"Background" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... plainly amid his sombre surroundings. I can see the muscles about his nostrils twitching, as he stops now and again to nibble at a withered tuft of grass. A lonely jay flits from one tree to another; a cardinal speeds by my window, a line of color across a dark background; and one by one the dry leaves drop noiselessly down, making thicker the soft covering which Nature is spreading over ...
— The Love Story of Abner Stone • Edwin Carlile Litsey
... mouth to scream, but fear had paralysed her voice, and she lay staring at the hangings, incapable of movement or sound. As she watched the curtain she saw it move again, and a shape appeared faintly against the gloomy background. ...
— The Angel of Terror • Edgar Wallace
... three weeks of daily bathing with water from 18 to 24 deg. C., however, the screaming decreased again. The experience that a pleasant feeling of warmth succeeded, may have forced the recollection of the unpleasant feeling into the background. But the screaming can not at all be represented by letters; ae and oe do not suffice. The same is true of the screaming, often prolonged, before falling asleep in the evening, which occurs not seldom also without any ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer
... to be one of serious agitations, different to any that had yet entered into her experience. Political enterprise for the time cast all purely personal interests and emotions into the background. "I have never known how to do anything by halves," she says of herself very truly; and whatever may be thought of the tendency of her political influence and the manner of its exertion, no one can tax her with sparing herself in a contest to which, moreover, she came disinterested; vanity ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... peaceful life to live there; But when first the room I entered, Over chips of wood I stumbled. On the door I knocked my forehead, And my head against the doorposts. At the door were eyes of strangers: Darksome eyes were at the entrance, 570 Squinting eyes in midst of chamber, In the background eyes most evil. From the mouths the fire was flashing, From beneath the tongues shot firebrands, From the old man's mouth malicious, From beneath ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous
... never forget my first sight of Rosetta Rosa as, robed with the modesty which the character of Elsa demands, she appeared on the stage to answer the accusation of Ortrud. For some moments she hesitated in the background, and then timidly, yet with what grandeur of mien, advanced towards the king. I knew then, as I know now, that hers was a loveliness of that imperious, absolute, dazzling kind which banishes from the hearts of men all moral conceptions, all considerations ...
— The Ghost - A Modern Fantasy • Arnold Bennett
... the effect which the varying conditions of light, background, etc., have upon the apparent distance of the object. Don't be content to memorize the following data, but go after the underlying reason in ...
— The Plattsburg Manual - A Handbook for Military Training • O.O. Ellis and E.B. Garey
... party, together with the Whites, were only spectators in the background, and the procession into church consisted of just the absolutely needful persons—-the bride in a delicate nondescript coloured dress, such as none but a French dressmaker could describe, and covered with transparent lace, like, as Mysie averred, a hedgeback full of pig-nut flowers, ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... picture; Perchance you have one too. Mine is not set in frame of gold; 'Tis first a bit of blue, And then a background of dark hills— A river just below, Along whose broad, green meadow banks The wreathing elm ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... feet of certain Celestial cacophonists, and made himself adept. He fathomed the, to us, obscure laws of their theory, and for this work made a careful selection of Chinese musical ideas, and used what little harmony they approve of with most quaint and suggestive effect upon a splendid background of his own. The result has not been, as is usual in such alien mimicries, ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... transport bound for New York stood the Broncho Rider Boys casting their last glance shoreward as the sun was setting behind the mountains that form the background of the city of Vera Cruz. Over the city still waved the Stars and Stripes, and as the darkness fell and the tip of Mt. Orizaba gradually faded from sight, Billie turned to the others and in a voice tinged with ...
— The Broncho Rider Boys with Funston at Vera Cruz - Or, Upholding the Honor of the Stars and Stripes • Frank Fowler
... get the last in—it will irritate, it cannot hurt him. There—you see!—he is furious now, and I am quite helpless. One more prod, another kick: now he is a mere lunatic! Stand behind me; I am quite helpless!' Mr. Romaine, I am asking myself as to the background or motive of this singular jest, and whether the name of it should not ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... who had just returned from the telegraph office, where they had sent word at once to their homes telling of their safe arrival in America. O'Connor who had come ashore at Harry's earnest solicitation, stood in the background talking with Mr. Hamilton, to whom he had briefly outlined the adventures of the three boys since they had been ...
— A Voyage with Captain Dynamite • Charles Edward Rich
... Rosalie forward to join Delancy, and, side by side, they crept ahead, keeping a clump of scrub hemlock between them and the edge of the clearing. It was the Green Pass feed-ground, a rocky strip of pasture climbing upward toward Lynx Peak; and there, clean cut against the snowy background, three dark objects were moving, trotting nervously here and there, nosing, nuzzling, tunnelling the snow with ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... given him soothed her that night as she lay tossing in her bed, and it was on this night and for the first time since she left Kilgobbin that the recollection of Pinckney came before her otherwise than as a shadow. He stood with the Hennessey circle as his background, a bright, good-looking figure and a ...
— The Ghost Girl • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... singing; no one is, indeed, more tuneful in the upper notes. But even while he sings the song of the Sirens, he still hearkens to the barking of the Sphinx. Jarring Byronic notes interrupt the flow of his Horatian humours. His mirth has something of the tragedy of the world for its perpetual background; and he feasts like Don Giovanni to a double orchestra, one lightly sounding for the dance, one pealing Beethoven[24] in the distance. He is not truly reconciled either with life or with himself; and this instant war ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... trees. Of the faces which came out fresh and vivid as though painted in yellow and red, the most prominent was a girl's face. By a trick of the firelight she seemed to have no body. The oval of the face and hair hung beside the fire with a dark vacuum for background. As if dazed by the glare, her green-blue eyes stared at the flames. Every muscle of her face was taut. There was something tragic in her thus staring—her age ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... generations, a plusieurs reprises. Everybody knows the fatal pollution of the marriage pomps on the reception of Marie Antoinette in Paris; the numbers who perished are still spoken of obscurely as to the amount, and with shuddering awe for the unparalleled horrors standing in the background of ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... did come, was indeed sudden and unexpected. A shout came from one of the men watching at the loopholes; and, darting forward, Henri discerned at once numbers of figures, which, dashing from the background, were rushing across the hall towards them. Indeed, half a dozen of the Brandenburgers were already at the exit from the hall, and as he looked through a loophole they leapt on the first step of ...
— With Joffre at Verdun - A Story of the Western Front • F. S. Brereton
... memory, in the glowing picture which they drew. He declares that he no longer wonders at the prevalence of this robber mania among the mountains; for he felt at the time, that had he been a young man and a strong man, and had there been no danger of the galleys in the background, he should have been half tempted himself ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... of hoofs was heard on the gravel outside, speedily followed by a peal on the bell; and Mr. Cottrell emerged from the dining-room just in time to see Jim open the hall door to Laura Chipchase, attired in hat and habit, with Miss Sylla mounted and holding her cousin's horse in the background. ...
— Belles and Ringers • Hawley Smart
... impression disappeared—or, rather, retired to the background—even as it became definite. And once more he was seeing the charms of physical loveliness, of physical—and moral, and mental—mystery that had a weird power over him. As they shook hands, a quiver shot through him as at the shock of a terrific ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... arisen, and the unblushing paper commenced to run "Tom Tiddler's School-days" again. So went the whirligig. But at Christmas, when the blue-nosed waifs carol in the cold and boys have extra pennies, Tom Tiddler himself slunk into the background, lost in the ample folds of a "Double Number," the same blazoned impudently, as though it did not demand double money. But the extra pennyworth was all ghosts: ghosts, ghosts, ghosts; full measure, pressed down and running over; not your Ibsenian shadows ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... six peers, eleven Members of Parliament, and some of the leading public men in Munster was refused a hearing by Mr Birrell. Though the act was the act of Mr Birrell, all the world knew that the sinister figure in the background was Mr Dillon. And they have both paid the penalty since then of their follies, not to say crimes—though a nation still ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... It is interesting to see, from this, that he could be almost conventional and courtly in moments when he held Laura farthest aloof; and when it is compared with the depths of solemn emotion in his later sonnets, it seems like the soft glistening of young birch-leaves against a background of pines. ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... training and a new environment they had succeeded best in realizing those conditions, social and political, which alone make their clear statement possible. The measure of success and validity of any social doctrine, no matter how abstract, is to be found in its harmony with the background from which it springs and in the extent to which it actually succeeds in effecting needed social adjustments. It was perfectly natural that our forefathers should wish to proclaim as a new and unalterable truth, the everlasting possession of themselves and of ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... had spread through the country, but nowhere was it so effective and well esteemed as in cities of the type of Zenith, commercial cities of a few hundred thousand inhabitants, most of which—though not all—lay inland, against a background of cornfields and mines and of small towns which depended upon them for mortgage-loans, table-manners, art, social philosophy ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... elbowed into the background, rose quietly and crossed to the other end of the room. Brooks followed her for a moment with regretful eyes. Her simple gown, with the little piece of ribbon around her graceful neck, seemed almost distinguished by comparison with the loud-patterned ...
— A Prince of Sinners • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... level with the strip of turf that formed the land's margin. Fifty yards back was the outer edge of a belt of dark wood that covered the flat lands and swept up the sides of the hills that lay off ten or twelve miles to the east. Against such a background nothing would be visible in the darkness. Across on the Gatcombe side were the steep sandstone cliffs, storm-washed and clean, ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... to suck the radiance along. It became a great cone of glowing light that, arrow-like, raced away upward. For a long instant the black length of the ship, and the greenish fan of flame, were outlined against the scarlet background of Jupiter. Then the freighter rocket, flinging herself upward at three gravities or better, passed the edge of the ...
— The Indulgence of Negu Mah • Robert Andrew Arthur
... Blake observed. "There every one is so expert that I used to feel like a great bungler. Seeing others do so beautifully made me feel as though I were particularly awkward, and I really did keep in the background because I was so ashamed of my clumsy performances. Perhaps though, that was only an excuse for my not being able to do better, and one ought not to offer excuses, ought one? Is there any pond near here on which we ...
— The Governess • Julie M. Lippmann
... the Warden, on each side, are two figures in sleeveless copes, tippets and pilei, without hoods—doctors in theology or degrees. More in the background are other pileati, wearing both tippet and hood; and through the armholes of their outer garments show the tight sleeves of the cassock. These may be secular doctors, or they may be bachelors of divinity ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... case is thrown exclusively upon the independent voters of the country; and, if elected, they will have conferred a favor on me for which I shall be unremitting in my labors to compensate. But if the good people in their wisdom shall see fit to keep me in the background, I have been too familiar with disappointments ...
— The Story of Young Abraham Lincoln • Wayne Whipple
... diamond (the latter from the background of a third day's shirt) shone on him together; and ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... arrangements of blue spires or spikes on the horizon, and, here and there, an attempt at representing an overhanging rock with a hole through it; but merely in order to divide the light behind some human figure. Lakes! No, nothing of the kind,—only blue bays of sea put in to fill up the background when the painter could not think of anything else. Broken-down buildings! No; for the most part very complete and well-appointed buildings, if any; and never buildings at all, but to give place or explanation to some circumstance of human conduct." And then he would look up again to the ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... author, we may say that the work is in style excellent reading, and that if it were not so, the narratives themselves are so thrilling, possess such a heart-reaching interest, that if these were literary crudities, they would be entirely placed in the background in the concentrated blaze of light which the author pours upon the bloody pathway of these victims of injustice, from 1851, when the terrors of the Fugitive Slave Law began, to the hour when Slavery and Rebellion were washed ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... farm brought scantier profit than it ought to have brought, it was probably no weak solace in the background of a life of harassing interests and perpetual disappointments. Burke was happier at Beaconsfield than anywhere else, and he was happiest there when his house was full of guests. Nothing pleased him better than to drive a visitor over to Windsor, where he would expatiate with enthusiasm ...
— Burke • John Morley
... to meet the two big men, leaving Mrs. Scharpe sobbing in the background. The poor woman felt terrible, he knew; but there was nothing he could do about that. "Then let us go," he said, and marched off. Feeling that one more effect wouldn't hurt, he led the way to the Town Hall; let them figure out how he had known just ...
— Wizard • Laurence Mark Janifer (AKA Larry M. Harris)
... Even if it had been my own idea three years ago, I wouldn't repeat it, and I certainly won't have it said that I copy my competitors. No, what I want you to do is go out there and find out what's going on. Get a full background on it. We'll figure out the presentation angle when we get some idea of what he's going to do this time." Winstein eased himself off the corner of Elshawe's desk and stood up. ...
— By Proxy • Gordon Randall Garrett
... erotic wishes in disguised and symbolically veiled form." (Jb.; ps. F., p. 519, and Trdtg., p. 117.) In this formula the wish fulfillment, following Freud's view, is preponderant, yet it would appear to me that it is given too exclusive a role in the (chiefly affective) background of the dream. An important point is the infantile in the dream, in which connection we must mention ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... through his wonderful picture gallery, showed me his tapestries, his enamels, his jewels, his carved ivories, made me wonder at the strange loveliness of the luxury in which he lived; and then told me that luxury was nothing but a background, a painted scene in a play, and that power, power over other men, power over the world, was the one thing worth having, the one supreme pleasure worth knowing, the one joy one never tired of, and that in our century only the rich ...
— An Ideal Husband - A Play • Oscar Wilde
... background for the utilization of his intellectual powers in this process, the commander requires knowledge of the capabilities and limitations of the technique of his profession and of the weapons of his calling. To the ...
— Sound Military Decision • U.s. Naval War College
... it to be a conservative Mussulman village, where the Turkish women, besides keeping themselves veiled with orthodox strictness, seldom go abroad, and the women who are not Mohammedan, imbibing something of the retiring spirit of the dominant race, also keep themselves well in the background. A round score of dogs, great and small, and in all possible conditions of miserableness, congregate in the main street of Eski Baba at eventide, waiting with hungry-eyed expectancy for any morsel of food or offal that may peradventure find its way within their reach. The Turks, to their credit ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... lake that stretched for a mile or more ahead of them, and she turned to nod her head at the spruce and cedar shores with their colourings of red and gold, where birch, and poplar, and ash splashed vividly against the darker background. ...
— God's Country—And the Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... preface. Am I then in a position to pass judgment? Yes, I am; for I can claim to be literally more informed on the subject than most people, having above my share of friends and relations who have been there. I have the clearest possible picture of the country—a stretch of sand, some pyramids in the background, and, in the centre foreground, smiling enigmatically—not the Sphinx, but my friend or relation. I at once gave Mr. LOW five marks out of ten upon discovering that none of his illustrations reproduced ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 11, 1914 • Various
... calling of natives across the valleys. Far out towards the sea a thunderstorm flashed; and after a long interval the rumblings came to us. So very distant was it that we paid it little attention, save as an interesting background to our own still evening. Almost between sentences of our slow conversation, however, it rushed up to the zenith, blotting out the stars. The tall palms began to sway and rustle in the forerunning breeze. Then with a swoop it was upon us, a tempest of fury. We turned in; and all ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... floors of soft Majorcan sandstone cut in small rectangles like wooden blocks. The rooms still boasted the old-time splendor of vaulted ceilings, some dark, with skilfully fitted paneling, others with a faded and venerable gilding forming a background for the colored escutcheons which were emblazoned with the coat of arms of the house. In some rooms the high walls, simply whitewashed, were covered by rows of ancient paintings, and in others were concealed by rich hangings of gay colors which time had failed to destroy. The sleeping room ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... that he acted on impulse, not realizing. You can't judge him by ordinary standards. It isn't fair," pleaded Juliet. "There was probably some extenuating circumstance in the background—something we don't know about. I hope you haven't been very ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell
... would be impracticable as well as unsafe and impolitic. Indeed, in his conduct of the Times, Raymond was again in accord with the Republicans, but he did not seek to renew his former relations with the party. Being complimented for "keeping in the background,"[1126] he replied that "when, a year ago, he declined a re-election to Congress, it was for the purpose of devoting himself wholly to the editorship of the Times, a position more to his taste than any other, and which carries with it as much of influence, honour, and substantial reward as any ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... various plateaus which form so many degrees which must be crossed, and which are not visible from below, appeared from the Brevent, and threw the so-much-desired summit, by the laws of perspective, still farther in the background. The Bossons glacier, in all its splendour, bristled with icy needles and blocks (blocks sometimes ten yards square), which seemed, like the waves of an angry sea, to beat against the sides of the rocks of the Grands-Mulets, ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... introspection is afforded by the study of after-images. Look for an instant at the glowing electric bulb, and then turn your eyes upon a dark background, and observe whether the glowing filament appears there; this would be the "positive after-image". This simple type of introspection is used by physiology in its study of the senses, as well as by psychology; and it gives such precise ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... private secretary, passing through the picturesque and interesting native bazaars. The narrow whitewashed streets lined with little shops, gaily decorated with gold and bright colours, form a fitting background to the smartly dressed groups moving about among them. We did not pause to make any purchases, but stopped the carriage at many points to admire the motley crowd and the curious and ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... of avowed reference to his own case throughout; and yet from first to last we are aware of young Mary Powell in the background. Inability for "fit and matchable conversation": this is that supreme fault in a wife on which the descant is from first to last, and from which, when it is plainly ingrained and unamendable, the right of divorce is maintained to be, by the law of God and all civil reason, the due deliverance. Hopeless ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... The Kew rose-garden has a wealth of roses, but it has, too, a wealth of old tree stems and broken branches which a garden meant for nothing but roses would hide. The herbaceous border grows luxuriant phloxes and delphiniums, but the background of glass houses sets a wrong light about it. The rock garden shows more rock and fewer masses of Alpine flowers than other English gardens more lately made, with better knowledge of what ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... which Napoleon had conferred upon the man he could not trust, but dare not openly distrust or dismiss, any more than could Louis XVIII. Even in the calmest and most peaceful times the Duke of Otranto remained menacing and terrible. The background which I see when I think of Fouch is not the Convention or the Committee of Public Safety. I see him as he is described to us by the youth who went to Lyons, to plead with him for the right to cross into Switzerland. He found Fouch busy. He was doing his best to execute ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... some object standing out against the vast background of sand, and soon was able to declare positively that there were two palm-trees ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... walked toward St. Andrew's Church and Tanfield Hall, where he insisted on taking me to get the "proper historical background," he told me about the great Disruption movement. He was extremely eloquent,—so eloquent that the image of Willie Beresford tottered continually on its throne, and I found not the slightest difficulty in giving an unswerving allegiance to the principles ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... face—a smile which seemed to Anne at once triumphant and taunting. In reality it was nothing of the kind. Gilbert was merely smiling with appreciation of the whole affair in general and of the effect produced by Anne's slender white form and spiritual face against a background of palms in particular. Josie Pye, whom he had driven over, sat beside him, and her face certainly was both triumphant and taunting. But Anne did not see Josie, and would not have cared if she had. She drew a ...
— Anne Of Green Gables • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... friendship more than willingly, vexed at being no longer able to gather any fruit from it for the advantage of the State or himself, wholly abandoned as he was to his Paris pleasures and to his minister. The conviction of my complete inutility more and more kept me in the background, without the slightest suspicion that different conduct could be dangerous to me, or that, weak and abandoned to Dubois as was the Regent, the former could ever exile me, like the Duc de Roailles, and Cariillac, or disgust me into exiling myself. ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... thousand scimitars flash in the sunlight, and thrice ten thousand dancing-girls strew flowers. Then, follow white elephants caparisoned in countless gorgeous colours, and infinite in number and attendants. Still the Cathedral Tower rises in the background, where it cannot be, and still no writhing figure is on the grim spike. Stay! Is the spike so low a thing as the rusty spike on the top of a post of an old bedstead that has tumbled all awry? Some vague period of drowsy laughter must be devoted to ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... her, as if she clutched my bleeding heart, and would clutch it till the last drop of life-blood ebbed away. She was my wife, and we hated each other. Gradually the hearth, the dim library, the candle-light disappeared—seemed to melt away into a background of light, the green serpent with the diamond eyes remaining a dark image on the retina. Then I had a sense of my eyelids quivering, and the living daylight broke in upon me; I saw gardens, and heard voices; I ...
— The Lifted Veil • George Eliot
... Hohenberg had been treated as enjoying equal privileges with her husband. During his short stay in Roumania the Archduke had the pleasure of seeing his wife treated as his equal and not as a person of slight importance, always relegated to the background. At the court balls in Vienna the duchess was always obliged to walk behind all the archduchesses, and never had any gentleman allotted to her whose arm she could take. In Roumania she was his wife, and etiquette was not concerned with her birth. The Archduke ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin
... jerks, between puffs, of his adventures; his first shot at a tiger, some trouble with hillmen at Peshawur, a row at a mess-table, in which two chaps lost their heads, and one his papers. He had been present as a guest, but had kept well in the background. There had been a lot of drinking done—luckily he was all right. He had a good head, you see; could carry a lot ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... mother. He'd come back to me a stranger. He'd come back a little ashamed of his shabby prairie mater, with her ten-years-old style of hair-dressing and her moss-grown ideas of things and her bald-looking prairie home with no repose and no dignifying background and neither a private gym nor a butler to wheel in the cinnamon-toast. He'd be having all those things, under Uncle Chandler's roof: he'd get used to ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... very unfavourably with Melbourne or Sydney. However, I soon modified my somewhat hasty judgment. We had seen the town's worst aspects, and later I noticed some attractive-looking shops; the imposing Houses of Parliament, in their enclosed grounds, standing out sharply defined against the hazy background of Table Mountain; and the Standard Bank and Railway-station, which would hold their own in any city. At the same time, as a place of residence in the summer months, I can well understand Cape Town being wellnigh deserted. Those who can ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... Mr. Ambassador," he grinned. "Extraterritoriality. Wonderful thing, extraterritoriality." He looked at Hoddy, who, for the first time since I had met him, was trying to shrink into the background. "And diplomatic immunity, too. Ain't ...
— Lone Star Planet • Henry Beam Piper and John Joseph McGuire
... much of it in Hannah's back yard as in either Virginia's or Nellie's—perhaps even a little more had drifted into the fence corners. Hannah's joy in discovering that in this respect she had not been slighted crowded her troubles into the background. Immediately after breakfast, bundled up snugly, she stood in her yard and threw snowballs toward her neighbors' homes, while she squealed with delight. In a very few minutes, three little girls were playing where ...
— The Little Mixer • Lillian Nicholson Shearon
... white. The euphorbia, acacia, and baobab or calabash-tree were all in bloom; and here and there, through openings between the trunks of the mangroves, glimpses were caught of rich splashes of deep orange-colour, standing out like flame against the dark background of shadowed foliage, that subsequent investigation proved to be clumps of elegant orchids. It appeared that we had entered the river at precisely the right time of the year to behold it at its brightest and best, ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... Only such a background as this could have evolved the conception of "Architecture, sculpture, and painting in motion" and given authenticity to its presentation. The validity of Lindsay's analysis is attested by Freeburg's ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... from distant parts of the North and West, and camped on the shores in the immediate vicinity of the town. When the fair was in full operation, a scene was represented well worthy of the bold brush of a Dore. The royal mountain, then as now, formed a background of rare sylvan beauty. The old town was huddled together on the low lands near the river, and was for years a mere collection of low wooden houses and churches, all surrounded by palisades. On the fair ground were to be seen Indians tricked out in their savage finery; coureurs ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... When the reason at length occurred to me, I felt very much disgusted with myself for being puzzled over so very simple a matter. After rain a flying swan may be visible to the eye at a vastly greater distance than during fair weather; the sun shining on its intense white plumage against the dark background of a rain-cloud making it exceedingly conspicuous. The fact that swans are almost always seen after rain shows only that ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... what life would be like with her beauty and talent if there were no vulgarly extravagant, unprincipled mother in the background, no insistent need to earn money, no gnawing ambition for a fame she already began to feel ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... don't," said John; "I've never had a chance to prove it. For years I have been kept in the background by your family. I'm never allowed to make a joke, and if I do nobody laughs. This is my chance. I'm going to be in the limelight now. I shall be the life of the party, and it's no good trying to stop me. In fact," he finished confidentially, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, December 22, 1920 • Various
... tell you what I do know—get my own knowledge of the background straight, so to speak. Now, as I understand it, the courts have agreed—temporarily, at least—that any person convicted of certain types of crimes must undergo a psychiatric ...
— Nor Iron Bars a Cage.... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... sky blue background representing the endless sky and a gold sun with 32 rays soaring above a golden steppe eagle in the center; on the hoist side is ...
— The 1995 CIA World Factbook • United States Central Intelligence Agency
... I give, of course, no theological opinion on its correctness: but as professor of Modern History, I am bound to set before you opinions which had the most enormous influence on the history of early Europe. Unless you keep them in mind, as the fixed and absolute background of all human thought and action for more than 1000 years, you will never be able to understand the doings ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... background to the left stands St. Augustine with one foot on a wooden Indian which is lying upon the ground. Why the artist decorated St. Augustine with a high hat and put his trousers inside his boots, and why he filled the saint's belt with navy ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... to remark, that while in all the other Slavic popular poetry, the musical element is prominent, it is in the Servian completely crowded into the background. Even the little lyric pieces, or female ballads, are not only in a high degree monotonous, but even without the peculiar sweetness of most popular airs. They also are ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... northward, we reached the entrance to the Midway Plaisance, directly east of which stood, encompassed by luxuriant shrubs and beds of fragrant flowers, like a white silhouette against the background of old and stately oaks, the daintily ...
— By Water to the Columbian Exposition • Johanna S. Wisthaler
... was raised above the level of the water, and shewed conspicuously; for the moonbeams reached the body before they fell on the surrounding water; for that reason then it was the body presented a strange and ghastly object against a deep, dark background, by which it ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... thing had happened in the strangest silence. Except for a feeble moaning from Aunt Jane, like the bleating of a sheep, which broke forth at intervals, nobody spoke or made a sound. The three riflemen in the background, standing like images with their weapons raised, looked like a well-trained ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... again, and as soon as the paint was dry went carefully over the letter part with gum, so delicately that the red colour was not disturbed nor the background smeared. ...
— The King's Sons • George Manville Fenn
... conscientiousness, and the heads are often wrought out with minuteness and fidelity, and have so much expression that they tell their own story clearly enough; but it seems not to have been the painter's aim to effect a lifelike illusion, the background and accessories being conventional. The trees are no more like real trees than the feather of a pen, and there is no perspective, the figure of the picture being shadowed forth on a surface of burnished gold. The effect, when these ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... O Zarathustra, wouldst view the ground of everything, and its background: thus must thou mount even above thyself—up, upwards, until thou hast even thy stars ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... no mouse-totem in the background. I do not feel quite convinced—the mouse being a totem, and a sacred or tabooed animal, in India and Egypt. {82a} But I am content to remain in a balance of opinion. That the Mouse is the Night (Gubernatis), ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... upon the Doraine. The illusion was startling. The ship seemed to be lying absolutely motionless; it was the land that approached instead of the other way round. A thin white beach suddenly emerged from the green background to the left, to the right an ugly mass of rocks took shape, stretching as far as the eye could reach. Farther inland rose high, tree covered hills, green as emeralds in the blazing sunlight. On a sea of turquoise lolled the ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... long line of white uniformed Cuirassiers in burnished corselets and black-plumed helmets; with the Lake for a background, and rank on rank of spectators on either side. In front, were the carriages of the Aristocracy of the Capital; and, as I galloped down to take post after the review, I could not but wonder how many ...
— The Colonel of the Red Huzzars • John Reed Scott
... own shortcomings lay; and then he began to go over the outlines again in the most simple fashion. After that, he sought, by scraping them off, to lose there, to mingle there, all the tones of the head and those of the background; and the face had assumed consistency and the shades vigour—the whole work had a look of greater firmness. At length the Marechale came back again. She even indulged in some hostile criticisms. The painter naturally persevered in his own course. After getting ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... sketch of this great book. It will at least serve to recall to the memory of some readers thoughts and words which long ago stirred their blood in youth. No volume could so fitly be chosen as a background against which to view the modern surge of the age-long battle. But the charm of Sartor Resartus is, after all, personal. We go back to the life-story of Teufelsdroeckh, out of which such varied and such lofty teachings sprang, and we read ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... continue to do the world's work, as they are best fitted to, these qualities in their representatives that have resulted in the present prejudice against them must be relegated to the background. The corporations must come out into the open and see and be seen. They must take the public into their confidence and ask for what they want, and no more, and be prepared to explain satisfactorily what advantage will accrue to the public if ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... in the dear old land of ready money, where the accident of birth doesn't give any man the right to sit on somebody else's neck, you'd be a big gun. You'd have money and a pull and probably, before you got through, you'd be investigated. Over here, you are deliberately kept in the background. You are the Patsy." ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade
... pictures as she had never seen, the world locked in the embrace of winter, glistening icicles as big as her body, cliffs thrown into strange, grotesque shapes, fields of untracked white with perhaps the sweep of a stream seeming ink black against the dazzling white background. ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory
... Oliver had arranged his palette the club had settled itself for work, the smoke from the pipes floating in long lines toward the ceiling, befogging the big white albatross that hung from a wire in the skylight. Munson, who had rubbed in a background of bitumen over a square tile, sat next to Fred, who was picking out, with the end of a wooden match, the outlines of an army-wagon sketched on a plate smeared with color. Simmons was looking over a portfolio that Watson, a new member, had brought with him, filled with a lot of his summer sketches ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... did not pronounce the word with his lips, his mind kept repeating: "Marechal—Marechal," as if to raise and challenge the shade. And on the black background of his closed eyelids, he suddenly saw him as he had known him: a man of about sixty, with a white beard cut in a point and very thick eyebrows, also white. He was neither tall nor short, his manner was pleasant, his eyes ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... point to Mr. Gladstone's agitation against Lord Beaconsfield's attitude at that period—was the drawing of the Prime Minister, leaning back comfortably reading in his armchair, declaring that he can see nothing at all about "Bulgarian Atrocities" in the Blue Books, though the background of the picture itself is all violence and butchery. Yet nobody recalled the fact that the artist had made a similar cartoon of Cobden and Palmerston in ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... remembered the morning, three days later, when Bruce went away. How blue the sky was, how clear the sunshine, how glorious the autumn pageant of the hills! Beside the gate a young maple burned like a shaft of flame. True, Bruce was only going to school now, but there was France in the background, a beckoning possibility with all that it meant of triumph and heroism and pain. That idea of France, and the fiery splendor of the hills, seemed to invest Bruce's strong young figure with a kind ...
— The Camerons of Highboro • Beth B. Gilchrist
... but love stories are women's affairs, and you know how good the boy is to me. A mother's word sometimes has more effect than a father's blow, and it is in life as it is in war; the light forces of archers go first into the field, and the heavily armed division stays in the background to support them; then, if the enemy will not yield, it comes forward and decides the battle. First let me speak to the lad. It may be that he threw the rose into Sirona's window only in sport, for she plays with his brothers and sisters as if she herself were one of them. I will question him; ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... rivers and roads running down on each side, has extended, and will further extend, the power of modern education, of unhampered ideas, of science and of humanity. From this magnificent view-point Sofia stretches along the low hill with the dark background of the Balkan beyond. Against that background now stands out the new embodiment of Bulgarian and Slavonic energy, genius, and freedom of mind, the great cathedral, with its vast golden domes brilliantly standing out from the shade behind them. In no other capital is a ...
— Bulgaria • Frank Fox
... American Republic, not from love of it, but on account of his detestation of England, provoked by her conduct during his desperate struggle against his Continental enemies, is, of course, on such occasions diplomatically kept in the background. ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... subject by "Phiz." A remarkable contrast in treatment; there is the suggestion of the pair being surprised. We see how the fat boy came on them. The old Manor Farm in the background, with its gables, etc., is a pleasing addition, and like all "Phiz's" landscapes, delicately touched in. The scared alarm on the two faces is first-rate—even Miss Wardle's foot as well as Tupman's is expressive. There appears to be ...
— Pickwickian Manners and Customs • Percy Fitzgerald
... corner; a most vicious chest of drawers snarled at her from between the windows. It was no relief to escape from those monsters to the looking- glass, for the reflection said, "What? Is that you all alone there? How you stare!" And the background was all a ...
— Tom Tiddler's Ground • Charles Dickens
... a huge, much-dinted musical instrument, hanging up outside against a background of uniforms, civil and military. Then, proudly and impetuously, he followed ...
— A Prince of Bohemia • Honore de Balzac
... pink candytuft for the border and single pink hollyhocks for the background with foxgloves right in front of them to cover up the stems at the bottom where they haven't many leaves and a medium height phlox in front of that for ...
— Ethel Morton's Enterprise • Mabell S.C. Smith
... crew, the one who made the most sensible suggestions, and to whom—though they teased her a little and called her "Grannie"—they all turned in the end for help and advice. Jess was slightly out of her element in a southern setting. Her appropriate background was moorland and heather and gray loch, and driving clouds and a breeze with fine mist in it, that would make you want to wrap a plaid round your shoulders and turn to the luxury of a peat fire. Quite unconsciously she suggested all these things. Peachy once ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... that, fresh from the tropic forests, and with their forms hanging always as it were in the background of my eye, I was impressed more and more vividly the longer I looked, with the likeness of those forest forms to the forms of our own Cathedral of Chester. The grand and graceful Chapter-house transformed itself into one of those green bowers, which, once ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... log, near a small rustic bridge, beneath which flowed a limpid, gurgling stream. On a log beside him sat a girl of perhaps eighteen years, exceedingly handsome with the flaming kind of beauty like a poppy's, striking to the eye, shallow-petaled. She was vividly effective against the background of deep green spruces and white birch in her bright pink dress and large drooping black hat. Her coloring was brilliant, her lips full, scarlet, ripely sensuous. Beneath her straight black brows her sparkling, black eyes gleamed with restless ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... against the background of dark foliage, were silently and dexterously manoeuvred by small, yellow, naked men, with long hair piled up on their heads in feminine fashion. Gradually, as we advanced farther up the green channel, the perfumes became more ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... of the Aryan family, and contain the revelation of Brahm which was preserved by tradition and collected by Vyasa, a name which means compiler. The word Veda, however, should be taken, as a collective name for the sacred literature of the Vedic age which forms the background of the whole Indian world. Many works belonging to that age are lost, though a large number ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... brightness wanted a foil, it was there; the gold glittered upon a cloudy background. My treasure was not exactly in my hand to enjoy. There might be many days before Thorold and I saw each other's faces again. Dangers lay threatening him, that I could not bear to think of; although I knew they were there. And even were ...
— Daisy in the Field • Elizabeth Wetherell
... controlled. I passed behind him once, and the odour that smote my olfactory sense told me too plainly that he had fortified himself with a stimulant on his way from the apartment to the laboratory. Of course O'Connor and Dr. Leslie were there, though in the background. ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... medium of sentiment and pathos? All this may be true. But the Yankee, after all, is a man, and as such his history, could it be got at, must have more or less of poetic material in it; moreover, whether conscious of it or not, he also stands relieved against the background of Nature's beauty or sublimity. There is a poetical side to the commonplace of his incomings and outgoings; study him well, and you may frame an idyl of some sort from his apparently prosaic existence. Our poets, we must needs think, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... spirits;' but what is their ministry, what the nature of their work, what their relationship to human beings?—all that was part of the instruction given in the Lesser Mysteries, as the actual communication with them was enjoyed in the Greater, but in modern days these truths have sunk into the background. For the Protestant the ministry of angels is little more ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... a menace to the social order. Their beauty shone out too boldly against a conventional background. But anxious mothers need have felt no alarm. They mistook the mettle of their sons. The respect for respectability was stronger than any ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather
... the future had Maxfield painted into the background. He loved the place as his own, as his sphere in life, as his destiny. Was that a dream after all? Were all his castles in the air to vanish, and leave him a mere dependant in ...
— Roger Ingleton, Minor • Talbot Baines Reed
... across the way I sought to go, while right and left, and within a foot of me, were two more burly figures. They were all in motion now, and as the lantern was borne closer it was thrown open, and, in what one of my neighbours would have called an augenblick, I saw in the background on one side the tilt of a wagon, and on the other the ...
— Charge! - A Story of Briton and Boer • George Manville Fenn
... had to be given to the scene that was going up in the background, borrowed from the Pan-Elocutionists. It was ...
— The Peterkin Papers • Lucretia P Hale
... external stimulus has been cut off. This "positive after-image" is like the main sensation, only weaker. There is also a "negative after-image", best got by looking steadily at a black-and-white or colored figure for as long as fifteen or twenty seconds, and then directing the eyes upon a medium gray background. After a moment a sensation develops in which black takes the place of white and white of black, while for each color in the original sensation the complementary color ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... how many ways this feeling appeals to us; it seems to be the background of our whole ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... while a skilled person, hired at a high price, rules in the dairy. The son rides a-hunting, and is glib on the odds. The 'offices'—such it is the fashion to call the places in which work was formerly done—are carefully kept in the background. The violets and snowdrops and crocuses are rooted up, all the sweet and tender old flowers ruthlessly eradicated, to make way for a blazing parterre after the manner of the suburban villa—gay in the summer, in the ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... successful only in the event of her being willing to be known and come out into the open. Suppose you write to her in care of the publishers. They would certainly forward the letter to wherever she may be. If she does not want you to know who she is she will ignore your letter and remain in the background. If, on the contrary, she has no fear of you, and is willing to meet you, she ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein
... New Inn, the background of this story, and one of the last surviving inns of Chancery, has recently passed away after upwards of four centuries of newness. Even now, however, a few of the old, dismantled houses (including ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... the struggle, the moon broke out from behind a great dark cloud, and there was seen struggling and labouring in the gale a ship whose sails caught the moonlight. She shone out vividly against the black background, but the lifeboatmen were horrified to see that, attracted by the lights of the Champion, she was heading straight for the terrible sea on the western jaw of the swatch, where she apparently thought she would find safe anchorage in ...
— Heroes of the Goodwin Sands • Thomas Stanley Treanor
... animated songs that were thus overloaded with meaningless embroideries by the sopranists and the prima donnas that followed them. Slow movements, which ought to breathe a spirit of melancholy, appear to have been especially selected as background for these vocal fireworks. I need not dwell on the unnaturalness of this style. To run up and down the scale wildly and persistently in singing a slow and sad song, is as consistent as it would be for an orator to grin and yodle ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... Finally, the stage opened a third time to show a new group, and this finished the representation. There were, then, only three movements to be made, that of the doors, that of the eyes, and that of the change of background. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 385, May 19, 1883 • Various
... say?" pursued Lepany. "Shall I say that the Ideal is, as it were, the Real distilled and sublimated in the alembic of the imagination? Shall I say that the Ideal is an image projected by the soul of genius upon the background of the universe? That it is that dazzling, that unimaginable, that incommunicable goal towards which the suns in their orbits, the stars in their courses, the spheres with all their harmonies, have been chaotically tending since time began! Ideal, say you? Call it ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... became general, artists were largely dependent on commissions in order to do any work except drawing. Fresco needed a wall, and work done in that manner could not be removed from place to place. The old-fashioned panel work with its gold background was so expensive that few artists could afford to paint pictures on the mere chance of selling them. But the facilities and the economy of pure tempera work, and work in oils, soon ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... manfully, and to do the world good service; but yet he may never win the smallest recognition or admiration in his school-days, while all the glory and honour and credit is still reserved for the graceful, attractive, high-spirited athlete, who may have nothing else in the background. ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... to bringing some relief to the guests at entertainments of this kind, I have endeavoured to construct one or two little winter pastimes of a novel character. They are quite inexpensive, and as they need no background of higher arithmetic or ancient history, they are within reach of the humblest intellect. Here is one of them. It is called Indoor Football, or ...
— Literary Lapses • Stephen Leacock
... Mikado's subjects on the opposite shores. Fusan has been nominally in the hands of the Japanese from very ancient times, although it was only in 1876 that a treaty was concluded by which it was opened to Japanese trade. The spot on which the settlements lie is pretty, with its picturesque background of high mountains and the large number of little islands rising like green patches here and there in the bay. Maki, the largest island, directly opposite the settlement, is now used as a station for breeding horses of very small size, and it possesses good pastures on ...
— Corea or Cho-sen • A (Arnold) Henry Savage-Landor
... replaced. And with all there are stories of gallantry, of sea rescues, of moving incidents wherein there is nothing but good to tell of the human animal. Would that it were all so. But it is not. The ruthlessness of the German rears itself like a sordid shadow against the background of Anglo-Saxon and Latin gallantry and heroism—a diminishing shadow, thank God, and thank, also, the navy of Great Britain ...
— Our Navy in the War • Lawrence Perry
... carefully before he aroused Nadia, who hurried into the control room. Looming large in the shortened range of the plate, their objective hurtled onward in its eternal course, its enormous velocity betrayed only by the rapidity with which it sped past the incredibly brilliant background of infinitely distant stars. Apparently it was a wild jumble of separate fragments; a conglomerate, heterogeneous aggregation of rough and jagged masses varying in size from grains of sand up to enormous chunks, ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... out of the window across a dull and apparently uninviting prospect of roofs and chimneys, to where in the background a faint line of silver and a wheeling flock of sea gulls became dimly visible through the branches of the distant trees. The window itself was flung wide open, but the slowly moving air had little of ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... those that shall come after us a blackened waste. The little one that lies in his cradle will be accursed for our sakes. Every child will be base-born, springing from ignoble blood. We inherited a fair fame, and bays from a glorious battle; but for him is no background, no stand-point. His country will be a burden on his shoulders, a blush upon his cheek, a chain about his feet. There is no career for the future, but a weary effort, a long, a painful, a heavy-hearted struggle to lift ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... the court, he soon put off the manners of a rustic and acquired the polished elegance of a courtier of the period. He spent much time in studying the drama of Parisian daily life, a brilliant, shifting series of gay scenes, with the revelation now and then of a cruel and sordid background. ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... brought bright again; and, accordingly, give the sober pictures to the professors, to be put right by rules of art. Then, the professors repaint the old pictures in all the principal places, leaving perhaps only a bit of background to set off their own work. And thus the professors come to be generally figured, in my mind, as the monkeys who tear holes in the pictures, to grin through. Then the picture-dealers, who live by the pictures, ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... its lustre to the fire on the hearth of every Christian household. Yet, for all that, they are inexperienced in those same stronger and darker passions of which they prate, and know nothing of the import of those pictures of them painted, with background of gloom and foreground of fire, in the works of the truly great masters. The disturbed spirit of such delineations is far beyond the reaches of their souls; and they mistake their own senseless stupor for solemn awe—or their ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... stair-case stood a young officer. He was leaning nonchalantly against the carved balustrade; the scarlet and gold of his uniform shone against a green background of palms, distinguishing his broad shoulders from among the rest. The palms screened him ...
— The Black Cross • Olive M. Briggs
... attracted the greatest attention. The countless bas-reliefs, cut on soft stone slabs, were pages from the history of the monarch in peace and war, in council, in the chase, or in processional rites. Beside him and around him his officers came in for a share of the background glory. Occasionally the common people had representations of their lives and their pursuits, but the main subject of all the valley art was the king and his doings. Sculpture and painting were largely illustrations accompanying a history written ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Painting • John C. Van Dyke
... appreciate the glorious beauties of the landscape. The Rivanna River looked like a ribbon of silvery satin laid on green velvet, all in striking contrast with the red soil of the tilled fields. The Blue Ridge mountains, nearly fifty miles distant, were, in the clear air, a massive and misty blue background for the picturesque Ragged Mountains near ...
— Rodney, the Ranger - With Daniel Morgan on Trail and Battlefield • John V. Lane
... guests, Philippa soon recovered her usual gay spirits. The news that Alec had disclosed the night before, which sent her stunned and heart-sick to her retreat in the old apple-tree, had faded into the background in the excitement of the fire. She thought of it all the time she was dressing, but the keenness of her distress was not so overwhelming as it had been. It was like some old pain that had lost its worst sting in ...
— Flip's "Islands of Providence" • Annie Fellows Johnston |
