"Mottled" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... marvellous surroundings. There are displayed tiny caves and grottoes of white coral, star-fishes, sea-urchins, growing sponges, sea-fans, and bright-colored fishes, including the hummingbird fish, and others like butterflies with mottled fins and scales, together with that little oddity, the rainbow-fish. The prevailing color of this attractive creature is dark green, but the tinted margins of its scales so reflect the light as to show all the colors of the rainbow, ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... pieces; I gathered the best petals, and leaves, and sprigs, and I have them in a book;" which, at her request, I then reached for her. I turned the pages. The book was full of beautiful relics from tokens of remembrance which kind friends had sent to her, and among them were some curiously mottled, green and rose-colored, petals, which she had designed for a wreath, on the first page of the little herbarium, which it was her intention to prepare; and then, with great hesitancy, and protesting their unworthiness, she repeated these simple lines, ...
— Catharine • Nehemiah Adams
... thy mansions should blight, With his chill mottled show'rs, and his flickering light, His moon that gleams wanly through snows falling fast, His pale mist that floats on the wings of the blast: With the voice of each river more fearfully loud— Every torrent all foam, and the heaven all cloud! Alas! that stern Winter ...
— The Poetry of Wales • John Jenkins
... drink. The master-passion had given a stamp of originality to an ursine physiognomy; his nose had developed till it reached the proportions of a double great-canon A; his veined cheeks looked like vine-leaves, covered, as they were, with bloated patches of purple, madder red, and often mottled hues; till altogether, the countenance suggested a huge truffle clasped about by autumn vine tendrils. The little gray eyes, peering out from beneath thick eyebrows like bushes covered with snow, were agleam with the cunning of avarice that had extinguished everything ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... as I sat close by him I could perceive but too plainly the change which had taken place since we last met. His figure was unwieldy, not so much from increased bulk as from diminished life and energy; his face was swollen and puffy, his complexion mottled and discoloured, his eyes heavy and dim; his head had been shaved, and he wore a small black silk cap, which was extremely unbecoming. Altogether, the change was no less striking than painful to behold. The impression, however, soon wore off (on finding, as I believed), that ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... and in internal haemorrhage, pale; in diseases of the liver, sometimes yellowish, or dark red; in diseases of the digestive tract (buccal mucous membrane), coated; if inflamed, dry at first, later excessively moist; and in certain germ diseases a mottled red, or showing ...
— Common Diseases of Farm Animals • R. A. Craig, D. V. M.
... could not have heard the marching-order; he remained rooted where he stood. Ebbings and flowings of color mottled his ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... manner she strolled forward, stopping now and then to look at the squirrel or rabbit or the yellow-hued warbler, the noisy and swift-flying finch, the russet-coated thrush, or dark brown and mottled woodpecker, as his head rattled against the bark of the tree trunks, into which he bored in ...
— Through Forest and Fire - Wild-Woods Series No. 1 • Edward Ellis
... she actually did. I only say she could; and under sufficiently strong provocation, I have no doubt she would.) She knew where the purple violets and the white innocence first flecked the spring turf, and where the ground-sparrows hid their mottled eggs. All the little waddling, downy goslings, the feeble chickens, and faint-hearted, desponding turkeys, that broke the shell too soon, and shivered miserably because the spring sun was not high enough in the morning to warm them, she fed with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... sort, but rather the external suffering that my unfortunate little head received at the hands of nurses, who half-suffocated me with the soap that produced temporary blindness in my eyes, and deafness in my ears, before the best family yellow or mottled was "slooshed" away, leaving me panting and hot. Then came the tremendous rubbing, followed by the jigging out of knots of hair with a cruel comb and the brushing which seemed to make numberless little holes in my tender scalp; while my head was knocked to this side and to that, and then tapped with ...
— The Queen's Scarlet - The Adventures and Misadventures of Sir Richard Frayne • George Manville Fenn
... tawny plumes Mottled in devising, Singing as though never sang Bird in close till now— Sharp are the javelins Of death that are seeking, Seeking even simple birds ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... open the door and went in himself. And, having paid his money, and left his boots with the boy at the threshold, he was rewarded by the sight of the manager emerging from a box at the far end of the room, clad in the mottled towels which the bather, irrespective of his personal taste in dress, is obliged to wear in ...
— Psmith in the City • P. G. Wodehouse
... of an oval shape, about ten inches long and four or five thick. It was of a mottled-gray colour, and had a thick rind. We found it somewhat like an Irish potato, and exceedingly good. The yam was roundish, and had a rough brown skin. It was very sweet and well- flavoured. The potato, we were surprised to find, was quite ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... minor flore-albo has white flowers, those of the normal plant being pale blue; V. minor flore-pleno differs in having double blue flowers; V. minor foliis aureis has golden-tinted leaves; and V. minor foliis argenteis bears silvery mottled and ...
— Hardy Ornamental Flowering Trees and Shrubs • A. D. Webster
... ornamented leggings, the men rode for the most part naked, and with their breasts and arms painted in a coarse and extravagant style. Some had a rude representation of a Death's head and bones in the centre of the chest; others were streaked and spotted; while again others wore a livery of a curiously mottled fashion, that seemed to resemble the markings of a tortoise, but was intended to imitate the changing aspect of ...
— The Silver Canyon - A Tale of the Western Plains • George Manville Fenn
... looked at us intently; and a most curious change came over his clever, bad-tempered face. His eyes are as bright as ice, and have somewhat the same cold light in them. Now a thaw set in and melted them, and a mottled red spread over ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... udder yields its willing streams, While Mary sings some lover's amorous dreams; And crouching Giles beneath a neighbouring tree Tugs o'er his pail, and chants with equal glee; Whose hat with tatter'd brim, of nap so bare, From the cow's side purloins a coat of hair, A mottled ensign of his harmless trade, An unambitious, peaceable cockade. As unambitious too that cheerful aid The mistress ...
— The Farmer's Boy - A Rural Poem • Robert Bloomfield
... help you to remember—mighty nigh every bird lays a egg that's mighty nigh like the bird herself. The cat bird's eggs is sorter blue—an' the wood-pecker's is white, like his wing, an' the thrasher's is mottled like ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... information. They counted their vessels, metal and wooden; they counted their finger rings, their clasps, their thumb rings, their diadems, and their gorgets of gold. They examined their many-coloured garments of crimson and blue, of black and green, yellow and mottled, white and streaked. All were equal. They then inspected their flocks and herds, swine from the forests, sheep from the pasture lands, and cows—here the first difference arose. It was one to excite Meav's haughty temper. There was a young bull found among Ailill's bovine ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... Tennyson's word-pictures, for instance, bear almost as much study as the landscape. One afternoon, last spring, I had been walking through a copse of young white birches,—their leaves scarce yet apparent,—over a ground delicate with wood-anemones, moist and mottled with dog's-tooth-violet leaves, and spangled with the delicate clusters of that shy creature, the Claytonia or Spring Beauty. All this was floored with last year's faded foliage, giving a singular bareness ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... looking down, Wondered what man he was, so curious His black hair dangled on his tattered gown: Then lifts he up his face, with glittering eyes,— "What will you buy, sweetheart?—Here's honeycomb, And mottled pippins, and sweet mulberry pies, Comfits and peaches, snowy cherry bloom, To keep in water for to make night sweet: All that you ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume II. • Walter de la Mare
... eyes twinkled feebly in the midst, like two stars of lesser magnitude in a hazy firmament, and his full-fed cheeks, which seemed to have taken toll of everything that went into his mouth, were curiously mottled and streaked with dusky ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... north-west, by ranges; which I was not sorry to perceive. Those to the west, and south-west, were the highest and most pointed. It appears that the Finke must come under or through some of those to the north-west. To-day I observed a most beautiful pigeon, quite new to me; it was of a dark-brown colour, mottled under the throat and on the breast; it had also a high top-knot. It is considerably smaller than the Sturt pigeon ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... of distortions with her shoulders, ran on ahead, picked up a few pebbles and threw them into the wood, glanced back at Lance with swimming mottled eyes, that seemed a piquant incarnation of everything ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... first-rate black bantam has been described, which during three seasons was perfectly black, but then annually became more and more red; and it deserves notice that this tendency to change, whenever it occurs in a bantam, "is almost certain to prove hereditary."[90] The cuckoo or blue-mottled Dorking cock, when old, is liable to acquire yellow or orange hackles in place of his proper bluish-grey hackles.[91] Now, as Gallus bankiva is coloured red and orange, and as Dorking fowls and ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... man looked at the sky. It was evening and the sun had set. The sky was all mottled with grey clouds. "I paint beautiful pictures and give them away," he declared. "My brother is in the penitentiary. He killed a man who called ...
— Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories • Sherwood Anderson
... decided, that, viewed from the moon, our globe presents a mottled appearance; but, as this assertion can possibly rest on no better authority than that of the Man in the Moon, we must decline putting the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 7, 1841 • Various
... subterranean room, or tomb. The entrance to it was covered with a single stone lintel. In examining this tomb Mr. Tucker had a narrow escape from being bitten by a boba, a venomous snake, nearly three feet in length, with vicious mouth, long fangs like a rattlesnake, and a strikingly mottled skin. At one place there was a low pyramid less than ten feet in height. To its top led a flight ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... stirring about, pecking at the solid lump of ice in their water-tin. When we flashed the lantern in their eyes, the hens set up a great cackling and flew about clumsily, scattering down-feathers. The mottled, pin-headed guinea-hens, always resentful of captivity, ran screeching out into the tunnel and tried to poke their ugly, painted faces through the snow walls. By five o'clock the chores were done—just when it was time to begin ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather
... we have seen occasional individuals with abnormal foliage—somewhat mottled, usually curled and often misshapen. Thinking that a virus might be the cause of this trouble the senior author tried grafting some of the shoots on to healthy stocks. The grafts were in no case successful because the scions were too weak. Finally he succeeded in grafting a branch from an affected ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 43rd Annual Meeting - Rockport, Indiana, August 25, 26 and 27, 1952 • Various
... an unsocial hatred for the baby whose matutinal ablutions were consummated at the same hour at which the old lady usually took her walk. I can remember that I was supposed to assist in some way at those ablutions, probably to hold the mottled soap, which curiously resembled the infant's limbs when pinched with cold; and so, I suppose, I would steal out and join the lady and her dog, walking a little to one side as we drifted slowly up the dull suburban street into ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... the long tail, and in the form of its head somewhat resembles a rabbit. It is covered with a dense soft fur 3/4 in. long on the back and upwards of an inch in length on the sides, of a delicate French grey colour, darkly mottled on the upper surf ace and dusky white beneath; the ears being long, broad and thinly covered with hair. Chinchillas live in burrows, and these subterranean dwellings undermine the ground in some parts of the Chilean ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... Gamp. 'True! Don't I know as that dear woman is expecting of me at this minnit, Mr Westlock, and is a-lookin' out of window down the street, with little Tommy Harris in her arms, as calls me his own Gammy, and truly calls, for bless the mottled little legs of that there precious child (like Canterbury Brawn his own dear father says, which so they are) his own I have been, ever since I found him, Mr Westlock, with his small red worsted shoe a-gurglin' in his throat, where he had put it in his play, a chick, ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... comes forth, her appearance is quite changed, so fat has she grown. She is then led by night to the river and bathed in presence of all the women of the village. Next day she flaunts before the public in her gayest attire, her head bedecked with ornaments and her face mottled with red paint. So everybody knows what ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... declare, that I am a thorough-going Church-and-State man, and Royalist, without any mistake about it. And this I lay down, because some people judging a sausage by the skin, may take in evil part my little glosses of style and glibness, and the mottled nature of my remarks and cracks now and then on the frying-pan. I assure them I am good inside, and not a bit of rue in me; only queer knots, as of marjoram, and ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... but reaching it, suddenly stopped, returned to the sofa, where the colonel still sat, imprinted a swift kiss on his mottled cheek, and fled, leaving him invested with a mingled flavor of freshly ironed muslin, wintergreen lozenges, and recent bread and butter. He sat still for some time, staring out of the window. It ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... want to see the moon at an observatory generally make the mistake of looking when the moon is full, and asking to see it through the largest telescope. Nothing can then be made out but a brilliant blaze of light, mottled with dark spots, and crossed by irregular bright lines. The best time to view the moon is near or before the first quarter, or when she is from three to eight days old. The last quarter is of course equally favorable, so far as seeing is concerned, only one must be up after midnight to ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... in a shaking voice. "Look here, I'd like—" He stopped, unable to go on, his agitation was so great. His chest heaved as from hard running, and his complexion, pallid at first, had become mottled; fiery splotches appearing at his temples and cheeks. "What do you mean by telling me—telling me there's talk about—about—" He gulped, and began again: "What do you mean by using such words as 'reputation'? What do you mean, speaking of ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... (Blessed darling crows, moos, jumps in his nurse's arms, and holds out a little mottled hand for a biscuit of Savoy, which mamma supplies.) "I can't help thinking, Arthur, that Rosey would have been much happier as Mrs. Hoby than she will be as ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... with their marvelous surroundings. There are displayed tiny caves and grottoes of white coral of great delicacy and variety, star-fishes, sea-urchins, growing sponges, sea-fans, and gaudy-colored tropical fishes, including the humming-bird-fish, and others like butterflies with mottled fins and scales, and that little oddity the rainbow-fish. The prevailing color of this attractive creature is dark green, but the tinted margins of its scales so reflect the light as to show all the colors of the rainbow, and hence its name. When bottled in alcohol, these fairy-like denizens ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... horsemen as a rat-tail, being but scantily covered with hair, and his neck was even more scantily supplied with a mane, while in color he could easily have taken any premium put up for homeliness, being an ashen roan, mottled with flecks and patches of divers hues; but his legs were flat and corded like a racer's, his neck long and thin as a thoroughbred's, his nostrils large, his ears sharply pointed and lively, while the white rings ...
— The Busted Ex-Texan and Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... had once said of him. "Or a phosphorescent log, rather," some one else amended; and we recognized the happiness of this description of his small squat trunk, with the red blink of the eyes in a face like mottled bark. He had always been possessed of a leisure which he had nursed and protected, instead of squandering it in vain activities. His carefully guarded hours had been devoted to the cultivation of a fine intelligence and a few judiciously chosen ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... there would be no time to reload. A yellow shadow slipped below a horse's belly, and there came the cry of an animal's agony. Then another and another, and yet more. But no one came near me in the gateway. I could not see anything to shoot at—only lithe shades and mottled shadows, for the torch lay on the wet ground, and was sputtering to its end. The moaning of the horses maddened me, and I sent a bullet through the head of my own poor beast, which was writhing horribly. Elspeth's horse got the contents of ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... appropriate and harmonious throughout, much of the furniture having been especially built for the place in which it was to stand. In the main hallway stood massive Florentine chairs and settees, with high backs, upholstered in mottled embossed leather, each bearing the coat of arms of the State. The waiting and writing rooms were appointed and finished in the same simple design which prevailed in the main hallway, light green being the dominating color, ...
— New York at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis 1904 - Report of the New York State Commission • DeLancey M. Ellis
... steep climate old Brown's in; And the rains there his ducks nearly drowns in The old man hisse'f wades his rounds in As ca'm and serene, mighty nigh As the old handsaw-hawg, er the mottled Milch cow, er the old rooster wattled Like the mumps had him 'most so well throttled That it was a pleasure ...
— Songs of Friendship • James Whitcomb Riley
... head in its brown wig was still shaking with fatigue, but under the prickle of white on his shaven jowl the purplish color came back in mottled streaks. He sipped the sherry breathlessly, the glass trembling in his veined and shrunken hand. "Well," he demanded, "how do you two like ...
— The Awakening of Helena Richie • Margaret Deland
... the white table cloth, spoke of their past with embarrassing eloquence. Opposite the host, on the other side of the table, at which he was a regular guest, was the Marquis de Monpavon, but a Monpavon who in no wise resembled the mottled spectre whom we saw in the last chapter; a man of superb physique, in the prime of life, with a long, majestic nose, the haughty bearing of a great nobleman, displaying a vast breastplate of spotless linen, which ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... works at Chelsea were not established till long afterwards; and according to Dr. Plott, whose "Natural History of Staffordshire" was published in 1686, the only kinds of pottery then made in this country were the coarse yellow, red, black, and mottled wares; and of those the chief sale was to "poor crate-men, who carried them on their backs all over the country", I have not found any account of the Mr. Dwight mentioned by Aubrey, or of his attempts to improve the art of pottery.- ...
— The Natural History of Wiltshire • John Aubrey
... exactly like a groom. And he knew it. And he knew that I knew he knew it. And if he was miserable, which I hope he was, I'm pretty sure he wasn't one-half so miserable as I was—and as I am. "Damn that woman!" I caught myself saying, out loud, after staring at my mottled old map in ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... Roads of Arranmore. At Burtonport they lie on the very water's edge. At a place called Lickeena, masses of beautiful salmon-and rose-coloured granite actually trend into the tidewater, and at Burtonport proper is a promontory of that richly-mottled granite which I had supposed to be the peculiar heritage of Peterhead, and which is now largely exported from Scotland to the United States. Why should not this Irish granite be shipped directly from Donegal to America, there to be built up into cathedrals, and shaped ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (1 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... of the professional!), and was holding by a short leash an enormous Danish hound; one of those great hulking hounds—a hound whose shoulders shake when he walks, with white, blinky eyes, smooth skin, and mottled spots—brown and gray—spattered along his back and ribs. Trick dog, evidently—one who springs at the throat of the assassin (the assassin has a thin slice of sausage tucked inside his collar-button), ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith
... Epidendron with large white flowers, which clothes thickly the trunks, is profusely in bloom. Several kinds of kingfisher resort to the place. Four species may be seen within a small space— the largest as big as a crow, of a mottled-grey hue, and with an enormous beak; the smallest not larger than a sparrow. The large one makes its nest in clay cliffs, three or four miles distant from this place. None of the kingfishers are so brilliant in colour as our English species. ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... as she sat in her usual place, with knitting cast aside and eyes fixed on the blue sky mottled with round clouds, a knock at the door announced the entrance of her landlady. Mrs. Manstey did not care for her landlady, but she submitted to her visits with ladylike resignation. To-day, however, it seemed harder than usual to turn from the blue sky and the ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... distinctly affected. They undergo a peculiar process of shrinking from extraction of water from them. They also lose some of their power to absorb oxygen from the air. In confirmed spirit-drinkers the face and hands are often seen of dark mottled color, and in very bad specimens of the kind, the face is sometimes seen to be quite dark. This is because the blood cannot take up the vital air in the natural degree. * * ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen
... blurs before his eyes. He understood Worry now. He knew now what was wrong with him, what had been coming all through that terrible game. The whole line of stands and bleachers wavered before him, and the bright colors blended in one mottled band. ...
— The Young Pitcher • Zane Grey
... the bullrushes growed, and the cattails so tall, And the sunshine and shadder fell over it all; And it mottled the worter with amber and gold Till the glad lilies rocked in the ripples that rolled; And the snake-feeder's four gauzy wings fluttered by Like the ghost of a daisy dropped out of the sky, Or a wownded apple-blossom ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... into a small room with a low ceiling. It was furnished with a cookstove, a table, a small side-board, an old conch and a few chairs. The floor was splintery and only partly covered by frayed rugs and worn oil cloth. The paper on the walls was a dark mottled green. The ceiling was discoloured ...
— Mary Minds Her Business • George Weston
... no describing the sudden look of rage with which he turned on her. His face grew a mottled red, his clenched fist made an abortive gesture as though he would have liked to ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... work, for instance, to take care of the Guinea fowls,—the handsome, mottled hens, that never knew when they were well off, but were always running away and getting lost. If it had not been for their shrill, silly cackle, their hiding-places would never have been found. Master Sunshine pursued them every time they strayed, and brought them home triumphantly. ...
— Master Sunshine • Mrs. C. F. Fraser
... safe to say that in using pure white or pure black in mixed rags, these two colours, and particularly the white, should appear in short pieces, as otherwise they give a striped instead of a mottled effect, and this is objectionable. White is valuable for strong effects or lines in design; indeed, it is hard to make design prominent or effective except in ...
— How to make rugs • Candace Wheeler
... the grass Of spice-wood and of sassafras; On pillars of mottled tortoise-shell Hung the burnished canopy— And o'er it gorgeous curtains fell Of the tulip's crimson drapery. The monarch sat on his judgment-seat, On his brow the crown imperial shone, The prisoner Fay ...
— The Culprit Fay - and Other Poems • Joseph Rodman Drake
... to come, and only Cheon was worthy to carry it to the feast; and as he came through the leafy way, bearing the huge mottled ball, as big as a bullock's head—all ablaze with spirits and dancing light and crowned with mistletoe—it would have been difficult to say which looked most pleased with itself, Cheon or the pudding; for each seemed wreathed in ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... stood there—most at the bottom of the school—in his scraggy corduroys and jacket, through the seams of which his great big bones were bursting—as the representative of so many pounds of tea, candles, sugar, mottled-soap, plums (of which a very mild proportion was supplied for the puddings of the establishment), and other commodities. A dreadful day it was for young Dobbin when one of the youngsters of the school, having run ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... "Palace," or state apartment, was not pointed out to us. His lordship, in so far as his literal claim to be styled a white elephant, was an impostor of the deepest dye and a very grim and ugly impostor to boot. He was a great, lean, brown, flat-sided brute, his ears, forehead, and trunk mottled with a dingy cream colour. But he belonged all the same to the lordly race. "White elephants" were a science which had a literature of its own. According to this science, it was not the whiteness that was the criterion of a "white elephant." So much, indeed, was the ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... manner. Mather wrote in the full and pregnant style of Taylor, Milton, Brown, Fuller, and Burton, a style ponderous with learning and stiff with allusions, digressions, conceits, anecdotes, and quotations from the Greek and the Latin. A page of the Magnalia is almost as richly mottled with italics as one from the Anatomy of Melancholy, and the quaintness which Mather caught from his favorite Fuller disports itself in textual pun and marginal anagram and the fantastic sub-titles of his ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... many miles in every direction. Strings of pedestrians, most of them so weary and dust-covered that it was evident that they had walked the thirty miles from London during the night, were plodding along by the sides of the road or trailing over the long mottled slopes of the moorland. A horseman, fantastically dressed in green and splendidly mounted, was waiting at the crossroads, and as he spurred towards us I recognised the dark, handsome face and bold black ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... of his youth in Old Mexico; of the cattle and the women of that land. Pete feigned a heaviness that he did not feel. Presently Flores's talk grew disconnected; his eye became dull and his swarthy face was mottled with yellow. The sweat, which had rolled down his cheeks and dripped from his nose, now seemed to coagulate in tiny, oily globules. He put down a half-empty tumbler and stared at Pete. "No man sleeps," ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... disconnected meander of incised lines encircles the rather high neck, and parts of the body and its attached features are painted red. As usual this color was applied along with the slip and in polishing has become much mixed up with it, giving a mottled effect. The handles take the form of curious human-appearing figures which sit against the constricted neck, their heads supporting the rim and their feet resting upon the shoulder of the vessel. In one case the hands are held tightly against the ...
— Ancient art of the province of Chiriqui, Colombia • William Henry Holmes
... flower-soft fists of conquering clutch, Two creased and dimpled wrists, That match, if mottled overmuch, Two ...
— A Channel Passage and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... well," came somewhat sarcastically from Professor Such's lips. "Your countenance has a strangely mottled hue." ...
— Frank Merriwell at Yale • Burt L. Standish
... she's left her umbrella," grumbled the mottled woman in the glass box near the door at the ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... remark, they cast a glance ahead of them, and perceived white rugged rocks looking, either like goblins, or resembling savage beasts, lying either crossways, or in horizontal or upright positions; on the surface of which grew moss and lichen with mottled hues, or parasitic plants, which screened off the light; while, slightly visible, wound, among the rocks, a narrow pathway like ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... a good drawing card, and having won the first game of the present series, bade fair to draw a record attendance. The long lines of bleachers, already packed with the familiar mottled crowd, sent forth a merry, rattling hum. Soon a steady stream of well-dressed men and women poured in the gates and up the grand-stand stairs. The soft murmur of many voices in light conversation and laughter filled the air. The peanut venders and score-card sellers kept up their insistent ...
— The Redheaded Outfield and Other Baseball Stories • Zane Grey
... dipped playfully in tightening circles toward the plot-mottled earth. The fields expanded beneath them, and the leader brought up and hovered over a farm road whose dust already stirred in the ...
— A Fine Fix • R. C. Noll
... a little while, as we wound our way along the face of these perilons rifts in the baked clay, with the mottled, inefficient river feeling its way gingerly at the bottom of the buff—colored ravine, what was my astonishment to see Jorian and Boris turn sharply at right angles and ride single file up one of the dry lateral cracks which opened, as it were, ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... together. Inspector Kilbride's stern features were set in a thoughtful, lowering scowl. Mr. Gully's tanned, leathery countenance looked curiously mottled. ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... central portion of the disc. The photosphere consists of gaseous vapours or clouds, of irregular form and size, separated by less brilliant interstices, and glowing white with the heat derived from the interior of the Sun. In the telescope the photosphere is not of uniform brilliancy, but presents a mottled or granular appearance, an effect created by the intermixture of spaces of unequal brightness. Small nodules of intense brilliance, resembling 'rice-grains,' but which, according to Nasmyth, are of a willow-leaf shape with pointed extremities, which form a network over portions ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... Charles Kean at the sale of Horace Walpole's collection. It is a felt hat with a brim about six inches wide all round, and a rather high crown; the color was, doubtless, a bright red originally, but now it is mottled with a grayish hue, and there are cracks in the brim, as if the hat had seen a good deal of wear. I suppose a far greater curiosity than this is the signet-ring of one of the Pharaohs, who reigned over Egypt during ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... bent sharp for a spring 1410 And the barbed shaft drawn, Till the shrill steel sing and the tense nerve ring That pierces the heart of the dark with dawn, O huntsman, O king, When the flame of thy face hath twilight in chase As a hound hath a blood-mottled fawn? He has glanced into golden the grey sea-strands, And the clouds are shot through with the fires of his hands, And the height of the hollow of heaven that he fills As the heart of a strong man is quickened and thrills; 1420 High over the folds ...
— Erechtheus - A Tragedy (New Edition) • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... an oval shape, about ten inches long and four or five thick. It was of a mottled-grey colour, and had a thick rind. We found it somewhat like an Irish potato, and exceedingly good. The yam was roundish, and had a rough brown skin. It was very sweet and well flavoured. The potato, we were surprised to find, was quite sweet and exceedingly palatable, ...
— The Coral Island • R.M. Ballantyne
... as if suddenly checked in headlong speed—startled, almost stunned. The blood rushed in a tumultuous flood to his thin cheeks, then receded, leaving his face mottled red and white. His steel-gray eyes suddenly glowed like hot metal. There was a moment of tense silence; then he said, his voice steady and controlled, his manner stiff but not without dignity, "Pray do not allow that to discompose you. She is ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... over from home. It was set for Surrey, Hodges told me once, and no manner of use, consequently, but very settled and home-like to see, if you understand me. In the middle was an old stone basin, all mottled and chipped, and the water ran out from a lion's mouth in some kind of brown metal, and trickled down its mane and jaws and splashed away. We cleaned it out, she and I, one day, pretending we had help, and Hodges went to town and got us some gold fish for it. They looked very handsome there. ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... to the man. Kirkwood saw the fat shoulders of the girl's companion stiffen suddenly as the woman's hand rested at his elbow; as she moved away, a little rippling shiver was plainly visible in the muscles of his back, beneath his coat—mute token of relaxing tension. An instant later one plump and mottled hand was carelessly placed where the woman's had been; and was at once removed with ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... so late as this," said Mrs. Dax, rocking herself furiously. She strongly resembled one of those mottled chargers of the nursery whose flaunting nostrils seem forever on the point of sending forth flame. Leander, the fat lady, and Miss Carmichael ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... young being born about three months later, the litter consisting of from one to five. The father assists in the support of the kittens, which are much like those of the domestic cat. The lynx's coat is gray mottled with brown, but in winter it turns a lighter colour; in weight he runs from thirty-five to forty-five pounds. His principal food is derived from rabbits and any other animals he can kill, from beaver down, as well as grouse, ptarmigan, and other birds and fowl; occasionally ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... see or discover it. It has not (as some people imagine) exactly the power of the chameleon to render itself invisible by assuming the color of the object it perches upon, but it sits very close and still, and its mottled back, of different shades of ashen gray, blends it perfectly with the bark of nearly every tree. The only change in its color I have ever noticed is that it is lighter on a light-colored tree, like the beech or soft maple, and darker on the apple, or cedar, or pine. Then it is usually ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... through the snow, mottled and beaten in, as it were, all sledges well under, except for here and there a red paraffin oil tin and the corner of an instrument box peeping out. Our ski-sticks and ski alone stood up above it all, and those sleeping-bags, ugh—rightly the place ...
— South with Scott • Edward R. G. R. Evans
... indignant exclamation, he poured out the whole story of his ill-treatment. "See here!" he cried, in conclusion, unbuttoning his blouse and baring his thin little shoulders. Great red welts lay across them, and one arm was blue with a big mottled bruise. ...
— The Gate of the Giant Scissors • Annie Fellows Johnston
... projections parallel to the proboscis; while those of Anopheles are so large that it appears to have three probosces. There are no markings on the wings of the ordinary species of Culex, while the wings of Anopheles are distinctly mottled. The Culex, sitting on a wall or ceiling, holds its hind legs above its back and its body nearly parallel to the wall or ceiling, but the Anopheles carries its hind legs either against the wall or hanging down ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume I (of VI) • Various
... came from the same palace as this specimen, the carving of which is not excelled by any period of the ancient glyptic art. The particular piece of alabaster selected by the artist for this slab was unusually fine, being mottled with nodules of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 497, July 11, 1885 • Various
... air was harsh and bleak; the ridged and mottled sky looked scourged, or cramping fogs set in from sea, for leagues around, ferreting out each rheumatic human bone, and racking it; the sciatic limpers shivered; their aguish rags sponged up the mists. No shelter, though it hailed. The sheds were for the bricks. Unless, ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... last sweet, languishing notes. Perhaps in the interval there had been some disturbing accident in his little wild life, though I could hardly believe it, since his mate was still sitting about thirty yards from the tree on the five little mottled eggs in her nest. Or perhaps his midsummer's music had reached its highest point, and was now in its declension. And perhaps the fault was in me. The virtue that draws and holds us does not hold us always, nor very long; it departs from all things, and we wonder why. ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... lovers the words fell like a blow. Zora shivered, and a grayish horror mottled the dark burning of her face. Bles started in anger, then paused in shivering doubt. What had happened? They knew not; yet involuntarily their hands fell apart; they avoided each ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... handed it to me in its mellowed age, to be bequeathed to one of my many protegees. It was brown in colour—I detest brown, and it cordially detests me in return— and by way of further offence the material was roughened and displayed a mottled check. The cut was that of a country tailor, the coat accentuating the curve of Aunt Eliza's back, while the skirt showed a persistent tendency to sag at the back. When I fastened the last button of the horror and surveyed myself in the glass, ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... This was near his air-tight heater, and his favorite position was to sit there with his feet propped against the stove and smoke by candle-light; and sometimes he would sit in the dark to save candles. His other furniture consisted of "Reindeer" brand condensed milk and blue-mottled soap boxes, which he had acquired at times from F.W. ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... you so, Will," cried Josh, whose ruddy-brown face was looking mottled with white. "I know'd the gashly old job was wrong. Come ...
— Menhardoc • George Manville Fenn
... hour they burned brightly yet, trying hard to pierce the bitter cold outside with a ray of warmth and cheer. Where the lamps in the delicatessen store made a mottled streak of brightness across the flags, two little boys stood with their noses flattened against the window. The warmth inside, and the lights, had made little islands of clear space on the frosty pane, affording glimpses of the wealth within, ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... face had turned to a dark mottled red. His slim, well manicured hands were clenched at ...
— The Island of Faith • Margaret E. Sangster
... remission of taxes, but, as far as I can see, the whole country's stinkin' with foxes. Our trouble will be choppin' 'em in cover. I've got a list of the only villages entitled to any remission. What d'you call this flat-sided, blue-mottled beast ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... over with their vegetable impressions, did certainly remind me, when I first examined them some fifteen years ago, of the bottom of some stagnant ditch beside some decaying hedge, as it appears in middle spring, when paved with fragments of dead branches and withered grass, and mottled with its life-impregnated patches of the gelid substance regarding which a provincial poet tells his readers, in ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... my fish—a gleaming shaft of mottled grey and silver with specks of iridescent blue on its head, back and sides, and as I grasped its quivering form and held it up to view my heart beat ...
— The Call Of The South - 1908 • Louis Becke
... moments she had spent below, her features had become frightfully changed. Her face was livid and mottled with purple spots, her eyes were distended and glittered with a strange brilliancy. She let the plates which she held fall upon the table ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... we all set out on a walk, in the course of which we called at a bookseller's shop to show U—— an enormous cat, which I had already seen. It is of the Angora breed, of a mottled yellow color, and is really a wonder; as big and broad as a tolerably sized dog, very soft and silken, and apparently of the gentlest disposition. I never imagined the like, nor felt anything so deeply soft as this great beast. Its master seems very fond and proud of it; and, great favorite ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the sea and the shore, a song without words, but told so well in tone that it was easy, seeing nothing there in the black shadow of the wood, yet to see it all; the jagged horizon against the sullen sky, the streaks of mottled foam sliding landward along the weltering backs of black waves, spinning into sea drift at every wind-sheared crest, and blowing, soft as wool, in rolling masses far inland. It was easy to see the greatest crests rear and draw back, ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... unearthly light over our heads, Then departed, dropt in the night, and was gone;) Of such, and fitful as they, I sing—with gleams from them would gleam and patch these chants, Your chants, O year all mottled with evil and good—year of forebodings! Year of comets and meteors transient and strange—lo! even here one equally transient and strange! As I flit through you hastily, soon to fall and be gone, what is this chant, What am I myself ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... and the lagoon lay silvery, like a trail of moonlight behind them—Venice in the distance, opalesque, radiant, a city of dreams. The clouds above them, beautiful with changing sunset lights, were no longer mirrored on a still lagoon, but mottled the broken surfaces of the river with hues of bronze and purple, between the leaves of the creeping water-plants which clogged the movement of the oars; for they had exchanged the liquid azure pavement of their "Citta Nobilissima" for the ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... nature. It also holds the mirror up in a limited way. It does not show a man what he looks like when he is both well and good. It does show a man what he looks like, however, when he breaks out into spots or goes yellow, pale, or mottled as a result of making a beast of himself. It reflects only sick men; but it reflects them with a purpose. It would be a crime to permit it, if the world were a hospital for incurables. To write satire is ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... and elms of Ockham Park. The church lies some hundred yards from the road, under the windows of the manor-house, a building which cannot be said to owe anything to the taste or consistency of successive architects. The tower is thirteenth century, buttressed, mottled into cool greys and pinks, and heavy with ivy. But the chief decoration of Ockham Church is its thirteenth century, seven-lancet east window, and in the carving of the capitals of its slender columns of black ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... likely to be favoured with weather fine enough to permit of our pursuing our voyage under the most favourable conditions. This symptom of approaching change merely consisted in the gathering in the heavens of a thin veil of mottled, fine-weather cloud, just dense enough to obscure most of the lesser stars and render the night rather dark, while a few of the brighter stars peeped through the openings between the clouds at tolerably frequent intervals, permitting us to steer our course without having recourse ...
— A Pirate of the Caribbees • Harry Collingwood
... the bowlder alone, a small brown creature in picturesque-looking rags, a mere waif and stray of a child, with her feet trailing in the pool; every now and then small mottled crabs scrambled crookedly along, or dug graves for themselves in the dry waved sand. The girl watched them idly, as she flapped long ribbons of brown seaweed, or dribbled the water through her hollowed hands, while a tired sea-gull that had lowered wing was skimming slowly along ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... of line. Sometimes six, sometimes eight, even so many as ten, marched with great gravity, and with that majestic dignity only possible to full-blooded Percherons, one after the other. They each wore a saddle-cloth of blue sheepskin. On their mottled haunches this bit of color made their polished coats to gleam like unto ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... a pair direct from Persia, from the Hon. C. Murray. They are rather smaller birds than the wild rock-pigeon, about the size of the common dovecote pigeon, white and mottled, slightly feathered on the feet, with the beak just perceptibly shorter than in the rock-pigeon. H.M. Consul, Mr. Keith Abbott, informs me that the difference in the length of beak is so slight, that only practised ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... Hertford to Hatfield Park; thence to the kilns on Watford Heath and at Bushey; they may also be traced from Watford to Harefield Park. These beds contain flints, usually found close to the Chalk, and consist chiefly of mottled clays, sands, and pebble-beds. Fossils are but rarely found. From the Woolwich and Reading Beds come those conglomerate masses of flint pebbles commonly called Hertfordshire plum-pudding stone. These ...
— Hertfordshire • Herbert W Tompkins
... which ran in back-currents and cross-currents, leaving behind it upon the bars and gaming-tables an alluvium of gold. Dr. Slavens was not at any of the tables; he was not reeling against any of the bars; nor was he to be seen anywhere in the sea of faces, mottled with shadows under ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... deep-set round eyes were open and, all their fire gone, seemed to stare at me from beneath the overhanging brows. The massive jaw had fallen and the red tongue hung out upon the pendulous lip. The leather-like skin of the bloated cheeks had assumed an ashen hue still streaked and mottled with brown. ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard |
