"Blue-black" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... looked up in surprise to see why. A man was slowly passing the table. He was a thick, tall, strong man, moving with a freedom that bespoke smoothly working muscles. His complexion was florid; and this, in conjunction with a sweeping blue-black moustache, gave him exactly the appearance of a gambler or bartender. Only as he passed the table and responded gravely to the formal salutes, Keith caught a flash of his eye. It was gray, hard as steel, forceful, ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... drew near the surface, those denizens of the Mediterranean I could observe most productively belonged to the sixty-third genus of bony fish. These were tuna from the genus Scomber, blue-black on top, silver on the belly armor, their dorsal stripes giving off a golden gleam. They are said to follow ships in search of refreshing shade from the hot tropical sun, and they did just that with the Nautilus, as they had once done with the vessels of ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... charming nook where the streamlet of water falling from the tragic mask into the ancient sarcophagus ever sang its shrill and flute-like song; and the laurel-bush which shaded it, and the bitter box-plants and the orange-trees skirting the paths now formed but vague masses under the blue-black sky. Ah! how gay and sweet had that melancholy garden been in the morning, and what a desolate echo it retained of Benedetta's winsome laughter, all that fine delight in coming happiness which now lay prone upstairs, steeped in the nothingness of things and beings! So dolorous was the pang which ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... bold regard, she was dreaming, her thoughts at loose-ends, her eyes studying the incalculable depths of blue-black night that swirled and eddied beyond the window-glass. The most shadowy of smiles touched her lips, the faintest shade of deepened color rested on her cheeks.... She was thinking of—him? As long as he dared, the young man, his heart in his own ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... already," thought Mr. Walraven's ward; "and your tall women, with flashing black eyes and blue-black hair, are apt to be good haters. Very well, Miss Oleander; it shall ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming
... lines. Black; the head and thorax opake. Abdomen shining blue-black. The face with silvery pile on each side of the clypeus, and sprinkled with erect black hairs. Thorax: the posterior margin of the prothorax with a line of silvery pubescence; the metathorax with a short light-brown ...
— Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society - Vol. 3 - Zoology • Various
... refused to let him go. Everything, he feared, was against him—his youth, his foreign name, his limited acquaintance, the impossibility of giving definite information regarding his father's past occupations or present whereabouts. Moreover, his spare young figure, his thin shapely hands and feet, his blue-black Irish eyes and black hair, his energetic colourless face, his ready yet reticent speech—all these marked him as unusual and exotic. And for the unusual and exotic the British employer of labour—of ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... with a shock. He saw both figures for an instant painted in blue-black against the light, khaki-coloured canvas. The woman was very tall, as tall as Stanton, and on her head was something high, like a crown set with plumes. Stanton led her away, walking quickly. They went toward the low, black tents of the guardians of ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... pairs along the stem, under the leaves, from the axils of the true Solomon's seal. Later in summer, when hungry birds wander through the woods with increased families, the wild spikenard offers them branching clusters of pale red speckled berries, whereas the latter plant feasts them with blue-black fruit, in the hope that they will drop the ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... grass in front of his moccasins—tiny dried blades of yellow grass, and underneath them he saw the dark traceries of their shadows. Each had its own little shadow—its soul—its changeable thing—its other life—just as he himself was cut blue-black beside himself on the sandstone. There were millions of these grass-blades, and each one shivered in the wind, maundering to itself in the chorus, which made the prairie sigh, and all for fear of a big brown buffalo wandering by, which would ...
— The Way of an Indian • Frederic Remington
... Tertius. There was an enormously big and well-kept man, who had evidently not campaigned for years, clean-shaved, soft-voiced, and cat-like, but still Abanazar for all that he adorned the Indian Political Service; and there was a lean Irishman, his face tanned blue-black with the suns of the Telegraph Department. Luckily the baize doors of the bachelors' wing fitted tight, for we dressed promiscuously in the corridor or in each other's rooms, talking, calling, shouting, and anon waltzing by pairs to songs ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... harder struggle for existence, and the spaces of sand between were wider. But now the dreaded, glistening choya began to show pale and gray and white upon the rising slope. Round-topped hills, sunset-colored above, blue-black below, intervened to hide the distant spurs and peaks. Mile and mile long tongues of red lava streamed out between the hills and wound down to ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... come a flood iv rain, an' th nex' year another flood, an' th' third year there wasn't a lumper turned up that wasn't blue-black to th' hear-rt. We was betther off than most, an' we suffered our share, Gawd knows; but thim that was scrapin' th' sod f'r a bare livin' fr'm day to day perished like th' ...
— Mr. Dooley in Peace and in War • Finley Peter Dunne
... breasts, and her two shock-headed children, bare-legged and lightly shod, tug at her hands on either side. Then a grave man in a long, fur-trimmed robe, a merchant, maybe, debates some serious matter with a white-tunicked clerk. And the clerk's face——? I turn to mark the straight, blue-black hair. The ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... half-open eyes of a little baby; her lips and the lobes of her tiny ears were pale, a little suggestive of anaemia; while across the bridge of her nose ran an adorable little line of freckles. But it was to her hair that one's attention was most attracted. Heaps and heaps of blue-black coils and braids, a royal crown of swarthy bands, a veritable sable tiara, heavy, abundant, odorous. All the vitality that should have given color to her face seemed to have been absorbed by this ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... down the car. A tiny light flashed and then lay stretching its rays in a yellow ripple out into a blue-black immensity. A shadow, beyond it and entirely detached, appeared drifting slowly, and passed them, an empty "plop-plop" following vaguely in its wake. The road turned again, a little to the left this time, and swishing branches ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... against the table, with his agonised eyes fixed upon the blue-black square of the door. The man who had befriended me still swayed his body about with a singular half-smile upon his face. His skinny hand was twitching at the frill of his shirt, and I conjectured that he held some weapon concealed there. Toussac stood between ...
— Uncle Bernac - A Memory of the Empire • Arthur Conan Doyle
... dearest friends who had so recently and merrily assisted him in his "rags" that he was not playing the game and was no sportsman. He was moreover a ludicrous sight, his trousers being torn, one blue-black eye staring from a confused outline of dust and blood, his ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... still full of people buying and selling, but the murmur of their voices was faint and far away, less loud than the twittering of the thousands of swallows that soared and circled, with glistening of innumerable blue-black wings and soft sheen of white breasts, in the tender light of sunset above the facade ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... Jerichow, if I mistake not, on very bad paper, Friday, the 29th of January. I am very thankful that you do not write in the evening, my love, even if I am myself to suffer thereby. Every future glance into your gray-blue-black eye with its large pupil will compensate me for ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... ever-ready color into Anita's delicately lovely face. It was a beautiful ball, as all military balls are, and lasted late. When the C. O. and Mrs. Fortescue and Anita got home it was Christmas morning, and the stars that led the Magi to the crib at Bethlehem were shining gloriously in the blue-black sky. ...
— Betty at Fort Blizzard • Molly Elliot Seawell
... stepped into the living room, Greenleaf introduced the stranger. He was Mr. Withers—Mr. George S. Withers, husband of the murdered woman. He was of the extreme brunette type, his hair blue-black, his black eyes keen and piercing and always on the move. Bristow got the impression in looking at him that all his features, the aquiline nose, the firm, compressed mouth, the ...
— The Winning Clue • James Hay, Jr.
... then of what's happened to us, or where we are?" Miss Ruse persisted. She was a rather small girl with large, beautiful gray eyes and thick blue-black hair. At the moment, she was barefoot and in a sleeping outfit which consisted of something soft wrapped around her top, soft and floppy trousers below. The black hair was tousled and she looked around fifteen. She'd been asleep in her stateroom when something smacked the Queen, ...
— The Winds of Time • James H. Schmitz
... was neither Cantonese nor Pekingese. His long, rather supercilious face, his aquiline nose, the flare of his nostrils, the back-tilted head, the high, narrow brow, and the shock of blue-black hair identified the Chinese stranger, even if his abnormal, rangy height were not taken into consideration, as a hill man, perhaps Tibetan, perhaps Mongolian. Certainly ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... three, two, two, one," were his memory-tabulations as he moved down the stream. When but one speck of gold rewarded his washing, he stopped and built a fire of dry twigs. Into this he thrust the gold-pan and burned it till it was blue-black. He held up the pan and examined it critically. Then he nodded approbation. Against such a color-background he could defy the tiniest yellow ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... I am certain." Partah Singh paused, and his eyes wandered over the dark gardens, with their gleaming white colonnades and kiosks and graceful towers rising into the blue-black sky. He traced the starlight down to its reflection in the great tank before he spoke again. "If I should place my son and my kingdom under the protection of the English, what would happen in ...
— The Path to Honour • Sydney C. Grier
... inner circle of the inferno. Before them a tall, hideous warehouse broke forth into a horrible beauty. It was as though a tortured soul had burst bars. It roared and glowed and sent up petals of smoky rose and seeds of fire against the blue-black sky. The crowds pressed against the ropes and turned up their faces to drink in ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... they had had ashes sprinkled on the planks on purpose. But she begged him to let her alone, she almost pushed him back; she drew Verena out into the dark freshness, closing the door of the house behind her. There was a splendid sky, all blue-black and silver—a sparkling wintry vault, where the stars were like a myriad points of ice. The air was silent and sharp, and the vague snow looked cruel. Olive knew now very definitely what the promise was that she wanted ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... the Earl of Avondale came out of his close, hot stateroom into the refreshing coolness that preceded the dawn, the position of the Southern Cross, scintillating in the blue-black sky to port, told him that the steamer was headed in for the coast. The black surface of the quiet sea crinkled with lines of phosphorescent light under the ruffling of the faint breeze, which crept offshore heavy with the stench of rotting vegetation. It was evident ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... Every small oasis of turf, amongst the heath and by the wayside, carried its pretty crop of centaury and wild thyme, of bed-straw, milkwort, and birdsfoot trefoil. Furzechats tipped about the gorse bushes, uttering a sharp, gay, warning note. A big flight of rooks, blue-black against the ethereal blue of the distance, winged their way slowly homeward to the long avenue of dark trees leading to a farm in the valley. The charm of the place was clear and sane, its beauty simple almost to austerity. This the young girl welcomed. It washed her imagination ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... the insects have been preserved, who can tell? But there their children are, in myriads; and ere a generation has passed, every dead gray stem will have disappeared before the ants and beetles and great wood-boring bees who rumble round in blue-black armour; the young plants will have grown into great trees beneath the immeasurable vital force which pours all the year round from the blazing sun above, and all be as it was once more. In verity we are in the Tropics, where the so-called 'powers of nature' are in perpetual ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... and a golden complexion, and endued with eye large as lotuses; and he was shining and graceful as a god. And rich was his beauty blazing like the Sun; and he was exceedingly fair with eyes graceful and black. And his twisted hair was blue-black and neat and long and of a fragrant scent and tied up with strings of gold. A beautiful ornament was shining on his neck which looked like lightning in the sky. And under the throat he had two balls of flesh without a single hair upon ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... loss of the pullet brought with it a still further depression, and Jimmy forgot all about his impersonation of the "Bald Eagle." He lost his conceit in the red ochre stripes on his face, and the iridescent feathers in his hat, and the blue-black mud on his nimble feet. For a few moments he was just a sad-eyed boy who saw the hand of the whole world raised against him. The cry of the new baby rang in his ears. The thought of the other boys teasing him about the number of babies at his house ...
— The Court of Boyville • William Allen White
... that night on her narrow bed. She had raised the shade, and the stars were splendid in the blue-black sky. ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... of our having a gale, the barometer having fallen considerably since the morning; while the sea got up more and more and the horizon ahead became banked with a mass of blue-black clouds as dark as night, patches of lighter vapour also scudding rapidly ...
— Crown and Anchor - Under the Pen'ant • John Conroy Hutcheson
... set in his mouth; his lips were rubies; his symmetrical body was as white as snow; his cheek was like the mountain ash-berry; his eyes were like the sloe; his brows and eye-lashes were like the sheen of a blue-black lance."[104] ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... feel as if you had never before appreciated the loveliness of that rich tint. As your eye dwells upon it the rich lustrous violet darkens to indigo, and sinking into deeper hues becomes a majestic threat of color. It is ominous, vivid blue-black—solid, adamantine, a crystal wall of amethyst. It is all around you. You are cased, dungeoned in the solid masonry of the waters. It is beauty indeed, but the sombre and awful beauty of the night and storm. The eye turns for relief and reassurance to the paly-golden ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... sand is yet cozy as a blanket off the warm body of a squaw, and the jaguars are out to kill... with a blue-black night coming on and a painted cloud stalking the first star— I shall go alone into the Silence... the coiled Silence... where a cry can run only a little way and waver and ...
— Sun-Up and Other Poems • Lola Ridge
... I always use, is a compound of raw umber and a small portion of blue-black diluted to the shade required with strong size in solution: this must be used hot. It is evident that this will not require the preparatory sizing before the application of the varnish. Common coal, ground in water, and used the same as any other colour, I have found to be an excellent stain ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 188, June 4, 1853 • Various
... I'd thought those past weeks, for now it was all over I was like a rag. I got down on my knees, sir, and prayed to God for the salvation of my soul, and when I got up and climbed to the living-room it was half past twelve by the clock. There was rain on the windows and the sea was running blue-black under the sun. I'd sat there all that time not ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... lower and grayer than the color of the near-by branch as depicted on your paper, while the near-by branch, in comparison, pales into a sable gray-green, which you could perhaps get with yellow ochre, blue-black, ...
— Outdoor Sketching - Four Talks Given before the Art Institute of Chicago; The Scammon Lectures, 1914 • Francis Hopkinson Smith
... parson came William Penn in the glory of a new bridle and saddle and a blanket of crimson cloth; his coat smooth as satin, his mane a tumbling cataract of white silk; bunches of wild roses at his ears; his blue-black eyes never so soft, and seeming to lift his feet cautiously like an elephant bearing an ...
— The Choir Invisible • James Lane Allen
... it and looked at the wicked, blue-black outlines of an automatic pistol. Idly he examined the clip, crowded with shiny, yellow cartridges. He recognized the gun as Fallon's, and smiled as he ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... which the molten granite flowed. Some mischief-loving god has let in the sea while things were yet red-hot, and there has been a time here. But the channel still seems filled with water from the mid-Atlantic, cold and blue-black, and in places between seven and eight thousand feet deep (one and a half miles). In fact, the enormous depth of the Saguenay is one of the wonders of physical geography. It is as great a marvel in its ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... lime-tree on a knoll above the Serpentine. There was very little breeze, just enough to keep alive a kind of whispering. What if men and women, when they had lived their gusty lives, became trees! What if someone who had burned and ached were now spreading over him this leafy peace—this blue-black shadow against the stars? Or were the stars, perhaps, the souls of men and women escaped for ever from love and longing? He broke off a branch of the lime and drew it across his face. It was not yet in flower, but it smelled lemony and ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... grey shoji For the breadth of innumerable countries, Is the sea with ships asleep In the blue-black ...
— Japanese Prints • John Gould Fletcher
... than theirs when we drove up to as gloomy a hostelry as I have ever beheld, with the blue-black forest smoking wet behind it, to find that here also the foul weather had brought the season to a premature and sudden end, literally emptying this particular hotel. Nor did the landlord give us the welcome ...
— No Hero • E.W. Hornung
... prostrate before the Divinity of Womanhood itself. He realized the grandeur of the abstract in the individual. What was any spoiled, sweet young girl to that? And Mrs. Ewing was, in truth, a wonderful creature. She was a large woman with a great quantity of blue-black hair, which had the ripples one sees in antique statues. Her eyes, black at first glance, were in reality dark blue. Her face gave one a never-ending surprise. James had not known that a woman could be so beautiful. Vague comparisons with the Greek Helen, or Cleopatra, came into his head. ...
— 'Doc.' Gordon • Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman
... which was not lessened when his eyes fell upon a sheath knife and huge revolver in the stranger's belt. Involuntarily Rutherford's hand went to his hip pocket, where reposed a dainty, pearl-handled Smith and Wesson, 38-calibre, but he immediately regretted the movement, for the blue-black eyes watching him scintillated for a moment with a cold, steel-like glitter, and the lips under the heavy, black beard curled with a smile of fine scorn, that made our young ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... was petite, with a still unformed girlish figure, perhaps a little too flat across the back, and with possibly a too great tendency to a boyish stride in walking. Her brow, covered by blue-black hair, was low and frank and honest; her eyes, a very dark hazel, were not particularly large, but rather heavily freighted in their melancholy lids with sleeping passion; her nose was of that unimportant character which no man remembers; her mouth was small and straight; ...
— The Story of a Mine • Bret Harte
... to exercise. The visibility was frequently limited, particularly on overcast days; one would glide along over the sea ice, which was in places wind-swept and in others covered with snow. Nothing in sight but the gray-white shadow underfoot and the blue-black sky above, a streak or band just a mere smudge of daylight in the north, but this would be sufficient to give one direction to go out on. Then slowly, dim, spectre-like shapes would appear which would ...
— South with Scott • Edward R. G. R. Evans
... the landscape and a breath of cool air accentuated the silence which fell at this point. We both looked up, and saw the edge of a blue-black cloud peeping over the ...
— The Love Story of Abner Stone • Edwin Carlile Litsey
... Jamaica, Salvador, Cuba; from Morocco and Senegal; blue-black negroes from the Pacific; ebony negroes from the South; brown, tan, yellow, and buff negroes from everywhere inhabit San Juan. Every language from Arabic to Spanish is spoken by these—the ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... up the hill M'tela was prepared. The blue-black beard and hearty, deep-chested carriage of the ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al
... forsooth! While brown Dolores Squats outside the Convent bank With Sanchicha, telling stories, Steeping tresses in the tank, Blue-black, lustrous, thick like horsehairs, —Can't I see his dead eye glow, Bright as 'twere a Barbary corsair's? (That is, if he'd let ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... the houses beyond, the steeple of the Church of the Lifted Cross pierced the blue-black sky. It was tipped with a blazing cross—a great cross, flaming in the night: a symbol of sacrifice, a hope, a protest, raised above the feverish world. To this the boy looked. It transported him far from the woman whose hand ...
— The Mother • Norman Duncan
... ever see a finer turkey?" he said. "He must weigh all uv forty pounds, an' he's as fat as he can be with the good food uv the wilderness. An' he's a beauty, too! Jest look at them glossy blue-black feathers. No wonder so many hens wuz in love with him. I could be pop'lar with the women folks, too, ef I wuz ez handsome ...
— The Forest Runners - A Story of the Great War Trail in Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... And blue-black beetles transact business, And gnats fly in a host, And furry caterpillars hasten That no time be lost, And moths grow fat and thrive, And ...
— Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems • Christina Rossetti
... the chief reception-room seems like a large omnibus, lighted, dressed with flowers, and having a row of ladies on each side. The personal beauty is perhaps less than one expects, though one sees some superb dark eyes and blue-black hair; they dress with a view to the latest French fashions, and sometimes rather a distant view. At last a lady takes her seat at the piano, then comes an eager rush of gentlemen into the room, and partners ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... I met Eve. She was beautiful. Not like Maria, who is like a fragile, fair, spun-sugar angel. Eve was more earthy, with skin like ivory, creamy and rich and pale. Her blue-black hair she wore long and gathered in the back. She looked about twenty-five, but a streak of pure white ran back from each of her temples. She was the most striking woman I have ever met. I had never known anyone like her, nor have I since I saw ...
— Each Man Kills • Victoria Glad
... obviously a great event in the eyes of Mrs. Seventh Man Who Is So Angry He Wallows In The Mire. A laughing Juno of thirty years, large and rounded as a breadfruit-tree, more than six feet in height, with a mass of blue-black hair and teeth that flashed white as a fresh-opened cocoanut, she rose from her mat on the paepae and rubbed my nose ceremoniously with hers. Clothed in a necklace of false pearls and a brilliantly scarlet loincloth, she was truly a barbaric figure, yet in her eye I beheld that instant ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... four feet in height, leafless, hollow, swollen just below the middle, and tapers to the top. The flowers are either white or rose-colored, and are produced at the extremity of the stalk in a regular, globular group, or umbel. The seeds ripen in August. They are deep blue-black, somewhat triangular, and similar in size and form in all the varieties. An ounce contains about seventy-five hundred seeds, which retain their ...
— The Field and Garden Vegetables of America • Fearing Burr
... of gamboge, of sepia, of blue-black, of cobalt, and vermilion; and prepare gradated columns (exactly as you have done with the Prussian blue) of the lake and blue-black.[8] Cut a narrow slip, all the way down, of each gradated color, and set the three slips side by side; fasten them down, and rule lines at equal distances across ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... me, and thou shalt have dancing—or art thou tired, my lad?" cried a girl with blue-black hair, and a wild dark fire in her eyes. She tripped up and down, and clapped her hands. She had white teeth and hot breath, and would have dragged ...
— Weird Tales from Northern Seas • Jonas Lie
... wide and empty world. To the west in sleeping Bethlehem, to the east in flaring Herodium, the life of man was infinitely far away from him. Even the stars seemed to withdraw themselves against the blue-black of the sky. They diminished and receded till they were like pin-holes in the vault above him. The moon in mid-heaven shrank into a bit of burnished silver, hard and glittering, immeasurably remote. The ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... casements of a barrack beside the road, where the horses paused before the last pull. There was one little girl in particular, beginning to lisser her hair, as civilisation approached, in a manner not to be described, with her poor little blue-black hands. At the summit are the two usual grim little stone taverns, the steel-blue tarn, the snow-white peaks, the pause in the cold sunshine. Then we begin to rattle down with two horses. In five minutes we are ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... Dragon, the highest in rank among all the dragons. We have seen, however, that the original sutra already prescribed to use the blue colour and to face the East.... Indra, the rain-god, is the patron of the East, and Indra-colour is nila, dark blue or rather blue-black, the regular epithet of the rain clouds. If the priest had not to face the East but the West, this would agree with the fact that the Nagas were said to live in the western quarter and that in India the West corresponds with the blue colour. Facing the East, however, seems to point to an old ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... night-cap; who played the violin and stamped in time, and scolded and made faces at us when we were clumsy and awkward; the latter, a highly colored, beak-nosed young gentleman who squinted fearfully with magnificent black eyes, and had one shining, oily wave of blue-black hair, which, departing from above one ear, traversed his forehead in a smooth sweep, and ended in a frizzly breaker above the other. This gentleman showed us our steps, and gave us the examples of graceful ability of which his father was no longer capable. I ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... thought he had never seen her carry her dusky good looks more scornfully. With a movement of impatience she brushed back a rebellious lock of blue-black hair ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine
... Mars' Lupus?" he asked, barring my way with one wrinkled, blue-black hand on the brass door-knob. "Kaze ef you is, ...
— The Maid-At-Arms • Robert W. Chambers
... departed; in the great hall the lilt of the song and the frenzy of the fiddles for the dance and the amateur mouthings of the drama are heard no more. A multitude of turbanned clerks are pouring forth the blue-black ink from their pens; schoolmasters haunt the portals to press their claims for educational grants for their own particular schools; and the click of a chorus of typewriters is the only music that is borne ...
— The Story of Madras • Glyn Barlow
... stile, and looked with eyes that seemed blurred with impalpable flaws at a world in which even the spring buds were wilted, the sunlight metallic and the shadows mixed with blue-black ink. ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... then fell down and wept with his face in the grass. He had slept so long that now he could not sleep, and when his tears would come no more, he sat up and watched the night through till the dawn grayed the blue-black sky. The noises of the noiseless woods made themselves heard: the cry of a night hawk, the hooting of an owl, the whirring note of the whip-poor-will; the long, plunging down-rush of a dead branch breaking the boughs below it; even the snapping of twigs as if ...
— The Leatherwood God • William Dean Howells
... down the narrow stairway, past the open door of the room where Little-Dad lay snoring, and out across the veranda. In the dim light of the moon that hung low in the arc of the blue-black sky, Jerry made out the figure of her mother, standing near the rough bench that overlooked ...
— Highacres • Jane Abbott
... beside the "worm" fence, she crossed the yard and stood hesitating at the beginning of the open furrow he had left behind him. His gaze was bent upon the horses, and for a moment she watched him in attentive silence, her eyes dwelling on his massive figure, which cast a gigantic blue-black shadow across the April sunbeams. She saw him at the instant with a distinctness, a clearness of perception, that she had never been conscious of until to-day, as if each trivial detail in his appearance was magnified by the pale yellow sunshine ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... pocketin'"—he straightened up his back and spoke reverently—"but pocketin' is the deepest science and the finest art. Delicate to a hair's-breadth, hand and eye true and steady as steel. When you've got to burn your pan blue-black twice a day, and out of a shovelful of gravel wash down to the one wee speck of flour gold,—why, that's washin', that's what it is. Tell you what, I'd sooner follow ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... strain of Indian in me, sir," he explained, "my hair would be straight, thick, coarse, and blue-black. You will observe that it is wavy, a medium crop, of average ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... uncertainty. They were mostly strong, sound-looking men; two or three were middle-aged, the rest young. No one looked unequal to the work, and no one proved so. All wore the inevitable blue cotton of the Chinese, varying with wear and patching from blue-black to bluish-white, and the fashion of the dress was always the same; short, full trousers, square-cut, topped by a belted shirt with long sleeves falling over the hands or rolled up to the elbow according to the weather. About their heads ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... her abundant blue-black curls. Its two points of heavy, gold-embroidered cloth extended to her slim hips. The golden serpent, emerald-eyed, was clasped about her little round, determined forehead, darting its double tongue ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit
... tea-cup, as it lent additional greenness to the beverage, whereas the white made it look pinkish and distasteful. It was because he used cake-tea. Later on, when the tea masters of Sung took to the powdered tea, they preferred heavy bowls of blue-black and dark brown. The Mings, with their steeped tea, rejoiced in ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... called a "sportsman's paradise," there is in certain regions a great profusion of game, from turkeys to crocodiles. The guajalote, or Mexican wild turkey, with its great red beard and shimmering blue-black plumage, is a conspicuous inhabitant of Tamaulipas and other wild regions, and its low flight and plump body render it comparatively easy of securing, whilst it forms an excellent addition to the bill of fare. Huge wild cats abound in the broken country, and osos, or ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... daring flight beyond their wildest ambition. Salomy Jane accepted the change with charming unconcern. She put on her yellow nankeen sunbonnet,—a hideous affair that would have ruined any other woman, but which only enhanced the piquancy of her fresh brunette skin,—tied the strings, letting the blue-black braids escape below its frilled curtain behind, jumped on her mustang with a casual display of agile ankles in shapely white stockings, whistled to the hound, and waving her hand with a "So long, sonny!" to the lately bereft but admiring nephew, flapped and fluttered away in her short ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... Blue-black, the sky over Venice, With a pricking of yellow stars. There is no moon, And the waves push darkly against the prow Of the gondola, Coming from Malamocco And streaming toward Venice. It is black under the gondola hood, But the yellow ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell
... was, that man, tall and broad of shoulder, but the head of the woman, shining like blue-black satin in the morning sun, was level with ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... come alone. A big boy of twelve, with a shock head of blue-black hair, two wild, glittering black eyes, and a diabolically handsome face, came with her. It was her only brother Juan, an imp incarnate from his cradle. He did not remain long. To the unspeakable relief of the neighborhood for miles around, he had vanished as suddenly ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... that the serpent, irritated by the movement of Rutler, precipitated itself upon him, the latter aimed and fired. The serpent fell at his feet with his head crushed. It was of a blue-black, spotted with yellow, and some eight or nine feet ...
— A Romance of the West Indies • Eugene Sue
... otherwise would be. This is shown by the increasing depth of the sky-colour when seen from the tops of lofty mountains, while from the still greater heights attained in balloons the sky appears of a blue-black colour, the blue reflected from the comparatively small amount of dust particles being seen against the intense black of stellar space. It is for the same reason that the "Italian skies" are of so rich a blue, because the Mediterranean Sea on one side ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... 100 cambric morning-dresses, with bullion and heavy satin ribbons running through; one lined throughout with pink, the other with blue silk 1 rich black silk glace, trimmed 200 with bugles and black velvet 1 blue-black Irish silk poplin, 125 made in Gabrielle style, trimmed with scarlet velvet all round the skirt; sleeves and body-belt and buckle to match 1 Cashmere, shawl pattern, 100 morning-dress, lined; sleeves and flies lined with red silk, cord and tassels to match; not ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... thick, the aspect of the furniture dusty: Percival Heron's own appearance was not at that moment calculated to insure admiration. His hair was absolutely dishevelled; truth compels us to admit that he had not shaved that day, and that his chin was consequently of a blue-black colour and bristly surface, which could not be called attractive: his clothes were shabby to the last degree, frayed at the cuffs, and very shiny on the shoulders. Heron was a poor man, and had a good deal of the Bohemian ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... approaches you (more happy than I, who cannot) did but know you as well as I (more happy than he, who does not) he would strew his days about you even as white apple-blossoms and his nights as blue-black heart's-ease; for then he should be your true faithful-serving lover — as am I — and should desire — as I do — that the general pelting of time might become to you only a tender rain of such flowers as foretell fruit and of such ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... island in their group, to display any object of a white color—the national color of the Hili-lites. So strict and inclusive was this command, that the natives were ordered to take each of their descendants as soon as his teeth appeared, and color them with an indelible, metallic blue-black dye, repeating the operation every year up to ten, and thereafter once in five years. The command closed with the statement that the natives would be allowed to retain the whites of their eyes, but only for the ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... murmured, gazing into the blue-black east which drew him with something more than a curious interest, "there was anything like that up in those ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... old Umpire is nearing her Northern home once more; and surely this is a right royal evening for the reception of her. What although the sun has just gone down, and the sea around them become a plain of heaving and wrestling blue-black waves? Far away, in that purple-black sea, lie long promontories that are of a still pale rose-color; and the western sky is a blaze of golden-green; and they know that the wild, beautiful radiance is still touching the wan walls of Castle ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... after leaving the mouth of the Ohio, the boat had passed the third Chickasaw Bluff, and was within fifty miles of Natchez, when blue-black clouds suddenly overcast the sky, and a violent storm burst upon the river. Buffeted by opposing forces, the Mississippi soon began to fume and rage like a wrathful brute. The three passengers were ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... with the prisoners, either male or female, for how could they escape in the centre of that huge plain? The Emir came towards them once, and stood combing out his blue-black beard with his fingers, and looking thoughtfully at them out of his dark, sinister eyes. Miss Adams saw with a shudder that it was always upon Sadie that his gaze was fixed. Then, seeing their distress, he gave an order, ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... several signs that rain was near. For one thing, a very sure sign, distant ridges had shown themselves sharply clear in the afternoon sunshine, and had looked far nearer then they were. Now great blue-black clouds began to roll slowly ...
— The Wolf Patrol - A Tale of Baden-Powell's Boy Scouts • John Finnemore
... of the Crab, and the half darkness allowed him a glimpse of that vast blue-black back, and the motionless eyes. Now and again he thought that he heard some one sobbing, but the ...
— Kipling Stories and Poems Every Child Should Know, Book II • Rudyard Kipling
... flat on the sand, the sunlight pouring like a silver liquid into the blue-black masses of her hair, her narrow brows, her thick eyelashes. Presently she fell asleep. Clara leaned against a low ledge of rock and spread her coppery mane across its surface. It dried almost immediately; she divided it into plaits and coils ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... Ivan Ivanovitch! splendid! And what lambskin! deuce take it, what lambskin! blue-black with silver lights. I'll forfeit, I know not what, if you find any one else owning such a one. Look at it, for heaven's sake, especially when he stands talking with any one! look at him side-ways: what a pleasure it is! To describe it is impossible: ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... of his pink cloak, ran a hand under one, and thrust into the firelight a foot-long embroidered presentment of the great god Krishna, playing on a flute. The heavy jowl, the staring eye, and the blue-black moustache of the god made up a ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... and tumbled mass, blue-black but attended by a copper-colored rack, detached itself from a shelf-like stratum of cloud, and elongating, seemed to descend to the surface of the sea. Daylight went out instantly and a prolonged moan came from ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... made him lose contact with that shadow. He looked down. From the gravel, from under rocks, gathered an army of blue-black, hard-shelled things, their clawed forelimbs extended, blue sense organs raised on fleshy stalks well above their heads, all ...
— Star Hunter • Andre Alice Norton
... new-risen sun burning his back through two thin shirts. He seemed in no doubt this morning as to the course he should take. He scarcely gave a glance at the trail. His eyes were staring straight before him at a sullen row of blue-black "thunder heads" that showed above the gray skyline. Yet he did not see them, did not give a ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... to strike, the thick wrist was seized from behind and he was spun violently about to glare into the smiling eyes of the cowpuncher—eyes in which a steely glint flickered behind the smile, a glint more ominous even than the feel of the muzzle of the blue-black six-gun that pressed deeply into his flabby paunch just above the ...
— The Texan - A Story of the Cattle Country • James B. Hendryx
... phrase, "You cannot eat your cake and have it." You cannot have a large quantity of blue rays present in your direct sunlight and have a luminous blue sky. The latter must always be light scattered from the former. Now, in the high Alps you have, on clear day, a deep blue-black sky, very different indeed from the blue sky of Italy or of England; and as it is the sky which is the chief agent in lighting up the shadows, not only in those regions do we have dark shadows on account of no intervening—what I will call—mist, but because the sky itself is so little luminous. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 595, May 28, 1887 • Various
... of the cleanest ships afloat. Her blue-black side, anointed daily with some mysterious compound rubbed on with serge, a compound the exact ingredients of which were known only to her commander and the painter who mixed it, was as smooth and as shiny as a mahogany table. Her decks were as clean as scrubbers, holystones, ...
— Stand By! - Naval Sketches and Stories • Henry Taprell Dorling
... daughter, Eulodia, was about fifteen as I first remember her, a tall slim handsome girl with blue-black hair, black eyes, coral-red lips, and a remarkably white skin without a trace of red colour in it. She was no doubt just like what her mother had been when the dashing impressionable young George Royd had first ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... heavy black belt about his waist. Attached to the belt were at least a dozen weapons: several grenades, a pistol, another pistol with a flaring muzzle, a long knife, a glassy looking tube fitted to a pistol-butt, and a blue-black ugly thing which was shaped like an ...
— Hunters Out of Space • Joseph Everidge Kelleam
... dances; very different from the steps that kept time to a wild, weird music, stirring but scarcely bending the grass-blades. There is no color in their flaxen locks, and little light in their pale-blue eyes; these will not bear comparison with the smooth, braided tresses that glistened like blue-black serpents, or the glances that rained down liquid fire through the twilight of the forests of Elf-land. Slowly the discontented dreamer realizes the fact that the spell is still upon him—riveted when he stole that first fatal kiss in despite of his mistress's ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... steamer passes from one small station to another, dropping a mail-bag, and perhaps a passenger or two. We pass farms lying close to the shore, the wooden houses being in many cases painted red or white, and thus forming a brilliant contrast to the blue-black mountains and dark green forests which rise up behind them. We see every now and then a clean white wooden church, and, away up on the mountain-sides we can discern tiny specks, which, we are told, ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Norway • A.F. Mockler-Ferryman
... were the pillars of the Giant's Causeway, blue-black against the sun. They were made so that the Finn MacCool, the champion of the giants, could take a running jump over to Scotland and he going deer-hunting in the forests of Argyll. So the country folk said, but wee Shane thought different, knew ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... paling the blue-black sky as the radio engineer returned. The street lights fluttered fitfully and at last died. The streets had become deserted although groups still eddied slowly about the ...
— The End of Time • Wallace West
... journey's end, I recollect, I went into a public-house. There was a person there whose presence made a deep impression upon my memory. A fine stocky lad, with a great square jaw, heavy beery jowls, and a blue-black, bearded chin; in a blue striped collar. He put both hands firmly on the bar-rail at a good distance apart; straightened his arms taut and his body at right angles with them, so that he resembled a huge carpenter's square; then curled his back finely in, and said, ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... of earth, blurred and ragged clouds showed every conceivable tone of umber and grey, from purest pearl-white to darkest depths of indigo. Only low down, where a blue-black mass ended with level abruptness, a flaming strip of day was splashed along the west—one broad brush-stroke, as it were, by some Titanic artist whose palette held liquid fire. Snows and mist alike caught and flung back the radiance in a maze of rainbow ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... lingering under the long curling lashes that made her blue eyes so dark, and her hair was as black at midday as at midnight. So that now—when she shook her head at the boy—a wonderful long, thick, silky lock escaped its fastenings, and the wind caught it and spun it like silk into the finest blue-black floss. ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... this time concentrating his attention on shags or cormorants. This species of cormorant is peculiar to the island, being found nowhere else. They are blue-black, with a white breast, and on the head they have a small black crest. At the top of the beak are golden lobes, while the skin immediately round the eye is pale blue. They remain on the shores of the island all the year and nest on the rocks in or very close to the ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... yacht club were reflected in the blue-black mirror of the boat basin. Bud parked and ...
— Tom Swift and the Electronic Hydrolung • Victor Appleton |
