"Inky" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... spread around them, the whole sky and lake were faintly shining though the goddess herself had not yet topped the trees. The shadows were becoming blacker and more sharply defined. In front of them the point loomed, inky black. Like a bird of the night the little canoe shot towards it, skimmed its darkness and then slipped, effortless, into shining silver space. The smile of the moon! Pleasing old hypocrite! Always she smiles the same upon ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... deck of the carack and watched the lights perish one by one in the little town that straggled up the hillside before him. The moon came up and bathed it in a white hard light, throwing sharp inky shadows of rustling date palm and spearlike minaret, and flinging shafts of silver athwart ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... down to the waiting beak, among the bases of the tentacles, all the tentacles awoke to dreadful life, writhing in aimless excitement, although there was no work for them to do. In a few seconds the fish was torn asunder and engulfed—those inky eyes the while unwinking and unmoved. A darker, livid hue passed fleetingly over the pallid body of the octopus. Then it slipped back under the shelter of the rock; and the writhing tentacles composed themselves once more to stillness upon the bottom, awaiting the next careless ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... the upper floor in a vast apartment with heavy black beams. But there was no ceiling, and the eye lost itself in the darkness under the high pitch of the roof. The thick shutters stood open. On a long table could be seen a large inkstand, some stumpy, inky quill pens, and two square wooden boxes, each holding half a hundred-weight of sand. Sheets of grey coarse official paper bestrewed the floor. It must have been a room occupied by some higher official of the Customs, because a large leathern armchair stood behind the ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... fiction in his life, but he knew by hearsay that Madame Blumenthal's literature, when put forth in pink covers, was subversive of several respectable institutions. Besides, he didn't believe in women knowing how to write at all, and it irritated him to see this inky goddess correcting proof-sheets under his nose—irritated him the more that, as I say, he was in love with her and that he ventured to believe she had a kindness for his years and his honours. And yet she was not such a woman as he could easily ask to marry him. The result of all this was that he ...
— Eugene Pickering • Henry James
... with a heavy brow and pushed-out lip. His daughter's outburst seemed at last to have roused him to a faint resentment. After she had ceased to speak he remained silent, twisting an inky penhandle between his fingers; then he said: "I guess mother and I can worry along without having Ralph's relatives drop in; but I'd like to make it clear to them that if you came from Apex your income came from there too. I presume they'd be sorry ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... missionaries, and to some other people. Pillaging and burning and unopposed, they were spreading everywhere. Flames were now leaping up from a dozen different quarters, ever higher and higher. The night was inky black, and these points of fire, gathering strength as their progress was unchecked, soon met and formed a vast line of flame half a mile long. There is nothing which can make such a splendid but fearful spectacle as fire at night. The wind, ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... (hammered out of railing); all logic reduced to this one primitive thesis, An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth!—Peltier, dolefully aware of it, ducks low; escapes unscathed to England; to urge there the inky war anew; to have Trial by Jury, in due season, and deliverance by young Whig eloquence, world-celebrated for ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... frame. He was not free from superstition, and the evil-omened bird was no friend of his. He would rather not have heard its harsh note just at this time; and he could have wished that the river did not look so inky black, or that the trees did ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... The sixteenth story, where himself was born, His patrimonial garret, fell to ground, And pale Edina shuddered at the sound: Strewed were the streets around with milk-white reams, Flowed all the Canongate with inky streams; This of his candour seemed the sable dew, That of his valour showed the bloodless hue; And all with justice deemed the two combined The mingled emblems of his mighty mind. But Caledonia's goddess hovered o'er 490 The field, and saved him from the wrath of Moore; From ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... the brief twilight was upon the faces of the surrounding cliffs, which soon faded into misty gloom. Only the stars, leaping into the misty gloom—only the stars, leaping forth into the inky sky, shed an indistinct light into this vault of horror and of death. He was shut in here—and shut in with this awful thing which should find him out during the hours of darkness. And, marvellous to tell, a sudden drowsiness came upon him—and whether the effects of the ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... while the Fijian gathered a pile of rotten wood, but before he could set fire to the heap I was on my feet clawing my way into the darkness in front. From somewhere out of the inky night came the voice of Edith Herndon lifted up in a little Italian melody that I had heard her singing the night we left Levuka. It seemed to me that she suspected my near presence, and that she was singing to guide me to the spot ...
— The White Waterfall • James Francis Dwyer
... sea lay right underneath the dragon's cave, or he would have done some nice mischief. As it was, the people on the coast looked out across the water toward Japan, and saw three inky-black clouds stretching from the sky ...
— Tales of Wonder Every Child Should Know • Various
... rigid, proud patience. Beside Boris stood a gentleman in riding-dress, wearing spurs on his boots; his fine, sharp-cut face was laughing, showing very white teeth under a small moustache, which sat on his upper lip like two inky ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... "cleanliness was next to godliness," the bath-house certainly should precede the church. I had often heard Dodd speak of the "black baths" of the Kamchadals; and without knowing definitely what he meant, I had a sort of vague impression that these "black baths" were taken in some inky fluid of Kamchatkan manufacture, which possessed peculiar detersive properties. I could think of no other reason than this for calling a bath "black." Upon entering the "black bath," however, at Kluchei, ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... to the gate; she stood there, in the moonlight, against the inky wells of shadow into which her black robe flowed, and in the moonlight her face, gazing after him, was an exquisite, ethereal apparition, like ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... bellow. Then other tentacles waved in the moonlight, and in a flash the tyranosaur was enmeshed as by a score of slimy cables. He was not altogether helpless. Suddenly the steam shovel of a beak buried itself in the jelly body of the water animal, and there spurted out a flood of inky liquid. The water animal emitted a sickening gurgle. But the tyranosaur's advantage was only temporary. Closer and closer drew the ugly, scabrous tentacles. The tyranosaur never had a chance. Its green eyes flared, the shovel beak plunged and slashed, but never ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... a man who might have been of peasant origin. An inky black beard hid the lower part of his face, but his nose was blunt and pugnacious, and his eyes were like black shoe-buttons sewn close together. He stuck out his stomach importantly, and the care with which his ...
— Trapped in 'Black Russia' - Letters June-November 1915 • Ruth Pierce
... she drove in a wash of rain. Each night she returned long after dark, and putting her car in the garage, felt her way up the inky road by the rushing of the river at its edge, crossed the wooden bridge, and entered the cell which she tried to make ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... up from the floor and held him in the air. He felt the position to be not only undignified but unsafe, and gave himself a shake of mingled relief and resentment when the hand set him down on the inky table-cloth. ...
— The Magic World • Edith Nesbit
... knocked. Receiving no reply, she opened the door, and her candle burnt in what a moment before must have been inky darkness. Emily lay on her bed—on the edge of it; and the only movement she made was to avert her eyes from the light. 'What! all alone in this darkness, Emily!... Shall I light your candles?' She had to repeat the question before she could ...
— Vain Fortune • George Moore
... and the wind was blowing harder still, making the slender poplars along the railway line bow and bend before the squalls and assume the most fantastic shapes, but vaguely shown against the night. The night was inky black. The keenest eye could make out nothing at all distinctly, even at the distance of a few yards: the darkness was so dense ...
— Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... am that yer and me is standin' here," rejoined the bewildered captain. "I've sailed the seven seas in my day, and man and boy seen many queer things; but if this don't beat cock fightin', I'm an inky Senegambian!" ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Eagle Patrol • Howard Payson
... were the saddest of all, because of the relative gaiety in other homes on that day, for there are joyful evenings even among those forgotten hamlets of the coast; here and there, from some closed-up hut, beaten about by the inky rains, ponderous songs issued. Within, tables were spread for drinkers; sailors sat before the smoking fire, the old ones drinking brandy and the young ones flirting with the girls; all more or less intoxicated and singing to deaden thought. Close to them, the great sea, their ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... large ball of flame fell from above. It resembled a shooting star or a meteor more than anything else that I had ever seen, and made me wonder whether we were not perhaps standing beneath some inky, ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... you not lighted all the lamps?" she inquired, and when Lettice replied in amazement that there were as many lamps as usual, she shrugged her shoulders, and muttered something about "inky darkness." If Mr Bertrand had not appeared at that moment it would be difficult to say what would have happened, but he came rushing in like a breeze of fresh, wintry air, seizing each of the girls in turn, and folding ...
— Sisters Three • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... just when the confusion was at its height; the room was littered with scraps of paper and inky cloths; the famous printer's towel was lying on the desk; the stove, with its hearth piled full of ashes, emitted smoke and coal gas freely; and the printer was emptying the vials of his wrath ...
— That Printer of Udell's • Harold Bell Wright
... from it. It's in the blood. Newspaper men have been known to inherit fortunes, to enter politics, to write books and become famous, to degenerate into press agents and become infamous, to blossom into personages, to sink into nonentities, but their news-nose remained a part of them, and the inky, smoky, stuffy smell of a newspaper office was ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... inky blackness at my right I saw two flaming eyes glaring into mine. They were on a level that was over two feet above my head. It is true that the beast who owned them might be standing upon a ledge within the cave, or that it might be rearing up upon its hind legs; ...
— At the Earth's Core • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... away the creeping line of advance could be gauged by the tone of firing. Higher, higher, in one mad high-pitched shriek, ten thousand shots in one minute from twenty or more enemy machine-guns sang and hummed in the inky pall. The high key lowered; the mind pictured the khaki line retreating, reforming—forward again. Then up again the shrill staccato; line drawing nearer. Higher, faster, louder the Satanic scream of lead. Higher, still higher! The head throbbed, beads glistened ...
— Norman Ten Hundred - A Record of the 1st (Service) Bn. Royal Guernsey Light Infantry • A. Stanley Blicq
... mushroom, Hypholoma perplexum, often grows in clusters, and so does the inky Coprinus, C. atramentarius, also the glistening Coprinus, C. micaceus. The honey-colored mushroom, Armillaria melloea, is often found in crowded clusters, and this growth is ...
— Among the Mushrooms - A Guide For Beginners • Ellen M. Dallas and Caroline A. Burgin
... went through the inky darkness, plunging along the rocky and winding path by which they had brought the ambulance up the steep. Not until they had got down into the road itself did Pike give his negro comrade an idea of what had happened. Then, speaking low and seizing ...
— Sunset Pass - or Running the Gauntlet Through Apache Land • Charles King
... leave you', and by the time the audience had finished singing the chorus he had rolled on another scene, which depicted a dreadful storm at sea, with a large ship evidently on the point of foundering. The waves were running mountains high and the inky clouds were riven by forked lightning. To increase the terrifying effect, Bert rattled the tea tray and played 'The Bay of Biscay', and the children sung the chorus whilst he rolled the next picture into view. This scene showed ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... and ate, inky spots on the nut-brown soil, and Jude enjoyed their appetite. A magic thread of fellow-feeling united his own life with theirs. Puny and sorry as those lives were, they much resembled ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... officers and men, not counting myself. After we had got, as I supposed, about a couple of miles from the ship, and I knew that I could not be sent back, I ventured to crawl out and look over the gunnel. The inky sea around us was dotted with boats, all the party keeping pretty close together. The night was so dark that I could see little more than their outlines, as they crept rapidly along, like many-footed monsters, over the deep. ...
— Marmaduke Merry - A Tale of Naval Adventures in Bygone Days • William H. G. Kingston
... the cheeks, he showed that nervous contraction which no ordinary convulsion can imitate, which no illness gives, but which says to the physician, "Go your ways!" and is, as it were, a standard which Death plants on his conquests. He clutched in one hand his pen, his poor last pen, inky and ragged, in the other a crust of his last piece of bread. His legs knocked together, so as to make the crazy bed crackle. I listened carefully to his hard breathing; I heard the rattle with its hollow husk; and I recognised Death in the room as a practised sailor recognises the tempest ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... and beheld a wide expanse of ocean, whose waters wore so inky a hue as to bring at once to my mind the Nubian geographer's account of the Mare Tenebrarum. A panorama more deplorably desolate no human imagination can conceive. To the right and left, as far as the eye could reach, there lay outstretched, ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... only the prelude of a lively scene. To the westward, beyond the low coast line dimly seen in the distance, was a dense mass of black clouds, rising rapidly towards the zenith. Low, muttering, muffled thunder came over the sea. The sun went into the inky veil; and then the lightnings flashed, faintly at first, but glaring brighter and brighter as the ...
— Dikes and Ditches - Young America in Holland and Belguim • Oliver Optic
... But this trail she dared not follow, there was not enough darkness on it. She crept along the base, the sense of danger coming to her with the increasing obscurity, until suddenly she stood before a cleft of almost inky hue. Here she remembered was the ascent to the estufa, here she had to perform the work, and here overpowered by emotion and excitement she dropped behind an angular block ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... rest of the Gordons, swinging along the road to crown the heights on either side the nek. Coming through I noticed—and the kilted Highlanders noticed, too, they were staying out all night—that the sky over Ladysmith was very black. The great inky stain of cloud spread and ran up the heavens, then down to the whole circumference. In five minutes it was night and rain-storm. It stung like a whip-lash; to meet it was like riding into a wall. Ladysmith streets ...
— From Capetown to Ladysmith - An Unfinished Record of the South African War • G. W. Steevens
... the place, I was given a youth of perhaps eighteen to be my body-servant. He was to black my boots, keep my clothes dusted, hold my stirrup, take care of my horse, and do anything else I wanted him to do. This negro I dubbed Inky, in ...
— The Love Story of Abner Stone • Edwin Carlile Litsey
... As often as necessary this went to the laundry. One day when it had just returned from one of these periodical visits, I was startled, but not surprised, to find that Field had appropriated my spotless linen duster to his own inky uses and left his own impossible creation hanging on my hook in its stead. Field's version of what then occurred is beautifully, if not truthfully, portrayed in the accompanying ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... night. A hot moist wind blows over the garden and its dull moaning dies away in the darkness only to begin again more loudly. The tops of the cypresses wave to and fro under an almost inky sky in which the stars burn with feeble ray. A band of clouds spans the heavens from side to side, ragged, contorted, blacker than the sky, like the tragic locks of a Medusa. The sea is invisible through the darkness, but it sobs as if in measureless and ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... their brains and stretched them, and who would have hidden under their bedclothes in a cold-sweat of terror, could they have seen the awful vision of Macbeth as he saw it? No! and to every other commentator who has wantonly tampered with the text, or obscured it with his inky cloud of paraphrase, we feel inclined to apply the quadrisyllable name of the brother of Agis, king of Sparta. Clearly, we should be grateful to an editor who feels it his chief duty to scrape away these barnacles ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... of light burst out over them, and there were conflicting voices raised one in opposition to another. Above them all, even above the beating of the twin screws and the churning of the inky water, arose that of an officer from the bridge ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... a vivid flash of lightning cut from one black hill in the clouds and buried itself behind another. As if piercing the fathomless blanket and renting holes in its inky cover, a downpour of rain broke through, and even before reaching the earth it could now be seen descending in a heavy mist at the ...
— The Girl Scouts at Bellaire - Or Maid Mary's Awakening • Lilian C. McNamara Garis
... it rained cats and dogs and hammer-handles," said one of the soldiers afterward. "It was inky dark—darker than I have ever known it to be anywhere on the plains. The water made a muddy pond of the whole camp, and the trenches were half filled in no time. Everything was blown helter-skelter by the furious wind, and ...
— American Boy's Life of Theodore Roosevelt • Edward Stratemeyer
... tone in or near Paris, if I had had only the humming sounds to contend with, but the shadow impelled me to look for the reason further than this. I glanced upward, eagerly seeking some explanation. One star was visible through the open skylight—Mars. Clear and bright it shone in the inky ...
— Zarlah the Martian • R. Norman Grisewood
... stranger full before her in the doorway, gazing at her with an enormous pair of sloe-black eyes, under heavy inky brows, set in a hard, red-complexioned face. She burst into a loud, hoydenish laugh as Loveday tried to stammer something about a ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... forget theirselves when young and sporty. Mr. Erroll is now a-bed, sir, and asleep like a cherub, ice havin' been served three times with towels, extra. Would you be good enough to mention the bill to him in the morning?—the grocer bein' sniffy." And she handed the wadded and inky memorandum of damages to Selwyn, who pocketed it with a ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... dense shadow; now ascending, now descending. At times he caught a glimpse of the distant gray river, gleaming in the darkness, with here and there the light on board some vessel at anchor, glittering like a star. In some places, where it was shut in by high banks, the road seemed inky black; and parts of it were so solitary, that even a stout heart might have shrunk from traversing it at that dreary hour. But Rust thought not of fear. What had he to do with that feeling, who sought only revenge ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... peasant; Still more, though, his cattle: For when they have eaten The scanty reserves Which remain from the winter, Their master will drive them To graze in the meadows, And what will they find there But bare, inky blackness? 30 Nor settled the weather Until it was nearing The feast of St. Nichol, And then the poor ...
— Who Can Be Happy And Free In Russia? • Nicholas Nekrassov
... close. At first we used our lights, but a shrapnel whistling overhead warned us that we were seen, and for the remainder of the night we travelled in darkness. These were minor roads, with a narrow paved causeway in the centre, and loose sand on each side. Long avenues of trees kept us in inky darkness, and how the drivers succeeded in keeping on the causeway I really do not know. Every now and then one of the buses would get into the sand; then all the men would collect, dig the wheels clear, ...
— A Surgeon in Belgium • Henry Sessions Souttar
... profoundly the blackness of a cloudy night in the woods. Until her eyes accustomed themselves to the transition from firelight to the gloom, she could see nothing but vague shapes that she knew to be the horses, and another dim, moving object that was Bill Wagstaff. Beyond that the inky canopy above and the forest ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... floor of snow all the shipmen of Shoreby came clustering in an inky mass, and tailing out rearward in isolated clumps. Every man was shouting or screaming; every man was gesticulating with both arms in air; some one was continually falling; and to complete the picture, when one fell, a dozen would fall upon the top ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 8 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... do not love us. The pride of the Garibaldian was not far behind the generosity of the former zouave. With an abruptness equal to that of Montfanon, he took up the volume and grumbled as he turned it over and over in his inky fingers: ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... wind howls in the chimney cowls, and the bat in the moonlight flies, And inky clouds, like funeral shrouds, sail over the midnight skies - When the footpads quail at the night-bird's wail, and black dogs bay the moon, Then is the spectres' holiday - then ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... Protestantism in opposition to Guise; instead he is relegated to quite a subordinate part. Anjou, again, the later opponent of Guise, makes a very belated bid for our favour after displaying a brutality equal to his rival's in the massacre. The author is careful to paint Catherine in truly inky blackness. But the only character which we are likely to remember is the Duke of Guise. Yet his portrait is of inferior workmanship. The murders by which he tries to reach the throne are too treacherous to be ranked in the grander scale of crime. Even the vastness of his organized massacre ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... in their Wains for gratitude. I know not where they got the malt from, but there was narrow a fault to find with the Brew. I recollect its savour now with a sweet tooth, condemned as I am to the inky Hog's-wash which the Londoners call Porter; and indeed it is fit for Porters to drink, but not for Gentlemen. These Peasants used to tremble all over with terror when they came to the Stag o' Tyne; but they were always hospitably made welcome, ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... common consent, as it appeared, the girls rose and crowded round the entrance. Ellenor lifted the latch, and, flinging the door wide open, she stood on the threshold and looked out into the inky blackness of the night. The wind howled and moaned as it entered the kitchen; and a flash of lightning tore open, for one second, the darkness of the sky. After the crash of thunder that followed, Blaisette cried ...
— Where Deep Seas Moan • E. Gallienne-Robin
... thunder sky, soft, fantastic, barred, and feathered, bright white where they ballooned out above into cumuli, rich purple in their massive shadows, and dropping from their under edges long sheets of inky rain. Thanks to the brave North-Easter, we had gained in five days thirty degrees of heat, and had slipped out of December into May. The North-Easter, too, was transforming itself more and more ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... impressive that they stood motionless, watching the flaming tree and the inky heavens beyond. Suddenly in the sky they saw a figure that resembled a vast balloon slightly inclined to one side, and spinning on its axis ...
— The Hunters of the Ozark • Edward S. Ellis
... Pope, and all their school, is briefly this: Their poetry is conceived and composed in their wits, genuine poetry is conceived and composed in the soul. The difference is immense.' Taine is contemptuous: 'Pope did not write because he thought, but thought in order to write. Inky paper, and the noise it makes in the world, was his idol.' Professor Henry A. Beers is more judicious: 'Pope did in some inadequate sense hold the mirror up to Nature.... It was a mirror in a drawing-room, but it gave ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... become the ordinary accompaniment of our afternoon's journey began to roll hoarsely over the prairie. Only a few minutes elapsed before the whole sky was densely shrouded, and the prairie and some clusters of woods in front assumed a purple hue beneath the inky shadows. Suddenly from the densest fold of the cloud the flash leaped out, quivering again and again down to the edge of the prairie; and at the same instant came the sharp burst and the long rolling peal of the thunder. ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... a brilliant spot of light, standing out vividly against the surrounding darkness. I could not account for that brilliantly lighted spot then. But we came into it as the car stopped; it was a sort of oasis of light in an inky desert of surrounding gloom. And as we came full into it and I stood up to descend from the car, stretching my tired, stiff legs, the silence and the darkness were split by ...
— A Minstrel In France • Harry Lauder
... rolling action into the valleys, and out of the wool-white waves sudden sharp dark forms upthrust like strange masters of the deep. Towers took shape and islands upheaved, crowned with dark fortresses. To the west a vast and inky-black Gibraltar magically appeared. Soon the sea was but a prodigious river flowing within the high walls of an ancient glacier, a ghost of the icy stream that once ground its slow way between these ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... these types with the letters upon them are being set up, all night long patient men pick up the metal letters and form them into pages; all night long the steam engine is going, and the letters from the inky metal pages are being stamped upon the clean white paper, which, when it is printed all over, will contain the week's history of the world, and will be ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... lieutenant, Fernando's rival, were rowing toward Duck Island fire or six miles away. The island was reached. It was a dismal affair little more than an elevated marsh. When the tide was out on Duck Island, its extended dreariness was potent. Its spongy, low-lying surface, sluggish, inky pools and tortuous sloughs, twisting their slimy way, eel-like, toward the open bay were all hard facts. Occasionally, here and there, could be seen a few green tussocks, with their scant blades, their amphibious flavor and unpleasant dampness. ...
— Sustained honor - The Age of Liberty Established • John R. Musick,
... of horses, the throats of swimming dogs, and pressed up to the edges of the travaux where frightened children sat among litters of puppies. Ponies bestrode by naked boys struck up showers of spray, squaws with lifted blankets waded stolidly in, mounted warriors, feathers quivering in their inky hair, indifferently splashing them. Here a dog, caught by the current, was seized by a sinewy hand; there a horse, struggling under the weight of a travaux packed with puppies and old women, was grasped by a lusty brave and dragged to shore. The water ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... reputation. On the one side of the space stood the kitchen, on the other the woodshed, and in a ramshackle penthouse against the hall at the back, the paper was trimmed and damped down. Here, too, the forms, or, in ordinary language, the masses of set-up type, were washed. Inky streams issuing thence blended with the ooze from the kitchen sink, and found their way into the kennel in the street outside; till peasants coming into the town of a market day believed that the Devil was taking a wash ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... a thankless task before her. Master Will required a great deal of preparation. His curls were gummed and tangled; his fingers were inky, ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... nimbly through the two other liquors, you shall (if you perform your part well, and have employ'd oyl of Vitriol Cleer and Strong enough) see the Darkness of the liquor presently begin to be discuss'd, and grow pretty Cleer and Transparent, losing its Inky Blackness, which you may again restore to it by the affusion of a small quantity of a very strong Solution of Salt of Tartar. And though neither of these Atramentous liquors will seem other than very Pale Ink, if you write with a clean Pen dipt in them, yet that is common ...
— Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664) • Robert Boyle
... the inky cloak, Mr. Applebite," replied Mrs. Greatgirdle, "that truly indicates regret; but it's here," (laying her hand upon her left side): "no—there, under his liver wing, that he feels it, poor bird! It's a shocking thing to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... the morning they went on again to join the rest of the regiment on Table Top. Struggling up the trench-like bottom of the ravine, through the inky blackness of the thick scrub, they found themselves at length in a cul-de-sac, with clay cliffs on either side. The officer went on to reconnoitre, and then, to the great discomfiture of the forty fellows huddled together in the clay watercourse, a hundred or so Turks put in an appearance on the ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie
... Milton, whose Comus we had to read for examination by some learned Board. If any one thing definitely committed me to poesy it was that poem; and as has nearly always happened to me, the crisis of discovery came in a flash. We were all there ranked at our inky desks on some drowsy afternoon. The books lay open before us, the lesson, I suppose, prepared. But what followed had not been prepared—that some ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... the hut I heard a low murmur of greeting pass between him and someone else, which told me that the owner was at home; then I followed and stood upright in what was, to my eye, inky blackness. ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... the dark with the wind in one's face at a kind of funeral goose step it is very easy to fall asleep. The odds were that we should blunder into some Turkish picket or patrol. Looking back it was hard to realize that the inky masses behind, like a column of following smoke, was an army on the march. The stillness was so profound one heard nothing save the howl of the jackal, the cry of fighting geese, and the ungreased wheel of an ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... course to the southwest. Ten days of this, and on the morning of December 6, at five o'clock, we sighted land "just where it ought to have been," dead ahead. We passed to leeward of Ua-huka, skirted the southern edge of Nuka-hiva, and that night, in driving squalls and inky darkness, fought our way in to an anchorage in the narrow bay of Taiohae. The anchor rumbled down to the blatting of wild goats on the cliffs, and the air we breathed was heavy with the perfume of flowers. The traverse was accomplished. Sixty days from land ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... many other honest folk, do not like to see the blank black front of a large mirror in a room dimly lighted, and where the reflection of the candle seems rather to lose itself in the deep obscurity of the glass, than to be reflected back again into the apartment. That space of inky darkness seems to be a field for Fancy to play her revels in. She may call up other features to meet us, instead of the reflection of our own; or, as in the spells of Hallowe'en, which we learned in childhood some unknown form may be seen peeping over our shoulder. In short, when I am in a ghost-seeing ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... the beach here, like that pretty little reef that runs right out before your windows, but three miles from the shore there is a fatal stretch of sand where wrecks are frequent, and all along which ominous white clouds are springing up from the inky surface of the wintry sea, like warning ghosts. It is very dreary and dismal looking; but, nevertheless, as I have no rehearsal, I am going out to walk. Kiss Dorothy for me. I am ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... publishers don't seem to recognize a genius and my P. O. box is always filled with long yellow comebacks—slip enclosed "Sorry we find your valuable Mss. unavailable for our publication, etc." However, nothing beats trying but failure. And although everything on this mud ball looks inky, and I am once more Past Grand Master of Hoodoo Philosophy, I shall grit my teeth and push ahead as I have done a thousand times before. My debts are growing like a snow ball and although I am not entirely broke, I am so badly bent that it ceases to be funny. There ...
— Letters of a Dakota Divorcee • Jane Burr
... beautiful. Its throat was ablaze with gold, and bordered with red were its inky black pinions. When they were unfolded, the boat flew in a race with the whirlwind and left far behind the swift eagle. Widely renowned was the ship, the chief of all ships ...
— Northland Heroes • Florence Holbrook
... coming along that terrace in Utopia, I see a little figure, a little bright-eyed, bearded man, inky black, frizzy haired, and clad in a white tunic and black hose, and with a mantle of lemon yellow wrapped about his shoulders. He walks, as most Utopians walk, as though he had reason to be proud of something, as though he had no reason to be afraid ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... out for Urnaesch, with a bright boy as guide. Hot gleams of sunshine now and then struck like fire across the green mountains, and the Sentis partly unveiled his stubborn forehead of rock. Behind him, however, lowered inky thunder-clouds, and long before the afternoon's journey was made it was raining below and snowing aloft. The scenery grew more broken and abrupt the farther I penetrated into the country, but it was everywhere as thickly peopled and as wonderfully cultivated. At Gonten, there is a large building ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... down into the circle. It was Bagheera the Black Panther, inky black all over, but with the panther markings showing up in certain lights like the pattern of watered silk. Everybody knew Bagheera, and nobody cared to cross his path; for he was as cunning as Tabaqui, as bold as the wild buffalo, and as ...
— The Kipling Reader - Selections from the Books of Rudyard Kipling • Rudyard Kipling
... might, he was unable to fill more than half a dozen small pages. He hesitated whether he should send them in, and held them in his inky fingers, thinking he would burn them. He was full of pity for his own inability. "I wish I was a clever ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... not inky darkness that met his gaze. The room was draped in the grey of dawn, cold, harsh, lifeless. Every object on the wall was plainly visible in this drear light. The light green stripes in the wall paper were leaden in colour, the darker border above was almost blue in its greyness. For ...
— Her Weight in Gold • George Barr McCutcheon
... his failure, and, when he wasn't helping Inky Jed get out the bogus tickets, he followed the show and tried to prevail on Harry to play another trick on me. Just what it was Harry doesn't know. He refused to do it, and then he came and confessed to me. So ...
— Joe Strong The Boy Fire-Eater - The Most Dangerous Performance on Record • Vance Barnum
... some two—as in the case of the one we had seen; the one at Ripley is said to have discharged no fewer than five at that time. These canisters smashed on striking the ground—they did not explode—and incontinently disengaged an enormous volume of heavy, inky vapour, coiling and pouring upward in a huge and ebony cumulus cloud, a gaseous hill that sank and spread itself slowly over the surrounding country. And the touch of that vapour, the inhaling of its pungent wisps, was ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... fleet-footed ahead, the man following with long strides. There was evidently a way and Tito knew it. His black head bobbed along in front, now a dark sphere glossed by the sunlight, now an inky silhouette against the white shine of water. There were creeks to jump and pools to wade—the duck shooters' planks only spanned the deep places—and the way ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... the captain's camp. There I found the familiar unwelcome sight which I had so often before me on the expedition of 1905-06—the white expanse of ice cut by a river of inky black water, throwing off dense clouds of vapor which gathered in a sullen canopy overhead, at times swinging lower with the wind and obscuring the opposite shore of ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary
... madam! Nay it is; I know not 'seems;' 'Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother, Nor customary suits of solemn black, Nor windy suspiration of forced breath, No, nor the fruitful river in the eye, Nor the dejected haviour of the visage, Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief That can denote me truly; these indeed seem, For ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... a dreary night for all on board. As long as there was light they could at least see what danger was to be faced, but now the barque was plunging and tossing through an inky obscurity. With a wild scooping motion she was hurled up on the summit of a great wave, and thence she shot down into the black gulf beyond with such force that when checked by meeting the next billow her whole fabric jarred from truck to keelson. There were two seamen ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... was going away from it all, into the blackness. Her lantern glimmered,—went out. Mary Bell's cramped fingers let it fall. Her heart pounded with fear of the inky dark. ...
— Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby and Other Stories • Kathleen Norris
... should be, found six miles underground. It has an inky flavour, which is not at all unpleasant. What a capital source of strength Hans has found for us here. We will call it ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... backwards to escape the deluge, cannoned into Queenie, and brought her headlong to the floor. Howls broke out anew, mingled with a crisp interchange of abuse between the elder pair, while Cecilia vainly sought to lessen the inky flood with a duster. Upon this pleasant scene ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... in a fair hand, that did not seem as that of any inky-fingered lay brother, but as I read the few words that were written I knew whose it was, for none but Nona would have ...
— A Prince of Cornwall - A Story of Glastonbury and the West in the Days of Ina of Wessex • Charles W. Whistler
... eye flashed upon a dark scene. The gloom of approaching night was deepened by the inky clouds that obscured the sky. Thick fog banks came sweeping past at intervals; a cold north-easterly gale conveyed a wintry feeling to the air. Small thick rain fell in abundance, and everything attested the appropriateness of Jerry MacGowl's observation, ...
— The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands • R.M. Ballantyne
... waiting to take Geoffrey back to the hotel. Under the saffron light of an uncanny sunset, which barred the western heavens with three broad streaks of orange and inky-blue like a gypsy girl's kerchief, the odd little vehicle rolled down the hill of Miyakezaka which overhangs the moat of the ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... Port Vigor seemed endless. I was a little nervous, remembering the tramps in Pratt's quarry, but with Bock sitting beside me on the seat I thought it craven to be alarmed. We rumbled gently through the darkness, between aisles of inky pines where the strip of starlight ran like a ribbon overhead, then on the rolling dunes that overlook the water. There was a moon, too, but I was mortally tired and lonely and longed only to see my little Redbeard. ...
— Parnassus on Wheels • Christopher Morley
... door dropped into place, a heavy object fell upon it with a thud, and they were in inky darkness. There was no sound save the sobs of the two boys, and later the steady tread of a man who paced the floor overhead,—a man ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... into that sweet face. Her lips parted, and some strong resolve came into those almond-shaped eyes; through her inky lashes, laden down with tears, I saw a gleam of true feeling that made me almost like the girl. But she closed her lips again, and the noble expression died out of her face, leaving it full of ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... the fast-descending twilight was hovering over the level plain as we two went forth. In the west, the red tinge of the sun, which had just disappeared below the horizon, lingered well up in the sky. Against it we could see, clearly outlined in inky blackness, the distant Indian wigwams; while to the eastward the crimson light was reflected in fantastic glow upon the heaving surface of the lake. For a moment we paused, standing upon the slope of the mound on which the Fort was built, ...
— When Wilderness Was King - A Tale of the Illinois Country • Randall Parrish
... Wales, and it was said that the most successful cock-fighters fought the bird that resembled the colour of the day when the conflict took place; thus, the blue game-cock was brought out on cloudy days, black when the atmosphere was inky in colour, black-red on ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... and yet in the inky blackness of the room accurate hunting down was difficult. It was like a duel between blind men. Thor was moving uncertainly, pausing from second to second to fix the ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... Lias, which, also extending across the island, forms by far the most largely-developed deposit of this formation in Scotland. It occupies a flat dingy valley, about six miles in length, and that varies from two to four miles in breadth. The dreary interior is covered with mosses, and studded with inky pools, in which the botanist finds a few rare plants, and which were dimpled, as I passed them this morning, with countless eddies, formed by myriads of small quick glancing trout, that seemed busily engaged in fly-catching. The ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... bare mountain-heads loomed up. Upward, on the right, led giant steps of cliff and bench and weathered slope to the fir-bordered and pine-fringed crags standing dark and bare against the stormy sky. Massed inky clouds were piling across the peaks, obscuring the highest ones. A fork of white lightning flashed, and, like the booming of an avalanche, ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... Of that there could be no manner of doubt. Callous and easy-going man of the world as he had ever been and ever would be, the steadfast truth and tender devotion of the poor child moved him to a faint sense of shamed admiration. On the inky blackness of the night he saw her face, floating like a vision,— her little uplifted, praying hands,—he heard her voice, piteously sweet, crying "Amadis! Amadis! Say you didn't mean it!—say it isn't true!—I thought you loved ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... the wall and was climbing up the treacherous slope when the airlock door opened, and someone stood outlined in the bright circle of light that cut into the inky blackness. An amplified voice filled the valley and ricocheted back off the walls of the mountains, casting eerie echoes down on the lone man on ...
— The Judas Valley • Gerald Vance
... to it," said Willet. And they did. The canoe shot forward at amazing speed over the surface of the river, inky save when the lightning flashed upon it. Robert paddled as he had never paddled before, his muscles straining and the perspiration standing out on his face. He was thoroughly inured to forest life, but he knew that even the scouts ...
— The Hunters of the Hills • Joseph Altsheler
... Liz. The storm was beginning to grow furious; the sun, which had already set, was tingeing the black and threatening clouds with dingy red. Far as the eye could reach, the once green prairie presented an angry sea, whose inky waves were crested and flecked with foam, and the current was drifting the hut away into the abyss of blackness that seemed to gape on ...
— The Red Man's Revenge - A Tale of The Red River Flood • R.M. Ballantyne
... and miniature pines; it glittered sharply under the moon; the light upon the snow was blue; cold roads wound away through it, deserted; little piles of dead leaves shivered; a fine keen spray ran along the tops of the drifts; inky shadows lurked and dodged about the undergrowth; in the broad spaces the snow glared; the lighted mills, a zone of fire, blazed from east to west; the skies were bare, and the wind was up, and Merrimack in the ...
— Men, Women, and Ghosts • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... a direction; it was hard to walk in the inky darkness over ground that was tossed and tumbled like a frozen sea: and as the earth still quaked and heaved, it was hard also to keep a footing. But if I did fall myself a score of times, my dear burden got no bruise, and presently I got to the skirts of the square, and found ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... expense—and also risk. Martin Luther, Dean Swift, John Milton, Paine, Voltaire, Sam Adams were all pamphleteers. The early Colonial "broadsides" were pamphlets issued by men with thoughts plus, and all of the men just named fired inky volleys which proved to be shots heard 'round ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... a flood that gapes, A frowning pile of horrid shapes. All darkness, blackness, deep despair, "My burden is greater than I can bear!" A rolling river, the dead of night, A form all palsied with affright, Alone, yes, alone, yet so afraid, A hurried stride from that inky shade; On over the barges away from the shore, One breathless clasp, one long clasp more— A heavy plunge and a gurgling groan, Two clammy corpses cold as stone, A brow distorted, a clenched fist, A babe the Lord ...
— The Minstrel - A Collection of Poems • Lennox Amott
... put it back on the shelf and took another and went to bed. You see what a lot of trouble we had over the pudding. Every evening till Christmas, which had now become only the day after to-morrow, we sneaked down in the inky midnight and boiled that pudding for as ...
— New Treasure Seekers - or, The Bastable Children in Search of a Fortune • E. (Edith) Nesbit
... her coat. The night, though windy and dark, was warm. Stars shone out from unexpected places, pencil-like streaks of inky-black clouds stretched menacingly across the sky. The wind came down from the moors above with a dull boom which seemed echoed by the waves beating against the giant rocks. The beads of the bare trees ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Its confident owner had led it in on a chain and held it negligently in a corner of the room, waiting for his cue. The panther had stood there drowsily, its eyes shifting a little, then, watching people, its inky head had begun to move from side to side. He remembered the way the loose chain jerked. The animal's eyes half-closed, it lowered its head, its upper lip began to draw away from its teeth. All at once it had dropped ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... not in the obscure light of thick-set spruce, pine, and hemlock, but in the shaggy, monstrous, and forbidding growth which appeared to be soiled with some common dye, water, earth, tree-trunks, foliage—all wore the same inky livery, and seemed wrought of rusty iron, so still the huge trees stood, with ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... fires," mounted into a cloudless heaven, higher and higher, in queenly majesty, until the dark world was filled with her glory, and the road before me became transformed into a silver track splashed here and there with the inky shadow of hedge and trees, and leading away into a land ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... the great west window of the school at Stoneborough, on its bare walls, the masters' desks, the forms polished with use, and the square, inky, hacked and hewed chests, carved with the names ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... was black, his vest the same, and when I look'd beneath, His breast was black—all, all, was black, except his grinning teeth. His sooty crew were like in hue, as black as Afric slaves! Oh, horror! e'en the ship was black that plough'd the inky waves! ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... a terrible blow: the doctor, the medicines, the comfort, the nursing that would have helped Dr. Shedd were all miles away and he was so ill that it was impossible to drive him back over that rough mountain track in the inky darkness of the night. ...
— The Book of Missionary Heroes • Basil Mathews
... his relations have another dodge as well. They possess a bag of inky fluid. By mixing this ink with the spurt of water from the funnel, the Octopus leaves a thick cloud behind him. The enemy is lost in this dark cloud, while the ...
— Within the Deep - Cassell's "Eyes And No Eyes" Series, Book VIII. • R. Cadwallader Smith
... fleshless limbs, and painted their nakedness in more than ever ghostly guise. It was then that Finn rose, painfully and slowly, to his feet, and moved, like an old, old man, across the floor of his cage to the bars, the bars that were of an inky blackness in that silvery light. For almost an hour this great hound, this tortured prince of a kingly race, stood sadly there, staring out at the moonlight between the bars of his prison; and for almost an hour, big clear drops kept forming in his black ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... eggs, and admiring the fortitude or indifference with which the fledglings endured the sizzling heat, I found myself subject to an optical illusion, for when I looked up and abroad the brightly gleaming sea had been changed to inky purple, the hills of the mainland to black. Though absolutely cloudless, the sky seemed oppressed with slaty gloom, and the leaves of the trees near at hand assumed a leaden green. For a few seconds I was convinced that some almost unearthly meteorological ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... small pinch of China leaves in an infuser spoon but a mean mockery of his own generous handful of black Indian leaves, well stewed in a billy to a strength suited for hide-tanning. Of this inky mixture he will cheerfully consume (several times a day) a quart, as an aid to the digestion of a pound or two of corned beef, with pickles and other deadly things, none of which seem to do him much harm. And ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... odd fleeces of white cloud between the lead colour and the black. They were hurried about in the sky, evidently by counter currents. The river was almost inky in its hue, and every large drop made its own splash and circle. Up went the umbrellas in both boats; but almost before they were raised, some were turned inside out, and all were dragged down again. The gust had come, and brought with it a pelt of hail—large ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau
... and there the elder boy had done things to him—absurd things, not worth chronicling separately. An apple-pie bed is nothing; pinches, kicks, boxed ears, twisted arms, pulled hair, ghosts at night, inky books, befouled photographs, amount to very little by themselves. But let them be united and continuous, and you have a hell that no grown-up devil can devise. Between Rickie and Gerald there lay a shadow that darkens life more often than we suppose. The ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... arrival, walked across and examined the fragmentary message, raising his eyebrows when he discovered that it was written upon the same paper as Leroux's MSS. He glanced, too, at the pen lying on a page of "Martin Zeda" near the lamp and at the inky splash which told how hastily the pen had ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... a line of inky blackness in the exact center of the falling floor. So black was it that at first glance I took it for ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... perfect splendor is a constant surprise. One steps from his hotel, not thinking of the Lake—the blue of it rises through the trees, over the rocks, everywhere, with startling vividness. Surely never before was so large and wonderful a lake of inky blue, sapphire blue, ultra-marine, amethystine richness spread out for man's enjoyment. And while the summer months show this in all its smooth placidity and quietude, there seems to be a deeper blue, ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... pall of darkness suddenly dropped upon the room. An inky curtain seemed to have fallen from the sky. At the same time the windows were shaken by tremendous blasts of wind, and, as the electric lights were hastily turned on, huge snowflakes, intermingled with rattling hailstones, were seen ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... now rolled in volumes over the mountain tops; their summits still bright and snowy, but the lower parts of an inky blackness. The rain began to patter down in broad and scattered drops; the wind freshened, and curled up the waves; at length it seemed as if the bellying clouds were torn open by the mountain tops, and complete torrents of rain came ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... Night, inky black, fathomless night, had now settled about us. In the distance one could just discern the red and green signal lamps—at closer range the burning tip of a cigar or cigarette. The soldiers turned ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard
... had been turned upside down. When one looked up at the illuminated sky, one seemed to be looking down at a mountainous landscape. The clouds, rent apart, torn, and shattered, were like masses of high hills, inky black on the summits, with copper-colored precipices and glistening purple slopes; and in remote depths of the valleys, where there should have been lakes of water, there were lakes of fire. In the intervals between the flashes, ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... of masonry rising out of the inky water, brought to Graham's mind the thought of the multitude of ways and galleries and lifts, that rose floor above floor overhead between him and the sky. The men worked in silence under the supervision of two of the Labour Police; their feet made a hollow ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... finally got courage to look through a side window, feeling quite sure that Mrs. Norton was out with her Chinaman, looking after some choice little chickens left in her care by the doctor. But not one light was to be seen in any place, and the inky blackness was awful to look upon, so I turned away, and just as I did so, something cracked and rattled down over the shingles and then fell to the ground. But which roof those sounds came from was impossible ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... first; but the option was hardly a simple one. By walking the horse and letting the car swing and jolt along one experienced the combined agonies of sea-sickness and rheumatism, with the additional chance of being shot headlong into the inky ditch on either side. By taking to what the driver called "our own hind legs," we accepted an ankle-deep plod through filth indescribable and treacherous boulders, which turned over when trust and sixteen ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker
... hideous square of painted deal!—Now it was on the walls of the rooms he lived in; now on the door of a church, like Luther's propositions; now at a street-corner, where should have been the name of the street; now inky-black against the fair white headstone of his own grave. Miserable dream, miserable man, for whom the scraping together of sordid dross was life's only object, and who, in ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... men had gone home early, wet and dispirited; and Walter stood, all splashed and stained with mud, sick at heart and heavy, on the edge of the place, and looked very gloomily at the trenches, which lay like an ugly scar on the green hilltop. The sky was full of ragged inky clouds, with fierce lights ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson
... see with and some are stars. Of the star kind, a few are lustrous and miraculous, and control destinies. I think yours are like that. One can flash lambent fire and the other can soften like the petals of a black pansy—it has just that touch of inky purple—and in their range are ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... away if they exposed themselves there to the full force of the wind. Looking round, the scene was terrible. The surface of the sea was almost hidden by the clouds of spray blown from the heads of the waves; a sky that was inky black hung overhead. The sea, save for the white heads, was of similar hue, but ahead there seemed a gleam of light. Jim Tucker, holding on by the rail, raised himself two or three feet higher to have a better ...
— A Chapter of Adventures • G. A. Henty
... of the steps the soldier stopped and took aim at the lad. With a backward sweep of his sword, Hal knocked the chandelier crashing to the floor, throwing the hall into inky darkness, and with a quick leap was several steps ...
— The boy Allies at Liege • Clair W. Hayes
... who writes, Ever. These two she saw like meteorites Flare down the wind and burn afar, then fade. And Leto next, a mother grave and staid, Drave out her chariot, which two winged stags drew, Swift following, robed in gown of inky blue, And hooded; and her hand which held the hood Gleamed like a patch of snow left in a wood Where hyacinths bring down to earth the sky. And in her wake a winging company, Dense as the cloud of gulls which from a rock At sea lifts up in myriads, if the knock ...
— Helen Redeemed and Other Poems • Maurice Hewlett
... and decorated the house with festoons and bows of black in the best possible taste. She tied up the knocker with black crape, and put a large bow over the corner of the steel engraving of Garibaldi, and swathed the bust of Mr. Gladstone, that had belonged to the deceased, with inky swathings. She turned the two vases that had views of Tivoli and the Bay of Naples round, so that these rather brilliant landscapes were hidden and only the plain blue enamel showed, and she anticipated the long-contemplated purchase ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... little outer office the visitor was met by a sharp lad with inky fingers, who presented him with a pen and a printed slip. The printed slip having been filled with the visitor's name and present business, and conveyed through an inner door, the lad reappeared with an invitation to the private office. There, behind a ...
— Martin Hewitt, Investigator • Arthur Morrison
... The inky blackness had lifted somewhat, and they could plainly perceive the hull of one of their own ships, presumably; but her ports were open, and her interior appeared as a glowing furnace, while, even as they looked, tongues of fire ...
— Across the Spanish Main - A Tale of the Sea in the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... that night was ever after like a confused dream in the minds of the Winnebagos and Sandwiches; a nightmare of howling wind and dashing waves and inky darkness out of which came ever increasing numbers of people to throng ...
— The Campfire Girls on Ellen's Isle - The Trail of the Seven Cedars • Hildegard G. Frey
... in despite of Pallas. Now, wherein we want desert were a thank-worthy labour to express: but if I knew, I should have mended myself. But I, as I never desired the title, so have neglected the means to come by it. Only overmastered by some thoughts, I yielded an inky tribute unto them. Marry, they that delight in poesy itself should seek to know what they do, and how they do; and especially, look themselves in an unflattering glass of reason, if they be inclinable unto it. For poesy must not be drawn by the ears, it must be gently led, ...
— English literary criticism • Various |
