"Chessboard" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Emmei-ji, in which there was enshrined a famous statue of Jizo, called Hadaka-Jizo, or Naked Jizo. The statue was indeed naked, but clothes were put upon it; and it stood upright with its feet upon a chessboard. Now, when pilgrims came to the temple and paid a certain fee, the priest of the temple would remove the clothes of the statue; and then all could see that, though the face was the face of Jizo, the body was ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... pick him up, and used him as an excuse for coming to Eastbourne? I see. That removes a troublesome pawn off the chessboard." ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... America know about these movements on the European chessboard, and upon what basis should she aspire to ...
— The Audacious War • Clarence W. Barron
... in and won. I could understand the autobiographical part perfectly, but although I have seen chess diagrams in the evening papers for years, I never have been able to become nervous over one. It has always seemed to me that when you have seen one diagram of a chessboard you have seen them all. Therefore, I can give only a superficial review of the technical ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley
... to divine what will be the next move upon the Spanish chessboard, it is out of the question, and nobody who knows the character of the people will attempt to do it. Unquestionably there is no such country in the world for anomalies of all kinds. Cosas de Espana! as Captain Widdrington amusingly enough says, when ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... the cushion, which, after removing the pipe from the hand of the Automaton, he places under its left arm as a support. Then taking also from the drawer the Automaton's set of chess-men, he arranges them upon the chessboard before the figure. He now proceeds to close the doors and to lock them—leaving the bunch of keys in door No. 1. He also closes the drawer, and, finally, winds up the machine, by applying a key to an aperture ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... the mark of genius,—that is, of a new influx of truth or beauty,—as a nun over her missal. In short, he is one of those men that know everything except how to make a living. Him would I keep on the square next my own royal compartment on life's chessboard. To him I would push up another pawn, in the shape of a comely and wise young woman, whom he would of course take—to wife. For all contingencies I would liberally provide. In a word, I would, in the plebeian, but expressive phrase, "put him through" all the material part of life; ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... of rural England, in short, wanted rearranging upon mathematical principles. To begin at the smallest divisions, the fields should be mapped out like the squares of a chessboard; next, the parishes; and, lastly, the counties. You ought to be able to work steam-ploughing tackle across a whole parish, if the rope could be made strong enough. If you talked with a farmer, you found him somehow ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... said Mider, "a chessboard which is not inferior to thine." It was even as he said, for that chessboard was silver, and the men to play with were gold; and upon that board were costly stones, casting their light on every side, and the bag that held the men was of woven chains ...
— Heroic Romances of Ireland Volumes 1 and 2 Combined • A. H. Leahy
... "She's a ring-bedight oak of the ale-cup, And her eyes never left me unhaunted. The strife in my heart I could hide not, For I hold myself bound in her bondage. O gay in her necklet, and gainer In the game that wins hearts on her chessboard,— When she looked at me long from the doorway Where the likeness of Hagbard ...
— The Life and Death of Cormac the Skald • Unknown
... Canterbury and the Lord Mayor of London had urged that it should be so. The Primitive Methodists' parson discovered himself next but one to Father Milton, who on any other day would have been a Popish priest, and whose wooden substitute for a wife was the queen on a chessboard. And on all these ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... passage, and we followed her, delighted. We were dazzled as we came into this new room by the brilliance of the lamps that lit it. It was the convent kitchen. How clean and bright everything was! The copper saucepans shone resplendently. The black and white pavement looked like an ivory chessboard. Two Sisters were sitting peeling vegetables which they threw into a bowl of water. An enormous pot, on the well-polished stove, was humming its inviting monotone. It was this pot which exhaled the delicious smell that had greeted us when we entered the house. The whole picture recalled ...
— In the Field (1914-1915) - The Impressions of an Officer of Light Cavalry • Marcel Dupont
... march through the streets amid the shouts and laughter of a crowd of urchins black and white. A feeling of blind rage surged within him. That the tables would be shortly turned, he was sure. He would play his part now without a scruple. He would use pretty Jennie Barton as any other pawn on the chessboard of Life and ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... brought the chessboard and played with him; but Sharrkan, instead of looking at her moves, kept gazing at her fair mouth, and putting knight in place of elephant and elephant[FN198] instead of knight. She laughed and said to him, "If thy play be ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... shut the door, lest the man should have a plot against thee." Upon that Gwalchmai arose, and when he came near unto the door, the man, with sixty others, fully armed, were ascending the tower. And Gwalchmai defended the door with a chessboard, that none might enter until the man should return from the chase. And thereupon, behold the earl arrived. "What is all this?" asked he. "It is a sad thing," said the hoary-headed man, "the young girl yonder has been sitting and eating with him who ...
— The Mabinogion Vol. 1 (of 3) • Owen M. Edwards
... only I think a bit of it's lost, and the clasp of a cricket belt, and old Dick Rodman's chessboard and some of the men, and ...
— The Triple Alliance • Harold Avery
... opened out on the parent valley, through which flowed a broad stream, fringed its whole length with a border of pale green banana-leaves with stems of gold. In the little valleys were gardens, showing up like a chessboard pattern in neat patches of green, red, and brown, according to whether there was ripening millet, young maize, or new-turned mould. Halfway down the valley was a village of beehive-shaped huts, with an open space in the centre, adorned ...
— In Search of the Okapi - A Story of Adventure in Central Africa • Ernest Glanville
... mind, carried on his reflections clearly. His thoughts were like those of Napoleon at the last hour of the battle of Waterloo: after a long day of success defeat had come with night. What was the reason? What mistake had he made? He replaced the pieces on the chessboard, and looked for the explanation of failure, but in vain. It had perhaps been rash of him to let two days pass without seeing her. But it was the most elementary rule that after such a scene as that in ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... both an English and a Danish prince. In one quartering he had a lion painted white with a crown, to signify Denmark, and in another quartering a lion, to signify England, and then a design like a chessboard, to betoken the long separation of his father ...
— A Danish Parsonage • John Fulford Vicary
... name?" said the king. "It is nothing very great," said he; "I am called Midhir of Bri Leith." "What is it brings you here?" said Eochaid. "I am come to play a game of chess with you," said the stranger. "Are you a good player?" said the king. "A trial will tell you that," said Midhir. "The chessboard is in the queen's house, and she is in her sleep at this time," said Eochaid. "That is no matter," said Midhir, "for I have with me a chess-board as good as your own." And with that he brought out his chessboard, and it made of silver, and precious ...
— Gods and Fighting Men • Lady I. A. Gregory
... a lovely afternoon and a most wonderful panorama spread below us. The great plain beneath us was marked off like a chessboard in squares of various shades of yellow and green, dotted here and there with little villages surrounded by the billowy crests of trees. We saw straight white roads going off in all directions, and beyond, (p. 263) towards the east, low murky clouds behind the German lines. We flew on and on till ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... insidiously. His hard-riding days were past. Progress marched steadily onward, leaving an after-guard of homesteaders intrenched behind miles of barbed-wire fence and mazes of irrigating-ditches. The once open range was now a chessboard of agricultural endeavor, with the pawns steadying ploughshares as they crept from square to square until the opposing cattle king suffered ignominious checkmate, his prerogative of free movement gone, his army scattered, his castles taken, and his glory surviving only ...
— Jim Waring of Sonora-Town - Tang of Life • Knibbs, Henry Herbert
... all was not so trivial in our abode of shadows. As example, I taught Oppenheimer to play chess. Consider how tremendous such an achievement is—to teach a man, thirteen cells away, by means of knuckle-raps; to teach him to visualize a chessboard, to visualize all the pieces, pawns and positions, to know the various manners of moving; and to teach him it all so thoroughly that he and I, by pure visualization, were in the end able to play entire games of chess in our minds. In the end, did I say? Another ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... popularity, he died at Wellington of an intestinal disease after a severe surgical operation. Quiet and unassuming in manner, Ballance, who was a well-read man, always seemed fonder of his books and his chessboard than of public bustle; yet his loss to New Zealand political life was great. A statue was erected to his memory in front of Parliament ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... analysed his motives with him, showed him a psychological weakness in the workings of one of his characters. She was liberal with her praise, called his characters by their christian names as though they were old friends, suggested other moves across the chessboard of his plot, until he felt that he and she, and those dear puppets of his own creations, were denizens together of some fairy and ethereal world, wandering through the fascinating maze of imaginative life. It was almost an intoxication, ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... thousand years and yet be no more account at the last than as a great eater of dinners. Whereas to suck all the sweet and snuff all the perfume but of a single hour, to push all its possibilities to the edge of the chessboard, is to live greatly though it be not to live long, and an end is an end if it come on the winged heels of a week or the dull crutch of ...
— If I Were King • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... Generals, the master minds who had propelled their mighty human machines against each other, were trying to reckon their losses—with the battle still in progress—and say to themselves whether they had won or lost. But this battlefield was no smooth and easy chessboard where the pawns might be moved as one wills and be counted as they fell, but a wilderness of thickets and forests and hills and swamps and valleys where the vast lines bent or twisted or interlaced ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... continued, "that I never looked upon you as anything more than the ordinary stereotyped politician, a skilful debater, of course, and with the chessboard brains of diplomacy. This,"—she touched the newspaper with her forefinger—"this ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the windmill to Farley Heath, two and a-half miles as the crow flies, nearer five miles as I walked it. The perplexing thing is the number of disused rides and paths in the wood. They cross each other perpetually at right angles, like lines on a chessboard, and if you are walking diagonally across them the temptation is to a succession of knights' moves which end in wrong places. I followed one of these rides a long way, and the wood grew thicker and thicker; suddenly it ended, and I found myself in a clearing, ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... take his enamorata for a walk, she said she would prefer to stay at home, as she was quite fatigued with the day's work. Nothing disconcerted, her lover remained with her in the house, and they amused themselves with a pack of cards and a chessboard. The following evening, however, Miss Ryland was again indisposed, and, on questioning her closely, Quintin drew forth the avowal that she had not sat down for a quarter of an hour during the whole day! It seems ...
— The Mysteries of Montreal - Being Recollections of a Female Physician • Charlotte Fuhrer
... one of the four types has an equal chance of being fertilised by a spermatozoon of any one of the four types. A convenient and simple method of demonstrating what happens under such circumstances is the method sometimes termed the "chessboard" method. For two series each consisting of four different types of gamete we require a square divided up into 16 parts. The four terms of the gametic series are first written horizontally across the four sets of four squares, ...
— Mendelism - Third Edition • Reginald Crundall Punnett
... this period was bound up with the name of Metternich, who personified the old hide-bound methods of the bureaucracy, the diplomacy of a past age, to which the nations were mere pawns on a chessboard. Under him the "Police-State" assumed its most perfect form, a form not even surpassed by ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... ridge on their right, crested with tall trees and dropping down abruptly on the other side. A little distance on rose another low ridge, but between the two was a snug and grassy bowl, and within the bowl, sitting on the dry grass, with a chessboard between them, were Colonel Leonidas Talbot and Lieutenant-Colonel Hector St. Hilaire. They were absorbed so deeply in their game that they did not notice the boys on the crest of the bank looking over ...
— The Star of Gettysburg - A Story of Southern High Tide • Joseph A. Altsheler
... unoccupied and did not seem to have been much used that day; and in the small breakfast-room Deede Dawson had been accustomed to consider his special apartment, his favourite little travelling chessboard stood on the table with pieces in ...
— The Bittermeads Mystery • E. R. Punshon
... good many specific variations. The oblong shanty in which thirty or forty common soldiers are stowed away is naturally a very different affair from the neat little bungalow of an officer. The buildings are distributed in chessboard fashion over a very large area, and form two distinct camps. There is also a substantial little town, chiefly composed of barracks and public-houses; in addition to which, at crowded seasons, far and near over the plain there is the glitter of white tents. "The neat little bungalow ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... we had some time in which we could amuse ourselves as we chose, and we had many means of entertainment. We had a chessboard and men—a set of quoits, dominoes, and cards; and there was the highly intellectual game of "push pin" open to all comers. Some very skillful chess players were discovered in the company. When the weather served, we had games of ball, and other athletic games, such as ...
— From the Rapidan to Richmond and the Spottsylvania Campaign - A Sketch in Personal Narration of the Scenes a Soldier Saw • William Meade Dame
... singular apartment, we crossed a square, in the midst of which was placed an immense slab of stone, raised a little off the ground; on each of the four sides of this slab there were 16 squares marked on the ground like those on a chessboard. ...
— A Journey to Katmandu • Laurence Oliphant
... her eyes filled with tears. The broad flat surface of the marsh was now arranged in regular lines where the water was being drawn off, all so well superintended and orderly, that Malvine could not help thinking of a chessboard. The windmill moved its long restless arms, as if to welcome her as mistress here; the one-storied dwelling house, raised on stone steps, lay there hospitably built on a raised terrace, with its number of large well-lighted ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... the river farther. Fortunately for Radisson, both Gillam and Bridgar, the Hudson's Bay governor, were drinking heavily and glad to take his advice. The winter passed, with Radisson perpetrating such tricks on his rivals as a player might with the dummy men on a chessboard; but the chessboard, with the English rivals for pawns, was suddenly upset by the unexpected. Young Gillam discovered that Radisson had no fort at all,—only log cabins with a handful of ragamuffin bushrovers; and Captain Gillam senior got word ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... which the astounding act of Angela has produced. As he sits there, the moonlight, pouring through the diamond panes of the window, throws rhomboids of light on to the polished floor. It looks like some enchanted chessboard. Leaning back and gazing with half-closed eyes, he peoples it with fantastic rooks, and knights and bishops, when suddenly the strangely penetrating voice of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 1, 1914 • Various
... remarked to me, "to see the shrapnel bursting all round in showers; one of the prettiest things I have ever seen." The enemy had open country and soon got away, but in the meantime the Union Jack was blowing bravely over Jacobsdaal, and we were in possession of a most important square on the big chessboard ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young
... a chessboard whereon the pieces move diversely: the knights leaping sidewise, and the bishops darting obliquely, and the rooks charging straightforward, and the pawns laboriously hobbling from square to square, each at the player's will. There is no discernible order, all to the onlooker ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... two old men, with long, white beards, were sitting inside playing chess, as quietly as mice, with their eyes fixed on the chessboard. ...
— The Book of Stories for the Storyteller • Fanny E. Coe
... peace and whatever obstructive tactics were interposed were not the acts of any of the nations now in arms but those of a small coterie of men who, in the secrecy of their respective cabinets, made their moves and countermoves upon the chessboard of nations. ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck
... logical to himself and others, being unaware all the time of the real cause of his action, so every man—for since "life is a dream" every man is in a condition of hypnotism—seeks to find reasons for his conduct. And if the pieces on a chessboard were endowed with consciousness, they would probably have little difficulty in ascribing their moves to freewill—that is to say, they would claim for them a finalist rationality. And thus it comes about that every philosophic theory serves to explain and justify an ethic, a doctrine ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... vegetation, ripe corn, and clover from the overheated earth and the neighboring fields, which had drunk their full of sunlight. Now and again a breath of fresh air was blown to us from the mountains. As the darkness deepened the country grew to look like a vast chessboard, with dark and light squares of grass and corn land, melting at no great distance into a colorless and unbroken horizon. But as night blotted out the earth, the heaven lighted up its stars. Never have I seen them so lustrous nor in such number. ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin
... Saint-Honore and another in the Rue de Rivoli. The girl sat on a small balcony from which she could view the Tuileries Gardens without turning her head; while looking farther westward she saw the Place de la Concorde, its windy spaces a chessboard for rapid vehicles, whose wheels, wet from the watered streets, ground out silvery fire in the sun-rays of this gay June afternoon. Where the Avenue des Champs Elysees began, a powdery haze enveloped the equipages, overblown with their summer ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... would sit down to chess and then Fyne's everlasting gravity became faintly tinged by an attenuated gleam of something inward which resembled sly satisfaction. Of the divine frivolity of laughter he was only capable over a chessboard. Certain positions of the game struck him as humorous, which nothing else on ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... them. He scattered fifty king's sons of them over the ground underneath him [1]before they got to the gate of Emain.[1] Five[b] of them," Fergus continued, "dashed headlong between me and Conchobar, where we were playing chess, even on Cennchaem ('Fair-head') [2]the chessboard of Conchobar,[2] on the mound-seat of Emain. The little boy pursued them to cut them off. [3]Then he sprang over the chessboard after the nine.[3] Conchobar seized the little lad by the wrists. "Hold, little ...
— The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Tain Bo Cualnge • Unknown
... easy to play a game at chess with a far superior player, then at least one learns something; but impossible to sit at a chess board with a child who throws all into confusion. The national chessboard is very confused in the White House. Cunning is good for, and only succeeds in dealing with, mean and ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... Senator from Kentucky, [Mr. Clay,] and his denunciations of these petitioners as abolitionists, and the hearty response and cordial embrace which his efforts met from the Senator from South Carolina, [Mr. Calhoun,] clearly shows that new moves have taken place on the political chessboard, and new coalitions are formed, new compromises and new bargains, settling and disposing of the rights of the country for the advantage ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... when the momentary absence of Bertram had left the two alone together. "I used to watch Bertram and Marie play years ago; but I never knew how to play myself. Not that I can see where the fun is in just sitting staring at a chessboard for half an hour at a time, though! But Bertram likes it, and so I—I want to learn to stare with him. Will ...
— Miss Billy Married • Eleanor H. Porter
... stood up straight and gravely, and answered very courteously and holding-tightly all the amiable roundabout remarks the old gentleman was shoving forward like pawns on a chessboard before the real game begins. She answered with the same trained cheerfulness she could give her library children when her head and her disposition ached worst; and even warmed to a vicious enthusiasm over the state of the streets and the wetness ...
— The Rose Garden Husband • Margaret Widdemer
... Fortune, Surveyed all that the Raja had painstakingly collected, And then commanded that it should be sent to his treasury. Then the Ambassador presented, written on silk, The letter which the Raja had addressed to Nushirvan; And a chessboard, wrought with such exceeding labor, That the pains bestowed upon it might have emptied a treasury. And the Indian delivered a message from the Raja: "So long as the heavens revolve, may thou be established in ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... the Bard wore sky-blue robes, and was universally honored, serving as the counsellor, the herald, and the minstrel of his patron. The domestic Bard and the chief of song had their office at the King's court, with many curious perquisites, among which was a chessboard from the King. The fine for insulting the Bard was 6 cows and 120 pence; for slaying him, 126 cows. With so much general respect, and great powers of extemporizing, the Bards were well able to sway the passions of the nation, and greatly contributed to keep up the fiery ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... mark of efficiency. They were equipped in a way totally beyond the means of such little countries. Who was supplying this driving force, the money, officers? They were but pawns, the Balkan States on an international chessboard. ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... with the chessboard, drew blood with the blowe, and had presently slain him upon the place had he not been stayed ...
— The Canterbury Puzzles - And Other Curious Problems • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... take out simple patterns from the matt: not outlined at all, but spotted and streaked in the matt itself, chequered and petalled and thumb-marked, just as nature spots and stripes and dapples, scatters daisies on the grass and snowflakes in the air, and powders over with chessboard chequers and lacings and "oes and eyes of light," the wings of butterflies ...
— Stained Glass Work - A text-book for students and workers in glass • C. W. Whall
... from which she cut, with her father's saw, a square piece about twenty inches square. The middle of this board she laid out in blocks with a pencil and ruler, careful to make them exactly perfect. The blocks were two inches square and there were eight each way; in fact, it was a copy of the chessboard ...
— Kristy's Rainy Day Picnic • Olive Thorne Miller
... was utterly helpless, a pawn on that tiny chessboard where the game was being played between Civilization and Barbarism. The fight must go on to the bitter end: he must either vanquish or be vanquished. There were other threads being woven into the garment of his life at that moment, but he knew ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... should walk up and down the chessboard of Beacon Hill—taking the knight's move occasionally across the narrow cross-streets—you could not help treading the very squares which were familiar to the feet of that generation of authors which has permanently stamped American literature. At 55 Beacon Street, down near the foot of ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... men were placed upon it, they would play of themselves. The chessboard was of gold, and the ...
— Tales of the Enchanted Islands of the Atlantic • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... his addresses to workingmen Huxley compared life to a game of chess. We must learn the names and the values and the moves of each piece, and all the rules of the game if we hope to play it successfully. The chessboard is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of nature. But it may be questioned if the comparison is a happy one. Life is not a game in this sense, a diversion, an aside, or a contest for victory over an opponent, except in ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... steps are softly yellowed with age, an exquisitely wrought iron balcony stretches across the front above the high ceilinged basement and great carved walnut doors open into a wide vestibule with a marble floor exactly like a bit of a gigantic chessboard. The transformation had so astounded me that I was almost afraid to touch the neatly polished beaten silver bell for fear the whole house ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... his staff, the King briefly called for information upon some point. It was the royal will to direct each move on the gigantic chessboard; to hold in the hollow of his hand the hosts who looked to him for guidance. At his left, a flock of swallows, affrighted by the noise of the cannonade, rose high in air, wheeled, and vanished ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... was such fun to see how desperately he played, for fear I should get him! Now, Dr. Lacey, I suppose you have been proposing to Julia in the real old, orthodox way, but that is too common. You must sit down at the chessboard and let Julia play for you," and she pushed them both toward the chairs, which she and Mr. Middleton ...
— Tempest and Sunshine • Mary J. Holmes
... to get acquainted with all the leading diplomatists on the European chessboard, to study them in their own haunts, and to perfect himself in playing with ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... questions of feminine attire is imitation. Incidentally, we may remark that nobody profits by such a mistaken foundation except the manufacturer, who moves the women of the world about like pawns on a chessboard merely to benefit his business. The society woman brings the latest thing "from Paris." The large New York establishments sell to their patrons copies of "Paris models." The middle-class shops and the middle-class women copy the copies. ...
— Vocational Guidance for Girls • Marguerite Stockman Dickson
... and his dogs, in a lugubrious little apartment in the Batignolles. The disorder which in this narrow space could not be spread about, seemed more hideous even than in the country. While the child and dogs rolled about in rooms the size of a chessboard compartment, Heurtebise; who was ill, lay with his face to the wall, in a state of utter prostration. His wife, dressed out as usual, and ever placid, hardly looked at him. "I don't know what is the ...
— Artists' Wives • Alphonse Daudet
... pre-eminently stands the noble pastime of chess. It is very ancient, and is supposed to have been invented by Xerxes, a philosopher in the court of Evil-Merodach, king of Babylon. It was well known in England before the Conquest, and Canute was very fond of the chessboard. King John was so engrossed in this game that when some messengers came to tell him that the French king had besieged one of his cities, he would not listen to them until he had finished his chess. The complicated movements of the various men seem to show that the game ...
— Old English Sports • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... learning anything from masters. Madame de Warens tried to have him taught both dancing and fencing; he could never achieve a minuet, and after three months of instruction he was as clumsy and helpless with his foil as he had been on the first day. He resolved to become a master at the chessboard; he shut himself up in his room, and worked night and day over the books with indescribable efforts which covered many weeks. On proceeding to the cafe to manifest his powers, he found that all the moves and combinations had got mixed up in his head, he saw nothing but ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... dreary towns and an architectural anarchy that resembles nothing more than an orchestra playing with every instrument tuned to a different key. The stamp of public control is to be seen, if at all, in an inconvenient and monotonous chessboard plan for streets. Congestion of traffic at the busy points; wide stretches of empty pavement on streets little used; houses of every style and no style, imbued with all the colors of the spectrum; weed-grown vacant lots, unkempt yards, some fenced, some unfenced; poster-bedecked ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake |
