"Blue-black" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... already," thought Mr. Walraven's ward; "and your tall women, with flashing black eyes and blue-black hair, are apt to be good haters. Very well, Miss Oleander; it shall be ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming
... the still grey shoji For the breadth of innumerable countries, Is the sea with ships asleep In the blue-black ...
— Japanese Prints • John Gould Fletcher
... the yacht club were reflected in the blue-black mirror of the boat basin. Bud parked and they ...
— Tom Swift and the Electronic Hydrolung • Victor Appleton
... over her abundant blue-black curls. Its two points of heavy, gold-embroidered cloth extended to her slim hips. The golden serpent, emerald-eyed, was clasped about her little round, determined forehead, darting its double tongue ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit
... front of the Crab, and the half darkness allowed him a glimpse of that vast blue-black back, and the motionless eyes. Now and again he thought that he heard some one sobbing, but the ...
— Kipling Stories and Poems Every Child Should Know, Book II • Rudyard Kipling
... swift change from a noon-day of beaming calm. Now it was curtained completely with blue-black cloud, which sent out mutterings, and then long brooding silences more ominous still in their very ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... reflected on his face, the olive tones of which he inherited from his mother. This ivory pallor, so fine by candlelight, so suited to the expression of melancholy thought, brought out vigorously the fire of the blue-black eyes, which gazed from their thick and heavy lids with the keen perception our fancy lends to kings, their color being a cloak for dissimulation. Those eyes were terrible,—especially from the movement of their brows, ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... of a sudden thrill of pleasure. It was the vision of Camilla, at the farther end of the dining-room, as she helped the Slater girls to receive their guests. Camilla wore a red dress that brought out the blue-black of her eyes, and it seemed to Jim as he watched her graceful movements that he had never seen anyone so beautiful. She was piloting a bevy of bashful girls to the stairway, and as she passed him she gave him a little nod and smile ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... at last we are brought face to face with the sheer impassable precipice. At its basement sleeps a pool, perfectly untroubled; a lakelet in which the sheltering rocks and nestling wild figs are glassed as in a mirror—a mirror of blue-black water, like amethyst or fluor-spar—so pure, so still, that where it laps the pebbles you can scarcely say where air begins and water ends. This, then, is Petrarch's 'grotto;' this is the fountain of Vaucluse. Up from ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... standing with her back to him, and Forrester didn't make a sound, not wanting to startle the Goddess. She was totally unclad, her glorious body shining in the light of the room, her blue-black hair unbound and falling halfway down her gently curved back. But she must have heard him somehow, for she turned, and for half a ...
— Pagan Passions • Gordon Randall Garrett
... two, one," were his memory-tabulations as he moved down the stream. When but one speck of gold rewarded his washing, he stopped and built a fire of dry twigs. Into this he thrust the gold-pan and burned it till it was blue-black. He held up the pan and examined it critically. Then he nodded approbation. Against such a color-background he could defy the tiniest ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... forgotten all grievances except that of the unhappiness arising from disparity of age in married life, on which she could descant by the half-hour. Dearest Maria had married the man of her heart, only eight years older than herself, with the sweetest temper, and that blue-black hair one so seldom sees. Mr. Hale was one of the most delightful preachers she had ever heard, and a perfect model of a parish priest. Perhaps it was not quite a logical deduction from all these premises, but it was still Mrs. Shaw's characteristic conclusion, ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... natives produce a most brilliant blue-black dye from the bark of the Eno, which is in great abundance. Some of the borders of the native mats, of a most magnificent black, are dyed with this substance. It has been tried in New South Wales; but, as ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... effort he kept his eyes open and flinchingly surveyed the scene around him. After zigging through a bombproof half-furlong of roof, he was dropping into a large twilit cave. The blue-black ceiling twinkled with stars. The walls were pierced at floor level by a dozen archways with busy niche stores and glowing advertisements crowded between them. From the archways some three dozen slidewalks curved out, tangenting off each other in a bewildering multiple cloverleaf. ...
— The Creature from Cleveland Depths • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... empty world. To the west in sleeping Bethlehem, to the east in flaring Herodium, the life of man was infinitely far away from him. Even the stars seemed to withdraw themselves against the blue-black of the sky. They diminished and receded till they were like pin-holes in the vault above him. The moon in mid-heaven shrank into a bit of burnished silver, hard and glittering, immeasurably remote. The ragged, inhospitable ridges of Tekoa lay stretched in mortal slumber along ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... a pivot, and with hardly a glance at the prostrate form, dashed over the back-trail with the curious lumbering strides of the man who would hurry on rackets. He had jerked off his heavy mitten at the sound of the shot, and his bared hand clutched firmly the butt of a blue-black automatic. A spruce-branch, suddenly relieved of its snow, sprang upward with a swish, thirty yards away. MacNair fired three times in ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... A trifle smaller than the English sparrow. Apparently considerably larger because of its wide wingspread. Male and Female — Steel-blue above, shading to blue-black on crown of head and on wings and tail. A brownish-gray ring around the neck. Beneath dusty white, with rufous tint. Crescent-like frontlet. Chin, throat, sides of head, and tail coverts rufous. Range — North and South ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... rather my little Ruth sat near me and let me place my hand on her hair. Your hair is jet-black, Ruthie—almost blue-black. So was your father's hair, my child. He was a very handsome boy. I never looked for it that he would die in the foreign parts and leave you to your grandmother and me. But you have been a rare blessing to ...
— The Rebel of the School • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... spirited look and a golden complexion, and endued with eye large as lotuses; and he was shining and graceful as a god. And rich was his beauty blazing like the Sun; and he was exceedingly fair with eyes graceful and black. And his twisted hair was blue-black and neat and long and of a fragrant scent and tied up with strings of gold. A beautiful ornament was shining on his neck which looked like lightning in the sky. And under the throat he had two balls of flesh ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... deal of interior commotion. 'By Jove, she's magnificent, she's really stunning,' he exclaimed to himself. He perceived that she was rather a big woman, tall, with finely-rounded, smoothly-flowing lines. Her hair,—velvety blue-black in its shadows,—where the light caught it was dully iridescent. Her features were irregular enough to give her face a high degree of individuality, yet by no means to deprive it of delicacy or attractiveness. She had a superb white throat, and a soft voluptuous ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... a jingle of steel scabbard and a ripple of glitter on his gold-embroidered breast; a heavy sword-hilt appeared at his side above the edge of the table. In this gorgeous uniform, with his bull neck, his hooked nose flattened on the tip upon a blue-black, dyed moustache, he looked like a disguised and sinister vaquero. The drone of his voice had a strangely rasping, soulless ring. He floundered, lowering, through a few vague sentences; then suddenly raising his big head and his ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... with a shock. He saw both figures for an instant painted in blue-black against the light, khaki-coloured canvas. The woman was very tall, as tall as Stanton, and on her head was something high, like a crown set with plumes. Stanton led her away, walking quickly. They went toward the low, black tents of the guardians of ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... munching at the sward; but there was not another sound, save the indescribable quiet talk of the runnel over the stones. I lay lazily smoking and studying the color of the sky, as we call the void of space, where it showed a reddish gray behind the pines to where it showed a glossy blue-black between the stars. As if to be more like a pedler, I wear a silver ring. This I could see faintly shining as I raised or lowered the cigarette; and at each whiff the inside of my hand was illuminated, and became for a second the highest ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... buck who was bearing down on the old gray horse, and under the slouch hat with its flapping brim—one Mayhall Wells, by name. There were but few strands of gray in his thick blue-black hair, though his years were rounding half a century, and he sat the old nag with erect dignity and perfect ease. His bearded mouth showed vanity immeasurable, and suggested a strength of will that his eyes—the real seat of power—denied, for, while shrewd and keen, they were unsteady. ...
— Christmas Eve on Lonesome and Other Stories • John Fox, Jr.
... blue' or 'all the brown,' though some of us, it is true, are condemned to wear our hair brown or blue-black. But such are only unhappy exceptions. Yellow or gold is the rule. The bravest men and the fairest women have had golden hair, and, we may add, in reference to another distinction of the colour we are celebrating, golden hearts. Hair at the present time is doing its best to conform to its ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... sank below the blue-black horizon, exhausted, red-eyed, gasping men struggled up from the drenched, smothering interior of the ship, and hurled themselves, not into the sea, but prone upon the decks! They had conquered! The scattered, vagrant fires, attacked in their infancy, while still ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... see me—opened wide, Blue-black, gazed right before her, yet they marked Nothing; and her two hands uplift as praying, She yet prayed not, wept not, sighed not. O father, She was past that, soft, tender, hunted thing; But, as it seemed, confused from time to time, ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Jean Ingelow
... feared, was against him—his youth, his foreign name, his limited acquaintance, the impossibility of giving definite information regarding his father's past occupations or present whereabouts. Moreover, his spare young figure, his thin shapely hands and feet, his blue-black Irish eyes and black hair, his energetic colourless face, his ready yet reticent speech—all these marked him as unusual and exotic. And for the unusual and exotic the British employer of labour—of whatever ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... eyes discover as the blue-black smoke blows over! The red-coats stretched in windrows as a mower rakes his hay; Here a scarlet heap is lying, there a headlong crowd is flying Like a billow that has broken ...
— Poems of American Patriotism • Brander Matthews (Editor)
... her blue eyes so dark, and her hair was as black at midday as at midnight. So that now—when she shook her head at the boy—a wonderful long, thick, silky lock escaped its fastenings, and the wind caught it and spun it like silk into the finest blue-black floss. ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... as he sat on the log. But the loss of the pullet brought with it a still further depression, and Jimmy forgot all about his impersonation of the "Bald Eagle." He lost his conceit in the red ochre stripes on his face, and the iridescent feathers in his hat, and the blue-black mud on his nimble feet. For a few moments he was just a sad-eyed boy who saw the hand of the whole world raised against him. The cry of the new baby rang in his ears. The thought of the other boys teasing ...
— The Court of Boyville • William Allen White
... me, in her white gown, simply made, and gathered at the waist with a broad blue ribbon, her slim white hands playing with the book upon her knee, her eyes gazing afar off across the water, her mouth drooping in the curve which it had never known till recently, her wealth of blue-black hair forming a halo round her head. Ah, that she were there when I open my eyes again, that I might speak to her! For the bitterest thought that ever came to me is one which troubles my rest from time to time even now: Did I love her as she deserved; was I a staff for her to lean upon in ...
— A Soldier of Virginia • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... lake, of gamboge, of sepia, of blue-black, of cobalt, and vermilion; and prepare gradated columns (exactly as you have done with the Prussian blue) of the lake and blue-black.[206] Cut a narrow slip all the way down, of each gradated colour, and set the three slips side by side; ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... earliest years, had affected her appearance and her manner. She was a very neat, very trim, even a very attractive little person, with dark brown, roguish eyes, blue-black hair, a fairy-like figure, and the prettiest hands and feet imaginable. She had first attracted Mrs. Greyne's attention by her devotion to St. Paul's Cathedral, and this devotion she still kept up. Whenever she had an hour or two free she always—so she herself said—spent ...
— The Mission Of Mr. Eustace Greyne - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... that of the rattle-snake. It can, however, open its jaws wide enough to gulp down a good-sized bird. It gains its name of the blue or black snake from the colour of its back, which is, as you see, blue-black; while the underside is of an ashen slate hue. The tints vary slightly, and hence the two names. Its tail is fine in the extreme, and enables it to steer its rapid course through ...
— With Axe and Rifle • W.H.G. Kingston
... cottage one fine afternoon, to my surprise the door was opened by a beautiful girl of about fourteen, neatly dressed in a bright cotton frock, just short enough to display the contour of her finely shaped legs and ankles, with a mass of blue-black hair hanging over her shoulders and down her back, so I should think she might have sat on it. She was a vision of delight, and at a glance I recognised she must ...
— Forbidden Fruit • Anonymous
... silver pheasant (Euplocamus nycthemerus), one of the earliest known and most beautiful species of the family Phasianidae. Its white mantle, delicately vermiculated with black, extends like a wedding veil over the head, back and tail, in striking contrast to the blue-black underparts, red ...
— Camps and Trails in China - A Narrative of Exploration, Adventure, and Sport in Little-Known China • Roy Chapman Andrews and Yvette Borup Andrews
... dyeing umbrella cloths and linings. Against aniline black it has the great advantage of not tendering the fibre in the least, and not turning green during storage. Diaminogene B and Diaminogene extra are mostly used for this purpose, the former for jet blacks, the latter for blue-black shades. ...
— The Dyeing of Cotton Fabrics - A Practical Handbook for the Dyer and Student • Franklin Beech
... on the sand, the sunlight pouring like a silver liquid into the blue-black masses of her hair, her narrow brows, her thick eyelashes. Presently she fell asleep. Clara leaned against a low ledge of rock and spread her coppery mane across its surface. It dried almost immediately; she divided it into plaits and coils and wove it into an elaborate structure. ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... an equerry. Oh, how sad, tired, and old they seemed in the gray light of that winter morning, all those pathetic heads, graceful or laughable, which we were only in the habit of seeing when transfigured by the prestige of the stage. Chins had become blue-black under too frequent shaving; hair thin and dry under the hot iron of the hair-dresser; skins rough under the injurious action of unguents and vinegar; eyes dull, burned by the glare of foot-lights—blinded, almost fixed, like those of ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... at the wicked, blue-black outlines of an automatic pistol. Idly he examined the clip, crowded with shiny, yellow cartridges. He recognized the gun as Fallon's, and smiled as he returned it ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... times, so that when viewed at a distance a large flock had the appearance of a cloud, growing dark and thin alternately, and continually changing its form. It was somewhat larger than a starling, with a freer flight, and had a richer plumage, its color being deep glossy blue, or blue-black, and underneath bright chestnut. When close at hand and in the bright sunshine, the aerial gambols of a flock were beautiful to witness, as the birds wheeled about and displayed in turn, as if moved by one impulse, first the rich blue, then the bright chestnut ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson
... before the colonel came to live with him. What sort of man was the colonel? Wasn't he a stout man, with a large quantity of jewelry, and a wig, and large black whiskers, very black (here Pen was immensely waggish, and caused hysteric giggles of delight from the ladies), very black, indeed; in fact, blue-black; that is to say, a rich greenish purple? That was the man; he had met him, too, ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... in Jess's letter which made me hot was this: "What is the matter with you and Billy? Pat says (Pat is Patricia, Billy's sister) that you've been pretty horrid about writing him, and he's been blue-black at not getting letters from you; but at present he is having a good time with a very jolly girl from the West who is at their hotel. Chirp him something cheerful, Canary Bird. If I were younger or Billy older ...
— Kitty Canary • Kate Langley Bosher
... after leaving the mouth of the Ohio, the boat had passed the third Chickasaw Bluff, and was within fifty miles of Natchez, when blue-black clouds suddenly overcast the sky, and a violent storm burst upon the river. Buffeted by opposing forces, the Mississippi soon began to fume and rage like a wrathful brute. The three passengers ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... Dark, petite, with a brilliant smile, flashing eyes, and a riot of blue-black curls, she was verily the daintiest and prettiest little creature the young farmer had ...
— Hiram The Young Farmer • Burbank L. Todd
... white, and of the texture suggesting that it will rub if too impetuously caressed. Yes, a man would hesitate to kiss her unless he were well shaved. At the very thought of kissing her Grant felt a thrill and a glow she had never before roused in him. She had an abundance of blue-black hair, and it and her slender black brows and long lashes gave her hazel eyes a peculiar charm of mingled passion and languor. She had a thin nose, well shaped, its nostrils very sensitive; slightly, charmingly-puckered lips; a small, strong chin. Certainly ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... it, the folds of her dress fell naturally round her in order, like ladies of honour round a throne, and she looked like an empress. All her movements were graceful and imperial. In the morning you could see her hair was blue-black, her complexion of dazzling fairness, with the faintest possible blush flickering, as it were, in her cheek. Her eyes were grey, with prodigious long lashes; and as for her mouth, Mr. Pendennis has given me subsequently to understand, that it was of a staring red colour, ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... first glow of dawn, he awoke, a strange sensation, almost of strangling and suffocation, upon him. There, bending over, framed in a mist of blue-black waves, he saw his lady's face. Its milky whiteness lit by her strange eyes—green as cats' they seemed, and blazing with the fiercest passion of love—while twisted round his throat he felt a great strand of her splendid hair. The wildest ...
— Three Weeks • Elinor Glyn
... Prince Swartzenberg's measure's in the house now; and what's more, I've cut for Wellington." I believe he would have gone to St. Helena to make a coat for Napoleon, so great was his ardour. He wore a blue-black wig, and his whiskers were of the same hue. He was brief and stern in conversations; and he always went to masquerades and balls in a ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... ain't pocketin'. This is just plain ordinary 'prentice work; but pocketin'"—he straightened up his back and spoke reverently—"but pocketin' is the deepest science and the finest art. Delicate to a hair's-breadth, hand and eye true and steady as steel. When you've got to burn your pan blue-black twice a day, and out of a shovelful of gravel wash down to the one wee speck of flour gold,—why, that's washin', that's what it is. Tell you what, I'd sooner follow ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... fingers; then he put it into his mouth and closed his lips. In a moment he took it out. The fly was moist and dejected. He placed it upon the gold-dust in the pan. The fly began to beat its wings and work its legs. In a moment its color changed from blue-black to yellow. It was coated with gold-dust. Hassan lifted it with a pair of tweezers, and popped it into an ...
— The Turquoise Cup, and, The Desert • Arthur Cosslett Smith
... sweet fragrance of the trees, shrubs, plants and vines; bathing in an atmosphere of calm and quiet that seems almost Divine; covered with a sky as cloudless and pure blue as the dome of heaven itself, and which, at night, changes into a rich blue-black velvet, studded with silvery emblazonments, that dance and dazzle in the pellucid air; listening to the varied voices of Nature, each eager to give tongue to its joy; eating healthful, simple food with appetite and relish; absorbing ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... where the streamlet of water falling from the tragic mask into the ancient sarcophagus ever sang its shrill and flute-like song; and the laurel-bush which shaded it, and the bitter box-plants and the orange-trees skirting the paths now formed but vague masses under the blue-black sky. Ah! how gay and sweet had that melancholy garden been in the morning, and what a desolate echo it retained of Benedetta's winsome laughter, all that fine delight in coming happiness which now lay prone upstairs, steeped in the nothingness of things and beings! ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... more at the table outside the cafe. A cold wind was blowing. The sky was blue-black and the ashen white arc lamps cast a mortuary light over everything. In the Colonnade of the Palais Royal the shadows were harsh and inky. In the square the people were gradually thinning. The lights in the Magazin du Louvre had gone out. From the ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... drank no wine, and that his food was simply ripe figs in the season, with coarse rye bread and nuts. Then there was that funny old hunchback, a hundred years old at least, and stone-deaf, who took care of the gondola, spending the whole day, waiting for his master, washing the trim, graceful, blue-black boat, arranging the awning with the white cords and tassels, and polishing the little brass lions at the sides. People tried to question the old hunchback, but he gave no secrets away. The master always stood up behind and rowed, while down on ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... its details: mighty peaks, each loftier and wilder than the last, rose to heights of 15,000 feet. What struck us all were the bare sides that many of these mountains showed; we had expected to see them far more covered with snow. Mount Fridtjof Nansen, for example, had quite a blue-black look. Only quite at the summit was it crowned by a mighty hood of ice that raised its shining top to some 15,000 feet. Farther to the south rose Mount Don Pedro Christophersen; it was more covered with snow, but the long, gabled summit was to a great extent bare. Still farther south Mounts ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... of the landscape and a breath of cool air accentuated the silence which fell at this point. We both looked up, and saw the edge of a blue-black cloud peeping over the shoulder of a ...
— The Love Story of Abner Stone • Edwin Carlile Litsey
... human body under normal bodily conditions of temperature and pressure, when the oxy-haemoglobin of the arterial blood changes over into the haemoglobin of the venous blood. A macrotelluric counterpart of this is the transformation of the red river-mud into the blue-black continental mud at the bottom of the sea, around the continental shores. Here, again, reduction takes place without those preliminaries that are necessary for carrying through ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... the bundle of blankets and buffalo-robes that lay by the side of the grave. Washington threw back the buffalo-robes, and a bright gleam of the cottonwood fire disclosed the upturned face of the dead Nez Perce and lightened up the long, thick locks of glossy blue-black hair. It was the face of a man about thirty—bold, clear-cut features and long, aquiline nose: a good face and a strong face it ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... face at the window. It was so perfectly beautiful, that face, that he wanted to shut his eyes against it. It almost hurt. It was the face of a young woman, very pale, but when her eyes met Eric's they filled with dancing laughter. Her hair under her peaked, white hood glistened blue-black like a river in the snow. She lifted a small white hand and tapped on the window pane, nodding ...
— The Little House in the Fairy Wood • Ethel Cook Eliot
... riding-breeches, drab putties, a scarlet cummerbund, and a skin tanned to the red of a Scotch fir by sun and wind, and mottled by the mosquito and the sand-fly. The other—small, quick, mercurial, with blue-black, curling beard and hair, a fly-switch for ever flicking in his left hand—was Scott, of the Courier, who had come through more dangers and brought off more brilliant coups than any man in the profession, save the eminent Chandler, now no longer ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... prevailing yellow. But soon it deepens into a rich violet. You feel as if you had never before appreciated the loveliness of that rich tint. As your eye dwells upon it the rich lustrous violet darkens to indigo, and sinking into deeper hues becomes a majestic threat of color. It is ominous, vivid blue-black—solid, adamantine, a crystal wall of amethyst. It is all around you. You are cased, dungeoned in the solid masonry of the waters. It is beauty indeed, but the sombre and awful beauty of the night and storm. The eye turns for relief ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... William Penn in the glory of a new bridle and saddle and a blanket of crimson cloth; his coat smooth as satin, his mane a tumbling cataract of white silk; bunches of wild roses at his ears; his blue-black eyes never so soft, and seeming to lift his feet cautiously like an elephant bearing an ...
— The Choir Invisible • James Lane Allen
... height, leafless, hollow, swollen just below the middle, and tapers to the top. The flowers are either white or rose-colored, and are produced at the extremity of the stalk in a regular, globular group, or umbel. The seeds ripen in August. They are deep blue-black, somewhat triangular, and similar in size and form in all the varieties. An ounce contains about seventy-five hundred seeds, which ...
— The Field and Garden Vegetables of America • Fearing Burr
... with a broad stripe of red terra cotta colour with an inside margin of white, widest on the back pair. Both pairs of wings were decorated with half-moons of white, outlined in black and strongly flushed with terra cotta; the front pair near the outer margin had oval markings of blue-black, shaded with grey, outlined with half circles of white, and secondary circles of black. When the wings were raised I could see a face of terra cotta, with small eyes, a broad band of white across the forehead, and an ...
— Moths of the Limberlost • Gene Stratton-Porter
... uncertainty. They were mostly strong, sound-looking men; two or three were middle-aged, the rest young. No one looked unequal to the work, and no one proved so. All wore the inevitable blue cotton of the Chinese, varying with wear and patching from blue-black to bluish-white, and the fashion of the dress was always the same; short, full trousers, square-cut, topped by a belted shirt with long sleeves falling over the hands or rolled up to the elbow according to the weather. About their heads ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... to bed early, so as to get a good night and arise fresh to our work, not, however, before we had made an expedition to the stationer's and expended half a crown in manuscript paper, J and D pens, blotting- paper, blue-black ink, and ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... dilutes the blue and renders it not quite so deep and pure as it otherwise would be. This is shown by the increasing depth of the sky-colour when seen from the tops of lofty mountains, while from the still greater heights attained in balloons the sky appears of a blue-black colour, the blue reflected from the comparatively small amount of dust particles being seen against the intense black of stellar space. It is for the same reason that the "Italian skies" are of so rich a blue, because the Mediterranean Sea on one side and the snowy Alps on the other do ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... July Charlotte Corday was taken from her prison to the gloomy guillotine. It was toward evening, and nature had given a setting fit for such an end. Blue-black thunder-clouds rolled in huge masses across the sky until their base appeared to rest on the very summit of the guillotine. Distant thunder rolled and grumbled beyond the river. Great drops of rain fell upon the soldiers' drums. Young, beautiful, unconscious of any wrong, Charlotte Corday stood ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... stretches. The sun was swinging like a copper ball above the Wall at the west. Down through the canyons the light came in long red shafts that cut through the cobalt shadows like sharp lances of fire and reached half across Lost Valley. All the western part of the Valley lay in that blue-black shadow. They could see Corvan set like a dull gem in the wide green country, the scattered ranches, ...
— Tharon of Lost Valley • Vingie E. Roe
... to each other of Maritz and our doings. It didn't seem to be a popular subject in that cafe. One big blue-black fellow said that Maritz was a dirty swine who would soon be hanged. Peter quickly caught his knife-wrist with one hand and his throat with the other, and demanded an apology. He got it. The Lisbon boulevardiers have ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... arm round her waist, and her head was on his shoulder. She said, 'I WILL trust you, Jack—I know you'll give up the drink for my sake. And I'll help you, and we'll be so happy!' or words in that direction. A thunderstorm was coming on. The sky had darkened up with a great blue-black storm-cloud rushing over, and they hadn't noticed it. I didn't mind, and the fish bit best in a storm. But just as she said 'happy' came a blinding flash and a crash that shook the ridges, and the first drops came peltering down. They jumped up and climbed the bank, ...
— Over the Sliprails • Henry Lawson
... he stood and waited, his face was white except that on one cheek was a spot almost like a scarlet stain of blood; his eyes seemed changed to blue-black, and in each there was a light which flickered like a point of flame and made him seem not himself, but some new relentless being, for far deeps of him had been ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Most prominent among the opals of to-day are the so-called "Black opals" from New South Wales. These give vivid flashes of color out of seeming darkness. In some positions the stones, as the name implies, appear blue-black or blackish gray. By transmitted light, however, the bluish stones appear yellow. Owing to the sharp contrast between the dark background and the flashing spectrum colors, black opals are most attractive stones and fine specimens command high prices. ...
— A Text-Book of Precious Stones for Jewelers and the Gem-Loving Public • Frank Bertram Wade
... were the pillars of the Giant's Causeway, blue-black against the sun. They were made so that the Finn MacCool, the champion of the giants, could take a running jump over to Scotland and he going deer-hunting in the forests of Argyll. So the country folk said, but wee Shane thought different, knew different. The Druids had made it for ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... years. The rough angularity of twenty had softened. Tall, but robust and compact, no stooping shoulders or slouching gait. The chestnut hair was no longer faded, but still cropped close; and the eyes were so deep that they seemed to have a blue-black tint, large, slow-moving, with that unutterable wistfulness which makes one sad. The face was good, strong, and earnest; and, if his manners were not those of a gentleman of leisure, they bore the impress of something quite as noble, honor, tenderness, ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... practiced eye detected it in the slender stateliness of carriage, in the graceful, yet voluptuous, curves of the lithe body, in the smallness and delicacy of hand and foot, in the purple sheen on straight-falling masses of blue-black hair, and, more than all else, in the long, dark eye, full and soft, yet alight with a slumbering fire. France, too, was responsible for somewhat in Tannis. It gave her a light step in place of the stealthy half-breed shuffle, it arched ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... and graceful, very beautifully dressed in purple and gold, and his blue-black hair was held in a net or coif of finest gold thread. His garments clung as tightly and smoothly as if he had been kneaded into them—as, indeed, he had. But it was his face that held my eyes. It was a sun-tanned, shaven hawk-face with black level brows, black eyes, and a strong ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... Blue-black, the sky over Venice, With a pricking of yellow stars. There is no moon, And the waves push darkly against the prow Of the gondola, Coming from Malamocco And streaming toward Venice. It is black under the gondola hood, But the yellow of a ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell
... closer and her bizarre beauty peremptorily demanded notice. A close-fitting blouse of moose-skin, fantastically beaded, outlined faithfully the well-rounded lines of her body, while a silken kerchief, gay of color and picturesquely draped, partly covered great masses of blue-black hair. But it was the face, cast belike in copper bronze, which caught and held Mrs. Sayther's fleeting glance. Eyes, piercing and black and large, with a traditionary hint of obliqueness, looked forth from under clear-stencilled, clean-arching brows. ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London
... the blue-black shadows of the pines, I quickly lost all sense of direction. After we had ridden in wordless silence a short half hour or less, and I supposed we should be nearing the head of our descending ravine, ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... a quite insignificant blossom. But the plant I mean is a wild peony, which I dug up in a brake on the slopes of Helikon. It is a single white whose flower lasts, perhaps, three days. It makes a large seed-pod, which burst a short time ago, and revealed blue-black seeds sheathed in coralline forms of the most absolute vermilion. You could see them fifty yards away. It seems to have no purpose in life but to pack the seeds—or perhaps, they are beacons for the birds. I took pains to be beforehand with the birds, having no desire ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... lifted his hand, stroked again the tangled beard, then made a gesture, a large animal gesture—still the satyr—to the sky. He turned and went down to the riverside. Mid-way he paused and stroked his beard again, and looked grimly up at where the maid and the manservant were blue-black against the evening sky. He shrugged his shoulders, "Women," said he, "they make trouble. I wish—I wish——" He had no word to finish the sentence with, he but sighed and proceeded ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... the faces thrust out at us from the greasy little double casements of a barrack beside the road, where the horses paused before the last pull. There was one little girl in particular, beginning to lisser her hair, as civilisation approached, in a manner not to be described, with her poor little blue-black hands. At the summit are the two usual grim little stone taverns, the steel-blue tarn, the snow-white peaks, the pause in the cold sunshine. Then we begin to rattle down with two horses. In five minutes we are swinging along the famous zigzags. Engineer, driver, horses—it's ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... between her breasts, and her two shock-headed children, bare-legged and lightly shod, tug at her hands on either side. Then a grave man in a long, fur-trimmed robe, a merchant, maybe, debates some serious matter with a white-tunicked clerk. And the clerk's face——? I turn to mark the straight, blue-black hair. ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... small clusters 6-8 mm., the individual sporangia slender, cylindric, blue-black or fuscous, becoming pallid as the spores are lost, stipitate; stipe short, about one-fourth the total height, black, shining; hypothallus scanty, but common to all the sporangia; columella prominent, attaining almost ...
— The North American Slime-Moulds • Thomas H. (Thomas Huston) MacBride
... houses where weaving is practiced is almost a necessity; in fact, it would be of far greater use at present than in the days when it was only used to dye the wool needed for family knitting and weaving. All shades of blue, from sky-blue to blue-black, can be dyed in the indigo tub; and it has the merit of being a cheap as well as an almost perfectly fast dye. It could be used for dyeing warps as well as fillings, and I have before spoken of the difficulty, indeed almost impossibility, of procuring indigo-dyed ...
— Hand-Loom Weaving - A Manual for School and Home • Mattie Phipps Todd
... with the scent of may and of honeysuckle, and his way was a green-gold—silver where the moon cascaded down the hedge—and blue-black bridal-path, arched with scented swords, strewn with pink and rose and cream and white confetti of blossom. But he only saw and smelt one thing, and that, those who have known hedgehogs intimately will agree, is not like unto the scent ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... Susan was filled by a tall and muscular young man, with very blue eyes, and a large and exceptionally charming mouth. The youth had teeth of a dazzling whiteness, a smile that was a bewildering Irish compound of laughter and tears, and sooty blue-black hair that fitted his head like a thick cap. He was a noisy lad, this William Oliver, opinionated, excitable, a type that in its bigness and broadness seemed almost coarse, sometimes, but he had all a big man's tenderness ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... and a head set on it with stag-like grace and uplift. His hair, cut straight across his brow and falling over his ears, after some caprice of Janet Andrews, the minister's housekeeper, was a glossy blue-black. The skin of his face and hands was like ivory; his eyes were large and beautifully tinted—gray, with dilating pupils; his features had the outlines of a cameo. Carmody mothers considered him delicate, ...
— Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... wall, No woman was in the room! His tall Chiffonier stood gaunt behind His chair. His old cloak, rabbit-lined, Hung from a peg. The door was closed. Just for a moment he must have dozed. He looked again, and saw it plain. The silhouette made a blue-black stain On the opposite wall, and it never wavered Even when the candle quavered Under his panting breath. What made That beautiful, dreadful thing, that shade Of something so lovely, so exquisite, Cast from a substance which the sight Had not been tutored to perceive? Paul brushed ...
— Sword Blades and Poppy Seed • Amy Lowell
... paling the blue-black sky as the radio engineer returned. The street lights fluttered fitfully and at last died. The streets had become deserted although groups still eddied slowly about the ...
— The End of Time • Wallace West
... And blue-black beetles transact business, And gnats fly in a host, And furry caterpillars hasten That no time be lost, And moths grow fat and thrive, ...
— The Posy Ring - A Book of Verse for Children • Various
... companion's clear-cut, delicate face, at the wind-tanned cheeks, against which her long braids lay like the blue-black locks of an Egyptian maid, then at her warm, dark eyes, in which was a hint of the golden light of the afternoon sun. He noted covertly the slender lines of her body and the dainty, firm, brown hands flung protectingly about the shoulders of her little ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... all in black, but it is a beautiful blue-black, and when the sun shines on his back it seems to be almost purple. That is why some folks call him the Purple Martin. He is one of the most social fellows I know of. I like a home by myself, such as I've got here, but Twitter loves company. He likes to live in an apartment ...
— The Burgess Bird Book for Children • Thornton W. Burgess
... resistance as she did to anything in the least suggestive to sentiment in the leave-taking. Oppose it, however, did the small hand which drew itself away with decision, the pretty lips which smiled again that coolly friendly smile, the blue-black eyes which were steady as ever in their straight look. Max, peering in upon the two to tell Jarvis to come along, saw his sister break down in her self-command, but only at sight of himself. As Jarvis ...
— Strawberry Acres • Grace S. Richmond
... poured a deluge, and the morning beheld the Aivron in roaring spate, the familiar landmarks of the banks having mostly disappeared and also many of the mid-channel rocks; while the blue-black current that came whirling down the strath seemed to bring with it the dull, constant thunder of the distant falls. The western hills looked wild and stormy; there was half a gale of wind tearing along the valley; and, if the torrents of the night had mitigated, there were still ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... alone, his hands blue-black with the smudge from a refractory typewriter ribbon which he was vainly endeavoring to adjust. It took some time for him to get his hands clean again, and Claire sharpened her pencils while she waited. But there really proved to be ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... Black; the head and thorax opake. Abdomen shining blue-black. The face with silvery pile on each side of the clypeus, and sprinkled with erect black hairs. Thorax: the posterior margin of the prothorax with a line of silvery pubescence; the metathorax with a short light-brown pubescence at the apex, and thinly clothed with black ...
— Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society - Vol. 3 - Zoology • Various
... what's happened to us, or where we are?" Miss Ruse persisted. She was a rather small girl with large, beautiful gray eyes and thick blue-black hair. At the moment, she was barefoot and in a sleeping outfit which consisted of something soft wrapped around her top, soft and floppy trousers below. The black hair was tousled and she looked around fifteen. She'd been asleep in her stateroom when something smacked the Queen, and she ...
— The Winds of Time • James H. Schmitz
... of the girl he loved showed itself in the dusky eyes sparkling beneath the soft mass of blue-black hair, in the glow of underlying blood that swept into her cheeks. She hoped—oh, how she hoped!—that the officer would stand by his cousin. In her heart she knew that if he did not—no matter how right his choice might be in principle—she ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine
... about fifteen as I first remember her, a tall slim handsome girl with blue-black hair, black eyes, coral-red lips, and a remarkably white skin without a trace of red colour in it. She was no doubt just like what her mother had been when the dashing impressionable young George Royd had first met her and ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... harder struggle for existence, and the spaces of sand between were wider. But now the dreaded, glistening choya began to show pale and gray and white upon the rising slope. Round-topped hills, sunset-colored above, blue-black below, intervened to hide the distant spurs and peaks. Mile and mile long tongues of red lava streamed out between the hills and wound down to stop abruptly upon ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... observation car, peering anxiously into its depths ("Looking for I. O. W. probably," surmised the agent), and two commercial gentlemen from the smoker whiling away a commercially unproductive hiatus by playing pinochle on a suitcase held across their knees. Glancing at the vast, swollen, blue-black billows rolling up the sky, Banneker guessed that their game ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... not a bonnet to be seen. Women of the better classes affect lace and flowers, those of the lower wear their own hair flowing down their backs, in a long, blue-black wave. Jewelry is profusely worn. Every woman sparkles with bracelets, earrings, and chains. Many of the males are similarly attired. Everybody smokes. Cigarettes at fifteen for a cent are in chief favour with the natives. Cigars at $1.50 ...
— The Boys of '98 • James Otis
... sash tied around his waist, and once, as he pushed back his coat, Hiram saw the glitter of a pistol butt. He was a powerful, thickset man, low-browed and bull-necked, his cheek, and chin, and throat closely covered with a stubble of blue-black beard. He wore a red kerchief tied around his head and over it a cocked hat, edged ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard Pyle
... extending from ear to ear at the back of his bare, pink head. But the little boy had to admit that Cousin Bill J.'s moustache was even grander than his father's. It fell in two graceful festoons far below his chin, with a little eyelet curled into each tip, and, like the ringlets, it showed the blue-black lustre of the crow's wing. In the full sunlight, at times, it became ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... assuring himself there was no one there. Then returning to his seat, he told her a strange story of a marvellously beautiful young girl, with Spanish fire in her lustrous eyes, and a satin gloss on her blue-black curls. ...
— Cousin Maude • Mary J. Holmes
... a corner and came upon the rest of their party, hitherto hidden by the apricot hedge and a turning in the road. A blue-black Kafir, with two yellow Hottentot drivers, man and boy, was harnessing, in the most primitive mode, four horses on to the six oxen attached to the wagon; and the horses were flattening their ears, and otherwise resenting the incongruity. Meantime a fourth figure, a colossal ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... the end of the garden path, stood still a moment, and looked out over the garden gate upon the stubble-fields and cropped meadows. Behind them the woods formed a blue-black frame about the picture, yellow in the sunshine—that dense pine forest that extended ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... hours earlier, and that might possibly mean an impending change of weather; but if so, the heavens showed no sign of it thus far, for the sky was still clear as crystal, the stars beamed down with undiminished radiance out of the immeasurable depths of the blue-black vault overhead, and the swell was perceptibly flattening. Then I looked at the clock, which, as is usual at sea, was set every day by the sun. It wanted five minutes to two; I therefore had still two hours of my watch to stand; and, to stave off a certain feeling of drowsiness that was ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood
... the place where the door hid itself under the ivy, she was startled by a curious loud sound. It was the caw—caw of a crow and it came from the top of the wall, and when she looked up, there sat a big glossy-plumaged blue-black bird, looking down at her very wisely indeed. She had never seen a crow so close before and he made her a little nervous, but the next moment he spread his wings and flapped away across the garden. She hoped he was not going to stay inside and she pushed the door ...
— The Secret Garden • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... was generally quiet in the cabin when he was there. He came in with Mary, a small, fair girl, and a good girl, who would keep his cabin tidy. His mother and sisters were broad-shouldered women with blue-black hair and red cheeks, and it was said that he had said he would like to bring a little fair ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... in Jerichow, if I mistake not, on very bad paper, Friday, the 29th of January. I am very thankful that you do not write in the evening, my love, even if I am myself to suffer thereby. Every future glance into your gray-blue-black eye with its large pupil will compensate me for ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... in the desert. She lay listlessly in her chair, a long and slender shape in a dull black gown which fell about her in those statuesque folds which all drapery assumed immediately she donned it; beneath it showed her feet in black satin slippers and the gleam of the satin seemed repeated in her blue-black hair. Her cheek was unwontedly pale. A monotone she appeared, half-within and half-without the zone of the firelight; but the individuality of her could not be thus subdued. It found expression in the concentration of light and color focused in the splendid rings which ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow |
