"Billiard" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... rolling around like balls on a billiard table," said young Raimonda, who had come after luncheon to call on Miss Brewster. "In this part of the city there will be ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... greatness. Of one thing I am convinced: that it is only necessary to do some one thing well—as well or better than any one else—in order to acquire distinction. The thing I do really well—better than any living human being—is to blunder. I defy competition. There are champion tight-rope dancers, billiard players, opera singers, swindlers, base-ballists, candidates for the Presidency. I am the champion blunderer. You remember the man who asked of another, "Who is that coarse, homely creature across the room?" and received for answer, "That creature is my wife!" Well, I ought to have been that man, ...
— The Blunders of a Bashful Man • Metta Victoria Fuller Victor
... Henry sprang to his feet at the sight, and then sat down once more. He rose again as a minute later the footman announced Mr. Ronald Barker. It was an early visit, but Barker was Sir Henry's intimate friend. As each was a fine shot, horseman, and billiard-player, there was much in common between the two men, and the younger (and poorer) was in the habit of spending at least two evenings a week at Walcot Old Place. Therefore, Sir Henry advanced cordially with ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... which, at the time we introduce him to the reader, fifty summers had passed, with their corresponding autumns, winters, and springs. The passage of so many seasons over him appeared to have exercised a polishing influence on the merchant, for Mr Sudberry's cranium shone like a billiard-ball. In temperament Mr Sudberry was sanguine, and full of energy. He could scarcely have been a successful merchant without these qualities. ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... Park Hotel, just finished, and really admirable in accommodations. It is a large and very tasteful structure, with the general air of a watering-place sojourn of the highest type—a civilized-looking fountain playing, and the familiar thunder of the bowling-alley forming bass to the click of the billiard-room. Here, as in Cumberland, we find an artificial forwardness of the dinner-table in the midst of the most unpromising circumstances. The daintiest meats and cates are served by the deftest waiters. The fact is, the hotel is owned by the company, and the dinners ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... mansion was a sight to go through—halls, libraries, gilded saloons, picture galleries, reception halls lined with mirrors, billiard rooms, bowling alleys, whatever that may be, dining rooms, with mirrors extending from the floor to the ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... among her other excitements, Pussy was passionately fond of gambling. She was known to have won and lost large sums at Monte Carlo, and she was a regular follower of the fashionable races in Paris. She had also been seen at the Olympia billiard academy, near the Grand Hotel, where Martinez and other experts played regularly before eager audiences, among whom betting on the games was the great attraction. The detective found two bet markers who remembered distinctly that, on several ...
— Through the Wall • Cleveland Moffett
... officers were sitting round the table in the messroom of the 103d Bengal Infantry at Cawnpore. It had been a guest night, but the strangers had left, the lights had been turned out in the billiard room overhead, the whist party had broken up, and the players had rejoined three officers who had remained at table smoking and ...
— Rujub, the Juggler • G. A. Henty
... opposite the capital, Lerwick. See, there is a long wide sound marked with good anchorage, called Brassay Sound, formed by the mainland and the island of Brassay. I wonder what sort of a city is Lerwick! It of course has theatres, hotels, billiard-rooms, and balls; these northern people are fond of dancing, I have read. We shall have ample ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... was Philiper Flash, And wore "loud clothes" and a weak mustache, And "done the Park," For an "afternoon lark," With a very fast horse of "remarkable dash." And Philiper handled a billiard-cue About as well as the best he knew, And used to say "He could make it pay By playing two ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... they reached the tavern, a wayside pot house, the sort of thing one can see by any main road. It had a very faded sign above the door, some billiard cues painted on the wall and the inoffensive name "Au rendezvous ...
— Tartarin de Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... cigarette hung from its accustomed short tooth, and his round, florid face seemed puffier than usual. His aversion to any exercise more vigorous than offered by a billiard cue was beginning to reflect itself in a premature rotundity of figure. But his soft, sedulous voice had not lost the note of friendly confidence which had attracted Dave, perhaps against his better judgment, on the night of ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead
... invited the soul to loaf in the long library before the baronial fireplace, or in the drawing-room with its deep comfy armchairs, its shaded lamps just made for a sly whisper of pretty nothings all a deux; or even in the billiard room where one could take a cue and show a prowess at still another game than that ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... was not to be opened till three o'clock in the afternoon, before which hour the promoters of the Beargarden thought it improbable that they and their fellows would want a club. There were to be no morning papers taken, no library, no morning-room. Dining-rooms, billiard-rooms, and card-rooms would suffice for the Beargarden. Everything was to be provided by a purveyor, so that the club should be cheated only by one man. Everything was to be luxurious, but the luxuries were to be achieved at first cost. It had been a happy thought, and the club was said ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... came for "his star." "I vill give you an engagement for one, two, tree year, upon my vord I vill," he said as they went downstairs. While the butler took him back to the library to sign his receipt and receive his cheque, Glory stood waiting by the billiard table in the hall and Drake and Lord Robert ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... him out. He was not a traveller. A traveller arrives and departs, goes on somewhere. Heyst did not depart. I met a man once—the manager of the branch of the Oriental Banking Corporation in Malacca—to whom Heyst exclaimed, in no connection with anything in particular (it was in the billiard-room ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... to have gone to church today, but only think, the clergyman's seat broke down last Sunday; lots of people go to it, you see, and one can't say 'no,' and old Pruesshawer, the carpenter, who was to have mended it this week, is down with a fever." Her words poured out smoothly like polished billiard-balls rolled by a happy ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... approbation, and tact is blessed by preferment. Place them in the senate: talent has the ear of the house, but tact wins its heart, and has its votes; talent is fit for employment, but tact is fitted for it. It has a knack of slipping into place with a sweet silence and glibness of movement, as a billiard ball insinuates itself into ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... Major John Knowle requests the presence of Mr Archibald Maine—Mr Archibald Maine— Archibald! What were the old people dreaming about? I don't know. It always sets me thinking of old Morley—bald, with the top of his head as shiny as a billiard-ball. Good old chap, though, even if he does bully one—requests the presence of Mr Archibald Maine at his quarters at—at seven o'clock this evening punctually. No. What's o'clock? I think it was six. Couldn't be seven, because that's dinner-time, and he wouldn't ask me then. ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... out. They were both assisting their father in business, and sought relief from his gigantic conception of a day's work by evening diversions at Hanbridge. These two former noisy Liberals had joined the Hanbridge Conservative Club because it was a club, and had a billiard-table that could only be equalled at the Five Towns Hotel ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... head upon her bed and moaned, for she was stricken to the heart. Then she rose and wrote a hasty note, and, putting it in her bosom, came downstairs and looked for Captain Kenealy. He proved to be in the billiard-room, playing the spotted ball against the plain one. "Oh, Captain Kenealy, I am come to try your friendship; you ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... who hated me, simply because I had sent to him a friend who represented a hair restorer. Said bald-headed man had many reasons to, and had often claimed to be, a friend of mine; but was foolishly sensitive about his lack of hirsute adornment, and said I insulted him by referring to his billiard-ball caput. Truly, gratitude is a lost art, and some friends immediately become enemies when they can secure from ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... he found out that he had spent a thousand pounds more than what he was accustomed to spend regularly." And it happened that he left abruptly, just as my husband had foretold, but not without promising a future commission for two pictures when his billiard-room should be finished. ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... Quinton and Mrs. Jules Keaveney were on their knees beside it, pushing out handfuls of little pink and white pills that somebody had brought in two bottles from the dispensary across the road, each using a billiard-bridge. The girl in the orange sweater had a handful of scribbled notes, and was telling them where to push the pills. There were other objects on the map, too—pistol-cartridges, and cigarettes, and foil-wrapped food-concentrate wafers. Paula, ...
— Uller Uprising • Henry Beam Piper, John D. Clark and John F. Carr
... elliptical and ellipsoidal. Perhaps some of you gentlemen may be familiar with the works of Mr W. S. Gilbert. In one of his songs he speaks of the billiard sharp who is ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... special censure because the saloon men advertised in his columns. No one thought anything about it. It was all legitimate business. Why not? Raymond enjoyed a system of high license, and the saloon and the billiard hall and the beer garden were a part of the city's Christian civilization. He was simply doing what every other business man in Raymond did. And it was one of the best paying sources of revenue. What would the paper do if it cut these out? Could it live? That was the question. But was that ...
— In His Steps • Charles M. Sheldon
... Town Club was filled with ineffable calm. The hum of convivial voices was hushed, the clicking billiard-balls were still, no merry groups of congenial spirits chatted in ante-room, or dining-room. All was strangely quiet, for most of the members were at the diggings, and the times were too pregnant with ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... Radwin "Then we'll look through the billiard room, writing room and other places. Young Somers must ...
— The Submarine Boys' Lightning Cruise - The Young Kings of the Deep • Victor G. Durham
... expedition who could not send cash sent useful articles of equipment, for the comfort or amusement of the men. Among such articles were a billiard table, various games, and innumerable books. A member of the expedition having said to a newspaper man, a short time before the Roosevelt sailed, that we had not much reading matter, the ship was deluged with books, magazines, and newspapers, which came literally in wagon loads. They were strewn ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary
... so we turned in early. W Unfortunately, our rooms were immediately over the billiard room, where a bibulous and cosmopolitan lot were earnestly endeavouring to bolster up by further proof the fiction that a white man cannot retain his health in the tropics. The process was pretty rackety, and while it could not keep us awake, it prevented us ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... the whole place was gloomy. There were none of those charms of modern creation which now make the mansions of the wealthy among us bright and joyous. There was not a billiard table in the house. There was no conservatory nearer than the large old-fashioned greenhouse, which stood away by the kitchen garden and which seemed to belong exclusively to the gardener. The papers on the walls were dark and sombre. The mirrors were small and lustreless. The carpets ...
— An Eye for an Eye • Anthony Trollope
... chapter Lamarck points out that animals move themselves, or parts of themselves, not through impulsion or movement communicated to them as from one billiard ball to another, but by reason of a cause which excites their irritability, which cause is within some animals and forms part of them, while it is ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... shop is provided where the men and their families may purchase goods bought under regimental arrangements at wholesale prices, and sold without more profit than is necessary to keep the institution self-supporting. On the first floor are billiard and games room, reading-room and library, and writing-room. The manager's quarter and kitchen premises complete the establishment. Near the recreation establishment is the canteen, devoted solely to the sale of beer, and not permitted to vie in attractiveness with the recreation ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... were always amused at the Wheelers' doings, got almost as much pleasure out of Ralph's lavishness as he did himself. One said Ralph had shipped a new piano out to Yucca county, another heard he had ordered a billiard table. August Yoeder, their prosperous German neighbour, asked grimly whether he could, maybe, get a place as hired man with Ralph. Leonard Dawson, who was to be married in October, hailed Claude in town ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... with green velvet, and looking not unlike a modern billiard table, stood at the right of the queen's crimson throne; and behind it, perched in a high chair, and wearing a long, solemn, black robe, sat a small, thick personage, whose skin Sir Norman would have known on a bush. He glanced at the lower throne and found it as he expected, ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... barrack squares, listened cheerfully to weekly concerts and the first of our long series of history and military lectures. They hunted for curios in the dusty alleys of Omdurman, enjoyed recreation in the library and billiard-room, and ran with great spirit the early numbers of the Manchester Sentry, first published of all active service periodicals. To this paper the Sirdar and Lady Wingate contributed welcome ...
— With Manchesters in the East • Gerald B. Hurst
... A library and an amusement room, supplied with good books, magazines, papers, a billiard or pool table, and a phonograph, are a source ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... the billiard-room, at the window of which she knocked. Max, her brother, who was playing a game with Queenie, his younger sister, let her in, and cried out at sight of her ...
— The Wharf by the Docks - A Novel • Florence Warden
... silver and a great number of pewter spoons, adorned the shelves of a cup-board; a couple of lads in chintz shirts, with dirty napkins over their shoulders, busied themselves at the bar. Through an open door you saw in the next room a billiard-table, and a hen gravely promenading ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... of those unforeseen events which are the work of Providence, was destined to decide my fate. Several times, already, in compliance with Arthur's urgent entreaties, I had met him at night time in a little pavilion in our garden. This pavilion contained a billiard-room and a spacious gallery in which my brother practised fencing and pistol shooting with his masters and friends. There, thanks to the liberty I enjoyed, we thought ourselves perfectly secure from observation, ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... papers, tossed back and forth without prefixes of Mr. or Miss, and often with pet diminutives. The whole represented a closed corporation of intimacies into which she could no more force her way than a worm into a billiard ball. Rash who was at first beguiled by the interchange of personalities began to experience a sense of discomfort that Letty should be so discourteously left out; but Barbara knew that it was best for both to force the lesson home. Rash must be given ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... another—or none. But again, there was a Golden Eagle (I do not mean that of Charing) which did much ARRIDE and console him. William's genius, I take it, leans a little to the figurative, for being at play at Tricktrack (a kind of minor Billiard-table which we keep for smaller wights, and sometimes refresh our own mature fatigues with taking a hand at), not being able to hit a ball he had iterate aimed at, he cried out, "I cannot hit that beast." Now the balls are usually called men, but he felicitously hit upon a middle ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... which he was chasing, and they kept straight on. He succeeded, however, in killing twenty-three, but they were scattered over a distance of three miles, while mine lay close together. I had "nursed" my buffaloes, as a billiard-player does the balls when ...
— The Life of Hon. William F. Cody - Known as Buffalo Bill The Famous Hunter, Scout and Guide • William F. Cody
... a square billiard-table to be placed with its corners directed to the four cardinal points. Suppose a player, standing at the north corner, to strike a red ball directly to the south, his design being to lodge the ball in the south pocket; which design, if not ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... every body who is any body at all—adjourns to the salle de reunion, the large assembly-room built over the baths. This is really a handsome well-arranged ball-room, full of mirrors, ottomans, and benches; at one end is a billiard and card room, and behind are rooms for robing. Here, upon the payment of a napoleon, you have the entree for the season; and here the guests meet, more upon the terms of a large family than as though they were strangers. Etiquette is relaxed; every body knows every body. The elder men ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... a complete volume on the ethics of sport, but it is not necessary to elaborate on the subject in a book of etiquette. When you are on the tennis courts or at the billiard tables remember only to observe the same good manners and courtesies that characterize your social ...
— Book of Etiquette • Lillian Eichler
... two was laid beside me. I read it unobserved. "Keep the B. from joining us in the drawing-room." The B.—? The bishop, of course. With pleasure. But why? And how? That's the question, never mind "why." Could I lure him into the library—the billiard room—the conservatory? I doubted it, and I doubted still more what I should do with him when I got ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... what the bunch would like," he told me. "All we'd have to do would be to paint these wooden walls a nice cheerful light color, change one room into a smoker, another into a billiard-room, and a third into a grill, add some gun-racks and leather wing-chairs, and we'd be right up to ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... region, were reading books full of deep thought, (for I looked over their shoulders); some meditating over a game of chess, more chattering vehemently and loudly, and many playing at billiards. Mr. C——, R——, and P—— had seated themselves in the vicinity of a billiard-table, and, when I partially recovered my senses, I followed their example. The table was about half the size of the billiard-tables in England, and the pockets were twice as large. The four balls, with which they played, were not much bigger than those ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... ashore by the inn of my imagination. The rooms almost overhung the water: so far my vision was fulfilled. Within there was an odour of spirits and spilled ale, a rustle of sporting papers, talk of racings, and the click of billiard-balls. Without there were two or three loafers, half boatmen, half vagabonds, waiting to pick up stray sixpences—a sort of leprosy of rascal and sneak in their faces and the lounge of their bodies. These Thames-side "beach-combers" are a sorry lot, a special ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... candidates or collected much money. As yet it was, politically, almost quiescent. And therefore Everett Wharton, whose sense of duty took him there, spent his afternoons either in the whist-room or at the billiard-table. ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... jibes, profanity, and bad words pass between the parties. Sunday theatres, concert-saloons, and places of amusement are in full blast. The Italians and Irish shout out their joy from the rooms they occupy. The click of the billiard ball, and the booming of the ten-pin alley, are distinctly heard. Before night, victims watched for will be secured; men heated with liquor, or drugged, will be robbed, and many curious and bold explorers in this locality will curse the hour in which they ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... remonstrate with one lady who was cramming into her trunk two of Miss Muriel's best evening dresses, but she told me to mind my own business and leave the room. One man I saw go away with four of Mr. Leithcourt's guns, and there was a regular squabble in the billiard-room over a set of pearl and emerald dress-studs that somebody found in his dressing-room. Crane, the valet, says ...
— The Czar's Spy - The Mystery of a Silent Love • William Le Queux
... know," said Bertram. "The barbs elected me business manager of the Occident last season—I didn't make the team until I was a Sophomore, you know—and that more than paid my way. This year I've got a billiard hall ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... say) give "his best"; and what a small part of a man "his best" is! His second and third best are often much better. If he is the first violin he must fiddle for life; he must not remember that he is a fine fourth bagpipe, a fair fifteenth billiard-cue, a foil, a fountain pen, a hand at whist, a gun, and an ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... their funds from home. It was now Pretty who came to him for the advance of cash enough to buy a walking-stick of the following superb description: a thoroughly even, straight-grained bit of hickory-wood, tapered like a billiard-cue, an inch and a half thick at the butt and three fourths of an inch thick at the point, the butt carrying a knob of silver, ...
— The Dozen from Lakerim • Rupert Hughes
... it?" she asked, later, of the half-dozen men to whom she was giving tea in the billiard-room. "If I'd stayed to watch you shoot for another five minutes, I should have escaped them! Not a bad, dowdy little woman—the man a worse stick in the drawing-room than the pulpit, if possible. Subjects: his—parish room he wants to ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... was a common room for the amusement of the students. There were all sorts of indoor games including a miniature billiard table in this common room. I was a regular visitor there. I did not care for any other indoor game than chess. Of course chess meant keeping out of bed, ...
— Indian Ghost Stories - Second Edition • S. Mukerji
... among the sepoys of the two battalions. They, on occasions, passed our officers without the customary salute, and, if my memory serves, a complaint of this want of respect was forwarded to their Colonels. Our billiard-marker, too, a high-caste Brahmin who had served on our side in the Afghan campaigns of 1839-42 in the capacity of a spy, a man of cunning and intelligence, warned us in unmistakable terms of the increasing disaffection among the sepoys of Ferozepore, and stated his opinion that the spirit of ...
— A Narrative Of The Siege Of Delhi - With An Account Of The Mutiny At Ferozepore In 1857 • Charles John Griffiths
... say so without offence, Mr. EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS reminds me a little of those billiard experts who, having evolved a particular stroke, will continue it indefinitely, to the joy of the faithful and the exasperated boredom of the others. To explain my metaphor, I gather that Mr. BURROUGHS, having "got set," to an incredible number of thousands, with an invention called Tarzan, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, August 11, 1920 • Various
... little effect if he were defrauded of his rays and their infinite reverberations. "Seen through a fog," says Sara Coleridge, the noble daughter of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "the golden, beaming sun looks like a dull orange, or a red billiard ball."—Introd. to Biog. Lit., p. clxii. And, upon this same analogy, psychological experiences of deep suffering or joy first attain their entire fulness of expression when they are reverberated from dreams. The reader must, therefore, suppose ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... votucher for four drinks.) Most unfair punishment. I only thought of Curtiss as Actaeon being chivied round the billiard tables by the nymphs ...
— Soldiers Three • Rudyard Kipling
... various as the stars; and, like them, differ one from another in magnitude. It is the quality of the aspiration that determines the true success or failure of a life. A man may aspire to be the best billiard-player, the best coachman, the best wardroom politician, the best gambler, or the most cunning cheat. He may rise to be eminent in his calling; but, compared with other men, his greatest height will be below ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... see—I much prefer Town on a Saturday morning to all Billabong and its bullocks. They wanted me to go out one night and—fancy!—help burn down dead trees; but, really, I jibbed on that. There is no billiard room. Uncle David intends building one when Jim comes home for good, but that certainly won't be in my time here. I fancy a very few weeks will see me back ...
— Mates at Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... moustache, had also found his way there. I remembered I had seen him slinking away during the quarrel, in a half prance, half shuffle, and trying very hard not to look scared. He was no stranger to the port, it seems, and in his distress was able to make tracks straight for Mariani's billiard-room and grog-shop near the bazaar. That unspeakable vagabond, Mariani, who had known the man and had ministered to his vices in one or two other places, kissed the ground, in a manner of speaking, before him, ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... heroine were again discussed that evening in another part of the Priory. They were in the billiard-room in the evening, and Mr. Bonteen was inveighing against the inadequacy of the law as it had been brought to bear against the sinners who, between them, had succeeded in making away with the Eustace diamonds. "It was a most unworthy conclusion to such a plot," ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... abandoned, when once adopted. The forger enjoys not only the pleasure of obtaining money so easily, but the triumph of befooling sharp men of the world. Dexterous penmanship is a source of the same sort of pride as that which animates the skilful rifleman, the practised duellist, or well-trained billiard-player. With a clean Gillott he fetches down a capitalist, at three or six months, for a cool hundred or a round thousand; just as a Scrope drops over a stag at ten, or a Gordon Cumming a monstrous male ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... father's anger and gone a-nutting or gathering blackberries. But the little square in the Lower town was the chief object of his thoughts; he imagined how he could improve his house: he dreamed of a new front, new bedrooms, a salon, a billiard-room, a dining-room, and the kitchen garden out of which he would make an English pleasure-ground, with lawns, grottos, fountains, and statuary. The bedrooms at present occupied by the brother and sister, on the ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... the brass and iron folk are kept at the top, and, by a law as sure as that of gravitation, they will gradually sink to the bottom. We have all known noble lords who would have been coachmen, or gamekeepers, or billiard-markers, if they had not been kept afloat by our social corks; we have all known men among the lowest ranks, of whom everyone has said, "What might not that man have become, if he had ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... tariff has always been our favourite device for obtaining a national revenue. During our Civil War, indeed, the national, government resorted extensively to direct taxation, chiefly in the form of revenue stamps, though it also put a tax upon billiard-tables, pianos, gold watches, and all sorts of things. But after the return of peace these unusual taxes were one after another discontinued, and since then our national revenue has been raised, as in Hamilton's time, from duties on imports and excise ...
— Civil Government in the United States Considered with - Some Reference to Its Origins • John Fiske
... was in perfect condition—a trifle hard, because of the season, but flat as a billiard table and as fast as even Rajputs could desire. A committee of them had been going over it daily for a week past, recommending touches here, suggesting something there, neglecting not an inch, because ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... Invaded now by the non-smoking sex, Virginal scruples vex, And matronly anathemas assail. Alas! and what avail Man's immunities of time or place? The sweet she-creatures chase From all old coigns of vantage harried man. In vain, how vain to ban Beauty from billiard-room or—Morning Bus What use to fume or fuss? And yet, and yet indeed it is no joke! Where shall one get a smoke Without annoying Shes with our cheroots, And being badged as "brutes"? If a poor fellow may not snatch a ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, July 25, 1891 • Various
... pleasure of convincing Mr. Percival that he was superior to it, he continued his visits. For some time he was a passive spectator. Billiards, however, was a game of address, not chance; there was a billiard-table at Oakly-park, as well as at Mr. Luttridge's, and he had played with his guardian. Why, then, should he not play with Mr. Luttridge? He did play: his skill was admired; he betted, and his ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth
... her arrival in Winthrop's car, Miss Forbes had kept to herself. In the morning, when the other young people were out of doors, she remained in her room, and after luncheon when they gathered round the billiard table, she sent for her cart and drove off alone. The others thought she was concerned over the possible result of the election, and did not want to disturb them by her anxiety. Winthrop, thinking the presence of Schwab embarrassed her, recalling as it ...
— The Scarlet Car • Richard Harding Davis
... Tuscaloosa, where Gideon built a house. But provisions were excessively dear, and his hospitality to other land seekers from Georgia soon consumed his savings. He began whipsawing lumber, but after disablement from a gunpowder explosion he found lighter employment in keeping a billiard room. He then set out westward again, breaking a road for his wagon as he went. Upon reaching the Tombigbee River he built a clapboard house in five days, cleared land from its canebrake, planted corn with a sharpened stick, and in spite of ravages ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... an adjournment to the dining-room to play bagatelle, the most inane of games, to which the billiard-player goes with contempt, changed quickly to wrath when he cannot put the balls into absurd little holes. Mary was an adept, and took pleasure in showing James how the thing should be done. He noticed that she and the curate managed the whole affair between them, arranging ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... sure,—and I'm not quite certain we got much good from them; but then our talk and thought were not all of books, and of what we spelt out in them. We rowed on the river, we played in the cricket-field, we lounged in the billiard-rooms, we ran up to town for the day, we had wine in one another's rooms after hall in the evening, and behaved like young fools, and threw oranges wildly at one another's heads, and generally enjoyed ourselves. ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... did not improve his health. He took the part of the natives against the whites and was denounced as a moral castaway. In 1904 he wrote Charles Morice: "I am a savage." But a savage of talent. In reality he was a cultivated man, an attractive man, and a billiard player and a fencer. Paint was his passion. If you live by the pen you may perish by the pen. The same is too often the case with the palette and ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... and billiard rooms as the very bane of the city—leading men on step by step to the vices of gambling and drunkenness. Mr. Green stated that he had never met with a gambler in his life, who played honestly, and got his living by playing cards honestly—for all he had ever known ...
— Secret Band of Brothers • Jonathan Harrington Green
... we go on shore? To the town? Not we, who came to see Nature, not towns. Some went off on honest business; some on such pleasure as can be found in baking streets, hotel bars, and billiard-rooms: but the one place on which our eyes were set was a little cove a quarter of a mile off, under the steep hill, where a white line of sand shone between blue water and green wood. A few yards broad of sand, and then impenetrable jungle, among which we could ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... North—in a minority of 34 against 117. "Very witty" it was sure to be, and its most effective hit was a topical allusion. The Union Society of those days had its quarters in what had originally been a Wesleyan chapel—a large room in Green Street, the floor of which is now used as a public billiard saloon, while the galleries from which applause and interruption used to come freely now stand empty. There had long been complaint of its inadequacy; Oxford had set the example of a special edifice, and as far ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... There is none of the sociability which makes the agreeableness of an English country house; there is no room in which the guests assemble, sit, lounge, and talk as they please and when they please; there is a billiard table, but in such a remote corner of the Castle that it might as well be in the town of Windsor; and there is a library well stocked with books, but hardly accessible, imperfectly warmed, and only tenanted by the librarian: it is a mere library, ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... rich vale of Evesham. On their left the slopes of Marcleeve Hill declined gradually to the open plain; on their right, behind a long fringe of willows, stretched meadow after meadow, all green and flat as billiard-tables. They were passing down through the scene of a famous battle. But the children had never heard of Evesham fight; and Mr. Jessup had mislaid his guide-book. He sat with half-closed eyes, now and ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... o'clock, and Straker, who ought to have been in the drawing-room playing bridge, or in the billiard-room playing billiards, or in the smoking-room talking to Brocklebank—Straker, who ought to have known better, had sneaked into the library to have a look at a brief he'd just got. He ought to have known better, ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... natives, a good system of drainage introduced, wide roads laid out and lighted, public seats placed in pleasant spots facing the water, trees planted, palatial houses built with gardens attached, a church constructed, clubs founded, billiard-tables and other insignia of Western luxury imported, a municipal council elected for managing local affairs, and a force of native police or Indian Sikhs raised, with which, under English superintendents, to maintain order ...
— Life and sport in China - Second Edition • Oliver G. Ready
... spacious lawn, scarcely less level than a billiard-table, and, even with the Colonel busy on the East Coast, the committee were unanimously adverse to the suggestion. But Kippy, born within hail of a Kentish cricket-field, was not to be denied, and, after all, one cannot haggle about a mere garden with someone who was with the first battalions ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 5, 1917 • Various
... and do nothing but make 'cannons'—for that's the gibberish they talk at billiards—when there's the manly and athletic game of cribbage, as my poor grandmother used to call it, at your own hearth. You can go into a billiard-room—you, a respectable tradesman, or as you set yourself up for one, for if the world knew all, there's very little respectability in you—you can go and play billiards with a set of creatures in mustachios, when you might take a nice quiet hand with me at home. But no! ...
— Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures • Douglas Jerrold
... investigators walked back for some little distance in silence, presently emerging via a narrow, dark, uninviting alleyway into West India Dock Road. A brilliantly lighted hostelry proved to be their objective, and there, in a quiet corner of the deserted billiard room, over their glasses, they discussed this mysterious case, which at first had looked so simple of solution if only because it offered so many unusual features, but which, the deeper they ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... snatched it away and went out quickly. He was stung by this repulse, and stood mortifying himself by thinking of it until he was disturbed by the entrance of a maid-servant. Learning from her that Sir Charles was in the billiard room, he joined him there, and asked him carelessly if he ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... as though they had been kicked to pieces by a lunatic giant. We sleep in batches of four or five on the floors of the rooms; there are very few inhabitants about, but the village inn still goes on. It has one poor weary billiard-table, very small with very big balls, and the cues are without tops; it is The Amusement of the place. Ortheris does miracles at it. When he leaves the army he says he's going to be a marker, 'a b——y marker.' The country ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... relieving himself from the late unusual strain upon his rough feelings. He went down to the billiard-room, and joining recklessly in the game that was still kept up by De Pean, Le Gardeur, and a number of wild associates, strove to drown all recollections of the past night at Beaumanoir by drinking and gambling with more than usual violence until ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... to the supercilious criticism referred to, he turned into a doorway, upon a pane of glass above which was painted a ship in full sail, with the words "Cafe Estaminet Hollandais." Ascending a flight or two of stairs, we entered a suite of spacious apartments, furnished with several billiard tables, with cue-racks, chairs, benches, and small tables for the use of drinkers. Several of the windows, which looked out upon the garden of the Palais Royal, were open, in the vain hope, perhaps, of purifying the place from the inveterate odour of tobacco ...
— Tales from Blackwood, Volume 7 • Various
... My dear Mr Savoyard, if you are a man with a sense of beauty you can make an earthly paradise for yourself in Venice on 1500 pounds a year, whilst our wretched vulgar industrial millionaires are spending twenty thousand on the amusements of billiard markers. I assure you I am a poor man according to modern ideas. But I have never had anything less than the very best that life has produced. It is my good fortune to have a beautiful and lovable daughter; and that girl, sir, has never seen an ugly ...
— Fanny's First Play • George Bernard Shaw
... is also on draught there. Highly varnished tables and chairs of cherry wood are scattered about the room. A red curtain divides the two rooms. In the oblong rear room are also chairs and tables and, in the extreme background, a billiard table. Lithographs, representing mainly hunting scenes, are hung ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume II • Gerhart Hauptmann
... main street of Pera, here four ways meet, all of which were not less mean and dirty than the lanes of Wapping. The hotel, however (kept by a Mons. Marchand), was a very comfortable mansion, containing many chambers handsomely furnished, and a large billiard-room, which is the resort of all the idle young men of the place. Our dinners there were better served, and composed of meats more to the English taste, than we had seen at any tavern since our departure from Falmouth; and the butter of Belgrade (perfectly fresh, though not of ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... quarter-deck by beat of drum, with a tipstaff, having a silver bauble of a stick, leading the way. This office fell to Godefroy, the trader, a fellow with the figure of a slat and a scalp tonsured bare as a billiard-ball by Indian hunting-knife. Spite of many a thwack from the flat of M. de Radisson's sword, Godefroy would carry the silver mace to the chant of a "diddle-dee-dee," which he was always humming in a sand-papered voice wherever he went. At beat of drum for conference ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... the second night of his visit to Newbury Grange that they had cornered him in the billiard-room. It was the beautiful daughter of Lord Castleberry who, with the audacity of youth, forced him, metaphorically speaking, into a corner, from whence ...
— Bones - Being Further Adventures in Mr. Commissioner Sanders' Country • Edgar Wallace
... Government people. His prospects—if only he were not going to be shot—are brilliant enough. He has written quite cleverly on the question of Recruiting, and advocated as much as twopence more a day and billiard rooms under the chaplain's control; he has invented a military bicycle with a wheel of solid iron that can be used as a shield; and a war correspondent and, indeed, any one who writes even the most casual and irresponsible article on military questions is a person worth his cultivating. ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... there and look at it yourselves?" But he was too enthusiastic about the new school to withhold his information. The living room and the old library had been built into one big room for a reference library; the classrooms were no end jolly; the billiard room had been enlarged and was to be an assembly room. A wing had been added for an indoor gymnasium. He and Stuart King had climbed way to the tower, but the tower ...
— Highacres • Jane Abbott
... corner, where two corridors ended in an angle, at the head of a staircase, he came into sudden and violent contact with Mr Toobad, and they both plunged together to the foot of the stairs, like two billiard-balls into one pocket. This gave the young lady time to escape, and enclose herself in her chamber; while Mr Toobad, rising slowly, and rubbing his knees and shoulders, said, 'You see, my dear Scythrop, in this little incident, one of the innumerable proofs of the temporary supremacy ...
— Nightmare Abbey • Thomas Love Peacock
... cures, His teeth, I've enacted, Shall all be extracted By terrified amateurs: The music-hall singer attends a series Of masses and fugues and "ops" By Bach, interwoven With Spohr and Beethoven, At classical Monday Pops: The billiard sharp whom any one catches His doom's extremely hard - He's made to dwell In a dungeon cell On a spot that's always barred; And there he plays extravagant matches In fitless finger-stalls, On a cloth untrue With a twisted ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... seemed to them—the most luxurious comfort. The space afforded them by the big basement, with its kitchen and laundry and pantry, and, above all, the specially large room which had been used for billiard playing, supplied actual vistas. For the sake of convenience and coolness they used the billiard room as a dormitory, sleeping on light cots, and they slept with all their windows open, the little breezes wandering from ...
— In the Closed Room • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... fierce heat; rugs of all the world's weaving, from the golden fleeces of Persia to fire-lit Navajos; a glimpse to the left, of a room walled with books, and sunk into an Egypt of silence; an acreage of covered billiard-tables through a vast door to the right—a composite of such impressions made the moment memorable. Bedient could only think of a king's winter palace—in summer.... He left the servant to return ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... Colonies act under similar circumstances as they did, and from being on arrival strong, hopeful and brave, they, from lack of something in themselves or from want of the needful advice and sense to adopt it, gradually deteriorate past all recovery. I recollect the billiard-marker at one of the Christchurch hotels was the younger son of a baronet. He worked as billiard-marker for his food, and as much alcohol as he could get. I believe he was never unfit to mark, and never quite sober. He died at his post, but not before ...
— Five Years in New Zealand - 1859 to 1864 • Robert B. Booth
... and yet again to the forest and to the forest always," she said, turning into the darkened billiard room. "Marie, beware, thou, of the forest. The good God created it express for the lovers,—but it is permitted to the devil to ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... wooden fence which showed the boundary of Cedarwood, and through its palings and above it, was visible the broad, shallow river, comfortably colored, for the most part, like cafe au lait, but flecked with many patches of foam and flat iron-colored rocks and innumerable islets, some no bigger than a billiard-table, but with even the tiniest boasting a tree or two. On the other—westward—was a mounting vista of close-shaven turf, and many copings, like magnified geometrical problems, and a host of stunted growing ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... trying balancing feats with a billiard-cue and two ivory balls, such as Barberou, one of his friends, had performed. They invariably fell, and, rolling along the floor between people's legs, got lost in some distant corner. The waiter, who had to rise every time to search for them on all-fours under the benches, ended ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... when they can be out-of-doors," said Mrs. Burgoyne; "but in winter they do make awful work indoors. However, there is tramping for dry weather, and I mean to have a stove set up in the old billiard-room down-stairs and turn them all loose in there when it's wet. Theatricals, and pasting things, and singing, and now and then candy-making, is all fun. And one knows that they're safe, and piling up happy memories ...
— The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne • Kathleen Norris
... definitely until Jack a month later turned up in Sacramento, with a billiard cue in his hand, and a heart overcharged ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... however, that owing to some confusion of doors I got by mistake into the reception room of the Brunswick-Balke-Collender Billiard Table Company, which is on the same corridor as the salesroom of the Oxford Press. It was a pleasant reception room, not very bookish in aspect, but in my agitation I was too eager to feel surprised by the large billiard ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... thick neck, and with a good-humored face, which, being clean-shaven, was chiefly notable for the breadth and the squareness of the jaws. He had merry blue eyes, and his crown—he was holding his battered Derby hat in his hand—was as bare as a billiard ball. Below timber-line, as he himself expressed it, he had a brush of close-cut sandy-red hair. I had encountered both of these men when I first came to Morelia, and during two or three weeks I had seen a good deal of them, for we had met daily ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... world. Of course, it cannot be expected of any Spaniards that they should do much, and beaux so fine cannot be expected to do any thing. Accordingly, his day is spent in riding from house to house, on a horse as fine as himself, a living machine of trappings, and the nights in dancing, billiard-playing, and flirting. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... admit to himself, with a twinge of jealousy, that the rough, uncultured boy of former days had wholly eclipsed him in every desirable accomplishment, as well as in the solid branches. For Maurice spent his evenings in quite a different way from our hero—at the billiard-saloon or bar-room, or in wandering about the streets without object. The result was that Mr. Ferguson, detecting the difference between the two clerks, and recognizing the superior value of Gilbert, ...
— Tom, The Bootblack - or, The Road to Success • Horatio Alger
... town. It was a warm dark night of faint clouds through which the moon shone palely as through a thin silk canopy. Fuselli stood by the fountain smoking a cigarette, looking at the yellow windows of the Cheval Blanc at the other end of the square, from which came a sound of voices and of billiard balls clinking. He stood quiet letting the acrid cigarette smoke drift out through his nose, his ears full of the silvery tinkle of the water in the fountain beside him. There were little drifts of warm and chilly air in the breeze that ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... surrounded with its old fortifications; and if they are far simpler in character (there is but one circle), they are quite as well preserved. The moat has been filled up, and the site of the town might be figured by a billiard-table without pockets. On this absolute level, covered with coarse grass, Aigues-Mortes presents quite the appearance of the walled town that a school-boy draws upon his slate, or that we see in the background of early Flemish pictures—a simple parallelogram, ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... the ground-floor is that of nearly all country houses built a hundred years ago. It was, evidently, erected on the ruins of some old castle formerly perched there. A large panelled entrance-hall has been turned by Felicite into a billiard-room; from it opens an immense salon with six windows, and the dining-room. The kitchen communicates with the dining-room through an office. Camille has displayed a noble simplicity in the arrangement of this floor, carefully avoiding all splendid decoration. The salon, painted gray, ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac |
