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More "Background" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the nation, belongs in a peculiar sense to the South. He was Southern by birth, temperament, and experience. He knew the South, — he had traveled from San Antonio to Jacksonville, and from Baltimore to Mobile Bay. Its scenery was the background of his poetry, — the marsh, the mountain, the seashore, the forest, the birds and flowers of the South stirred his imagination. He knew personally many of the leaders of the Confederacy, as well as the men who made possible the New South. He was heir ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... consideration; the intensity of the object *with regard to its background has yet to be considered. Aubert has shown that the accuracy of the distinction is the same when a square of white paper is looked at from an angle of 18'', and when conversely a square of black paper on white background is looked at from an angle of 85''. "When we put a gray paper in the sunshine, it may become objectively brighter than white paper in shadow. But this does not prevent us from knowing one as gray and the other as pure ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... reader, was set up a scaffold high above the crowd, large enough to hold Ezra and thirteen supporters—principal men, no doubt—seven on one side of him and six on the other. Probably a name has dropped out, and the numbers were equal. There, in the morning light, with the new walls for a background, stood Ezra on his rostrum, and amid reverent silence, lifted high the sacred roll. A common impulse swayed the crowd, and brought them all to their feet—token at once of respect and obedient attention. Probably many ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... d'Estrees' "evenings" were certainly not matrimonial. Still the unforeseen was surely the probable in Lady Kitty's case. What sort of man ought she to marry—what sort of man could safely take the risks of marrying her—with that mother in the background? ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... successor consisted of pieces of timber, three arches, and some mill ends. We had hope as to the bottom of the next; but it was blighted and withered in its infancy as we gazed upon 25 tree trunks, a mill, and two tall chimneys. Additional wood, an office, and an entire mill formed the background of the street subsequently encountered. Extra mill buildings closed up the career of the road beyond it; ditto beyond that; partially ditto afterwards, the front of the picture being relieved by a few thirsty souls, looking plaintively at a landlord, who stood with a ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... must unquestionably be labouring. But he was not a little amazed himself, when they did reach it, and entered the parlour where Mr Pecksniff was sitting alone before the fire, drinking some hot tea, to find that instead of taking favourable notice of his relative and keeping him, Mr Pinch, in the background, he did exactly the reverse, and was so lavish in his attentions to Tom, ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... I'll excuse you," she said with meaning emphasis, which was not lost on the older brother, keeping well in the background. ...
— Tabitha's Vacation • Ruth Alberta Brown
... who grew more and more cheerful in the face of these six pairs of grim eyes. "But I'm sure obliged to the gent that give me the sendoff. What d'you want?" Drawing into the background Larsen said: "Open up on ...
— The Rangeland Avenger • Max Brand
... glen by the side of the fiord, on ALLMERS'S property. On the left, lofty old trees overarch the spot. Down the slope in the background a brook comes leaping, and loses itself among the stones on the margin of the wood. A path winds along by the brook-side. To the right there are only a few single trees, between which the fiord is visible. In front is seen the corner of a boat-shed with a boat ...
— Little Eyolf • Henrik Ibsen
... are getting back to the recognition of the proper place of fact, of its power as the background and basis against which and upon which Personality must stand. Our eyes are opening to see that if the girl is to gain a religion which shall mean life, she must gain it through a person ...
— The Girl and Her Religion • Margaret Slattery
... of tough New England fibre, combining sturdy physique, thorough individuality and undiluted common sense, form a groundwork on which no modern youth need hesitate to build, while the mellow background of a virtuous lineage well prepares the canvas for whatever of high aim and noble deed shall fill up the fresher foreground ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... former represented a tomb, with a youthful female weeping over it, exhibiting a church with arched windows in the background. On the tomb were the names, with the dates of the births and deaths, of several individuals, all of whom bore the name of Grant. An extremely cursory glance at this record was sufficient to discover to ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... of the least handsome streets of the city for more than a mile, turned into a cross street, and drew up before a small frame house, from the front of which a sign, painted in white upon a black background, announced to the reading public, in letters inclined to each other at various angles, that whitewashing and kalsomining were "dun" there. A knock at the door brought out a slatternly looking colored woman. She had evidently been disturbed at her toilet, for she held a comb ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... Pitti Galleries at Florence contain one or two fine specimens of Luca Signorelli's Holy Families, which show his influence over the early manner of Michel Angelo. Into the background of one circular picture he has introduced a group of naked figures, which was imitated by Buonarroti in the Holy Family of the Tribune. The Accademia has also a picture of saints and angels illustrative of his large style and crowded composition. The Brera at Milan ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... be heaped upon injury. As God hears me, I tell you solemnly that you have seen your husband since I have. Upon Maurice Carlyle's face I have never looked since that fatal hour when I last saw yours, ghastly and rigid, against the background of guava-boughs. From that day until this, I have neither seen, nor spoken, nor ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... jostled each other good-naturedly around a long table, where insolent waiters served tepid coffee, and sandwiches that had been cut by the hand of a knave. In the background a number of ladies nodded encouragement to their cavaliers in the intervals of scrutinizing each other's dresses. Many pencilled eyebrows were raised in derision of too little style displayed by some innocent rival, or brought down in disapproval of too much of the same vague quality displayed ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... men pushed into the background of affairs; men young, intelligent, active, clear-sighted, in one word, fitted out with all mental and intellectual requisites for commanders, leaders, pilots and helmsmen of every kind; and nevertheless twenty times a day I hear repeated ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... on the Irishman, "you've but felt the tickle of the spur; when I drive it in, you'll yell like a whipped kid. Always you play into me hands, McTee. Now when you see Kate, you'll feel me grin in the background mockin' ye, eh?" ...
— Harrigan • Max Brand
... to give. This tended to crystallise the national proneness to defer until the emergency arose the measures necessary to meet it. It followed, then, that while attention was given to the needs of the moment, practically all provision for the requirements of the future was relegated to the background. A further defect in the system was that it resulted in there being no proper understanding between those who had intimate knowledge of what was required by the army and those who ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice
... is the appearance of a new type of management. A group of younger men and women with a broad background, an intense interest in cooperation and a capacity of growing up with the business is working now to make these cooperatives even more successful. The cooperative movement is likely to grow in pretty close proportion to the ability of these leaders and ...
— Consumers' Cooperative Societies in New York State • The Consumers' League of New York
... great favours, so as out of a doubtful friend to make a certain enemy, and one, too, who will seek to support his own cause by defaming you, or to make men say, "I do not know what the reason is that he cannot endure a man to whom he owes so much; there must be something in the background?" Any man can asperse, even if he does not permanently stain the reputation of his betters by complaining of them; nor will any one be satisfied with imputing small crimes to them, when it is only by the enormity of his falsehood that he ...
— L. Annaeus Seneca On Benefits • Seneca
... wooded hills which mark the boundary of the valley on that side, is a modern chateau; but the architect found his model for it in the past, when castles were more picturesque than comfortable. When the amber-tinted towers are seen through the haze of a summer morning against the background of wooded hill, one thinks that in just such a castle as this Tasso or Spenser would have put an enchantress, whose wiles, combined with the indolent influence of the valley, few pilgrim knights taking the eastward way to Roc-Amadour would have been ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... brush carefully again, and as soon as the paint was dry went carefully over the letter part with gum, so delicately that the red colour was not disturbed nor the background smeared. ...
— The King's Sons • George Manville Fenn
... "background" will be the next point to be considered. Tableaux vivants may be divided into two classes, the dramatic, i.e., representing some incident, e.g., a duel, or a trial in a court of justice, and the simply artistic, viz., such as portray ...
— Entertainments for Home, Church and School • Frederica Seeger
... figure of Christ, gathered up and focussed, as it were, all the vague and floating intimations of super-human sympathy, all the shadowy rumours and intimations of super-human help, which move to and fro in the background of our apprehension. ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... the first time lost heart. He had been fighting during all the beginning of the year 1455, reducing the west and south, the Douglas country, to subjection and desolation. But when he found himself menaced by an army as great as anything he could muster, with the angry north in the background and clouds of half-savage warriors on the horizon, the King's heart sank. He is said to have left Edinburgh in disgust and depression, and taken ship at Leith for St. Andrews, to seek counsel from the best and most trustworthy of his advisers, a man whose noble presence appears in the ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... visible universe, that seems so fixed and stable, becomes immaterial, evanescent, vanishing; it is no longer a permanent order of seas and continents and rounded skies; it is a vision painted by an unseen hand against a background of mystery. Dead, cold, unchangeable as I see it in the glimpses of a single hour, it becomes warm, vital, forever changing as I gaze upon it from the outlook of the centuries. It is the momentary creation of forces that stream through it in endless ebb and flow, that are to-day touching ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... no believer in the theory that the objectionable portions of history should be kept in the background, and that only the bright side should be turned towards the world. If, as one has happily said, "history is experience teaching by example," we most surely need to have both sides fairly presented to us before we can properly extract ...
— Bundling; Its Origin, Progress and Decline in America • Henry Reed Stiles
... to reach the center easily. Any table with tight joints in the top and four- or five-inch boards fitted tightly around the edge will serve the purpose. The inside of the box should be painted to prevent warping and leaking. An "ocean blue" is a good color, as it makes a good background for islands. ...
— Primary Handwork • Ella Victoria Dobbs
... of the snowy mountains, and the endless shades of green presented by the verdure-clad surface of the earth, are a never-failing source of pleasure to all who enjoy the inestimable gift of sight. Yet these constitute, as it were, but the frame and background of a marvellous and ever-changing picture. In contrast with these broad and soothing tints, we have presented to us in the vegetable and animal worlds an infinite variety of objects adorned with the most beautiful and most ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... in a little valley. Half-way up the opposite slope a brush fire was burning clearly and steadily in a maple grove. There was something indescribably alluring in that fire, glowing so redly against the dark background ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... of the genus who were ensconced that forenoon in the bow windows of the Royal Hotel and gazed across the bright green valley at the dull historical background beyond. One we already know, a stoutish gentleman, ruddy-faced and black-eyed, with check trousers, light waistcoat and heavy chain, legs widely parted, his hands in his pockets, and on his face that expression ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... which surround the name of Charlemagne there can hardly be found a quainter or more interesting one than that which has for a background the old town of Ingelheim (Angel's Home), where at one time ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... official or backstairs Constitutionalism, whichever for the month may have convinced the royal mind. If flight to Bouille, and (horrible to think!) a drawing of the civil sword do hang as theory, portentous in the background, much nearer is this fact of these Twelve Hundred Kings, who sit in the Salle de Manege. Kings uncontrollable by him, not yet irreverent to him. Could kind management of these but prosper, how much better were it than armed Emigrants, Turin-intrigues, and the help of Austria! ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... Fletchers—Milton's first task was to reduce it to the strict relations of time and space. His blindness probably helped him by relieving him from the hourly solicitations of the visible world, and giving him a dark and vacant space in which to rear his geometric fabric. Against this background the figures of his characters are outlined in shapes of light, and in this vacancy he mapped out his local ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... displaced or their outlines become doubtful and ill defined, it is fair to suppose that the water is getting low or is even entirely dried up. Then, in place of the canals there remains either nothing or at most stripes of yellowish color differing little from the surrounding background. Sometimes they take on a nebulous appearance, for which at present it is not possible to assign a reason. At other times true enlargements are produced, expanding to 100, 200 or more kilometers (60 to 120 miles) in breadth, and this sometimes happens for ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... only building far or near visible in the whole horizon; and what a position has its architect secured! In the midst of hills on a bit of table-land, apparently made such by smoothing down the summit of one of them, with a greensward in front, and set off behind by a mountain background, stands this eternal monument of the noblest of arts amidst the finest dispositions of nature. There is another antiquity of the place also to be visited at Segeste—its theatre; but we are too immediately below it to know any thing about it at present, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... recall the streams of passionate description with which his words clothed these glowing memories of his vision. Great pictures of it haunt the background of my mind, pictures that lie in early mists, framed by the stars and glimmering through some golden, flowered dawn. Besides the huge outlines that stood breathing in the background like dark mountains, there flitted here and there strange dreamy forms of almost impossible beauty, ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... ashamed. The most of us have his defect. We take a natural interest in novelties, but it is against nature to take an interest in familiar things. The gorse and the broom were a fine accent in the landscape. Here and there they burst out in sudden conflagrations of vivid yellow against a background of sober or sombre color, with a so startling effect as to make a body catch his breath with the happy surprise of it. And then there was the wattle, a native bush or tree, an inspiring cloud of sumptuous yellow bloom. It is a favorite with the Australians, and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the fort. For some months there were constant skirmishes. The English had no difficulty in defeating all attacks, but, none the less, trade was brought to a standstill; so Mr. Walter Brown was sent down from Bombay to put matters straight. Poola Venjamutta, who had all the time kept himself in the background, was quite ready to help an accommodation, as open force had proved useless. Things having quieted down, Gyfford, 'flushed with the hopes of having Peace and Pepper,' devoted himself to trade. He had at this time a brigantine called the Thomas, commanded by his wife's brother, ...
— The Pirates of Malabar, and An Englishwoman in India Two Hundred Years Ago • John Biddulph
... scene, with a background of rugged mountains, appealed strongly to our photographic instincts. After three or four exposures, we climbed the farthest fence and passing from alfalfa to sage-brush in one step, were at the ...
— Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico • E. L. Kolb
... was in danger of being altogether forgotten. Half guessing the cause of her uneasiness, and feeling more averse than ever to taking part in the matter, the doctor, after a hasty survey of her person, withdrew into the background, and sat where he could not be seen. This brought the short dress into full view, together with the dainty little foot, ...
— Aikenside • Mary J. Holmes
... Gilbert also had raised his eyes from the ground, and they fixed themselves on the wonderful features of the greatest man of the age, while his voice forgot to chant and his lips remained parted in wonder. Upon the bright green grass against the background of hewn stone walls, in the glorious autumn sunshine, Bernard of Clairvaux moved like the supernal vision of a heavenly dream. His head thrown back, the delicate silver-fair beard scarcely shadowing ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford
... they justly regarded with anxiety, they refused to permit the erection of a stone building for a theatre.(10) Instead of this there was erected for each festival a scaffolding of boards with a stage for the actors (-proscaenium-, -pulpitum-) and a decorated background (-scaena-); and in a semicircle in front of it was staked off the space for the spectators (-cavea-), which was merely sloped without steps or seats, so that, if the spectators had not chairs brought along with them, they squatted, reclined, ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... eagerly. His face brightened, as he passed the count's arm through his own. When they were gone, M. Daburon could not resist a impulse of curiosity. He hastened to the door, which he opened slightly; and, keeping his body in the background that he might not himself be seen, he looked out into the passage. The count and Noel had not yet reached the end. They were going slowly. The count seemed to drag heavily and painfully along; the advocate took short steps, bending slightly ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau
... We at home have had our own experiences, our deep anxieties, our doubts, our griefs, and always we have been conscious of the might of forces in grapple and the high issues that hung upon the fate of the armies. In the background of all our thoughts at all times has been the solemn consciousness that the destiny of mankind was at work in mighty throes toward an end hidden to our knowledge if not to our faith and hope. We have none of us passed ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... junks, gleaming white against the background of dark foliage, were silently and dexterously manoeuvred by small, yellow, naked men, with long hair piled up on their heads in feminine fashion. Gradually, as we advanced farther up the green channel, the perfumes became more ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... excellent soldiers, but their training as such is not promising for the command of modern armies, mainly of infantry and artillery, with other complements. In war much has changed since Waterloo, with the value of cavalry retreating into the background as aeroplanes sweep to the front ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... the transformation scene of some pantomime, so here the waning and the waxing shapes are mingled; the new forms, at first shadowy and filmy, gain upon the old; and now both blend; and now the old scene fades into the background; still, who shall say whether the new scene ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... purposely retain it in the vaguest possible shape. They say that this life is not all; if it were all, they argue, we should be rightly ruled by our stomachs; but they scrupulously decline to give form and substance to their anticipations. We must, they think, have avowedly a heavenly background to the world, but our gaze should be restricted habitually within the visible horizon. The future life is to tinge the general atmosphere, but not to be offered as a definite goal of action or a ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... any ado went to the instrument, not realizing until after she had done so that it would have been better policy for her to have remained as much in the background as possible, and not to have shown any accomplishments lest people should suspect her position. However, she was too new at acting a part to always think of these little things, and she played the hymns so well that they gathered about her after the hour ...
— Exit Betty • Grace Livingston Hill
... the introduction of human figures into their foregrounds; whereas in the poetic paintings of Mr. Wordsworth the landscape is always subordinate to a higher interest; certainly, in 'The Waggoner', the little sketch of human nature which occupies, as it were, the front of that encircling background, the picture of Benjamin and his temptations, his humble friends and the mute companions of his way, has a character of its own, combining with sportiveness a homely pathos, which must ever be delightful to some of those who are thoroughly conversant with the spirit of Mr. Wordsworth's ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... pupils—they were having a lesson in the choir. It was in January. Two gas jets lighted up the choir, illuminating and distorting the marble figures on the altar. The whole of the large church with its two barrel-vaults, which crossed one another, lay in semi-darkness. In the background the shining organ pipes faintly reflected the gas flames; above it the angels blowing their trumpets to summon the sleepers before the judgment seat of their maker, looked merely like sinister, threatening human figures above life size; the ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... come to the circumstance of the composition of Lavengro. The Bible in Spain, when it appeared in 1843, implied a wonderful background to the Author's experience, a career diversified by all kinds of wild adventures, "sorcery, Jews, Gentiles, rambles," ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... Philippines will be greater with the United States than they can ever hope to be standing alone, if so be that they can stand alone at all. It has retarded the development of the Islands and has checked progress. It forces into the background the fact that with an infinitude of work lying before Americans and Filipinos alike, if the Islands are to have their full value in the world's economy, the best way to do this work is for Americans and Filipinos to labor together, each contributing his share to the ...
— The Head Hunters of Northern Luzon From Ifugao to Kalinga • Cornelis De Witt Willcox
... the fulfilment of her promise. She said nothing against the choice or the decision, merely observing that she was sorry that Jack had quarrelled with his father. By way of counsel she advised strongly that the engagement be kept as much in the background as possible. She did not, she said, want Millicent to be a sort of red rag to Sir John, and there was no necessity to publish abroad the lamentable fact that a quarrel had resulted from a very natural and convenient attachment. ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... of cloth, sewn on the sleeve of the outer garment. Army chevrons are worn on both sleeves with the point up, and special devices may be incorporated within the chevron to indicate specialties. Chevrons for combat soldiers are blue on a gold background, and all others are gold on a blue background. Naval chevrons are worn point down. Air Force chevrons have no point, but are a compound reverse curve with the deepest part of the curve worn down; over this is imposed a star within a circle. Marine Corps chevrons are worn on both sleeves with the ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... knew his job. Everything Sterne did had a dollar somewhere in the background. Even his blackmailing game. He worked with the business office, and he took his orders on that basis. Now if you had some man whom you could turn over this news end to while you're building ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... not the result of accident! I don't like the look of it at all.' Then he turned to the ladies, who were all huddled together, gasping and questioning, with their maids and the other servants in the background, and said: 'Ladies! I advise you to go back to your rooms as quickly as possible. There is not the slightest danger, but it might be just as well to ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... himself, he may believe himself to be obeying the insight of some one wiser than himself, or of society as expressed in its customs and institutions. But no man ever admitted that his life was purely a matter of expediency, or that in his dominant ideal he was the victim of chance. In the background of the busiest and most preoccupied life of affairs, there dwells the conviction that such living is appropriate to the universe; that it is called for by the circumstances of its ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... the short moss that crackled softly beneath her feet. The sun was setting; the sky showed red between the branches, and the trunks of the trees, uniform, and planted in a straight line, seemed a brown colonnade standing out against a background of gold. A fear took hold of her; she called Djali, and hurriedly returned to Tostes by the high road, threw herself into an armchair, and for the rest of the evening did ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... plump and still pretty, reclined upon a large gilded bed. Its splendid silk coverlet and pillows cased in embroidery and lace made an effective background for her. She leaned with a luxurious indolence among them, sipping chocolate and smoking a cigarrito. Isabel was on a couch of the same description. She wore a satin petticoat, and a loose linen waist richly trimmed with lace. ...
— Remember the Alamo • Amelia E. Barr
... lovely dark green mountain, and when there was a rainbow, as there frequently was, nothing could have looked more enchanting than it did rising from the opposite bank of the stream with the wet, shadowy mountain for a background. All the Flower family would invariably run to their front windows and ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... with a look that bit into every one of his fashionable details. Presently he lifted his arm and pointed. The son followed the direction of that long, strong, useful-looking forefinger, until his gaze rested upon a sign: "No Smoking"—big, black letters on a white background. ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... the background, was seen to emerge from the thatched cottage. The man hid himself behind a clump of trees. From time to time, the screen displayed, on an enormously enlarged scale, his fiercely rolling eyes or his murderous hands with ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... people were preparing for their first landing, there detached itself from the background of trees along the shore the most singular aquatic structure I think I have ever seen. It looked like the skeleton of some antediluvian wigwam which a prehistoric roc had subsequently chosen for a nest. Four poles planted in ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell
... green, blue, red, gilt, and silver. Each spire and dome has its glittering cross; and when the sun shines upon the group, it is in effect like the bursting of a rocket at night, against a dark blue background. ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... his courtiers, richly but tastefully dressed. The pit was full and the boxes also. The latter were ornamented with mirrors, and on that occasion were all illuminated for some reason or other. It was a magnificent scene, but all this glitter and light put the stage into the background. ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... worn your hair that way since I came; and where's the dress you had on the day I arrived? The colors suited you perfectly. I shall never forget how you looked—it was all blossoms, you and everything—and the background of the dark door, and the white of the porch columns, with just a touch of yellow ochre to break it—Oh, it was delicious! Please, now, put that dress on again and wear a low-neck waist with it. The flesh tones of the throat ...
— Colonel Carter's Christmas and The Romance of an Old-Fashioned Gentleman • F. Hopkinson Smith
... somewhat smaller than the Rock Ptarmigan. They nest abundantly near the summits of the ranges in Colorado, making their nests among the rocks, and generally lining them with a few grasses. During June, they lay from six to twelve eggs having a creamy background, speckled and blotched with chestnut ...
— The Bird Book • Chester A. Reed
... had observed, not without jealousy and scorn, that a favourable impression appeared to exist in behalf of Mr Sweedlepipe and his young friend; and that she had fallen rather into the background in consequence. She now struggled to the front, therefore, and stated ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... recall them, the memory of those more recent and more interesting events which occurred after my return to England gets between me and my adventures in Spain, and seems to force these last into a shadowy background, until they look like adventures that happened many years since. I confusedly recollect delays and alarms that tried our patience and our courage. I remember our finding friends (thanks to our letters of recommendation) in a Secretary to the Embassy and in a Queen's ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... in appearance but of vital artistic importance, is the author's power of description, of picturing both the appearance of his characters and the scenes which make his background and help to give the tone of his work. Perhaps four subjects of description may be distinguished: 1. External Nature. Here such questions as the following are of varying importance, according to the character and purpose of the work: Does the author know and care for Nature and ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... every restaurant. At any osteria con cucina on the Campagna one is also sure of a good omelet and salad; and, sitting under the vines, after a long walk, I have made as savory a lunch on these two articles as ever I found in the most glittering restaurant in the Palais Royal. If one add the background of exquisite mountains, the middle distance of flowery slopes, where herds of long-haired goats, sheep, and gray oxen are feeding among the skeletons of broken aqueducts, ruined tombs, and shattered mediaeval towers, and the foreground made up of picturesque groups of peasants, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... of storms could not come, and doves brooded softly. They talked sometimes now of the coming of their son; Louis, once he had got over his conventional horror of such a proceeding, said that she would be as safe in Mrs. Twist's care, with him hovering in the background, as though she had gone to the nursing home in Sydney, as he had suggested ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... lying dead upon the floor; it showed his poor corpse weltering helpless in its blood; it showed myself, as a girl of eighteen, standing awestruck, gazing on in blank horror at the sight; and in the background, half blurred by the summer evening light, it showed the vague outline of a man's back, getting out of the window. On one side was the door: that formed no part of my mental picture, because it was at my back; but in the photograph ...
— Recalled to Life • Grant Allen
... her had risen to the effort. Never in her life had Stephen Norman looked more radiantly beautiful, more adorable, more desirable. Even Leonard Everard felt his pulses quicken as he saw that glowing mass of beauty standing out against the cold background of old French tapestry. All the physical side of him leaped in answer to the call of her beauty; and even his cold heart and his self-engrossed brain followed with slower gait. He had been sitting opposite Miss Rowly in one of the windows, twirling his hat in nervous suspense. He jumped ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... somewhat the same relation to these cliques that the politico-industrial magnates and financiers of to-day do; to all appearances distinctly apart from participation in politics, and yet by means of money, having a strong or commanding influence in the background. But the Rhinelander brothers, William and Frederick, were integral members of the political machine in power. Thus we find that in 1803, William Rhinelander was elected Assessor for the Fifth Ward (a highly important and sumptuary office at that time), ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... might be a wholesome warning to avoid giving offence to the jealousy which, when once pointed out to her, she could not prevent herself from tracing in Juliana's petulance towards herself, and resolve to force her into the background. Even Bertha was more often brought forward, for in spite of a tongue and temper cast somewhat in a similar mould, she was rather a favourite with Juliana, whom she was not unlikely to resemble, except that her much more elaborate and accurate training might give her both ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Mr. Hems) "presents, as will be seen, a frosty, moonlight night, with a brilliantly-lit old farmhouse in the background. In the fore are leafless fruit-trees, and three men firing guns at them, whilst the jovial farmer and another man drink success to the year's crop from glasses evidently filled from a jug of cider, which the latter ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... auctioneers;—Jew-brokers sorting out of it at this moment, in a confused distressing manner, what is still valuable or salable. And, in fact, it lies massed up in our minds as a disastrous wrecked inanity, not useful to dwell upon; a kind of dusky chaotic background, on which the figures that had some veracity in them—a small company, and ever growing smaller as our demands rise in strictness—are delineated for us.—"And yet it is the Century of our own Grandfathers?" ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. I. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Birth And Parentage.—1712. • Thomas Carlyle
... a scene for a painter: the great American humorist on one side of the game, and the silly little creature on the other, with the Matterhorn for a background. Mark was reminded that the time he was consuming was valuable, but to no purpose. The Gorner Grat could wait. He held on with undiscouraged perseverance till he carried his point; the lamb finally put its nose in Mark's hand, and he was ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... music, had in it a semi-barbaric chord that the college men had loved, something—or so one might have said who took the canoe-music seriously—of the wildness and fierceness of old tribal loves and plaints and unremembered wooings with a desert background: a gallop of hoof-beats, a quiver of noon light above saffron sand—these had been, more or less, in the music when St. George had been wont to lie in a boat and pick at the strings while Amory paddled; and these he must have reechoed before the crowd of curious ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... respectable tense in the Greek language. It (or shall we say he?) was known to the whole Christian world by this distinction of Primus; clearly, therefore, there must be some low, vulgar tense in the background, pretending also to the name of Aorist, but universally scouted as the Aoristus Secundus, or Birmingham counterfeit. So that, unable as I was, from ignorance, to go along with Lord M.'s appreciation ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... Col. Wm. C. Hunter, with his signature, makes a fine pocket piece. It has a hole in the center so you may tack it up on your desk, dresser or on the wall. It is engraved in heavy brass, background with black, baked enamel. This beautiful souvenir sent postpaid to any address for ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter
... medicine has been a record of diminishing resort to this power as a means of cure. The measure of our success and of our control over disease has been, and is yet, in exact proportion to the extent to which we can relegate this resource to the background and avoid resorting to it. Instead of mental influence being the newest method of treatment it is the oldest. Two-thirds of the methods of the shaman, the witch-doctor, the medicine-man, were psychic. Instead of ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... Thread-spinner at her work. She carefully examines every thread, watching it closely as she draws it off the distaff; and that she may see it the more distinctly, a piece of dark blue paper is used as a background for the flax. Whenever the spinner notices the least unevenness, she stops the evolution of her wheel, breaks off the faulty piece of flax, and then resumes her spinning. This fine flax being as costly as gold, the pieces thus broken off are carefully laid aside ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Of Literature, Art, and Science - Vol. I., July 22, 1850. No. 4. • Various
... regiments of little scholars creeping in and forming square, each in its appointed place, under the vast roof; and teachers presently coming to them. A stream of light from the jewelled windows beams slanting down upon each little squad of children, and the tall background of the church retires into a grayer gloom. Pattering little feet of laggards arriving echo through the great nave. They trot in and join their regiments, gathered under the slanting sunbeams. What are they learning? Is it truth? Those two gray ladies with their books ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... which surrounds the house and slopes away from it, and they are brilliant patches of colour, gay with verbenas, geraniums, and petunias. Here and there clumps of tall trees rise above the shrubs, and as a background there is a thick plantation of red and blue gums, to shelter the garden from the strong N.W. winds. Then, in front, the country stretches away in undulating downs to a chain of high hills in the distance: every now and then there is a deep gap in these, ...
— Station Life in New Zealand • Lady Barker
... of William Paterson (born 1658), the far-travelled and financially-speculative son of a farmer in Dumfriesshire. He was the "projector," or one of the projectors, of the Bank of England of 1694, investing 2000 pounds. He kept the Darien part of his scheme for an East India Company in the background, and it seems that William, when he granted a patent to that company, knew nothing of this design to settle in or near the Panama isthmus, which was quite clearly within the Spanish sphere of influence. When the philosopher John Locke heard of the scheme, he wished ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang
... middle ground of the piano with soft chords which are felt rather than heard, and which always come in upon the half beat or the quarter beat, and rarely or never upon the full accented part of a measure. The differentiation of the melody from its harmonic and rhythmic background is accomplished by this great master in a beautiful manner. Take for instance, the romanze in F sharp, Opus 28, No. 2. The melody of the first strophe of this exquisite music might have been written for Church. It is a duet for baritones, the voices being represented by the ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... were we able to move about freely without running foul of things but, standing aft by the useless wheel and looking forward, every detail of the ship's hull, spars, sails, and rigging stood out clearly and sharply, like a silhouette cut out of black paper, against a background of shining oil- smooth water and dense masses of twisting and writhing cloud-shapes all reflecting the weird, mysterious ruddy light. It was an awe-inspiring phenomenon, strongly suggestive of the supernatural, ...
— The Strange Adventures of Eric Blackburn • Harry Collingwood
... he her father? Was it a father who had sold her so, careless, callous—or was it only a father's semblance, and did there lie in the background of those petted, childish years some darker shadow, of a tragedy that had wrecked her mother's life and broken ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... Hugh, for various reasons, the greatest possible excitement. He would have liked to have asked Mr. Pidgen many questions. Christmas Day came, and a beautiful day enthroned it: a pale blue sky, faint and clear, was a background to misty little clouds that hovered, then fled and disappeared, and from these flakes of snow fell now and then across the shining sunlight. Early in the winter afternoon a moon like an orange feather sailed into the sky as the lower stretches ...
— The Golden Scarecrow • Hugh Walpole
... or man ever walks in a straight line. But, oh, how beautiful it was with the fruit-trees and shrubbery in bloom, wild flowers, and stretches of meadow, where cows were pastured, and here and there a small flock of sheep! Up above, on the brow of a hill, a wooded background gave it a still more ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... a step or two farther away from the spot where he still stood as though absorbed. His angular figure was clearly defined through the twilight against the empty background of space. He was on the very edge of the cliff, ...
— The Betrayal • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... who had quite won the confidence of the pious circle. Being active and attentive, he was consoling to the sick; but, more than by all this, he extended his practice by the gift of showing in the background some mysterious medicines prepared by himself, of which no one could speak, since with us the physicians were strictly prohibited from making up their own prescriptions. With certain powders, which may have been some ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... started toward the barn to harness Jack into the worn, old-fashioned sleigh, which sleigh was built high in the back, and had a curved dasher of monstrous proportions, ornamented with a prancing horse in an impossible attitude, done in bright vermilion on a blue background! ...
— The Busted Ex-Texan and Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... and the rural population. On the side of the Parisian proletariat stood none but itself. Over 3,000 insurgents were massacred, after the victory 15,000 were transported without trial. With this defeat, the proletariat steps to the background on the revolutionary stage. It always seeks to crowd forward, so soon as the movement seems to acquire new impetus, but with ever weaker effort and ever smaller results; So soon as any of the above lying ...
— The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte • Karl Marx
... you! May coins fall into your coffee and the finest wines and wittles lie smilingly about your path, with a kind of dissolving view of fine scenery by way of background; and may all speak well of you—and me too for that matter—and generally all things be ordered unto you totally regardless of expense and with a view to nothing in the world but enjoyment, edification, and a portly ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the church rose in the background. But we had no time to look at it, for we were already driving up to the institute itself, which was at the end of the village, and consisted of two rows of houses with an open space closed at the rear by the wide front of ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... and fascinating story depicting the unfettered life of a young Russian ... the background of society and ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... space outside the main building, which lies to the right. A projecting corner of it is visible, with a door approached by a flight of low stone steps. The background consists of steep fir-clad slopes, quite close at hand. On the left are small scattered trees, forming the margin of a wood. The snowstorm has ceased; but the newly fallen snow lies deep around. The ...
— John Gabriel Borkman • Henrik Ibsen
... real thought and interest in his work by bringing him right to the sources of historical knowledge and enabling him to see the very words of those who, writing when the past was present, can carry him back to themselves and make their times his own. In this way the book offers the proper background and atmosphere for "The Development of Modern Europe," by the same authors, which it accompanies chapter by chapter and section ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... grim-looking stone house, with its windows for the most part covered by their drawn-down blinds. Under other circumstances, with fairly kept gardens and trim borders, the old-fashioned building, dating from the days of Henry the Seventh, would have been attractive enough, with its background of trees, and fine view along the valley out to the far-stretching blue sea; but poverty seemed to have set its mark upon the place, and the boy was so impressed by the gloomy aspect of the house, that he ceased ...
— Cutlass and Cudgel • George Manville Fenn
... for the little inlet, with its background of tall firs, where she had first met little Lottie Drugg, and she often walked down there. So she became pretty well acquainted with "Mr. Selectman" Cross Moore. But as yet she did not get as far out on the Middletown Lower Road as the house where ...
— Janice Day at Poketown • Helen Beecher Long
... by earlier artists to represent celestial glory. The simple and solemn lines of the landscape showing the curved surface of the globe give a cosmic character to the scene, and the beautiful indigo blue of the distance forms a fine background for the supremely modelled flesh. This composition is the first in the order of execution in which Michael Angelo fully realised his scheme of decoration, as to scale and form, making a few figures fill the space allotted to them with ease and freedom of movement. Truly the ...
— Michael Angelo Buonarroti • Charles Holroyd
... transport bound for New York stood the Broncho Rider Boys casting their last glance shoreward as the sun was setting behind the mountains that form the background of the city of Vera Cruz. Over the city still waved the Stars and Stripes, and as the darkness fell and the tip of Mt. Orizaba gradually faded from sight, Billie turned to the others and in a voice tinged ...
— The Broncho Rider Boys with Funston at Vera Cruz - Or, Upholding the Honor of the Stars and Stripes • Frank Fowler
... return me," I said. I was standing with my arm around Mary. I could feel her shuddering. I was trying to be calm, but across the background of my consciousness thoughts were whirling. We must escape. This Tugh was our real enemy, and for all the gruesome aspect of the pseudo-human Robot, this man Tugh seemed the more sinister, more menacing.... ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... fundamental objective, her political attitude toward attaining it, and her militant spirit were revived in suffrage history in 1913 when Alice Paul, also of Quaker background, entered the national field as leader of the new suffrage ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... knowing that I was taking up their Champion. The Bishop's answer, like Mr. Burke's attack on the french revolution, served me as a back-ground to bring forward other subjects upon, with more advantage than if the background was not there. This is the motive that induced me to answer him, otherwise I should have gone on without taking any notice of him. I have made and am still making additions to the manuscript, and shall continue to do so till an ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... however, not deny that it was the intellectual rejuvenation which made the religious reformation possible or, at all events, effective. Nor can it be denied that after the Revolution, in the Protestant communities the intellectual element was thrust into the background. The practical and devotional prevailed. Humanism was for a time shut out. There was more room for it in the Roman Church than among Protestants. Again, the Renaissance itself had been not so much an era of discovery of a new intellectual ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... nearby. He was rather wistfully envious of that year in the camp, when Lily Cardew and Cameron had been together, and at first it was the bond of Lily that sent him to the shop. In the beginning the shop irritated him, because it seemed an incongruous background for the fiery young orator. But later on he joined the small open forum in the back room, and perhaps for the first time in his idle years he began to think. He had made the sacrifice of his luxurious young life to go to war, had slept in mud and risked his body and ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Frederick was shrewd enough to keep in the background all the time! She took no part in the fight between her son and Prince Bismarck, and was particularly careful to avoid identifying herself in any way with Professor Hintzpeter. The result was that the kaiser ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... the first year,—endure and study,—and all for what? That, after dressing in the corner farthest from the looking-glass, in a dismal room you would scarcely use for your housemaid's brooms and dusters at home, you may stand for a few moments in the background of some scene, and watch the leading lady making the hit in the foreground. Will these few, well-dressed, well-lighted, music-thrilled moments repay you for the loss of home love, ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... ship facing the hoist side rides on a dark blue background with yellow wavy lines under the ship; on the hoist side, a vertical band is divided into three parts: the top part (called ikkurina) is red with a green diagonal cross extending to the corners overlaid by ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... Sleth again. "Well, that's the background, then. Now tell me about what happened yesterday ...
— Temple Trouble • Henry Beam Piper
... even to better advantage in a pleasanter but, at the same time, far more difficult task, the famous Life of Scott. The extraordinary interest of the subject, and the fashion, no less skilful than modest, in which the biographer keeps himself in the background, and seems constantly to be merely editing Scott's words, have perhaps obscured the literary value of the book to some readers. Of the perpetual comparison with Boswell, it may be said, once for all, ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... Pleasant was the change. Nanny's home was as a clock that had been run out, and is set going again. Already the old woman was unpacking her box, to increase the distance between herself and the poorhouse. But Gavin only saw her in the background, for the Egyptian, singing at her work, had become the heart of the house. She had flung her shawl over Nanny's shoulders, and was at the fireplace breaking peats with the leg of a stool. She turned merrily to the minister to ask him to chop up his staff for firewood, ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... the play-house sense) and any complication of plot are utterly absent; all this must have concentrated not the eye of the spectator on the scene, but his ear upon the voice, and his emotions on the personages who stood out before him without a background, sharp-cut and clear as a group of statuary which is the same, place it where you will, complete in itself—a world of beauty, independent of all other things and beings save on the ground on which it needs must stand. ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... pulpit. In a moment's weakness I had owned to her that I liked violets—pah! I am sick of the scent of them now. On Sunday morning I found a bunch of them, done up after a well-known fashion, with dried maiden-hair as a background, laid beside the pulpit cushion. I had good reason to know from whence it came. I said to her when she waylaid me on my homeward course that the woman who cleaned the church would have to be reprimanded. ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... among the shadowy figures gathered there, its subject being Colonel Benjamin Harrison. He was friend and college roommate of Thomas Jefferson, and a member of the first State Executive Council in 1776. Against the dense background is shown a slender gentleman of the old school, with an intellectual, kindly face and ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... love-affairs of three young people, with an old-fashioned romance in the background. A tiny dog plays an important role in serving as a foil for the heroine's talking ingeniousness. There is poetry, as well as tenderness and charm, in this tale of a weaver ...
— Whispering Smith • Frank H. Spearman
... point. And so the fight surged to and fro throughout the night. All around the scene of the conflict the sky was lit up by the flashes of the guns and the light of blazing villages and farms, while against this background of smoke and flame, looking out in the murky light over the crumbling ruins of the old town, rose the battered wreck of the cathedral town and the ...
— World's War Events, Vol. I • Various
... misty mountain-tops of heroism, she dragged you down and chained you to the commonplace, taking all the zest and fervour out of your soul! The memories of "seam-squirrels" and of thin coffee and ill-smelling and greasy soup had slipped somewhat into the background of Jimmie's mind, and he lived again the sublime hour when he had confronted the court and stood for the fundamental rights of an American citizen. He wanted to have that act of daring appreciated at its true value. Poor, ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... attitude; and then the pretty business of the parade. All under that July sky; all under that flicker of cloud and sun, and the soft sweet breath of air that sometimes stole to us to relieve the hot stillness; and all with that setting and background of cedars and young foliage and bordering hills over which the cloud shadows swept. Then came the mounting-guard business. By and ...
— Daisy • Elizabeth Wetherell
... reflection of the vanished day. Up in the blue of the cupola shine the stars, speaking peace, as they always do, those unchanging friends. In the south stands a large red-yellow moon, encircled by a yellow ring and light golden clouds floating on the blue background. Presently the aurora borealis shakes over the vault of heaven its veil of glittering silver—changing now to yellow, now to green, now to red. It spreads, it contracts again, in restless change; next it breaks into waving, many-folded bands of shining silver, ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... disclosing as they passed long tracts of lovely country, bathed in a rich golden glow. The broad Douro, with its transparent current, shone out like a bright-colored ribbon, meandering through the deep garment of fairest green; the darkly shadowed mountains which closed the background loomed even larger than they were; while their summits were tipped with the yellow glory of the morning. The air was calm and still, and the very smoke that arose from the peasant's cot labored as it ascended through the perfumed air, and save the ripple of the ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... on the stage of a country theatre, at night, after the play. To the right a row of rough, unpainted doors leading into the dressing-rooms. To the left and in the background the stage is encumbered with all sorts of rubbish. In the middle of the stage is ...
— Swan Song • Anton Checkov
... magnificent. But I aspired to higher things. I felt within me the stirrings of what I could not help believing to be genius—true genius. I longed to distinguish myself, to emerge from the crowd, from the background, to make myself remarked, to do something, to be somebody, to see my name a famous one. I was fortunate enough at this epoch to attract the notice of X——, the poet. He believed in me, and encouraged me to believe in myself. It is one of the regrets ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... and Vita Nuova. Love is now rather a mystical idea than a direct affection for a particular lady: the lover is swayed by a spiritual and intellectual ideal, and the motive of physical attraction recedes to the background. The cause of love, however, remains unchanged: love enters through the ...
— The Troubadours • H.J. Chaytor
... recent transcripts—the Albaniz Tango, the negro melody Deep River and Amani's fine Orientale—you will see what I mean. They are conceived as pictures—I have not tried to analyze too much—and while so conceiving them their free harmonic background shapes itself for me without strain ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... distinctly represented local feeling and physical conditions. In the North they generally stood on hillsides apart where the winds rattled the boughs of the surrounding pines or elms and the murmur of a river could be heard from below. The hill and the trees, the wind and the river, were their usual background, with the garden and park and the great plantations of trees belting the estate around; the house itself standing on the highest ...
— The Measure of a Man • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... blue, and the stars shone down with a sharp, diamond-like lustre. Beneath the bank of clouds, yet far enough in the foreground of this picture to partly emerge from obscurity, stood, on an eminence, a white marble building, with columns of porticos, like a Grecian temple. Projected against the dark background were its classic outlines, looking more like a vision of the days of Pericles ...
— The Good Time Coming • T. S. Arthur
... feeling, for the sake of his secretary, who had come to occupy so wide a sector of his comfort and affection. Yet the old virago evidently spoke from a broad background of experience. She was at least half convincing. While the Captain repelled her charge against his quiet, hard-working brown helper, he admitted it against Cissie Dildine, whom he did not know. She was an animal, a female centaur, a ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... head—nothing more—standing out boldly from a dark background. The face was again Stafford's, but the presentment differed strangely. It was still beautiful; it had even a beauty the other had not, the beauty of youth and passion. The devotee was gone; in his place was a face that, in spite of the ascetic cast of feature, was so lighted up with the fire of ...
— Father Stafford • Anthony Hope
... Of all the thousands of camp-fires I have elsewhere built none was just like this one, rejoicing in triumphant strength and beauty in the heart of the rain-laden gale. It was wonderful,—the illumined rain and clouds mingled together and the trees glowing against the jet background, the colors of the mossy, lichened trunks with sparkling streams pouring down the furrows of the bark, and the gray-bearded old patriarchs bowing low and ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... "Come, lad, we're in for it now. Take you the cutlass and Til try their skulls with the butt o' my pistol: it has done good work before now in that way. If there's no more o' the blackguards in the background we'll bate them aisy." ...
— Martin Rattler • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... which she had of the woman as she went by; for the outlines of the figure and dress of the woman and of the basket and child were very simple. Mrs. Holiday afterwards put in some of the scenery for a background. ...
— Rollo in Geneva • Jacob Abbott
... three appeared. They were in view for several seconds, then they were gone. In a few minutes the lights did a repeat performance. The man admitted he had been scared. He broke off his story of the lights and launched into his background as a native Texan, with range wars, Indians, and stagecoaches under his belt. What he was trying to point out was that despite the range wars, Indians, and stagecoaches, he had been scared. His wife had been scared too. We had some difficulty ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt
... me that I was disconcerted. It was quite true that he was compelling my respect, while my first dislike of him still obstinately lurked in the background of my mind. I felt ungenerous, but I would not lie ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... best volunteer organizations of the South—line upon line, as far as the eye could reach—their bright uniforms, glancing muskets and waving banners giving color to the view. Far in the rear the fringed woods made dim background; while between, regular rows of white tents—laid out in regiments and company ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... got well settled down to work presently. He found the situation, the climate, the background, entirely suited to literary production, and in a little while he had accomplished more than at any other time since his arrival in Europe. From letters to Mrs. Crane and to Mr. Hall we learn something of ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the weird calling of natives across the valleys. Far out towards the sea a thunderstorm flashed; and after a long interval the rumblings came to us. So very distant was it that we paid it little attention, save as an interesting background to our own still evening. Almost between sentences of our slow conversation, however, it rushed up to the zenith, blotting out the stars. The tall palms began to sway and rustle in the forerunning breeze. Then with a swoop it was upon ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... certainly—supposing neither his wife, nor her guardians and trustees, objected to his anticipating more than half of the income at his disposal, for some unknown purpose, in the first year of his marriage. But even if he got over this obstacle, there was another waiting for him in the background. The lady at the Villa, had heard of his contemplated marriage. A superb woman, Mr. Blake, of the sort that are not to be triffled with—the sort with the light complexion and the Roman nose. She felt the utmost ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... At any osteria con cucina on the Campagna one is also sure of a good omelet and salad; and, sitting under the vines, after a long walk, I have made as savory a lunch on these two articles as ever I found in the most glittering restaurant in the Palais Royal. If one add the background of exquisite mountains, the middle distance of flowery slopes, where herds of long-haired goats, sheep, and gray oxen are feeding among the skeletons of broken aqueducts, ruined tombs, and shattered mediaeval towers, and the foreground made up of picturesque groups ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... during the rest of the trip; that is, until the next stopping place was reached. This was at a place in Kansas where Mr. Pertell planned to have some farming operations shown as a background to a certain ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Rocky Ranch - Or, Great Days Among the Cowboys • Laura Lee Hope
... framed in such rude setting, but almost as startling, at first, as the apparition of the fair witch in the forest to Christabelle. Slightly in the background stood a mature dame—the mother, evidently. No need to ask what their crime had been; aid and abetment of the South suggested itself before you detected the ensign of her faith that the demoiselle still wore undauntedly—a pearl solitaire, fashioned as a single star. I may not deny that my ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... rains. Seen from rising ground, they enrich the landscape with the beauty of their graceful elevations; from the lower levels of the town, and in contrast to the foliage of palm or bamboo, their sheer height is manifested by the intense blueness of the background they afford. ...
— A Visit to Java - With an Account of the Founding of Singapore • W. Basil Worsfold
... In the background close to the window stood Barney, with all his old training manifest in his attitude—that of a petty officer in charge of a prisoner; for that was the character which his son occupied just then in his eyes. His gardening was, for the time being, forgotten, and he ...
— Syd Belton - The Boy who would not go to Sea • George Manville Fenn
... "The background of the poem — as of 'Sunrise' — is the forest, the coast and the marshes near Brunswick, Georgia. Early in life Lanier had been thrilled by this wonderful natural scenery, and later visits had the more powerfully impressed his imagination. He is the poet of the marshes ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... of these mounted warriors the infantry fell into the background. In the main it essentially resembled the bands of Celts, with whom the Romans had fought in Italy and Spain. The large shield was, as then, the principal weapon of defence; among the offensive arms, on the other hand, the long thrusting lance now played the chief part in room ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... and was brushed perfectly smooth and coiled on the back of her shapely head, which was placed admirably on her shoulders. She was dressed in the coarse, black-blue stuff of the country, and a kerchief, also dark blue, was knotted under her chin, and fell back behind her head, forming a dark background for her silken hair. ...
— Elsket - 1891 • Thomas Nelson Page
... Western mania for shortening names and thereby sometimes breaking with the historical past led to the cutting out of a letter and leaving the name in its present form. But the present city of Calgary, with its great buildings and its distinctive place within sight of the Rockies, has a definite background of early police history which has done much to ...
— Policing the Plains - Being the Real-Life Record of the Famous North-West Mounted Police • R.G. MacBeth
... even if no actual proof existed. But all nations have at some period used the needle to copy the masterpieces of great artists. The English, as a typical example of this spirit of imitation, sought on a background of cloth of gold to embroider the saints from the canvas of Fra Angelico. Also the French, in the manufacture of their tapestries, copied the works of many of the old masters. Positive proof of the existence of patchwork, or as some choose to call it, "applied work," ...
— Quilts - Their Story and How to Make Them • Marie D. Webster
... become a favorite with theatre audiences through his clever portrayal of a crook in The Marquis of Keith and of the popular stage favorite in The Court Singer. He is little concerned with the probability of the plot; his situations will not bear the test of serious scrutiny. They are only the background from which the figure of the hero stands out in strong relief. The popular tenor, who is an amusing combination of the artist and the businessman, is one of the characters in the plays of Wedekind that have little or ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... word of avowed reference to his own case throughout; and yet from first to last we are aware of young Mary Powell in the background. Inability for "fit and matchable conversation": this is that supreme fault in a wife on which the descant is from first to last, and from which, when it is plainly ingrained and unamendable, the right of divorce is maintained to be, by ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... grand display of armed men, with their armour glittering and standards on high, marching in different bodies as if to take part in some glorious pageant to be held in the mighty, rugged amphitheatre whose walls were mountains and whose background was formed by the piled-up masses of ice and snow, here silvery, there dazzling golden in the blaze of the afternoon sun, and farther back beauteous with the various azure tints, from the faintest tinge to the deepest purple, in the rifts and chasms ...
— Marcus: the Young Centurion • George Manville Fenn
... Milwaukee was only one of many people from strange walks of life who entered that lottery. There were others whose background was equally alien to life in a homestead cabin, who came to see the West while it was still unchanged, drawn for reasons of personal adventure, or because the romantic legends of the West attracted them. People drawn by the intangibles, ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... (we were at the end of the wet weather), the sodden, dingy pines, the muddy road, and the black powder-riven cliffs formed a gloomy background against which the black and white liveries of the jhampanies, the yellow-paneled 'rickshaw and Mrs. Wessington's down-bowed golden head stood out clearly. She was holding her handkerchief in her left hand and was leaning hack exhausted against the ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... to the exile of Napoleon two decades later, the United States as a neutral nation was incessantly menaced by the aggressions of one or the other of the belligerents. A faithful picture of American politics must set the stirring events of this epoch against the forbidding background of European intrigue and war. In this struggle the supremacy of the seas fell to Great Britain. However victorious on European battlefields, French armies were powerless to defend the colonial possessions in the West Indies. Cut off from France the colonies ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... something else. Coffin shared things with them—predominantly North American background, scientific habit of thought, distrust of all governments. But few Constitutionalists had any religion; those who did were Romish, Jewish, Buddhist, or otherwise alien to him. All were tainted with the self-indulgence of this ...
— The Burning Bridge • Poul William Anderson
... and gigantic tree ferns, between thirty and forty feet high, up whose great stems gaily flowered creepers wind their hawser-like fronds, make a delicious and cooling shade. Yonder tree away there in the background, with delicate pea-green leaves, is an old friend of ours. Let your memories go back to your infancy. Cannot you recall many a wry face; cannot you remember how unpleasant the after sensations when stern, but kind mothers forced a nauseous decoction called "senna" down your widely-gaping ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... convulsions. Who, then, directs? Who commands? The members of the Commune, divided as they are in opinion, do not appear capable, on account of their number and lamentable inexperience, of taking the sole lead in military affairs. Is there not some one either amongst them or in the background, who knows how to think, direct, and act? Is it Bergeret? Is it Cluseret? The future perhaps will unravel the mystery. In the meantime, and in spite of the reverses to which the Federals have had to submit during these last days, the whole ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... touch with him. Mere curiosity would have made me do that. He grew more normal as the years went by, and gradually the fancy that had come to me at our first meeting faded farther into the background. Sometimes, using the very language of the dead man's letter, I would talk to him, wondering if by any chance some flash of memory would come back to him, and once or twice it seemed to me that into the mild, pathetic eyes there came a look that I had seen before, ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome
... black into the little sitting-room on the ground floor in which the old Duke used to take delight. Here he found two ladies,—but only two ladies,—waiting to receive him. The Duchess came forward to welcome him, while Madame Goesler remained in the background, with composed face,—as though she by no means expected his arrival and he had chanced to come upon them as she was standing by the window. He was thinking of her much more than of her companion, though he knew also how much he owed to the kindness of the Duchess. But what ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... endeavor there are thousands of people who are forced to remain in the background because they lack self-confidence in speech and manner—the very fundamental of success. For just such people Grenville Kleiser has written his book "How to Develop Self-Confidence ...
— Successful Methods of Public Speaking • Grenville Kleiser
... proximate element in the composition of the body—a primitive organ. From this point of view he apprehends and judges its morphological relations with, in the first place, the other co-ordinated primitive organs in the system as a whole; in all this the cells remain in the background, and have nothing to do directly with the determination of these morphological relations" (p. 6). Within the nervous system there are separate organs which stand to one another in a definite morphological and ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... wretch, that it was he who hindered her bye play, hurrying on with his cue in order to prevent any applause, and in his anxiety to regain the public ear, monopolizing the front of the stage, leaving his wife in the background. She never complained, for she loved him too well; moreover success makes us indulgent and every evening she was compelled to quit the shade in which she strove to conceal and efface herself, to obey the summons enthusiastically calling her to ...
— Artists' Wives • Alphonse Daudet
... "unrest of the age." Much has already been done in the right direction by divines, philosophers, and physicists, and more still, perhaps, by the great poets, who have striven earnestly to see the spiritual background which lies behind the abstractions of materialistic science. But much yet remains to be done. We may agree with Hinton that "Positivism bears a new Platonism in its bosom"; but the child has not yet come ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... we heard a commotion on the dock side, and looked over to see the wanderers, accompanied by all the 'larrikins' of 'sailor-town,' making for the ship. Two policemen in the near background were there to see that no deliberate breach-of-the-peace ...
— The Brassbounder - A Tale of the Sea • David W. Bone
... the very air; in it the war-time precautions against light seemed fantastic, like shading candles in a room still full of daylight. What lights there were had the effect of strokes and stipples of dim colour laid by a painter's brush on a background of ghostly whitish blue. The dreamlike quality of the town was perhaps enhanced for her eyes by the veil she was wearing—in daytime no longer white. As the music died out of her, elation also ebbed. Somebody ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy
... to stand upon the air as steadily as though it were solid ground: the uplifted arms of the Apostles, the sweep of their draperies, their ecstatic gestures, gave an impression of exultation and of holy joy. The background of nearly all was the sky by night, the dark night of the soul, with wild clouds swept by strange winds of hell and lit ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... Background, perhaps. The feel of the place. We don't really know, out in the Belt, what's going on there. The beamcast news is hardly a trickle. Besides, you have more common sense in your left little toe than that big mick yonder has ...
— Industrial Revolution • Poul William Anderson
... features of the teachings of Spiritualism which were painfully prominent in its earlier stages, which there is no reason to believe are discountenanced or abandoned either in theory or practice, are relegated to an invisible background, while in its outward aspect it now poses in the attitude of piety and the garb of religion. It even professes to adopt some of the more prominent and popular doctrines of Christianity. In this phase the average churchgoer ...
— Modern Spiritualism • Uriah Smith
... impulsive though she was, she was not accustomed to speak of her feelings to others, and did her best to thrust her longing for freedom into the background. But she grew pale and thin in the struggle, and at last there came a day when a visitor, guessing what was the matter, hinted that as she had taken her vows before she was old enough to do so by law, it would be easy to get absolved from them. Something of the ...
— The Red Book of Heroes • Leonora Blanche Lang
... the world I could h'ist you up there," she remarked, from an evident background of ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... evening came slowly on, the grim, warlike aspect of the scene seemed to die out, and the smoke of the camp-fires, the pennons fluttering in the evening breeze, and the glinting of breastplate and morion formed a picture against the background of green, which might from a distance have been ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... as a park of more than ten acres the grounds of a subsidiary residence of the daimyo. The magnificent trees, with lakes, rivulets and hills fashioned with infinite art,[175] and the background of natural hill and woodland, made in all a possession which exhibited the delectable possibilities of Japanese gardening. An occasional electric light amid the trees gave an effect in the evening in which Japanese delight. Some of the old carp which dashed up to the bridges ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... three windows only on each floor, and, within the building, a courtyard, or, to speak more correctly, a square pit or well. Above the three or four rooms occupied by Grassou of Fougeres was his studio, looking over to Montmartre. This studio was painted in brick-color, for a background; the floor was tinted brown and well frotted; each chair was furnished with a bit of carpet bound round the edges; the sofa, simple enough, was clean as that in the bedroom of some worthy bourgeoise. All these ...
— Pierre Grassou • Honore de Balzac
... tall lady veiled and dressed in black. He lifted his hat; he heard an alarmed little cry and retired. The clock said, Five minutes: a secret chiromancy in addition indicating on its face the word Fool. An odd word to be cast at him! It rocked the icy pillar of pride in the background of his nature. Certainly standing solos at the hour of eight P.M., he would stand for a fool. Hitherto he had never allowed a woman to chance to posture him in that character. He strode out, returned, scanned every lady's shape, and for a distraction ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... and gradually veer to more serious topics... But once she stood in his rather austere inner shrine of business, she decided against subterfuges. He had stepped into the main office, the boy who showed her in explained. Would she have a seat? She dropped into a chair, taking in her background with feminine swiftness. A barometer, a map, two stiffly painted pictures exhibiting as many sailing vessels in full flight, a calendar bearing the advertisement of a ship-chandlery firm—this was ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... beautiful bay. Penzance is a fine town in a splendid situation; the bay, bounded by the Lizard and its opposite bold brother-headland, inclosing St. Michael's Mount, and having a fertile and villa-studded background; the town full of good handsome shops (one like the Egyptian Hall), a large cathedralish church, and with a very special market-place, of light granite, in the form of a plain Grecian temple, surmounted at the middle by an imposing dome. As I had duly culled information ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... land dotted with habitations. Water is plentiful, and though the scenery certainly lacks trees except in the immediate neighbourhood of the villages and houses, it has, nevertheless, a certain picturesqueness on account of its background of wooded mountains. I started from Pithoragarh at 6.30 A.M.; leaving the road to Tal on the left, I followed the track at a medium elevation of 6250 feet, arriving at Shadgora (6350 feet) just in time to witness the blessing of a calf by a Brahmin. Inside a ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... turned with a sturdy determination to fancies about remote things, and especially to imaginings of the boy—the little fellow who loved him, and who, thank God, was not as yet "sorry for him!" Oddly enough, the mother seemed to have taken her place in the background of Hamilton's thoughts. It was her son who appealed to him—the innocent man-child, half American, half Russian, entering so happily and unconsciously on the enhanced uncertainties of life in the ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... matter into consideration, and he put up one of his hands to his eyes. Fortunately the bell for the opening of the session broke in upon the conversation, and not only diverted him, but relegated the whole subject to the background for the time being. Nevertheless, the thought of it continued in Mary's mind as she sat listening to the exercises. How could an attractive girl like this take a fancy to such a trickster? It seemed totally incompatible with the teacher's ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... word that might fall from the general in reply; and a volunteer company, doing duty as a guard, pricked ruthlessly with their bayonets at any particularly quiet person among the throng. So Ernest, being of an unobtrusive character, was thrust quite into the background, where he could see no more of Old Blood-and-Thunder's physiognomy than if it had been still blazing on the battle-field. To console himself, he turned towards the Great Stone Face, which, like a faithful and long-remembered friend, looked back and smiled upon him through the ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... certain sweeping convictions. He was not conscious of this inner compulsion when he concluded to try and meet Sam Carr without making theology an issue. Somehow this man Carr began to loom in the background of his thought as a commanding figure. At least, Thompson said to himself as he passed through the fringe of timber, Sam Carr by all accounts was a person to whom an educated man could speak in words of more than two syllables without meeting ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... a vision of a very old woman walking over the top of a hill. She leans on a knobby cane. She smokes a corn-cob pipe. Her face is corrugated with wrinkles and as tough as leather. She comes out of a high background of sky. The wind whips her skirts about her thin shanks. Her legs ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... Barney Bill's cropped, shoe-brush hair was white as the driven snow; but the wry, bright-eyed face was unchanged. And Jane, quietly and decently dressed, her calm eyes fixed on him, was—Jane. These two curiously detached themselves against the human background. It was only the sudden stillness of the exhausted applause that brought him to consciousness of his environment; that, and a heaven-sent fellow at the back of the audience who shouted: "Go ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... a man dying, yet chanting away furiously all the time, then he grows still more animated, occasionally adjusting his spear with his throwing-stick and quivering it with a peculiar grace. The young women now come timidly up to see what is going on; little flirtations take place in the background, whereat the very elderly gentlemen with very young wives, whose dignity would be compromised by appearing to take an interest in passing events, and who have therefore remained seated in their own huts, wax ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey
... Alicia, smiling brightly at him, "brought you a letter, I know." It was extraordinary how detached she was from her vital personal concern in him. It seemed relegated to some background of her nature while she occupied herself with the play of circumstances or was lost in ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... railway bridge the road rises sharply for a few yards, and then a whole stretch of undulating woodland is before one: to the right bosky green, but on the left a rough dark heath with a shaggy wilderness of pine for background, heightened here and there with a sudden surprise of gentle silver birch. How freshly the wind met one at the top of the road: a southwest wind soft and blithe enough to have blown through 'Diana of ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... seemed to shun her society. His relations at home had heard nothing of his proposal for Margaret's hand, and Janetta, like them, did not know that it had ever been actually made. Another event drove this matter into the background for some little time—for it was evidently fated that Janetta should never ...
— A True Friend - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... opened in a quaint house that bent its bulging gables crookedly over the gleaming water, and a girl, holding a small lamp, looked out for a moment. Her face, fresh and smiling, was fair to see against the background of dense shadow,—the light she carried flashed like a star,—and leaning down from the lattice she sang half-timidly, half mischievously, the first two or three bars of the old song.. "Du, du, liegst in mein Herzen ... !" "Ah! Gute Nacht, Liebchen!" ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... of Queen Anne or of the early Georges. The church would have been ancient even then. With its air of faded grandeur, its sculptured recesses and dark niches, the tattered banners hanging from its roof, it must have made an admirable background. Perhaps an historical novel in the Thackeray vein? She could see her heroine walking up the aisle on the arm of her proud old soldier father. Later on, when her journalistic position was more established, she might think of it. It was still quite early. There ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... annals of the poor interest her to the extent of providing an entire volume of three hundred odd pages from the events of a single day. But though now and then the old Northern counsel to "get eendways wi' it" does hover in the background of one's mind I repeat that sincerity carries the thing through. For all that, however, The Splendid Fairing did but confirm me in a previous impression that these Mary-call-the-cattle-home localities must remain more convenient ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. CLVIII, January 7, 1920 • Various
... blue background of the sky, it could be perceived that these men carried coils of rope, pieces of wood, and other implements that might be ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid
... battles. At evening we arrived at Ceneda, where our Italian poet Da Ponte was born, situated just at the base of the Alps, the rocky peaks and irregular spires of which, beautifully green with the showery season, rose in the background. Ceneda seems to have something of German cleanliness about it, and the floors of a very comfortable inn at which we stopped were of wood, the first we had seen in Italy, though common throughout the Tyrol and the rest of Germany. A troop of barelegged boys, ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... with a monk in a Trappist cloister, apostrophes to the imagination, the sea, and nature, anew division of travelers, adebate of personal attributes, constant appeals to his dear Sophie, who is, like Eliza, ever in the background, occasional references to objects made familiar through Yorick, as Dessein's Hotel, and a Yorick-like sympathy with the dumb beast; in short, an open imitation of Sterne, but the motifs from Sterne are here more mixed and less ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... passed along this road in the days before the War Between the States, Coker says. In addition to these he claims to have seen many travellers by foot, and not infrequently furtive escaped slaves, the latter usually under cover of an appropriate background of darkness. ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - From Interviews with Former Slaves - Florida Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... only love affair be hampered by an element so disturbing as Mama Joy? Why, when he had hazed the Pilgrim out of his sight—and as he supposed, out of his life—must the man hover always in the immediate background, threating the peace of mind of Billy, who only wanted to be left alone that he and his friends might live unmolested in the ...
— The Long Shadow • B. M. Bower
... is a background of seamanship and sailing vessels, for the time is just after the Napoleonic War with France. This of course is the setting in which ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... in the background Rogers took it all in. He moved up and slipped a ten-franc piece into the boy's hand. 'Secretaries don't wear clothes like this,' he whispered. 'We'll go into town to-morrow and get the sort ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... purpose by the Florentines. The marks of his chisel hatch out the forms and develop the planes just as the parallel strokes of his pen cut out the reliefs of his drawings from the paper. His method of sculpture in the round was that of a carver of bas-reliefs. He gradually cut away the background more and more until the relief was actually the highest relief possible, the round. Every piece of sculpture Michael Angelo executed is the better for a background, whether niche or wall, for they all partake of this bas-relief ...
— Michael Angelo Buonarroti • Charles Holroyd
... And when he called for volunteers, three or four stepped up at once. The others made a general milling, as though each were trying to get forward and each were prevented by the crowd in front. But in the background big Jack Landis was seriously trying to get to the firing line. He was encumbered with the clinging ...
— Gunman's Reckoning • Max Brand
... of scene is about to open on our heroine, and we shall show her to you, for an evening at least, in new associations, and with a different background from that homely and rural one in which she has fluttered as a white dove ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... everything was in readiness for the little flower play. There was quite a large audience gathered on the smooth green lawn where seats had been placed for them. The shrubs and flower beds with trees beyond made a fine background for the stretch of terrace, which became a stage for the occasion. Jennie in a fuzzy grayish brown frock with a hood, made a dear little Pussy Willow, Edna in pink with her rosy cheeks was the very picture of Pinky Blooms, Dorothy's golden head made a lovely centre for Daisy ...
— A Dear Little Girl at School • Amy E. Blanchard
... that his journal, and correspondence with Lord Hood, clearly recognize this, his true relation to the siege of Calvi; for it makes it probable that, in attributing to himself a much more important part at Bastia, and in saying that Hood's report had put him unfairly in the background, he was not exaggerating his actual though ill-defined position there. That Nelson loved to dwell in thought upon his own achievements, that distinction in the eyes of his fellows was dear to him, that he ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... those lips that are motionless, those cheeks that the blood never tinges, that the freshness of health and happiness shall never visit again! Woeful, warning figure of dumb sorrow and patient pain, to fill the background of a picture of Love, ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... could be used with peculiar advantage for purposes of "pressure." Ratcliffe's success in his contest with the new President depended on the amount of "pressure" he could employ. To keep himself in the background, and to fling over the head of the raw Chief Magistrate a web of intertwined influences, any one of which alone would be useless, but which taken together were not to be broken through; to revive the lost art of the Roman retiarius, who from a safe distance threw his net ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... now every tower and steeple was bathed in rosy light, or else stood black against the radiant sky—towers illuminated, towers in densest shadow; the slim spars of ships showing as if drawn with pen and ink on a sulphur background—a scene of surpassing splendour and terror. Fareham had seen Flemish villages blazing, Flemish citadels exploding, their fragments hurled skyward in a blue flame of gunpowder; but never this vast arch of crimson, glowing and growing before his astonished gaze, as he paddled the boat ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... verbal acknowledgment of Farnham's merits. While he was abroad some of the city departments were reorganized, and Farnham on his return found himself, through Metzger's intervention, chairman of the library board. With characteristic sagacity the butcher kept himself in the background, and the committee who waited upon Farnham to ask him to accept the appointment placed it entirely upon considerations of the public good. His sensitive conscience would not permit him to refuse a duty thus imposed, and so with many inward qualms he assumed a chair in the vile ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... on top of the hill?" queried Flagg, indicating a number of tents gleaming in dots of white against the background ...
— A Gunner Aboard the "Yankee" • Russell Doubleday
... Lowick Gate. He had not been there since his first interview with Bulstrode in the morning, having been found at the Hospital by the banker's messenger; and for the first time he was returning to his home without the vision of any expedient in the background which left him a hope of raising money enough to deliver him from the coming destitution of everything which made his married life tolerable—everything which saved him and Rosamond from that bare isolation in which they ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... verdict of the princes and the people, Ahikam's intervention was needed. Yet the people were always fickle, and the king who is not mentioned in connection with Jeremiah's case, but as we see from Urijah's watched cruelly from the background, was not the man to be turned by a popular verdict from taking vengeance on the Prophet who had attacked him. Ahikam, however, had influence at court, and proved friendly ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... McMurdo was left once again to his thoughts. Night had now fallen, and the flames of the frequent furnaces were roaring and leaping in the darkness. Against their lurid background dark figures were bending and straining, twisting and turning, with the motion of winch or of windlass, to the rhythm of ...
— The Valley of Fear • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... she had stepped across the threshold of her career, she unconsciously realized that the home stage is the real background of the supreme world drama, and she shows this by the intimate, tender domestic scenes which made all of her stories bits of real life, with a strong appeal to those whose homes are joyous parts of ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... "search after the infinite," or of mistakes arising out of the confusion of a great chief's name with the thing signified by the name. But, however this may be, I think it is again merely matter of fact that, among a large portion of mankind, ancestor-worship is more or less thrown into the background either by such cosmic deities, or by tribal gods of uncertain origin, who have been raised to eminence by the superiority in warfare, ...
— The Evolution of Theology: An Anthropological Study - Essay #8 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... the Parisian insurrection of June, 1848—the first great battle between Proletariat and Bourgeoisie—drove again into the background, for a time, the social and political aspirations of the European working class. Thenceforth, the struggle for supremacy was again, as it had been before the revolution of February, solely between the different sections of the propertied class; the working class was reduced to ...
— Manifesto of the Communist Party • Karl Marx
... sat staring in amaze; the blacksmith strode to the door and looked out, himself a massive, dark silhouette upon the shimmering neutrality of the background. There was no figure in sight; no faint foot-fall was audible, no rustle of the sere leaves; only the voice of the mountain torrent, far below, challenged the stillness ...
— The Riddle Of The Rocks - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... men so liable to public insults as painters? Only last summer a new, and I think unique, type of insult was dropped upon me. I had a picture in hand, and wanted a bit of background to complete it. I had seen just the very thing near Twickenham, so, taking my sketching-box and camp-stool, I trained out, and in due course started work. Although I was painting by the side of a public road, the traffic was small and ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... substantial tribute of affectionate gratitude for happy hours spent in the Queen City of Europe and have the prospect of a desirable dividend at the same time. Here is a piece of foreign financing with a distinction and a background all its own. Aside from its purely sentimental phase it is perhaps the only loan floated in America since the war which is dedicated to construction instead of destruction. The proceeds are to be used to reimburse the City of Paris for expenditures in building ...
— The War After the War • Isaac Frederick Marcosson
... is never allied with a sanctified heart. And, therefore, everyone may apply a clinical test to his own life: "What is the character of my speech? What do my words indicate? What do they suggest as to the depths and background of the soul?" "By thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... says Fassmann, with a pleasant wit. Fassmann succeeded to all the emoluments and honors; but did not hold them; preferred to run away before long: and after him came one and the other, whom the reader is not to be troubled with here. Enough if the patient reader have seen, a little, into that background of Friedrich Wilhelm's existence; and, for the didactic part, have caught up his real views or instincts upon Spiritual Phosphorescence, or Stupidity grown Vocal, which are much sounder than ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... subtly aware how much more interesting is repentance when there is genuine human passion to repent, is renunciation when there is real love to sacrifice; of how much more effective is saintliness set off against a background of transgression. It was a real if somewhat childish joy to be able to sin actually yet without going beyond hope; of being dramatically false to his vows without crossing the line of ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... is but a secondary figure after all. What shall I do?" And Coquelin, who understood him, answered, "Take it to Sarah; she has just played Hamlet, and wants to do another boy." So M. Rostand "took it to Sarah," and finished up the duke with her in view, while in the background the figure of Flambeau scowled upon him over grandes moustaches—a true grognard indeed! Thus it happened that Coquelin never played the part of Flambeau until he came to New York with Mme. Sarah Bernhardt in the fall of 1900; and the grenadier conceived in the Porte St. Martin first ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... Preller {161} points out, 'nothing to do with natural man, but with an ideal world of heroes, with sons of the gods, with consecrated kings, heroes, elders, a kind of specific race of men. The people exist only as subsidiary to the great houses, as a mere background against which stand out the shining figures of heroes; as a race of beings fresh and rough from the hands of nature, with whom, and with whose concerns, the great houses and their bards have little concern.' This feeling—so universal in Greece, and in the feudal ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... proprietor to me—a little pale-faced man with a black moustache, who had been hovering in the background. He hastened to my side, smiling and bowing. This time I did not ask him a ...
— The Lost Ambassador - The Search For The Missing Delora • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... eyes. Clare knew that she was young, she felt that the white dream was sweet, and she believed that the world's heart was clean and good. All good was natural and eternal, lofty and splendid as an archangel in the light. God had made evil as a background of shadows to show how good the light was. Every one could come and stand in the light if he chose, for the mere trouble of moving. It seemed so simple. She wondered why everybody could not see it ...
— Adam Johnstone's Son • F. Marion Crawford
... upon William the Testy for genuine gold; and the little governor would sit for hours and listen to his gunpowder stories of exploits, which left those of Tirante the White, Don Belianis of Greece, or St. George and the Dragon, quite in the background. Having been promoted by William Kieft to the command of his whole disposable forces, he gave importance to his station by the grandiloquence of his bulletins, always styling himself Commander-in-Chief of the Armies of the New Netherlands; though in sober truth these Armies were nothing more ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... came into a recess which bounded his steps and invited him to repose. It was a circle, so formed artificially by slight trellises, to which clung parasite roses heavy with leaves and flowers. In the midst played a tiny fountain with a silvery murmuring sound; at the background, dominating the place, rose the crests of stately trees, on which the sunlight shimmered, but which rampired out all horizon beyond. Even as in life do the great dominant passions—love, ambition, desire of power or gold or fame or knowledge—form ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... should determine the nature of the reading. The texts beyond the primary grades are now for the most part selections of literary art. Very little of it has any conscious relation, immediate or remote, to present-day problems and conditions or with their historical background. Probably children should read many more selections of literary art than are found in the textbooks and the supplementary sets now owned by the schools. But certainly such cultural literary experience ought not to crowd out kinds of reading that are of much greater practical ...
— What the Schools Teach and Might Teach • John Franklin Bobbitt
... through my chinks—I find errors, follies, faults; forward, old age and death, pleasures fleeting from me, no virtues succeeding to their place—il faut avouer, I want all my quicksilver to make such a background receive ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... Sisters' window. Its panes were always well-washed, and though their display of artificial flowers, bands of scalloped flannel, wire hat-frames, and jars of home-made preserves, had the undefinable greyish tinge of objects long preserved in the show-case of a museum, the window revealed a background of orderly counters and white-washed walls in pleasant contrast to ...
— Bunner Sisters • Edith Wharton
... known established its altars in Dovelands Cottage. The understanding between father and daughter was complete and was rendered more perfect by the necessity for companionship experienced by both. Poor Mrs. Duveen possessed the personality of a chameleon, readily toning with any background; but intellectually she was never present. Why Michael Duveen had selected such a mate was a mystery which Flamby, who loved her mother the more dearly for her helplessness, could never solve. It was a mystery to which ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... forced from her the admission that it was expecting a good deal of Ann. She could see that nothing would be more bootless than thrusting traditions upon people who would not know what to do with them. But something about Ann encouraged one to believe she could fit into a background prepared for her. And if she could—would—! The prospect lured—excited. It was as inexplicably intoxicating as a grimace at the preacher—a wink at the professor. It seemed to be saucily tweaking the ear of that insufferably solemn ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... noiselessly, bringing the boat's nose this way and that with deft turns of the wrist. She was as harmonious against the background of brown water and green grass as a ...
— The Huntress • Hulbert Footner
... unpastoral-looking fields of an industrial neighbourhood. The town-village which stretched up the hillside before him presented scarcely a single redeeming feature. The small, grey stone houses, hard and unadorned, were interrupted at intervals by rows of brand-new, red-brick cottages. In the background were the tall chimneys of several factories; on the left, a colliery shaft raised its smoke-blackened finger to the ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... beginning to feel that he did not care much what was the outcome of the trial. Life was a good thing, it was true. And death, or a life of death, as a murderer, was worse than twenty common deaths. But that had all dropped into the background. Only one big thing stood before him. It laid hold upon him and shook him and took from him his interest in every other fact ...
— The Shepherd of the North • Richard Aumerle Maher
... guard drew back a heavy drape that hid an embrasure in the far wall. There, on a stubby pedestal, was revealed a gleaming sphere of crystal, a huge polished ball that shimmered a ghastly green against a background of jet. ...
— The Copper-Clad World • Harl Vincent
... advice on half the subjects on which she had been longing for it. However, short as his visit was, it was very useful as well as very pleasant, reviving old thoughts and habits of feeling which were in danger of falling into the background, and stimulating her to follow the example of a brother who was so stedfastly bent on ...
— Lucy Raymond - Or, The Children's Watchword • Agnes Maule Machar
... degree that startles the household. It is a charming morning of later September; the window is wide open, and the sick one looks out over a stretch of orchard (he knew its every tree), and upon wooded hills beyond (he knew every coppice and thicket), and upon a background of sky over which a few dappled white clouds ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... replied Walters. "Every man in that hangar has been carefully screened by our Security Section. Background, history, everything. No, I think ...
— Sabotage in Space • Carey Rockwell
... all out,—Brown and his wife, French and Irma, with Paulina in the background. They crowded around him with vociferous welcome, Brown leading in a series of wild cheers. After the cheering was done, ...
— The Foreigner • Ralph Connor
... center of a family group. It was her sharp voice that had first aroused the American's attention. Opposite her sat the Duke, his thin face wearing an expression of gloom and dissatisfaction. The child Tato occupied a stool at her father's feet, and in the background were three serving women, sewing or embroidering. Near the Duke stood the tall brigand known ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Abroad • Edith Van Dyne
... before, she noticed the silence and emptiness of the small bar, and the room beyond; and as she tapped loudly Mrs. Tennant came from another room. This time it was Sally who took charge of everything. Gaga drooped in the background, a feeble figure. But he gathered strength to smile at Mrs. Tennant and ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... the lesson of nature for a moment. In the springtime the farmer plants the kernels of corn shelled from ears like this. [Draw the ear of corn, making first a solid yellow background for the ear and then putting in the fine lines with brown or black.] He has every reason to believe that when the harvest time comes he will reap a crop of many hundredfold, because each kernel is expected to send up ...
— Crayon and Character: Truth Made Clear Through Eye and Ear - Or, Ten-Minute Talks with Colored Chalks • B.J. Griswold
... the more remarkable and the stronger as a witness of the truth, from the fact that it occurs in this perfectly incidental fashion, and without a word of explanation or apology, as taking for granted that there was a background of teaching in the Thessalonian Church which had prepared the way for it, and rendered it intelligible, as well as a background of conviction ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... supplementing that of Isidore and Bede and explaining sacred Scripture. Aristotle is treated like a Church father, but extreme care is taken not to go beyond the great maxim of St. Augustine; then, little by little, Bede and Isidore fall into the background, Aristotle fills the whole horizon, and his utterances are second in sacredness only to ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... reach the center easily. Any table with tight joints in the top and four- or five-inch boards fitted tightly around the edge will serve the purpose. The inside of the box should be painted to prevent warping and leaking. An "ocean blue" is a good color, as it makes a good background for islands. ...
— Primary Handwork • Ella Victoria Dobbs
... conquer and expand on the south of the Humber, as the Englishmen of Deira and Bernicia remained free to the north of that river. It was plain, therefore, that from this moment the growth of these powers would throw their fellow kingdoms into the background, and that with an ever-growing inequality of strength must come a new arrangement of political forces. The greater kingdoms would in the end be drawn to subject and absorb the lesser ones, and to the war between Englishman and ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... a "golden age" myth; faint traditions of a period when things were better; which seems to coincide with this background of matriarchal rule. The farther back we go in our civilization the more traces we find of woman's power and freedom, with goddesses, ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... by Saint Marx and many flags, quickly filled with an incongruous mass of four hundred delegates, and the gallery were soon yelling. Bebel, who kept in the background and pulled the strings, proposed a limiting amendment about "political action" which the Anarchists maintained includes revolutionary force. This was the signal for the fight. Landauer, a German, young, long, ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... in jerks, between puffs, of his adventures; his first shot at a tiger, some trouble with hillmen at Peshawur, a row at a mess-table, in which two chaps lost their heads, and one his papers. He had been present as a guest, but had kept well in the background. There had been a lot of drinking done—luckily he was all right. He had a good head, you see; could carry a lot ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... or Sydney. However, I soon modified my somewhat hasty judgment. We had seen the town's worst aspects, and later I noticed some attractive-looking shops; the imposing Houses of Parliament, in their enclosed grounds, standing out sharply defined against the hazy background of Table Mountain; and the Standard Bank and Railway-station, which would hold their own in any city. At the same time, as a place of residence in the summer months, I can well understand Cape Town being wellnigh deserted. Those who can boast of even the most moderate ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... by means of the men. Of course, there will be from the outset a small proportion capable of rightly using the place. For all these reasons, it seems as if we may be very well contented that the recreation part of the scheme has been for the moment kept in the background. ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... crucifix on Calvary's height Has cast its shadow on the human heart. Let now Religion's great co-worker Art, Limn on the background of departing night, The shining Face all palpitant with light, And God's true message to the world impart. Go tell each toiler in the home and mart, 'Lo, Christ is with ye, if ye seek aright.' The world forgets the vital ...
— Poems of Experience • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... Gotha, which can only come to pass in the course of the next months; besides this, he has such gigantic plans for his new establishment in Gotha that the affairs of the Neue Zeitschrift might be left somewhat in the background. I entirely agree with you on this point, that you cannot put the Neue Zeitschrift in the market and offer it to just any publisher who has shown himself up to now hostile to our tendencies. To do such a thing as that could ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... marriage pomps on the reception of Marie Antoinette in Paris; the numbers who perished are still spoken of obscurely as to the amount, and with shuddering awe for the unparalleled horrors standing in the background of ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... themselves about the actress-teacher, who clasped her arms about the shoulders of as many as she could reach. It made a pretty scene in front of the old school-house, with the green trees for a background. The use of the school had been allowed the moving picture company for ...
— The Bobbsey Twins at Meadow Brook • Laura Lee Hope
... small rectangles like wooden blocks. The rooms still boasted the old-time splendor of vaulted ceilings, some dark, with skilfully fitted paneling, others with a faded and venerable gilding forming a background for the colored escutcheons which were emblazoned with the coat of arms of the house. In some rooms the high walls, simply whitewashed, were covered by rows of ancient paintings, and in others were concealed by rich hangings of gay colors which time ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... fog lifted and before us lay the blessed land. A high range of sparsely wooded hills, crowned with rocky ledges, and with abrupt slopes covered with dry brown grass, running to the water's edge, formed the background of the picture. Nearer, a tongue of high land, brushy and rocky, made out from the main shore, and curving southward, formed a shelter to what seemed a harbor within. Against the precipitous point ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... "but I do not look my years, though my hair, still thick and full of vigour, is prematurely white—so often the case with men whose brains are continually on the stretch. The little home, far from grandiose, which forms the background to this most interesting personality is embowered in trees. Cats have made their mark on its lawns, and its owner's love of animals was sharply illustrated by the sheep-dog which lay on his feet clad in Turkish ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... him, but I knew, from what he told me of the doctor's remarks, that he had no earthly chance of being passed. He seemed to have entirely mastered his regret at his inability to serve his country in the ranks, but I understood at once that he was merely putting his own troubles in the background in face of my own. The meal over, we "got behind" two of Dennis's excellent ...
— The Mystery of the Green Ray • William Le Queux
... now always in the background. He took her for quiet meals and brought her home early. He promised her that sometime he would see that she got ...
— Love Stories • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... caught a glimpse of a tiny blaze afar over to the east, and instantly passed the word. Only half an hour it was observed, and then, away toward the south-east, an answering gleam burned for a moment against the black background of the Sierras. Then both went out as ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King
... plum- black statue—taking no interest in the transactions of these incomprehensible whites, but dreaming with calm eyes of a certain bush village high on the jungle slopes of Malaita, with blue smoke curling up from the grass houses against the gray background of an ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... that part of the defences nearest the woods, when they saw the ten natives approaching holding up their empty hands and making other demonstrations of a peaceful nature. Far away on the heights in the background the whole army of savages could be seen watching the ...
— The Norsemen in the West • R.M. Ballantyne
... them—he couldn't remember who the dickens it was—told him about this? He had supposed she was just the ordinary American woman doing Europe with an affectionate dollar-dispensing husband in the background somewhere. ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... party, and the Llewellens, would cross each others' paths in the woods, or pastures; but little Margaret always shrank into the background. If Nan tried to surprise her, the half wild little thing would slip away into the deeper woods like ...
— Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp - or, The Old Lumberman's Secret • Annie Roe Carr
... they were sad, long days. Troubles which she had previously managed to keep in the background now again beset her. She had attached herself to her grandfather; gratitude for all that he was doing at her wish strengthened her affection, and she awaited each new day with fear. Waymark seemed colder to her in these days ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... her and walked in silence back to the shore. In the shadows of the point he stopped to look back at her, standing out like some inspired prophetess against the fiery background of the sunset sky and silver-blue water. The sky overhead was thick-sown with stars; the night breeze was blowing up from its lair in distant, echoing sea caves. On his right the lights of the Cove ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... the gravel outside, speedily followed by a peal on the bell; and Mr. Cottrell emerged from the dining-room just in time to see Jim open the hall door to Laura Chipchase, attired in hat and habit, with Miss Sylla mounted and holding her cousin's horse in the background. ...
— Belles and Ringers • Hawley Smart
... much room for doubting or regret. Several important concerts were fixed for May. She looked forward to these with intense eagerness, and pushed everything that interfered with preparation into the background. As though to make up for that instinctive recoil from giving her heart, of which she was always subconscious, she gave him all her activities, without calculation or reserve. She was ready to play for him all day and every ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... This was the first occasion upon which they could re-appear in the arena of National politics. It had been suggested to them from friendly sources that while the memory of their part in the bloody strife was still so fresh it would be prudent for them to remain in the background, but they vigorously resented this proposed exclusion. General Forrest of Tennessee published an indignant letter, in which he referred to "the counsel of timid men" that those who had prominently borne the flag of rebellion should abstain from any share in political ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... always Leam in the background with whom he had to reckon—Leam, who wandered through the house in her straight-cut, plain black gown, made in the deepest fashion of mourning devisable, pale, silent, feverish, like an avenging spirit on his track; undoing what he had done if he had profaned an ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... face, lit by a half cordial, half mocking smile; the same fragile body and indomitable spirit. The illusion is enhanced by our surroundings, for the mellow splendor of the room where we stand might have served as a background ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... Turn into trees." Then back she fell, dead. And as she fell, the tribes that were standing round the edge of the ring, preparatory to gathering their goods and going, and that her hand pointed to as it waved round, turned into trees. There they now stand. The tribes in the background were changed each according to the name they were known by, into that bird or beast of the same name. The barking Mahthi into dogs; the Byahmul into black swans: the Wahns into crows, and so on. And there at the place of the big borah, ...
— Australian Legendary Tales - Folklore of the Noongahburrahs as told to the Piccaninnies • K. Langloh Parker
... to forbid monotony, and sufficiently intellectual to be stimulating, and there was always the background of Big Business. Larry was conscious that he was moving amid large ideas and far-reaching interests, and that though he himself was a small element, he was playing a part not altogether insignificant, with a promise of bigger things in the ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... instances in which women have been called to places of power and responsibility in the State are comparatively rare, is not to be attributed to natural incapacity or mental inferiority, but to the fact of the persistent efforts made by men to keep them as much as possible in the background; that in many instances women have broken the fetters of oppression and prejudice by which they were bound, and have ascended the hill of fame in advance of their male opponents. If, then, women have in ...
— Woman: Man's Equal • Thomas Webster
... know where she is," cries a little, shrill voice from the background. It comes from Tommy, and from that part of the room where Tommy and Mabel and little Bertie are having a game behind the window curtains. Blocks, dolls, kitchens, farm yards, ninepins—all have been given to them as a means of keeping them quiet. One thing ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... The background to our portrait is a forest, lofty, shaggy, and dense, and the home of a thousand wild things, which, being invisible at this moment, could not, with due regard to fidelity, be introduced into our picture. The foreground is a cultivated clearing of about one hundred ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady
... it had been designed as a setting for Natalie, although every color-scheme, almost every chair, had been bought with a view to forming a background for her, it was too big, too massive. It dwarfed her. Out-of-doors, Audrey lost that feeling. In the formal garden Natalie was charmingly framed. It was like her, beautifully exact, carefully planned, already with its spring borders ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... mind of the average citizen with the idea of Pyramids and flesh pots. For the first, symbolic pictures were largely to blame. There never was a design representing "Britain's far flung battle line," which did not show a comfortable man in a sun helmet with a Pyramid in the background. Pyramids are so easy to draw. The artists were beaten by the flesh pot—because they had no very clear conception of what a flesh pot looks like. But the old Biblical phrase rose irresistibly to the ...
— The Fifth Battalion Highland Light Infantry in the War 1914-1918 • F.L. Morrison
... itself from an internal cloud. She frowned—a deep wrinkle appeared on her forehead, the corners of her mouth drooped somewhat, and her face, with that brilliant star in the aureole of bright hair above, had an expression of pain when seen on the drapery of the box as a background. ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... little stream near Arnay-le-Duc, and beheld, on the other side, two or three thousand of the royalist cavalry. There were no guns in sight, and the infantry had been drawn up at some distance in the background. ...
— For The Admiral • W.J. Marx
... mean that it shall always go. If a story always had the rapidity and intensity of a climax, it would be intolerable. Music that is all rushing climaxes is unbearable; a picture must not be a glare of high lights. The quiet passages in music, the grays and low tones in the background of the picture, the slow chapters in a story, are as necessary as their opposites; indeed, climaxes are dependent on contrasts in order ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... and trees among which he toiled. Something of their dignity, too, though your town dweller might fail to see it beneath the drab exterior. He had about him none of the highlights and sharp points of the city man. He seemed to blend in with the background of nature so as to be almost undistinguishable from it, as were the furred and feathered creatures. This farmer differed from the city man as a hillock differs from an artificial golf bunker, though form and substance ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... and masses of them, in clumps on the grass, with other shrubs and trees by the side of walks, and one great continuous bank of them half a mile long right past the west front of the house, away down as far as one could see, shining glorious against a background of firs. When that time came, and when, before it was over, the acacias all blossomed too, and four great clumps of pale, silvery-pink peonies flowered under the south windows, I felt so absolutely happy, and blest, and thankful, and grateful, that I really cannot describe it. ...
— Elizabeth and her German Garden • "Elizabeth", AKA Marie Annette Beauchamp
... six persons. It was just growing dusk, but the dancing firelight gave a pleasant illumination. Harmer and Mason were seated on opposite sides of the hearth in straight-backed wooden armchairs, and both were smoking. Rachel sat at her wheel, with her sister Dinah near to her; and in the background hovered two fine-looking young men, the two eldest sons of the household—Reuben, his father's right-hand man in business matters now; and Dan, who had the air and appearance of a sailor ashore, as, indeed, was the ...
— The Sign Of The Red Cross • Evelyn Everett-Green
... and face, whereon was stamped a most fiendish and terrifying expression. There was no doubt about it; there were the thick lips, the fat cheeks, and the squat nose standing out with startling clearness against the flaming background. There, too, was the round skull, washed into shape perhaps by thousands of years of wind and weather, and, to complete the resemblance, there was a scrubby growth of weeds or lichen upon it, which against the ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... the fox, who had not hitherto spoken, and kept rather in the background, modestly bent his head, and looked ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies
... sky, glowing with tints of the clearest, palest amber melting into a delicate rose, which merged in its turn imperceptibly into a clear, deep, transparent blue as the eye glanced from the horizon toward the zenith, was without a trace of cloud, and against this pure and exquisitely tinted background the outlines of Hurst Castle stood sharply out, the castle itself and the low spit of land on which it is built appearing of a deep, rich, powerful, purple hue, as though carved out of a giant amethyst, while the country further inland ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... in stately fashion. Beneath an old willow, whose drooping boughs form quite a vault of pale verdure, a squadron of multicolored boats remain fastened to the balustrade of a landing stage. Through an opening in the trees you see in the distance fields of yellow corn, and in the near background, behind a row of poplars, ever moving like a flash of silver lightning, the Oise flows on between ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... sky-blue Montague in the foreground, with a dissolving view of impossibly-constructed servitors of both houses and the County Paris, with six strongly accented bridges to his nose and a worsted tear upon his cheek, in the background. Under this production was worked in white, upon a black ground, the legend which Mrs. Rusker mournfully repeated as she ...
— Julia And Her Romeo: A Chronicle Of Castle Barfield - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... France, widowed of Henry and waiting for Richelieu, lay in the clutches of Concini's, Epernons, and Bouillons, bound hand and foot to Spain. Germany, falling from Rudolph to Matthias, saw Styrian Ferdinand in the background ready to shatter the fabric of a hundred years of attempted Reformation. In the Republic of the Netherlands were the great soldier and the only remaining statesman of the age. At a moment when the breathing space had been agreed upon before the conflict ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... mistake in our houses is, that they are designed, as inexperienced persons choose their paper-hangings, to be something of themselves, and not as mere background, as they should be. Thus it is that people seek to beautify their houses by ornamenting them, as a vulgar person sticks himself over with jewelry. A man's house is only a wider kind of dress; and as we do not call a man well-dressed when we are forced ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... there are stories of gallantry, of sea rescues, of moving incidents wherein there is nothing but good to tell of the human animal. Would that it were all so. But it is not. The ruthlessness of the German rears itself like a sordid shadow against the background of Anglo-Saxon and Latin gallantry and heroism—a diminishing shadow, thank God, and thank, also, the navy of Great Britain ...
— Our Navy in the War • Lawrence Perry
... morning, Mrs K," said my friend, as we entered the stifling house; "how are you geting on?" The mother stood in the middle of the floor, wiping her sore eyes, and then folding her hands in a tattered apron; whilst her daughters gazed upon us vacantly from the background. "Oh, then," replied the woman, "things is worse wid us entirely, sir, than whenever ye wor here before. I dunno what will we do whin the winter comes." In reply to me, she said, "We are seven altogether, wid my husband an' myself. I have ...
— Home-Life of the Lancashire Factory Folk during the Cotton Famine • Edwin Waugh
... ever had a background of ten thousand million stars, peering up from below them as well as from overhead. Nor did any ever have a mottled greenish planet rolling by 4,000 miles beneath them, nor a blazing sun glaring down at them from ...
— Space Tug • Murray Leinster
... for the first time publicly displayed. Like many valuable articles, its appearance, marred by bad cutting, did not quite correspond with the large estimate of its worth, about two millions. In order to increase its effect, the precious clumsily-cut "goose's egg," relieved against a background of crimson velvet in its strong cage, was shown by gas-light alone. Since those days, the jewel has been cut, so that its radiance may have full play when it is worn by her Majesty on great occasions. To keep the Koh-i-Noor in company, ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, (Victoria) Vol II • Sarah Tytler
... an old willow by little Jacques; then the old faces of her grandfather and grandmother, the sufferings of her mother, and the handsome face of Major Brigaut,—in short, the whole of her careless childhood. It was all a dream, a luminous joy on the gloomy background of the present. ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... history transpires in the healthy atmosphere of the open air, on the green earth beneath the open sky.... The figures of Right, Truth, Justice, Honor, Purity, Courage, Reverence for Law, are always in the background; and the grand passion inspired by the book is for strength to do well and ...
— The Bee-Man of Orn and Other Fanciful Tales • Frank R. Stockton
... their brightness being repeated on the white smock-frocks of some of the labourers, and in a mellower, ruddier form on their faces and hands, on those of the grinning gargoyles, and on other salient stonework of the weather-beaten church in the background. ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... Confessor, and at some farther distance her faithful nurse, was seated at this silvan banquet, the leaves rustling to a gentle breeze, the water bubbling in the background, the birds twittering around, while the half-heard sounds of conversation and laughter at a distance announced that their guard was in the vicinity, she could not avoid making the Constable some natural compliment on his happy selection of a place ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... background and dropped beside the still figure of Lomax. He opened the man's left hand and pulled out a bunch of keys, examining them. "Engine keys, Captain Muller. Hey—it's my set! He must have lifted them from my pocket. It looks as if Grundy's ...
— Let'em Breathe Space • Lester del Rey
... coat of arms, Arba; I won the decoration when I retired from hard work at the age of fifty. That was about the time you were starting in life by selling fake mining stock around this State. My coat of arms is two patches on a homespun background, surrounded by looped galluses. And I can show you the mile of stone walls I ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day
... me in a dainty Louis Quinze room done in rose and French gray, and filled incongruously with delicate chairs and heavy brocaded curtains, a background which instantly you felt precisely suited his Excellency. In the English newspapers, which, by the way, are not barred from Berlin cafes, I had read of his Excellency as the "Iron Fist," or the "Heavy Heel," and I rather expected ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... respectively contained in a tin pint-measure and an earthenware jug, with two or three tumblers beside them, out of which nearly all the party drank; some coming up to the counter frankly, others lingering in the background, waiting to be pressed, two paying for their own liquor and withdrawing. B—— treated them twice round. The pilot, after drinking his brandy, gave a history of our fishing expedition, and how many and how large fish we caught. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... he ejaculated, and for a long minute the spoon was poised while his eyes fairly devoured the scene spread out before him against the background of Paradise Ridge. ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... unrolled. It was no good. Poor me! nobody quite understood. Some thought possibly that I was a glib liar; others did not even trouble to think anything. How much they understood! They had not the background, the atmosphere, the long weeks which were necessary to teach even us ourselves. They had not tasted the poison and did not yet suspect its existence. So I gradually desisted. Now I say nothing, never a word. I listen and understand how history is made. It ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... new threat from an advancing Soviet Union, against the background of regional instability of which it can take advantage, requires that we reinforce our ability to defend our regional friends and to protect the flow of oil. We are continuing to build on the strong political, economic, ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Jimmy Carter • Jimmy Carter
... further offer of help; and when the moment came he quietly took his place beside her in the carriage. His last impression, as the horses wheeled round, was of the open hall door—Crapham in his sombre livery and the maid in her black dress, both silhouetted against the dark background of the hall; then, as the carriage moved forward smoothly and rapidly, he leaned back in his seat ...
— The Masquerader • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... villagers to meet Where they enjoy communion sweet, With Him who answers ev'ry prayer That humble faith can utter there. There's music in those sabbath bells, This pleasing truth methinks they tell, That God is held in rev'rence there, And worshiped in His house of prayer. In the fair background now are seen Sweet hills and dales, all robed in green, With here and there a pleasant grove Where every class delights to rove; There, age sits down beneath the shade, Where he has oft in childhood strayed; There, ...
— The Snow-Drop • Sarah S. Mower
... related but apart from their appearance they have no other essence, no being or reality. The Tathata doctrine which was preached by As'vagho@sa oscillated between the position of this absolute non-essentialness of all dhammas and the Brahminic idea that something existed as the background of all these non-essential dhammas. This he called tathata, but he could not consistently say that any such permanent entity could exist. The Vijnanavada doctrine which also took its rise at this time appears to me to be a mixture of the S'unyavada doctrine and the Tathata doctrine; but ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... preparatory work on the ground of the huge new Air Trust plant, he deemed most essential. The Cosmos people, scenting a big contract, had fostered his belief, and now, already, the work was well under way. Subterranean methods were still sufficing; but, should these fail, others lay in the background. ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... secret, deprecating scorn. A girl has, indeed, eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil when her eyes are opened in such wise that she is ashamed of her plain, honorable, old-fashioned parents, or, if not ashamed, is still willing to let them retire to the background while she ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... into the young, whose purport is that children should seldom be seen and never heard, had early been accepted by Christian, without resentment, even, as she grew older, with gratitude. Having diffidently taken Larry's listless and pallid paw, she had slipped into the background, and waited silently, while her eager brain absorbed and stored every detail for future meditation. Long after Larry had lightly forgotten all save the large facts of his illness and incarceration, Christian could describe the Pope, whose highly-coloured ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... plain rolling away to the Sierras in the background. The railroad track traversed it in a thin line. There were no trees—only here and there a clump of cactus or chaparral, a tuft of dog-grass or a few patches of dogwood. At intervals in the distance one could see a hacienda standing in majestic solitude in a cup ...
— Further Foolishness • Stephen Leacock
... simply unhappy I should thank God," he went on without looking at his listener. "My personal unhappiness sinks into the background when I remember how often in my enthusiasms I have been absurd, far from the truth, unjust, cruel, dangerous! How often I have hated and despised those whom I ought to have loved, and vice versa, I have ...
— The Chorus Girl and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... goblins' territory. The first night or two he came upon nothing worth remembering; saw only a little of the home-life of the cobs in the various caves they called houses; failed in coming upon anything to cast light upon the foregoing design which kept the inundation for the present in the background. But at length, I think on the third or fourth night, he found, partly guided by the noise of their implements, a company of evidently the best sappers and miners amongst them, hard at work. What were they about? It could not well be the inundation, seeing that had in the meantime been postponed ...
— The Princess and the Goblin • George MacDonald
... restriction against the women taking part in the men's dances. They also act as assistants to the chief actors in the Totem Dances, three particularly expert and richly dressed women dancers ranging themselves behind the mask dancer as a pleasing background of streaming furs and glistening feathers. The only time they are forbidden to enter the kasgi is when the shaman is performing certain secret rites. They also have secret meetings of their own when all men ...
— The Dance Festivals of the Alaskan Eskimo • Ernest William Hawkes
... the men hate her too because she will not flatter them by accepting their ridiculous attentions. She will be much happier in her own home,—such a grand old castle it is!—a cluster of towers and broad battlements, with purple mountains in the background, and tall pine-trees everywhere ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... carriage-wheels, but as he opened the door he was quite dazzled at the scene before him. It was a brilliant moonlight night, and the terrace and wide lawn were bathed in the pure white light. A crisp frost had touched the grass and silvered each blade, and the effect against the dark background of trees ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... appropriate, but they'll do," whispered Roger to Dr. Watkins, whose clear tenor supported him. Dorothy's sweet voice soared high, Tom's croak made a heavy background, and the more or less tuneful voices of the others added a hearty body of sound. There was no response from the house except that a corner of an upstairs curtain was drawn ...
— Ethel Morton's Holidays • Mabell S. C. Smith
... Until proficiency is attained, two copies of the alphabet should be kept by each observer for reference, one for dispatching a message arranged in alphabetical order and the other far reading a message arranged as set out above. The white flag should be used when standing against a dark background, and the blue one when on the skyline ...
— The Sewerage of Sea Coast Towns • Henry C. Adams
... Rothes dainty, Mrs. Davenant dapper, and Sir Philip's curls were all blown about by the wind. Mrs. Byron rejoices that her Admiral and I agree so well; the way to his heart is connoisseurship it seems, and for a background and contorno, who comes up to ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... conquered, the white man John Every should be handed over to me, together with any goods which he might claim. His cruel captivity was, I need hardly say, the only reason that induced me to join in so hair-brained an expedition, but I was careful from motives of policy to keep this fact in the background. Nala accepted this condition. My third stipulation was that no women or children should be killed. This being also agreed to, we went on to consider ways and means. Wambe, it appeared, was a very powerful petty chief, ...
— Maiwa's Revenge - The War of the Little Hand • H. Rider Haggard
... grew more erect against the background of exterior darkness. Even the hand that rested on the woodwork of the window became tense. Lambent fire in her eyes—the light that he used to call non-Aryan—took the place of the fugitive glance of the woodland animal; but ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... to have a freak cousin or so knockin' round in the background, and I s'pose it was a star play of Mr. Robert's, givin' the glad hand to this one; but if I'd found Clifford hangin' on my fam'ly tree I'd have felt like ...
— Torchy • Sewell Ford
... before reaching Albury, and the country was very beautiful in the afternoon, when our friends drove us through the district. The Murray was in flood, and the "water, water everywhere" sparkling in the winter sunshine, with the snowcapped Australian Alps in the background, made an exquisite picture. Albury was the only town we visited in our travels which still retained the old custom of the town crier. Sitting in the room of the hotel after dinner, we were startled ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... avenue of cypresses in the Montparnasse Cemetery at Paris. The background shows mortuary chapels, stone crosses on which are inscribed "O Crux! Ave Spes Unica!" and the ruins of ...
— Plays by August Strindberg, Second series • August Strindberg
... sitting. When I came to collect them and publish them in a volume, I conceived my parson-editor, with his pedantry and verbosity, his amiable vanity and superiority to the verses he was editing, as a fitting artistic background and foil. He gave me the chance, too, of glancing obliquely at many things which were beyond the horizon of my ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... photography was unknown, and in addition there were certain crudities of construction that seriously interfered with the illumination of the pictures, rendering it necessary to make them practically as silhouettes on a very conspicuous background. Hence it will be obvious that these toys produced merely ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... Christian and Graeco-Roman symbolism in one work of modern art, is the most natural interpretation; but it would not be impossible to trace in it a metaphor of the resurgent Pagan spirit also—as though, leaving Jonah and his Biblical associations in the background, the artist had determined that from the mouth of the monstrous grave should issue not a bearded prophet, but the victorious youth who had captivated with his beauty and his heroism the sunset age of the classic world. At any rate, whatever ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... immaterial alarms, terrors and beauties scared by the sound of speech, memories and forgettings that the touch of memory itself crumbles into dust—this very texture of the life of the soul might have been a gray background over which tumultuous existence passed unheeding had not Edward Thomas so painfully sought the angle from which it appears, to the eye of eternity, as the enduring warp ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... Steward of the Household. In niches are shown the statues of Edward III. and John of Gaunt, the king's ancestors. In the foreground the clerk of the Company is exhibiting the roll with the names of the kings, &c., who were free of this Company. In the background are represented the banners of the Company and of the City of London. The Yeomen of the Guard, at the entrance of the palace, close the view. On the staircase are likewise pictures of the following Lord Mayors, ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... his deep affection for us, presents us this flag as the greatest and most expressive remembrance which he can give us. The red stripes stand for the generous blood of her sons, shed to obtain her liberty; the white stripes stand for her virginity and purity as our country; the blue background indicates the sky and each star represents a free and independent State; this is America, and the Consul is desirous that we also should have so glorious a history as hers and that it may be as brilliant as could be wished, securing peace with respect, and may God be our help ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... I." No. 53. "The Restoration of Monarchy and King Charles II." A number of cavaliers on horseback, with their conical hats and long tresses, occupy the foreground of this picture; the army appears in the background. This is the last, though ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 210, November 5, 1853 • Various
... turn gray in the sunlight, it suddenly occurred to him that, in some unaccountable manner, the question of the succession had receded somewhat into the background; it no longer seemed to him of such overwhelming consequence; at least, he had not been thinking of it a moment before, ...
— Affairs of State • Burton E. Stevenson
... air; but even as I urged him I knew that he could not, without losing his rich beauty of careless suggestion, and the persons and images that for ancestry have all those romantic ideas that are somewhere in the background of all our minds. He could not have made Slieve-na-Mon nor Slieve Fua incredible and phantastic enough, because that prolonged study of a past age, necessary before he could separate them from modern association, would have ...
— Selections from the Writings of Lord Dunsay • Lord Dunsany
... Sand Goby, or Spotted Goby, He is common enough in the pools at low tide, but not easy to find. You can look at him, yet not see him! For he takes the same colour as the rocks and sands of his home. Amid the glinting lights and shadows of his rock-pool, with a background of sand, rock, and weed, this little fish is nearly invisible. Of course it is a dodge, and a useful one, to escape the ...
— Within the Deep - Cassell's "Eyes And No Eyes" Series, Book VIII. • R. Cadwallader Smith
... late proprietress, a chair with a high, straight back, in which, even in her old age, she used always to sit bolt upright. On the wall hung an old portrait of Fedor's great-grandfather, Andrei Lavretsky. His dark, sallow countenance could scarcely be distinguished against the cracked and darkened background. His small, malicious eyes looked out morosely from beneath the heavy, apparently swollen eyelids. His black hair, worn without powder, rose up stiff as a brush above his heavy, wrinkled forehead. From the corner of the portrait hung a dusky wreath of immortelles. "Glafira Petrovna deigned to ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... simple, hexagonal room, with lofty, gold-entrellised window; its whole beauty consists in this, that the walls are inlaid with amethysts, from whose jacinth-hued background shine forth the more lustrous raised arabesques formed by topazes and dalmatines. Precious stones are the delight of the Padishah. Every inch of his garments is resplendent with diamonds, rubies, and pearls, his very fingers are hidden by the rings which sparkle upon them. ...
— Halil the Pedlar - A Tale of Old Stambul • Mr Jkai
... greatly in the interval, and perhaps she was not reluctant to carry on a flirtation with the young man—your client. Of course, she could not allow it to go further than the outside of the door of the Duke of Chiselhurst's town house, for you must remember there was her husband in the background—a violent man, as you have said; and Lord Donal must have thoroughly angered the Princess by what you term his rudeness in tearing off her glove; and now the Princess will never admit that she was at the ball, so it seems ...
— Jennie Baxter, Journalist • Robert Barr
... into the background of his mind as—juvenile, doing a juvenile share, no sort of man yet—Mr. Britling could give a free rein to his generous imaginations of a national uprising. From the idea of a universal participation in the struggle he passed by an easy transition to an anticipation ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... stillness. A swift zigzagged across the cattle trail he was following. Out of a blue sky the Arizona sun still beat down upon a land parched by aeons of drought, a land still making its brave show of greenness against a dun background. ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
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