"Chequered" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... treachery. But would not a little straightforward treachery be not only very expedient, but rather moral? Were high principles a sine qua non to such a humble individual as himself, a "bookmaker" on race-courses, a billiard-marker elsewhere in their breathing-times? Though indeed Mr. Jerry in his chequered life had seen many other phases of employment—chiefly, whenever he had the choice, within the zone of horsiness. For he had a mysterious sympathetic knowledge of the horse. If pressed to give an account of himself, he was often compelled to admit that he was doing nothing particular, but ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... on horseback to view this wonderful garden. We rode about three miles through a very beautiful park kept in the highest order and much resembling the approach to Luton in Bedfordshire; the grounds gently undulated and chequered with various groupes of well contrasted trees in the offskip. As we moved onward an extensive lake appeared before us, the extremities of which seemed to lose themselves in distance and obscurity. Here ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... Emma was greatly comforted by a summons to Nauvoo. She could now enter in triumph upon the more glorious stage of her chequered career. ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... The fury of Scylla and the roaring recesses of her crags you have been anigh; the rocks of the Cyclops you have trodden. Recall your courage, put dull fear away. This too sometime we shall haply remember with delight. Through chequered fortunes, through many perilous ways, we steer for Latium, where destiny points us a quiet home. There the realm of Troy may rise again unforbidden. Keep heart, and endure till prosperous ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... go the whole hog." George, who had laid off every penny, and a few besides, and stood to win, however it came out, grinned down on him from his bulky height, with the words: "So ho, my wild one!" for after a chequered apprenticeship weathered with the money of a deeply complaining Roger, his Forsyte blood was beginning to stand him in good stead in the profession ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Parliament, and its political history had been chequered. When first I came to know it, the two members were Mr. Samuel George Smith and Sir Nathaniel de Rothschild (afterwards Lord Rothschild). Mr. Smith was a Tory. Sir Nathaniel professed to be a Liberal; but, as his Liberalism was of the sort which had ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... her architect, Solomon Debrosse, to build a new palace in the style of the Pitti at Florence. The work was begun in 1615, and resulted in the picturesque but somewhat Gallicised Italian palace which, after descending to Gaston of Orleans and his daughter the Grande Mademoiselle, ends a chequered career as palace, revolutionary prison, house of peers, and socialist meeting-place by becoming the respectable and dull Senate-house of the third Republic. The beautiful Renaissance gardens have suffered but few changes; adorned with Debrosse's picturesque fountain, they form one of the most ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... the shadow of the pillars at the end of the "Bocca di Piazza," and then we forget them all; for between those pillars there opens a great light, and, in the midst of it, as we advance slowly, the vast tower of St. Mark seems to lift itself visibly forth from the level field of chequered stones; and, on each side, the countless arches prolong themselves into ranged symmetry, as if the rugged and irregular houses that pressed together above us in the dark alley had been struck back into sudden obedience ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... the noonday light, Are scenes whereof I love the sight,— Broad pictures of the lower world Beneath my gladdened eyes unfurled. Irradiate distances reveal Fair nature wed to human weal; The rolling valley made a plain; Its chequered squares of grass and grain; The silvery rye, the golden wheat, The flowery elders where they meet,— Ay, even the springing corn I see, And garden haunts of bird and bee; And where, in daisied meadows, shines The wandering river ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... sad, harmonies that will soothe sadness. If longing for home fill the mind, the dear scenes that cluster there are painted in many a song. Requiems to the loved departed are also here. Indeed, almost every scene to which the chequered life of man is subject is here made the refrain of song. For ...
— Rollo in Holland • Jacob Abbott
... Under the hill on which the ruins stand is the "Cavern of the Peak," with a fine entrance in a gloomy recess formed by a chasm in the rocks. This entrance makes a Gothic arch over one thousand feet wide, above which the rock towers nearly three hundred feet, and it is chequered with colored stones. Within is a vast flat-roofed cavern, at the farther side being a lake over which the visitors are ferried in a boat. Other caverns are within, the entire cave extending nearly a half mile, a little river ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... minor hills which lay round its base: all were melted into perfect unity: and from the height of its main range the whole seemed within a quarter of a mile from the spot which he himself occupied. Between this and the abbey lay a level lawn, chequered with moonlight and the mighty shadows of Snowdon. Of the abbey itself many parts appeared in the distance; sullen recesses which were suddenly and partially revealed by the fluctuating glare of the fire; aerial windows through which the sky gleamed ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. II. • Thomas De Quincey
... chequered existence of this pioneer among Canadian literary associations, one day, above all others is likely from the preparations—pageant and speeches which marked it, to be long remembered among Quebecers as a red letter ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... suitor, while the union of several sheriffdoms under some of its members connected it closely with the local courts. As a financial body, its chief work lay in the assessment and collection of the revenue. In this capacity it took the name of the Court of Exchequer from the chequered table, much like a chess-board, at which it sat and on which accounts were rendered. In their financial capacity its justices became "barons of the Exchequer." Twice every year the sheriff of each county appeared before these barons and rendered ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... central aisle was chequered with light and shade in broken outlines; the shades seeming cooler and more soothing than ever shade was, and the lights like patches of amber diamond animated with heavenly fire. And above, from west to east the blue sky vaulted the ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... "'December 27, 1838. "'My Dear Father,—Through all the chances, changes, and vicissitudes of my chequered life, I never had a task so painful to my mangled feelings as the present one, of addressing you from this doleful spot—my sea-girt prison, on the beach of which I stand a monument of destruction, driven by the adverse winds of fate to ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... apprehensions which are the material of future thought and, to a great extent, the rule of future conduct. I have been to school in both countries, and I found, in the boys of the North, something at once rougher and more tender, at once more reserve and more expansion, a greater habitual distance chequered by glimpses of a nearer intimacy, and on the whole wider extremes of temperament and sensibility. The boy of the South seems more wholesome, but less thoughtful; he gives himself to games as to a business, striving to excel, but is not readily transported by imagination; the type ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... be too much a matter of the tides and the stones. Even the little trellises of the traghetti count charmingly as reminders, amid so much artifice, of the woodland nature of man. The vine-leaves, trained on horizontal poles, make a roof of chequered shade for the gondoliers and ferrymen, who doze there according to opportunity, or chatter or hail the approaching "fare." There is no "hum" in Venice, so that their voices travel far; they enter your windows and mingle even with your dreams. ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... monastery seems to have occupied the same site throughout its chequered history; but the 'Memoriale' states that Aldred began the new church 'a little further from the place where it had first stood, and nearer to ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Gloucester [2nd ed.] • H. J. L. J. Masse
... her as she turned into the garden. The shadows of the ilex-avenue chequered her straw bonnet, her prim black cape, her white skirt. There had been no meddling of freakish hands with her dark hair this morning. It was tightly plaited at the back of her head. Her plain sun-shade, her black kid ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of the sunny month of May, and the declining rays of the sun penetrated the thick foliage of an old English forest, lighting up in chequered pattern the velvet sward thick with moss, and casting uncertain rays as the wind shook the boughs. Every bush seemed instinct with life, for April showers and May sun had united to force each leaf and spray into its fairest development, and ...
— Edwy the Fair or the First Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... at the scene before him with indescribable amazement! He had often witnessed strange things in the course of his short though chequered life, but he had never seen anything like this. Many a dream of the most extravagant nature had surrounded his pillow with creatures of curious form and scenes of magic beauty, but never before, either by actual observation or in nightly vision, had Ned Sinton beheld a scene ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne
... the "Mars," "to paint the ship a la Nelson, which most of the fleet are doing." This, according to the admiral's biographers, was with two yellow streaks, but the portholes black, which gave the sides an appearance of being chequered. ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. II. (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... often the men—perhaps even our M.C. himself—wore in summer trousers made of linen cloth, for which the yarn was spun at home by the maids, and was then taken to the weaver's to be made into cloth. Part of the linen yarn was dyed blue, and, mingled with white or unbleached yarn, was woven into a chequered stuff for the curtains of servants' beds and for dresses for the maids and aprons for their mistresses. In view of the fact that all the bed-linen and most of the table-linen was thus made at home, one cannot wonder that a house-wife's linen-closet ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... We then sat together, under the chequered shade of the big tree which towered over our table ... Baxter waxed as eloquent as an angel ... the ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... whose enormous disc, muffled in cloud, was shining lividly in the weird sky. At one part of the limb a range of lofty mountain peaks rose above the clouds and chequered ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... them, the white sod warm below, and already chequered here and there with green; and, advancing in long battalion, crane and goose and mallard came up from the south to follow the sun towards the Pole. The iron winter had fled before it, and all nature smiled; but Hetty, who had often swept ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... Biddy; "I declare you're bringing quite a new-sense to all the square, vat vith your hurdy-gurdy vonien, French true-baw-dears, and barrel organ-grinders, nobody has no peace not at all in the neighbourhood." During this elegant colloquy, the immortal Mr. Punch had reared his chequered theatre upon the pavement opposite, the confederate showman had concealed himself beneath the woollen drapery, and the Italian comedian had just commenced his merry note of preparation by squeaking some of ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... been darkness. He saw nothing, felt nothing, except a sort of long sea-sickness, and then suddenly he was not being moved. He could see now. He could feel. He was being held tight in a sort of vice—a vice covered with chequered cloth. It looked like the pattern, very much exaggerated, of his school knickerbockers. It was. He was being held between the hard, relentless knees of that creature that had once been Lord Hugh, and to whose ...
— The Magic World • Edith Nesbit
... unceasing exercise of the memory, in search of wonderful thoughts and allusions, and the same contempt for the subject, except as the medium of displaying the author's learning and ingenuity, marks the style of Davenant, though in a less degree than that of the metaphysical poets, and though chequered with many examples of a simpler and chaster character. Some part of this deviation was, perhaps, owing to the nature of the stanza; for the structure of the quatrain prohibited the bard, who used it, from ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... luck. Nay, I have had some omens: I got out of bed backwards too this morning, without premeditation; pretty good that too; but then I stumbled coming down stairs, and met a weasel; bad omens those: some bad, some good, our lives are chequered. Mirth and sorrow, want and plenty, night and day, make up our time. But in troth I am pleased at my stocking; very well pleased at my stocking. Oh, here's my niece! Sirrah, go tell Sir Sampson Legend I'll wait on him if he's at leisure: —'tis now three ...
— Love for Love • William Congreve
... alternate light and shade "Sweep the long vale. Here, hovering, lowers "The shadowy cloud; there, downward pours, "Streaming direct, a flood of day, "Which from the view flies swift away; "It flies, while other shades advance, "And other streaks of sunshine glance. "Thus chequered is the life below "With gleams of joy, and clouds of woe. "Then hope not, while we journey on, "Still to be basking in the sun; "Nor fear, though now in shades ye mourn, "That sunshine will no more return. "If, by your terrors overcome, "Ye fly before the approaching gloom, "The rapid ...
— The Minstrel; or the Progress of Genius - with some other poems • James Beattie
... lady (now a nun) who was on a visit at Abbotsford during the autumn and winter of 1854, gives a very pleasing and distinct idea of the domestic life there during that brief period of happiness, which, however (as we shall see presently), was already chequered by sorrow destined in the Divine providence to become yet deeper and sadder. To this letter I am indebted for the following particulars, which I have ventured slightly to rearrange, yet keeping as closely as possible to the words ...
— Memoirs of James Robert Hope-Scott, Volume 2 • Robert Ornsby
... life chequered by a great variety of incidents, and in which I have been called upon to act in many interesting scenes, I have had an opportunity of employing my attention upon a subject of great importance; a subject intimately and inseparably connected with the happiness and ...
— ESSAYS, Political, Economical and Philosophical. Volume 1. • Benjamin Rumford
... river. These alleys, I may note in passing, were known as "chares"—a designation which used habitually to puzzle the Judges of Assize when they had to inquire into the circumstances of one of the not infrequent riots which in those days chequered the harmony of life on the banks of the Tyne. It was towards the end of July, 1853, that the rumour spread, reaching even a schoolboy like myself, that the cholera was approaching. A few weeks later it was with us in all its grim reality. Its actual appearance in the town ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... characteristic, and the one which suggests a divine plan to be fulfilled in the sum of things. It distinguishes man vitally and immeasurably from all other creatures. Fitful, often arrested, sometimes reversed, it does not cease. It may point to an ultimate solution of the enigma of our chequered being such as shall "justify the ways of God to man." This may be still the world's childhood, and the faith which seems to be collapsing may be only ...
— No Refuge but in Truth • Goldwin Smith
... as well for the body as for the mind. During my long experience, amid the vicissitudes of a chequered life, I have found that periods of profound rest at certain intervals, in addition to the ordinary hours of repose, are necessary to the wellbeing of man. And the nature as well as the period of this rest varies, according ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... father's unworthy wife, and Orsini married Victoria Accoramboni; and the deeds were done within the walls of the old house of which a fragment still remains in the Lungaretta, with a door surmounted by the chequered shield of ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... stones of a greenish color. On the left were the linen-rooms, kitchens, and servants' hall; to the right, the wood-house, coal-house, and offices, whose doors, walls, and windows were decorated with designs kept exquisitely clean. The daylight, threading its way between four red walls chequered with white lines, caught rosy tints and reflections which gave a mysterious grace and fantastic appearance to faces, ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac
... was chequered and restless. She had influence, which she used oft-times recklessly, and led less gifted people than herself into committing needless errors. She wrote and spoke with a wit and sarcasm which charmed all but those at whom ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... of the parcel in which those first copies came! What disappointment, chequered with ecstasy, at reading their own verse, unaltered, yet in print! An experience not so common then as now; to be a poetess in those days had a certain distinction, and the three sisters must have anxiously waited for a greeting. The poems had been despatched to many ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... and earnest, who carried the union of the British, separated, Provinces, and made the "Dominion," no man gave more soul and substance to the cause, by his eloquence, than Mr. d'Arcy McGee. His had been a chequered career. Beginning, like Sir George Etienne Cartier, in revolt against what he believed to be British tyranny, he ended his life, one of the most loyal, as he was one of the most eloquent, of Her Majesty's ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... growing thick and strong, and it was full of flowers, as the cowslip and the oxlip, and the chequered daffodil, and the wild tulip: the black-thorn was well-nigh done blooming, but the hawthorn was in bud, and in some places growing white. It was a fair morning, warm and cloudless, but the night had been misty, and the haze still hung ...
— The Roots of the Mountains • William Morris
... to say that this matter caused me deeper and more long-drawn-out misery than any other episode of a somewhat chequered career. I have dwelt on it at length because I think the relation reveals a moral. At that breakfast-table began a course of torture which lasted for several years. To say I was chaffed by everyone, from my father and mother down to old Larry Frane, an ex-soldier who occupied the lodge ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... commentator pure and simple, and found, but did not supply, his matter. Thus there was no danger of running dry, and as his happiest style was not indignation but good-natured raillery, his increasing prosperity, not chequered, till quite the close of his life, by any serious bodily ailment, put him more and more in the right atmosphere and temper for indulging his genius. Plymley, though very amusing, and, except in the Canning matter above referred to, not glaringly ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... Kilmarnock, however beautiful and touching in expression, will not, however, satisfy those who look for consistency in the most solemn moments of this chequered state of trial; but in perusing the summary of it, let it be remembered that he was a father; the father of those who had already suffered deeply for his adherence to Charles Edward; that he was the husband of a lady who, whatever may have been their differences, ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... Cambrian, had had a chequered early career. Indeed, it might be said that its embarrassments began at the cutting of the first sod, when Mr. Whalley, who was as ubiquitous as ever where Welsh railways were concerned, permitted himself to make some remarks, in his speech, disparaging Messrs. David Davies and Savin because ...
— The Story of the Cambrian - A Biography of a Railway • C. P. Gasquoine
... of Europe the narcissi, should choose the turf in which to flower, instead of the woods, where grass does not grow, is one of the secrets of the flower-world. So, too, the wild hyacinths grow not in the meadows, though the fritillaries, the chequered red or pale "snake flowers," are grass-lovers, and grow only in the alluvial meadows by the streams and brooks of the valleys. Early though the fritillaries are, they are a real "grass flower," flourishing best where there is some early succulent growth ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... in the earliest periods, among powerful nations, this linear decoration is more or less filled with chequered or barred shade, and begins at once to represent animal or floral form, by filling its outlines with flat shadow, or with flat colour. And here we instantly find two great divisions of temper and thought. The Greeks look upon all colour first as light; ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... both Philip V. and the cabinet of Versailles equally testified their gratitude to her. She had manifested an inflexible devotedness in the midst of reverses, and adversity had taken its full measure of her. Never, throughout the course of her chequered career, had Madame des Ursins shown more activity than during the six months which intervened between the return of the Court to Madrid and the battle of Almanza. Her position was as delicate as it was perilous. It was necessary ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... hers. And they went on in silence through Kirton hamlet, where an old man followed them with his eyes, and perhaps envied them their youth and love; and across the Ivy beck where the mill was splashing and grumbling low thunder to itself in the chequered shadow of the dell, and the miller before the door was beating flour from his hands as he whistled a modulation; and up by the high spinney, whence they saw the mountains upon either hand; and down the hill again to the back courts and ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... South Seas in those days, Jo's amiability was frequently put to the test. He sojourned, while there, in a condition of alternate calm and storm; but riotous joviality ran, like a rich vein, through all his chequered life, and lit up its most sombre phases like gleams of light on an ...
— Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader • R.M. Ballantyne
... recrossing, and now we're coming to a region of chequered fields, green and brown and yellow. I always like these varied colors of the French country. It's a beautiful land ...
— The Forest of Swords - A Story of Paris and the Marne • Joseph A. Altsheler
... extremely beautiful and very fertile, being chequered with mountains and vallies, all of which were cloathed with fine straight trees. The verdure of the meadows, and freshness of the woods, afforded a delightful prospect, insomuch that all the people believed they should have found abundance of excellent fruits. But the commodore ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... 'lecture,' as she designated it; 'testifying of the hope that was in her'-exhorting the people to embrace Jesus, and refrain from sin, the nature and origin of which she explained to them in accordance with her own most curious and original views. Through her life, and all its chequered changes, she has ever clung fast to her first permanent impressions on ...
— The Narrative of Sojourner Truth • Sojourner Truth
... two, viz., the persuasion of love, and the compulsion of force. In the case of all those who can be reached thereby the gentler means are employed. With what infinite patience were the Children of Israel led throughout their chequered career; with what divine compassion were the faltering disciples guided along the way of salvation! But where gentler means fail or are inapplicable, sterner measures are unhesitatingly sanctioned. The Bible knows nothing ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw
... Vetch had appeared at a disadvantage that was almost ridiculous; and, as Stephen Culpeper had hastened to point out, this was merely a striking illustration of the damning contrast between the Governor's chequered political career and Benham's ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... to all manner of unsuitable vehicles, to the private history of the decade. This, though sadly chequered by Mr Arnold's first domestic troubles, was on the whole prosperous, was somewhat less laborious than the earlier years, and was lightened by ever more of the social and public distractions, which no man entirely dislikes, ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... charming picture, especially if the skies overhead are blue and the sun is shining. Then the town is lying in alternate light and shade; the pavements are chequered with gabled outlines, long drawn out or foreshortened according to their position. The canal bordering the old market-place is lined with a long row of women, alternately beating linen upon boards and rinsing it in the water. ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 2, February, 1891 • Various
... began to decay mightily: as to linen, I had none a good while, except some chequered shirts which I found in the chests of the other seamen, and which I carefully preserved, because many times I could bear no other clothes on but a shirt; and it was a very great help to me, that I had among all the men's clothes of the ship almost ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe
... be helped at Oxford. The stone, with which most of the old colleges were built, was taken from a quarry close to Oxford, and began to peel off and to crumble in a very curious manner. Artists like these chequered walls, and by moonlight they are certainly picturesque, but the colleges had to think of what was safe. My own college, All Souls, has ever so many pinnacles, and we kept an architect on purpose to watch which of them were unsafe and had to be restored or replaced by new ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller
... to such sights, could not help dwelling on the exquisite beauty of the scene; on the garden of gay flowers, of every imaginable form and hue, which fringed every boulder at his feet, peeping out amid delicate fern-fans and luxuriant cushions of moss; on the chequered shade of the palms, and the cool air, which wafted down from the cataracts above the scents of a thousand flowers. Gradually his ear became accustomed to the roar, and, above its mighty undertone, he could hear the whisper of the ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... imprisonment. In 1490 John Francis married Isabella d'Este, daughter of Hercules I. Duke of Ferrara, by whom he had several children. He died at Mantua in March 1519, his widow surviving him until 1539. Among the many dignities acquired by the Marquis in the course of his singularly chequered life was that of gonfalonier of the Holy Church, conferred upon him ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. III. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... beauties are peculiar to the romantic drama. It does not (like the Old Tragedy) separate seriousness and the action, in a rigid manner, from among the whole ingredients of life; it embraces at once the whole of the chequered drama of life with all its circumstances; and while it seems only to represent subjects brought accidentally together, it satisfies the unconscious requisitions of fancy, buries us in reflections on the inexpressible signification of ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... chequered by the shade On meadows of the past, I gathered blossoms that no sun can fade No ...
— The Miracle and Other Poems • Virna Sheard
... in cue just then either to admire the Josefa's paces or to take much note of the wonderful picture presented by the river, with its brown mud-tinted waters lashed into fury by the breath of the tropical tempest and chequered here and there with the shadows of the scurrying clouds, or lighted up by the phosphorescence which tipped each wave with a crest of scintillating silvery stars. The wound in my shoulder was every moment becoming more excruciatingly painful and more ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... ours to Cordoba was in reality a little pleasure trip, got up for the special delectation of our aunt and young Mrs. Moncrieff. It formed part and parcel of the Scotchman's honeymoon, which, it must be allowed, was a very chequered one. ...
— Our Home in the Silver West - A Story of Struggle and Adventure • Gordon Stables
... the gods and the Asuras, let king Duryodhana call to mind the words thou hast spoken for bringing about peace. Today let the son of Subala, O Krishna, know that my shafts are dice, my Gandiva the box for throwing them, and my car, the chequered cloth. O Govinda, slaying Karna with keen shafts I will dispel the long sleeplessness of Kunti's son. Today the royal son of Kunti, upon the slaughter of the Suta's son by me, shall be gratified ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... Jenkins, attributed (with what justice, deponent knoweth not) to a noble and learned lord, supreme in natural theology and excitability, remarkable for versatile nose and talents, and distinguished for chequered fortunes, and "inexpressibles" to match. This learned lord, or Tomkins aforesaid, or whoever may have been the inditer of the epistle ad Jenkins, is eloquent exceedingly upon the narcotine of fashionable life: declares ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... of Annie Bragin is written in another place. It is one of the many less respectable episodes in Mulvaney's chequered career. ...
— Soldier Stories • Rudyard Kipling
... long before the performance.' It is greatly to be desired that Raleigh could have been as well advised as his contemporary and possible friend, the Huguenot poet-soldier, Agrippa d'Aubigne, who at the close of a chequered career also prepared a Histoire Universelle, in which he simply told the story of his own political party in France through those stormy years in which he himself had been an actor. We would gladly exchange all these chronicles of Semiramis and Jehoshaphat for a plain statement of ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... first a rather chequered journey: got involved in gardens, butted into houses, and had even once the misfortune to awake a sleeping family, the father of which, as I suppose, menaced me from the window with a blunderbuss. Altogether, though I had been some time gone from my companions, I was still at no great ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... away of the abundant growth and selecting a position for their camp, a great stretch of wall was laid bare, one portion of which displayed the chequered pattern and another the herring-bone ornamentation adopted by the ancient people in building up what seemed to be the remains of a great structure which might have been ...
— Dead Man's Land - Being the Voyage to Zimbambangwe of certain and uncertain • George Manville Fenn
... her by her short fore-topgallantmast, by her chequered band, and by other signs clear to a sailor's eye, and the three of us sent up a shout of delight, for it was like stumbling upon one's very home, as it were, after having been all night lost amidst the blackness and snow of the country ...
— The Honour of the Flag • W. Clark Russell
... of Danielou's successor Germain, the Acadians and their savage allies had a chequered experience indeed, but this has been already related in the ...
— Glimpses of the Past - History of the River St. John, A.D. 1604-1784 • W. O. Raymond
... supposed: she was young, slight, and full of subtle character. And with her scarlet coral beads twisted among her dark little turret curls and bows, there was piquancy and attraction in Chrissy. But her first purely disinterested and unbounded pleasure in the gaiety was grievously chequered, and it was to be feared the account she would carry home of her first ball to expectant Blackfaulds would ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... different modes and fashions optimists; at any rate in their earlier writings. They stood outside the Churches; dogmatic beliefs they tacitly put away; they were in sympathy with the Christian ideal apart from its supernatural element; they professed a vague trust in an unseen Power, chequered here and there by intimations of pantheism; they made no frontal assault upon the central positions of theology. When we turn to their emotional poetry we find that they were always decorous; there is much discourse of ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... rolled on, and how chequered by passing events! Chapultepec had fallen, the city of Mexico was taken, and peace, thrice glorious peace, had waved her pinions over the land of war. The volunteers were joyfully hastening to their homes, and, among the rest, I once more ...
— Thrilling Adventures by Land and Sea • James O. Brayman
... vessel, of about our own tonnage, painted black with a broad white ribbon chequered with false ports; she had a Dutch look about her; and, from her model, was evidently somewhat elderly. She had been ship-rigged, and from the appearance of the wreckage alongside had been caught unawares, very probably by the recent hurricane, and dismasted. ...
— The First Mate - The Story of a Strange Cruise • Harry Collingwood
... of which have not been rebuilt, and which has a chequered pavement of uncertain date, was for some centuries the burial-place of the owners of Studley Royal, and is often called the Mallory Chapel. A curious recess in the south wall is concealed by the monument of John Aislabie of Studley, Chancellor of the Exchequer ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Ripon - A Short History of the Church and a Description of Its Fabric • Cecil Walter Charles Hallett
... size, and I can well believe, as Fra Carlo informed us, that they were probably planted by the Roman colonists, established there by Titus. The gnarled, veteran boles still send forth vigorous and blossoming boughs. There were all manner of lovely lights and shades chequered over the turf and the winding path we rode. At last we reached the foot of an ascent, steeper than the Ladder of Tyre. As our horses slowly climbed to the Convent of St. Elijah, whence we already ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... the city, with the noisy streets of the busiest metropolis in Europe eddying around its walls, was a sacred island in the tumultuous main. Through the perpetual twilight, tall columnar trunks in thick profusion grew from a floor chequered with prismatic lights and sepulchral shadows. Each shaft of the petrified forest rose to a preternatural height, their many branches intermingling in the space above, to form an impenetrable canopy. Foliage, flowers and fruit of colossal ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Cindery, and of the corpulent Tapstress whom the Blacks called Mother Drum. These two women were very fond of gossiping with me; and especially did Mother Drum love to converse with me upon her own Career, which had been of the most Chequered, not to say Amazing nature. I have already hinted that at one time this Remarkable Woman had professed the Military Profession, in which she had shone with almost a Manly Brilliance; and from her various confidences—all ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... So also, when the people of a kingdom together come into covenant with the Lord. In the character of Israel as a covenanted people, there shines out a special splendour. One of the most brilliant events in Judah's chequered history is that in which, in the days of the good king Asa, "they gathered themselves together to Jerusalem and entered into a covenant to seek the Lord God of their fathers with all their heart and with all their soul; ...
— The Covenants And The Covenanters - Covenants, Sermons, and Documents of the Covenanted Reformation • Various
... to be a much chequered affair. One of the first places to which the sisters made their way was the Widow Mole's. They found it, rather beyond the church, down a lane, where it was hidden behind an overgrown thorn hedge, and they would scarcely have found it at all, if a three-year-old ...
— The Carbonels • Charlotte M. Yonge
... sank, and the moon rose in great beauty, throwing a silvery light upon the surface of the water chequered by the dark shadows of the surrounding trees. Suddenly the hoarse bark of an elk sounded within a short distance, and I could distinguish two or three dark forms on the opposite bank. The shrill and continual barking of spotted deer now approaching nearer ...
— The Rifle and The Hound in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... No, my young unknown friend, I have far too much with which to reproach myself, have brought from the conflicts of a changeful life a lacerated heart, but I have never reached the point where that heart ceased to cherish Fanny Ebers among the most sacred memories of my chequered career. How often her loved image appears before me when, in lonely twilight hours, I recall ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the chattering of women, whose Christian names we only knew. And then the returning in open carriages rolling through the white dust beneath the immense heavy dome of the summer night, when the dusty darkness of the street is chequered by a passing glimpse of light skirt or flying feather, and the moon looms like a magic ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... and Clara could hold the conversations respecting her, which were their chief comfort and relief. If they were certain that Oliver was busy, and James writing letters, they would walk up and down the sheltered alley, where Louis had last year comforted Clara. The green twilight and chequered shade well accorded with the state of their minds, darkened, indeed, by one of the severest losses that could ever befall either of them, and yet it was a sorrow full of thankfulness ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge
... partly of a warm brown sandstone, partly of stone of a pale yellow or drab colour, the two kinds being in many places mixed so as to give the walls a chequered appearance. This may be noticed both outside and inside the building. In some of the walls the stones are used irregularly, in others they are carefully squared. The red stone is to be met with in ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: Wimborne Minster and Christchurch Priory • Thomas Perkins
... with her books and her salon and her cavalier, she spent the rest of her chequered life until the end came one day in 1824; and her last resting-place was, as she wished it to be, by the side of her beloved Alfieri. In the Church of Santa Croce, in Florence, midway between the tombs of Michael Angelo and Machiavelli, the two ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... were of a bright copper colour, so different from black that one had painted his thighs with black chequered lines which made his skin very much resemble ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... chequered all over; and it was very large, and opened its mouth very wide, and showed its red tongue. It would have killed me if it had bitten me, ...
— Lady Mary and her Nurse • Catharine Parr Traill
... say, in my thoughts—whether I should take back the raft; but this appeared impracticable; so I resolved to go as before, when the tide was down; and I did so, only that I stripped before I went from my hut, having nothing on but my chequered shirt, a pair of linen drawers, and a pair of pumps on ...
— The Junior Classics, V5 • Edited by William Patten
... brigand; rebel, king, fugitive, saint, sinner, psalmist, penitent—he lived a life full of strongly marked alternations, and 'the times that went over him' were singularly separate and different from each other. There are very few of us who have such chequered lives as his. But the principle which dictated the selection by the chronicler of this somewhat strange phrase is true about the life of ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... and the gaunt telegraph posts came up out of the far horizon and sank into the east, they raced across the wide levels. The red dawns burned behind them, the sunsets flamed ahead, and still there was only dust and grass, chequered here and there with bands of stubble, while driving grit and ugliness were the salient features of the little stations ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... I, Upon the pinions of the wind! All human dwellings left behind, We sped like meteors through the sky, When with its crackling sound the night[262] Is chequered with the Northern light. Town—village—none were on our track, But a wild plain of far extent, 430 And bounded by a forest black[263]; And, save the scarce seen battlement On distant heights of some strong hold, Against the Tartars built of old, No ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... a small, latticed place, overgrown with the Seven Sisters rose, and set in a breast-high ring of box opening here and there to the garden paths. A tulip tree towered above the gravel space before it, and two steps led to a floor chequered with light and shade, and to a rustic chair and table. Jacqueline was not within the summer-house; she sat in the doorway, upon the step. She was not reading. She sat bowed together, her head upon her folded arms, a ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... this country are a most remarkable success. Generally speaking the career of Joint Stock Companies in this country has been chequered. Adam Smith, many years since, threw out many pregnant hints on the difficulty of such undertakings—hints which even after so many years will well repay perusal. But joint stock banking has been an exception to this ...
— Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market • Walter Bagehot
... writes Madame de Hell, "in an enchanted region, though but just beyond the verge of the steppes. The faint lines that chequered the sky gradually assumed a greater distinctness of form and colour; at first the mountains seemed so many light, transparent vapours, floating upon the wind; but by degrees the airy vision developed into forest-crowned ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... her enforced banishment, though it gradually became impossible for those who had learned to love her so dearly to blind themselves to the fact that the gentle old woman was not far from the end of her chequered and at one time ...
— Robin Redbreast - A Story for Girls • Mary Louisa Molesworth
... a fixed design, without a preconceived choice, what inspiration spontaneously dictated to him; it is thus that there arose in his music, without solicitation, without effort, the most idealised form of the emotions which had animated his childhood, chequered his adolescence, and embellished his youth...Without making any pretence to it, he collected into a luminous sheaf sentiments confusedly felt by all in his country, fragmentarily disseminated in their ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... at last, she stepped out under the yew-trees and wondered why she had not made her escape before. She was the first to leave the church, and wandering down the path through the hot, chequered sunlight she saw the shining car drawn up at the gate, and a young chauffeur waiting at the door. She glanced at him as she passed, and was surprised for a second to find him gazing at her with a curious intentness. He lowered his eyes the moment they met hers, and ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell
... is the story of Vanessa after she had gone to Ireland, as Stella had gone before, to be near the presence of Swift. Her life was one of deep seclusion, chequered only by the occasional visits of the man she adored, each of which she commemorated by planting with her own hand a laurel in the garden where they met. When all her devotion and her offerings had failed to impress him, she sent him ...
— The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees • Mary Caroline Crawford
... droll little chemin de fer de ceinture I love this tramway better. It speeds along the quays between the Seine and the garden of the Champs Elysees, through miles of chestnut bloom, the roadway chequered with shadows of chestnut leaves; the branches meet overhead, and in a faint delirium of the senses I catch at a bloom, cherish it for a moment, and cast it away. The plucky little steamboats are making for the landing-places, stemming the ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... paid to naked talent? If the attention of posterity rested here, where were the lessons of wisdom to be learnt from his example? His path through the world was marked by strong outlines, and instruction is to be derived from every feature of his mind, and every portion of his eventful and chequered life. In all the aspects of his character, he was probably the most singular man that has appeared in this country during the preceding century, and the leading incidents of whose life ought to stand ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... this time about thirty-five years of age, described as "taking" in appearance, of a fair complexion, and rather well educated. She had led a somewhat chequered married life with a gentleman named Bailey, from whom she continued in receipt of a weekly allowance until she passed under the protection of Peace. Her first meeting with her future lover took place on the occasion of Peace inviting Mrs. Adamson ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... best we could with a doom we were unable to avert. Often afterwards it was a source of melancholy pleasure to some of his comrades that he had not been induced to incur what he regarded as guilt. The lofty consciousness of unerring rectitude which sustained his fortitude could not fail to be chequered by the recollection of acts which in his own estimation were not purely blameless. Had success attended the suggested proposals, they would receive the world's unqualified approval; while failure, explained through the medium of a malicious law, and a warped and cowardly public opinion, would brand ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... baseness of his desire; he therefore applied to another of her passions, that proved the bane of her virtue. This was her timidity, which at first being constitutional, was afterwards increased by the circumstances of her education, and now aggravated by the artful conversation of Fathom, which he chequered with dismal stories of omens, portents, prophecies, and apparitions, delivered upon such unquestionable testimony, and with such marks of conviction, as captivated the belief of the devoted Celinda, and filled ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... because they have beaten you," said the Emperor, and we younger men turned away our faces and smiled. But Ney and Foy were grave and serious. All the time the English line, chequered with red and blue and dotted with batteries, was drawn up silent and watchful within a long musket-shot of us. On the other side of the shallow valley our own people, having finished their soup, were assembling for the battle. It had rained very heavily, but at this moment the ...
— The Adventures of Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... of the pony's hoofs sounded through the silence, in a cheerful trot upon the white roads. They were traversing an open, breezy country, chequered with wooded hollows, where generally a village sought shelter from the winds. And these patches of foliage were golden and red in the meditative autumn sunshine, which seemed as if it were a little sad ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... day the necessity came for me to visit a house agent. Life has these chequered moments. There is something of despatch and order wanting about most house-agents, possibly the result of their very odd and difficult business, which is for the greater part carried on with people who don't know their own minds ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156., March 5, 1919 • Various
... frolic, by leaning out of a boat to embrace the reflection of the moon. Tu Fu, A.D. 712-770, is generally ranked with Li Po, the two being jointly spoken of as the chief poets of their age. The former had indeed such a high opinion of his own poetry that he prescribed it for malarial fever. He led a chequered and wandering life, and died from the effects of eating roast beef and drinking white wine to excess, immediately after a long fast. Po Chue-i, A.D. 772-846, was a very prolific poet. He held several high official posts, but found ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... Voldemar!" says the pretty lady, with a mournful smile. "My life has been so full, so varied, so chequered. Above all, I am unhappy. I am a suffering soul in some page of Dostoevsky. Reveal my soul to the world, Voldemar. Reveal that hapless soul. You are a psychologist. We have not been in the train an hour together, and you have already fathomed ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... after the roots of such wild plants as he himself thought pretty, or such as he found (one can hardly tell how) were considered by better judges to be worthy of a place in the parterre. The different orchises, for instance, the white and lilac primrose, the golden oxslip, the lily of the valley, the chequered fritillary, which blows so freely along the banks of the Kennett, and the purple campanula which covers with equal profusion the meadows of the Thames, all found their way to Phoebe's flower-plats. He brought her in summer ...
— Jesse Cliffe • Mary Russell Mitford
... situation is entirely worthy of being a royal residence, a more beautiful being scarce to be found; for, from the brow of a gentle rising, it enjoys the prospect of an even and green country; its front commands a valley extended every way, and chequered with arable lands and pasturage, clothed up and down with groves, and watered by that gentlest of rivers, the Thames; behind rise several hills, but neither steep nor very high, crowned with woods, and seeming designed by Nature herself for ...
— Travels in England and Fragmenta Regalia • Paul Hentzner and Sir Robert Naunton
... say, in my thoughts, whether I should take back the raft, but this appeared impracticable; so I resolved to go as before, when the tide was down; and I did so, only that I stripped before I went from my hut, having nothing on but a chequered shirt and a pair of linen drawers, and a pair of pumps on ...
— The Children's Hour, v 5. Stories From Seven Old Favorites • Eva March Tappan
... can be. The cliffs near Paignton are red, nearer Torquay they are a warm russet, alternating with a rosy grey where limestone comes to the surface; and some of the rocks beneath, shining with salt water, are pink, interlined with white veins. In fair weather the warm tints of these cliffs, chequered by a green lattice-work of plants and bushes, and the rich, full colours of the sea, make a picture that is ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... But the rust of disappointment has dried up his better nature; his heart is wrung with the shafts of ingratitude—all the fierce passions of his nature, hate, scorn and revenge, rise up in the one stormy outburst of his soul. He casts upon her a look of withering scorn, the past of that life so chequered flashes vividly through his thoughts, his hate deepens, he hurls her from him, invokes a curse upon her head, and shuts her from his sight. "Mine will be the retribution!" he says, ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... vocation—namely, Boston, New York and Philadelphia—I have never taught in the public schools; and any survey of the educational facilities of the country that leaves them out would resemble a performance of Hamlet with the role of the prince omitted. Nevertheless, my brief sojourn here has been a chequered and, in some respects, an amusing one; and any one who chooses to hear my record of it may add as much salt as he pleases, for I promise to be perfectly frank ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... advertisements and in the House of Lords. The dozen chairs suggested an acute bodily discomfort such as would only be tolerated by a sitter all of whose sensory faculties were centred in his palate. On a broken chair in a corner was an insecure pile of books. A smaller table was covered with a chequered cloth on which were a few plates. Along one wall, under the window, ran a pitch-pine sofa upholstered with a stuff slightly dissimilar from that on the table. The mattress of the sofa was uneven and its surface wrinkled, and old newspapers and pieces of brown paper ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... watching processes that are controllable and results that with patience are assured. But in the midst of this infinity I know no finite world so complete and satisfying as that I enter when I take down the chessmen and marshal my knights and squires on the chequered field. It is then I am truly happy. I have closed the door on the infinite and inexplicable and have come into a kingdom where justice reigns, where cause and effect follow "as the night the day," and where, come victory or come defeat, the sky is always ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... played tennis. There was a court at one end of the lawn beneath the trees, all chequered with sunlight and mingled shadow; very beautiful, Norah thought, though Mr. Spillikins explained that the spotted light put him off his game. In fact, it was owing entirely to this bad light that Mr. Spillikins's fast drives, ...
— Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich • Stephen Leacock
... career, contain, perhaps, as strong and simple a picture as we shall anywhere find of hardy English youth,—its proud self-sufficingness and careless independence of all human things. Excitement, and thought, and joy, seem to come at once at its bidding; and the chequered and struggling existence of adult men seems something which it need never enter, and ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... known as Mrs. Behn, or "the divine Astraea"; "a gentlewoman by birth, of a good family in the city of Canterbury." Her father was appointed to a colonial office in the West Indies, where he took his family while Mrs. Behn was yet a young girl. There the future authoress began a chequered life by living on a plantation among rough and lawless colonists, and there she made the acquaintance of the slave Oroonoko, whose sad story she afterward made known to the world. On her return to England, ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... more able, my honoured friend, to return you, with my own hand, thanks for the many instances of your friendship, and particularly for your kind anxiety in this last disaster, that my evil genius had in store for me. However, life is chequered—joy and sorrow—for on Saturday morning last, Mrs. Burns made me a present of a fine boy; rather stouter, but not so handsome as your godson was at his time of life. Indeed I look on your little namesake to be my chef d'oeuvre in that species of manufacture, as I look on Tam o' Shanter to ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... the rotundity of his figure, it has never been able to make his collars snowy or his conversation refined. He is often found upon the Committees of new Clubs which start with a blare of journalistic trumpets upon a chequered existence, only to perish in contempt a few years afterwards. But while they last he attends them in the hope of picking up a friend who may be valuable, or some gossip which he may turn to account. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, July 12, 1890 • Various
... knowledge he affords them an example. His subjects number about 14 millions, but when in conversation I happened to allude to a remote border village, his subsequent remarks made me wonder whether he had just been reading an article about the chequered history of that little place. He is, in fact, like his late grandfather of Montenegro, the father of his people. But they have different ideas about the duties of a father; and while Nikita's laugh was pretty grim, the deep whole-hearted laugh of Alexander ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... are the cynic, and have no feeling: and you sneer because that grief is unintelligible to you which touches my finer sensibility. The OLD-CLOTHES'-MAN had been defeated in one of the daily battles of his most interesting, chequered, ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of the floor of chequered marbles, black and white, stood a carved table of black oak. By this he halted, leaning lightly against it whilst she sat enthroned in the great ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... he sat staring in front of him as the light of the lamp grew dim in the coming light of day, there was no movement anywhere save for the chequered curtain behind his friend, which stirred as though blown by the wind of dawn; they seemed to be alone, quite alone in the desert, these two who had been known as David and Jonathan in the care-free ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... crowded with people, who seem to enjoy the repose which universally prevails, and from whom no sound is to be heard which can break the stillness or serenity of the scene. The regularity of the forms is wholly lost in the masses of light and shadow that are there displayed; the foliage throws a chequered shade over the ground beneath, while the different vistas of the Elysian Fields are seen in that soft and mellow light by which the radiance of the moon is so peculiarly distinguished. After passing through these favourite scenes of the ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... doctrines, fortunes of the individual man. It was not so with Pattison. He was essentially a bookman, but of that high type—the only type that is worthy of a spark of our admiration—which explores through books the voyages of the human reason, the shifting impulses of the human heart, the chequered fortunes of great human conceptions. Pattison knew that he is very poorly equipped for the art of criticism who has not trained himself in the observant analysis of character, and has not realised that the writer ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 5: On Pattison's Memoirs • John Morley
... coast in all directions was much admired; the vegetation was most luxuriant; every hill was chequered with plantations, and every valley was watered by a sparkling stream. The survey of the group being at length completed, the Resolution stood away towards New Zealand. The supposed continent of Quiros had dwindled into a small island, and, as Captain Cook took his departure ...
— Captain Cook - His Life, Voyages, and Discoveries • W.H.G. Kingston
... chequered and inglorious history there is one day to be remembered. On April 11, 1794, 130 merchantmen, laden with food-supplies, sailed from Chesapeake Bay for the ports of France. Lord Howe went out to intercept them; and on May 16 the French fleet left Brest to protect ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... the bank, under the tall pines, where sun and shadow chequered the russet carpet of pine-needles, there, white-robed, sat Susanna: white-robed, hatless, gloveless. She was waving her hand, softly, in a gesture invocative of caution; but her eyes ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... that's something," Archelaus put in with affability, his spirits rising as the danger drew nearer. "Talk about Garrison Hill! She seems to be pretty well at home on Inniscaw, too." For Vashti, halting in the chequered sunlight beneath a trellised arch, had reached up the hooked handle of her sunshade to draw down the spray of a late autumnal rose, and stood for a ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... of the single gas burner Brigit caught at once the predominating note of the house: its intense and wonderful cleanliness. The walls, painted white, were snowy, the chequered oilcloth under her feet as spotless as if it had that moment come from the shop, and the slender handrail of the steep staircase glanced with polish, drawing an arrow of ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... Some hearts are like the bright Tree-chequered spaces, flecked with sun and shade, Where gathered in old days the youth and maid To woo, and weave their dances: with the night They cease their flutings, and the next day's light Finds the smooth green ...
— Artemis to Actaeon and Other Worlds • Edith Wharton
... cherishing a natural prejudice in favour of his own productions, Mr. Punch forbears to commend this little volume, but he may permit himself to say that, in the judgment of The Daily News, which is above suspicion of bias, it is calculated to provoke "a sorrow chequered ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 1, 1919 • Various
... spoke to me as plainly and distinctly as any one could. He said he knew he would surprise me when he talked like other folks; but he would give me a good reason for having seemed to be dumb. He then gave me a sketch of his chequered career. He was once a slave, but had been a free man between thirty and forty years. At the age of twenty, he was purchased from his master, at Petersburg, Virginia, to save his life, by a band of outlaws of which he became a member, ...
— Secret Band of Brothers • Jonathan Harrington Green
... for a portrait, motionless, watching the chequered lights and shades on the tree-trunks, the children playing opposite the school previous to entering for the morning lesson, the reapers in a field afar off. The certainty of possession had not come, and there was nothing to mitigate the youth's ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... round the Lodge reminds us of the travels of human life, in which Masonry is an enlightened, a safe, and a pleasant path. Its tesselated pavement of Mosaic-work intimates to us the chequered diversity and uncertainty of human affairs. Our step ...
— Masonic Monitor of the Degrees of Entered Apprentice, Fellow Craft and Master Mason • George Thornburgh
... the walk up from the quayside was one of the many milestones in his chequered life. He talked readily. He listened, too. But under it all his thought was busy. The mystery of Father Adam's letter was no longer a mystery. He understood. But he was also puzzled. How had this thing come about? How had Father Adam learned of this visit? How ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... of her kind, and the cravings of her sex, had been as happy as the chequered circumstances of her outer life would permit; but now for the first time her peace of mind was disturbed, and she felt the heaving of the ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... houses may, perhaps, be instanced as the best specimen of its class,—and its class in our opinion, is the best—to be met with in Cheshire, considered with reference either to the finished decoration of its exterior, rich in the chequered coloring we have alluded to, preserved with a care and neatness almost Dutch, or to the consistent taste exhibited by its possessor to the restoration and maintenance of all its original and truly national ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... rouge and no powder, and the brown of lashes and brows was free from the black water-paint. She raked under the bed with a faded sunshade till she found an old brown portmanteau. Her smart black and white dress was changed for a black one, of a mode passee these three years. A gray chequered golf cape and the dulled hat ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... united, should more than ever walk warily, and distrust the counsels of those who occasionally in Great Britain spoke lightly of war. It was easy to talk about the victories of Marlborough and Wellington; but the military history of England was really a very chequered one, and of this Englishmen were, unfortunately, mostly unaware. Our military prestige had never been great in the commencement of our wars, and, as he had said in the recent debates on the Boer War, [Footnote: House of Commons, February 1st, 1900] ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... dropped a little; he looked out with veiled eyes upon the lake chequered with the blue and white of its inverted sky. Nelly guessed—trembling—at the procession of images that was passing through them; and felt for a moment strangely ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... fellow-adventurers were Junot and Marmont. The former was the child of plain French burghers, twenty-three years old, a daring, swaggering youth, indifferent to danger, already an intimate of Napoleon's, having been his secretary at Toulon. His chequered destiny was interwoven with that of his friend and he came to high position. But though faithful to the end, he was always erratic and troublesome; and in an attack of morbid chagrin he came to a violent end in 1813. ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... Pasha of Yannina, and laid final siege on April 27 to Mesolonghi, just a year after Byron had died of fever within its walls. The Greeks were magnificent in their defence of these frail mud-bastions, and they more than held their own in the amphibious warfare of the lagoons. The struggle was chequered by the continual coming and going of the Greek and Ottoman fleets. They were indeed the decisive factor; for without the supporting squadron Rashid would have found himself in the same straits as his predecessors at the approach of autumn, while ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... Weird Sisters crooning over their horrible cauldron? In Germany the forests are magic-mad. Walking under the huge oaks of the Thuringian Forest or the Taunus, or in the pine woods of Hesse, one can see the flutter of airy garments in the chequered sunlight falling upon fern and moss; one can glimpse goblins and kobolds hiding behind the roots and rocks; one can hear the King of the Willows[1] and the Bride of the Wind moaning and calling ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... later life, that of all the impositions he had had in the course of his chequered career, none had been more abominable and wearisome than this. Oh, how he got to detest that governess and her ward, and how sickening their talk became before ...
— The Cock-House at Fellsgarth • Talbot Baines Reed
... him. She was leaning in front of her maidens, beside a richly-carved canopy of state, underneath which, on days of feudal hospitality and pomp, presided the master of the banquet. Behind, a long and richly-variegated window poured down a chequered halo of glory around her form. She seemed an angel of light, issuing from that fountain of splendour, and irradiating the ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... primitive upheaval, from the summits of which you find half England unrolled at your feet. A dozen broad counties, within the scope of your vision, commingle their green exhalations. Closely beneath us lay the dark rich hedgy flats and the copse-chequered slopes, white with the blossom of apples. At widely opposite points of the expanse two great towers of cathedrals rose sharply out of a reddish blur of habitation, taking ...
— A Passionate Pilgrim • Henry James
... marble figure of Mary is stretched upon the tomb, round which is an iron railing, much corroded, bearing her national emblem—the thistle. I was weary with wandering, and sat down to rest myself at the monument, revolving in my mind the chequered and ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various
... Fanny, awfully hove-to with rheumatics and injuries received upon the field of sport and glory, chasing pigs, was unable to go up and down stairs, so she sat upon the back verandah, and my work was chequered by her cries. "Paul, you take a spade to do that—dig a hole first. If you do that, you'll cut your foot off! Here, you boy, what you do there? You no get work? You go find Simele; he give you work. Peni, you tell this boy he go find Simele; ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... thoughts, whether I should take back the raft; but this appeared impracticable: so I resolved to go as before, when the tide was down; and I did so, only that I stripped before I went from my hut; having nothing on but a chequered shirt, a pair of linen drawers, and a pair of ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe Of York, Mariner, Vol. 1 • Daniel Defoe
... against which the tide beat in dalliance—the chafed spray catching and reflecting the glories of the setting sun—ran smoothly up a slope of some thirty yards; beyond which, the orange trees, in their greenest foliage, chequered with their shade the white ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... of Mesopotamia proper (Gezira) must have shared the chequered history of that land (see MESOPOTAMIA.) Of 'Ana's fortunes under the early Babylonian empire the records have not yet been unearthed; but in a letter dating from the third millennium B.C., six men of Hanat (Ha-na-atK1) are mentioned in a statement as to certain disturbances ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... I given you a circumstantial detail of my Italian expedition, during which I was exposed to a great number of hardships, which I thought my weakened constitution could not have bore; as well as to violent fits of passion, chequered, however, with transports of a more agreeable nature; insomuch that I may say I was for two months continually agitated either in mind or body, and very often in both at the same time. As my disorder at first arose ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... the same door. They were all eating similar food simultaneously; they began together and they finished together. The flies that haunted the paper-bunches which hung from the chandeliers to the level of the flower-vases, were more free. The sole event that chequered the exact regularity of the repast was the occasional arrival of a wine-bottle for one of the guests. The receiver of the wine-bottle signed a small paper in exchange for it and wrote largely a number on the label of the bottle; then, staring at the number and fearing that after all ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... become at once part of the company which sits down to the table d'hote. There are ten people besides ourselves, and not a commonplace or colorless character among them. My left-hand neighbor is a somewhat slangy young gentleman in a suit of chequered clothes, who carves the meats, being at the head of the table; and my happy propinquity secures me the honor of selection by the young gentleman as the recipient of his observations: a toughish round of beef which he is called upon to carve evokes from him an aside to the effect that ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various |
