"Patchwork" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... from what I had heard and read of it: if the shore-line, and the entrance, and the bay, and the scene were finer than Rio, I was prepared to be angry; but Rio is grand and Havana is pretty, so that one may like both and not divide his allegiance. A patchwork of good pictures in the Moorish vein of town, and shore, and water would reproduce, and yet not copy, all that Havana has to offer; but there is not a picture in the world that aspires to the grandeur of Rio. But I won't deny the sparkle and brilliancy of Havana. At this moment the sky ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... the salon. It was long, built around two sections of the tetragon, and with low divans beneath the view windows. The floor was thick pile rugs pushed one against another in a crazy patchwork of reds and browns. At the far end of the room, someone in blue fatigues like his own was bent over a stand of some sort. The figure straightened at the same time a tinkle of music filled the room. He recognized the red-gold hair of the young woman he ...
— Operation Haystack • Frank Patrick Herbert
... the other. They wished each other good-night, going through the usual forms in the coolest manner possible. Molly went up to her little bedroom, clean and neat as a bedroom could be, with draperies of small delicate patchwork—bed-curtains, window-curtains, and counter-pane; a japanned toilette-table, full of little boxes, with a small looking- glass affixed to it, that distorted every face that was so unwise as to look in it. This room had been to the ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... old Billy. And going to his own room, he dragged off all the pretty patchwork quilts above his neatly-made bed, grabbed up the voluminous feather-bed, staggered with it in his arms down the hall, through the side door, and flung it on to the ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... neighbors' girls, who wear overskirts and high hats, and sit at the table with the family; where there are rag carpets and "painted chamber-sets;" where they feed calves and young turkeys, and string apples to dry in the summer, and make wonderful patchwork quilts, and wax flowers, and worsted work, perhaps, in the long winters; where they go to church and to sewing societies from miles about, over tremendous hills and pitches, with happy-go-lucky wagons and harnesses ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... is the temptation to shrink with a senseless fear from using a plain word twice in the same page, and often from using a plain word at all. This unmanly dread of simplicity, and of what is called "tautology," gives rise to a patchwork made up of scraps of poetic quotations, unmeaning periphrases, and would-be humorous circumlocutions,—a style of all styles perhaps the most objectionable and offensive, which may be known and avoided by the name of Fine Writing. Lastly, there is the danger of obscurity, ...
— How to Write Clearly - Rules and Exercises on English Composition • Edwin A. Abbott
... Menalcas sings of Milon, Daphnis of Nais), and of nature. Daphnis is the winner,- it is his earliest victory, and the prelude to his great renown among nymphs and shepherds. In this version the strophes are arranged as in Fritzsche's text. Some critics take the poem to be a patchwork by various hands. ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... brook, a fearful and wonderful portrayal of an otter, and a very fancy stag of unlimited points dazzled the eye. The ceiling was decorated with an elaborate and most effective design in wood—a fashion very common in Srinagar, consisting of a sort of patchwork panelling of small pieces of wood, cut to length and shape, and tacked on to a backing in geometrical designs. At a little distance the effect is rich and excellent, but close inspection shows up the tintacks and ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... bedding. At length a brigantine worthy of Robinson Crusoe floated on the waters of the Chenonceau. They laid in what provision they might, gave all that remained of their goods to the delighted Indians, embarked, descended the river, and put to sea. A fair wind filled their patchwork sails and bore them from the hated coast. Day after day they held their course, till at length the favoring breeze died away and a breathless calm fell on the face of the waters. Florida was far behind; France farther yet before. Floating idly on the glassy waste, the craft lay motionless. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... out his dazzling wares upon the patchwork counterpane, then stepped back to observe the effect. Ma Briskow's hands fluttered toward the gems, then reclasped themselves in her lap; she bent closer and regarded them fixedly. The Juno-like daughter also stared down at ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... Patchwork," he called out, with a laugh. "Thare's a shellin' fur ye, which is more, bedad, than yer howl sthock-in-thrade is worth! Changee fur changee, black dog fur whoite moonkey, sure, as my ould fayther used ...
— Young Tom Bowling - The Boys of the British Navy • J.C. Hutcheson
... a rumbling from inside the pile and a huge jagged patchwork of metal shot out, smashing both arms. The slagger teetered, swaying more and more violently from side to side until it collapsed on its side. The rumbling grew. And then the pile, like a mechanical cancer, ripped the slagger apart ...
— The Junkmakers • Albert R. Teichner
... perhaps, in a few passages of the Ode on the Manners. Campbell's criticism is, otherwise, worthy of this beautiful poet, whom he praises with congenial spirit. When Hazlitt speaks of the "tinsel and splendid patchwork" of Collins, "mixed with the solid, sterling ore of his genius," he speaks of a base material not to be found there. In Collins there is no tinsel or patchwork, one of his excellencies is, that the whole of every piece is of one web; there are no joinings or ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... of himself as the golden head. Golden head must have golden breast, and a golden breast must have a golden trunk, and golden trunk golden legs, and golden legs must rest on feet of gold. That will stand, and that will represent me better than this patchwork affair of which I dreamed. So he set him up the golden image in the plain of Dura. That represented himself as he regarded himself, the image seen in vision represented him as he was in reality, as God saw him. What followed? God smote him and he went ...
— The Village Pulpit, Volume II. Trinity to Advent • S. Baring-Gould
... whom every lover of 'prose as a fine art' looks up with an admiration which may well become despair. What is it in this style, this way of putting things, so occasional, so variegated, so like his own harlequin in his 'ghastly vest of white patchwork,' 'the apparition of a dead rainbow'; what is it that gives to a style, which no man can analyse, its 'terseness, its jocular pathos, which makes one feel in laughter?' Those are his own words, not used of himself; ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... father wouldn't let her. No, it simply happened because her window was right across the alleyway from ours. The Ponsonby house was next to us, on the right, and between us were only a fence, a hedge of box, and a sprawly acacia tree that shaded Miss Ponsonby's window, where she always sat sewing—patchwork, as I'm alive—when she wasn't working around the house. Patchwork seemed to be Miss Ponsonby's sole and ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... western system of physics. Your physics are without form and void; patchwork, constantly changing. There is no substantial foundation for any system of metaphysics. What you say or do in ...
— Ancient and Modern Physics • Thomas E. Willson
... a success, and all that winter the old ladies did their part faithfully, finding the task more to their taste than everlasting patchwork and knitting, and receiving a fair profit on their outlay, being shrewd managers, and rich in ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag, Vol. 5 - Jimmy's Cruise in the Pinafore, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... of the Junetide came loudly and insistently to a little girl as she sat in the sitting-room of a prosperous farmhouse in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and sewed gaily-colored pieces of red and green calico into patchwork. ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers
... however, had remained mere wretched patchwork, his logic came to an end wherever bold reliance upon the intuitive process was needed to supply missing links ...
— The Indian Lily and Other Stories • Hermann Sudermann
... late!" she gasped, briefly. Then, because she needed comforting and Uncle Jem was her comforter of old, her head went down on the patchwork quilt that covered his twisted old frame, and she cried like a ...
— Judith Lynn - A Story of the Sea • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... diameter of 20 feet; the largest tree of the New England forest, conspicuous by its great height, massive trunk and branches, and by its magnificent, wide-spreading, dome-shaped or pyramidal, open head. The sunlight, streaming through the large-leafed, rusty foliage, reveals the curiously mottled patchwork bark; and the long-stemmed, globular fruit swings to every breeze till ...
— Handbook of the Trees of New England • Lorin Low Dame
... hearth served for seats for the children, with the addition of two beds raised a little above the ground by a frame of split cedars. On these lowly couches lay extended two poor men, suffering under the wasting effects of lake-fever. Their yellow bilious faces strangely contrasted with the gay patchwork-quilts that covered them. I felt much concerned for the poor emigrants, who told me they had not been many weeks in the country when they were seized with the fever and ague. They both had wives and small children, who seemed ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... the licensed and unlicensed fool Charter to challenge me at every turn. The jester's laughing bauble blunts my sword, His gibes cut deeper than its fearful edge; And I, a man, a soldier, and a prince, Before this motley patchwork of a man, Stand all appalled, as if he were a glass Wherein I saw my own deformity. O Heaven! a tear—one little tear—to wash This aching dryness ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker
... the accounts of trials published up to that time. His work he dedicated to the two judges at Taunton, Sir John Walter and Sir John Denham, and to the archdeacon of Wells and the chancellor of the Bishop of Bath and Wells. The book was, indeed, a truly remarkable patchwork. All shades of opinion from that of the earnestly disbelieving Scot to that of the earnestly believing Roberts were embodied. Nevertheless Bernard had a wholesome distrust of possessions and followed Cotta in thinking that catalepsy ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... Fig. 305. Now, then, cover the rag with a thick coat (Fig. 306) of the white lead. Next tack the tin over the wounded spots, putting the tacks close together, as shown by Fig. 306. Afterward coat the tin with a covering of white lead and the patchwork is done. The roof will not leak again at those spots in the next twenty years. This will leave white, unsightly blotches on the roof, but after the white lead is dry a few dabs with the red roof paint will make the white patches the same color as the surrounding tin and ...
— Shelters, Shacks and Shanties • D.C. Beard
... happy feeling that, so far as their old landlords are concerned, their lot is one of 'quietness and assurance for ever.' Nowhere—even on the high ranges about Newry, where the population is far too dense, where the patchwork cultivation creeps up the mountain side, and the hand of industry snatches a precarious return from a poor, cold, ungrateful soil, amidst desolating tempests and blighting fogs—not even there did I notice ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... without turning from his station at the window. Below them now, less than half a mile down on the patchwork of the Nile valley, men were standing, staring up, collecting in little groups, gesticulating toward the strange thing that had materialized in ...
— Invaders from the Infinite • John Wood Campbell
... the distant castles in Spain which were a part of her legitimate heritage of childhood. The room was like a Nutting picture, with its rag carpet, old-fashioned, low cherry bed, covered with a pink and white calico patchwork quilt, its low cherry bureau, its rush-bottom chairs, its big walnut chest covered with a hand-woven coverlet gay with red roses and blue tulips. An old- fashioned room and an old-fashioned mother and daughter—the ...
— Amanda - A Daughter of the Mennonites • Anna Balmer Myers
... ... inchoate ... a disjunctive ... patchwork," replied the Wonder. His abstracted eyes were blind to the objective world of our reality; he seemed to be profoundly analysing the very ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... comfortably clothed with blankets—I say blankets, as they are much superior to coverlids; the perspiration will more readily pass through a blanket than a coverlid. A thick coverlid ought never to be used; there is nothing better, for a child's bed, than the old-fashioned patchwork coverlid, as the perspiration will easily ...
— Advice to a Mother on the Management of her Children • Pye Henry Chavasse
... the hillside fell away, clean and cleared for fifteen hundred feet, where a little village of stone-walled houses, with roofs of beaten earth, clung to the steep tilt. All round it the tiny terraced fields lay out like aprons of patchwork on the knees of the mountain, and cows no bigger than beetles grazed between the smooth stone circles of the threshing-floors. Looking across the valley, the eye was deceived by the size of things, and could not at first realise that what seemed to ...
— The Second Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling
... a good, industrious girl,' she said to Alice. 'Now you must come in and have some cake and milk, and I have a few little scraps of finery your mother may like for her patchwork.' ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... duty and burned all night; should, unluckily, the fire be out he lost no time in rekindling it with birch-bark and cypress branches, placed heavier pieces on the mounting flame, and ran back to snuggle under the brown woollen blankets and patchwork quilt till the comforting warmth once more ...
— Maria Chapdelaine - A Tale of the Lake St. John Country • Louis Hemon
... idea of the decorations of the nave, in their general outline; but fails to show the details of Constantine's patchwork. His system of structure may be better understood by referring to another of his creations, the basilica of S. Lorenzo fuori le Mura, of which a section of the interior is illustrated on ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani
... of continually deepening intensity of political agitation. The patchwork of compromises and settlements contrived by make-shift politicians like Clay and Douglas would not hold; they tore out, and the rent was made worse. Part of the Compromise of 1850, which was to be something altogether sempiternal, was a Fugitive ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... could all of us lead two lives. I don't mean I wish that we could live twice as long—though, in reality, it would come to the same thing. But I would like to live the two lives which I want to lead, and only do lead in a sort of patchwork-quilt kind of way. I would like to live a life in which I could wander gipsy-like over the face of the globe—seeing everything, doing everything, meeting everybody. I should also like to live a purely vegetable existence ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... state bed, overshadowing so large a portion of the floor, the births and, as far as may be, the deaths, of the household take place. At the Corneys', the united efforts of some former generation of the family had produced patchwork curtains and coverlet; and patchwork was patchwork in those days, before the early Yates and Peels had found out the secret of printing the parsley-leaf. Scraps of costly Indian chintzes and palempours were intermixed with commoner black and red calico ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. I • Elizabeth Gaskell
... there were only blocks of wood and a rude bench on one side of the fireplace. The bed was a little platform of poles, on which were spread the furry skins of wild animals, and a patchwork quilt of ...
— Four Great Americans: Washington, Franklin, Webster, Lincoln - A Book for Young Americans • James Baldwin
... which certainly was not a gain, but when landed in the drawing-room, the space seemed to her magnificent. And their own furniture, the two or three cherished portraits brought from Vale Leston, their father's chair, their mother's sofa, the silk patchwork table-cover that had been the girl's birthday present to Mamma, the bookcase with Papa's precious books, ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... followed him to the cold hospitality of the spare room, a place of peril but beautifully clean. There was a neat rag carpet on the floor, immaculate tidies on the bureau and wash table, and a spotless quilt of patchwork on the bed. But, like the dungeon of mediaeval times, it was a place for sighs and reflection, not for rest. Half an inch of frost on every window-pane glistened in the ...
— Darrel of the Blessed Isles • Irving Bacheller
... effects of deceit. Taking advantage of the present ignorance in relation to Christian Science Mind-healing, many are flooding our land with conflicting theories and practice. We should not spread abroad patchwork ideas that in some vital points lack Science. How sad it is that envy will bend its bow and shoot its arrow at the idea which claims only its inheritance, is naturally modest, generous, and sincere! ...
— No and Yes • Mary Baker Eddy
... It appeared to him that he never lost consciousness of his errand. When he opened his eyes the dawn was already stealing over the sky, and at the tremendous pace to which Rodier had put the engine the aeroplane seemed to rush into the sunlight. Far below, the earth was spread out like a patchwork, greens and whites and browns set in picturesque haphazard patterns; men moving like ants, and horses ...
— Round the World in Seven Days • Herbert Strang
... can, if you try hard enough. Just think how much properer it is for me to be companion to a lovely lady in her own house, than to be racing around lower Broadway for patchwork!" ...
— Patty's Success • Carolyn Wells
... respectably for a day or two; but the house was rather dull, she missed Nelly, wanted to run in the street, and longed to see mamma. She amused herself as well as she could with picture-books, patchwork, and the old cat; but, not being a quiet, proper, little Rosamond sort of a child, she got tired of hemming neat pocket-handkerchiefs, and putting her needle carefully away when she had done. She wanted to romp and shout, ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... the "tin can on the shingle" between them and their prey. The Monitor and Merrimac then began their epoch-making fight. The patchwork engines of the deep-draught Merrimac made her as unhandy as if she had been water-logged, while the light-draught Monitor could not only play round her when close-to but maneuver all over the surrounding shallows as well. The Merrimac put her last ounce of steam into an attempt to ram ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood
... pointing in-doors to where a long, motionless figure seated in a chair was covered with a ragged patchwork quilt. The doctor nodded gravely, paused, asked if she ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... day the barometer began to fall. The breeze stiffened. The sea became choppy, and white-caps danced fitfully over the greenish stretches, growing wilder and wilder under the whip of a flouting wind. The two patchwork sails on the lumbering Doraine flapped noisily for awhile, as if shaking off their tor-por, then suddenly grew taut and fat with prosperity. The twisted, half-jammed rudder,—far from worthy despite the efforts of its repairers,—whiningly obeyed the man at the wheel, and ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... strolling singers of a lay here and a lay there— lays now incorporated in the Iliad and Odyssey— scrupulously avoid such faults. They never even introduce a signet ring. These are difficulties in the theory of the Iliad as a patchwork by many hands, in many ages, which nobody explains; which, indeed, nobody seems to find difficult. Yet the difficulty is insuperable. Even if we take refuge with Wilamowitz in the idea that the Cyclic and Homeric poems were at first mere protoplasm of lays of many ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... many greens among the dark brown hills, neither tree nor shrub growing; yet the grass and the potatoes looked greener than elsewhere, owing to the bareness of the neighbouring hills; it was indeed a wild and singular spot—to use a woman's illustration, like a collection of patchwork, made of pieces as they might have chanced to have been cut by the mantua-maker, only just smoothed to fit each other, the different sorts of produce being in such a multitude of plots, and those so small and of such irregular shapes. Add to the strangeness of the village ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... to care for words, to select them judiciously and lovingly, is not in the least essential to all writing, all speaking; for the sad fact is this, that most of us do our thinking, our writing, and our speaking in phrases, not in words. The work of a feeble writer is always a patchwork of phrases, some of them borrowed from the imperial texture of Shakespeare and Milton, others picked up from the rags in the street. We make our very kettle-holders of pieces of a king's carpet. How many overworn quotations from Shakespeare suddenly ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Walter Raleigh
... felt quite at home and welcome. The same cheery fire in the chimney-place, the spotless floor, the tidy rush-bottomed chairs, and a whole nest of little white-heads and twinkling eyes, just on the border of a bright patchwork quilt, was invitation enough, even if we had not been met at the threshold by the master himself, who stretched out his great arms with a ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... miniature sitting-room at one side, contentedly matching patchwork. Little Jane Vennard, her step-daughter,—usually at work in the mills, but, since their close, making herself busy at home, whither she had brought a cookery-book through which Ray declared he expected to eat his way,—bustled about from room ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... This "patchwork ideal," as Kugler calls it, was, however, but a transition step in the history of the Carracci and their art. In the prime of their activity they threw off a great deal of their eclecticism, and attained an independence of their own. The merit ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... monuments. Wrest and Hawnes are both ugly places; the house at the former is ridiculously old and bad. The state bedchamber (not ten feet high) and its drawing-room, are laced with Ionic columns of spotted velvet, and friezes of patchwork. There are bushels of deplorable earls and countesses. The garden was execrable too, but is something mended by Brown. Houghton Park and Ampthill stand finely: the last is a very good house, and has a beautiful park. ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... therefore, the annexed provinces present a strangely complex patchwork and oft-repeated palimpsest, civilization after civilization overlapping each other. If Alsace-Lorraine has produced no Titan either in literature or art, she ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... the nursery door at home, she found Jennie building block houses, to Flyaway's great delight, while at the other end of the room sat Dotty Dimple, resolutely sewing patchwork. ...
— Dotty Dimple's Flyaway • Sophie May
... people active and influential in intellectual things—are still quite untrained in the methods of thought and absolutely innocent of any criticism of method; it is scarcely a caricature to call their thinking a crazy patchwork, discontinuous and chaotic. They arrive at conclusions by a kind of accident, and do not suspect any other way may be found to their attainment. A stage above this general condition stands that minority of people who have at some time or other discovered general terms and a certain use for ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... to woman, in spite of the poets. It induces intense concentration for the time, consequently looms larger in the affairs of life than the million other scraps that go to make up the vast patchwork. But it is as well to remember that it is but an occasional patch in the quilt, even if it be of the most vivid hue. And there is a lot to be got out ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... bedstead—glory of the Macys and envy of their neighbors—with its curtains of big figured chintz, brown sunflowers sprawling over a white ground, drawn aside in the daytime to display the marvelous patchwork of the quilt beneath. Fuel was scarce even then on the sandy isle; and economy compelled Mr. and Mrs. Macy to make use of this living-room as a bedchamber also, since Thomas Macy confessed to "bein rather tender," and to liking a warm room to sleep In, though his ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... the fancy and even the wish and desire of philosophy itself; so native and so pure a simplicity, as we by experience see to be in them, could never enter into their imagination, nor could they ever believe that human society could have been maintained with so little artifice and human patchwork. I should tell Plato that it is a nation wherein there is no manner of traffic, no knowledge of letters, no science of numbers, no name of magistrate or political superiority; no use of service, riches or poverty, no contracts, no successions, no dividends, ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... hustled it off into the garret the moment she'd done with it. I saw it there a year after the funeral, with the patchwork cushion of red and blue cloth moth-eaten and ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... logical texture and cohesion in his pages; development, evolution, growth; one thing follows another naturally, and each paragraph follows from what went before. But most of his later writings are a kind of patchwork; unrelated ideas are in juxtaposition; the incongruities are startling. All those chapters, I suppose, were read as lectures to miscellaneous audiences in which the attention soon became tired or blunted if required ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... the window, a handsome cat purred in front of the fireplace, and on a bracket in one corner an asthmatic clock ticked off the hours with wheezy vigor. In an adjoining room Evadne could see a bed with its gay patchwork quilt of Dyce's making, and in the little kitchen beyond she heard her singing as she trod to and fro. A couple of dainty muslin dresses were draped over chairs, for Dyce was the finest clear starcher in Marlborough, and her kitchen was all too small to hold the products of ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black
... now, and to note with a little care, that you cannot rationally accept a part of one theory and a part of the other, and so make up a patchwork to suit yourselves. Take, for example, the one question, Is man lost or is he not? He is not half lost or sort of lost: he is either lost or he is not lost. Which is true? If he is not "lost," then he does not need to be "saved." He may ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... blinds down is like a verandah. All the green in front was surrounded with sheds, some of flapping canvas, some of green palm boughs, where (in three sides of a huge oblong) the natives sat by villages in a fine glow of many-hued array. There were folks in tapa, and folks in patchwork; there was every colour of the rainbow in a spot or a cluster; there were men with their heads gilded with powdered sandal-wood, others with heads all purple, stuck full of the petals of a flower. In the midst ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... my slaughtered race. Frequently there were parts of two or three varieties on one hat—a tail of one kind, a wing of another, or a head of a different species. The ends of the world had been searched to make this patchwork of blood. The women raved over the cruel display; they gloated over our beauty; but they cared nothing for the pathetic story the hats told of rifled nests ...
— Dickey Downy - The Autobiography of a Bird • Virginia Sharpe Patterson
... outward appearance of the typical British officer? How will the little Lapps, befurred and smiling, who come sliding to market behind the trotting reindeer, report of us to the smaller Lapps at home? In any case I hope we shall found a legend of a well-meaning if peculiar and patchwork people. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 28, 1919. • Various
... the transepts are altogether a curious patchwork, yet when entered from the south end they seem almost entirely satisfactory, since the eye is so engrossed by the magnificence of the five great lancets of the north front, and the great height of the lantern, that it is unable ...
— The Cathedral Church of York - Bell's Cathedrals: A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief - History of the Archi-Episcopal See • A. Clutton-Brock
... of the carpet to meet the light and warmth that radiated from the small semicircle behind the glittering fender. A bed hung with white curtains, a dressing bureau, with its fancy pincushion, and numerous cut-glass bottles of perfumery, a lounge covered with bright patchwork, and furnished with log-cabin cushions, easy-chairs and ottomans, together with the workstand and its inseparable little basket filled with every indispensable for needlework—all, all bore the trace of ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... whistling bullets that would tell him he was discovered. But the lights flared and burned out, leaped afresh and died out again, and there was no sign that he had been seen. For the moment he felt reasonably secure. The earth on the crater's rim was broken and irregular, the surface an eye-deceiving patchwork of broken light and black heavy shadow under the glare of the flying lights. The mackintosh he wore was caked and plastered with mud, and blended well with the background on which he lay. He took care to keep his arms in, to sink his head well into his rounded shoulders, to curl ...
— Action Front • Boyd Cable (Ernest Andrew Ewart)
... old cribs, in which the infant limbs of Mamie and Abner had been tucked up; old looking-glasses, that had reflected their shining, soapy faces, and Mamie's best chip Sunday hat; an old sewing-machine, that had been worn out in active service; old patchwork quilts; an old accordion, to whose long drawn inspirations Mamie had sung hymns; old pictures, books, and old toys. There were one or two old chromos, and, stuck in an old frame, a colored print from the "Illustrated London News" of a Christmas gathering in an old English country ...
— A Millionaire of Rough-and-Ready • Bret Harte
... most feeble. The reason for this strange phenomenon is, that nature is always on the watch; always aiming to attain her ends. The desire for love is, in a woman, a large part of her nature. Her virtue is nothing but a piece of patchwork. ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... unfold itself to our view like an immense and variegated map, the predominant colour of which is green in all its shades and tints. The irregular division of the country into fields made it resemble a patchwork counterpane. The size of the houses, churches, fortresses, was so considerably diminished as to make them resemble nothing so much as those playthings manufactured at Carlsruhe. This was the effect produced by a microscopic train, which whistled very faintly to attract our ...
— Wonderful Balloon Ascents - or, the Conquest of the Skies • Fulgence Marion
... I don't know," she replied, her eyes and fingers busy with an unruly heart, which declined to adjust itself to requirements. "What are they going to do with this silly patchwork, anyway?" ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley
... bed, gay with patchwork quilts—Nancy knew all the patterns: Sunrise on the Peaks; Drunkard's Path; the Rainbow—Mary was making up for all that her forebears had neglected to do. Early and late she spun and wrought—she ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... the big airy room with its patchwork quilt of blue and white, its rugs and curtains to match, and looked at pictures of his mother. From the windows he watched the sun rise and shine on the merry little hills and the yellow road that wound up to his mother's old home. As he breathed in the wine of the spring mornings ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... blue woolen sock and a shoe-blacking brush. There is a paste bottle and brush on the table and a pair of scissors, much used by the poet, who writes, for the most part, on small bits of paper and parts of old envelopes and pastes them together in patchwork fashion. ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... motives of pride, party, or resentment to espouse the doctrine of separation and independance; I am clearly, positively, and conscientiously persuaded that it is the true interest of this continent to be so; that every thing short of THAT is mere patchwork, that it can afford no lasting felicity, —that it is leaving the sword to our children, and shrinking back at a time, when, a little more, a little farther, would have rendered this continent the glory ...
— Common Sense • Thomas Paine
... pleasure to put the house in its most shining order, to plan daily little special dishes, lest he come upon her unawares; to sit and sew upon her clothing, shifting and turning her patchwork materials until she had worked out clever combinations which conveyed small ...
— Under the Country Sky • Grace S. Richmond
... Pavlova, Tom Sayers, Tod Sloan, Spinoza, and Barnum, and Mrs. Chapone; For a bloke that has only just got his discharge, She's rather too dazzling a patchwork, is Marge. ...
— Marge Askinforit • Barry Pain
... But in Prussia, all that is best in the civilised machinery is put at the service of all that is worst in the barbaric mind. Here again the Prussian has no accidental merits, none of those lucky survivals, none of those late repentances, which make the patchwork glory of Russia. Here all is sharpened to a point and pointed to a purpose, and that purpose, if words and acts have any meaning at all, is the destruction of liberty ...
— The Barbarism of Berlin • G. K. Chesterton
... in the time; but really something fit to be seen is emerging. Terry is sorting the coins, a pretty job, I should say; but felicity to him. But oh! the industrial articles! There are all the regalia, carved out of cherry-stones, and a patchwork quilt of 5000 bits of silk each no bigger than a shilling. And a calculation of the middle verse in the Bible, and the longest verse, and the shortest verse, and the like edifying Scriptural researches, all copied out like flies' ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... huge space in the centre of the town where thousands of shaggy, ice-covered horses stand each with an ice-covered sledge. The peasants, men and women, in huge fur coats which reach to the snow-covered ground, harmonise perfectly with the cattle they control. Their fur coats form a study in colour—patchwork coats from calfskins which combine every shade from white to rusty red; goatskins, from long straight black to white; curly bearskins from black to brown and brown to polar white; wealthy peasant women, with beautiful red fox furs hiding neck and face, their eyes ...
— With the "Die-Hards" in Siberia • John Ward
... kettledrums, and horns. He wore on his head an ornament like a bishop's mitre, covered with strings of coral. His tobe was of green silk, crimson silk, damask, and green silk velvet, sewn together like a piece of patchwork. He wore English cotton stockings, and sandals of neat workmanship. His subjects as they approached prostrated themselves, rubbing their heads with earth, and kissing the ground repeatedly, till their faces were covered with the ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... should even invite you to make yourself at home." With a laugh he glanced about the bare little room,—at the uncovered rafters, the rough log walls, and the empty cupboard with its swinging doors. In one corner there was a pallet hidden by a ragged patchwork quilt, and facing it a small pine table upon which stood an ash-cake ready ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... moment. "Robert," "Les Huguenots," "Le Prophete," in the forms we have them, are quite different from those in which they were first cast. These operas have therefore been called "the most magnificent patchwork in the history of art," though this is a harsh phrasing of the fact, which somewhat outrides justice. Certain it is, however, that Meyerbeer was largely indebted to the ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... Patchwork legislation will not now succeed; speeches from the Lord Lieutenant—articles in the newspapers—lending to the landowners at 3 1/2 per cent. money raised by taxation from the traders of England, who have recently been paying 8 per cent.—all will fail to revive the ...
— Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 • John Bright
... light of a Pariah, and put on insufferably superior airs when they saw me. So, like Veronica, I amused myself, and passed days on the sea-shore, or in the fields and woods, mother keeping me in long enough to make a square of patchwork each day and to hear her read a Psalm—a duty which I bore with patience, by guessing when the "Selahs" would come in, and counting them. But wherever I was, or whatever I did, no feeling of beauty ever stole into my mind. I never turned my face up to the sky to watch the passing of a cloud, or ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... of a fine summer evening. Through the upper pane of the station window Police-constable Bennett, who felt that his senses at the moment were abnormally keen, recognised with a sinking heart such reds and yellows as bedecked the best patchwork quilt at home. By contrast the lights of the superintendent's office were subdued, so that within the walls of the police-station sounds seemed of greater importance. Somewhere a drunkard, deprived of his boots, was drumming his criticism of authority on the walls of his cell. From the next ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... called hers ever since she was three years old, and had to climb on a chair to open the door. There she kept her treasures of all kinds,—paper dolls and garden seeds, and books, and scraps of silk for patchwork; and the top shelf of all was a sort of hospital for broken toys, too far gone to be played with any longer, but too dear, for old friendship's sake, to be quite thrown away. The furniture of the sitting-room was cherry-wood, dark with age; and between the west windows stood ...
— Eyebright - A Story • Susan Coolidge
... months ago at Marignano. Having likewise disabled his right arm, and being well off through the payment of some ransoms, he had come home partly to look after his family, and partly to provide himself with a full suit of English harness, his present suit being a patchwork of relics of numerous battle-fields. Only one thing he desired, a true Spanish sword, not only Toledo or Bilboa in name, but nature. He had seen execution done by the weapons of the soldiers of the Great Captain, and been witness to the endurance of their metal, and this ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... thing more," said Lund, grinning at them. "If enny of you saw a man hurtin' a dog, you'd probably fetch him a wallop. But you don't think ennything of scarin' the life out of a half-baked kid an' markin' up his hide like a patchwork quilt. Thet kid's stayin' aft after this. One of you monkey with him, an' you'll do jest what he's bin doin', wish you was ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... As adders cast their skins And keep their venom, so kings often change; Councils and counsellors hang on one another, Hiding the loathsome 130 Like the base patchwork of a leper's rags. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... the Sleeping Beauty of childhood, is wholly incongruous. If the fragment had ended abruptly at the moment when the lady arises in her shroud from the coffin, Sir Bertrand would have been a more effective tale of terror. From the historical point of view Mrs. Barbauld's curious patchwork is full of interest. She seems to be reaching out wistfully towards the mysterious and the unknown. Genuinely anxious to awaken a thrill of excitement in the breast of her reader, she is hesitating and uncertain as to the ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... and sideboard: holding the Bible and almanac, the old lady's best bonnet, a pot or two of preserves, a nosegay of spring flowers, and a tea-caddy. An old-fashioned four-post bedstead stood in one corner, covered with a patchwork quilt; in another was an impromptu bed, spread on the floor, and occupied by a woman and two children, apparently asleep. A table, covered with oil-cloth, with some cups and saucers on it, stood between the bed and a dresser cupboard, containing rows of shining milk-pans, piled one ...
— A Trip to Manitoba • Mary FitzGibbon
... did, an' then set there o' nights a snip-snip-snippin' it up into little scraps an' sewin' 'em together again. If a woman'll do that, it's proof what sort o' brains she's got." Then, with sudden energy, he advised: "Don't you never let her set you a sewin' patchwork, Kitty Keehoty. It's all on a piece with knittin' mittens for the Hottentots—a waste of time. A waste o' sinful time, I mean a ...
— The Brass Bound Box • Evelyn Raymond
... the blankets and the many-coloured patchwork quilt, lifted himself on one elbow and looked at the pale face of his young wife. She was sleeping. He slipped noiselessly out of the bunk, lightly pulled up the coverings again, and hurriedly drew on two pairs of heavy, ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... "Patchwork and imagination," returned the other wearily. "That's what I get special rates for. Now, if I'd had your chance, right there on the spot, with the whole stage-setting around one—Lordy! How ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... Mrs. Jerry sitting inside, with a patchwork quilt over her shoulders, her eyes holding a shade more of wistfulness and less twinkle, perhaps, but with her lips quite ready to smile upon her visitor. Teresita sat down upon a box and curiously watched the pretty senora try to make a small, triangular piece of ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... go back now," said the purple ant, with the green patchwork squares on his checks. "If we crossed over the bridge we might fall off and be drowned. We'll go back, but you go ahead, and we wish ...
— Uncle Wiggily's Adventures • Howard R. Garis
... terms of the Romans, present a strange appearance amid the Greek world; Roman -aediles- and -tresviri- are grotesquely mingled with -agoranomi- and -demarchi-; pieces whose scene is laid in Aetolia or Epidamnus send the spectator without scruple to the Velabrum and the Capitol. Such a patchwork of Roman local tints distributed over the Greek ground is barbarism enough; but interpolations of this nature, which are often in their naive way very ludicrous, are far more tolerable than that thorough alteration of the pieces into a ruder shape, which ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... Arthur, getting out of bed like a badly made parcel, with sheet, blanket, and patchwork quilt rolled round him; and as he shut the window with a bang he could see his brother and Will trudging ...
— Menhardoc • George Manville Fenn
... not do either. First you would notice an old wooden cradle, painted blue, that stood in a corner. A button-eyed, blank-faced rag doll, the size of a baby at the fist-sucking age, was tucked neatly under the red-and-white patchwork quilt made to fit the cradle. Hanging directly over the cradle by a stirrup was Jean's first saddle,—a cheap pigskin affair with harsh straps and buckles, that her father had sent East for. Jean never had liked that saddle, even when it ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... class throws a suspicion of high coloring over the whole story; but it can be readily imagined what a capital campaign-cry it would be in the heat of a popular movement. The tide of feeling swept away Walpole's patchwork of compromise, and war was declared against Spain by Great Britain on the 19th of October, 1739. The English ultimatum insisted upon a formal renunciation of the right of search as claimed and exercised by the Spaniards, and upon an ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan
... display of wealth, and every article of furniture bore signs of long though careful use. The spotless boarded floor was bare of carpet, but was strewn with rough-cured skins, timber-wolf, antelope, coyote and bear, and here and there rugs of undoubted home make; these latter of the patchwork order. The centre table was of wide proportions and of solid mahogany, and told of the many services of the apartment; the small chairs were old-fashioned mahogany pieces with horse-hair seats, while the easy-chairs—and there were several of these—were capacious ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... shawl, in the quaint clean chamber, with the heavy oak rafters, and the jasmine coming in at the window, and glancing with pardonable pride at the fair face reflected in the mirror. But as she laid her things on the patchwork coverlet, it seemed to her that the lace veil became fine white linen, and was folded about a figure that lay in the bed; and when she looked round the room again everything was draped in white—white blinds hung before the windows, ...
— The Brownies and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... Austro-Hungarian Monarchy is the patchwork-quilt, the Midway Plaisance, the national chain-gang of Europe; a state that is not a nation, but a collection of nations, some with national memories and aspirations and others without, some occupying distinct provinces almost purely ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... The patchwork blouse cut a caper, a look of lively joy shot from the man's eyes, where a tear was gathering, and the wagon, from its bursting cover, gave utterance to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... donations of work, and much more will be acceptable. Sheets, pillow cases, underclothing or patchwork, basted ready for sewing, will be very thankfully received. The work in the sewing classes includes patchwork, the making of dresses, all kinds of other garments, and quilting.—From the ...
— American Missionary, Volume 44, No. 6, June, 1890 • Various
... there as could be; almost as happy as I was at home. Well, but next year I thought I could go at a leisure time, and missis telled me I should have a fortnight then, and I used to sit up all that winter working hard at patchwork, to have a quilt of my own making to take to my mother. But master died, and missis went away fra Manchester, and I'd to look out ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... Warrender," she said. "I guess the woman that's married him thinks he's A1 and gilt-edged now, poor soul. But he's just a miserable patchwork mummy really, and there isn't any white in him—no, ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... "Patchwork—miserable patchwork. We are cobbling up a robe for the Emperor out of mere rags; we are upholsterers and not artists. If it were only for Hadrian, and not for Diotima and her children, not another finger would I ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... hardihood. I'm keen for a line of plain, full, roomy old-fashioned flannel nightgowns of the improved T. A. Buck Featherloom products variety. They'll be wearing 'em long after knickerbockers have been cut up for patchwork." ...
— Roast Beef, Medium • Edna Ferber
... fit to say that he has delayed his visit to London on account of the battle-piece, which is a mere subterfuge. He stayed to finish his patchwork, as the first attempt ...
— Beethoven's Letters 1790-1826, Volume 1 of 2 • Lady Wallace
... the stranger's side, gazed at him for a moment, in the wildest dismay, and sank insensible upon the floor. Feathertop, likewise, had looked towards the mirror, and there beheld, not the glittering mockery of his outside show, but a picture of the sordid patchwork of his real ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... said little till, pausing before a small, black-looking print in a sheet full of rather coarse coloured caricatures, cuttings from illustrated papers and old-fashioned books, second-rate lithographs, and third-rate original sketches, fitted into a close patchwork, she gave ...
— Six to Sixteen - A Story for Girls • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... fast, even you, Alec, have to shoot passim," said a witty Hebrew, and Delgrado did not appreciate the mot until some one told him that passeem in Hebrew meant "patchwork," and that Jacob's offense to Joseph's brethren lay in the gift of a Prince's robe to ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... the funeral of Her Royal Highness the Princess Charlotte. Among the poor old gentlemen there are no such niceties. Their furniture has the air of being contributed, like some obsolete Literary Miscellany, 'by several hands;' their few chairs never match; old patchwork coverlets linger among them; and they have an untidy habit of keeping their wardrobes in hat-boxes. When I recall one old gentleman who is rather choice in his shoe-brushes and blacking-bottle, I have summed up the domestic elegances of ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... up on two pillows, an open book before her on the patchwork quilt, and her head had sagged forward on the breast of her blue flannelette nightgown. She was making a low comedy sound which would have distressed her beyond measure if she had heard it. When Jane took the book from under her plump hands and gently ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... smell of cornflowers and fennel, and a bedstead with a perfect mountain of pillows, standing in the corner by the stove; this must have been the old mother's room. From there he passed into another little room, and here he saw Lyubka. She was lying on a chest, covered with a gay-coloured patchwork cotton quilt, pretending to be asleep. A little ikon-lamp was burning in the corner above ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... sandbank, some doing a little fishing round its rim, others bringing the washing there, all skylarking and singing. Few prettier sights have I ever seen than those on that sandbank— the merry brown forms dancing or lying stretched on it: the gaudy- coloured patchwork quilts and chintz mosquito-bars that have been washed, spread out drying, looking from Kangwe on the hill above, like beds of bright flowers. By night when it was moonlight there would be bands of dancers on it with bush-light torches, ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... hearth, facing Uncle Ish and Aunt Verbeny. Between them Delphy's son-in-law, Moses, was helping Bernard mend a broken hare trap, while Delphy, herself, was crooning a lullaby to one of her grandchildren as she carded the wool which she had taken from a quilt of faded patchwork. On the stones of the great fireplace the red flames from lightwood splits leaped over a smouldering hickory log, filling the cabin with the penetrating odour of burning, resinous pine. From the wall above the hearth a dozen roasting apples ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... appears to be impossible, and the other characters mostly conventional, The Dangerous Age makes a very charming entertainment at the Vaudeville, a patchwork of humour and pathos ingeniously woven together; of which the humour was as fresh and jolly as anything I have heard on the stage, and the pathos put me in greater danger of being caught "blubbering like a seal" than I have ever been before. It is to Masters ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 13, 1914 • Various
... to the strangers by right of usage, opened from the kitchen; with another door upon the tiny entry-way once described. It had a fireplace, at present full of green pine bushes; a very clean bed covered with patchwork; the plainest of chairs and a table; and a little bit of carpet on one spot of the floor; the rest was painted. One little window looked to the south; another to the east; the woodwork, of doors and windows, exceeding homely and unpainted. An extraordinary gay satin ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... that of the other plays. It is the work of a saner and less flamboyant age.[168] The Agamemnon and the Oedipus have been suspected on the ground that certain of the lyric portions are written in a curious patchwork metre of a character fortunately unique in Latin lyric verse. The Agamemnon further has two choruses.[169] But in all other respects the language, technique, and metre closely resemble the other dramas. Neither objection need carry any weight. There is ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... with the observation of real life,—their works undoubtedly would never have taken such a hold on the minds of their contemporaries, nor kept it so long. Everything to live must have an infusion of truth within it, and this "patchwork ideal," as it has been well styled, was held together by such a principle. The founders of the Caracci school, and their immediate followers, felt the influences of the time, and worked them out. They ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... and give you new ones. A hundred and fifty years ago Cancelmo and Klein did it on a dog, and called it sub-total prosthesis. A crude job—I've seen their papers and films. Vat-grown hearts and kidneys, revitalized vascular material, building up new organ systems like a patchwork quilt, coaxing new tissues to grow to replace old ones—but they got a living dog out of it, and that dog lived to the ripe old age of 37 years before ...
— Martyr • Alan Edward Nourse
... as if by magic, like her gown. The narrow rounds of the ladder had become broad steps of polished wood, and it seemed as if she was mounting the polished stairway of some fairy-built pagoda. When she reached the deck everything was changed. The ragged patchwork which had served so long as a sail had become a beautiful sheet of canvas that rolled and floated proudly in the river breeze. Below were the dirty fishing smacks which Lu-san was used to, but here was a stately ship, larger and fairer than ...
— A Chinese Wonder Book • Norman Hinsdale Pitman
... object to be attained was to provide each guest with as much food as possible in the shortest possible time. She was arrayed in a new black gown, worn under protest, for her own idea had been to wear her Sunday dress, a vivid purple, with trimmings which, for color and variety, looked "like a patchwork tidy," as Captain Dan expressed it. Also, under still greater protest, she wore a white apron ...
— Cap'n Dan's Daughter • Joseph C. Lincoln
... frontier refrigerator reached by a rope ladder, was a narrow chamber in which Margaret Rowland kept her meats fresh, often for a week at a time. For another purpose as well it was used: a big basket with a patchwork quilt and a pillow marking the spot where Baby Rowland, with the summer heat all about, slept ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge
... the same as the other day, they were all together on a steel ring. Having secured them, Raskolnikoff at once passed into the bedroom. It was a very small apartment; on one side was a large glass case full of holy images, on the other a great bed looking very clean with its quilted-silk patchwork coverlet. The third wall was occupied by a chest of drawers. Strange to say, the young man had no sooner attempted to open them, he had no sooner commenced to try the keys, than a kind of shudder ran through his frame. Again the idea came to him to give up his task and go away, ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... it. Much scrubbing had removed from it the objections manifest in Glad's room above. There was a small red fire in the grate, a strip of old, but gay carpet before it, two chairs and a table were covered with a harlequin patchwork made of bright odds and ends of all sizes and shapes. The fog in all its murky volume could not quite obscure the brightness of the often rubbed window and its harlequin curtain drawn across upon ...
— The Dawn of a To-morrow • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... she relapsed to a slumber which was more torpor than sleep. Her yellow, old-ivory face was faintly tinged with color; her thin lips were relaxed, and seemed a trifle fuller, so that Mary thought she looked better in sickness than in health; but the limp arm lying on the patchwork quilt seemed to be more skinny than thin, and the hand was more ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... a bag to be carried home for the amusement of cottage children. The noises of hobnailed shoes on the oak floors, and of unrestrained clownish and churlish voices everywhere, were tremendous. Here a fat cottager might be seen standing on a lovely quilt of patchwork brocade, pulling down, rough in her cupidity, curtains on which the new-born and dying eyes of generations of nobles had rested, henceforth to adorn a miserable cottage, while her husband was taking down the bed, larger perhaps, than the room itself ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... any evidence to support Mr. Darley's view? Milton has been charged with having borrowed the design of Paradise Lost from some Italian author; and this allegation, coupled with that made by Mr. Darley, would, if founded, reduce our great national epic to what Hazlitt has described as "patchwork and plagiarism, the beggarly copiousness ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 208, October 22, 1853 • Various
... hull chest full of sheets and piller-biers and towels I'm goin' to give her, besides three or four bedquilts I pieced myself, two in herrin'-bone pattern, and one in risin' sun. I'll show 'em to you," and leaving the room, she soon returned with three patchwork quilts, wherein were all possible shades of color, red and yellow predominating, and in one the "rising sun" forming ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes
... the morning, the first thing which he saw upon the patchwork quilt, was a skein of cherry-coloured twisted silk, and beside his bed ...
— The Tailor of Gloucester • Beatrix Potter
... and figures in my imagination as a thing to be desired. We used to live there so quietly—I and an old landlady who is now dead. How my heart aches to remember her, for she was a good woman, and never overcharged for her rooms. Her whole time was spent in making patchwork quilts with knitting-needles that were an arshin [An ell.] long. Oftentimes we shared the same candle and board. Also she had a granddaughter, Masha—a girl who was then a mere baby, but must now be a girl of thirteen. ...
— Poor Folk • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... with towers and churches and painted roofs, all set on the side of a hill that sloped down into the sea. At the foot of the hill was a quiet harbour, and they sailed in there and moored the ship and hauled down their patchwork sails. ...
— Old Peter's Russian Tales • Arthur Ransome
... gave this first proof of the free and proper action of his lungs, the patchwork coverlet which was carelessly flung over the iron bedstead, rustled; the pale face of a young woman was raised feebly from the pillow; and a faint voice imperfectly articulated the words, 'Let me see ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... door of the bedroom, and thought how pleasant it looked, with its pink-and-white patchwork quilt and the brown unpainted paneling ...
— The Country of the Pointed Firs • Sarah Orne Jewett
... scarlet or yellow; for careless beauty one must look to the heaps of blossoms piled up in the corners (later to be used on the beds as a fertiliser), which are always beautiful, and doubly so when reflected in a canal. From a balloon, in the flowering season, the tulip gardens must look like patchwork quilts. ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... cannot agree with this, because I think that the extracts I have given have all the signs of a piece of patchwork by no means well put together, but I will assume that he is right in ...
— The Lost Gospel and Its Contents - Or, The Author of "Supernatural Religion" Refuted by Himself • Michael F. Sadler
... perseverance would do this. One hundred men who would subscribe one thousand dollars cash, would give us a fine capital. Something effectual, I think, might be done with such an amount; less than that would, I fear, be patchwork. ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... patchwork sunshine nets the lea, The flitting shadows halt and pass Forlorn, the mossy humble-bee ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... interested glances as she ate her supper in the long dining-room for, although she was nearly thirty, there was still something of girlhood in her tired face. But she seemed engrossed in her own thoughts and returned to her room as soon as she had eaten. There she lay down upon the patchwork quilt which covered her bed, with her hands clasped above her head, staring at the ceiling and trying to forget the past in ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... as is evident to the whole country, that we are drifting into a war between the United States and an individual State, does it become the Senate to sit listlessly by and discuss abstract questions, and read patchwork from the opinions of men now mingled with the dust? Are we not bound to meet events as they come before us, manfully and patriotically to struggle with the difficulties which ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... 'Orpheus' behind the fire, and let every opera I have ever written follow it to destruction. I would bite out my tongue, and spit it in Hasse's face, sooner than go before him with a mouth full of flattering lies, to befool him with praise of that patchwork he has made, and calls AN OPERA! When I was obscure and unknown, I scorned these tricks of trade; and think you that to-day I would stoop to such baseness? Eight years ago, in Rome, a cabal was formed to cause the failure of my ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... subjects is the obverse side of the conception of experience or life as a patchwork of independent interests which exist side by side and limit one another. Students of politics are familiar with a check and balance theory of the powers of government. There are supposed to be independent separate functions, like the legislative, ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... and comprehended its contents and purport and significance: and, after perusing it," etc. These forms, decies repetita, may go down with an Eastern audience, but would be intolerable in a Western volume. The absence of padding, however, reduces the story almost to a patchwork of doggerel rhymes, for neither I nor any man can "make a silk purse from a ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... closed her eyes. Her groping left hand ceased its aimless plucking at a yarn knot in the patchwork comforter. Her breath came evenly—Mary Hope wondered if she slept. A hand fell on Mary Hope's shoulder, though she had not heard a footfall. She seemed prepared, seemed to know what she must do. She slipped out of the ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... belief. What strikes one as most remarkable—if Paley's contention of the sufferings of the witnesses be true, and these writings authentic—is that so very little mention is made of the apostles, of their labours, toils, and sufferings, and that these epistles are simply a kind of patchwork, chiefly of Old Testament materials, mixed up with exhortations ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... carpets and rugs; such an arranging of china and glass; such a placing of andirons, fenders, shovels, tongs, and bellows; hanging of pictures, curtains, and mirrors—old and new; moving in of sofas, chairs, and rockers; making up of beds with fluted frills on the pillows—a silk patchwork quilt on St. George's bed and cotton counterpanes ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith |
