"Inky" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Ferdinand Lopez mounted high on his horse,—for he had triumphed greatly in his marriage, and really felt that the world could give him no delight so great as to have her beside him, and her as his own. But the inky devil sat close upon his shoulders. Where would he be at the end of three months if Mr. Wharton would do nothing for him,—and if a certain venture in guano, to which he had tempted Sexty Parker, should not turn out the right way? He believed ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... peculiarly flat nose; Willis Collins had had a particularly high one. Carson Wildred's hair was inky black; Willis Collins's had been a bright auburn. Wildred's face was smooth; Collins's mouth and chin had been concealed by a heavy though close-cropped red beard. So far as I knew there was but one man living ...
— The House by the Lock • C. N. Williamson
... perhaps it is deliverance that the tablet commemorates—and then you will see the miller kneeling beside his mill with a flood rushing down upon it, or a peasant kneeling in his harvest-field under an inky-black cloud, or a landlord beside his inn in flames, or a mother praying beside her sick children; and above appears an angel, or a saint, or the Virgin ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... of white cloud between the lead colour and the black. They were hurried about in the sky, evidently by counter currents. The river was almost inky in its hue, and every large drop made its own splash and circle. Up went the umbrellas in both boats; but almost before they were raised, some were turned inside out, and all were dragged down again. The gust had come, and brought with it a pelt of hail—large hailstones, which fell in ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau
... man, Where thou dost stand—an hour ago, And round his feet three rivers ran, Of equal depth, and equal flow— A golden stream—and one like blood, And one like sapphire seemed to be; But where they joined their triple flood It tumbled in an inky sea. The spirit sent his dazzling gaze Down through that ocean's gloomy night; Then, kindling all, with sudden blaze,— The glad deep sparkled wide and bright— White as the sun, far, far more fair ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... presence in the immediate neighbourhood of the house of some intruder, man or beast. Shaking off the sleep that held him, he crept to the window and looked out. The moon was gone and the stars had almost faded from the inky black dome. He guessed the hour with the acute instinct of one to whom the vagaries of night have become familiar through long understanding. It would now be about three o'clock in the morning, with the creeping dawn an ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... it bursts again; while all the narrow horizon is dim and spongy with vapor drifting before a chilly breeze. As the day went on, the breeze died down, and the sea fell to a long glassy foam-flecked roll, while overhead brooded the inky sky, and round them the leaden mist shut out alike the shore ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... would have suited the moment, for it was at that instant precisely that an inky cloud burst over Paris and emptied torrents of ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre
... went out on the instant and in absolute inky darkness we held our breath and listened. Somebody was quietly approaching the barn. The steps were not exactly stealthy, but guarded and wary, though quite assured, as if the man were only exercising ...
— The Man From the Clouds • J. Storer Clouston
... few seconds all was inky darkness on the other side of the thick plate glass of the conning tower. Then, all in a flash, Dalzell caught sight of the twinkling stars as the dripping conning tower rose above the top ...
— Dave Darrin's Fourth Year at Annapolis • H. Irving Hancock
... inky office of the New York Evening Sentinel he had been wont three months before to sit at a long green table fitting words about the yachts of others to the dreary music of his typewriter, the while vaguely conscious of a blur of eight telephone ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... original driver himself a bandit, and the beautiful girl reclining on the cushions a bandit's daughter? He dozed, and on coming to his waking senses again, discovered that the darkness had slightly lifted. He could see the distant horizon, defined by inky woods, outlined on a lighter sky. A few stars, scattered here and there in this tableau, whilst emphasizing the vastness of the space overhead—a vastness that was positively annihilating—at the same time conveyed a sense of solitude ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... shaking his head sorrowfully, but patting his purse comfortably; whence it appears that he suffered from a conflict of feelings, his mind being ill at ease, but his purse heavier. And when in the evening the Sultana came, attended only by one tall, formidable, and inky-black attendant, Hassan ushered her into the reception room of the harem, telling her that Lallakalla, the first wife of his master, would attend her immediately. Then he went out, and, having brought in the big black slave very secretly, set him in the antechamber of the room where the Sultana ...
— Frivolous Cupid • Anthony Hope
... torrents over the great battlefield, as Hal Paine and Chester Crawford, taking advantage of the inky blackness of the night, crept from the shelter of the American trenches that faced the enemy ...
— The Boy Allies with Haig in Flanders • Clair W. Hayes
... dangerous brute, where they began yelling and splashing the water with their weapons in order to prevent its returning to the sea and to drive it upon the shore. It moved toward the beach, only a few yards distant, and whenever it was submerged discolored the water almost to inky blackness. At last, harrassed on all sides, it put its slimy tentacles on the gravelly beach. Its round, pudgy body was no sooner out of the water, than an expert, in the person of a half naked fisherman, rushed in and struck ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... all there was, except for a fearful drawing of a coffin and a skull. And such an array of inky names, scrawled with obvious pains and distinctness, was on the paper that argument itself was plainly hand in hand ...
— Bruvver Jim's Baby • Philip Verrill Mighels
... said as he took one from the President's case. He looked at the cigar and remembered all he had read of Benjamin Harrison's black cigars. This one was black—inky black—and big. ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok
... thorn in the flesh of those of our neighbors from beyond the Alps who do not love us. The pride of the Garibaldian was not far behind the generosity of the former zouave. With an abruptness equal to that of Montfanon, he took up the volume and grumbled as he turned it over and over in his inky fingers: ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... leas'd out (I die pronouncing it) Like to a tenement or pelting farm. England bound in with the triumphant sea, Whose rocky shore beats back the envious surge Of wat'ry Neptune, is bound in with shame, With inky-blots and rotten parchment bonds. That England, that was wont to conquer others, Hath made a shameful ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... best, but I could only make out a blurred mass of men on board both junks. They seemed to be swaying to and fro, and the smoke, instead of passing off, once more grew thicker, and in place of being white and steamy, it now looked to be of a dirty inky black, completely enveloping the vessels and ...
— Blue Jackets - The Log of the Teaser • George Manville Fenn
... mouth from 100 to 200 yards in breadth. The vegetation on its banks has a similar aspect to that of the Rio Negro, the trees having small foliage of a sombre hue, and the dark piles of greenery resting on the surface of the inky water. The village is situated on the left bank, about a mile from the mouth of the river, and contains twenty habitations, nearly all of which are merely hovels, built of lath-work and mud. The short streets, after rain, are almost impassable on account of the many puddles, and are choked up with ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... caverns of shade—what there was of it—stirred strangely. A hundred yards away a blotch of shadow beneath a group of stunted trees swayed and broke up into several zebra moving off to water. Fifty yards distant the inky shade that carpeted the earth under a bare outcrop of rock gave up a single gnu antelope bull and a Grant's gazelle whose lyrate horns were as wonderful as ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... clattering on the floor and the patter of naked feet. Realizing that the men he was after were making their escape by another exit, Jennings hurled himself against the door, an automatic in either hand. It gave way before his assault and he was precipitated headlong into the inky blackness of the room. Taking no chances this time, he raked it with a stream of lead from end to end. Then, there being no further sound, he swept the place with a beam from his electric torch. Stretched on the floor were three dead Chinamen and ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... of the mountain into the presence of the Lord. What happened? When the children of Israel saw the whole mountain burning and smoking, the black clouds rent by fierce lightning flashing up and down in the inky darkness, when they heard the sound of the trumpet blowing louder and longer, shattered by the roll of thunder, they were so frightened that they begged Moses: "Speak thou with us, and we will hear: but let not God speak with us, lest we die." (Ex. 20:19.) I ...
— Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians • Martin Luther
... only these walls, rising sheer from the water to the height of two thousand feet, going down sheer beneath it, or rather by the side of it, to many times that depth. The water was of some colour blacker than black. Even by daylight it is inky and sinister. It flows without foam or ripple. No white showed in the wake of the boat. The ominous shores were without sign of life, save for a rare light every few miles, to mark some bend in the chasm. Once a canoe with ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... to pieces with traffic, and frequently pitted with shell holes, and as a rule very narrow. There is no moon, which is just as well, and no lights can be carried. The driver feels his way through inky blackness by some sixth sense begotten of many such journeys. Every now and then a flare lights up the broken cobbles for a few seconds. His wheels are only a couple of feet from the mud on either side, and if he goes into that the car would be there for hours. A little to the right ...
— On the King's Service - Inward Glimpses of Men at Arms • Innes Logan
... instinctively crafty, and have an ineradicable tendency to lie. For as lions are furnished with claws and teeth, elephants with tusks, boars with fangs, bulls with horns, and the cuttlefish with its dark, inky fluid, so Nature has provided woman for her protection and defence with the faculty of dissimulation, and all the power which Nature has given to man in the form of bodily strength and reason has been conferred on woman in this form. Hence, dissimulation is innate in woman and almost ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... surface together, and on the same plank or support of whatever kind continued the combat, begun possibly in the vortex fathoms down. Writhing and twisting in deadly embrace, sometimes striking with sword or javelin, they kept the sea around them in agitation, at one place inky-black, at another aflame with fiery reflections. With their struggles he had nothing to do; they were all his enemies: not one of them but would kill him for the plank upon which he floated. He made ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... is watched," he announced as he entered. "Have you got a back door? Good! Leave your light burning and we'll go out that way." They slipped quietly into an inky, tortuous passage which led back towards Second Street. Floundering through alleys and over garbage heaps, by circuitous routes, they reached the bridge, where, in the swift stream beneath, they saw ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... I saw him thread his way amongst the lines of people, moving toward the dark walls of the observatory that covered the hill. At long intervals rockets rose from the opposite rim of the great circular ridge around the City, scarring the deep, inky vault about us with lines of fire. They ascended to an enormous distance. Almost instantly these were apparently answered by similar rockets in other colors from the hill I ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... idea of being able to follow him without dogs; and it was their intention to send for one or two to the house, when they perceived that the bear's trace could be made out—at least, for some distance— without them. The inky water, that had copiously saturated his long fur, had been constantly dripping as he trotted onward in his flight; and this could easily be seen upon the herbage over which ...
— Bruin - The Grand Bear Hunt • Mayne Reid
... seated himself at the deal table that Sheila had set with the coffee-cups and a big loaf of French bread, and began slowly consuming a bowl of inky fluid, strong of chicory, into which from time to time he dipped a portion of the loaf. Sheila imitated his processes with less daintiness and precision, since she was shaken with excitement at ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley
... thrust a stick into the fire, and so kept the flames alive. But it was a dim little blaze at best. Yet it was mighty cheering and comforting as the darkness wrapped the forest, and the gloom beneath the rhododendron thicket became inky and impenetrable. ...
— The Young Wireless Operator—As a Fire Patrol - The Story of a Young Wireless Amateur Who Made Good as a Fire Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss
... so with the least sincerity. Then Paul, instructed by Cornelia, shook hands with the four young gentlemen at Mr Feeder's desk; then with the two young gentlemen at work on the problems, who were very feverish; then with the young gentleman at work against time, who was very inky; and lastly with the young gentleman in a state of stupefaction, who ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... hideous square of painted deal!—Now it was on the walls of the rooms he lived in; now on the door of a church, like Luther's propositions; now at a street-corner, where should have been the name of the street; now inky-black against the fair white headstone of his own grave. Miserable dream, miserable man, for whom the scraping together of sordid dross was life's only object, and who, in ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... crescent Earth was dwindling ... Mars was far away in another portion of its orbit—the Moon was behind the Earth. There were just the myriad blazing giant worlds of the stars—infinitely remote, with vast distances of inky void between them. And now there was a visible movement to the stars! A sort of ...
— The World Beyond • Raymond King Cummings
... handsome, four inches across, ivory white, with a round well in the centre of its broad lip, which makes a theme for endless speculation. The daring eccentricities of colour in this class of plant have no stronger example than C. callosum, a novelty from Caraccas, with inky brown sepals and petals, brightest orange column, labellum of verdigris-green tipped ...
— About Orchids - A Chat • Frederick Boyle
... writing ink, printing ink, printer's ink, Indian ink, India ink. V. be black &c adj.; render black &c adj.. blacken, infuscate^, denigrate; blot, blotch; smutch^; smirch; darken &c 421. black, sable, swarthy, somber, dark, inky, ebony, ebon, atramentous^, jetty; coal-black, jet-black; fuliginous^, pitchy, sooty, swart, dusky, dingy, murky, Ethiopic; low-toned, low in tone; of the deepest dye. black as jet &c n., black as my hat, black as a shoe, black as a tinker's pot, black as November, black as thunder, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... went in the right direction and managed to locate the Porpoise. Then, feeling along her steel sides, he led the boys through the inky blackness to the water chamber by which entrance could be had to ...
— Under the Ocean to the South Pole - The Strange Cruise of the Submarine Wonder • Roy Rockwood
... not now—they've been drained. But the place would be too damp for a dwelling-house. It's all right as offices. They burn enormous fires. The rooms are quite charming. This is what happens to the stately homes of England—they buzz with inky clerks, or their equivalent. Stateliness is on its ...
— Touch and Go • D. H. Lawrence
... Dunfermline, and a few days later we were at Leven, with two companies on duty at the docks at Methil. The Leven companies did uninterrupted training, the Methil companies uninterrupted guards, and to the credit of the latter no one was drowned on these inky nights in the docks. It was there one night a small but gallant officer was going his rounds. One sentry was posted in mid-air on a coal shute, and to challenge persons approaching his post was one of his duties. On the approach of the officer there was no challenge, so to find the ...
— The Fifth Battalion Highland Light Infantry in the War 1914-1918 • F.L. Morrison
... he was unable to fill more than half a dozen small pages. He hesitated whether he should send them in, and held them in his inky fingers, thinking he would burn them. He was full of pity for his own inability. "I wish I was a ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... the pitchy night the fire died down and the woodpile grew small. Neither of us moved to replenish the stock, and the darkness consequently came up very close to our faces. A few feet beyond the circle of firelight it was inky black. Occasionally a stray puff of wind set the billows shivering about us, but apart from this not very welcome sound a deep and depressing silence reigned, broken only by the gurgling of the river and the ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... taking upon us to be poets in despite of Pallas. Now, wherein we want desert, were a thankworthy labour to express. But if I knew, I should have mended myself; but as I never desired the title so have I neglected the means to come by it; only, overmastered by some thoughts, I yielded an inky tribute unto them. Marry, they that delight in poesy itself, should seek to know what they do, and how they do, especially look themselves in an unflattering glass of reason, if they ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... Demetrius stared down into the inky water. "It will not give back those who are gone forever. Achilles could ask Hephaestus for his armour, but he could not put breath into the body of Patroclus. Plutus and Cratus[162] are, after all, but weaklings. A! This ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... here and there was made to show her form to the best advantage. Mary had not known that hair could be as black as the heavy waves which melted into the black velvet of the hat. The level brows over the long eyes were equally black, and so were the thick short lashes. Between these inky lines the eyes themselves were as coldly gray and empty as a northern sea, yet they were attractive, if only by an almost sinister contrast. The skin was extraordinarily white, and it did not occur to Mary that Nature alone had not whitened it, or reddened the large scarlet mouth. Women did ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... breath of air seemed to stir the branches of the trees, and the inky blackness of the ...
— Daisy Brooks - A Perilous Love • Laura Jean Libbey
... from a shelf-like stratum of cloud, and elongating, seemed to descend to the surface of the sea. Daylight went out instantly and a prolonged moan came from the distant east. Blinding flashes of lightning illuminated the whirling mass and almost absolute darkness fell after each bolt. Out of the inky midnight toward the east came an ever-increasing sound of a maddened sea, gathering in volume and fury and menace. Kenkenes flung himself on his ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... the principal island bearing the name of Mainland. Fields, yellow with flowers, among which stood here and there a cottage, sloped softly down to the water, and beyond them rose the bare declivities and summits of the hills, dark with heath, with here and there still darker spots, of an almost inky hue, where peat had been cut for fuel. Not a tree, not a shrub was to be seen, and the greater part of the soil appeared never to have ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... uffish spectral gleaming of that wild resounding clang Came hooting o'er the margin of the dusky moors that hang Like palls of inky darkness where the hoarse, weird raven calls, And the bhang-drunk Hindoo staggers on and on ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... spread out the first. It was a scene of mountain storm, painted as in an elemental fury. Inky pine branches slashed and hurled upward, downward, and across a tortured gray sky. A cloud-rack tore the void like a Valkyrie's cry made visible. One huge talon of lightning ...
— The Dragon Painter • Mary McNeil Fenollosa
... all was yet comparatively calm, but the heavy clouds, gathering on three sides, seemed gradually converging towards a common centre; a short abrupt cross sea, began to form, and the water assumed a glistening inky hue. There was something peculiar and striking in the appearance of the clouds surrounding us; they seemed to rest upon the surface of the ocean, and towered upward like a dark wall to the skies. Their upper extremities were torn and irregular, and long narrow fragments, like ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... he fell into the usual inky deliberation. "Dear Josephine" was so inadequate. "My dear Josephine" had—or did it not have—just an extra little touch of tenderness, a peculiar claim to possession. But if so, would it be too bold or ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... breasts are not like young roes that feed among the lilies, but ivory hemispheres threaded with purple fire and tinged with sunset's tawny gold. Reverently as though touching divinity's robe, Joseph caresses the wanton curls that stream like an inky storm-cloud over the shapely shoulders—he puts the little hands, heavy with costly gems, back from the tearful face and holds them with a grasp so fierce that the massy rings of beaten gold bruise the tender flesh. Mrs. Potiphar starts up, alarmed by his unwonted ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... the early Puritan ministers was free from the sad shadow of doubt and fear. No "rose-pink or dirty-drab views of humanity" were theirs; all was inky-black. And it is impossible to express the gloom and the depression of spirit which fall on one now, after these centuries of prosperous and cheerful years, when one considers thoughtfully the deep and despairing agony of mind endured by these good, brave, ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... who had given him one inky finger—(a pile of letters just completed lay beside her)—shook her head, looking him critically up and down ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... it is; I know not seems. 'Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother, Nor customary suits of solemn black, Nor windy suspiration of forced breath, No, nor the fruitful river in the eye, Nor the dejected havior of the visage, Together with all forms, modes, shows of grief, That can denote me truly: these, ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... INKY PEN.—We sympathise much with your anxiety, but we can only say to you as we say to all who wish to succeed in literary work, you must try and try again for a long time before you will succeed, and success is not ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII, No. 357, October 30, 1886 • Various
... with the inky pen beside it, was an unfinished sermon, with a sentence broken in the midst, where his thoughts had ceased to gush out upon the page two days before. He knew that it was himself, the thin and white-cheeked minister, who had done and suffered these things, and written ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... with several little furnaces contained in one room. This mode of preparation must greatly tend to deprive the shrub of its native juices, and to contract a rust from the iron on which it is dried. This may probably be the cause of vitriol turning tea into an inky blackness. We therefore do not think with Boerhaave, that the preparers employ green vitriol for improving the colour of the finer green teas. It may however be concluded, from the colour of bohea, souchong, and such as are called black teas, that they may ...
— A Treatise on Foreign Teas - Abstracted From An Ingenious Work, Lately Published, - Entitled An Essay On the Nerves • Hugh Smith
... through the transparent darkness of a cloudless April morning, a little before sunrise, that he saw again the mountains of his native land,—far lofty sharpening sierras, towering violet-black out of the circle of an inky sea. Behind the steamer which was bearing him back from exile the horizon was slowly filling with rosy flame. There were some foreigners already on deck, eager to obtain the first and fairest view of Fuji from ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... study, she found Trevor himself, as she had expected, waiting for her in slippers and worn velvet jacket, pipe in hand, and silk skullcap awry upon the silver-white hair. He extended an inky hand, and still holding it and talking, led her to an easy-chair ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... unconscious, the patient had not once been washed or the bed changed. The result, even with my experience, appalled me. But while there is life in a young patient there is always hope, and we at once set to work on our Augean task. By the strangest coincidence it was an inky dark night outside, with a low fog hanging over the water, and the big trap boat, with a crew of some six men, among them the skipper's sons, had been missing since morning. The skipper had stayed home out of sympathy for his servant girl, and ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... the sky and sea lead-colored, the brown coast by degrees lost its distinctness, and became covered with a dark haze that seemed to blend everything into a still, stony, threatening iron-gray mass. The wind rose, the sea became inky black and swelled into heavy ridges, which made our little vessel dip deep and spring high, as she toiled forward; and then down came the rain—such tremendous rain! Cloaks, shawls, and umbrellas were ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... children on their shoulders; small black boys learned on their back little brothers equally inky, and, gravely depositing them, shook hands. Never had I seen human beings so clad, or rather so unclad, in such amazing squalid-ness and destitution of garments. I recall one small urchin without a rag of clothing ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... as a chorus of harsh execration reached her ears. She looked toward the barns and hay corrals whence the sound came, and, on the instant, a hideous terror seized upon her. The barn was afire! The hay had just been fired! And, in the inky blackness of the night, the ruddy glow leapt suddenly and lit up the figures of a crowd of men, now shouting and blaspheming at the result of ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... beside the tiny gate house where flickering lights burned on the sills of three little mullioned windows. They drove through the gates, across the flagstone-paved drive of the stable yard and came to a slow stop under the inky shadows of the wooden gallery that was built across the front of the house. A woman was hurrying down the sagging steps, such a fat, comfortable woman that Felice unconsciously leaned toward her even before she could ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... written page sent in a little while ago. All night long these types with the letters upon them are being set up, all night long patient men pick up the metal letters and form them into pages; all night long the steam engine is going, and the letters from the inky metal pages are being stamped upon the clean white paper, which, when it is printed all over, will contain the week's history of the world, and will be read by thousands ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... thirty negroes on the place, I was given a youth of perhaps eighteen to be my body-servant. He was to black my boots, keep my clothes dusted, hold my stirrup, take care of my horse, and do anything else I wanted him to do. This negro I dubbed Inky, in ...
— The Love Story of Abner Stone • Edwin Carlile Litsey
... ladyship approved of it, and could compound with the inferiority of the pursuit by doing practical justice to some of its advantages. I had reason to know (my reason was simply that poor Mrs. Stormer told me) that she suffered the inky fingers to press an occasional bank- note into her palm. On the other hand she deplored the "peculiar style" to which Greville Fane had devoted herself, and wondered where an author who had the convenience of so lady-like ...
— Greville Fane • Henry James
... went on, added to it, came the Roumanian army retreating—hundreds of guns, cavalry, infantry, ambulances, Red Cross carts, motor-kitchens, and wounded on foot—a most extraordinary scene. The night was inky black; the only lights were our own head-lights and those of the ambulance behind us, but they revealed a sad and never-to-be-forgotten picture. Our driver was quite wonderful; she sat unmoved, often for half an hour at a time. There was a block, and we had to wait while the yelling, ...
— Elsie Inglis - The Woman with the Torch • Eva Shaw McLaren
... space stood the kitchen, on the other the woodshed, and in a ramshackle penthouse against the hall at the back, the paper was trimmed and damped down. Here, too, the forms, or, in ordinary language, the masses of set-up type, were washed. Inky streams issuing thence blended with the ooze from the kitchen sink, and found their way into the kennel in the street outside; till peasants coming into the town of a market day believed that the Devil was taking a wash inside ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... greatest ferocity. At any moment, perhaps at this very moment, some silent-footed beast of prey might catch my scent where it laired in some contiguous passage, and might creep stealthily upon me. I craned my neck about, and stared through the inky darkness for the twin spots of blazing hate which I knew would herald the coming of my executioner. So real were the imaginings of my overwrought brain that I broke into a cold sweat in absolute conviction that some beast ...
— The People that Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... a pear and an apple, a pineapple, a bunch of grapes, and several fat plums, all very beautifully done in wax, as was the fashion about the middle of this most glorious reign. They were appropriately coloured—the apple blushing red, the grapes an inky black, emerald green leaves were scattered here and there to lend finish, and the whole was mounted on an ebonised stand covered with black velvet, and protected from dust and dirt by a beautiful ...
— Liza of Lambeth • W. Somerset Maugham
... came over her sparkling, happy face, like an inky cloud across a noon sky, and he felt a shiver stealing ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... very exciting, is it not?" She glanced over her shoulder up the ill-lighted street. Rows of shade trees cast long inky blots between the corner illuminations; the houses on either side sat well back in their yards, increasing the sense of isolation. "It is quite ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... sails were on her we gathered at the starboard rail to watch the shore. There the hills ran into inky blackness, as the horizon sometimes merges into a thunder squall. A dense white steam came from the creek bed within the arroyo. The surges beat on the shore louder than the ordinary, and the foam, even in these day hours, seemed ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... not see Loch Katrine, perhaps, under its best presentment; for the surface was roughened with a little wind, and darkened even to inky blackness by the clouds that overhung it. The hill-tops, too, wore a very dark frown. A lake of this size cannot be terrific, and is therefore seen to best advantage when it is beautiful. The scenery of its shores is not altogether so rich and lovely as I had preimagined; ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Cardo; "I had not noticed it before, though. How inky black the sky is over there! And the sea as black, and that white streak on the line of ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... sense but not see. As I waited for Mac to strike a match my eyes roved about, seeking to pierce the unnatural blackness that wrapped itself about us, and while my gaze was for an instant fixed on the night-enshrouded canyon, a red tongue of flame flashed out for a moment in the inky shadow below. MacRae saw it also, ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... malignant way along the valleys and hollows of that part of Central Kentucky in which the rural settlement of Three Forks is situated. It had been "trying to rain" all day in a half-hearted sort of manner, and now the drops were flying about in a cold spray. The night was one of dense, inky blackness, occasionally relieved by flashes of lightning. It was hardly a night on which a girl should be out. And yet one was out, scudding before the storm, with clenched teeth and wild eyes, wrapped head and shoulders in a great blanket shawl, and looking, as she ...
— The Strength of Gideon and Other Stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... we struck a sheltered dip, where we decided to camp for something to eat. It was after 8 P.M. and I was for camping there for the night, as it seemed to me folly to venture upon a piece of untried newly frozen sea-ice in inky darkness, with a blizzard coming up behind us. Against this of course we were only five miles from Cape Evans, and though we had hardly any grub with us, not having anticipated the cliff or the saltness of the sea-ice, and ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... three days the wind went worrying on, and a line of surf leapt on the sea-wall always to the same height. The hills all around were inky black ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... rider. A closer examination showed the squire what had happened. Like himself, Master Potts had incautiously approached the swamp, and, getting entangled in it, was thrown, head foremost, into the slough; out of which he was now floundering, covered from head to foot with inky-coloured slime. As soon as they were aware of the accident, the two grooms pushed forward, and one of them galloped after Flint, whom he succeeded at last in catching; while the other, with difficulty preserving his countenance at the woful ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... the garden and overhanging the boarded partition threw one corner of the playground into deep shadow. The boys rushed into the angle, and, crouching down in the inky darkness, were at once hidden from the view of any one who might advance even to within a ...
— The Triple Alliance • Harold Avery
... faster; and then thought of the young countess and the friend she might be about to lose. She could number her friends on her fingers. Admiral Fakenham's exclamations of the name of the place where she now was, conveyed an inky idea of the fall she had undergone. Counting her absent brother, with himself, his father, and the two Whitechapel girls, it certainly was an unexampled fall, to say of her, that they and those two girls had become by ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Faces inky black and golden peering through darkness and mist, Muscular backs stretching, or suddenly crouching Round mighty ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... Seine. The boats are plying again, but they stop at nightfall, and the river is inky-smooth, with the same long weed-like reflections as in August. Only the reflections are fewer and paler; bright lights are muffled everywhere. The line of the quays is scarcely discernible, and the heights of the Trocadero are lost in the blur of night, which presently effaces even the firm tower-tops ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... would have damped the courage of any one except old Liz. The storm was beginning to grow furious; the sun, which had already set, was tingeing the black and threatening clouds with dingy red. Far as the eye could reach, the once green prairie presented an angry sea, whose inky waves were crested and flecked with foam, and the current was drifting the hut away into the abyss of blackness that seemed to gape on ...
— The Red Man's Revenge - A Tale of The Red River Flood • R.M. Ballantyne
... longer, and then crawled back to the cave. The owl hooted, and presently Wake descended lightly beside me; he must have known every foothold and handhold by heart to do the job in that inky blackness. I remember that he asked no question of me, but he used language rare on the lips of conscientious objectors about the men who had lately been in the crevice. We, who four hours earlier had been at death grips, now curled up on the hard floor like two tired dogs, and ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... we reached San Bartolome. As we drew near the village, we saw a magnificent double rainbow, brilliantly displayed upon the eastern sky against a cloud of almost inky blackness. Looking westward, as we entered the village, we saw the sun setting in a sea of gold, between Popocatapetl and Ixtaccihuatl. Watching this magnificent sunset, we sat down before the old church, and almost instantly a crowd gathered to see what the strangers might want. ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr
... island lay, they could manage to locate it by the inky blur that seemed to settle upon the water at this one particular spot. But if any one expected to see lanterns moving to and fro like animated fireflies, they made a sad mistake. It remained as dark as the inside of a pocket ...
— The Boy Scouts' First Camp Fire - or, Scouting with the Silver Fox Patrol • Herbert Carter
... a wash of rain. Each night she returned long after dark, and putting her car in the garage, felt her way up the inky road by the rushing of the river at its edge, crossed the wooden bridge, and entered the cell which she tried ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... Inky pinky, my black hen Lays eggs for gentlemen; Whiles ane, whiles twa, Whiles a bonnie black ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... not alone thy inky cloak, good Sir EDWARD, that attracts the Baron, nor is it the business-like profile of THOMAS DE GREY, sixth Lord Walsingham, Chairman of the Ensilage Committee, that gives the Baron matter for special admiration; but it is the perfectly charming portrait of "'DAISY PLESS' H.S.H. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, November 12, 1892 • Various
... along that terrace in Utopia, I see a little figure, a little bright-eyed, bearded man, inky black, frizzy haired, and clad in a white tunic and black hose, and with a mantle of lemon yellow wrapped about his shoulders. He walks, as most Utopians walk, as though he had reason to be proud of something, as though he had no reason to be afraid of anything ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... victim. I can only ask my reader,—did you ever upset your ink-bottle, and watch, in helpless agony, the rapid spread of Stygian blackness over your fair manuscript or fairer table-cover? With a like inky swiftness did gossip now blacken the reputation of the Rev. Amos Barton, causing the unfriendly to scorn and even the friendly to stand aloof, at a time when difficulties of another kind ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... And then from the inky blackness at my right I saw two flaming eyes glaring into mine. They were on a level that was over two feet above my head. It is true that the beast who owned them might be standing upon a ledge within the cave, or that it might be ...
— At the Earth's Core • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... the train of his thought. Another and a worse one crowded close upon it. He glanced up through the trees into the inky cavern of the skies, and a single large drop of water ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... of them half of its trunk and branches, and, weaving together the two halves that remained, would make of them either a single pillar of shade, defined by the surrounding light, or a single luminous phantom whose artificial, quivering contour was encompassed in a network of inky shadows. When a ray of sunshine gilded the highest branches, they seemed, soaked and still dripping with a sparkling moisture, to have emerged alone from the liquid, emerald-green atmosphere in which the whole grove was plunged as though beneath the sea. For the ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... passed, Weldon mounted once more and, with Kruger Bobs following close behind, rode carefully away into the inky, drizzling night. For the first hour, he rode steadily and with comparative comfort. The excitement of the battle was still in his blood, its noises ringing in his head, its sights dancing like will-o'-the-wisps ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller
... the men, each darting at once to his own post—and not an instant too soon. A huge white cloud seemed to leap upward through the inky sky like smoke from a cannon, a long line of foam glanced like a lightning flash across the dark sea, and then came a rush and a roar, and over went the ship on her beam ends, and every man on board was blinded, ...
— Harper's Young People, April 27, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... peeved!" Bones's knowledge of French was of the haziest. "Remember, dear old thing," he said solemnly, wagging his inky forefinger, "as an employer of labour, I must protect the young an' innocent, my jolly ...
— Bones in London • Edgar Wallace
... The hot inky odors of a newspaper plant took me by the throat during my progress in the whiny elevator ...
— Blister Jones • John Taintor Foote
... he had caught himself in the act of dropping off, and the last night he had actually wakened with a start to find it quite light. As his last recollection before that was of an inky darkness impenetrable to the eye, dismay gripped him with a sudden clutch and he ran swiftly down to the museum. His relief on finding that the scarab was still there had been tempered by thoughts of what might ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... very small, yet clearly visible in swarms upon the inky-black expanse of waters, a hundred, a thousand little points of ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... proceeded, however, I saw that he had understood the matter better than I. He put a hook into the nose of this huge monster, wallowing in his inky pool and bespattering the passers-by; he dragged him to the land and made him tractable. One suit followed another; one editor was sued, I thinly half-a-dozen times; some of them found themselves under a second indictment before the first was tried. In vindicating ...
— Precaution • James Fenimore Cooper
... preceded me into the hut I heard a low murmur of greeting pass between him and someone else, which told me that the owner was at home; then I followed and stood upright in what was, to my eye, inky blackness. ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... of a man who might have been of peasant origin. An inky black beard hid the lower part of his face, but his nose was blunt and pugnacious, and his eyes were like black shoe-buttons sewn close together. He stuck out his stomach importantly, and the care with which his uniform and decorations were painted strengthened the impression that he ...
— Trapped in 'Black Russia' - Letters June-November 1915 • Ruth Pierce
... were almost torn from their hold upon the weather rigging, while the men at the wheel were under water again and again. Vainly did Olaf strain his eyes to windward in the hope of seeing a break in the inky sky. All was grim and gloomy, and amid the blinding spray and the deepening darkness it was hard to tell where the sea ended and the ...
— Harper's Young People, January 27, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... in inky gloom, and there was an impressive stillness except for the occasional rustle of a leaf; but the stillness was broken by a puff of icy wind which suddenly stirred the grass. The harsh rustle it made was followed by a deafening crash, and a jagged streak of lightning fell from ...
— The Intriguers • Harold Bindloss
... o' blueberries," said the Boy, his inky-looking mouth bearing witness to veracity; "and there are black and red currants in the snow, ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... funereal Close, where the trees were green only in proportion as they were distant from the church, lay two microscopic ponds like the mouths of two wells; one covered to the brim with yellow-green duck-weed, the other full of brackish water of inky blackness, in which three goldfish lay as ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... take her out into the moonlight of that deep inland country. The trees were dark with leaves and brooded close above them; old water-fences and milldams cast inky shadows on the still, shallow ponds clasped in wooded hills. No region could have offered a more striking contrast to the empty plains. Moya felt shut in with old histories. The very ground was but moulding sand in which generations of human lives had been poured, and the sand swept over to ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... not attempt to get on to the poop, for they felt they would be blown away if they exposed themselves there to the full force of the wind. Looking round, the scene was terrible. The surface of the sea was almost hidden by the clouds of spray blown from the heads of the waves; a sky that was inky black hung overhead. The sea, save for the white heads, was of similar hue, but ahead there seemed a gleam of light. Jim Tucker, holding on by the rail, raised himself two or three feet higher to have a better view. A ...
— A Chapter of Adventures • G. A. Henty
... thinks of the floods of foul or idle or malicious talk which half drown the world as being revelations of the sort of hearts from which they have gushed, one is appalled. What a black, seething fountain that must be which spurts up such inky waters! ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... raged for eight-and-forty hours. There had been wild, black, awful nights, and sullen days when the gray curtains of the sky were torn asunder and whirled over us in inky folds, their tattered fringes lashing up the seas, and whipping our frail bark till it skulked and cowered, like a beaten cur that looks in vain for mercy. We had drifted northward far from our course, our two consorts had disappeared, and we had well-nigh ...
— Margaret Tudor - A Romance of Old St. Augustine • Annie T. Colcock
... moon still shone brightly ahead of us and lit up the blackness. Beneath its sheen a huge white-topped breaker, twenty feet high or more, was rushing on to us. It was on the break—the moon shone on its crest and tipped its foam with light. On it rushed beneath the inky sky, driven by the awful squall behind it. Suddenly, in the twinkling of an eye, I saw the black shape of the whale-boat cast high into the air on the crest of the breaking wave. Then—a shock of water, a wild rush of boiling foam, and I was clinging for ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... heavier gust of rain and wind beat upon them. The minister struggled with the umbrella. The gust passed and with it the fog. An instant before it had been all about them, shutting them within inky walls. Now it was not. Through the rain he could see the shadowy silhouettes of bushes at the road side. Fifty yards away the lighted windows of the Hammond tavern gleamed yellow. Farther on, over a ragged, ...
— Keziah Coffin • Joseph C. Lincoln
... (otherwise called Chalcanthum) is here most predominant, there needs no other proofe, then from the assay of the water it selfe; which both in the tart and inky smack thereof, joyned with a piercing and a pricking quality, and in the savour (which is somewhat a little vitrioline,) is altogether like unto the ancient Spaw waters; which according to the consent of all those, who have ...
— Spadacrene Anglica - The English Spa Fountain • Edmund Deane |
