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More "Quaint" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a stated address either in opening or closing, but throughout the entire convention kept up a running fire of quaint, piquant, original and characteristic observations which delighted the audience and gave a distinctive attraction to the meetings. It was impossible to keep a record of these and they would lose their zest and appropriateness if separated from the circumstances which called them forth. They can ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... have been well known to Kuhnau. Apart from the character of the music, the title of the work, Musikalische Fruelings Fruechte, and the religious style of the preface, remind one of Kuhnau's "Frische Fruechte," also of his preface to the "Bible" Sonatas. It is curious to find the quaint expression "unintelligent birds" used first by Becker, ...
— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock
... again at the quaint adroitness of his speech. But her lips were curiously unsteady, and she found the darkness very comforting. There was no moon, and the sky was veiled. She suffered the strong clasp of his fingers about her own without protest. What did it ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... of talent and beauty. The figures that used to be seen on Wallack's stage, at the house he established upon the wreck of John Brougham's Lyceum, often rise in memory, crowned with a peculiar light. Lester Wallack, in his peerless elegance; Laura Keene, in her spiritual beauty; the quaint, eccentric Walcot; the richly humorous Blake, so noble in his dignity, so firm and fine and easy in his method, so copious in his natural humour; Mary Gannon, sweet, playful, bewitching, irresistible; Mrs. Vernon, as full of character as the tulip is of colour or the hyacinth ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... Quaint old Thomas Fuller gives a pretty simile when he says that "Poetry is music in words, and music is poetry in sound"; and, in so far as melodious form and harmonious thought express and arouse emotion, he gives ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... brimmed hat trimmed with roses and fluttering ribbons. High-heeled slippers with bright buckles and a crook tied with blue ribbons added to the quaint effect, and the whole costume was very becoming to ...
— Patty Fairfield • Carolyn Wells
... district, between the celebrated towns of Hastings and Brighton, may be found the quaint old structure known as Bereford Castle. From the style of architecture it may be dated to the time of Edward the Third, bearing a striking resemblance to the castle re-erected in that monarch's reign by the Earl of Warwick. The castle of this period ...
— Lady Rosamond's Secret - A Romance of Fredericton • Rebecca Agatha Armour
... 'traditions' were remarkable for their absence; but I fancy that the spirits of Siddons and Kemble, Macready and Garrick, looked down with kind approval upon these earnest young actors as they recited the matchless old words, moving to and fro in the quaint setting of trees and moonlight, with an orchestra of ...
— A Summer in a Canyon: A California Story • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... spines being gone, Not royal in their smells alone, But in their hue; Maiden pinks, of odour faint, Daisies smell-less, yet most quaint, ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... which, in common with most British people, I am bitterly opposed. Walsh's "World Rebuilt" is a good exhortation, and Mugge's "Parliament of Man" is fresh and sane and able. The omnivorous reader will find good sense and quaint English in Judge Mejdell's "Jus Gentium," published in English by Olsen's of Christiania. There is an active League of Nations Society in Dublin, as well as the London and Washington ones, publishing pamphlets and conducting propaganda. ...
— In The Fourth Year - Anticipations of a World Peace (1918) • H.G. Wells
... an old man; indeed, in years he was in the prime of life. Yet by his looks he might almost have been double his age, the more so in contrast with Minna Pitts, his young and very pretty wife, who stood near him in the quaint breakfast-room and solicitously moved a pillow back ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... that he had allowed no time for preliminary threats and profanity, rather baffled these hoodlums. He had a quaint way of cutting out all the customary boasts and menaces preceding an encounter, and going straight to ...
— Pee-Wee Harris Adrift • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... provisioned ourselves was adorned with the legend, Vreugde bij Vrede, "Joy with Peace," and it bore every mark of the busy retirement of a comfort-loving proprietor. I went along his garden, which was gay and delightful with big bushes of rose and sweet brier, to a quaint little summer-house, and there I sat and watched the men in groups cooking and squatting along the bank. The sun was setting in a nearly ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... to examine these quaint tributes, Miss Keene had thrown herself, with an impulsive, girlish abandonment, on the mound by the cross, and Hurlstone sat down beside her. Their eyes met in an innocent pleasure of each other's company. ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... chamber in an ancient house. Curious and quaint carvings adorn the walls, and the large chimney-piece is a curiosity of itself. The ceiling is low, and a large bay window, from roof to floor, looks to the west. The window is latticed, and filled with curiously painted glass and rich stained pieces, ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... book will interest lovers of animals, and the quaint style in which M. Gautier tells of the wisdom of his household pets will please every one. The translator, too, is happy in her work, for she has succeeded in rendering the text into English without loss of the French tone, which makes it fascinating. These household pets ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... looked lovely in a perfectly simple white satin dinner frock, her only jewellery being a thin gold necklet, from which was suspended a very fine opal in a quaint and curious gold setting. She acknowledged my introduction to her with the slightest possible inclination of her head, and thereafter ignored my existence for the rest of the evening. And her brother's greeting of me ...
— The First Mate - The Story of a Strange Cruise • Harry Collingwood
... hall Stephen's door stood always open, and Courtland, walking that way one day, found fresh flowers upon his desk and wreathed around his mother's picture. A quaint little photograph of Stephen taken several years back hung on one wall. It had been sent at the class's request by Stephen's mother to honor her son's ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... Never moping, never dull, For her mind is amply stored With an overflowing hoard Of the tales of fairy times, And of quaint old nursery rhymes, So that she can always find Good companions when inclined! This is Fairy Fanciful, IN ...
— Fairy's Album - With Rhymes of Fairyland • Anonymous
... Cyprian, in his quaint, eastern accent. It was the strange guest in the tavern by Corinth. The Prince—prince surely, whatever his other title—was in the same rich dress as at the Isthmus, only his flowing beard had been dyed raven black. Yet Democrates's eyes were diverted instantly to the peculiarly handsome ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... on his temples. Gamut stood at his side, his meek head bared to the rays of the sun, while his eyes, wandering and concerned, seemed to be equally divided between that little volume, which contained so many quaint but holy maxims, and the being in whose behalf his soul yearned to administer consolation. Heyward was also nigh, supporting himself against a tree, and endeavoring to keep down those sudden risings of sorrow that it required ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... thoughts that swelled the seaman's broad chest during that walk, and numerous, as well as wild and quaint, were the plans of escape which he conceived and found it ...
— Jarwin and Cuffy • R.M. Ballantyne
... though he had been a faithful servant to his master, was always longing to enjoy his free liberty, to wander uncontrolled in the air, like a wild bird, under green trees, among pleasant fruits, and sweet-smelling flowers. 'My quaint Ariel,' said Prospero to the little sprite when he made him free, 'I shall miss you; yet you shall have your freedom.' 'Thank you, my dear master,' said Ariel; 'but give me leave to attend your ship home with ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... great care, as any other part of the contents. There are probably very few among American magazine readers who do not habitually look through the advertising pages, with the certainty that they will be entertained by the beauty of the advertiser's illustrations and the quaint curtness of his phrases. Another reason is that the American monthly magazine goes to all parts of the United States, while, owing to the time required for long journeys on even the swiftest trains, no American daily paper can have so general a circulation as The Times in the United ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... always kept a shrew ash at hand which, when once medicated, would maintain its virtue for ever. A shrew ash was made thus: into the body of the tree a deep hole was bored with an auger, and a poor devoted shrew-mouse was thrust in alive, and plugged in, no doubt with several quaint incantations long since forgotten." It is marvellous how people could ever have believed such stuff; but equal absurdities are still accepted by many people to this very day; so strong a hold on men's minds have the kindred vices ...
— Country Walks of a Naturalist with His Children • W. Houghton
... released, and turned by those streams of water into streams of wealth—fleecy cotton, luscious fruit and melons, food and clothes. And what nice people lived out here. The Chinamen who worked in the field, quaint and friendly and faithful. Even the Mexicans with their less industrious and more tricky habits were warm hearted and courteous. That serenading Madrigal was very interesting—and handsome. He had fire in him; perhaps dangerous ...
— The Desert Fiddler • William H. Hamby
... indulged himself in going about under that broiling sun of July, peddling starch, was very probably an impostor. He computed a good day's profits of seventy-five cents, and when asked if that was not very little for the support of a sick wife and three children, he answered with a quaint effort at impressiveness, and with a trick, as I imagined, from the manner of the regimental chaplain, "You've done your duty, my friend, and more'n your duty. If every one did their duty like that, we should get along." So he took leave, and shambled out into the furnace- heat, the ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... revealed a ladder, leading to a hiding-place between the floor of the nursery and the ceiling of the room below—a hiding-place so small that he who had hid there must have crouched on his hands and knees or lain at full length, and yet large enough to contain a quaint old carved oak chest, half filled with priests' vestments, which had been hidden away, no doubt, in those cruel days when the life of a man was in danger if he was discovered to have harbored a Roman Catholic priest, or to have ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... Grant, and Sorrel, found themselves in the quaint old city of Bergen their first thought was ...
— Chasing the Sun • R.M. Ballantyne
... A quaint old house of colonial date and style, set in the midst of extensive grounds and shaded by graceful old trees,—this is "Quillcote,"—the summer home of Mrs. Wiggin. Quillcote is typical of many old New England homesteads; ...
— Polly Oliver's Problem • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... recording. More facts than we have space to reproduce, testify to the heroism, religious zeal, and literary industry of the women who helped to build up the early civilization of New England. Their writings, for some presumed on authorship, are quaint and cumbrous; but in those days, when few men published books, it required marked courage for women to appear in print at all. They imitated the style popular among men, and received much attention for their literary ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... service. At first with some aid from an interpreter, afterwards mostly by signs and broken fragments of language, I got to be able to converse with this Turk. (In the Balkans the various shreds of races have quaint crazy-quilt patchworks of conversational language. Somehow or other even a British citizen with more than the usual stupidity of our race as to foreign languages can make himself understood in the Balkan Peninsula, which is so polyglottic that its inhabitants ...
— Bulgaria • Frank Fox
... which we have any record, took place two years after the signing. General Howe had left the city shortly before, and every one was feeling bright and happy. In the diary of one of the old patriots who took part in this unique celebration, appears the following quaint, and even picturesque, description of the events ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... upshot of the matter was that he went to the girl and told her—all these ideas of his; quit, came West; left the road open to the other man. Oh, yes, there was another man, of course; one thoroughly approved of by the family. Quaint, wasn't it? Perhaps a little overly judicial. But then that was his way. Slow-moving and sure. He saw the girl at dusk in the garden of her family's country place; near a sun-dial, or some other appropriately romantic spot. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... cheerful and practical presence, the faint odour of lavender still clung to the air, and the silence was unbroken except for a faint stirring of the window curtains now and then to the breeze from outside. Everything was, indeed, just as it had been left, the toilet tidies and all the quaint contraptions of the '50's and '60's in their places. On the wall opposite the bed hung several water colours evidently the work of that immature artist Mary Mascarene, a watch pocket hung above the bed, a thing embroidered with blue roses, enough to disturb the sleep of any aesthete, yet beautiful ...
— The Ghost Girl • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... Alexander Spotswood, Governor of the Colony of Virginia, and a gallant soldier who had served under Marlborough in the English wars, rode, at the head of a dauntless band of cavaliers, down the quiet street of quaint old Williamsburg. ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... coevals, whom at last Time Is taking by the locks at forty-nine, Searching (a quaint but inexpensive pastime) For balder heads ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, April 28, 1920 • Various
... "he ought to know better," or "he shouldn't write such things"—in other words, he is guilty of the shocking crime of letting the cat out of the bag. He discards the Creation Story, just like Professor Bruce, who calls the fall of Adam a "quaint" embodiment of the theological conception of sin. He dismisses all the patriarchs before Abraham as "mythical." He admits the late origin of the Pentateuch, and only claims for Moses the probable authorship of the Decalogue. He says the Song of Solomon is "of the nature of a drama." ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... suggestion made to me indirectly through a friend by Mr. Andrew Lang. They have been translated from the modern version written by Sadanami Sanjin. These stories are not literal translations, and though the Japanese story and all quaint Japanese expressions have been faithfully preserved, they have been told more with the view to interest young readers of the West than ...
— Japanese Fairy Tales • Yei Theodora Ozaki
... by Martin's side and stroked his fair curls, as he sought in his own quaint fashion to console him. But in vain. Martin grew quite desperate as he thought of the misery into which poor Aunt Dorothy Grumbit would be plunged, on learning that he had been swept out to sea in a little boat, and drowned, as she would naturally ...
— Martin Rattler • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... resumed Fu-Manchu, "we call this quaint fancy the Six Gates of joyful Wisdom. The first gate, by which the rats are admitted, is called the Gate of joyous Hope; the second, the Gate of Mirthful Doubt. The third gate is poetically named, the Gate of True Rapture, and the fourth, the Gate of Gentle Sorrow. I once was honored in ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... indeed but little to amuse the traveller in Langres, after the cathedral, beyond the quaint streets and the beautiful old timber-framed houses. Doubtless Monsieur Verdayne—he did not know Paul's title—would wish to see the cathedral that very afternoon; it would be pleasant to go to vespers. A little later for himself, he would recommend another walk to the ramparts ...
— High Noon - A New Sequel to 'Three Weeks' by Elinor Glyn • Anonymous
... rather provoking," Morriston said, as they waited. "I particularly wanted to show you the view, which should be lovely on a clear day like this. If we have to wait much longer the light will be going. Besides, it is quite a quaint old room with a curious recess formed by the bartizan you ...
— The Hunt Ball Mystery • Magnay, William
... through the earnest hands that have labored for its welfare and left imperishable monuments. To the legacies of remembrances you have had handed down to you, I add this little story of a long ago time, a posy culled from quaint gardens. ...
— A Little Girl in Old Philadelphia • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... wharf, and along a quaint and crooked street. The sidewalk was so narrow that we had to walk in single file, and the curb-stone, as Mr. Daddles put it, was made of wood. There were a few shops, but as most of them sold ships' supplies, we did not go in any of them. A pleasant smell of tar ...
— The Voyage of the Hoppergrass • Edmund Lester Pearson
... curious kind, and entitled, 'The Canister of the Blue Devils, by Democritus, junior.' Dr. Bell possessed a very large library, and spent a good part of his time in extracting, both from his books and the newspapers and periodicals of the day, all available paragraphs containing quaint sayings and doings, which he stuck upon large pieces of pasteboard, for the inspection of his friends, and subsequent publication in some 'canister' shape. John Clare met Peter Pindar's friend at the ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... in the slush and sleet at the gate of the graveyard, it was welcomed by a strange pair, Franz Harruschka, the assistant grave-digger, and his mother Katharina, known as 'Frau Katha,' who filled the quaint office of ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... first part—a Cookery Book, with a few dry sprigs of rosemary and lavender stuck here and there between the leaves, (I suppose to point to some of the old lady's most favorite receipts,) and there was "Wither's Emblems," an old book, and quaint. The old-fashioned pictures in this last book were among the first exciters of the infant Rosamund's curiosity. Her contemplation had fed upon ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... side of the square, and half-hidden in ivy, was a Noah's Ark church, topped by a quaint belfry holding a bell that had not rung for years, and faced by a clock-dial all weather-stains and cracks, around which travelled a single rusty hand. In its shadow to the right lay the home of the Archdeacon, ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... one of the most popular orators of his day. He had a deep, sonorous, flexible voice, which he used to great advantage. He had a wonderful gift of touching the human heart, now melting his hearers by his pathos, then convulsing them with his quaint humor. He was attractive in manner, generous in feeling, spontaneous in expression, and free from ...
— Successful Methods of Public Speaking • Grenville Kleiser
... be worth while to go once. The first time I went I thought it was like a quaint, melancholy dream. Such a dim, hollow, dusty old building, and little cherubs with grimy little marble faces looking down from the walls. When the congregation began to shuffle in each new-comer was more decrepit and withered than the last, till I ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... original appearance in 1810. Mr. Codman in his most valuable book on the Expedition, justly says of these and similar journals: "They constitute an invariably interesting body of historical material, which preserves unimpaired the quaint individuality of their widely-diverse authors, and the unmistakable color and atmosphere of a period which must always be of particular importance to the students ...
— An interesting journal of Abner Stocking of Chatham, Connecticut • Abner Stocking
... villas. The charm of it all is incomparable. To the northwest stretches the limpid horizon of the Bay of Biscay, and to the south the snowy summits of the Pyrenees, and the adorable bays of Saint-Jean-de-Luz and Fontarabie, while behind, and to the eastward, lies the quaint country of the Basques, and the mountain trails into Spain in ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... cloister wall: The deadliest sin her mind could reach Was of monastic rule the breach; And her ambition's highest aim To emulate Saint Hilda's fame. For this she gave her ample dower, To raise the convent's eastern tower; For this, with carving rare and quaint, She decked the chapel of the saint, And gave the relic-shrine of cost, With ivory and gems embossed. The poor her convent's bounty blest, The pilgrim in its halls ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... knew also, but not intimately. Young Plunkett, as he was always called, would never strike one as a militant person. He, like Pearse and MacDonagh, wrote verse, and it was no better nor worse than their's were. He had an appetite for quaint and difficult knowledge. He studied Egyptian and Sanscrit, and distant curious matter of that sort, and was interested in inventions and the theatre. He was ...
— The Insurrection in Dublin • James Stephens
... began and told her, omitting nothing, while she listened eagerly to every word, hardly interrupting him at all. As he finished his tale they reached the door of the quaint old village church just as the clock ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... background. Between them from the first of those days in London was a consciousness of being man and woman there had not been for her at Cloom, though he now told her she had always disturbed him, that there was for him a something profoundly troubling in her slim sexless body, her burning mind, her quaint little sureness of poise which never let her lose her sense of proportion. That had so appealed to him ... never from her had he heard the talk of women, that love was the greatest thing in the world, or that any one person could matter more than all the many other things ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... blithe and jolly peal Makes the Franciscan steeple reel? And see! upon the crowded street, In motley groups what masquers meet! Banner and pageant, pipe and drum, And merry morrice-dancers come. I guess, by all this quaint array, The burghers hold their sports to-day. James will be there; he loves such show, Where the good yeoman bends his bow, And the tough wrestler foils his foe, As well as where, in proud career, The high-born filter shivers spear. I'll follow to the ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... streets and quaint old houses of the little town of Coucy-le-Chateau are huddled around the outworks of the colossal castle, almost as closely as are the climbing streets and the terraced houses of St.-Michel around ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... quadrangular pile, deep-set in rich woody country, and twinkling with triple rows of quaint windows, every one of which seemed alight as we drove up just in time to dress for dinner. The carriage had whirled us under I know not how many triumphal arches in process of construction, and past the tents and flag-poles of a juicy-looking cricket-field, on which Raffles undertook to bowl ...
— The Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... unprotected leg, just above the knee, and shattered the bone. He endeavored to remain on the field, but his horse became unmanageable, and in agonies of pain and thirst he rode back to the English quarters, a mile and a half distant. An incident of that ride, as told in the quaint language of Lord Brooke, retains the immortal charm of pathos which commands our ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... no more difficult thing to do well than to model the figure while still preserving the decorative outline. Several examples of the skilful accomplishment of this problem are illustrated here. Observe, for instance, how in the quaint Duerer-like design by Mr. Howard Pyle, Fig. 66, the edges of the drapery-folds are emphasized in the shadow by keeping them white, and see how wonderfully effective the result is. The same device is also to be noticed in the book-plate design by Mr. A. G. Jones, Fig. 62, as well as in the ...
— Pen Drawing - An Illustrated Treatise • Charles Maginnis
... mediaeval impressions have been unearthed in strange localities, in the bed of the Seine, as far away as Paris. Rude and archaic are many of these early essays in the sculptor's art. But they preserve for us, in quaint intensity, the fervor of adoration which possessed that earlier, more devout time and period. On the mind of this nineteenth century pilgrim, the same lovely old forms of belief and superstition were imprinted as are still to be ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... together through gardens of amaranth and asphodel towards the Grecian portico of heaven; and all these fortunate personages, whether monarchs, priests, fine ladies, or beggars, are depicted with perfectly infantine faces. To do this well lay exactly in the quaint, delicate nature of the angelic Frater; and this portion of the picture is most exquisitely handled. The other moiety, where devils with rabbits' ears, tiger faces, and monkeys' tails, are forking over the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... Plouharnel, Concarneau, Concurrus, Locmariaquer, Kermario, Kerlescant, Erdeven, and Sainte-Barbe. All these places are situated within a few miles of one another, and a good centre from which excursions can be made to each is the little town of Auray, with its quaint medieval market-house and shrine of St Roch. Archaeologists, both Breton and foreign, appear to be agreed that the groups of stones at Meneac, Kermario, and Kerlescant are portions of one original and continuous series ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... forgotten, had come to be disregarded—the penalty of dailiness—as the sun itself is disregarded unless it makes its power felt heavily. Captain Hagberd's movements showed no infirmity: he walked stiffly in his suit of canvas, a quaint and remarkable figure; only his eyes wandered more furtively perhaps than of yore. His manner abroad had lost its excitable watchfulness; it had become puzzled and diffident, as though he had suspected that there was somewhere about him something slightly compromising, some embarrassing oddity; ...
— To-morrow • Joseph Conrad
... rise and fall, seasons had come and gone, generations had reposed beneath its branches, and now they were reposing under the shadow of the old church, the clock of which had just struck the hour of six. On examining the tree closely, we were astonished to find carved in immense letters, and in quaint language, the ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... on the road to Huan-chiang, I lost myself—that is, I lost my men, and did not know the road. I got away into some quaint, secluded garden and sat down, tired and hot, under a tree in the shade, where a faint wind swung the heavy foliage with a solemn sound, and the subdued and soothing music of a brook running between ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door "'Tis some visitor," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door— Only ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... at Canterbury the cathedral; Black Edward's helm, and Becket's bloody stone, Were pointed out as usual by the bedral, In the same quaint, uninterested tone:— There 's glory again for you, gentle reader! All Ends in a rusty casque and dubious bone, Half-solved into these sodas or magnesias; Which form that ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... Dora. Breakfast was a hurried affair, while both she and Susie were absent from the midday dinner. The shy, fluttering glances which he occasionally surprised from her, the look of mutual appreciation which sometimes passed between them at a quaint bit of philosophy or naive remark, started his pulses dancing and set the whole world singing a ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... government displeasure or political trouble; and he imagined that such might be the history of the occupants of the dwelling before him. Passing the gate, which his young guide opened for him, he found himself in a large quaint garden. A miniature landscape, traversed by a winding stream, was faintly distinguishable. "Deign for one little moment to wait," the child said; "I go to announce the honorable coming;" and hurried toward the house. It was a spacious house, but seemed very old, and built in the fashion of another ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... how fair they shew, The Quarto quaint, the Aldine tall, Print, autograph, portfolio! Back from the outer air they call The athletes from the Tennis ball, This Rhymer from his rod and hooks, Would I could sing them, one and all, The ...
— London Lyrics • Frederick Locker
... Let all my thoughts be plain, honest, pious, simple, prudent, and charitable, till Thou art pleased to draw the curtain and let me see Thyself, O Eternal Jesu!' If I had time I could tell you more about Think-well's quaint old father. But the above may be better than nothing about ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... hope all of us have a realizing sense that we are permitted to be good and loyal friends; but we will kindly leave Mickey to make his own arrangements, and work out his own salvation, and that of his child. And Leslie, I didn't hear you offering to buy any of the quaint dishes and old furniture you hoped you might ...
— Michael O'Halloran • Gene Stratton-Porter
... anticipate, because the mention of Edenburn earlier in this chapter suggests a quaint individual about whom a few observations may ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... for a moment, staring straight in front of her at the blue smoke that circled up from the quaint chimney stacks of the town beneath the ...
— In the Mayor's Parlour • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... and Thor stood safely among the ruins, dressed in their tattered maiden robes, a quaint and curious sight; and Loki, full of mischief now as ever, burst ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... President, the people seeming impressed with the wisdom of his quaint phrase that "it was best not to swap horses while crossing a stream." Through all the vicissitudes of his first term he justified the unbounded confidence of the nation, supporting with no laggard hand, cheering and inspiring the citizen soldier with noble example and kindly ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... long back and rubbing herself against the hem of Zulma's cloak. Blanche gave her visitor a seat, helped her to take off her furs, and soon the two were engaged in earnest discourse. Zulma looked around the room and moved about to examine the many articles of its quaint furniture. This afforded her the opportunity of asking many questions, to all of which Blanche returned the most intelligent answers. Indeed, the child gave proofs of very remarkable intelligence. There was patent ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... they discipline themselves so as, in their own feelings, to put high above all the approbation or censure of their fellows the approbation or censure of Jesus Christ. That will take some cultivation. It is a great deal easier to shape our courses so as to get one another's praise. I remember a quaint saying in a German book. 'An old schoolmaster tried to please this one and that one, and it failed. "Well, then," said he, "I will try to please Christ." ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... Walter Scott knew it well, it being quite near to Ashiestiel, where he wrote "The Lay of the Last Minstrel," "Marmion," and "The Lady of the Lake." It was one of the prototypes of "Tully Veolan" in his Waverley. There was no abode in Scotland more quaint and curious than Traquair House, for it was turreted, walled, buttressed, windowed, and loopholed, all as in the days of old. Within were preserved many relics of the storied past and also of royalty. Here was the bed on which Queen Mary slept in 1566; here ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... whole being richly ornamented with pinnacles, buttresses, crocketted spires and elaborate tracery. Statues of saints, kings, queens and bishops are placed in niches along the northern and southern fronts, and the western front itself is sculptured with scenes from Holy Scripture in the quaint grotesque style of mediaeval art. No ivy is permitted to conceal the beauties of the building; and elevated in the clear air, far above the smoke of the town, it looks as fresh and white and clean cut as though it had been erected only ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... "Quaint superscription," he managed to observe. "How did you come by it?" and then wished he had not spoken.... Who but the recipient could be interested in its method of delivery? If anyone suspected him of ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... mayn't agree With FECHNER'S pedant formulae, I don't complain of such disparity; Too flawless that perfection shows; For me a larger comfort flows From human failings (take your nose— I like its quaint irregularity). ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. CLVIII, January 7, 1920 • Various
... Ufton Court both from its secluded situation and quaint internal construction, appears to have been peculiarly suitable for the secretion of persecuted priests. Here are ample means for concealment and escape into the surrounding woods; and so carefully have the ingenious ...
— Secret Chambers and Hiding Places • Allan Fea
... hand—a reduced likeness of his friend Captain Hunnewell, holding a telescope and quadrant—may be seen to this day, at the corner of Broad and State streets, serving in the useful capacity of sign to the shop of a nautical instrument maker. We know not how to account for the inferiority of this quaint old figure, as compared with the recorded excellence of the Oaken Lady, unless on the supposition that in every human spirit there is imagination, sensibility, creative power, genius, which, according to circumstances, may either ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Rena is recovering from her illness, and Tryon from his love, and while Fate is shuffling the cards for another deal, a few words may be said about the past life of the people who lived in the rear of the flower garden, in the quaint old house beyond the cedars, and how their lives were mingled with those of the men and women around them and others that were gone. For connected with our kind we must be; if not by our virtues, then by our vices,—if not by our services, at least ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... His genius flashes upon us like a certain flamboyant style of poetic architecture—the flowing, flame-like curves of his humor blending happily with the Gothic cusps of veneration for the old, with quaint ivy-leaves, green and still rustling under the wind and rain, springing easily out of its severer lines. What resistless magic is there in the fingers whose touch upon the same rich banks of keys, summons solemn, vibrant ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... the station lies through a pair of finely designed wrought-iron gates to the north frontage of the palace, erected by Wolsey himself. This front is all in the fine red-brick architecture of the period, with quaint gables, small mullioned windows, and a collection of moulded and twisted red-brick chimneys of wonderfully varied designs. The entrance through the gatehouse, flanked by two towers, is under a massive Tudor gateway, and leads into an inner quadrangle and thence into a second court, ...
— What to See in England • Gordon Home
... decidedly more worn and mended; and Miss Winifred Farebrother, the Vicar's elder sister, well-looking like himself, but nipped and subdued as single women are apt to be who spend their lives in uninterrupted subjection to their elders. Lydgate had not expected to see so quaint a group: knowing simply that Mr. Farebrother was a bachelor, he had thought of being ushered into a snuggery where the chief furniture would probably be books and collections of natural objects. The Vicar himself seemed to wear rather a changed aspect, as most men do when acquaintances made elsewhere ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... unreliable, and the instruments of navigation almost as crude as in the days of Columbus. Even the savage Indian, not content with lurking in ambush, went afloat to wreak mischief, and the records of the First Church of Salem contain this quaint entry under date of July 25, 1677: "The Lord having given a Commission to the Indians to take no less than 13 of the Fishing Ketches of Salem and Captivate the men... it struck a great consternation ...
— The Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine
... a start, and stared at the little quaint figure standing before him. Lucina wore a short blue woollen gown; below it her starched white pantalets hung to the tops of her morocco shoes. She wore also a white tier, and over that a little coat, and over that a little green cashmere shawl sprinkled with palm leaves, which her mother ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... Whaler" is abridged from a quaint account written by the Mate and published in an old volume which is long since out of print and very scarce. The papers on the Tonquin, John Paul Jones, and "The Great American Duellists" speak for themselves. The account of the battle ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... such a godfather. He was so full of genius and devotion to letters that a special impetus ought thereby to have been given to the cultivation of a similar spirit among those who were to inhabit the land of his love. But, though Hariot, Lawson, and quaint Dr. Brickell were moved by such a spirit, the muses have not made the Old North State very remarkable in ...
— School History of North Carolina • John W. Moore
... of Mr. Nelson, he had decided to read "Elizabeth"; and Louise, as she stood at the side of the stage, listening to the quaint old tale of the Quaker wooing, found herself forgetting all her surroundings in the interest of the familiar story. Dr. Brownlee had turned a little to one side, in order to conceal his discolored temple from the audience, and this brought him into a position ...
— In Blue Creek Canon • Anna Chapin Ray
... the archaic spelling Salvage (Lat. silvaticus). Curtis is Norman Fr. curteis (courtois). The adjective garish, now only poetical, but once commonly applied to gaudiness in dress, has given Gerrish. Quaint, which has so many meanings intermediate between its etymological sense of known or familiar (Lat. cognitus) and its present sense of unusual or unfamiliar, survives as Quint. But Coy is ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... lectured to you long ago about Greek and English poems on insects, I told you that nearly all the English poems on the subject were quite modern. I still believe that I was right in this statement, as a general assertion; but I have found one quaint poem about a grasshopper, which must have been written about the middle of the seventeenth century or, perhaps, a little earlier. The date of the author's birth and death are respectively 1618 and 1658. ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... almost everywhere. David Balfour could never have writ some speeches attributed to him—they are just R. L. Stevenson with a very superficial difference that, when once detected, renders them curious and quaint and ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... unquestionably, English domestic architecture has lost its most impressive features, in the course of the last century. In this respect, there are finer old towns than Lincoln: Chester, for instance, and Shrewsbury,—which last is unusually rich in those quaint and stately edifices where the gentry of the shire used to make their winter-abodes, in a provincial metropolis. Almost everywhere, nowadays, there is a monotony of modern brick or stuccoed fronts, hiding houses that are older than ever, but obliterating ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... It has been an old-fashioned house, Judith, but somebody who didn't know how has altered it and spoiled it. People are always doing that. There must have been a fanlight over this door. You could restore it. And do you see that quaint round window in the gable? Probably they looked at that and longed to do away with it, but happily for you didn't ...
— The Indifference of Juliet • Grace S. Richmond
... of my abundance to these old friends, but their pride stood in the way and the attempt failed. Worse than that. As if to show that benefits should proceed from them to me rather than from me to them, James bestowed on me a gift. It is a strange one,—nothing more nor less than a quaint Florentine dagger which I had often admired for its exquisite workmanship. Was it the last treasure he possessed? I am almost afraid so. At all events it shall lie here in my table- drawer where I alone can see it. Such sights are not good ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green
... they reached the castle. Lydia lingered for a moment on the terrace. The Gothic chimneys of the Warren Lodge stood up against the long, crimson cloud into which the sun was sinking. She smiled as if some quaint idea had occurred to her; raised her eyes for a moment to the black-marble Egyptian gazing with unwavering eyes into the ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... yellow-faced, quaint little fellow coming out of the darkness into the light to bend down and carefully lay some fresh wood upon the fire, after which he slowly began to ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn
... solitude, rejoicing to be free from souls so quarrelsome and contentious. Again these tracts give a picture of how they should live that are truly Buddha's disciples. Buddha finds three disciples living in perfect harmony, and asks them how they live together so peaceably and lovingly. In quaint and yet dignified language they reply, and tell him that they serve each other. He that rises first prepares the meal, he that returns last at night puts the room in order, etc. (ib. 4). Occasionally in the account of unruly brothers it is evident that tradition ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... the Clockmaker exists no longer, except perhaps in some lonely corner; every one laughs at his humorous descriptions of the slow old times, and confesses, that if things were as Sam has portrayed them in his quaint way, he only acted the part of a true moralist in laying them bare to the world, and aiming at them the pointed shafts of his ready satire. The work is likely to have a more enduring reputation than the mere mechanical humour of the productions of 'Mark Twain.' ...
— The Intellectual Development of the Canadian People • John George Bourinot
... fluid. The exact process by which a beefsteak becomes a feeling—tender or not, according to the age of the animal from which it was cut; the successive stages of elaboration through which a caviar sandwich is transmuted to a quaint fancy and reappears as a pungent epigram; the marvelous functional methods of converting a hard-boiled egg into religious contrition, or a cream-puff into a sigh of sensibility—these things have been patiently ascertained by M. Pasteur, and by him expounded with convincing lucidity. ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... my aunt's quaint style of dress contrasted somewhat strongly with many of the fashionably attired lady passengers in the same car. I presume this gave her little uneasiness, for she cared little for the opinion of others in matters pertaining to dress; and she regarded ...
— Walter Harland - Or, Memories of the Past • Harriet S. Caswell
... little prince in his black velvet suit, with Flossie's red sash tied from shoulder to waist, in gay court fashion. Flossie wore the pink slip that belonged under her lace dress, and on her head was a silk handkerchief pinned up at the ends, in that square quaint fashion of little ...
— The Bobbsey Twins at the Seashore • Laura Lee Hope
... the west of London—a room full of pictures and bric-a-brac, of quaint and luxurious furniture, with volumes abundant, with a piano in a shadowed corner, a violin and a mandoline laid carelessly aside—two men sat facing each other, their looks expressive of anything but mutual confidence. The one (he wore an overcoat, and had muddy ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing
... Chartres, or Rouen have ten, fifteen, or twenty medallions in each, and each medallion contains two figures at least, often six or seven, representing every event of interest in the history of the saint whose life is in question. Nay, but, you say those figures are rude and quaint, and ought not to be imitated. Why, so is the leafage rude and quaint, yet you imitate that. The coloured border pattern of geranium or ivy leaf is not one whit better drawn, or more like geraniums and ivy, than the figures are like figures; but you call the geranium leaf idealized—why don't you ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... imperfect translation of Father Vincent de Paul's quaint narrative, is published at the request of the leading clergy of Antigonish County, that section of Eastern Nova Scotia in which the holy Trappist so long ...
— Memoir • Fr. Vincent de Paul
... extremities in a pair of shoes about large enough to make two leather cradles; on his head a hat that scorned to shine, and in his hand he carried an oaken staff; his small grey eyes glistened with a spark of latent wit, whilst on his face was stamped in unequivocal characters some quaint originality. ...
— Yorksher Puddin' - A Collection of the Most Popular Dialect Stories from the - Pen of John Hartley • John Hartley
... a deep bank clothed with timber, which led the eye down by slow descents into the beautiful valley of the Ell. Here the silver river wound its gentle way through lush and poplar-bordered marshes, where the cattle stand knee-deep in flowers; past quaint wooden mill-houses, through Boisingham Old Common, windy looking even now, and brightened here and there with a dash of golden gorse, till it was lost beneath the picturesque cluster of red-tiled roofs that marked the ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... rapidity which seemed to hush the tumult of its swift current far underneath the rippling surface. The old stone light-house—the town's traditionary godfather—stood sturdily for its rights out in mid-stream, and helped support the quaint zigzag of that most charming relic of the past, the longest wooden foot-bridge of Lucerne. A never-ending crowd of all ages and sexes and conditions of natives and strangers were mounting and descending its steps, ...
— A Woman's Will • Anne Warner
... were not troubled with a superfluity of servants, were glad to welcome one to their household who had such a wondrous talent for amusing them, and keeping them still. In spite of all her oddities, she was respected for her industry and simplicity, and a certain quaint, old-fashioned, superstitious piety, that made a streak of light through ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... the church, and their crocketed pinnacles shot up almost to the ceiling. But it was well they had not shared the destruction in which almost all the other ornaments of the magnificent fane they once decorated were involved. Carefully preserved, the black varnished oak well displayed the quaint and grotesque designs with which many of them—the Prior's stall in especial—were embellished. Chief among them was the abbot's stall, festooned with sculptured vine wreaths and clustering grapes, ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... at Gibraltar on Sunday, March 11th, and in our walk from the shore to the quaint old tavern known as the King's Arms,—combining much comfort with its dinginess,—we found the day was but partially observed as one of rest. The stores were mostly open, and the numerous bar-rooms noticeably so, after the usual style in Roman Catholic countries. The first impression ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... nature made rivals, and time made friends or enemies, as it happened. A curious observer, in looking over a collection of the Cambridge poems, which were formerly composed by its students, has remarked that "Cowley from the first was quaint, Milton sublime, and Barrow copious." If then the characteristic disposition may reveal itself thus early, it affords a principle which ought not to be neglected at ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... lingering touch which had something of hesitation in it, and which reduced all music to a succession of soft chords, The Maid of Dundee and Annie Laurie, The Banks of Banna and The Last Rose of Summer, then one of the simpler nocturnes of Chopin, and, following these, a quaint, slow melody which was like all of the others ...
— The Early Bird - A Business Man's Love Story • George Randolph Chester
... deceased. Partially separated from the rest of the house, it communicated by a winding staircase with a chamber above, to which Philip had been wont to betake himself whenever he returned late, and over- exhilarated, from some rural feast crowning a hard day's hunt. Above a quaint, old-fashioned bureau of Dutch workmanship (which Philip had picked up at a sale in the earlier years of his marriage) was a portrait of Catherine taken in the bloom of her youth. On a peg on the door that led to the staircase, still hung his rough driving ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 1 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... disturbances. Surely I did not approve of their leaving their homes for such purposes as that! As tactfully as I could, I suggested that conditions in England were peculiar. There was, for example, the quaint old law which permitted a husband to beat his wife subject to certain restrictions. Would an American woman submit to such a law? There was the law which made it impossible for a woman to divorce her husband for infidelity, unless accompanied by desertion or ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... boys would throw stones at him.' He, however, did not alter my opinion of a favourite authour, to whom I was first directed by his being quoted in The Spectator[566], and in whom I have found much shrewd and lively sense, expressed indeed in a style somewhat quaint, which, however, I do not dislike. His book has an air of originality. We figure to ourselves an ancient ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... scene presented by the grotto itself, the farm-buildings on the face of the cliff, the huge table-rock and flagstaff, the many quaint blocks, pillars and wild escarpments, and the numerous domestic animals, such as mastiffs, pigs, ravens, and goats, all congregated together in a small bay, and literally separated from the world by the barren waste land above, and the huge cliffs ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 218, December 31, 1853 • Various
... next day ever passed she never knew, for before her eyes wherever she looked danced that lovely, quaint old gown of shimmering silk, and she could think of nothing else. It hid the map of Europe when she opened her geography, it played leap-frog among common fractions when she tried to do her sums, it waved at the head of the Continental Army while ...
— Tabitha at Ivy Hall • Ruth Alberta Brown
... I occupied at L—— was a quaint, old-fashioned building, a corner-house. One side, in which was the front entrance, looked upon a street which, as there were no shops in it, and it was no direct thoroughfare to the busy centres ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... I. e. less diluted than usual. On this quaint picture of ancient manners, compared with the customs of the Hebrew fathers, compare Coleridge, ...
— The Iliad of Homer (1873) • Homer
... probably prompt Mr. Flower to the indulgence of a form of matrimonial banter which was not unlike the endearments he bestowed upon his horses, and which, when you knew that he loved the little quaint woman with all his heart, you were able to translate into more customary modes ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... quaint conceit of him, that Mars and Mercury fell at variance whose servant he should be; and there is an epigrammatist that saith that Art and Nature had spent their excellences in his fashioning, and, fearing they could not end what they had begun, they bestowed him up for time, and Nature ...
— Travels in England and Fragmenta Regalia • Paul Hentzner and Sir Robert Naunton
... less equal in the translation, as well as less interesting in itself. What is stupidly said of Shakspeare, is really true and appropriate of Chapman; mighty faults counterpoised by mighty beauties. Excepting his quaint epithets which he affects to render literally from the Greek, a language above all others blest in the happy marriage of sweet words, and which in our language are mere printer's compound epithets—such as quaffed divine 'joy-in-the-heart-of-man-infusing' wine, ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... that on the occasion of his first visit we children regarded him with mingled awe and curiosity. His quaint appearance and his formal, deliberate manner of speech made him seem to us like a being from another world. We were at once fascinated and repelled, and I think he became at first the object of our constant, though furtive, ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... six weeks of the Easter vacation, she had revelled so in his three queer little letters, half-shy, half-confidential; kissed them, and worn them in her dress! And in return had written him long, perfectly correct epistles in her still rather quaint English. She had never let him guess her feelings; the idea that he might shocked her inexpressibly. When the summer term began, life seemed to be all made up of thoughts of him. If, ten years ago, her baby had lived, if its cruel death—after her agony—had not killed for good ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... different. It was simple almost to the point of plainness. Its charm lay in its glimmering glistening sheen, like the inside of a shell. Its draperies were caught up to show slender feet in low-heeled slippers. A quaint cap of silver tissue held closely the waves of thick fair hair. Her eyes were like the sea in a storm—deep gray ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... safe from it, no Prince may depend upon it, the vastest intelligence can not bring it about, and puny efforts to make it universal end in quaint comedy, and coarse farce. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... I." Her expression suddenly was absent, with a quaint, slight smile hovering about her lips. She looked at him merrily. "You see, it's got to ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... an old Tudor mansion. My father was very particular in keeping the smallest peculiarities of his home unaltered. Thus the many peaks and gables, the numerous turrets, and the mullioned windows with their quaint lozenge panes set in lead, remained very nearly as they had been three centuries back. Over and above the quaint melancholy of our dwelling, with the deep woods of its park and the sullen waters of the mere, our neighborhood was thinly peopled and primitive, and ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... corner of the domains of Kaiser Bill, in a fair district to which he has no more right than a highwayman has to his victim's wallet, there is a quaint old house built of gray stone and covered ...
— Tom Slade with the Boys Over There • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... possibly be synthesised by one mind regarding the locality we were passing through. He suggested that we try our fortune in the little town where the car first meets the Lake. This we did and looked up and down that Main Street. It was quiet and quaint, but something pressed home to us that was not all joy—the tightness of old scar-tissue in the chest.... The countryman came running to us from the still standing car, though this was not his destination, and pointing to a little grey man ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... lines Sprays and leaves and quaint designs; Setting round thy border scrolled Buds of ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... and prayers gain the hardest hearts, Tears, vows and prayers have I spent in vain; Tears cannot soften flint nor vows convert; Prayers prevail not with a quaint disdain. I lose my tears where I have lost my love, I vow my faith where faith is not regarded, I pray in vain a merciless to move; So rare a faith ought better be rewarded. Yet though I cannot win her will with tears, Though my soul's ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet-Cycles - Delia - Diana • Samuel Daniel and Henry Constable
... trumpery books;" the last being those which served her to conduct the business of the house. There were many elderly gentlemen in the author's younger days, who still held it part of the amusement of a journey "to parley with mine host," who often resembled, in his quaint humour, mine Host of the Garter, in the Merry Wives of Windsor; or Blague of the George, in the Merry Devil of Edmonton. Sometimes the landlady took her share of entertaining the company. In either case, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 368, May 2, 1829 • Various
... The quaint old Fuller sums up in a few words the character of the true gentleman and man of action in describing that of the great admiral, Sir Francis Drake: "Chaste in his life, just in his dealings, true of his word; ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... lounging upon the dock, while before them lay the Santa Maria ready for her midnight sailing. Behind slept Unalaska, quaint, antique, and Russian, rusting amid the fogs of Bering Sea. Where, a week before, mild-eyed natives had dried their cod among the old bronze cannon, now a frenzied horde of gold-seekers paused in their rush to the new El Dorado. They had come like a locust ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... to divert his thoughts from his crime, and at the same time tried to reap its reward by studying the stolen recipe; but his attempt was not successful. The cramped letters, brown with age, on the brown parchment, danced before his eyes; and the quaint, intricate High German phraseology became more and more involved. He could make nothing of it at all. And the thought occurred to him that perhaps he never would be able to make anything of it—that, without losing any part of the penalty justly attendant ...
— A Romance Of Tompkins Square - 1891 • Thomas A. Janvier
... the tall spires of Beaminster Cathedral came into sight, and a few minutes brought the carriage across the grey stone bridge and down the principal street of the quaint old place which called itself a city, but was really neither more nor less than a quiet country town. Here Lady Caroline turned to her young guest with a question—"You live in Gwynne Street, I believe, ...
— A True Friend - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... It is pleasant, with a heart at ease, Just after sunset, or by moonlight skies, To make the shifting clouds be what you please, Or let the easily persuaded eyes Own each quaint likeness issuing from the mould Of a friend's fancy; or with head bent low And cheek aslant see rivers flow of gold 'Twixt crimson banks; and then, a traveller, go From mount to mount through Cloudland, gorgeous land! ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... with brevity, yet curiosity was all awake and all abroad; for the procession lasted some hours. Not a door but was open; not a threshold but was crowded, and not a window of the many-windowed gothic modern, frightful, handsome, quaint, disfigured, fantastic, or lofty mansions that diversify the large' market-place of Brussels, but was occupied by lookers on. Placidly, indeed, they saw the warriors pass : no kind greeting welcomed their arrival; no warm wishes followed them to combat. Neither, on the other hand, was there the ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... we know each other!" she resumed. "You could help me so much if you would! Next time you come, you must tell me something about those old French rhymes that have come into fashion of late! They say a pretty thing so much more prettily for their quaint, antique, courtly liberty! The triolet now—how deliriously impertinent it is! Is ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald
... ex-Queen, 'I shall send you the medal and diploma of my Academy as a slight acknowledgment of the pleasure I have had this afternoon. At present Don Alberto is going to introduce me to the quaint Roman custom of eating snails in the open air. Will you join us, Maestro? But I see that you are still in your robes, and I have no doubt you look forward to a more substantial supper than a dish of molluscs fried in oil! Good-night, my dear Maestro. Vale, as those delightful ancients ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... one or other of these directions, is polytheism culminating in the rule of one supreme divinity. High above the doctrine of souls, of divine Manes, of local nature gods, of the great gods of class and element, there are to be discerned in barbaric theology, shadowings, quaint or majestic, of the conception of a Supreme Deity, henceforth to be traced onward in expanding power and brightening glory along the history of Religion. It is no unimportant task, partial as it is, to select and group the typical data which show the nature and position of the ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... all fun with my boy, however; he had his troubles, and in spite of his cheerfulness he knew what heartache was. Walking in the quaint garden of the Luxembourg one day, he confided to me the little romance of his life. A very touching little romance as he told it, with eloquent eyes and voice and frequent pauses for breath. I cannot give his words, but the ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... the ditty of "Wapping Old Stairs" (a ballad so sweet and touching that surely any English poet might be proud to be the father of it), and he sang this quaint and charming old song in an exceedingly pleasant voice, with flourishes and roulades in the old Incledon manner, which has pretty nearly passed away. The singer gave his heart and soul to the simple ballad, and delivered Molly's ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... allowed him to stay anywhere in Norton but at their house, now that the Elmers had moved away. After supper Ruth and the Mays came over to see him, and he entertained them the whole evening with his funny stories and quaint sayings. ...
— Wakulla - A Story of Adventure in Florida • Kirk Munroe
... await her return from chapel," answered Ercole. He took the letter and departed. As he emerged into the courtyard he was startled to see the fool dash towards him, gasping for breath, and with excitement in every line of his quaint face. ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini
... over once or twice from Litchfield that next summer to fetch Sylvia and to administer comfort to Hannah. He was a quaint, prim little gentleman, neat as any wren, but mild-mannered as wrens never are, and in a moderate way kindly and sympathetic. When the children had haled their lovely sister away to see their rustic possessions, ...
— Good Cheer Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... affair. A whole back garden, had been transformed into a vast pavilion, containing an Armida's garden, whose masses of ferns and piles of gorgeous flowers made delightful nooks for strangers who left the glare of the dancing-room, and the quaint dresses harmonised with the magic of the gaslight and the strange ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... once christened "The Crazy American." A lady must not be escorted home from an evening party by a gentleman, but by a servant with a lantern; and as the streets have no lamps, I never could see the breaking-up of any such entertainment without recalling Retzsch's quaint pictures of the little German towns, and the burghers plodding home with their lanterns,—unless, perchance, what a foreign friend of ours called a "sit-down chair" came rattling by, and transferred our associations ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... a good scene for such a narrative, with the oak-wainscoting, quaint, and clumsy furniture, the heavy beams that crossed its ceiling, and the tall four-post bed, with dark curtains, within which you might imagine what shadows ...
— Madam Crowl's Ghost and The Dead Sexton • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... his end? Not mechanical, scientific theories, that was clear. Not mere realistic description of life. He told me he had little faith in mere observation, except for comic or quaint characterization. He had seldom if ever studied a serious character from a model. One woman he invented entirely (was it Tess?) and she was thought to be his best. What, then, was this essence which the novelist, growing old, would convey ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... country, and went twisting in and out through lovely little green valleys. There were several varieties of gum trees; among them many giants. Some of them were bodied and barked like the sycamore; some were of fantastic aspect, and reminded one of the quaint apple trees in Japanese pictures. And there was one peculiarly beautiful tree whose name and breed I did not know. The foliage seemed to consist of big bunches of pine-spines, the lower half of each bunch a rich brown or old-gold color, the upper half a most vivid and strenuous ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... however, he quickly found an entrance to a labyrinthine walk, which led him at last to an open space and a rustic summer-house that stood beneath a gnarled and venerable pear-tree. The summerhouse was a quaint stockade of dark madrono boughs thatched with red-wood bark, strongly suggestive of deeper woodland shadow. But in strange contrast, the floor, table, and benches were thickly strewn with faded rose-leaves, scattered ...
— Maruja • Bret Harte
... time now the spirit of the herd mastered Jimmie; he wanted what all the men about him wanted—to hold back the Beast from these fair French fields and quaint old villages, and these American hospitals and rest-camps and Y.M.C.A. huts—to say nothing of motor-cycle repair-sheds with Jimmie Higgins in them! And the trouble was that the Beast was not being held back; ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... isn't always at liberty to play about with the scapegrace young men of her acquaintance, you know. And this morning my employer was seized with a sudden desire to visit Aigle, so we drove over and lunched at a quaint old inn there. ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... church on Sunday morning, because it was quaint and old-fashioned to do so, and because he loved to see the women of his acquaintance in their devotional moods and attitudes. There was hardly any mood or attitude in which he did not love to see a woman, partly because he was full of human sympathy and tenderness, and partly ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... and tranquil life of the Three Vows had a fine and delicate effect on the genius of Francis. He was primarily a poet. The perfection of his literary instinct is shown in his naming the fire 'brother,' and the water 'sister,' in the quaint demagogic dexterity of the appeal in the sermon to the fishes 'that they alone were saved in the Flood.' In the amazingly minute and graphic dramatisation of the life, disappointments and excuses of any shrub ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... way the distinctive features and interests of each document will most readily be found. The parallel suggested is easy and instructive, and it reveals the relative ethical and theological superiority of E to J. J tells the story of Abraham's falsehood with a quaint naivete (xii.); E is offended by it and excuses it (xx.). The theological refinement of E is suggested not only here, xx. 3, 6, but elsewhere, by the frequency with which God appears in dreams and not in ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... anything. This, also, befalls me, that I do not find myself where I seek myself, and I light upon things more by chance than by any inquisition of my own judgment. I perhaps sometimes hit upon something when I write, that seems quaint and sprightly to me, though it will appear dull and heavy to another.—But let us leave these fine compliments; every one talks thus of himself according to his talent. But when I come to speak, I am already so lost that I know not ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... in the author's younger days, who still held it part of the amusement of a journey 'to parley with mine host,' who often resembled, in his quaint humour, mine Host of the Garter in the MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR; or Blague of the George in the MERRY DEVIL OF EDMONTON. Sometimes the landlady took her share of entertaining the company. In either case, the omitting to pay them due attention gave displeasure, and perhaps brought down a smart ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... with a faintly quizzical smile and made no reply. The dignity of ownership of many thousand cattle kept the old rancher's shoulders square, and there was an antique gentility about his thin face with its white goatee. He was more like a quaint figure of the seventeenth century than a successful cattleman ...
— The Untamed • Max Brand
... Prince withdrew from Pharsala to take up a stronger position at Domokos, and the Greeks under General Smolenski, the military hero of the campaign, were forced to retreat, and the Turks came in, and, according to their quaint custom, burned the village and marched on to Volo. John Bass, the American correspondent, and myself were keeping house in the village, in the home of the mayor. He had fled from the town, as had nearly all the villagers; and as we liked the ...
— Notes of a War Correspondent • Richard Harding Davis
... figure work so easily that one may say safety is to be found only in the most delicate relief. To make figures look round is to make them look stuffed. That stuffy images are to be found in mediaeval church work is only too true. In Gothic art one finds this quaint, perhaps, but it is perilously near the laughable. The point of the ridiculous is plainly overpassed in English work of the 17th century, which degenerates at last into mere doll work—the dolls duly stuffed and dressed ...
— Art in Needlework - A Book about Embroidery • Lewis F. Day
... which stands by us is not precious only because it contains the quaint wisdom and manifold experience of Ambroise Pare, mingled with his credulous gossip, and again sweetened by his simple reverence; not precious alone because it contains the noblest words ever uttered by one of his profession,—Ie le pensay et Dieu le guarit; ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... for telling us such a dandy story." cried Ted, who had not lost a word of this quaint tale, told so graphically over the camp-fire of the old ...
— Kalitan, Our Little Alaskan Cousin • Mary F. Nixon-Roulet
... not finish his threat. I daresay it would have been something very dreadful, but I was not in the least frightened as I held on; but as he clung to the big quaint coping of the wall he suddenly gave two or three such tremendous kicks that one of them, aided by his getting his free foot on my shoulder, was given with such force that I was driven backwards, and after staggering a few steps, caught my heel and came down ...
— Brownsmith's Boy - A Romance in a Garden • George Manville Fenn
... proves to be a quaint, straggling Mormon village with a touch of modern enterprise; south of Cedar City the villages lack the enterprise. The houses are of a gray composition resembling adobe, and many of them are half a century old and more. Dilapidated square forts, reminders of pioneer ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... favor. I have before intimated that the city in which he dwelt was the seat of a learned institution; and it was his fortune—ill or good, will appear in the sequel—to make the acquaintance of several inmates of the university, who seemed "to take a liking to him," to borrow the quaint juvenile expression in such cases, especially during the ripening and ingathering of the fruit in his father's little orchard. At these seasons their visits were frequent; and as the student's life appeared to be at once ...
— Ups and Downs in the Life of a Distressed Gentleman • William L. Stone
... with me in my playing at cards. I left Leghorn with certain muleteers with whom I played at cards at the baiting-houses, and who speedily won from me all the ha'pennies and sixpences I had won from the sailors. I got my money's worth, however, for I learnt from the muleteers all kind of quaint tricks upon the cards, which I knew nothing of before; so I did not grudge them what they chated me of, and when we parted we did so in kindness on both sides. On getting to . . . I was received into the religious house for Irishes. It was the Irish house, Shorsha, ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... faithful account of my brothers and my sister, and a brief description of the dear old-fashioned cottage, with its white- plaster walls crossed with great black beams, its many gables and quaint latticed windows. I told her how happy and united we had always been at home, and how this made my separation from those I loved so much the harder to bear; to all of which Milly Darrell listened ...
— Milly Darrell and Other Tales • M. E. Braddon
... the impression of absurdity is simply the consequence of antiquity; and even that which is rightly regarded as absurd in the present age, will not at least have produced the discomposing effects of absurdity upon the less developed beholders of that age; just as the quaint pictures with which their churches were decorated may make us smile, but were by them regarded with awe ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... perfect things in the world. What most people, however, remember is its tombs, its doors, and its reliefs; the proportions escape them. I think its shallow easy dome beyond description beautiful. Brunelleschi, who had an investigating genius, himself painted the quaint constellations in the ceiling over the altar. At the Pazzi chapel we shall find similar architecture; but there extraneous colour was allowed to come in. Here such reliefs as were ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... transformed by the addition. It presented a quaint, foreign appearance, for the high square sail was exactly like that of a Chinese junk, while its flaming red color was irresistibly suggestive of the craft ...
— Canoe Boys and Campfires - Adventures on Winding Waters • William Murray Graydon
... in the veritable wilds, camping in virgin forests, or on the edge of glaciers, or in the dust of American deserts. He had never been to Europe, but he had been to Buenos Aires. You can imagine what Kathleen Somers and her father felt about that: they thought him too quaint and barbaric for words; but still not barbaric enough to be ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... French shopkeepers, speaking a quaint, broken English, came to their shop doors to greet the Americans, even to urge the newcomers to enter and buy, but Captain Ribaut waved all such aside with ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys with Pershing's Troops - Dick Prescott at Grips with the Boche • H. Irving Hancock
... you, that Fullalove invited him into the mizentop to fight the pirate. The Patient came gingerly and shivered there with fear. But five minutes elapsing, and he not killed, that weakness gave way to a jocund recklessness; and he kept them all gay with his quaint remarks, of which I must record but one. When they crossed the stern of the pirate, the distance was so small that the faces of that motley crew were plainly visible. Now, Vespasian was a merciless critic of coloured skins. "Wal," said he, turning up his nose sky-high, "dis child never ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... Esplanade, and every stall is profusely lighted; the hawkers, who carry about their goods in a more humble way upon their heads in baskets, have them stuck with candles, and the wild shadowy effects produced, amid the quaint buildings thus partially lighted, ...
— Notes of an Overland Journey Through France and Egypt to Bombay • Miss Emma Roberts
... spoke to her their voices softened to an undernote of tenderness never used among themselves. She had won her way steadily to every girl's heart. They had marveled at her invariable sweetness of temper; they had laughed at her quaint, naive sayings, and, most of all, they had loved her for the warm, grateful heart that found room and ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... which was not distinctly forbidden by law. The prisoner was acquitted, and the decision has sanctioned the present practice of cremation. Fitzjames, as I gather from letters, was much interested in the quaint old Druid, and was gratified by ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... the bedside of Jimmy Brady, a former jockey from the Pimlico turf in Baltimore, and now a proud wearer of Uncle Sam's khaki. In his own quaint way, Jimmy told me the story of what a little handful of Americans did in the great battle in Picardy. Jimmy knew. ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... senseless kind of classification. For instance: One set of volumes contains nothing but copper-plate engraved titles, and woe betide the grand old Dutch folios of the seventeenth century if they cross his path. Another is a volume of coarse or quaint titles, which certainly answer the end of showing how idiotic and conceited some authors have been. Here you find Dr. Sib's "Bowels opened in Divers Sermons," 1650, cheek by jowl with the discourse attributed falsely to Huntington, the Calvinist, "Die and be ...
— Enemies of Books • William Blades
... never err officially, and their States are, officially, as well administered as Our territories. Also, the private allowances to various queer people are not exactly matters to put into newspapers, though they give quaint reading sometimes. ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... upon their grapes, and who knew nothing of the great world beyond, and spoke of Paris with awe, and even a shade of doubt. Living the same lives generation after generation, tilling the same crops, and praying before the same stone altar in the small, quaint church, it is not to be wondered at that when a change occurred to any one of their number, it was regarded as a sort of social era. There were those in St. Croix who had known Mere Giraud's grandfather, a slow-spoken, kindly old peasant, who had ...
— Mere Girauds Little Daughter • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... palace on one of the radiating avenues, was giving a dancing-party, to which the entire blue book had been invited. Kalora went, trailed by the long-suffering Popova. She wore her most fetching Parisian gown, and decked herself out with wrought jewelry of quaint and heavy design, which was the envy of all the other young women in town, and she put in a very busy night, for she danced with army officers, and lieutenants of the navy, and one senator, and goodness knows how ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade
... fixed at different heights and of varying diameters to accommodate the wrists of man, woman, and child, may still be found in the middle of the Priests' Green. These stand, it will be remembered, under a quaint old roof supported on rough, oaken pillars, and surmounted by a weathercock which the monkish fancy has fashioned to the shape of the archangel blowing the last trump. His clarion or coach-horn, or whatever instrument of music it was he ...
— The Lady Of Blossholme • H. Rider Haggard
... at the quaint flowers in their golden vases. And when the Witch ran to her and kissed her she did not even look at her. She looked only at Eric, and her eyes said, "I ...
— The Little House in the Fairy Wood • Ethel Cook Eliot
... to the isles of four old Dutch navigators, who all describe the dodo under different names, we come to the quaint old traveller, Sir Thomas Herbert, who touched at the Mauritius in 1627. In his Relation of some Yeare's Travaile, he thus describes the bird:—'The dodo; a bird the Dutch call walghvogel or dod eersen; her body is round and fat, which occasions the slow pace, or that her corpulencie; and so ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 440 - Volume 17, New Series, June 5, 1852 • Various
... get used to the quaint language of the people, and from the helpless way in which they stare at me, my tongue must be equally unintelligible. A delightful camaraderie exists; every one knows every one else, or they all act as if they did. As ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... man. A few soft-toned pictures adorned the dull gray walls above the wainscoting, and directly over a massive desk that never was seen open hung a framed letter. The letter was written on blue-lined paper in red pokeberry ink. At the top of the letter was the advertisement of a hotel, done in quaint, old-fashioned, fancy script with many curly-cues and printers' ornaments. The advertisement set forth that the Thayer House at Sycamore Ridge was "First class in every particular," and that "Especial attention was paid to transient custom." On a line in the right-hand corner ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... made out his cheque for the amount, and having signed his name to it in a cramped little quaint handwriting, which reminded one of his person, was duly presented with a receipt and dismissed to his counting-house. There he entertained the other clerks by a glowing description of the magnanimity of ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... rest of the passengers on the steamer, go directly from Liverpool to London, but stopped for a couple of days in the quaint old town of Chester. "If we don't see it now," said Euphemia, "we never shall see it. When we once start back we shall be raving distracted to get home, and I ...
— The Rudder Grangers Abroad and Other Stories • Frank R. Stockton
... he had dedicated his first composition to the other sex. It was a set of "exercises," and the compliment was paid to Lydia Garella, a quaint little hunchback, whom he used afterward to refer to as his first love. But it was later, when he was giving lessons to support his mother, and just turned seventeen, that he drifted into what was really his first love. The Comte de Saint Criq, then Minister of the Interior, had an ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... a quaint dress stepped forward, a paper in his hand, and, backed as he was by half a dozen halberdiers, would in a moment have laid hands on me if M. de Rambouillet had not intervened with a negligent air of authority, which sat on him the more gracefully as he held ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... thread of an old-fashioned madrigal which he had often heard his mother sing, with quaint words long since gone out of style and hardly to be understood, and between the staves a warbling, wordless refrain which he had learned out on the hills and in the fields, picked up ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... representatives of the later and higher Asiatic fauna 'more anon'; for the present we may regard it as approximately true that aboriginal and unsophisticated Australia in the lump was wholly given over, on its first discovery, to kangaroos, phalangers, dasyures, wombats, and other quaint marsupial animals, with names as strange ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... kind will unconsciously inoculate his boy, allowing him to play beside him in the bookroom, where the air is charged with germs (against which there is no disinfectant, I believe, except commercial conversation), and when the child is weary of his toys will give him an old book of travels, with quaint pictures which never depart from the memory. By and by, so thoughtless is this invalid father, who has suffered enough, surely, himself from this disease, that he will allow his boy to open parcels of books, reeking with infection, and explain to him the rarity ...
— Books and Bookmen • Ian Maclaren
... appointed.—Tell me, however, what has become of your Book on England? We shall really be obliged to you for that. A piece of it went through all the Newspapers, some years ago; which was really unique for its quaint kindly insight, humor, and other qualities; like an etching by Hollar or Durer, amid the continents of vile smearing which are called "pictures" at present. Come on, Come on; give us the Book, and ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... genial malice; stayed so long at village public-houses without visible motive that I incurred the suspicion of the local constabulary, and on one memorable occasion found myself identified with a long watched-for robber of local hen-roosts. When I dropped upon some quaint village that, from a pictorial point of view, seemed to offer all that I desired, I found my tale, that I wished to settle in it, universally derided. No one could conceive any sane person as being desirous of living ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... loved the great cellars under the inn, which were once the cloisters of an old monastery: where there are unexpected steps, and dim archways, and winding paths where it is very easy to imagine that you see bare-footed friars with brown habits and rope girdles pacing slowly along. There they bought quaint brown jars and mustard-pots of the kind that are used, and have always been used, on the tables above. But best of all were the great oaken beams above them, solid as England itself, but blackened and charred by the Great Fire of 1666. ...
— Captain Jim • Mary Grant Bruce
... a quarter of venison." Here the steamer's course lies among islands covered partly with undergrowth and partly with forests. In the shadow of the tall trees on one of the most lovely of these islands is seen from the deck a quaint, barefooted company consisting of two men, a woman and three small children, who have just stepped ashore from two boats made from the hollowed-out trunks of trees. Two dogs accompany them. The adults of the party are clothed in rags. These people are monteros, and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... There were two quaint rush-bottomed chairs and a yellow stool, such as we tie with ribbons and call a milking stool. A nice warm rug lay at the side of the bed, and a smaller one at the washing stand. These were woven ...
— A Little Girl in Old Boston • Amanda Millie Douglas
... the Romantic School can be pretty definitely set at about 1796; its cradle was in the quaint university town of Jena, at that time the home of Schiller and his literary-esthetic enterprises, and only a few miles away from Goethe in Weimar. Five names embody about all that was most significant in the earlier ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... Bernard, of Paris, was granted a French patent on a coffee roaster, which was an improvement designed to bring the roasting cylinder and the fire in closer contact. This was accomplished, to quote the quaint language of the inventor, by applying movable legs and "by superimposing a sheet iron circlet around the edge of the furnace to get double the quantity of heat and it presents so much advantage that it has seemed to me worthy of ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... Anice he found a subtle inspiration. She seemed to understand his trials by instinct, and even the minutiae of his work made themselves curiously clear to her. As to the people who were under his control, she was never tired of hearing of them, and of studying their quaint, rough ways. To please her he stored up many a characteristic incident, and it was through him that she heard most frequently of Joan. She did not even see Joan for fully two months after her arrival in Riggan, and then it was Joan ...
— That Lass O' Lowrie's - 1877 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... delightful addition to those quaint and laughable tales which have made the author of 'Uncle Remus' loved and fancied wherever ...
— Finnish Legends for English Children • R. Eivind
... Dragoeiro (Dracaena Draco Linn., Palma canariensis Tourn.), which an Irish traveller called a 'dragon-palm,' owed its vulgar name to the fancy that the fruit contained the perfect figure of a standing dragon with gaping mouth and long neck, spiny back and crocodile's tail. It is a quaint tree of which any ingenious carpenter could make a model. The young trunk is somewhat like that of the Oreodoxa regia, or an asparagus immensely magnified; but it frequently grows larger above than below. ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... the charm of the quaint room, with its dim lighting, the low fire, the fantastic patterns of rug and basket showing faintly, and through the windows the mountains and the stars. As the conversation began to yield to the quiet of the place, Herrick went to the piano and played softly. It had never fallen to the ...
— Across the Mesa • Jarvis Hall
... of the "History of Pirates," of 1725, has a quaint frontispiece, showing the two women pirates, Anne Bonny and Mary Read, in action with their swords drawn, upon the deck of a ship. While the fourth edition, published in 1726, in two volumes, contains the stories of the less ...
— The Pirates' Who's Who - Giving Particulars Of The Lives and Deaths Of The Pirates And Buccaneers • Philip Gosse
... twenty years. Batavia proper is a commonplace city of featureless streets, brick-walled canals, and ramshackle public buildings, but the residential town of Weltevreden, suggesting a glorified Holland, combines the quaint charm of the mother country with the Oriental grace and splendour of the tropics. The broad canals bordered by colossal cabbage-palms, the white bridges gay with the many coloured garb of the Malay population, the red-tiled roofs embowered in a wealth of verdure, and the pillared verandahs ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... friend's story. The bizarre quality of the inscription which had annoyed Salisbury was to him an attraction; and now and again he took it up and scanned thoughtfully what he had written, especially the quaint jingle at the end. It was a token, a symbol, he decided, and not a cipher; and the woman who had flung it away was, in all probability, entirely ignorant of its meaning. She was but the agent of ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... the great, undulating meadow which stretched from the Homestead to the river, a wall made of the stones picked up on the place around it, a plain granite shaft erected by the first Gray in the centre, and grouped about the shaft the quaint tablets of the century before, with old-fashioned names spelled in an old-fashioned manner, and with homely rhymes and trite sayings underneath; farther off, the newer gravestones, more ornate and less appealing. The elms were just beginning to ...
— The Old Gray Homestead • Frances Parkinson Keyes
... This quaint reflection and delicate compliment broke the bird's spell and made Pepeeta laugh,—a laugh as musical and sweet as the song of the bird itself. It passed through the fringe of trees along the river bank, rippled across ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... kept another memory of Provence. Next to a painting, by Horace Vernet, of a scene on the Mediterranean coast, little Anne Fisher, born 1588, exhibited herself in hooped and embroidered petticoat, quaint cap and costly laces, a person of great dignity at six years old. She was to be Lady Dilke of Maxstoke Castle and a shrewd termagant, mother of two sons who sided, one with the Commonwealth, the other with the ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... a Nagasaki artist? You smiled when I assured you that the carefully attired little damsel placed between us had been one of our neighbors. Kindly receive my book with the same indulgent smile, without seeking therein a meaning either good or bad, in the same spirit in which you would receive some quaint bit of pottery, some grotesquely carved ivory idol, or some fantastic trifle brought to you from this singular fatherland of ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... modern thought and feeling. The brilliant pictures of feudal society in the romances of Scott and Fouque give no faithful image of that society, even when they are carefully correct in all ascertainable historical details.[1] They give rather the impression left upon an alien mind by the quaint, picturesque features of a way of life which seemed neither quaint nor picturesque to the men who lived it, but only to the man who turns to it for relief form the prosaic, or at least familiar, conditions ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... that they should attend the king in the next world), but no royalties. Prof. Petrie found the arm of a female mummy, who may have been of royal blood, though there is nothing to show that she was. And the quaint plait and fringe of false hair, which were also found, need not have belonged to a royal mummy. It is therefore quite possible that these tombs at Abydos were not the actual last resting-places of the earliest kings, who may really have been buried at Hierakonpolis ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall
... A large, quaint, low-ceiled chamber on the second floor, with a superfluity of tiny greenish window-panes, was assigned to the stranger, and his African servant, Jake, was installed in a smaller adjoining apartment. The day after his arrival Maurice spent in unpacking and polishing his precious ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... sunrise. Rome was founded by him on the ninth day of the month Pharmouthi, between the second and third hour; for it is supposed that the fortunes of cities, as well as those of men, have their certain periods which can be discovered by the position of the stars at their nativities. The quaint subtlety of these speculations may perhaps amuse the reader more than their ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... "Doctor" concerning the authorship of that queer, quaint, delightful book are Elia's affected anger and indignation against the author of the "Indicator" for attributing the essays of Elia to their right author. Leigh Hunt must have "laughed consumedly," as he read the P.S. to the "Chapter ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... houses which have been her homes. In indicating it we have nothing to do with grey Windsor in its historical glories, or even in its more picturesque lights. We leave behind the Waterloo Gallery, the Garter-room and the quaint cottages of the Poor Knights in order to point out the touches which are the tokens of Queen Victoria's presence. Though she dwelt here principally in the bright days of her early reign, the chief signs ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, (Victoria) Vol II • Sarah Tytler
... noise was hellish; sounds of triumph, sounds of panic, of anger, encouragement, appeal, despair, woe and pain, with the callous roar of musketry and the loud indifference of the guns. Above it all the man on the quaint war horse made himself heard. From the blue line of steel above his head, from the eyes below the forage cap, from the bearded lips, from the whole man there poured a magic control. He shouted and his voice mastered the storm. "Rally, brave men! Rally and follow ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... my earliest childhood, and intermingled with them are my dear mother's looks, the calm, earnest gaze of my father, gardens and vine leaves, and soft green turf, and a very old and quaint picture-book—and this is all I can recall of the first ...
— Memories • Max Muller
... o'clock, a round of calls made, the Green Imp came for Bob and Mrs. Lessing. They met him, hand in hand, the little figure in its voluminous misfit clothes looking quaint, enough beside the perfect outlines of his companion's attire. But ...
— Red Pepper Burns • Grace S. Richmond
... offense usually came from her. In the "Lawe's resolution of Women's Rights," published in the year 1632, a book which I have not seen, but of which there are copies in the country, the anonymous and quaint author says, and with a sly satire: "It is true that man and woman are one person, but understand in what manner. When a small brooke or little river incorporateth with Rhodanus, Humber, or the Thames, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... on feathered foot Faint and fainter sounds the flute, Rarer songs of gods; and still Somewhere on the sunny hill, Or along the winding stream, Through the willows, flits a dream; Flits but shows a smiling face, Flees but with so quaint a grace, None can choose to stay at home, All must ...
— Poems of To-Day: an Anthology • Various
... note, if humourists by trade On waistcoat had the shoe displayed, Lampoon's sour spirit might be laid, And cease its spiteful railing. Whether the humour chanced to be Joke, pun, quaint ballad, repartee, Slang, or bad spelling, we should see ...
— The True Legend of St. Dunstan and the Devil • Edward G. Flight
... when, tired and dusty, the outfit pulled up at La Luz, a quaint hamlet nestling in the foothills of the Sacramento Mountains. The place they found to be largely Mexican, and it was almost as if the visitors had slipped over the border to ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in New Mexico • Frank Gee Patchin
... flourish in. Nothing is stunted by the churlish, icy hand of indifference or severity. The poet runs riot in a conceit, and idolizes a quibble. His whole object is to turn the meanest or rudest objects to a pleasurable account. The relish which he has of a pun, or of the quaint humour of a low character, does not interfere with the delight with which he describes a beautiful image, or the most refined love. The clown's forced jests do not spoil the sweetness of the character ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... grasses Warming to life Quaint beetles, curious weeds, Till earth awakens, pregnant beneath its rays— So came the shepherds down ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Marjorie Allen Seiffert
... her little boy instead, hoping that the change of air would do him good after the winter months spent leaning over school books. So in the quaint low-ceiled bedroom upstairs, sheets that smelled of lavender, with beautiful hand-embroidered initials, made by some bride for her trousseau long ago, were spread on the tall four-poster bed with its curious starched valence and silk ...
— The Pigeon Tale • Virginia Bennett
... frontispieces for the books with which Florentine printers were rapidly superseding the manuscripts of twenty years before: collections of sermons, of sonnets, lives of saints, editions of Virgil and Terence, quaint versified encyclopaedias, and even books on medicine and astrology. From these little woodcuts, groups of saints round the Cross, with Giotto's tower and Brunellesco's dome in the distance, pictures of Fathers of the Church or ancient poets seated at desks in neatly panelled closets—always with ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... the first thoughts of the carols. Harry had to drive cows that day; but the others were with her, and as they came out through Mr. Giertz's woods, and looked down upon the pasture where the sheep were feeding, little Phil began the quaint old version of the shepherd psalm that she had ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... is a light-hearted loon, If you listen to popular rumour; From morning to night he's so joyous and bright, And he bubbles with wit and good humour! He's so quaint and so terse, both in prose and in verse; Yet though people forgive his transgression, There are one or two rules that all Family Fools Must observe, if they love their profession. There are one or two rules, Half-a-dozen, maybe, That ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... Nancy!" he called out,—he always called her that when he wished to annoy her, for Nan had a special dislike to her quaint, old-fashioned name; it had been her mother's and grandmother's name; in every generation there had been a Nancy Challoner,—"come, come, Miss Nancy! we cannot have you playing at hide-and-seek in this fashion. We want some music. Give us something rousing, to keep ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... away into mere dreams: but it is singular how often the dream turns out to have been a half-waking one, presaging a reality. Ovid foreshadowed the discoveries of the geologist: the Atlantis was an imagination, but Columbus found a western world: and though the quaint forms of Centaurs and Satyrs have an existence only in the realms of art, creatures approaching man more nearly than they in essential structure, and yet as thoroughly brutal as the goat's or horse's half of the mythical compound, are now ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... laws and discussions, philosophic, theologic, and juridic dicta, historical notes and national reminiscences, injunctions and prohibitions controlling all the positions and relations of life, curious, quaint tales, ideal maxims and proverbs, uplifting legends, charming lyrical outbursts, and attractive enigmas side by side with misanthropic utterances, bewildering medical prescriptions, superstitious practices, ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... characteristic and very clean, a cross-between a little French theatre, say in Monte Parnasse, and one of the lesser London theatres. The acting was French in style and expressive, and full of humour and frankness, and there was a quaint decorative style in all the tableaux and in the actors' movements that made me think rather of Persian figures in decorations than of India. There was a parterre and a wide gallery, in which we got back seats; the audience were all men and well-dressed, and laughed heartily at the ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... moment a short girl, with a very red face and round beady eyes, came into the room carrying on a tray two quaint old pewter tureens full of steaming soup, which emitted very savoury and appetising odours. Setting these down before Matt Peke and Helmsley, with two goodly slices of bread beside them, she held out ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... her, chanced to look her best that night. The delicate pallor of her cheeks under the rich tone of her hair seemed quite apart from any suggestion of ill-health, her eyes were wonderfully full and soft, a quaint pearl ornament hung by a little gold chain from her slender, graceful neck. A sort of dreamy content came over Brooks. After all, why should he throw himself in despair against the gates of that other world, outside which ...
— A Prince of Sinners • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... and found no soul in any room as we wandered from room to room,—from the rose-covered porch to the strange and quaint garrets amongst the great timbers of the roof, where of old time the tillers and herdsmen of the manor slept, but which a-nights seemed now, by the small size of the beds, and the litter of useless and disregarded ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... The most penitent of all was the deviser of the original idea. He had generously offered to stay at home with the little patient, which was as generously refused; but the next evening he was allowed to come and sit on his bed, and describe it all for the amusement of his friend. He was a quaint boy, this urchin, with a face as broad as an American Indian's, eyes as bright as a squirrel's, and all the mischief in life lurking about him, till you could see roguishness in the very folds of his hooded Indian winter coat of blue ...
— The Brownies and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... went back to his quarters, my lord Marquess strolled through the quaint streets of the town slowly, and looking upon the ground as he walked. For some reason he felt vaguely depressed, and, searching within himself for a reason, recognised that the slight cloud resting upon his spirits recalled to him a feeling of his early childhood—no other than the ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... from her hips in those inimitable folds the secret of which the dowagers of the olden time have carried away with them. She retained the black mantilla trimmed with black lace woven in large square meshes; her caps, old-fashioned in shape, had the quaint charm which we see in silhouettes relieved against a white background. She took snuff with exquisite nicety and with the gestures which young people of the present day who have had the happiness of seeing their grandmothers and great-aunts replacing their gold ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... productions, would mention vaguely, yet with perfect sincerity, a sense of dreamy, wild, indefinite, and he would perhaps say, indefinable delight; on being required to point out the source of this so shadowy pleasure, he would be apt to speak of the quaint in phraseology and in general handling. This quaintness is, in fact, a very powerful adjunct to ideality, but in the case in question it arises independently of the author's will, and is altogether apart from his intention. Words and their rhythm have varied. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... these quaint writings the 'Studies on the life and habits of animals' which are singular from their peculiar aphoristic style, and I have transcribed them in exactly the order in which they are written in MS. H. This is one of the very rare instances ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... you could flee from all this stupidity, from all this cant of governments, and this hideous reiteration of hatred, this strangling hatred ..." he would say to himself, and see himself working in the fields, copying parchments in quaint letterings, drowsing his feverish desires to calm in the deep-throated passionate chanting of the ...
— One Man's Initiation—1917 • John Dos Passos
... dreary, while I pondered weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore, While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. ''Tis some visitor,' I muttered, 'tapping at my chamber door— ...
— Risen from the Ranks - Harry Walton's Success • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... charming place to repent in," said Sara, her eyes wandering to the distant bay, where the quaint little town straggled picturesquely up the hill that ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... With a quaint mixture of playfulness and gravity, she extended her hand, and Adrian stooped and kissed it—as he had kissed fair Cecile de Savenaye's rosy finger-tip upon the porch of ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... and so encased wandered through the country, rapt in his thoughts and bearing witness to the truth that God had revealed to him; about 1646 began his crusade against the religion of mere formality, and calling upon men to trust to the "inner light" alone; his quaint garb won him the title of "the man with the leather breeches," and his mode of speech with his "thou's" and "thee's" subjected him to general ridicule; but despite these eccentricities he by his earnestness gathered disciples about him who believed ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... created and sustained without capital, without business knowledge, without technical skill, and for the sole purpose of affording the shiftless population of Ballyshannon regular wages at the week's end. The gentlemen who lean over the quaint bridge, with its twelve arches and sharply-pointed buttresses, are merely waiting for the factories, which are to spring from the earth fully-equipped at a wave of the enchanter's hand, to be a blessing to the whole world while fulfilling their chief mission ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... probabilities of the exploring party coming out into the main trunk from one of the branches they had passed, but, as Gwyn said, they dared not reckon upon this, and must keep on now they were there. And at last they went trudging on almost in silence, the tramping of their feet and the quaint echoes being all that was heard, while three black shadows followed after them along the rugged floor, like three more explorers watching to see which ...
— Sappers and Miners - The Flood beneath the Sea • George Manville Fenn
... fittest to aid him in ruling it, he found it easy to surpass every one of them, each in his own trade. He produced a richer damask than any of the silk-weavers; a finer linen than any of the linen-weavers; a more complicated as well as ornate cabinet, with more drawers and quaint hiding-places, than any of the cabinet-makers; a sword-blade more cunningly damasked, and a hilt more gorgeously jewelled, than any of the sword-makers; a ring set with stones more precious, more brilliant in colour, ...
— Gutta-Percha Willie • George MacDonald
... our economic system and our race prejudices,—Clark's Field! We pass it night and morning of all the days of our lives, but rarely see it—see, that is, more than its bricks and mortar and empty faces. It should be called, in the quaint phrase of the judge's people, "God's Acre!" One might say that the beauty, the supreme fruit of this Clark's Field, which never blossomed into flower and fruit all these years we have been concerned with its fate, was Adelle. ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... nickname which clung to this dandy through life is usually ascribed to a quaint resemblance noticeable in him to the Australian quadruped after which he was called; but others attributed it rather to the leaps and bounds by which he advanced socially, though on account of his connections and the exquisite perfection ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... Manila; and their coming with most hospitable intent only added to the poor girl's perplexities, for they showered welcomes upon her and bade her get her luggage up at once. They had come to take her to their own roof. They had secured such a quaint, roomy house in Ermita right near the bay shore, and looking right out on the Luneta ...
— Ray's Daughter - A Story of Manila • Charles King
... breakfasts were served under the white awnings stretched over the after-deck, where, lounging in the grateful shade, we could look out across the harbor, dotted with the gaudy sails of fishing craft and bordered by the walls and gardens of the quaint old city, to the islands of Arbe and Pago, rising, like huge, uncut emeralds, from the lazy southern sea. At noon we usually lunched with a score or more of staff-officers in the large, cool dining-room of the officers' mess, and at night we dined with the governor-general and his family ...
— The New Frontiers of Freedom from the Alps to the AEgean • Edward Alexander Powell
... and strange surroundings. A carpenter, whose name was the same as his trade, built him a bookcase out of scraps of lumber, and on the shelves of it he assembled old friends—Parkman and Irving and Hawthorne and Cooper and Lowell, "Ike Marvel's breezy pages and the quaint, pathetic character-sketches of the Southern writers—Cable, Craddock, Macon, Joel Chandler Harris, and sweet Sherwood Bonner." Wherever he went he carried some book or other about him, solid books as a rule, though he was not averse on occasion to what one cowpuncher, who ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... frequently made in the rags. Old pockets, containing small sums of money, are occasionally found. A foreign coin valued at about $3 was found a few days ago. In the paper stock, quaint and valuable old books or pictures are found often. One of the workmen has a museum composed of curiosities found amid the rags and shreds of paper. Rev. Dr. Bolles, of Massachusetts, makes an annual pilgrimage to Mechanic Falls for the sake ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 363, December 16, 1882 • Various
... by the government at different times, and collected here with little relevancy to their original appeal. Some are Scriptural subjects and some are figures of the dancers who take part in certain ceremonials of the Spanish churches (notably the cathedral at Seville), which have a quaint reality, an intense personal character. They are of a fascination which I can hope to convey by no phrase of mine; but far beyond this is the motionless force, the tremendous repose of the figures of ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... for the Southern Journey and a well-written serious article on the Geological History of our region by Taylor. Except for editorial and meteorological notes the rest is conceived in the lighter vein. The verse is mediocre except perhaps for a quaint play of words in an amusing little skit on the sleeping-bag argument; but an article entitled 'Valhalla' appears to me to be altogether on a different level. It purports to describe the arrival of some of our party at the gates proverbially guarded by St. Peter; the humour is really ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... between the celebrated towns of Hastings and Brighton, may be found the quaint old structure known as Bereford Castle. From the style of architecture it may be dated to the time of Edward the Third, bearing a striking resemblance to the castle re-erected in that monarch's reign by the Earl of Warwick. The castle ...
— Lady Rosamond's Secret - A Romance of Fredericton • Rebecca Agatha Armour
... El Ghor. A huge plaster Trimurti stood close to the wall, on a triangular pedestal of black rock, and the Siva-face and the writhing cobra confronted all who entered. Just opposite grinned a red granite slab with a quaint basso-relievo taken from the ruins of Elora. Near the door were two silken divans, and a richly carved urn, three feet high, which had once ornamented the facade of a tomb in the royal days of Petra, ere the curse fell on Edom, now stood an in memoriam of the original ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... discussion was going on, the cloud of limestone dust had disappeared and from it had emerged a quaint old coach, lumbering and shabby, drawn by a pair of sleek sorrel horses, whose teeth would have given evidence of advanced age had a possible purchaser submitted them to the indignity of examining them. Their progress was slow and sedate, although ...
— The Comings of Cousin Ann • Emma Speed Sampson
... Africans, but with straight hair and European features. A large number of them visited the ship this morning. They were fine specimens of physical development, and wore scarcely any other covering than a cloth about the loins. They were sprightly and chatty, and in their quaint canoes ...
— The Cruise of the Alabama and the Sumter • Raphael Semmes
... sir. (With the glass half way to his lips, he checks himself, giving a dubious glance at the wine, and adds, with quaint intensity.) Will anyone oblige me with a glass ...
— The Devil's Disciple • George Bernard Shaw
... enthusiastic temper grows up into youth in a dream of love. The lady of his mystic passion dies early. He dreams of her still, not as a wonder of earth, but as a saint in paradise, and relieves his heart in an autobiography, a strange and perplexing work of fiction—quaint and subtle enough for a metaphysical conceit; but, on the other hand, with far too much of genuine and deep feeling. It is a first essay; he closes it abruptly as if dissatisfied with his work, but with the resolution of raising at a future day a worthy ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... was not the first time she had taken an admiring visitor to see the local monuments. Basil Ransom, walking with her from point to point, admired them all, and thought several of them exceedingly quaint and venerable. The rectangular structures of old red brick especially gratified his eye; the afternoon sun was yellow on their homely faces; their windows showed a peep of flower-pots and bright-coloured curtains; they wore an expression of scholastic quietude, and exhaled ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... thorned staff of office; and then—the sudden, electric wakening, and the consternation of the whole staid and pious congregation at such terrible profanity in the house of God. Ah!—it was not two hundred and forty years ago; when I read the quaint words my Puritan blood stirs my drowsy brain, and I remember it all well, just as I saw ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... the ground; there are heavy-walled sewers through which the crystal brook of which Jordan is born still runs; in the hill-side are the substructions of a costly marble temple that Herod the Great built here—patches of its handsome mosaic floors still remain; there is a quaint old stone bridge that was here before Herod's time, may be; scattered every where, in the paths and in the woods, are Corinthian capitals, broken porphyry pillars, and little fragments of sculpture; and up yonder in the precipice where the fountain gushes ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... of the possibility of colonizing the regions thus to be discovered. The quaint language in which he describes the chances of what is now called 'imperial expansion' ...
— Adventurers of the Far North - A Chronicle of the Frozen Seas • Stephen Leacock
... devices, and its new and more heroic adventure had created, was not yet 'full' till he came in. The Round Table grew rounder with this knight's presence. Over those dainty stores of the classic ages, over those quaint memorials of the elder chivalry, that were spread out on it, over the dead letter of the past, the brave Atlantic breeze came in, the breath of the great future blew, when the turn came for this knight's adventure; whether opened in the prose of its statistics, ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... yes, let other men Love Elia for his antic pen, And watch with dilettante eyes His page for every quaint surprise, Curious of caviare phrase. Yea; these who will not also praise? We surely must, but which is more The motley that his sorrow wore, Or the great heart whose valorous beat Upheld his brave unfaltering feet Along the narrow path he chose, And ...
— English Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... broke upon us a little interruption, so diverting, so utterly like the whole quaint tininess of Kings Port, that I should tell it to you, even if it did not bear directly upon the matter which was beginning so actively to concern me—the love difficulties ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... in gamesome prank; Or, silent-sandal'd, pay our defter court, Circling the Spirit of the Western Gale, Where wearied with his flower-caressing sport, 65 Supine he slumbers on a violet bank; Then with quaint music hymn the parting gleam By lonely Otter's sleep-persuading stream; Or where his wave with loud unquiet song Dash'd o'er the rocky channel froths along; 70 Or where, his silver waters smooth'd to rest, The tall tree's shadow sleeps ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... was the interval of the dinner-hour—wound up with a speech from Mr. Wallace. The iniquity of the abandonment of the In-and-Out clause of the Bill was again the burden of his theme. He brought to the subject the same quaint, rich, but somewhat elaborate humour which made the success of his previous speech; and the Tories were more than delighted with some telling hits which he gave to Mr. Gladstone for the change of front. But Mr. ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... general, Peter Smith's book contains about ninety prescriptions for the cure of as many diseases or forms of disease, to be compounded generally from now well-known medicine, roots, herbs, etc., some of them heroic, others quaint, etc. He did not recommend dispensing wholly with the then universal practice of bleeding patients, but he ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... invariably took her part. We were never given a chance to explain. The charge was simply: 'You have made Nina cry. Now, Jimmy can go home, and Sally must get her arithmetic.' I liked Nina, too; she was so quaint and unexpected, and her eyes were lovely; but I often wanted ...
— My Antonia • Willa Cather
... in February begins to make two quaint notes, like the whetting of a saw, is the marsh titmouse; the great titmouse sings with three cheerful, joyous notes, and begins about the ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1 • Gilbert White
... Carolus, Karl, or Charles, dearly loved his tender mother. From her he learned lessons of truth and nobleness that even through all his stormy and wandering life never forsook him. Often while he had swung gently to and fro in his quaint, carved, and uncomfortable-looking cradle, had she crooned above him the old saga-songs that told of valor and dauntless courage and all the stern virtues that made up the heroes of those same old ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... of a public-works policy by the Colonial Government in 1875. Ocean steamships of 4000 and 5000 tons burden can now be berthed at these wharfs, and there is a constant and convenient service of trains between the port and the town. Even to-day the presence of superannuated Dutch warships and quaint craft from China and the Malay islands relieves the monotony of the vast hulls of the steamships of the British India, the Messageries Maritimes, ...
— A Visit to Java - With an Account of the Founding of Singapore • W. Basil Worsfold
... Abbey, have the privilege of shouting out 'Vivat Rex!' at the coronation of their Sovereign—this means 'Let the King live'—and right heartily did the hundreds of young voices greet their King and Queen in this quaint way, shouting, 'Vivat, Vivat, Vivat Rex Georgius!' as the King was seen advancing up the aisle. The organ rang out, trumpets sounded, and a glorious mass of sound ascended to the roof and died away in echoes in the gray arches that have seen ...
— The Children's Book of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... its native land of Germany, and in every town the bands of strolling players sent Marlowe's great conception far and wide. In England also the puppet play was extremely popular. The drama had moved from the church to the market-place, and much of the Elizabethan drama appeared in this quaint form, played by wooden figures upon diminutive boards. To the modern mind nothing could be more incongruous than the idea of a solemn drama forced to assume a guise so grotesque and childish; but, according to Jusserand, much of the stage-work was extremely ghastly, and no ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... Bible, half a dozen books, and a pile of newspapers which had been carefully preserved from time to time, including copies of the "Pennsylvania Gazette," edited by Benjamin Franklin, and also of the latter's publications known as "Poor Richard's Almanack," full of quaint sayings and maxims. Over the shelf were some deer's antlers and on these rested two muskets, with the powder horns and bullet pouches hanging beneath. Behind the door stood another musket, loaded and ready for use, should an enemy or a wild beast ...
— On the Trail of Pontiac • Edward Stratemeyer
... "History," with that quaint prolixity which was his peculiar proclivity gives numerous instances of the rise and fall of families connected with Birmingham. In addition to the original family of De Birmingham, now utterly extinct he traced back many others then and now well-known ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
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