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More "Chess" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... on, and found her still an inmate of Glenfern Castle. Destitute of very resource in herself, she yet turned with contempt from the scanty sources of occupation or amusement that were suggested by others; and Mrs. Douglas's attempts to teach her to play at chess and read Shakespeare were as unsuccessful as the endeavours of the good aunts to persuade her to study Fordyce's Sermons ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... of Italy! There should be extradition treaties all over the world to bring this arch-conspirator to justice. The door of his conscience had been knocked at by a thousand bleeding ghosts, and nothing had opened to them. What was Italy in his eyes? A chess-board; and Italians were the chessmen to this cold player with live flesh. England nourished the wretch, that she might undermine the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... that other man, if there be one!" Le Gardeur rose and walked angrily across the room two or three times. Angelique was playing a game of chess with Satan for her soul, and felt that ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... sheriffdoms under some of its members connected it closely with the local courts. As a financial body, its chief work lay in the assessment and collection of the revenue. In this capacity it took the name of the Court of Exchequer from the chequered table, much like a chess-board, at which it sat and on which accounts were rendered. In their financial capacity its justices became "barons of the Exchequer." Twice every year the sheriff of each county appeared before these barons and rendered the sum of the fixed rent from royal domains, the Danegeld ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... in, and for the first time since that fearful minute when she quitted him, the husband and wife were alone. Not quite so, for he had left the door wide open—purposely, she thought. There was a full vision of Mary playing chess with her father, and of Eulalie lounging on the sofa, gazing now and then with idle curiosity ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... Again, choose, in your head, the best volume of Labiche there is, and post it to Jules Simoneau, Monterey, Monterey Co., California: do this at once, as he is my restaurant man, a most pleasant old boy with whom I discuss the universe and play chess daily. He has been out of France for thirty-five years, and never heard of Labiche. I have eighty-three pages written of a story called A Vendetta in the West, and about sixty pages of the first draft of the Amateur Emigrant. They should each cover from 130 to 150 pages when ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Chess is a game which can only be played by two persons at the same time. The requisites are a board consisting of 64 squares of alternate black and white, and 32 pieces of wood, ivory, bone or other composition, which are technically known as "men." The board is so placed between the players ...
— Entertainments for Home, Church and School • Frederica Seeger
... reality. She lost not a word; she failed not to observe and regard every movement; she knew, without being seen to look, just what his play of feature and various expressions were; all the while she was calmly embroidering, or idly gazing out of the window, or skilfully playing chess with Mr. ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... could come with us, Mr Knowles. We shall miss you very much. Father, when he looked at his chess-board yesterday, heaved such a tremendous sigh, and I knew that he was thinking of you, and wondering if he will ever find any such ...
— Tom Gerrard - 1904 • Louis Becke
... then quitting her for another, attacking them all, but attaching themselves to none. My thoughts,—these are the wantons for me. If the weather be too cold or too wet, I take shelter in the Regency coffee-house. There I amuse myself by looking on while they play chess. Nowhere in the world do they play chess so skilfully as in Paris, and nowhere in Paris as they do at this coffee-house; 'tis here you see Legal the profound, Philidor the subtle, Mayot the solid; here you see the most astounding moves, and listen to the sorriest talk, for if a man may be at once ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... beginning in Doctor Keene's making himself specially entertaining in an old-family-history way, with a view to keeping his patient within doors for a safe period. He had conceived a great liking for Frowenfeld, and often, of an afternoon, would drift in to challenge him to a game of chess—a game, by the way, for which neither of them cared a farthing. The immigrant had learned its moves to gratify his father, and the doctor—the truth is, the doctor had never quite learned them; but ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... is characteristic of European and Asiatic relations today. For the peace-loving Nations, and there are many of them, find that their very identity depends on their moving and moving again on the chess board ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... eyes at me. "You must write and tell me everything behind the creature's back." I confess I found her rather disquieting company. The evening drew on. Lamps were brought by a man with a nondescript face and very quiet footsteps. Seaton was told to bring out the chess-men. And we played a game, she and I, with her big chin thrust over the board at every move as she gloated over the pieces and occasionally croaked "Check!" after which she would sit back inscrutably staring ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... Newcome's alternate Thursdays in Bryanstone Square, pinched her daughter Mira, engaged in a polyglot conversation with Herr Schnurr, nor Carabossi, the guitarist, and Monsieur Pivier, the celebrated French chess-player, to point out the Boyar. Mira Miles wished she knew a little Moldavian, not so much that she might speak it, but that she might be heard to speak it. Mrs. Miles, who had not had the educational ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... comfort. Memory holds a picture, more vivid than most, of a small boy reading the "Midsummer Night's Dream" by firelight, in a room where candles were lit, and some one touched the piano, and a young man and a girl were playing chess. The Shakespeare was a volume of Kenny Meadows' edition; there are fairies in it, and the fairies seemed to come out of Shakespeare's dream into the music and the firelight. At that moment I think that I was happy; ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... SPECIAL TIMES FOR YOUR RECREATIVE STUDY.—Cultivate some hobby as a relief from your concentrated study of books. Music, some games of cards, chess, billiards, or other relaxations, are admirable means of recuperation. When you indulge in recreation or recreative reading, do not let the mind worry about problems of your previous studies. Make your recreative reading in itself have some aim. Do not allow ...
— How to Study • George Fillmore Swain
... the evening meal, of tea, next partaken of. If it was school night, the voluntary pupils went to their tasks, the masters to their posts; reading men producing their books, writing men their desks, artists painted by candle-light, and cards, chess, or draughts, combined with conversation, and an evening's glass of grog, and a cigar or pipe, served to ...
— Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal; • Sherard Osborn
... through a fiery ordeal and I hope you preserved a kindly memory of one who suffered tremendously for you. Major Von Sendlingen was not an undetached person whose quarrel could be kept among private ones. On the contrary, he moved the authorities like a chess-player does the pieces, and he moved them against me. At the first, they talked of nothing less than trying me for treason, since the projected arrest of the Polish conspirator and yourself—kinswoman of the Dobronowska inscribed in the black ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... passed without any explanation being sent, or any secret message bidding me be patient. She used to come down to the drawing-room for an hour in the morning; in the evening she was present at dinner, and then would play piquet or chess with her father. During all this time she was so well watched that I could not exchange a glance with her. For the rest of the day she remained in her own room—inaccessible. Noticing that I was chafing at the species of captivity ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... academy? or a State theatre? Should gambling be legal? Should potatoes be boiled in their skins? should dynamiters? Should newspapers publish racing tips? or divorce cases? or comment? The New Journalism. What is the best ninth move in the Evans gambit? Would Morphy have been a first-class chess-player to-day? Is the Steinitz gambit sound? Do plants dream? Ought we to fill up income-tax papers accurately? Shelley and Harriet and Mary. Swift and Vanessa and Stella. Lord and Lady Byron. Did Mrs. Carlyle deserve it? The limits of biography; of photography in painting; of the ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... late when we returned to the khan, we found everybody still up. The room in which we were to sleep (there was only one room) was filled with a crowd of loiterers, and tobacco smoke. Some were playing games similar to our chess and backgammon, while others were looking on, and smoking the gurgling narghile, or water-pipe. The bicycles had been put away under lock and key, and the crowd gradually dispersed. We lay down in our clothes, and ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... asked himself, for a man to have two natures, quite distinct in tastes? He worried himself almost to distraction over the question; but as there was no one to answer it, he drove it from his mind by spending the evening at the Hamiltons' teaching Jessie to play chess. ...
— Duncan Polite - The Watchman of Glenoro • Marian Keith
... unable to endure contact with the outer world, or even that of the loving home circle which environed him with anxious tenderness. He could not read or write: a favorite piece of music from his young sister's piano, a game of chess with his mother in the evening, were his only recreations—his only excitement the letters which still came from Venice, for which he looked with a sick longing, at which one cannot wonder on reading them and remembering what a companionship it was that he had lost. Urged by his brother ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... easy to play a game at chess with a far superior player, then at least one learns something; but impossible to sit at a chess board with a child who throws all into confusion. The national chessboard is very confused in the White ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... Prospero forgave them; and, upon their engaging to restore his dukedom, he said to the king of Naples, "I have a gift in store for you too;" and opening a door, shewed him his son Ferdinand, playing at chess with Miranda. ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... together with chess, were greatly in vogue in mediaeval Wales, and are frequently alluded to in the Mabinogion and other early works. The four minor games or feats (gogampau) among the Welsh were playing the harp, chess, backgammon, and dice. The ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne
... mind as she reached the landing; but the next moment it gave way to a contradictory feeling. Westy Gaines was not alone in the hall. From under the stairway rose the voices of a group ensconced in that popular retreat about a chess-board; and as Justine reached the last turn of the stairs she perceived that Mason Winch, an earnest youth with advanced views on political economy, was engaged, to the diversion of a circle of spectators, in teaching the Telfer girls chess. The futility of trying to fix the spasmodic attention ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... father. To Opdyke's certain knowledge, the good professor curtailed by hours and hours and hours his more congenial occupations for the sake of helping his son to work out the chess problems in which they both were taking a perfunctory delight. Reed did unfeignedly enjoy his father's company; but that was no reason he should reduce him to a captivity akin to his own. How long had it lasted, anyhow? May, June—nine ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... among them, though the motion had been pretty lively during the passage across the Bay of Biscay; and by this time they had thoroughly settled down and become almost as perfectly at home in the ship as though they had been born on salt water. The gentlemen chatted, smoked, walked the poop, and played chess together, romped with the children, or read aloud to the ladies whilst they reclined in their deck-chairs and pretended to work, and otherwise made themselves generally useful. This was the usual disposition ...
— The Missing Merchantman • Harry Collingwood
... game of elegance and interest, and the being a good chess-player, carries with it a certain impression of general ability and of intellectual activity and resource. Perhaps I may allow that playing at chess adds a certain degree of interest to the perusal of the history of a campaign, whether ancient or modern, with ...
— Advice to a Young Man upon First Going to Oxford - In Ten Letters, From an Uncle to His Nephew • Edward Berens
... he entered as office-boy into the employment of Briggs & Livingstone—the firm at the time of which I am now writing was Lynde, Livingstone & Co. Mr. David Lynde lived in a set of chambers up town, and dined at his club, where he usually passed the evenings at chess with some brother antediluvian. A visit to the theatre, when some old English comedy or some new English ballet happened to be on the boards, was the periphery of his dissipation. What is called society saw nothing of him. He was a rough, breezy, thickset old gentleman, betrothed from his birth ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... the haunt in question. A flight of stairs brought them to a small room in which were exposed the daily newspapers; another ascent, and they were in a room devoted to magazines, chess, and refreshments; yet another, and they reached the department of weekly publications; lastly, at the top of the house, they found a lavatory, and a chamber for the use of those who desired to write. The walls of this last retreat were of blue plaster and sloped inwards from ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... gaming, and naturally leads to gaming for something. It is sacrificing time, and that, too, for the worst of purposes. I have kept house for nearly forty years; I have reared a family; I have entertained as many friends as most people; and I have never had cards, dice, a chess-board, nor any implement of gaming, under my roof. The hours that young men spend in this way are hours murdered; precious hours, that ought to be spent either in reading or in writing, or in rest, preparatory to the duties of the dawn. Though I ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... hence the amazement and blank wonder of the public at some of the finest passages of Turner, which look like a mere meaningless and disorderly work of chance; but, rightly understood, are preparations for a given result, like the most subtle moves of a game of chess, of which no bystander can for a long time see the intention, but which are, in dim, underhand, wonderful way, bringing out their foreseen and ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... like this," he said, "to have sat there for two or three mortal hours arguing about stale ideas! Threshing over the straw—almost as silly an occupation as chess—when we might have been out here, being alive! But it must have seemed natural to you to hear me going on like that." And then with a burst, before she ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... smoking and gossiping, we also played games, either chess or backgammon or munkula. This last is an exceedingly primitive and ancient game—it must date almost as far back as jackstones or knucklebones. I have seen the natives in Central Africa and the Indians ...
— War in the Garden of Eden • Kermit Roosevelt
... standing on the same squares of the chess-board where we left them, we say they are all in the SAME place, or unmoved, though perhaps the chessboard hath been in the mean time carried out of one room into another; because we compared them only to the parts of the chess-board, ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books I. and II. (of 4) • John Locke
... are far more amusable, far more jovial and open-hearted. They have their coffee-houses every night, and their religious festivities periodically; they play at all sorts of complicated games, resembling draughts and chess, and find means ingeniously to vary their sports. If they compromise their dignity, they succeed in whiling away their leisure time far more successfully than the pride-stuffed Levantine. One of their amusements—called the game of plaff—is worth mentioning, ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various
... an appetite. But since to overcome is pleasant, it must follow, of course, that amusements where there is field for rivalry, as those of music and disputations, are pleasant; for it frequently occurs, in the course of these, that we overcome; also chess, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various
... our Redeemer holding the world in his hand, and on the other the figure of a serpent marvellously contorted, per-adventure in token of the victory which Jesus atchieved over the enemy of the human race. That noble chess-board, the men whereof were of gold and silver, was also in the Monastery in the days of King Don Alfonso the Wise, but it hath long since been lost, no man knoweth how. Moreover there is in this Sacristy a precious stone of great size, ...
— Chronicle Of The Cid • Various
... shop, turned on all the lights, put the basket of ruddy apples on the counter, straightened the pile of old magazines and pulled out the carom board, the box of chess and checkers. He took a last housewifely look around, then put on his hat and coat and started out. There was pain and anger and a terrible determination in ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... Olivia had a move to make. In fact, that she wanted to set us all to making moves. She proposed a chess-club, for the winter, to bring us together regularly; to include half a dozen families, and meet by turn at the ...
— We Girls: A Home Story • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... seasonings. A woman that haggles over herself, my poor boy, and only means to inspire love! Well, have her like an extra horse—for show. The match between the sofa and confessional, black and white, queen and knight, conscientious scruples and pleasure, is an uncommonly amusing game of chess. And if a man knows the game, let him be never so little of a rake, he wins in three moves. Now, if I undertook a woman of that sort, I should start with the deliberate purpose of——" His voice sank to a whisper over the last words in Armand's ear, and he went before ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... the desk to an old chess table and, sitting down, began to move the pieces this way and that. "The nineteenth of February—the nineteenth of February." He saw again a firelit room, and heard the tapping of maple boughs against a window. ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... American loans, dexterously appealing to the much-overworked Monroe Doctrine every time his country was threatened by a French or German or British blockade. But his mind was of no small caliber. He could hold his own not only at his own game of international chess, but in the cultured discussion of polite topics. Orme knew of him as a clever after-dinner speaker, a man who could, when he so desired, please greatly ...
— The Girl and The Bill - An American Story of Mystery, Romance and Adventure • Bannister Merwin
... own. He feels no more hate than love. For him there is no one but himself: all other creatures are mere ciphers. The force of his will consists in the imperturbable calculations of his egotism: he is an able chess-player whose opponent is all humankind, whom he intends to checkmate. His success is due as much to the qualities he lacks as to the talents he possesses. Neither pity, nor sympathy, nor religion, nor attachment to any idea whatsoever would have power to turn him from his path. He has ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... me at chess," laughed the young man, "and will bet me a jar of peach wine to a box of ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... turquoise. Again, in "The Deerslayer" three castles of a curious set of chessmen are given in one part of the story to the Indians. Later on, two other castles of the same set make their appearance. This is a singular mistake for Cooper to overlook, for chess was a game of ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... to play a kind of chess, which appeared to me to be essentially different from that game as played by the Persians, the Indians, and other oriental nations, both with regard to the lines drawn on the board, the form of the chess-men, and the moves, from which I should rather conclude it to be ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... driven from the field but by a deluge from a fire-engine; when stumbling down-stairs, guided by the banisters, she finally dismayed her father, who thought her long ago in safety, by emerging from the house, dragging after her a marble-topped chess table, when half the upper windows ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... verses with a paper cutter. In front of him stand, facing each other, KEGEL and KAeFERSTEIN on one side, SPITTA on the other, thus representing the two choruses in Schiller's "Bride of Messina." The young men stand in the midst of a diagram drawn with chalk on the floor and separated, like a chess-board, into sixty-four rectangles. On the high stool in front of the office desk WALBURGA is sitting. Waiting in the background stands the house steward QUAQUARO, who might be the manager of a wandering circus and, in the capacity of athlete, its main attraction. His speech is ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume II • Gerhart Hauptmann
... chaffed him on his flukes. He had not the temperament of a billiard-player. Still, I have heard that he played a fair game at St. Stephen's; but I can hardly believe it without first-hand testimony. I am willing to believe, however, that he was a good chess-player. Certainly he had a head for it But chess is a vile game for a brain-worker, whose recreations should never ...
— Reminiscences of Charles Bradlaugh • George W. Foote
... Serapis stood and toiled in mechanical magic of discipline. They tended those rows of guns, as Lowell girls the rows of looms in a cotton factory. The Parcae were not more methodical; Atropos not more fatal; the automaton chess-player ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... of which was hidden under his jacket, while the barrel, pointed towards the ground, glittered in the moonlight. Pressing the weapon to his side, he attentively examined the square shadows cast by the piles of timber. The ground looked like a chess-board, with black and white squares clearly defined by alternate patches of light and shade. The sawyers' tressels in the centre of the plot threw long, narrow fantastic shadows, suggesting some huge geometrical figure, upon a strip of bare grey ground. The rest of the yard, ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... had chess for those who played it, whist, cribbage, books, backgammon, and shovelboard. In all weathers, fair or foul, calm or windy, we were every one on deck, walking up and down in pairs, lying in the boats, leaning over the side, or chatting in a lazy group together. We had no lack of music, ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... when feebleness has become so feeble as even to invent a theory, making thinness of voice, weakness of stamina, and general emasculation literary virtues; when intellect can find adequate interest only in the chess-puzzles of a Browning, and the sense of humor can find adequate sustenance only in the table-leaping antics of a Mark Twain, and the conscience can be goaded into remorse only by the sight of actual starvation, it is well to turn to these Russians and ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... been persons who could attend to half a dozen different conversations going on together, and take a rational part in them all, and indulge, all the time, in a distinct consecutive train of thought beside. I dare say, Mr. Morphy, the chess-player, would find no difficulty in it. But Devereux was not by any means competent to the feat, though there was one conversation, perhaps, the thread of which he would gladly have caught up and disentangled. So the talk at top and ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... to silence, chess, books, and mischief, except when a treat of facetious small talk was got up for their benefit. Any attempt of the ladies to join in the conversation was replied to with a condescending levity that reduced Ethel to her girlhood's awkward sense of forwardness and presumption; Mary was ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... ethnographical chess-board have been for centuries rather tribal than national, and are still rather philosophical than political, rather idealistic than practical, rather dreamy than adventurous. To organize this population for self-support and self-defence, to ignore differences, racial and religious, ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... comrades slept Sheridan was moving the men on his chess board. Young in years, but great in experience, he was never more eager and never more clear of mind than on this, one of the most eventful days of his life. He saw the opportunity, and he was resolved that it should not escape ...
— The Tree of Appomattox • Joseph A. Altsheler
... lies, in triumphantly victorious humor, in the early days of June, Year 1547. Johann Friedrich of Saxony had been, by some Imperial Court-Council or other,—Spanish merely, I suppose,—doomed to die. Sentence was signified to him while he sat at chess: "Can wait till we end the game," thought Johann;—"PERGAMUS," said he to his comrade, "Let us go on, then!" Sentence not to be executed ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle
... papers have to go outside the field of general news. They go to the dazzling levels of society, to scandal and crime, to sports, pictures, actresses, advice to the lovelorn, highschool notes, women's pages, buyer's pages, cooking receipts, chess, whist, gardening, comic strips, thundering partisanship, not because publishers and editors are interested in everything but news, but because they have to find some way of holding on to that alleged host of passionately interested readers, who ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... and the Duke came among the rest; and Lord Anglesea solicited admirably, and I did wonders. But, after all, the matter was put off till Monday, and then we are to be at it again. I dined with Lord Mountjoy, and looked over him at chess, which put me in mind of Stella and Griffyth.(2) I came home, and that dog Patrick was not within; so I fretted, and fretted, and what ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... hourly more difficult to carry through, until it was finally subverted by De Wet. Many of the commanding officers had as little knowledge of Kitchener's purpose as the pawns which are moved by the hands of the chess player. ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited
... astonishing, my conception is clear and penetrating, if not hurried: I can make excellent impromptus at leisure, but on the instant could never say or do anything worth notice. I could hold a tolerable conversation by the post, as they say the Spaniards play at chess, and when I read that anecdote of a duke of Savoy, who turned himself round, while on a journey, to cry out "a votre gorge, marchand de Paris!" I said, "Here is ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... where the Social was to be held—a large, lofty room, genial, clean, and well-lighted, The floor was bare, but a red rug before the leaping fire gave a touch of cosiness. Small tables were scattered everywhere; draughts here, dominoes there, chess elsewhere, cards in other places. Chairs were distributed with a studied air of casual disorder. Newspapers littered a side-bench. The grand piano, by Cadenza of The Emporium, stood diagonally across the left centre, and on it lay the violin-case ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... that will work," replied Ortigosa. "This is scientific politics. Ruffianism converted into philosophy. We are playing a game of chess with Father Martin and we are going to see if ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... I've brought some games,' she went on. 'Draughts and cards—but they all mean counting. I wish I'd brought chess, but I can't play chess. What can we ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... individual in the neighborhood, blessed with a large bump for mechanics, and good nature, made me a sort of wide bench, which, covered with a neat plaid, looks quite sofa-like. A little pine table, with oilcloth tacked over the top of it, stands in one corner of the room, upon which are arranged the chess and cribbage boards. There is a larger one for dining purposes, and as unpainted pine has always a most dreary look, F. went everywhere in search of oilcloth for it, but there was none at any of the bars. At last, "Ned," the Humboldt Paganini, remembered ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... by the slovenly shoeing of a horse, causes his lameness, and, he stumbling, the career of his world-conquering rider ends, and the destinies of empires are changed. A generous officer permits an imprisoned monarch to end his game of chess before leading him to the block; and meanwhile the usurper dies, and the prisoner reascends the throne. An unskillful workman repairs the compass, or malice or stupidity disarranges it, the ship mistakes her course, the waves swallow a Caesar, and a new chapter is written ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... word is Persian, with many meanings, e.g. a cheek (Lalla "Rookh"); a "rook" (hero) at chess; a rhinoceros, etc. The fable world-wide of the wundervogel is, as usual, founded upon fact: man remembers and combines but does not create. The Egyptian Bennu (Ti-bennuphoenix) may have been a reminiscence of gigantic pterodactyls and other winged monsters. From ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... at Chetah a chess board in a box ten inches square with a miniature tree six inches high on its cover. The figure of a man in chains leaning upon a spade near a wheelbarrow, stood under the tree. The expression of the face, the details of the clothing, the links of the chains, the limbs ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... hour, but in a second. M. Noirtier, who, on the previous night, was the old Jacobin, the old senator, the old Carbonaro, laughing at the guillotine, the cannon, and the dagger—M. Noirtier, playing with revolutions—M. Noirtier, for whom France was a vast chess-board, from which pawns, rooks, knights, and queens were to disappear, so that the king was checkmated—M. Noirtier, the redoubtable, was the next morning 'poor M. Noirtier,' the helpless old man, at the tender mercies of the ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... my father allowed me to visit a brother of his, who lived in the country, about thirty miles from Benares. My uncle had two sons, of nearly my own age, and several daughters. With the former I rode, played chess, and engaged in such sports as are not forbidden to my profession; but my female cousins I seldom saw, as they rarely left their Zenana, into which I was not permitted to enter. I was of an age to be desirous of becoming better acquainted with my female cousins, especially after ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... nation of mighty conjurors created a man out of brass and wood, and leather, and endowed him with such ingenuity that he would have beaten at chess, all the race of mankind with the exception of the great Caliph, Haroun Alraschid. (*22) Another of these magi constructed (of like material) a creature that put to shame even the genius of him who made it; for so great were its reasoning powers that, in a second, it performed ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... anything to drink. He depends upon Ralph, and it will be harder for me when he is not with us. His attitude towards me is just about what it has always been. I try to amuse him by reading the newspapers and with games; we have a chess-board. At times he seems grateful, and then he will suddenly grow tired and hard to control. Once or twice I have had to call in Dr. Magruder, who ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... they lived happily by the chase. Naisi's two brothers went with them, and thus the three sons of Usnach were all in Alba. Then the story goes on to say that Fergus, one of Conor's nobles, goes to seek the exiles, and Naisi and Deirdre, while playing at the chess, hear from the shore 'the cry of a man of Erin.' It is against Deirdre's will that they finally leave Alba with Fergus, who says, "Birthright is first, for ill it goes with a man, although he be great and prosperous, if he does not see daily his ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... as it happened, Lucy was playing chess with her father; and her heart, though not remorseful, was as heavy as George could have wished. But she did not let Eugene see that she was troubled, and he was pleased when he won three games of ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... Shuffle-board, chess, and backgammon, with exercise and pleasant converse, will while away the intervening hours so quickly, that, if you do not keep a bright look-out, you will be surprised by the dinner-bell before you think ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... Browning "Never the Time and the Place" Robert Browning Song, "Oh! that we two were Maying" Charles Kingsley For He Had Great Possessions Richard Middleton Windle-straws Edward Dowden Jessie Thomas Edward Brown The Chess-board Edward Robert Bulwer Lytton Aux Italiens Edward Robert Bulwer Lytton Song, "I saw the day's white rapture" Charles Hanson Towne The Lonely Road Kenneth Rand Evensong Ridgely Torrence The Nymph's Song ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... and Germany. Prince Eugene and Marlborough restored the peace and the political equilibrium of Europe. In England, the different parties in Parliament, the frequenters of the clubs and coffee-houses, were then watching every move on the political chess-board of Europe, and criticising the victories of their generals and the treaties of their ambassadors. In Germany, the nation took but a passive part. It was excluded from all real share in the great questions of the day; and, if it showed any sympathies, they were confined to the simple admiration ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... violent storm-wind which rushes from the mountain to the valley beneath, and in its fury snaps asunder the trunks of large trees as if they were but slender reeds, and carries the wooden houses from one side of a river to the other as easily as we could move the pieces on a chess-board. After an hour had passed, they told Rudy that it was all over, and he might go to sleep; and, fatigued with his long walk, he readily slept at ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... bank. In other places it looks like a gate, and is made of several slim branches placed at regular distances like the steps of a ladder lying horizontally. The form turns, like the echalier, on a pivot. These "hedges" and echaliers give the region the appearance of a huge chess-board, each field forming a square, perfectly isolated from the rest, closed like a fortress and protected by ramparts. The gate, which is very easy to defend, is a dangerous spot for assailants. The Breton peasant thinks he improves his fallow ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... games of chance for high stakes—undoubtedly a most degrading form of vice. And one may say generally that if a man finds himself with nothing to do, he is sure to choose some amusement suited to the kind of power in which he excels,—bowls, it may be, or chess; hunting or painting; horse-racing or music; cards, or poetry, heraldry, philosophy, or some other dilettante interest. We might classify these interests methodically, by reducing them to expressions of the three fundamental powers, the factors, ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer: The Wisdom of Life • Arthur Schopenhauer
... which I thought out most cleverly, with the utmost care and the utmost precaution, the one which I shrouded in the greatest darkness and mystery, the one which it took the biggest generalship to carry through. It was a regular game of chess, played according to strict scientific and mathematical rules. And yet Ganimard ended by unravelling the knot. Thanks to him, they know the truth to-day on the Quai des Orfevres. And it is a truth quite out of the common, ...
— The Confessions of Arsene Lupin • Maurice Leblanc
... altered and added to so often that it had at last arrived at a complex ugliness which was not altogether displeasing. The materials for its structure had all been drawn at different periods from the same stone quarry, and the chequered look of new bits and old bits had a hint of the chess-board. Here Samson Mountain dwelt on his own land in the midst of ...
— Julia And Her Romeo: A Chronicle Of Castle Barfield - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... administration, and versed in all the traditions of diplomacy. His avenger and successor, Hideyoshi, was a totally different type of soldier: a son of peasants, an untrained genius who had won his way to high command by shrewdness and courage, natural skill of arms, and immense inborn capacity for all the chess-play of war. With the great purpose of Nobunaga he had always been in sympathy; and he actually carried it out,—subduing the entire country, from north to south, in the name of the Emperor, by whom he was appointed Regent (Kwambaku). Thus universal peace was temporarily ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... another human soul. How could there be? It was a world of pure reason, where human personality had no place. What puzzled me was why he should feel the absence of this. One wouldn't you know, in an intricate problem of geometry or a game of chess. I asked him, but he didn't understand the question. I puzzled over it a good deal, for it seemed to me that if Hollond felt lonely, there must be more in this world of his than we imagined. I began to wonder if there was any truth in fads ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... Almagro, "rascals," says Calancha, "worthy of Manco's favor." Obliged by the civil wars of the conquistadores to flee from the Pizarros, they were glad enough to find a welcome in Uiticos. To while away the time they played games and taught the Inca checkers and chess, as well as bowling-on-the-green and quoits. Montesinos says they also taught him to ride horseback and shoot an arquebus. They took their games very seriously and occasionally violent disputes arose, one of which, as we shall see, was to have fatal consequences. They were kept informed ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... too, began to rise, and it blew so fresh that they retired to the cabin, where Albert occupied himself with a game of chess, and Mary read, with evident pleasure, such parts of her dearly-prized Bible which suited the state of her mind, occasionally calling Albert's attention to some passage ...
— Autographs for Freedom, Volume 2 (of 2) (1854) • Various
... very seldom came and made himself agreeable; playing an occasional game of chess, and more often regaling Daisy with a history of his expeditions. Other visitors Daisy had from Melbourne, now and then; but her best friend for real service, after her father and Juanita, was Dr. Sandford. He took great care of ...
— Melbourne House • Elizabeth Wetherell
... his own ideal of a well-dressed man. All the contestants in a chess tournament could have played on his clothes at one time, and the ox-blood stripes on his shirt exactly matched the color of his necktie and socks. He had concluded his interview with Morris on the morning following Henochstein's fiasco, before Abe's arrival ...
— Potash & Perlmutter - Their Copartnership Ventures and Adventures • Montague Glass
... heard the wind as he was playing chess with Lois. Lois was Captain Jacob's wife. And Captain Jacob listened to the wind and forgot about the game of chess that he was playing, so that Lois beat him two games. That made Captain Jacob angry, for Lois didn't care much about chess and couldn't play as well as Captain Jacob ...
— The Sandman: His Sea Stories • William J. Hopkins
... one with a hundred thousand failures, a gray-haired, neat man, who had been everything and done nothing, and who now said evasively that he was "in the collection business." He read Dickens and played a masterful game of chess. He liked to have it thought that his past was brave with mysterious splendors. He spoke hintingly of great lawyers. But he had been near to them only as a clerk for a large law firm. He was grateful to any one for noticing him. Like most of the failures, ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... precisely how and when the Oriental influence came into Europe, but that it did come is absolutely certain. The transformation of the Buddha-legend into the Christian legend of Barlaam and Josaphat, the migration of fables and stories, and the introduction of the game of chess furnish the ...
— The Influence of India and Persia on the Poetry of Germany • Arthur F. J. Remy
... hippocampus or sea-horse of the aquariums, whose dried remains, in a mummified state, form a standing wonder in many tiny domestic museums. But the Australian species, instead of merely mimicking the knight on a chess-board, looks rather like a hippocampus in the most advanced stage of lunacy, with its tail and fins and the appendages of its spines flattened out into long thin streaming filaments, utterly indistinguishable in hue and shape from the fucus round which the creature clings for support with its ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... frescoed with illustrations of Goethe, Schiller, and Wieland; there is the room where Goethe and the Grand-Duke used to play chess together; there is the conservatory opening from it where they liked to sit and chat; everywhere in the pictures and sculptures, the engraving and intaglios, are the witnesses of the tastes they shared, the love they both had for Italy, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... been stated by careful students that the original stories in the world number but two hundred and fifty; but we have not forgotten our arithmetic, and we have learned chess, so we know something of the manifold combinations of numbers, and we ...
— The Writer, Volume VI, April 1892. - A Monthly Magazine to Interest and Help All Literary Workers • Various
... Catherine was more unconquered than invulnerable as to love, was paying court to her. The play of all these passions strangely complicated those of politics,—making, as it were, a double game of chess, in which both parties had to watch the head and heart of their opponent, in order to know, when a crisis came, whether the one would ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... in their chariots, harpers in hundreds, smiths with gleaming spears and shields and harness for battle steeds and chariots; troops of men and boys leading racehorses; jewellers with gold drinking-horns, and brooches, and pins, and ear-rings, and costly gems of all kinds, and chess-boards of silver and gold, and golden and silver chessmen in bags of woven brass; dyers with their many-coloured fabrics; bands of jugglers; drovers goading on herds of cattle; shepherds driving their sheep; huntsmen with spoils of the chase; dwellers in the lakes or by the fish-abounding ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • Edmund Leamy
... inlaid. There were apartments in this palace sufficient to lodge two princes of the highest rank with their retinues.... The emperor has another beautiful palace, with a large court-yard paved with handsome flags in the style of a chess-board. ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... in the sunshine, studying the week's Paris newspapers with dim, kindly eyes, or played interminable chess games with his ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... gallery, where three or four hundred of the Vizier's Albanian guards were lounging. In an antechamber, which opened from the gallery, a number of officers were smoking, and in the middle, on the floor, two old Turks were seriously engaged at chess. ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... presided over my pastimes — He taught me to brew beer, to make cyder, perry, mead, usquebaugh, and plague-water; to cook several outlandish delicacies, such as ollas, pepper-pots, pillaws, corys, chabobs, and stufatas. — He understands all manner of games from chess down to chuck-farthing, sings a good song, plays upon the violin, and dances a hornpipe with surprising agility. — He and I walked, and rode, and hunted, and fished together, without minding the vicissitudes of the ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... night's sleep. And so we rumbled along, through the vast fields of sugar-cane, now mostly tied in huge sheaves upright, through boundless stretches of richly-cultivated soil, intersected with the regularity of a chess-board by the rivulets and channels of a laborious irrigation. Here and there stood the high frames made by planting four bamboos in a square and wickering the top, whereon the ryots sit when the crops are ripening, to watch against thieves and cattle, and to drive away the birds of the ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford
... Then, it seemed, everything had a latent life in it. He had suspected as much. "There is always a something," said he, "in what we make, not only beyond what we intend to make, but different from it. We study a long time the powers of position,—in chess, for example;—how much is produced by one move that we did not anticipate, and perhaps cannot ascertain,—certainly not prevent! How many times we are wittier than we meant to be,—striking out, by our unconscious blow, thoughts related to the one we utter, but far more brilliant,—and ourselves ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... games on chequered boards or other delineations, and persons of superior rank are in general versed in the game of chess, which they term main gajah, or the game of the elephant, naming the pieces as follows: king, raja; queen or vizir, mantri; bishop or elephant, gajah; knight or horse, kuda; castle, rook, or chariot, ter; and pawn or foot-soldier, bidak. For check they use the word sah; and for checkmate, mat or ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... strangely contrasted with the grave and self-denying habits to which the Dominicans were devoted in their neighboring cells. The festive season was nearly at an end, for it was the 20th of February, but the evening had been more than usually gay, and had been spent in games at chess, tables, or backgammon, reading romances of chivalry, harping and singing. King James himself, brave and handsome, and in the prime of life, was the blithest of the whole joyous party. He was the most accomplished ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... admit that, when Johnson died, they were not on speaking terms. His explanation is that Johnson irritated him by an allusion to his being beaten by Omai, the Sandwich Islander, at chess. Mrs. Piozzi's marginal note on Omai is: "When Omai played at chess and at backgammon with Baretti, everybody admired at the savage's good breeding and at the ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... it was fair," said a lady's voice. "I firmly believe, and I've said it all along, that you let me beat you. Why, you taught me chess yourself, and how is it possible that I could catch up to my master in ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... the record of a well-ordered household, in which each man performed the duties assigned to him, duties which gave each enough exercise to tire him out and make him long for the quiet hours of reading or chess-playing, or games, which were to follow in the cabin when the day's work ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 56, December 2, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... and all the merry games, which kept the little circle round the cabin-lamp so deep in innocent amusement, that a hurricane might have howled overhead without their hearing it; but he freely owned that he had no talent for whist, and that he didn't know a knight from a castle upon the chess-board. ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... and there, or a walk, or a concert, or an hour on the church organ, when Reggie would blow and Mr. Gray, who was musical, would play as nobody in the town, not excepting the organist, could play. Or a game of chess in Mrs. Gray's drawing-room, while Elaine played or sang to them and ...
— The Girls of St. Olave's • Mabel Mackintosh
... energy, their intelligence—when these show above the groundwork—are monstrous. I have known a Russian learn Chinese within six months. English! they learn it while you are talking to them. The children play at chess and study the violin ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... as finishing his game of chess calmly while the officers of the Terror waited to conduct him to the guillotine. He is exactly—oh, but exactly!—grandmamma's idea of a gentleman. I wish she had ...
— The Reflections of Ambrosine - A Novel • Elinor Glyn
... lone figures seemed! With her smiling countenance the one upon me beamed; Like the zigzag lightning flashed the other's piercing eye; Terror seized my soul,—yet on I gazed in ecstasy. Proudly upright stands the one, the other leans in weariness On the solitary table, where they play a game of chess. Pawns they barter, or they move them now from place to place;— Then the game is lost and won,—she fades away in space,— She who radiantly smiled, ah, she who lost the game; Instantly the bands of children vanish whence they came. Tumult rises; darkness deepens; ...
— Early Plays - Catiline, The Warrior's Barrow, Olaf Liljekrans • Henrik Ibsen
... Early English work may be seen in the heads carved on some of the larger shafts and the caps of the subsidiary pillars, a noticeable figure being "a monk crouched in a caryatidal attitude and holding a chess-board." ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Winchester - A Description of Its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • Philip Walsingham Sergeant
... upon his business as a means of support or of material comfort. Business had become for him an intellectual pursuit, a study in enterprise and increment. The field of commerce lay before him like a chess-board; the moves interested him like the manoeuvres of a game. More money was more power, a greater advantage in the game, the means of shaping men and events and markets to his own ends and uses. It was his will that set fleets afloat and determined the havens they were ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... failure, one with a hundred thousand failures, a gray-haired, neat man, who had been everything and done nothing, and who now said evasively that he was "in the collection business." He read Dickens and played a masterful game of chess. He liked to have it thought that his past was brave with mysterious splendors. He spoke hintingly of great lawyers. But he had been near to them only as a clerk for a large law firm. He was grateful to any one for noticing him. Like most of the failures, he had learned the art of doing nothing ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... little table by the fire stood a chess-board, the old carved red and white pieces standing on it in jumbled disarray; for Chloe and her husband, both inveterate chess-lovers, had begun a game which they were unable, through lack of time, ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... Taylor's visit has been a very pleasant one to us, and I believe to herself also. She and Mr. Weightman have had several games at chess, which generally terminated in a species of mock hostility. Mr. Weightman is better in health; but don't set your heart on him, I'm afraid he is very fickle—not to you in particular, but to half a dozen other ladies. He ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... is easily grasped. The river throws itself round the city like an elbow, and in the corner of land thus embraced the streets are laid out something in the manner of an irregular chess board. One main thoroughfare runs from the S. gate, and climbs by a gradual ascent northwards; and as it goes, expands into the spacious shopping quarters of Milsom Street. Another good string of streets runs ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade
... headed the Goldwing to the east. As he had predicted, the wind was increasing, and the schooner carried quite a bone in her teeth. It looked a little like a game of chess, where each player has to wait a long time for the other to make his move. The captain and his passenger appeared to be still engaged in the discussion in the bow of the boat. Dory thought he could quicken their movements; ...
— All Adrift - or The Goldwing Club • Oliver Optic
... reward. Professor Thompson possessed invaluable qualities for this expedition: rare balance of mind, great cheerfulness, and a sunny way of looking on difficulties and obstacles as if they were mere problems in chess. His foresight and resourcefulness were phenomenal, and no threatening situation found him ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... feet, and the wooden balls and "bats"—as racquets are still called in England—were much harder. Cards and dice were passionately played, a game called "triumph" or "trump" being the ancestor of our whist. Chess ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... all right. The next link in the chain was a chap called Cloyster. James Orlebar Cloyster. The Reverend brought him down to teach boxing. For my own part, I don't fancy anything in the way of brutality. The club, so I thought, had got on very nicely with more intellectual pursuits: draughts, chess, bagatelle, and what-not. But the Rev. wanted boxing, and boxing it had to be. Not that it would have done for him or me to have mixed ourselves up in it. He had his congregation to consider, and I am often on duty at the downstairs counter before the very heart ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... Takeefim. Why, them same Takeefim only comes here, in the first place, because they want to see what it looks like in one of the East Side cafes, where they got such good music and such interesting characters, which sits and drinks coffee and plays chess und Tarrok." ...
— Elkan Lubliner, American • Montague Glass
... rattlesnake. Everybody, talking idly or concentrating on writing up the day's observations, stiffened. Luis Gofredo, dozing in a chair, was on his feet instantly and crossing the hut to the instruments. His second-in-command, who had been playing chess with Willi Schallenmacher, rose and snatched his belt from the back of ...
— Naudsonce • H. Beam Piper
... came on by degrees. I used to think of how things might be different; that was the way it began. I tried to work out schemes of life in my head, as I would do a game of chess; not schemes of life for myself, you know, but such as should save other people from being very miserable. I wanted to do some good in the world,"—she paused here to choose her words—"and that kind of thought naturally resolves itself into action, ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... more books have been written on chess than on any other individual subject in the world, barring Masonry," she said. "And the next one to it—the yellow-bound one—is a book about old English games; not games of chance, but games for holidays and parties. I was glancing through it in my ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... such were mentioned in his hearing, he seldom failed to point out how necessary it was to arrest the object of your curiosity in its first transit, and to tell his favourite story of Snuffy Davie and Caxton's Game at Chess."Davy Wilson," he said, "commonly called Snuffy Davy, from his inveterate addiction to black rappee, was the very prince of scouts for searching blind alleys, cellars, and stalls for rare volumes. He had the scent of a slow-hound, sir, and the snap ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... honour of playing a game of chess with this great man. It was during the Christmas holidays, and I had come down to Roughborough for a few days to see Alethea Pontifex (who was then living there) on business. It was very gracious of him to take notice of me, for ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... favourites among the Ildown people, and went out to many cheery Christmas parties; but they enjoyed more the quiet evenings at home when they all sat and talked after dinner round the dining-room fire, and while the two boys played at chess, and Violet and Eva worked or sketched, Julian and Kennedy would read aloud to them in turns. How often those evenings recurred to all ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... opponent's left, center and right in a desperate effort to pierce the wall of gray, and once or twice his heroic veterans almost succeeded in battering their way through. But at every crisis Lee rose to the emergency and moved his regiments as a skillful chess player manipulates his pieces on the board, now massing his troops at the danger point and now diverting his adversary's attack by a swift counter-stroke delivered by men unacquainted with defeat. Both his hands were heavily swathed in bandages and far too painful to admit of his even touching ...
— On the Trail of Grant and Lee • Frederick Trevor Hill
... and Uncle Richard were playing chess. Morten, Fanny, and Rachel were talking of to-morrow's ball, and they every now and then addressed themselves to Miss Cordsen, who was sitting by the fireside ...
— Garman and Worse - A Norwegian Novel • Alexander Lange Kielland
... 4. Exercise Of body and mind, but moderate, as hawking, hunting, riding, shooting, bowling, fishing, fowling, walking in fair fields, galleries, tennis, bar. Of mind, as chess, cards, tables &c., to see plays, masks, &c., serious studies, business, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... shuffle, and perhaps sing a few verses of some jingling rhyme. Out-door recreation is not so easily attainable, in the winter, as the time at your disposal is so short. In-door amusements must, to a great extent, take their place. The gymnasium is a good institution; chess is a game worth learning, and very fascinating to some minds; cards are good as long as gambling is avoided, and many other games readily suggest themselves to ...
— Boys - their Work and Influence • Anonymous
... had not, completed their preparations, or whether Dr. Jameson had 1,200 or 500 men. Certainly some such assumption is necessary to account for the fact that Rhodes treated his confederates at Johannesburg as so many pawns on a chess-board. It is equally necessary to account for Dr. Jameson's action. "Twenty years friends, and now he goes in and ruins me," was Rhodes's comment on the news that Dr. Jameson had "ridden in," in spite ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... the President of the Board and his daughter Hope working out a game of football on the billiard table. They had chalked it off into what corresponded to five-yard lines, and they were hurling twenty-two chess-men across it in "flying wedges" and practising the several tricks which young Langham had intrusted to his sister under an oath of secrecy. The sight filled the directors with the horrible fear that ...
— Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... angry with Grumbach; rather he seemed to be drawn to him more closely than ever. Mad with love. That was the phrase. He conned it over and over; mad with love. That excused many things. How strangely the chess-men were moved! Had Grumbach not assisted in the abduction, her highness would in all probability have grown up as other princesses, artificial, cold, reserved, seldom touched by the fires of animated thought or action. In fact, had things been otherwise, he never would have ridden with her ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath
... nor can it be arranged that the midday express shall convey all the good people safely, while the 4.15, which is wrecked, carries none but undesirable characters. To this it might be replied that the inconceivable complexity of the chess-board of the world exists only in relation to our human faculties; but what is far more to the point is the indubitable fact that many salutary miracles might be wrought which would raise no question whatever as ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... was all this while in a turret at the commandment of La Beale Isoud, and when she might she came unto Sir Tristram. So on a day King Mark played at the chess under a chamber window; and at that time Sir Tristram and Sir Kehydius were within the chamber over King Mark, and as it mishapped Sir Tristram found the letter that Kehydius sent unto La Beale Isoud, also he had found the letter that she wrote unto Kehydius, and at that same time La Beale Isoud ...
— Le Morte D'Arthur, Volume I (of II) - King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table • Thomas Malory
... were safe indoors; Isa working chess problems with another of the lads, Avice keeping Jane company over the putting the little ones to sleep—in Mount Lebanon, as they call the Druce lodging—and Pica preserving microscopic objects. "Isn't she awful?" said one of those ...
— More Bywords • Charlotte M. Yonge
... But I am not going to-night. The princess of the castle in the air is engaged to his Excellency the Governor of Virginia for a game of chess. In the mean time here comes my father, who shall entertain your Excellency while Betty and I go ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... 1314. See G. Villani, 1. ix. c. 62. v. 48. One.] She predicts also the fate of Ricciardo da Camino, who is said to have been murdered at Trevigi, where the rivers (Sile and Cagnano meet) while he was engaged in playing at chess. ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... state, with little prospect of their coming out. Easterly winds were prevalent, and we were generally at anchor, one half of the ship's company doing nothing, and the other helping them. I soon found that our noble commander was fond of the game of chess and a stiff glass of grog, and I frequently found him en chemise with those companions at daylight on one of the cabin lockers. He was an unmarried man, but a great admirer of the fair sex of all descriptions, ...
— A Sailor of King George • Frederick Hoffman
... acquainted with Prince Andrew Bolkonski, through whom he hoped to obtain a post on the commander in chief's staff. Berg and Boris, having rested after yesterday's march, were sitting, clean and neatly dressed, at a round table in the clean quarters allotted to them, playing chess. Berg held a smoking pipe between his knees. Boris, in the accurate way characteristic of him, was building a little pyramid of chessmen with his delicate white fingers while awaiting Berg's move, and watched his ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... their long night! Their evil stars Deliver them unarmed into our hands, And from their drunken dream of golden fortunes The dagger at their hearts shall rouse them. Well, The duke was ever a great calculator; His fellow-men were figures on his chess-board To move and station, as his game required. Other men's honor, dignity, good name, Did he shift like pawns, and made no conscience of Still calculating, calculating still; And yet at last his calculation proves Erroneous; the whole game is lost; and low! ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... be that, Uncle Eric; and I shall always be glad if you will tell me how I can make your time pass more pleasantly. I know this house must seem gloomy enough at best. Let us try a game of chess; we have not played since ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... unintelligible; hence the amazement and blank wonder of the public at some of the finest passages of Turner, which look like a mere meaningless and disorderly work of chance; but, rightly understood, are preparations for a given result, like the most subtle moves of a game of chess, of which no bystander can for a long time see the intention, but which are, in dim, underhand, wonderful way, bringing out their foreseen and ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... tiny word would get through to them, and anxiety would lift a little from their hearts; for a day or two they would smile. One we had, paralysed in the legs, who would sit doing macram work and playing chess all day long; every relative he had—wife, father, mother, sisters—all were in the power of the German. As brave a nature as one could see in a year's march, touchingly grateful, touchingly cheerful, but ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... us in the dug-out; two are playing chess, but I am reading—the same thing over and over again, for I am tired to death of lying idle, of sleeping and walking. Poor indeed are men's resources, for in three days we had exhausted all we had to say. Yesterday a soldier who had lost his hand ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... required, were converted into differently-tinted reds, by a few hours' immersion in the Kiefel. He also kneaded bread in the hand, until it became as plastic as clay. This he modelled into snuffboxes (with strips of rag for hinges, and a piece of whalebone for a spring), draughts, chess-men, pipe-bowls, and other articles. When dry, they became hard and serviceable; and he sold them among the prisoners and the prison officials. He obtained thus a number of comforts not afforded by the ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... occupied now by the offices of the different Labour men, was mostly in darkness, but on the top floor was a big room used as a club and restaurant, and also for informal meetings. Six or seven of the twenty-three were there, but not Fenn. Cross, a great brawny Northumbrian, was playing a game of chess with Furley. Others were writing letters. They all turned around at Catherine's entrance. She held out her hands ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Vidame de Chartres, that Catherine was more unconquered than invulnerable as to love, was paying court to her. The play of all these passions strangely complicated those of politics,—making, as it were, a double game of chess, in which both parties had to watch the head and heart of their opponent, in order to know, when a crisis came, whether the one would ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... Captain Jacob heard the wind as he was playing chess with Lois. Lois was Captain Jacob's wife. And Captain Jacob listened to the wind and forgot about the game of chess that he was playing, so that Lois beat him two games. That made Captain Jacob angry, for Lois didn't care much about chess and ...
— The Sandman: His Sea Stories • William J. Hopkins
... time, and that, too, for the worst of purposes. I have kept house for nearly forty years; I have reared a family; I have entertained as many friends as most people; and I have never had cards, dice, a chess-board, nor any implement of gaming, under my roof. The hours that young men spend in this way are hours murdered; precious hours, that ought to be spent either in reading or in writing, or in rest, preparatory to the duties of the dawn. Though I do not agree with the base and nauseous flatterers, ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... therefore, at George's preference for his own office, whose four walls had never looked down upon anything but innocent young fellows smoking and talking whatever harmless nonsense came into their heads, or playing chess or penny-ante, or upon his own generous thoughts and solitary contemplations, or hard work on some intricate lawsuit. So we aroused the sleeping waiter, and walked back to the Academy of Music ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various
... of Imagination, with the sensuous objects of Nature for symbols and Faith—with Love and Pride as the unseen impetus and moving-power of all, make up the curious chess-game of a poem. ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... our interests have for years weighed upon my heart; I ever stand as over a chess-board, and regard no move of my adversary as insignificant; and as men of science carefully investigate the secrets of nature, so I hold it to be the duty, ay, the very vocation of a prince, to acquaint ...
— Egmont - A Tragedy In Five Acts • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... the most adroit men in the world. He had the persistence of his race. In spite of the prejudices of eighteen hundred years, he rose to the highest position that can be occupied by a citizen. During his administration England again became a Continental power and played her game of European chess. I have never regarded Beaconsfield as a man controlled by principle, or by his heart. He was strictly a politician. He always acted as though he thought the clubs were looking at him. He knew all the arts belonging to his trade. He would have succeeded ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... and it was the time of fires and warm drawn curtains. One evening, after dinner, I was sitting alone in my study, puzzling over a chess problem, when the servant brought me a card on ...
— The Mysterious Shin Shira • George Edward Farrow
... of sunshine and happy leisure, of boating and fishing, of riding upon the long stretch of hard sands, of sweet, silent games of chess in shady corners, of happy communion in song and story, and of conscious conversations wherein so few words meant so much. And perhaps the lovers in their personal joy grew a little selfish, for; one night the Bishop said to Phyllis, "Come and see me in the morning, daughter, ...
— The Hallam Succession • Amelia Edith Barr
... we must go, then." He rose and walked the length of the room, stopped a moment at the chess table in the corner, then resumed his chair. "You are wondering, no doubt, what it is to me, ...
— Arms and the Woman • Harold MacGrath
... command of most of the roads leading to Washington. But he knew that General Jubal A. Early who commanded the Confederate troops was a skilful and tried soldier, and, to begin with, he moved with caution. For some weeks indeed both commanders played as it were a game of chess, maneuvering for advantage of position. But at length a great battle was fought at Winchester in which the Confederates were defeated and driven from the field. Three days later another battle was fought at Fisher's Hill, and once again in spite of gallant ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... When the chess-board is a Florentine palace, and the pieces are fifteenth-century human beings, such complications are likely to occur. The Lady Lisa had more than once given evidence that she was not carved of wood or ivory. But for three years the situation had remained the same—the husband unobservant, ...
— Unfinished Portraits - Stories of Musicians and Artists • Jennette Lee
... took on new speed. Maybe her new brightness meant only that her heart was learning to bear its load; but we hoped that was just what it was unlearning, as she and Ferry sat at chess on ...
— The Cavalier • George Washington Cable
... matter of unsettled South American loans, dexterously appealing to the much-overworked Monroe Doctrine every time his country was threatened by a French or German or British blockade. But his mind was of no small caliber. He could hold his own not only at his own game of international chess, but in the cultured discussion of polite topics. Orme knew of him as a clever after-dinner speaker, a man who could, when he so desired, please greatly by ...
— The Girl and The Bill - An American Story of Mystery, Romance and Adventure • Bannister Merwin
... personage could have sprung from no other soil. In former times his stratagems were of the romantic order. Colin bleated forth his passion in rhyme, and cast sheep's eyes from among his flock, while Phyllis coquetted with her crook and stuck posies in his hat; royal Ferdinand and Miranda played at chess; Ivanhoe upset his fellow-men like ninepins for love of lackadaisical Rowena; and "sweet Moll" turned the pages while her lover, Milton, sang. But in our day the jolly little god, though still a heathen in the severe simplicity of his attire, has become modernized in his arts, and ...
— On Picket Duty and Other Tales • Louisa May Alcott
... the oldest, Edith, had been married many years. Laura and Deborah lived at home, but they were both out this evening. It was Friday, Edith's evening, and as was her habit she had come from her apartment uptown to dine with her father and play chess. In the living room, a cheerful place, with its lamp light and its shadows, its old-fashioned high-back chairs, its sofa, its book cases, its low marble mantel with the gilt mirror overhead, they sat at a small oval table in front of a quiet fire of ...
— His Family • Ernest Poole
... genial, though somewhat impulsive, hospitality. It had broad, smooth-shaven lawns and towering oaks and elms; there were bosky shades at several points, and not far from the house there was a little rill spanned by a rustic bridge with the bark on; there were fruits and flowers, pleasant people, chess, billiards, rides, walks, and fishing. These were great attractions, but none of them, nor all of them together, would have been sufficient to hold me to the place very long. I had been invited for the trout season, but should, probably, have finished my visit early in the summer had ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... staircase, which led to an open gallery, where three or four hundred of the Vizier's Albanian guards were lounging. In an antechamber, which opened from the gallery, a number of officers were smoking, and in the middle, on the floor, two old Turks were seriously engaged at chess. ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... at a select party at Lady Delacour's, a Spanish gentleman was amusing the company with some anecdotes, to prove the extraordinary passion which some of his countrymen formerly showed for the game of chess. He mentioned families, in which unfinished games, bequeathed by will, had descended from father to son, and where victory was doubtful ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth
... cards of king, queen, and knave: allegorical figures of Genius, Liberty and Equality take their places, and since Law alone is above them all, Patriotism, as it flings down its biggest card, shall cry no longer, "Ace of trumps," but "Law of trumps," and "Genius of trumps." Chess terms too were republicanised. Furniture becomes of Spartan simplicity. The people lie down on patriotic beds and eat and drink from patriotic mugs and platters. Lotteries are abolished, regulations ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... xxiv. p. 203., for a valuable article, entitled "Historical Remarks on the introduction of the Game of Chess into Europe, and on the ancient Chessmen discovered in the Isle of Lewis, by Frederick Madden, Esq., F.R.S., in a Letter addressed to Henry ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 191, June 25, 1853 • Various
... Justine's mind as she reached the landing; but the next moment it gave way to a contradictory feeling. Westy Gaines was not alone in the hall. From under the stairway rose the voices of a group ensconced in that popular retreat about a chess-board; and as Justine reached the last turn of the stairs she perceived that Mason Winch, an earnest youth with advanced views on political economy, was engaged, to the diversion of a circle of spectators, in teaching the Telfer ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... man called Anton stood before one of the Indian shops and stared at the window's contents. Carved ivory statuettes from the Far East, cameras from Japan, ebony figurines, chess sets of ...
— Border, Breed Nor Birth • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... to shave the boards of the flower press down, or it'll be a sorry burden for a poor, tired botanist. Good night to you, my bouchal boy, and it's a pack you might throw into a corner of your sack." "Cards!" replied Wilkinson; "no sir, but my pocket chess box will be at your service." "Chess be hanged," said the lawyer; "but, see here, are they checkers when you turn them upside down? If they ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... Basilio, who was a little bit jolly. "We have a law-suit that has been pending for fifteen years, and there isn't a judge in the Supreme Court in Manila who can decide it. Let us see if we can settle it on the chess ...
— Friars and Filipinos - An Abridged Translation of Dr. Jose Rizal's Tagalog Novel, - 'Noli Me Tangere.' • Jose Rizal
... Soldiers on active service seldom walk by sight. It is theirs always "to trust and obey." Even regimental officers seldom know precisely where their next stopping-place will be, or what presently they will be called upon to do. They often resemble the pieces on a chess board, which cannot see the hand that moves them and cannot tell why this piece instead of that is taken. To keep our adversaries if possible in the dark, we have ourselves to dwell in darkness; but it is a source of sore ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry
... for some of us at the Hall. Rachel and her betrothed sat apart and talked. Grace played chess with Mr. Hill, and, to escape from Captain Tyrrell, I ...
— The Late Miss Hollingford • Rosa Mulholland
... to be seen studying English hard, saying that he was going to be a businessman. He was like a girl by nature, and so "sassy" that we two were never on good terms, and had to fight it out about once every ten days. When we played a chess game one day, he placed a chessman as a "waiter,"—a cowardly tactic this,—and had hearty laugh on me by seeing me in a fix. His manner was so trying that time that I banged a chessman on his forehead which was injured a little bit and bled. He told all about this to father, who ...
— Botchan (Master Darling) • Mr. Kin-nosuke Natsume, trans. by Yasotaro Morri
... however, at Waterloo Napoleon met his conqueror; the great criminal was captured and sent to St. Helena; and then, while he was playing chess and grumbling at the weather, the Brethren met again at Herrnhut in another General Synod {1818.}. At this Synod some curious regulations were made. For the purpose of cultivating personal holiness, ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... And Oliver was considering why, when if as he pressed the bell, he had felt so much like a modern St. George and wholly as if he were doing something rather fine and perilous, he should feel quite so much like a gauche seventeen-year-old now. He thought that he would not enjoy playing chess with Mrs. Severance. She was one of those people who smiled inoffensively at the end of a game and then said they thought it would really be a little evener if they gave ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... dear—the game of chess is nothing to it. Good-night, Polly. I sincerely hope no serious results will accrue from these efforts on my part ...
— Polly - A New-Fashioned Girl • L. T. Meade
... he's the one. He's been hoverin' 'round, like an old buzzard, for three or four years now, playin' chess with the old man while he lasted, but always with his pop-eyes fixed on Marion. And since she's been left alone he'd been callin' reg'lar once a week, urging her to be his tootsy-wootsy No. 3. He was the main wheeze in some ...
— Torchy and Vee • Sewell Ford
... compound, carefully locking both gates behind them, and walked back to the office. Once there, Hanlon said, "I see you have a chess set, sir. Do you play? ...
— Man of Many Minds • E. Everett Evans
... His game of chess was to his cost, Of pawns has he a many lost, And twice[8] his guard is broken; His castles help him not a mite, And see how lonesome stands his knight! ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... divides the world into seven horizontal strips, known as "climates," and ranging from the equator to the British Isles. These strips are subdivided into eleven sections, so that the world, in Edrisi's conception, is like a chess-board, divided into seventy-seven squares, and his work consists of an elaborate description of each of these squares taken one by one, each climate being worked through regularly, so that you might get parts of France in the eighth and ninth squares, ...
— The Story of Geographical Discovery - How the World Became Known • Joseph Jacobs
... all knightly games and exercises by his foster-father, and grew apace in strength and skill. Once a Norwegian vessel arrived upon the coast of Ermonie laden with a freight of hawks and treasure (hawks at that period were often worth their weight in gold). The captain challenged anyone to a game of chess with him for a stake of twenty shillings, and Rohand and his sons, with Tristrem, went on board to play with him. Tristrem moved so skilfully that he overcame the captain, and won from him, in many games, ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... Rome. His wife is highly accomplished and his daughter is a beautiful girl, full of vivacity, and speaks English fluently.... During the evening there was music; his daughter played on the piano and others sang. There was chess, and, at a sideboard, a few played cards. The style was simple, every one at ease like our soirees in America. Several noblemen and dignitaries of ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... cause "set down," "reserved," or "put off," because counsel are engaged elsewhere? How often has he heard the same advocate in four or five causes in the same week, in the same court, changing positions like the queen of an active chess-board; profiting his fame and pocket by means of only a hurried glance at the elaborate brief which his junior has "got up" ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... exactly similar. Along the two opposite walls there were narrow carpets spread on the floor, covered with cushions and low stools. Before every occupant there was an oblong on the bare floor, traced also with chalk, and divided, like a chess board, into small quadrangles which were destined for dishes and plates. Both the latter articles were made of the thick strong leaves of the butea frondosa: larger dishes of several leaves pinned together with thorns, plates and saucers of one ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... in any game," Thornly replied. "I rather think it comes from my chess training. When a child begins that pastime, as you might say, in his cradle, with such a teacher as father, it's apt ...
— Janet of the Dunes • Harriet T. Comstock
... minister to the needs of the three parts of man—body, mind, and soul. At the bar which stands at one end of the hut men buy food, drink (strictly non-alcoholic), and tobacco. In the body of the room men play draughts, chess, anything except cards, read papers and write letters. Often there are concerts and lectures. Sometimes there are classes which very few men attend. So ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... his father. To Opdyke's certain knowledge, the good professor curtailed by hours and hours and hours his more congenial occupations for the sake of helping his son to work out the chess problems in which they both were taking a perfunctory delight. Reed did unfeignedly enjoy his father's company; but that was no reason he should reduce him to a captivity akin to his own. How long had it lasted, anyhow? May, June—nine months. And, in ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... contest that point very vigorously; yet I confess that, as usual, my inveterate scepticism leaves me in some doubts. Will you assist me in resolving them?—but not to-night; let us have a little more talk about old college days,—or what say you to a game at chess?" ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... burn half a dozen of candles on the altar of the Virgin Mary. There was one, however, who had wept for me; it was Isabella, a lovely girl of fifteen, and daughter to the old Governor. The General, too, was glad to see me; he liked me very much, because we played chess while smoking our cigars, and because I allowed him to beat me, though I could have given him the queen and the move. I will confess, sotto voce, that this piece of policy had been hinted to me by his daughters, who wished me to find ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... to the nobility by divine right—as much as did Disraeli. Both had an inward contempt for titles, but they knew the hearts of the owners so well that they simply played a game of chess, and the "men" they moved were live knights, bishops, kings and queens, with rollers under the castles. The pawns they pushed here and there were the literary puppets of ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... in Latin, Greek, and mathematics so easy that we studied with real pleasure and had more leisure for play. Henry Bayard's chief pleasures were walking, riding, and playing all manner of games, from jack-straws to chess, with the three younger sisters, and we have often said that the three years he passed in Johnstown were the most ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... commonplace in his contemplation; kings were his people—nations were his outposts; and he disposed of courts, and crowns, and camps, and churches, and cabinets, as if they were titular dignitaries of the chess-board. Amid all these changes, he stood ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... right to hold the invaded territory which was claimed also by New York. Burgoyne's instructions forbade him to turn aside and strike them a heavy blow. He must go on to meet Howe who was not there to be met. A being who could see the movements of men as we watch a game of chess, might think that madness had seized the British leaders; Burgoyne on the upper Hudson plunging forward resolutely to meet Howe; Howe at sea sailing away, as it might well seem, to get as far from Burgoyne ...
— Washington and his Comrades in Arms - A Chronicle of the War of Independence • George Wrong
... interested in the books he saw and the tale of how they were printed that he purchased some type and, bringing it home, set up a printing press in London not far from Westminster Abbey. The first English book to be printed was dated 1474 and was called 'The Game of Chess.' Then came a Bible which was presented to the king. From this time on there was practically an end to the handwritten books made by the monks in cloisters and monasteries. Occasionally such a volume was made for the very rich because, ...
— Paul and the Printing Press • Sara Ware Bassett
... to chess, and found it a little more soothing. He soon mastered the moves and the chief gambits and commoner closing positions, and began to beat the Vicar. But then the cylindrical contours of the opposite ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... engaged Wade in a fierce battle of chess, with Fuller as an interested spectator. Arcot, too, was watching, but he was ...
— Islands of Space • John W Campbell
... boys went into the kitchen again, leaving our tutors playing at chess, which Mr Clare was trying to teach Captain Mugford. That kitchen was a favourite resort of ours in the evenings, and Clump and Juno liked to have us there. There was a famous fire—three or four fresh logs singing over a red mass ...
— Captain Mugford - Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors • W.H.G. Kingston
... division, making sixteen in all, each party of four dressed in garments of different colour from those worn by the others. The King and his ministers sat on the slab in the middle, and the game, which was something like chess, commenced. It must have been a glorious game: the prizes were numerous and worth playing for, and one can easily imagine the crafty old King moving his Queen so as to take the lovely slave of one of his ministers, or a handsome and ...
— A Journey to Katmandu • Laurence Oliphant
... departure from Petersburg Prince Andrew brought with him Pierre, who had not been to the Rostovs' once since the ball. Pierre seemed disconcerted and embarrassed. He was talking to the countess, and Natasha sat down beside a little chess table with Sonya, thereby inviting Prince Andrew to ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... electors, they would have justified that. The stirring excitement of the three months' contest between the great rivals led them to pronounce upon the transaction as a whole, and to leave unnoticed what seemed for the moment to be the minor issues—the moves, if we may borrow a metaphor from the chess-table, which opened the game; and it may be observed that, though, on the 17th of December, Pitt resisted Mr. Baker's resolution with his utmost energy, in the numerous debates which ensued he carefully avoided all allusion to ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... had a governess at all like you. They were old, and cross, and ugly, and didn't love to play chess, and could not sing, and I hated them! But I do like you, and I will ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... the duel Mr. Rogers' secretary arrived with my checks and stock, and while we were verifying these, I had time to study my mental chess-board for the next move. The papers were all passed at last and then I entered into some explanation of my own intentions. I told Mr. Rogers that for the time being I would hold all my stock, but that I intended to borrow a stack of money on it from Stillman through ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... on the walls of Esens. Was it connected with Bensersiel too, or the country between? I searched the ordnance map again, standing up to get a better light and less jolting. There was the road northwards from Esens to Bensersiel, passing through dots and chess-board squares, the former meaning fen, the latter fields, so the reference said. Something else, too, immediately caught my eye, and that was a stream running to Bensersiel. I knew it at once for the muddy stream or drain we had seen at the harbour, issuing through the sluice or siel ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... my friend the notaire comes to play chess with me, you should see him eye my antiques, ah, so covetously; I see him, but I never let on. Such a collection of antiques as we all are, M'sieur." Then he became serious, and lifting his cane he pointed to a gravestone at one side, "My old servant lies there, M'sieur; we ...
— Vanished towers and chimes of Flanders • George Wharton Edwards
... of truth, and alleviates, perhaps, to a royal ear, the harshness of instruction. With a similar design, to admonish kings that they are strong only in the strength of their subjects, the same Indians invented the game of chess, which was likewise introduced into Persia under the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... bagatelle, tivoli, and dolls, a very merry morning might be spent. The young people then dispersed in search of their own peculiar amusements. Some of the young men went into the billiard-room, and a few chess parties were formed. Some began to act charades for the edification of such among the elders as would choose to make an audience. A still larger party adjourned to the school-room to play at houses with their dolls, and two tables were soon spread with ground plans ...
— Louis' School Days - A Story for Boys • E. J. May
... pragmatism. It ranges from systematic doctrines, reminiscent of Fichte, which seek to define practical needs and deduce knowledge from them, to the more irresponsible utterances of those who liken science to "shorthand,"[407:8] and mathematics to a game of chess. In any case pragmatism attributes to nature a certain dependence on will, and therefore implies, even when it does not avow, that will with its peculiar principles or values cannot be reduced to the terms of nature. In short, it would be ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... sport for the rich, it is the resource of those who have nothing to do; I shall be so busy with my pleasures that I shall have no time to waste. I am poor and lonely and I never play, unless it is a game of chess now and then, and that is more than enough. If I were rich I would play even less, and for very low stakes, so that I should not be disappointed myself, nor see the disappointment of others. The wealthy man has no motive for play, and ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... survival, and will soon disappear altogether. The 'notes' are the characteristic feature of the modern newspaper, and it is in them that the modern journalist displays his fervour, sprightliness, and erudition. 'Note'-writing, like chess, has certain recognised ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... Prebendary of Wells Cathedral, and corresponded a good deal with Anna Seward. Wilberforce’s description of him is worth recalling, viz., “the true picture of a sensible, well-informed and educated, polished, old, well-beneficed, nobleman’s and gentleman’s house-frequenting, literary and chess-playing divine.” ...
— Anna Seward - and Classic Lichfield • Stapleton Martin
... up and down, some, squatted Upon their hams, were occupied at chess; Others in monosyllable talk chatted, And some seemed much in love with their own dress; And divers smoked superb pipes decorated With amber mouths of greater price or less; And several strutted, others slept, and some Prepared for supper ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... a far corner and showed her a set of wonderful carved chess-men that he had bought that morning; and photographs of his friends at Eton, and of the school, and of some of the masters. He talked very earnestly and elaborately about these dull matters, and passed by the opportunities ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... vulgar notions of Prince Bismarck's incessant wiles, or of Louis Napoleon's base designs against his neighbors may be discarded as relatively subordinate. The incidents that marked the gigantic game of chess played (not in Europe only) from the overthrow of the Orleans dynasty to the death of Friedrich III. and the fall of Bismarck in the winter of last year were neither the outcome of individual Machiavelianism nor entirely attributable ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... most intellectual persons about the court, asked to be invited to meet the Professor the next time he should come. So he had to be invited again; and he was invited, and came, and was charming again; he could even play chess. ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... has the illusion of freewill. Doubtless the pieces in that chess game, which Eastern monarchs are said to play with human figures, come to think they move of themselves. The knight chuckles as he makes his tortuous jump at the queen, and the bishop swoops down on the castle with ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... understand truth,—not for any secondary artifice in handling his ideas. Some of the sharpest men in argument are notoriously unsound in judgment. I should not trust the counsel of a smart debater, any more than that of a good chess-player. Either may of course advise wisely, but not necessarily because he wrangles or ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... is happiest in his delicate little pastorals and fantastic comedies, and, for all their slightness, his works bear the test of revival better than those of many of his more learned contemporaries. Philidor (1726-1797) was almost more famous as a chess-player than as a composer. He had the advantage of a sound musical education under Campra, one of the predecessors of Rameau, and his music has far more solid qualities than that of Gretry or Monsigny. His treatment ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... my club with two friends, one of them a young Dutch attache, the other a barrister of my Inn. We did ourselves pretty well, and took our cigars into the smoking-room, which was crowded. Some men in a corner were playing chess; the club bore, decent enough in peace but positively lethal in war, was demonstrating to a group of impatient listeners that the Staff work at G.H.Q. was all wrong, when, catching sight of me, he came up and said, "Hullo, old man, back from the Front? When will the war end?" I returned the ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... Rome was the chosen headquarters of the Society, the nucleus of their growth, and the fulcrum of their energy. From Rome, as from a center, Ignatius moved his men about the field of Europe. We might compare him under one metaphor to a chess-player directing his pieces upon the squares of the political and ecclesiastical chessboard; under another, to a spider spinning his web so as to net the greatest number of profitable partisans. The fathers were kept in perpetual ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... that releases man from Toil, He play'd the Chess of Social Intercourse; Prepared his Banquet Hall like Paradise, Summon'd his Houri-faced Musicians, And, when his Brain grew warm with Wine, the Veil Flung off him of Reserve. Now Lip to Lip Concerting with the ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and Salaman and Absal • Omar Khayyam and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... up on Lilias's window-shutter, and we write down every month's invitations—in stormy weather they are not many—and we fulfil them in rotation. You don't often want me in the evenings, for you've quite given me up at chess, and you only condescend to backgammon when it is mid-winter and there has been no curling, and the book club is all amiss. Lilias insists upon the card, because the parties are by no means always merry affairs, and she says that otherwise we would slip them off on each other, and pick and choose, ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... not in a day, not in an hour, but in a second. M. Noirtier, who, on the previous night, was the old Jacobin, the old senator, the old Carbonaro, laughing at the guillotine, the cannon, and the dagger—M. Noirtier, playing with revolutions—M. Noirtier, for whom France was a vast chess-board, from which pawns, rooks, knights, and queens were to disappear, so that the king was checkmated—M. Noirtier, the redoubtable, was the next morning 'poor M. Noirtier,' the helpless old man, at the tender mercies ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... pretty lively during the passage across the Bay of Biscay; and by this time they had thoroughly settled down and become almost as perfectly at home in the ship as though they had been born on salt water. The gentlemen chatted, smoked, walked the poop, and played chess together, romped with the children, or read aloud to the ladies whilst they reclined in their deck-chairs and pretended to work, and otherwise made themselves generally useful. This was the usual disposition of their day from about nine a.m. to about eight ...
— The Missing Merchantman • Harry Collingwood
... direct hereditary way," H. L. Hollingworth[164] observes, "or as the result of unexplained mutation or deviation from type, are: mathematical aptitude, ability in drawing,[165] musical composition,[166] singing, poetic reaction, military strategy, chess playing. Pitch discrimination seems to depend on structural factors which are not susceptible of improvement by practice.[167] The same may be said of various forms of professional athletic achievement. Color blindness ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... alarming problems, beating out ideas, trying the stuff and mettle of mental capacity. Not always with real knowledge, or a real sense of fact, but always rapid and impetuous, taking in the whole dialectical chess-board at a glance, he gave no quarter, and a man found himself in a perilous corner before he perceived the drift of the game; but it was to clear his own thought, not—for he was much too good-natured—to embarrass another. If the old scholastic disputations had been ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... had just remembered the gold cloak, gold chess-board, and bright gold piece that the King had lost about a ...
— The Yellow Fairy Book • Leonora Blanche Alleyne Lang
... boy! for morning after morning their hands would be together tying up the same vines, or clearing out the same flower bed; day after day at the doctor's orders Traverse attended Clara on her rides; night after night their blushing faces would be bent over the same sketch book, chess ...
— Hidden Hand • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... parlor. Great was the rejoicing in London when Abdul Hamid's "down-and-out" performance carried his trusted friend William along. The glee changed to grief when, within a year—so quickly does the appearance of the chess-board change in "the great game"—Great Britain was once more on the doorstep, and fickle Germany was snuggling close to Young Turkey on the divan in the dimly lighted parlor. Virtuous old Britain professed to be shocked and horrified; he occupied himself with talking scandal about young ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... angry elements without, and save for the gentle rocking of the ship and the occasional splashing of water against its sides, we can easily imagine that we are a thousand miles from the sea. Passengers sit at the long tables, reading or chatting. Other groups are playing cards or chess. In the cushioned corners, young men and maidens are exchanging banter with words and glances. A young lady is playing the piano, and over all this scene of life, and light, and gaiety, the electric lamps gleam ...
— Story of Chester Lawrence • Nephi Anderson
... her justice, Maud had meant to intrench herself in sullen silence. She saw the attack coming, and prepared to remain on the defensive. Aunt Agatha began quietly enough—to borrow a metaphor from the noble game of chess, she advanced a pawn. ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... been to Turin, by the way? To that city which reminds one of nothing so much as a gigantic chess-board set down upon the banks of the yellow river—that city with never-ending, straight streets, all running at right angles to each other, and whose extremities frame in delicious pictures of wooded hill or snow-capped Alp; whose inhabitants recall the grace and courtesy of ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 2, February, 1891 • Various
... With him, man-hunting was like a game of chess; and after he had questioned the Indian for a quarter of an hour he saw his opportunity. Pastamoo, the Cree, was made a part of his Majesty's service on the spot, with the promise of torture and speedy execution if he proved ...
— Back to God's Country and Other Stories • James Oliver Curwood
... peasant were playing a game together one day (probably a game of chess, which was a favourite winter pastime with the Northern vikings). They of course had determined to play for certain stakes, and the giant, being victorious, won the peasant's only son, whom he said he would come and claim on the morrow unless the parents could hide him so cleverly ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... bow, and held the ship from nearing the shore. At last he cried, "Cut away the cable!" A few strokes of the axes were heard, and then the cable flew out of the hawsehole in a blaze of fire, from the violence of the friction, and disappeared under a huge wave, which struck us on the chess-tree, and deluged us with water fore and aft. But we were now on the other tack, and the ship regained her way and we had evidently increased our distance from the land. "My lads," said the captain to the ship's company, "you have behaved ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... "No," said Havelock. "Chess, rather. The game where chance hasn't a show—the game of the intelligent future. That very irregular and disconcerting move of his.... And he got taken, you might say. She's an ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... with another army corps, and attacking the Prussians in the rear, thus hemming in part of their army between himself and the troops of Bazaine in Metz; but he seems to have been really in the position of a pawn driven about a chess-board by an ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... men, with long, white beards, were sitting inside playing chess, as quietly as mice, with their eyes ...
— The Book of Stories for the Storyteller • Fanny E. Coe
... is made into a "pie", the horn is sounded. Many games are variations on pursuit and capture (or escape): tag, hide-and-seek, prisoner's base, blind {488} man's buff, football, and we might include chess and checkers here. Wrestling, boxing, snowballing are variations on attack and defense. A great many are variations on action at a distance, of which instances have already been cited from children's toys; ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... century, who substituted imitation leaves of gilt paper for real leaves, which had previously been adopted for playing some kind of game. There are also various games played with chequers, some of great antiquity; and there is chess, that is to say, a game so little differing from our chess as to leave no doubt as to the common origin of both. In all of these the money element comes in; and it is not too much to say that more homes are broken up, and more misery caused by this truly national vice than can be attributed ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... waiting. But days and nights passed without any explanation being sent, or any secret message bidding me be patient. She used to come down to the drawing-room for an hour in the morning; in the evening she was present at dinner, and then would play piquet or chess with her father. During all this time she was so well watched that I could not exchange a glance with her. For the rest of the day she remained in her own room—inaccessible. Noticing that I was chafing at the species of captivity in which I was compelled to live, ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... fellow-passengers are of a high order, and since the hurricane we have been rather like a family circle than a miscellaneous accidental group. For some time our days went by in reading aloud, working, chess, draughts and conversation, with two hours at quoits in the afternoon for exercise; but four days ago the only son of Mrs. Dexter, who is the only lady on board besides myself, ruptured a blood vessel on the lungs, and lies in a most critical state ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... we had all imbibed, the Earl and Uncle Tooter played chess on the great mahogany table in the center of the room; Holmes and Thorneycroft started a game of checkers, as did Lord Launcelot and myself, sitting on the leather-covered divans in the broad bay-window, ...
— The Adventures of the Eleven Cuff-Buttons • James Francis Thierry
... the room immediately, but returned the next moment, saying, "I jes looked into de parlor, darlin', an' Mass Horace he mighty busy playin' chess wid Miss Lucy's mamma, an' I didn't say nuffin' to him. Jes you go sleep, my pet, an' tell Mass Horace all ...
— Elsie Dinsmore • Martha Finley
... Chilian, who had been playing a rather prolonged game of chess with a visitor. But Bentley kept on with them, and said good-night with a polite bow, adding, "She must come again, Mr. Leverett, we had ...
— A Little Girl in Old Salem • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... I was more and more struck by the change in the O'Keefe. All flippancy was gone, rarely did his sense of humour reveal itself in any of his answers. He was like a cautious swordsman, fencing, guarding, studying his opponent; or rather, like a chess-player who keeps sensing some far-reaching purpose in the game: alert, contained, watchful. Always he stressed the power of our surface races, ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... romance—and now aimed at edification or instruction. Science in the hands of the clergy must needs be spiritualised and moralised; there were sermons to be found in stones, pious allegories in beast and bird; mystic meanings in the alphabet, in grammar, in the chase, in the tourney, in the game of chess. Ovid and Virgil were sanctified to religious uses. The earliest versified Bestiary, which is also a Volucrary, a Herbary, and a Lapidary, that of Philippe de Thaon (before 1135), is versified from the Latin Physiologus, itself a translation ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... fell, her four-and-twenty ladies would play their games of chess. Many a game had Janet ...
— Stories from the Ballads - Told to the Children • Mary MacGregor
... sat all day in the sunshine, studying the week's Paris newspapers with dim, kindly eyes, or played interminable chess games with his wife on ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... long their game of chess, But Jehan's eyes rose oft to Mahal's brow, His ardent love he could not well repress, Nor tried—she was his own ...
— Gleams of Sunshine - Optimistic Poems • Joseph Horatio Chant
... another in quick succession. Bismarck was beginning to move the pawns on the chess-board of Europe. He had conciliated Russia by taking sides with her against the Poles in spite of the attitude of London, Paris, and Vienna. He feared the spirit of insurrection would spread to the Poles in Prussia, and had no sympathy with the aspirations ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... Marney, followed somewhat reluctantly by his brother, advanced to the other end of the drawing-room, where his wife was employed with her embroidery-frame, and seated next to her young friend, Miss Poinsett, who was playing chess with Captain Grouse, a member of the chess club, and one of ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... Juliana's, as day after day rolled heavily on, and found her still an inmate of Glenfern Castle. Destitute of very resource in herself, she yet turned with contempt from the scanty sources of occupation or amusement that were suggested by others; and Mrs. Douglas's attempts to teach her to play at chess and read Shakespeare were as unsuccessful as the endeavours of the good aunts to persuade her to study Fordyce's ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... from that wheel! And get outen this pilot-house!" yelled Brown. "You ain't fitten to become no pilot!" An order that Sam found welcome enough. The other pilot, George Ealer, was a lovable soul who played the flute and chess during his off watch, and read aloud to Sam from "Goldsmith" and "Shakespeare." To be with George Ealer was to forget the persecutions ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... nervous sweat I dug their advances. They were avoiding my position, trying to encircle me by making long semicircular marches, hoping to get between me and the other side. This was a rough maneuver, sort of like two telepaths playing chess. Both sides knew to a minute exactly what the other had in mind, where he was, and what he was going to do about his position. But they kept shifting, feinting and counter-advancing, trying to gain the advantage of number or position ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... it did come is absolutely certain. The transformation of the Buddha-legend into the Christian legend of Barlaam and Josaphat, the migration of fables and stories, and the introduction of the game of chess furnish the clearest proofs ...
— The Influence of India and Persia on the Poetry of Germany • Arthur F. J. Remy
... by had been cut into square patches like a chess-board, (a square of turf of about eighteen inches being removed, and a hollow made,) and all were filled with ducks. A windmill was infested, and so were all the out-houses, mounds, rocks, and crevices. The ducks were everywhere. Many of them were so ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... from the rudest materials, and many were the games with which some of our comrades sought to beguile the weary hours. Capt. Frank H. Mason of the 12th Cavalry had the reputation of being our best chess player and young Adjutant Putnam was ...
— Lights and Shadows in Confederate Prisons - A Personal Experience, 1864-5 • Homer B. Sprague
... a great game of chess. Doubtless the politicians believed they were moved from their own true and noble motives. The fact was that the pickets had moved the Democrats a step. The Republicans ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... when cleared of its gambling details, as good a domestic game for three players as cribbage or piquet is for two. My "Court Gamester," which was in its fifth edition in 1728, after devoting its best energies to ombre, contented its readers in fewer pages with the addition only of piquet and chess. ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... been written regarding the remarkable feats of Zuckertort and Blackburn who can play as many as sixteen to twenty games of chess at once, and blindfolded. Of course the only way they can do this is by having in the mind a clear picture of each chess-board, with all the figures arranged ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... Doctor Keene's making himself specially entertaining in an old-family-history way, with a view to keeping his patient within doors for a safe period. He had conceived a great liking for Frowenfeld, and often, of an afternoon, would drift in to challenge him to a game of chess—a game, by the way, for which neither of them cared a farthing. The immigrant had learned its moves to gratify his father, and the doctor—the truth is, the doctor had never quite learned them; but he was one of those ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... note has just been given me calling me to Earl, who is ill, but not seriously. Barbara has prescribed for him a game of chess. The desire to see you again has got into my blood. I think I shall be in the new West ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... part, I prefer the daylight and the glass, without any daubing. What does science discover in the universe? Precision, accuracy, reliability—any amount of it; but as to pity, mercy, love! The fact is, that famous simile of the angel playing at chess was a mistake. Very smart, I grant you, but altogether misleading. Why! the orthodox quote it as much as the others—always a bad sign. It tickles these anthropomorphic fancies, which are at the bottom of all their creeds. Imagine ...
— Cecilia de Noel • Lanoe Falconer
... colonnade in front of an enclosed room at the back. The illustration shows the front overlooking the court, while beyond is the Octagon Tower, the residence of the chief Sultana. In the court a portion of the marble pavement is made to represent a pachisi or chess board, and it is said the game was played with slave girls, who were used instead of the customary chessmen. The Octagon Tower is built out over the river Jumna, as will be seen ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... to start playing Life another way. It would be like chess, where you can see the opponent's every move. But in all human history there has never been a social analogue for chess. That's why Paul Wendell and his group had to be stopped—for a while ...
— Suite Mentale • Gordon Randall Garrett
... say: We could have done no worse than these chess players of Europe and we might have done better. Assuredly if we grasp and hold the reins of the world there will never be another war. We are not, in the first place, as greedy as men; we will divide the world ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... Behind the house stretched the garden; and in its midst, mounted on a stone arch, stood a dismal sun-dial with hearts and spades painted between its figures; while the trees around it were trimmed into the shapes of confessionals and chess-pawns. To the right, a labyrinth of young trees, similarly clipped in the fashion of the time, led by a thousand devious turns to a mysterious valley, where one heard continually a low, sad murmur. This proceeded from a nymph ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... converse with a soldier, who had been in the battle of Marengo. He gave me a very lively account of the conduct of that extraordinary man, the French Emperor, in this grand event of his life. His expression was, that he looked over the battle as if looking upon a chess-board: that he made it a rule never to engage personally, till he saw the whole plan of the battle in execution; that he would then ride alternately to each division, and encourage them by fighting awhile with them: that he visited all the sick and wounded soldiers the day after the ...
— Travels through the South of France and the Interior of Provinces of Provence and Languedoc in the Years 1807 and 1808 • Lt-Col. Pinkney
... singing songs of triumph as they came, "which, in our ears," says one of the Conquerors, "sounded like the songs of hell"! *10 Then followed other bodies of different ranks, and dressed in different liveries. Some wore a showy stuff, checkered white and red, like the squares of a chess-board. *11 Others were clad in pure white, bearing hammers or maces of silver or copper; *12 and the guards, together with those in immediate attendance on the prince, were distinguished by a rich azure livery, and a profusion of gay ornaments, while the large pendants attached ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... music, politics did not exhaust the interests of this strong and eager mind. He was a good chess-player, and followed with lively curiosity the new developments in mechanics and aviation. Very fond of dogs, between him and our little fox-terrier there was a tie of deep affection. As indicative of ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... the tavern, just back, as they said, from sea, and come with sunburned skins from a very long voyage to the South; and one of them had a board and chessmen under his arm, and they were complaining that they could find no one who knew how to play chess. This was the year that the Tournament was in England. And a little dark man at a table in a corner of the room, drinking sugar and water, asked them why they wished to play chess; and they said they would play any man for a pound. They opened their box of chessmen then, a ...
— Tales of Wonder • Lord Dunsany
... the time when she knew he would be absorbed in a game of chess with John Stone, and she would be safe from interruption for several hours if she wished, she went to Major Warfield's little armory in the closet adjoining his room, opened his pistol case and took from it a pair of revolvers, closed and locked ...
— Capitola the Madcap • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... being hatched Pauline and Harry were playing chess in the library. As she checkmated him for the third time he arose ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard
... fateful evening doth descend upon us, And brings on their long night! Their evil stars Deliver them unarmed into our hands. And from their drunken dream of golden fortunes 20 The dagger at their heart shall rouse them. Well, The Duke was ever a great calculator; His fellow-men were figures on his chess-board, To move and station, as his game required. Other men's honour, dignity, good name, 25 Did he shift like pawns, and made no conscience of it: Still calculating, calculating still; And yet at last his calculation proves Erroneous; the whole game is lost; and ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... "Never the Time and the Place" Robert Browning Song, "Oh! that we two were Maying" Charles Kingsley For He Had Great Possessions Richard Middleton Windle-straws Edward Dowden Jessie Thomas Edward Brown The Chess-board Edward Robert Bulwer Lytton Aux Italiens Edward Robert Bulwer Lytton Song, "I saw the day's white rapture" Charles Hanson Towne The Lonely Road Kenneth Rand Evensong Ridgely Torrence The Nymph's Song to Hylas ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... directions for playing Chess, Backgammon, Checkers, Billiards, Pool, Bagatelle, Bowling, ...
— The Harbor Master • Theodore Goodridge Roberts
... drawing-room and halted in the following chamber, where the walls were adorned with white garlands and the curtains and upholstering were of blue watered-silk. Beyond, in a small drawing-room. Miss Mary sat down to play chess with Maryan; Cara took her place near them in the character of observer, and Irene unrolled in the lamp-light a piece of church stuff, very old and time-worn, which the baron had brought her as a rarity, and which she ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... secretaryship, which seemed to promise a good deal of varied experience, and I had let the year or two run on to four years before the end came. The offer came to me through the last thing in the world I should have put forward as a qualification for a salaried post, and that was chess.' ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... cobbles beneath us, and sent the thrill of it into our teeth, "all this needs is Mary Pickford and a player organ to be a good film!" The only thing we saw that made us homesick was the group of firemen in front of the engine house playing checkers or chess or something. But the town had an historic interest for us as the home of the Girondists of the French Revolution; so we looked up their monument and did proper reverence to them. They were moderate idealists ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... and Ted tried to get interested in a game of chess, but with little success. Bill Witt sought with mouth organ and banjo to buoy up the spirits of his downcast mates and succeeded poorly. Noon mess was served at eleven forty-five and even Jean Cartier, as he dispensed canned beans, brown bread, stewed fruit and tea, forgot to smile ...
— The Brighton Boys with the Submarine Fleet • James R. Driscoll
... table with the motley collection of books borrowed from the library with the very best intentions—books which had hardly been opened before sleep would obliterate everything from his sight; that merry picture of the two medieval enthusiasts playing chess, and those jolly Dickensian paintings of huntsmen at luncheon with grinning waiters and ubiquitous dogs. What a charm they all had! What a merry little spot England had been in those ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... simplest fancies of the normal individual and the impossible imaginings of the lunatic. Every man imagines frequently the appearance of an absent friend, of a landscape he has once seen. The painter draws even the features of an absent model; the practiced chess-master plays games without having the board before him; persons half asleep see the arrival of absentees; persons lost in the wood at night see spirits and ghosts; very nervous people see them at home, and the lunatic sees the most extraordinary and disgusting things—all these are imaginations ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... discourse he was grave and modest; and if he was ignorant of the Arabic language, he spoke with fluency and elegance the Persian and Turkish idioms. It was his delight to converse with the learned on topics of history and science; and the amusement of his leisure hours was the game of chess, which he improved or corrupted with ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... to theaters, etc. In the suburbs I have about half a dozen family friends. Here I meet with pleasant society and a hearty welcome. I am passionately fond of music, have an excellent piano, and can hear the best concerts in Europe. I go to all good plays. I am a good chess player. Lastly, I am an omnivorous reader. You will allow that my resources for passing ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... this that Angus first impressed us with his real power. We had seen much of him in the years that had passed since he spent his first New Jedboro night beneath our roof. Often and often he would spend the evening with us, chatting on pleasant topics or teaching our Margaret the high things of chess, at which he was well-nigh a master. But I little dreamed then what fateful moves there may be even in a game of chess, what mating and checkmating and sundry other operations may be sublimely mingled in that so ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... repertoire. Cards were unknown. The General was said to like a quiet game of whist in his own room, but if he had a pack of cards, it was probably the only one on the Farm. There was no prejudice against cards or chess or any other game so far as I know, but no one cared for any form of amusement that separated two or four from all the others. I imagine that even courting, the divine solitude of two, must have been handicapped by this persistent penchant ...
— My Friends at Brook Farm • John Van Der Zee Sears
... the tyro and the expert chess-player—the tyro "free," yet the expert foreseeing and holding the issue of the game in his own hands—is only superficially plausible. There seems, however, one other possible explanatory hypothesis, ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... most striking passages are to be found in this address; one the simile of the force behind nature as the hidden chess player; the other the noble description of the ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... for him a good many months—as was the humble duty of the pilot-apprentice: stood a daylight watch and spun the wheel under the severe superintendence and correction of the master. He was a prime chess player and an idolater of Shakespeare. He would play chess with anybody; even with me, and it cost his official dignity something to do that. Also—quite uninvited—he would read Shakespeare to me; not ...
— Is Shakespeare Dead? - from my Autobiography • Mark Twain
... teller of tales and fables. Others called for dice and tables, and played games of chance for a wager. Evil befalls to winner and loser alike from such sport as this. For the most part men played at chess or draughts. You might see them, two by two, bending over the board. When one player was beaten by his fellow, he borrowed moneys to pay his wager, giving pledges for the repayment of his debt. Dearly enough he paid for ...
— Arthurian Chronicles: Roman de Brut • Wace
... apartment is already sacred and formidable to strangers. I dress at half-past one, and at two (an early hour, to which I am not perfectly reconciled) we sit down to dinner.... After dinner, and the departure of our company, one, two, or three friends, we read together some amusing book, or play at chess, or retire to our rooms, or make visits, or go to the coffee-house. Between six and seven the assemblies begin, and I am oppressed only with their number and variety. Whist, at shillings or half-crowns, is the game I generally play, and ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... what a colossal move on the political chess-board the Coronation was. Bedford realized this by and by, and tried to patch up his mistake by crowning his King; but what good could that ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... had so often hidden himself as a boy. There the satinwood bookcase filled with his dog-eared schoolbooks. On the wall behind it was hanging the same ragged Flemish tapestry, where a faded king and queen were playing chess in a garden, while a company of hawkers rode by, carrying hooded birds on their gauntleted wrists. How well he remembered it all! Every moment of his lonely childhood came back to him as he looked round. He recalled the stainless purity of his boyish life, ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... a game of chess; or pictures in Bond Street, or a long way home to take the air with Bonamy on his arm, meditatively marching, head thrown back, the world a spectacle, the early moon above the steeples coming in for praise, the sea-gulls flying high, Nelson on his column surveying ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... old room at Guldvik for me;—when we sat there of an evening and played chess with the ale jug ...
— Early Plays - Catiline, The Warrior's Barrow, Olaf Liljekrans • Henrik Ibsen
... load his memory with indelible infamy. The story, in substance, I understand to be this—That Lord Braxfield once tried a man for forgery at the Circuit at Dumfries, who was not merely an acquaintance, but an intimate friend of his Lordship, with whom he used to play at chess: That he did this as coolly as if he had been a perfect stranger: That the man was found guilty: That he pronounced sentence of death upon him; and then added, "Now, John, I think I have checkmated you now." A more unfeeling and brutal conduct ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... consists of an open colonnade in front of an enclosed room at the back. The illustration shows the front overlooking the court, while beyond is the Octagon Tower, the residence of the chief Sultana. In the court a portion of the marble pavement is made to represent a pachisi or chess board, and it is said the game was played with slave girls, who were used instead of the customary chessmen. The Octagon Tower is built out over the river Jumna, as will be seen in a ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... father was out, allowed him to race up and down the stairs, played at hide-and-seek with him in the passages, let him dance her round and round the lower rooms. Or else she played games with him, cards, chess, tric-trac; or he lay and listened to her while she told him fairy tales; listened with a dreamy half-understanding, with a certainty, underlying all his impatience, that there was nothing to live for now. What did it matter, after all? One moment, life and hope ...
— Angelot - A Story of the First Empire • Eleanor Price
... take a piece of smooth, but not glossy, Bristol board or pasteboard; divide it, with your pencil and rule, into squares as large as those of the very largest chess-board: they need not be perfect squares, only as nearly so as you can quickly guess. Rest the pasteboard on something sloping as much as an ordinary desk; then, dipping your brush into the color you have mixed, and taking ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... baffling than subtlety and guile—that is the reason your American girl is never understood by foreign men—where naturalness is despised as gauche and art commands homage, where, in short, the game is everything—that most aristocratic and enthralling of all games—the game of chess, with men and women as kings, queens, pawns. . . . There you have the whole explanation of my apparent riddle. You have never met ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... the hospitality he is enjoying permits him to breakfast from seven till ten, alone, or in company with the family if he chooses. Horses, dogs, and guns for the gentlemen—billiards, the carriage, music, or promenading, with cards, chess, backgammon, or dominos for the ladies, to pass away the day until dinner. At this meal the household and guests unite, and the rich viands, wines, and coffee make a feast for the body and sharpen the wit to a feast of the soul. This society is the freest ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... nothing loth to find himself in the fresh air again. Some progress had been made like the opening of a chess-match between masters, and yet the more Steel thought of it the more muddled and bewildered did he become. No complicated tangle in the way of a plot had ever been anything like the skein ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... for the compliment, which, as it is only feather-weight, I will allow to be thrown into the scale. But I do not agree with you. I consider war but as a game of chess, and will never hesitate to sacrifice a knight for a castle. Provided that castle is lost, Mr Pearce," continued the captain, pointing to the French vessel—"this little frigate, if necessary, shall be knight-errant ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... language is one thing and memorising an illogical system of visual images—for that is what reading ordinary English spelling comes to—is quite another. A man can learn to play first chess and then bridge in half the time that these two games would require if he began by attempting simultaneous play, and exactly the same principle applies to the ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... at chess in prison when the news of this unjust sentence was brought to him. He calmly listened to it, with the courage native to his race. On October 22, 1268, he, with Frederick and his other companions, was conducted ...
— Historical Tales, Vol 5 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality, German • Charles Morris
... given up to dancing; the picture gallery was devoted to chamber music. Chess-players and card-players found remote and quiet rooms especially prepared for them. People who cared for nothing but talking were accommodated to perfection in a sphere of their own. And lovers (in earnest or not in earnest) discovered, in a dimly-lighted conservatory ...
— The Black Robe • Wilkie Collins
... Life another way. It would be like chess, where you can see the opponent's every move. But in all human history there has never been a social analogue for chess. That's why Paul Wendell and his group had to be ...
— Suite Mentale • Gordon Randall Garrett
... himself, for a man to have two natures, quite distinct in tastes? He worried himself almost to distraction over the question; but as there was no one to answer it, he drove it from his mind by spending the evening at the Hamiltons' teaching Jessie to play chess. ...
— Duncan Polite - The Watchman of Glenoro • Marian Keith
... duel, goes on. In such passages every power at the writer's command is needed; unerring directness of thought, and words which clothe this thought as an athlete's garments fit the body. Everything must count, and the movement of the narrative must be sustained to the utmost. The chess-playing scene between Elfride and Knight in A Pair of Blue Eyes is an illustration. Sergeant Troy displaying his skill in handling the sword—weaving his spell about Bathsheba in true snake fashion, is another example. ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... Crossthwaite did not speak without hearers. He could make the fierce, shrewd, artisan nature flash out into fire—not always celestial, nor always, either, infernal. So he agitated and lived—how, I know not. That he did do so, is evident from the fact that he and Katie are at this moment playing chess in the cabin, before my eyes, and making love, all the while, as if they had not been ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... afternoon, if he is well enough, we drive; if not he sleeps, and I get a walk. Later on an old Indian friend of his will sometimes drop in; if not he likes to be read to until dinner. After dinner we play chess—he is a first-rate player. At ten I help him to bed; from eleven to twelve I smoke and study Socialism and all the rest of it that Lynwood is ...
— Derrick Vaughan—Novelist • Edna Lyall
... His own actions or to control the issues of them in governing the universe. This he seeks to show, very ingeniously, by asserting that the Supreme Being must be competent to foresee not the actual volition that will be made, but every variety that is possible; and as a consummate chess-player provides by comprehensive forecast against every possible move which his antagonist can make, and has ready a counter-move, so may we, on the supposition suggested, conceive the Supreme Being as fully competent, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... peer for learning and piety either in the time of the first or the second Temple. (94) In his capacity as the chancellor of Solomon, he was the object of the king's special favor. He was frequently invited to be the companion of the king in his games of chess. The wise king naturally was always the winner. One day Solomon left the chess-board for a moment, Benaiah used his absence to remove one of the king's chess-men, and the king lost the game. Solomon gave much thought to the occurrence. He ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... character : karaktero; (drama) rolo. charm : cxarmi; talismano. chaste : cxasta. cheat : trompi. check : haltigi; kontroli. cheek : vango. cheerful : gaja. cheese : fromagxo, chemist : apotekisto, hxemiisto. cheque : cxeko. cherry : cxerizo. chess : sxako. chest : brusto; kesto, (of drawers) komodo. chestnut : kasxtano, ("horse—") marono. chew : macxi, ("—cud") remacxadi. chicory : cikorio. chief : cxef'o, -a. chimney : kamentubo. chin : mentono. china : porcelano. chirp : pepi; (insects) cxirpi. chisel : cxiz'i, -ilo. chocolate ...
— The Esperanto Teacher - A Simple Course for Non-Grammarians • Helen Fryer
... him. The Jarl was the most agreeable of hosts; but the King was silent and sullen. The Jarl talked to him in every way to make him cheerful, and brought forward everything he could think of to amuse him; but the King remained stern, and speaking little. At last the Jarl proposed a game of chess, which he agreed to. A chess-board was produced, and they played together. Jarl Ulf was hasty in temper, stiff, and in nothing yielding; but everything he managed went on well in his hands: and he was ...
— Early Kings of Norway • Thomas Carlyle
... Oriental influence came into Europe, but that it did come is absolutely certain. The transformation of the Buddha-legend into the Christian legend of Barlaam and Josaphat, the migration of fables and stories, and the introduction of the game of chess furnish the ...
— The Influence of India and Persia on the Poetry of Germany • Arthur F. J. Remy
... To the Place of the Orient, And the stout Queen sneered, "Ah, well! You are proud and prude, ma belle! But I think I will hazard a guess I shall see you one day playing chess With ...
— Pike County Ballads and Other Poems • John Hay
... and the name of the palace was Rosnaree. And upon the level green in front of the regal abode, or in the banqueting-halls, might always be seen noble companies of knights and ladies bright,—some feasting, some playing at the chess, some giving ear to the music of their own harps, some continually shaking the Chain of Silence, and some listening to the poems and tales of heroes of the olden time that were told by the king's ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... imitation of the old Court of France. During these excursions he sometimes partook of the pleasures of the chase, but merely for the sake of reviving an old custom, for in that exercise he found as little amusement as Montaigne did in the game of chess, ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... that the bag is my bag." When the Kurd heard my words, he wept and wailed and said, "O my lord the Cadi, my bag is known and what is in it is renowned; therein are castles and citadels and cranes and beasts of prey and men playing chess and draughts. Moreover, in this my bag is a brood-mare and two colts and a stallion and two blood-horses and two long lances and a lion and two hares and a city and two villages and a courtezan and two sharking pimps and a catamite and two gallows-birds and a blind man and two dogs and ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume III • Anonymous
... and after we had all imbibed, the Earl and Uncle Tooter played chess on the great mahogany table in the center of the room; Holmes and Thorneycroft started a game of checkers, as did Lord Launcelot and myself, sitting on the leather-covered divans in the broad bay-window, while ...
— The Adventures of the Eleven Cuff-Buttons • James Francis Thierry
... quite so well as you and Katy; and all recess-time she wouldn't speak to me, but now we've made up. Dorry is so awfully in love with her that I never can get him to come into the room when she is here, and he blushes when we tease him about her. But this is a great secret. Dorry and I play chess every evening. He almost always beats unless papa comes behind and helps me. Phil has learned too, because he always wants to do every thing that we do. Dorry gives him a castle, and a bishop, and ...
— What Katy Did At School • Susan Coolidge
... commanding must have a plan of operations. Napoleon said that war is like a game of chess, and that a commander must make his game. He must think it out beforehand, and in such a manner that the enemy will be compelled to play it in his way and be defeated. The general-in-chief must see the end from the beginning, just as Napoleon, sticking his map of Europe ...
— My Days and Nights on the Battle-Field • Charles Carleton Coffin
... a pleasant one for Adelaide, being an earnest of the future for which, if she had not worked hard, she had controlled much. Edgar sang solos to her accompaniment, and put in his rich baritone to her pure if feeble soprano; he played chess with her for an hour, and praised her play, as it deserved: naturally, not thinking it necessary to make love to his sisters, he paid her almost exclusive attention, and looked the admiration he felt. She really ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... "every sin has its antithesis. It's like a chess board—the human mind—with the black men ranged on one side and the white on the other, ready to move, to advance, skirmish, threaten, manoeuvre, attack, and check each other, and the intervening squares represent the ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... table by the fire stood a chess-board, the old carved red and white pieces standing on it in jumbled disarray; for Chloe and her husband, both inveterate chess-lovers, had begun a game which they were unable, through lack of time, to finish; and as his eyes fell on the board Anstice had ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... leaders is past. The analogies and precedents that lead one to forecast the coming of military one-man-dominions, the coming of such other parodies of Caesar's career as that misapplied, and speedily futile chess champion, Napoleon I. contrived, are false. They are false because they ignore two correlated things; first, the steady development of a new and quite unprecedented educated class as a necessary aspect of the expansion of science and mechanism, ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... with many of his relatives, called panguilans, and his children and brothers. This witness saw and knew the tumango and mandahala, the panguilan Salalila, and many others. The said king of Borney was playing chess, seated in a hall with the said panguilans. This witness bowed low and made the usual obeisance, gave him the said carpet, and sat down. One of the king's sons said to this witness, in his own language, that he talked excellently, and asked him his nationality. ...
— The Philippine Islands 1493-1898, Vol. 4 of 55 - 1576-1582 • Edited by E. H. Blair and J. A. Robertson
... one is willing to play? one wins and another loses: why there have been as many moves among titled persons, Kings, Queens, Bishops, Lords and Knights, within the last century, as there are in a game at chess. Pawns have been taken and restored in all classes, from the Sovereign, who pawns or loses his crown, to the Lady whose reputation is in pawn, and becomes at last not worth half a crown. Shuffling, cutting, dealing out and 358 dealing in, double dealing and double ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... have also long been accustomed to print in colours. The paper they employ is manufactured from the bark of the mulberry, but is so thin that only one side can be used. They have sorts of games, some like our chess, and cards, and lotto, and we saw the lads in the streets playing ball very much as boys do in ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... paper; he competes in the oratorical contests. One, for example, is a member of the school orchestra; another, perhaps the son or the grandson of an immigrant from Germany, leads the cheers at the track meet; another, himself an immigrant from Russia, plays on the chess team and is one of the brilliant scholars in his class. This last does, at present, have something of the stranger about him, but before long, no doubt, his speech will have become more smooth, his trousers will have begun to show a crease; he will have become quite an interesting and regular figure ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... grace, etc.—which began to come in with Dryden, and has been coming ever since. The comedy Spaniard, like Don Armado in "Love's Labour's Lost," was a familiar figure on the English boards. Middleton took the double plot of his "Spanish Gipsy" from two novels of Cervantes; and his "Game of Chess," a political allegorical play, aimed against Spanish intrigues, made a popular hit and was stopped, after a then unexampled run, in consequence of the remonstrances of Gondomar, the Spanish ambassador. Somewhat later the Restoration stage borrowed ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... euchre, or hearts, or parchesi; Susan and Philip struggled with chess; there were talks about the fire, and they all straggled upstairs at ten o'clock. Anna, appreciative and affectionate and brave, came home for almost every Saturday night, and these were special occasions. Susan and Betsey wasted their best efforts upon ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... strong family likeness to her father—a likeness which had grown upon her as she had become older, and which extended even to voice and manner of speaking. He remembered how he had heard me describe the game of chess I had played with the doctor in days gone by, and with his mind's ear seemed to hear Miss Skinner saying, as though it were ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... good old yeoman, reached the hall of Frithiof, he found the hero sitting with Bjoern at a game of chess. Gladly was he greeted by the young man, who pointed to the High Chair, the chief seat at the board, and bade him sit and drink a horn of mead while they finished ...
— Told by the Northmen: - Stories from the Eddas and Sagas • E. M. [Ethel Mary] Wilmot-Buxton
... Miss Purcell, who was longing to cry over her novel, to allow him to read for her, since he saw that she was trying her eyes, and therewith made fiasco of a page of delicious dolor; and being challenged to chess by a third, declared that was child's play, and dominoes was the game for science,—whereon, having seated a circle at that absorbing sport, he deserted for a meerschaum and the gentlemen, and in company with Captain Purcell, Mr. McLean, and the rest, rolled up from the hall below ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... space jockey, doing his job in this screwball fight out here in the empty reaches. Back on Earth, there was no war. The statesmen talked, held conferences, played international chess as ever. Neither side bothered the other's satellites, though naturally they were on permanent alert. There just wasn't going to be any Moon station for a while. Nobody knew what there might be on the Moon, but if one side couldn't have it, then the other side ...
— Slingshot • Irving W. Lande
... in their reading, of which there was a good assortment—the daily papers, the magazines and a choice collection of books furnished by the American Library Association. Other groups were intent upon chess or checkers, while in the piano corner were the musically inclined. Sometimes it was a piano or a baritone solo, but most often the boys were singing "Keep the Home Fires Burning," "The Long, Long ...
— The Fight for the Argonne - Personal Experiences of a 'Y' Man • William Benjamin West
... thickly covered with gold cups, silver salvers, and other such valuables. All this Alleyne examined with curious eyes; but most interesting of all to him was a small ebony table at his very side, on which, by the side of a chess-board and the scattered chessmen, there lay an open manuscript written in a right clerkly hand, and set forth with brave flourishes and devices along the margins. In vain Alleyne bethought him of where he was, and of those laws of good breeding and decorum which should ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... for the nations had been utterly ignored in London by the allotment of German Tyrol to Italy. Wilson forbade this and declared that nations could not be treated against their will and moved hither and thither like the pieces in a game of chess. Wilson said that every solution of a territorial question arising out of this war must be arrived at in the interests and in favour of the peoples concerned, and not as a mere balancing or compromise of claims from rival sources; and further, that ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin
... who talk English, drink beer, like jokes and beat me at chess or table-tennis are people for my money, even if they look like ...
— Accidental Death • Peter Baily
... contained. Yet Philip said there was a world in those books. The room was a small and singularly cosy one, and here, when Mr. Faringfield was not occupied at the mahogany desk, we children might play at chess, draughts, cards, and other games. From this room, one went back into the dining-room, another apartment endeared to me by countless pleasant memories. Its two windows looked Southward across the side grounds (for the hall and great parlour came not so far back) to our house ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens
... a broad-shouldered, heavy-set, bushy-eyebrowed individual, looked up from the chess-board, annoyed at this interruption of a game which had been in progress since ten o'clock that night. O'Leary grabbed ...
— Midnight • Octavus Roy Cohen
... Europe of Paul Morphy, the Chess Champion; including an Historical Account of Clubs, Biographical Sketches of Famous Players, and Various Information and Anecdote relating to the Noble Game of Chess. By Paul Morphy's late Secretary. New York: D. Appleton ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... Harry was unfitted alike by nature and training. He could sing romantic ditties, and accompany himself with discretion on the piano; he was a graceful although a timid cavalier; he had a pronounced taste for chess; and nature had sent him into the world with one of the most engaging exteriors that can well be fancied. Blond and pink, with dove's eyes and a gentle smile, he had an air of agreeable tenderness and melancholy and the most submissive and caressing manners. But when all is said, he was not the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of these departed abruptly ere the meal was at an end. The Sabbath was observed strictly by the majority of the emigrants. I heard an old woman express her surprise that, "The ship didna gae doon," as she saw some one pass her with a chess-board on the holy day. Some sang Scottish psalms. Many went to service, and in true Scottish fashion came back ill pleased with their divine. "I didna think he was an experienced preacher," ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... hall, and up and down, some, squatted Upon their hams, were occupied at chess; Others in monosyllable talk chatted, And some seem'd much in love with their own dress. And divers smoked superb pipes decorated With amber mouths of greater price or less; And several strutted, others slept, and some Prepared for supper ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... built a new one, and Cromwell's soldiers smashed it about, but it was patched up again. It is a very odd house: the front door opens straight into the dining-room, and there are red curtains and a black-and-white marble floor like a chess-board, and there is a secret staircase, only it is not secret now—only rather rickety. It is not very big, but there is a watery moat all round it with a brick bridge that leads to the front door. Then, on the other side ...
— The Wouldbegoods • E. Nesbit
... flashed through Justine's mind as she reached the landing; but the next moment it gave way to a contradictory feeling. Westy Gaines was not alone in the hall. From under the stairway rose the voices of a group ensconced in that popular retreat about a chess-board; and as Justine reached the last turn of the stairs she perceived that Mason Winch, an earnest youth with advanced views on political economy, was engaged, to the diversion of a circle of spectators, in teaching the Telfer girls chess. The futility of trying ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... met Cousin Chilian, who had been playing a rather prolonged game of chess with a visitor. But Bentley kept on with them, and said good-night with a polite bow, adding, "She must come again, Mr. Leverett, we had ...
— A Little Girl in Old Salem • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... one of the most delightful of our resting places, even in the Shenandoah Valley. We passed the days pleasantly, strolling or riding among the groves of black walnut, visiting among the various regiments, amusing ourselves with chess and books. Nothing occurred to interrupt these pleasant pastimes and the monotony of picket duty until the 13th of September, when the Second division was directed to make a reconnoissance to the ...
— Three Years in the Sixth Corps • George T. Stevens
... for the girls, red and white and gold—there were sweets by the pound and by the box—and long yards and yards of soft silk from India, to make frocks for the girls—and a real Indian sword for Oswald and a book of Japanese pictures for Noel, and some ivory chess men for Dicky: the castles of the chessmen are elephant-and-castles. There is a railway station called that; I never knew what it meant before. The brown paper and string parcels had boxes of games in them—and big cases of preserved fruits and things. And the shabby old newspaper ...
— The Story of the Treasure Seekers • E. Nesbit
... Without thee by, a lie's a lie— The truth is nought but truthful. But by me stay, and night is day— And even you are youthful When thou art near, love,— Not, love, unless,— Thick soup is clear, love, Football is chess. IRVINGS are TOOLES, love, Tadpoles are deer, Wise men are fools, love, When ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, July 19, 1890 • Various
... followed it out on the marsh, and when it cut into another dyke she followed that, walking on the bank beside the great teazle. A plank bridge took her across between two willows, and after some more such movements, like a pawn on a chess-board, she had crossed three dykes and was at the ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... instead the record of a well-ordered household, in which each man performed the duties assigned to him, duties which gave each enough exercise to tire him out and make him long for the quiet hours of reading or chess-playing, or games, which were to follow in the cabin when the ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 56, December 2, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... a secret society, to occupy our subterranean dwelling. In that I fear we overstepped the rules of the school. Of course, Mr. Clark knew of our cave, in fact he visited us there once, lowering his dignity sufficiently to squeeze into the narrow passageway, and playing Bill a game of chess at our club table. He seemed quite pleased with our work, and complimented us very highly on the masterful way in which we had built the underground house. We told him that we had organized a club of the older fellows to play ...
— The Scientific American Boy - The Camp at Willow Clump Island • A. Russell Bond
... carried to the country of a great Sultan, and when the Sultan heard that there was an ape who could write beautiful poems, he sent for him to the palace, and they had dinner together, and they played at chess afterwards, the ape behaving in all respects like a man, excepting that he could not speak. Then the Sultan sent for his daughter, the Queen of Beauty, to see this great wonder. But when the Queen of Beauty came into the room she was very angry with her father for showing her to a man, for ...
— Fairy Tales; Their Origin and Meaning • John Thackray Bunce
... were much in the same state, with little prospect of their coming out. Easterly winds were prevalent, and we were generally at anchor, one half of the ship's company doing nothing, and the other helping them. I soon found that our noble commander was fond of the game of chess and a stiff glass of grog, and I frequently found him en chemise with those companions at daylight on one of the cabin lockers. He was an unmarried man, but a great admirer of the fair sex of all descriptions, ...
— A Sailor of King George • Frederick Hoffman
... them were sipping wine, others were playing cards, others chess, other groups were chatting together, and many were smoking cigarettes while they waited for the coming duels. Nearly all of them wore colored caps; there were white caps, green caps, blue caps, red ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... needs be spiritualised and moralised; there were sermons to be found in stones, pious allegories in beast and bird; mystic meanings in the alphabet, in grammar, in the chase, in the tourney, in the game of chess. Ovid and Virgil were sanctified to religious uses. The earliest versified Bestiary, which is also a Volucrary, a Herbary, and a Lapidary, that of Philippe de Thaon (before 1135), is versified from the Latin Physiologus, itself a translation from the work of an Alexandrian Greek of the ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... necessary both for play and for aesthetic appreciation, the latter differs essentially from the former by its contemplative nature. For although it may be possible to watch other people playing football or chess or bridge in a purely contemplative spirit and with the deepest admiration, even as the engineer or surgeon may contemplate the perfections of a machine or an operation, yet the concentration on the aim and the next moves constitutes on the part of the players themselves an eminently practical ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee
... Mrs. Hsueeh would readily come over and converse, on one thing and another, with dowager lady Chia, or have a chat with madame Wang; while Pao-ch'ai came together, day after day, with Tai yue, Ying-ch'un, her sisters and the other girls, either to read, to play chess, or to do needlework, and the pleasure which they derived was ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... first years when he entered as office-boy into the employment of Briggs & Livingstone—the firm at the time of which I am now writing was Lynde, Livingstone & Co. Mr. David Lynde lived in a set of chambers up town, and dined at his club, where he usually passed the evenings at chess with some brother antediluvian. A visit to the theatre, when some old English comedy or some new English ballet happened to be on the boards, was the periphery of his dissipation. What is called society saw nothing of him. He was a rough, ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... by oxen, delivers the water into a trough which passes into a reservoir, roughly fashioned with clay, from which, small channels of about ten inches in width radiate through the plantation. The fields, divided into squares like a chess-board, are thus irrigated by a succession of minute aqueducts. The root of this principle is the reservoir. A certain steady volume of water is required, from which the arteries shall flow throughout a large area of dry ground; ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... a man of the world and knew an unlimited number of racy stories, and even if he repeated some of them unduly, they were better than no stories at all. And then, there was his matchless, unfailing patience in playing chess or backgammon or draughts or bezique, whatever he perceived that the ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... of a game of chess. The generals of the Danes were beaten at it, and they were vexed; and Cennedigh was killed on a hill near Fermoy. He put the Holy Gospels in his breast as a protection, but he was struck through them with a reeking dagger. It was Brodar, ...
— The Kiltartan History Book • Lady I. A. Gregory
... who was the centre of so many orbs. What affairs had he not to manage! what designs, what projects, what secrets! what interests to unravel, what wars to undertake, what intrigues, what noble games at chess to play and to direct! Ah! my God, grant me a little time; I want to give check to the Duke of Savoy—checkmate to the Prince of Orange. No, no, you shall not have a moment, not a single moment. Are events like these ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... fair," said a lady's voice. "I firmly believe, and I've said it all along, that you let me beat you. Why, you taught me chess yourself, and how is it possible that I could catch up to my master in ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... track whist trash brick smack crash whim chest crust stump stock which script scrub splash scrap whisk spend shred struck block ship cramp grunt scamp frank chill smash print shrink throb chat twitch stack thump pluck sprang spring drink thrush shrub sham switch check stretch brush chess snatch ...
— The Beacon Second Reader • James H. Fassett
... every move with that care and instinct which marks a good chess-player. And because he had to count upon possibilities far ahead he drew Ramon's saddle to him and cut the stirrup-leathers, cinchas, and latigos. If Ramon got one of their horses, his own jaded animal would be left. Eventually the rurales would find ...
— Jim Waring of Sonora-Town - Tang of Life • Knibbs, Henry Herbert
... gathered his warriors to fight King Ring, the angry Frithiof was playing chess with his friend Bjorn. Hilding urged him to forget his anger and go into battle to fight for his king and his country. "The times are evil, dear foster-son," said the good Hilding, "and you ...
— Northland Heroes • Florence Holbrook
... Those evenings in the bleak December, Curtained warm from the snowy weather, When you and I played chess together, Checkmated by each ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... name of our rook in chess is taken from that of this same bird; though first perverted ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... In chess, the object of the game, namely, to checkmate one's opponent, is of arbitrary adoption; of the possible means of attaining it, there is a great number; and according as we make a prudent use of them, we arrive at our goal. We enter on the ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; The Art of Controversy • Arthur Schopenhauer
... vowed The royal gonfalon to rear; Gerein, and his fellow in arms, Gerier; With them many a gallant lance, Full fifteen thousand of gentle France. The cavaliers sit upon carpets white, Playing at tables for their delight: The older and sager sit at the chess, The bachelors fence with a light address. Seated underneath a pine, Close beside an eglantine, Upon a throne of beaten gold, The lord of ample France behold; White his hair and beard were seen, Fair of body, and proud of mien, Who ...
— The Harvard Classics, Volume 49, Epic and Saga - With Introductions And Notes • Various
... really, when cleared of its gambling details, as good a domestic game for three players as cribbage or piquet is for two. My "Court Gamester," which was in its fifth edition in 1728, after devoting its best energies to ombre, contented its readers in fewer pages with the addition only of piquet and chess. ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... read, write, and calculate, which is more than we can say of the English. They are a grave, honest, benevolent people, but not remarkable for their industry. Their favorite amusements, when assembled together, consist in reading history or poetry, in singing, or playing at chess, in which game they take great delight, priding themselves on their skill. They are refined enough to admire poetry and music: I think I need say no more. We will ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... its name implies, is devoted to chess. Germans patronize it to a great extent. Politics do not enter into ...
— The Dodge Club - or, Italy in 1859 • James De Mille
... tears of rage in my exile—my wanderings—have I asked that question of myself! That rage has ceased; and I have but one feeling left for that credulous, fickle Paris, of which one day I was the idol, the next the byword. Well, a man sometimes plays chess more skilfully for having been long a mere bystander. He understands better how to move, and when to sacrifice the pieces. Politics, M. Vane, is the only exciting game left to me at my years. At yours, there is still that of love. How time flies! we are nearing ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... was one man (History) who was not quite the all-round athlete of the universe, and was not good at anything more muscular than chess and golf, the eleven others had each his specialty and ...
— The Dozen from Lakerim • Rupert Hughes
... were printed that he purchased some type and, bringing it home, set up a printing press in London not far from Westminster Abbey. The first English book to be printed was dated 1474 and was called 'The Game of Chess.' Then came a Bible which was presented to the king. From this time on there was practically an end to the handwritten books made by the monks in cloisters and monasteries. Occasionally such a volume was made for the very rich because, as I told you, the elegant still considered paper ...
— Paul and the Printing Press • Sara Ware Bassett
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