"Quaint" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... allowed him to stay anywhere in Norton but at their house, now that the Elmers had moved away. After supper Ruth and the Mays came over to see him, and he entertained them the whole evening with his funny stories and quaint sayings. ...
— Wakulla - A Story of Adventure in Florida • Kirk Munroe
... await her return from chapel," answered Ercole. He took the letter and departed. As he emerged into the courtyard he was startled to see the fool dash towards him, gasping for breath, and with excitement in every line of his quaint face. ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini
... over once or twice from Litchfield that next summer to fetch Sylvia and to administer comfort to Hannah. He was a quaint, prim little gentleman, neat as any wren, but mild-mannered as wrens never are, and in a moderate way kindly and sympathetic. When the children had haled their lovely sister away to see their rustic possessions, ...
— Good Cheer Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... affair. A whole back garden, had been transformed into a vast pavilion, containing an Armida's garden, whose masses of ferns and piles of gorgeous flowers made delightful nooks for strangers who left the glare of the dancing-room, and the quaint dresses harmonised with the magic of the gaslight and the strange ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... once christened "The Crazy American." A lady must not be escorted home from an evening party by a gentleman, but by a servant with a lantern; and as the streets have no lamps, I never could see the breaking-up of any such entertainment without recalling Retzsch's quaint pictures of the little German towns, and the burghers plodding home with their lanterns,—unless, perchance, what a foreign friend of ours called a "sit-down chair" came rattling by, and transferred our associations ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... a good scene for such a narrative, with the oak-wainscoting, quaint, and clumsy furniture, the heavy beams that crossed its ceiling, and the tall four-post bed, with dark curtains, within which you might imagine what shadows ...
— Madam Crowl's Ghost and The Dead Sexton • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... his end? Not mechanical, scientific theories, that was clear. Not mere realistic description of life. He told me he had little faith in mere observation, except for comic or quaint characterization. He had seldom if ever studied a serious character from a model. One woman he invented entirely (was it Tess?) and she was thought to be his best. What, then, was this essence which the novelist, growing old, would convey ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... country, and went twisting in and out through lovely little green valleys. There were several varieties of gum trees; among them many giants. Some of them were bodied and barked like the sycamore; some were of fantastic aspect, and reminded one of the quaint apple trees in Japanese pictures. And there was one peculiarly beautiful tree whose name and breed I did not know. The foliage seemed to consist of big bunches of pine-spines, the lower half of each bunch a rich brown or old-gold color, the upper half a most vivid and strenuous ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... however, he quickly found an entrance to a labyrinthine walk, which led him at last to an open space and a rustic summer-house that stood beneath a gnarled and venerable pear-tree. The summerhouse was a quaint stockade of dark madrono boughs thatched with red-wood bark, strongly suggestive of deeper woodland shadow. But in strange contrast, the floor, table, and benches were thickly strewn with faded rose-leaves, scattered ...
— Maruja • Bret Harte
... time now the spirit of the herd mastered Jimmie; he wanted what all the men about him wanted—to hold back the Beast from these fair French fields and quaint old villages, and these American hospitals and rest-camps and Y.M.C.A. huts—to say nothing of motor-cycle repair-sheds with Jimmie Higgins in them! And the trouble was that the Beast was not being held back; ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... isn't always at liberty to play about with the scapegrace young men of her acquaintance, you know. And this morning my employer was seized with a sudden desire to visit Aigle, so we drove over and lunched at a quaint old inn there. ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... church on Sunday morning, because it was quaint and old-fashioned to do so, and because he loved to see the women of his acquaintance in their devotional moods and attitudes. There was hardly any mood or attitude in which he did not love to see a woman, partly because he was full of human sympathy and tenderness, and partly ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... and tranquil life of the Three Vows had a fine and delicate effect on the genius of Francis. He was primarily a poet. The perfection of his literary instinct is shown in his naming the fire 'brother,' and the water 'sister,' in the quaint demagogic dexterity of the appeal in the sermon to the fishes 'that they alone were saved in the Flood.' In the amazingly minute and graphic dramatisation of the life, disappointments and excuses of any shrub ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... way the distinctive features and interests of each document will most readily be found. The parallel suggested is easy and instructive, and it reveals the relative ethical and theological superiority of E to J. J tells the story of Abraham's falsehood with a quaint naivete (xii.); E is offended by it and excuses it (xx.). The theological refinement of E is suggested not only here, xx. 3, 6, but elsewhere, by the frequency with which God appears in dreams and not in ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... anything. This, also, befalls me, that I do not find myself where I seek myself, and I light upon things more by chance than by any inquisition of my own judgment. I perhaps sometimes hit upon something when I write, that seems quaint and sprightly to me, though it will appear dull and heavy to another.—But let us leave these fine compliments; every one talks thus of himself according to his talent. But when I come to speak, I am already so lost that I know not ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... in the author's younger days, who still held it part of the amusement of a journey 'to parley with mine host,' who often resembled, in his quaint humour, mine Host of the Garter in the MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR; or Blague of the George in the MERRY DEVIL OF EDMONTON. Sometimes the landlady took her share of entertaining the company. In either case, the omitting to pay them due attention gave displeasure, and perhaps brought down a smart ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... with a faintly quizzical smile and made no reply. The dignity of ownership of many thousand cattle kept the old rancher's shoulders square, and there was an antique gentility about his thin face with its white goatee. He was more like a quaint figure of the seventeenth century than a successful cattleman ...
— The Untamed • Max Brand
... Prince withdrew from Pharsala to take up a stronger position at Domokos, and the Greeks under General Smolenski, the military hero of the campaign, were forced to retreat, and the Turks came in, and, according to their quaint custom, burned the village and marched on to Volo. John Bass, the American correspondent, and myself were keeping house in the village, in the home of the mayor. He had fled from the town, as had nearly all the villagers; and as we liked the ...
— Notes of a War Correspondent • Richard Harding Davis
... figure work so easily that one may say safety is to be found only in the most delicate relief. To make figures look round is to make them look stuffed. That stuffy images are to be found in mediaeval church work is only too true. In Gothic art one finds this quaint, perhaps, but it is perilously near the laughable. The point of the ridiculous is plainly overpassed in English work of the 17th century, which degenerates at last into mere doll work—the dolls duly stuffed and dressed ...
— Art in Needlework - A Book about Embroidery • Lewis F. Day
... which stands by us is not precious only because it contains the quaint wisdom and manifold experience of Ambroise Pare, mingled with his credulous gossip, and again sweetened by his simple reverence; not precious alone because it contains the noblest words ever uttered by one of his profession,—Ie le pensay et Dieu le guarit; ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... for telling us such a dandy story." cried Ted, who had not lost a word of this quaint tale, told so graphically over the camp-fire of the old ...
— Kalitan, Our Little Alaskan Cousin • Mary F. Nixon-Roulet
... not finish his threat. I daresay it would have been something very dreadful, but I was not in the least frightened as I held on; but as he clung to the big quaint coping of the wall he suddenly gave two or three such tremendous kicks that one of them, aided by his getting his free foot on my shoulder, was given with such force that I was driven backwards, and after staggering a few steps, caught my heel and came down ...
— Brownsmith's Boy - A Romance in a Garden • George Manville Fenn
... proves to be a quaint, straggling Mormon village with a touch of modern enterprise; south of Cedar City the villages lack the enterprise. The houses are of a gray composition resembling adobe, and many of them are half a century old and more. Dilapidated square forts, reminders of pioneer ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... favor. I have before intimated that the city in which he dwelt was the seat of a learned institution; and it was his fortune—ill or good, will appear in the sequel—to make the acquaintance of several inmates of the university, who seemed "to take a liking to him," to borrow the quaint juvenile expression in such cases, especially during the ripening and ingathering of the fruit in his father's little orchard. At these seasons their visits were frequent; and as the student's life appeared to be at once ...
— Ups and Downs in the Life of a Distressed Gentleman • William L. Stone
... with me in my playing at cards. I left Leghorn with certain muleteers with whom I played at cards at the baiting-houses, and who speedily won from me all the ha'pennies and sixpences I had won from the sailors. I got my money's worth, however, for I learnt from the muleteers all kind of quaint tricks upon the cards, which I knew nothing of before; so I did not grudge them what they chated me of, and when we parted we did so in kindness on both sides. On getting to . . . I was received into the religious house for Irishes. It was the Irish house, Shorsha, ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... faithful account of my brothers and my sister, and a brief description of the dear old-fashioned cottage, with its white- plaster walls crossed with great black beams, its many gables and quaint latticed windows. I told her how happy and united we had always been at home, and how this made my separation from those I loved so much the harder to bear; to all of which Milly Darrell listened ...
— Milly Darrell and Other Tales • M. E. Braddon
... the impression of absurdity is simply the consequence of antiquity; and even that which is rightly regarded as absurd in the present age, will not at least have produced the discomposing effects of absurdity upon the less developed beholders of that age; just as the quaint pictures with which their churches were decorated may make us smile, but were by them regarded with awe ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... perfect things in the world. What most people, however, remember is its tombs, its doors, and its reliefs; the proportions escape them. I think its shallow easy dome beyond description beautiful. Brunelleschi, who had an investigating genius, himself painted the quaint constellations in the ceiling over the altar. At the Pazzi chapel we shall find similar architecture; but there extraneous colour was allowed to come in. Here such reliefs as were ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... transformed by the addition. It presented a quaint, foreign appearance, for the high square sail was exactly like that of a Chinese junk, while its flaming red color was irresistibly suggestive of the craft ...
— Canoe Boys and Campfires - Adventures on Winding Waters • William Murray Graydon
... in the veritable wilds, camping in virgin forests, or on the edge of glaciers, or in the dust of American deserts. He had never been to Europe, but he had been to Buenos Aires. You can imagine what Kathleen Somers and her father felt about that: they thought him too quaint and barbaric for words; but still not barbaric enough to be ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... French shopkeepers, speaking a quaint, broken English, came to their shop doors to greet the Americans, even to urge the newcomers to enter and buy, but Captain Ribaut waved all such aside with ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys with Pershing's Troops - Dick Prescott at Grips with the Boche • H. Irving Hancock
... you, that Fullalove invited him into the mizentop to fight the pirate. The Patient came gingerly and shivered there with fear. But five minutes elapsing, and he not killed, that weakness gave way to a jocund recklessness; and he kept them all gay with his quaint remarks, of which I must record but one. When they crossed the stern of the pirate, the distance was so small that the faces of that motley crew were plainly visible. Now, Vespasian was a merciless critic of coloured skins. "Wal," said he, turning up his nose sky-high, "dis child never ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... Esplanade, and every stall is profusely lighted; the hawkers, who carry about their goods in a more humble way upon their heads in baskets, have them stuck with candles, and the wild shadowy effects produced, amid the quaint buildings thus partially lighted, ...
— Notes of an Overland Journey Through France and Egypt to Bombay • Miss Emma Roberts
... spoke to her their voices softened to an undernote of tenderness never used among themselves. She had won her way steadily to every girl's heart. They had marveled at her invariable sweetness of temper; they had laughed at her quaint, naive sayings, and, most of all, they had loved her for the warm, grateful heart that found room and ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... which was not distinctly forbidden by law. The prisoner was acquitted, and the decision has sanctioned the present practice of cremation. Fitzjames, as I gather from letters, was much interested in the quaint old Druid, and was gratified by ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... the bedside of Jimmy Brady, a former jockey from the Pimlico turf in Baltimore, and now a proud wearer of Uncle Sam's khaki. In his own quaint way, Jimmy told me the story of what a little handful of Americans did in the great battle in Picardy. Jimmy knew. ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... senseless kind of classification. For instance: One set of volumes contains nothing but copper-plate engraved titles, and woe betide the grand old Dutch folios of the seventeenth century if they cross his path. Another is a volume of coarse or quaint titles, which certainly answer the end of showing how idiotic and conceited some authors have been. Here you find Dr. Sib's "Bowels opened in Divers Sermons," 1650, cheek by jowl with the discourse attributed falsely to Huntington, the Calvinist, "Die and be ...
— Enemies of Books • William Blades
... never err officially, and their States are, officially, as well administered as Our territories. Also, the private allowances to various queer people are not exactly matters to put into newspapers, though they give quaint reading sometimes. ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... upon their grapes, and who knew nothing of the great world beyond, and spoke of Paris with awe, and even a shade of doubt. Living the same lives generation after generation, tilling the same crops, and praying before the same stone altar in the small, quaint church, it is not to be wondered at that when a change occurred to any one of their number, it was regarded as a sort of social era. There were those in St. Croix who had known Mere Giraud's grandfather, a slow-spoken, kindly old peasant, who had ...
— Mere Girauds Little Daughter • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... palace on one of the radiating avenues, was giving a dancing-party, to which the entire blue book had been invited. Kalora went, trailed by the long-suffering Popova. She wore her most fetching Parisian gown, and decked herself out with wrought jewelry of quaint and heavy design, which was the envy of all the other young women in town, and she put in a very busy night, for she danced with army officers, and lieutenants of the navy, and one senator, and goodness knows how ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade
... fixed at different heights and of varying diameters to accommodate the wrists of man, woman, and child, may still be found in the middle of the Priests' Green. These stand, it will be remembered, under a quaint old roof supported on rough, oaken pillars, and surmounted by a weathercock which the monkish fancy has fashioned to the shape of the archangel blowing the last trump. His clarion or coach-horn, or whatever instrument of music it was he ...
— The Lady Of Blossholme • H. Rider Haggard
... at the quaint flowers in their golden vases. And when the Witch ran to her and kissed her she did not even look at her. She looked only at Eric, and her eyes said, "I ...
— The Little House in the Fairy Wood • Ethel Cook Eliot
... to the isles of four old Dutch navigators, who all describe the dodo under different names, we come to the quaint old traveller, Sir Thomas Herbert, who touched at the Mauritius in 1627. In his Relation of some Yeare's Travaile, he thus describes the bird:—'The dodo; a bird the Dutch call walghvogel or dod eersen; her body is round and fat, which occasions the slow pace, or that her corpulencie; and so ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 440 - Volume 17, New Series, June 5, 1852 • Various
... get used to the quaint language of the people, and from the helpless way in which they stare at me, my tongue must be equally unintelligible. A delightful camaraderie exists; every one knows every one else, or they all act as if they did. As ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... man. A few soft-toned pictures adorned the dull gray walls above the wainscoting, and directly over a massive desk that never was seen open hung a framed letter. The letter was written on blue-lined paper in red pokeberry ink. At the top of the letter was the advertisement of a hotel, done in quaint, old-fashioned, fancy script with many curly-cues and printers' ornaments. The advertisement set forth that the Thayer House at Sycamore Ridge was "First class in every particular," and that "Especial attention was paid to transient custom." On a line in the right-hand corner ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... made out his cheque for the amount, and having signed his name to it in a cramped little quaint handwriting, which reminded one of his person, was duly presented with a receipt and dismissed to his counting-house. There he entertained the other clerks by a glowing description of the magnanimity of ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... rest of the passengers on the steamer, go directly from Liverpool to London, but stopped for a couple of days in the quaint old town of Chester. "If we don't see it now," said Euphemia, "we never shall see it. When we once start back we shall be raving distracted to get home, and I ...
— The Rudder Grangers Abroad and Other Stories • Frank R. Stockton
... he had dedicated his first composition to the other sex. It was a set of "exercises," and the compliment was paid to Lydia Garella, a quaint little hunchback, whom he used afterward to refer to as his first love. But it was later, when he was giving lessons to support his mother, and just turned seventeen, that he drifted into what was really his first love. The Comte de Saint Criq, then Minister of the Interior, had an ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... a quaint dress stepped forward, a paper in his hand, and, backed as he was by half a dozen halberdiers, would in a moment have laid hands on me if M. de Rambouillet had not intervened with a negligent air of authority, which sat on him the more gracefully as he held ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... thread of an old-fashioned madrigal which he had often heard his mother sing, with quaint words long since gone out of style and hardly to be understood, and between the staves a warbling, wordless refrain which he had learned out on the hills and in the fields, picked up ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... representatives of the later and higher Asiatic fauna 'more anon'; for the present we may regard it as approximately true that aboriginal and unsophisticated Australia in the lump was wholly given over, on its first discovery, to kangaroos, phalangers, dasyures, wombats, and other quaint marsupial animals, with names as strange ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... kind will unconsciously inoculate his boy, allowing him to play beside him in the bookroom, where the air is charged with germs (against which there is no disinfectant, I believe, except commercial conversation), and when the child is weary of his toys will give him an old book of travels, with quaint pictures which never depart from the memory. By and by, so thoughtless is this invalid father, who has suffered enough, surely, himself from this disease, that he will allow his boy to open parcels of books, reeking with infection, and explain to him the rarity ...
— Books and Bookmen • Ian Maclaren
... appointed.—Tell me, however, what has become of your Book on England? We shall really be obliged to you for that. A piece of it went through all the Newspapers, some years ago; which was really unique for its quaint kindly insight, humor, and other qualities; like an etching by Hollar or Durer, amid the continents of vile smearing which are called "pictures" at present. Come on, Come on; give us the Book, and ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... genial malice; stayed so long at village public-houses without visible motive that I incurred the suspicion of the local constabulary, and on one memorable occasion found myself identified with a long watched-for robber of local hen-roosts. When I dropped upon some quaint village that, from a pictorial point of view, seemed to offer all that I desired, I found my tale, that I wished to settle in it, universally derided. No one could conceive any sane person as being desirous of living ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... loved the great cellars under the inn, which were once the cloisters of an old monastery: where there are unexpected steps, and dim archways, and winding paths where it is very easy to imagine that you see bare-footed friars with brown habits and rope girdles pacing slowly along. There they bought quaint brown jars and mustard-pots of the kind that are used, and have always been used, on the tables above. But best of all were the great oaken beams above them, solid as England itself, but blackened and charred by the Great Fire of 1666. ...
— Captain Jim • Mary Grant Bruce
... a quarter of venison." Here the steamer's course lies among islands covered partly with undergrowth and partly with forests. In the shadow of the tall trees on one of the most lovely of these islands is seen from the deck a quaint, barefooted company consisting of two men, a woman and three small children, who have just stepped ashore from two boats made from the hollowed-out trunks of trees. Two dogs accompany them. The adults of the party are clothed in rags. These people are monteros, and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... There were two quaint rush-bottomed chairs and a yellow stool, such as we tie with ribbons and call a milking stool. A nice warm rug lay at the side of the bed, and a smaller one at the washing stand. These were woven ...
— A Little Girl in Old Boston • Amanda Millie Douglas
... the Romantic School can be pretty definitely set at about 1796; its cradle was in the quaint university town of Jena, at that time the home of Schiller and his literary-esthetic enterprises, and only a few miles away from Goethe in Weimar. Five names embody about all that was most significant in the earlier ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... Bernard, of Paris, was granted a French patent on a coffee roaster, which was an improvement designed to bring the roasting cylinder and the fire in closer contact. This was accomplished, to quote the quaint language of the inventor, by applying movable legs and "by superimposing a sheet iron circlet around the edge of the furnace to get double the quantity of heat and it presents so much advantage that it has seemed to me worthy of ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... Anice he found a subtle inspiration. She seemed to understand his trials by instinct, and even the minutiae of his work made themselves curiously clear to her. As to the people who were under his control, she was never tired of hearing of them, and of studying their quaint, rough ways. To please her he stored up many a characteristic incident, and it was through him that she heard most frequently of Joan. She did not even see Joan for fully two months after her arrival in Riggan, and then it was Joan ...
— That Lass O' Lowrie's - 1877 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... delightful addition to those quaint and laughable tales which have made the author of 'Uncle Remus' loved and fancied wherever ...
— Finnish Legends for English Children • R. Eivind
... brimmed hat trimmed with roses and fluttering ribbons. High-heeled slippers with bright buckles and a crook tied with blue ribbons added to the quaint effect, and the whole costume was very ...
— Patty Fairfield • Carolyn Wells
... Dragoeiro (Dracaena Draco Linn., Palma canariensis Tourn.), which an Irish traveller called a 'dragon-palm,' owed its vulgar name to the fancy that the fruit contained the perfect figure of a standing dragon with gaping mouth and long neck, spiny back and crocodile's tail. It is a quaint tree of which any ingenious carpenter could make a model. The young trunk is somewhat like that of the Oreodoxa regia, or an asparagus immensely magnified; but it frequently grows larger above than below. ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... the charm of the quaint room, with its dim lighting, the low fire, the fantastic patterns of rug and basket showing faintly, and through the windows the mountains and the stars. As the conversation began to yield to the quiet of the place, Herrick went to the piano and played softly. It had never fallen to the ...
— Across the Mesa • Jarvis Hall
... of the "History of Pirates," of 1725, has a quaint frontispiece, showing the two women pirates, Anne Bonny and Mary Read, in action with their swords drawn, upon the deck of a ship. While the fourth edition, published in 1726, in two volumes, contains the stories of the less ...
— The Pirates' Who's Who - Giving Particulars Of The Lives and Deaths Of The Pirates And Buccaneers • Philip Gosse
... twenty years. Batavia proper is a commonplace city of featureless streets, brick-walled canals, and ramshackle public buildings, but the residential town of Weltevreden, suggesting a glorified Holland, combines the quaint charm of the mother country with the Oriental grace and splendour of the tropics. The broad canals bordered by colossal cabbage-palms, the white bridges gay with the many coloured garb of the Malay population, the red-tiled roofs embowered in a wealth of verdure, and the pillared verandahs ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... friend's story. The bizarre quality of the inscription which had annoyed Salisbury was to him an attraction; and now and again he took it up and scanned thoughtfully what he had written, especially the quaint jingle at the end. It was a token, a symbol, he decided, and not a cipher; and the woman who had flung it away was, in all probability, entirely ignorant of its meaning. She was but the agent of ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... the great, undulating meadow which stretched from the Homestead to the river, a wall made of the stones picked up on the place around it, a plain granite shaft erected by the first Gray in the centre, and grouped about the shaft the quaint tablets of the century before, with old-fashioned names spelled in an old-fashioned manner, and with homely rhymes and trite sayings underneath; farther off, the newer gravestones, more ornate and less appealing. The elms were just beginning to ...
— The Old Gray Homestead • Frances Parkinson Keyes
... This quaint reflection and delicate compliment broke the bird's spell and made Pepeeta laugh,—a laugh as musical and sweet as the song of the bird itself. It passed through the fringe of trees along the river bank, rippled across ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... kept another memory of Provence. Next to a painting, by Horace Vernet, of a scene on the Mediterranean coast, little Anne Fisher, born 1588, exhibited herself in hooped and embroidered petticoat, quaint cap and costly laces, a person of great dignity at six years old. She was to be Lady Dilke of Maxstoke Castle and a shrewd termagant, mother of two sons who sided, one with the Commonwealth, the other with the ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... a Nagasaki artist? You smiled when I assured you that the carefully attired little damsel placed between us had been one of our neighbors. Kindly receive my book with the same indulgent smile, without seeking therein a meaning either good or bad, in the same spirit in which you would receive some quaint bit of pottery, some grotesquely carved ivory idol, or some fantastic trifle brought to you from this singular fatherland of ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... modern thought and feeling. The brilliant pictures of feudal society in the romances of Scott and Fouque give no faithful image of that society, even when they are carefully correct in all ascertainable historical details.[1] They give rather the impression left upon an alien mind by the quaint, picturesque features of a way of life which seemed neither quaint nor picturesque to the men who lived it, but only to the man who turns to it for relief form the prosaic, or at least familiar, conditions ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... that they should attend the king in the next world), but no royalties. Prof. Petrie found the arm of a female mummy, who may have been of royal blood, though there is nothing to show that she was. And the quaint plait and fringe of false hair, which were also found, need not have belonged to a royal mummy. It is therefore quite possible that these tombs at Abydos were not the actual last resting-places of the earliest kings, who may really have been buried at Hierakonpolis ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall
... A large, quaint, low-ceiled chamber on the second floor, with a superfluity of tiny greenish window-panes, was assigned to the stranger, and his African servant, Jake, was installed in a smaller adjoining apartment. The day after his arrival Maurice spent in unpacking and polishing his precious ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... sunrise. Rome was founded by him on the ninth day of the month Pharmouthi, between the second and third hour; for it is supposed that the fortunes of cities, as well as those of men, have their certain periods which can be discovered by the position of the stars at their nativities. The quaint subtlety of these speculations may perhaps amuse the reader more than their ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... "Doctor" concerning the authorship of that queer, quaint, delightful book are Elia's affected anger and indignation against the author of the "Indicator" for attributing the essays of Elia to their right author. Leigh Hunt must have "laughed consumedly," as he read the P.S. to the "Chapter ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... houses which have been her homes. In indicating it we have nothing to do with grey Windsor in its historical glories, or even in its more picturesque lights. We leave behind the Waterloo Gallery, the Garter-room and the quaint cottages of the Poor Knights in order to point out the touches which are the tokens of Queen Victoria's presence. Though she dwelt here principally in the bright days of her early reign, the chief signs ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, (Victoria) Vol II • Sarah Tytler
... noise was hellish; sounds of triumph, sounds of panic, of anger, encouragement, appeal, despair, woe and pain, with the callous roar of musketry and the loud indifference of the guns. Above it all the man on the quaint war horse made himself heard. From the blue line of steel above his head, from the eyes below the forage cap, from the bearded lips, from the whole man there poured a magic control. He shouted and his voice mastered the storm. "Rally, brave men! Rally and follow ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... my earliest childhood, and intermingled with them are my dear mother's looks, the calm, earnest gaze of my father, gardens and vine leaves, and soft green turf, and a very old and quaint picture-book—and this is all I can recall of the first ...
— Memories • Max Muller
... o'clock, a round of calls made, the Green Imp came for Bob and Mrs. Lessing. They met him, hand in hand, the little figure in its voluminous misfit clothes looking quaint, enough beside the perfect outlines of his companion's attire. But ...
— Red Pepper Burns • Grace S. Richmond
... offense usually came from her. In the "Lawe's resolution of Women's Rights," published in the year 1632, a book which I have not seen, but of which there are copies in the country, the anonymous and quaint author says, and with a sly satire: "It is true that man and woman are one person, but understand in what manner. When a small brooke or little river incorporateth with Rhodanus, Humber, or the Thames, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... on feathered foot Faint and fainter sounds the flute, Rarer songs of gods; and still Somewhere on the sunny hill, Or along the winding stream, Through the willows, flits a dream; Flits but shows a smiling face, Flees but with so quaint a grace, None can choose to stay at home, All must ...
— Poems of To-Day: an Anthology • Various
... note, if humourists by trade On waistcoat had the shoe displayed, Lampoon's sour spirit might be laid, And cease its spiteful railing. Whether the humour chanced to be Joke, pun, quaint ballad, repartee, Slang, or bad spelling, we should see ...
— The True Legend of St. Dunstan and the Devil • Edward G. Flight
... when, tired and dusty, the outfit pulled up at La Luz, a quaint hamlet nestling in the foothills of the Sacramento Mountains. The place they found to be largely Mexican, and it was almost as if the visitors had slipped over the border to ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in New Mexico • Frank Gee Patchin
... flourish in. Nothing is stunted by the churlish, icy hand of indifference or severity. The poet runs riot in a conceit, and idolizes a quibble. His whole object is to turn the meanest or rudest objects to a pleasurable account. The relish which he has of a pun, or of the quaint humour of a low character, does not interfere with the delight with which he describes a beautiful image, or the most refined love. The clown's forced jests do not spoil the sweetness of the character ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... grasses Warming to life Quaint beetles, curious weeds, Till earth awakens, pregnant beneath its rays— So came the shepherds down ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Marjorie Allen Seiffert
... her little boy instead, hoping that the change of air would do him good after the winter months spent leaning over school books. So in the quaint low-ceiled bedroom upstairs, sheets that smelled of lavender, with beautiful hand-embroidered initials, made by some bride for her trousseau long ago, were spread on the tall four-poster bed with its curious starched valence and silk ...
— The Pigeon Tale • Virginia Bennett
... frontispieces for the books with which Florentine printers were rapidly superseding the manuscripts of twenty years before: collections of sermons, of sonnets, lives of saints, editions of Virgil and Terence, quaint versified encyclopaedias, and even books on medicine and astrology. From these little woodcuts, groups of saints round the Cross, with Giotto's tower and Brunellesco's dome in the distance, pictures of Fathers of the Church or ancient poets seated at desks in neatly panelled closets—always with ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... the first thoughts of the carols. Harry had to drive cows that day; but the others were with her, and as they came out through Mr. Giertz's woods, and looked down upon the pasture where the sheep were feeding, little Phil began the quaint old version of the shepherd psalm that she had ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... is a light-hearted loon, If you listen to popular rumour; From morning to night he's so joyous and bright, And he bubbles with wit and good humour! He's so quaint and so terse, both in prose and in verse; Yet though people forgive his transgression, There are one or two rules that all Family Fools Must observe, if they love their profession. There are one or two rules, Half-a-dozen, maybe, That ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... Nancy!" he called out,—he always called her that when he wished to annoy her, for Nan had a special dislike to her quaint, old-fashioned name; it had been her mother's and grandmother's name; in every generation there had been a Nancy Challoner,—"come, come, Miss Nancy! we cannot have you playing at hide-and-seek in this fashion. We want some music. Give us something rousing, to keep ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... away into mere dreams: but it is singular how often the dream turns out to have been a half-waking one, presaging a reality. Ovid foreshadowed the discoveries of the geologist: the Atlantis was an imagination, but Columbus found a western world: and though the quaint forms of Centaurs and Satyrs have an existence only in the realms of art, creatures approaching man more nearly than they in essential structure, and yet as thoroughly brutal as the goat's or horse's half of the mythical compound, are now ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... laws and discussions, philosophic, theologic, and juridic dicta, historical notes and national reminiscences, injunctions and prohibitions controlling all the positions and relations of life, curious, quaint tales, ideal maxims and proverbs, uplifting legends, charming lyrical outbursts, and attractive enigmas side by side with misanthropic utterances, bewildering medical prescriptions, superstitious practices, ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... characteristic and very clean, a cross-between a little French theatre, say in Monte Parnasse, and one of the lesser London theatres. The acting was French in style and expressive, and full of humour and frankness, and there was a quaint decorative style in all the tableaux and in the actors' movements that made me think rather of Persian figures in decorations than of India. There was a parterre and a wide gallery, in which we got back seats; the audience were all men and well-dressed, and laughed heartily at the ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... moment a short girl, with a very red face and round beady eyes, came into the room carrying on a tray two quaint old pewter tureens full of steaming soup, which emitted very savoury and appetising odours. Setting these down before Matt Peke and Helmsley, with two goodly slices of bread beside them, she held out ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... her, chanced to look her best that night. The delicate pallor of her cheeks under the rich tone of her hair seemed quite apart from any suggestion of ill-health, her eyes were wonderfully full and soft, a quaint pearl ornament hung by a little gold chain from her slender, graceful neck. A sort of dreamy content came over Brooks. After all, why should he throw himself in despair against the gates of that other world, outside which ...
— A Prince of Sinners • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... and found no soul in any room as we wandered from room to room,—from the rose-covered porch to the strange and quaint garrets amongst the great timbers of the roof, where of old time the tillers and herdsmen of the manor slept, but which a-nights seemed now, by the small size of the beds, and the litter of useless and disregarded ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... The most penitent of all was the deviser of the original idea. He had generously offered to stay at home with the little patient, which was as generously refused; but the next evening he was allowed to come and sit on his bed, and describe it all for the amusement of his friend. He was a quaint boy, this urchin, with a face as broad as an American Indian's, eyes as bright as a squirrel's, and all the mischief in life lurking about him, till you could see roguishness in the very folds of his hooded Indian winter coat of blue ...
— The Brownies and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... went back to his quarters, my lord Marquess strolled through the quaint streets of the town slowly, and looking upon the ground as he walked. For some reason he felt vaguely depressed, and, searching within himself for a reason, recognised that the slight cloud resting upon his spirits recalled to him a feeling of his early childhood—no other than the ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... from her hips in those inimitable folds the secret of which the dowagers of the olden time have carried away with them. She retained the black mantilla trimmed with black lace woven in large square meshes; her caps, old-fashioned in shape, had the quaint charm which we see in silhouettes relieved against a white background. She took snuff with exquisite nicety and with the gestures which young people of the present day who have had the happiness of seeing their grandmothers and great-aunts replacing their gold ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... productions, would mention vaguely, yet with perfect sincerity, a sense of dreamy, wild, indefinite, and he would perhaps say, indefinable delight; on being required to point out the source of this so shadowy pleasure, he would be apt to speak of the quaint in phraseology and in general handling. This quaintness is, in fact, a very powerful adjunct to ideality, but in the case in question it arises independently of the author's will, and is altogether apart from his intention. Words and their rhythm have varied. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... these quaint writings the 'Studies on the life and habits of animals' which are singular from their peculiar aphoristic style, and I have transcribed them in exactly the order in which they are written in MS. H. This is one of the very rare instances ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... you could flee from all this stupidity, from all this cant of governments, and this hideous reiteration of hatred, this strangling hatred ..." he would say to himself, and see himself working in the fields, copying parchments in quaint letterings, drowsing his feverish desires to calm in the deep-throated passionate chanting of the ...
— One Man's Initiation—1917 • John Dos Passos
... dreary, while I pondered weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore, While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. ''Tis some visitor,' I muttered, 'tapping at my chamber door— ...
— Risen from the Ranks - Harry Walton's Success • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... charming place to repent in," said Sara, her eyes wandering to the distant bay, where the quaint little town straggled picturesquely up the hill that ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... With a quaint mixture of playfulness and gravity, she extended her hand, and Adrian stooped and kissed it—as he had kissed fair Cecile de Savenaye's rosy finger-tip upon the porch of ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... and so encased wandered through the country, rapt in his thoughts and bearing witness to the truth that God had revealed to him; about 1646 began his crusade against the religion of mere formality, and calling upon men to trust to the "inner light" alone; his quaint garb won him the title of "the man with the leather breeches," and his mode of speech with his "thou's" and "thee's" subjected him to general ridicule; but despite these eccentricities he by his earnestness gathered disciples about him who believed ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... created and sustained without capital, without business knowledge, without technical skill, and for the sole purpose of affording the shiftless population of Ballyshannon regular wages at the week's end. The gentlemen who lean over the quaint bridge, with its twelve arches and sharply-pointed buttresses, are merely waiting for the factories, which are to spring from the earth fully-equipped at a wave of the enchanter's hand, to be a blessing to the whole world while fulfilling their chief mission ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... probabilities of the exploring party coming out into the main trunk from one of the branches they had passed, but, as Gwyn said, they dared not reckon upon this, and must keep on now they were there. And at last they went trudging on almost in silence, the tramping of their feet and the quaint echoes being all that was heard, while three black shadows followed after them along the rugged floor, like three more explorers watching to see which ...
— Sappers and Miners - The Flood beneath the Sea • George Manville Fenn
... fittest to aid him in ruling it, he found it easy to surpass every one of them, each in his own trade. He produced a richer damask than any of the silk-weavers; a finer linen than any of the linen-weavers; a more complicated as well as ornate cabinet, with more drawers and quaint hiding-places, than any of the cabinet-makers; a sword-blade more cunningly damasked, and a hilt more gorgeously jewelled, than any of the sword-makers; a ring set with stones more precious, more brilliant in colour, ...
— Gutta-Percha Willie • George MacDonald
... our economic system and our race prejudices,—Clark's Field! We pass it night and morning of all the days of our lives, but rarely see it—see, that is, more than its bricks and mortar and empty faces. It should be called, in the quaint phrase of the judge's people, "God's Acre!" One might say that the beauty, the supreme fruit of this Clark's Field, which never blossomed into flower and fruit all these years we have been concerned with its fate, was Adelle. ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... nickname which clung to this dandy through life is usually ascribed to a quaint resemblance noticeable in him to the Australian quadruped after which he was called; but others attributed it rather to the leaps and bounds by which he advanced socially, though on account of his connections and the exquisite perfection ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... Manila; and their coming with most hospitable intent only added to the poor girl's perplexities, for they showered welcomes upon her and bade her get her luggage up at once. They had come to take her to their own roof. They had secured such a quaint, roomy house in Ermita right near the bay shore, and looking right out on the Luneta ...
— Ray's Daughter - A Story of Manila • Charles King
... breakfasts were served under the white awnings stretched over the after-deck, where, lounging in the grateful shade, we could look out across the harbor, dotted with the gaudy sails of fishing craft and bordered by the walls and gardens of the quaint old city, to the islands of Arbe and Pago, rising, like huge, uncut emeralds, from the lazy southern sea. At noon we usually lunched with a score or more of staff-officers in the large, cool dining-room of the officers' mess, and at night we dined with the governor-general and his family ...
— The New Frontiers of Freedom from the Alps to the AEgean • Edward Alexander Powell
... and strange surroundings. A carpenter, whose name was the same as his trade, built him a bookcase out of scraps of lumber, and on the shelves of it he assembled old friends—Parkman and Irving and Hawthorne and Cooper and Lowell, "Ike Marvel's breezy pages and the quaint, pathetic character-sketches of the Southern writers—Cable, Craddock, Macon, Joel Chandler Harris, and sweet Sherwood Bonner." Wherever he went he carried some book or other about him, solid books as a rule, though he was not averse on occasion to what one cowpuncher, who ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... frequently made in the rags. Old pockets, containing small sums of money, are occasionally found. A foreign coin valued at about $3 was found a few days ago. In the paper stock, quaint and valuable old books or pictures are found often. One of the workmen has a museum composed of curiosities found amid the rags and shreds of paper. Rev. Dr. Bolles, of Massachusetts, makes an annual pilgrimage to Mechanic Falls for the sake ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 363, December 16, 1882 • Various
... quaint accident that we employ the word "short-sighted" as a condemnation; but not the word "long-sighted," which we should probably use, if at all, as a compliment. Yet the one is as much a malady of vision as the other. We rightly ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... by the government at different times, and collected here with little relevancy to their original appeal. Some are Scriptural subjects and some are figures of the dancers who take part in certain ceremonials of the Spanish churches (notably the cathedral at Seville), which have a quaint reality, an intense personal character. They are of a fascination which I can hope to convey by no phrase of mine; but far beyond this is the motionless force, the tremendous repose of the figures of ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... for the Southern Journey and a well-written serious article on the Geological History of our region by Taylor. Except for editorial and meteorological notes the rest is conceived in the lighter vein. The verse is mediocre except perhaps for a quaint play of words in an amusing little skit on the sleeping-bag argument; but an article entitled 'Valhalla' appears to me to be altogether on a different level. It purports to describe the arrival of some of our party at the gates proverbially guarded by St. Peter; the humour is really ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... between the celebrated towns of Hastings and Brighton, may be found the quaint old structure known as Bereford Castle. From the style of architecture it may be dated to the time of Edward the Third, bearing a striking resemblance to the castle re-erected in that monarch's reign by the Earl of Warwick. The castle ...
— Lady Rosamond's Secret - A Romance of Fredericton • Rebecca Agatha Armour
... El Ghor. A huge plaster Trimurti stood close to the wall, on a triangular pedestal of black rock, and the Siva-face and the writhing cobra confronted all who entered. Just opposite grinned a red granite slab with a quaint basso-relievo taken from the ruins of Elora. Near the door were two silken divans, and a richly carved urn, three feet high, which had once ornamented the facade of a tomb in the royal days of Petra, ere the curse fell on Edom, now stood an in memoriam of the original ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... discussion was going on, the cloud of limestone dust had disappeared and from it had emerged a quaint old coach, lumbering and shabby, drawn by a pair of sleek sorrel horses, whose teeth would have given evidence of advanced age had a possible purchaser submitted them to the indignity of examining them. Their progress was slow and sedate, although ...
— The Comings of Cousin Ann • Emma Speed Sampson
... quaint stores bordering both sides of the street bear no names and no signs over their huge arched doors;—you must look well inside to know what business is being done. Even then you will scarcely be able to satisfy ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... Africans, but with straight hair and European features. A large number of them visited the ship this morning. They were fine specimens of physical development, and wore scarcely any other covering than a cloth about the loins. They were sprightly and chatty, and in their quaint canoes ...
— The Cruise of the Alabama and the Sumter • Raphael Semmes
... sir. (With the glass half way to his lips, he checks himself, giving a dubious glance at the wine, and adds, with quaint intensity.) Will anyone oblige me with a glass ...
— The Devil's Disciple • George Bernard Shaw
... enthusiastic temper grows up into youth in a dream of love. The lady of his mystic passion dies early. He dreams of her still, not as a wonder of earth, but as a saint in paradise, and relieves his heart in an autobiography, a strange and perplexing work of fiction—quaint and subtle enough for a metaphysical conceit; but, on the other hand, with far too much of genuine and deep feeling. It is a first essay; he closes it abruptly as if dissatisfied with his work, but with the resolution of raising at a future day a worthy ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... was not the first time she had taken an admiring visitor to see the local monuments. Basil Ransom, walking with her from point to point, admired them all, and thought several of them exceedingly quaint and venerable. The rectangular structures of old red brick especially gratified his eye; the afternoon sun was yellow on their homely faces; their windows showed a peep of flower-pots and bright-coloured curtains; they wore an expression of scholastic quietude, and exhaled ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... thorned staff of office; and then—the sudden, electric wakening, and the consternation of the whole staid and pious congregation at such terrible profanity in the house of God. Ah!—it was not two hundred and forty years ago; when I read the quaint words my Puritan blood stirs my drowsy brain, and I remember it all well, just as I saw ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... the ground; there are heavy-walled sewers through which the crystal brook of which Jordan is born still runs; in the hill-side are the substructions of a costly marble temple that Herod the Great built here—patches of its handsome mosaic floors still remain; there is a quaint old stone bridge that was here before Herod's time, may be; scattered every where, in the paths and in the woods, are Corinthian capitals, broken porphyry pillars, and little fragments of sculpture; and up yonder in the precipice where the fountain gushes ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... of the possibility of colonizing the regions thus to be discovered. The quaint language in which he describes the chances of what is now called 'imperial expansion' ...
— Adventurers of the Far North - A Chronicle of the Frozen Seas • Stephen Leacock
... devices, and its new and more heroic adventure had created, was not yet 'full' till he came in. The Round Table grew rounder with this knight's presence. Over those dainty stores of the classic ages, over those quaint memorials of the elder chivalry, that were spread out on it, over the dead letter of the past, the brave Atlantic breeze came in, the breath of the great future blew, when the turn came for this knight's adventure; whether opened in the prose of its statistics, ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... yes, let other men Love Elia for his antic pen, And watch with dilettante eyes His page for every quaint surprise, Curious of caviare phrase. Yea; these who will not also praise? We surely must, but which is more The motley that his sorrow wore, Or the great heart whose valorous beat Upheld his brave unfaltering feet Along the narrow path he chose, And ...
— English Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... broke upon us a little interruption, so diverting, so utterly like the whole quaint tininess of Kings Port, that I should tell it to you, even if it did not bear directly upon the matter which was beginning so actively to concern me—the love difficulties ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... in gamesome prank; Or, silent-sandal'd, pay our defter court, Circling the Spirit of the Western Gale, Where wearied with his flower-caressing sport, 65 Supine he slumbers on a violet bank; Then with quaint music hymn the parting gleam By lonely Otter's sleep-persuading stream; Or where his wave with loud unquiet song Dash'd o'er the rocky channel froths along; 70 Or where, his silver waters smooth'd to rest, The tall tree's shadow sleeps ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... was the interval of the dinner-hour—wound up with a speech from Mr. Wallace. The iniquity of the abandonment of the In-and-Out clause of the Bill was again the burden of his theme. He brought to the subject the same quaint, rich, but somewhat elaborate humour which made the success of his previous speech; and the Tories were more than delighted with some telling hits which he gave to Mr. Gladstone for the change of front. But Mr. ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... general, Peter Smith's book contains about ninety prescriptions for the cure of as many diseases or forms of disease, to be compounded generally from now well-known medicine, roots, herbs, etc., some of them heroic, others quaint, etc. He did not recommend dispensing wholly with the then universal practice of bleeding patients, but he ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... invariably took her part. We were never given a chance to explain. The charge was simply: 'You have made Nina cry. Now, Jimmy can go home, and Sally must get her arithmetic.' I liked Nina, too; she was so quaint and unexpected, and her eyes were lovely; but I often wanted ...
— My Antonia • Willa Cather
... in February begins to make two quaint notes, like the whetting of a saw, is the marsh titmouse; the great titmouse sings with three cheerful, joyous notes, and begins about the ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1 • Gilbert White
... Carolus, Karl, or Charles, dearly loved his tender mother. From her he learned lessons of truth and nobleness that even through all his stormy and wandering life never forsook him. Often while he had swung gently to and fro in his quaint, carved, and uncomfortable-looking cradle, had she crooned above him the old saga-songs that told of valor and dauntless courage and all the stern virtues that made up the heroes of those same old ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... of a public-works policy by the Colonial Government in 1875. Ocean steamships of 4000 and 5000 tons burden can now be berthed at these wharfs, and there is a constant and convenient service of trains between the port and the town. Even to-day the presence of superannuated Dutch warships and quaint craft from China and the Malay islands relieves the monotony of the vast hulls of the steamships of the British India, the Messageries Maritimes, ...
— A Visit to Java - With an Account of the Founding of Singapore • W. Basil Worsfold
... Abbey, have the privilege of shouting out 'Vivat Rex!' at the coronation of their Sovereign—this means 'Let the King live'—and right heartily did the hundreds of young voices greet their King and Queen in this quaint way, shouting, 'Vivat, Vivat, Vivat Rex Georgius!' as the King was seen advancing up the aisle. The organ rang out, trumpets sounded, and a glorious mass of sound ascended to the roof and died away in echoes in the gray arches that have seen ...
— The Children's Book of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... its native land of Germany, and in every town the bands of strolling players sent Marlowe's great conception far and wide. In England also the puppet play was extremely popular. The drama had moved from the church to the market-place, and much of the Elizabethan drama appeared in this quaint form, played by wooden figures upon diminutive boards. To the modern mind nothing could be more incongruous than the idea of a solemn drama forced to assume a guise so grotesque and childish; but, according to Jusserand, much of the stage-work was extremely ghastly, and no ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... Bible, half a dozen books, and a pile of newspapers which had been carefully preserved from time to time, including copies of the "Pennsylvania Gazette," edited by Benjamin Franklin, and also of the latter's publications known as "Poor Richard's Almanack," full of quaint sayings and maxims. Over the shelf were some deer's antlers and on these rested two muskets, with the powder horns and bullet pouches hanging beneath. Behind the door stood another musket, loaded and ready for use, should an enemy or a wild beast ...
— On the Trail of Pontiac • Edward Stratemeyer
... "History," with that quaint prolixity which was his peculiar proclivity gives numerous instances of the rise and fall of families connected with Birmingham. In addition to the original family of De Birmingham, now utterly extinct he traced back many others then and now well-known ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell |
