"Swallow-tailed" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... where in the air A thousand streamers flaunted fair; Various in shape, device, and hue, Green, sanguine, purple, red, and blue, Broad, narrow, swallow-tailed, and square, Scroll, pennon, pensil, bandrol, there O'er the pavilions flew. Highest and midmost, was descried The royal banner floating wide; The staff, a pine-tree strong and straight, Pitched deeply in a massive stone - Which still in ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... at large was already excitedly speculating—stood in every available spot. But if Eden Village found subject for comment in the extravagant shipment of roses, imagine its wonderment when it beheld, shortly after six o'clock, Doctor Crimmins parading magnificently up the street in swallow-tailed coat and white vest, a costume which Miss Cousins was certain he had not worn in ...
— The Lilac Girl • Ralph Henry Barbour
... fellows, and much more able to look after their personal comforts than British soldiers, as their camps indicated. The uniform of those days consisted in a schako, which spread out at the top; a short-waisted, swallow-tailed coat; and large, baggy trousers and gaiters. The clothing of the French soldier was roomy, and enabled him to march and move about at ease: no pipeclay accessories occupied their attention; in a word, their uniforms and accoutrements were infinitely superior ...
— Reminiscences of Captain Gronow • Rees Howell Gronow
... for a little vacation, I jumped on board a steamer, crossed to Southampton, and biked up-country, doing these ruins on the way. I meant to have presented myself at the palace this afternoon in due form and a swallow-tailed coat, but I'm just as much pleased to see you as if ...
— His Lordship's Leopard - A Truthful Narration of Some Impossible Facts • David Dwight Wells
... their permanent rainbows and Sibylline temples and classic allusions and Byronic quotations; a wondrous romantic jumble of such things and quite others—heterogeneous inns and clamorous guingettes and factories grabbing at the torrent, to say nothing of innumerable guides and donkeys and white-tied, swallow-tailed waiters dashing out of grottos and from under cataracts, and of the air, on the part of the whole population, of standing about, in the most characteristic contadino manner, to pounce on you and take you somewhere, ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... phases of thought, much younger than his years in others—was overtaken by a light-footed pedestrian, whom, notwithstanding the gloom, he could perceive to be wearing an extraordinarily tall hat, a swallow-tailed coat, and a watch-chain that danced madly and threw around scintillations of sky-light as its owner swung along upon a pair of thin legs and noiseless boots. Jude, beginning to feel lonely, endeavoured to keep up ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... or two up and down my room, and sighed, looking at myself in the glass, adjusted my great white "choker," folded and tied after Brummel, the immortal "Beau," put on a buff waist-coat and my blue swallow-tailed coat with gilt buttons; I deluged my pocket-handkerchief with Eau-de-Cologne (we had not then the variety of bouquets with which the genius of perfumery has since blessed us) I arranged my hair, on which I piqued myself, and which ...
— The Room in the Dragon Volant • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... beautiful costumes in the windows. He was a little fellow, not much bigger than a boy of ten. His cheeks were as red as roses, and he had on a long curling wig as white as snow. He wore a suit of crimson velvet knee-breeches, and a little swallow-tailed coat with beautiful golden buttons. Deep lace ruffles fell over his slender white hands, and he wore elegant knee buckles of glittering stones. He sat on a high stool behind his counter and served his customers himself; ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... to visit me upon a public occasion and during a function. I knew that I must introduce him, and with all possible ceremony, to my colleagues. He was very queer; tall and peaked, wearing a black, swallow-tailed suit, shiny with age, and a silk hat, bound with black crepe to conceal its rustiness, not to indicate a recent death; but his linen as spotless as new-fallen snow. I had my fears. Happily the company, quite dazed by the apparition, proved decorous to solemnity, and the kind ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... quarter, to give them an American sailor's dance; but after the ridiculous figure some of our countrymen cut, in dancing after the Spaniards, we thought it best to leave it to their imaginations. Our agent, with a tight, black, swallow-tailed coat, just imported from Boston, a high stiff cravat, looking as if he had been pinned and skewered, with only his feet and hands left free, took the floor just after Bandini; and we thought they had ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... long before the strange gentleman came in with a swallow-tailed coat on, a white vest and cravat, with ball-gloves on ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... orchid, was abundantly in flower on the hill-top, and the great white swallow-tailed moth (Saturnia Atlas) was extremely common, with tropical butterflies and other insects. The curious leaf-insect (Mantis) was very abundant on the orange trees, on the leaves of which the natives believe it to feed; nor indeed could we persuade ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... States are found here at one season or another. For instance, among the rapacious birds, we have the three Eagles which visit America, the White-Headed, the Washington, and the Golden or Royal Eagle. Of Hawks and Falcons, fourteen or fifteen species, among which are the beautiful Swallow-tailed Hawk, and that noble falcon, the Peregrine. Ten or twelve Owls, among which, as a rare visitor, we find the Great Gray Owl, (Syrnium cinereum,) and the Snowy Owl, which is quite common in the winter season on the prairies, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... families of butterflies, there are certain groups of the great genus Papilio—the true swallow-tailed butterflies—which have all the characteristics of uneatable insects. They have a special coloration, usually red and black (at least in the females), they fly slowly, they are very abundant, and they possess a peculiar odour somewhat like that of the Heliconidae. One of these ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... Flag: yellow with two diagonal bands of white (top, almost double width) and black starting from the upper hoist side; the national emblem in red is superimposed at the center; the emblem includes a swallow-tailed flag on top of a winged column within an upturned crescent above a scroll and flanked by ...
— The 1992 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... the bulk, as already intimated, are of the Milesian order. At the rear, where many of the poor choose to sit, some of the truest specimens of the "finest pisantry," some of the choicest and most aromatic Hibernians we have seen, are located. The old swallow-tailed Donnybrook Fair coat, the cutty knee-breeches, the short pipe in the waistcoat pocket, the open shirt collar, the ancient family cloak with its broad shoulder lapelle, the thick dun-coloured shawl in which many a young Patrick has ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... shell-holes, seemed over-optimistic, but the intention was good. At the little railway station a couple of straw-stuffed dummies, side by side on a platform seat as if waiting for a train, showed that a waggish spirit was abroad. One figure was made up with a black swallow-tailed coat, blue trousers, and a bowler hat set at a jaunty angle; the other with a woman's summer skirt and blouse and an open parasol. B Battery, who had discovered excellent dug-outs in the railway cutting, reported that their only trouble was ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... of the view, but for supervision of the labourers engaged in distant fields. Lastly, the brisk, active servants who received the visitors on the verandah were very different menials from the drunken Petrushka, even though they did not wear swallow-tailed coats, but only Cossack tchekmenu [47] of ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... mornings of which I would draw a picture before they fade away, with me also, from men's minds, it is the quaintness of dress which first comes back to me, and I find myself wondering that in nankeen breeches and swallow-tailed blue coats with buttons of brass once lived men who, despite gnarled-rimmed beavers and much wealth of many-folded cravats, loved and were loved as ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various
... his left arm round Kate's waist. Kate was dressed in a gown that rivalled the snow itself in whiteness. One little gold clasp shone in her bosom; it was the only ornament she wore. Mr. Kennedy, too, had somewhat altered his style of costume. He wore a sky-blue, swallow-tailed coat, whose maker had flourished in London half-a-century before. It had a velvet collar about five inches deep, fitted uncommonly tight to the figure, and had a pair of bright brass buttons, very close together, situated ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... her for the time a better woman—that thing was new, shining black cloth. It made her think of the predikant; it made her think of the elders who sat in the top pew of the church on Sundays, with the hair so nicely oiled, so holy and respectable, with their little swallow-tailed coats; it made her think of heaven, where everything was so holy and respectable, and nobody wore tancord, and the littlest angel had a black-tailed coat. She wished she hadn't called him a thief and a Roman Catholic. She hoped the German hadn't told him. ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... leaving Jack in charge, Waller and I went on board the brig. The master, a tall, thin, sallow man, with a pointed beard, no whiskers, and a hooked nose, with a huge cigar in his mouth, a straw hat on his head, loose nankeen trousers, and a gingham swallow-tailed coat, received us at ...
— Salt Water - The Sea Life and Adventures of Neil D'Arcy the Midshipman • W. H. G. Kingston
... they only made sport of his appearance; especially one evening, when his monkey jacket being wet through, he was obliged to mount one of his swallow-tailed coats. They said he carried two mizzen-peaks at his stern; declared he was a broken-down quill-driver, or a footman to a Portuguese running barber, or some old maid's tobacco-boy. As for the captain, it had become all the same to Harry as if there were no gentlemanly and complaisant Captain ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... kitchen girls came running to the office, and called me to come quick to the back door. I hastened, and to my astonishment found the Doctor, under the greatest excitement. No spectacles on, his hat gone, a large piece torn from his fine swallow-tailed coat, and to all appearances he had just ...
— Twenty Years of Hus'ling • J. P. Johnston
... Royal Academician then present—the scene must have been a very curious one—stepped forward, and in this manner saluted the work of the President; they did so, not because it was his, but on account of its charming qualities. Conceive the painters, each in his swallow-tailed coat, his ruffles and broad cuffs, his knee-breeches, buckles, long waistcoat, and the rest of his garments of those days, thus uniting in one acclaim. The reader may judge whether or not such applause was deserved by the picture, which ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... similar facts wherever sufficient data are to be had, but owing to the abundant collections that have been made in Java, an unfair preponderance may be given to that island. This does not, however, seem to be the case with the true Papilionidae or swallow-tailed butterflies, whose large size and gorgeous colouring has led to their being collected more frequently than other insects. Twenty-seven species are known from Java, twenty-nine from Borneo, and only twenty-one from Sumatra. Four are entirely confined to Java, while ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... glittering army, at their head the king's great royal standard bearing the golden lilies of France quartered with the lions of England, and each troop guided by the square banner, swallow-tailed pennon or pointed pennoncel of their leader, came marching to the gates of Calais, above which floated the blue standard of France with its golden flowers, and with it the banner of the governor, Sir Jean de Vienne. A herald, in a rich long robe embroidered with the arms of England, rode ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... as he was solicitously examining the crease in the soft lovely black trousers, after hanging the swallow-tailed coat over a padded hanger, Snorky came in ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... the school set a caricature in circulation, labelled, to prevent mistakes, with the schoolmaster's name. An immense bell-crowned hat, and a long, pointed, swallow-tailed coat showed that the artist had in his mind the conventional dandy, as shown in prints of thirty or forty years ago, rather than any actual human aspect of the time. But it was passed round among the boys ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... his movements, far advanced in years, with thin snow white hair, his pallid full face seamed and wrinkled and his head curiously inclined to the left shoulder. An immense white cravat like a poultice pushed his high standing collar up to the ears. The sharp contrast of the black swallow-tailed coat, with the dead white of cravat, collar, face and hair, suggested the uncanny idea of ...
— The Southerner - A Romance of the Real Lincoln • Thomas Dixon
... somewhat sadly. 'Yes, I should like to be going, but the doctor says that I must not walk much before Christmas, and no one wants to spend three days in the woods in the middle of December. I should have liked the chance of catching a swallow-tailed butterfly ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various |
