"Mottled" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... egg's lower fragment, Now the solid earth was fashioned, From the cracked egg's upper fragment, Rose the lofty arch of heaven, From the yolk, the upper portion, Now became the sun's bright lustre; From the white, the upper portion, Rose the moon that shines so brightly; 240 Whatso in the egg was mottled, Now became the stars in heaven, Whatso in the egg was blackish, In the air as ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous
... the Greek [phos] (phos), which means light, is, as we have already said, the innermost portion of the sun which can be seen. Examined through a good telescope it shows a finely mottled structure, as of brilliant granules, somewhat like rice grains, with small dark spaces lying in between them. It has been supposed that we have here the process of some system of circulation by ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... a mile above and below, were nearly bare of trees, being covered instead with a luxuriant growth of blue-grass, the peculiar green whereof was relieved with pleasing effect by the rich purple bloom of the iron-weed, which in dense patches mottled all the glade. If we may except the grass and iron-weeds, which grew everywhere, and the clump of trees from out of which was rising the smoke of the Indian camp-fire, the opposite hill showed a bare front, and sloped steeply, but smoothly, to the edge of ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady
... Mother Mit-chee knew enough to sit perfectly still, and her mottled feathers blended so exactly with the tree trunks and the dead leaves about her that only the sharp eyes of the Finder of the Magic ...
— The Magic Speech Flower - or Little Luke and His Animal Friends • Melvin Hix
... gambling-saloons and behind liquor-bars), was far from being a thing of beauty. He was so obnoxiously gross and shapeless, that it seemed as if he did it on purpose and to be irritating. His fat head was big enough to make a dwarf of, hunchback and all. His mottled cheeks were vast and pendulous to that degree that they inspired the imaginative beholder with terror, as reminding him of avalanches and landslides which might slip their hold at the slightest shock and plunge downward in a path of destruction. One puffy eyelid drooped in a sinister way; ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... forest, or built its nest in the tree-tops or house-tops, or to one that was black, yellow, or red. Having to conciliate all these conditions, and do the best with the material at hand, they pitched upon a rather large, brownish bird, in a drab waistcoat, slightly mottled, and with a loud, cracked voice, which nobody ever liked. So it never became a favorite, even to those who first gave it the name of lark. It was not its only defect that it lacked an ear and voice for music. There is always a scolding accent that marks ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... a stormy scene with the Signorina. The waves of her fury rolled up and up and broke, crashing, over Honor's rocklike calm. At last, breathless, her fat face mottled with temper, "Go, then," said the singer, and went out of the room with heavy speed and slammed the door resoundingly. But she went with Honor to her steamer at Naples and embraced her forgivingly. "Go with God," she wept. "Live a little; it is best, ...
— Play the Game! • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... load of the supplies they had brought, and carried them out under the shade of an immense pine-like tree—a gigantic column of wood that stretched far into the sky to lose its green leaves in a waving sea of foliage. The mottled sunlight of the bright star above them made them feel very much at home. Its color, intensity, and warmth were all exactly ...
— Islands of Space • John W Campbell
... the floating mass which drew a gasp from Forrester, and caused Lawton's scalp to prickle. Crawling slowly across that Sargasso-like island of noxious vegetation was a huge, elongated shape which bore a nauseous resemblance to a mottled garden slug. ...
— The Sky Trap • Frank Belknap Long
... glistened as she saw one being, at least, beside herself, rejoiced at her son's return. "Tib knows thee! poor dumb beast!" said she, smoothing down the mottled coat of her favourite; then recollecting herself, with a melancholy shake of the head, "Ah, my poor Dolph!" exclaimed she, "thy mother can help thee no longer! She can no longer help herself! What will become of ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... voice scaled up. He was close to the ragged edge, and the last push toward the breaking point had not been the Throg speech, but that message from Thorvald. If the Survey officer was going to make any move in the mottled dusk, it ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... noon, and reached Louvain at three. Though not taken so completely by surprise as we were last year, the town-house still gave us great pleasure. They were at work repairing it, and the fresh stones gave it a mottled look, but, on the whole, it is one of the most extraordinary edifices I know. It is a sort of condensation of quaintness, that is quite without a rival even in this land of laboured and curious architecture. The little ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... late as this," said Mrs. Dax, rocking herself furiously. She strongly resembled one of those mottled chargers of the nursery whose flaunting nostrils seem forever on the point of sending forth flame. Leander, the fat lady, and Miss Carmichael meekly murmured ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... Darrow of her girlhood dreams, grown rather paunchy and mottled now, and with the curling black hair but a sparse grizzled fringe, had belied Horace Winter's contemptuous opinion. He was a moneyed man now, with an extravagant wife, but no children. Hannah underwrote him for a handsome sum, received his heavy compliments with a deft detachment, heard ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... arched over the narrow path, and a wild canary, singing in the sun, hopped from bough to bough. A robin's cheery chirp came from another tree, and the clear notes of a thrush, with a mottled breast, were answered by another in the gold-green ...
— Lavender and Old Lace • Myrtle Reed
... slipped away through the early morning twilight. The next eye to gaze upon the miserable Goree was the orb of day. He peered through the uncurtained window, first deluging the sleeper in a flood of faint gold, but soon pouring upon the mottled red of his flesh a searching, white, summer heat. Goree stirred, half unconsciously, among the table's debris, and turned his face from the window. His movement dislodged a heavy law book, which ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... intolerable. The terror he felt at the prospect of a discussion with Mademoiselle Gamard increased day by day; the secret distress which blighted his life began to injure his health. One morning, as he put on his mottled blue stockings, he noticed a marked dimunition in the circumference of his calves. Horrified by so cruel and undeniable a symptom, he resolved to make an effort and appeal to the Abbe Troubert, requesting him to intervene, ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... again, they dipped playfully in tightening circles toward the plot-mottled earth. The fields expanded beneath them, and the leader brought up and hovered over a farm road whose dust already ...
— A Fine Fix • R. C. Noll
... walk, edged with pointed bricks and bordered by cowslips and wallflowers, which led through the short garden to the three stone steps and the tall iron gate. She was a shapeless yet majestic woman of some fifty years, with a large mottled face in which a steadfast expression of gentle obstinacy appeared to underly the more evanescent ripples of thought or of emotion. Her severe black silk gown, to which she had just changed from her morning dress of alpaca, was softened under her full double chin by a knot of lace and a cameo ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... bicolor^, tricolor, versicolor^; of all the colors of the rainbow, of all manner of colors; kaleidoscopic. iridescent; opaline^, opalescent; prismatic, nacreous, pearly, shot, gorge de pigeon, chatoyant^; irisated^, pavonine^. pied, piebald; motley; mottled, marbled; pepper and salt, paned, dappled, clouded, cymophanous^. mosaic, tesselated, plaid; tortoise shell &c n.. spotted, spotty; punctated^, powdered; speckled &c v.; freckled, flea-bitten, studded; flecked, fleckered^; striated, barred, veined; brinded^, brindled; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... Johnny grinned and went higher, and the face of Schwab became not mottled but a sickly white. He sat gripping the edges of the cockpit and gazing fearfully downward, save when he turned to implore, threaten, and command. He would report Johnny to his employers. He could make him sorry for this. He would make it worth his while to land. ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower
... scraggy red neck, a long beak-like nose, and queer slate-coloured eyes with pale lashes; his hair was thin and very fine in colour and texture, strangely like that of a yellow cat; and face, neck, and nose were mottled with patches of small purple veins. To-day he was dressed in a long seedy black coat, a short seedy black vest, and a pair of now moleskins, glaringly white, and much too long and ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... struck him with a pole, and in revenge the serpent capsized his boat; but he forbore to eat his enemy, and, diving to the bottom, disappeared. The creature had a black body, about six inches thick, ringed with dingy-yellow bands, and a mottled-green head, long and pointed, like ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... work, for instance, to take care of the Guinea fowls,—the handsome, mottled hens, that never knew when they were well off, but were always running away and getting lost. If it had not been for their shrill, silly cackle, their hiding-places would never have been found. Master ...
— Master Sunshine • Mrs. C. F. Fraser
... and fifty feet in width and some fifty in height, stood among the trees ahead. It was almost invisible from any distance; the concrete dome was of mottled green and gray concrete, trees grew so close as to brush it with their branches, and the little pavilion on the flattened top was roofed with translucent green plastic. As the airboat came in, a couple of men in Assassins' garb emerged from the pavilion ...
— Last Enemy • Henry Beam Piper
... they expand and occupy the whole thorax, and closely surround the heart and thymus gland. The portions containing air are of a light brick-red colour, and crepitate under the finger. The lungs are mottled from the presence of islands of aerated tissue, surrounded by arteries and veins. The weight of the lungs before respiration is about 550 grains, after an hour's respiration 900 grains; but this test is of little value. The ratio of the weight of the ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson
... site of several villages. The Chalk rises abruptly from the low lying argillaceous plain to form the Chiltern Hills. The form of the whole of the hilly district round Chesham, High Wycombe and the Chalfonts is determined by the Chalk. Reading beds, mottled clays and sands, repose upon the Chalk at Woburn, Barnham, Fulmer and Denham, and these are in turn covered by the London Clay, which is exposed on the slopes about Stoke Common and Iver. Between the Tertiary-capped ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... well, I must say. Mr. Stitt left on the ten train that morning, looking lemon-colored and mottled. He insisted that he wasn't able to go, but Mr. Sam gave him a headache powder and put ...
— Where There's A Will • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... his face mottled and his breathing heavy. "Whatever you are, you made a Machiavellian puppet-master out of a lousy, flea-bitten mongrel! Was it beyond those powers ...
— The Short Life • Francis Donovan
... the approaches to a village, there appear gardens, which no longer have human shape. Instead of cultivation there are puddles and mud. All is burned or drowned, and the walls scattered like bones everywhere; and we see the mottled and bedaubed shadows of soldiers. War befouls the country as it ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... hole, which was rather more than an inch in diameter, was made immediately beneath a branch which stretched out almost horizontally from the main stem. It appeared merely a deeper shadow upon the dark and mottled surface of the bark with which the branches were covered, and could not be detected by the eye until one was within a few feet of it. The young chirped vociferously as I approached the nest, thinking it was ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... mind, a sun-mottled kitchen with a black iron range, and along the walls festoons of looped-up green peppers. White bread now in abundance for small mouths not so hungry. At evening, Simon Meyerburg, with rims of dirt under his nails, entering that kitchen door, the ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... flower-beds, gay with luxuriant, rainbow-tinted blooms, to watch the tall palms swaying as the wind swept through their clashing fronds, to note the magnificent butterflies and the brilliant-plumaged birds flitting hither and thither, with the blue foam-flecked sea, mottled with rich purple cloud shadows, stretching away to the far horizon. I was allowed to sit there for two hours, drawing in renewed health with every breath; and then Mama Elisa and Teresita, her lieutenant, swooped down upon me, declaring ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... exalt, Nor in the pink and mottled vault The opposing spirits tilt; And by the coasting reader spied, The silverlings and crusions glide For ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... very aged man, the principal headman present, a wrinkled old savage, scarred by encounters with wild beasts, and mottled with skin disease and dirt, lifted up his voice and spoke, shaking his straggling mop of frowsy grizzled hair in time ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... morning opened in an undecided way. The wind was southerly: it is what the deer call a dog-wind, having come to know quite well the meaning of "a southerly wind and a cloudy sky." The sole companion of the doe was her only child, a charming little fawn, whose brown coat was just beginning to be mottled with the beautiful spots which make this young creature as lovely as the gazelle. The buck, its father, had been that night on a long tramp across the mountain to Clear Pond, and had not yet returned: he ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... not speak; then raised a face of mottled purple and white, and, dabbing her cheeks with a handkerchief not of the cleanest, choked ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... hour they burned brightly yet, trying hard to pierce the bitter cold outside with a ray of warmth and cheer. Where the lamps in the delicatessen store made a mottled streak of brightness across the flags, two little boys stood with their noses flattened against the window. The warmth inside, and the lights, had made little islands of clear space on the frosty pane, affording glimpses of the wealth ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... stars of the sky are actually innumerable is only a cold statement of the plainest fact. Hear it in the language of one privileged to behold the glories of one out of the thousands of similar firmaments: "The mottled region forming the lighter part of the mass (the nebula in Orion) is a very blaze of stars. But that stellar creation, now that we are freed from all dubiety concerning the significance of those hazes that float numberless in space, how glorious, how endless! Behold, amid that ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... the eye could reach over the hills of the south shore. Huge oaks that might have stood there from the beginning of the world, wide-branching elms, and dark pines overshadowed the highway, opening now and then into vistas of green fields where stood a cottage or two, with a herd of mottled cows grazing down by the brook. On the higher ridges the trees formed a close phalanx, and with their dark tops cut the horizon into a long, irregular line of forest, as if offering battle to the woodman's axe that was threatening ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... shape, and water sprinkled over, until it runs down from the centre in many little branches or rivulets. While running, a solution of copperas is sprinkled on, and carried along the branches which radiate from the central trunk, producing the dark-mottled colored effect which resembles, more or less nearly, a tree with ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... continued along the crest of the mountain from which grand views of distant peaks and vast forest-sides could be seen. The brilliant hues of wild flowers, everywhere, mottled the ground; the dark-green of towering pines, or again the shorter aspens like pickets on guard in the foreground; the bleached skeletons of lodge-pole pine burnt clean in forest fires; and just before the riders, the plunging water falling from a cliff that shut out any glimpse ...
— Polly of Pebbly Pit • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... toddling, mottled mite Asserts with voice emphatic, In lisping accents, "Mite is right," Their rule is autocratic: The song becomes, that charmed mankind, Their musical narcotic, And baby lips than Love, she'll ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... few moments she had spent below, her features had become frightfully changed. Her face was livid and mottled with purple spots, her eyes were distended and glittered with a strange brilliancy. She let the plates which she held fall upon the table with ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... stone walls, as they heard the tramp of the approaching feet. Then four strong horses trotted out, two and two, into the moonlight beyond, each bearing on his back a messenger of the terrible tidings, and all breaking into a brisk gallop as the party disappeared in the mottled black and white distance under the mighty trees. One rode for Sigmundskron, and one for the nearest surgeon, one for the distant town, and one to bear the ghastly tale to Greif himself, the nameless orphan, ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... birds are still more remarkably protected by their assimilative hues. The stonechats, the larks, the quails, the goatsuckers and the grouse, which abound in the North African and Asiatic deserts, are all tinted and mottled so as to resemble with wonderful accuracy the average colour and aspect of the soil in the district they inhabit. The Rev. H. Tristram, in his account of the ornithology of North Africa in the 1st volume of the "Ibis," says: "In the desert, where neither trees, brush-wood, nor even undulation ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... acquired considerable skillfulness in her business, and manifested no little originality. Her bouquets did not always please everybody, however. Sometimes they made one smile, sometimes they alarmed the eyes. Red predominated in them, mottled with violent tints of blue, yellow, and violet of a barbaric charm. On the mornings when she pinched Marjolin, and teased him till she made him cry, she made up fierce-looking bouquets, suggestive of her own bad temper, bouquets with strong ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... ways than one there is a vast deal of "soft soap" used in Birmingham, but its inhabitants ought to be cleanly people, for the two or three manufactories of hard yellow and mottled in and near the town turn out an annual supply of ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... not have heard the marching-order; he remained rooted where he stood. Ebbings and flowings of color mottled his handsome face. ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... His "Palace," or state apartment, was not pointed out to us. His lordship, in so far as his literal claim to be styled a white elephant, was an impostor of the deepest dye and a very grim and ugly impostor to boot. He was a great, lean, brown, flat-sided brute, his ears, forehead, and trunk mottled with a dingy cream colour. But he belonged all the same to the lordly race. "White elephants" were a science which had a literature of its own. According to this science, it was not the whiteness that was the criterion of a "white elephant." So much, ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... to suppose that were an eye so constituted as to be able to see, say, cumulus masses of warmer air, strata mottled with traces of other gases, and beds of invisible matter in suspension, one might suppose that what we deem the clearest sky would then appear flecked with forms as many and various as the clouds that adorn our ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon
... an Argument That proved he was the Pope: He looked again, and found it was A Bar of Mottled Soap. "A fact so dread," he faintly said, ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... shade of the trees that buzzed with insects, Christophe would watch the fevered movements of the ants, the long-legged spiders, that seemed to dance as they walked, the bounding grasshoppers, that leap aside, the heavy, bustling beetles, and the naked worms, pink and glabrous, mottled with white, or with his hands under his head and his eyes dosed he would listen to the invisible orchestra, the roundelay of the frenzied insects circling in a sunbeam about the scented pines, the trumpeting of ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... next made the objects of instruction; and to this the well-chosen position of the establishment largely contributed. Sunshine and storm, the light clouds which mottled the sky and the black heaps which foreboded the tempest, the lightning and the rainbow, all in turn served to awaken the slumbering faculties, and to rouse the torpid intellect ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... Lucivee. He is nearly a third larger than Yowler. From the tip of each ear long tufts of black hair stand up. On each side of his face is a ruff of long hair. His tail is even shorter than Yowler's, and the tip of it is always wholly black. His general color is gray, mottled with brown. His face ruff is white with black border. Yowler's feet are large, but Tufty's are immense for his size. This is because Tufty lives where the snow lies deep for many months, and these big, broad feet enable him to travel about on the snow without breaking ...
— The Burgess Animal Book for Children • Thornton W. Burgess
... turning, crossing, even seeming to stand for an instant erect, but always borne impetuously forward like a crowd of triumphant feasters. Sit close down by it, and you see a fragment of the torrent against the sky, mottled, steely, and foaming, leaping onward in far-flung criss-cross strands of water. Perpetually the eye is on the point of descrying a pattern in this weaving, and perpetually it is cheated by change. In one place ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... mottled on young trees, at length separating into small, thin, flat, reddish scales; in old trees striate with shallow sinuses, separating into ashen-white plates, often partially detached; spray reddish or yellowish white in autumn with minute, erect, pale ...
— Handbook of the Trees of New England • Lorin Low Dame
... covered with mottled black and white feathers, which make them look gray. In some kinds of hawks, the ...
— Friends in Feathers and Fur, and Other Neighbors - For Young Folks • James Johonnot
... impoverished or bloodless conditions of the body and in internal haemorrhage, pale; in diseases of the liver, sometimes yellowish, or dark red; in diseases of the digestive tract (buccal mucous membrane), coated; if inflamed, dry at first, later excessively moist; and in certain germ diseases a mottled red, or showing nodules, ulcers ...
— Common Diseases of Farm Animals • R. A. Craig, D. V. M.
... they lie on the very water's edge. At a place called Lickeena, masses of beautiful salmon-and rose-coloured granite actually trend into the tidewater, and at Burtonport proper is a promontory of that richly-mottled granite which I had supposed to be the peculiar heritage of Peterhead, and which is now largely exported from Scotland to the United States. Why should not this Irish granite be shipped directly from Donegal to America, ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (1 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... waters under the earth have no more fascinating sight than the gray, silent form of a pike, moving and motionless in the shallow water, a shadow more tangible than himself thrown by a jack-light on the mottled yellow rocks and sands of the bottom. A passing breath of wind, even the slightest motion of the punt, breaks every shadow and indentation into myriad fleeting ripples and waves of light, transforming the slender, silent fish into a sheaf of wriggling glimmers. With the stilling of the ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... in the herd, horned like the bulls, but smaller, and without the rending tusks. The cows, at this season, all had young. After one long, comprehending stare at the two gigantic mottled shapes bearing down upon them, the herd put itself in motion. The man-creature they hardly noticed, he ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... wider and deeper frame. She, too, was beautifully—yes, spectacularly—built. Her hair, fully as thick as Belle's own and worn in a free-falling bob three or four inches longer than Belle's, was bleached almost white. Her eyes were not really speckled, nor really mottled, but were regularly patterned in lighter and darker shades of hazel. She was, Garlock decided, a ...
— The Galaxy Primes • Edward Elmer Smith
... was yet to come, and only Cheon was worthy to carry it to the feast; and as he came through the leafy way, bearing the huge mottled ball, as big as a bullock's head—all ablaze with spirits and dancing light and crowned with mistletoe—it would have been difficult to say which looked most pleased with itself, Cheon or the pudding; for each seemed wreathed ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... "and skin somewhat mottled. But I was not so much interested in your beauty as I was in trying to determine whether you were well enough to stand ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... We go loitering. We speak Only with old questionings Of the dear remembered things Of the days of long ago, When the stream seemed thus and so In our boyish eyes:—The bank Greener then, through rank on rank Of the mottled sycamores, Touching tops across the shores: Here, the hazel thicket stood— There, the almost pathless wood Where the shellbark hickory tree Rained its wealth on you and me. Autumn! as you loved us then, Take us to ...
— Riley Child-Rhymes • James Whitcomb Riley
... the agonizingly slow plastic creep of metal under great pressure, the gorilla-faced giant was yielding. His dark skin became mottled. His breath came gaspingly. His rope-knotted ...
— The Martian Cabal • Roman Frederick Starzl
... the sky. It was evening and the sun had set. The sky was all mottled with grey clouds. "I paint beautiful pictures and give them away," he declared. "My brother is in the penitentiary. He killed a man who called him an ...
— Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories • Sherwood Anderson
... What suicidal inspiration had prompted her to say that! Had what she had been listening to here, the horror of it, indeed turned her brain and robbed her of her wits to the extent that she should invite exposure? Danglar's face had gone a mottled purple; the misshapen thing at Danglar's side was leering at her ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... the bag, and saw a large mottled caterpillar walking about upon a leaf, apparently wondering where he was, and doubtless thinking that the sun had gone under a cloud, since he could not ...
— Ruby at School • Minnie E. Paull
... the afternoon, and a chill north breeze ruffled the leaden surface of the lake and seemed to curdle the water with its breath; patches of soft ice already mottled it. The sky was white, and leafless maple and evergreen seemed almost alike colourless in the dull, cold air. Bates had turned from his work to stand for a few moments on the hard trodden level in front of the house and survey ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... further dried by waving through the air. A little turpentine on a rag will remove the mastic, but turpentine will not touch the shellac coating. The surface of the brass will be found irregularly acted upon, producing a sort of mottled look. To obtain a nice frosting the process of applying the mastic and etching must be repeated three or four times, when a beautiful coarse-grain mat or ...
— Watch and Clock Escapements • Anonymous
... and perhaps respected throughout the world. He was born a peasant, the poorest of peasants, a crofter. The little homestead of his family, with its whitewashed walls and straw-thatched roof, still stands on the bleak ayre-lands of Ellan, like a herd of mottled cattle crouching together in ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... in a shaking voice. "Look here, I'd like—" He stopped, unable to go on, his agitation was so great. His chest heaved as from hard running, and his complexion, pallid at first, had become mottled; fiery splotches appearing at his temples and cheeks. "What do you mean by telling me—telling me there's talk about—about—" He gulped, and began again: "What do you mean by using such words as 'reputation'? What do you mean, speaking of a ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... expedient to keep aloof from the shore; and at length, as the night was falling, the skill and perseverance exerted seemed successful; for, clearing a formidable headland that had lain on the lee for hours, and was mottled with broken ships and drowned men, the sloop was seen stretching out in a long tack into the open sea. "Miller's seamanship has saved him once more!" said Matheson, the Cromarty skipper, as, quitting ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... in the air above the wonderful White Cliff rise in places six hundred feet of drab shales and chocolate limestones intermixed with crimsons whose escaping dye drips in broad vertical streaks across the glistening white. And even above that, in places, lie remnants of the mottled, many-colored beds of St. Elmo shales and limestones in whose embrace, a few hundred miles away, lie embedded the bones of many monster dinosaurs of ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... isle. It is still known as Ellen's Isle. "It is rather high, and irregularly pyramidal. It is mostly composed of dark-gray rocks, mottled with pale and gray lichens, peeping out here and there amid trees that mantle them,—chiefly light, graceful birches, intermingled with red-berried mountain ashes and a few dark-green, spiry pines. The landing is beneath an aged oak; and, as ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... of the glorious work of the Master-Builder; perhaps of the tints and shades where the blue of the forest, the brown of the fern-clad foot-hills, the buff of the sun-dried grass, mottled the panorama which lay spread before her. But if so, why did she sigh? Does the contour of a hill suffuse the eye? Not a hundred-thousand hills could in themselves cause a sob, not even the gentle sob which amounted to no more than a painful little ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... is mottled with a lot of flowers; The blosshom freight bends down the lofty trees; And, hanging from the leafy tree-top bowers, The monkeys bob, like breadfruit in the ...
— The Little Clay Cart - Mrcchakatika • (Attributed To) King Shudraka
... his coat collar, Hav'n't they frightened Mr. Tooke, who once said he could beat them Hollar? Then at Lambeth, ain't Mr. Baldwin and Mr. Cabbell been both on 'em bottled By Mr. D'Eyncourt and Mr. Hawes, who makes soap yellow and mottled! And hasn't Sir Benjamin Hall, and the gallant Commodore Napier, Made such a cabal with Cabbell and Hamilton as would make any chap queer? Whilst Sankey, who was backed by a Cleave-r for Marrowbone looks cranky, Acos the electors, like lisping babbies, cried out "No Sankee?" Then South'ark ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 1, July 17, 1841 • Various
... its merits, was assailed with all forms of amendments from all parts of the House. Many of the amendments were adopted, until the bill became so mottled that Mr. Morrill, discouraged and strongly inclined against the bill as changed, was disposed to abandon it to its fate. He was not familiar with the rules, and, for this reason, labored under a disadvantage in the conduct ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... and dingy. The brick floor had never known other cleansing than sprinkling and sweeping, the yellow-washed walls had become with time a pale, mottled brown, the paint had disappeared under a fixed dinginess which the dusting-brush alone could not remove, and the glass of the windows had never been washed except by the rain. Yet, for all that, the place had an air of cleanliness. For though these people do not clean their houses more than ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... mottled as he hastened to obey. When Artok stood finally released, he glared heavily at Hilary and Joan. Then slowly a smile broke over his warty features, a smile that boded unutterable things. Hilary waited quietly, ready to seize ...
— Slaves of Mercury • Nat Schachner
... her mate. Together they built a fine nest in a tree that stood near to the crow's tall pine, and soon after they had settled down to housekeeping Mrs. Blue Jay began to lay eggs of a pretty brown color mottled with darker brown specks. ...
— Twinkle and Chubbins - Their Astonishing Adventures in Nature-Fairyland • L. Frank (Lyman Frank) Baum
... speech the countenance of the newly made Earl of Douglas grew white and mottled, tallowy white and dull red in turns showing upon it, like the flesh of a drained ox. He rose unsteadily to his feet, moving one hand deprecatingly before him, like a helpless man unexpectedly stricken. His nether lip quivered, pendulous and piteous, in the midst of his grey beard, and ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... emotion. Pringle's shameless mendacity shocked him. But it was Creagan's sorry plight that he must affect never to have seen this insolent Pringle before. The sheriff's face mottled with wrath. Pringle reflected swiftly: The sheriff's rage hinted strongly that he was in Creagan's confidence and hence was no stranger to last night's mishap at the hotel; their silence ...
— The Desire of the Moth; and The Come On • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... outer world, where he swaggered among his fellows and was thrashed, or bungled his lessons and was thrashed again, imprinted themselves vividly on his mind, and he hated the impressions. When Swipey Broon was hot the sweat pores always glistened distinctly on the end of his mottled nose—John, as he thought angrily of Swipey this afternoon, saw the glistening sweat pores before him and wanted to bash them. The varnishy smell of the desks, the smell of the wallflowers at Mrs. Manzie's on the way to ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... discussing so eagerly in the yard?" continued Frederick Massingbird. But the words had scarcely escaped his lips, when the housekeeper, Mrs. Tynn, entered the room. She had a mottled face and mottled arms, her sleeves just now being ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... five or six years. She gave little milk, but the quality was rich. She was crossed by a country bull, but her progeny very closely resembled herself, being entirely white, excepting the ears, which were brown, and the legs, which were mottled." These ...
— Delineations of the Ox Tribe • George Vasey
... attention to a steer and vouchsafed the statement that the animal loved music,—that he could be lured out of the herd with singing. To prove his assertion, the man sang what he termed the steer's favorite, and to the surprise of every soldier present, a fine, big mottled beef walked out from among a thousand others and stood entranced over the simple song. In my younger days my voice was considered musical; I could sing the folk-songs of my country better than the average, and when the herdsmen ...
— Reed Anthony, Cowman • Andy Adams
... would be found trailing along the ground and climbing over shrubs and stunted trees, with their elegant pitchers hanging in every direction. Some of these, he said, were long and slender, others broad and short. The plant at which they were looking was a broad green one, variously tinted and mottled with red, and was large enough to hold ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... consentingly slipped the rings from her small mottled hands. It was soothing to feel herself in Mrs. Heeny's grasp, and though she knew the attention would cost her three dollars she was secure in the sense that Abner wouldn't mind. It had been clear to Mrs. Spragg, ever since their rather precipitate departure from Apex City, that Abner was resolved ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... hares, successive, cross your road, And scarcely give the time to fire and load,— While shots resound, and pheasants loudly crow, Who heeds the bramble? Who fatigue can know? Here from the brake, that bird of stealthy flight, The mottled woodcock glads our eager sight, Great is his triumph, whose lucky shot shall kill The dark-eyed stranger of the lengthy bill Unlike the pheasant, who himself betrays, And dearly for his daring challenge ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... scarcely glanced at the mottled board, it was that kind of a day. He noted an occasional high in his log book, but most signals were ignored. At 5:14 he noted a severe reading of 87 which stayed on the board; at 5:16 another light came on, climbed ...
— The Circuit Riders • R. C. FitzPatrick
... a bundle of sticks," Murchard had once said of him. "Or a phosphorescent log, rather," some one else amended; and we recognized the happiness of this description of his small squat trunk, with the red blink of the eyes in a face like mottled bark. He had always been possessed of a leisure which he had nursed and protected, instead of squandering it in vain activities. His carefully guarded hours had been devoted to the cultivation of a fine ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... mottled cord and vein I trace the varying chart of years, I know the troubled heart, the strain, The weight of Atlas—and ...
— The Poets' Lincoln - Tributes in Verse to the Martyred President • Various
... woman I remember," said Honey Smith. There were bruises, mottled blue and black, all over Honey's body. There was a falsetto whistling to Honey's voice. "That Irish granny! She didn't say a word. Her mouth just opened until her jaw fell. Then the wave struck!" He paused. He tried to control the falsetto whistling. But it got away from him. "God, I ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... disposal of Miriam's things. Miriam noted the easy range of the child's voice, how smoothly it slid from birdlike queries and chirpings, to the consoling tones of the lower register. It seemed to leave undisturbed the softly-rounded, faintly-mottled chin and cheeks and the full unpouting lips that lay quietly one upon the other before she spoke, and opened flexibly but somehow hardly moved to her speech and afterwards closed again gradually until they lay softly ...
— Pointed Roofs - Pilgrimage, Volume 1 • Dorothy Richardson
... dress like chorus girls. White-faced, scared-looking, yellow-eyed men who belong to societies for the suppression of vice. Men who boast that they neither drink nor smoke. Men who mop their bald heads with perfumed handkerchiefs. Men with drawn, mottled faces, in the last stages of arterio-sclerosis. Silent, stupid-looking men in thick tweeds who tramp up and down the decks of ocean steamers. Men who peep out of hotel rooms at Swedish chambermaids. Men who go to church on Sunday morning, carrying Oxford Bibles under their ...
— A Book of Burlesques • H. L. Mencken
... sort of day, one that seemed vainly trying to appear cheerful! A day that threw out half-promises, that showed tentatively on the sky a mottled blur where the sun should have been! On such a day, a month after that night in Lord Ronsdale's rooms, Captain Forsythe, calling on John Steele, found himself admitted to the sitting-room. While waiting for an answer to his request to see Mr. ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... was none too apt at his Latin, for the pages were dog-eared and rubbed and interlined, the margins mottled with pencil sketches—bugles, stacked bayonets, and artillery carriages. In the act of putting the book down, I happened to run over the pages to the end, and on the fly-leaf at the back I saw his name again, and a drawing—with his initials and a date—of the Federal flag; ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... you! This was Latimer's rug. I had noticed it that evening—a warm, soft, mottled green that looked like silk and fur mixed. I could see the way his long, white hands looked on it, and as I touched it I could hear ...
— In the Bishop's Carriage • Miriam Michelson
... opened. A large man in evening dress staggered in. His clothes were in disorder. His high hat had been rubbed the wrong way in spots. But Lewis hardly noticed the clothes. His eyes were fastened on the man's face. It was bloated, pouched, and mottled with purple spots and veins. Fear filled it. Not a sudden fear, but fear that was ingrown, that proclaimed that face its habitual habitation. The man's eyes bulged and stared, yet saw nothing that was. He blundered ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... their fill of the delight of young fatherhood and motherhood. After its morning bath Bartley was called in, and allowed to revere the baby's mottled and dimpled back as it lay face downward on the nurse's lap, feebly wiggling its arms and legs, and responding with ineffectual little sighs and gurgles to her acceptable rubbings with warm flannel. When it was ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells |
