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More "Patchwork" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... hear all the bother 't all the rest have been havin'. She says 't she ain't had no bother a tall. She says 't she whipped Josephus nine times the day 't she took him home with her, 'n' since then she's taught him to read 'n' write 'n' sew patchwork 'n' beat up batter. She says 'f she'd 'a' had Henry Ward Beecher he wouldn't 'a' roamed but once, nor would little Jane 'a' give but one suck, nor Fox but one yell, nor would Augustus 'a' throwed but one cat down her well. ...
— Susan Clegg and Her Friend Mrs. Lathrop • Anne Warner
... patchwork of the French manner and mistaken imitations. It has something of Hamlet, and something of Clytemnestra and Orestes; but nothing of any of them as it ought to be. The passion for an unknown son is borrowed from the Semiramis of Crebillon. ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... she said, pointing in-doors to where a long, motionless figure seated in a chair was covered with a ragged patchwork quilt. The doctor nodded gravely, paused, asked if ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... away upstairs in the very room, looking out eastward into the spruce grove, which father had once occupied. Dan shared it with us, sleeping in a bed of his own in the opposite corner. The sheets and pillow-slips were fragrant with lavender, and one of Grandmother King's noted patchwork quilts was over us. The window was open and we heard the frogs singing down in the swamp of the brook meadow. We had heard frogs sing in Ontario, of course; but certainly Prince Edward Island frogs were more tuneful and mellow. ...
— The Story Girl • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Not even to woman, in spite of the poets. It induces intense concentration for the time, consequently looms larger in the affairs of life than the million other scraps that go to make up the vast patchwork. But it is as well to remember that it is but an occasional patch in the quilt, even if it be of the most vivid hue. And there is a lot to be got out of the ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... respectably for a day or two; but the house was rather dull, she missed Nelly, wanted to run in the street, and longed to see mamma. She amused herself as well as she could with picture-books, patchwork, and the old cat; but, not being a quiet, proper, little Rosamond sort of a child, she got tired of hemming neat pocket-handkerchiefs, and putting her needle carefully away when she had done. She wanted to romp and shout, and slide down the banisters, ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... her entire literary wealth, to piece the disjointed fragments together, smooth the asperities and hand down to posterity the finished epic of the Celtic world, superior, perhaps, to the Iliad or the Odyssey. What has come down to us is "a sort of patchwork epic," as Prescott called the Ballads of the Cid, a popular epopee in all its native roughness, wild phantasy and extravagance of deed and description as it developed during successive generations. It resembles the frame of some huge ship left ...
— The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Tain Bo Cualnge • Unknown
... of running up on deck, jumping ashore and going home, as I could easily have done at any time within an hour of boarding the boat. I buried my face in the dirty pillow with no pillow-case on it, and filled my mouth with the patchwork quilt. It seemed as though I should die of weeping. My breath came in long spasmodic draughts, as much deeper and bitterer than sighs as sighs are sadder and more pitiful than laughter. My whipped back pained ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... door and sounded a loud rat-tat with the knocker. No one answered, so I knocked still louder. At length I heard a slow and laborious shuffling of feet in the passage, and an old woman, wrapped in a patchwork quilt and wearing a white nightcap, opened the door. She regarded ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... piled up in the corners (later to be used on the beds as a fertiliser), which are always beautiful, and doubly so when reflected in a canal. From a balloon, in the flowering season, the tulip gardens must look like patchwork quilts. ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... social rite: it's a feat of hardihood. I'm keen for a line of plain, full, roomy old-fashioned flannel nightgowns of the improved T. A. Buck Featherloom products variety. They'll be wearing 'em long after knickerbockers have been cut up for patchwork." ...
— Roast Beef, Medium • Edna Ferber
... intruders on their domains. At length the sylvan scenery gives place to endless fields of cabbage, potatoes, maize, and onions, for the cool heights of the Tengger range serve the prosaic purpose of market-garden to Eastern Java, and all European vegetables may be cultivated here with success. A patchwork counterpane of green, brown, and yellow, clothes these steep slopes, but the extent of the mountain chain, and the phantasmal outlines of volcanic peaks, absorb the incongruities grafted upon them. Valerian and violet border ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... its contents, no masculine ear heard a phrase from its pages. However, the view they take of the matter rather pleases me than otherwise. If they like, I am not unwilling they should think a dozen ladies and gentlemen aided at the compilation of the book. Strange patchwork it must seem to them—this chapter being penned by Mr., and that by Miss or Mrs. Bell; that character or scene being delineated by the husband, that other by the wife! The gentleman, of course, doing the rough work, the lady getting ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... shirts and bedding. At length a brigantine worthy of Robinson Crusoe floated on the waters of the Chenonceau. They laid in what provision they might, gave all that remained of their goods to the delighted Indians, embarked, descended the river, and put to sea. A fair wind filled their patchwork sails and bore them from the hated coast. Day after day they held their course, till at length the favoring breeze died away and a breathless calm fell on the face of the waters. Florida was far behind; France farther yet before. Floating idly on the glassy ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... of himself as the golden head. Golden head must have golden breast, and a golden breast must have a golden trunk, and golden trunk golden legs, and golden legs must rest on feet of gold. That will stand, and that will represent me better than this patchwork affair of which I dreamed. So he set him up the golden image in the plain of Dura. That represented himself as he regarded himself, the image seen in vision represented him as he was in reality, as God saw him. What followed? God smote him and he went mad. He was driven ...
— The Village Pulpit, Volume II. Trinity to Advent • S. Baring-Gould
... connection, as well as all others, he was insistent that business should be honestly conducted, yet it was his purpose to throw all possible safeguards around it. In the past it had been not only harassed by a monetary system that was a mere patchwork affair and entirely inadequate to the needs of the times, but it had been constantly threatened by tariff, railroad and other legislation calculated to cause continued disturbance. The ever-present demagogue had added to the confusion, and, altogether, ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House
... try and work in the old good thing with the new, not as patchwork though, but making the new thing grow out in such a way as to embrace the ...
— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps
... easy to see that his "reconstruction" is as hopeless as that of the famous Greek frieze, outwardly whole andyet always a patchwork. So he chafes continually under what he believes to be the tyranny and despotism of an undefined autocracy, which, in a general way, he calls "the Government," but which really refers to the distribution of certain local offices ...
— Colonel Carter of Cartersville • F. Hopkinson Smith
... each other perfectly. They approached as warily as two foxes. When the roll was finally spread out on the counter, the dim lamplight flickered over a patchwork quilt of the familiar log-cabin pattern, gay with colors as varied as those ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... the old oaken framework of the others diffused an air of antiquity over the whole assemblage. The church itself was undergoing repair and restoration, which is but another name for change. Masons were making patchwork on the front of the tower, and were sawing a slab of stone and piling up bricks to strengthen the side-wall, or possibly to enlarge the ancient edifice by an additional aisle. Moreover, they had dug an immense pit in the churchyard, long and ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... left for himself a greater fame in the masonry of the central tower, whose base he rebuilt after the old stone spire had been destroyed by fire, and especially in the tomb of Cardinal d'Amboise, than ever he will gain by the patchwork of the west facade. What he could do with a free hand and his own designs to begin with, may be imagined from the fact that he built the Bureau des Finances on the opposite side of the Parvis and laid the first plans for the Palais de Justice. ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... stretched right and left there was a broken line of tenements topped by telegraph wires and bathed in a soft cloud of black soot falling from a chimney in the neighbourhood. The sidewalks were a patchwork of dirt, broken paving-stones and wooden boards. The sunshine was hot and gloomy. There were no names on the corner lamps and the house numbers were dull and needed repainting. It was already late in the ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... and I can't think how it is all to be done in the time; but really something fit to be seen is emerging. Terry is sorting the coins, a pretty job, I should say; but felicity to him. But oh! the industrial articles! There are all the regalia, carved out of cherry-stones, and a patchwork quilt of 5000 bits of silk each no bigger than a shilling. And a calculation of the middle verse in the Bible, and the longest verse, and the shortest verse, and the like edifying Scriptural researches, all copied out like flies' legs, in writing no one can see but Julius with his ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... winding up his watch a lot ahead, and holding it to his ears to see if it had heart disease, as the boy had intimated. "But, you see, people have got to be amused. It has got so there is not the inspiration in looking at vegetables that there used to be, and the patchwork quilt does not draw like a house afire. The farmers are not going to blow in money to exhibit things for a blue ribbon, and the wealthy people who have fancy stock take the premiums and advertise their business. Money is paid for exhibits that more properly belong to the ...
— Peck's Uncle Ike and The Red Headed Boy - 1899 • George W. Peck
... developing a specific design cannot be overestimated. No machine on the market, of any type, is one hundred per cent perfect and none on the market should, therefore, be taken as a standard to be met by the new manufacturer. It is a patchwork, only, that is obtained by one common method used to obtain a newly designed machine. Namely, the manufacturer purchases every type of machine, already marketed to perform a given work, and adapts one part from one machine, another part from a second ...
— The Consumer Viewpoint • Mildred Maddocks
... "I do not think a man's life is of much importance," he said. "No man is big enough to grasp all of life. That is the foolish fancy of children. The grown man knows he cannot see life at one great sweep. It cannot be comprehended so. One has to realise that he lives in a patchwork of many lives ...
— Marching Men • Sherwood Anderson
... River in her father's shack. This log house of Pierre's was a castle by contrast. John Carver and his daughter had shared one room between them; Joan's bed curtained off with gunny-sacking in a corner. She slept on hides and rolled herself up in old dingy patchwork quilts and worn blankets. On winter mornings she would wake covered with the snow that had sifted in between the ill-matched logs. There had been a stove, one leg gone and substituted for by a huge cobblestone; there had been two chairs, a long box, a table, shelves—all ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... ground by a frame of split cedars. On these lowly couches lay extended two poor men, suffering under the wasting effects of lake-fever. Their yellow bilious faces strangely contrasted with the gay patchwork-quilts that covered them. I felt much concerned for the poor emigrants, who told me they had not been many weeks in the country when they were seized with the fever and ague. They both had wives and small children, ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... between her two plump little hands, and her eyes were feasting on some charming pictures which were spread out before her. A pretty little work-basket stood on a chair at her side. It contained several yards of rumpled patchwork, two pieces of broadcloth with figures partially worked on them as if they were intended for a pair of slippers, a watch-pocket half finished, and a small piece of silk composed of very little squares. On the table close to her left elbow was a cambric ...
— Jessie Carlton - The Story of a Girl who Fought with Little Impulse, the - Wizard, and Conquered Him • Francis Forrester
... in the long dining-room for, although she was nearly thirty, there was still something of girlhood in her tired face. But she seemed engrossed in her own thoughts and returned to her room as soon as she had eaten. There she lay down upon the patchwork quilt which covered her bed, with her hands clasped above her head, staring at the ceiling and trying to forget the past in ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... Milly a good deal excited, and Olly very curious to see what Becky would look like. Mr. Backhouse took them in, and they found Becky lying comfortably on a little bed, with a patchwork counterpane, and her shoulders and arms covered up in a red flannel dressing-gown that Aunt ...
— Milly and Olly • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the name of the mother of Alexander Hamilton: we do not know the given name of his father. But from letters, a diary and pieced-out reports, allowing fancy to bridge from fact to fact, we get a patchwork history of the events preceding the birth ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... built, Borrowed alike from fools and wits, Dick's mind was like a patchwork quilt, Made up of new, old, motley bits— Where, if the Co. called in their shares, If petticoats their quota got And gowns were all refunded theirs, The quilt would ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... to go back now," said the purple ant, with the green patchwork squares on his checks. "If we crossed over the bridge we might fall off and be drowned. We'll go back, but you go ahead, and we wish you good luck, ...
— Uncle Wiggily's Adventures • Howard R. Garis
... Milon, Daphnis of Nais), and of nature. Daphnis is the winner,- it is his earliest victory, and the prelude to his great renown among nymphs and shepherds. In this version the strophes are arranged as in Fritzsche's text. Some critics take the poem to be a patchwork by various hands. ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... single file along a tiny track worn threadbare amid the brown, lumpy grass: and, as the man came round the mountain's shoulder, a narrow valley opened out beneath him—a scanty patchwork of green fields, and, here and there, a whitewashed farm, flanked by a dark cluster ...
— Victorian Short Stories • Various
... whose sign creaked in response to the greeting of her footsteps, which not a human soul heard but herself. Under the thatched roofs her mind's eye beheld relaxed tendons and flaccid muscles, spread out in the darkness beneath coverlets made of little purple patchwork squares, and undergoing a bracing process at the hands of sleep for renewed labour on the morrow, as soon as a hint of pink nebulosity appeared ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... the face of an ox. There are some with extraordinary force of command in the rooms of the sick, who believe that whiskey is nourishing and that milk is liquid food; that doses go into human stomachs to travel the rounds of the circulation, and finally drop off at the right place for either patchwork or original work. ...
— The No Breakfast Plan and the Fasting-Cure • Edward Hooker Dewey
... under a blanket on the box, and three more had slipped beneath a tattered piece of carpet under the table, there still remained five little bodies to be bedded. For them an old straw mattress, limp enough to be rolled up and thrust under the bed, was at night extended on the floor. With this, and a patchwork quilt, the five were left to pack themselves together as best they could. So that, if Ginx, in some vision of the night, happened to be angered, and struck out his legs in navvy fashion, it sometimes came to pass that ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins
... in supposing that this age more than any past or future one is destined to see the garments of antiquity exchanged for a new suit, instead of gradually renewing themselves by patchwork; ... and more than all, in fancying that it mattered anything to the great end in view whether he himself should contend ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... of the Revolution, by BENSON J. LOSSING, (Harper & Brothers,) is a work that cannot well be praised overmuch. There have been an immense number of illustrated and pictorial histories of this country, all or nearly all of which are worthless patchwork; but Mr. Lossing's is a production of equal attractive interest and value. The first volume only has been completed; one more will follow with all convenient haste, ending the work. The letter-press is written from original materials, the drawings of scenery are made from original surveys, the engravings ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... contradictions in phraseology and in meaning are as numerous as the repetitions, so that one is not surprised to find it described as "the wonderful song, which causes the hair to stand on end." The different meanings given to the same words are indicative of its patchwork origin, which again would help to explain its philosophical inconsistencies. It was probably composed, as it stands, before there was any formal Ved[a]nta system; and in its original shape without doubt it precedes the formal S[a]nkhya; though both philosophies existed long before they ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... Again, there is the temptation to shrink with a senseless fear from using a plain word twice in the same page, and often from using a plain word at all. This unmanly dread of simplicity, and of what is called "tautology," gives rise to a patchwork made up of scraps of poetic quotations, unmeaning periphrases, and would-be humorous circumlocutions,—a style of all styles perhaps the most objectionable and offensive, which may be known and avoided by the name of Fine ...
— How to Write Clearly - Rules and Exercises on English Composition • Edwin A. Abbott
... very broad and quite flat, and is thus easily irrigated in all parts. The little square gardens are crowded with orange and olive trees, and every sort of vegetable. On each side huge bare mountains rise, and this from the contrast renders the patchwork valley the more pleasing. Whoever called "Valparaiso" the "Valley of Paradise," must have been thinking of Quillota. We crossed over to the Hacienda de San Isidro, situated at the very foot of ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... This is what ranks its writer with the master-spirits of the age! This is what has been described, over and over again, in terms which would require some qualification if used respecting Paradise Lost! It is too much that this patchwork, made by stitching together old odds and ends of what, when new, was but tawdry frippery, is to be picked off the dunghill on which it ought to rot, and to be held up to admiration as an inestimable ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... magazines, songs and special literature. The boys make sleds and carts, hall stands, umbrella racks, center tables and stools. They make cupboards and shelves for the school, quilting-frames on which the girls do patchwork. Rags are woven into rag carpets and sold. The print shop prints all of the stationery for the school. Each can of preserves, in the ample stock put up by the ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... may not be supposed to make use of the humdrum literature of the day; who introduces obsolete words and coins new ones, and makes a patchwork of all languages; makes use of execrable phrases, and invents a style that may be called his own.' The Doctor ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... simply of a series of rooms which have been "knocked into one" by the removal of the partition walls. As all these rooms were not of the same height, the ceiling presents a curious patchwork appearance. A long counter occupies one end of the hall, at which refreshments and liquors are served. There is a stage at the other side, on which low farces are performed, and a tall Punch and Judy box occupies a conspicuous position. Benches and chairs are scattered ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... up on two pillows, an open book before her on the patchwork quilt, and her head had sagged forward on the breast of her blue flannelette nightgown. She was making a low comedy sound which would have distressed her beyond measure if she had heard it. When Jane took the book from under her plump hands and gently removed one ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... church with its twin spires piercing the blue of the sky. Then, in the foreground, I see, behind the houses, the little gardens whose breath reached me just now. They are there, divided into small plots of equal size, simple or pretentious, sometimes humble kitchen-gardens, but sometimes also a patchwork adorned with grottoes, arbours ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... with it—poor little tortured broken-hearted thing! And some empty-headed heiress goes mincing into the Metropolitan, on a Caruso night, very proud and peacocky over her new ermine coat, without ever dreaming it's a patchwork of animal sufferings that is keeping her fat body warm, and that she's trying to make herself beautiful in a ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... and too much allied to petty Court intrigues, with which he was totally unacquainted, to be in the least interesting to Julian. As it continued for more than an hour, he soon ceased to pay the least attention to a discourse consisting of nicknames, patchwork, and innuendo; and employed himself in reflecting on his own complicated affairs, and the probable issue of his approaching audience with the King, which had been brought about by so singular an agent, and by means so unexpected. He often looked to his guide, Fenella; and observed ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... had been called hers ever since she was three years old, and had to climb on a chair to open the door. There she kept her treasures of all kinds,—paper dolls and garden seeds, and books, and scraps of silk for patchwork; and the top shelf of all was a sort of hospital for broken toys, too far gone to be played with any longer, but too dear, for old friendship's sake, to be quite thrown away. The furniture of the sitting-room was cherry-wood, ...
— Eyebright - A Story • Susan Coolidge
... in a small attic of one of the meanest houses in the lowest portion of a provincial town in the south of England, a woman lay dying. The curtainless window and window—panes, stuffed with straw, the scanty patchwork covering to the bed, the single rickety chair, the unswept floor, the damp, mildewed walls, the door falling from its hinges, told of pinching poverty. On the opposite corner to the bedstead there was a heap of straw, to serve as ...
— The Ferryman of Brill - and other stories • William H. G. Kingston
... a refreshment or variety, while books entailing reasoning and the marshalling of large bodies of facts were being written. Moreover, many of his researches were allowed to drop, and only resumed after an interval of years. Thus a rigidly chronological series of letters would present a patchwork of subjects, each of which would be difficult to follow. The Table of Contents will show in what way I have attempted to ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... looks at the endless hexagons and octagons, before she indulged any distinct idea of relinquishing her task. At length, however, it did forcibly occur to her that, after all, she was not obliged to go on with it; and that, really, patchwork was a thing that was better done by degrees, when one happens to want a job, than to be finished all at once. So, with this thought (which would have been a very good one if it had occurred in proper time), she suddenly drew out her needle, thrust all her pieces, arranged and unarranged, into a ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 3 (of 12) - Classic Tales And Old-Fashioned Stories • Various
... is a patchwork city. The National Park Hotel, its chief hostelry, is an unusually good hotel for a city of this size, and Washington Street, in the neighborhood of the hotel, has the look of a busy city street; yet ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... father wouldn't let her. No, it simply happened because her window was right across the alleyway from ours. The Ponsonby house was next to us, on the right, and between us were only a fence, a hedge of box, and a sprawly acacia tree that shaded Miss Ponsonby's window, where she always sat sewing—patchwork, as I'm alive—when she wasn't working around the house. Patchwork seemed to be Miss Ponsonby's sole and only ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... James II. It would perhaps be straining the suggestion already made of the persistent influences of origins to see in the varied racial and national beginnings of New York a presage of that cosmopolitan quality which still marks the greatest of American cities, making much of it a patchwork of races and languages, and giving to the electric stir of Broadway an air which suggests a Continental rather than an English city, but it is more plausible to note that New York had no original link with the Puritanism of New England ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... mass of people—and not simply common people, but people active and influential in intellectual things—are still quite untrained in the methods of thought and absolutely innocent of any criticism of method; it is scarcely a caricature to call their thinking a crazy patchwork, discontinuous and chaotic. They arrive at conclusions by a kind of accident, and do not suspect any other way may be found to their attainment. A stage above this general condition stands that minority of people who have at some time or ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... in, and the soft shadows were creeping out of the corners of the little room. There was a gentle mellowness in the twilight which softened the darns in the patchwork picture the place presented. This room was before all things her shop; and, in consequence, comfort and the picturesque were sacrificed to utility. Yet there was a pleasant femininity about it. A femininity which never fails to act upon the opposite sex. ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... needle-craft, found riotous expansion in quilt-piecing. A thrifty economy, too, a desire to use up all the fragments and bits of stuffs which were necessarily cut out in the shaping, chiefly of women's and children's garments, helped to make the patchwork a satisfaction. The amount of labor, of careful fitting, neat piecing, and elaborate quilting, the thousands of stitches that went into one of these patchwork quilts, are to-day almost painful to regard. Women revelled in intricate and difficult patchwork; they ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... the book for what it is in our power to learn from personal observation, we dismiss our organs of perception and comprehension from their righteous charge, and cover the emptiness of our own minds with the patchwork of others." ...
— Froebel's Gifts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... of physics. Your physics are without form and void; patchwork, constantly changing. There is no substantial foundation for any system of metaphysics. What you say or do in physics is ...
— Ancient and Modern Physics • Thomas E. Willson
... afternoons in a week, and is conducted by a lady from New York, with some dozen ladies to assist her. There were present, the afternoon I visited it, one hundred and thirteen girls from six to twenty years of age, all plying the needle, some with pieces of patchwork, and others ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... am, boys, turned up again-a subject of this moral reform school, of moral old Charleston. If my good old mother thinks it'll reform a cast-off remnant of human patchwork like me, I've nothing to say in protest. Yes, here I am, comrades (poor Tom Swiggs, as you used to call me), with rum my victor, and modern vengeance hastening my destruction." This is the exclamation of poor Tom Swiggs (as his ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... a moment outside the hut, studying the sky, which was a patchwork of clouds scattered across grey splotches that would turn to blue with the coming of the sun. Evidently the sky had been quite overcast during the night, but the clouds were broken now, though by no ...
— Aces Up • Covington Clarke
... and wholly unlike that of the other plays. It is the work of a saner and less flamboyant age.[168] The Agamemnon and the Oedipus have been suspected on the ground that certain of the lyric portions are written in a curious patchwork metre of a character fortunately unique in Latin lyric verse. The Agamemnon further has two choruses.[169] But in all other respects the language, technique, and metre closely resemble the other dramas. Neither objection ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... the dinner itself, there was no patchwork about that. Brown himself had supplied the essentials, trusting that the most of his guests could have no notion whatever of the excessively high cost of turkeys that season, or of the price of the especial quality of butter and eggs which he handed over to Mrs. Kelcey ...
— The Brown Study • Grace S. Richmond
... kerchiefs, spotted ones, striped ones; ivory bobbins, sprigs of coral, and sea-shells from far places, they'll murmur you secrets o' nights if you put em under your pillow; here are patterns for patchwork, and here's a sheet of ballads, and here's a pack of cards for telling fortunes. What will ye buy? A dream-book, a crystal, a charmed powder that shall make you see ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon
... and charcoal. The ceiling had, in many places, given way; the laths had been removed; and, where any plaster remained, it was either mapped and blistered with damps, or festooned with dusty cobwebs. Over an old crazy bedstead was thrown a squalid, patchwork counterpane; and upon the counterpane lay a black hood and scarf, a pair of bodice of the cumbrous form in vogue at the beginning of the last century, and some other articles of female attire. On a small shelf near the foot of the bed stood a couple ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... standing in the corner by the stove; this must have been the old mother's room. From there he passed into another little room, and here he saw Lyubka. She was lying on a chest, covered with a gay-coloured patchwork cotton quilt, pretending to be asleep. A little ikon-lamp was burning in the corner ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... to many scents, and to many thoughts; and you take no pains to harden yourself against these weaknesses, but yield to them and sink down into them as into a luxurious feather-bed; and I often fear I shall lose you altogether some day, and find nothing but a patchwork of whims and prejudices sitting at that table instead of ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... great prairie schooners, hooded in canvas to keep out the rain. Some of them were miracles of patchwork, racked and strained and broken till scarcely a sound bit of iron or wood remained, but, all splinted and bound with strips of the cowboy's indispensable rawhide, they wabbled crazily along, with many a shriek and groan, threatening every moment to collapse, ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... head to the still open back door, where Mrs. Morran could be heard at her labours. He stepped across and shut it. "I'm no' wantin' that auld wife to hear," he said. Then he squatted down on the patchwork rug by the hearth, and warmed his blue-black shins. Looking into the glow of the fire, he observed, "I seen you two up by the Big ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... province as well as they can. The actual presence of God in the world would seem to drag Him down into questionable limitations, not to be assumed without express warrant, as exception, miracle, and in things consecrated and set apart. Hence the patchwork composition of the early painters; we see in it an extreme diversity of value ascribed to the things about them. It is a world partly divine and partly rubbish; not a universe, but a collection of fragments from various worlds. The figures in their landscapes do not tread the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... there o' nights a snip-snip-snippin' it up into little scraps an' sewin' 'em together again. If a woman'll do that, it's proof what sort o' brains she's got." Then, with sudden energy, he advised: "Don't you never let her set you a sewin' patchwork, Kitty Keehoty. It's all on a piece with knittin' mittens for the Hottentots—a waste of time. A waste o' sinful time, I mean a sinful waste ...
— The Brass Bound Box • Evelyn Raymond
... Dilly, "but to-day ain't tomorrer. They're both light-complected. It's jest like patchwork. Put light an' dark together, I say, or you won't git no figger. Here, le's have a mite o' cake! Mis' Tolman's a proper good cook, if her childern have all turned out ducks, an' took to the water. Every one on 'em's took back as ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... the park towards a little lake, shining amidst bracken and bushes, a jewel dropped from heaven. A couple of stiff-necked swans floated in motionless trance upon it; black water-hens flapped in flashing, splashing flight to safety as Christian came near; a string of patchwork coloured mandarin-ducks propelled themselves in jerks towards her, confident that any human being meant food. Two gigantic turquoise dragon-flies rose, with a dry crackle of talc-like wings, from a dead ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... remarkable—if Paley's contention of the sufferings of the witnesses be true, and these writings authentic—is that so very little mention is made of the apostles, of their labours, toils, and sufferings, and that these epistles are simply a kind of patchwork, chiefly of Old Testament materials, mixed up ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... chafed and angry with the other. They wished each other good-night, going through the usual forms in the coolest manner possible. Molly went up to her little bedroom, clean and neat as a bedroom could be, with draperies of small delicate patchwork—bed-curtains, window-curtains, and counter-pane; a japanned toilette-table, full of little boxes, with a small looking- glass affixed to it, that distorted every face that was so unwise as to look in it. This room had been to the child one of the most dainty and luxurious places ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... children. The noises of hobnailed shoes on the oak floors, and of unrestrained clownish and churlish voices everywhere, were tremendous. Here a fat cottager might be seen standing on a lovely quilt of patchwork brocade, pulling down, rough in her cupidity, curtains on which the new-born and dying eyes of generations of nobles had rested, henceforth to adorn a miserable cottage, while her husband was taking down the bed, larger perhaps, ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... squaws the ladies were, and whose were the little blond-haired children. Certain articles of finery seemed to be greatly valued among them, such as red, white and blue umbrellas, like those used as signs in our cities; patchwork and Marseilles quilts; orange shirts and green dresses; pink and pearl shells; little bells; small mirrors; and beads about four inches long made of fine pipeclay. These beads cost a dollar and a half each, and are made especially ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... to herself as she moved about her room, loving the dear, common things of every day—the splash of cool water on her face and throat, the patchwork quilt, and even the despised brown gingham, which was, ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... method should be applied consistently and to the limit of its value. The results of various kinds of observation should be correlated so that there should ultimately emerge a unitary and practically valuable account of primate life, to replace the patchwork of information ...
— The Mental Life of Monkeys and Apes - A Study of Ideational Behavior • Robert M. Yerkes
... brighten the lustre of your true heart," said Mr. Davis; and here his wife handed me a patchwork ...
— The Harvest of Years • Martha Lewis Beckwith Ewell
... good. There were books lying on the table and flowers in the window, a handsome cat purred in front of the fireplace, and on a bracket in one corner an asthmatic clock ticked off the hours with wheezy vigor. In an adjoining room Evadne could see a bed with its gay patchwork quilt of Dyce's making, and in the little kitchen beyond she heard her singing as she trod to and fro. A couple of dainty muslin dresses were draped over chairs, for Dyce was the finest clear starcher in Marlborough, and her kitchen was all too small ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black
... was certainly a capable little person at a tender age, concocting delectable milk toast, browning toothsome buckwheats, and generally making a very good Parent's Assistant. I have also visions of her toiling at patchwork and oversewing sheets like a nice old-fashioned little girl in a story book; and in connection with the linsey woolsey frock and the sled before mentioned, I see a blue and white hood with a mass of shining fair ...
— Polly Oliver's Problem • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... more vividly the sentiment of the old father in the comedy, after consulting the lawyers, "Incertior sum multo quam ante." He saw that the profession of faith contained in the Articles was but a patchwork of bits of orthodoxy, Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Zuinglism; and this too on no principle; that it was but the work of accident, if there be such a thing as accident; that it had come down in the particular shape in which the English Church ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... was rolling; but sometimes again there were shadows, and the wheel was then heavy and slower. Sometimes, the threads grew so tangled, that I sighed with impatience and worry, the weft bears the marks in the weaving—they are plain, in unwinding the pirns—and still, 'twas a labor of love, this patchwork of sunlight and shadow, this discord of sorrow ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... a disjunctive ... patchwork," replied the Wonder. His abstracted eyes were blind to the objective world of our reality; he seemed to be profoundly analysing the very elements ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... there are persons, who, for a personal and momentary advantage, do not fear to break the only bond which constitutes our strength, union among ourselves, I do not wish to be, and I never will be, of the {178} number."[19] Eventually a patchwork ministry was constructed, but its pitiable weakness proved how difficult it was to create a council, except along orthodox British party lines. It was a reductio ad absurdum of the eclectic ...
— British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government - 1839-1854 • J. L. Morison
... thing more," said Lund, grinning at them. "If enny of you saw a man hurtin' a dog, you'd probably fetch him a wallop. But you don't think ennything of scarin' the life out of a half-baked kid an' markin' up his hide like a patchwork quilt. Thet kid's stayin' aft after this. One of you monkey with him, an' you'll do jest what he's bin doin', wish you was ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... corner stood the chief piece of furniture, and the one which drew the attention of the visitors with the most powerful attraction. It was a large clumsy four-post bedstead, hung with blue and white homespun curtains, and covered with a gay patchwork quilt. The curtains on both sides were drawn back, and the face and figure of the sleeper were in full view. She lay as if under the influence of a narcotic, so still that her breathing could scarcely be distinguished. ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 2 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... third with Homer and Milton. In death they crowned his forehead, and for three days the mourning crowd gazed on all that remained of their great poet. And yet Delille's Jardins is no better than a patchwork of carpet-gardening, in which the flowers are theatrical paper-flowers. If anything lives from the descriptive poetry of the eighteenth century, it is a few detached lines ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... who under the Normans filled the place of the English gleeman, tumbled, sang, and balanced knives in the hall; or, out in the bailey of an afternoon, displayed the acquirements of his trained monkey or bear. The fool, too, clad in coloured patchwork, cracked his ribald jests and shook his cap and bells at the elbow of roaring barons, when the board was spread and the circling of the ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... girl sat on a stool sewing patchwork. This particular pattern was called a lemon star and had eight diamond-shaped pieces of two colors, filled in with white around the edge, making a square. Her grandmother was coming to "join" it for her, and have it quilted before she was eight years old. ...
— A Little Girl in Old New York • Amanda Millie Douglas
... he bent his energies to read them all, from Helen down to Aunt Betsy, the latter of whom proved the most transparent of the four. Arrayed again in the pongee, but this time without the hoop, she came into the parlor, bringing her calico patchwork, which she informed him was pieced in the "herrin' bone pattern" and intended for Katy; telling him, further, that the feather bed on which he slept was also a part of "Catherine's setting out," and was made from feathers she picked herself, showing ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... carried on, not sparingly, but in good taste, with the result that, in spite of its newness at the present writing, it appears as a consistent and thoroughly conscientious piece of work, and not the mere patchwork that such repairs ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... sight of Kate standing at the top of the rock talking to Peter M'Shane. In a few days they would come to him to be married, and he hoped that Peter and Kate's marriage would make amends for this miserable patchwork, for Ned Kavanagh and Mary Byrne's marriage was no better ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... their supper and the famous wine, but there was still no diligence. The village also had finished its supper and was drifting in family groups into the piazza. The moon was just showing above the house-tops, and its light, combined with the blazing braziers before the cook-shops, made the square a patchwork of brilliant high-lights and black shadows from deep-cut doorways. Constance sat up alertly and watched the people crowding past. Across from the inn an itinerant show had established itself on a rudely ...
— Jerry • Jean Webster
... been forced on him, bitterly, bafflingly, after he had climbed the narrow streets of that town which always seemed to him a patchwork of nationalities, a polyglot mosaic of outlandish tongues, climbed up through alien-looking lanes and courts, past Moorish bazaars and Turkish lace-stores and English tobacco-shops, in final and frenzied ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... days came and went, they brought nothing to her but a little round of chores, a bit of patchwork, or straw braiding, and occasionally a walk to the village store to buy the few articles ...
— The King's Daughter and Other Stories for Girls • Various
... it through a second time, and looked at her baby. Daddy seemed to think that she might be willing to part from this wonderful creature! Sunlight fell through the plum blossom, in an extra patchwork quilt over the bundle lying there, touched the baby's nose and mouth, so that he sneezed. Noel laughed, and put her lips close to his face. 'Give you up!' she thought: 'Oh, no! And I'm going to be happy too. They ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... and followed him to the cold hospitality of the spare room, a place of peril but beautifully clean. There was a neat rag carpet on the floor, immaculate tidies on the bureau and wash table, and a spotless quilt of patchwork on the bed. But, like the dungeon of mediaeval times, it was a place for sighs and reflection, not for rest. Half an inch of frost on every window-pane glistened in the ...
— Darrel of the Blessed Isles • Irving Bacheller
... wooden posts; some were made of zinc; others, (imported from the States), of wood, painted white, and edged with green; a few were built of sun-dried bricks, still fewer of corrugated iron, and many of all these materials pieced together in a sort of fancy patchwork. Even boats were used as dwellings, turned keel up, with a hole cut in their sides for the egress of a tin smoke-pipe, and two others of larger size to serve as ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne
... flying fast, even you, Alec, have to shoot passim," said a witty Hebrew, and Delgrado did not appreciate the mot until some one told him that passeem in Hebrew meant "patchwork," and that Jacob's offense to Joseph's brethren lay in the gift of a Prince's robe to his ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... beneath the surface, and midway of its depth, a frontier refrigerator reached by a rope ladder, was a narrow chamber in which Margaret Rowland kept her meats fresh, often for a week at a time. For another purpose as well it was used: a big basket with a patchwork quilt and a pillow marking the spot where Baby Rowland, with the summer heat all about, slept ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge
... rare occasions. Now and then, especially in his earlier essays, there is logical texture and cohesion in his pages; development, evolution, growth; one thing follows another naturally, and each paragraph follows from what went before. But most of his later writings are a kind of patchwork; unrelated ideas are in juxtaposition; the incongruities are startling. All those chapters, I suppose, were read as lectures to miscellaneous audiences in which the attention soon became tired or blunted if required to follow ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... an odd cheer in it. Much scrubbing had removed from it the objections manifest in Glad's room above. There was a small red fire in the grate, a strip of old, but gay carpet before it, two chairs and a table were covered with a harlequin patchwork made of bright odds and ends of all sizes and shapes. The fog in all its murky volume could not quite obscure the brightness of the often rubbed window and its harlequin curtain drawn across ...
— The Dawn of a To-morrow • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... framework of the others diffused an air of antiquity over the whole assemblage. The church itself was undergoing repair and restoration, which is but another name for change. Masons were making patchwork on the front of the tower, and were sawing a slab of stone and piling up bricks to strengthen the side-wall, or possibly to enlarge the ancient edifice by an additional aisle. Moreover, they had dug an immense pit in the churchyard, long and broad, and fifteen feet deep, ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... replied Morey without turning from his station at the window. Below them now, less than half a mile down on the patchwork of the Nile valley, men were standing, staring up, collecting in little groups, gesticulating toward the strange thing that had materialized in ...
— Invaders from the Infinite • John Wood Campbell
... in which no fire could have been kindled without falling into the middle of the room. He recalls that racking head-ache, that scorching thirst, and those pains in all the bones of a wan, wasted figure lying under a patchwork quilt on a squalid bed. A figure, independent of, and dissevered from himself, yet in some degree identified with his thoughts, his sufferings, and his memories. Somebody nursed the figure, too—he is sure of that—bringing it water, medicines, food, ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... in the shortest possible time. She was arrayed in a new black gown, worn under protest, for her own idea had been to wear her Sunday dress, a vivid purple, with trimmings which, for color and variety, looked "like a patchwork tidy," as Captain Dan expressed it. Also, under still greater protest, she wore a white apron ...
— Cap'n Dan's Daughter • Joseph C. Lincoln
... Jew" and inchplant, the tendrils at least a yard long. In the other window was a blowzy-looking canary in a cage. A corpulent tortoise-shell cat occupied the turkey-red cushion in one generous rocking chair, There was a couch with a faded patchwork coverlet, several other chairs, and in a glass-fronted case standing on the mantlepiece a model of a brigantine in full sail, ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... civilised machinery is put at the service of all that is worst in the barbaric mind. Here again the Prussian has no accidental merits, none of those lucky survivals, none of those late repentances, which make the patchwork glory of Russia. Here all is sharpened to a point and pointed to a purpose, and that purpose, if words and acts have any meaning at all, is the destruction of liberty throughout ...
— The Barbarism of Berlin • G. K. Chesterton
... infant limbs of Mamie and Abner had been tucked up; old looking-glasses, that had reflected their shining, soapy faces, and Mamie's best chip Sunday hat; an old sewing-machine, that had been worn out in active service; old patchwork quilts; an old accordion, to whose long drawn inspirations Mamie had sung hymns; old pictures, books, and old toys. There were one or two old chromos, and, stuck in an old frame, a colored print from the "Illustrated London News" of a Christmas gathering ...
— A Millionaire of Rough-and-Ready • Bret Harte
... consisted of a small table, now covered with a perpetual litter of papers; a ramshackle wash-hand stand, on which a broken vegetable dish served as a receptacle for soap and such objects; a bed, which bred remarkable crops of fleas, and to which clung an old patchwork quilt, but which was otherwise poor in adornment; a chair, and an old travelling-box. As I have already mentioned, a trap-door in the floor gave access to this apartment. There was no ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... behaved herself respectably for a day or two; but the house was rather dull, she missed Nelly, wanted to run in the street, and longed to see mamma. She amused herself as well as she could with picture-books, patchwork, and the old cat; but, not being a quiet, proper, little Rosamond sort of a child, she got tired of hemming neat pocket-handkerchiefs, and putting her needle carefully away when she had done. She wanted to romp and shout, and ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... from its demure shelter her eyes looked gravely out. Her vest was a fine tawny brown, of a sprigged pattern, both gown and vest as artistically harmonious as the product of an Eastern loom. Pieces of both were sewn into a patchwork ...
— Quaker Hill - A Sociological Study • Warren H. Wilson
... Obviously this collection of patchwork could not fulfill their needs for an engine. First, it would be next to impossible to start if the body was placed on the running gear, as the flywheel then would be practically inaccessible. The absence of rings on the piston caused a further ...
— The 1893 Duryea Automobile In the Museum of History and Technology • Don H. Berkebile
... as they focused on the distant castles in Spain which were a part of her legitimate heritage of childhood. The room was like a Nutting picture, with its rag carpet, old-fashioned, low cherry bed, covered with a pink and white calico patchwork quilt, its low cherry bureau, its rush-bottom chairs, its big walnut chest covered with a hand-woven coverlet gay with red roses and blue tulips. An old- fashioned room and an old-fashioned mother and daughter—the ...
— Amanda - A Daughter of the Mennonites • Anna Balmer Myers
... evening meeting. I watched the people as they came in, still and solemn. Not many of the women wore bonnets. All who lived within a moderate distance just stepped in with a little homespun blanket over the head, or a patchwork cradle-quilt. I noticed Rachel when she entered and took her seat upon the settle. It will only take a minute to tell what a settle is, or, rather, was. If you should take a low wooden bench and add to it a high back and ends, you would make a settle. It usually stood ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... it—when he was not travelling. When he was, he left it unlocked, all save one room; and people came and went through the house as they pleased, eyeing with curiosity the dusty, tattered books upon the shelves, the empty bottles in the corner, the patchwork of cheap prints, notices of sales, summonses, accounts, certificates of baptism, memoranda, receipted bills—though they were few—tacked or stuck to ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... of long though careful use. The spotless boarded floor was bare of carpet, but was strewn with rough-cured skins, timber-wolf, antelope, coyote and bear, and here and there rugs of undoubted home make; these latter of the patchwork order. The centre table was of wide proportions and of solid mahogany, and told of the many services of the apartment; the small chairs were old-fashioned mahogany pieces with horse-hair seats, while the easy-chairs—and ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... the courtyard. In its small proportions, it was not unlike the kind of place usually assigned to a gate-porter in Paris. Certain keys were hanging on the wall, to which he now added the gate key; and his patchwork-covered bed was in a little inner division or recess. The whole had a slovenly, confined, and sleepy look, like a cage for a human dormouse; while he, looming dark and heavy in the shadow of a corner by the window, looked like the human ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... a curious collection as they gathered there by the door, and waited to see if the enemy would carry out those loud threats to break in. Rod was reminded of accounts he had read about the patchwork army gathered together by one Falstaff in early English days, which consisted of the lame, the halt and the blind. All the same, those old fellows had the right sort of spirit, and acted as though quite willing to yield up their own lives ...
— The Big Five Motorcycle Boys on the Battle Line - Or, With the Allies in France • Ralph Marlow
... suggestion at the very last moment. "Robert," "Les Huguenots," "Le Prophete," in the forms we have them, are quite different from those in which they were first cast. These operas have therefore been called "the most magnificent patchwork in the history of art," though this is a harsh phrasing of the fact, which somewhat outrides justice. Certain it is, however, that Meyerbeer was largely indebted to ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... contrary, the harvest is blighted overnight.... That which stood there aere perennis, the imperium Romanum, the most magnificent form of organization under difficult conditions that has ever been achieved, and compared to which everything before it and after it appears as patchwork, bungling, dilletantism—those holy anarchists made it a matter of "piety" to destroy "the world," which is to say, the imperium Romanum, so that in the end not a stone stood upon another—and even Germans and other ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... was the cause, so it was that he did but feel more vividly the sentiment of the old father in the comedy, after consulting the lawyers, "Incertior sum multo quam ante." He saw that the profession of faith contained in the Articles was but a patchwork of bits of orthodoxy, Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Zuinglism; and this too on no principle; that it was but the work of accident, if there be such a thing as accident; that it had come down in the particular shape in which the English Church now receives it, when it might have come down ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... "Patchwork and imagination," returned the other wearily. "That's what I get special rates for. Now, if I'd had your chance, right there on the spot, with the whole stage-setting around one—Lordy! How a fellow could ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... in vain to attempt the reduction of such a patchwork system to any single principle, astronomical or moral, as some have tried to do—a system originating from no single point as to country or to time. The gradual growth of many ages, its diversities ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... church Father Tom remembered that he had caught sight of Kate standing at the top of the rock talking to Peter M'Shane. In a few days they would come to him to be married, and he hoped that Peter and Kate's marriage would make amends for this miserable patchwork, for Ned Kavanagh and Mary Byrne's marriage was no ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... the stillness every beating of her heart. She stood by the bed. It was covered, not with its usual counterpane of patchwork stars, the work of Elspie's diligent hand through many a long year, and on which her own baby-fingers had been first taught to sew—but with a large white sheet. She stood, scarce knowing whether to fly or not, until she heard a footstep on the stairs. One minute, and it would be too late. ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... be sure; but then, work is often even more charming than play, as I think some little girls know when they have been helping their mothers,—running of errands, dusting the furniture, and sewing little squares of patchwork that the baby may have a cradle-quilt made entirely by her ...
— The Seven Little Sisters Who Live on the Round Ball - That Floats in the Air • Jane Andrews
... the kitchen was the "living-room," in one corner of which stood a carved high-post bedstead—glory of the Macys and envy of their neighbors—with its curtains of big figured chintz, brown sunflowers sprawling over a white ground, drawn aside in the daytime to display the marvelous patchwork of the quilt beneath. Fuel was scarce even then on the sandy isle; and economy compelled Mr. and Mrs. Macy to make use of this living-room as a bedchamber also, since Thomas Macy confessed to "bein ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... a peacemaker," Reginald said, "for she's piecin' a silk patchwork quilt, an' papa said she'd be blessed glad ...
— Dorothy Dainty's Gay Times • Amy Brooks
... to work again on that motley procession of pictures which he had likened to a patchwork film. Was it as disjointed as it seemed? Could it not be so put together as to make a true continuity, ...
— John Wesley, Jr. - The Story of an Experiment • Dan B. Brummitt
... feeble. The reason for this strange phenomenon is, that nature is always on the watch; always aiming to attain her ends. The desire for love is, in a woman, a large part of her nature. Her virtue is nothing but a piece of patchwork. ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... entreaties to accompany them. "You, with your smooth cheeks and bright eyes, may well think of passing a winter in Washington; but what should I do there? Why, the people would say I had lost my senses. No, we three ladies will have a nice quiet time at Exeter, and I can go on with my quilting and patchwork. You see, Miss Alice, that you come back with red cheeks. The birds and the flowers will be glad to see you again ...
— Aunt Phillis's Cabin - Or, Southern Life As It Is • Mary H. Eastman
... behind the houses, the little gardens whose breath reached me just now. They are there, divided into small plots of equal size, simple or pretentious, sometimes humble kitchen-gardens, but sometimes also a patchwork adorned with ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... taken down in rough notes at the museum, of a specimen of patchwork—even like the patchwork counterpanes of our great-grandmothers—stitched together by dusky slender fingers in the days of the great ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... length a brigantine worthy of Robinson Crusoe floated on the waters of the Chenonceau. They laid in what provision they might, gave all that remained of their goods to the delighted Indians, embarked, descended the river, and put to sea. A fair wind filled their patchwork sails and bore them from the hated coast. Day after day they held their course, till at length the favoring breeze died away and a breathless calm fell on the face of the waters. Florida was far behind; France farther yet before. Floating idly on the glassy waste, the craft lay ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... handkerchief and slowly wiped the back of his neck. She measured, in fact, nineteen or twenty feet over-all, but to the eye she appeared considerably longer, having (as the Elder afterwards put it) as many lines in her as a patchwork quilt. Her ribs, rising above the unfinished top-strakes, claimed ancestry in a dozen vessels of varying sizes; and how the builder had contrived to fix them into one keelson passed all understanding or guess. For over their unequal curves he had nailed a sheath of packing-boards, ...
— Merry-Garden and Other Stories • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the Holy Bible, (Whene'er 'twas the thought first struck him, How death, at unawares, might duck him Deeper than the grave, and quench The gin-shop's light in hell's grim drench) Than he handled it so, in fine irreverence, As to hug the book of books to pieces: And, a patchwork of chapters and texts in severance, Not improved by the private dog's-ears and creases, Having clothed his own soul with, he'd fain see equipt yours,— So tossed you again your Holy Scriptures. And you picked them up, in a sense, no doubt: Nay, had but a single face ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... thought of that "To-morrow" which they had promised to one another. The white Italian cities which he had visited alone gleamed whiter than ever before him. Was it possible that he should sit in the great square of St. Mark's with Miriam Gale by his side, the sun making a patchwork of gold and blue among the pinnacles of the Church of the Evangelist? There, too, he saw, as he walked, the Lido shore, and the long sickle sweep of the beach. The Adriatic slumbrously tossed up its toy surges, and lo! ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... bed, overshadowing so large a portion of the floor, the births and, as far as may be, the deaths, of the household take place. At the Corneys', the united efforts of some former generation of the family had produced patchwork curtains and coverlet; and patchwork was patchwork in those days, before the early Yates and Peels had found out the secret of printing the parsley-leaf. Scraps of costly Indian chintzes and palempours were intermixed with commoner black and red calico in minute hexagons; and the variety ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. I • Elizabeth Gaskell
... by motives of pride, party, or resentment to espouse the doctrine of separation and independance; I am clearly, positively, and conscientiously persuaded that it is the true interest of this continent to be so; that every thing short of THAT is mere patchwork, that it can afford no lasting felicity, —that it is leaving the sword to our children, and shrinking back at a time, when, a little more, a little farther, would have rendered this continent the glory of ...
— Common Sense • Thomas Paine
... mediaeval Church felt that much of classical literature was injurious to the minds of the young, and in consequence discouraged the use of it in schools. The classics were allowed to perish, and their place was taken by Christian poets such as Prudentius or Juvencus, by moralizations of Aesop, patchwork compositions known as 'centos' on Scriptural themes, and the like. The scholars, therefore, who went to Italy and came home to the North carrying the new enthusiasm, had strenuous opposition to encounter. The Schoolmen considered them impertinent, the Church counted them immoral. To ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... a good, industrious girl,' she said to Alice. 'Now you must come in and have some cake and milk, and I have a few little scraps of finery your mother may like for her patchwork.' ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... was throbbing, and every fibre trembling with fear and wretchedness; but yet it was best to assume such calmness and lightness. Margaret now asked the little girls, while she sealed her note, how their patchwork was getting on—thus far the handsomest patchwork quilt she ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau
... even invite you to make yourself at home." With a laugh he glanced about the bare little room,—at the uncovered rafters, the rough log walls, and the empty cupboard with its swinging doors. In one corner there was a pallet hidden by a ragged patchwork quilt, and facing it a small pine table upon which stood an ash-cake ready ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... another. And, where a dance is expletively introduced in the intervals of the acts, the subject of it should have, at least, some affinity to the piece. A long custom has made the want of this attention pass unnoticed. It is surely an absurd and an unnatural patchwork, between the acts of a deep tragedy, to bring on, abruptly by way of diversion, a comic dance. By this contrast both entertainments are hurt; the abruptness of the transition is intolerable to the audience; and the thread, especially of the ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... darning—very much as they would upon the broken fragments of an upset dinner-table. Away up in that convenient attic lie the desecrated splendors of the past, scattered in confusion by charitable mice,—blue and crimson wax-flowers melt underneath the eaves, all destitute of petals that would not fit on; patchwork quilts and cushions, in silk and satin distractions, just fall short of harmony in the arrangement of their squares and colors; vivid buttercups and daisies mingle with bulky cat-o'-nine-tails,—all on canvas ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... brook, a fearful and wonderful portrayal of an otter, and a very fancy stag of unlimited points dazzled the eye. The ceiling was decorated with an elaborate and most effective design in wood—a fashion very common in Srinagar, consisting of a sort of patchwork panelling of small pieces of wood, cut to length and shape, and tacked on to a backing in geometrical designs. At a little distance the effect is rich and excellent, but close inspection shows up the tintacks and the glue, and a prying finger penetrates the solid-looking ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... said she. Aunt Hannah was making a crazy patchwork quilt, and she frowned hard at a triangular piece of red silk and circular piece of pink, wondering how to fit them ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... quaint traceries, the arrangement of which became one of their few fine arts. Many a maiden, as she sorted and arranged fluttering bits of green, yellow, red, and blue, felt rising in her breast a passion for somewhat vague and unknown, which came out at length in a new pattern of patchwork. Collections of these tiny fragments were always ready to fill an hour when there was nothing else to do; and as the maiden chatted with her beau, her busy flying needle stitched together those pretty bits, which, little in themselves, were destined, by gradual ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... "Bought good new Merrimac print, she did, an' then set there o' nights a snip-snip-snippin' it up into little scraps an' sewin' 'em together again. If a woman'll do that, it's proof what sort o' brains she's got." Then, with sudden energy, he advised: "Don't you never let her set you a sewin' patchwork, Kitty Keehoty. It's all on a piece with knittin' mittens for the Hottentots—a waste of time. A waste o' sinful time, I mean a ...
— The Brass Bound Box • Evelyn Raymond
... She had helped Mammy sweep the floor, had wiped the dishes, and rocked Baby Squealer to sleep. She did not wish to sew any more patchwork squares. ...
— The Graymouse Family • Nellie M. Leonard
... dining-room for, although she was nearly thirty, there was still something of girlhood in her tired face. But she seemed engrossed in her own thoughts and returned to her room as soon as she had eaten. There she lay down upon the patchwork quilt which covered her bed, with her hands clasped above her head, staring at the ceiling and trying to forget the past ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... state Has given the licensed and unlicensed fool Charter to challenge me at every turn. The jester's laughing bauble blunts my sword, His gibes cut deeper than its fearful edge; And I, a man, a soldier, and a prince, Before this motley patchwork of a man, Stand all appalled, as if he were a glass Wherein I saw my own deformity. O Heaven! a tear—one little tear—to wash This aching dryness ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker
... did when cogitating some knotty point, "I'll tell you, ma'am. If it's agreeable to you, ma'am, the boys and I might go on to Brading and see the remains of that Roman villa I was talking about yesterday. That is, unless you would like us to wait till you've done your patchwork there, and all of us go ...
— Bob Strong's Holidays - Adrift in the Channel • John Conroy Hutcheson
... with nursing babies living in tents or patchwork shacks. Some of these women dream at night of silks and satins ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter
... materials will be able to withstand. He does not work empirically, and count upon patching up the mistakes which may later appear under the stress of actual use. The educational engineer should emulate this example. Tests and forethought must take the place of failure and patchwork. Our efforts have been too long directed by "trial and error." It is time to leave off guessing and to acquire a scientific knowledge of the material with which we have to deal. When instruction ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... remember that the greater flexibility belonging to the novel by no means removes the novel from the laws which rule the drama. The parts of a novel should have organic relations. Push the licence to excess, and stitch together a volume of unrelated chapters,—a patchwork of descriptions, dialogues, and incidents,—no one will call that a novel; and the less the work has of this unorganised character the greater will be its value, not only in the eyes of critics, but in its effect on ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... a little grimace of defiance as she scrambled to her feet. "I'm not going to give up all my good times and take to fancy work, when it's as much as I can do to sew on my own buttons. He can stay in the house, and sing songs and sew patchwork all day long, if he wants to, but I'm not going to give up all my frolics; need I, boys?" she concluded, in a mutinous outburst, quite at variance with her recent plea for their ...
— In Blue Creek Canon • Anna Chapin Ray
... was as if the gipsies set to work to refurnish Stonehenge and make it a commodious residence. It was as if they spread a sort of giant umbrella over the circle of stones, and elaborately hung curtains between them, so as to turn the old Druid temple into a sort of patchwork pavilion. In one sense there is much more vandalism, and in another sense much more practicality; but it is a practicality that always stops short of the true creative independence of going off ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... deep, for on this upland water was far beneath the surface, and midway of its depth, a frontier refrigerator reached by a rope ladder, was a narrow chamber in which Margaret Rowland kept her meats fresh, often for a week at a time. For another purpose as well it was used: a big basket with a patchwork quilt and a pillow marking the spot where Baby Rowland, with the summer heat all about, slept away the ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge
... with a patchwork quilt of great antiquity; and at the upper end, upon the side nearest to the door, hung a scanty curtain of blue check, which prevented the Zephyrs that were abroad in Kingsgate Street, from visiting Mrs Gamp's ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... opposite the fire, a confusion of dirty patchwork, lean-ribbed ticking, and coarse sacking, the lawyer, hesitating just within the doorway, sees a man. He lies there, dressed in shirt and trousers, with bare feet. He has a yellow look in the spectral ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... "tin can on the shingle" between them and their prey. The Monitor and Merrimac then began their epoch-making fight. The patchwork engines of the deep-draught Merrimac made her as unhandy as if she had been water-logged, while the light-draught Monitor could not only play round her when close-to but maneuver all over the surrounding shallows as well. The Merrimac put her last ounce ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood
... western system of physics. Your physics are without form and void; patchwork, constantly changing. There is no substantial foundation for any system of metaphysics. What you say or do in physics is ...
— Ancient and Modern Physics • Thomas E. Willson
... the Revolution, by BENSON J. LOSSING, (Harper & Brothers,) is a work that cannot well be praised overmuch. There have been an immense number of illustrated and pictorial histories of this country, all or nearly all of which are worthless patchwork; but Mr. Lossing's is a production of equal attractive interest and value. The first volume only has been completed; one more will follow with all convenient haste, ending the work. The letter-press is written from original materials, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... minister, the Reverend James Lyon, whose little daughter, Melvina, was said to be the best behaved and the smartest girl in the settlement. Although only ten years old Melvina had already "pieced" four patchwork quilts and quilted them; and her neat stitches were the admiration of all the women of the town. But most of the little girls were a little in awe of Melvina, who never cared to play games, and always brought her knitting ...
— A Little Maid of Old Maine • Alice Turner Curtis
... seventh centuries may have written the tales that we have, known even to men who in the tenth and eleventh centuries copied them and commented upon them; but the romances as they now stand do not look like pieces of patchwork, but like the works of men who had ideas to convey; and to me at least they seem to bear approximately the same relation to the Druid legends as the works of the Attic tragedians bear to the archaic Greek legends on which ...
— Heroic Romances of Ireland Volumes 1 and 2 Combined • A. H. Leahy
... line, "Great Wits are sure to Madness near allied" (Absalom and Achitophel, l. 248). By means of these alterations in his sources, Boyer has compiled a passage that has focus and direction, and gives little evidence of its patchwork origin. ...
— The Present State of Wit (1711) - In A Letter To A Friend In The Country • John Gay
... mansard grading of the roof. One window looked out on the greenhouses, another toward Thorley's Pond. Beside the former, in a high, upholstered arm-chair, sat a tall woman, fully dressed in black, with a patchwork quilt of many colors across her knees. In spite of gray hair slightly disheveled, and wild gray eyes, she was a handsome woman who on a larger scale made him ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... The sight of the patchwork uniforms, worn by armed men, seemed to be a magnet for the panic-stricken inhabitants of the village. So far the people had been far too busy with their fears and their eagerness to save themselves ...
— The Belgians to the Front • Colonel James Fiske
... harlot form[384] soft sliding by, With mincing step, small voice, and languid eye: Foreign her air, her robe's discordant pride In patchwork fluttering, and her head aside: By singing peers upheld on either hand, She tripp'd and laugh'd, too pretty much to stand; 50 Cast on the prostrate Nine a scornful look, Then thus in ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... some time, quite still, and deeply moved, her black hair against the red squares and the lavender-sprigged squares of the patchwork quilt. Prayer was almost essential to her. Then she fell into that rapture of self-sacrifice, identifying herself with a God who was sacrificed, which gives to so many human souls ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... great sticks of birch had done their duty and burned all night; should, unluckily, the fire be out he lost no time in rekindling it with birch-bark and cypress branches, placed heavier pieces on the mounting flame, and ran back to snuggle under the brown woollen blankets and patchwork quilt till the comforting warmth once ...
— Maria Chapdelaine - A Tale of the Lake St. John Country • Louis Hemon
... He could not yet see the citadel clearly, or the heights of Levis; but the ascent to Montmorenci bristled with naked trees, and in the stillness he could hear the roar of the falls. Gaspard ambled along his belt of ground to take a last look. It was like a patchwork quilt: a square of wheat stubble showed here, and a few yards of brown prostrate peavines showed there; his hayfield was less than a stone's throw long; and his garden beds, in triangles and sections of all shapes, filled the interstices of ...
— The Chase Of Saint-Castin And Other Stories Of The French In The New World • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... white thread of science, if under science we may include those simple truths, drawn from observation of nature, of which men in all ages have possessed a store. Could we then survey the web of thought from the beginning, we should probably perceive it to be at first a chequer of black and white, a patchwork of true and false notions, hardly tinged as yet by the red thread of religion. But carry your eye farther along the fabric and you will remark that, while the black and white chequer still runs through it, there rests on the middle portion of the web, where religion ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... been havin'. She says 't she ain't had no bother a tall. She says 't she whipped Josephus nine times the day 't she took him home with her, 'n' since then she's taught him to read 'n' write 'n' sew patchwork 'n' beat up batter. She says 'f she'd 'a' had Henry Ward Beecher he wouldn't 'a' roamed but once, nor would little Jane 'a' give but one suck, nor Fox but one yell, nor would Augustus 'a' throwed but one cat down her well. ...
— Susan Clegg and Her Friend Mrs. Lathrop • Anne Warner
... by any one to Ada's speech, but she never appeared at another rehearsal. After two weeks' diligent practice, the players were pronounced perfect and a night was set for the performance of "The Violet Patchwork." ...
— Betty Gordon at Boarding School - The Treasure of Indian Chasm • Alice Emerson
... decorum and well-grounded study of Tibaldi, the invention of the learned Primaticcio, and a little of Parmigianino's grace; but without so much study and weary labor let him apply himself to imitate the works which our Niccolo—dell Abbate—left us here." Kugler calls this "a patchwork ideal," which puts ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... the temptation to shrink with a senseless fear from using a plain word twice in the same page, and often from using a plain word at all. This unmanly dread of simplicity, and of what is called "tautology," gives rise to a patchwork made up of scraps of poetic quotations, unmeaning periphrases, and would-be humorous circumlocutions,—a style of all styles perhaps the most objectionable and offensive, which may be known and avoided by the name of Fine Writing. Lastly, there is the danger of obscurity, ...
— How to Write Clearly - Rules and Exercises on English Composition • Edwin A. Abbott
... Confederate asked questions to piece out his patchwork information. He knew that Philip Farnum had come out of the war with a constitution weakened by the hardships of the service. Rumors had drifted to him that the taste for liquor acquired in camp as an antidote ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... open the inner door, and somewhat reluctantly went in. It was decent, that room was; and this disabled old woman lay under a patchwork quilt, on a bed that seemed comfortable. But the window was shut, and the air was close. ...
— Opportunities • Susan Warner
... seems to unfold itself to our view like an immense and variegated map, the predominant colour of which is green in all its shades and tints. The irregular division of the country into fields made it resemble a patchwork counterpane. The size of the houses, churches, fortresses, was so considerably diminished as to make them resemble nothing so much as those playthings manufactured at Carlsruhe. This was the effect produced by a microscopic train, which whistled very faintly to attract our attention, and which ...
— Wonderful Balloon Ascents - or, the Conquest of the Skies • Fulgence Marion
... gave this first proof of the free and proper action of his lungs, the patchwork coverlet which was carelessly flung over the iron bedstead, rustled; the pale face of a young woman was raised feebly from the pillow; and a faint voice imperfectly articulated the words, 'Let me see ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... eyes. Her groping left hand ceased its aimless plucking at a yarn knot in the patchwork comforter. Her breath came evenly—Mary Hope wondered if she slept. A hand fell on Mary Hope's shoulder, though she had not heard a footfall. She seemed prepared, seemed to know what she must do. ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... been refashioned by humble hands into a new dwelling-place. Thus does life spring from death, comfort from desolation, and happiness from shattered hopes, and thus our whole career may be but a patchwork ...
— Garman and Worse - A Norwegian Novel • Alexander Lange Kielland
... influence of work done twice for one result. But the toil went on, and when at last Davidge left the hospital he was startled by the change in the vessel. As a father who has left a little girl at home comes back to find her a grown woman, so he saw an almost finished ship where he had left a patchwork of iron plates. ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... our story is reminiscent of at least three different cycles of tales, it nevertheless does not sound like a modern bit of patchwork, but appears to be old; how old, I am unable to say. The most unreasonable part of our narrative is the fact that the hero should find himself so many miles from home when going to buy five cents' ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... corners (later to be used on the beds as a fertiliser), which are always beautiful, and doubly so when reflected in a canal. From a balloon, in the flowering season, the tulip gardens must look like patchwork quilts. ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... while. Well, Fatty went to bed, in one of the hay bunks, pretty soon after that. He stripped to his underclothes and turned in under the patchwork comforters. He was too beat out to want any supper, even if there'd been any in sight. I built a fire in the rusty cook stove and dried his duds and mine. Then I set down in the busted chair and begun to think. After a spell I got up and took account of stock, as you might say, ...
— The Depot Master • Joseph C. Lincoln
... and ways to stop this waste. What is done to-day in this direction is mere patchwork, and utterly inadequate. As an illustration of what could be done to-day, may be cited the canalization and the laying out of vast fields in the capital of the Empire, on whose value, however, experts are of divided opinion. ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... only a few walls of upper stories are whitened. Where it is not protected from the rains by an overhanging coping or other feature, the finish is not durable. Occasionally where a doorway or other opening has been repaired the evidences of patchwork are obliterated by a surrounding band of fresh plastering, varying in width from 4 inches to a foot or more. Usually this band is laid on as a thick wash of adobe, but in some instances a decorative effect is attained by using white. It is curious to find that at Tusayan the decorative treatment ...
— Eighth Annual Report • Various
... Ideala!" said Ralph, patronisingly; "you certainly have a memory, and are quite as good at patchwork as the author of 'Delysle.' I could criticise on another count, but taking into consideration time, place, circumstances, and the female intellect, I refrain. That is the generous sort of creature I am. So, without expressing ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... fast, even you, Alec, have to shoot passim," said a witty Hebrew, and Delgrado did not appreciate the mot until some one told him that passeem in Hebrew meant "patchwork," and that Jacob's offense to Joseph's brethren lay in the gift of a Prince's robe to ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... wall, and framed with oyster-shells; a little bed, which there was just room enough to get into; and a nosegay of seaweed in a blue mug on the table. The walls were whitewashed as white as milk, and the patchwork counterpane made my eyes quite ache with its brightness. One thing I particularly noticed in this delightful house, was the smell of fish; which was so searching, that when I took out my pocket-handkerchief to wipe my nose, I found it smelt exactly as if it had wrapped up a lobster. On my imparting ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... solemnly along the mantel-shelf. Even the spittoon was an original note, and instead of sawdust contained sea-shells. And as for the hearthrug, it would merit an article to itself, and a coloured diagram to help the text. It was patchwork, but the patchwork of the poor; no glowing shreds of old brocade and Chinese silk, shaken together in the kaleidoscope of some tasteful housewife's fancy; but a work of art in its own way, and plainly a labour of love. The patches came exclusively ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... back to a rock, his knees drawn up and clasped within fingers nervously interlocked. His eyes were fixed upon the great stretch of landscape below, shadowy now, and indistinct, like a rolling plain of patchwork woven by mysterious fingers. Gray mists were floating over the meadows and low-lying lands. Away in the distance they marked the circuitous course of the river, which only an hour ago had shone like a belt of silver in the light of the setting sun. Twilight had fallen ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... yellow light of the paraffin lamp, and gazed in wonderment at Gentle Annie. He was a tattered and mournful object; his boots worn out, his trousers a marvel of patchwork, his coat a thing discoloured and torn, his hair and beard unshorn, himself a being ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... the patchwork counterpane of his bed and gazed at the sky. He was feeling a little happier, a little less unsettled, for his stomach was empty and his mind had begun to fix itself with pleasure on the images of hot toast and jam. He 'wanted his tea:' the manner in which he glanced at his ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... Israel dismounted nimbly enough, and directed the men to take his bed upstairs, which they did, while Harlan and Dorothy stood by helplessly. Here, under his profane and involved direction, the structure was finally set in place, even to the patchwork quilt, fearfully and wonderfully made, which surmounted ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... church, admirably primitive and curious, reminded me of the two or three oldest churches of Rome—St. Clement and St. Agnes. The interior is rich in grimly mystical mosaics of the twelfth century and the patchwork of precious fragments in the pavement not inferior to that of St. Mark's. But the terribly distinct Apostles are ranged against their dead gold backgrounds as stiffly as grenadiers presenting arms—intensely personal sentinels of a personal Deity. ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... their educational systems, and have returned home with innumerable fads—but no system. Everything of the fantastic has been copied, but no foundations have been laid; with the result that England's educational system to-day resembles a piece of patchwork containing a rich variety of colours and a still greater variety of stuff-quality. It were better for us to have done with educationists who preach about 'the rigid uniformity of system which is alien both to the English temperament and to the lines on which English ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... Arthur, getting out of bed like a badly made parcel, with sheet, blanket, and patchwork quilt rolled round him; and as he shut the window with a bang he could see his brother and ...
— Menhardoc • George Manville Fenn
... Timmy followed the woman through the kitchen of the lodge to a bedroom, where lay a pale-faced little girl of six. On the patchwork counterpane were a pair of scissors and a big sheet of paper. It was evident that the child had been trying to amuse herself by cutting out patterns. As the visitors came in, she sat up, and her little face flushed with joy. Here was her dream come true! Here were some visitors—a beautiful ...
— What Timmy Did • Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes
... quilt-piecing. A thrifty economy, too, a desire to use up all the fragments and bits of stuffs which were necessarily cut out in the shaping, chiefly of women's and children's garments, helped to make the patchwork a satisfaction. The amount of labor, of careful fitting, neat piecing, and elaborate quilting, the thousands of stitches that went into one of these patchwork quilts, are to-day almost painful to regard. ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... with folded arms and knitted brows, to the cellar down below, where there was a small copper fixed in one corner, a chair or two, a form and table, a glimmering fire, and a truckle-bed, covered with a ragged patchwork rug. ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... to proceed upstairs to his room and, slipping his braces from his shoulders, allow his nether garments to drop to the floor and, without further preparation, roll into bed. Of the effeminacy of a night robe Webster knew nothing except by somewhat hazy rumour. Once under the patchwork quilt he was safe for the night, for, heaving himself into the middle of the bed, he sank into solid and stertorous slumber, from which all Cameron's prods and kicks failed to arouse him till the grey dawn once more summoned him to life, whereupon, resuming the aforesaid nether garments, he ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... muttered, flouncing out to their carriage, without seeing May, who had taken refuge behind the bed, which was hung round with some faded patchwork, to keep out air. ...
— May Brooke • Anna H. Dorsey
... quainter architectural shapes than many of the buildings that border this street. They are mostly of the timber-and-plaster kind, with bowed and decrepit ridge-poles, and a whole chronology of various patchwork in their walls; their low-browed door-ways open upon a sunken floor; their projecting stories peep, as it were, over one another's shoulders, and rise into a multiplicity of peaked gables; they have curious windows, breaking out irregularly all over the house, some even in the roof, set ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... to survival unto eager, ignorant hands, and then by its own limitations snatched that title away from them again. It sought to do that which can not be done—to establish growth instead of the chance to grow. It was cruel. It was unjust. In the wisdom of a later day its patchwork form must once more be changed. It must be changed as a protection, no more against the former slaves of the South than against the future ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... fishing round its rim, others bringing the washing there, all skylarking and singing. Few prettier sights have I ever seen than those on that sandbank— the merry brown forms dancing or lying stretched on it: the gaudy- coloured patchwork quilts and chintz mosquito-bars that have been washed, spread out drying, looking from Kangwe on the hill above, like beds of bright flowers. By night when it was moonlight there would be bands of dancers on it with bush-light torches, gyrating, intermingling ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... that this heroic romance was foredoomed to inefficiency. It was not a genuine kind at all: but a sort of patchwork of imitations of imitations—a mule which, unlike the natural animal, was itself bred, and bred in and in, of mules for generations back. It was true to no time, to no country, to no system of manners, life, or thought. Its oldest ancestor in one sense, though not in another—the ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... moment the clock struck eleven and the clear tones of its bell broke the silence sharply; the patient moaned as if in reply, and his thin hairy arms stirred feverishly on the wide patchwork counterpane. She took them in her hands and covered them over; she tried to arrange the pillows more comfortably, but as she did so he turned and tossed impatiently, and, fearing to disturb him, she put back the handkerchief she had taken from the pillow to wipe the sweat from his brow, ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... of the least considerable of hamlets, and consists of a few cottages on a green beside a burn. Some of them (a strange thing in Scotland) are models of internal neatness; the beds adorned with patchwork, the shelves arrayed with willow-pattern plates, the floors and tables bright with scrubbing or pipeclay, and the very kettle polished like silver. It is the sign of a contented old age in country places, where there is little matter for gossip and no street sights. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... remember any cathedral with so fine a site as this, rising up out of the center of a beautiful green, extensive enough to show its full proportions, relieved and insulated from all other patchwork and impertinence of rusty edifices. It is of gray stone, and looks as perfect as when just finished, and with the perfection, too, that could not have come in less than six centuries of venerableness, with a view to which ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various
... sewing patchwork, not because it was needed but simply as a protest against the frivolous lace Catherine was crocheting. Eliza listened with a frown and Catherine with a smile, as the girls explained their errand. To be sure, ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Cure had been watching all night beside the mahogany bed. Now and then he slipped his hand in the breast of his soutane of rusty black, drew out a steel watch, felt under a patchwork-quilt for a small feverish wrist, counted its feeble pulse, and filling a pewter spoon with a mixture of aconite, awakened the little boy who gazed at him with hollow eyes sunken above cheeks of ...
— A Village of Vagabonds • F. Berkeley Smith
... homely comfort. A blue-and-white rag carpet in the centre left a border of bare floor, painted pumpkin-yellow; there was a glittering airtight stove with isinglass windows that shone like square, red eyes; a gay patchwork cushion in the seat of a rocking-chair was given up to the black cat, whose sleek fur glistened in the lamplight. Three of the sisters knitted silently; two others rocked back and forth, their tired, idle hands in their laps, their eyes closed; the other three yawned, and spoke occasionally between ...
— The Way to Peace • Margaret Deland
... enough to do as he pleased. His great aim was exploration. He used to make all kinds of a row because there was nothing left to explore now, only patchwork and filling in, he said. He filled in well enough—he had a lot of talents—great on mechanics and electricity. Had all kinds of boats and motorcars, and was one of ...
— Herland • Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman
... frequently through introducing a multiplicity of narrators, either writing a patchwork story in which all take a hand, or placing narration within narration as in the "Arabian Nights." The method of allowing a number of persons consecutively to carry on the plot is very attractive, since it offers a way of introducing a personally interested narrator without making him ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... summers of varied success and as many winters of total inaction had told heavily against her river worthiness; the sun had cracked her roof and sides, the rigour of the Winnipeg winter left its trace on bows and hull. Her engines were a perfect marvel of patchwork—pieces of rope seemed twisted around crank and shaft, mud was laid thickly on boiler and pipes, little jets and spurts of steam had a disagreeable way of coming out from places not supposed to be capable ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... the red cheeks of the apples everywhere begin to show; Now the supper's scarcely over ere the darkness settles down And the moon looms big and yellow at the edges of the town; Oh, it's good to see the children, when their little prayers are said, Duck beneath the patchwork covers ...
— A Heap o' Livin' • Edgar A. Guest
... to the still open back door, where Mrs. Morran could be heard at her labours. He stepped across and shut it. "I'm no' wantin' that auld wife to hear," he said. Then he squatted down on the patchwork rug by the hearth, and warmed his blue-black shins. Looking into the glow of the fire, he observed, "I seen you two up by the Big ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... here, and eat candy all day long, with no tiresome school or patchwork to spoil my ...
— The Louisa Alcott Reader - A Supplementary Reader for the Fourth Year of School • Louisa M. Alcott
... glass; such a placing of andirons, fenders, shovels, tongs, and bellows; hanging of pictures, curtains, and mirrors—old and new; moving in of sofas, chairs, and rockers; making up of beds with fluted frills on the pillows—a silk patchwork quilt on St. George's bed and cotton counterpanes ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... old Billy. And going to his own room, he dragged off all the pretty patchwork quilts above his neatly-made bed, grabbed up the voluminous feather-bed, staggered with it in his arms down the hall, through the side door, and flung it on to the back ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... language, however, although pungent, and sometimes even eloquent, he is singularly incorrect. He cannot utter a sequence of three sentences without violating common grammar in the most atrocious way; and his tropes and figures are so distorted, hashed, and broken—such a patchwork of different patterns, that you are bewildered if you attempt to make them out; but the earnestness of his manner, and a certain fitness of character, in his observations a kind of Shaksperian pithiness, redeem all this. Besides, his manifold blunders of syntax do not offend the taste ...
— The Ayrshire Legatees • John Galt
... calculated to destroy consecutive and considered thought than the enormous variety of inconsequential topics that assails one every time one opens a newspaper. The mind becomes completely fuddled with the heterogeneous patchwork of entirely useless information. The only method I have discovered by which one can acquire the important news and yet retain the serenity of one's mind is that of having such news only as she knows will be of ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... reached. The supremacy along the coast passed in the 17th century from Portugal to Holland and from Holland in the 18th and 19th centuries to France and England. The whole coast from Senegal to Lagos was dotted with forts and "factories'' of rival powers, and this international patchwork persists though all the hinterland has become either ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... gray sheets beneath an old patchwork counterpane on one side of the room, and veiled his boxes and suchlike oddments, and invading the two corners of the window were an old whatnot and the washhandstand, on which were distributed the simple appliances ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... wings, on the garden front, was roofed over, and paved with stone, descending in several broad shallow steps at the centre and ends, guarded at each angle by huge carved eagles, the crest of the builder, of the most regular patchwork, and kept, in spite of the owner's non-residence, in perfect order. The strange thing was that this fair and stately place, basking in the sunshine of early June, should be left in complete solitude save for the hermit in the opposite wing, the three children, and ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... by her reappearance, rescued from the river but perfectly dry, in the arms of faithful Tom, who had plunged in to save her, without either so much as wetting his shoes, than if I had been engaged with her in a reckless romp? I could count the white stitches in the loose patchwork, and yet could take it for a story rich and harmonious; I could know we had all intellectually condescended and that we had yet had the thrill of an aesthetic adventure; and this was a brave beginning for a consciousness that was to be nothing if not mixed ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... great variety; some bore small kishes,[23] in which a woman and some children might be seen; others had a shake-down of clean straw to serve for cushions; while the better sort spread a feather-bed for greater comfort, covered by a patchwork quilt, the work of the "good woman" herself, whose own quilted petticoat vied in brightness with the calico roses on which she was sitting. The most luxurious indulged still further in some arched branches of hazel, which, bent above ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover
... looked in horror upon the strong claws that grew out of his fur-covered fingers. His feet were like his hands. Trailing at his heels was a scaly tail tipped with a serpent's open jaws. His face was a patchwork: he had bearded cheeks, like some I had seen palefaces wear; his nose was an eagle's bill, and his sharp-pointed ears were pricked up like those of a sly fox. Above them a pair of cow's horns curved upward. ...
— American Indian stories • Zitkala-Sa
... her miniature sitting-room at one side, contentedly matching patchwork. Little Jane Vennard, her step-daughter,—usually at work in the mills, but, since their close, making herself busy at home, whither she had brought a cookery-book through which Ray declared he expected to eat his way,—bustled about from room to room. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... father not to tear the old portions of the manor down, but, using the first foundations, put up a house half castle and half manor. Pictures of the old manor were found, and so we have a place that is no patchwork, but a renewal. I made my father give me the old surviving part of the building for my own, and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... those who have gone astray, keep astray, rather than bring Milton into disrepute by pushing themselves into his company and imitating his manner. Milton is none of these: and his language is never a patchwork. We find daily, in almost every book we open, expressions which are not English, never were, and never will be: for the writers are by no means of sufficiently high rank to be masters of the mint. To arrive at this distinction, it is not enough to scatter in all directions ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... exception to the rule. Nothing can be more picturesque than its appearance from the broken ground around, above, and below, and no less imposing is the quaint straggling indescribable old church of St. Quiriace close by, now a mere patchwork of different epochs, but in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries one of the most remarkable religious monuments in Brie and Champagne. Here was baptized Thibault VI., the song-maker, the lover of art, the patron of letters, and the importer into Europe of the famous Provence rose; of Thibault's ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... bookcase and sideboard: holding the Bible and almanac, the old lady's best bonnet, a pot or two of preserves, a nosegay of spring flowers, and a tea-caddy. An old-fashioned four-post bedstead stood in one corner, covered with a patchwork quilt; in another was an impromptu bed, spread on the floor, and occupied by a woman and two children, apparently asleep. A table, covered with oil-cloth, with some cups and saucers on it, stood between the bed and a dresser ...
— A Trip to Manitoba • Mary FitzGibbon
... unfortunate creature, man, being left by bountiful Nature naked and cold, has to cover himself as best he may with a sorry patchwork of shreds and tatters such as he can contrive to procure either from vegetable fibres, the tissue of silkworms, or the furs or feathers he is driven to secure by force or stratagem either from beasts or from ...
— Tales of the Caliph • H. N. Crellin
... My heart sank; patchwork was the thing my mother had tried to have me do, and I hated it. I remember now some mussed up, dirty-looking blocks, stuffed behind a bureau at ...
— Kristy's Rainy Day Picnic • Olive Thorne Miller
... arranged it, the map of the West Coast is like a mosaic, like the edge of a badly constructed patchwork quilt. In trading along the West Coast a man can find use for five European languages, and he can use a new one at each port ...
— The Congo and Coasts of Africa • Richard Harding Davis
... thrust their heads and frightened faces out of the door of a room where a bright samovar was boiling and where the steward's high bedstead stood with its patchwork quilt. ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
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