"Sconce" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of an otherwise noiseless tread, there sounded ever the faint note of the little bell. At the toe of shoes otherwise silent, there peeped in and out the flash of diamonds, and in the dark masses of her hair, shifting as she trod beneath each new sconce in turn, and catching more and more brilliance as she advanced, there smoldered the flame of a mass of scintillating gems. A queen's raiment was that of this unknown beauty, and she herself might have been a queen as she swept down the great hall, scornfully ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... down the stairs, and a few minutes after the Junker was standing in Peter's study, face to face with Maria. The shutters were closed, and the sconce on the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... in bed. The gas was out, the stove was out, and according to his custom he was reading himself to sleep by the light of a candle in a sconce attached to the bed's head. His eyes ran along line after line and down page after page, and transmitted nothing coherent ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... letting his hands swing ludicrously by his sides, "do not affright a poor clerk! If you look at me like that I will call the cook from yonder eating-stall to protect me with his basting-ladle. I wot if he fetches you one on the other side of your cracked sconce, you will never take service again ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... this remote atheneum was sconce for Mr. Holliday's candle I do not hazard. It seems I have heard him say that his cousin, Professor Wilbur Cortez Abbott (of Yale) was then teaching at the Kansas college, and this was the reason. It doesn't matter now; fifty years hence it ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... attend his lectures.... Upon occasion of one such imposition he said to Jorden:—"Sir, you have sconced [fined] me two pence for non-attendance at a lecture not worth a penny." Hawkins's Johnson, p. 9. A passage in Whitefield's Diary shows that the sconce was often greater. He once neglected to give in the weekly theme which every Saturday had to be given to the tutor in the Hall 'when the bell rang.' He was fined half-a-crown. Tyerman's Whitefield, i. 22. In my time (1855-8) at Pembroke ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... of the maxim, cherished by all true knights, that "fair play is a jewel," hastened to take advantage of the hero's fall; but, as he stooped to give a fatal blow, Peter Stuyvesant dealt him a thwack over the sconce with his wooden leg, which set a chime of bells ringing triple bob majors in his cerebellum. The bewildered Swede staggered with the blow, and the wary Peter seizing a pocket-pistol which lay hard by, discharged it full at the head of the reeling ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... Fire, and got the old man down to the door in his shirt, when Lavender ran away with his night-cap, and threw it into the water in St. James's Square, whilst the Baronet put it in right and left at his sconce, and told him to hide his d——d ugly masard. This induced him to come out and call the Watch, during which time the buck Parson got into his house, and was very snug with the cook wench until the next evening, when old fusty ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... is as familiar as with the sole material of his own wig—though, by the by, last time we had the pleasure of seeing and sitting by him, he wore his own hair—"but that not much;" for, like our own, his sconce was bald, and, like it, showed the organ of constructiveness as fully developed as Christopher or a Chaffinch. He is perfectly well acquainted, too, with all the diversities of their modes of building—their orders of architecture—and ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... easy-chairs, a chest of drawers with an alarum clock by way of ornament, a very low bedstead with a coverlet flung over it—a red cloth with a black key border—all these things made part of a whole that told of a life reduced to its simplest terms. A triple candle-sconce of Egyptian design on the chimney-piece recalled the vast spaces of the desert and Montriveau's long wanderings; a huge sphinx-claw stood out beneath the folds of stuff at the bed-foot; and just beyond, a green ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... its oddly-shaped houses, its by-ways and crooked little flights of steps leading to nowhere, its gables and slanting roofs, and its utter absence of all structural proportion. A shrine here, a broken statue there,—a half-obliterated coat-of-arms over an old gateway,—a rusty sconce fitted fast into the wall to support a lantern no longer needed in these days of gas and electricity,—an ancient fountain overgrown with weed, or a projecting vessel of stone for holy water, in which small birds bathe and disport themselves after a shower of rain,—those are but a few of ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... bound to you, if you would direct me where I can buy that same tackle that all arrant must wear; as for the matter of the long pole, headed with iron, I'd never desire better than a good boat-hook, and could make a special good target of that there tin sconce that holds the candle—mayhap any blacksmith will hammer me a skull-cap, d'ye see, out of an old brass kettle; and I can call my horse by the name of ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... were wont, when trade was better, to play at the hand-ball; but, poor fellows, since the trade fell off, they have had no heart for the game, and the vintner's half-mutchkin stoups glitter in empty splendour unrequired on the shelf below the brazen sconce above the bracepiece, amidst the idle pewter pepper-boxes, the bright copper tea-kettle, the coffee-pot that has never been in use, and lids of saucepans that have survived their principals,—the wonted ornaments of every trig ...
— The Ayrshire Legatees • John Galt |
