"Mottled" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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
... lambs as wide awake as heart can desire; half a dozen of them playing together, frisking, dancing, leaping, butting, and crying in the young voice, which is so pretty a diminutive of the full-grown bleat. How beautiful they are with their innocent spotted faces, their mottled feet, their long curly tails, and their light flexible forms, frolicking like so many kittens, but with a gentleness, an assurance of sweetness and innocence, which no kitten, nothing that ever is to be a cat, can have. ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... 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 ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... attired in a voluminous brown holland wrapper, with a limp cape and a trimming of dingy pink ribbon. The ex-waitress at Darch's Dining-rooms was absorbed in the contemplation of a large dish, containing a leathery-looking substance of a mottled yellow color, profusely sprinkled ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... which was rather more than an inch in diameter, was made immediately beneath a branch which stretched out almost horizontally from the main stem. It appeared merely a deeper shadow upon the dark and mottled surface of the bark with which the branches were covered, and could not be detected by the eye until one was within a few feet of it. The young chirped vociferously as I approached the nest, thinking it was the old one with ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... could reach over the hills of the south shore. Huge oaks that might have stood there from the beginning of the world, wide-branching elms, and dark pines overshadowed the highway, opening now and then into vistas of green fields where stood a cottage or two, with a herd of mottled cows grazing down by the brook. On the higher ridges the trees formed a close phalanx, and with their dark tops cut the horizon into a long, irregular line of forest, as if offering battle to the woodman's axe that was threatening to ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... of animation, though if it chanced to fall open it would reveal caricature drawings of school authorities which must needs draw confusion upon her head. She would never have the heart to draw caricatures again! The thick book with the mottled cover contained the compositions which had won praise and distinction. She had felt so proud of the "Excellent" written in pencilled letters at the end of the final sentences. Never again would she know what it was to be happy ...
— Etheldreda the Ready - A School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... Joyce, choosing the side opposite the fireplace. "These big volumes look so interesting." She brushed the thick dust off their backs, revealing the titles. "Look!— They're all alike, with red backs and mottled sides." She opened one curiously. "Why!—they're called 'Punch'! What a strange name! What kind of books can they be?" And then, on further examination,—"Oh! I see. It's a collection of English papers full of jokes and politics ...
— The Boarded-Up House • Augusta Huiell Seaman
... the tree, apparently at some terrible object. I looked up also, and saw a large yellow snake, nearly ten feet long, let itself gradually down directly over the coffin, between me and the bright glare, (the outline of its glossy mottled skin glancing in the strong light, which gave its dark opaque body the appearance of being edged with flame, and its glittering tongue, that of a red hot wire,) with its tail round a limb of the cottontree, until its head reached within an inch of the dead man's face, which ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... great main staircase, and burst into the breakfast room, her face mottled with terror, her hand spread above her heart ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... eaten," said Baloo, with a grunt of relief, as soon as he saw the beautifully mottled brown and yellow jacket. "Be careful, Bagheera! He is always a little blind after he has changed his skin, and very quick ...
— The Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling
... in Nos. 34, 51, and 52 as a mixture of red and white must have been the mottled or variegated Roses, commonly called the York and Lancaster Roses;[253:1] these are old Roses, and very probably quite as old as the sixteenth century. There are two varieties: in one each petal is blotched with white and pink; ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... sticking a small piece of plaster over the prick on his finger. "I have to be careful," he continued, turning to me with a smile, "for I dabble with poisons a good deal." He held out his hand as he spoke, and I noticed that it was all mottled over with similar pieces of plaster, and discoloured ...
— A Study In Scarlet • Arthur Conan Doyle
... and beasts of prey. The dark stripes at a little distance look like shadows between stems of plants, while the lighter stripes represent streaks of light passing through foliage. When young birds live in the open, as on shingly beaches, then their down is mottled. How perfectly this harmonises with the surrounding stones only those who have tried to find young terns (fig. 4), or young ringed plover (fig. 2), for example, can tell. But this question of young birds is a big one, and must be taken up ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... of the goatsucker in Demerara, a bird with prettily mottled plumage like that of the owl. Its cry is so remarkable that, once heard it can never be forgotten. When night reigns over these wilds you will hear this goatsucker lamenting like one in deep distress. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... dogs had come wagging in and had been quietly motioned to heel, Gordon stood still and looked around at the mottled tree-trunks glimmering above the underbrush. The first beechnuts had dropped; a few dainty sweet acorns lay under the white oaks. Somewhere above a ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... but its botanical name is Mucuna bennetti. It has been found impossible to introduce it into cultivation. Among other flowers were some very large sweet-scented Crinum lilies and some very pretty pink flowering begonias, with their leaves beautifully mottled with silver. Here and there we would notice a variegated croton or pink-leafed ...
— Wanderings Among South Sea Savages And in Borneo and the Philippines • H. Wilfrid Walker
... disregarded a portion of his friend Corliss's note, and the morning following his lean guest's arrival at the ranch the jovial Irishman himself saddled and bridled the swiftest and most vicious horse in the corral; a glass-eyed pinto, bronc from the end of his switching tail to his pink-mottled muzzle. He was a horse with a record which he did not allow to become obsolete, although he had plenty of competition to contend with in the string of broncs that Murphy's riders variously bestrode. Moreover, the pinto, like dynamite, "went off" at ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... only does the general structure of the web of nature present a clearly striped pattern, instead of the mottled gray of the theory—neither the beginning, nor the middle, nor the end is like what the evolution theory ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... unheard, unseen, A new-year's gift from Mab our queen: But tell it not, for if you do, You will be pinch'd all black and blue. Consider well, what a disgrace, To show abroad your mottled face: Then seal your lips, put on the ring, And sometimes ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... buff, many of the branches having a piebald aspect, or mottled with dark purple patches; when wetted these portions present a beautiful crimson colour. Polypidom five or six inches high, rising with a strong, tapering, longitudinally grooved stem, which is sometimes sparingly branched, but more commonly simple. Stem and branches pinnate or bipinnate, ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... again, they 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
... turban, with his companion, strode rapidly by, apparently not deigning to look at us, and disappeared in the village. He was scarcely out of sight when I perceived a boat approaching the shore with a curiously mottled sail. As it came nearer I saw that it was a quilt of patchwork taken from a bed. In the bottom of the boat lay a barrel, apparently of flour, a stout young fellow pulled a pair of oars, and a slender-waisted damsel, neatly dressed, sat in the stern, plying ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... supported four high, square-topped turrets, through which the stout reins led from the mouths of the horses to the hands of the driver, who was a negro of apparently twenty years of age. His face, which Nature had colored with a glistening black, was now mottled with the cold, and his large shining eyes filled with tears; a tribute to its power, that the keen frosts of those regions always extracted from one of his African origin. Still, there was a smiling expression of good humor in his happy countenance, that was created by the thoughts ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... which disfigure the human countenance with what is termed expression. Two small gray 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
... his lips as I entered. "Weener, although a rigid adherence to fact compels me to claim some acquaintance with general knowledge and a slight cognizance of abnormal psychology, I must admit bafflement at the spectacle of your mottled complexion once more in these rooms sacred to the perpetuation of truth and the dissemination of enlightenment. Everyday you embezzle good money from this paper under pretense of giving value received, and each day your uselessness becomes ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... continued flying about close to the ship. On going after them on the ice I soon shot one of them, and was not a little surprised, on picking it up, to find it was a little bird about the size of a snipe; the mottled back, too, reminded me also of that bird. Soon after this I shot the other. Later in the day there came another, which was also shot. On picking this one up I found it was not quite dead, and it vomited up ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... the diurnal birds of prey it is but a short step. Next to the warblers, the raptores are the most difficult birds to distinguish one from the other. Nearly all of them are creatures of mottled-brown plumage, and, as the plumage changes with the period of life, it is impossible to differentiate them by ...
— Birds of the Indian Hills • Douglas Dewar
... a contingency which does not frequently occur in practice. According to Trautwine, the cast iron for pipes to resist sea water should be close-grained, hard, white metal. In such metal the small quantity of contained carbon is chemically combined with the iron, but in the darker or mottled metals it is mechanically combined, and such iron soon becomes soft, like plumbago, under the influence of sea water. Hard white iron has been proved to resist sea water for forty years without deterioration, whether ...
— The Sewerage of Sea Coast Towns • Henry C. Adams
... hated the nicked, dun colored dishes they ate from, and the black bottomed pots and pans that all the energy of Eleanor's energetic little elbow could not restore to decency again. She hated the cracked, dun colored walls, and the mottled floor that no amount of sweeping and dusting seemed to make an impression on. She hated the compromise of housekeeping in an attic,—she who had been bred in an atmosphere of shining nickle-plated ranges and linoleum, where even the kitchen pump gleamed brightly under its annual coat ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley
... underwear until the first of June, and Isaac felt nothing. But Eva Gonorowsky saw and shuddered, hiding her eyes from the symbol and the desecration. Patrick glowered at her, filled his brush again, bent quickly down, and branded the bare and mottled legs of his enemy with two ...
— Little Citizens • Myra Kelly
... of the dining-room she stopped aghast. The walls had been distempered a particularly hideous drab; the curtains were mustard yellow; the carpet was a dull brown; the mottled marble mantelpiece, for which she had been intending to substitute one in walnut wood with tiles, still shone in slabs of petrified brawn; there was a huge mahogany sideboard of a kind she had only seen in ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... they bring him the three-year-olds and the four-year-olds to break them,— Some are such beautiful animals, so lofty looking,—some are buff-colored, some mottled, one has a white line running along his back, some are brindled, Some have wide flaring horns (a good sign!) look you! the bright hides See the two with stars on their foreheads—see the round bodies and broad backs How straight ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... of pallid city maples. She preferred the open light of the Square to the gloom of the street that cut like a canyon between the towering office-buildings on either side of it. There was a touch of autumn in the air, and a black frost of the night before had left the sidewalks carpeted with the mottled roans and yellows and ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... a lightning-flash. The somber forest enveloped them. They moved through it as through a deep wall that opened by enchantment. The moon came up, gibbous and white and glittering, paler than silver; and the forest became streaked and mottled with its light. A soft, sudden wind tore the light and shade into eerie, dancing ribbons and tatters and shreds. There were such sounds as are not heard in daylight—moon sounds and cloud sounds and sounds of dark wind; branches ...
— Snow-Blind • Katharine Newlin Burt
... thence through the temperate zone up to the exceeding cold of the mountains. The state as a whole is healthy, and the mountain breezes bracing, but the coast is subject to the usual paludismo or malarial fevers of Western America generally. Pinto, the curious mottled skin disease, is encountered in some of the valleys: ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... a stool, his back against the thin partition, when John Aldous sauntered in. There was still a groggy look in his mottled face. His thick bulk hung a bit limply. In his heavy-lidded eyes, under-hung by watery pouches of sin and dissipation, there was a vengeful and beastlike glare. He was surrounded by his friends. One of them was taking ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... trunk smoothish and mottled on young trees, at length separating into small, thin, flat, reddish scales; in old trees striate with shallow sinuses, separating into ashen-white plates, often partially detached; spray reddish or yellowish white in autumn with minute, ...
— Handbook of the Trees of New England • Lorin Low Dame
... life. Not that the man was altogether ugly, for he had a good enough nose and a fine double chin; but his eyes stood out from his face and were red and watery, and he winked them continually, as though they were always a-smarting. His lips were thick and purple-red, and his cheeks mottled here and there with little ...
— Stolen Treasure • Howard Pyle
... early 1930's 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 ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 43rd Annual Meeting - Rockport, Indiana, August 25, 26 and 27, 1952 • Various
... drifting out and mingling with the scents of baked earth and tarweed that came from the heated fields. With his cheek against the cow's side he could see between the lower limbs of the oaks the country beyond, rust-colored and tan, streaked with blue shadows and the mottled blackness below the trees. Turning a little further he could look down the road with the eucalyptus tall on either side, the yellow path barred by their shade. From the house came a good smell of hot ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... greaser and dude, tin-horn gamblers and tenderfeet, hayseeds and merchants, jostled each other good humouredly. In the pool box were two men. One —the auctioneer—a perfect specimen of the "sport"; a ponderous individual, brazen of face and voice, who presented to the crowd an amazing front of mottled face, diamond stud, bulging shirt sleeves, and a bull-neck encircled by a soiled eighteen-and-a-half inch paper collar. The other gentleman, who handled the tickets, was unclean, unshorn, and cadaverous-looking, with a black cigar, unlighted, stuck aggressively ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... may be called round, though it is somewhat irregular in shape. It grows large, and often becomes hollow. It should, therefore, be used while young, or when not more than an inch or an inch and a half in diameter. The outside coat is mottled with greenish-brown, wrinkled, and often marked with transverse white lines. The flesh is mild, not so solid as that of many varieties, and of a greenish-white color. The leaves are similar to those of the Yellow Turnip-rooted, ...
— The Field and Garden Vegetables of America • Fearing Burr
... the buzzard vulture. Whence had it come? Who knows? Far beyond the reach of human eye, it had seen or scented the slaughtered antelopes; and, on broad, silent wing was now descending to the feast of death. Presently another, and another, and many others, mottled the blue field of the heavens, curving and wheeling silently earthward. Then the foremost swooped down upon the bank, and, after gazing around for a moment, flapped off toward its prey. In a few seconds, the prairie was black with filthy birds, who clambered over the dead antelopes, and ...
— Thrilling Adventures by Land and Sea • James O. Brayman
... from the Greek [phos] (phos), which means light, is, as we have already said, the innermost portion of the sun which can be seen. Examined through a good telescope it shows a finely mottled structure, as of brilliant granules, somewhat like rice grains, with small dark spaces lying in between them. It has been supposed that we have here the process of some system of circulation by which the sun keeps sending forth its radiations. In the bright ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... coast, hairy with currents and rips, and mottled with shoals and rocks. Practically the same men hold on here in the same ships, with much the same crews, for months and months. A most senior officer told me that they were "good boys"—on reflection, "quite good boys"—but neither he nor the flags on his ...
— Sea Warfare • Rudyard Kipling
... peculiar *mottled appearance* of the *bark* (Fig. 48) in the trunk and large branches is the striking character here. The bark produces this effect by shedding in large, thin, brittle plates. The newly exposed bark is of a yellowish green color which often ...
— Studies of Trees • Jacob Joshua Levison
... toil and dust and struggle of this money-getting world, there are green fields, and whispering forests, and verdurous nooks of breezy shadow by the side of brooks where the white pebbles shine through the mottled stream,—where you find great pied pan-sies under your hands, and catch the black beady eyes of orioles watching you from the thickets, and through the lush leafage over you see patches of sky flecked with thin clouds that sail so lazily ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... hair, Spreading is the parting straight, Mottled the complexion fair, Halting is ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... on paws, and tail slow wagging, and beside him on her mat, Sitting drowsy in the firelight, winked and purred the mottled cat. ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... overcast, lowering, murky, overclouded, obscure, sullen, nebulous, hazy, dim; tarnished, indistinct, blurred; variegated, mottled. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... He was born a peasant, the poorest of peasants, a crofter. The little homestead of his family, with its whitewashed walls and straw-thatched roof, still stands on the bleak ayre-lands of Ellan, like a herd of mottled cattle crouching together in ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... this is the vengeance for Hellas, for the sack and razing of Corinth and all the other atrocities! Rome can conquer with the sword; but we Greeks, though conquered, can, unarmed, conquer Rome. How these Italians can waste their money! Villas, statues, pretty slaves, costly vases, and tables of mottled cypress,[29] oysters worth their weight in gold, and I know not what else! And I, poor Pratinas, the Greek, who lives in an upper floor of a Subura house at only two thousand sesterces rental, find in these noble Roman ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... a sorry company that gathered that night around the long table with its mottled oil-cloth covering and benches polished to a glass-like smoothness with their own vigorous bodies. They did not talk much about the Old Man; indeed, they came no nearer the subject than to ask Weary if he were going to drive the team in to Dry Lake. They did not talk much about anything, for that ...
— Flying U Ranch • B. M. Bower
... underneath a wall of mottled stone, We knew the sleeping beauty lay in state, Entangled in a mist of tears, to wait The prince whose kiss would raise her ...
— Cross Roads • Margaret E. Sangster
... happy site among the oaks 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 Sussex marble. There is some quaint ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... the three Ports, or Portland, it is getting too prosperous to be as attractive as its less northerly neighbors. Meant for a fine old town, to ripen like a Cheshire cheese within its walls of ancient rind, burrowed by crooked alleys and mottled with venerable mould, it seems likely to sacrifice its mellow future to a vulgar material prosperity. Still it remains invested with many of its old charms, as yet, and will forfeit its place among this admirable trio only when it gets a hotel with unequivocal ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... slight and doubtful encouragement, Rollo again took the way to Morton Hollow. It was early October now; the maples and hickories showing red and yellow; the air a wonderful compound of spicy sweetness and strength; the heaven over their heads mottled with filmy stretches of cloud, which seemed to float in the high ether quite at rest. A day for all sorts of things; good for exertion, and equally inviting one to ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... the door, 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 was very quiet in the room; a bumblebee blundered ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... important occur on the shore at Portsoy, as for example the gabbro masses in Portsoy Bay with enstatite, hypersthene and labradorite, the graphic granite with microcline, muscovite and tourmaline at East Head, the chiastolite-schist west of the marble quarry, the mottled serpentine with strings of chrysotile. Resting unconformably on these metamorphic rocks, Old Red sandstone strata are met with in a few places. Thus, they cross the Spey and appear in the Tynet Burn east of Fochabers, and extend eastwards to Buckie. Outliers of these beds appear on the shore near ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... a clear warm morning. The wind blew deliciously over the Mountainside. Here and there she saw a late primrose but she did not stop to call upon them. The sky was mottled ...
— The Princess and the Goblin • George MacDonald
... all fat and in splendid condition. The ptarmigans, now changing their mottled brown-and-white coat for the pure white plumage of winter, were gathered into large flocks, and easily had. A considerable number were killed with the first blast of frosty weather, and, together with a few ducks and geese, stored where they would freeze and keep ...
— The Gaunt Gray Wolf - A Tale of Adventure With Ungava Bob • Dillon Wallace
... outspread far and far beyond Lisconnel before a grey hill-range begins to rise in slow undulations, crested with furze and broom. Here we smell turf-smoke again, and see a cabin-row that is Sallinbeg, and hence the road strikes north-westward in among the mountains, where a few mottled-faced sheep peer down over it from their smooth green walks, but do not care to trust their black velvet legs upon it. And then, by the time that the air has become sea-scented, the road climbs to the top of a hill, and stops there ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... Urga's face mottled as he hastened to obey. When Artok stood finally released, he glared heavily at Hilary and Joan. Then slowly a smile broke over his warty features, a smile that boded unutterable things. Hilary waited quietly, ready to seize the slightest ...
— Slaves of Mercury • Nat Schachner
... pertinacious to a degree are these pests, and their bite is like the piercing of a red-hot needle. Simple and innocent they appear, not unlike a house fly, but larger and with the tips of their wings crossed and folded at the end like a swallow's. They are mottled grey in colour, and their proboscis sticks out straight in front. Hit them and they fall off, only to rise again and attack once more; for their bodies are so tough and resistant, that great force is required to destroy them. They are infected with trypanosomes, ...
— Sketches of the East Africa Campaign • Robert Valentine Dolbey
... second basin. Not a foam flake was on the surface of either sable cup, nothing but the wrinkles produced by the ever circling eddies. Below—past broken edge, grassy shelf, yawning cleft, and jutting ledge, was the broad deep hollow through which the "Deer" (mottled with sunshine and shadow) leaped away to the woods beyond, whilst in the meadow was seen the little "Fawn" tripping along its green banks until lost in the verdure of the valley. Add to these, the ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... 246), in the Neelgherries, decomposed to a depth of forty feet.) The minerals retain their positions in folia ranging in the usual direction; and fractured quartz veins may be traced from the solid rock, running for some distance into the softened, mottled, highly coloured, argillaceous mass. It is said that these decomposed rocks abound with gems of various kinds, often in a fractured state, owing, as some have supposed, to the collapse of geodes, ...
— South American Geology - also: - Title: Geological Observations On South America • Charles Darwin
... moment long it sail'd its balls of 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 but one ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... had a mottled glass in which greens predominated. The sizes and shapes of these pieces of glass would better be determined after the woodwork ...
— Mission Furniture - How to Make It, Part 2 • H. H. Windsor
... high as the Tower of Babylon; they swarm with columns like a forest; they pullulate into statues and pictures. The walls, pavements, and ceilings are dazzling from the lustre of the rarest marble, red and yellow, green and mottled. Fountains of perfumed water shoot aloft from the floor, and fish swim in rocky channels round about the room, waiting to be caught and killed for the banquet. We dine; and we feast on the head of the ostrich, the brains of the peacock, the liver of the bream, the milk of the murena, and the tongue ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... children would not have a perfect spring without the dog's tooth violet. The leaves are attractive and almost make the beauty of a bouquet. It is sometimes called trout lily. The mottled effect of the leaves accounts for the trout part of the name, and as for lily, it is a lily, and never belonged to the violet family at all. Dig the plant up, and the bulbous root tells the story. It really does belong to the lily family. The nodding yellow flower is pretty, ...
— The Library of Work and Play: Gardening and Farming. • Ellen Eddy Shaw
... and very different species from any of the foregoing, having the crown ashy blue, and the long scapulars black instead of white. It also has a broad V-shaped mark on the throat. Like all the other Eiders, the female is mottled brown and black, the different species being very difficult to separate. The nests are sunk in the ground and lined with down. Eggs number from six to ten. Size 2.80 x 1.80. Data.—Point Barrow, Alaska, July 5, 1898. Five eggs. Nest a hollow in the moss on tundra ...
— The Bird Book • Chester A. Reed
... for 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 ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... the signal. The air was filled with the shriek of speeding shells, the skies were mottled with patches of smoke, white and brown, where the ...
— Tam O' The Scoots • Edgar Wallace
... them, shewing how the beach had dried and cracked in the sun after the animals had walked over it. In the quarries at Stourton, in Cheshire, some years ago, a gentleman named Cunningham observed slab surfaces mottled in a curious manner with little circular and oval hollows, and these were finally determined to be the impressions produced by rain—the rain of the ancient time, long prior to the existence of human beings, when the strata were formed! Since ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 459 - Volume 18, New Series, October 16, 1852 • Various
... impression was, and it appears to have been the impression of several of the assistants here, that the willow leaves stand out dark against the luminous photosphere. On looking at the Sun, I was at once struck with the apparent resolvability of its mottled appearance. The whole disc of the Sun, so far as I examined it, appeared to be covered over with relatively bright rice-like particles, and the mottled appearance seemed to be produced by ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... glace silk, or cotton two-toned effects. The name is French, meaning woven so as to have a mottled effect. ...
— Textiles • William H. Dooley
... up, but it had not needed to. It had practically exploded the creature anyway—the .450 has two tons of striking energy at the muzzle. From what was left, Ed deduced a smallish, rabbit-sized thing, smooth-skinned, muscular, many-legged, flattish, mottled to camouflage perfectly in the leaves. There was a head at one end, mostly undamaged since it had been at the end of a long muscular neck, with a pair of glazing beady eyes and a surprisingly small mouth. When Ed pressed on ...
— Cat and Mouse • Ralph Williams
... been a flowery pink, was now pale and patternless; the Venetian blind over the window (which looked out on the smaller square) had lost one of its cords and hung at an irregular angle; there was a mirror over the mantelpiece with the silvering much mottled, and a leather-covered easy chair whereof the spring was broken and the ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... the Sweetwater Valley, and a new heaven and a new earth were revealed to the sons of men. Like a chariot of fire, the great sun rolled in all its gorgeous beauty down the west. The eastern sky grew radiant with a pink splendor, and every brown and mottled stretch of distant landscape was touched with golden light or deepened into richest purple, or set with a roseate bound of flame. Somewhere far away, a feathery gray mist hung like a silvery veil toning down the ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... 32 are shown two buttons of the size when they are just ready to break through the soil. They appear mottled with dark and white, for the outer layer of fungus threads, which are dark brown, is torn and separated into patches or scales, showing between the delicate meshes of white threads which lie beneath. The upper part of the button is already forming the cap, and the slight constriction ...
— Studies of American Fungi. Mushrooms, Edible, Poisonous, etc. • George Francis Atkinson
... had felt for years, found his place at one of the tables, he was disgusted to find upon his plate—not, as he had confidently expected, a couple of plump poached eggs, with their appetising contrast of ruddy gold and silvery white, not a crisp and crackling sausage or a mottled omelette, not even the homely but luscious rasher, but a brace of chill forbidding sardines, lying grim and ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... he has yielded he departs forthwith from his gorged carcass and flaps his transcendental wings.... Do honeymooners ever come to Waterloo Bridge? I doubt it. Imagine turning from that sublime sweep of greys and sombre gilts, that perfect arrangement of blank masses and sweeping lines, to the mottled pink of a cheek lately virgin, the puny curve of a modish eyebrow, the hideous madness of a ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... came in and took him. She sailed away so swiftly that he could at first mark nothing but the speed with which the clouds above and the dim earth below went rushing past. Soon he began to see that the sky was very lovely with mottled clouds all about the moon on which she threw faint colours ...
— At the Back of the North Wind • Elizabeth Lewis and George MacDonald
... very satisfactory, because they bloom so freely and constantly, and have enough of the droop in them to make them as useful in covering the sides of the box as they are in spreading over its surface. If pink and white varieties are used to the exclusion of the mottled and variegated kinds the effect will be found vastly more pleasing than where there is an ...
— Amateur Gardencraft - A Book for the Home-Maker and Garden Lover • Eben E. Rexford
... head with a string of pearl beads she had found in the treasure trunk. Laughing merrily, they all raced to the long mirror which stood at the other end of the garret; though cracked and discolored they were able to distinguish the gaily clad figures within its mottled depths, more like the quaint images of an old tapestry than happy, romping children at play. Then they scattered to their own games, the boys to stage an exciting battle between a red skin and a gallant soldier, the little girls to comfort Benjamin, who, having ...
— The New Land - Stories of Jews Who Had a Part in the Making of Our Country • Elma Ehrlich Levinger
... in May. The sun was low, and the street was mottled with the shadows of its paving-stones—smooth enough, but far from evenly set. The sky was clear, except for a few clouds in the west, hardly visible in the dazzle of the huge light, which lay among them like a liquid that had broken its vessel, and was pouring over ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... Karshish would write, if he could, of more important matters than the madman of Bethany; he would record his discoveries in scalp-disease, describe the peculiar qualities of Judea's gum-tragacanth, and disclose the secret of those virtues derived from the mottled spiders of the tombs. But the face of Lazarus, patient or joyous, the strange remoteness in his gaze, his singular valuations of objects and events, his great ardour, his great calm, his possession of some secret which gives new meanings to all things, the perfect logic of his irrationality, ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... changed in the sky. And presently the leaves of the forest were lit by the moon instead of the sun, and the spaces in the top boughs were dark blue instead of saffron, and the small clouds were no longer fragments of amber, but bits of mottled pearl seen through sea-water. But Rosalind witnessed none of these slow changes, and when after a great while she lifted her faint head, she saw only that the day was changed to night. And on the other side of the beech-tree, touched with moonlight, a motionless white ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon
... tall captain, with an air of relief, as Captain Trimblett turned and revealed a hot face mottled and streaked with red. "Make him listen to reason. He won't ...
— Salthaven • W. W. Jacobs
... telegraph steeple; here and there were large chateaux and parks and white roads, and paths lined with red and white cable posts were extremely conspicuous in the landscape. There were walled enclosures like gardens and rickyards and great roofs of barns and many electric dairy centres. The uplands were mottled with cattle. At places he would see the track of one of the old railroads (converted now to mono-rails) dodging through tunnels and crossing embankments, and a rushing hum would mark the passing of a train. Everything was extraordinarily clear as ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... the night he woke. Some sound was threatening him. It was London, coming to get him and torture him. The light in his room was dusty, mottled, gray, lifeless. He saw his door, half ajar, and for some moments lay motionless, watching stark and bodiless heads thrust themselves through the opening and withdraw with sinister alertness till he sprang up and ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... tree top none too soon. Even as she swung herself into place upon the huge bough, there came rushing across the space beneath, snarling, smelling and seeking, a brute as foul and dangerous as could be imagined for mother and son upon the ground. It was of a dirty dun color, mottled and striped with a lighter but still dingy hue. It had a black, hoggish nose, but there were fangs in its great jaws. It resembled a huge wolf, save as to its massiveness and club countenance, It was one of the monster hyenas of the time, a beast which must have been as dangerous to the men ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo
... 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, ...
— Master Sunshine • Mrs. C. F. Fraser
... sat under 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 ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... I'll be bound, an' kep' it at compound interest through the eternal years—had his heart been as tender as his fear o' the world was large, or had he give way, by times, t' the kindness o' soul he was born with. A scrawny, pinch-lipped, mottled little runt of a Labrador skipper, his face all screwed up with peerin' for trouble in the mists beyond the waters o' the time: he was born here at Dirty-Face Bight, but sailed the Word o' the Lord out o' Rickity ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... versicolor[obs3]; of all the colors of the rainbow, of all manner of colors; kaleidoscopic. iridescent; opaline[obs3], opalescent; prismatic, nacreous, pearly, shot, gorge de pigeon, chatoyant[obs3]; irisated[obs3], pavonine[obs3]. pied, piebald; motley; mottled, marbled; pepper and salt, paned, dappled, clouded, cymophanous[obs3]. mosaic, tesselated, plaid; tortoise shell &c. n. spotted, spotty; punctated[obs3], powdered; speckled &c. v.; freckled, flea-bitten, studded; flecked, fleckered[obs3]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... road a mountain-side pasture, and reached the forest. Under a dead spruce sat my lady, in a snug bed among the fallen leaves. She was wet; her lovely mottled plumage was disarranged and draggled, but her head was drawn down into her feathers in patient endurance, the mother love triumphant over everything, even fear. We stood within six feet of the shy creature; we discussed her courage in the face of the human monsters we felt ourselves to be. Not a ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... sat down to the table, great-grandpapa and Pansie side by side, and the kitten, as soon appeared, making a third in the party. First, she showed her mottled head out of Pansie's lap, delicately sipping milk from the child's basin without rebuke: then she took post on the old gentleman's shoulder, purring like a spinning-wheel, trying her claws in the wadding of his dressing-gown, and still more impressively reminding him of her presence ...
— The Dolliver Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... to it, and rubbed the ache out of the back of his neck. All about him the fresh morning was falling; yonder shone a green-mottled face of granite, and there a red iron blow-out streaked with veins of glittering silicate, and in this corner, still misted with the last delicate shades of night, glimmered rhyolite, lavender-pink. The single-jack dropped from the hand of Gregg, ...
— The Seventh Man • Max Brand
... "good-nights," the shutting of doors, and the little steamer lay silent, dark, and motionless in the shadow of the high Haifa bank. And beyond this one point of civilisation and of comfort there lay the limitless, savage, unchangeable desert, straw-coloured and dream-like in the moonlight, mottled over with the ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... neuralgic pains, dyspepsia, irritability, and mental depression, with restless nights. An acute attack generally begins in the early morning with sudden, sharp, excruciating pain in the larger joint of one of the big toes, more often the right, which becomes rapidly dark red, mottled, swollen, hot, tense, shiny, and exceedingly sensitive to touch. There is commonly some fever; a temperature of 102 deg. to 103 deg. F. may exist. The pain subsides in most cases to a considerable degree during the day, only to return for several nights, ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume II (of VI) • Various
... kind of dainty. Tell Clarice to cook me up a nice little steak with plenty of fat on it, and some fried potatoes, and a cup of coffee and a few waffles to come. The Judge he wouldn't get up yet. He looked kind of mottled and anguished, but I guess he'll pull around all right. I had the chink take him up about a gallon of strong tea. Say, listen here, the Judge ain't so awful much ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... time we spent on the docks. All were roofed, and exploring the long dock sheds and climbing down into the dark holds of the square-rigged ships called "clippers," we found logs of curious mottled wood, huge baskets of sugar, odorous spices, indigo, camphor, tea, coffee, jute and endless other things. Sam knew their names and the names of the wonder-places they came from—Manila, Calcutta, Bombay, Ceylon. He knew besides such words as "hawser," ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... "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 reverse, ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... crouching low as she went, for the woods were full of enemies. She was uttering a soft little cluck in her throat, a call to the little balls of mottled down that on their tiny pink legs came toddling after, and peeping softly and plaintively if left even a few inches behind, and seeming so fragile they made the very chicadees look big and coarse. There were twelve of them, but Mother ...
— Lobo, Rag and Vixen - Being The Personal Histories Of Lobo, Redruff, Raggylug & Vixen • Ernest Seton-Thompson
... brightened and he grew talkative. He spoke 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," he mumbled, as his lids drooped. Slowly his chin sank to his chest and he ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... the Major, puffing out his cheeks, his red face growing mottled in his anger. "How ...
— Fix Bay'nets - The Regiment in the Hills • George Manville Fenn
... Persian Tumblers.—I have received a pair direct from Persia, from the Hon. C. Murray. They were rather smaller birds than the wild rock-pigeon, being about the size of the common dovecot-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 Persian fanciers can distinguish these Tumblers from ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... Courthorne. He had heard Shannon's story, and, remembering it, could fancy that Courthorne had planned the trooper's destruction with a devilish cunning that recognized by what means the blame could be laid upon a guiltless man. Winston's face became mottled with gray again as he realized that if he revealed his identity he had nothing but his word to offer in ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... nullah. Country wooded. Phaenix sylvestris very abundant: Areca Catechu also becoming abundant. A good deal of cultivation occurs, mottled chiefly with sugar-cane and vegetables. The habits of the black and white kingfisher, Alcedo rudis, are different from those of the other Indian species: it never perches, choosing rather the ground to rest upon: it builds in banks: takes its prey by striking it from a height ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... 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 ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... the golden seaweed, Soon as o'er the gray cliff peep'd the dawn: Side by side, when came the hour for tea, we'd Crunch the mottled shrimp and ...
— Fly Leaves • C. S. Calverley
... thrust both hands in, and drew out handfuls of something that looked like ripe Windsor soap, or rich mottled old cheese; very unctuous and savory withal. You might easily dent it with your thumb; it is of a hue between yellow and ash colour. And this, good friends, is ambergris, worth a gold guinea an ounce to any druggist. Some six handfuls were ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... of the young man looked with hers, and found the reason for the sudden scene. A serpent, some feet in length—one of the mottled, harmless species sometimes locally called the blow-snake—obviously had come out into the morning sun to warm himself, and his yellow body, lying loose and uncoiled, had been invisible to horse and rider until they were almost upon it. ...
— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough
... traveled in silence. They reached the pile of stones below her father's place, and Elizabeth released her aching arm. In silence they watched the strangely mottled effect where the moonlight fell in patches across the water as the clouds flitted past. A patter of rain, accompanied by a sharp whistle of wind, warned ...
— Captain Pott's Minister • Francis L. Cooper
... excitement of that charge! Oh, the rush of the bending plumes and the dull thudding of eight thousand feet! The Usutu came up the slope to meet us. In silence we went, and in silence they came. We drew near to each other. Now we could see their faces peering over the tops of their mottled shields, and now we could see their ...
— Child of Storm • H. Rider Haggard
... with a resplendent tin basin and wrapped royally in a table-cloth mottled with grease-spots and coffee stains, and bearing a sceptre that looked strangely like a belaying-pin, walked upon a dilapidated carpet and perched himself on the capstan, careless of the flying spray; his tarred and weather-beaten ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... 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 ...
— The Call Of The South - 1908 • Louis Becke
... confusion the thin S.P.C.K. copy of the Apocrypha, bound in mottled calf, from which I had been reading; and ordering us to go to bed at once, ...
— Six to Sixteen - A Story for Girls • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... was not the same: something was missing from those 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
... when I found myself fairly adrift. Delicious sunshine came pouring over the hills, lighting the tops of the pines, and setting free a steam of summery fragrance that contrasted strangely with the wild tones of the storm. The air was mottled with pine-tassels and bright green plumes, that went flashing past in the sunlight like birds pursued. But there was not the slightest dustiness, nothing less pure than leaves, and ripe pollen, and flecks of withered bracken ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... the virgin's hand. Then rose his kinsmen's savage yell. Swift as the doe's Wiwst's feet Fled away to the forest. The hunters fleet In vain pursue, and in vain they prowl, And lurk in the forest till dawn of day. They hear the hoot of the mottled owl; They hear the were-wolf's [52] winding howl; But the swift Wiwst is far away. They found no trace in the forest land, They found no trail in the dew-damp grass, They found no track in the river sand, Where they thought Wiwst would ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... her nephew's prohibition and her recent fears, the good widow entered, and leaned anxiously over the stranger's form. A tall, gaunt man, clad in threadbare garments, which hung loosely upon the shrunken breast and arms, black hair and beard, mottled with white, ragged, and unshorn, and dank from exposure to the snow and sleet; a chalky-white face, with closed and sunken eyes, sharpened nose, and prominent cheek-bones—this was what they beheld as the candle flamed up steadily in the comparatively still air of the ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... wing of dappled peacock-hen, and puts the black hackle on before the wings, in order to give the peculiar hunch-backed shape of the natural fly. Many a good fish has this tie killed. But the best pattern of all is tied from the mottled wing-feather of an Indian bustard; generally used, when it can be obtained, only for salmon flies. The brown and fawn check pattern of this feather seems to be peculiarly tempting to trout, especially to the large trout of Thames; ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... could see that in the coarse, shaggy hair, like a door mat; the awkward ungainly walk, the legs doubling under him; the drooping tail with bare spots down its length, suggesting past indignities. He was not a large dog—only about as high as a chair seat; he had mottled lips, too, and sharp, sawlike teeth. One ear was gone, perhaps in his puppyhood, when some one had tried to make a terrier of him and had stopped when half done. The other ear, however, was active enough for two. It would curl forward in attention like a deer's, or start up like a rabbit's in ...
— A Gentleman Vagabond and Some Others • F. Hopkinson Smith
... German sausage," said Mavis, as she caught sight of the mottled meat, a commodity which her old friend ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... blow, Like a great flood are spread. Sometimes the sacred spot Hears human sounds profane, when As from Ophir or from Memphre Stretches the caravan. From far the eyes, its trail Along the burning shale Bending its wavering tail, Like a mottled serpent scan. These deserts are of God! His are the bounds alone, Here, where no feet have trod, To Him its centre known! And from this smoking sea Veiled in obscurity, The foam one seems to see ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... Two more have sunk prostrate beside their work within the last hour. The panic grows grotesque. Men and women tear their clothes off, looking to see if they have anywhere upon them a rash or a patch of mottled skin, find that they have, or imagine that they have, and rush, screaming, half- undressed, into the street. Two men, meeting in a narrow passage, both rush back, too frightened to pass each other. A boy stoops down and scratches his leg—not an action that under ordinary ...
— John Ingerfield and Other Stories • Jerome K. Jerome
... rough and hideous aspect. Blacker were her face and her two hands than the blackest iron covered with pitch; and her hue was not more frightful than her form. High cheeks had she, and a face lengthened downwards, and a short nose with distended nostrils. And one eye was of a piercing mottled grey, and the other was as black as jet, deep sunk in her head. And her teeth were long and yellow, more yellow were they than the flower of the broom. And her stomach rose from the breast bone, ...
— The Mabinogion Vol. 1 (of 3) • Owen M. Edwards
... unjointed his pole, left his minnow bucket where it was, mounted his horse and rode up the path. About him, the beech leaves gave back the gold of the autumn sunlight, and a little ravine, high under the crest of the mottled mountain, was on fire with the scarlet of maple. Not even yet had the morning chill left the densely shaded path. When he got to the bare crest of a little rise, he could see up the creek a spiral of blue rising swiftly from a stone chimney. ...
— The Trail of the Lonesome Pine • John Fox, Jr.
... again, "the principal chief or king of this part of the Timmannee country, is about ninety years of age, with a mottled, shrivelled-up skin, resembling in colour that of an alligator more than that of a human being, with dim, greenish eyes, far sunk in his head, and a bleached, twisted beard, hanging down about two feet from his chin; like the king ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... up that only his face was visible, lay one whom at first I failed to recognize, for the horribly contorted features presented a kind of mottled green appearance ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... of all these disturbing causes, primary and secondary, is seen in that irregular distribution of climates, which the tortuous isothermal lines and the mottled raincharts illustrate. The isothermal lines may be regarded as the topographical delineations of that bed of temperatures down which the upper atmosphere flows from the equator toward the poles, till its downward tendency is balanced by the centrifugal force ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... he tried to talk quickly, he who weighed every word on ordinary occasions; the expression of his eyes, which was generally wavering, grew irritated and deceitful, and his pale, distinguished-looking face became mottled with patches of ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... lingering thought; and then his eyes to meet The scanty rays are turned, and on his mind Awhile the captive fate forgets to find Its deepest force or weary sigh to send. Turn from the city, and to country lend A passing thought. All labor is at rest. The plough lies set, point in the mottled breast Of half-tilled field; the flail is laid above The barn's brown wall; the shining sickles move Not from their keep; the woodman's axe is still; The golden sheaf doth not the feeder fill; The huntsman's horn ...
— A Leaf from the Old Forest • J. D. Cossar
... imagine what a splendid sight was presented by a Zulu impi twenty thousand strong, divided into several regiments, one with snow-white shields and tall cranes' feathers on their heads, one with coal-black shields and black plumes, and others with red and mottled shields, and bands of fur upon their foreheads. In their war with the English many of the Zulus were armed with muzzle-loading guns and rifles of the worst description, of which they could make little use, for ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... about as big as an ordinary setter dog, but much thicker in the body, shorter in the legs, and shaggier in the coat. Its head was flat, and its ears short and rounded. Its hair was long, rough, and of a mottled hoary grey colour, but dark-brown upon the legs and tail. The latter, though covered with long hair, was short, and carried upright; and upon the broad feet of the animal could be seen long and strong curving claws. Its snout was sharp as that of a greyhound—though ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... yet 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
... Terai at the foot of the mountains, but is only an occasional visitor to Sikkim proper. But the leopard and the clouded leopard are permanent residents and fairly common. This last is of a most beautiful mottled colouring. Another leopard is the snow-leopard, which inhabits high altitudes only. The marbled-cat is a miniature edition of the clouded leopard, and the leopard-cat of the common leopard. The large Indian civet-cat is not uncommon, but the spotted tiger-civet, a very beautiful ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... Mottled clouds were dimming the moon. Mahon, peering from the window, could make out only the slight bulk above the rails that marked the place where the contractor lay. A moment later a spot of light sank from beneath him—lower and lower, ...
— The Return of Blue Pete • Luke Allan
... all colours, which, on his sunburnt face, mottled it till it looked like jasper. The duke and duchess suppressed their laughter so as not altogether to mortify Don Quixote, for they saw through Sancho's impertinence; and to change the conversation, and keep Sancho from uttering more absurdities, the duchess asked Don Quixote ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... yet they are hard to banish from their native haunts, but linger after the woods are cleared and the meadow drained. The bright flowers blaze back all the yellow light of noonday as the gay petals curl and spread themselves above their beds of mottled leaves; but it is always a disappointment to gather them, for indoors they miss the full ardor of the sunbeams, and are apt to go to sleep and nod expressionless ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... looked at nothing, but seemed to penetrate the universe and shed soft solemn light over all things. Back from the broad, low brow, floated a cloud of silky yellow hair, that glittered in the slanting rays of sunshine as if powdered with gold dust; and over its streaming strands fluttered two mottled butterflies, and a honey-laden bee. On distant hill-slopes cattle browsed, and at the right of the kneeling woman a young lamb nibbled a cluster of snowy lilies, while a dappled fawn watched the gambols of a dun kid; and on the left, in a tuft of bearded grass, a brown snake arched its neck to ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... large cannon-ball, which was tied up in a cloth and seemed to require an immense amount of boiling. The smell of this was delicious, and, when ultimately turned out of its cloth it presented a whitey-brown mottled appearance ...
— The Walrus Hunters - A Romance of the Realms of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... climbing accomplishments are not greater than those of other mice. The color, however, is subject to many variations. Besides individuals of uniform gray, light yellow, and white color, I have had specimens mottled with gray and white, and blue and white. Tricolored mice seem to be very rare. It is a known fact that we also have white, black, and yellow mice and occasionally pied ones, and the Chinese have profited by these variations of the common mouse also, to satisfy their fancy in breeding ...
— The Dancing Mouse - A Study in Animal Behavior • Robert M. Yerkes
... son's speech the countenance of the newly made Earl of Douglas grew white and mottled, tallowy white and dull red in turns showing upon it, like the flesh of a drained ox. He rose unsteadily to his feet, moving one hand deprecatingly before him, like a helpless man unexpectedly stricken. His nether lip quivered, pendulous and piteous, in the midst of his grey beard, and for ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... way over the mottled stone floor with as easy a grace as though it were a flowery turf, but Patricia, not so well schooled in concealing her feelings, made ...
— Miss Pat at School • Pemberton Ginther
... 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
... have settled down, he pushed 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 ...
— Psmith in the City • P. G. Wodehouse
... feet of sandstones, known in Germany by the name of "Bunter," from its mottled and spotted appearance. What lies under them again, does not concern us ...
— Town Geology • Charles Kingsley
... the smooth, close-grained bowls which the Indians made from the veined and mottled knots of maple-wood. They were valued at what seems high prices for wooden utensils and were often named and bequeathed in wills. Maple-wood has been used and esteemed by many nations for cups and bowls. The old English and German vessel ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... dank with odours Strong, within each encrusted gyre, 'Mid treasure-vaults digged by gray Age, Affronting witches incense burn; And howling ghouls gape thro' vapours, Two siffling vampyres dance on fire, Each mottled sage a conquered page To him whose hate no Doom can turn, No bat-faced gnome can stem the blaze: Hence harlots, ghastly with giant sin, Chant runes to him in strobic gloom As figgum's plied before his throne. Malignly mute, ...
— Betelguese - A Trip Through Hell • Jean Louis de Esque
... silent, presentientest Maiden-kittens, Dudu and Suleika, —ROUNDSPHINXED, that into one word I may crowd much feeling: (Forgive me, O God, All such speech-sinning!) —Sit I here the best of air sniffling, Paradisal air, truly, Bright and buoyant air, golden-mottled, As goodly air as ever From lunar orb downfell— Be it by hazard, Or supervened it by arrogancy? As the ancient poets relate it. But doubter, I'm now calling it In question: with this do I come indeed Out of Europe, That doubt'th more eagerly than doth any Elderly ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... "the difference of natural and of artificial colour seems to me very easily discerned; that of nature is mottled and varying; that of art set, and too smooth; it wants that animation, that glow, that indescribable something, which, even now that I see it, wholly surpasses all my ...
— Evelina • Fanny Burney
... a voice of thunder; and for the first time the innkeeper spoke, his ruddy face now mottled with white, and his hands trembling as he placed them ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... Lion,' added Gilbert; but Algernon, fancying the game was by way of giving useful instruction to the children, went on in full swing. 'Handsomely mottled with darker brown; a ruminating animal; so gentle that in spite of its size, none of my little friends need be alarmed at its vicinity. Inhabits the African deserts, but may be bred in more temperate latitudes. I myself saw an individual in the Jardin des ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Enganchada," the girl sold for debt. Her shawl lay beside her basket, so her hair, that had flown loose since the morning bath, fell in a cataract over the polished amplitudes of bosom and shoulders. Save when feeling shot them with tawny flashes—as waving branches filter mottled sunlight on brown waters—her eyes were dark as the pools of Lethe, wherein men plunge and forget the past. They brought forgetfulness to Paul of his moral tradition, racial pride, the carefully conned apology which he did not remember until, an hour later, he fed her entire stock in trade to ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... go from paper to ink, ink to paper, and listened to its scratch, scratch, and to the buzz of a big fly against the dirty window-pane. Ashamed to look at any one, he looked at the lawyer's big ink-well—a great, circular affair of mottled brown wood. It had several openings, each one with its own little cork attached with a short string to the side of the stand. He had never seen ...
— The Calico Cat • Charles Miner Thompson
... Dudley's at Hindley, was kept in my family as a favourite. The animal was a female, quite white, and perfectly deaf. She produced, at various times, many litters of kittens, of which, generally, some were quite white, others more or less mottled, tabby, &c. But the extraordinary circumstance is, that of the offspring produced at one and the same birth, such as, like the mother, were entirely white, were, like her, invariably deaf; while those that had the least speck of colour on their fur, as invariably possessed the usual faculty ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume XII. F, No. 325, August 2, 1828. • Various
... The orange, or yellow, and the black with amber eyes are also prize winners. There are the tigers also, the brown tabby, and the orange and white. Mixed colors are more common than solid ones; the tortoise-shell cat of three colors and well mottled ...
— Concerning Cats - My Own and Some Others • Helen M. Winslow
... palpi, the name given to the 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 |
