"Coal black" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... strain so sweet, as that which they will sing. And at the moment thou art most delighted with the song of the birds, thou wilt hear a murmuring and complaining coming towards thee along the valley. And thou wilt see a knight upon a coal black horse, clothed in black velvet, and with a pennon of black linen upon his lance, and he will ride unto thee to encounter thee, with the utmost speed. If thou fleest from him he will overtake thee, and if thou abidest there, as sure as thou art ...
— The Mabinogion Vol. 1 (of 3) • Owen M. Edwards
... thinking of his unfinished supper, the orderly of what might possibly be in one of the casks on the other side of the cellar. Suddenly the man whom they had thought dead raised his head and gazed tranquilly into their faces. His complexion was coal black; the cheeks were apparently tattooed in irregular sinuous lines from the eyes downward. The lips, too, were white, like those of a stage negro. There was ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... were a rich greenish-blue, while the reins and velvet caps and belts of the drivers were a dull cerise; the caps were braided with silver, while they and the coats and the blue velvet rugs were lined and bordered with sable. One set of horses was coal black, and the others a dark gray. Everything seemed in keeping with the buildings, and the semi-Byzantine scene with its Oriental ...
— His Hour • Elinor Glyn
... disgust. He had the short, heavy-set neck of the lower order of animals. His skin was coal black, his lips so thick they curled both ways up and down with crooked blood marks across them. His nose was flat, and its enormous nostrils seemed in perpetual dilation. The sinister bead eyes, with brown splotches in their whites, were set wide ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon
... tremendous parade for to-morrow. You know that it will be the most startling demonstration of its kind ever arranged. One hundred thousand pan-antis will parade on the Boulevard, with a hundred brass bands, led by the Bishop himself on his coal black horse. Do you know the ...
— In the Sweet Dry and Dry • Christopher Morley
... the tavern? It is no less a personage than the Marquis Lafayette, who has come all the way from Providence to visit the French gentlemen boarding there. What a gallant-looking cavalier he is, with his quick eyes and coal black hair! Forty years later he visited the spot again; his locks were gray and his step was feeble, but his heart held its ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... inspect cautiously. Then it would get absent-minded, and stare with equal intentness in another direction (just to confuse the onlookers), and suddenly go on furiously washing its body again, but in quite a new place. Except for a white patch on its breast it was coal black. ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... town, when we stopped before a small, tumble-down shanty, built of rough boards, and roofed with the same material. In the narrow front yard, a large iron pot, supported on two upright poles, was steaming over a light wood fire. The boiling clothes it contained were being stirred by a brawny, coal black negro woman, with an arm like the Farnese Hercules, and a form as stout as Wouter Van Twiller's. The yellow boy, Ally, was heaping wood on ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... evening gloom, In the evening gloom, Give the engines room, Give the engines room, Lest souls be trapped In a terrible tomb." The sparks and the pine-brands Whirl on high From the black and reeking alleys To the wide red sky. Hear the hot glass crashing, Hear the stone steps hissing. Coal black streams Down the gutters pour. There are cries for help From a far fifth floor. For a longer ladder Hear the fire-chief call. Listen to the music Of the firemen's ball. Listen to the music Of the firemen's ball. To be read or ...
— The Congo and Other Poems • Vachel Lindsay
... a man of about thirty, of gaunt face and figure, wearing a hat with a black feather, and the uniform of a colonel of cavalry. The features were regular and might have been called handsome; the eyes, hair, mustache, and imperial—he wore no beard—coal black; the complexion so pale that the effect was startling. More curious than all else, however, was the officer's expression. In the lips and eyes could be read something bitterly cynical, mingled with a profound and apparently ineradicable ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... the New Town to mind. The stretch cut through by the Birmingham railway is the most thickly built-up and the worst. Here flows the Medlock with countless windings through a valley, which is, in places, on a level with the valley of the Irk. Along both sides of the stream, which is coal black, stagnant and foul, stretches a broad belt of factories and working-men's dwellings, the latter all in the worst condition. The bank is chiefly declivitous and is built over to the water's edge, just as we saw along the Irk; while the houses are equally bad, whether built on the Manchester ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... of Maxendorf were curiously mixed. He saw before him a tall, lanky figure of a man, dressed in sombre black, a man of dark complexion, with beardless face and tanned skin plentifully freckled. His hair and eyes were coal black. He held out his hand to Maraton, but the smile with which he had welcomed Selingman had passed from ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Greece and Rome were yet barbarous, we find the light of learning and improvement emanating from this, by supposition, degraded and accursed continent of Africa, out of the midst of this very woolly-haired, flat-nosed, thick lipped, and coal black race, which some persons are tempted to station at a pretty low intermediate point between men and monkeys.'[AG] It is needless to dwell on this topic; and we say with the same writer, the blacks had a long and glorious day: and after what they have been and done, it argues ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... putting others under close cross-examination, than allowing himself to be subjected to the same sifting process. But whether he had his own motives for telling the old woman the truth, or whether he saw that those coal black old eyes were looking through him and divining all that he wished or intended—he certainly submitted to the question and told the truth, ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... of fire; his tail was like a cow's. Then came Astaroth in the form of a worm, going upright on his tail, and had no feet, but a tail like a glow-worm; under his chops grew two short hands, and his back was coal black; his belly thick in the middle, yellow, like gold, having many bristles on his back like a hedgehog. After him came Cannagosta, being white and grey mixed, exceeding curled and hairy; he had a head like the head ...
— Mediaeval Tales • Various
... half in height, but my limbs were well made, and I was both deep and broad in the chest. In colour I was, and my white hair notwithstanding, am still extraordinarily dark hued, my eyes also were large and dark, and my hair, which was wavy, was coal black. In my deportment I was reserved and grave to sadness, in speech I was slow and temperate, and more apt at listening than in talking. I weighed matters well before I made up my mind upon them, but being made up, nothing could turn me from ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard
... he ordered her, and lifted her over the tangle of wires. They walked forward, again on the hilltop's unscreened edge. The harbour was hidden by the elms, but below lay the frosted marsh and islands, girdled by the glistening sea-walls and their coal black shadows, and great wide Kerith, its expanse jewelled here and there by the lights of homesteads. It was beautiful, but she did not say anything about it to Richard, who was walking on ahead, though there did not seem ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... proceeded. The dying hand of the Prince was found to be clenched upon a lock of hair, resembling, in colour and texture, the coal black bristles of Bonthron. Thus, though famine had begun the work, it would seem that Rothsay's death had been finally accomplished by violence. The private stair to the dungeon, the keys of which were found ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... same parallel line with these Negroes, as about the Straits of Magellan, are white coloured, and yet some in Presbyter John's country in Ethiopia are dun; they in Zeilan and Malabar parallel with them again black: Manamotapa in Africa, and St. Thomas Isle are extreme hot, both under the line, coal black their inhabitants, whereas in Peru they are quite opposite in colour, very temperate, or rather cold, and yet both alike elevated. Moscow in 53. degrees of latitude extreme cold, as those northern countries usually are, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... to Alene. Hastily looking from the fish to their owner, she encountered a pair of frank, gray eyes, whose rather deep setting and coal black brows gave the whole face an odd, ...
— Peggy-Alone • Mary Agnes Byrne
... of January 7th, 1879, page 68, a correspondent ("N. F. T. T.") writes that he obtained a specimen of this bear which was coal black throughout, with the exception of a dark dirty yellow on the lower lip, but of the usual crescentic white mark she had not a trace. This exceptional specimen was shot in Kumaon. Robinson, in his 'Account ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... from Virginny. Her name was Harriet Brewer. My daddy was my young Marster. His name was Marster George Brewer an' my mammy always tol' me dat I was his'n. I knew dat dere was some dif'ence 'tween me an' de res' o' her chillun, 'cause dey was all coal black, an' I was even lighter dan I is now. Lawd, it's bean to my sorrow many a time, 'cause de chillun used to chase me 'round an' holler at me, 'Old yallow Nigger.' Dey ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Mississippi Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... demanding from the Goddess of Death the boon of life for her son, cast her jewels upon the altar and made promise of cattle and grain and her three daughters as handmaidens in the secret places of the temple. And I, aforetime great among the Thugs, lamented that I had but a coal black kid to offer as a sacrifice, for behold, Kali demands life for life, and will ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... ugly dress of a pauper is seen. The man is Felix Tournour. He carries in a bucket of coal. He performs this action like one who has acquired the habit of work under an overseer. He is an ugly figure in his pauper dress. His scanty beard is coal black. He has a wide mouth and discoloured teeth. His forehead is narrow and bony. He is ...
— Three Plays • Padraic Colum
... time we were haunted for several days by an apparition, to which our people gave the appellation of the Black Spectre. We never saw it except at evening, when his coal black steed, his mourning dress, and plume of black feathers, had a majestic and awe-striking appearance; his face, one said, who had seen it for a moment, was ashy pale; he had lingered far behind the rest of his troop, and suddenly at a turn in the road, saw the Black Spectre ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... without so much as a fold out of order, and by a somewhat elaborate modification of a widow's cap which added half an inch to her height. As Rose wrote in an early letter home, Mrs. Jennings's cap looked as if she had been born with it on her coal black hair, or as if it were glued and gummed there beyond any possibility of being displaced. Mother ought to see it, take an example, and abandon her flighty, waggling head-gear. No, on second thoughts, Rose would not ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... are high-minded, and he—that is the reason I should die if he found out; for he hates, he loathes deceit. Oh, I've grown to hate this country. I love you, but I'd like to forget that it was ever on the map. I wish I was coal black and had been born ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... by Mr. Caldwell at Yen-ping are even more surprising. The old female is coal black, but the young male is distinctly brownish-black with a chestnut stripe from the mane to the tail along the mid-dorsal line where the hairs of the back form a ridge. The horns of the female are nearly ...
— Camps and Trails in China - A Narrative of Exploration, Adventure, and Sport in Little-Known China • Roy Chapman Andrews and Yvette Borup Andrews
... is very light-colored, but as summer advances, its coat assumes a reddish-brown hue, which by December often becomes coal black. Its eyes are large, black, and full of intelligence, and its delicate hoofs are surrounded by a projecting rim which renders it firm-footed and able to march with ease over the great glaciers or along narrow ledges ...
— Harper's Young People, March 23, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... was coal black, his scales glittering in the cold sunlight, his hatchet-face inscrutable. He stopped when the stoker was a few paces away. The stoker stopped, too. All the Jeks were watching him and paying no attention to anything else. The ...
— The Stoker and the Stars • Algirdas Jonas Budrys (AKA John A. Sentry)
... a brilliant scarlet and blue bird with an enormous yellow bill perched on the palisade of the compound. Immediately the young man forgot his musing and rose, calling for his spear. A stocky man, coal black, with a fuzzy tuft of a beard, came out of the hut. From the slave Zalu Zako took a broad-bladed spear with a short haft. Watching to see that the bird was still sitting on the fence as he passed out of the compound, ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle |
