"Checkered" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... he turned and hurriedly left the gardens, his breast swelled with exultation. When he was out of sight, the hunchback whistled softly, and Cocardasse and Passepoil came out of the shadow of the trees. The lights were now rapidly dying out, and the gardens lay in darkness checkered ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... about him is admirably expressed: he appears on the pinnacle of triumph; his charger snuffs the very gale of glory, and the uncurbed energy of exultation seems to animate those immediately around him. The eye descends to the checkered toil beneath: the brawny soldier bearing the delicate form of his lovely wife, which is well contrasted with the bold, muscular figure of the former: the exhausted youth, and the veteran directing the army, but especially the former, are finely drawn and painted: ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 541, Saturday, April 7, 1832 • Various
... first time in hours he seemed to have returned to his usual placid self. "Good thing somebody in this spacer watches Video serials—Ali, you can brief us on all the latest tricks of space pirates. Nothing is so wildly improbable that you can't make use of it sometime during a checkered career." ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... may have caught on thy chisel and broken from its fastening. Thou dost remember that the floor was checkered with deep black shadows." ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... the historian of Karaism. This school, the only educational establishment of its kind during that period, served in Odessa as a center for the "Friends of Enlightenment." Being a new city, unfettered by traditions, and at the same time a large sea-port, with a checkered international population, Odessa outran other Jewish centers in the process of modernization, though it must be confessed that it never went beyond the externalities of civilization. As far as the period under discussion is concerned, the ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... down beside the red-and-white-checkered cloth spread on the ground, and Wade, after passing the still fretting baby to his wife, ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... The war continued with checkered results and heavy losses on both sides in the two following years. An invasion of the canton of the Agniers, by the French, was at first successful, but in the retreat the colonists suffered great privation, and most of their prisoners escaped, while any of their number that ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... moon was stealing above the horizon. Under its light the mesa took form out of the darkness—the level sagebrush plain criss-crossed by willow-lined ditches and checkered by small Mexican fields, the winding shimmering Burntwood River with its border of cottonwoods, the narrow road, the distant town of San Mateo, a vague blot of shadow picked out by ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd
... gadding town, we enter within their covert as we go under the roof of a cottage, and cross its threshold, all ceiled and banked up with snow. They are glad and warm still, and as genial and cheery in winter as in summer. As we stand in the midst of the pines, in the nickering and checkered light which straggles but little way into their maze, we wonder if the towns have ever heard their simple story. It seems to us that no traveller has ever explored them, and notwithstanding the wonders which science is elsewhere revealing every day, who would not like to hear their ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... one shoots off his big bazoo while the TV's on is gonna find hisself cut off without a dollar—" his voice suddenly softened and sweetened—"when they wave that checkered flag at the Indianapolis Speedway, and old Gramps gets ready for the Big ...
— The Big Trip Up Yonder • Kurt Vonnegut
... in consequence of her father's checkered career, this girl of sixteen had passed through a much greater variety of experience than most women have known at thirty. Her mother, too, had for some time suffered almost continuously from ill-health, so that the eldest ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... her thoughts were turned, when, just as she attained the middle of the avenue, the imperfect and checkered light which found its way through the silvan archway, showed her something which resembled the figure of a man. Lady Peveril paused a moment, but instantly advanced;—her bosom, perhaps, gave one startled throb, as a debt to the superstitious belief of the times, ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... the ways of the valley! That day when we rode into it every tree seemed to be waving its green arms in salute. As we swung through the gap, around the bend at the saw-mill and into the open country, checkered brown and yellow by fields new-ploughed and fields of stubble, a flock of killdeer arose on the air and screamed a welcome. In their greeting there seemed a taunting note as though they knew they had no more to fear from me and could be generous. I saw every crook in the fence, ...
— The Soldier of the Valley • Nelson Lloyd
... long before the little hostelry was full to overflowing with officers and men of every arm of the service. There was not a vacant table, and the bright uniforms shone resplendent against the green background of leaves checkered with spots of sunshine. Major Bouroche had just come in and taken a seat beside Rochas, when Jean presented himself ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... step, near the shadow of the wall; she is poorly dressed; her age is between forty and fifty; her forehead is bound with a red checkered handkerchief, from which hang meshes of uncombed hair. The face is red and the eyes blurred, and she moves with her look bent down on the ground. Her right hand is in her pocket, or in the bosom of her half-unbuttoned ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... fane, and the many alliances of his descendants. The sheen of their blazonry gleamed bright in the darkness, as if to herald to his last home another of the line whose achievements it displayed. Glowing colorings, checkered like rainbow tints, were shed upon the broken leaves of the adjoining yew-trees, and upon the ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... but a sorry partner, but she undertook to instruct me. O'Brien was our vis-a-vis with Miss Euterpe. The other gentlemen were officers from the ships, and we stood up twelve, checkered brown and white, like a chess-board. All eyes were fixed upon Mr Apollo Johnson, who first looked at the couples, then at his fiddle, and lastly, at the other musicians, to see if all was right, and then ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... for outside missionary work in a needy part of the city, has had a checkered but useful experience. Once it was burned. It was rebuilt in 1890. Here Miss Martha J. Adams was wont to meet people, young and old, and dispense aid and comfort along many lines. Here, too, have been held for many years Sunday-school ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 54, No. 2, April, 1900 • Various
... spare ammunition, and various other articles that would be required here, buried under a heap of stones near the stream, and on the morning of the 2d set out for the ships. The change which one week had made upon the ice it is quite impossible to conceive, the whole surface being now checkered with large and deep pools of water, where not a symptom of thawing had before appeared. This continued the whole way to the ships, which we reached at eight P.M., finding Captain Lyon and his party returned, after a laborious but ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... his brilliant artery blood spurting ten feet as straight and bright as a ray of light. There was a great burst of jolly laughter all around from friend and foe alike; and thus closed one of the pleasantest incidents of my checkered military life. ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain
... meaning by example. A writer in a newspaper wished to state that a man who had once caused excitement by a book of temporary interest and who, after the days of his notoriety were over, lived a long and checkered career, had killed himself. This is ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various
... derived the name of one of its higher degrees; and its armorial bearings, consisting of pictures of the Lion, the Bull, the Waterman, and the Flying Eagle, which representing the signs at the cardinal points, constituted the genii of the seasons. Besides these, we have the checkered flooring or mosaic work, representing the earth and its variegated face, which was introduced when temple worship succeeded its grove form; the two columns representing the imaginary pillars of heaven resting upon the earth at Equinoctial points, and supporting ...
— Astral Worship • J. H. Hill
... the mud-hole where we last took leave of the reader, we pursued our way for some time along the narrow track, in the checkered sunshine and shadow of the woods, till at length, issuing forth into the broad light, we left behind us the farthest outskirts of that great forest, that once spread unbroken from the western plains to the shore ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... through the mismanagement of the Regents." It appeared at first as a large 16-page pamphlet, three columns to the page. At the same time the Chronicle was established, a sophomore annual appeared, The Oracle, which had a long and checkered career as a champion ...
— The University of Michigan • Wilfred Shaw
... is finished, and occupied by patients, as is also the south end of the east front. The theatre for lectures on surgery and medicine will accommodate 150 students. Immediately adjoining it is the museum of anatomical preparations. The entire edifice is faced with compost, coloured and checkered in imitation of stone. The hospital, when complete, will contain 29 wards, and 460 beds. The contracts for building the whole amount ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, Number 489, Saturday, May 14, 1831 • Various
... been more simply or humbly affirmed, and no man I think could have been more helplessly sincere. He had nothing of that false self-respect which forbids a man to own himself wrong promptly and utterly when need is; and in fact he owned to some things in his checkered past which would hardly allow him any sort of self-respect. He had always an essential gaiety not to be damped by any discipline, and a docility which expressed itself in cheerful compliance. "Why do you use bias for opinion?" I demanded, in going ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... or lady-birds as they are often called, are fairly uniform in shape and color. They are oval or round in outline with the back rounded or elevated and the underside flat. In color they are usually either orange or yellow, checkered or blotched with black or black with yellow or bright orange markings. They closely resemble small tortoises. Unfortunately several plant feeding beetles are similar in shape and color which casts reflections ...
— An Elementary Study of Insects • Leonard Haseman
... of kings form an impressive chapter in the history of Europe; and one of the most striking episodes in the narrative is the checkered life of the last king of France—one week among the mightiest monarchs on the loftiest pinnacle of ambition, he was, the next, an exile in a foreign land—his past ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... several islands of the Solomon archipelago, amongst others the Three Maries and San Juan. Upon the latter island, whilst the ships were being repaired and calked, several affrays with the natives occurred, in which some prisoners were made. After this checkered rest, Mendana again put to sea, and visited the islands of San Christoval, Santa Catalina, and Santa Anna. But as by this time the number of invalids was considerable, the provisions and ammunition nearly exhausted, and the ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... word the sons of Pandu went with Draupadi into exile, and passed twelve years in the wilderness; and many were the incidents which checkered their forest life. Krishna, who had stood by Yudhishthir in his prosperity, now came to visit him in his adversity; he consoled Draupadi in her distress, and gave good advice to the brothers. Draupadi with a woman's pride and anger ...
— Maha-bharata - The Epic of Ancient India Condensed into English Verse • Anonymous
... interesting as the history of Nevada itself is the excited checkered career of this man, who at an early date left his native State of California where he had risen from the ranks of private to Adjutant of the 10th Battalion Infantry Guards and had sought in preference the dangers ...
— Reno - A Book of Short Stories and Information • Lilyan Stratton
... a graduate of West Point, and while still a young man had served with marked credit for some twelve years in the army. But he had more than a military education. Through a checkered career in civil life, he had enlarged his knowledge of the country, his acquaintance with men, his experience in affairs. He had been a banker in California, a lawyer in Kansas, President of a college in Louisiana, ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... being the rendezvous of drug-fiends. Long wanted and at last cornered, Frazer had fought tigerishly and died in his tracks, preferring death to capture. A sly and secretive creature, he had had a checkered career in the depths. It was his one boast that more than anybody else he had known and been a sort of protege of the once notorious Slippy McGee, that King of Crooks whose body had been found in the East River ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... have never seen, or been among the prairie Indians, have by the lapse of time and the many exciting scenes through which I have passed become in a measure effaced from my mind. But I shall endeavor to relate as fully as possible my checkered experiences; and this narrative, whatever its demerits, will have at least one attribute of excellence, it will adhere ...
— Seven and Nine years Among the Camanches and Apaches - An Autobiography • Edwin Eastman
... were by this time drawn up five rows deep, and a dense mass of them spread along the barriers, checkered by the light coats of white horses. Beyond them other carriages stood about in comparative isolation, looking as though they had stuck fast in the grass. Wheels and harness were here, there and everywhere, according as the conveyances to which they belonged were side by side, at an ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... knife at his belt, he looked so cruel and inexorable that one would have thought he was going to engage in bloody strife with his fellow men rather than to hunt a small animal. Around the hind legs of his horse the hounds gambolled like a cluster of checkered, restless balls. If one of them wished to stop, it was only with the greatest difficulty that it could do so, since not only had its leash-fellow also to be induced to halt, but at once one of the huntsmen would wheel round, crack his whip, ...
— Childhood • Leo Tolstoy
... him that I was not game enough just then to address him, and demand a satisfactory answer concerning what seemed inexplicable in him. .. Meanwhile, he continued the business of undressing, and at last showed his chest and arms. As I live, these covered parts of him were checkered with the same squares as his face; his back, too, was all over the same dark squares; he seemed to have been in a Thirty Years' War, and just escaped from it with a sticking-plaster shirt. Still more, his very legs were marked, as if a parcel of dark green frogs were ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... muscle under fluid control. It never paid to talk back, to allow any sign of defiance to show. He would go through the motions as if he were a bad little boy who had realized his errors. It was a meek-and-mild act that had paid off more than once in Ross's checkered past. So he faced the man seated behind the desk in the other room with an uncertain, diffident smile, standing with boyish awkwardness, respectfully waiting for the other to ...
— The Time Traders • Andre Norton
... rustling against his domino. He was wandering in the garden of what is termed the Schwarzpanier House, situated on a slope or glacis in the outskirts of Wahring. The evening was so far advanced, that candles already twinkled from the upper windows of the building, while the fires of the kitchens checkered the shrubs and gravel with patches of glaring light. Through the flowerbeds, and along the intricate paths of the shrubbery, the Alchemist strolled at a languid pace, musing upon the things he had already ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... glass window, the sun cast a medley of lines and lights on her hands, and on the checkered table-cloth. There were two rough benches, and a square table; the coffeecups stood on a metal tray; the lid of the pot was odd, did not match the set: all these inanimate things, which, a moment ago, Maurice had seen without seeing them, now stood out before his eyes, as if each of ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... a striped skirt and a white jacket fitted to her waist. The checkered shadows cast by the tree made spots of light and darkness over her face and her uncovered neck, the top button of her camisole being unfastened on account of the heat. De Buxieres had been perfectly ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... with the youth, he was loudly dressed, wearing a light checkered suit with a cap to match and a flaming red ...
— The Rover Boys Under Canvas - or The Mystery of the Wrecked Submarine • Arthur M. Winfield
... me more than once stumbling away across rock-tumbled Gatun dam that squats its vast bulk where for long centuries, eighty-five feet below, was the village of Old Gatun with its proud church and its checkered history, where Morgan and Peruvian viceroys and "Forty-niners" were wont to pause from their arduous journeyings. They call it a dam. It is rather a range of hills, a part and portion of the highlands that, east and west, enclose the valley ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... that it had the same effect on the landscape that a glass has on a picture, to give it an ideal remoteness and perfection. The landscape was clothed in a mild and quiet light, in which the woods and fences checkered and partitioned it with new regularity, and rough and uneven fields stretched away with lawn-like smoothness to the horizon, and the clouds, finely distinct and picturesque, seemed a fit drapery to hang over fairy-land. The ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... year later): "My clothes, too, began to decay; as to linen, I had had none a good while, except some checkered shirts, which I carefully preserved, because many times I could bear no other clothes on. I had almost three dozen of shirts, several thick watch coats, too hot ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison
... and yet I sometimes think it's wery hard to be shut up here, a wearin' checkered clothes, a livin' on cold vittles, a sleepin' on iron beds, a lookin' out upon the world through iron muskeeter bars, and poundin' stun like a galley slave, day after day, week after week, and year after year, while my brother thieves (for to speak ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 7 • Charles Farrar Browne
... was certain that the little foreign image-vender had indeed departed, Eve stole over to the bench beneath the lofty arches of the elm-tree, all checkered with flickering sunlight, and endeavored to read the sentence carved thereon. It was at first undecipherable, and then, the text conquered, not easy for her to comprehend. But when she had made it hers, she rose, bathed with blushes, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... half-way out of bed to go to her assistance, and then lay down again and called himself a fool. At last he could stand it no longer, and taking a burning brand from the broken stove that stood in the centre of the room, he went to the door and looked out. The great arc-light of the moon had checkered the snow-crust with inky shadows, and patches of dazzling white. The cold air struck him like needles, and he said to himself that it was no wonder that either a cat or a woman should cry if she had to stay out in the snow on such a night. The moaning and wailing ceased as ...
— Forest Neighbors - Life Stories of Wild Animals • William Davenport Hulbert
... help you. Try whether it does or not: and if the patterned drapery confuses you, keep for a time to the simple white one; but if it helps you, continue to choose patterned stuffs (tartans and simple checkered designs are better at first than flowered ones), and even though it should confuse you, begin pretty soon to use a pattern occasionally, copying all the distortions and perspective modifications of it among the folds ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... historian; a writer who, in the words of his epitaph,—written by Dr. Johnson, and with no extravagant eulogium,—touched all subjects, and touched none that he did not adorn,—nullum quod tetigit non ornavit. His life was a strange melodrama, so varied with laughter and tears, so checkered with fame and misfortune, so resounding with songs pathetic and comic, that, were he an unknown hero, his adventures would be read with pleasure by all persons of sensibility. There is no better illustration of the subjective in literature. It is the man who ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... Woven of the willow white, Lent a dimly checkered light; And the night-stars glimmered down, Where the lodge-fire's heavy smoke, Slowly through an opening broke, In the low roof, ribbed with oak, Sheathed ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... and should be made by our friends themselves. Europe, for example, is now marked by checkered areas of labor surplus and labor shortage, of agricultural areas needing machines and industrial areas needing food. Here and elsewhere we can hope that our friends will take the initiative in creating broader markets and more dependable currencies, to allow greater exchange of goods ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Dwight D. Eisenhower • Dwight D. Eisenhower
... the very picture of an old dame, with a black bonnet, high-crowned and crescent shaped in front, with a white muslin cap below, a buff handkerchief crossed over her shoulders, a dark short-sleeved gown, long mittens covering her arms, and a checkered apron; a regular orthodox birch-rod by her side, and a black cat at her feet. But her head was shaking with palsy, and she hardly seemed to understand what Lizzie screamed into her ear that, "Here was ...
— The Carbonels • Charlotte M. Yonge
... but one can scarcely grudge to his sickly sensitive nature the anodyne of feminine sympathy. Why so close and tender a friendship never ripened into marriage is an inquiry that may be consigned to the limbo of questions insoluble. It is enough that in the checkered chronicle of the loves of the poets, "blue-eyed Patty Blount" has an immortality almost as secure ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... whose loins I sprang, is called the Old Clump. It sits there with bare head but mantled sides, looking southward and holding the home farm of three hundred and fifty acres in its lap. The farm with its checkered fields lies there like a huge apron, reaching up over the smooth sloping thighs on the west and on the east and coming well up on the breast, forming the big rough mountain fields where the sheep and young cattle graze. Those mountain pastures rarely ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... circus which they said was then at Washington. Going thither with them, he was drugged, shackled, despoiled of his free papers, and delivered to a slave trader who shipped him to New Orleans. Then followed a checkered experience as a plantation hand on the Red River, lasting for a dozen years until a letter which a friendly white carpenter had written for him brought one of his former patrons with an agent's commission from the governor of New York. With the assistance ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... only authentic biography of himself and his travels that has ever been written. We heartily recommend THIS BOOK to the reading community for perusal, as it presents a life out of the usual routine of business, and is checkered with adventures which have tried this bold and daring man. We are cognizant of most of the details of the book, and vouch ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... long poles of canes brought together in peaks to support them and netting the hill-slopes with the endless succession of their tops. The eye wearied itself in following them as in following the checkered wiring of the Kentish hop-fields, and was glad to leave them for the closer-set, but never too closely set, palaces of Frascati: the sort of palaces which we call cottages in our summer cities, and the Italians call casinos from the same instinctive modesty. ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... in the park were riding after the English manner, in neatly cut riding-trousers and light saddles. Fate in derision had made each youth bedizen his animal with a checkered enamelled leather brow-band visible half a mile away—a black-and-white checkered brow-band! They can't do it, any more than an Englishman, by taking cold, can add that indescribable nasal ...
— American Notes • Rudyard Kipling
... to conceive, 75 Intended to be viewed eventually As a great whole, not analyzed to parts, But each part having reference to all— How shall a certain part, pronounced complete, Endure effacement by another part? 80 Was the thing done?—then, what's to do again? See, in the checkered pavement opposite, Suppose the artist made a perfect rhomb, And next a lozenge, then a trapezoid— He did not overlay them, superimpose 85 The new upon the old and blot it out, But laid them on a level in his work, Making at last a picture; there it lies. So, first the perfect separate ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... criminal. Besides, there are still a few more hours left for a new batch of exciting happenings. I tell you, boys, this little side trip proposed by Alec and engineered by Hugh bids fair to equal anything we've endured in our whole checkered career." ...
— The Boy Scouts with the Motion Picture Players • Robert Shaler
... a checkered career. After captivity, possibly slavery and manumission, Caesar had found him keeping a line of post horses and pack mules for hire on the great Aemilian way, and had drafted him into his transport ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... by John Algernon Owens, and published by P. W. Ziegler & Co., Philadelphia. The book bears the title of "Sword and Pen," and recounts the ventures and adventures of the subject of it in war and literature, comprising incidents and reminiscences of his childhood, his checkered life as a student and teacher, and his remarkable career as a soldier and author; embracing also the story of his unprecedented journey from ocean to ocean on horseback, and an account of his discovery of the source of the Mississippi river, and his canoe voyage from thence to the ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... out West where the antelope roam, And the coyote howls 'round the cowboy's home, Where the mountains are covered with chaparral frail, And the valleys are checkered with the cattle trail, Where the miner digs for the golden veins, And the cowboy rides o'er ...
— Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp • Various
... the proper vibrations of his oscillating current to coincide with all the other material factors he was using, the final result was before him-real invisibility. He used a patterned background—a symmetrically checkered surface, most difficult of all. The light rays coming from this background passed through the magnetic field surrounding the invisible colorless cube, and were bent into a curved path. But their own ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various
... the E.A.N.A. (Esperanto Association of North America), central offices, Newton Center, Mass., has so far had but a checkered and precarious existence. ...
— Esperanto: Hearings before the Committee on Education • Richard Bartholdt and A. Christen
... curves, crossed at each turn by rustic farm-bridges, with clumps of trees fringing the deeper pools. The plain is skirted by a country road, bordered with majestic trees, and with farm-houses standing all along its winding course. Beyond, the land rises, and the slope is checkered, to the foot of the hills, with arable fields. The view is bounded by the craggy sides of the great hills which separate this quiet vale from the broad valley of the Connecticut. Here, all is soft and tranquil beauty. But ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... ribbon leaves, producing a marked tropical effect—not semi-tropical, as they are so fond of saying here, while speaking of their fruits. Nothing I have noticed strikes me as semi, save the brusque little bits of civilization with which the wilderness is checkered. These are semi-barbarous or less; everything else in the region has a most exuberant pronounced wholeness. The city held me but a short time, for the San Gabriel Mountains were in sight, advertising themselves grandly along the northern sky, and I was eager ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... St. Pierre;—there may be less money and less zeal and less remembrance of the lost. Then from the morne, over the bulwark, the green host will move down unopposed;—creepers will prepare the way, dislocating the pretty tombs, pulling away the checkered tiling;—then will corne the giants, rooting deeper,—feeling for the dust of hearts, groping among the bones;—and all that love has hidden away shall be restored to Nature,—absorbed into the rich ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... am a thinker. My mind is full of pictures when your fancy is checkered with red and blue lines. So you are willing to forgive her?" he added ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... afford a mirror, he was conscious that he must present about as absurd a figure as can well be conceived. He was bare-footed, and the left leg of his trousers was turned up to keep it from the floor, while the right, owing to the Captain's misfortune, barely reached his ankle. A checkered woolen shirt hung about him in folds, and over it he wore a garment that Cap'n Cod was pleased to style his "professional coat." It was a blue swallow-tail, with bright brass buttons. As worn by Winn the tails hung nearly to the ...
— Raftmates - A Story of the Great River • Kirk Munroe
... assented to what his brother said, but he could not help beginning to think of other things. When they came out of the woods, all his attention was engrossed by the view of the fallow land on the upland, in parts yellow with grass, in parts trampled and checkered with furrows, in parts dotted with ridges of dung, and in parts even ploughed. A string of carts was moving across it. Levin counted the carts, and was pleased that all that were wanted had been brought, and at the sight of the meadows his thoughts passed ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... taken in hand, but more commonly in connection with the very highest breeding of the most thoroughly trained society. She was a splendid scowling beauty, black-browed, with a flash of white teeth which was always like a surprise when her lips parted. She wore a checkered dress, of a curious pattern, and a camel's-hair scarf twisted a little fantastically about her. She went to her seat, which she had moved a short distance apart from the rest, and, sitting down, began playing listlessly with her gold chain, as was ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... was accompanied by a morbid sensibility almost amounting to disease. She had not been born deaf and dumb; but had lost her hearing in a fit of sickness, and with it the power of distinct articulation. Her life had evidently been checkered and unhappy; she was apparently without family or friend, a lonely, desolate being, cut off from society by ...
— Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey • Washington Irving
... rooks (so called from the Indian rukh and Persian rokh, meaning "a soldier") and the knights appear to have always had the same powers as at present. As to the chessboards, they were formerly uncoloured, and it is not until the 13th century that we hear of checkered ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... which could form such discordant materials into a compact organized force, and inspire them with the spirit of patient discipline and loyalty to their chief, so that they were true to him in his adverse as well as in his prosperous fortunes; and throughout the checkered series of his campaigns no panic rout ever disgraced a division under his command, no mutiny, or even attempt at mutiny, was ever known in his camp; and finally, after fifteen years of Italian warfare, his men followed their old leader to Zama, "with no ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... ideal standard of morality, but with many of those frail men who, aiming at noble ends, but often drawn from the right path by strong passions and strong temptations, have left to posterity a doubtful and checkered fame. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... and dropped down into the lighted bowl of the launching site. The rocket towered, winged and monstrously checkered in white and orange, against the first flickerings ...
— The Hills of Home • Alfred Coppel
... swiftly they went warily as well, keeping an eye and ear open and muskets ready. But there was no sound other than their own quick footfalls upon the floor of rotting leaves, or the eager brushing of their bodies through occasional undergrowth; no sight but the serried trees and the checkered light and ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... that the door swung open and I stumbled in, falling almost face downward on the marble floor faintly checkered off to my sight in the dim light of a lamp set far back in a bare and dismal hall. I was on my feet again in an instant and it was in this manner, and with all the disadvantages of a hatless head and a disordered countenance, that ...
— The Millionaire Baby • Anna Katharine Green
... grassy acclivity. Below her, far below, Confederate shells were constantly striking the base of the hill. A mile away black squares checkered a slope; beyond the squares a wood was suddenly belted with smoke, and behind her she heard the swinging signal flags begin to whistle and snap in the hill wind. She had sat there a long while before Captain ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... first transport of his reception home had passed, Jack proceeded to put on the market his ship-load of nitrate, to be met with another rebuff in the checkered wheel ...
— Jack North's Treasure Hunt - Daring Adventures in South America • Roy Rockwood
... demand an accounting and to avenge. It seemed incredible, and yet there could be no other explanation. Malbihn shrugged. Well, others had sought Malbihn for similar reasons in the course of a long and checkered career. He fingered his rifle, ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... half-pay major. As a "soldier of fortune" he was vastly more successful. In all the pages of American history, indeed, it would be difficult to find anybody whose career was more interestingly and picturesquely checkered than was his. ...
— The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees • Mary Caroline Crawford
... afterwards, although compelled in the end to succumb and resume a subject position under their own masters. Artabanus seems to have died in August or September A.D. 42, the year after the death of Caligula. His checkered reign had covered a space which cannot have fallen much short of ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 6. (of 7): Parthia • George Rawlinson
... Life seemed a dream that night. It was very real this April morning. The young artist involuntarily drew a deep breath that was half a sigh and stooped to pick up her fallen brushes. But she dropped them again with a glad cry. Far across the lake, in the leaf-checkered sunshine, Thaine ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... Mercury gives an interesting account of the life and fortunes of a young woman of that neighborhood who rose to a high station by means of her personal attractions, and, after a checkered life, died in Italy a few weeks ago. She was the daughter of John Peele, a small farmer at Corringham, near Gainsborough, who eked out a somewhat declining livelihood by dealing in horses, &c., having previously been in better circumstances. Being an only daughter, and aware that ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... certain that there was a pet deer in the family, and that he was as likely to have come into the kitchen by the window as by the door. One of the boy's uncles had seen this deer swimming the Mississippi, far to the southward, and had sent out a yawl and captured him, and brought him home. He began a checkered career of uselessness when they were ferrying him over from Wheeling in a skiff, by trying to help wear the pantaloons of the boy who was holding him; he put one of his fore-legs in at the watch-pocket; but it was disagreeable to the boy and ruinous to the trousers. ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells
... colors, in which different designs appear. Some display symmetric zigzags, converging and spreading throughout their length. In others bands of high color are defined by zones of neutral tints, or parted by thin, bright lines into a checkered mosaic. In many only the most subdued shades appear. Fine effects are obtained by using a short gray wool in its natural state, to form the body of the fabric in solid color, upon which figures in black, white and red are introduced. Sometimes blankets are woven in narrow stripes of ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James
... wore on his head a red checkered handkerchief, the folds of which hung down over his eyes; and in consequence of this head-dress he always went by the name of the ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... rude grate. Beside it lay some cooking utensils and a bucket half-full of water. A litter of empty tins showed that the place had been occupied for some time, and I saw, as my eyes became accustomed to the checkered light, a pannikin and a half-full bottle of spirits standing in the corner. In the middle of the hut a flat stone served the purpose of a table, and upon this stood a small cloth bundle—the same, no doubt, which I had seen through ...
— Hound of the Baskervilles • Authur Conan Doyle
... since I had seen the family, and on reaching the ranch, my father gruffly noticed me, but my mother and sisters received me with open arms. I was a mature man of twenty-eight at the time, mustached, and stood six feet to a plumb-line. The family were cognizant of my checkered past, and although never mentioning it, it seemed as if my misfortunes had elevated me in the estimation of my sisters, while to my mother I ...
— The Outlet • Andy Adams
... confined themselves to a denunciation of the "utopian and bourgeois" character of the anarchist philosophy. They went into the past history of Bakounin, revived all the accusations that had been made against him, and exposed every particle of evidence obtainable concerning his "checkered" career as a revolutionist. It will be remembered that it was in 1869 that Nechayeff appeared in Switzerland. When the Marxists got wind of him and his doctrine, their rage knew no bounds. And later they ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... changing scenes we'll go, Its checkered paths of joy and woe, With holy care we'll tread: Quit its vain scenes without a tear, Without a trouble or a fear, And ...
— Hymns for Christian Devotion - Especially Adapted to the Universalist Denomination • J.G. Adams
... him, and moved down to the road, declining his invitation to come into the house. Westward, the sun had gone down and left the sky a glowing amber and rose. The fields rolled their young green like a checkered carpet over the low hills—the sweet, familiar hills. For an instant, in the hush of gathering twilight, we stood there silent and bridged the years; wiping out the strife, the toil, the ambitions, ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... late in solemn musing On the checkered scenes of life, Peace was o'er my mind diffusing As I ...
— The Emigrant Mechanic and Other Tales In Verse - Together With Numerous Songs Upon Canadian Subjects • Thomas Cowherd
... and those of the simplest and most indispensable description,—nothing for luxury, nothing for show. To the outfit of the poorest laborer's domicile he added little more than a white cloth spread over checkered Chinese matting, to stand for chair, table, and bed; a cushion or two to recline upon; a few earthen vessels of the better quality, to hold rice or water; a brass lamp for cocoa-nut oil; several more ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... checkered and the little girl more operatic than before, sat on stools eating bonbons, while a French maid and the African ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott
... little hill. They came over the summit of this and there, lying before them, was the beautiful slope of farming country down to the very bank of the Lumano River. Fenced fields, tilled and untilled, checkered the slope, with here and there a white farmhouse with its group of outbuildings. There was no hamlet in sight, merely scattered farms. The river, swollen and yellow with the Spring rains, swept upon its bosom fence ...
— Ruth Fielding of the Red Mill • Alice B. Emerson
... perfection of title to land—payment of a quitrent—likewise had a checkered career in the seventeenth century. Under the company there is some question whether quitrents were due. It is clear that "the greate charter" of 1618 in order to encourage immigration exempted for seven ...
— Mother Earth - Land Grants in Virginia 1607-1699 • W. Stitt Robinson, Jr.
... three white Mouldiwarps friends to thy house," she told him—"the Mouldiwarp who is the badge, and the Mouldiwarp who is the crest, and the Great Mouldiwarp who sits on the green and white checkered field of the Ardens' shield of arms. It was the first ...
— Harding's luck • E. [Edith] Nesbit
... management of the blue-checkered border is seen. It is the means of drawing your colored diaper work toward that blue background, the sky, and is superb in its ...
— Palaces and Courts of the Exposition • Juliet James
... river and peaceful valley checkered with fields of grain, no low-lying gardens and climbing forests, reward the scaler of the heights behind the Comstock—only the bare little brown town far down, digging tenacious heels into the mountain's side and propped ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... time in his checkered career Mr. Gibney had a sane, sensible, and serious thought. "Has it ever occurred to you, Mac, how much nicer it is to have a few dollars in the bank, good clothes on your back, an' a credit with your friends? Me, all my life I been a come-easy, go-easy, come-Sunday,-God'll-send-Monday ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne
... put forth one arm. Eternal powers! It touched no soul nor body, but the wall, On which the moonbeams fell in silvery showers Checkered with all the tracery of the hall. He shuddered, as no doubt the bravest cowers When he can't tell what 'tis that doth appal. How odd, a single hobgoblin's nonentity Should cause more fear than a whole ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... I did not have to tell the tale of still another descent into Avernus, of this boy of the checkered career. But I have started out to paint the picture exactly as it is, and I dip my brush in black again with a sigh. You have to do the same thing in telling, even to yourself, the story of yourself, don't you, my reader whose blood has iron in it, and whose pulses ...
— The Evolution of Dodd • William Hawley Smith
... farm-lands that checkered the valley and climbed the green slopes of the Helderbergs, went the orders of the boy patroon, summoning all "our loyal and loving tenantry" to take of their stock and provender all that they could spare, save the ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... calling in the aid of the authorities, for an instant crossed his mind, but was as instantly dismissed. He had but an instinct—to see with his own eyes what his reason told him was true. Day was breaking through drifting scud and pewter-colored clouds as he reached Woodville ferry, checkered with splashes of the soil and the spume of his horse, from whose neck and flanks the sweat rolled like lather. Yet he was not conscious how intent had been his purpose until he felt a sudden instinctive shock on seeing that ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... about him, a contemplative light in his round gray eyes, that sometimes worried Stumpy. He was always tractable and quiet, and it is recorded that once, having crept beyond his "corral," [Footnote: Corral: an inclosure for animals.]—a hedge of tessellated [Footnote: Tessellated: checkered.] pine boughs which surrounded his bed,—he dropped over the bank on his head in the soft earth, and remained with his mottled legs in the air in that position for at least five minutes with unflinching gravity. He was extricated without a murmur. I hesitate ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... I really am married," Isabel said reflectively; "for I certainly object most decidedly to my father's way of talking to you. Heavens! If I have to go through life resenting the things people say of my husband, I shall certainly lead a checkered career." ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... gave a uniform coat, a pair of leggings, a few handkerchiefs, three knifes and some other small articles, the whole of which did not in the United States cost more than twenty dollars: a fourth was purchased by the men for an old checkered shirt, a pair of old leggings and a knife. The Indians seemed to be quite as well pleased as ourselves at the bargains they had made. We now found that the two inferior chiefs were somewhat displeased at not having ...
— History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, Vol. I. • Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
... of the ecclesiastical cenobites who, since the days of Pachomius at Tabennae, have made their hearts altars of the Triple Vows, and girdled the globe with a cable of scholastic mysticism. The pale, shrunken hand he laid on the black serge that covered his breast, was delicate as a woman's, and checkered with knotted lines ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... buds that are formed in the axils at the base of leaves of the previous season's growth. In the Persian walnut they may be detected as early as July. The staminate bud that forms the pollen-producing catkin of the next season, can be distinguished by its checkered appearance, something like a tiny pine cone. They occur in the axils of the lower leaves of the shoot of ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 44th Annual Meeting • Various
... Europe or whipped the corsairs of Barbary in the Strait of Gibraltar. Never was a race of seamen so admirably fitted for the daring trade of privateering as the crews of these tall sloops, topsail schooners, and smart square-riggers, their sides checkered with gun-ports, and ready to drive to sea ...
— The Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine
... chastisement for our faithlessness, or His loving discipline meant to perfect our characters. We read the past best from the vantage-ground of the Temple. From its height we understand the lie of the land. Communion with God explains much which is else inexplicable. Solomon's judgment of Israel's checkered history will be our judgment of our own when we stand in the higher courts of the heavenly home, and look from that height upon all the way by which the Lord our God hath led us. In the meantime, it is often a trial for faith to repeat these words; but the blessing that comes ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... me, after she had looked it all over and said it wuz kinder thin and slazy, and checkered shawls had gone out of fashion, and the black looked some as if it would fade with washin', and the white wuzn't over clear, and the colors wuzn't no ways becomin' to ...
— Samantha Among the Brethren, Complete • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... fantastic veil of creepers and leaves, to look past the solid trunks, to see through the forbidding gloom—and the mystery was disclosed—enchanting, subduing, beautiful. He looked at the woman. Through the checkered light between them she appeared to him with the impalpable distinctness of a dream. The very spirit of that land of mysterious forests, standing before him like an apparition behind a transparent veil—a veil woven of sunbeams ...
— An Outcast of the Islands • Joseph Conrad
... life becomes merged in larger life? Sympathy is that bond by which we come to realise the unity of all life. Before us are spread multitudinous plants, silent and seemingly impassive. They too like us are actors in the Cosmic drama of life, like us the play thing of destiny. In their checkered life, light and darkness, the warmth of summer and frost of winter, drought and rain, the gentle breeze and whirling tornadoes, life and death alternate. Various shocks impinge on them, but no cry is raised in answer. I shall nevertheless try ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... reason why I too may not ask for it, and this simple concession, involving no public interest, will much soften the blow, which, right or wrong, I construe as one of the hardest I have sustained in a life somewhat checkered with adversity. ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... his novels; and when fortune proved less unkind to him, he took a cottage which lay between the highway and the forest, and there the first happy years of his life were spent. They were few, and they were checkered. His chief petty annoyance was his want of skill as a sportsman. He could never bring down game with his gun, and he was passionately fond of shooting. On taking up his abode in the country, the first thing he had made was a full hunting-suit in the most approved fashion, and this costume he would ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... intricate, chaotic to all but the scientific eye. Conceive them, flowing along, from the Heights of Chaber, behind Prossik Hamlet (right wing of infantry plants itself at Prossik, horse westward of them); and ever onwards in broad many-checkered tide-stream, eastward, eastward, then southward ("our artillery went through Podschernitz, the foot and horse a little on this westward side of it"): intricate, many-glancing tide of coming battle; which, swift, correct as clock-work, becomes two lines, from Prossik to near Chwala ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... silence, trying in vain to guess the thoughts that were stirring behind her shining eyes, as green and golden as the sea under a noonday sun. What a wealth of romance must be hidden in that woman's past! What tragedies must have been woven into the checkered fabric ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... pectoral ornament, composed of several rows of enamels, gold and cornelian beads, and fishes and lizards of stamped gold, covered her breast from the lower part of the neck to the upper part of the bosom, which showed pink and white through the thin warp of the calasiris. The dress, of a large checkered pattern, was fastened under the bosom with a girdle with long ends, and ended in a broader border of transverse stripes edged with a fringe. Triple bracelets of lapis-lazuli beads, divided here and there by golden balls, encircled her slender wrists, delicate as those of a child; and her ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... open country where it had been breathing all night the quivering pines, and brown swamps, and the white and gray checkered fields that would soon be upturned by the plowshares—a vagrant wind wandered ...
— Hiram The Young Farmer • Burbank L. Todd
... and the Union troops were on a sharp lookout for Toombs. Convinced that further travel might be hazardous, General Toombs and his friend rode back to the mountains of North Georgia, and there remained until the early fall. It was in the month of October that the fugitives again started on their checkered flight. The May days had melted into summer, and summer had been succeeded by early autumn. The crops, planted when he started from home that spring day, were now ripening in the fields, and Northern statesmen ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... and, shaping their course in the direction indicated by the huntsman, entered the park, and proceeded along a glade, checkered by the early sunbeams. Here the noise they made in their progress speedily disturbed a herd of deer browsing beneath the trees, and, as the dappled foresters darted off to a thicker covert, great difficulty was experienced by the varlets in restraining the hounds, who struggled eagerly ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... the ins and outs of politics during the first ten years of Louis Philippe's reign, which were checkered by revolts, emeutes, and attempts at regicide, I pass on to the next event of general interest,—the explosion of ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... as its water soothingly flows over the rounded pebbles in its bed. There is a charm in the environment of such a spot that will photograph its picture on the memory as the gem of all the varied experiences of a checkered life. ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... in the history of the human heart, that the times most sad to experience are often the most grateful to recall; and of all the passages in our brief and checkered love, none have I clung to so fondly or cherished so tenderly, as the remembrance of that desolate and tearful hour. We walked slowly home, speaking very little, and lingering on the way—and my arm was round ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 17, No. 483., Saturday, April 2, 1831 • Various
... Of loveliness that looks on all it loves! Yet are there moods, when the soul's wells are high With crystal waters which a strange fear moves, To doubt if what it joys in, be a joy; Fear not, thou fond and gentle one! though life Be but a checkered scene, where wrong and right, Struggle forever; there is not a strife Can reach thy bower: the future, purely bright, Is round about thee, like a summer sky. And there are those, brave hearts and true, to guard Thy walks forever; and to make each hour Of coming time, by fond and faithful ward, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... Lodge any ornaments? A. It has; the Mosaic, or checkered pavement; the indented tressel; that beautiful tesselated border which surrounds it, with the ...
— The Mysteries of Free Masonry - Containing All the Degrees of the Order Conferred in a Master's Lodge • William Morgan
... sir, I should think it was," replied the other, a tall man, with sandy hair and beard, and dressed in a checkered business suit, which had lost a good deal of the freshness of its early youth. "I may as well tell you at once who I am. I am an anti-detective. Never heard of that sort of person, ...
— The Late Mrs. Null • Frank Richard Stockton
... eclipsed by a new anxiety. Persis had friends of whose existence he was unaware. She corresponded with men in distant cities. These apparently trivial facts took on greater import as he mused. His own chances to win her, dishearteningly small at the best of times in view of his checkered record, suddenly sank below the level of insignificance and ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... a slow process, but it was peaceful, progressive, and certain, especially when Texas should have been checkered by railroads, and her system connected with that of the South and of Mexico. I desired then, however, to accelerate this action, by making it a part of the compact of Texas with the Federal Government, that the proceeds of the sales of her public lands, ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... eyes, a little dim with weeping. Her cotton dress of indigo blue, covered with golden-colored moons, was pinned well up at the back, displaying her home-knit stockings and low shoes fastened with brass latchets. She had on her head a cap of white linen, stiffly starched, and a checkered kerchief was pinned over her ...
— The Hallam Succession • Amelia Edith Barr
... succeeding nine years (1865-73) his life was checkered indeed. Seriously ill for six weeks, he arose from his bed to see his mother carried off by consumption and to find himself suffering with congestion of the lungs. Slightly relieved, Lanier turned his hand to various projects for making ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... Malvern) all round me are the Mountains, Cheviot and Galloway (three to fifteen miles off), Cumberland and Yorkshire (say forty and fifty, with the Solway brine and sands intervening). I live in total solitude, sauntering moodily in thin checkered woods, galloping about, once daily, by old lanes and roads, oftenest latterly on the wide expanses of Solway shore (when the tide is out!) where I see bright busy Cottages far off, houses over even in Cumberland, and ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... we are again between hills without fields and where the trees are pine with clumps of bamboo. In four minutes more we are among small rice paddies and at 10:35 have passed another gap and are crossing another valley checkered with rice fields and lotus ponds, but in one minute more the hills have closed in, leaving only room for the track. At 10:37 we are running along a narrow valley with its terraced rice paddies where ...
— Farmers of Forty Centuries - or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan • F. H. King
... about 1804, son of the preceding and of M. Husson —army-contractor; led a checkered career, explained by his origin and childhood. He scarcely knew his father, who made and soon lost a fortune. The previous fast life of his mother, who afterwards married again, gave rise to or ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... late in the afternoon. The ox was now possessed with his desire, and would not lie down for any rest. All night long, through the gleaming silver of the open spaces, through the weird and checkered gloom of the deep forest, heedless even of his hunger, or perhaps driven the more by it as he thought of the wild clover bunches and tender timothy awaiting him, the solitary ox strove on. And all night, lagging far behind in his unabating caution, ...
— Earth's Enigmas - A Volume of Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... wilderness! Welcome the wild scenes of our boyhood, which, as the checkered panorama of the past is unrolled at our bidding, rise on the mental vision in all their original freshness and beauty! It was here we first essayed to study the works of nature, and in them trace the Master-hand that moulded and perfected ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... (irresolute) 605; oscillate &c. 314; vibrate between, two extremes, oscillate between, two extremes; alternate; have as man phases as the moon. Adj. changeable, changeful; changing &c. 140; mutable, variable, checkered, ever changing; protean, proteiform|; versatile. unstaid[obs3], inconstant; unsteady, unstable, unfixed, unsettled; fluctuating &c. v.; restless; agitated &c. 315; erratic, fickle; irresolute &c. 605; capricious &c. 608; touch and go; inconsonant, fitful, spasmodic; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... higher character for honesty, integrity, and sincerity of purpose and action than Andrew Johnson. The life of each of these two great men had been a series of obscure but heroic struggles; each had experienced a varied and checkered career; each reached the highest political station of earth. Their official state papers are of supreme interest, and comprise the utterances of President Lincoln while he in four years placed in the field nearly ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Lincoln - Section 1 (of 2) of Volume 6: Abraham Lincoln • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... for both Alhama and Zalea. They then dismissed the army for the winter. Ferdinand and Isabella retired to Alcala de Henares, where the queen on the 16th of December, 1485, gave birth to the princess Catharine, afterward wife of Henry VIII. of England. Thus prosperously terminated the checkered ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... were pure works of art. No moral was everlastingly perking itself in the reader's face, no labored lecture to prove what was self-evident interrupted the progress of the story. There is scarcely an allusion to any of the events which had checkered the novelist's career. References to contemporary occurrences are so slight that they would pass unheeded by any one whose attention had not been called beforehand to their existence. These works showed what Cooper ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... his gaunt bearded head sunk forward on his thin chest swathed in the gay worsted wrap, his wasted hands, the tendons corded with pale violet veins, clenched outside the checkered quilt beneath which his ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... them checkered off into squares by the irrigation ditches, level as a table. The long rows of cotton were five to ten inches high, and of a dark green colour. The stand on most of the fields was almost perfect. One Chinaman with a span of mules cultivated ...
— The Desert Fiddler • William H. Hamby
... English history are more pregnant with events, or more interesting to the antiquary, and general reader, than that which comprised the fortunes of Wolsey. The eventful life of the Cardinal, checkered as it was by the vicissitudes of fortune, his sudden elevation, and finally his more sudden fall and death, display an appalling picture of "the instability of human affairs." This prelate and statesman, who even aspired to the Papal throne itself, "was an honest poore man's sonne ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume XII, No. 347, Saturday, December 20, 1828. • Various
... at Ballymahon. He emerged, however, unscathed from this dangerous ordeal, more fortunate in this respect than his comrade Bryanton; but he retained throughout life a fondness for clubs; often, too, in the course of his checkered career, he looked back to this period of rural sports and careless enjoyments as one of the few sunny spots of his cloudy life; and though he ultimately rose to associate with birds of a finer feather, his heart would still yearn in secret after the ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... 1841 may be deemed the brightest of Poe's checkered career. On every side acknowledged to be a new and brilliant literary light, chief editor of a powerful magazine, admired, feared, and envied, with a reputation already spreading rapidly in Europe as well as in his native continent, ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... a Saxon bishop of York, born in Northumbria; brought up at Lindisfarne; had a checkered life of it; is celebrated in legend for his success in converting pagans, and is usually represented ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... outside of the houses became less frequent; in short it was apparent that we had entered a different region, even if the custom-house and police officers on the frontier had not signified to us that we were now in the kingdom of Bavaria. We passed through extensive forests of fir, here and there checkered with farms, and finally came to the broad elevated plain bathed by the Isar, in ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... Hubble's store, with wet newspaper, stagnant slop jar, dirty tooth brush, filthy basin, sloppy soap—all humming with flies—is the worst I have ever seen and the most stomach turning. There is some freak from Boston in a checkered suit and goggles who walks around with some ideas for Indian betterment. I think they have reached the highest pitch in the fact that they do not scalp him! I had coffee, oatmeal and bacon all out of one bowl. I drink water that looks like bean soup and never use a fork and a spoon ...
— Nelka - Mrs. Helen de Smirnoff Moukhanoff, 1878-1963, a Biographical Sketch • Michael Moukhanoff
... of these incidents in his checkered career a new thought blazed up in his mind—rather a blinding thought. As its rays brightened he halted in his course, and stood gazing across the street as if uncertain as to his next move. Perhaps, after all, it would be best NOT to pawn the ...
— Felix O'Day • F. Hopkinson Smith
... accordion; pucker at the pensive flute, or beat the martial, soul-arousing drum. One stripped, as it were, on his way to Jericho, could slink in here and select for himself a fig-leaf from a whole Eden of cut-away coats and wide-checkered trousers, all fitting "to surprise yourself," and could be quite sure of finding a pair of boots, of whatever size was needed, of the very finest custom hand work,—a misfit, made for a gentleman in New York. A devout man, according to his leanings, ...
— Five Hundred Dollars - First published in the "Century Magazine" • Heman White Chaplin
... beyond them, and a hundred times a year the Pacific fogs came creeping over them long before dawn, and Santa Paloma awakened in an enveloping cloud of soft mist. Here and there the slopes of these hills were checkered with the sharp oblongs and angles of young vineyards, and hidden by the thickening green of peach and apple orchards. A few low, brown dairy ranch-houses were perched high on the ridges; the red-brown moving stream of the cattle home-coming ...
— The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne • Kathleen Norris
... top was brilliantly clear and far-reaching. The broad plain across the river was checkered black and white with alternating spruce thickets and lakes; beyond it and the mountains that bounded it lay the valley of the south fork which we had crossed fifty or sixty miles farther up on our journey hither. Right in front of us the middle fork made ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... restraint upon the fancy. Dark is less fertile of images than the feeble luster of the moon. I was alone, and the walls were checkered by shadowy forms. As the moon passed behind a cloud and emerged, these shadows seemed to be endowed with life, and to move. The apartment was open to the breeze, and the curtain was occasionally blown from its ordinary position. This motion was not unaccompanied with sound. I failed not to snatch ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... flowers of Feraghan Into the fabric that thy birth began; Iris, narcissus, tulips cloud-band tied, These thou shalt picture for the eye of Man; Henna, Herati, and the Jhelums tide In Sarraband and Saruk be thy guide, And the red dye of Ispahan beside The checkered Chinese fret of ancient gold; —So heed the ban, old as the law is old, Nor weave into thy warp the laughing face, Nor limb, nor body, nor one line of grace, Nor hint, nor tint, nor any veiled device Of Woman who is ...
— The Tracer of Lost Persons • Robert W. Chambers
... with the natives, perils of the sea, discontents, disappointments; and when at last he returned to Spain, in 1504,—broken with age and infirmities, after twelve years of harassing cares, labors, and dangers (a checkered career of glory and suffering),—nothing remained but to prepare for his final rest. He had not made a fortune; he had not enriched his patrons,—but he had discovered a continent. His last days were spent in disquieting and fruitless negotiations to perpetuate his honors ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... concerning the streets and edifices of Palma. The round, solid head, earnest eyes, and abstracted air of the painter came forth distinct from the limbo of things overlaid but never lost, and went with me through the checkered blaze and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... little disturbed. She hammered the beetle rather excitedly upon the limb a few times, as if it were in some way at fault, then dropped down to try for her nest again. Only vacant air there! She hovers and hovers, her blue wings flickering in the checkered light; surely that precious hole must be there; but no, again she is baffled, and again she returns to her perch, and mauls the poor beetle till it must be reduced to a pulp. Then she makes a third attempt, ...
— Bird Stories from Burroughs - Sketches of Bird Life Taken from the Works of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... water weed, or the leaf beneath, into gems by the magic of its own brightness. The boughs were waving over head, covered with many-colored foliage, and the sun, glancing through, not only enriched the tints above, but checkered the mossy path along which they wandered like a chess-board of brown and gold. Some of the late autumn birds uttered their short sweet songs from the copse hard by, and the musical wind came sighing up from the valley, as ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... brogues or pumps without heels * * * Few besides gentlemen wear the truis, that is, the breeches and stockings all of one piece and drawn on together; over this habit they wear a plaid, which is usually three yards long and two breadths wide, and the whole garb is made of checkered tartan or plaiding; this with the sword and pistol, is called a full dress, and to a well proportioned man with any tolerable air, it makes an agreeable figure."[2] The plaid was the undress of the ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... in the same direction in which I was. He was going very briskly, but I soon came up to him. He was a small, well-made fellow, with reddish hair and ruddy, determined countenance, somewhat tanned. He wore a straw hat, checkered shirt, open at the neck, canvas trousers and blue jacket. On his feet were shoes remarkably thin, but no stockings, and in his hand he held a stout stick, with which, just before I overtook him, he struck a round stone which lay on the ground, sending it flying at least fifty ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... around the huge room. The morning sunlight streamed in through the high mullioned windows and spread a diamond-checkered pattern across the tapestry on the far wall, lighting up the brilliant hunting scene ...
— The Eyes Have It • Gordon Randall Garrett |
