Free Translator Free Translator
Translators Dictionaries Courses Other
Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Quaintly   /kwˈeɪntli/   Listen
Quaintly

adverb
1.
In a strange but not unpleasant manner.
2.
In a quaint old-fashioned manner.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Quaintly" Quotes from Famous Books



... heart of some one not far off. A quaintly-clad, somewhat aged, woman was slowly climbing the stile at the moment that the words rang clearly out into the summer air. "Oh Toby, our Toby!" and no one who had not seen it could have believed how nimbly old Barbara skipped or slid or tumbled down the steps ...
— "Us" - An Old Fashioned Story • Mary Louisa S. Molesworth

... exciting rivals against Dryden in the public opinion, but assailed him personally in an imitation of Horace, which he quaintly entitled, "An Allusion to the Tenth Satire." It came out anonymously about 1678, but the town was at no loss to guess that Rochester was the patron or author. Much of the satire was bestowed on Dryden, whom Rochester for the first time distinguishes by a ridiculous nickname, which ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott

... home feeling younger that he had done for years. What is thirty-nine? No age for a thin man. (He was in reality nearly forty-one.) He was pleased with himself. How quaintly amusing he had been about the mouse. He regretted, not for the first time, that he did not write novels, for little incidents like that, which the conventional mind of the ordinary novelist was incapable of perceiving, would intertwine charmingly with a love scene. The small service ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley

... first holder of this newly-created office, lived at the other end of the village and a little way outside it, in a low-storeyed house which had been greatly improved by Suzanne's good taste and fancy. It was surrounded by a garden with arbours and quaintly-clipped old trees and a clear, winding stream that flowed under ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc

... the world is of individual and varying compass. It may be likened to one of those curious Chinese balls of quaintly carved ivory, containing other balls, one within another, the proportions ever dwindling with each successive inclosure, yet each a more minute duplicate of the external sphere. This might seem the least world of all,—the restricted limits of the quadrangle ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock

... word for a house; a dissyllable, variously spelt, rhyming with 'quarry.' It is often quaintly joined with English words; e.g. a sod-whare, a cottage built with sods. In a Maori vocabulary, the following are given: whare-kingi, a castle; whare-karakia, ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris

... from his touch, for, plain and clear, came the sound of footsteps on the road near by. Sighing, Barnabas turned thitherwards and beheld advancing towards them one who paused, now and then, to look about him as though at a loss, and then hurried on again. A very desolate figure he was, and quaintly pathetic because of his gray hair, and the empty sleeve that flapped helplessly to and fro with the hurry of his going—a figure, indeed, that there was no mistaking. Being come to the finger-post, he paused to look wistfully on all sides, and Barnabas could see that his ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al

... deliver a more perfect address than he gave that night. He began with the beginning, the meagerness of that little hamlet that had seen his birth, and sketched it all so quaintly and delightfully that his hearers laughed and shouted, though there was tenderness under it, and often the tears were just beneath the surface. He told of his habits of life, how he had reached seventy by following a plan of living that would probably kill anybody else; how, in fact, he believed ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine

... Fleming," that wonderful and painful book, long out of print,[21] and hunted for at bookstalls like an Aldine; Hardy's "Pair of Blue Eyes"; and two of Charles Reade's, "Griffith Gaunt" and "The Double Marriage," originally called "White Lies," and founded (by an accident quaintly favourable to my nomenclature) on a play by Maquet, the partner of the great Dumas. In this kind of novel the closed door of "The Author of Beltraffio" must be broken open; passion must appear upon the scene and utter its last ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson

... propelled it slowly seaward. Once or twice they ran into the bank and had to push off, but very soon their eyes grew accustomed to the darkness. By degrees the creek broadened. They passed close to the walls of the garden, and very soon they were perceptibly nearer the quaintly-situated workshop. Granet paused for a ...
— The Kingdom of the Blind • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... the Western humour, and the quaintly untrammelled American intelligence, focussed upon diverse and age-encrusted civilizations, which caught the instantaneous fancy of a vast public. It was a virgin field for the humorous observer; Europe had ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson

... genteel man," Pope quaintly said to Spence, speaking of the manner and habits of the famous old patriarch of Will's. With regard to Pope's own manners, we have the best contemporary authority that they were singularly refined and polished. With his extraordinary sensibility, with his known tastes, with his delicate ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray

... talk like that, Olga, even in jest," she said, with a little touch of matronly dignity that sat rather quaintly and sweetly upon her. "I know you don't like Max—never have liked him—but please recollect that ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler

... over the amount of humor that he was capable of displaying. His handwriting was exquisitely minute in character, and I have in my possession two valentines composed by him and sent to me which are quaintly beautiful in language and, although sixty years old, are still in a ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur

... placid, and each of her white-gloved hands held tight to a pretty picture-book child who was wriggling with wild excitement. One had yellow frilly hair and one had brown bobbed hair, and both were quaintly, immaculately, expensively kissable. They were the kind of children every girl wishes she could have a set like, and hugs when she gets a chance. Mother and children were making their way, under an awning that crossed the street, to the matinee of ...
— The Rose Garden Husband • Margaret Widdemer

... this English artist—to note him in his apprenticeship—when he tamed as well as his rough nature would permit, his hand to the delicate graving so cherished by his master, Ellis Gamble; and when freed from his apprenticeship, he sought art through the stirring scenes of life, saying quaintly enough, that "copying other men's works resembled pouring wine out of one vessel into another; there was no increase of quantity, and the flavor of the vintage was liable to evaporate;"—whoever would study the great, as well as the small, peculiarities ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various

... already broken before his arrival. His only embarrassment, in fact, arose from the difficulty which he naturally experienced in adapting himself to the speech and address of the Mitchenor family. The greetings of old Eli, grave, yet kindly, of Abigail, quaintly familiar and tender, of Moses, cordial and slightly condescending, and finally of Asenath, simple and natural to a degree which impressed him like a new revelation in woman, at once indicated to him his ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... into the hurricane-house—or, as the packet-men quaintly term it, the coach-house, where they stood watching the movements on the quarter-deck for the next half-hour; an interval of which we shall take advantage to touch in a few of the stronger lights of our picture, leaving the softer tints and the shadows to be discovered by the manner ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper

... long, delicate handle of an ashen lance. A quiver made of the cougar skin, from which the tail of the animal depended, as a characteristic ornament, was slung at his back, and a shield of hides, quaintly emblazoned with another of his warlike deeds, was suspended from his neck by ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper

... was evident from his silence. Seeing her as she stood there, so quaintly pretty, so feminine in look and manner—in short, such a flower—it was but natural that he should marvel at the incongruity she ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green

... kept every one occupied the whole day. What with the excitement and curiosity over the many presents—the clothes, useful things, and games stowed quaintly into the packing-cases together; what with every one's amusement over Miss Chase's frequent astonishment at the commonest things of their everyday life, time slipped cheerily away towards evening. The children never remembered ...
— Queensland Cousins • Eleanor Luisa Haverfield

... the most beautiful studies of childhood—Rebecca's artistic, unusual and quaintly charming qualities stand out midst a circle of austere New Englanders. The stage version is ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy

... intuition, rather than by deduction. The next day Wordsworth arrived from Bristol at Coleridge's cottage. I think I see him now. He answered in some degree to his friend's description of him, but was more gaunt and Don Quixote-like. He was quaintly dressed (according to the costume of that unconstrained period) in a brown fustian jacket and striped pantaloons. There was something of a roll, a lounge in his gait, not unlike his own Peter Bell. There was a severe, worn pressure ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin

... Rocco at Venice is first, in his Life of the Castelfranco painter, ascribed by Vasari to Giorgione, and then in the subsequent Life of Titian given to that master, but to a period very much too late in his career. The biographer quaintly adds: "This figure, which many have believed to be from the hand of Giorgione, is to-day the most revered object in Venice, and has received more charitable offerings in money than Titian and Giorgione together ever gained in the ...
— The Earlier Work of Titian • Claude Phillips

... lavished on the Army of the Potomac to make it earn foreign military critics' praise at reviews, was not thrown away, but made sound soldiers which in time were invaluable to General Grant, Lincoln did him justice by quaintly, but earnestly, saying: ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams

... he was embarked; and which at length emboldened Monsieur to receive in like manner the emissaries of Ferdinand and Philip. These nocturnal movements were not, however, so unobserved as the conspirators had believed; and the result of the suspicions which they engendered is so quaintly narrated by Rambure that we shall give it in the identical words of ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe

... she cracked, while her little ones hastily began to feed. All the charm of infancy was theirs. Half-naked as it were, with round heads, eyes sparkling like steel needles, beaks so queerly set, and down so quaintly ruffled up, they looked like penny toys. Desiree laughed with enjoyment at ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola

... strain off like bows, And tremble while the arrowy undertide Shoots on and cleaves the marble as it goes, And strikes up palace-walls on either side, And froths the cornice out in glittering rows, With doors and windows quaintly multiplied, And terrace-sweeps, and gazers upon all, By whom if flower or kerchief were thrown out From any lattice there, the same would fall Into the river underneath, no doubt, It runs so close and fast 'twixt wall and wall. How beautiful! the mountains from without In silence ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning

... acquaintance, he finds a total of 67 men, from 73 to 93 years of age. Their average age is 78 and a fraction. Of these 67, 54 were smokers or chewers; 9 only, non-consumers of tobacco; and 4 were doubtful, or not ascertained. About nine-elevenths smoked or chewed. The compiler quaintly adds, "How much longer these men might have lived without tobacco, it is impossible ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various

... made no reply, but seemed lost in a reverie, and Albert slowly puffed his cigar and looked out on the ocean, and along the ever-widening path of moonlight. He very much wished that this fair girl, so quaintly spoken of, were there beside him, that he might talk to her about her art. And as he grew curious and a bit surprised at the sort of people he had unexpectedly come upon, a little desire to know at ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn

... elf, right beauteous to behold, Whose coat was like a brooklet that the sun Hath all embroider'd with its crooked gold, It was so quaintly wrought and overrun With spangled traceries,—most meet for one That was a warden of the pearly streams;— And as he stept out of the shadows dun, His jewels sparkled in the pale moon's gleams, And shot into the air ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood

... Buxoma in a morning fair, With gentle finger stroked her milky care, I quaintly stole a kiss; at first, 'tis true, She frowned, yet after granted one or two. Lobbin, I swear, believe who will my vow, Her breath by ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange

... sensation to come from the outer world and talk to these people. No, no, he may to some extent have secured notoriety in circles even as far off as London, but really there is nothing in the man. Why, he was brought up here in the village! But these quaintly prejudiced folk are, after all, but a remnant, and the great mass of people all around in the farms and cottages prize his fame highly. The pride with which a villager refers to the fact that he went to school with ...
— Lloyd George - The Man and His Story • Frank Dilnot

... most charming of correspondents; in a chirography almost feminine, he wrote, in the old cavalier style, such quaintly pleasant epistles, with graceful turns of expression, beautiful epithets, and appropriate adjectives, that, to one fond of the writer and cognizant of his native tongue, the most casual note was a prize to be treasured. "Truly," remarks one of his friends, "he was squisitamente affetuoso ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various

... Hindu human nature as The Thousand Nights and a Night of Arab manners and customs in the cinquecento." In India the book is known as the Kama Shastra or Lila Shastra, the Scripture of Play or Amorous Sport. The author says quaintly, "It is true that no joy in the world of mortals can compare with that derived from the knowledge of the Creator. Second, however, and subordinate only to his are the satisfaction and pleasure arising from the possession of a ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright

... still smiled; and, buttoning up his coat, he paused for a moment on the doorstep to turn his face to the copper-red sun and breathe in the crisp, invigorating air; then, with a quaintly decisive manner that seemed to set sentiment aside, he walked to the edge of the footpath and hailed a ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston

... portion of the house, was comparatively modern, built of stone in solid Georgian fashion, but quaintly flanked at either end by a massive, mediaeval tower, survival of the good old days when the Lovells of Fallowdene had held their own against all comers, not even excepting, in the case of one Roderic, his liege lord and master the King, the latter having conceived a not entirely ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler

... in what you have come here to learn,—the perpetuation of your life on earth for just so long as you desire it—the secret which gives to Rafel Santoris his youth and strength and power, as well as his governance over certain elemental forces. But first take this"—and he poured out from a quaintly shaped flask a full glass of deep red-coloured wine—"This is no magic potion—it is simply a form of nourishment which will be safer for you than solid food,— and I know you have eaten nothing all day since your light breakfast. Drink it ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli

... for the convenience of markets, which in those days were placed in their center. A few of these old-time markets still remain, notably that at Second and Pine streets, its market house or central building of quaintly interesting design embracing features such as the octagonal cupola, marble lintels, sills and belt, and the elliptical and semicircular fanlights ...
— The Colonial Architecture of Philadelphia • Frank Cousins

... these, Professor Lowell quaintly remarked that, "To chronicle thus the very weather on our neighbour will convince any one that interplanetary communication has already commenced; and that, too, after the usual ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks

... like it," she acknowledged quaintly to the doctor, as he leaned over her with compassionate words. "I shall have to get acquainted with myself all over again. And so I have been ill! I shouldn't have thought a little burn like that would make me ill. ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green

... the chair, with shining grey curls peeping out from beneath her black satin hood. She was wrapped in some sort of fur-lined cloak; and by her side walked two little dark-faced, shy-looking girls of seven, quaintly dressed in rich black velvet, very like two wee maidens stepped out of some old picture, and each wearing a hood similar to that worn by ...
— The Heiress of Wyvern Court • Emilie Searchfield

... Ned's eyes rested was seated in the centre of the group, on a quaintly made stool, and his gorgeous dress immediately suggested that this must be the great man himself whom they had come to see. For he was evidently got up expressly for the occasion, with his courtiers carefully arranged about him, some standing behind and ...
— The Rajah of Dah • George Manville Fenn

... Carlyle has somewhere in his voluminous but well-indexed writings a highly humorous and characteristic passage in which he, with all his delightful gusto, dilates upon the oddity of the scene where a withered old sinner perched on a bench, quaintly attired in red turned up with ermine, addresses another sinner in a wooden pew, and bids him be taken away and hung by the neck until he is dead; and how the sinner in the pew, instead of indignantly remonstrating ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell

... to match are at the table. There are coloured prints of Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort on the walls on each side of the door at the back, and a plain one of Lord Beaconsfield over the fire-place. Antimacassars abound, and the decoration is quaintly ugly. It is an overcrowded, "cosy" room. HOBSON is quite contented with it, and doesn't realize that it is at present ...
— Hobson's Choice • Harold Brighouse

... quaintly describes it thus:—"The limbs of a bear, the body of a badger, the head of a fox, the nose of a dog, the tail of a cat, and sharp claws, by which it climbs trees like a monkey." We cannot admit the similarity of its tail to that of a cat. The tail of ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid

... moment hesitating. Then a glance at the girl on the bench, drooping a little forward in freeing her face from the veil that hung from her pretty hat, together with a sense of something quaintly charming in the confidence shown him on such purely compatriotic grounds, decided him to do just what he had been asked. The girl had got her veil up by this time, and as he came near, she turned from looking at the sunset over the stretch ...
— Between The Dark And The Daylight • William Dean Howells

... and a flight of steps ascending to the bishop's seat above all,—after the manner of the earliest Christian churches. The partition parapet before the high altar is of almost transparent marble, delicately and quaintly sculptured with peacocks and lions, as the Byzantines loved to carve them; and the capitals of the columns dividing the naves are of infinite richness. Part of the marble pulpit has a curious bass-relief, said to be representative ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells

... rise of curtain GIRL is discovered alone, sewing. She is faintly, quaintly pretty in a mild New England way, no longer young, yet with a pathetic, persistent girlishness about her. A faint whistle is heard. She rises, goes to door of rear room and calls to BROTHER that the ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell

... cloud lifted. It turned out that Martha had been in some peril at sea, but got safe into Leith Roads at six in the morning. A clairvoyant dream was also vouchsafed to Dr. Pitcairn, though 'a Jacobite, and a person of considerable sense,' as Wodrow quaintly remarks about another individual. ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang

... John, Will Scarlet, Allan a Dale, and others, stretching themselves upon the ground near by. Then a garland was set up at the far end of the glade, and thereat the bowmen shot, and such shooting was done that day as it would have made one's heart leap to see. And all the while Robin talked so quaintly to the Bishop and the Knight that, the one forgetting his vexation and the other his troubles, they both laughed aloud again ...
— The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood • Howard Pyle

... perhaps this misery which she could so little imagine; however, she let the subject drop as to any more words about it. She was only what the doctor called "quaintly sober," all the rest ...
— Melbourne House • Elizabeth Wetherell

... their lives would go on forever in just this way,—that they would always be, as her grandfather liked to put it, "shipmates," walking together, studying together, sitting as they sat now, at their simple meals, with just the same quaintly flowered dishes, the same oddly turned teapot, with its attendant cream pitcher (slightly cracked as to lip) and the sugar-bowl, with a laboring ship depicted in blue on its curved side, which was not related, even by the most ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson

... seems to us so hard and firm, roll and rock in waves, till people are sea-sick, as on board a ship; and that rocking motion (which is the most common) will often, when it is but slight, set the bells ringing in the steeples, or make the furniture, and things on shelves, jump about quaintly enough. It will make trees bend to and fro, as if a wind was blowing through them; open doors suddenly, and shut them again with a slam; make the timbers of the floors and roofs creak, as they do in a ship at sea; or give men such frights as one of the dock-keepers at ...
— Madam How and Lady Why - or, First Lessons in Earth Lore for Children • Charles Kingsley

... restaurant is small and quaintly decorated. Very popular with the upper and middle classes and extremely respectable, cuisine very fair, set meals, and especially supper after the play very inexpensive. But if you order a la carte, like most other places, it is rather dear. A capital beer restaurant in connection with ...
— The Gourmet's Guide to Europe • Algernon Bastard

... the ancient mansions in the United Kingdom, and there is still, happily, a large selection, none perhaps is so picturesque and quaintly original in its architecture as the secluded Warwickshire house Compton Winyates. The general impression of its vast complication of gable ends and twisted chimneys is that some enchanted palace has found its way ...
— Secret Chambers and Hiding Places • Allan Fea

... getting bored. He was describing to Fauchery an escapade of that little Mme de Chezelles, whom he simply referred to as Leonide. "A blackguard woman," he said, lowering his voice behind the ladies' armchairs. Fauchery looked at her as she sat quaintly perched, in her voluminous ball dress of pale blue satin, on the corner of her armchair. She looked as slight and impudent as a boy, and he ended by feeling astonished at seeing her there. People comported themselves better at Caroline Hequet's, whose ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola

... should have to recognize bad luck coming if I had to ride him instead of Jim," remarked Tommy quaintly. She turned and ran in to her ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce

... years old, could only speak the Baluba language. From her infancy her nurses had been natives and she was facing the problem of going to America for the first time without knowing a word of English. It was quaintly amusing to hear her jabber with the wood-boys and the firemen on board and with the people of the various villages ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson

... Shakespeare was not his real name, but the "noted weed" in which he "kept invention."'* The author of the Sonnets does nothing of the kind. Judge Webb has merely misconstrued his text. The passage which he so quaintly misinterprets occurs in ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang

... mid-afternoon sun lay rich across the road. We passed another farm, but I did not suggest stopping as I felt we ought to push on. Mifflin seemed lost in meditation, and I began to wonder, a little uneasily, how the adventure would turn out. This quaintly masterful little man was a trifle disconcerting. Across the next ridge I could see the Greenbriar church ...
— Parnassus on Wheels • Christopher Morley

... so hard a task, either," quaintly remarked Sir Henry, as he rose. "I am giving her to you, understand, for your father's sake; in the trust that you are the same honourably good man, standing well before the world and Heaven, that he was. Unless your looks belie ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood

... at once strident and unctuous. Owing to the almond shape of her sparkling black eyes and the flatness of her nose, the bridge of which had been broken (most likely in childhood), she looked absurdly like a Japanese woman, save that upon her quaintly-cut mouth, curving slightly upwards horse-shoe fashion, there was that twitter of humorous alertness which is perhaps rarely seen in perfection except among the lower orders, Celtic or Saxon, of London. Her build was that of a Dutch ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton

... considered fairly in society, and the world decides there is nothing detrimental about her. She is admitted to be pretty, she is well-bred, with some little touches of formalism, due to her training, that are really refreshing to elderly people, and sit quaintly upon her. She is charming, both when her natural vivacity crops out, that has been so repressed, and when she is shyly diffident. Cards and invitations are left for her, and Grandon Park blossoms out into unwonted gayety. The people who go ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas

... subsequently filled in with coloured enamel or with some precious metal. These portals of Amalfi, perhaps the earliest example in Southern Italy of this rare form of art, are divided into panels adorned with Scriptural subjects simply and quaintly treated, wherein the stiff attitudes of the figures and the many long straight lines introduced testify plainly enough to their Byzantine origin and workmanship. As we enter the cool dark incense-scented building, we note ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan

... doubt despise the quaintly idealistic mode of Spenser's expression, yet express much the same view in asserting that romantic excitement is a stimulus which keys all the senses to a higher pitch, thus dispersing one's amorousness over all creation. The ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins

... quaintly garbed and bearded; Strange tales, that snared the fancy of the child: Of far-off lands, strange beasts, and birds, and people, Of storm and sea-fight, ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various

... and considerable and pleasing variety is obtained by treating the two storeys differently. Very great skill in carving is shown, all the posts, brackets, beams, and projecting rafters being formed into elaborate representations of animals and plants, or quaintly conceived grotesques; and the flat surfaces have frequently a shallow incised arabesque pattern intertwined with foliage. The roofs are always covered with tiles, and a curious effect is produced by enriching the hips and ridges with several courses of tiles in cement, thus making them ...
— Architecture - Classic and Early Christian • Thomas Roger Smith

... are yet for the most part of strong timber', and he even thinks that houses made of oak were luxurious, for in times past men had been contented with houses of willow, plum, and elm, but now nothing but oak was good enough; and he quaintly says that the men who lived in the willow houses were as tough as oak, and those who lived in the oak as soft as willow. There are very few mansions left of the time before Edward III, for being of ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler

... with the young man, my son," Allan Welsh read in the quaintly sealed and delicately written letter which his brother minister in Edinburgh had sent to him, and which Ralph had duly delivered in the square, grim manse of Dullarg, with a sedate and old-fashioned reverence which sat strangely on one of his years. "Be faithful with the young man," continued ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett

... course, was a militia; some few officers were professional soldiers, others were drawn from a civil career and were doctors, lawyers, engineers, and merchants. In 1907 the country had consented to lengthen the periods of training in what are quaintly called the "recruits' schools" and "rehearsal schools." In the former category the men do sixty-five days' training a ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... time had Elihu Burritt, "the youngest of many brethren," as he himself quaintly puts it, born in a humble home in New Britain, Connecticut, reared amid toil and poverty? Yet, during his father's long illness, and after his death, when Elihu was but a lad in his teens, with the family partially dependent upon the work of his hands, ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden

... these words, as we rejoin our companions, is the first intimation given that the bombardment is deferred. But, though, there is some disappointment, their surprise is not extreme. For Garibaldi never informs even his nearest aide-de-camp what he is about to do. In fact, he quaintly says, "If his shirt knew his plans, he would take it off and burn it." Some half-hour later, having descended from the eminence, we take our last look of Garibaldi. He has retired with a single servant to a sequestered place upon the mount, whither he ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various

... atmosphere of refined puritanism and provocative intelligence, the utter incongruity of Enriquez' extravagant attentions if ironical, and their equal hopelessness if not, seemed to me plainer than ever. What had this well-poised, coldly observant spinster to do with that quaintly ironic ruffler, that romantic cynic, that rowdy Don Quixote, that impossible Enriquez? Presently she ceased playing. Her slim, narrow slipper, revealing her thin ankle, remained upon the pedal; her delicate fingers were resting idly on the ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte

... hand it is also probably true that the residents of Cuzco are of more mixed descent than those of remote villages, where even to-day one cannot find more than two or three individuals who speak Spanish. Furthermore, the attention of the gendarmes might have been drawn more easily to the quaintly caparisoned Indians temporarily in from the country, where city fashions do not prevail, than to those who through long residence in the city had learned to adopt a costume more in accordance with European notions. In 1870, according to Squier, seven eighths of the population of ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham

... Ran stream, or bubbling fountain's wave did spin, On bark or rock, if yielding were the stone, The knife was straight at work or ready pin. And there, without, in thousand places lone, And in as many places graved, within, MEDORO and ANGELICA were traced, In divers cyphers quaintly interlaced. ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto

... at its bright red walls, covered with magic inscriptions, whose meaning was hidden from all but the Wise One. She beheld with amazement the chimneys, like lighted torches, that topped its roof and the blazing flame-bushes that surrounded it. When the Prince knocked on the quaintly carved door and entered at the Wise One's word, she drew back quickly and seated herself under a flame-bush until ...
— The Shadow Witch • Gertrude Crownfield

... through the inadequacy of his pay and the cutting-off of his army allowance. It has been stated that when he had taken his passage for England he was without any money in his pocket, and that he quaintly said to a friend: "Do you think it is right for a Major-General of the British Army to set out on a journey like this without sixpence in his pocket?" There is nothing improbable in such an occurrence, and it was matched only sixteen months later, when he was on the point of starting ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume II • Demetrius Charles Boulger

... "ye ancient and loyale toune," as Portsmouth was quaintly designated by Queen Bess of virginal memory on the occasion of her visiting the place, our little party, I can well call to mind, put up at the "Keppel's Head" on ...
— Crown and Anchor - Under the Pen'ant • John Conroy Hutcheson

... Roger de Coverley, is a most happy one,—so excellent indeed, and when done, it is so obviously well that it is done, that we can only wonder how it is, that, instead of having now to thank Messrs. Longman for the quaintly and beautifully got up volume entitled Sir Roger de Coverley. By the Spectator. The Notes and Illustrations by Mr. Henry Wills: the Engravings by Thompson, from Designs by Fred. Tayler,—as a literary novelty—such a selection has not been a stock book ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 53. Saturday, November 2, 1850 • Various

... sea along each bank of the river, in mazes of little narrow streets; curious old quays project over the water at different points; coast-trade vessels are being loaded and unloaded, built in one place and repaired in another, all within view; while the prospect of hills, harbour, and houses thus quaintly combined together, is beautifully closed by the English Channel, just visible as a small strip of blue water, pent in between the ridges of two promontories which stretch out on ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins

... attributes the edifice as having belonged to Blanche de Navarre, the wife of Philippe de Valois. Again it is thought to have been a sort of royal attachment to the Abbaye de Royaumont, built near by, by Saint Louis. This quaintly charming manor of minute dimensions was a tangible, habitable abode in 1333, but for generations after appears to have fallen into desuetude. A mill grew up on the site, and again the walls of a chateau obliterated the more mundane, ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield

... came in troops, and filled the mountain tops and sides, and reached down into the valleys. She welcomed them as they approached her. In majesty she was seated upon a summer throne. It was formed of the finest woods of the forest, and quaintly fashioned by the little work-people. It was cushioned with the most delicate mosses, and wild vines had been trained up and over and around it, blending charmingly with the rustic woodwork. Above her tiny head spread a canopy of delicate ...
— Nick Baba's Last Drink and Other Sketches • George P. Goff

... there came three abreast. These were the Lord High Chancellor, in wig and robes, carrying the Great Seal of England in a red silk bag. On his right walked a gentleman carrying the golden sceptre, jewelled and quaintly worked, while he on the left carried the sword of state, point up, in a red scabbard, studded ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye

... meant nothing to Letty, she thanked the nurse, smiled at the other patients, and, trudging at Miss Towell's side with her quaintly sturdy grace, went ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King

... wondered very quaintly what he would say, when, in a few days, he heard of the failure of John Meavy & Co. for three millions of dollars. ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various

... did not seem to me to be like one of the fairy tales that we have seen so gracefully and quaintly modernised; and at the risk of seeming to travestie the Farnese statue in a shooting-coat and wide-awake, I could not help going on, as the notion grew ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge

... twinkled as he shook hands with her. Her manner was quaintly formal, but he fancied that there was a spice of mischief hidden behind it. Carroll, watching his hostess, surmised that her daughter's remarks had not altogether pleased her. She chatted with them, however, until the man who had driven them appeared with their baggage, ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss

... Reader of the Middle Temple, 1615. Near this is the effigy—also colored and under a canopy—of Edmund Plowden, the famous jurist, of whom Lord Ellenborough said that "better authority could not be cited"; and referring to whom Fuller quaintly remarks: "How excellent a medley is made, when honesty and ability meet in a man of his profession!" There is also a monument to James Howell (1594-1666), whose entertaining letters, chiefly written from the Fleet, ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various

... quaintly attractive sitting-room with a frown on her face, which lightened, however, at sight of the tea-table standing ready, and pulling off her gloves and coat she flung herself into a low chair with ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes

... old Tuscan artists, among whom Fra Angelico makes the principal figure. These pictures are all on wood, and seem to have been taken from the shrines and altars of ancient churches; they are predellas and triptychs, or pictures on three folding tablets, shaped quaintly, in Gothic peaks or arches, and still gleaming with backgrounds of antique gold. The wood is much worm-eaten, and the colors have often faded or changed from what the old artists meant then to be; a bright angel darkening into what looks quite as much like the Devil. In one of Fra ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... waterfalls appear at the same moment, sending a clear sheet of crystal water over a broad stone slab, and gradually receding from sight in the wooded distance. A broad canal runs right through the gardens, bridged at intervals by summer-houses and crossed by carved and quaintly-fashioned stepping stones. At the extremity there is a magnificent baradurree of black marble, which looks as if it had been many centuries in existence, and had originally figured in some very different situation. ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight

... would say; the ball flew round and fell into a number; it might be ten, or twenty, or twenty- five, it did not much matter; she looked to see what it was, but right or wrong, never failed to eat the bonbon—an illogical result, which contrasted quaintly with the intense seriousness with which she made her stakes. Sometimes she would place two or three sugar-plums on one number, always naming it aloud—"trente-et-un," "douze-premier," "douze- apres." It was the oddest game for a small thing not six years old; and there was ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter

... had descended before its hospitable doors, travel-worn and weary, we had been pained to find a sort of full-dress dinner going on where we expected to find an ordinary table d'hote. For this reason alone we passed the hotel by, and hunted out the quaintly named Hotel du Croissant, in a dimly lighted little back street, indicated by a flaring crescent of ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield

... characteristic of Lightener that the room in the house which was peculiarly his own was called by him his office, not his den, not the library.... There were two interests in Lightener's life—his family and his business, and he stirred them together in a quaintly granite sort ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland

... the point, although he knew that she took gifts of quaintly-shaped nuggets from the other men with the indifference ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson

... in her nature answered to their looks, words and evident desires. She felt that she would as soon marry one as the other, and that she would rather be buried beside Captain Hanfield and take the journey of which Uncle Lusthah had quaintly spoken than wed either. Yet in her lassitude she feared that she could now be compelled to marry either or any one if enough active force was employed, so strangely had ebbed ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe

... Budleigh Salterton (why either, but especially both?), quaintly pretty, and rather Holland-like with its miniature bridges and canal. Then to Exmouth, with its flowering "front," its tiny "Maison Carree" (which would remind one more of Nimes if it had no bay windows), and its ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson

... fruits of which we spoke—the plum and cherry—though the produce of much larger plants, nay, one of them of a tree which ranks among the timber-trees of our land, are not of superior, if of equal value to those which are about to engage our attention. An old writer quaintly remarks: 'It is certain that there might have been a better berry than the strawberry, but it is equally certain that there is not one;' and I suppose there are few in the present day who will be disposed to dispute this opinion, for there are few fruits, if any, which are in more ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 462 - Volume 18, New Series, November 6, 1852 • Various

... before it, and accented the blackness of the rocky ledge beyond. A small curly-headed boy, bearing a singular likeness to a smudged and blackened crayon drawing of Minty, was mechanically blowing the bellows and obviously intent upon something else; while her father—a powerfully built man, with a quaintly dissatisfied expression of countenance—was with equal want of interest mechanically hammering at a horseshoe. Without noticing Minty's advent, he lazily broke into a querulous drawling chant of ...
— A Phyllis of the Sierras • Bret Harte

... a term quaintly used by the learned M Pierre Muret to express the devouring of the dead by birds and animals or the surviving friends and relatives. Exposure of the dead to animals and birds has already been mentioned, but in the absence of any positive proof it is not believed that the North American ...
— An introduction to the mortuary customs of the North American Indians • H. C. Yarrow

... noticing a young girl at an early meet held at the castle, who had attracted her attention by her air of breeding, beauty, and faultless seat on her mare. She had learnt that the girl was the daughter of an old yeoman farmer who lived on his farm, quaintly called 'The Bower,' far outbye on the moorland beside the ...
— Border Ghost Stories • Howard Pease

... who would no doubt despise the quaintly idealistic mode of Spenser's expression, yet express much the same view in asserting that romantic excitement is a stimulus which keys all the senses to a higher pitch, thus dispersing one's amorousness over all creation. The love celebrated in Brooke's ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins

... Third at Bosworth he assumed the royal title, advanced to London, and had himself crowned King of England; and at the following Christmas festival he married Elizabeth of York. The Archbishop who married them (Archbishop Bourchier) had crowned both Richard III. and Henry VII., and Fuller quaintly describes this last official act of marrying King Henry to Elizabeth of York as the holding of "the posie on which the White Rose and the Red Rose were tied together." And Bacon says, "the so-long-expected and so-much-desired marriage between the King and the Lady Elizabeth ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson

... Harry, and I saw Lee standing beside a slender figure in unbecoming dress among a group of men in blue shirts and quaintly mended jackets; also that some planks had been laid ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss

... Eastern curios quaintly shaped and sometimes beautifully embroidered shoes are met with, such as those which have been brought over to this country from China and Eastern lands. Most of the shoes worn in the East are slipped off easily, and, like Persian and Turkish slippers, ...
— Chats on Household Curios • Fred W. Burgess

... again, quaintly addressing me by a name not my own—"believe me, she'd fight a rattlesnake and give it the ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson

... still standing up looking around her. Suddenly her eyes fell upon a quaintly built cottage, perched upon the edge of the cliff ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... somewhat voracious haste, but that appeared to be the custom of the country, and Agatha could find no great fault with their manners or conversation. The latter was, for the most part, quaintly witty, and some of them used what struck her as remarkably fitting and original similes. Indeed, as the meal proceeded she became curiously interested in the men ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss

... (witness Orthodoxy [1908], What's Wrong with the World? [1910], The Ball and the Cross [1909]), a pamphleteer, and a poet. His first volume of verse, The Wild Knight and Other Poems (1900), a collection of quaintly-flavored and affirmative verses, was followed by The Ballad of the White Horse (1911), one long poem which, in spite of Chesterton's ever-present didactic sermonizing, is possibly the most stirring creation he has ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various

... a month passed rapidly and pleasantly away, what with exploring excursions by land and air, in the latter of which by no means the least diverting element was the keen and quaintly-expressed delight of Louis Holt at the new method of travel. Two or three times Arnold had, for his satisfaction, sent the Ariel flying over the ridge across which she had entered Aeria, but he had always been content with a glimpse of the outside world, and was always glad to get back ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith

... that there was a secret compact between them, for he said, quaintly: "They all sing one song, and she hath ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr

... gold, and went Outside the city, through the whole campong Of goldsmiths, seeking there the best to make The fan and girdle. And the hammered gold Soon shone with many amethysts and gems. It was a marvel to behold those rare And quaintly fashioned ornaments, to deck A sultaness. Of priceless worth they were. Four days, and all was ready for the Queen. But she had never eaten all this time Because of grief. She thought the fan more fine Than Java princess ever yet ...
— Malayan Literature • Various Authors

... Guest thought nothing of all this, but at a sign from Myra drew open the outer door, and she stood in the dimly lit entry as if framed; she let her hood fall back, and gazed straight before her into the quaintly furnished room as if wondering that she did not at once see the object ...
— Witness to the Deed • George Manville Fenn

... white and black which you must make valuable; you must give rare worth to every colour you use; but the white and black ought to separate themselves quaintly from the rest, while the other colours should be continually passing one into the other, being all evidently companions in the same gay world; while the white, black, and neutral grey should stand monkishly aloof in the ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin

... she might float onward like a spirit. The extreme whiteness of her feet attracted my eye, and I was surprised to find that instead of being bare, as I had supposed, these were incased in white satin slippers quaintly embroidered with ...
— David Poindexter's Disappearance and Other Tales • Julian Hawthorne

... of a very humorous and famous letter announcing the death of the raven which figures in "Barnaby Rudge." Notice the curious originality of form shown in the capital Y and R. The wording of this letter is also quaintly original, and the sensitive mind of this man again caused his nerve-muscular action—his gesture—to harmonize with his mood. Points of this kind, which the handwriting of Dickens illustrates so well, have a deeper meaning for the observant than for the casual reader ...
— The Strand Magazine: Volume VII, Issue 37. January, 1894. - An Illustrated Monthly • Edited by George Newnes

... home, the children, for the first few days of the New Year, dressed in their best crepe, made up in three silken-wadded layers. Their crest was embroidered on the centre of the back and on the sleeves of the quaintly flowered long upper skirt. Beneath its wadded hem peeped the scarlet rolls of the hems of their under-dresses, and then the white-stockinged feet, with, passing between the toes, the scarlet thong of the black-lacquered clog. The little girl's ...
— Child-Life in Japan and Japanese Child Stories • Mrs. M. Chaplin Ayrton

... Everywhere one law and one futility. The human race? Strange marine monsters crawling about in the bed of an air-ocean, unable to swim upwards, oddly tricked out in the stolen skins of other creatures. As absurd, impartially considered, as the strange creatures quaintly adapted to curious environments one saw in aquaria. Kant's Moral Law Within! Dissoluble by a cholera germ, a curious blue network under the microscope, not unlike a map of Venice. Yes, the cosmic ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... more than once the wind whaffed it into my face. In walking our fingers touched once and again; greatly daring, mine slipped over hers, and so like children we went hand in hand. An old romancer tells quaintly in one of his tales how Love made himself of the party, and so it was with us that night. I found my answer at last without words. While the heavens wept our hearts sang. The wine of love ran through me in exquisite thrills. Every simple word she spoke went ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine

... the world with one of the most vivid panoramas of human nature known to man, happened in Tom Davies's bookshop in Covent Garden. Mr. and Mrs. Davies were friends of the Doctor, who frequently visited their shop. Of them Boswell remarks quaintly that though they had been on the stage for many years, they "maintained an uniform decency of character." The shop seems to have been a charming place: one went there not merely to buy books, but also to have a cup of tea in the back parlor. It is sad to think that though ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley

... became so bad that Wingfield decided to end both quarrels and John Smith. So he ordered a gallows to be set up and, having accused Smith of mutiny, made ready to hang him. But John Smith stoutly defended himself. Nothing could be proved against him. He laughed at the gallows, and as he quaintly puts it "could not be ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall

... him in savage Africa so that he might think things over, and put to the test, far away from the artificialities of Modern Life, the ideas he had assimilated in the highly sophisticated atmosphere of Oxford. As he quaintly put it: "Since Paul went into Arabia for three years, I don't see why I should not go to British East Africa for six months!" He did not, however, stay the whole time there, but re-visited his beloved Mauritius, and also ...
— A Student in Arms - Second Series • Donald Hankey

... tedium of the trip. How often when he sat down to my own, or any other table, would he tell how his old friend, Neander, when asked to say grace at a dinner, and roast pig was the chief dish, very quaintly said: "O, Lord, if Thou canst bless under the new dispensation what Thou didst curse under the old dispensation, then graciously bless this leetle ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler

... tried to brighten the tiny home. She could gladden it wonderfully when she chose, for Miss Margaret possessed many pleasing traits of character; but, alas! she seldom did choose, and, as Miss Deborah quaintly expressed it, "one had to endure innumerable showers of rain for one gleam of sunshine." Nellie had become so accustomed, however, to the invalid's whims and caprices, that she thought little, if at all, about them, and in ...
— Aunt Judith - The Story of a Loving Life • Grace Beaumont

... French pictures at that place in Suffolk Street? There's a man there—a Parisian—I forget his honoured name—Leblanc, or Lenoir, or Lebrun, or something—but he's a most humorous artist, and he paints monkeys and storks and all sorts of queer beasties ALMOST as quaintly and expressively as you do. Mind, I say ALMOST, for I never will allow that any Frenchman could do anything QUITE so good, quite so funnily mock-human, ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen

... fervour which influences the lives of men. The chivalry of the middle ages was as dead as its religion. Men spoke of women as coarsely as they spoke of their cattle. Human nature indeed could not be entirely crushed. John Paston's wife (see p. 321), for instance, was quaintly affectionate. "I would," she once wrote to her husband, "ye were at home, if it were for your ease ... now liever than a gown, though it were of scarlet." But the system of wardship (see p. 116) made marriages ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner



Words linked to "Quaintly" :   quaint



Copyright © 2024 Free-Translator.com