, the owners of large collections have their chief anxiety about the binding and the type. Take down the whole set of Walter Scott's novels, and find that only one of them has been read through. There are Motley's histories on that shelf; but get into conversation about the Prince of Orange, and see that Motley has not been read. I never was more hungry than once while walking in a Charleston mill amid whole harvests of rice. ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... cranks of an Achard, by the wreathed smiles of a Rose Cheri. Where the funeral once took its slow and solemn way, rouged processions pass, tinsel heroes strut, and vapour. Thousand-tinted garlands supplant the pale immortelles that decked the graves; the sable cloak is doffed, and motley's the only wear. Surely actors must be bold men to tread a stage covering so many mouldering relics of mortality. Not for Potosi, and the Real del Monte to boot, would we do it, lest, at the witching hour, some ghastly skeleton array should rise and drive us from the Golgotha, or drag us to the charnel-house ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... with U—— to Mr. Motley's balcony, in the Corso, and saw the Carnival from it yesterday afternoon; but the spectacle is strangely like a dream, in respect to the difficulty of retaining it in the mind and solidifying it into a description. I ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... observe how at this early period of Carlyle's life, when all the talent and learning of England bowed at these levees before the gigantic speculator and dreamer, he, perhaps alone, stood aloof from the motley throng of worshippers,—with them, but not of them,—coolly analyzing every sentence delivered by the oracle, and sufficiently learned in the divine lore to separate the gold from the dross. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... the corvette Louisiana, anchored in the stream. No sooner had the heads of the British columns appeared than they were driven back by the fire of the American batteries; the field-pieces, mortars, and rocket guns were then brought up, and a sharp artillery duel took place. The motley crew of the Louisiana handled their long ship guns with particular effect; the British rockets proved of but little service [Footnote: Latour, 121.]; and after a stiff fight, in which they had two field-pieces and a light mortar dismounted, [Footnote: ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt
... you please, the Jack Pudding to the company, whose business it was to crack the best joke, and sing the best song,—he could. Unluckily, however, this functionary was for the present obliged to absent himself from St. Ronan's; for, not recollecting that he did not actually wear the privileged motley of his profession, he had passed some jest upon Captain MacTurk, which cut so much to the quick, that Mr. Meredith was fain to go to goat-whey quarters, at some ten miles' distance, and remain there in a sort of concealment, until the affair ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... himself treated like a sans-culotte was guillotined four days before Robespierre, whose death would have saved him. His young widow left prison, reduced to extreme want, and took refuge with her father-in-law, at Fontainebleau; then she made her appearance in the motley society which, first showed itself in the drawing-room of Madame Tallien, then at the Luxembourg under Barras. Rivalling Madame Tallien and Madame Recamier in popularity, she smiled through her tears, like Andromache in Homer. Her means becoming greater, ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... liberty no homage paid to his genius by the class whose admiring welcome is most seductive to scholars has ever spoiled; our fellow-citizen, the historian of a great Republic which infused a portion of its life into our own,—John Lothrop Motley. ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... clown." The uncle smiled. "This at first, was a boy's whim, an illusion. That ambition was based entirely upon a desire to acquire sufficient money to make me comfortable. It was a boyish fancy at the beginning but some of the happiest days of my life were when I wore the motley and endeavored to spread gladness as ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... (Psa. 37:1) "Be not thou afraid when one is made rich, when the glory of his house is increased" (Psa. 49:16). But go thou into the sanctuary of thy God, read His Word, and understand the end of these men-(Mason). Often, as the motley reflexes of my experience move in long processions of manifold groups before me, the distinguished and world-honoured company of Christian mammonists appear to the eye of my imagination as a drove of camels heavily laden, yet all at full speed; and each in the confident expectation ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... on, with folded arms; moved by the grandeur and majesty of the scene. The devouring element, loosed in its awful recklessness there in the heart of this lonely forest. The motley group of black and white standing out in the great red light, powerless to do more than wait and watch. But more was he stirred to the depths of his being, by the sight of this human tragedy ...
— At Fault • Kate Chopin
... on his cap and bells, he too was "wont to set the table on a roar," as the feasters at a hundred tables, from "Casey's Table d'Hote" to the banquets of the opulent East, now rise to testify. But Shakespeare plainly reveals, concerning Yorick, that mirth was not his sole attribute,—that his motley covered the sweetest nature and the tenderest heart. It could be no otherwise with one who loved and comprehended childhood and whom the children loved. And what does Hamlet say?—"He hath borne me ...
— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field
... hard in time; after which it is whitewashed. The roof was thatched with a hard sort of rushes, more durable and less likely to catch fire than straw. There was no ceiling under the roof, but the rafters overhead were hung with a motley assemblage of the produce of the chase and farm, as large whips made of rhinoceros-hide, leopard and lion skins, ostrich eggs and feathers, strings of onions, ...
— The Mission • Frederick Marryat
... little chance of this. As they crossed the court, lackeys, with smoking dishes and, full jugs, passed and repassed continually, although it was long past midnight. On entering the hall, they found Sir Randal at the head of a vast table, surrounded by a fiercer and more motley collection of individuals than had congregated there even in the time of Sir Rollo. The lord of the castle had signified that "it was his royal pleasure to be drunk," and the gentlemen of his train had ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... commission of the prince of Orange. This event, which took place on the 1st of April 1572, was the first blow in the long war of Dutch independence, and was followed by a general outbreak of the patriotic party (Motley, Rise of the Dutch Republic, part iii. chapter vi.). "The Brill" was one of the four Dutch towns handed over to Queen Elizabeth in 1584 as security for English expenses incurred in aiding the Dutch. Brielle is the birthplace of the famous admiral Martin van Tromp, and also of Admiral van Almonde, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... of Bilhah and Zilpah, wives of his father. Joseph complained on his brethren, and accused them to their father of the most evil sin. Israel loved Joseph above all his sons for as much as he had gotten him in his old age, and made for him a motley coat. His brethren then seeing that he was beloved of his father more than they were, hated him and might not speak to him a peaceable word. It happed on a time that Joseph dreamed, and saw a sweven ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... clustered on that miserable noontide, about four hundred human beings—a weak, hungry, and emaciated looking throng for the most part; their half naked forms, browned by the sun, and hardened by the winter winds—a motley gathering; amongst whom there were scores of fasting men, and hundreds through whose wretched dwellings the, wind and rain found free ingress. They were poor, they were weak, they were ignorant, they were unarmed! but there was one, thing at least which they possessed—that quality which ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... of puzzles," he resumed, "which is played upon a map. One party playing requires another to find a given word—the name of town, river, state or empire—any word, in short, upon the motley and perplexed surface of the chart. A novice in the game generally seeks to embarrass his opponents by giving them the most minutely lettered names; but the adept selects such words as stretch, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... City, Sunday, March 2. We have a rather motley-looking set. A good many look like broken-down schoolmasters or ministers who have excellent dispositions but not much talent. As the kind of talent required where we are going is rather peculiar, the men may be useful, but I don't believe there will ...
— Letters from Port Royal - Written at the Time of the Civil War (1862-1868) • Various
... this violent emotion, was a young man, dressed in a mean and tattered garb, his face begrimed corresponding with that of the motley crew by which he was surrounded. He was a perfect stranger to the others present, and had not participated in their previous conversation, nor been personally ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... up and deep in the discoloured wall, allowed a few rays of yellow sunlight to fall revealingly upon a motley collection of antiquities. Empire chairs were piled upon Louis Quinze writing-desks. Tables of every known period formed a leaning tower in one corner. Rich Persian rugs draped huge Florentine mirrors; priests' vestments trailed from half-open chests ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... arrived at Quebec. In the colony of New York Sir William Johnson, the rough and cheery Irishman, much loved of the Iroquois, was gathering forces to attack Canada. Early in July, 1755, Johnson had more than three thousand provincial troops at Albany, a motley horde of embattled farmers, most of them with no uniforms, dressed in their own homespun, carrying their own muskets, electing their own officers, and altogether, from the strict soldier's point of view, a rabble rather than an army. To meet this force and destroy ...
— The Conquest of New France - A Chronicle of the Colonial Wars, Volume 10 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • George M. Wrong
... Scanning the motley scene that varies round. There some grave Moslem to devotion stoops, And some that smoke, and some that play, are found. Here the Albanian proudly treads the ground Half-whispering, there the Greek is heard to prate. Hark! from the mosque the nightly solemn sound; The Muezzin's call doth shake ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... pretended to join in the pursuit of the nimble runaways, but only pretended. Then he suddenly perceived that they were growing breathless and had almost fallen beneath the feet of a mighty Norman horse. The man beneath his motley uniform rose to the emergency. Catching the bridle of a near-by pony, he flung the monkey from its back, scooped the babies up from the ground, set them in the monkey's place and, mounting behind ...
— Dorothy's House Party • Evelyn Raymond
... Such a crowd of people—for Janenne took part in it—that there was scarcely anybody left to look at it. But then the processionists had the pleasure of looking at each other. The band came first, in blue blouse and clean white trousers. Then came the soldiery, a motley crew, with Monsieur Dorn at their head, drawn sword in hand, and next to him a personage who might have been translated clean from Astley's—a gentleman in long hose, with a flower on each shoe, and a hat of red velvet shaped like a bread tray, decorated with prodigious coloured ...
— Schwartz: A History - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... years flit by And after them at headlong pace The evanescent fashions fly In motley and amusing chase. The world is ever altering! Farthingales, patches, were the thing, And courtier, fop, and usurer Would once in powdered wig appear; Time was, the poet's tender quill In hopes of everlasting fame A finished madrigal would frame Or couplets more ingenious still; Time was, ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... table d'hote at six p.m., coffee, tea, liquors, and a grand ball to complete the work of digestion. A long corridor leads to this earthly Eden, and the two doors at the end of it open, the one into the dining, and the other into the ball-room. A motley crew collected there for the evening meal, and on Sundays it is next to impossible to procure a seat. But the dining-room is the Grand Turk's greatest attraction, for as soon as the dessert is over the head waiter makes ...
— Caught In The Net • Emile Gaboriau
... with vacant face, The Proteus Hill[17] put in his modest plea,— Let Favour speak for others, Worth for me.— For who, like him, his various powers could call Into so many shapes, and shine in all? 110 Who could so nobly grace the motley list, Actor, Inspector, Doctor, Botanist? Knows any one so well—sure no one knows— At once to play, prescribe, compound, compose? Who can—but Woodward[18] came,—Hill slipp'd away, Melting, like ghosts, before the rising day. With that low cunning, ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... to be coldly pondered over, and skeptically conned; they were read aloud at solemn festivals to listening thousands: they were to arrest the curiosity—to amuse the impatience—to stir the wonder of a lively and motley crowd. Thus the historian imbibed naturally the spirit of the tale-teller, as he was driven to embellish his history with the romantic legend—the awful superstition—the gossipy anecdote—which yet characterize the stories of the popular and oral fictionist in the bazaars of the Mussulman, ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... Orange Lodge, of which community he certainly shows no favourable specimen; but by degrees these national feelings and asperities become more softened, and the second generation know little of them. The settlement from whence these sketches are drawn, was formed of a motley mixture of all the different nations—Blue Nose, English, ...
— Sketches And Tales Illustrative Of Life In The Backwoods Of New Brunswick • Mrs. F. Beavan
... cried Eddring, suddenly. "Open the gates! Let 'em out! I want to hear 'em holler!" The pack poured out, motley, vociferous, eager for the chase, filling the air with their wild music, with a riot of primeval, savage life. "Get me a horse saddled, Cal, quick," cried Eddring. "I want to feel leather under me again. I want to feel the air in my ears. I've got to ride, to ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... the Box Street tenement looked out upon the river. It was lifted high: the activities of the broad stream and of the motley world of the other shore went silently; the petty noises of life—the creak and puff and rumble of its labouring machinery,—straying upward from the fussy places below, were lost ...
— The Mother • Norman Duncan
... in the gallery giving the signal and their friends on the lawn joining in enthusiastically. They were a motley crowd—over a hundred I should think—ranging from the municipal councillor of La Ferte, in his high hat and black cloth Sunday coat, to the humpbacked daughter of the village carpenter and the idiot boy who lived in a cave on the road and frightened the ...
— Chateau and Country Life in France • Mary King Waddington
... held in no other spot. Hence the Arabs are said to be stone worshippers; but the phrase is an awkward one: what they worshipped was not the stone but a god connected with it. And the early gods of Arabia are a motley company; it is only in their relations to their worshippers and in the order of the worship paid them that they have some uniformity. The greatest and oldest deity of the Arabs is Allat or Alilat, "the Lady." Like the female deity found in all primitive Semitic religions, ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... hodge-podge. The question I put in a wider reference is the question of the Englishman, as expressed in the Scotchwoman's dialect, What's intilt? and I assume that there enter into it, as radically component parts, at least the ingredients of this motley soup. Into the large hodge-podge of nature and terrestrial economics, as into this small section of Scotch cookery, there enter the element of water, the flesh of animals, and the fruits of the earth, as well as the processes by which these are brought to hand and rendered serviceable to ...
— Lectures on Popular and Scientific Subjects • John Sutherland Sinclair, Earl of Caithness
... Frenchman, who had found some boys playing at soldiers, and was teaching them in his own tongue from apparently vague recollections of the manual of arms. I do not insist that we profited by the occasion; I only say that life likes a motley wear, and that he who rejects the antic aspects it so often inappropriately puts ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... not, however, object to the sergeant joining him; and the other three men were accordingly ordered to take up their quarters at the hut, with its motley inhabitants. ...
— In the Rocky Mountains - A Tale of Adventure • W. H. G. Kingston
... are wrong. We are not sure whether Mr. Kemble, who, as an excellent critic has observed, is always seeking for novelty and always running into error, may not lately have added that patch to his motley garb of new readings; but his authority is disallowed. Even Garrick, whose claims were of a very superior kind, when he attempted to render the English language, already too unstable, more so, by his innovations, was ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... saw the corner where I once sat down on a stool to have a pair of ready-made half-boots fitted on. I have been seduced more than once, in that street on a Saturday night, by a show-van at a corner; and have gone in, with a very motley assemblage, to see the Fat-pig, the Wild-indian, and the Little-lady. There were two or three hat-manufactories there then (I think they are there still); and among the things which, encountered anywhere or under any circumstances, ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... ago, at the hour of noon, a motley throng of people might have been seen pouring forth from the gates of a far Eastern city and moving towards a hill called Calvary. Amidst soldiers and civilians, both friends and foes, the central figure is that of a man scarcely more than thirty years of age. He has all the attributes, ...
— John Brown: A Retrospect - Read before The Worcester Society of Antiquity, Dec. 2, 1884. • Alfred Roe
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