"Chequered" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... flint and stone, and otherwise ornamenting the surface, to bring it into uniformity with the porch which was then built at that end of the church. There are now three round-headed recesses in the central portion of the wall, those at the extremities containing narrow windows; a band of chequered stonework is carried across the space beneath them, and a small circular window inserted above. It may be mentioned here that the pointed arch has generally been adopted in the new work, to distinguish it from the old, but the characteristic massiveness and predominant scale of the ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Priory Church of St. Bartholomew-the-Great, Smithfield • George Worley
... which he lost. In the following year he was again defeated by Daun, in a night attack at Hochkirch, with the loss of 100 guns. And in 1759, which is the turning of the tide, the Russians beat him at Kunersdorf. And yet it is to this chequered year 1757, not to the preceding career of incessant victory, that Frederic the Great owes the immensity of his ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... ahead—a huddled mass of houses low upon the water. One by one, as we rowed steadily, the fishing-boats passed by, emerging from their harbour for a twelve hours' cruise upon the open sea. In a long line they came, with variegated sails of orange, red, and saffron, curiously chequered at the corners, and cantled with devices in contrasted tints. A little land-breeze carried them forward. The lagoon reflected their deep colours till they reached the port. Then, slightly swerving eastward on their course, but still in single file, ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... bird, not much unlike the Frigate-Bird, as light, but not so swift. The under-part of its plumage is chequered brown and white, but the upper-part is ...
— History of Louisisana • Le Page Du Pratz
... been troubled by nothing of the sort; indeed, his nights were for some while like other men's, now blank, now chequered with dreams, and these sometimes charming, sometimes appalling, but except for an occasional vividness, of no extraordinary kind. I will just note one of these occasions, ere I pass on to what makes my dreamer truly interesting. It seemed to him ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a faithful account of one of the many strange incidents which chequered the life of Hardress Fitzgerald—one of the now-forgotten heroes who flourished during the most stirring and, though the most disastrous, by no means the least glorious ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume III. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... things are those without which we cannot live, or without which we ought not to live, or without which we do not want to live. Examples of the first group are, to be rescued from the hands of the enemy, from a tyrant's anger, and the other chequered perils that beset human life. Whichsoever of these we avert, we shall earn gratitude proportionate to the terrible magnitude of ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... pull it away, my enemy had shut the door from the outside, and I heard the key turn in it. I looked about me; I was in a narrow paved chamber, with one small window very high up, through which the sunbeams came, chequered by a tall tree, so high that I knew it was late in the day, and that we must have driven far. There was the frame of a narrow bedstead in one corner, a straw chair, a crucifix, and an empty cell in a deserted convent; but there was a stone table projecting from the wall, on which ...
— Stray Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... away of the abundant growth and selecting a position for their camp, a great stretch of wall was laid bare, one portion of which displayed the chequered pattern and another the herring-bone ornamentation adopted by the ancient people in building up what seemed to be the remains of a great structure which might have been ...
— Dead Man's Land - Being the Voyage to Zimbambangwe of certain and uncertain • George Manville Fenn
... a Roman boy, has a very chequered career, being now a captive in the hands of Spartacus, again an officer on board a vessel detailed for the suppression of the pirates, and anon a captive once more on a pirate ship. He escapes to Tarsus, is taken prisoner in the war with Mithridates, and detained in Pontus ...
— By Conduct and Courage • G. A. Henty
... reform of the English Criminal Law nor the emancipation of Irish Catholics resulted from the enlightenment of foreign Courts, or could be hindered by their indifference. But on the Continent of Europe the progress towards constitutional freedom was indeed likely to be a slow and a chequered one when the Ministers of absolutism formed so close and intimate a band, when the nations contained within them such small bodies of men in any degree versed in public affairs, and when the institutions on which it was proposed to base the liberty of the future were so destitute of that ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... view at sunrise of the Basquiau Hill, skirting half the horizon with its white sides chequered by forests of pine. It is seen from Pine Island Lake at the distance of fifty miles and cannot therefore be less than three-fourths of a mile in perpendicular height; probably the greatest elevation between the Atlantic Ocean and the ...
— The Journey to the Polar Sea • John Franklin
... the pleasures of the table within his reach, has increased the rotundity of his figure, it has never been able to make his collars snowy or his conversation refined. He is often found upon the Committees of new Clubs which start with a blare of journalistic trumpets upon a chequered existence, only to perish in contempt a few years afterwards. But while they last he attends them in the hope of picking up a friend who may be valuable, or some gossip which he may turn to account. As a rule, he affects the society of those who are intellectually dull in order that he ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, July 12, 1890 • Various
... Byron had died of fever within its walls. The Greeks were magnificent in their defence of these frail mud-bastions, and they more than held their own in the amphibious warfare of the lagoons. The struggle was chequered by the continual coming and going of the Greek and Ottoman fleets. They were indeed the decisive factor; for without the supporting squadron Rashid would have found himself in the same straits as his predecessors at the approach of autumn, while the slackness of the islanders ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... that was in her'-exhorting the people to embrace Jesus, and refrain from sin, the nature and origin of which she explained to them in accordance with her own most curious and original views. Through her life, and all its chequered changes, she has ever clung fast to her first ...
— The Narrative of Sojourner Truth • Sojourner Truth
... workrooms that rarest of visitants, a stray sunbeam. Only if the sun happened to shine at given moments could any of its light fall directly into the room I speak of; this afternoon, however, all circumstances were favourable, and behold the floor chequered with uncertain gleam. The workers were arranged in groups of three, called 'parties,' consisting of a learner, an improver, and a hand. All sat with sleeves pushed up to their elbows, and had a habit of rocking to and fro as they plied their mechanical industry. Owing to the movement ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... to administer judicial corporal punishment to a human being for the first time in his life. As he himself whimsically expressed it, he had received ample correction during his own chequered career; but he had never been in a position to ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... remained under the charge of Ciceley of the Cindery, and of the corpulent Tapstress whom the Blacks called Mother Drum. These two women were very fond of gossiping with me; and especially did Mother Drum love to converse with me upon her own Career, which had been of the most Chequered, not to say Amazing nature. I have already hinted that at one time this Remarkable Woman had professed the Military Profession, in which she had shone with almost a Manly Brilliance; and from her various confidences—all delivered to me ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... Luis de Leon was a bloodless philosopher, incapable of resentment, and, indeed, without a touch of human weakness in his aloof and lofty nature. His works do not lend colour to this presentation of the man, nor do the ascertainable details of his chequered career. The conception of Luis de Leon as a meek spirit, an unresisting victim of malignant persecution, is not the sole view tenable of a complex character. However, the recorded facts may be trusted ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... to himself that such a necklace was worth having,—as also, no doubt, were Portray Castle and the income arising from the estate, even though they could be held in possession only for a single life. Hitherto in his very chequered career he had escaped the trammels of matrimony, and among his many modes of life had hardly even suggested to himself the expediency of taking a wife with a fortune, and then settling down for the future, if submissively, still comfortably. To say that ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... rage for property suppresses public considerations, and personal rather than national interests have become the great objects of attention. Representative bodies will ever be faithful copies of their originals, and generally exhibit a chequered assemblage of virtue and vice, of abilities and weakness. The mass of men are neither wise nor good, and the virtue, like the other resources of a country, can only be drawn to a point by strong circumstances, ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 4 (of 5) • John Marshall
... Strickland, has this part bluish. The tail has a terminal dark bar, with the outer feathers externally edged at the base with white. The wings have two black bars. Some semi-domestic breeds, and some truly wild breeds, have, besides the two black bars, the wings chequered with black. These several marks do not occur together in any other species of the whole family. Now, in every one of the domestic breeds, taking thoroughly well-bred birds, all the above marks, even to the white edging of the outer tail-feathers, sometimes concur perfectly developed. ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... my honoured friend, to return you, with my own hand, thanks for the many instances of your friendship, and particularly for your kind anxiety in this last disaster, that my evil genius had in store for me. However, life is chequered—joy and sorrow—for on Saturday morning last, Mrs. Burns made me a present of a fine boy; rather stouter, but not so handsome as your godson was at his time of life. Indeed I look on your little namesake to be my chef d'oeuvre in that species of manufacture, as I look ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... about the. room. Before the back door there was a screen covered with nankeen, and between that and the fireplace an old-fashioned sofa covered with white long-cloth, on which Napoleon reclined, dressed in his white morning-gown, white loose trousers and stockings all in one, a chequered red handkerchief upon his head, and his shirt-collar open without a cravat. His sir was melancholy and troubled. Before him stood a little round table, with some books, at the foot of which lay in confusion upon the carpet a heap of those which he had already perused, and at the ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... detained a prisoner of war, and yet this unfortunate man exposed his life in fighting for the British off Cape St. Vincents, as much as the noble Lord himself. Such is the difference of rewards in this chequered world! ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... have kept time with my thoughts, for the Sun is just rising, and I my self just now come to this place, and the dogs have just now put down an Otter, look down at the bottom of the hil, there in that Meadow, chequered with water Lillies and Lady-smocks, there you may see what work they make: look, you see all busie, men and dogs, dogs and men, ...
— The Complete Angler 1653 • Isaak Walton
... She had darted up the last stairs to the chequered darkness of the top floor, where loose tiles lay among broken laths, and the walls were scrawled with names, sentiments, and hop records. "They've been keeping pigeons ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... put in with affability, his spirits rising as the danger drew nearer. "Talk about Garrison Hill! She seems to be pretty well at home on Inniscaw, too." For Vashti, halting in the chequered sunlight beneath a trellised arch, had reached up the hooked handle of her sunshade to draw down the spray of a late autumnal rose, and stood for a moment ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... ravaged with fire and sword, and the heat was an excuse for almost any lapse of virtue, McGilveray had not been drunk once—not once. It was almost unnatural. Previous to that, McGilveray's career had been chequered. No man had received so many punishments in the whole army, none had risen so superior to them as had he, none had ever been shielded from wrath present and to come as had this bandmaster of Anstruther's regiment. He had no rivals for promotion ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... over the details of his torments, wept for joy over his miraculous preservation. At the close he was applauded on all sides, which bewildered him a little, for he had never known anything but abuse in all his chequered life. ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... tree; the actual sight of the little wood, with its gray and silver sea of life, is entirely a winter vision. So dim and delicate is the heart of the winter woods, a kind of glittering gloaming, that a figure stepping towards us in the chequered twilight seems as if he were breaking through ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... the breast of her boy, how she would have agonised in prayer for him! But she did not know. There was, however, One who did know, who loved him better even than his mother, and who watched and guarded him throughout all his chequered career. ...
— Blue Lights - Hot Work in the Soudan • R.M. Ballantyne
... thefts and losses—perhaps aided by the American patriots who remained in Philadelphia—that included drugs and surgical instruments. In November an advertisement reported the loss of "a sett of Surgeons Pocket instruments in a crimson chequered covering, with a silver clasp. Whoever will bring them to the bar of the coffee-house or to Mr. Allman, surgeons mate of the Royal Artillery, shall have a Guinea reward, and no questions asked." In April an unidentified druggist ...
— Drug Supplies in the American Revolution • George B. Griffenhagen
... had the Copy of a Letter sent me out of the Country, which was written from a young Gentleman in the Army to his Father, a Man of a good Estate and plain Sense: As the Letter was very modishly chequered with this Modern Military Eloquence, I shall present my Reader with ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... down upon one of the couches and fell asleep. When he awoke, he noticed, for the first time, the walls which, by the way, were really the strangest part of his new home. They had in them twelve long, chequered windows which reached from the ceiling to the floor. The spaces between the windows were filled with mirrors exactly the same size as the windows, so that the whole room was walled in with windows and looking-glasses. Through ...
— The Book of Stories for the Storyteller • Fanny E. Coe
... wonder at events. The event once squarely met, she struck immediately into the course it demanded, cheerfully, without repining, and with as little attention as possible to forebodings. Her voice died away toward the back of the house. The moon was shining, and the lawn lay chequered beneath the trees. Corbin Wood, who had been standing in a brown study, began to descend the steps. "I'll take a little walk, Judith, my dear," he said, "and think it over! I'll let myself in." He was gone walking rapidly, not toward the big gate and the road, but across to the fields, a ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... the performance.' It is greatly to be desired that Raleigh could have been as well advised as his contemporary and possible friend, the Huguenot poet-soldier, Agrippa d'Aubigne, who at the close of a chequered career also prepared a Histoire Universelle, in which he simply told the story of his own political party in France through those stormy years in which he himself had been an actor. We would gladly exchange all these chronicles of Semiramis and Jehoshaphat ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... led me into a steep forest, where I lost sight of the Tarn. The soil was too rocky for the trees—oaks and chestnuts chiefly—to grow very tall; consequently the underwood, although dense, was chequered all through with sunshine. Heather and bracken, holly and box, made a wilderness that spread over all the visible world, for the opposite side of the gorge was exactly similar. Shining in the sun amidst the flowering heather or glowing ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... The upland hamlets will invite, When the merry bells ring round, And the jocund rebecks sound To many a youth and many a maid Dancing in the chequered shade, And young and old come forth to play On a ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... life, or so free to evolve from our inner consciousness the momentous conclusions of the armchair moralist. When you have had your sneeze," he added, glancing at the Angel, who was taking snuff, "I shall make known to you the conclusions I have formed in the course of a chequered career." ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... discern the tops of the cliffs beyond Garlestone on the Suffolk coast. The swell of the sea drove him over the Cross Sand Ridge, and he then got sight of a buoy, which, although it told him his exact position, 'took him rather aback,' as he had hoped he was nearer the shore. It proved to be the chequered buoy, St. Nicholas' Gate, off Yarmouth, and opposite his own door, but distant from the land four miles. And now again he held counsel with himself, and the energies of his mind seem almost superhuman; he had been five hours in the ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... and earnest, who carried the union of the British, separated, Provinces, and made the "Dominion," no man gave more soul and substance to the cause, by his eloquence, than Mr. d'Arcy McGee. His had been a chequered career. Beginning, like Sir George Etienne Cartier, in revolt against what he believed to be British tyranny, he ended his life, one of the most loyal, as he was one of the most eloquent, of Her Majesty's subjects. In 1848 he was one ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... Florence. The work was begun in 1615, and resulted in the picturesque but somewhat Gallicised Italian palace which, after descending to Gaston of Orleans and his daughter the Grande Mademoiselle, ends a chequered career as palace, revolutionary prison, house of peers, and socialist meeting-place by becoming the respectable and dull Senate-house of the third Republic. The beautiful Renaissance gardens have suffered but few changes; adorned with Debrosse's picturesque fountain, they ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... because it is morning and yet too early to get up. A little wandering of the voice, a little wandering of the feet.... The may tree in the middle of the garden seemed to be her partner. A small blot moved up and down the chequered trunk of the tree, and that was the shadow of a grey squirrel, watching the dancing. The squirrel wore the same fur as the two-and-a-half-guinea young lady wears, and sometimes it looked with a tilted head ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... stubble'. And this means that everywhere and always, but most specially and centrally and potently in man's spirit, there is Progress, in spite of checks and hindrances which come from within it, a constant if chequered advance in true worth or value. And that knowledge I build on grounded and reasoned hope that it will and must continue—how, I do not know, but can only surmise and conjecture ...
— Progress and History • Various
... to say, however, I scarcely felt in cue just then either to admire the Josefa's paces or to take much note of the wonderful picture presented by the river, with its brown mud-tinted waters lashed into fury by the breath of the tropical tempest and chequered here and there with the shadows of the scurrying clouds, or lighted up by the phosphorescence which tipped each wave with a crest of scintillating silvery stars. The wound in my shoulder was every moment becoming more excruciatingly painful and more exacting in its demands upon my attention; ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... part of the affair is the efforts he made to ingratiate himself with the lower classes of the Corsicans, his admiration of whom is sometimes chequered by a wholesome fear of their wild instincts. “I got a Corsican dress made,” he says, “in which I walked about with an air of true satisfaction. The general did me the honour to present me with his ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... next place, my clothes began to decay, and my linen had been gone long before. However, I had preserved about three dozen of the sailors chequered shirts, which proved a great refreshment to me, when the violent beams of the sun would not suffer me to bear any of the seamen's heavy watch coats, which made me turn taylor, and, after a miserable botching manner, convert them to jackets. To preserve my ...
— The Life and Most Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of - York, Mariner (1801) • Daniel Defoe
... rectified the mistake, one fiction was called in to support another. It was the same fear of the sudden termination of prosperity, that made Amasis king of Egypt warn his friend Polycrates of Samos, that the gods loved those whose lives were chequered with good and evil fortunes. Nemesis was supposed to lie in wait particularly for the prudent; that is, for those whose caution rendered them accessible only to mere accidents; and her first altar was ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... of citron, geraniums, and lilac jessamine. These walks were now deserted. Every one in the house and in the town was occupied with something far different from moonlight strolls, for pleasure or for meditation. The chequered lights and shadows lay undisturbed by the foot of any intruder. The waters gleamed as they rose, and sparkled as they fell; and no human voice, in discourse or in laughter, mingled with the murmur and the splash. Here Therese permitted herself the indulgence of the tears which she had made ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... gone. Lily in the retrospect was the faultless woman—the ideal wife and love's young dream in one. "I have had my day," was the thought of his heart, as he looked across the gulf of strenuous, chequered, disappointing years to that idyll of the far past which her pictured form brought back to him. "Whatever is lacking now, I HAVE known the fullness of love and bliss—that there is such a thing as a perfect union between man and woman, rare as it may be." It will be remembered that he ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... and the refinement, religious advantages, and social life of the metropolis, were altogether absent. Perea was to Jerusalem what the Highlands, a century ago, were to Edinburgh. There our Lord spent the last few months of his chequered career. ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... himself, you might have thought that he had a sufficiently chequered career, yet Mr. CYRIL RAYMOND got very little colour out of the part. For the rest, Mr. H. DE LANGE, as the millionaire, got a certain amount out of the subject of his wife's indigestion, which was a sort of leit-motif ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, October 27, 1920 • Various
... lover in the true light; she may pray that her heart be not betrayed into false hopes, and resolve that she will never abandon her judgment, in so momentous a transaction. Such an one looks at the world as it is, a chequered scene; a place in which "one thing is set over against another;" a mart in which a just price must be paid for every article we obtain. This aspect of life may be less pleasing than its opposite. It may render what is termed "Courtship" something else beside a golden age; yet, in the end, who ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... contrasts of vegetation and lack of it are just as emphatic; barren snow-topped mountains overhang tiny valleys, veritable gems of tropical beauty; you pass with one step from a waste of rock and sand to a garden-like oasis of soft green and rippling waters. Yunnan's chequered history is revealed in the varied peoples that inhabit the deep valleys and narrow river banks. Nominally annexed to the empire by Kublai Khan, the Mongol, in the thirteenth century, ever since ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... Ramiro, "there speaks the voice of small experience. Oh! youth, so easily exalted and so easily depressed! Joyous, chequered youth! How many happy marriages have I not known begin with such hate as this? Well, there it is, you must take my word for it. If you want to marry Elsa Brant, I can manage it for you, and if not, why, you can ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... time though a much chequered life Amidst this world's bustle, its turmoil and strife My mind has been solaced with thoughts of thy love, Which does thy relation ...
— The Emigrant Mechanic and Other Tales In Verse - Together With Numerous Songs Upon Canadian Subjects • Thomas Cowherd
... letter which has been communicated to me from a lady (now a nun) who was on a visit at Abbotsford during the autumn and winter of 1854, gives a very pleasing and distinct idea of the domestic life there during that brief period of happiness, which, however (as we shall see presently), was already chequered by sorrow destined in the Divine providence to become yet deeper and sadder. To this letter I am indebted for the following particulars, which I have ventured slightly to rearrange, yet keeping as closely as possible to the words ...
— Memoirs of James Robert Hope-Scott, Volume 2 • Robert Ornsby
... little bowl is like a mossy pool In a Spring wood, where dogtooth violets grow Nodding in chequered sunshine of the trees; A quiet place, still, with the sound of birds, Where, though unseen, is heard the endless song And murmur of the never resting sea. 'T was winter, Roger, when you made this cup, But coming Spring guided your eager hand And round the edge you fashioned ...
— A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass • Amy Lowell
... respects coincided, and was employed as the usual interlude and especially as afterpiece along with the other dramatic performances.(9) The plot was of course still more indifferent, loose, and absurd than in the harlequinade; if it was only sufficiently chequered, the public did not ask why it laughed, and did not remonstrate with the poet, who instead of untying the knot cut it to pieces. The subjects were chiefly of an amorous nature, mostly of the licentious sort; for example, poet ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... powerful. Massachusetts {53} had guaranteed bonds of local roads to the extent of eight millions, without ever having to pay a cent of the interest; and though New York's experience had been more chequered, the successes were stressed and the ...
— The Railway Builders - A Chronicle of Overland Highways • Oscar D. Skelton
... certain circumstances life was worth living. It was while he was in this happy frame of mind that the string, with which he had just produced a triumphant rattle from beneath the chest of drawers, was seized, and the next instant its owner was enjoying the warmest minute of a chequered career. Tony, like Brer Rabbit, had laid low until he was certain of the direction from which the sound proceeded. He had then slipped out of bed, crawled across the floor in a snake-like manner which would have done credit to a Red Indian, found ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... countenance the term cone-buoys. They are floated over sands and other obstructions in navigation, as marks to be avoided; they are made very large, to be seen at a distance; where there are several, they are distinguished by their colour, as black, red, white, or chequered; &c. ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... We descended to the Walk and thence slowly made our way to the quiet court behind the church, where poor old Oliver Goldsmith lies, as he would surely have wished to lie, in the midst of all that had been dear to him in his chequered life. I need not record the matter of our conversation. To Thorndyke's proposals I had no objections to offer but my own unworthiness and his excessive liberality. A few minutes saw our covenants fully agreed upon, and when ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... - that is to say in my thoughts - whether I should take back the raft; but this appeared impracticable: so I resolved to go as before, when the tide was down; and I did so, only that I stripped before I went from my hut, having nothing on but my chequered shirt, a pair of linen drawers, and a pair of ...
— Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... was greatly comforted by a summons to Nauvoo. She could now enter in triumph upon the more glorious stage of her chequered career. ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... failed to satisfy him upon the mystery of life, he went to revelation, and found the problem solved. The consequence was, that whilst he felt as a man, he endured as a Christian—aware that this life is, for purposes which we cannot question, chequered with evils that teach us the absolute necessity of another, and make us, in the meantime, docile and submissive to the will of him ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... a patron of the lad's family. The boy was an orphan, and described, twenty years after, with a sweet pathos and simplicity, some of the earliest recollections of a life which was destined to be chequered by a strange variety of ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of his life are not wasted in idleness and vice, they are spent for the most part in a perpetually recurring round of trivialities, in the satisfaction of merely animal wants, in eating, drinking, and slumber. When they survey the history of mankind as a whole, they find the record chequered and stained by folly and crime, by broken faith, insensate ambition, wanton aggression, injustice, cruelty, and lust, and seldom illumined by the mild radiance of wisdom and virtue. And when they turn their eyes from man ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... steed and I, Upon the pinions of the wind! All human dwellings left behind, We sped like meteors through the sky, When with its crackling sound the night[262] Is chequered with the Northern light. Town—village—none were on our track, But a wild plain of far extent, 430 And bounded by a forest black[263]; And, save the scarce seen battlement On distant heights of some strong hold, Against the Tartars built of old, No trace of man. The year before A ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... perhaps have heard me mention a M. Etienne Rambert, an old friend of mine, with whom I had many a dance in the long ago. I had lost sight of him completely until about two years ago, when I met him at a charity function in Paris. The poor man has had a rather chequered life; twenty years ago he married a woman who was perfectly charming, but who is, I believe, very ill with a distressing malady: I am not even sure that she is not insane. Quite lately Etienne Rambert has been compelled to send her to ...
— Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... time about thirty-five years of age, described as "taking" in appearance, of a fair complexion, and rather well educated. She had led a somewhat chequered married life with a gentleman named Bailey, from whom she continued in receipt of a weekly allowance until she passed under the protection of Peace. Her first meeting with her future lover took place on the occasion of Peace inviting Mrs. Adamson to dispose of a ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... crowded with people, who seem to enjoy the repose which universally prevails, and from whom no sound is to be heard which can break the stillness or serenity of the scene. The regularity of the forms is wholly lost in the masses of light and shadow that are there displayed; the foliage throws a chequered shade over the ground beneath, while the different vistas of the Elysian Fields are seen in that soft and mellow light by which the radiance of the moon is so peculiarly distinguished. After passing through these favourite scenes of the French people, we frequently came to small ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... chequered complexion," answered his friend. "Farewellin good or bad fortune I will not forget ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... population Scotland has been remarkably prolific in the rearing of eminent statesmen, soldiers, and litterateurs. Viewed with respect to its relative importance as an item in the map of Europe, it has likewise a most chequered and eventful history—a history to which, in various essentials, no counterpart can be found elsewhere. Chiefly, however, has "the land of mountain and of flood" bulked largely in the records of the world, from the stern ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans
... and eager to pour forth the particulars of their genealogy, embellished with every detail that memory had handed down or fancy fabricated; and, behold! from every ramification of that tree there dangled a halter. The Elliotts themselves have had a chequered history; but these Elliotts deduced, besides, from three of the most unfortunate of the border clans - the Nicksons, the Ellwalds, and the Crozers. One ancestor after another might be seen appearing a moment out of the rain and the hill mist upon his furtive business, speeding home, perhaps, with ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... black, chequered all over; and it was very large, and opened its mouth very wide, and showed its red tongue. It would have killed me if it had bitten me, would ...
— Lady Mary and her Nurse • Catharine Parr Traill
... lay over a broad common chequered with fine trees and groups of trees, some of them of great age; for the rest he ran through a world where harvest in its latest stages was still the governing fact. In some fields the corn was being threshed on the spot, without waiting for the stacks; in others, the last ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the noonday sun shone perpendicularly through the chequered leaves, was entirely deserted; at least no other forms than those of Olinthus and the priest infringed upon the solitude. They sat themselves on one of the benches, placed at intervals between the trees, and facing the faint breeze that came languidly from the river, whose waves danced and sparkled ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... eventide of the sunny month of May, and the declining rays of the sun penetrated the thick foliage of an old English forest, lighting up in chequered pattern the velvet sward thick with moss, and casting uncertain rays as the wind shook the boughs. Every bush seemed instinct with life, for April showers and May sun had united to force each leaf ...
— Edwy the Fair or the First Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... leading incidents in the history of this plucky little town, which formerly returned two members to Parliament. Relatively, its eminent position is entirely lost, but it has an eminence for loveliness of situation that can never be taken from it, and it can educate its sons in a glorious though chequered tradition. It has memories of occupation long before days of Cinque Port emulation. Close to Menabilly Park (Menabilly is the seat of the Rashleighs, a Cornish family of ancient repute) is a granite pillar known as the Longstone, ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... the untying of the parcel in which those first copies came! What disappointment, chequered with ecstasy, at reading their own verse, unaltered, yet in print! An experience not so common then as now; to be a poetess in those days had a certain distinction, and the three sisters must have anxiously waited for a greeting. The poems had been ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... must take at least ten years to add double the amount to the first capital, allowing no increase to the spare capital required for working the estate. A rapid fortune can never be made by working a coffee estate. Years of patient industry and toil, chequered by many disappointments, may eventually reward the proprietor; but it will be at a time of life when a long residence in the tropics will have given him a distaste for the chilly atmosphere of old England; his early ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... Patrick's Hall, the Throne-room, and the Long Drawing-room are the most important of the State apartments. While in the vicinity of the Castle, St. Patrick's Cathedral should be visited. Founded so long ago as 1190, this cathedral, dedicated to the Apostle of Ireland, has had a chequered history. Mostly Early English in architecture, modern styles have been grafted on the building without consistency or unity of ideal. The monuments are many. Dean Swift's bears an inscription written by himself ...
— The Sunny Side of Ireland - How to see it by the Great Southern and Western Railway • John O'Mahony and R. Lloyd Praeger
... snow—I wonder how we can stand it! Fortunately, the Germans are equally badly off. I have had a chequered life. Last night, after a meagre dinner of tinned beef, I found an officer of the Royal Engineers waiting for me, who announced that he and a party of men had come to put my wire entanglements into order. Having done that, they were to go home. Passing along a deep drain, led by myself, we got ...
— Letters of Lt.-Col. George Brenton Laurie • George Brenton Laurie
... whether I should take back the raft; but this appeared impracticable: so I resolved to go as before, when the tide was down; and I did so, only that I stripped before I went from my hut; having nothing on but a chequered shirt, a pair of linen drawers, and a pair of pumps ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe Of York, Mariner, Vol. 1 • Daniel Defoe
... land are the work of unrecorded generations who peopled the valley. The kings of the historic period had only to maintain and develop certain points of what had already been done, and Upper Egypt is to this day chequered by the network of waterways with which its earliest inhabitants covered it. The work must have begun simultaneously at several points, without previous agreement, and, as it were, instinctively. A dyke protecting a village, a canal draining or watering some small province, demanded the ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... the public, there are few whose virtues have been so little known, or whose characters have been so unfairly estimated, as the subject of the preceding memoir. To compress within narrow limits the numerous circumstances by which the later years of Mrs. Robinson's life were chequered, will be a task of no little difficulty. The earlier periods of her existence, rendered more interesting as narrated by her own pen, have doubtlessly been justly appreciated by the reflecting and candid reader, whose sympathy they ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson
... as green withs and the covenanter stands forth in liberty and in power. So also, when the people of a kingdom together come into covenant with the Lord. In the character of Israel as a covenanted people, there shines out a special splendour. One of the most brilliant events in Judah's chequered history is that in which, in the days of the good king Asa, "they gathered themselves together to Jerusalem and entered into a covenant to seek the Lord God of their fathers with all their heart and with all their soul; and all Judah rejoiced at the oath." More than any other nation ...
— The Covenants And The Covenanters - Covenants, Sermons, and Documents of the Covenanted Reformation • Various
... Justina's, a noble temple, designed by Palladio, and worthy of his reputation. The dimensions are vast, and the equal distribution of light and ornament truly admirable. Upon my first entrance, the long perspective of domes above, and chequered marble below, struck me with surprise and pleasure. I roved about the spacious aisles for several minutes, then sat down under the grand cupola, and admired the ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... about the tundra that fringes the Polar Sea, the vast desolation frozen hard in summer a few inches below the surface, on which nothing beyond the mosses ever grew. It was easy to understand the brain-crushing sameness and monotony of an existence chequered only by times of dire scarcity on ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... their earlier writings. They stood outside the Churches; dogmatic beliefs they tacitly put away; they were in sympathy with the Christian ideal apart from its supernatural element; they professed a vague trust in an unseen Power, chequered here and there by intimations of pantheism; they made no frontal assault upon the central positions of theology. When we turn to their emotional poetry we find that they were always decorous; there is much ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... made, So oft I have, the evening still, At the fountain of a rill, Sate upon a flowery bed, With my hand beneath my head; While strayed my eyes o'er Towy's flood. Over mead, and over wood, From house to house, from hill to hill, 'Till Contemplation had her fill. About his chequered sides I wind, And leave his brooks and meads behind, And groves, and grottoes where I lay, And vistas shooting beams of day: Wide and wider spreads the vale, As circles on a smooth canal: The mountains round—unhappy fate! Sooner or later, of all height, Withdraw their summits from the skies, And ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... sculpture. There is a powerful sun; the somewhat rigid folds in the dress of coarse stuff are well marked; one half the face is in deep shade, the other in strong light; the churchyard wall throws a broad shadow behind, while in the foreground there is a gracefully chequered breadth of intermingled dark and light in the form of a mass of rank grass and foliage. Had an old thin man of striking figure and features been selected, and some study-worn scholar introduced in front of him, the ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... above them, the white sod warm below, and already chequered here and there with green; and, advancing in long battalion, crane and goose and mallard came up from the south to follow the sun towards the Pole. The iron winter had fled before it, and all nature smiled; but Hetty, who had often swept the prairie at a wild gallop, with ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... refuses to burst into leaf at Yuletide, no matter how enticing the warmth. But the thick white pillars and their wooden cross-beams, around which are entwined the leafless coiling limbs of the sleeping vine, throw dark blue patterns of chequered shadow upon the sunlit ground. Above the terraced garden rises the orangery, well watered by many artificial rillets, and from the midst of the orange and lemon trees there emerges a path leading to the entrancing bosco, or grove, that ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... meditans nugarum"—sometimes humming the fag end of an Irish melody; anon stopping to stare in a print-shop window; and then I would trudge on, chewing the cud of sweet and bitter fancy as I conned over the various ups and downs that had chequered my life since Jack Withers and I were thoughtless lads together ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... Time a chequered mantle wears, Earth awakes from wintry sleep, Again the tree a blossom bears Cease, Britannia, cease to weep, Hark to the peals on this bright May morn, They tell that ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, (Victoria) Vol II • Sarah Tytler
... of Annie Bragin is written in another place. It is one of the many less respectable episodes in Mulvaney's chequered career. ...
— Soldier Stories • Rudyard Kipling
... with her books and her salon and her cavalier, she spent the rest of her chequered life until the end came one day in 1824; and her last resting-place was, as she wished it to be, by the side of her beloved Alfieri. In the Church of Santa Croce, in Florence, midway between the tombs of Michael Angelo and Machiavelli, the two lovers sleep together their last sleep, beneath ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... they played tennis. There was a court at one end of the lawn beneath the trees, all chequered with sunlight and mingled shadow; very beautiful, Norah thought, though Mr. Spillikins explained that the spotted light put him off his game. In fact, it was owing entirely to this bad light that Mr. Spillikins's fast drives, wonderful though they were, somehow never ...
— Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich • Stephen Leacock
... the British ridge, the plain over which the great fight raged is a picture of pastoral simplicity and peace. The crops that Sunday morning were high upon it, the dark green of wheat and clover chequered with the lighter green of rye and oats. No fences intersect the plain; a few farmhouses, each with a leafy girdle of trees, and the brown roofs of one or two distant villages, alone break the level floor of green. The ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... a greater, antiquity may be claimed for the game of draughts, or, as it has been called, chess. As in the two former, the players sat on the ground, or on chairs, and the pieces, or men, being ranged in line at either end of the tables, moved on a chequered board, as in our ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... manner of unsuitable vehicles, to the private history of the decade. This, though sadly chequered by Mr Arnold's first domestic troubles, was on the whole prosperous, was somewhat less laborious than the earlier years, and was lightened by ever more of the social and public distractions, which no man ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... May the scaffold was reared at Tyburn, where so many other malefactors had looked their last on the world; and at nine o'clock in the morning Lord Ferrers started on his last journey—the most splendid and most tragic of his chequered life. He was allowed, as a last favour, to travel to his death, not in the common hangman's cart as an ordinary criminal, but in his own landau, drawn by 'six beautiful horses; and thus he made ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... a taste for metaphor, was pleased with this, and said, 'Very good, Toots! Very well said, indeed, Toots!' and nodded his head and patted his hands. Mr Feeder made in reply, a comic speech chequered with sentiment. Mr Alfred Feeder, M.A., was afterwards very happy on Doctor and Mrs Blimber; Mr Feeder, B.A., scarcely less so, on the gauzy little bridesmaids. Doctor Blimber then, in a sonorous ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... plain, and slippery places smooth, and judgments "bright as the noonday;" but if not here, there is at least a glorious day of disclosures at hand, when the reign of unbelieving doubt shall terminate for ever, when the archives of a chequered past will be ransacked of their every mystery;—all events mirrored and made plain in the light of eternity; and this saying of the weeping Saviour of Bethany obtain its true and everlasting fulfilment, "SAID I NOT UNTO THEE, IF THOU WOULDST BELIEVE, THOU SHOULDST ...
— Memories of Bethany • John Ross Macduff
... include The Gull's Hornbook (1609), The Seven Deadly Sins of London, and The Belman of London (1608), satirical works which give interesting glimpses of the life of his time. His life appears to have been a somewhat chequered one, alternating between revelry and want. He is one of the most poetical of the older dramatists. Lamb said he "had poetry ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... nor place to speak of the misfortunes that chequered his life. It will be sufficient to say that, in all he did, he at the time of doing it believed himself justified to his own conscience; while the various ills of poverty and loss of friends brought home to him the sad realities of life. ...
— Notes to the Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley • Mary W. Shelley
... in a boat on the Serchio or the Arno, baking in a glazed cage on the roof of a Tuscan villa, or lying among the ruins of the Coliseum or in the pine-woods near Pisa. Their Italian wanderings are too intricate to be traced in detail here. It was a chequered time, darkened by disaster and cheered by friendships. Both their children died, Clara at Venice in 1818, and William at home in 1819. It is impossible not to be amazed at the heedlessness—the long journeys in a rough foreign land, the absence ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... close by which we lay, was, being Sunday morning, crowded by a chequered assemblage of European, Quadroon, Negro, and Indian, all gabbling, pushing, and purchasing in company. We unmoored in very capital style, though pretty closely jammed, for a ship of seven hundred tons, and ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... line of mist which is the sea; here the view was one of infinite sun-dried earth, earth pointed in pinnacles, heaped in vast barriers, earth widening and spreading away and away like the immense floor of the sea, earth chequered by day and by night, and partitioned into different lands, where famous cities were founded, and the races of men changed from dark savages to white civilised men, and back to dark savages again. Perhaps their English blood made this prospect ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... the Peak," with a fine entrance in a gloomy recess formed by a chasm in the rocks. This entrance makes a Gothic arch over one thousand feet wide, above which the rock towers nearly three hundred feet, and it is chequered with colored stones. Within is a vast flat-roofed cavern, at the farther side being a lake over which the visitors are ferried in a boat. Other caverns are within, the entire cave extending nearly a half mile, a little river ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... buildings could not be helped at Oxford. The stone, with which most of the old colleges were built, was taken from a quarry close to Oxford, and began to peel off and to crumble in a very curious manner. Artists like these chequered walls, and by moonlight they are certainly picturesque, but the colleges had to think of what was safe. My own college, All Souls, has ever so many pinnacles, and we kept an architect on purpose to watch which of them were unsafe and had to be restored or replaced by new ones. Every one of ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller |
