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More "Matting" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... scroll-work on its porches and horsehair furniture inside. Oh, the smell of its darkened interior on a midsummer day! Like the flavour of that choicest of tropical fruits, the mangosteen, it baffles analysis, and the nearest I can come to it is a mixture of matting and corn-bread, with another element ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the fair, curving beach, below the white houses scattered on the declivity, clustered the Indian lodges, with their amber-brown matting, so soft and bright of hue, in the late afternoon sun. The first afternoon I was there, looking down from a near height, I felt that I never wished to see a more fascinating picture. It was an hour of the deepest serenity; bright blue and ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... the sand or on a cement base, each contain three men. Those of the Ottoman prisoners form one sectional group of 24 tents. In the centre of each tent is a wire-work cupboard to contain personal belongings. The space inside the tent is ample for the three beds. Some prisoners are provided with matting and ...
— Turkish Prisoners in Egypt - A Report By The Delegates Of The International Committee - Of The Red Cross • Various
... drawing-room, a spacious apartment now in its simple summer dress of straw matting, linen ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... small room—the one across the hall—and rather shabby, with its matting soiled and torn, its cheap iron bedstead and painted washstand and chairs. Lizette however ...
— The Torch Bearer - A Camp Fire Girls' Story • I. T. Thurston
... ground floor, had been cut sheer away. The effect was startling, and through the panes, freed from the dust and cobwebs of a generation, the blue distant line of the Pennines could be distinctly seen far away to the southeast. The floor of the gallery was spread with a fine matting of a faint golden brown, on which at intervals lay a few old Persian or Indian rugs. The white panelling of the walls was broken here and there by a mirror, or a girandole, delicate work of the same date as the ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... she rode up to the gate on the afternoon following her departure from the water-hole, and she felt a thrill of pride at the acres of sprouting corn, the dense green fields of alfalfa so nicely fitted between their fences. They were like clean, green squares of matting spread for the feet ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... about excitedly, and it could be seen that they were bringing from the huts the rude household utensils in which they did their primitive cooking. The women had their babies, and some, not so encumbered, carried rolls of grass matting. The ...
— Tom Swift and his Electric Rifle • Victor Appleton
... obligation to put so much faith in the builder, who is said to be your God and Father, as to do the thing he tells you? Instead of working away at the palace, like men, will you go on tacking bits of matting and old carpet about the corners of the scaffold to keep the wind off, while that same wind keeps tearing them away and scattering them? You keep trying to live in a scaffold, which not all you could do to all eternity would make a house of. You ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... woods on that mountain, as they always thought of Kiriti, every day and night appeared unto them even as a year. From that very moment joy had taken leave of them when, with Dhaumya's permission, the high-souled Jishnu, matting his hair, departed (for the woods). So, how could they, absorbed in his contemplation, experience happiness there? They had become overwhelmed with grief ever since the moment when at the command ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... its usual resting-place, and I sat down on the stool. The woman opened a box, and took out a strange little basket or hamper, not much larger than a man's fist, and formed of a delicate kind of matting. It was sewed at the top; but, ripping it open with a knife, she held it to me, and I saw, to my surprise, that it contained candied fruits of a dark green hue, tempting enough to one of my age. 'There, my tiny,' said she; 'taste, and tell me ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... We sat very close together upon the same stool in a house about as big as a bee-hive, which we had built for our exclusive use out of old planks. Our dwelling was covered with pieces of foreign matting that had come from the Antilles packed about some boxes of coffee. The sunbeams pierced the roof, which was of a coarse straw-colored material, and the warm breeze that stirred the leaves of the trees about us made the sunlight dance as it fell upon our faces and aprons. (During at least two summers ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... other mornings. He had heard her light footsteps in the big room—the room where he had unpacked the cases from London; the room now lined with the backs of books halfway up on its three sides. Above the cases the fine matting met the ceiling of tightly stretched white calico. In the dusk and coolness nothing gleamed except the gilt frame of the portrait of Heyst's father, signed by a famous painter, lonely in the middle ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... but the ordinary cultivator's house is one-roomed, with an angan or small yard in front and a little space for a garden behind, in which vegetables are grown during the rains. The walls are of bamboo matting plastered over with mud. The married couples sleep inside, the room being partitioned off if there are two or more in the family, and the older persons sleep in the verandahs. In the middle of the village by the biggest temple will be an old pipal tree, the trunk ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... apple tree. The eggs, generally five, are bluish or pure white. The same nest is often occupied season after season. One which had been used for five successive summers, was repaired each year with the same material, matting that the birds had evidently taken from the covering of grape vines. The nest was very neatly and thoroughly ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [May, 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... an attic which he shared with a younger brother. The furniture of the latter might have answered for the cell of an anchorite, and consisted of a hard mattress on a cot-bedstead, plain wooden chairs and table, with matting on the floor. It was without fire, and to cold he was throughout life extremely sensitive; but he never complained or appeared in any way to be conscious of inconvenience. 'I recollect,' says his brother, 'after one most severe night, that in the ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... doubtless very interesting to Menou, made me gape a little. I amused myself by looking round the dining-room, in which we then were, the furniture and appearance of which rather improved my opinion of Creole civilization and comfort. The matting that covered the floor was new and of an elegant design—the sideboard solid and handsome, although prodigiously old-fashioned—tables, chairs, and sofas were of French manufacture. On the walls were suspended two or three engravings; not the fight at New ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... most palaces and castles at this period the walls were covered with tapestry and the floors with matting. This remark is necessary to enable ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. I. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... round the room, noting the rough stone walls, the ancient, uneven floor, uncovered by so much as a piece of matting; and then his glance returned to the large modern window which looked so incongruous ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... from old Chinese rugs which have found their way here via Lhassa, and though upon close examination it is true they differ considerably in quality and manufacture, they are pleasing enough to the eye. These rugs are woven upon coarse thread matting, the coloured material being let in vertically. A soft surface is obtained not unlike in general appearance to that of Persian carpets, but not quite so pleasant to the touch. These small rectangular rugs are offered in the house of Shoka gentlemen to guests to sit on, and are also used ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... of paper right on to my garden. I was just going to peep at it, and see what it was mother shouldn't have done. Then granny gets up, and goes peering all round to see where the paper's gone. She pulled all the cushions out of the chair, and turned up the matting, and looked over her letters ever so many times, and never noticed that it had blown out of the window. Presently I put my head through the window, and cried out, 'What's the matter, granny?' 'It's only I've dropped a little bit of paper, my dear,' she says to me. 'Just come and see ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... window was boarded up. The ceiling had once been whitewashed and a few limp, dark fragments of paper still adhering to the walls proved that some forgotten decorator had exercised his art upon them in the past. A piece of well-worn matting lay upon the floor, and there were two chairs, a table, and a number of empty tea-chests in ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... Furniture, should be selected with Reference to each other. Laying down Carpets. Blocks to prevent Sofas and Tables from rubbing against Walls, and to hold Doors open. Footstools. Sweeping Carpets. Tealeaves. Wet Indian Meal. Taking up and cleansing Carpets. Washing Carpets. Straw Matting. Pictures and Glasses. Curtains and Sofas. Mahogany Furniture. Unvarnished Furniture; Mixtures for. Hearths and Jambs. Sweeping ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... said. She had gathered little comforts and embellishments about her from summer to summer, until the room had a home-cheeriness, and even a look of luxury, contrasted with the bare dormitories around it. Over the straw matting, that soon grows shabby in a hotel, she had laid a large, nicely-bound square of soft, green carpet, in a little mossy pattern, that covered the middle of the floor, and was held tidily in place by a foot of the ...
— A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life. • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... moaning with grief, had tossed all night on her hard bed of matting and her harder pillow of hollowed wood. Even the familiar raucous sounds of early morning in the Chinese quarter of San Jose, remindful of that far-distant country which held all of her heart not lying dead under Christian sod, failed to lighten the burden which sat upon her. She saw the morning ...
— The Ape, the Idiot & Other People • W. C. Morrow
... was husked, the loose chaff was winnowed from it in a flat basket like a sieve; and it was then put by in coarse birch baskets, roughly sewed with leather-wood bark, or bags made of matting woven by the little squaw from the cedar-bark. A portion was also parched, which was simply done by putting the rice dry into the iron pot, and setting it on hot embers, stirring the grain till it burst; it was then stored by for use. Rice thus prepared is eaten dry, ...
— Lost in the Backwoods • Catharine Parr Traill
... forms the Baiga's residence, and if it is burnt down, or abandoned on a visitation of epidemic disease, he can build another in the space of a day. A rough earthen vessel to hold water, leaves for plates, gourds for drinking-vessels, a piece of matting to sleep on, and a small axe, a sickle and a spear, exhaust the inventory of the Baiga's furniture, and the money value of the whole would not exceed a rupee. [96] The Baigas never live in a village with other castes, but have their ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... worth the ten sen fee, if only to see their manner of conducting the opera. If you imagine the interior of a church, having all its pews removed, leaving only the cant pieces on which they were erected, and the spaces between these pieces covered and padded with the beautiful rice-straw matting of the country, you will get a fairly good idea of the simple fittings of a Japanese music hall. A whole family seats itself in one of these squares; and as a concert in this country is really a formidable ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... above me the sky was flooded with pale and palpitating stars. We slid out of the mountains into the broad Humboldt desert one cloudless day: it was like getting on the roof of the world—the great domed roof with its eaves sloping away under the edges of heaven, and whereon there is nothing but a matting of sagebrush, looking like grayish moss, and a deep alkali dust as white and as fine ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... Willoughby a formidable front. His head-piece was gone, his breastplate dinted, his right sleeve a rag hanging from his shoulder about a naked arm. He was splashed from head to foot with blood, and there was blood from a scalp-wound that he had taken matting his hair and mixing with the grime of powder on his ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... him: e had three contusions in the head, three strokes across the brow, a bayonet wound in the throat under the ear, and other wounds in the body—I counted fifteen wounds in that single carcase. Some were bringing handkerchiefs, others bed furniture, and matting to cover up the faces of the dead. O God! sir, it was a sight for a sabbath morn that, I humbly implore Heaven, may never be seen again. Poor women crying for absent husbands, and children frightened into quietness. I, sir, write disinterestedly, and I hope my feelings arose from a true ...
— The Eureka Stockade • Carboni Raffaello
... our house neatly laid with mats, and looking comparatively inviting. The firebrands had been carried out, leaving only the coals in the center of the floor, surrounded by stones to protect the matting. The house was of thatched sides and altogether looked very much like the native houses ...
— Scenes in the Hawaiian Islands and California • Mary Evarts Anderson
... the front room we had ostensible things such as fruit, a guitar, and a table with a conch shell on it. In the back room O'Connor had his desk and a large looking-glass and his sword hid in a roll of straw matting. We slept on hammocks that we hung to hooks in the wall; and took our meals at the Hotel Ingles, a beanery run on the American plan by a German proprietor with Chinese cooking served a la ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... of fact, Lyddy was reveling in house-furnishing of a humble sort. She had a passion for color. There was a red-and-white straw matting on the sitting-room floor. Reckless in the certain possession of twenty dollars a month, she purchased yards upon yards of turkey red cotton; enough to cover a mattress for the high-backed settle, for long curtains at the windows, and for cushions to the rockers. She knotted ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin
... my throat. I wink, sneeze, and cough. The clerk sneezes; the clergyman winks; the unseen organist sneezes and coughs (and probably winks); all our little party wink, sneeze, and cough. The snuff seems to be made of the decay of matting, wood, cloth, stone, iron, earth, and something else. Is the something else, the decay of dead citizens in the vaults below? As sure as Death it is! Not only in the cold, damp February day, do we cough and sneeze dead citizens, all through the service, but dead citizens ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... trees damp, and cherished a vague fear of meeting a bull. To guard against such contingencies she frequented the more populous watering-places, where she installed herself impersonally in a hired house and looked on at life through the matting screen of her verandah. In the care of such a guardian, it soon became clear to Lily that she was to enjoy only the material advantages of good food and expensive clothing; and, though far from underrating these, she would gladly have exchanged them for what Mrs. ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... recesses—looked into the garden. Each recess was filled with groups of flowers in pots. On the other side, the old wall was gaily decorated with hangings of bright chintz. The doors were colored of a creamy white, with gilt moldings. The brightly ornamented matting under our feet I at once recognized as of South American origin. The ceiling above was decorated in delicate pale blue, with borderings of flowers. Nowhere down the whole extent of the place was so much as a single morsel of dark color to be ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... broad cocoa-nut and plantain leaves. But every part of it was in a state of the utmost decay. Moss and green matter grew in spots all over it. The woodwork was quite perforated with holes; the roof had nearly fallen in, and appeared to be prevented from doing so altogether by the thick matting of creeping-plants and the interlaced branches which years of neglect had allowed to cover it almost entirely; while the thick, luxuriant branches of the bread-fruit and other trees spread above it, and flung a deep, sombre shadow over the ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... matting under the riffles of the first six boxes. Half-way the length of the sluice-boxes the finest gravel, yellow and black sand, dropped through perforated sheet-iron grizzles into the "undercurrents" while the rocks and boulders rushed on through ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... overside, and cast him loose upon the breadth of the antipodes. Rare and far, the sails of junks patched the horizon with umber polygons. Rudolph, sitting among his boxes in the sampan, viewed by turns this desolate void astern and the more desolate sweep of coast ahead. His matting sail divided the shining bronze outpour of an invisible river, divided a low brown shore beyond, and above these, the strips of some higher desert country that shone like snowdrifts, or like sifted ashes from which the hills rose black and ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... evident. And that was not all. Traces of former spasmodic and individual efforts desecrated the present ideals. The doctor's pew had a pink-and-blue Brussels on it; the lawyer's, striped stair-carpeting; the Browns from Deerwander sported straw matting and were not abashed; while the Greens, the Whites, the Blacks, and the Grays displayed floor coverings as dissimilar as ...
— Homespun Tales • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... dust should be carefully excluded. It should be furnished with nothing apt to collect and retain dust; a carpet is therefore not only a useless article, but very improper. A bare floor is to be prefered; but if you must cover it use matting. There is no place about your establishment where greater care should be taken to have order and cleanliness; for it will prevent many failures often attributed to other causes. "A place for every ...
— The History and Practice of the Art of Photography • Henry H. Snelling
... stairs, for his knees were trembling under him. Twice as we ascended Holmes whipped his lens out of his pocket and carefully examined marks which appeared to me to be mere shapeless smudges of dust upon the cocoa-nut matting which served as a stair-carpet. He walked slowly from step to step, holding the lamp, and shooting keen glances to right and left. Miss Morstan had remained ...
— The Sign of the Four • Arthur Conan Doyle
... by weeping mourners, who made the ruins of Janina echo with their lamentations. The guns were fired at long intervals. The portcullis was raised to admit the procession, and the whole garrison, drawn up to receive it, rendered a military salute. The body, covered with matting, was laid in a grave beside that of Amina. When the grave had been filled in, a priest approached to listen to the supposed conflict between the good and bad angels, who dispute the possession of the soul of the deceased. When he at length announced ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - ALI PACHA • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... our daily expenses were concerned we in the provinces had very little inconvenience to suffer on account of "Mex"; but in Manila all merchants fixed their prices in gold and took occasion to put them up mercilessly. I remember trying to buy some Japanese matting which could have been bought for twenty-five cents a yard in the States, but which was priced at seventy-five cents in Manila. The merchant wanted me to pay him in "Mex" at a ratio of 2.66, or at the rate of two pesos a yard for matting which he ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... charge was ready, Nick pulled up the heavy rope matting from the floor, and after doubling it again and again until there was a huge wad of it, he braced it with desks and chairs against the front of the safe; and when all that was done to his satisfaction, he lighted the fuse, and ran back to the rear hallway, where ...
— A Woman at Bay - A Fiend in Skirts • Nicholas Carter
... thousands of acres of tillable land which have been left by the restless shiftings of the American population. In New England the abandoned farm has long been an institution. Throughout the East there are depleted and dying villages, their solidly built cottages hidden in the matting of trees and shrubs which neglect has woven about them. One can see paralysis creeping over them as the vines creep over their deserted thresholds and they surrender one by one the little industries that gave them life. These are ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth
... soon full to overflowing, and so was our one room, for everything ordered for the house had arrived—rolls of calico heavy and unbleached, mosquito netting, blue matting for the floors, washstand ware, cups and saucers, and dozens of smaller necessities piled in every corner of ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... answer all the inquiries of curious neighbours, which was his department. His presence and example diffused such alacrity among the persons employed, that, in a few hours, the house was emptied of everything, but pieces of matting, empty porter-pots, ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... Yellow Sea to ports along the northern coasts or to the hermit kingdom of Corea. These vessels have frequently five or six masts spread out like a fan, from the foremast, which rakes forrard at an extraordinary angle, to the mizzenmast, which shoots well out over the stern. Ill-shaped sails of matting, ropes made of twisted bamboo splits, hemp, or cocoa-nut fibre, huge wooden anchors, and a total absence of paint lend to them a most ramshackle and unseaworthy appearance, while clothes drying on the line, cocks crowing, pigs rambling about at will, plants growing in pots and old ...
— Life and sport in China - Second Edition • Oliver G. Ready
... giving the word before each repetition. When they had finished their solemn chant, they came along-side, and asked for the chief. As soon as I shewed myself, a pig and a few cocoa-nuts were conveyed up into the ship; and the principal person in the canoe made me an additional present of a piece of matting, as soon as he and ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... up with scanty care. The embrasures are framed with decaying palm-trunks; the loop-holes belong partly to the age of archery; and nothing can be ruder than the battlements placed close together, as if to be manned by bowmen, while in not a few places there are the remains of matting between the courses. At the highest part we found another carefully cemented Sehrij, or underground cistern, with two sharp-topped arches divided by a tall column, Saracenic certainly and not Doric:[EN125] above it a circular aperture, arched round with the finest bricks, serves to lighten the superstructure. ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... seems; my little chamber here, with its delicate matting and snowy draperies, looks like the nest of a ring-dove, it is so white and quiet. The sweet visions which visit me here are melodious as the warbling of the young bird, when the early morning wakens it, as the ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... between my feet; but countless arrows, I knew, were aimed and ready for me, when I came to the surface. So I held down for what seemed an interminable time, though it was only a few seconds, struck for the far shore, and presently felt the green slime of the upper water matting in ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... was a confused assemblage of tall, cone-shaped lodges, built of slender poles supporting great sheets of bark or overlapping folds of fine matting so closely woven from rushes as to be thoroughly rain-proof. Scores of graceful birch canoes, such as the northern tribes excel in making, were drawn up on the river bank; paddles and spears leaned against the lodges, smoke-blackened kettles and other rude ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... good is as the doer thereof and the doer is of the people of Paradise:' so suffer me to sleep here in some corner;" but quoth the other, "Up with thee and be off: yesterday they stole me a bit of matting and to-night I will bolt the door nor allow any to sleep here. And indeed the Apostle of Allah (whom the Almighty save and assain!) hath forbidden sleep o' nights in the mosques." Attaf had no competence to persuade the Castrato by placing himself under his protection, albeit he prayed ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... Hudson Bay country, have even been known to nurture trees of considerable dimensions. The broad flat tail of the animal serves a most excellent purpose, in carrying the mud to the dams or huts, and in matting and smoothing it into ...
— Camp Life in the Woods and the Tricks of Trapping and Trap Making • William Hamilton Gibson
... vines and wistaria. The thirty rooms were somewhat superfluous, as Don Roberto would have none of house-parties, but he could not have breathed in a small house. The rooms were very large and lofty, the floors covered with matting, the furniture light and plain. Above, as from the town house, floated the ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... did Miss Eunice detect a little note of homesickness creeping into his letters. She would not have wondered could she have looked in on him while he wrote, buttoned up in his overcoat and with his hat on. His chilly little bedroom, with its dim lamp and worn matting, was a dismal contrast to the cheerful home where he had always spent his winter evenings. Then she noticed that there was nearly always some reference to the restaurant fare, some longing expressed for one more taste of her cooking—the good cream gravy, the mince ...
— Flip's "Islands of Providence" • Annie Fellows Johnston
... shaped his course. He had observed on the sulphur barrels, near the wall, a strip of matting, used as a cover for them. Nick snatched it from the barrels, and rushed to wrap it around the skirts and limbs ...
— With Links of Steel • Nicholas Carter
... cool draught that was brought him, then flinging himself on a pile of matting in a corner of a dim room, sank forthwith into slumber. He had intended to pretend to sleep, but to lie awake and think. His custodians, however, had arranged things differently, and Black's wits were not working ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... days! Notice it —every stone is laid horizontally; that is to say, just as nature laid it originally in the quarry not set up edgewise; in our day some people set them on edge, and then wonder why they split and flake. Architects cannot teach nature anything. Let me remove this matting—it is put here to preserve the pavement; now there is a bit of pavement that is seven hundred years old; you can see by these scattering clusters of colored mosaics how beautiful it was before time and sacrilegious idlers marred it. Now there, in ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... in the form of a square, near the centre of the building. They were from twelve to fifteen feet in height, and were connected at the top by four stringers forming a square. The rafters rested upon these stringers and upon the top of the circular wall below. The rafters were covered with willow matting, and upon this was spread a layer of prairie grass. Then both wall and roof, from the ground up to the summit, were covered with earth, solid and hard, to a thickness of at least two feet. The rafters projected above ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... He left Hallam full of happy dreams and plans, and as soon as he reached his home began the improvements which were to make it beautiful for his wife. It had its own charm and fitness; its lofty rooms, furnished in cane and Indian matting; its scented dusk, its sweet breezes, its wealth of flowers and foliage. Whatever love could do to make it fair Richard did; and it pleased him to think that his wife would come to it in the spring of the year, that the orange-trees would be in bloom to ...
— The Hallam Succession • Amelia Edith Barr
... to speak, and for several minutes she stood silent. With the exception of her mother's pleasant parlor in Old England, she had never before seen any thing which seemed to her so cosy and cheerful as did that little room, with its single bed, snowy counterpane, muslin curtains, clean matting, convenient toilet table, and what to her was fairer than all the rest, upon the mantel-piece there stood two small vases, filled with sweet spring flowers, whose fragrance filled the apartment with delicious perfume. All this was so different ...
— The English Orphans • Mary Jane Holmes
... fishing-creels, the rods of reed, the hooks, the sails bedraggled with sea-spoil, the lines, the weels, the lobster-pots woven of rushes, the seines, two oars, and an old cobble upon props. Beneath their heads was a scanty matting, their clothes, their sailors' caps. Here was all their toil, here all their wealth. The threshold had never a door nor a watch-dog. All things, all, to them seemed superfluity, for Poverty was their sentinel; they had ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... conveyance in which we accomplished the first two thousand miles of the journey across Siberia. A Yakute sleigh has a pair of runners, but otherwise totally differs from any other sleigh in the wide world. Imagine a sack of coarse matting about four feet deep suspended from a frame of rough wooden poles in a horizontal triangle, which also forms a seat for the driver. Into this bag the traveller first lowers his luggage, then his mattress, pillows, and furs, and finally enters himself, lying at full length upon his belongings. ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... a remarkable state of affairs exists. The first floor has been washed out completely and the second, while submerged, was badly damaged, but not ruined. The walls, floors and pews were drenched, and the mud has collected on the matting and carpets an inch deep. Walking is attended with much difficulty, and the undertakers and attendants, with arms bared, slide about the slippery surface at a tremendous rate. The chancel is filled with coffins, strips of muslin, boards, and all undertaking accessories. ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... the earliest dynasties were placed about a mile back on the great desert plain. The earliest is about 10X20ft. inside, a pit lined with brick walls, and originally roofed with timber and matting. Others also before Menes are 15X25 ft. The tomb probably of Menes is of the latter size. After this the tombs increase 111 size and complexity. The tomb-pit is surrounded by chambers to hold the offerings, the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... covered by a hood of matting, and a mattress inside eases the jolting by day, and serves as ...
— Burma - Peeps at Many Lands • R.Talbot Kelly
... convent parlor being a complete novelty to me, I looked around with some interest on first entering my painting-room at the nunnery. There was but little in it to excite the curiosity of any one. The floor was covered with common matting, and the ceiling with plain whitewash. The furniture was of the simplest kind; a low chair with a praying-desk fixed to the back, and a finely carved oak book-case, studded all over with brass crosses, being the only useful objects that I could discern which had any conventional character ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... severest tax on the imagination, though I always thought myself, that they were both surpassed by incredible swarms of impossible humming-birds, with very gold and silver wings. The floor was covered with bran new matting, and the bedstead of cedar-wood was also new, though the bullock-skin on which the mattress rested, had rather an antiquated air. Moreover, I had a pair of sheets which were not of a bad color, although ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... or late, and late was very near, must pass. But pass to what? There was the rub. And so it was, on occasion, that he ordered all forth from his big grass house, and, alone with his problem, lowered from the roof-beams the matting-wrapped parcels of heads of men he had once seen live and who had passed into the mysterious ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... clothing the Spaniards would have suffered terribly from the severe cold of the nights, but for the ingenuity of one of their number, who invented a soft, thick, warm matting or coverlet which he wove from some long grass that abounded in the vicinity. Every soldier was speedily engaged in the manufacture of these beds or blankets. They were made several inches in thickness and about six feet square. One half served as a mattress, and the ...
— Ferdinand De Soto, The Discoverer of the Mississippi - American Pioneers and Patriots • John S. C. Abbott
... Pomaree. Writing-desks, cut glass and beautiful china, valuable engravings, and gilt candelabras, arms and instruments of all kinds, lay scratched and broken, musty and rusting amongst greasy calabashes, old matting, paddles, fish-spears, and rubbish of all kinds. It was supper-time; and presently the queen came out of her private boudoir, attired in a blue silk gown and rich shawls, but without shoes or stockings. She lay down upon a mat, and fed herself with her fingers. Presumptuous ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... persuaded them, and they landed me on the point, half a mile away, with a box of cheroots, and a roll of matting to take my nap on. I walked round to the clearing, and spread my mat under the canary tree, close to the shore. All that blessed afternoon I waited, and smoked, and killed a snake, and made notes in a pocket Virgil, and ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... breeches. The higher a person's rank, the more clothes he wore, some throwing a large piece loosely over the shoulders. They shaded their eyes from the sun with hats made at the moment required, of cocoanut leaves or matting, and the women sometimes wore small turbans, or a head-dress which consisted of long plaited threads of human hair, wound round and round, with flowers of various kinds stuck between the folds, especially the Cape jessamine, which was always planted near their houses. ...
— Captain Cook - His Life, Voyages, and Discoveries • W.H.G. Kingston
... "lay-by flow" extending for two or three months until the crop, then standing shoulder high and thick with bending heads, was ready for harvest. The flowings served a triple purpose in checking the weeds and grass, stimulating the rice, and saving the delicate stalks from breakage and matting by storms. ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... injustice, Miss Horsingham; indeed you do," broke out the Squire in a white heat and with a deprecating glance at me. "I assure you I sent over a very fine cutting, with a pot and everything, directions for matting it in winter and transplanting after a year. If you never got it I'll discharge my gardener; I will, upon ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... but followed the group. I myself was dressed in light European clothes, and furnished with an umbrella for keeping off the sun. This latter was all my arms of offence and defence. The other camel carried a trunk and some small boxes, cooking utensils, and matting, and a very light tent for keeping off sun and heat. We had two gurbahs, or "skin-bags for water," and another we were to buy in the mountains, so each having a skin of water to himself. Said was to ride this camel, and now and ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... floor with, say, thirty yards of good matting, at fifty cents a yard. This gives us a carpet for fifteen dollars. We are here stopped by the prejudice that matting is not good economy, because it wears out so soon. We humbly submit that it is precisely the thing for a parlor, which is reserved for the reception-room of friends, ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... paneless, had been screened by netting with the finest of meshes, though none can be fine enough to wholly exclude the infinitesimal insects like the coloradilla, or red flea, whose bite is as the point of a red hot needle, the sand fly, and other devilish insects beyond enumeration. Matting was spread on the smooth stone floors, there were imported chairs of costly make, stands, a bureau and much of what constitutes the appointments of a modern residence in a tropical country. The doors were made of a species of wood, beautifully carved, but showing no effects of the tooth ...
— Up the Forked River - Or, Adventures in South America • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... tangled with vines, and the dead boughs and logs which have fallen, from their great age or which the storms do beat off, or the winter snows and ices do break down. Here, also, through the thick matting of dead leaves, all manner of shrubs and bushes, some of them very sweet and fair in their flowering, and others greatly prized for their healing virtues, do grow up plenteously. In the season of them, many wholesome fruits abound in the woods, such as blue and black berries. We passed many trees, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... violated in this example. The north end and part of the adjoining sides have been brought to an even face by filling in the inequalities of the excavation with reeds which are applied in a vertical position and are held in place by long, slender, horizontal rods, forming a rude matting or wattling. The rods are fastened to the rocky wall at favorable points by means of small prongs of some hard wood, and the whole of the primitive lathing is then thickly plastered with adobe mud. Mr. Stephen found the Ponobi kiva of Oraibi treated in the same manner. The walls are lined ...
— A Study of Pueblo Architecture: Tusayan and Cibola • Victor Mindeleff and Cosmos Mindeleff
... exposition building. It is Filipino in all its motives. Its groups of four columns suggest the four essential posts of native hut construction; the broad roofs are tiled; the windows are not glass, but of thin shell, the common material used in the islands; the walls are finished in split bamboo matting. The same style of construction is used also in all the Philippine booths in the palaces. The materials are used with restrained taste, and this, with the magnificent cabinet woods employed throughout the construction, has resulted ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... brilliance of her father's smile; Flora had greater regularity of feature, and was fast becoming a very pretty girl, while Mary and Harry could not boast of much beauty, but were stout sturdy pictures of health; Harry's locks in masses of small tight yellow curls, much given to tangling and matting, unfit to be seen all the week, till nurse put him to torture every Saturday, by combing them out so as, at least, to make him for once like, she said, a gentleman, ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... erected for the spectators. These were all covered with crimson cloth fringed with gold. Underneath them were lines of foot-guards, very martial-looking, fellows. The old stone floor, worn with the tread of Kings' coronations and funeral processions, was covered with matting, and purple and crimson cloth. Immediately under the central tower of the Abbey, inside the choir, five steps from the floor, on a carpet of purple and gold, was a platform covered with cloth of gold, and on it was the golden "Chair of Homage." Within ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... in the direction of the Cathedral. The punkah mats flapped languidly, and the lower part of the church was dark, only the chancel being lighted with ungainly punkah-proof lamps, and the two altar candles that threw their gleam on a plain gold cross, guttered in the heat. A strip of cocoa-nut matting lay along the aisle, and the chancel and altar steps were covered in sad, faded red. The organist did not attend except on Sundays or Feast Days, and the service was plain, conducted throughout by the ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... Kyoto and elsewhere. And till I saw them I had no idea how exquisite human life might be made. The Japanese, as is well known, discovered the secret of emptiness. Their rooms consist of a floor of spotless matting, paper walls, and a wooden roof. But the paper walls, in these old palatial rooms, are masterpieces by great artists. From a background of gold-leaf emerge and fade away suggestions of river and coast and hill, of peonies, chrysanthemums, lotuses, of wild geese and swans, of reeds and ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... is a much simpler affair than in America. The residents in a locality unite and erect a large stage of bamboo and matting, the bamboo poles are tied with strips of rattan, and all the material of the stage, excepting the rattan, can be used over again when it is taken down. Most of the audience stand in front of the stage and in the open air, the theater generally being in front of the ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... the rafters, and in the twilight that reigned here, a man moved among the bales piled roof-high around him. He was gathering rough tow from a broken bale of Russian hemp and had stripped the Archangel matting from the mass. ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... was silent now, chilled himself by the presence of this crisis, looking unseeingly out upon the plain, little old-world parlour, its tall window, its strip of matting, conscious chiefly of the dreary hopelessness of this human brother of his who had eyes but did not see, ears and was deaf. He wished he would say good-bye, and go. There was no ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... weather is very cold, take care of delicate plants by spreading cocoa-nut fibre or light manure over the beds, or by covering the plants with matting. ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII, No. 357, October 30, 1886 • Various
... close to the door. After I had been there two or three minutes I felt there was some one else in the mosque. I looked round. Before the Mihrab there was a man. It was your husband. He was kneeling on the matting, but—but he wasn't praying. When I knew, when I heard what he was doing, I went away at once. ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... and down a room as he talked. I remember on one occasion, when he was making a call, he stopped short in his walk in the midst of a declamation on some subject, and said, 'You have a brick floor here.' The hostess confessed that it was true, though she hoped that it had been disguised by double matting and a thick carpet. He said that his habit of always walking enabled him to tell accurately the material he ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... desk, at which were high stools, backed up against the pickets; a big round stove occupied the centre; a safe crowded one corner. Blue print maps decorated the walls. Coarse rope matting edged with tin strips protected the floor. A single step down through a door led into a painted private office where could be seen a flat table desk. In the air hung a mingled odour of fresh pine, stale tobacco, and ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... temple were pieces of matting, low tables of stone, wood, or metal, a few utensils for cooking the offerings, a few vessels for containing the blood, oil, wine, and water with which the god was every day regaled. As provisions for sacrifice ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... said the boys, and then Sam led the way to the stoke-hole of the green-house, where, tucked up in the rafters, and rolled tightly up in piece of matting, were ...
— Hollowdell Grange - Holiday Hours in a Country Home • George Manville Fenn
... the folding-doors apart and went slowly down the gloomy room. I heard the doors swing again, and footsteps patter on the matting behind me. I did not turn; the man came round me and looked at my face. It was Polehampton. There were tears ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... shall hear of it some time. But come into the parlor, and you, Angele, my sister, ring and order coffee," said the old Frenchman, leading the way into a pleasant apartment on the right of the hall, furnished with straw matting upon the floor and bamboo settees and ...
— Capitola's Peril - A Sequel to 'The Hidden Hand' • Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth
... White matting covered the floor. Heaps of music were upon the table and the piano. There were few books to indicate the taste or studies of the owner beside these sheets and volumes of music, and they were everywhere. All that ever was ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... of the walls. In front, there was first a vestibule, into which three doors gave entrance; next, the large inner room, where several lamps hung from the platform; the walls were ornamented for the festival, half way up, with beautiful matting or tapestry, and an aperture had been made in the roof, and covered ...
— The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ • Anna Catherine Emmerich
... inhabitants. The houses are variously built, some of brick, others of mud and cow-dung, and a great number with bamboos (a large kind of reed or cane) and mats. The bamboos are placed as stakes in the ground, and crossed with others in different ways, so as to enable them to make the matting fast, when for the roofing they lay them one upon the other, when a large family lie in that small compass of about six feet square, which makes a very motley appearance. The mixture of European and Asiatic manners observed in Calcutta is ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to India; of a Shipwreck on board the Lady Castlereagh; and a Description of New South Wales • W. B. Cramp
... the Prince said "'Tis well, O Master." Then quoth the Jew, "Do thou sweep the Synagogue and cleanse it and shake out the mats and rugs;" and quoth the other, "Good!" But when the Prince left him and went into the building, his glance fell upon the two bundles of matting wherein were wrapped the corpses of his brothers, so he drew near to them and, raising a corner of the covering, found the bodies stinking and rotten. Hereat he arose and fared forth the Synagogue and opening a pit in the ground took up his brothers (and he sorrowing over them and ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... a modest and comfortable prosperity—a general prosperity —perhaps one might strengthen the term and say universal. There were no fine houses, no fine furniture. There were no decorations. Tallow candles furnished the light for the bedrooms, a whale-oil lamp furnished it for the parlor. Native matting served as carpeting. In the parlor one would find two or three lithographs on the walls—portraits as a rule: Kamehameha IV., Louis Kossuth, Jenny Lind; and may be an engraving or two: Rebecca at the Well, Moses smiting the rock, Joseph's servants finding the cup in ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... in a twilight bower; 420 Just when the light of morn, with hum of bees, Stole through its verdurous matting of fresh trees. How sweet, and sweeter! for I heard a lyre, And over it a sighing voice expire. It ceased—I caught light footsteps; and anon The fairest face that morn e'er look'd upon Push'd through a screen of roses. Starry Jove! ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... quarter, leaving the remainder for the sofa, small tables—under which were stored boxes and trunks of various sizes—safe, and chairs. We covered the walls with pictures, nails whereon to hang everything that would hang, and small shelves. The matting saved from the hall covered what was otherwise unoccupied of the shanty floor. In fine weather it was not at all unpleasant, as the children and I almost lived out of doors, and even when in the shanty kept our hats on, ready to go out again the moment our office was called on ...
— A Trip to Manitoba • Mary FitzGibbon
... of a city of its size, some 300,000 inhabitants. Here may be seen vessels of all sorts, from all parts of the world: steamships, junks, tugs, rowboats, and cascos, the last being the name given the native barge for carrying freight. The casco is covered by a roof of matting, made in sliding sections, with a cabin in the stern where the family ...
— Wanderings in the Orient • Albert M. Reese
... was unwilling to receive her. There came into his presence, as he sat in the palace, a group of slaves bearing a long roll of matting, bound carefully and seeming to contain some precious work of art. The slaves made signs that they were bearing a gift to Caesar. The master of Egypt bade them unwrap the gift that he might see it. They did so, and out of the wrapping came Cleopatra—a ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... the bundle over which the piache had been performing his extraordinary dance when they interrupted him, and which had the appearance of being simply a bundle of ordinary matting. But Stukely's eye happened to have been resting upon it while he spoke, and he ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... received, and his rooms were in order. He pulled out his latch-key and turned it in the lock. The door opened on an interior pleasantly familiar, yet piquantly removed from the dulness of every-day acquaintance. The matting was agreeable to his foot. The green bronze Narcissus in the corner beckoned invitingly; above all, the porcelain tub in the bath-room beyond, with its unlimited supply of water, and sybaritic variety of towels, appealed to him irresistibly. Into it he plunged with all despatch, ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... Elsie was next carried off by Lucy to the room prepared for her special use during her stay at Ashlands. It also was large, airy, and cheerful, on the second floor—opening upon a veranda on one side, on the other into a similar apartment occupied by Lucy herself. Pine India matting, furniture of some kind of yellow grained wood, snowy counterpanes, curtains and toilet covers gave them both an air of coolness and simple elegance, while vases of fresh flowers upon the mantels shed around a slight ...
— Elsie's Girlhood • Martha Finley
... No breath of wind stirred the vast, invisible sea of air, quivering and oily under the vertical sun. The landscape was deserted of animated life; there was little stirring abroad. In the house one kept within the cool, darkened rooms with matting on the floors and comfortable, deep wicker chairs, the windows wide to the least stirring of the breeze. Adler dozed in his canvas hammock slung between a hitching-post and a crab-apple tree in the shade behind the stable. ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... Torishihimari or mistress of ceremonies. By clock-work she offered me a seat on the floor, a fan and congratulations. This last simply because I was me. The house was ancient and beautiful. The room in which I sat had nothing in it but matting as fine as silk, a rare old vase with two flowers and a leaf in formal arrangement, and an atmosphere of aloofness that lulled mind and body to restful revery. After my capacity for tea and sugared dough was tested, the little serving maid fanning me, bowing every time I blinked, the ...
— The Lady and Sada San - A Sequel to The Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... confused and dizzy. Her cheeks were flaming with the excitement and joy and effort and passion of her singing; her eyelids were cast down, and beneath them her eyes watched, half in terror, half in a strained delight, the blue Persian slippers advancing silently over the matting on ...
— Six Women • Victoria Cross
... prospect of getting the almighty dollar). In some way the matter was compromised by putting on over our shoes large sandals made of straw. After paying 50 centimes each (equal to 10 cents in our currency), we entered a large room without furniture or other adornment, with stone floor, some matting, upon which a number of worshipers were kneeling and supplicating "Allah," their supreme being. There was an earnestness that bespoke sincerity, and an all-abiding faith. I could but think how few of us who would criticise are true to the creed ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... the deceased are unloaded from the wagons or unpacked from the backs of ponies and carefully arranged in the vault-like tomb. The bottom, which is wider than the top (graves here being dug like an inverted funnel), is spread with straw or grass matting, woven generally by the Indian women of the tribe or some near neighbor. The sides are then carefully hung with handsome shawls or blankets, and trunks, with domestic articles, pottery, &c., of less importance, are piled around in abundance. The sacrifices ...
— A Further Contribution to the Study of the Mortuary Customs of the North American Indians • H.C. Yarrow
... commanded that he should paint S. Ercolano, Bishop and Protector of that city, in the square; wherefore, having agreed about the price, on the spot where the painting was to be done there was made a screen of planks and matting, to the end that the master might not be seen painting; and this made, he put his hand to the work. But before ten days had passed, every passer-by asking when this picture would be finished, as ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Volume 1, Cimabue to Agnolo Gaddi • Giorgio Vasari
... of a good deal, Mr. Holmes. I knew that someone had entered the house cautiously from without. I next examined the corridor. It is lined with cocoanut matting and had taken no impression of any kind. This brought me into the study itself. It is a scantily furnished room. The main article is a large writing-table with a fixed bureau. This bureau consists of a double ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... dressing-gown and slippers, and she read the paper to him. It was quite a different hour of the day from all of the rest: sitting, looking stealthily around while she read, delighted to see how cozy he had made his little girl,—how pure the pearl-stained walls were, how white the matting. He never went down to Wheeling with the crops without bringing something back for the room, stinting himself to do it. Her brother had had the habit, too, since he was a boy, of bringing everything pretty or pleasant he found to his sister; he had a fancy ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... I took in that room, in the book shelves always full, in the pretty rugs and the cool matting and the dainty drapery, all girls can imagine. It was my own Snuggery, and I kept it in the loveliest good order, as ...
— Holiday Stories for Young People • Various
... with old-fashioned papers, five and ten cents a roll, and cheap matting improved the floors. But how to furnish eleven rooms? ...
— Adopting An Abandoned Farm • Kate Sanborn
... the day flashed into the old house when the captain angrily kicked open the door. He was aware of a wide hallway carpeted with matting and extending deep into the dwelling. There was also an old walnut hatrack and a little marble-topped table with a vase and two books upon it. Farther back was a great, ...
— The Little Regiment - And Other Episodes of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... to advance, and obliged to turn back to the abandoned village, where we encamped for the night. Near night-fall the storm greatly increased, and our bivouac became most uncomfortable; but spreading my blankets on the snow and covering them with Indian matting, I turned in and slept with that soundness and refreshment accorded by nature to one exhausted by fatigue. When I awoke in the morning I found myself under about two feet of snow, from which I arose with difficulty, yet grateful that it had kept me ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... a splitting headache, which, as memory remounted its throne, brought up a train of recollections. I found myself to be seated upon a heavy wooden bench set flat against a wall, which was covered with a kind of straw matting. My hands were firmly tied behind me. In the first agony of that reawakening I ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... boy, and with the prospect of a long, well-filled to-morrow, Joe suggested that they go to bed. And then there was a moment's pausing upon the threshold of a yawning black door beyond which things smelled mustily sweet, with dusty shadows that crept across the matting from a shielded lamp; and later a most delicious yielding of one's self to the cool envelope of soft white sheets, and a moment's wide-eyed staring at the ceiling; and ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... for end, between his fingers a minute, reflectively studying a knot-hole in the floor that yawned through a corresponding breach in the matting. Then he flung the stump of a cigar into a sawdust spittoon ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... for it between the shells, and if you did not know the exact location of the dugout you might have been hunting for it some time. Runners bearing messages took their chances both going and coming and two men were hit. The colonel was quite safe twenty feet underground with the matting of debris including that of a fallen chimney overhead, but he was a most unpopular host. The next day he moved his headquarters and not having been considerate enough to inform the Germans of the fact they kept on methodically pounding the roof ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... by means of a similar extension of the bearing surface. Suppose the engine to be 20 feet long and 5 feet wide, thus covering a surface of 100 square feet, and, provided the bearing has been extended by means of cross sleepers supported on a matting of heath and branches of trees covered with a few inches of gravel, the pressure of an engine of 20 tons will be only equal to about 3 pounds per inch over the whole surface on which it stands. Such was George Stephenson's idea in contriving ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... irregular pieces, ab, cd, and ef; The Warp, or the thread that ran crossing the Riband, appear'd like a single Rope of an Inch Diameter; but the Woof, or the thread that ran the length of the Riband, appear'd not half so big. Each Inch of six-peny-broad Riband appearing no less then a piece of Matting Inch and half thick, and twelve foot square, a few yards of this, would be enough to floor the long Gallery of the Loure at Paris. But to return to our piece of Riband: It affords us a not unpleasant object, appearing like a bundle, or wreath, ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... finished none too soon, as a dry spring followed, and the reservoirs had barely filled when the creek ceased flowing. The unusual winter snowfall had left a season's moisture in the ground, and the grass came in abundance, matting slope and valley, while the garden grew like a rank weed. The corn crop of the year before had repaid well in forage, and was again planted. In the face of another drouthy summer, the brothers sowed ...
— Wells Brothers • Andy Adams
... the city of Sparta, and also a kind of broom used for weaving rough matting, which served for the beds ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... two of them were joined laterally together by a couple of strong spars, so that there was a space of about six or eight feet between them: A mast was hoisted in each of them, and the sail was spread between the masts: The sail, which I preserved, and which is now in my possession, is made of matting, and is as neat a piece of work as ever I saw: their paddles were very curious, and their cordage was as good and as well laid as any in England, though it appeared to be made of the outer covering of the cocoa-nut. ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... discharging in the basins where they lay; And the cargoes that I saw there they were every sort and kind, Every blessed brand of merchandise a man could bring to mind; There were things in crates and boxes, there was stuff in bags and bales, There were tea-chests wrapped in matting, there were Eastern-looking frails, There were baulks of teak and greenheart, there were stacks of spruce and pine, There was cork and frozen carcasses and casks of Spanish wine, There was rice and spice and cocoa-nuts, and rum enough was there ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 4th, 1920 • Various
... did not gather together—at least just then. They ran about excitedly, and it could be seen that they were bringing from the huts the rude household utensils in which they did their primitive cooking. The women had their babies, and some, not so encumbered, carried rolls of grass matting. The ...
— Tom Swift and his Electric Rifle • Victor Appleton
... shelf desk, at which were high stools, backed up against the pickets; a big round stove occupied the centre; a safe crowded one corner. Blue print maps decorated the walls. Coarse rope matting edged with tin strips protected the floor. A single step down through a door led into a painted private office where could be seen a flat table desk. In the air hung a mingled odour of fresh pine, stale tobacco, ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... punningly termed Jacquesson's celery beds. To shield the vines from hailstorms prevalent in the district, and the more dangerous spring frosts, so fatal to vines planted in low-lying situations, long rolls of straw-matting were stored close at hand with which to roof them over when needful. These precautions were scarcely needed, however; the vines languished through moisture at the roots, and eventually ...
— Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines • Henry Vizetelly
... on her feet. Her daughters now bought the strip of Axminster carpet and laid a path across the bedroom, and another one from the bedroom door to the great chair in the sitting-room, so that her feet might not note the straw matting on the floor and question ...
— Across the Years • Eleanor H. Porter
... produce great quantities of excellent dates, and a considerable trade is done with the Nile Valley in rush matting, made chiefly in the southern portion of the oasis, at Boulak ...
— The Fife and Forfar Yeomanry - and 14th (F. & F. Yeo.) Battn. R.H. 1914-1919 • D. D. Ogilvie
... so. The crystals were more beautiful than diamond stars. They put it in a solid square of ice, which was packed in charcoal and straw, and then cased in cocoa matting. To this I attached cords, and slung it about my neck. The veil, in a satin case half an inch square, ...
— Prince Lazybones and Other Stories • Mrs. W. J. Hays
... man! See what's coming to you!" With this I slapped them with my pillow twice or thrice, but the objects being so small, the effect was out of proportion to the force with which the blows were administered. I adopted a different plan. In the manner of beating floor-mats with rolled matting at house-cleaning, I sat up in bed and began beating them with the pillow. Many of them flew up by the force of the pillow; some desperately clung on or shot against my nose or head. I could not very ...
— Botchan (Master Darling) • Mr. Kin-nosuke Natsume, trans. by Yasotaro Morri
... gave us our change, that we should have immediate delivery. We had explained at some length that this was important, and why. He waved us off with the assurance that we need give ourselves no uneasiness in the matter—that, in all probability, the matting we had purchased as a floor basis would be there before ...
— The Van Dwellers - A Strenuous Quest for a Home • Albert Bigelow Paine
... was cramped, and I had barely room to stretch my legs. My cabin was 5 feet 6 inches square and 4 feet high, open behind, but with two little doors in front, out of which I could just manage to squeeze myself sideways round the mast. Coir matting was next the floor boards, then a thick Chinese quilt (a pukai), then a Scotch plaid made in Geelong. My pillow was Chinese, and the hardest part of the bed; my portmanteau was beside me and served as a desk; a Chinese candle, more wick ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... wood. The floor is of discolored stone. Everywhere one sees wood wrought into lattices, crumbling carpets that look almost as frail and brittle and fatigued as wrappings of mummies, and worn-out matting that would surely become as the dust if one set his feet hard upon it. The structure of the building is basilican, and it contains some strange carvings of the Last Supper, the Nativity, and St. Demetrius. Around the nave there are monolithic columns of white marble, and one ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... From Mr. Martin Hume's Modern Spain I learn that when the court fled to Aranjuez from Madrid before the advance of Murat, and the mob, civil and military, hunted Godoy's villa through for him, he jumped out of bed and hid himself under a roll of matting, while the king and the queen, to save him, decreed his dismissal from all ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... consisting, however, of only a few calabashes and pillows, and removed into a smaller hut. We found our house neatly laid with mats, and looking comparatively inviting. The firebrands had been carried out, leaving only the coals in the center of the floor, surrounded by stones to protect the matting. The house was of thatched sides and altogether looked very much like the native houses we ...
— Scenes in the Hawaiian Islands and California • Mary Evarts Anderson
... are furnished with old rugs, pottery, brasses, the curious embroidered hangings which line the tents of the chiefs, and other specimens of Arab art. One room reproduces a barber's shop in the bazaar, its benches covered with fine matting, the hanging mirror inlaid with mother-of-pearl, the razor-handles of silver niello. The horseshoe arches of the outer gallery look out on orange-blossoms, roses and the sea. It is all beautiful, calm and harmonious; and if one is tempted to mourn the absence of life and local colour, one has ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... of them were joined laterally together by a couple of strong spars, so that there was a space of about six or eight feet between them: A mast was hoisted in each of them, and the sail was spread between the masts: The sail, which I preserved, and which is now in my possession, is made of matting, and is as neat a piece of work as ever I saw: their paddles were very curious, and their cordage was as good and as well laid as any in England, though it appeared to be made of the outer covering of the cocoa-nut. When these vessels sail, several men sit upon the spars which ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... comfortable. All pleasure is made possible by a higher power, and all you got to do is to feel grateful, same as you would to me if I gave you a dollar, and there you are. You just be square, and do business on the golden rule plan, and you have got a heap more religion than some people who are Matting about all the time. I just thought I would paralyze you kids by showing you that I was all wool, and wanted the Lord to keep tab on us, and know that we appreciated good health, and all that. Now, you go to school, and don't say anything to that blue-eyed teacher of yours that you have nominated ...
— Peck's Uncle Ike and The Red Headed Boy - 1899 • George W. Peck
... few minutes they arrived at the place where the canoe was fastened to the bank; a rude craft, just large enough to carry two men. A paddle lay at the bottom; along with a piece of matting of plaited palm-leaf, which on occasions was called into requisition as a sail. But Costal threw out the matting, as there was no likelihood of its being ...
— The Tiger Hunter • Mayne Reid
... been—(as Mr. Horner's little lad Gregson ought to have been this morning)—could read writing as well as either you or I. So what does he do, on obtaining the nosegay, but examine it well. The stalks of the flowers were tied up with slips of matting in wet moss. Pierre undid the strings, unwrapped the moss, and out fell a piece of wet paper, with the writing all blurred with moisture. It was but a torn piece of writing-paper, apparently, but Pierre's wicked mischievous eyes read what was written on it,—written so as to look like a fragment,—'Ready, ...
— My Lady Ludlow • Elizabeth Gaskell
... that as I lay on my side my eye caught a gleam of light through a little ragged hole in the matting of pine branches. Part of the interior of the cabin, the doorway, and some space outside were plainly visible. The thud of horses had given place to snorts, and then came a flopping of saddles and packs on the ground. "Any water hyar?" asked a gruff voice I recognized ...
— The Young Forester • Zane Grey
... up carpets in the spring to put down matting, have them well shaken, and if there are any spots on them, they should be washed off with a stiff brush and dried; if there is oil or grease spilt on them, mix up whiting or nice clay with water; spread it on both sides of the spot, ...
— Domestic Cookery, Useful Receipts, and Hints to Young Housekeepers • Elizabeth E. Lea
... puff, and blew the piece of paper right on to my garden. I was just going to peep at it, and see what it was mother shouldn't have done. Then granny gets up, and goes peering all round to see where the paper's gone. She pulled all the cushions out of the chair, and turned up the matting, and looked over her letters ever so many times, and never noticed that it had blown out of the window. Presently I put my head through the window, and cried out, 'What's the matter, granny?' 'It's only I've dropped a little bit of paper, my dear,' she says to me. 'Just come and see if your young ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... and rode off on his horse, whither he did not know. At nightfall he arrived at some place, where a man met him, and invited him to lodge at his house. The prince accepted the invitation, and was treated like a prince. Matting was spread for him to squat on, and the ...
— Tales of Wonder Every Child Should Know • Various
... sap until it will solidify, when it is run into cakes resembling chocolate or our brown maple sugar. Immense quantities of sugar cane, too, are exported to the northern provinces, in bundles wrapped with matting or other cover, for the retail markets where it is sold, the canes being cut in short sections and sometimes peeled, to be eaten from ...
— Farmers of Forty Centuries - or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan • F. H. King
... they undressed in their rooms and in pyjamas and slippers came out into the compound, where on either side of a table on which was a lighted lamp stood their bedsteads, the mattress of each covered with a thin strip of soft China matting. For in the hot weather in many parts of India this must be used to lie upon instead of a linen sheet, which would become saturated with perspiration. Looking carefully at the ground over which they passed for fear of snakes ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly
... lights of the day flashed into the old house when the captain angrily kicked open the door. He was aware of a wide hallway carpeted with matting and extending deep into the dwelling. There was also an old walnut hatrack and a little marble-topped table with a vase and two books upon it. Farther back was a great, ...
— The Little Regiment - And Other Episodes of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... over or round the edges. Carpets are better not made of ordinary carpet, for it is much too thick, but of colored canvas, or chintz, or thin felt, or serge. A rug made of a plain colored material with a cross-stitch or embroidered pattern around it is very pretty. Fine matting can also be used, and oil-cloth is ...
— What Shall We Do Now?: Five Hundred Games and Pastimes • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... growths, waist-high, had to be carefully dealt with. As we neared the spot, I used my eyes the best I could, but I did not see the hawk till she sprang into the air not ten yards away from us. She went screaming upward, and was soon sailing in a circle far above us. There, on a coarse matting of twigs and weeds, lay five snow-white eggs, a little more than half as large as hens' eggs. My companion said the male hawk would probably soon appear and join the female, but he did not. She kept drifting away to the east, and was soon gone from ...
— Bird Stories from Burroughs - Sketches of Bird Life Taken from the Works of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... to show—strange, small gulls, yellow-beaked and swift. Off to northward, a native dhow was beating down-wind with full-bellied lateen sail, with matting over its hatches. Heat was beginning to grow intense, for no longer was Nissr making a gale that cooled; no longer was she at high, cold levels. Africa, the tropics, had suddenly become real; and the sudden contrast oppressed ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... pressed her fingers against her eyes to still their throbbing. Then she looked round at her surroundings, and a little wry smile twisted her lips. A rough floor of ant-heap composition and cow-dung hardened to cement, with some native reed matting laid down; a small stretcher bed; a packing-case for a washhand-stand, and enamel ware. Another packing-case for a dressing-table, and a little cheap glass nailed to the wall. Walls of baked mud, which had fallen ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... had contrived to make the cellar a little more comfortable. They managed to get some straw, and with two or three old sacks made a bed for the mother and the baby and Moxy on the packing-case. They got also some pieces of matting, and contrived to put up a screen betwixt it and the rickety door. By the exercise of their art they had gained enough to keep them in food, but never enough to pay for the poorest lodging. They counted themselves, however, better ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... along a wide passage, thickly carpeted and having its walls covered with a kind of matting kept in place by strips of bamboo. Its roof was similarly concealed. A door near to the end, and on the right, proved to open into a square room quite simply furnished in the manner of a bed-sitting room. A little bathroom opened out of it in one corner. The walls were distempered white, and there ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... fair, let us step into one of the suttling booths. The principal booth was the Robin Hood, behind Garlick-row, which was fitted up with a good sized kitchen, detached from a long room and parlour. Here were tables covered with baize, and settles of common boards covered with matting. The roof covering was of hair cloth, the same as ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 333 - Vol. 12, Issue 333, September 27, 1828 • Various
... of the old vehicle, which looked guilty and treacherous enough to have committed all kinds of break-downs and upsets in its day. While they were thus engaged, the driver and an assistant mounted to the top and made fast the baggage, covering it all with a rough reed matting, and tying it carefully on with cords, except a large-sized basket, which they let fall, striking Caper on one side of the head as ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... looked below, where was pictured a bouquet of fresh flowers and a bed covered with tattered matting. There were also several distiches ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... these two years,—not much taller, and more agile than robust,—was lopping vigorously with his great pruning-knife, Amabel nursing a bundle of drooping rose branches, Charlotte, her bonnet in a garland of wild sweet-brier, holding the matting and continually getting entangled ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... thought at first the mosque was quite empty. I sat down close to the door. After I had been there two or three minutes I felt there was some one else in the mosque. I looked round. Before the Mihrab there was a man. It was your husband. He was kneeling on the matting, but—but he wasn't praying. When I knew, when I heard what he was doing, I went away at once. I ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... were a great many different kinds of garden-tools, such as hoes, rakes, shovels, and spades; there were one or two wheelbarrows, and little wagons. Over these were two or three broad shelves, with baskets, and bundles of matting, and ropes, and chains, and various iron tools. Around the wall, in different places, various things were hung up—here a row of augers, there a trap, and in other places ...
— Rollo at Work • Jacob Abbott
... the panes, freed from the dust and cobwebs of a generation, the blue distant line of the Pennines could be distinctly seen far away to the southeast. The floor of the gallery was spread with a fine matting of a faint golden brown, on which at intervals lay a few old Persian or Indian rugs. The white panelling of the walls was broken here and there by a mirror, or a girandole, delicate work of the same date as the Riesener table; while halfway ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... street by ancient right must needs figure in all Russian romance. We have instead been prating of drawing-rooms and mere interiors of houses, which to-day are the same all the world over. A Japanese fan is but a Japanese fan, whether it hang on the wall of a Canadian drawing-room or the matting of an Indian bungalow. An Afghan carpet is the same on any floor. It is the foot that treads the carpet which makes one to differ ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... extension of the bearing surface. Suppose the engine to be 20 feet long and 5 feet wide, thus covering a surface of 100 square feet, and, provided the bearing has been extended by means of cross sleepers supported on a matting of heath and branches of trees covered with a few inches of gravel, the pressure of an engine of 20 tons will be only equal to about 3 pounds per inch over the whole surface on which it stands. Such was George Stephenson's idea in contriving his floating road—something ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... his feelings to answer, Callandar followed her up the narrow stair and into a clean bright room with green-tinted walls and yellow matting ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... bespoke him a sailor, but it seemed as though there were nothing left save the dead body of the unfortunate tar, so pale and thin and ghastly were his features. A terrier dog lay beside him, so shrunken that it looked like a mere scrap of door-matting. Both man and dog were apparently dead, but they were not so in reality, for, after lying about an hour quite motionless, the man ...
— Jarwin and Cuffy • R.M. Ballantyne
... on that mountain, as they always thought of Kiriti, every day and night appeared unto them even as a year. From that very moment joy had taken leave of them when, with Dhaumya's permission, the high-souled Jishnu, matting his hair, departed (for the woods). So, how could they, absorbed in his contemplation, experience happiness there? They had become overwhelmed with grief ever since the moment when at the command of his brother, Yudhishthira, Jishnu of the tread of a mad elephant had departed from the Kamyaka ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... large that two great fires which burned at either end were not at all too much to emit even tolerable warmth. The room was bright with three or four lamps which were suspended from the ceiling, the floor was covered with matting, and the walls were divided into curious partitions, which gave the room a peculiar but very cosy effect. These partitions consisted of large panels, and were divided by slender rails the one ...
— A World of Girls - The Story of a School • L. T. Meade
... and confidence, the smile faded. Towel in hand he surveyed the barrenness of it. He stared at the impossible wall paper, at the battered furniture, the worn carpet. He sniffed the stuffy smell of—what was that smell, anyhow?—straw, and matting, and dust, and the ghost-odor of hundreds who had occupied the room before him. It came over him with something of a shock that this same sort of room had been his mother's only home in the ten years ...
— Personality Plus - Some Experiences of Emma McChesney and Her Son, Jock • Edna Ferber
... protection for the roots, and for plants—like roses—which do not die back to the earth level, and which sometimes require a screen as well as a quilt; bracken, fir branches, a few pea sticks, and matting or straw are all handy helps. The old gentleman who ran out—without his dressing gown—to fling his own bed-quilt over some plants endangered by an unexpected frost, came very near to having a fine show of bloom and not being there to see it; but, short ...
— Last Words - A Final Collection of Stories • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... was half kitchen and half sitting room, with its red-tiled floor covered by bright matting, Mrs. Wiseman produced a well-dusted Windsor chair, which she placed at Saul Arthur Mann's disposal before she politely vanished. In a very few words the investigator stated his errand, and Constable Wiseman listened in noncommittal silence. When ...
— The Man Who Knew • Edgar Wallace
... whose ward and private bower were cold, dirty, inconvenient, up stairs and down stairs, and in every body's chamber. At the Armory, in ward K, I found a cheery, bright-eyed, white-aproned little lady, reading at her post near the stove; matting under her feet; a draft of fresh air flowing in above her head; a table full of trays, glasses, and such matters, on one side, a large, well-stocked medicine chest on the other; and all her duty ...
— Hospital Sketches • Louisa May Alcott
... up to the gate on the afternoon following her departure from the water-hole, and she felt a thrill of pride at the acres of sprouting corn, the dense green fields of alfalfa so nicely fitted between their fences. They were like clean, green squares of matting spread for the feet ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... farther north. However, we kept our frigate on float by the help of two great poles, which we fastened into the ground to moor her, like poles; and the little weak ropes, which, as I said, we had made of matting, served us well enough ...
— The Life, Adventures & Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton • Daniel Defoe
... These were all covered with crimson cloth fringed with gold. Underneath them were lines of foot-guards, very martial-looking, fellows. The old stone floor, worn with the tread of Kings' coronations and funeral processions, was covered with matting, and purple and crimson cloth. Immediately under the central tower of the Abbey, inside the choir, five steps from the floor, on a carpet of purple and gold, was a platform covered with cloth of gold, and on it ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... gallery, which was otherwise clear of patients (for they were all out), there was a poor little dark-chinned, meagre man, with a perplexed brow and a pensive face, stooping low over the matting on the floor, and picking out with his thumb and forefinger the course of its fibres. The afternoon sun was slanting in at the large end-window, and there were cross patches of light and shade all down the vista, made by the unseen windows and the open doors of ...
— The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices • Charles Dickens
... reached the Torishihimari or mistress of ceremonies. By clock-work she offered me a seat on the floor, a fan and congratulations. This last simply because I was me. The house was ancient and beautiful. The room in which I sat had nothing in it but matting as fine as silk, a rare old vase with two flowers and a leaf in formal arrangement, and an atmosphere of aloofness that lulled mind and body to restful revery. After my capacity for tea and sugared dough was tested, the little serving maid fanning ...
— The Lady and Sada San - A Sequel to The Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... as you are, and could never run about and play, for he was lame, poor fellow, and always had to hop along on a little crutch. He was never well enough to go to school, but as his fingers were active and quick he could plait straw matting and make baskets at home. He had four or five rosy, bright little brothers and sisters, but they were all so strong and could play all day so easily that Lolo was not with them much; so Moufflou was his very best friend, and they were together ...
— The Story Hour • Nora A. Smith and Kate Douglas Wiggin
... that ten shillings to get a new cocoa-matting for the front room floor," she said, decidedly. "The bricks strike as cold as a grave since the old ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 5, May, 1891 • Various
... in the passage downstairs, where the cocoanut matting was—with the hole in it that you always caught your foot in if you were not careful. Martha's voice could be heard in the kitchen,—grumbling loud ...
— Five Children and It • E. Nesbit
... head. So shaken was he that I had to pass my hand under his arm as we went up the stairs, for his knees were trembling under him. Twice as we ascended Holmes whipped his lens out of his pocket and carefully examined marks which appeared to me to be mere shapeless smudges of dust upon the cocoa-nut matting which served as a stair-carpet. He walked slowly from step to step, holding the lamp, and shooting keen glances to right and left. Miss Morstan had remained behind with the ...
— The Sign of the Four • Arthur Conan Doyle
... interval, turned round the corner of the pi-pi, and, under the guidance of the venerable Marheyo, was soon out of sight. His departure oppressed me with melancholy, and, re-entering the dwelling, I threw myself almost in despair upon the matting of ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... To dream of matting, foretells pleasant prospects and cheerful news from the absent. If it is old or torn, you will have vexing ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... the indistinct figure of a man in white coming up, and threw myself to one side to avoid him, but he stumbled in front of me, and we went sprawling into the corridor below. It was a nasty spill, and I shot out on the matting at full length with my hands thrown before me. The polished teak-wood floor and the loose matting saved ...
— The Devil's Admiral • Frederick Ferdinand Moore
... watched him getting into the boat, and quickly went into his house dissimulating, sending one of his brothers to receive the Admiral and conduct him to one of the houses that had been set aside for the Spaniards, which was the largest and best in the town. In it there was a couch made of palm matting, where they sat down. Afterward the brother sent an attendant to say that the Admiral was there, as if the king did not know that he had come. The Admiral, however, believed that this was a feint in order to do him honor more. The attendant gave the message, ...
— The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot, 985-1503 • Various
... coming round a point masked by a clump of cocoa palms, was a large canoe with outrigger, upon which three or four men were perched so as to help balance their vessel, which, crowded with blacks, was literally racing along a short distance from the reef, impelled by its wide-spreading matting sail. ...
— Fire Island - Being the Adventures of Uncertain Naturalists in an Unknown Track • G. Manville Fenn
... out. Tom arrived at the door with the wheelbarrow about two o'clock. The provisions were stowed safely away in the bottom and covered over with a piece of old matting, and then Tom and Susy started off. Both boy and girl were in high spirits. The day was as fine as it had been on the previous day, and Susy chattered to her ...
— The Rebel of the School • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... the severest tax on the imagination, though I always thought myself, that they were both surpassed by incredible swarms of impossible humming-birds, with very gold and silver wings. The floor was covered with bran new matting, and the bedstead of cedar-wood was also new, though the bullock-skin on which the mattress rested, had rather an antiquated air. Moreover, I had a pair of sheets which were not of a bad color, although slightly patched. In addition, there was a ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... who was half imperative and half impatient. She never forgot that hour in all her life, everything was so new and strange. The windows open towards the water, the fresh salt air coming in, the India matting under her feet, made her feel as if she had got into a new world. The dishes were also in part strange to her, and her only companion fully strange. The good cup of tea she received was almost the only familiar thing, for ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... following account of burial near Cateel: "The dead person is dressed in his best clothes, wrapped in a piece of abaca cloth, and placed in a coffin of bamboo poles, or one hewn from a solid log, if the person was one of means, and buried. If of the poorer class he is merely wrapped in a piece of matting-, and either buried or covered over with stones, sticks, and the like. If of high rank, the body is not buried, but after preparation is taken into the forest and placed in a small hut under a balete ...
— The Wild Tribes of Davao District, Mindanao - The R. F. Cummings Philippine Expedition • Fay-Cooper Cole
... The north end and part of the adjoining sides have been brought to an even face by filling in the inequalities of the excavation with reeds which are applied in a vertical position and are held in place by long, slender, horizontal rods, forming a rude matting or wattling. The rods are fastened to the rocky wall at favorable points by means of small prongs of some hard wood, and the whole of the primitive lathing is then thickly plastered with adobe mud. Mr. Stephen ...
— Eighth Annual Report • Various
... for several minutes she stood silent. With the exception of her mother's pleasant parlor in Old England, she had never before seen any thing which seemed to her so cosy and cheerful as did that little room, with its single bed, snowy counterpane, muslin curtains, clean matting, convenient toilet table, and what to her was fairer than all the rest, upon the mantel-piece there stood two small vases, filled with sweet spring flowers, whose fragrance filled the apartment with delicious perfume. All this was ...
— The English Orphans • Mary Jane Holmes
... place, have every rough board planed, and painted in soft and cheerful tints. I would have the walls pleasantly colored, or covered with delicate, or bright, or warm-hued paper. The floor should be either tiled, or hidden under carpets, durable, if possible, at any rate, decent. Straw or rope matting is better than brown, yawning boards. There you have things put upon an entirely new basis. At no immoderate expense there is a new sky, a new earth, a new horizon. If a boy is rich and can furnish his room handsomely, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... had finished their solemn chant, they came along-side, and asked for the chief. As soon as I shewed myself, a pig and a few cocoa-nuts were conveyed up into the ship; and the principal person in the canoe made me an additional present of a piece of matting, as soon as he and his ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... most part without windows; but there is a board divided in the middle horizontally, the upper part of which being open, it serves for a window, and when both parts are open, it forms a door. The flooring usually consists merely of hard-trodden clay, covered with straw matting. The furniture, like the apartments, is rude and inconvenient. These remarks of course apply to the habitations of the very poor class of people. The richer families live in more comfortable style. Of the public buildings, the custom-house and the governor's residence are the ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... yarn is worked up into cloth by the women of the household. Four-fifths of the clothing of the lower classes is supplied by this domestic industry. Of minor industries Indian ink is manufactured in Ngan-hui and Sze-ch'uen, fans, furniture, lacquer ware and matting in Kwang-tung, dyes in Cheh-kiang and Chih-li, and varnished tiles in Hu-nan. Paper, bricks and earthenware are made ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... Surveyor-General, who, having pitched his tent in a similar position, was disturbed during the night by feeling a movement of the earth below his bed, from which on the following day a crocodile emerged, making its appearance from beneath the matting.[2] ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... the past. Stimulated by the little cultivation Quincy Wells had found time to give it, it had leaped its three acres and rioted through the Hollow. There were scarlet runners crossing the abandoned sluices, peas climbing the court-house wall, strawberries matting the trail, while the seeds and pollen of its few homely Eastern flowers had been blown far and wide through the woods. By a grim satire, Nature seemed to have been the only thing that still prospered in ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... like them. Norton! I haven't seen him for ages—since that morning...." He turned into Pump Court. The doors were wide open; and there was luggage and some packing-cases on the landing. The floor-matting was rolled, and the screen which protected from draughts the high canonical chair in which Norton read and wrote was overthrown. John was packing his portmanteau, and on either side of him there was a Buddha and Indian warrior ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... if you please, and in case the housecleaning man gets all the ice cream up from under the sitting-room matting, and makes a snowball of it for the poll parrot to play horse with, I'll tell you next about Bully and Bawly going ...
— Bully and Bawly No-Tail • Howard R. Garis
... stationary, while the other is worked by the hand power of two men who rotate it quickly. Further drying of the hulled berry follows. It is then put into bags of closely woven aloe fiber, lined with matting made of palm leaves. It is next sent to the local market at the foot of the mountain. There, on regular market days, the Turkish or Arabian merchants, or their representatives, buy and dispatch their purchases by camel train to Hodeida or Aden. The principal primary market in recent years has ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... narrow path, where, pipe in mouth, and emitting puffs of smoke, the old gentleman was busy with some strips of matting tying up the heavy blossoms of carnations to some neatly cut sticks. So intent was he upon his occupation that the two lads stood gazing at him for a few minutes before he rose up, emitting a long puff of smoke, and turned round to nod shortly at Will, and stare severely at the new-comer ...
— Menhardoc • George Manville Fenn
... writing table and desk, a chair, and even a bookshelf containing some volumes. A long locker, fitted like a lounge, had been made up as a couch for him, with the unwonted luxury of clean white sheets and pillow-cases. A soft matting covered the floor of the heavy wagon bed, which, Mr. Peyton explained, was hung on centre springs to prevent jarring. The sides and roof of the vehicle were of lightly paneled wood, instead of the usual ...
— A Waif of the Plains • Bret Harte
... murderer feels. Finally, we forced ourselves back to the room with the lamp and the Other Thing in it, and began to take up the next piece of work. I am not going to write about this. It was too horrible. We burned the bedstead and dropped the ashes into the Canal; we took up the matting of the room and treated that in the same way. I went off to a village and borrowed two big hoes—I did not want the villagers to help—while the Major arranged—the other matters. It took us four hours' hard work to make the grave. As we worked, we ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... to have some resemblance to breeches. The higher a person's rank, the more clothes he wore, some throwing a large piece loosely over the shoulders. They shaded their eyes from the sun with hats made at the moment required, of cocoanut leaves or matting, and the women sometimes wore small turbans, or a head-dress which consisted of long plaited threads of human hair, wound round and round, with flowers of various kinds stuck between the folds, especially the Cape jessamine, which was always planted near their houses. The chiefs sometimes wore ...
— Captain Cook - His Life, Voyages, and Discoveries • W.H.G. Kingston
... looked round the room, noting the rough stone walls, the ancient, uneven floor, uncovered by so much as a piece of matting; and then his glance returned to the large modern window which looked so incongruous in ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... out of the breasts of their shirts, and that all of them wore long knives in sheaths by their sides. There was some talking below, and one by one sixty black-skinned natives made their appearance on deck, and were ranged on either side. None of them had any other clothing besides a piece of matting or sail-cloth round the waist. Unfortunately, Green had come away without an interpreter; but he did his best to try and ascertain from the natives if they were on board of their own free will. No one uttered a complaint, ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... young ladies, offered to accompany me; so off we started down the winding paths, which were cut among the banks overhanging the Esk. The ground was starred over with patches of pale-yellow primroses, and for the first time I saw the heather, spreading over rocks and matting itself around the roots of trees. My companions, to whom it was the commonest thing in the world, could hardly appreciate the delight which I felt in looking at it; it was not in flower; I believe it does not blossom till some ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... lateral to the perpendicular position of a leader? The uninitiated in these matters, and, in fact, practical gardeners generally, would at once reply, by supporting to a stake with the all-powerful Cuba or bast-matting. But no. A far simpler method than that, namely, by fore-shortening all the laterals of the upper tier but the one selected for a leader. Nature becomes the handmaid of art here; for without the ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters
... is burnt down, or abandoned on a visitation of epidemic disease, he can build another in the space of a day. A rough earthen vessel to hold water, leaves for plates, gourds for drinking-vessels, a piece of matting to sleep on, and a small axe, a sickle and a spear, exhaust the inventory of the Baiga's furniture, and the money value of the whole would not exceed a rupee. [96] The Baigas never live in a village ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... villages, with the object of checking the frightful evil of surface pollution of the whole country, from the people habitually fouling the fields, roads, streets, and watercourses. Long trenches are dug, at about one foot or less in depth, at a spot set apart, about 200 or 300 yards from dwellings. Matting screens are placed round for decency. Each day the trench, which has received the excreta of the preceding day, is filled up, the excreta being covered with fresh earth obtained by digging a new trench adjoining, which, when ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 421, January 26, 1884 • Various
... the utmost decay. Moss and green matter grew in spots all over it. The woodwork was quite perforated with holes; the roof had nearly fallen in, and appeared to be prevented from doing so altogether by the thick matting of creeping-plants and the interlaced branches which years of neglect had allowed to cover it almost entirely; while the thick, luxuriant branches of the bread-fruit and other trees spread above it, and flung a deep, sombre ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... temple is extremely lofty. The walls and rafters are of teak and the floor is covered with a matting made of silver wire. At the far end of this imposing room an enormous, pyramidal shrine of gold rises almost to the roof, its dazzling brilliancy somewhat subdued by the semi-obscurity of the interior. Wat Phra Keo ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... part of the old oak panelling, which it seemed such a pity to mutilate with axe and crowbar, we came upon a brick wall, that quickly gave way before the strength of the constable. Then we pulled out some substance like matting, and found a second brick wall, beyond which was a further shell of panelling. The hole we made revealed nothing but darkness inside, and although we shouted, there was no answer. At last, when we had hewn it large enough for a man ...
— The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont • Robert Barr
... side, along the fair, curving beach, below the white houses scattered on the declivity, clustered the Indian lodges, with their amber-brown matting, so soft and bright of hue, in the late afternoon sun. The first afternoon I was there, looking down from a near height, I felt that I never wished to see a more fascinating picture. It was an hour of the deepest serenity; bright blue and gold, with rich shadows. ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... went, reached the end of it, and then turned to the right, afterwards climbing up a long flight of steps. This brought them to another long passage, but much wider than the one leading to their own cell. It was also covered with some kind of matting, and several doors ...
— Across the Spanish Main - A Tale of the Sea in the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... Benevolent Society of the Fourth Congregational Church has been newly decorated, new lights installed, the matting donated by the Philathea class in place, and all in readiness ...
— News Writing - The Gathering , Handling and Writing of News Stories • M. Lyle Spencer
... drive was our favorite resort of an afternoon; and we continued to haunt it long after every summer guest had disappeared, and when the datchas and palaces showed plank and matting in place of balcony and window. In the very heart of St. Petersburg the one full stream of the Nevada splits into three main arms, which afterwards subdivide, each seeking the Gulf of Finland at its own swift, wild will. The nearest of these islands, Vassili Ostrow, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... as comfortably as possible, Inez Hawthorne being given a place in front, where a sort of compartment was made for her, by means of stretching awnings of cocoa-matting and a portion of the reserve fund of lateen on hand. The others disposed themselves so that she was left undisturbed whenever she chose to withdraw to her "state room," as Captain ...
— Adrift on the Pacific • Edward S. Ellis
... relieving us in the line. The officer's mess accommodation was somewhat limited and it was found necessary to form two battalion messes, Headquarters and half the officers occupying a fairly comfortable dug-out with matting roof for a shade. The other mess was constructed by Captain Fyfe, who worried the Adjutant for working parties until he had dug a large enough hole in the ground as he considered would be necessary. The next ...
— The Fifth Battalion Highland Light Infantry in the War 1914-1918 • F.L. Morrison
... rocky ledge, near a small, landlocked narrow inlet of one of the clustering Twelve League Keys on the south side of Cuba, stood a red-tiled stone building, with a spacious veranda in front, covered by plaited matting and canvas curtains triced up all around. The back and one side of the building rested against a craggy eminence which overlooked the sea on both sides of the island, and commanded a wide sweep of reef and blue water beyond. A few clumps ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... a Hot-bed.—Sow in the open ground the last of March or early in April, arch the bed over with hoops or pliant rods, and cover constantly at night and during cold days with garden-matting. In moderate days, turn up the covering at the side next the sun; and, if the weather is very fine and mild, remove ...
— The Field and Garden Vegetables of America • Fearing Burr
... catch refused to catch, so he was compelled to shut the window and leave the swinging blind at the mercy of the wind. He then improvised a screen from a high-backed chair and an extra blanket, and again betook himself to bed. Stepping on a tack that had been left over when the floor matting was laid provoked certain exclamations calculated to exorcise the demon—or should I say alarm the angel?—of decorative art, and he was soon wrapped in the slumber of the just, undisturbed ...
— The House that Jill Built - after Jack's had proved a failure • E. C. Gardner
... is this inner bark, which makes the Poplar and Willow branches so hard to break. These strong, woody fibres of the inner bark give us many of our textile fabrics. Flax and Hemp come from the inner bark of their respective plants (Linum usitatissimum and Cannabis sativa), and Russia matting is made from the bark ...
— Outlines of Lessons in Botany, Part I; From Seed to Leaf • Jane H. Newell
... her little mound of clothing across the room's second chair, groping carefully by the stream of moonlight. Severe as a sibyl in her straight-falling nightdress, her hair spreading over her shoulders, her bare feet pattered on the cool matting. Then she slid into bed lightly, scarcely raising the covers. From the mantelpiece the ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... an answering echo as if something had slipped or slid, perhaps the sole of a bare foot on the fibrous floor matting, at the window, fell upon his senses. Turning his face toward the sound he waited, eyes trying to pierce the gloom, and ear attuned. He almost cried out in alarm as something floated through the dark from the window and fell with a ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser
... the matting of the window was pushed aside, and Fitz came softly into the dimly lighted room. He glanced at me, but attempted no sort of salutation. I saw him exchange a long silent look with Elsie, and then he took his station at the bedside next to ...
— Tomaso's Fortune and Other Stories • Henry Seton Merriman
... is very cold, take care of delicate plants by spreading cocoa-nut fibre or light manure over the beds, or by covering the plants with matting. ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII, No. 357, October 30, 1886 • Various
... sir, your two-wheeled carriage, packed up in matting, which was thrown on shore in the gale? You laughed when you saw it, and said it would be of little use now; but the wheels and axle will be very useful, as we can make a wide path to the place when I cut down the trees, ...
— Masterman Ready - The Wreck of the "Pacific" • Captain Frederick Marryat
... is usually done by song, and accompanied with great action and flourishing of weapons, particularly when boasting of his prowess. 20. A duck and a gull. 34. A corrobory, or native dance. 65. A crab. 30. A native in a hut, with portion of the matting with which they cover their habitations. 67. A kangaroo. 71. Appears to be a bird of prey, having seized upon a kangaroo-rat. 32. ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... all covered, bottom and seats, with the leaves of the Golden Willow under which it is moored, and I set sail with a cargo of them rustling under my feet. If I empty it, it will be full again to-morrow. I do not regard them as litter, to be swept out, but accept them as suitable straw or matting for the bottom of my carriage. When I turn up into the mouth of the Assabet, which is wooded, large fleets of leaves are floating on its surface, as it were getting out to sea, with room to tack; but next the shore, a little farther up, they are thicker than foam, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... mutter something about having already eaten, but Trevelyan put this aside with a wave of his hand as he led the way into a spacious room, in which had been set out a table with almost a sumptuous banquet. The room was very bare and comfortless, having neither curtains nor matting, and containing not above half a dozen chairs. But an effort had been made to give it an air of Italian luxury. The windows were thrown open, down to the ground, and the table was decorated with fruits and three or four ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... the steps, to find the place light, cool, and rather dark, coming as they did out of the glare of the sun; but as their eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, it was to see that the place was neatly covered with matting, and that there was a darker inner room with more ...
— The Rajah of Dah • George Manville Fenn
... eyes of Issoudun seemed the height of luxury, but are so common in vulgar fashion-plates that even the petty shopkeepers in Paris have discarded them at their weddings. One very unusual thing appeared, which caused much talk in Issoudun, namely, a rush-matting on the stairs, no doubt to muffle the sound of feet. In fact, though Max was in the habit of coming in at daybreak, he never woke any one, and Rouget was far from suspecting that his guest was an accomplice in the nocturnal performances of the ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... lonely and trees damp, and cherished a vague fear of meeting a bull. To guard against such contingencies she frequented the more populous watering-places, where she installed herself impersonally in a hired house and looked on at life through the matting screen of her verandah. In the care of such a guardian, it soon became clear to Lily that she was to enjoy only the material advantages of good food and expensive clothing; and, though far from underrating these, she would gladly have exchanged them for what Mrs. Bart ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... to the shendza. All things considered, it is the best conveyance for a long interior journey in China. It consists of a couple long poles with a rope basket work in the middle and a cover of matting. It is borne by two mules, and has the advantage of protecting the traveller from the sun and from light rains. An opening in the back gives him the benefit of any breeze while it is possible to get occasional relief by changing position, ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... shores, where they soon vegetate. It is in this way that the coral islands of the Indian Ocean have become covered with these palms. Every part of this tree is put to some useful purpose. The outside rind or husk of the fruit yields the fiber from which the well-known cocoa matting is manufactured. Cordage, clothes, brushes, brooms, and hats are made from this fiber, and, when curled and dyed, it is used for stuffing mattresses and cushions. An oil is produced by pressing the white kernel ...
— Catalogue of Economic Plants in the Collection of the U. S. Department of Agriculture • William Saunders
... Berangere had coaxed the goat into a corner of the room with a marchpane cake, without any one having noticed her. In an instant they had become good friends. The curious child had detached the bag from the goat's neck, had opened it, and had emptied out its contents on the rush matting; it was an alphabet, each letter of which was separately inscribed on a tiny block of boxwood. Hardly had these playthings been spread out on the matting, when the child, with surprise, beheld the goat (one of whose "miracles" this was no doubt), draw out certain letters with its golden hoof, and ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... beneath it. This particular step of a short flight running from the landing into a garret is, upon closer inspection, indeed movable, and beneath gapes a dark cavity about five feet square, on the floor of which still remains the piece of sedge matting whereon a certain Father Wall rested his aching limbs a few days prior to his capture and execution in August, 1679. The unfortunate man was taken at Rushock Court, a few miles away where he was traced after leaving Harvington. ...
— Secret Chambers and Hiding Places • Allan Fea
... time, my house had been constructed of the frail bamboos and matting which are exclusively used in the buildings of the Bassa country. I had added a cane verandah or piazza to mine, and protected it from the pilfering natives, by a high palisade, that effectually excluded all intruders. Within the area of this inclosure was ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... run for it between the shells, and if you did not know the exact location of the dugout you might have been hunting for it some time. Runners bearing messages took their chances both going and coming and two men were hit. The colonel was quite safe twenty feet underground with the matting of debris including that of a fallen chimney overhead, but he was a most unpopular host. The next day he moved his headquarters and not having been considerate enough to inform the Germans of the fact they kept on methodically pounding the roof ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... ten bells, and the clock on the tower has a triple face, one face showing the hour of the day, one showing the day of the week, and the third, the day of the month. The heavy doors were open, but a curtain of matting hung over the entrance. A ragged, barefoot boy ran before us, and, drawing aside the matting that we might enter, extended his hand for a penny. We walked over the beautiful inlaid mosaic marble floor, and beheld handsomely painted ceilings with life-size figures overhead, and richly decorated ...
— A Trip to the Orient - The Story of a Mediterranean Cruise • Robert Urie Jacob
... incommode, and when firewood was employed, the fumes escaped through openings in the gable. For windows there were holes closed by shutters which, like the doors, swung upon hooks and staples. Rugs of skin or of rush matting served to spread on the boarded floor, and in rare cases silk ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... a lofty room on the ground-floor with an elaborately-devised skylight, and a large window facing north, through which a distant glimpse of Holland Park could be obtained. Lightmark had covered the floor with pale Indian matting, with a bit of strong colour, here and there, in the shape of a modern Turkish rug. For furniture, he had picked up some old chairs and a large straight-backed settee with grotesquely-carved legs, which, with the aid of a judicious arrangement ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... season the beasts are half-starved. Their "kitchen" is a meagre ration of bruised beans, and their daily bread consists of the dry leaves of thorn trees, beaten down by the Makhbat, a flail-like staff, and caught in a large circle of matting (El-Khasaf). In Sinai the vegetation fares even worse: the branches are rudely lopped off to feed the flocks; only "holy trees" escape this mutilation. With the greatest difficulty we prevented the Arabs tethering their property all night close to our tents: ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... bureau, black with age and ill usage, stood crosswise in the corner behind the door, and reflected in the dim mirror he saw his own face looking back at him. A film of dust lay over everything in the room, over the muddy blue of the walls, over the strip of discoloured matting on the floor, over the few fine old pieces of furniture, fallen now into abject degradation. The handsome French bed, placed conveniently between door and window, stood naked to the eyes, with its cheap husk mattress rolled half back, and its bare slats, ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... by the restless shiftings of the American population. In New England the abandoned farm has long been an institution. Throughout the East there are depleted and dying villages, their solidly built cottages hidden in the matting of trees and shrubs which neglect has woven about them. One can see paralysis creeping over them as the vines creep over their deserted thresholds and they surrender one by one the little industries that gave them life. These are the opportunities of the ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth
... words, we conscious of ourselves, Perused the matting: then an officer Rose up, and read the statutes, such as these: Not for three years to correspond with home; Not for three years to cross the liberties; Not for three years to speak with any men; And many ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... bottom and roof, the former being supported by brackets to give strength, and the latter put on with two slanting side pieces nailed to the top of the upright narrow sash spoken of, to give the roof a pitch. Top and bottom were covered with old flexible rubber matting which was carried back under the clapboards making a weather-proof, tight joint with the side of the house. Six-inch light wooden shelves on the inside gave a conservatory of considerable capacity. How many houses there are where some such arrangement could be made as the result ...
— Gardening Indoors and Under Glass • F. F. Rockwell
... a lamp burning low upon the table. She had succeeded in making the room look habitable and homelike. There were some books on the table and a lounge near at hand. On the floor was a fresh matting, covered with a rug or two; and on the walls hung a few tasteful pictures. But the room was filled with flowers. These were a surprise to her. Arobin had sent them, and had had Celestine distribute them during Edna's absence. Her bedroom was adjoining, and across a small passage ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin
... it was plainly but yet comfortably furnished in European fashion, and the tables, chairs, and sideboard had evidently been a portion of a ship's cabin fittings. From the sitting-room—the floor of which was covered by white China matting—he could see a bedroom opposite, a bed with snowy white mosquito curtains, and two mahogany chairs draped with old-fashioned antimacassars. The sight of these simple furnishings first made him smile, then sigh—he had not seen such things since he had left his own home nearly ...
— "Old Mary" - 1901 • Louis Becke
... beholding romantic woods on that mountain, as they always thought of Kiriti, every day and night appeared unto them even as a year. From that very moment joy had taken leave of them when, with Dhaumya's permission, the high-souled Jishnu, matting his hair, departed (for the woods). So, how could they, absorbed in his contemplation, experience happiness there? They had become overwhelmed with grief ever since the moment when at the command of his brother, Yudhishthira, Jishnu of the tread of a mad elephant had departed from the Kamyaka ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... her arms. She was a stout and largely-made child, and the little woman found her somewhat difficult to carry. She would not let her down, however, but conducted her across the cool hall and into a room at the further end of the passage. This room was nearly empty, matting covered the floor and a round table stood in the center, while two or three high-backed chairs, with hard seats, were placed at intervals round the walls. It was a decidedly dreary room, and rendered all the more so because the morning sun was pouring in through ...
— A Little Mother to the Others • L. T. Meade
... down a narrow path, where, pipe in mouth, and emitting puffs of smoke, the old gentleman was busy with some strips of matting tying up the heavy blossoms of carnations to some neatly cut sticks. So intent was he upon his occupation that the two lads stood gazing at him for a few minutes before he rose up, emitting a long puff of smoke, and turned round to nod shortly at ...
— Menhardoc • George Manville Fenn
... Cossack in buff and bright green. Mrs. Britling was dignified and beautiful in a purple djibbah, and her stepson had become a handsome still figure of black and crimson. Teddy had contrived something elaborate and effective in the Egyptian style, with a fish-basket and a cuirass of that thin matting one finds behind washstands; the small boys were brigands, with immensely baggy breeches and cummerbunds in which they had stuck a selection of paper-knives and toy pistols and similar weapons. Mr. Carmine and his young man had come provided with real Indian costumes; the feeling of the ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... dead the chattels of the deceased are unloaded from the wagons or unpacked from the backs of ponies and carefully arranged in the vault-like tomb. The bottom, which is wider than the top (graves here being dug like an inverted funnel), is spread with straw or grass matting, woven generally by the Indian women of the tribe or some near neighbor. The sides are then carefully hung with handsome shawls or blankets, and trunks, with domestic articles, pottery, &c., of less importance, are piled around in abundance. The sacrifices are next inaugurated. A pony, first designated ...
— A Further Contribution to the Study of the Mortuary Customs of the North American Indians • H.C. Yarrow
... which you procure ready made at schools, and which can only be kept up at a very high cost, abounded and pervaded the place. Badly dressed people felt themselves out of place in that brilliant sanctuary; a muddy footprint upon the thick matting in the passages was looked at as a crime. Clean dry feet issuing out of carriage or cab kept the aisles unstained, even on the wettest day. We say cab, because many of the people who went to the Crescent Chapel objected to take out ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... walls, heads of sambhur, markor, and the lesser deer of the Himalayas showed dimly in the light of one lowered lamp. Skins of bear and leopard, and one or two costly Persian prayer-rugs, partially hid the groundwork of dusty matting, taken over with the bungalow from its former occupant, and in places revealing the stone floor beneath. The broad mantel-shelf was given over to books, a motley crowd in divers stages of dilapidation. 'The Master of Ballantrae' ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... be more correctly styled, her boudoir. It was a room about fourteen feet square, the sides of which were covered with a beautiful paper, representing portions of the history of Paul and Virginia: the floor was covered with fine matting, with here and there a small Persian carpet above it. Small marble tables were decorated with a variety of ornaments and French perfumes, or vases filled with the splendid flowers of a tropical clime. There was a large window at each end of the room, cut down to the ground, in the French ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... found themselves indoors. Norah and her father had disappeared; they were all together, father, mother, and babies, in a big room flooded with sunlight: a room covered with a thick red matting with heavy rugs on it; a room with big easy-chairs and gate-legged tables, and a wide couch heaped with bright cushions, drawn close to an open casement. There was a fire of logs, crackling cheerily in the wide fireplace: there were ...
— Captain Jim • Mary Grant Bruce
... and four deep. They are furnished with gimbals, the cross-pieces being connected by a rafter. On the other side there is a small platform, four feet square, and furnished with a roof, under which they are accustomed to keep their provisions. These pirogues have a triangular sail, which is made of matting woven from bandanus leaves, and is attached to two yards. In tacking about they drop the sail, and turn the mast towards the other end of the canoe, to which, at the same time, they have passed the fastening of the sail, so that the pirogue moves ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... it derogatively sometimes. It was both in his favour and against him. For, either he looked like an untidy parcel of brown paper, loose ends of string straggling out of him, or else—in his Sunday best—was indistinguishable from a rose- bush wrapped up carefully in matting against the frost. Yet, in either aspect, no one could pretend that he looked like anything but a genuine Head Gardener, the spirit of the kitchen-garden ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... up through the quiet house carrying the jugs of hot water, had been her first impression on her arrival the previous night. She had turned when they reached the candle-lit attic with its high uncurtained windows and red-covered box beds, and standing on the one strip of matting in her full-skirted grey wincey dress with its neat triple row of black ribbon velvet near the hem, had shown Miriam steel-blue eyes smiling from a little triangular sprite-like face under a high-standing pouf of soft dark hair, and said, "Voila!" Miriam had never ...
— Pointed Roofs - Pilgrimage, Volume 1 • Dorothy Richardson
... became broad daylight Harry took one of the oars himself, and all save the twelve rowers, and Jacob and William Long who sat in the stern, lay down in the bottom of the boat, where some pieces of matting, used for covering cargo, were thrown over them. There was not as yet a breath of wind, and the ship's sails hung idly against the masts. After three-quarters of an hour's hard rowing the barge approached her side. There were only a ...
— Friends, though divided - A Tale of the Civil War • G. A. Henty
... towards camels. We waited for upwards of an hour, in the hope of seeing those camels hoisted aboard; but in vain. While we were so waiting one of the deck passengers below us, a Somali in white clothes and a gorgeous cerise turban, decided to turn in. He spread a square of thin matting atop one of the hatches, and began to unwind yards and yards of the fine silk turban. He came to the end of it—whisk! he sank to the deck; the turban, spread open by the resistance of the air, fluttered down to cover him from head to foot. Apparently he fell asleep ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... drew still nearer, to the children's delight, as they watched the previously described graceful bamboo arch rise before their gateposts. Then came a party of three with an oven, a bottomless tub, and some matting to replace the bottom. They shifted the pole that carried these utensils from their shoulders, and commenced to make the Japanese cake that may be viewed as the equivalent of a Christmas pudding. They mixed a paste of rice and put the sticky mass, to prevent ...
— Child-Life in Japan and Japanese Child Stories • Mrs. M. Chaplin Ayrton
... to. They thought you'd trust us because we look almost human. It was a trick that worked before." Tears streamed across his face, matting the golden fur. "You see, the radioactive planets your men reported, one of ...
— Alien Offer • Al Sevcik
... the Spaniards would have suffered terribly from the severe cold of the nights, but for the ingenuity of one of their number, who invented a soft, thick, warm matting or coverlet which he wove from some long grass that abounded in the vicinity. Every soldier was speedily engaged in the manufacture of these beds or blankets. They were made several inches in thickness ...
— Ferdinand De Soto, The Discoverer of the Mississippi - American Pioneers and Patriots • John S. C. Abbott
... After having been opened and disemboweled, they are exposed to the sun on scaffolds erected on the river banks. When sufficiently dry, they are pounded fine between two stones, pressed into the smallest compass, and packed in baskets or bales of grass matting, about two feet long and one in diameter, lined with the cured skin of a salmon. The top is likewise covered with fish skins, secured by cords passing through holes in the edge of the basket. Packages ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... of Strasburg to 'strip off their shoes,' and send them to the Armies where as many as 'ten thousand pairs' are needed. Also, that within four and twenty hours, 'a thousand beds' are to be got ready; (Moniteur, du 27 Novembre 1793.) wrapt in matting, and sent under way. For the time presses!—Like swift bolts, issuing from the fuliginous Olympus of Salut Public rush these men, oftenest in pairs; scatter your thunder-orders over France; make France one enormous ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... sides have been brought to an even face by filling in the inequalities of the excavation with reeds which are applied in a vertical position and are held in place by long, slender, horizontal rods, forming a rude matting or wattling. The rods are fastened to the rocky wall at favorable points by means of small prongs of some hard wood, and the whole of the primitive lathing is then thickly plastered with adobe mud. Mr. Stephen found the Ponobi kiva of Oraibi treated in the same manner. ...
— Eighth Annual Report • Various
... readily carried by the wind. The name bulrush is more correctly applied to Scirpus lacustris, a member of a different family (Cyperaceae), a common plant in wet places, with tall spongy, usually leafless stems, bearing a tuft of many-flowered spikelets. The stems are used for matting, &c. The bulrush of Scripture, associated with the hiding of Moses, was the Papyrus (q.v.), also a member of the order Cyperaceae, which was ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... established in a large space at the back of the Great Pagoda, trustfully open to the soft blue night, otherwise strictly encompassed with matting; for in these changed and money-making days, there was an official box-office at the entrance and no admittance without cash payment! The stage was only raised a foot or two from the ground, and a long row of little lamps threw a becoming ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... putting on over our shoes large sandals made of straw. After paying 50 centimes each (equal to 10 cents in our currency), we entered a large room without furniture or other adornment, with stone floor, some matting, upon which a number of worshipers were kneeling and supplicating "Allah," their supreme being. There was an earnestness that bespoke sincerity, and an all-abiding faith. I could but think how few of us who would criticise are true to the creed ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... a young fan palm, {78a} growing not ten feet from the window. It has no stem as yet; and the lower leaves have to be trimmed off or they would close up the path, so that only the great forked green butts of them are left, bound to each other by natural matting: but overhead they range out nobly in leafstalks ten feet long, and fans full twelve feet broad; and this is but a baby, a three years' old thing. Surely, again, we are in the Tropics. Ten feet farther, thrust all awry by the huge palm leaves, grows a young tree, ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... Carpets are better not made of ordinary carpet, for it is much too thick, but of colored canvas, or chintz, or thin felt, or serge. A rug made of a plain colored material with a cross-stitch or embroidered pattern around it is very pretty. Fine matting can also be used, and oil-cloth is excellent for ...
— What Shall We Do Now?: Five Hundred Games and Pastimes • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... to cut away the matting; when the workmen, apprehensive that the carriage might sustain some damage from the impetuosity of their proceedings, took upon themselves the act of dismantling the mysterious machine; during which operation, the cry of ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... of vegetable growth that floats perpetually to the Bay, and is called "lilies," though having the look of small cabbages. The stream is almost as broad as the Ohio, and, in its snaky turns, crooked as the Mississippi. The banks seem to be prevented from washing away by the dense matting of grasses, and the overhanging thickets, imposing in luxuriance. The houses are close to the water, for the tidal river does not rise and fall enough to disturb the inhabitants. There are mountains a few miles away ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... tall shrouded pulpit and reading desk; the dreary perspective of empty pews stretching away under the galleries, and empty benches mounting to the roof and lost in the shadow of the great grim organ; the dusty matting and cold stone slabs; the grisly free seats' in the aisles; and the damp corner by the bell-rope, where the black trestles used for funerals were stowed away, along with some shovels and baskets, and a coil or two of deadly-looking rope; the strange, unusual, uncomfortable smell, ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... a silence. They both paused, helping each other as if by pre-arrangement, and Victor Durnovo suddenly felt that he must go. He rose, and picked up the whip which he had dropped on the matting. There was no help for it—the united wills of these two people were too strong ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... when the clerk of the weather will be polite enough to give moon and stars and soft southern breezes. Then cover the surface of the roof with rugs or else stretch a matting over the tin. Improvise couches upon boxes covered with rugs, or bring up a couple of cots and pile cushions ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... toasted, pounded, and kneaded to a kind of porridge in leathern bags like Turkish tobacco-pouches. The object was to save the teeth, of which the Guanches were particularly careful.] or parched grain. The articles of dress were grass-cloth, thick as matting, and tamarcos, or smock-frocks, of poorly tanned goatskins. They had also rough cords of palm-fibre, and they seem to have preferred plaiting to weaving; yet New Zealand flax and aloes grow abundantly. Their mahones correspond with Indian ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... scenery screened from our dwelling the unsightly squalor of a negro village, which lay at a distance of a mile and a half on the other side of an abrupt hill to our rear. It consisted merely of some score of huts, of miserable aspect, formed of matting, stretched on stakes stuck in the ground; and in other cases, of interwoven bamboos, dabbed with mud, and roofed over with gigantic palm-leaves. Each had its garden in front, of yams, cocos, and sweet potatoes. The ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 449 - Volume 18, New Series, August 7, 1852 • Various
... and painted in soft and cheerful tints. I would have the walls pleasantly colored, or covered with delicate, or bright, or warm-hued paper. The floor should be either tiled, or hidden under carpets, durable, if possible, at any rate, decent. Straw or rope matting is better than brown, yawning boards. There you have things put upon an entirely new basis. At no immoderate expense there is a new sky, a new earth, a new horizon. If a boy is rich and can furnish his room handsomely, the furnishings will not shame the room and its vicinity. If he is poor ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... down on his strip of couch-matting; rose and ate, and passed the dreadful untamed hours; nor would Wilfrid ask whether it was day or night. We belong to time so utterly, that when we get no note of time, it wears the shrouded head of death for ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... encampment was a confused assemblage of tall, cone-shaped lodges, built of slender poles supporting great sheets of bark or overlapping folds of fine matting so closely woven from rushes as to be thoroughly rain-proof. Scores of graceful birch canoes, such as the northern tribes excel in making, were drawn up on the river bank; paddles and spears leaned against the lodges, smoke-blackened kettles and other rude cooking-utensils were scattered ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... comfortably as possible, Inez Hawthorne being given a place in front, where a sort of compartment was made for her, by means of stretching awnings of cocoa-matting and a portion of the reserve fund of lateen on hand. The others disposed themselves so that she was left undisturbed whenever she chose to withdraw to her "state room," as Captain ...
— Adrift on the Pacific • Edward S. Ellis
... room, doors and windows, and half of them I can't lock or bar or fasten up in any way. What I should do if a Mutiny occurred I can't think! My bed with its mosquito-curtains stands like a little island in a vast sea of matting, and there are two large wardrobes, what they call almirahs, a dressing-table, and two chairs. It is empty and airy, and that is all that ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... European clothes, and furnished with an umbrella for keeping off the sun. This latter was all my arms of offence and defence. The other camel carried a trunk and some small boxes, cooking utensils, and matting, and a very light tent for keeping off sun and heat. We had two gurbahs, or "skin-bags for water," and another we were to buy in the mountains, so each having a skin of water to himself. Said was to ride this camel, and now and then give a ride to Mohammed the camel-driver, ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... cases of oranges stacked on deck, and made fast with matting and cordage to the bulwarks. That night was very dark, and next morning there was a row. The captain said he'd "give any man three months that ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... gormand, gloating round, Cried, 'Sheep, I wonder much Who could have made you such. You're far the fattest I have found; I'll take you for my eating.' And on the creature bleating He settled down. Now, sooth to say, This sheep would weigh More than a cheese; And had a fleece Much like that matting famous Which graced the chin of Polyphemus;[23] So fast it clung to every claw, It was not easy to withdraw. The shepherd came, caught, caged, and, to their joy, Gave croaker to his ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... into the broad Humboldt desert one cloudless day: it was like getting on the roof of the world—the great domed roof with its eaves sloping away under the edges of heaven, and whereon there is nothing but a matting of sagebrush, looking like grayish moss, and a deep alkali dust as white and as ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... that I never could undress myself for dread of the cold. After loosening my neckcloth and shoes, I lay down in the dress which I wore during the day. My bed was a simple mattress laid over a piece of matting, which latter was spread on the hard earth or sands of The Desert, as it might be, with a small sofa cushion for a pillow. After I had laid down the mattress, I then covered myself up with a large woollen barracan or blanket, very thick and heavy, ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... conducted along a wide passage, thickly carpeted and having its walls covered with a kind of matting kept in place by strips of bamboo. Its roof was similarly concealed. A door near to the end, and on the right, proved to open into a square room quite simply furnished in the manner of a bed-sitting room. A little bathroom opened out ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... barely room to stretch my legs. My cabin was 5 feet 6 inches square and 4 feet high, open behind, but with two little doors in front, out of which I could just manage to squeeze myself sideways round the mast. Coir matting was next the floor boards, then a thick Chinese quilt (a pukai), then a Scotch plaid made in Geelong. My pillow was Chinese, and the hardest part of the bed; my portmanteau was beside me and served as a desk; a Chinese candle, more wick than ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... garden, and we were at first shown into a small sitting-room. It seems the fashion all over America, as it is abroad, to leave the space open in the middle of the room, and the chairs and sofas arranged round the walls, but there is always a good carpet of lively colours or a matting in summer, and not the bare floor so constantly seen in France and Germany. The little gathering consisted of the Governor, his two daughters (his only children), his niece, and his sister, Mr. Dennison, and Mr. Barnay, a clever New York lawyer, with whom we had crossed the ...
— First Impressions of the New World - On Two Travellers from the Old in the Autumn of 1858 • Isabella Strange Trotter
... brought it between their legs so as to have some resemblance to breeches. The higher a person's rank, the more clothes he wore, some throwing a large piece loosely over the shoulders. They shaded their eyes from the sun with hats made at the moment required, of cocoanut leaves or matting, and the women sometimes wore small turbans, or a head-dress which consisted of long plaited threads of human hair, wound round and round, with flowers of various kinds stuck between the folds, especially the Cape jessamine, which was always planted ...
— Captain Cook - His Life, Voyages, and Discoveries • W.H.G. Kingston
... thatched cottage was scrupulously clean and neat, as they nearly all are in the valley, but barer and more scantily furnished than most of them. No photographs or pictures decorated the white-washed walls, no scraps of carpet or matting hid the red-brick floor. The Monks were evidently of the poorest. An old piece of faded curtain had been hung from a rope between the chimney-piece and the door to shield the patient from the draught. He sat in a stiff wooden arm-chair near the fire, drawing his breath laboriously. ...
— Cecilia de Noel • Lanoe Falconer
... daybreak they go into a separate lodge, which is closed up so as to be totally dark. A small hole is then made in the roof, through which the medicine-man, with a bunch of feathers, brushes in the souls, in the shape of bits of bone and the like, which he receives on a piece of matting. A fire is next kindled, by the light of which the medicine-man sorts out the souls. First he puts aside the souls of dead people, of which there are usually several; for if he were to give the soul of a dead person to a living ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... side, along the fair, curving beach, below the white houses scattered on the declivity, clustered the Indian lodges, with their amber brown matting, so soft, and bright of hue, in the late afternoon sun. The first afternoon I was there, looking down from a near height, I felt that I never wished to see a more fascinating picture. It was an hour of the deepest serenity; bright blue and gold, rich shadows. Every moment ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller
... fitted, each of them, fifty-two in number, having accommodation for seven or eight persons. Higher up was a circle of sixty windows. Although the building itself was constructed of wood, it could boast of a plaster floor, which was covered with matting. Scattered over that floor were numerous tables covered with red baize whereon refreshments were served. Such was the general arrangement of the Rotunda, but one alteration had speedily to be made. It was quickly ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... its broad and rounded leaf, interspersed with clusters of small hard berries now nearly ripe, and made an agreeable shade for us sailors. The inner bark of this genus is the bast, the material of the fisherman's matting, and the ropes and peasant's shoes of which the Russians make so much use, and also of nets and a coarse cloth in some places. According to poets, this was once Philyra, one of the Oceanides. The ancients are said to have used its bark for the roofs of cottages, for baskets, and for a ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... another till I finally reached the Torishihimari or mistress of ceremonies. By clock-work she offered me a seat on the floor, a fan and congratulations. This last simply because I was me. The house was ancient and beautiful. The room in which I sat had nothing in it but matting as fine as silk, a rare old vase with two flowers and a leaf in formal arrangement, and an atmosphere of aloofness that lulled mind and body to restful revery. After my capacity for tea and sugared dough was tested, ...
— The Lady and Sada San - A Sequel to The Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... of a bird's foot. The sole, scarcely streaked by a few almost imperceptible cross lines, afforded evidence that it had never touched the bare ground, and had only come in contact with the finest matting of Nile rushes and the softest carpets ...
— The Mummy's Foot • Theophile Gautier
... become home to him in the last three years. He had grilled in the heat, sweated in the rains, and shivered with fever under the rude thatch roof; the lime-wash beside the door was covered with rough drawings and formulae, and the sentry-path trodden in the matting of the veranda showed where he had walked alone. There is no eight-hour limit to an engineer's work, and the evening meal with Hitchcock was eaten booted and spurred: over their cigars they listened to the hum of the village as the ...
— Kipling Stories and Poems Every Child Should Know, Book II • Rudyard Kipling
... the fine Alaska cedar (C. Nootkatensis), the lumber from which is noted for its durability, fineness of grain, and beautiful yellow color, and for its fragrance, which resembles that of sandalwood. The Alaska Indians make their canoe paddles of it and weave matting and coarse cloth from ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... feet deep, and from twelve to thirty feet long, according to the wealth of the owner and the size of his family,—two things which usually correspond. The sides and the partitions are sometimes made of woven reeds, like coarse matting. Within there is an apartment (if you can call it so) for the family, a pen for the chickens, and room for dogs, cats, calves and other creatures to find shelter. The fireplace of flat stones is in the centre, and the smoke oozes out through ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... size and shape according to their use; as, flat-headed, gimp, round-headed, and double-pointed or matting tacks, a sort of small staple. Their size is indicated by the word "ounce." For example, a two-ounce tack is 1/4" long, a three-ounce tack is 3/8" long, a four-ounce tack is 7/16" long, a six-ounce tack is 1/2" long, etc. This term once ...
— Handwork in Wood • William Noyes
... shaped like the letter X, answers very well, but the Mexican pack, known as the aparcho, is much better. It is made of a plated straw matting, on which is fastened a strong wicker-work saddle, and a properly folded blanket, for you must be careful that the animal's back does not get sore. The saddle is fastened by pliant ropes, or broad belts of leather, called in the West "cinches," to fasten which securely requires some skill, as ...
— Healthful Sports for Boys • Alfred Rochefort
... quite late trying to get straight. It has taken a longer time because there is so little space. Our sitting-room looks quite cosy. We have half partitioned off a portion of it with a green stoep blind which we bought at the Cape, and in the private part thus left have laid down a white matting, and really at night with a lamp and a fire it looks very ...
— Three Years in Tristan da Cunha • K. M. Barrow
... Khargeh produce great quantities of excellent dates, and a considerable trade is done with the Nile Valley in rush matting, made chiefly in the southern portion of the oasis, at Boulak ...
— The Fife and Forfar Yeomanry - and 14th (F. & F. Yeo.) Battn. R.H. 1914-1919 • D. D. Ogilvie
... to see Igoon. The governor was absent, so that it was not possible to call on him. We were shown to a temple near at hand, a building fifteen feet by thirty, with a red curtain at the door and a thick carpet of matting over a brick pavement. The altar was veiled, but its covering was lifted to allow me to read, if I could, the inscription upon it. It stood close to the entrance, like the screen near the door of a New York bar-room. There were several ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... were new, and the Persian pattern-birds flying among bluish reeds—produced the effect of a dream in summer, ethereal figures floating before one's languid eyes. The lowered blinds, the matting on the floor, the Virginia jasmine clinging to the trellis-work outside, produced a refreshing coolness which was enhanced by the splashing in the river near by, and the lapping of its ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... of its lakes and meadows, forests and wild gardens, has a charm and a grandeur of its own. There are lakes of many kinds. One named for the painter, now dead, who many times sketched and dreamed on its shores, is a beautiful ellipse; and its entire edge carries a purple shadow matting of the crowding forest. Its placid surface reflects peak and snow, cloud and sky, and mingling with these are the green and gold of pond-lily glory. Another lake is stowed away in an utterly wild place. It is in ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... on the walls, the dresser filled with bright crockery, including a whole shelf of lustre jugs, the pots and pans set out to advantage, to say nothing of the cans, a clean scrubbed table, a few chairs, a strip of matting in front of the fireplace, flowers in a jug on the table which also bore Susan's few implements of sewing and a pile of white stuff, the ...
— Love of Brothers • Katharine Tynan
... the cave, to one side, was a hoistway, where bales and boxes were drawn up from the cellar or swung twisting and twirling to the lofts above. Amidships the place was strewn with small tubs, matting-covered bales and boxes, coils of bright new rope, and odd-looking packages of a hundred sorts, all of them with gaping wounds in their envelopes, or otherwise having their pristine integrity wounded. From this it was not difficult to guess that these were samples of merchandise. Most of ...
— The Story of a New York House • Henry Cuyler Bunner
... in fact it did look extremely pretty, with its branching piazzas full of well-dressed people, and its green lawns where the children were playing. I led the way to the room which I had taken for him next my own; it was simply furnished, but it was sweet with matting, fresh linen, and pure whitewashed walls. I flung open the window-blinds and let him get a glimpse of the mountains purpling under the sunset, the lake beneath, ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells
... was naked, save for a tarboosh on his head and a loin-cloth about his middle. His slim body shone with moisture, and where he stood on the white matting were two little pools. Kano from his brown feet to the soaked fez, he stood erect with that curious assumption of pride and equality which the Mussulman bears with less offence to his ...
— The Keepers of the King's Peace • Edgar Wallace
... the design: will you say also that you are under no obligation to put so much faith in the builder, who is said to be your God and Father, as to do the thing he tells you? Instead of working away at the palace, like men, will you go on tacking bits of matting and old carpet about the corners of the scaffold to keep the wind off, while that same wind keeps tearing them away and scattering them? You keep trying to live in a scaffold, which not all you could do to all eternity would make a house of. ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... head-piece was gone, his breastplate dinted, his right sleeve a rag hanging from his shoulder about a naked arm. He was splashed from head to foot with blood, and there was blood from a scalp-wound that he had taken matting his hair and mixing with the grime of powder on his ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... they have reached the spot where the burial place is. After that, having placed the corpse in the tomb upon a bed of leaves, they stick spears along on this side and that of the corpse and stretch pieces of wood over them, and then they cover the place in with matting. Then they strangle and bury in the remaining space of the tomb one of the king's mistresses, his cup-bearer, his cook, his horse-keeper, his attendant, and his bearer of messages, and also horses, and a first portion of all things else, and cups of gold; for ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 1(of 2) • Herodotus
... after your bath you occupied fully two or three hours. What you were up to during that time we never knew. We could not very well walk in. When you had however done washing, and we entered your room, we found the floor so covered with water that the legs of the bed were soaking and the matting itself a regular pool. Nor could we make out what kind of washing you'd been having; and for days afterwards we had a laugh over it. But I've neither any time to get the water ready; nor do I see the ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... the whim of that generation. If the truth were known, Nancy had once lighted her candle and slipped downstairs at midnight to sit on the parlor sofa and feast her eyes on the room's loveliness. Gilbert had painted the white matting the color of a ripe cherry. Mrs. Popham had washed and ironed and fluted the old white ruffled muslin curtains from the Charlestown home, and they adorned the four windows. It was the north room, on the left as you entered the ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... bow-window and fire-place in both, and there is to be a fire-place in the hall, which is to be finished in oak, with a wide staircase and a tall clock on the landing, and the windows are to have little colored panes of glass at the top, and the floors are to be inlaid and waxed, with rugs of matting instead of carpets, as we want everything cool for summer, and we will have a big piazza where we can have tea or breakfast, or even a dance, if we ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... miss,"—she replied—"Miss Harland wouldn't have all these things about her on any account. There are no carpets or curtains in Miss Harland's rooms. She thinks them very unhealthy. She has only a bit of matting on the floor, and an iron bedstead— all very plain. And as for roses!—she wouldn't have a rose near her for ever so!—she can't bear the ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... purified, flows through wooden troughs into a series of basins, in which the peat is formed and dried. These basins are made upon the ground by putting up a square frame (of boards on edge,) about one foot deep, and placing at the bottom old matting or a layer of flags or reeds. Each basin is about a rod square, and 800 of them are employed. They are filled with the peat pulp to the top. In a few days the water either filters away into the ground, or evaporates, so that a soft stratum of peat, about 3 inches in thickness, remains. Before ...
— Peat and its Uses as Fertilizer and Fuel • Samuel William Johnson
... Cathedral. The punkah mats flapped languidly, and the lower part of the church was dark, only the chancel being lighted with ungainly punkah-proof lamps, and the two altar candles that threw their gleam on a plain gold cross, guttered in the heat. A strip of cocoa-nut matting lay along the aisle, and the chancel and altar steps were covered in sad, faded red. The organist did not attend except on Sundays or Feast Days, and the service was plain, conducted throughout by the Rev. ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... of her smart white dress looked new. There was no fear of delay for painting and patching. Clean cocoa-nut matting was spread upon the floor of the little decks fore and aft; the brass rails dazzled our eyes with their brilliance; the windows of the roofed cabin were brighter than the Ko-hi-nur, the day I went to see it in the Tower of London; basket-chairs, with pink and blue and ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... bullock's shin-bone was put into the sun-bath, on a piece of matting, and this was a source of great interest to the pups, whose little white teeth were now as sharp as needles; a fact known only too well to their respective foster-mothers. Finn's favourite amusement was to lie straddled along this bone, ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... was a large square sheet, which was either wove or knit. This fabric was the inner bark of a tree, which I judge from appearances to be that of the linn tree. In its texture and appearance, it resembled the South Sea Island cloth or matting; this sheet enveloped the whole body and the head. The hair on the head was cut off within an eighth of an inch of the skin, except near the neck, where it was an inch long. The color of the hair was a dark ...
— Rambles in the Mammoth Cave, during the Year 1844 - By a Visiter • Alexander Clark Bullitt
... board divided in the middle horizontally, the upper part of which being open, it serves for a window, and when both parts are open, it forms a door. The flooring usually consists merely of hard-trodden clay, covered with straw matting. The furniture, like the apartments, is rude and inconvenient. These remarks of course apply to the habitations of the very poor class of people. The richer families live in more comfortable style. Of the public buildings, ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... much as I hated them when I was there; and just before you came in I wanted to cry. I guess my rooms are too big and have too much in them; any way, I have the feeling that I am visiting, and everything is strange and new. I do believe I liked the old room better, with its matting on the floor and the little mirror with the peacock feathers ornamenting the top, and that painted plaster image of Samuel on the mantel. It is very ungrateful in me, I know, when father has done it mostly to please me. Do you believe—he has hunted me up a maid; Doris ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... building. It is Filipino in all its motives. Its groups of four columns suggest the four essential posts of native hut construction; the broad roofs are tiled; the windows are not glass, but of thin shell, the common material used in the islands; the walls are finished in split bamboo matting. The same style of construction is used also in all the Philippine booths in the palaces. The materials are used with restrained taste, and this, with the magnificent cabinet woods employed throughout the construction, has resulted in a beautiful building. ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... all united to dig through the wall—John with his dagger, the others with stones taken from the ground, or with their nails, while Mulrady, stretched along the ground, watched the native guard through a crevice of the matting. ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... booths. The principal booth was the Robin Hood, behind Garlick-row, which was fitted up with a good sized kitchen, detached from a long room and parlour. Here were tables covered with baize, and settles of common boards covered with matting. The roof covering was of hair cloth, the same as the shops, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 333 - Vol. 12, Issue 333, September 27, 1828 • Various
... Pope's household came to say that by request of Father Pifferi the lady was to step into an anteroom; and Roma followed him into a small adjoining chamber, carpeted with cocoanut matting and furnished with a marble-topped table and two wooden chest-seats, bearing the papal arms. The little room opened on to a corridor overlooking a courtyard, a secret way to the Pope's private rooms, and it had a door to ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... Jane having stipulated that he should not be intrusted with the ring; her previous observations leading her to conclude that he would most probably slip it unconsciously on to his finger, and then search through all his own pockets and all Garth's; and begin taking up the church matting, before it occurred to him to look at his hand. Jane would not have minded the diversion, but she did object to any delay. So the ring went to church in Garth's waistcoat pocket, where it had lived since Jane brought it out from Aberdeen; and, without any fumbling or hesitation, ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... Street, and climbed the stairs of a little tea-shop with the depressed feeling of a man who is expiating an offence which he bitterly repents. Violet was waiting for him at one of the tables shut off from the main room by a sort of Japanese matting hanging from the ceiling. He resigned his stick and hat with a sigh to one of the trim waitresses, and sat down ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the way as she spoke, and the country people followed her, all agape. In the hall they paused to wonder at the cocoanut matting; but when they stood on the soft pile carpet, so grateful to their bare feet, in the sitting-room, and looked round, they lowered their voices respectfully, and this gave Beth a sudden sensation of superiority. She began to show them the things: the pictures on the walls, the subjects of ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... that dim day, man took upon himself the task of increasing his dominion over space and time, and right nobly has he acquitted himself. Because of it he became a road builder and a bridge builder; likewise, he wove clumsy sails of rush and matting. At a very remote period he must also have recognized that force moves along the line of least resistance, and in virtue thereof, placed upon his craft rude keels which enabled him to beat to windward ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... and castles at this period the walls were covered with tapestry and the floors with matting. This remark is necessary to enable one to ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. I. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... the establishments of the various slave merchants. These were arranged under large tents formed of matting, and contained many young girls of extreme beauty, ranging from nine to seventeen years of age. These lovely captives, of a rich brown tint, with delicately formed features, and eyes like those of the gazelle, ...
— In the Heart of Africa • Samuel White Baker
... them, till I saw him hunt up a proper place to hide them. The place he chose was between the leaves of a book. He would push a pin far in out of sight, and then go after another. A match he always tried to put in a crack, under the baseboard, between the breadths of matting, or under my rockers. He first placed it, and then tried to hammer it out of sight. He could seldom get it in far enough to suit him, and this worried him. Then he would take it ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
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