"Speckled" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was a jolly chap, and he seemed to stand out among all the other toys on the counter. He wore calico trousers of which one leg was red and the other yellow. He had a calico shirt that was spotted, speckled and striped in gay colors, and on each of his hands was a round piece of brass. These pieces of brass were called "cymbals," and the Calico Clown could bang them together as the drummer bangs ...
— The Story of Calico Clown • Laura Lee Hope
... Yung again, the Master said, "If the offspring of a speckled ox be red in color, and horned, even though men may not wish to take it for sacrifice, would the spirits of the hills ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous
... most mocking funeral! The sea-vultures all in pious mourning, the air-sharks all punctiliously in black or speckled. In life but few of them would have helped the whale, I ween, if peradventure he had needed it; but upon the banquet of his funeral they most piously do pounce. Oh, horrible vultureism of earth! from which not ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... never! I am not worthy now; my soul indeed Is free from sin; but the foul speckled stains Are from my body ne'er to be washed out, But in my death. Kill me, my love, or I Must kill myself; else you may think I was A black adultress in my mind, and some ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... almost as different from each other as are the birds themselves. The robin lays four or five blue eggs. The dove lays two white eggs. The sparrow lays six or eight speckled eggs. If we should find a nest with four blue eggs in it, we could be pretty sure that it was the nest of a............. rather ...
— Stanford Achievement Test, Ed. 1922 - Advanced Examination, Form A, for Grades 4-8 • Truman L. Kelley
... In his domestic arrangements he was the very figure of a bachelor. His slimsy silver spoon, dented with toothmarks of an ancestor who had died in a delirium, was laid evenly by his plate. The hand lamps on the shelf wore speckled brown-paper bags inverted over their chimneys. A portrait of a man playing the violin hung out, in massive gilt, over the table, like a ship's figurehead projecting over a wharf's end. His red couch bore northeast and southwest, so that he might not lose ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... they awakened in cool Michigan country and went speeding north among evergreen forests and clear lakes mirroring the pointed forest tops and blue sky, past slashing, splashing streams, in which they could almost see the speckled trout darting over the beds of white sand. By late afternoon they had reached their destination and were in their rooms, bathed, dressed, and ready for the dinner hour. In the evening they went walking, coming back to the hotel tired and happy. After several days they began talking to people ...
— A Daughter of the Land • Gene Stratton-Porter
... as it is called, sounds through the woods like tapping hard on a hollow log. His equally shy neighbor is the mountain-quail, while through the farming lands and all along the hillsides the valley—quail are plenty. Perhaps you have seen a happy family of these speckled brown birds. Papa quail has a black crest on his head, and he calls "Look right here" from the wrong side of the road to fool you, while Mamma and her little, cunning chicks scatter like flying brown leaves in the brush. After the danger ...
— Stories of California • Ella M. Sexton
... How those delicious courts would ring With gusts of lovely mirth! What white-robed throng could lift a song So mellow with righteous glee As this brown bird that all day long Delights my hawthorn tree. Hark! That's the thrush With speckled breast From yon white bush Chaunting his best, Te ...
— The New Morning - Poems • Alfred Noyes
... intersected the green lawns. There was a whole nation of motionless marble there steeped in the diffuse light falling from the glazed roof on high. Looking southwards, some holland screens barred half of the nave, which showed ambery in the sunlight and was speckled at both ends by the dazzling blue and crimson of stained-glass windows. Just a few visitors, tired already, occupied the brand-new chairs and seats, shiny with fresh paint; while the flights of sparrows, who dwelt above, among the iron girders, swooped down, quite at home, raking up the ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... through the solid rock. In the afternoon they caught in the falls some of both kinds of the white fish, and half a dozen trout from sixteen to twenty-three inches long, precisely resembling in form and the position of its fins the mountain or speckled trout of the United States, except that the specks of the former are of a deep black, while those of the latter are of a red or gold colour: they have long sharp teeth on the palate and tongue, and generally a small speck of red on each side behind the front ventral fins; ...
— History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, Vol. I. • Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
... young philosopher finds that things which roll so easily are very apt to roll into the wrong corner, and to get out of his way when he most wants them, while he always knows where to find the others, which stay where they are left. Thus he learns— thus we learn—to drop the streaked and speckled globes of falsehood and to hold fast the white angular blocks of truth. But then comes Timidity, and after her Good-nature, and last of all Polite-behavior, all insisting that truth must ROLL, or nobody can do anything with it; and so the first with her coarse ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... thick, sturdy man, with very small keen black eyes, a square face, a dark complexion, and a snub nose. His constant dress, both in winter and summer, was a snuff-colour suit of clothes, blue and white speckled worsted stockings, a plain shirt, and a bob wig. He was seldom without a stick in his hand, which he usually held to his ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... you think this is a new and strange doctrine, and that they who preach it are speckled birds. But let me tell you that most of the spiritual men in the pulpits of Great Britain are firm in this faith. Spurgeon preaches it. I have heard Newman Hall say that he knew no reason why Christ might not come before he got through with his ...
— That Gospel Sermon on the Blessed Hope • Dwight Lyman Moody
... theory of tarantella and tarantismo has been gravely discussed by old Italian writers, and a certain learned prelate of the fifteenth century, Niccolo Perotto, Archbishop of Siponto, alludes to the malignant cause of this dance-cure as "a species of speckled spider, dwelling in rents of the ground caused by excessive heat. It was not known in the time of our fore-fathers, but now it is very common in Apulia ... and is generally called Tarantula. Its bite seldom kills a man, yet it makes him half stupid, and affects him in a variety of ways. ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... look on her face—gone right away somewhere, right away—amazed him. She had never seemed to like children, had said she did not want a child. She turned her head and saw him. He went in. She made a faint motion toward the baby, and her eyes smiled. Winton looked at that swaddled speckled mite; then, bending down, he kissed her hand and ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... floors, Shiny and sparkling,—arms and crowns and rings: Gold, sweet to toy with as beloved hair, — To plunge the lustful, crawling fingers down, Arms elbow deep, and draw them out again, And watch the glinting metal trickle off, Even as at night some fisherman, home bound With speckled cargo in his hollow keel Caught off Campeche or the Isle of Pines, Dips in his paddle, lifts it forth again, And laughs to see the luminous white drops Fall back in flakes of fire. . . . Gold was the dream That cheered that desperate enterprise. And now? . . . Victory ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... by which it is intimated, I suppose, that Rousseau in his grave is enlightening the world. After a short proclamation here, we were shown into another stone chamber with "Voila le tombeau de Voltaire!" This was of wood also, very nicely speckled and painted to resemble some kind of marble. Each corner of the tomb had a tragic mask on it, with that captivating expression of countenance which belongs to the tragic masks generally. There was in the room a marble statue of Voltaire, with that wiry, sharp, keen, yet ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... heard from all the girls after they had rubbed the sleep from their eyes. By then Willy was nearing their shore, and the bow of his canoe, a real birch canoe made by himself, landed on the beach, whereupon, Willy threw out a mess of speckled trout, sufficient for breakfast for the entire party, amid little cries of delight ...
— Grace Harlowe's Overland Riders in the Great North Woods • Jessie Graham Flower
... a brook or speckled trout, for it has no speckles, and it's not a relative of the late William Basse, for it isn't deep enough in the body, nor a perch, for it's too big and has no stripes. It's either a salmon trout ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... youthful limbs I wont to lave; No torrents stain thy limpid source; No rocks impede thy dimpling course, That sweetly warbles o'er its bed, With white, round, polish'd pebbles spread; While, lightly pois'd, the scaly brood In myriads cleave thy crystal flood; The springing trout in speckled pride; The salmon, monarch of the tide; The ruthless pike, intent on war; The silver ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... was the water, that where it was only twenty or thirty feet deep the bottom was so perfectly distinct that the boat seemed floating in the air! Yes, where it was even eighty feet deep. Every little pebble was distinct, every speckled trout, every hand's-breadth of sand. Often, as we lay on our faces, a granite bowlder, as large as a village church, would start out of the bottom apparently, and seem climbing up rapidly to the surface, till presently it threatened to touch our ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... heavy, black, cloudy stain, with less character in it than the first ten lines had. If you are not as great as Rembrandt, you will have a stain by no means cloudy; but sandy and broken,—instead of a face, a speckled phantom of a face, patched, blotched, discomfited in every texture and form—ugly, assuredly; dull, probably; an unmanageable and manifold failure ill concealed by momentary, ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... percussively upon the ear. Vast piles of fuel, part neatly corded, part lying in huge logs, with heaps of brush, barricade the brown, paintless farmhouses. Swine, hanging by the ham-strings in the neighboring shed; the barn-yard speckled with the ruffled poultry, some sedate with recent bereavement, others cackling with a dim sense of temporary reprieve; the rough-coated steer butting in the fold, where the timid sheep huddle together in the corner; little boys on a single skate improving the newly frozen horse-pond—these ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... could not usurp all my feeling. The purple peaks to the westward and farther inland, had a beauty of their own, and in the gentle curves with which they leaned towards each other, there was a promise of the flowery meadows of Enna. The smooth blue water was speckled with fishing-boats. We hailed one, inquiring when the festa was to commence; but, mistaking our question, they answered: "Anchovies." Thereupon, a waggish Maltese informed them that Maestro Paolo thanked them heartily. All the other boats were hailed in the name of Maestro ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... old, and I live in the northern part of Canada. My sister takes YOUNG PEOPLE. I liked the story of "The Moral Pirates" very much. Our nearest neighbor is about six miles away. There are lots of lakes here in which are a great many speckled and salmon trout, and there are troops of red deer in the woods. I have killed thirteen myself. We have two hounds which run the deer in the lakes, and we have birch-bark canoes in which we row. There is a sporting club comes here every ...
— Harper's Young People, October 26, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... Brookes, but continued at the hunting until they had brought down two wild boars and also an animal fashioned like unto nothing I had ever seen before. It was something after the manner of a serpent, but speckled on the stomach as is a toad, and Captain Smith believed the true name of it to be Iguana, the like of which he says that he has often seen in other countries and that its flesh makes ...
— Richard of Jamestown - A Story of the Virginia Colony • James Otis
... hand. And again in the first chapter of Zechariah the eighth to the eleventh verses, "I saw by night, and behold a man riding upon a red horse, and he stood among the myrtle trees that were in the bottom; and behind him were there red horses, speckled and white. Then said I, O my Lord, what are these? And the angel that talked with me said unto me, I will shew thee what these be. And the man that stood among the myrtle trees answered and said, These are they whom the Lord hath sent to walk to and fro through the ...
— And Judas Iscariot - Together with other evangelistic addresses • J. Wilbur Chapman
... remember that big Christmas puddin, That puddin mooast famous ov all in a year; When each lad at th' table mud stuff all he could in, An ne'er have a word ov refusal to fear. Ha its raand speckled face, craand wi' sprigs o' green holly Seem'd sweeatin wi' juices ov currans an plums; An its fat cheeks made ivvery one laff an feel jolly, For it seem'd like a meetin ov long parted chums, That big Christmas pudding,—That rich steamin puddin,— That scrumptious plum ...
— Yorkshire Lyrics • John Hartley
... this battle, the ground permitted no massed movements. For miles the saddle of Oregione, the snow-clad sides of Paralba, and every smaller peak and ravine extending to Monte Croce and Freikofel were speckled with fighting men. After the two sides came to grips, the big guns held their fire, and it was man to man and bayonet against bayonet. At one point only did the Austrian thrust reach Italian soil. For a short time ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... many kinds, but only one (Proctotretus multimaculatus) remarkable from its habits. It lives on the bare sand near the sea-coast, and from its mottled colour, the brownish scales being speckled with white, yellowish red, and dirty blue, can hardly be distinguished from the surrounding surface. When frightened, it attempts to avoid discovery by feigning death, with outstretched legs, depressed body, and closed eyes: ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... brisk health down the narrow dirt road that led toward Glen Oaks. Elm trees lined the road. The morning air was damp and cool. Dew kept the yellow dust settled where spots of sunlight came through leaves and speckled it. Birds darted ...
— Strange Alliance • Bryce Walton
... cathedral; the fourteenth on Saint Pierre; and a few examples—unfortunately broken up and used in a medley mosaic—of painted glass of the sixteenth century in Saint Aignan, another church where the vaulted roof had been washed of the colour of gingerbread speckled with anise-seed, by painters ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... telegraph poles, flashed into points of light. Now the leaping, glittering sea was so bright it made one's eyes ache to look at it. The shepherd drew a pipe, the bowl as small as an acorn, out of his breast pocket, fumbled for a chunk of speckled tobacco, pared off a few shavings and stuffed the bowl. He was a grave, fine-looking old man. As he lit up and the blue smoke wreathed his head, the dog, watching, looked proud ...
— The Garden Party • Katherine Mansfield
... cold. No sooner had I reached the place than I began to vomit, during which there came from my stomach a hairy worm about a quarter of a cubit in length: the hairs were long, and the worm was very ugly, speckled of divers colours, green, black, and red. They kept and showed it to the doctor, who said he had never seen anything of the sort before, and afterwards remarked to Felice: "Now take care of your Benvenuto, for he is cured. Do not permit him any irregularities; for though he has escaped ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... on a short wooden pipe he held ready in his hand. Alvina felt he was going to be out of breath. But no, rapid and high came the next verse, verse after verse, with the wild scream on the little new pipe in between, over the roar of the bagpipe. And the crumbs of snow were like a speckled veil, faintly drifting the atmosphere and powdering the littered threshold where they stood—a threshold littered with faggots, leaves, straw, fowls and geese and ass droppings, and rag thrown out from the house, and pieces ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... Father art Of her, and me, and all; reverse that doom! Earth, in the name of God, let her food be Poison, until she be encrusted round With leprous stains! Heaven, rain upon her head 130 The blistering drops of the Maremma's dew, Till she be speckled like a toad; parch up Those love-enkindled lips, warp those fine limbs To loathed lameness! All-beholding sun, Strike in thine envy those life-darting eyes 135 ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... dust-colour'd beetle climbs with pain O'er the smooth plantain-leaf, a spacious plain! Thence higher still, by countless steps convey'd, He gains the summit of a shiv'ring blade, And flirts his filmy wings, and looks around, Exulting in his distance from the ground. The tender speckled moth here dancing seen, The vaulting grasshopper of glossy green, And all prolific Summer's sporting train, Their little lives by various pow'rs sustain. But what can unassisted vision do? What, but recoil where most it would pursue; His patient gaze but finish with a ...
— The Farmer's Boy - A Rural Poem • Robert Bloomfield
... on foot it is useless to attempt a description. Beards of awful size, moustaches of every shade and length under a foot, phizzes of all colors and contortions, four-story hats with sky-scraping feathers, costumes ring-streaked, speckled, monstrous, and incredible, made up the motley crew. There was a Northern emigrant just returned from Kansas, with garments torn and water-soaked, and but half cleaned of the adhesive tar and feathers, watched ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... a very stately bird himself in appearance, and had a splendid blackish-green tail and a golden speckled hackle, which shone and glistened in the sun. He had also won many sharp battles with certain young cocks in the neighbourhood, whom curiosity about the tufted foreigners had attracted to the yard. The consequence of these triumphs was ...
— Brothers of Pity and Other Tales of Beasts and Men • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... punishment will be heavy for her to bear. . . . If it had only been he that was false, not she! He could have borne all easily; speckled as he is, a spot or two would have made little difference. And he is nothing, ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... your messengers, Mr. Meyer?" she asked, when the men had lit their pipes, and the square-face—as Hollands was called in those days, from the shape of the bottle—was set upon the rough table of speckled buchenhout wood. ...
— Benita, An African Romance • H. Rider Haggard
... abundance. One man in less than an hour caught eighteen large fish, one of which was a curiosity from its immense size, and the beauty of its colours. In shape and general form it most resembled a cod, but was speckled over with brown, blue, and yellow spots, like a leopard's skin; its gills and belly a clear white, the tail and fins a dark brown. It weighed entire seventy pounds, and without the entrails sixty-six pounds: it is somewhat singular that in none of these fish is any thing found ...
— Journals of Two Expeditions into the Interior of New South Wales • John Oxley
... built a little later to crown the mausoleum of Itimad-ud-daula. Finch, the traveller, who was at Agra about 1611, was informed that the cenotaph was 'to be inarched over with the most curious white and speckled marble, and to be seeled all within with pure sheet gold, richly inwrought.' The reason for omitting the dome ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... pheasants wry-nosed Tooly sells, But ne'er so much as licks the speckled shells: Only, if one prove addled, that he eats With superstition, as the cream of meats. The cock and hen he feeds; but not a bone He ever ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... sooty coots, and speckled teals; Ye fisher herons, watching eels; Ye duck and drake, wi' airy wheels Circling the lake; Ye bitterns, till the quagmire reels, Rair for ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... seabirds, only two species, however, of which were breeding. The Brown Booby (Sula fusca) and a large tern (Thalasseus pelecanoides) existed in about equal numbers; the latter, in one great colony, had laid their solitary large speckled eggs in a slight excavation in the sand, the former were scattered all over the island, and had regular nests of weed, containing either two eggs, or a single young bird covered with white down. Well does the booby deserve its name. The grotesque and stupid look of the old bird standing by its ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray
... paving courts and alleys, and sometimes—to the discomfort of your feet—whole streets, or set up as bournestones at corners, or laid in heaps to be broken up for road-metal, certain round pebbles, usually dark brown or speckled gray, and exceedingly tough and hard. Some of them will be very large—boulders of several feet in diameter. If you move from town to town, from the north of Scotland as far down as Essex on the east, or as far ...
— Town Geology • Charles Kingsley
... beech, was stroke to death, his clothes stinking with a sulphurous stench, being about the age of twenty years or thereabouts, at Mereden House." The Dorking fowls all have the peculiarity of an extra claw on each foot, being white and speckled, and a Roman origin being claimed for the breed, which is most delicate in flavor and commands a high price. On the southern outskirts of the town is Deepdene, a mansion surrounded by magnificent trees and standing on the slope of a hill. It was the home of the ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... a good way back in their gardens, and as their centre, one of the great old coaching inns of past days, now chiefly farmhouse, though a sign, bearing a golden bugle-horn upon a blue ground, stood aloft in front of it, over the heads of the speckled mass of tan, black, and white, pervaded with curved tails, over which the scarlet-coated whips kept guard, while shining horses, bearing red coats and black coats, boys, and a few ladies, were moving about, and carriages drew ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge
... three at Romsey. Then I sat in front for a little while to talk to my Malachi. When I looked back, Shend was solidly asleep, and stayed so for the next two hours, while Leggatt chased Attley's fat Daimler along the green-speckled hedges. He woke up when we said good-bye at Mittleham, with promises ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... we are guided, almost forced, by the laws of nature, to do right in art. Had granite been white and marble speckled (and why should this not have been, but by the definite Divine appointment for the good of man?), the huge figures of the Egyptian would have been as oppressive to the sight as cliffs of snow, and the Venus de Medicis would have looked like some exquisitely graceful species of frog."—Slade ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... 'Twas a beautiful speckled and glossy trout, And when from the water I drew him out On the grassy bank, as he floundered about, It made me shivering cold, To think I had caused so much needless pain; And I tried to relieve him, but all in vain; O! never, as long as I live, again ...
— Parker's Second Reader • Richard G. Parker
... vision he saw all the stars flying upwards between the teakwood jambs on a black sky. The whole lot took flight together and disappeared, leaving only a blackness flecked with white flashes, for the sea was as black as the sky and speckled with foam afar. The stars that had flown to the roll came back on the return swing of the ship, rushing downwards in their glittering multitude, not of fiery points, but enlarged to tiny discs brilliant with a ...
— Typhoon • Joseph Conrad
... The speckled skin under the toad's mouth mysteriously wrinkled itself, then slowly expanded again, as if he had swallowed the words just addressed to him. Magdalen started back in disgust from the first perceptible movement in the creature's body, trifling as it was, and returned ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... and amber fungi, with amanita and other hooded folk. In companies and clusters they sprang or arose misshapen, sinister, and alone. Some were orange and orange-tawny; others white and purple; not a few peered forth livid, blotched, and speckled, as with venom spattered from some reptile's jaws. On the wreck of the year they flourished, sucked strange life from rotten stick and hollow tree, opened gills on lofty branch and bough, shone in the green grass rings of the meadows, thrust cup ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... proceed to load up their automobiles with their fishing tackle and in the early morning turn Capeward. They have experiences of previous years to guide them and know certain brooks and pools where the speckled beauties await them. The wise ones know just where to throw their lines and the kind of bait that is sure to lure the denizens of that particular spot. For fishing is a science, as well as a sport requiring skill and judgment. The born fisherman seems to have an uncanny sense of ...
— Cape Cod and All the Pilgrim Land, June 1922, Volume 6, Number 4 • Various
... she wanted, and she got, the pick of the water. She seemed to be equally at home on all kinds of streams, large and small. She would pursue the little mountain-brook trout in the early spring, and the Labrador salmon in July, and the huge speckled trout of the northern lakes in September, with the same avidity and resolution. All that she cared for was to get the best and the most of the fishing at each place where she ...
— Fisherman's Luck • Henry van Dyke
... corn pile, start the singing, and keep things lively for them. Now and then he would pass around the jug. They sang a great deal during cornshuckings, but I have forgotten the words to those songs. Great excitement was expressed whenever a man found a red ear of corn, for that counted 20 points, a speckled ear was 10 points and a blue ear 5 points, toward a special extra big swig of liquor whenever a person had as many as 100 points. After the work was finished they had a big feast spread on long tables in the yard, and dram flowed plentiful, then they played ball, tussled, ran ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Georgia Narratives, Part 4 • Works Projects Administration
... Sicilian luggerman. Slept in his lugger." He showed his brow and cheeks speckled with mosquito-bites. "Ate little hard-tack and coffee with him this morning. Don't want much." He offered the dollar with a quarter ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... range is greater. I have mentioned the ever-present bats, and dozens of them were seen. There were also small, white eyeless salamanders, small, yellow, speckled salamanders, with signs of eyes but no sight; also a jet black salamander, which like the rest, was blind. The bats were of two species—the common brown bat and the larger light grey or yellow species. But this ...
— Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills • Luella Agnes Owen
... far beyond the bay, right up to the town! One day, as he rowed along the coast, beyond the bay, he noticed that the clay and flag-stone formation in the hills and ridges was speckled with grey. Helene had told him how extraordinary it looked out there now that the trees were gone, but as they would have had to come out in the boat to see it he had let the remark pass. Now he decided to land there. The shore rose steeply ...
— Absalom's Hair • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... pursued the smaller, greenish globe of its companion across a cloudless sky in which the stars made a speckled pattern like the scales of a huge serpent coiled around a black bowl. Ras Hume paused at the border of scented spike-flowers on the top terrace of the Pleasure House to wonder why he thought of serpents. He understood. Mankind's age-old hatred, brought from his native planet to the distant stars, ...
— Star Hunter • Andre Alice Norton
... examined it curiously. The room, the statue, and I myself must all have seemed very strange to her. I wore a dress of some deep yellow woolen material which my little daughter used to call the "frog dress," because it was speckled with brown like a frog's skin. It was cut like a Viollet-le-Duc tabard, and had not a trace of the fashion of the time. Mrs. Bancroft, however, did not look at me less kindly because I wore aesthetic clothes and was painfully thin. She explained that they were going to put on "The Merchant of Venice" ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... Mr. Wilson was unwilling that she should tax her strength by close application. Life in the delightful home furnished interest enough to make resort to fiction unnecessary as an entertainment. In 1879 the death of Mr. Wilson ended the idyllic home life and she returned to her desk, writing "The Speckled Bird" and "Devota," with a pen that had lost much of its charm in the ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... clouds, as it were, descends a waterfall of immense size, broken by the woody rocks into a thousand channels to the lake. On the other side is seen the blue extent of the lake and the mountains, speckled with sails and spires. The apartments of the Pliniana are immensely large, but ill-furnished and antique. The terraces, which overlook the lake, and conduct under the shade of such immense laurel-trees as deserve the epithet of Pythian, ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... water,—covered with forests of oak, parasites, lichens, and with vines that swept our heads as we passed under them, drooping now and then to trail in the water, a plaything for the fishes, and a landing-place for amphibious insects. The sun speckled the water with its flickering patterns, showering us with light and heat. We have no spring suns; our sun, even in December, is a ...
— Balcony Stories • Grace E. King
... heard that Madison had a stone crusher, and so she wanted one. La Crosse is bound to have anything that any other town has, whether it is a railroad, an insane asylum, or a speckled hen. La Crosse could have bought Madison's stone crusher at a discount, but she wanted one new, with the paint all on, fresh. Second-hand stone crusher? Not any for La Crosse. So the city ordered a brand new one, right from the mint, at ...
— Peck's Compendium of Fun • George W. Peck
... speckled with white incrustations and sombre tufts of desert herbs; here and there, where the winter's rain lingers underground, are spots of brilliant green; short-lived crops of corn, sown by the nomads. ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... gang-plank at the steamship-dock in San Francisco, the first face he saw among the waiting crowd was Buck Ogilvy's. Mr. Ogilvy wore his over-coat and a joyous smile, proving that in so far as he was concerned all was well with the world; he pressed forward and thrust forth a great speckled paw for Bryce to shake. Bryce ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... And roused the prisoned brutes within. The old horse thrust his long head out, And grave with wonder gazed about; The cock his lusty greeting said, And forth his speckled harem led The oxen lashed their tails, and hooked, And mild reproach of hunger looked; The horned patriarch of the sheep, Like Egypt's Amun roused from sleep, Shook his sage head with gesture mute, And ...
— Whittier-land - A Handbook of North Essex • Samuel T. Pickard
... cried the jolly Clown. He was a gaily dressed fellow, and his calico suit was of many colors. One leg was red and another yellow, and his shirt was spotted and speckled and striped. ...
— The Story of a Lamb on Wheels • Laura Lee Hope
... very large place the sea is," said Sammy. He had gone quite a distance before he realized that the occasion for hurry was now over, and then he rose gracefully to the surface and looked about him. Overhead stretched the blue sky speckled with fleecy, white clouds, and off in the distance a long line of white sand showed the shore line, against which the incoming tide sent its undulating billows. Near the shore circled a flock of sea-gulls, and far away, where sea and sky seemed ...
— How Sammy Went to Coral-Land • Emily Paret Atwater
... lighted lamp in my room at night. Other habits affecting my special senses followed in rapid succession. The visitors began pouring in to see me on the second day, and I think it was a morbid interest that any one could work up over such a red, speckled mite of humanity as I must have been. They all insisted on digging me out of my nest, taking me up and rolling me about, when it was my natural inclination to want to sleep nearly all the time. From this procedure I soon grew restless and disturbed ...
— Confessions of a Neurasthenic • William Taylor Marrs
... been seized and swallowed by a Mugger. Although convinced that aid was now impossible, we took our guns and hastened to the spot where the accident happened; but all was still there, not a wavelet disturbed the surface of the stream. A small speckled kingfisher was hovering overhead, as if balanced in the air, with its beak bent down on its breast, watching the fish beneath; presently it darted like an arrow into the water; returned with an empty bill, and then went off, with its clear, sharp, twittering note, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... busy," continued Frank, pointing to the buoys, that speckled the waters. I am afraid ...
— All Aboard; or, Life on the Lake - A Sequel to "The Boat Club" • Oliver Optic
... their teachers. And up from the South following these old honkers came the snow geese, the Wilson geese, and all the other little geese (we ignorantly called all of them "brants"), with their wild flutings like the high notes of clarinets—and the ponds became speckled with ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... Pao-yue in her arms, she noticed that his face was sallow and his breath faint, and that his green gauze nether garments were all speckled with stains of blood, so she could not check her fingers from unloosening his girdle. And realising that from the thighs to the buttocks, his person was here green, there purple, here whole, there broken, and that there was, in fact, not the least bit, which had not sustained some injury, she of ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... (Bald Eagle), thou art passing stout of heart and strong of will. Therefore make I thee the younger brother of the Wolf, the guardian and master of the Upper regions, for thou fliest through the skies without tiring, and thy coat is speckled like the ...
— Zuni Fetiches • Frank Hamilton Cushing
... act as if she didn't hear what Mamma Speckle said; but she couldn't help it, for you know how loud the speckled hen talks. She never paid any attention to the babies, though, and the other fowls took care of them as best they could ...
— The Gray Goose's Story • Amy Prentice
... of stuccoed brick, with a square front porch and green shutters which were sagging on loosened hinges. On the walls where the stucco had peeled away, the red brick showed in splotches, and the pillars of the porch, which had been white, were now speckled with yellow stains. Over the whole place, with its air of fallen respectability, there hung the depressing smell of mingled dust, stale cooking, and bad tobacco. A number of imposing and well-preserved ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... afraid that even such delicacies came to many of their tables hardly oftener than Christmas. In the windows of other little shops you saw half a dozen wizened herrings, some eggs in a basket, looking so dingily antique that your imagination smelt them, fly-speckled biscuits, segments of a hungry cheese, pipes and papers of tobacco. Now and then a sturdy milk-woman passed by with a wooden yoke over her shoulders, supporting a pail on either side, filled with a whitish fluid, the composition of which was water and chalk and the milk of a sickly ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Ben, I take my pen To tell you where, And how, and when, I found the nest Of our speckled hen. She would never lay, In a sensible way, Like other hens, In the ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... to the twelve zodiacal signs—to Aries, white and red; to Taurus, white and lemon; to Gemini, white and red (the same as Aries); to Cancer, green or russet; to Leo, red or green; to Virgo, black speckled with blue; to Libra, black, or dark crimson, or tawny colour; to Scorpio, brown; to Sagittarius, yellow, or a green sanguine (this is as strange a colour as the gris rouge of Moliere's L'Avare); Capricorn, black or russet, ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... speak, however, the door burst open, and Raymond precipitated himself into the room. He was a big, broad fellow of sixteen, for he and Lettice were twins, though widely differing in appearance. Raymond had a flat face, thickly speckled over with freckles, reddish brown hair, and a pair of brown eyes which fairly danced with mischief. It was safe to prophesy that in less than two minutes from the time that he entered the room where his sisters were sitting, they would all three ...
— Sisters Three • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... which empty into Lake Superior, those of the north shore of Lake Huron, the west shore of Lake Michigan as far as Lake Winnebago, and all the streams of Lake Ontario, contain the Speckled Trout (Salmo Fontinalis); while they are not found in the streams on the southern coasts of Lake Michigan, or (so far as we know) in the streams of Lake Erie. What can determine this limitation of the range of the species? It cannot be latitude, since trout are ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... the lowest, that there might still be degrees for the gentlemen of gentlemen's gentlemen. And since even cockroaches must drink, in this fungus-bed of misery there flourished a rather infamous tavern by the sale of vino nostrano, black and sour, of certain sausages, black also and nameless, speckled with white lumps, and of other wares whom to name were to expose. This was the ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... Tryon. He and Gay were still some way behind. Marice half-way between them, and Druro was apparently trying to disentangle her flickering, fluttering chiffons from a fresh engagement with the bushes when the terrible thing happened. The lithe, speckled body of a leopard came sailing, with a grace and swiftness indescribable, through the air and, leaping upon the fluttering figure, bore her to the ground. A scream of terror and anguish rent the night, and Gay and Tryon, galvanized by ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... can do it without cleaver or saw, in a way that would surprise a civilized butcher not a little. Joe was covered with blood up to the elbows. His hair, happening to have a knack of getting into his eyes, had been so often brushed off with bloody hands, that his whole visage was speckled with gore, and his dress was by ...
— The Dog Crusoe and His Master - A Story of Adventure in the Western Prairies • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... elephant but a tame one, unless it's a pink or speckled one with a brass tail climbing up the wall of his room when he's got D.T's. He never went out shooting in the jungle in his life. But you ask Payne or Reynolds or any of the chaps on the other gardens who know ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... Snana entered the thorny enclosure, which was almost a rude teepee, and, tucked away in the furthermost corner, lay something with a trout-like, speckled, tawny coat. She bent over it. The fawn was apparently sleeping. Presently its eyes moved a bit, and a shiver passed ...
— Old Indian Days • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... holy song Inwrap our fancy long, Time will run back, and fetch the age of gold; And speckled vanity Will sicken soon and die, And leprous sin will melt from earthly mould; And hell itself will pass away. And leave her dolorous mansions to ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... drinking-bowl turned out of some kind of wood, by preference of maple, and especially the spotted or speckled variety called "bird's-eye maple" (see W. H. St. John Hope's paper, "On the English Mediaeval Drinking-bowls called Mazers," "Archaeologia," vol. 50, ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... the ends they're as black as a niggers in billing time, and near the roots they're all speckled ...
— Our American Cousin • Tom Taylor
... knee-deep with painted leaves, has joys the eager tongue trips over itself in the endeavor to recount. Boy and Boy's mother took the six o'clock train to town last night. This morning, throwing open the parlor blinds, I espy the six flat, white beans and the three red-speckled crab-apples. They were so much to the owner; except for the value imparted by association with the dancing blue eyes and the tight clutch of fingers that had green stains on them when the wrestle with the pods was over, they are so much more than worthless to everybody else—that ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... thing, For no more nesting, For no more speckled eggs In pattered cup of clay,— Soon your song shall come to this You who make the twilight yours, And echoes of the abbey, At the ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... the female is quite different from that of the male Grouse. Her general color is brown, with a tinge of orange, barred with black and speckled with the same hue, the spots and bars being larger on the breast, back, and wings, and the feathers on the breast more or less edged with white. The total length of the adult male is about twenty-two inches, and that of the female from seventeen to eighteen ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [December, 1897], Vol 2. No 6. • Various
... summit showing plainly against the starry arch that spanned the river, and seemed to rest upon the other side of the rocky gorge fifty yards away. And there now, close to our feet, so close that we could have lain down and drunk had we been so disposed, rushed on towards the great fall the glassy gold-speckled water. ...
— Bunyip Land - A Story of Adventure in New Guinea • George Manville Fenn
... fawn, Nimble, kept close beside her. Slowly as his mother moved, he found the traveling none too easy. And he was glad when she stopped in a pocket-like clearing. There she spoke to a proud speckled bird who was sitting on a log and amusing himself by spreading his tail feathers into a ...
— The Tale of Nimble Deer - Sleepy-Time Tales • Arthur Scott Bailey
... protective habit, of course, acquired through precisely the same causes that had given to animals their protective coloration—the stripes, say, of the zebra and tiger that blend so cunningly with the barred and speckled shadowings of bush and jungle, the twig and leaflike shapes and hues of certain insects; in fact, all that natural camouflage which was the basis of the art of concealment so astonishingly ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... my disappointment, occasionally exhibits, more or less, a speckled appearance by transmitted light, which frequently, in deep painting, impresses the positive with an unsightly spotted character, somewhat similar to that of a bad lithograph taken from a worn-out ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 234, April 22, 1854 • Various
... Crow woke up hungry, and as he sat lazily in his big nest, he remembered that he had seen four pretty brown eggs, speckled with white, in the nest of the oriole that lived at ...
— Twinkle and Chubbins - Their Astonishing Adventures in Nature-Fairyland • L. Frank (Lyman Frank) Baum
... submitted to be taken about under Mr. Pickwick's patronage, but soon the mutual irritation broke out. The occasion was the latter's putting on speckled stockings for the dance at Manor Farm. "You in silk stockings," exclaimed Tupman, jocosely; a most natural, harmless remark, considering that Mr. Pickwick invariably wore his gaiters at evening parties. But the remark was hotly resented, and challenged. "You see nothing extraordinary ...
— Pickwickian Studies • Percy Fitzgerald
... try you and maybe they wouldn't. Anyways, they'd sure wind up by hangin' you by the neck till you was as dead as the speckled rooster." ...
— Way of the Lawless • Max Brand
... gathered in clusters, separated, reformed, and broke again, all heading one way; while men hailed and whistled and cat-called and sang, and the water was speckled with rubbish thrown overboard. ...
— "Captains Courageous" • Rudyard Kipling
... copper. A smell like a washing day! That was the cloth. A smell like an eating house and a pastry cook's next door to each other, with a laundress's next door to that! That was the pudding! In half a minute Mrs. Cratchit entered—flushed, but smiling proudly—with 10 the pudding, like a speckled cannon ball, so hard and firm, blazing in half of half a quartern of ignited brandy and bedight with Christmas ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... darkness was coming, Dick was bending over a low fire, watching a frying pan in which four speckled beauties, well dipped in batter, ...
— The High School Boys' Fishing Trip • H. Irving Hancock
... could be obtained by sitting placidly under an apple-tree with a well-thumbed volume of the wisdom of the inspired pagan Slave, Epictetus, in the hand, and the eyes fixed, not on any printed page, but on a spray of warmly- blushing almond blossom, where a well-fed thrush, ruffling its softly speckled breast, was singing a wild strophe concerning its mate, which, could human skill have languaged its meaning, might have given ideas to a nation's laureate. Yet John Walden found unalloyed happiness in this apparently vague and vacant way. There was an acute sense of ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... casual character of modern literature: everything about it is temporary and fragmentary. Look at a railway stall: you see books of every color,—blue, yellow, crimson, "ring-streaked, speckled, and spotted,"—on every subject, in every style, of every opinion, with every conceivable difference, celestial or sublunary, maleficent, beneficent—but all small. People take their literature in morsels, as they take sandwiches on ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... quite well the year that Jackanapes began to walk, for it was the year that the speckled hen for the first time in all her motherly life got out of patience when she was sitting. She had been rather proud of the eggs—they are unusually large—but she never felt quite comfortable on them; and whether it was because she used to get cramp, ...
— Jackanapes, Daddy Darwin's Dovecot and Other Stories • Juliana Horatio Ewing
... of the animals themselves; and, from the appearance of bones and old excrement, we suppose that buffalo sometimes stray into the valley, though we have as yet seen no recent sign of them. Along the water are a number of snakes, some of a uniform brown color, others black, and a third speckled on the abdomen, and striped with black and a brownish yellow on the back and sides. The first, which is the largest, is about four feet long; the second is of the kind mentioned yesterday; and the third resembles in size and appearance the garter-snake of the United States. On ...
— First Across the Continent • Noah Brooks
... energetic, countenance. He was richly dressed in the finest of broadcloth and the whitest of linen, with a great gold watch-chain, and studs and spectacles of the same precious material. He wore a broad-folded tie, white and speckled with lilac, and he carried on his arm a comfortable driving-coat of fur. There was no doubt but he became his years, breathing, as he did, of wealth and consideration; and it was a surprising contrast to see our parlour sot—bald, dirty, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Male. Pale cinereous, thickly speckled with ferruginous red. Palpi long, hardly ascending, almost straight; third joint linear, obtuse at the tip, rather shorter than the second. Antennae bare. Abdomen conical, extending rather beyond the hind wings; apical tuft small. Legs rather long and slender, almost bare; spurs very long. ...
— Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society - Vol. 3 - Zoology • Various
... At such time as the year brings on the pleasant spring, But hunts-up to the morn the feather'd sylvans sing: And in the lower grove, as on the rising knoll, Upon the highest spray of every mounting pole, Those choristers are perch'd with many a speckled breast. Then from her burnish'd gate the goodly glitt'ring east Gilds every lofty top, which late the humorous night Bespangled had with pearl, to please the morning's sight: On which the mirthful choirs, with their clear open throats, Unto the joyful morn so strain ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... the wind was wailing about, And the sea was speckled wi' foam, From room to room she went in and out And she came ...
— Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood • George MacDonald
... rocky soil, almost worthless for farming land. But what a paradise it would be for Izaak Walton and Daniel Boone! Quaint old Izaak would have realized a dream of Utopia in watching in the crystal stream its millions of speckled trout. It almost seems as if the New England trout had learned their proverbial wariness from long experience. There is none of it in these Yellowstone fish. They leap at the bare hook with the most ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... the speckled mirror beneath the antlers and surveyed herself anxiously. Her own travelling suit of dark green tweed, with its white silk shirt, was as carelessly perfect as his own, and the little green turban, ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... fowl on the farm heard the call and was coming. There were big hens and little hens, brown hens, black hens, white hens, and speckled hens. There were fluffy baby chicks and long-legged middle- sized chickens. There were proud roosters with bright combs and gay, glossy feathers. There were stately turkeys with long necks and great fan-like tails. ...
— Five Little Friends • Sherred Willcox Adams
... widow had three sons and a daughter. One day when her sons were out looking for sticks in the wood they saw a fine speckled bird flying in the trees. The next day they saw it again, and the eldest son told his brothers to go and get sticks by themselves, for he was ...
— The Aran Islands • John M. Synge
... exactly in the middle of the "riggin'," as a chimney; immediately under which is an excavation in the floor, burned away by a large fire of turf, loosely heaped together. This is surrounded by a circle of urchins, sitting on the bare earth, stones, and hassocks, and exhibiting a series of speckled shins, all radiating towards the fire, like sausages on a Poloni dish. There they are—wedged as close as they can sit; one with half a thigh off his breeches—another with half an arm off his tattered coat—a third without breeches at all, wearing, as a substitute, a piece of his mother's ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... scratched in the earth, and thereupon began to crow merrily, in order to make it known that he had something nice to invite to, and as two neat grey-speckled hens sprang towards him, he let first one grain of corn and then another fall out of his beak, of which, agreeably to a clever hen-instinct, they availed themselves without ceremony or compliments. ...
— Strife and Peace • Fredrika Bremer
... the travellers found "strange birds with white bodies and purple heads and golden beaks," and afterwards three great birds, "one blue and his head crimson, and another crimson and his head green, and another speckled and his head gold." ...
— The High Deeds of Finn and other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland • T. W. Rolleston
... prating and speckled pie," said Dryfesdale, "that art so vain of thine idle tongue and variegated coat! Beware ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... you to listen. Have you noticed anything different about me lately, Kent?" She tilted her head, while she passed judgment upon a cluster of speckled blossoms, odd but ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower
... fountain jet in front of that building. We think of the merry mercators of the Whitehall Club sitting at lunch on the cool summit of that great edifice. We think of the view as seen from there, the olive-coloured gleam of the water, the ships and tugs speckled about the harbour. And, looking down, we can see a peaceful gentleman sitting on a bench in St. Paul's graveyard, reading a book. We think seriously of writing a note, "What are you reading?" and weighting it with an inkwell and hurling it down to him. This ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... There were a good few chaps sitting quietly about the bar and veranda when the doctor arrived. The Giraffe was sitting at the end of the counter, on which he had laid his hat while he wiped his face, neck, and forehead with a big speckled "sweatrag." It was a very ...
— Children of the Bush • Henry Lawson
... the banister one afternoon a week later, "there's some one at the door." Anthony, who had been lolling in the hammock on the sun-speckled south porch, strolled around to the front of the house. A foreign car, large and impressive, crouched like an immense and saturnine bug at the foot of the path. A man in a soft pongee suit, with cap to match, ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... States. The red species is the most common and is too well known to need a description here. The Cross Fox considerably resembles the above, only being much darker in color, the red hair being thickly speckled with black. This species varies considerably in color in different individuals, often much resembling the red variety, and again approaching nearer in color to the Black or Silver Fox. This variation, together with the name of the animal, has given rise among ...
— Camp Life in the Woods and the Tricks of Trapping and Trap Making • William Hamilton Gibson
... same) oppositions and signs of destruction; the gnat, thirsty of human blood, announces himself to our sight by the white spots with which his brown body is speckled; and by the shrill sound of his wings, which interrupts the calm of the groves, he announces himself to our ear as well as to our eye. The carnivorous wasp is streaked like the tiger, with bands of black over a ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... said Tom, carelessly, lugging five plump speckled fellows, weighing some seven and a half pounds, out of his creel, and laying them out for ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... and then we had to climb among huge rocks, varying from one to ten tons, and to catch hold of the stones or fragments that projected, while we ascended in an angle of seventy or eighty degrees. A little before four o'clock we got to the top of the mountain, which I knew to be Brae Riach, or the speckled mountain. Here we found the highest well, which we afterwards learned was called Well Dee, and other five copious fountains, which make a considerable stream before they fall over the precipice. We sat down completely ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... features I have described. The forehead, in a side-view, almost hangs over the nose; and this looks hardly less than broken, were it not for a trifling proturberance in the middle. The eyebrows are not thick with hair; the eyes may even be called small, of a colour like horn, but speckled and stained with spots of bluish yellow. The ears in good proportion; hair of the head black, as also the beard, except that both are now grizzled by old age; the beard double-forked, about five inches long, and not very bushy, as may partly ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... above, on its hollow back, clinging thereto like the snaky eels, that cling and slide on the back of the Sword fish, our terrible foe. But what curious eels these are! Do they deem themselves pretty as we? No, no; for sure, they behold our limber fins, our speckled and beautiful scales. Poor, powerless things! How they must wish they were we, that roam the flood, and scour the seas with a wish. Swim away; merry fins, swim away! Let him drop, that fellow that halts; make a lane; close in, and fill up. Let him drown, if he can not ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... grouse was still quite white, except near the tip of the tail, where the feathers were of a fine glossy black; but in every hen which we had lately killed, a very perceptible alteration was apparent, even from day to day, and their plumage had now nearly assumed that speckled colour which, from its resemblance to that of the ground, is so admirably adapted to preserve them from being seen at the season of their incubation. We found it difficult, in general, to get near the ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry |
