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More "Ebony" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... toddle across the floor. His toes struck a rug and he fell, showing above his white socks a pair of little fat legs that seemed to be made in ebony, so clearly were they in contrast to his white clothing. Even Drusilla sat back and joined the men in their merriment. The baby looked at them solemnly; then put his chubby fist into his mouth and his face puckered up and great tears came to ...
— Drusilla with a Million • Elizabeth Cooper
... of this belligerent demonstration was afforded at the Christmas festival, held yearly at Beauseincourt, by Colonel and Mrs. La Vigne—in the great, many-windowed drawing-room with its waxed parquet—its ebony-framed mirrors, its pier consoles, and ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... than ever!" muttered Venters. He followed the sorrel into the narrowing split between the walls, and presently had to desist because he could not see a foot in advance. As he went back toward the open Wrangle jumped out of an ebony shadow of cliff and like a thunderbolt shot huge and black past him down into the starlit glade. Deciding that all attempts to catch Wrangle at night would be useless, Venters repaired to the shelving rock where he had hidden saddle and blanket, and ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... away. No man could do this but I, and the eldest son of my body. Him has the god decreed to excel in art, and I have seen the perfections of the work of his hands in every kind of rare stone, in gold and silver, in ivory and ebony." Now since Mertisen and his son were the chief artists of their day, it is more than probable that they were employed to decorate their king's funerary chapel. So that in all probability the XIth Dynasty reliefs from Der el-Bahari are the work ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall
... first fact to impress itself upon me was that these people among whom I now found myself were of an entirely different race from the negro, properly so-called—the woolly-pated, high cheek-boned, ebony-skinned individual with snub nose and thick lips usually met with aboard a slaver. To start with, their colour was much lighter, being a clear brown of varying degrees of depth, from that of the mulatto to a tint not many shades deeper than that of ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... seen her bring home such a prize. Usually she found only crumpled things like old bits of wrinkled brown paper which she called "specimens." This one was marvellously beautiful. It had a dainty, slender stalk of ebony black, and its hundred tiny leaves quivered like a shower of green water-drops in the air. There was actual joy in ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... to be done up in a marvellous chignon on the top of her head. First, her maids washed it beautifully clean with the juice of the lime and the lather of the soap-nut; then it was combed and brushed until every hair glistened like ebony; next it was twisted up and stuck full of the quaint golden and tortoise-shell bodkins, with here and there a spray ...
— Tales of the Malayan Coast - From Penang to the Philippines • Rounsevelle Wildman
... you Young America, to see that form, and the cross-gashes of the meat ax in it. It is the half of a gigantic English oak, which was growing in Julius Caesar's time, sawed through lengthwise, making a top surface several feet wide, black and smooth as ebony. Some of the bark still clings to the under side. The dancing-hall is the great room of the building. All that the taste, art and wealth of that day could do, was done to make it a splendid apartment, and it would pass ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various
... great numbers and a variety of kinds of walnut-trees in this country. There is a very large kind, the wood of which is almost as black as ebony, but very porous. The fruit, with the outer shell, is of the size of a large hen's egg: the shell has no cleft, is very rough and so hard as to require a hammer to break it. Though the fruit be very relishing, yet it is covered ...
— History of Louisisana • Le Page Du Pratz
... spluttered Bones in English, "do you mean by telling people about me—eh, you scoundrel? What the dooce do you mean by it, you naughty old ebony?" ...
— Bones in London • Edgar Wallace
... polish'd, elegant, with the air of finest conventional library, picture-gallery or parlor, with ladies and gentlemen in them, and plush and rosewood, and ground-glass lamps, and mahogany and ebony furniture, and a silver inkstand and scented satin paper ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... almost too openly. They chatted lightly on many subjects as they walked together, knee-deep, at times, among scarlet wine-berries, and the delicate green and ebony of maidenhair fern. The scents and essence of summer hung heavy in the air. Shafts of golden sunlight, piercing the somber canopy of the forest isles, touched, and, it seemed to Geoffrey, etherealized, his companion. The completeness of his enjoyment troubled the man, and presently ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... who detained the envoy of D'Artagnan, placed in the hands of that messenger a letter from himself for D'Artagnan, and a small coffer of ebony inlaid with gold, which was not very voluminous in appearance, but which, without doubt, was very heavy, as a guard of five men was given to the messenger, to assist him in carrying it. These people ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... With great ebony brushes he smoothed his hair till it shone like silver under the light; then he, too, came out on the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... EBENUS.—Jamaica or West India ebony tree. This is not the plant that yields the true ebony-wood of commerce. Jamaica ebony is of a greenish-brown color, very hard, and so heavy that it sinks in water. It takes a good polish, and is used by turners for the manufacture ...
— Catalogue of Economic Plants in the Collection of the U. S. Department of Agriculture • William Saunders
... banqueting-room of moderate size, but brilliant enough to dazzle the eyes of the spectator with the richness of its furniture. The walls, lately so bare and ghastly, were now clothed with hangings of sky-blue velvet and silver; the chairs were of ebony, richly carved, with cushions corresponding to the hangings; and the place of the silver sconces which enlightened the ante-chamber was supplied by a huge chandelier of the same precious metal. The floor was covered with a Spanish foot-cloth, or carpet, on which ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... stood by while the big Negro silently tended to the horses—removing the packs and preparing them for the night. Still in silence he produced a small lantern and lighted it. It showed his face for the first time—the skin ebony black and polished over the cheekbones, but the rest of the face almost handsome, except that the slight flare of his nostrils gave him a cast of inhuman ferocity. And the fierceness was given point ...
— Gunman's Reckoning • Max Brand
... revels of a country village. To counterbalance those foreign sentinels, there mounted guard on the other side of the mirror two stout warders of Scottish lineage; a jug, namely, of double ale, which held a Scotch pint, and a quaigh, or bicker, of ivory and ebony, hooped with silver, the work of John Girder's own hands, and the pride of his heart. Besides these preparations against thirst, there was a goodly diet-loaf, or sweet cake; so that, with such auxiliaries, the apartment seemed victualled against ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... is adapted for the front or door of a small rosewood or an inlaid ebony cabinet, suitable for a lady's boudoir or dressing-room. It looks well if worked upon white instead of black satin; and if the former is used, it is advisable to have plate-glass as a protection to ...
— The Lady's Album of Fancy Work for 1850 • Unknown
... be more striking or pretty than the contrast between James and Angela thus grouped. On the one hand, blond tresses, alabaster tints, rosy cheeks, infantile grace and elegance; on the other, the bronze tint, ebony locks, and manner at ...
— A Romance of the West Indies • Eugene Sue
... before your own picture arrives at that pitch, While the lights are still light, and the shadows, though rich. More transparent than ebony shutters, Never minding what Black-Arted critics may say, Stop the biting, and pour the green blind away, As you please, into bottles ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... in its emphasis, but which she welcomed because it was an escape from worry, of a row he had had one late December afternoon. He spoke of finding his way among white oily creeks that wound among gleaming ebony mud-banks over which showed the summits of the distant hills that had been skeletonised by a thin snowfall; and of icy air that was made glamorous as one had thought only warmth could be by the blended lights of the ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... thy merchandise. They of the house of Togarmah traded for thy wares with horses and war-horses and mules. The men of Dedan were thy traffickers: many isles were the mart of thine hand: they brought thee in exchange horns of ivory and ebony. Syria was thy merchant by reason of the multitude of thy handyworks: they traded for thy wares with emeralds, purple, and broidered work, and fine linen, and coral, and rubies. Judah, and the land of Israel, they were thy traffickers: they traded for thy merchandise ...
— Select Masterpieces of Biblical Literature • Various
... neck: and this scrag neck and the bald head above it stood out from his fur collar as if they had been a vulture's. By his dress and the embroidered bag at his girdle, and the clasps of his furred shoes, I made no doubt he was a rich man; and he leaned on an ebony staff or wand capped with a pretty device of ivory ...
— The Laird's Luck • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... the feast that was spread for him. The dishes were crystallized lotus leaves and flowers, and the chopsticks were of the rarest ebony. As soon as they sat down, the sliding doors opened and ten lovely goldfish dancers came out, and behind them followed ten red-carp musicians with the koto and the samisen. Thus the hours flew by till midnight, and the beautiful music and dancing had banished all thoughts of the centipede. The Dragon ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... Prospero's magic wand, broken into three fragments by the hand of its mighty master. On the same shelf lay the gold ring of ancient Gyges, which enabled the wearer to walk invisible. On the other side of the alcove was a tall looking-glass in a frame of ebony, but veiled with a curtain of purple silk, through the rents of which the gleam of ...
— A Virtuoso's Collection (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... presented a truly stately appearance in her light yellow dress with a border of roses, with her black, almost ebony hair, olive complexion, and classically beautiful face—a typical Veronese—took Janina by the arm and gracefully promenaded about the salon with her, casting proud glances at those ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont
... lady waving at him her ebony crook, "do not run away, young gentleman. I see that you admire my garden. Pray step inside and look ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... of Falla threw back her big shawl, and then Jan saw that she held under it a long, silver-mounted ebony stick and a stiff, ...
— The Emperor of Portugalia • Selma Lagerlof
... desert might flash from them in response to a summons from within. The circles of olive shadow about them were bounded by thick arching lines of eyebrow. Magnificent mental power, well-nigh amounting to genius, seemed to dwell in the swarthy forehead beneath the double curve of ebony hair that lay upon it like a crown, and gleamed in the light like a varnished surface; but like many another actress, Coralie had little wit in spite of her aptness at greenroom repartee, and scarcely any education in spite of her boudoir experience. Her brain was prompted by her senses, ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... on the group of observers, and well knows when the 'sun is up' by the stir which takes place amongst the astronomers; or by noticing the master working out his latitude with a pencil on the ebony bar of his quadrant or on the edge of the hammock railing,—though, if he be one of your modern, neat-handed navigators, he carries his look-book for this purpose. In one way or other the latitude is computed as soon as the ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... strange Knight. Pen might fail to do justice to the magnificent preparations made to do honour to the brave Champion who had conquered the Green Dragon. As he approached the city he was met by a sumptuous chariot of massive gold, drawn by fifty milk-white steeds; the wheels were of the purest ebony, and the covering was of silk embossed with gold. On either side rode a hundred of the noblest peers of Bagabornabou, attired in crimson velvet, and mounted on chargers of the same pure colour as those ...
— The Seven Champions of Christendom • W. H. G. Kingston
... last scene was exceedingly clever and true to nature as well, being that combination of lovely scenery and execrable architecture which is so specially characteristic of a German spa. As for the drawing-room scene, I cannot regard it as in any way a success. The heavy ebony doors are entirely out of keeping with the satin panels; the silk hangings and festoons of black and yellow are quite meaningless in their position and consequently quite ugly; the carpet is out of all colour relation with the rest of the room, ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... the fleet touched at Java the Less "in compass about two thousand miles, with abundance of treasure and spices, ebony, and brazil, and so far to the south that the North Star cannot be seen, and none of the stars of the Great Bear." Here they were in great fear of "those brutish man eaters," with whom they traded for victuals ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... held their classes. If he went on a journey, they accompanied him and studied by the way. And it was a familiar sight on north Formosan roads or field paths to see Mackay, always with his book in one hand and his big ebony stick under his arm, walking along surrounded by a group ...
— The Black-Bearded Barbarian (George Leslie Mackay) • Mary Esther Miller MacGregor, AKA Marion Keith
... her eyes on her mistress as she spoke, and immediately a transformation scene was presented. The eyes dwindled into slits as the cheeks rose, and the serious pout became a smile so magnificent that ivory teeth and scarlet gums set in ebony alone met ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... was exactly on the opposite side of the circle. The four men with whom he shared his tiny cotton tent, askaris all as beseemed his dignity, were sound asleep. He squatted on his heels, pushed together the embers of his fire, staring into the coals. His ugly face was as though carved from ebony. Only his wild savage eyes glowed and flashed with a brooding lambent flame; and his wide nostrils slowly expanded and contracted as though with ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al
... day on which land was discovered we reached the mouth of Demarara River, and received a pilot on board, and a queer-looking fellow, for a pilot I thought him. He was a negro, with a skin dark as ebony, which shone with an exquisite polish. His costume was simplicity itself consisting of an old straw hat, and a piece of coarse "osnaburg" tied around the waist! But he was active and intelligent, notwithstanding ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... panels. It was strewed with sweet fresh rushes, and had three cross-legged chairs, besides several stools; the table, as usual upon trestles, was provided with delicate napery, and there was a dainty perfume about the whole; a beautiful crucifix of ivory and ebony, with images of Our Lady and St. John on either side, and another figure of St. Helena, cross in hand, presiding over the holy water stoup, were the most ecclesiastical things in the garniture, except the exquisitely illuminated breviary that ...
— Two Penniless Princesses • Charlotte M. Yonge
... snout-like jaws, swollen lips, a broad flat nose, short crimped hair, falsely called wool, long arms, meagre thighs, calfless legs, highly elongated heels, and flat feet. No single tribe, however, possesses all these deformities. The colour of the skin passes through every gradation, from ebony black, as in the Joloffers, to the light tint of the mulattoes, as in the Wakilema, and Barth even describes copper-coloured negroes in Marghi. As to the skull in many tribes, as in the above mentioned Joloffers, the jaws are not prominent, and the lips are not swollen. ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... hard wood, polished until it shone dully like a mirror in a shaded room. No rugs save the two great bear-skins, one black, the other white; no pictures beyond the one great painting against the farther wall. There was a fire-place, wide and deep and rock-bound. And yonder, a dull gleam as of ebony, a grand piano. Leather ...
— Under Handicap - A Novel • Jackson Gregory
... unusual pallor and extremely patrician in its modelling, surmounted by a coiffure so black that it could be compared only to ebony—black and almost gleaming with the life that was in it. It came low on her forehead, shading the wondrous dark eyes—eyes that were a deep yellowish green in their division between grey and black, eyes that were soft and luminous and unwaveringly ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... was more beautiful than I usually am. My hair, without powder and black as ebony, fell in curls over my forehead, my neck, and my shoulders; my dress was made of white gauze, and had not that long train which hides the feet and impedes the motions. I wore a zone of gold and precious stones round my waist, and was ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... light aloft with one hand like an ebony Statue of Liberty, and pointed straight ahead into ...
— Colonel Carter of Cartersville • F. Hopkinson Smith
... Dutch pioneers chose to house themselves in such lordly fashion. At Groot Constantia, which still retains its original furniture, the rooms are paved with black and white marble, and contain a wealth of great cabinets of the familiar Dutch type, of ebony mounted with silver, of stinkwood and brass, of oak and steel; one might be gazing at a Dutch interior by Jan Van de Meer, or by Peter de Hoogh, instead of at a room looking on to the Indian Ocean, and only eight miles distant from the Cape of Good ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... from the ceiling serves to light the vast and sombre room, with walls draped in black velvet sewn with golden fleur-de-lys. Near the wall which faces the two entrance doors that at this moment are both shut close, there stands beneath a brocaded canopy an ebony bed, supported on four twisted columns carved with symbolic figures. The king, after a struggle with a violent paroxysm, has fallen swooning in the arms of his confessor and his doctor, who each hold one of his dying hands, feeling his pulse anxiously ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - JOAN OF NAPLES—1343-1382 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... magnificent blackamoor whom be had discovered at the entrance of one of the aristocratic hotels on the Schlossberg, where he performed the function of a kind of caryatid, and looked, in the black of his skin and the white of his flowing costume, like a colossal figure carved in ebony and ivory. They took a roundabout way through a street entirely of villa-pensions; every house in Carlsbad but one is a pension if it is not n hotel; but these were of a sort of sentimental prettiness; with each a little garden ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... the carriage would be round directly; but Ellerton need not fear that she would be late. And then, when the old servant had closed the door, she went up to her husband's chair, leaning over it and embracing it with her two arms, while she rested her cheek against the carved ebony back. "This is where he will sit this evening," she said. "Good-bye, God bless you, dear;" and then she left ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... bore proof of the handiwork of hundreds of cunning craftsmen; but the furnishings filled Dolores's eyes to the exclusion of all else. Divans and chairs, cabinets and tables carried the mind far away to the realm of emperors and kings; vases from China and Greece stood on stands of boule-work; a tall ebony-and-ivory clock-case, in which ticked sonorously a masterpiece of Peter Hele, stood between two gorgeous pieces of Gobelin tapestry. And around her and above, Dolores's amazed eyes lighted upon gems of the painter's art such ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... roared Commodus, and again the ebony-posted bed creaked under him. Narcissus stepped into the darkened room. He left the door open, to have light to do his work by, but Marcia closed it, clinging to the gilded satyr's head that served for knob with both hands, her ...
— Caesar Dies • Talbot Mundy
... rise before the Black Eagle arrives," the merchant rejoined confidently. "Then he has palm nuts in bulk, gum, ebony, skins, ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... dark, ivory skin and ebony, male and female, or almost sexless in the excess of deformity, there were some to suit all tastes. Each wore a tablet hung round the neck by a green cord: on this were writ the chief merits of the wearer, and also a list of his or her defects, so ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... indifferently attired, represents to her, as to the entomologist, the nation of the Buprestes. The inventory of the Hornet's larder will include Diptera clad in grey or russet frieze; others are girdled with yellow, flecked with white, adorned with crimson lines; others are steel-blue, ebony black, or coppery green; and underneath this variety of dissimilar costumes ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... commerce exclusively an oil colour. When true, it is a lake prepared from the green ebony, or laburnum, and is of considerable permanence, transparency, and depth, both in water and oil; in which latter vehicle it dries well. This variety, however, may be said to be obsolete; having given way to a mixture, usually semi-stable, and liable ...
— Field's Chromatography - or Treatise on Colours and Pigments as Used by Artists • George Field
... girding the fire-furrowed plain of Catania where olive, lemon, oleander and orange springing out of black lava, mingled hues like paints on an ebony palette—rose vast, lonely, purple at base, snowy at summit, brooding Etna; dozing in the soft, sweet springtime, with red, wrathful eyes veiled by a silvery haze. An unlimited expanse of crinkling blue sea, shot like Persian silk with gleams of gold, and laced here and there with ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... some maintaining that we are strongest in humour—others, that our power is in pathos. The judicious declare that our forte lies in both—in the two united, or alternating with each other. "But is it not quite shocking," exclaims some scribbler who has been knouted in Ebony, "to hear so very serious an affair as the death of a Quaker in the snow among mountains, treated with such heartless levity? The man who wrote that description, sir, of the Ordinary of the Red Tarn Club, would not scruple ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... features, he tells us, were distinguished neither by regularity nor classical beauty, but had an indefinable charm. Her black eyes were full of sweetness, reverie, and restrained fire; a smile of ineffable voluptuousness played around her lips; and her magnificent hair was as dark as ebony and long enough to serve her as a mantle. Chopin and Maria saw each other every evening at the house of her uncle, the Palatine Wodzinski. The latter concluded from their frequent tete-a-tete at the piano ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... Bostil peered long into the shadows. Then he looked up. The ragged ramparts far above frowned bold and black at a few cold stars, and the blue of its sky was without the usual velvety brightness. How far it was up to that corrugated rim! All of a sudden Bostil hated this vast ebony pit. ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... quarter of a mile almost as distinct as though it were midday; and, clearly defined against the ghostly grey of the grass-clad ridge, I could see the head and shoulders of a savage, the white moonlight gleaming upon his ebony skin as he waved his ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... animalism refined by sentiment." He further declares that the Black is in point of affection inferior to the brutes. "No humane Englishman would sell his dog to a negro." [190] The phrase "God's image in ebony" lashed him to ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... on the remnant; and though the spencers are out of fashion they have outlived many a poetical popularity. These are instances of the ridiculous. The trifling are full as extensive. Where is the poet who shares half the popularity of Warren, Turner, or Day and Martin, whose ebony fames are spread through every dirty little village in England? These instances of the trifling and ridiculous made as much noise and stir in their day as the best, and noise and bustle are the essence and soul ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... envious perhaps at her former charms, had carried off the gristly part; and some earthly damsel, perhaps, from the same envy, had levelled the bone with the rest of her face: indeed it was far beneath the bones of her cheeks, which rose proportionally higher than is usual. About half a dozen ebony teeth fortified that large and long canal which nature had cut from ear to ear, at the bottom of which was a chin preposterously short, nature having turned up the bottom, instead of suffering it to grow to ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... orchards which arched and overshadowed its entire length. The sturdy over-reaching boughs hung heavy with myriads of green balls. Now and then one dropped noiselessly on the thick turf in the lane, and a noble Holstein mother, ebony banded with ivory white, her swollen cream-colored bag and dark-blotched teats flushed through and through by the delicate rose of a perfectly healthy skin, lowered her meek head and, snuffing largely, caught sideways as she passed at the ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... which he was shown, by a maid, was jungle-like in its hangings and deep-tufted upholstery of maroon and royal blue velvets, its lace and twisted cords with heavy tassels, and hassocks crowded on the sombrely brilliant rugs sacred in mosques. There was a mantle in colored marbles, cabinets of fretted ebony, tables of onyx and floriated ormolu, ivories and ornaments of Benares ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... his desk, opened with great deliberation an ebony box, took out two cigars, offered one to Jack, leaned over the lamp until his own was alight, and took the chair opposite Jack's. All this time Jack sat watching him as a child does a necromancer, wondering what he meant ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... if there were light under it, as well as over it, and was, unmistakably, red. She made more fun of it than anybody else, but at heart she loved her hair, and would not have exchanged it for paley-gold or ebony tresses. Bud had fastened his chubby hands in it to steady himself on his perch, as she ran, and pulled some of it loose from her comb. A thick curl strayed over her arm, bare almost to the shoulder, ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... and a cap suggesting the Corinthian order. In this array, majesty replaced picturesqueness, and there were those in Elmerton who quailed at the very thought of this tiny old woman, upright in her ebony chair, with the acanthus-leaf in finest Brussels nodding over her brows. The last touch of severity was added when Mrs. Tree was found knitting, as on the ...
— Mrs. Tree • Laura E. Richards
... garden-wall, and finally, undiscovered, but pallid and remorseful, gained the casement. Softly raising his head, he peeped within. The room was full of music; he seemed to grow blind for a moment, when lo! upon the kitchen-table sat the mysterious songster, an ebony-hued negress, scouring the tinware, and singing away. Just as he was peering through the window, the ebony songster discovered him. The soldier's limbs sank beneath him, and the black specimen ...
— Incidents of the War: Humorous, Pathetic, and Descriptive • Alf Burnett
... the Ulpian library, denominated from his family name. In a word, we have accounts of the rich ornaments the ancients bestowed on their libraries; of their floors paved with marble, their walls covered with glass and ivory, and their shelves and desks of ebony ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... steps in all the glory of new blue broadcloth and flowered velvet. Sir Charles Grandison could not have been more elegant, nor Sir Roger more gracious. Behind him yet grander stood George—George Washington—his master's fac-simile in ebony down to the bandanna handkerchief and the trick of waving the right hand in a flowing curve. It was perhaps this spectacle which saved the Major, for Miss Jemima was so overwhelmed by George Washington's portentous dignity that she exhibited sufficient humility ...
— "George Washington's" Last Duel - 1891 • Thomas Nelson Page
... energetically. Luckily for the pair in distress, they were to the westward of the approaching ship, with the evening sky, in which still lingered a pale primrose glow, behind them, and against this background their figures and that of the boat stood out black as silhouettes cut in ebony. It is possible that, even with this advantage, they might have escaped notice, had not Phil thought of waving his coat; but the figure of him standing there, apparently upon nothing—for it was only now and then that a small portion of the hull became visible—waving frantically something ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... from under the bed, the curtains disarranged, the chairs drawn out from the wall. Even my study had not been safe from this rough intruder, for the prints of a heavy boot were plainly visible on the ebony-black carpet. ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... now introduced, was one of those appropriated to the reception of guests and visitors to the convent. The apartment was plainly furnished with a table and a few wooden chairs; and in a recess hung a large ebony crucifix, before which was placed a hassock, its cloth envelope worn threadbare by the knees of the devout. But if the room of itself offered little worthy of note, the case was far different with the person who now ushered Don Baltasar into ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... being printed week by week in the local press, some of which must have been painful reading to Mr. Abel's friends. A darkened chamber, the existence of which had never been suspected in that familiar house in Main Street, furnished only with an ebony stand on which stood a cinerary urn, its surface ornamented with flower and leaf and thorn, and winding through it all the figure of a serpent; an inscription, too, of seven short words which no one could understand or rightly ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... he ran the car into a lane, slipped off the motor coat, and from his pocket whipped out the little metal insignia case—and in another moment a diamond-shaped gray seal was neatly affixed to the black ebony rim of the steering wheel. He smiled ironically. It was necessary, quite necessary that the police should have no doubt as to who had been in Doyle's house with Connie Myers that night, or to whom they had so ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... contrast to the neglect that reigned in the rest of the house. The walls were covered with rich tapestry, the best of the collection in the possession of the family; the bright furniture, of Louis XV. style, was brought from Madrid, with the magnificent ebony bedstead inlaid with marble in the alcove, when Don Pedro was making futile efforts to win the heart of his wife. There was a perfumed sensual atmosphere about the place, showing the refined tastes ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... Leo's great-grandfather, Duncan Gordon, with tall bronze candelabra on each side, holding wax candles. At the right of two marble steps that led to the altar, was spread a rug, and upon this stood an ebony reading-desk where a prayer-book rested. Filling a niche in the wall on the left side, the gilded pipes of an organ rose to meet a marble console that supported a ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... cheerful view over the grand canal. Full curtains of crimson damask partially shrouded the lofty windows, intercepting the superabundant light, and diffusing tints resembling the ruddy, soft, and melancholy hues of autumnal foliage; while these hues were further deepened by a richly carved ceiling of ebony, which, not reflecting but absorbing light, allayed the sunny radiance beneath, and imparted a sombre yet brilliant effect to the pictured walls, and glossy draperies, of the spacious apartment. Above the rich and lofty mantelpiece hung one of the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... fate. Not even when a low, half-strangled cry came to them across the water, out of the blackness that brooded upon the harbor, did any of the four give sign of excitement. The Babu started, and rose to his feet shivering; the others still squatted, mute and motionless as statues of ebony, neither by gesture nor murmur betraying their consciousness that at any moment, by tocsin from the fort, a thousand fierce and relentless warriors might be launched like sleuth hounds ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... sunk without any memorable effort, under the arms of Cyrus; followed in distant wars the standard of the great king, and presented him every fifth year with one hundred boys, and as many virgins, the fairest produce of the land. [76] Yet he accepted this gift like the gold and ebony of India, the frankincense of the Arabs, or the negroes and ivory of Aethiopia: the Colchians were not subject to the dominion of a satrap, and they continued to enjoy the name as well as substance of national independence. ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... in the heart of the city when I first made its acquaintance, and one of the famous houses of the town. And it was no wonder it was famous, for such a collection of Oriental furniture, bric-a-brac, and objects of art never was seen outside of a museum. There were ebony cabinets, book-cases, tables, and couches wonderfully carved and inlaid with mother-of-pearl. There were beautiful things in bronze and jade and ivory. There were all sorts of strange rugs and curtains and portieres. As to the china-ware and the vases, no house was ever so stocked; and as for ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... a toy ship in a big basin of blue water; we could distinguish the sword-fish reef, as the lad called it, and other reefs to the east and north, but the place we stood on was shut in by a black wood of teak and blue ebony, and, save for the rustling of the great leaves, we couldn't hear a sound. As for the path through the plantation, that was covered with long, rank grass, and some pit or other—I don't know what it was—gave a pungent, heavy odour which didn't suit a seaman's lungs. I was set against ...
— The House Under the Sea - A Romance • Sir Max Pemberton
... the most fascinating hour in the "Mouse Trap" is in the late afternoon, when no one is there, and the ebony hand-maiden in the big back kitchen is taking the fat, delicious-smelling cakes from the oven. Drop in some afternoon and sniff the fragrance that suggests your childhood and "sponge-cake day." You will feel that ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... day the chief men of the two tribes formed a procession and passed through the streets of the town, carrying a very gorgeously painted tablet of ebony wood, ten feet high. This was a picture-history, such as they preserved for each of the ancient kings of Popsipetel to ...
— The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle • Hugh Lofting
... five-franc piece on to the number 10, using a rake of her own which Dick Carleton had given her. It was a glorified rake, which he had ordered specially for her, made of ebony with the initials "M. G." set into it in little ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... make a Normandy dray horse that could compete with a Kentucky thoroughbred on the race course. It is a pitiful sight to watch students who could not possibly become virtuosos slave year after year before an ivory and ebony tread-mill, when, if they realized their lack of personal qualifications, they could engage in teaching or in some other professional or mercantile line and take a delight in their music as an avocation that they would never ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... smiled Emigration Jane. "Don't tear your features." She bestowed a glance of almost vocal disdain upon a Kaffir girl in turkey-red cotton twill, with a green hat savagely pinned upon her woolly hair. At another ebony female who advanced along the sidewalk pushing a white baby in a perambulator she tossed her head. "Funny," she observed, "when I was 'ome I used to swaller all the tales what parsons kep' pitchin' about that black lot ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... me, and went into a meeting-house, where a black bridegroom, in a blue broadcloth suit, white waistcoat, kid gloves, patent-leather shoes, and white hose, and an ebony bride, in white muslin caught up with jessamines, and a myrtle wreath on her head, had gone in, followed by a train of colored people. The white people, invited guests, it seems, were already assembled. The sexton told your Uncle that the parties were servants, ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... gently swelling canvass, the higher sails decreasing in size, until they tapered away nearly to a point, though topsail, topgallant sail, royal and skysails, showed like towers of snow, and the cordage like silver threads, while each dark spar seemed to be of ebony, fished with ivory, as a flood of cold, pale, mild light streamed from the beauteous planet over the whole stupendous machine, lighting up the sand white decks, on which the shadows of the men, and of every object that intercepted the moonbeams, were cast ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... and Xanthus and Assyrian Throne Repose of King Asshurbanipal Examples of Egyptian Furniture in the British Museum: Stool; Stand for a Vase; Head-rest or Pillow; Workman's Stool; Vase on a Stand; Folding Stool; Ebony Seat inlaid with ivory An Egyptian of High Rank Seated An Egyptian Banquet Chair with Captives as Supports, and an Ivory Box Bacchus and Attendants Visiting Icarus Greek Bedstead with a Table Greek Furniture ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield
... as of Araby. In an alcove, chastely draped with violent violet velvet, the grey apes swing, and the peacocks preen, on fretted pillar and jewelled screen. Horologes, to chime the hours, and even the quarters, uprise from tables of ebony-and-mother-of-pearl. Cabinets from Ind and Venice, of filligree gold and silver, enclose complete sets of Hansard's Parliamentary Debates; whilst lamps of silver, suspended from pendant pinnacles in the fretted ceiling, shed a soft light over the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 8, 1890 • Various
... in form, with alcoves lit with light which filtered in through the thinnest sheets of coloured marble; the furniture, simple, but choice; a kline or two of cedar-wood, enriched with gold, to recline on when weary; a few chairs of ebony, cypress, and rosewood were placed in the alcoves; a marble thronos for his sitters; a few small tables, three-legged and four-legged, beautifully carved, stood about to hold his brushes and palettes ...
— Saronia - A Romance of Ancient Ephesus • Richard Short
... freight of massive Tantes and comely daughters, followed by swarms of children of all sizes, dressed in all manner of print and moleskin, who are taken care of by Hottentot, Kaffer, and half-caste nurses, whose many-shaded complexions, ranging from light yellow up to ebony black, add variety ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... was polished and partially covered by three good-sized mats. There was a writing-table on one side of the room with an ebony-and-gold crucifix standing upon it. Opposite to it, on the other side of the room near the fireplace, was a bookcase. On the shelves were volumes of Shakespeare, Dante, Emerson, Wordsworth, Browning, Christina Rossetti, Newman's ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... form erect and proud of bearing. Yes!—I am alive, though declared to be dead; alive in the fullness of manly force—and even sorrow has left few distinguishing marks upon me, save one. My hair, once ebony-black, is white as a wreath of Alpine snow, though its clustering curls are thick ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... had enough of ivory and ebony; I am going in for a blonde," and Rodolphe began to ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... dogs. George, the elder, exhibited an ebony-tipped nose, surrounded by a narrow margin of pink flesh, and a coat marked in random splotches approximating in colour to white and slaty grey; but the grey, after years of sun and rain, had been scorched and washed out of the more prominent ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... stick, And presto, they're up all around you as thick And hard to explain as a conjuror's trick." "It must be on charcoal they fatten their fruit. I taste in them sometimes the flavour of soot. And after all really they're ebony skinned: The blue's but a mist from the breath of the wind, A tarnish that goes at a touch of the hand, And less than the tan with which pickers are tanned." "Does Mortenson know what he has, do you think?" "He may ...
— North of Boston • Robert Frost
... her ebony fan, which hid half her face and emphasized the curious glow of her black eyes. "I do not think you are as dull as you pretend. Have you ...
— The Buccaneer Farmer - Published In England Under The Title "Askew's Victory" • Harold Bindloss
... have the rare and weird sight of a black from Abyssinia whose splendid ebony hide has been tattooed in white. Furthermore, a young girl of scarcely fourteen summers will astound you by entering the cage of the ferocious beasts, whose terrible roarings reach you here! The programme is most interesting, and after these incomparable ...
— The Exploits of Juve - Being the Second of the Series of the "Fantmas" Detective Tales • mile Souvestre and Marcel Allain
... rose early, between five and six o'clock, made his coffee, and then went through his devotions, a black ebony crucifix, with the figure of our Lord in brass, on the table before him. Wherever he went he had this carried with him. [Footnote: This particular crucifix, however, was only used by Mr. Hope-Scott after his first ...
— Memoirs of James Robert Hope-Scott, Volume 2 • Robert Ornsby
... almost expecting to see a literal fulfilment of the prophecy. A form of imposing stature appeared. It was that of a negro upwards of six feet in height, magnificently proportioned, straight as a pillar, and black as ebony. He wore a dress of skins, carried a gun in his hand, and had an ...
— Cudjo's Cave • J. T. Trowbridge
... since that day at the Vingtieme. Only once, however, have I seen him at close quarters. This was a couple of years ago, in Paris. I was walking one afternoon along the rue d'Antin, and I saw him advancing from the opposite direction, overdressed as ever, and swinging an ebony cane and altogether behaving as though the whole pavement belonged to him. At thought of Enoch Soames and the myriads of other sufferers eternally in this brute's dominion, a great cold wrath filled me, and I drew myself up to my full ...
— Enoch Soames - A Memory of the Eighteen-nineties • Max Beerbohm
... thick-lipped men, as they sit about their huts Making drums out of guts, grunting gruffly now and then, Carving sticks of ivory, stretching shields of wrinkled skin, Smoothing sinister and thin squatting gods of ebony, Chip and grunt and do not see. But each mother, silently, Longer than her wont stays shut in the dimness of her hut, For she feels a brooding cloud of memory in the air, A lingering thing there that ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 - Edited by Sir Edward Howard Marsh • Various
... which the body passed, hung with black. The cathedral church was thronged, and holy and thrilling the service which consigned dust to dust, and hid for ever from the eyes of his fellow men, the last decaying remains of one so universally beloved. The coffin of ebony and silver, partly open, so as to disclose the face of the corpse, as was customary with Catholic burials of those of high or priestly rank, and the lower part covered with a superb velvet pall, rested before the high altar during ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar
... a pointed black beard and wandering green eyes, wearing a Spanish sombrero and a black cloak, and carrying an ebony stick nearly as tall as himself, at this moment slipped furtively into the room, and, without changing his delicately plaintive expression, came up to Miss Van Tuyn and ceremoniously shook hands ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... Egypt were at once laid before the Chief of Punt, and soon the seashore was alive with people. The ships were drawn up, gang-planks were very heavily laden with "marvels of the country of Punt." There were heaps of myrrh, resin, of fresh myrrh trees, ebony and pure ivory, cinnamon wood, incense, baboons, monkeys, dogs, natives, and children. "Never was the like brought to any king of Egypt since the world stands." And the ships voyaged safely back to Thebes with all their booty and with pleasant recollections of ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge
... butler coursed through Uncle Jimpson's veins, a stately, ebony butler who had been wont to stand at the Thornwood door during the old days and hold a silver tray covered with boutonnieres, for the arriving guests. Uncle Jimpson had inherited this tray along with an ambition that was not above buttons. Year after year he had descended with ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... our decks covered so thickly with the ebony bodies that with difficulty we could move about; fortunately they were as quiet as so many snakes. In the meantime the first officer, Mr. Block, was sending up a new topgallant yard, reeving new rigging, repairing the sails, and getting everything ataunto aloft. The Kroomen were busy washing ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... Field, the beatifier of childhood; or Joel Chandler Harris, the fabulist of the plantation; or Ruth McEnery Stuart, the coronal singer of the joys and hopes, the loves and the dreams of the images of God in ebony in the old South, ere it leaped and hardened to ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... went down red and angry. The night came on dark and howling. No moon. A murky sky, like a black bellying curtain above, and huge ebony waves, that in the appalling blackness seemed all crested with devouring fire, hemmed in the tossing boat, and growled, and snarled, and raged above, below, ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... the room and sat down on another chair which was black, probably ebony. It had a curial appearance that suggested the senate, not the senate at Washington, but the S. P. Q. of Rome. It was quite near the hyacinth curtain and behind the latter she heard voices. Like the rooms they were subdued. She could distinguish nothing. Yet there ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... exquisite bindings, some paper covered. On the top of the bookcases stood four dragon china vases filled with carnations of various colours. Electric lights burned just under the ceiling, but they were hidden from sight. In an angle of the wall, on a black ebony pedestal, stood an extremely beautiful marble statuette of a nude girl holding a fan. Under this, on a plaque, was written, ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... steps a door opened before them, and they found themselves in a spacious chamber, brightly, yet from its size imperfectly illumined by a single large lamp. It was wainscoted with ebony, and the furniture was of the same. A long table was covered with scrolls, skulls, crucibles, crystals, star-charts, geomantic figures, and other appurtenances of a magician's calling. Tomes of necromantic ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... his hands on their shoulders, where their ebony fur was frosted with gray. Age had not yet affected their quick, flowing movement but they were getting old—they were only a few weeks short of his own age. He could not remember when they had not been ...
— Space Prison • Tom Godwin
... from Crete. Into one vessel they placed as many balls as there were noble youths in the city, and into the other as many as there were maidens; and all the balls were white save only seven in each vessel, and those were black as ebony. ...
— Old Greek Stories • James Baldwin
... that a person with a dark skin might have a grateful heart: and the colonel, who dealt little in innuendo, said, "Come, don't you be so hard on jet, you ebony!" ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... a little scream of delight, but Kat simply made a bow, and said "Thanks," with the grace of a ramrod, and shut her box with a snap. They were two beautiful chains and lockets, of ebony and gold, with the letters "K. D." in raised letters on the lockets, and a picture of the giver within. Ralph took no notice of Kat's reception of the gift, but complimented Kittie as she put hers on, and ...
— Six Girls - A Home Story • Fannie Belle Irving
... seriously interested for Ludovico, he was himself going to strike upon the door with the instrument, when he observed its singular beauty, and with-held the blow. It appeared, on the first glance, to be of ebony, so dark and close was its grain and so high its polish; but it proved to be only of larch wood, of the growth of Provence, then famous for its forests of larch. The beauty of its polished hue and of its delicate carvings determined the Count to spare this door, and he returned to ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... her own room. She was sitting at a small ebony writing desk, jotting down a few thoughts in her diary When her sister entered, but now arose and drew forth a luxurious arm-chair for the imperious beauty ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... gate was an open casement with some homely flowers in the window, from behind which good-humoured girls' faces were peeping. They were watching the young traveller dressed in black as he walked up gazing towards the castle, and the ebony attendant who followed the gentleman's steps also accoutred in mourning. So was he at the gate in mourning, and the girls when they came ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... streams, flowing, like all others, from this point, west to the Atbara, we slept by a large pool in a third stream of considerable size. A waterfall flowed over a row of perpendicular basalt columns that surrounded a deep basin, resembling piles of ebony artificially arranged. On the following morning we started before sunrise, and rode over the usual pathless burnt prairies, until we reached the base of Nahoot Guddabi, the mountain for which we had been steering. Eight miles farther, we arrived at Metemma, a Tokroori village, ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... advances noiselessly upon his track, and he stands with ears thrown forward, tail erect, trunk thrown high in the air, with its distended tip pointed to the spot from which he winds the silent but approaching danger. Perfectly motionless does he stand, like a statue in ebony, the very essence of attention, every nerve of scent and hearing stretched to its cracking point; not a muscle moves, not a sound of a rustling branch against his rough sides; he is a mute figure of wild and fierce eagerness. Meanwhile, the wary tracker ...
— The Rifle and The Hound in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... balustrades lifting up to the support of the heavy beams in the ceiling. The furnishings were in keeping, but dust obscured the mirror-like surface of the mahogany tables, the heavy draperies were in need of renovation, while a housewife would have viewed with despair the condition of brass and ebony inlaid cabinets, ancient tapestries, and pictures, well-nigh defaced, but worthy, even in their faded aspect, of the brush of Sir Godfrey Kneller, Benjamin ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... being removed from the-tree, is steeped in water, or in a black muddy hole, till the outer of the two inner barks can be separated, then commences the tapping with a mallet to separate and soften the fibres. The head of this is often of ebony, with the face cut into small furrows, which, without breaking, separate ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... a few steps into an inner library where piles of early folios were wasting away on the ground. Beneath an old ebony table were two long carved oak chests. I lifted the lid of one, and at the top was a once-white surplice covered with dust, and beneath was a mass of tracts—Commonwealth quartos, unbound—a prey to worms and decay. All was neglect. The outer door ...
— Enemies of Books • William Blades
... the mother I saw the downcast look, and noticed the sigh that escaped a heavy heart, as she listened to the claim and price set upon her little darling. It's mother, Mary, was ebony black, her child was a light mulatto, which was in keeping with the story of abuse to which she was compelled to submit, or ...
— A Woman's Life-Work - Labors and Experiences • Laura S. Haviland
... uninterrupted solitude. One day, when I was seated at the foot of the cottages, and contemplating their ruins, a man, advanced in years, passed near the spot. He was dressed in the ancient garb of the island, his feet were bare, and he leaned upon a staff of ebony; his hair was white, and the expression of his countenance was dignified and interesting. I bowed to him with respect; he returned the salutation; and, after looking at me with some earnestness, came and placed himself upon the hillock on which I was seated. Encouraged by this mark ...
— Paul and Virginia • Bernardin de Saint Pierre
... his tempter, and opened the case, but uttered a cry of desperation when he saw his Straduarius in the same state of utter ruin to which he had reduced it before. The neck separated from the body; both faces shivered to fragments—the ebony rests, the gold-headed stops, the bridge, the sides—all a confused ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... down about him, warm, sweet-scented night floated out from the dusk, a few stars shone, the moon passed up above the ridge at his right and made of the Little MacLeod's racing water alternate lustrous ebony and glistening silver, a liquid mosaic. Drennen fell silent, a deep content ...
— Wolf Breed • Jackson Gregory
... my earliest youth I dreamed in hues volcanic. I saw each day open Like a curtain of flame. Black slaves attended My waking moments; Three ebony slaves Washed sleep from my white body. Three ebony slaves Around my ivory smoothness Folded heavy robes Of crimson and white. And as I issued forth Into the blue vault of the daylight A grey ape pranced before me And a leopard ...
— Spectra - A Book of Poetic Experiments • Arthur Ficke
... if the other had in fact been the servant she took her for, and Laura followed to where, farther on, a bedroom door stood open, which presently closed upon them both. It was a spacious room, with pale high-hung draperies, a scent of flowers, such things as an etching of Greuze, an ivory and ebony crucifix over the bed. Captain Filbert remembered the crucifix afterward with a feeling almost intense, also some silver-backed brushes on the toilet-table. Across the open window a couple of bars of sunset glowed red and gold, and a tall palm of the ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... terrifying face which had daunted his fellow-countrymen, the great Tarasconian feverishly fumbled with his hunting-knife haft; for, despite what Barbassou had told him, he was only half at ease as regarded the intention of these ebony-skinned porters, who so little resembled ...
— Tartarin of Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... room is a painting of the head of Queen Mary, in a charger, taken the day after the execution. Many other interesting portraits grace the walls of this room. But by far the finest apartment in the building is the Drawing-room, with a lofty ceiling, and furnished with antique ebony furniture. After passing through the Library, with its twenty thousand volumes, we found ourselves in the Study, and I sat down in the same chair where once sat the Poet; while before me was the table upon which was written the "Lady of ...
— Three Years in Europe - Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met • William Wells Brown
... the G.T. here is another example of Marco's use, probably unconscious, of an Oriental word. It is Persian Abnus, Ebony, which has passed almost unaltered into the Spanish Abenuz. We find Ibenus also in a French inventory (Douet d'Arcq, p. 134), but the Bonus seems to indicate that the word as used by the Traveller was strange to Rusticiano. The word which he uses for pen-cases ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... disorder could mean, he rushed into the house and through several deserted and wrecked apartments. At last, seeing light in one of the rooms, he went in, and there found his mother sitting on the remains of a chest made of ebony all inlaid with ivory and silver. When she saw Caesar, she rose, pale and dishevelled, and pointing to the ...
— The Borgias - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... room where we are now sitting was filled, just as it is annually, with flowers and presents; it was impossible to move about in the midst of such a conglomeration of porcelain, books with costly bindings, ebony work-boxes, picture-frames, and no end of other ...
— First Love (Little Blue Book #1195) - And Other Fascinating Stories of Spanish Life • Various
... from Sorrento to Baia, together with the islands, scattered like giant sentinels at the mouth; but all looked strange and fantastic through the sulphurous vapor. The sun was setting in a bath of blood and gold, just behind a straight line of ebony clouds with a sharp rim, like a wall of black marble. The white houses on the slopes of Castel a Mare were already looking ghastly ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... of delicately carved ivory, softened the light to a faint opal tint, and all around stood pots of orchis, peonies, and daisies, which filled the air with delicious perfume. Curtains of rich silk were draped over the entrance, and on the marble tables within were scattered fans, tooth-picks, ebony pipes, and pencils with ...
— The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872 - A Typographic Art Journal • Various
... while I was in Barnaool the doctor left me writing, and went out for a promenade. In half an hour he returned accompanied by a tall, well-formed man with a brunette complexion, and hair and mustache black as ebony. His dress was Russian, but the face impressed me ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... painting of the head of Queen Mary, in a charger, taken the day after the execution. Many other interesting portraits grace the walls of this room. But by far the finest apartment in the building is the Drawing-room, with a lofty ceiling, and furnished with antique ebony furniture. After passing through the Library, with its twenty thousand volumes, we found ourselves in the Study, and I sat down in the same chair where once sat the Poet; while before me was the table upon which was written ...
— Three Years in Europe - Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met • William Wells Brown
... room," he said, opening the next door and putting the can down; "I think you'll find everything." And closing the door behind her he went back to his own room. Brushing his hair with his great ebony brushes, and dabbing his forehead with eau de Cologne, he mused. She had come so strangely—a sort of visitation; mysterious, even romantic, as if his desire for company, for beauty, had been fulfilled by whatever it was which fulfilled that sort of thing. And before the mirror he straightened his ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... English-fashion, in full. Then a noteworthy change came over the faces of men. Everybody beamed upon me in the streets, and there arrived multitudinous little gifts at my house—choice wines, tie-pins, game, cigars, ebony walking-sticks, confectionery, baskets of red mullets, old prints, Capodimonte ware, candied fruits, amber mouthpieces, maraschino—all from donors who plainly desired to remain anonymous. Such things were dropped from the clouds, so to speak, ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... away scouring the plains in search of game. Everything on board was taut and trim and neat: not a yard out of the square, not a rope out of place, the decks as white as old ivory, the polished woodwork glittering like glass, the brass all gold apparently, the guns like ebony, and the very lanyards pipeclayed till they looked like coils of ...
— As We Sweep Through The Deep • Gordon Stables
... swiftly, and carried it, flaring red, through the door into the corridor. We followed him. There in the flickering light of the lamp was the machine sure enough, squat, ugly, and askew; a thing of brass, ebony, ivory, and translucent glimmering quartz. Solid to the touch—for I put out my hand and felt the rail of it—and with brown spots and smears upon the ivory, and bits of grass and moss upon the lower parts, and ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... Phidias essayed to embody the Homeric ideal of the supreme divinity of the people of Greece sitting on his throne as a monarch, and in an attitude of majestic repose. The throne, made of cedar-wood, was covered with plates of gold, and enriched with ivory, ebony, and precious stones. It rested on a platform twelve feet high, made of costly marble and carved with the images of the gods who formed the council of Zeus on Olympus. The feet of the god rested on a footstool supported by lions, and with the combat ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... piece on to the number 10, using a rake of her own which Dick Carleton had given her. It was a glorified rake, which he had ordered specially for her, made of ebony with the initials "M. G." set into it in ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... rheumatic limbs he slowly settled himself on a bench and folded his hands over the top of an ebony cane preparatory to answering the youngster's question. His inquisitor, however, was, at the moment, being hauled from beneath a brass railing by ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various
... you won't have this old, black what-not standing in the corner of the room. I do believe it is made of spools, strung on wire, as supports for the shelves; then all painted black, imitation of ebony, I suppose. It must have been made in the Black Age, at the same time the old corner cupboard was painted, as Uncle John told me he scraped off three different layers of paint before doing it over, and one was black. It was originally made of cherry. It certainly looks fine now, with ...
— Mary at the Farm and Book of Recipes Compiled during Her Visit - among the "Pennsylvania Germans" • Edith M. Thomas
... as oriental. Lena returned with the robes for Cora, and laid them on a divan. Then she adjusted a screen, thus forming a dressing room in one corner. This corner was hung with an oblong mirror, framed in wonderful ebony. Helka saw ...
— The Motor Girls Through New England - or, Held by the Gypsies • Margaret Penrose
... corner of Fleet and Ann streets. Then we notice two ladies who rejoice in the mellifluous names of "Bald-head" and "Cockroach," and who are both worthy representatives from Keith's Alley. These, with a small sprinkling of ebony lasses and their attendant cavaliers, make up the ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson
... had gone, he let himself fall wearily into a tall, carved chair that was placed near an ebony table with silver feet in the middle of ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... Salle Street hall bedroom. No clothes to wear, nothing but the soup and fish. So he must sit and wait till evening came, till a gentleman could put on his best bib and tucker, and then—allons! Freshly shaved, pink jowled, swinging his ebony stick, his pumps gleaming with a new coat of vaseline, off for the ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... and calm stands the great round tower of living wood, half ebony, half silver, with its mighty cloud above of flake jet leaves ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... art-work—all more than a century old, and mostly lying as lumber. There were suites of tapestry hangings, common and fine; green and scarlet leather-work, on which the gilding was still but little injured; venerable damask curtains; quilted silk table-covers, ebony cabinets, worked satin window-cushions, carved bedsteads, and embroidered bed-furniture which had apparently screened no sleeper for these many years. Downstairs there was also an interesting collection of armour, together ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... of the riches of this country, the khan sent one of his generals, named Segatu, to invade it, Acambute, who was then king of the country, was old, and chose to avoid the dangers and miseries of war, by agreeing to pay the before-mentioned tribute. In Ziambar there are many woods of black ebony, of great value. ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... Viner ten minutes to find out the secret. He would not have found it at all but for accident. But pressing here and pulling there, he suddenly touched what appeared to be no more than a cleverly inserted rivet in the ebony surface; there was a sharp click, and ...
— The Middle of Things • J. S. Fletcher
... tiny cotton tent, askaris all as beseemed his dignity, were sound asleep. He squatted on his heels, pushed together the embers of his fire, staring into the coals. His ugly face was as though carved from ebony. Only his wild savage eyes glowed and flashed with a brooding lambent flame; and his wide nostrils slowly expanded and contracted as though with ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al
... said the gentleman's gentleman, as he also mounted to ride off. The emphasis on the 'Mister' was too much for the trader, and taking one spring toward the darky, he laid his stout whip across his face. The scented ebony roared, and just then his horse, a high-blooded animal, reared and threw him. When he had gathered himself up, Larkin made several warm applications of his thick boot to the inexpressible part of the darky's person, and, roaring with pain, that personage made off at a gait faster than that of ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... it. If she could not do the one, how is she to perform the other? In all such cases we must look upon Reason as dispossessed of her empire, by a revolt of the mind. She retires herself to a distance to weep, and the ebony sceptre of Despair rules alone. All that Reason can do is to suggest, to hint a thought, to signify a wish, to cast now and then a kind of bewailing look, to hold up, when she can catch the eye, the miniature-shaded portrait of Hope; and though dethroned, ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... be seen the most valuable woods of Ceylon. The ebony grows in great perfection and large quantity. This tree is at once distinguished from the surrounding stems by its smaller diameter and its sooty trunk. The bark is crisp, jet black, and has the appearance of being charred. ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... for mamma, in token of her daughter's purity. And, lastly, a German looking-glass, several bunches of beads, a coral necklace, a dozen of turkey-red handkerchiefs, and a spotless white country-cloth, were presented to the bride; together with a decanter of white palm-oil for the anointment of her ebony limbs after the bath, which is never ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... work could charm the heaven, the earth, the great abyss, the mountains and the seas. This marvellous composition he inclosed in a box of gold, which he placed within a box of silver; the box of silver within a box of ivory and ebony, and that again within a box of bronze; the box of bronze within a box of brass; and the box of brass within a box of iron; and the book, thus guarded, he threw into the Nile at Coptos. The fact became known, and the book was searched for and found. It gave ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... doorway of the room in which Jacob and Ben slept was a bronze stork that, with outstretched neck, held a lamp to light the guests into the apartment. Between the two narrow beds of carved whitewood and ebony, stood the household treasure of the Van Gends, a massive oaken chair upon which the Prince of Orange had once sat during a council meeting. Opposite stood a quaintly carved clothespress, waxed and polished to the utmost and filled with precious stores of linen; beside it a table holding a large ...
— Hans Brinker - or The Silver Skates • Mary Mapes Dodge
... wonderfully beautiful young damsel of sixteen years of age who sat in the pavilion upon a carved bench and upon a cushion of cloth of gold, and who bent over a frame of embroidery, which she was busy weaving in threads of silver and gold. And the hair of that damosel was as black as ebony and her cheeks were like rose leaves for redness, and she wore a fillet of gold around her head, and she was clad in raiment of sky blue silk. And near by was a table spread with meats of divers sorts and likewise with several wines, both white and red. And ...
— The Story of the Champions of the Round Table • Howard Pyle
... ebony, but more commonly of some other wood. The grasp for the hand is cylindrical. The handle is often bound with a braid of rattan, or a band or two of steel or of brass, to prevent splitting, or less commonly with silver bands for ornament's sake. Curving downward ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... favourite attendants who served him as secretaries, stewards and body-servants. One was named Topaz; he was handsome and well-made, as fair as a Circassian beauty, as gentle and obliging as an Armenian, and as wise as a Parsee. The other was called Ebony; a good-looking Negro, more active and more industrious than Topaz, and one who never made objections. To them he spoke about his journey. Topaz tried to dissuade him with the cautious zeal of a servant who is anxious not to offend, and reminded him of ...
— Tales of Wonder Every Child Should Know • Various
... way down the ranks of the 2,992 paraders appeared the colors, and all hats came off with double reverence, for the Stars and Stripes and the blue regimental standard that two husky ebony lads held proudly aloft had been carried from here to France, from France to Germany and back again, and each bore the bronze token with its green and red ribbon that is called the Croix de Guerre. Keen eyes could see these little ...
— History of the American Negro in the Great World War • W. Allison Sweeney
... stretched out his ebony wand, calling the green flame higher. Then he put out his hands over the flame, without the wand, moving them slowly with constantly tremulous fingers. And all at once they heard him begin to speak. His deep voice flowed musically while he scarcely seemed to be speaking ...
— Don Rodriguez - Chronicles of Shadow Valley • Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron, Dunsany
... pupils held their classes. If he went on a journey, they accompanied him and studied by the way. And it was a familiar sight on north Formosan roads or field paths to see Mackay, always with his book in one hand and his big ebony stick under his arm, walking along surrounded by ...
— The Black-Bearded Barbarian (George Leslie Mackay) • Mary Esther Miller MacGregor, AKA Marion Keith
... water, out of the blackness that brooded upon the harbor, did any of the four give sign of excitement. The Babu started, and rose to his feet shivering; the others still squatted, mute and motionless as statues of ebony, neither by gesture nor murmur betraying their consciousness that at any moment, by tocsin from the fort, a thousand fierce and relentless warriors might be launched like sleuth ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... long, and somewhat curved in the middle to fit the neck. For the common people they were roughly made of wood, smoothed where the head came; but the head-stools of the wealthy were constructed of ebony, cedar, and other scarce woods, beautifully inlaid with ivory. Amuba had made several trials of these head-stools, but had not once succeeded in going to sleep with one under his head, half an hour sufficing to cause such an aching of his ...
— The Cat of Bubastes - A Tale of Ancient Egypt • G. A. Henty
... brown. Until he shows his double row of glistening teeth, you would never guess how ferocious he could be. His muzzle, as far as his eyebrows, and his large paws (they are so large that his trail is sometimes mistaken for that of a bear) are the colour of ebony. His horrible claws are as white as milk, and the natives use them for necklaces. I wish they had them all," he finished with a deep sigh. "I can't help thinking he'll pounce ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... beautiful pillow lace, her own handiwork. Her skirt of stiffly starched cotton is red and purple in colour. A crimson flowered folded shawl hangs over her right shoulder and great strings of beads ornament the ebony of her neck and arms. To sit at the feet of Theresa, the ama, is to enter the gate of ...
— Fairy Tales from Brazil - How and Why Tales from Brazilian Folk-Lore • Elsie Spicer Eells
... that of a superior hand-organ from afar. But, to my amazement, I could discover none; there were only two black boys in the street. Alexis Paxton, the son of my host, explained to me that what I heard was unquestionably music made by those ebony flutes of boys, and that there were some wonderful performers in the city. I have listened to the same music at a public exhibition. I greatly wonder that I have never heard of this kind of music in Europe or the East. It is distinctly instrumental, not vocal ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... were wan and withered. The centre of the inlaid and polished floor of the apartment was covered with a Tournay carpet of brilliant yet tasteful decoration. An old cabinet of fanciful workmanship, some chairs of ebony, and some girandoles of silver completed the furniture of the room, save that at its extreme end, exactly opposite to the door by which Venetia entered, covered with a curtain of green velvet, was what she concluded must be ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... cook appeared with a bowl of smoking hot soup for Fred. The cook was named Sam and was as black as ebony. ...
— The Go Ahead Boys and the Treasure Cave • Ross Kay
... color. The Chinese, in order to blacken them, chew what is called "betel" or "betel nut," a common masticatory in the East. The Siamese and the Tonquinese do the same, but to a still greater extent, which renders their teeth as black as ebony, or more so. As the use of the masticatory is generally not commenced until a certain age, the common practice is to stain the teeth of the boys and girls with a strong preparation of it, on the former attaining the age ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... to the neglect that reigned in the rest of the house. The walls were covered with rich tapestry, the best of the collection in the possession of the family; the bright furniture, of Louis XV. style, was brought from Madrid, with the magnificent ebony bedstead inlaid with marble in the alcove, when Don Pedro was making futile efforts to win the heart of his wife. There was a perfumed sensual atmosphere about the place, showing the refined tastes that the foreign lady had brought from other lands to the severe mansion of the Quinones. She seated ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... disposed with peculiar beauty, at least to one who, like me, prefers the seclusion of a home scene to great and extensive prospects. The river which glides before my door passes in a straight line across the woods, looking like a long canal shaded by all kinds of trees. Among them are the gum tree, the ebony tree, and that which is here called bois de pomme, with olive and cinnamon-wood trees; while in some parts the cabbage-palm trees raise their naked stems more than a hundred feet high, their summits crowned with a cluster of leaves, and towering above the woods ...
— Paul and Virginia • Bernardin de Saint Pierre
... his uncle Dick go on a voyage to the remoter islands of the Eastern seas, and their adventures are told in a truthful and vastly interesting fashion. The descriptions of Mr. Ebony, their black comrade, and of the scenes of savage life, are full of ...
— Miss Ashton's New Pupil - A School Girl's Story • Mrs. S. S. Robbins
... of the French sailors, fortunately for the British, failed them, and they fired the ships too soon. But the spectacle of these flaming monsters as they drifted towards the British fleet was appalling. The river showed ebony-black under the white flames. The glare lit up the river cliffs, the roofs of the city, the tents of Montcalm, the slopes of the distant hills, the black hulls of the British ships. It was one of the most stupendous exhibitions of fireworks ever witnessed! ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... and two morning-rooms. The furniture of these rooms was handsome, though not new. It pleased Jeanne better than if it had been furnished expressly for her. All the rich antiques disdained by fashionable ladies, the marvelous pieces of carved ebony, the glass lusters, the gothic clocks; chefs-d'oeuvre of carving and enamel, the screens with embroidered Chinese figures, and the immense vases, threw Jeanne into indescribable raptures. Here on a chimney-piece two gilded ...
— The Queen's Necklace • Alexandre Dumas pere
... near the Temple of Ptah. And first he took him to a chamber that had been made ready for him in the Palace, a beautiful chamber, richly painted with beast-headed Gods and furnished with ivory chairs, and couches of ebony and silver, and with a ...
— The World's Desire • H. Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang
... Rasswurm. Called on Mr. James, a colored missionary, now occupying the house of Mr. Wilson, who has lately removed to Gaboon river. Mr. James presented us with some ebony, and a few Grebo books. He informed us that the fever had visited him more or less severely, as often as once in four weeks during seven years. This may truly be called a feverish life! He is about to remove ...
— Journal of an African Cruiser • Horatio Bridge
... face watching her so jealously, and so hardening toward her as he saw how pale she grew, and heard her exclamation of surprise when she first recognized the note, and remembered that in turning over the contents of the ebony box she must have ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... file, scrape with glass, fine sandpaper, finer sandpaper, powdered pumice stone, putty powder. Finish with oiled rag. Old bison horn, weathered on the prairies till they resemble old roots, can be made to look like polished ebony by the above formula. Don't forget to add ...
— Home Taxidermy for Pleasure and Profit • Albert B. Farnham
... and flowers. There was the old-fashioned square piano in its carven case, and cabinets from China or East India; also a lacquered Japanese screen, marble-topped tables of filigreed teek, brackets of inlaid ebony. Curios there were galore. Some paintings there were, and these rocked softly upon the gently-heaving walls. As for the velvet carpet, it was a bed of gigantic roses that might easily put to the blush the prime of summer in a ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... used to receive voyagers from the Orient who came clad in wide breeches and red fezzes; Genoese and Provencals wearing capes with monkish hoods; and the valiant native captains of the island covered with their red Catalonian helmets. Venetian merchants sent their Majorcan friends ebony furniture delicately inlaid with ivory and lapis lazuli, or enormous, heavy plate-glass mirrors with bevelled edges. Seafarers returning from Africa brought ostrich feathers and tusks of ivory; and ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... herald who had come from Crete. Into one vessel they placed as many balls as there were noble youths in the city, and into the other as many as there were maidens; and all the balls were white save only seven in each vessel, and those were black as ebony. ...
— Old Greek Stories • James Baldwin
... and angry. The night came on dark and howling. No moon. A murky sky, like a black bellying curtain above, and huge ebony waves, that in the appalling blackness seemed all crested with devouring fire, hemmed in the tossing boat, and growled, and snarled, and raged ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... pillows set up as a background for her, and a little pillow for every bone which might make a dint in the feather bed. Another such piece of furniture was not to be found in the Territory. It and her ebony chairs, her claw-footed tables, her harp and dower chest, had come with her from France. The harp alone she had already given to Angelique, who was to inherit all ...
— Old Kaskaskia • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... dining room, decorated and furnished in austere good taste. Inlaid with ebony trim, tall oaken sideboards stood at both ends of this room, and sparkling on their shelves were staggered rows of earthenware, porcelain, and glass of incalculable value. There silver-plated dinnerware gleamed under rays pouring ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... most exact that can be fancy'd: The most famous Statuary could not form the Figure of a Man more admirably turn'd from Head to Foot. His Face was not of that brown rusty Black which most of that Nation are, but a perfect Ebony, or polished Jet. His Eyes were the most aweful that could be seen, and very piercing; the White of 'em being like Snow, as were his Teeth. His Nose was rising and Roman, instead of African and flat: His Mouth the finest shaped that could ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... Commodities.] Here is Iron and Christal in great plenty. Salt-Petre they can make. Brimstone some say, is here, but the King will not have it discovered. Steel they can make of their Iron. Ebony in great abundance, with choice of tall and large Timber. Cardamums, Jaggory, Rack, Oyl, black Lead, Turmeric, Salt, Rice, Bettel-Nuts, Musk, Wax, Pepper, Which last grows here very well, and might be in great plenty, if it had a Vend. And the peculiar ...
— An Historical Relation Of The Island Ceylon In The East Indies • Robert Knox
... festoons of fruits embossed in high relief. Deeply drilled worm-holes set a seal of antiquity upon the blooming faces and luxuriant garlandslike the touch of Time who 'delves the parallels in beauty's brow.' On the shelves of an ebony cabinet close by he showed us a row of cups cut out of rock-crystal and mounted in gilt silver, with heaps of engraved gems, old snuff-boxes, coins, medals, sprays of coral, and all the indescribable lumber that one age ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... our investigations at the House of Seven Turnings," continued the ceremonious Higgins, "we will go to the Palace of Ebony, where a ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... boats together and put off into the slow current. A haggard, eerie fragment of moon slinked westward. Stars glinted in the flawless chilly blue. The surface of the river was like polished ebony—a dream-path wrought of gloom and gleam. The banks were lines of dusk, except where some lone cottonwood loomed skyward like a giant ghost clothed with a mantle that glistered and darkled ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... Joe had treasures rare indeed in the good Brother's eye: a wonderful crucifix of ivory and ebony; the silver altar lamp of an old Spanish monastery; a Madonna in dull tints that still bore traces of a master hand; a rosary, whose well-worn beads made Brother Bart's pious ...
— Killykinick • Mary T. Waggaman
... love, is the fruit of animalism refined by sentiment." He further declares that the Black is in point of affection inferior to the brutes. "No humane Englishman would sell his dog to a negro." [190] The phrase "God's image in ebony" ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... black carpet. The pulpit, also draped in black and decorated with the Imperial eagle, and from which was pronounced the funeral oration over the marshal, was situated on the left in front of the bier; on the right was a seat of ebony decorated with Imperial arms, bees, stars, lace, fringes, and other ornaments in silver, which was intended for the prince arch-chancellor of the Empire, who presided at the ceremony. Steps were erected in the arches of the aisles, and ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... fire-furrowed plain of Catania where olive, lemon, oleander and orange springing out of black lava, mingled hues like paints on an ebony palette—rose vast, lonely, purple at base, snowy at summit, brooding Etna; dozing in the soft, sweet springtime, with red, wrathful eyes veiled by a silvery haze. An unlimited expanse of crinkling blue sea, ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... is a story which begins in Peru but finishes in an "Isle of Ebony," where the names of Zobeide and Abdelazis seem rather more at home; it is not without merit. As for the fables and stories which Fenelon composed for that imperfect Marcellus, the Duke of Burgundy, they have all the merits of style, sense, and good feeling which ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... magnitude," said he, "and perhaps the foundation of the one complained of. It is that of transferring slave labor from its legitimate field, the cultivation of the soil, into that of the mechanic arts.... Negro mechanics are an ebony aristocracy into which slaves seek to enter by teasing their masters for permission to learn a trade. Masters are too often seduced by the prospect of gain to yield their assent, and when their slaves have acquired a trade are forced to the violation of the law to realize their promised gain. We ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... black shining face did not impress him at all; but when the swarthy giant caught the two fair little hands in his own great black palm and wanted to kiss them, the boy withdrew his hands with a quick gesture and struck the ebony forehead ...
— Dr. Dumany's Wife • Mr Jkai
... are streets of shops and trades, so there are streets of dwelling-houses, but even the finest of these present a miserable appearance to the passers-by, for all one can see is a lofty and dimly-lighted stone vestibule, furnished with carved ebony chairs with marble seats and backs, and not infrequently with gigantic coffins placed on end, the gift of pious juniors to their seniors! A porter stands in this vestibule ready to open the lofty triple gate which admits to the courtyard of the interior. ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... thirteen hundred and fifty francs—a unique bargain!—and he could sell them again at a profit of thousands of francs if he wished to. Perhaps he would consent to part with the commode, but he intended to keep the writing desk and place it between two ebony wardrobes which he already possessed, and it would cost him nothing, because the sale of the other piece, the commode, would cover the entire cost! And although in his letters to Mme. Hanska he defended himself against the charge of prodigality, these ...
— Honor de Balzac • Albert Keim and Louis Lumet
... might ask Lord Vargrave to write something in her album, and who cast a bashful look of admiration at the slim secretary, as he now sauntered into the room, in a black coat, black waistcoat, black trousers, and a black neckcloth, with a black pin,—looking much like an ebony cane split half-way up. Miss Biddy was a fair young lady, a leetle faded, with uncommonly thin arms and white satin shoes, on which the slim ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... last order of the Isocarpous sympetalae has but a single common representative in the United States; viz., the persimmon (Diospyros) (Fig. 117, E). This belongs to the family Ebenaceae, to which also belongs the ebony a member of the same genus as the persimmon, and found ...
— Elements of Structural and Systematic Botany - For High Schools and Elementary College Courses • Douglas Houghton Campbell
... swayed on its ebony stand, the boy's hands, rudely withdrawn, almost overthrowing it. But the little man's first impulse, cursing and screaming though he was, was to ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... rooms were more like scenes of enchantment pencilled by a poet's fancy, than anything perhaps before displayed in a domestic habitation. Escritoires of ebony, inlaid with mother-of-pearl, and rich caskets for antique gems, exquisitely enamelled and adorned with onyx, opals, rubies, and emeralds; cabinets of ivory, curiously wrought; mosaic tables, set with jasper, blood-stone, and lapis-lazuli, their feet carved ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... delicate, indefinable tints; porcelain jars with monsters that belched fire; amber-colored shawls, as delicate as woven sighs; and in the small windows that had been converted into display cases, all the trinkets of the extreme Orient, in silver, ivory or ebony; black elephants with white tusks, heavy-paunched Buddhas, filigree jewels, mysterious amulets, daggers engraved from hilt to point. Alternating with these establishments of a free port that lives upon contraband, there were confectioneries owned ...
— Luna Benamor • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... Only once, however, have I seen him at close quarters. This was a couple of years ago, in Paris. I was walking one afternoon along the rue d'Antin, and I saw him advancing from the opposite direction, overdressed as ever, and swinging an ebony cane and altogether behaving as though the whole pavement belonged to him. At thought of Enoch Soames and the myriads of other sufferers eternally in this brute's dominion, a great cold wrath filled ...
— Enoch Soames - A Memory of the Eighteen-nineties • Max Beerbohm
... tea and overlooks one of the most varied human tides that flows through any street of the world, Benton and Cara sat at a table near the edge—the man wondering how he could tell her. Fakirs with spangled shawls from Assouit, bead necklaces, ebony walking-sticks, scarabs and souvenir postcards jostled on the sidewalk to pass their wares over the railing. Fat Arab guides with red fezes and the noisy jargon of half-mastered French and English discussed to-morrow's journeys with ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... Johnson, "about de younges'" of the nine children of Milford and Patsey Johnson, is a tall ebony-black old man with the whitest hair and the roundest, merriest face. He lives in Washington, but even at his ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... of the poor, Capitan Tiago appeared to be younger than he really was; he might have been thought between thirty and thirty-five years of age. At the time of our story his countenance always wore a sanctified look; his little round head, covered with ebony-black hair cut long in front and short behind, was reputed to contain many things of weight; his eyes, small but with no Chinese slant, never varied in expression; his nose was slender and not at all inclined to flatness; and if his mouth ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... this steamboat was a negro woman, very neatly dressed, with a very good-looking negro child, about nine months old, in her arms. It was of the darkest ebony in colour, and its dress rather surprised me. It was a chali frock, of a neat fawn coloured pattern, with fine muslin trousers edged with Valenciennes lace at the bottom; and very pretty did its little tiny black feet look, relieved by these expensive unnecessaries. ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... during the evening, as they sat on in the ebony and ivory chamber, while the strains of music reached them faintly ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... complexions! Are there not causes enough to which the apparent inferiority of an African may be ascribed, without limiting the goodness of God, and supposing he forbore to stamp understanding on certainly his own image, because "carved in ebony." Might it not naturally be ascribed to their situation? When they come among Europeans, they are ignorant of their language, religion, manners, and customs. Are any pains taken to teach them these? Are they treated as ...
— The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African - Written By Himself • Olaudah Equiano
... through the studio, with the furniture and arrangements of which the sculptor was familiar, he missed a small ebony writing-desk that he remembered as having always been placed on a table there. He knew that it was Hilda's custom to deposit her letters in this desk, as well as other little objects of which she wished to be ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... brave splendor of a November sky that this morning burst through the lattice for me, on my bed? According to terrestrial calculations, above the horizon, in the east, there rose one rod of rainbow [20] hues, crowned with an acre of eldritch ebony. Little by little this topmost pall, drooping over a deeply daz- zling sunlight, softened, grew gray, then gay, and glided into a glory of mottled marvels. Fleecy, faint, fairy blue and golden flecks came out on a background of [25] cerulean hue; ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... me out of this palace! Why there, in that ebony trunk, lies the rescript of Euergetes which confers the stewardship of this residence on my ancestor Philip, and as a hereditary dignity in his family. Now Philip's wife had the honor of being the king's mistress—or, as some say, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... surprised Ortega. I had closed the front door without noise and stood for a moment listening, while he glanced about furtively. There were only two other doors in the hall, right and left. Their panels of ebony were decorated with bronze applications in the centre. The one on the left was of course Blunt's door. As the passage leading beyond it was dark at the further end I took Senor Ortega by the hand and led him along, unresisting, like a child. For some reason or other I moved on tip-toe and he followed ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... costume and color are striking in the extreme. Here are seen men and women, white, brown, yellow, black and shades and combinations of two or all. Here are youthful forms, graceful and like living bits of ebony or bronze; antiques weatherworn and wind-dried, who when asleep upon the sidewalk, which is quite the custom, look like recently disentombed mummies; old and wrinkled women with hair dyed a brilliant red; Italian soldiers in the national green uniform; native or colonial troops ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... The ebony faces, their cream-colored teeth showing with smiles and their wide rolling eyes roaming the room made a striking and dramatic contrast to the rugged face and frame of the man who ...
— The Southerner - A Romance of the Real Lincoln • Thomas Dixon
... appearance abruptly, in successive shocks, standing out from the darkness like pictures of scarlet above a background of ebony. ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert
... widower, and had this only child; consequently, Esther was heiress to a large fortune. Her excellent father loved her blindly, and she deserved his love. Her skin was snow white, delicately tinted with red; her hair was black as ebony, and she had the most beautiful eyes I have ever seen. She made an impression on me. Her father had given her an excellent education; she spoke French perfectly, played the piano admirably, and was passionately fond ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... present, however, they all forgot their own fears of what might come in their interest at the reply which the famous diplomatist might make to a suggestion which everybody knew to be so true. He stood, leaning upon his black ebony stick, with his bulky shoulders stooping forward, and an amused smile upon his face, as if the most innocent of compliments had been addressed to him. One of his few titles to respect is that he always met Napoleon upon ...
— Uncle Bernac - A Memory of the Empire • Arthur Conan Doyle
... friend and comforter—the concertina. That senseless thing of rose-wood, ivory, ebony, mother-of-pearl, and leather was to him what a brother, a pipe, a bull terrier, a trusted confidant, might have been to another James. And now, in the accents of the Hallelujah Chorus, it yielded to ...
— Helen with the High Hand (2nd ed.) • Arnold Bennett
... violin and an expert in such matters, in 1872 had thought this instrument to be worth 600 pounds, so that its value had trebled in less than twenty years. The celebrated violinist, Ole Bull, owned a Stradivarius violin, dated 1687, and inlaid with ebony and ivory, which is said to have been made for a king of Spain. In the "Tales of a Wayside Inn" Longfellow ...
— Among the Great Masters of Music - Scenes in the Lives of Famous Musicians • Walter Rowlands
... at it if it showed its forked tongue. A ghost of a watchman, carrying a faint corpse candle, haunted the distant upper gallery and flitted away. Retiring within the proscenium, and holding my light above my head towards the rolled-up curtain—green no more, but black as ebony— my sight lost itself in a gloomy vault, showing faint indications in it of a shipwreck of canvas and cordage. Methought I felt much as a diver might, at the bottom of ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... fastened by a belt of leather with silver ornamentations inlaid in wrought-iron to hold a needle-case, tinder-pouch and steel, with a bead hanging from the leather thong, and a pretty dagger with sheath of ebony, steel, and filigree silver, besides other articles, such as a bullet-pouch and bag. In their kamarbands or belts, the Jogpas, in common with the majority of Tibetan men, wear a sword in front, and whether the ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... was slowly raking the leaves cast from a clump of tall magnolias. Beneath the spreading shade of an umbrella-China tree, lay the burly Hector, but half awake to the possible nearness of tramps; and Betsy, a piece of youthful ebony in blue cottonade, was crossing leisurely on her way to the poultry yard; unheeding the scorching sun-rays that she thought were sufficiently parried by the pan of chick feed that she balanced adroitly on ...
— At Fault • Kate Chopin
... men, women, and children, waiting to see us as we passed. On the following morning we went ashore and got water in a waterhole near the bank, and also firewood off an old fallen tree, which, I think, is probably the real ebony. Late in the evening we reached a point on the eastern bank about three miles above ...
— Journal of Landsborough's Expedition from Carpentaria - In search of Burke and Wills • William Landsborough
... orange grove at the left and the ash-colored leaves of the silver wattle above them, Weldon could almost have fancied himself in England. The lawn with its conventional tennis court was essentially English; English, too, the tray with its fixtures. There, however, the resemblance stopped. The ebony handmaiden who brought out the tray was never found in private life outside the limits of South Africa. When she sought foreign countries, it was merely as a denizen of a ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller
... a splendid animal, instinct with life from his thin flaring nostril to his small hoof; black as a raven, his highly groomed skin took the polish of ebony, and showed the play of his powerful muscles, and, one might say, almost the nervous currents that thrilled his fine texture. His large, bold eyes, though not wicked, flamed now and then with an energy and excitement that gave ample ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... this apartment, also, that there stood against the western wall, a gigantic clock of ebony. Its pendulum swung to and fro with a dull, heavy, monotonous clang; and when the minute-hand made the circuit of the face, and the hour was to be stricken, there came from the brazen lungs of the clock a sound which ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... honor. Camaralzaman commanded his vizier to put them both to death; but instead of doing so, he conducted them out of the city, and told them not to return to their father's kingdom (the island of Ebony). They wandered on for ten days, when Assad went to a city in sight to obtain provisions. Here he was entrapped by an old fire-worshipper, who offered him hospitality, but cast him into a dungeon, intending to offer him up a human victim on the "mountain ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... excellence; her works of art provoke astonishment for their richness and beauty. Her jewellers and gold-workers carry off the palm from even those of Paris. Her satins and brocades compete with the richest contributions of Lyons. She exhibits tables of malachite and caskets of ebony, whose curious richness indicates at once the lavish expenditure of a barbaric court, and the refinement and taste of civilization. Nor do we deem it of much account that her part of the exhibition is not exclusively the work of native artisans. Her satins are none the less genuine product ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... with a monstrous black periwig, a bright star on his breast, and a broad blue ribbon crossing his plum-coloured velvet doublet. He had dismounted from his heavy coach, while the horses were fagging up hill, and by the help of a great crutch-staff of ebony, ornamented with silver, was toiling after them. Hearing our prattling and laughing, he looked over the hedge and saw us in the very thick of our mimic Combat. This seemed to divert him exceedingly; and although we, seeing so grand a gentleman looking ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... alone gave it or rather would give it at certain moments a touch of singular firmness. Beneath the beautiful fair hair waving on his brow and temples, as was the fashion at that period, eyebrows, eyes and lashes were black as ebony. The rest of the face was, as we have said, almost feminine. There were two little ears of which only the tips could be seen beneath the tufts of hair to which the Incroyables of the day had given the name of "dog's-ears"; a straight, perfectly proportioned nose, a rather large mouth, ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... veneers. The process of inlaying is of the most remote antiquity, and the student may see in the cases of the British Museum, at the Louvre, and in other museums, examples of both Assyrian and Egyptian inlaid patterns of metal and ivory, or ebony or vitreous pastes, upon both wood and ivory, dating from the 8th and 10th centuries before the Christian Era, or earlier. The Greeks and Romans also made use of it for costly furniture and ornamental sculpture; in Book 23 of ...
— Intarsia and Marquetry • F. Hamilton Jackson
... rare and weird sight of a black from Abyssinia whose splendid ebony hide has been tattooed in white. Furthermore, a young girl of scarcely fourteen summers will astound you by entering the cage of the ferocious beasts, whose terrible roarings reach you here! The programme is most interesting, and after these incomparable attractions, you will applaud the cinema ...
— The Exploits of Juve - Being the Second of the Series of the "Fantmas" Detective Tales • mile Souvestre and Marcel Allain
... the superhuman energy of his utterance there had been found the potency of a spell, the huge antique panels to which the speaker pointed threw slowly back, upon the instant, their ponderous and ebony jaws. It was the work of the rushing gust; but then without those doors there did stand the lofty and enshrouded figure of the Lady Madeline of Usher. There was blood upon her white robes, and the evidence of some bitter struggle upon every portion of her emaciated frame. For a moment she remained ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... the wall were a number of grotesque Chinese idols. The floor was jet black and polished like ebony. Several tiger-skin rugs were strewn about it. But, dominating the strange place, in the center of the floor stood an ivory pedestal, supporting a golden dragon of exquisite workmanship; and before it, as before a shrine, an enormous Chinese ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... member for the city, P. A. Tourangeau, Esq., N.P. Vividly, indeed, can we recall the busy aspect of its former counter, studded with gilt madonnas, rosaries, some in brass mountings, variegated Job beads for the million; others set in ebony and silver for rich devotes, flanked with wax tapers, sparkling church ornaments, bronze crucifixes—backed with shelves of books bearing, some, the visa of Monseigneur de Tours—the latter for the faithful; others in an inner room, without ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... seems to be, that people will be sentimental; they must do a certain amount of tribulation, "whether or no." We would not even counsel the wearing of black diamonds. We would refrain from jet, bog, and ebony. We would not try to grin through a disguise of skull and bones. Be gay (and by all means look gay) in spite ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 33, November 12, 1870 • Various
... keeps his eye on the group of observers, and well knows when the 'sun is up' by the stir which takes place amongst the astronomers; or by noticing the master working out his latitude with a pencil on the ebony bar of his quadrant or on the edge of the hammock railing,—though, if he be one of your modern, neat-handed navigators, he carries his look-book for this purpose. In one way or other the latitude is computed as soon as the master is satisfied the sun has reached his highest altitude in ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... and left—for the cave had split it in two, lay the solid vein of coal, shining in the light, and throwing back splinters of ebony, to ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... windings at the base, coiled a snake. The pipe was not over large, for all its wealth of ornamentation. Barndale had hung over it when he smoked it first with the care of an affectionate nurse over a baby. It had rewarded his cares by colouring magnificently until it had grown a deep equable ebony everywhere. Not a trace of burn or scratch defaced its surface, and no touch of its first beauty was destroyed by use. Apart from its memories, Barndale would not have sold that pipe except at some astounding figure, which nobody would ever have been likely to bid for ...
— An Old Meerschaum - From Coals Of Fire And Other Stories, Volume II. (of III.) • David Christie Murray
... as large as a good-sized cupboard, and was illuminated in the day-time by a window commanding a pleasant prospect of coal-shed and dead wall. The paper on the walls was dark and greasy with age; and every bit of clumsy, bulging deal furniture in the room had been transformed into a kind of ebony by the action of time and dirt, the greasy backs and elbows of idle loungers, the tobacco-smoke and beer-stains of half ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... so called from the colour of the building, which is all of the finest polished black marble. There are always burning in it five thousand everlasting lamps. It has also an hundred folding doors of ebony, which are each of them watched day and night by an hundred negroes, who are to take care that ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... garden, stood a small work-table of birds'-eye maple, which methought had once stood in the lady's cabin of some splendidly appointed steamer. Her wash-stand was of mahogany richly carved: on the shelf above it stood an ebony writing-desk, inlaid with silver; below was a lady's dressing case—ivory—and elaborately carved. Two cases of foreign birds of exquisite plumage completed the decoration of the apartment. It is true necessitous sailors and carousing smugglers ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... other gods, which, though less commanding in position and size, were yet similar to that of Zeus in design and workmanship, all being the work of the divine artist Hephaestus. Below these were other palaces of silver, ebony, ivory, or burnished brass, where the Heroes, ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... very likely to consist of several old black people, "bad with the rheumatize," some forlorn wandering woman, and a couple of small images of God cut in ebony. How she manages to feed and clothe herself and them, the Lord best knows. She has too much pride and too much faith to beg. She takes thankfully, but without any great effusiveness of gratitude, whatever ...
— Harriet, The Moses of Her People • Sarah H. Bradford
... the rooms was of a very quaint and curious description, while yet it was very rich and magnificent. There were elegant bedsteads of carved ebony surmounted with silken curtains and canopies of the most gorgeous description. There were cabinets inlaid with silver and pearl, and elegant cameos and mosaics, and a profusion of other such articles, all of which Rollo had very little time to examine, as the schloss-vogt ...
— Rollo on the Rhine • Jacob Abbott
... design is adapted for the front or door of a small rosewood or an inlaid ebony cabinet, suitable for a lady's boudoir or dressing-room. It looks well if worked upon white instead of black satin; and if the former is used, it is advisable to have plate-glass as ...
— The Lady's Album of Fancy Work for 1850 • Unknown
... deliver no louder note than a moan. The agony of mind I was under lest a shark should seize me I cannot express, and my strained eyeballs would come from the tall shadow of the ship to the the sea about me in a wild searching of the liquid ebony of it for the sparkling configuration of the most abhorred of all fish. I could have sworn that hours elapsed before they lowered a boat from the ship, that seemed to grow fainter and fainter every time I looked at her, so swallowing is the ...
— Stories by English Authors: The Sea • Various
... very beautiful young woman, wearing a wonderful lantern crown, sat on an ebony throne. On each side of the throne stood a tall soldier, clad in scarlet and holding a long ebony staff surmounted by a round lantern lit ...
— The Firelight Fairy Book • Henry Beston
... Black Eagle arrives," the merchant rejoined confidently. "Then he has palm nuts in bulk, gum, ebony, ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... toward the dwelling, leaped the garden-wall, and finally, undiscovered, but pallid and remorseful, gained the casement. Softly raising his head, he peeped within. The room was full of music; he seemed to grow blind for a moment, when lo! upon the kitchen-table sat the mysterious songster, an ebony-hued negress, scouring the tinware, and singing away. Just as he was peering through the window, the ebony songster discovered him. The soldier's limbs sank beneath him, and the black ...
— Incidents of the War: Humorous, Pathetic, and Descriptive • Alf Burnett
... of the wall were a number of grotesque Chinese idols. The floor was jet black and polished like ebony. Several tiger-skin rugs were strewn about it. But, dominating the strange place, in the center of the floor stood an ivory pedestal, supporting a golden dragon of exquisite workmanship; and before it, as before a shrine, an enormous Chinese ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... in livery now came up the path, and spoke in an undertone to the young gentleman—'Mr. Charles, my lady's wanting you yonder sadly, to bid for her for the black ebony cabinet; and Lady Jean Devorgoil is wi' her an' a'; ye ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... a ruler on my fingers. Ah! those ruler strokes of Mlle. Caroline's! I reproached her about them when I met her again twenty-five years later. She used to make us put all our fingers round the thumb and hold our hands straight out to her, and then bang came her wide ebony ruler. She used to give us a cruelly hard, sharp blow which made the tears spurt to our eyes. I took a dislike to Mlle. Caroline. She was beautiful, but with the kind of beauty I did not care for. She had a ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... then seven hundred and twenty five thousand, besides 5 Millions of pores, which would, I doubt not, seem even incredible, were not every one left to believe his own eyes. Nay, having since examin'd Cocus, black and green Ebony, Lignum Vitae, &c. I found, that all these Woods have their pores, abundantly smaller then those of soft light Wood; in so much, that those of Guajacum seem'd not above an eighth part of the bigness of the pores of Beech, but then the Interstitia ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... fruit, but I will accept your offer of the table. Well, Aunt Sarah, I know you won't have this old, black what-not standing in the corner of the room. I do believe it is made of spools, strung on wire, as supports for the shelves; then all painted black, imitation of ebony, I suppose. It must have been made in the Black Age, at the same time the old corner cupboard was painted, as Uncle John told me he scraped off three different layers of paint before doing it over, and one was black. It was originally made of cherry. It certainly looks fine now, with those new brass ...
— Mary at the Farm and Book of Recipes Compiled during Her Visit - among the "Pennsylvania Germans" • Edith M. Thomas
... as ebony as a negro can get and as nattily dressed as only Savile Row can turn out a man. He said, "My name is Loo Motlamelle." He looked at them expressionlessly ...
— Combat • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... up and came to the door; not a drop of rain had fallen yet. He crossed the yard and stood at the fort wall looking into blackness. It was solid as ebony, and he could hear the soldiers, whose huts were outside the wall, ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... repose breathes over that noble countenance! What a clear and far-sighted spirit looks out of those eyes! But—gods of Rome and of the world!—who sits beside him? Whose dark soul is lodged in that fearful tenement?—fearful and yet beautiful, as would be a statue of ebony!' ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... is said to contain the body of St. Mark is of the richest description, encrusted with gold and jewels on polished ebony and marble. There is a legend that after St. Mark had seen the people of Aguilia well grounded in religion he was called to Rome by St. Peter; but before setting off he took with him in a boat the ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... should have liked to see her dance, only there were no castanets to be had. Instantly she seized the old woman's only earthenware plate, smashed it up, and there she was dancing the Romalis, and making the bits of broken crockery rattle as well as if they had been ebony and ivory castanets. That girl was good company, I can tell you! Evening fell, and I heard the ...
— Carmen • Prosper Merimee
... sombre room, with walls draped in black velvet sewn with golden fleur-de-lys. Near the wall which faces the two entrance doors that at this moment are both shut close, there stands beneath a brocaded canopy an ebony bed, supported on four twisted columns carved with symbolic figures. The king, after a struggle with a violent paroxysm, has fallen swooning in the arms of his confessor and his doctor, who each hold one of his dying hands, feeling his pulse anxiously and exchanging looks of intelligence. At the ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - JOAN OF NAPLES—1343-1382 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... synod proceeded to business, the Bishop of Aberdeen presented to the Bishop of Connecticut a Pastoral Staff, the gift of Scotch Churchmen to him and his successors in office, with these words: [Footnote: The Staff is of ebony, the upper part being of silver parcel gilt. The crook proper has for its central subject our Lord's charge to St Peter, who kneels at the Saviour's feet. The pierced side of our Lord is significantly seen, as the drapery falls ...
— Report Of Commemorative Services With The Sermons And Addresses At The Seabury Centenary, 1883-1885. • Diocese Of Connecticut
... fortune-teller he was tolerably successful,—chiefly, I think, because of his perfect sincerity, and because of a peculiar gentle manner that invited confidence. His system was the old scholarly one: he used the book known to English readers as the Yi-King,—also a set of ebony blocks which could be so arranged as to form any of the Chinese hexagrams;—and he always began his divination with an earnest ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... mail-bag. Miss Lucy, laying down her knitting, took it from him with eager fingers. Place a la poste—in eighteen hundred and sixty-one! She untied the string, emptied letters and papers upon the table beside her, and began to sort them. Julius, a spare and venerable piece of grey-headed ebony, an autocrat of exquisite manners and great family pride, stood back a little and ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... Earthly monda, tera. Earthquake tertremo. Ease komforto. Ease, at sengxene. East oriento. Easter Pasko. Easterly orienta. Easy facila. Eat mangxi. Eatable mangxebla. Eaves defluilo. Ebb (and flow) forfluo (kaj alfluo). Ebony ebono. Ebriety ebrieco. Ebullition bolado. Eccentric stranga. Ecclesiastic ekleziulo. Ecclesiastical eklezia. Echo ehxo. Eclipse mallumigxo. Ecliptic ekliptiko. Eclogue eklogo. Economical sxparema. Economics ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... swell. The bud scales change color and become a delicate rose pink. I note this especially in the European maple. The bud scales flush as if the effort to "keep in" brought the blood into their faces. The scales of the willow do not flush, but shine like ebony, and each one presses like a hand upon the catkin that ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
... Europe. Knowledge of the New World, with its many peoples, products, and peculiarities, tended to dispel the silly notions of medieval ignorance; and the goods of every land were brought for the comfort of the European—American timber for his house, Persian rugs for his floors, Indian ebony for his table, Irish linen to cover it, Peruvian silver for his fork, Chinese tea, ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... garb, yet not too fantastic to be worn decorously in the street; the delicately-wrought embroidery of the skirt; the broad gold chain about her neck; the curious ring upon her finger; the fan, so exquisitely sculptured in open work, and painted to resemble pearl and ebony;—where could Drowne, in his sober walk of life, have beheld the vision here so matchlessly embodied! And then her face! In the dark eyes, and around the voluptuous mouth, there played a look made up of pride, coquetry, and a gleam of mirthfulness, ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... foot-stool before it, ruffled with the chintz; and in one corner of the room were a square pink and white and green Moorish rug, with ten or a dozen chintz-covered pillows, piled up in a sort of chair-shaped bed upon it, and a fantastic ebony box standing near, the lid thrown back, and battledoors and shuttlecocks, and many other gay-colored games, tossed in confusion. The walls were literally full of exquisite pictures; no very large ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson
... distension of his nostrils would give to his bronzed face a look of extraordinary boldness. This was the only play of feature of which he seemed capable, being a Southerner of a concentrated, deliberate type. His ebony hair curled slightly on the temples. He may have been forty years old, and he was a great voyager on the ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... human nature in a man here and there is surely one of those accidents to be counted on at least as often as fire, shipwreck, or the cattle-disease; and the man who chooses to put his money into these images of his Maker cut in ebony should be content to take the incident risks along with the advantages. We should be very sorry to deem this risk capable of diminution; for we think that the claims of a common manhood upon us should be at least as strong as those of Freemasonry, and that those ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... scouring the plains in search of game. Everything on board was taut and trim and neat: not a yard out of the square, not a rope out of place, the decks as white as old ivory, the polished woodwork glittering like glass, the brass all gold apparently, the guns like ebony, and the very lanyards pipeclayed till they looked ...
— As We Sweep Through The Deep • Gordon Stables
... gilt and decorated, the signing of Magna Charta. The floor was strewed thick with dried rushes and odorous herbs; the furniture was scanty, but rich. The low-backed chairs, of which there were but four, carved in ebony, had cushions of velvet with fringes of massive gold; a small cupboard, or beaufet, covered with carpetz de cuir (carpets of gilt and painted leather), of great price, held various quaint and curious ornaments of plate inwrought with precious stones; and beside this—a singular contrast—on ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... One detail alone gave it or rather would give it at certain moments a touch of singular firmness. Beneath the beautiful fair hair waving on his brow and temples, as was the fashion at that period, eyebrows, eyes and lashes were black as ebony. The rest of the face was, as we have said, almost feminine. There were two little ears of which only the tips could be seen beneath the tufts of hair to which the Incroyables of the day had given the name of "dog's-ears"; a straight, perfectly proportioned nose, a rather large mouth, ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... "small vaulted room," and eventually to a "subterraneous communication between your apartment and the chapel of St. Anthony scarcely two miles off." Arrived at the abbey, she is disappointed at the modern appearance of her room, but contrives to find a secret drawer in an ancient ebony cabinet, and in this a roll of yellow manuscript which, on being deciphered, proves to be a washing bill. She is convinced, notwithstanding, that a mysterious door at the end of a certain gallery conducts to ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... evening before the function Meynell went into the Cathedral with Mary just as the lengthening March afternoon was beginning to wane. They stepped through the western doors set open to the breeze and the sunshine into a building all opal and ebony, faintly flooded with rose from the sky without; a building of infinite height and majesty, where clustered columns of black marble, incredibly light, upheld the richness of the bossed roof, where every wall was broidered history, where every step was on "the ruined sides of Kings," ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... young man of about 28 years of age, rose slowly. In his hand he held ostentatiously a small ebony stick, that was his constant companion, and which he ...
— Australia Revenged • Boomerang
... The hand in some cases is large in proportion, measuring as much as 2 1/2 in. in length, sometimes as an open hand, at others with the fingers closed, often very beautifully modelled. Horn and whalebone were favourite materials for the handle, although some were of ebony and other woods. Scratchbacks appear to have been made both in lefts and rights in this country; but the scratchbacks of the Far East were invariably rights. The accompanying illustrations, Fig. 65, show the usual types of these now obsolete ...
— Chats on Household Curios • Fred W. Burgess
... had gathered itself together, and came into full view in all its magnificence. There were pagodas in teakwood inlaid with gold; and resting on ebony poles, and behind them, on a very tame Rosinante decked with leopard skins and gold bullion fringes, a Chinese maiden dressed to represent a queen of Celestial mythology. Then came more pagodas, and companies of standard-bearers in lavender tunics, red sashes, green and orange ...
— Marm Lisa • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... revelations of polish confined to things having variety in their internal construction; they operate equally in things of homogeneous structure. It is the polished ebony or jet which gives the true blank, the material darkness. It is the polished steel that shines keen and remorseless and cold, like that human justice whose symbol it is. And in the polished diamond the ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... were made of solid gold, and the green upon which the ear stood upright was a mass of sparkling emeralds. Upon the very top of the structure was perched a figure representing the Scarecrow himself, and upon his extended arms, as well as upon his head, were several crows carved out of ebony and having ruby eyes. You may imagine how big this ear of corn was when I tell you that a single gold kernel formed a window, swinging outward upon hinges, while a row of four kernels opened to make the ...
— The Emerald City of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... had altered in Rushbrook's villa at Los Osos! More than that, on close examination it proved to be the very same furniture, arranged as she remembered to have arranged it, even to the flowers and grasses, now, alas! faded and withered on the walls. There could be no mistake. There was the open ebony escritoire with the satin blotter open, and its leaves still bearing the marks of her own handwriting. So complete to her mind was the idea of her own tenancy in this bachelor's mansion, that she looked around with a half indignant alarm for the photograph ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... high moment. The twins were solemnly silent. Amid the funereal gloom, broken only by a hushed word or two from Winona or her mother, the judge completed his fond stroking of the luminous hat, raised it slowly, and with both hands adjusted it to his pale curls. Then he took up his gold-headed ebony cane and stepped from the dusk of the parlour into the light of day, walking uprightly in the pride of fine raiment and conscious dignity. Mrs. Penniman walked at his side, not unconscious herself of the ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... whispers mysterious secrets to the swaying plumes of the tall sago-palms, and dies away in the delicate foliage of tamarind and ironwood tree. A network of air roots makes a grotesque circle round the spreading boughs of the banyan grove, mahogany and sandal-wood, ebony and cork, ginger-tree and cardamom, mingle their varied foliage, the translucency of sun-smitten green shading through deepening tones into the sombre tints of ilex and pine with exquisite gradation. Flamboyant trees flaunt fiery pyramids of blossom high in the air, and the golden ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... perhaps at her former charms, had carried off the gristly part; and some earthly damsel, perhaps, from the same envy, had levelled the bone with the rest of her face: indeed it was far beneath the bones of her cheeks, which rose proportionally higher than is usual. About half a dozen ebony teeth fortified that large and long canal which nature had cut from ear to ear, at the bottom of which was a chin preposterously short, nature having turned up the bottom, instead of suffering it to grow ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... to get a glimpse of that ebony ring round your neck?" interrogated his mother significantly. "Anybody who saw that would ...
— Carl and the Cotton Gin • Sara Ware Bassett
... DC.—A small tree of Jamaica, where the wood is known as green ebony, and is used for making various small articles. It is imported into this country under the name of cocus wood, and is used with us for making flutes and other wind instruments. Mr. Worthington Smith considers that the wood equals bad ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 497, July 11, 1885 • Various
... Burton, "affection, like love, is the fruit of animalism refined by sentiment." He further declares that the Black is in point of affection inferior to the brutes. "No humane Englishman would sell his dog to a negro." [190] The phrase "God's image in ebony" lashed ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... to the light before I saw his face, and the whole man might have been hacked out of ebony, it was every inch the living Levy who stood peering in our direction, one hand hollowed at an ear, ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... earthward they all wept again. And the gods tore white clouds out of the sky and draped them about the body of Morning Zai and bore him forth from his valley behind the hills, and muffled the mountain peaks with snow, and beat upon their summits with drum sticks carved of ebony, playing the dirge of the gods. And the echoes rolled about the passes and the winds howled, because the faith of the olden days was gone, and with it had sped the soul of Morning Zai. So through the mountain passes the gods came at night bearing Their dead father. And Uldoon followed. ...
— Time and the Gods • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... the soul a substance is this. If the soul were an accident it should be possible for it to pass from the animal body to something else, as blackness is found in the Ethiopian's skin, in ebony wood and in pitch. But the soul exists only ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... Brugsch-Bey explains that "under the name of Punt the ancient inhabitants of Chemi meant a distant land surrounded by a great ocean, full of mountains and valleys, and rich in ebony and other expensive woods, in perfumes, precious stones and metals, in wild beasts, giraffes, leopards and big monkeys." The name of a monkey in Egypt was Kaff, or Kafi, in Hebrew Koff, in ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... Tatterdemalion as they were, the ragged army were well-organized as Thode saw at a glance; no haphazard, leaderless crew was this, for at their head rode a diminutive, jockey-like figure, his face glistening and ebony in the eerie radiance, his teeth flashing white as he turned in the saddle. The Little ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... of far more spacious and more magnificent palaces than are to be found in all Damascus and Bagdad. From the roofs of these palaces there hung myriads of gems, liked diamonds, but larger than men; and in among the streets of towers and pyramids and temples, there flowed immense rivers as black as ebony, and swarming with fish that had ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... carved oak, I next found myself in a room that might have been the scene of Plato's symposium. Here were walls painted in classic fresco; windows curtained with draperies of chocolate and amber; chairs and couches of ebony, carved in antique fashion; Etruscan amphorae; vases and paterae of terracotta; exquisite lamps, statuettes and candelabra in rare green bronze; and curious parti-colored busts of philosophers and heroes, in all kinds of variegated marbles. Powdered footmen ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... the way through the first room, where a basket of eggs was deposited on the open hearth, near a heap of broken egg-shells and a bank of ashes. In strange keeping with that sordid litter, there was a low bedstead of carved ebony, covered carelessly with a piece of rich oriental carpet, that looked as if it had served to cover the steps to a Madonna's throne; and a carved cassone, or large chest, with painted devices on its sides and lid. There was hardly any other furniture in the large ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... tears.[420] One should bear one's foe on one's shoulders as long as time is unfavourable. When however, the opportunity has come, one should break him into fragments like an earthen jar on a stone. It is better, O monarch that a king should blaze up for a moment like charcoal of ebony-wood than that he should smoulder and smoke like chaff for many years. A man who has many purposes to serve should not scruple to deal with even an ungrateful person. If successful, one can enjoy happiness. If unsuccessful, one loses esteem. Therefore in ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... costly stuff, contrasting oddly with a new carpet and the bright, fresh hangings of the bed, which had been hurriedly erected. The furniture was half old, half new; and on the dressing-table stood a very quaint oval mirror, in a frame of black wood—unpolished ebony, I think. I can remember the very pattern of the carpet, the number of chairs, the situation of the bed, the figures on the tapestry. Nay, I can recollect not only the color of the dress I wore ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... you good, you Young America, to see that form, and the cross-gashes of the meat ax in it. It is the half of a gigantic English oak, which was growing in Julius Caesar's time, sawed through lengthwise, making a top surface several feet wide, black and smooth as ebony. Some of the bark still clings to the under side. The dancing-hall is the great room of the building. All that the taste, art and wealth of that day could do, was done to make it a splendid apartment, ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various
... at the feast that was spread for him. The dishes were crystallized lotus leaves and flowers, and the chopsticks were of the rarest ebony. As soon as they sat down, the sliding doors opened and ten lovely goldfish dancers came out, and behind them followed ten red-carp musicians with the koto and the samisen. Thus the hours flew by till midnight, and the beautiful ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... the ruins of the old Build we: a temple of the human form Fairer than marble, since with life-blood warm, Well crowned with its appointed crown of gold, Russet or ebony; lines clear and bold Beneath—a citadel no ills can storm, Buttressed with health; a type to be the norm In that great age ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... box consisted of woods of about four inches square, all polished. Among these were mahogany of five different sorts, tulip-wood, satin-wood, cam-wood, bar-wood, fustic, black and yellow ebony, palm-tree, mangrove, calabash, and date. There were seven woods, of which the native names were remembered; three of these, Tumiah, Samain, and Jimlake, were of a yellow colour; Acajou was of a beautiful deep crimson; Bork and Quelle were apparently fit for cabinet work; and ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... of "REDFERN," painted not very conspicuously in the top-light of the door. Immediately on entering, we find ourselves among a confusion of old rubbish and valuables, ancient armor, historic portraits, ebony cabinets inlaid with pearl, tall, ghostly clocks, hideous old china, dim looking-glasses in frames of tarnished magnificence,—a thousand objects of strange aspect, and others that almost frighten you ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... advance toward us, a fine, stately old lady, carrying herself with unmistakable dignity, although she was forced to lean a good deal on a gold-mounted, black ebony stick. And, as I looked at her, I thought of Father Adrian's words: "I can break his mother's heart;" and I leant eagerly forward in the chastened twilight with my eyes anxiously fixed upon her. ...
— A Monk of Cruta • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... These books and these pictures were the elegant monument of hobbies which their owner had outlived. His present hobby happened to be music. A Steinway grand-piano was prominent in the chamber, and before the ebony instrument stood ...
— Hugo - A Fantasia on Modern Themes • Arnold Bennett
... a dark and faded green, wrought to correspond with the tapestry, but by a more modern and less skilful hand. The large and heavy stuff-bottomed chairs, with black ebony backs, were embroidered after the same pattern, and a lofty mirror, over the antique chimney-piece, corresponded in its mounting with ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... of a strong fire in the woods at night is to give to surrounding space an appearance of ebony blackness, against which dark ground the gnarled stems and branches and pendent foliage appear as if traced out in light and lovely colours, which are suffused with a rich ...
— The Gorilla Hunters • R.M. Ballantyne
... approaching ship, with the evening sky, in which still lingered a pale primrose glow, behind them, and against this background their figures and that of the boat stood out black as silhouettes cut in ebony. It is possible that, even with this advantage, they might have escaped notice, had not Phil thought of waving his coat; but the figure of him standing there, apparently upon nothing—for it was only now and then that a small portion of the hull became visible—waving ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... human life on the whole was held rather cheap in consequence. They are the days when in Liverpool the privateers were daily fitting out or bringing in the "prizes," and when, in Lord Street Offices, distant cargoes of "living ebony" were put to auction by steady, intensely respectable, Church-going merchants. But especially they are the days of war and the fortunes of war; days of pressgangs, to kidnap unwilling rulers of the waves; of hulks and prisons filled to overflowing, even ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... found its way to this far-away province through the caprice of some artistic potentate, Pobloff nervously preluded. Notwithstanding the warning of the girl, he had allowed himself to be convoyed to the great Hall of Ebony, and there, quite alone, he sat waiting for some cue to begin. None came. He glanced curiously about him. For all the signs of humanity he might as well have been on the heights of Kerb, out among its thorny groves, or in its immemorial forests. He preluded as he gazed around. He could ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... explosives. The nerve of the French sailors, fortunately for the British, failed them, and they fired the ships too soon. But the spectacle of these flaming monsters as they drifted towards the British fleet was appalling. The river showed ebony-black under the white flames. The glare lit up the river cliffs, the roofs of the city, the tents of Montcalm, the slopes of the distant hills, the black hulls of the British ships. It was one of the most stupendous exhibitions ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... Ireland, from Bovey near Exeter, and other places; and from a famous cavern called the Temple of the Devil, near the town of Altorf in Franconia, at the foot of a mountain covered with pine and savine, in which are found large coals resembling trees of ebony; which are so far mineralized as to be heavy and compact; and so to effloresce with pyrites in some parts as to crumble to pieces; yet from other parts white ashes are produced on calcination, from which fixed alcali is procured; which evinces their vegetable ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... chance encounters, for there was not a soul in the vast building: the police were making their rounds outside it. Our adventurous journalist did not make his way upwards with stealthy tread—there was no need for that. Having gained the top floor, he went straight to a corner where an ebony ladder was ensconced, a ladder which had long been the joy and pride of the grand master of this part of the Palais, the amiable ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... Prince, who was not accustomed to keep his ideas to himself, and he positively found himself wishing for his old friend Patience. However, he had to follow his guides in silence, and they led him into a magnificent hall; the floor was of ebony, the walls of jet, and all the hangings were of black velvet, but the Prince looked round it in vain for something to eat, and then made signs that he was hungry. In the same manner he was respectfully given to understand that he must ...
— The Green Fairy Book • Various
... still steady but the clouds had consolidated and the night was pitch black. On the bridge the Gaston de Paris seemed driving into a solid wall of ebony. ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... said the stranger. He was looking at a faded picture in an ebony frame which hung by the side of the bed. It was the portrait of an old man with a beautiful forehead and ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... their eyes. And the surly thick-lipped men, as they sit about their huts Making drums out of guts, grunting gruffly now and then, Carving sticks of ivory, stretching shields of wrinkled skin, Smoothing sinister and thin squatting gods of ebony, Chip and grunt and do not see. But each mother, silently, Longer than her wont stays shut in the dimness of her hut, For she feels a brooding cloud of memory in the air, A lingering thing there that makes her sit bowed With hollow shining eyes, as the night-fire dies, ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 - Edited by Sir Edward Howard Marsh • Various
... a certain carved lock, closing a certain door of carved ebony, which separates a certain apartment from a certain blue and ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... waving at him her ebony crook, "do not run away, young gentleman. I see that you admire my garden. Pray step inside and look more ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... the village was bombarded severely, but the little house escaped by a miracle. Marie considered it the same miracle that left holy pictures unhurt on the walls of destroyed houses, and allowed the frailest of old ebony and rosewood ...
— The Amazing Interlude • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... to envelop her surroundings, Madeline marked that the fir-trees had given place to pine forest. Suddenly a pin-point of light pierced the ebony blackness. Like a solitary star in dark sky it twinkled and blinked. She lost sight of it—found it again. It grew larger. Black tree-trunks crossed her line of vision. The light was a fire. She heard a cowboy song and the wild chorus of a pack of coyotes. Drops of rain on the branches of trees glittered ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... Victoria Nyanza the flora resembles that of Uganda (q.v.). The characteristic trees of the coast regions are the mangrove and coco-nut palm. Ebony grows in the scrub-jungle. Vast forests of olives and junipers are found on the Mau escarpment; the cotton, fig and bamboo on the Kikuyu escarpment; and in several regions are dense forests of great trees whose lowest branches ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... of 29 deg. N. we fell in with a Dutch ship from the Mauritius, having gone there to cut timber, which seemed a bastard ebony. Contrary to their expectation, they found there the lamentable wreck of four ships come from Bantam and the Moluccas, which had gone to pieces on the rocks. The goods and men of two of these were totally lost, most of the goods of the third were saved, with part of ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume IX. • Robert Kerr
... fleet touched at Java the Less "in compass about two thousand miles, with abundance of treasure and spices, ebony, and brazil, and so far to the south that the North Star cannot be seen, and none of the stars of the Great Bear." Here they were in great fear of "those brutish man eaters," with whom they traded for victuals and camphire and spices and precious stones, being forced ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... cold-storage chicken looks the finest that ever happened. What's this rolled up in tissue-paper? Deviled eggs and ham sandwiches AND caviar, not to speak of claret frappe. I'm certainly grateful to the gentleman finished in ebony who helped to provision us for this siege. He'll never know what a tip he missed by not ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... might come in, and an unusual glimpse of the new foreroom rug was afforded the spectators. Everything was as neat as wax, for Diadema was a housekeeper of the type fast passing away. The great coal stove was enveloped in its usual summer wrapper of purple calico, which, tied neatly about its ebony neck and portly waist, gave it the appearance of a buxom colored lady presiding over the assembly. The kerosene lamps stood in a row on the high, narrow mantelpiece, each chimney protected from the flies ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin
... further informed his wondering contemporaries that the chiefs of the doctrine always carried about with them to their place of meeting their symbol, called the R.C. which was an ebony cross, flourished and decked with roses of gold; the cross typifying Christ's sufferings upon the Cross for our sins, and the roses of gold the glory and beauty of his Resurrection. This symbol was carried alternately to Mecca, Mount Calvary, Mount Sinai, Haran, and ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... were frequently of costly materials, veneered with rare woods, or made of ebony, inlaid with ivory, painted with various devices, or stained to imitate materials of a valuable nature; and the mode of fastening the lid, and the curious substitute for a hinge given to some of them, show the former was ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... you, my young friend!" laughed the police-commissary, with satisfaction. He wore an overcoat and hard felt hat, and carried in his hand an ebony cane with silver knob. ...
— The White Lie • William Le Queux
... pilgrimage originated it appears to have been an object of veneration, and the commencement of the pilgrimage is lost in the dimness of the past. Like the statue of the Virgin at Le Puy, it is as black as ebony, but this is the effect of age, and the smoke of incense and candles. The antiquity of the image is, moreover, proved by the artistic treatment. The Child is crowned and rests upon the Virgin's knee; she does not touch him with her hands. This is in accordance with the early Christian ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... crept down about him, warm, sweet-scented night floated out from the dusk, a few stars shone, the moon passed up above the ridge at his right and made of the Little MacLeod's racing water alternate lustrous ebony and glistening silver, a liquid mosaic. Drennen fell silent, a deep content ...
— Wolf Breed • Jackson Gregory
... there not causes enough to which the apparent inferiority of an African may be ascribed, without limiting the goodness of God, and supposing he forbore to stamp understanding on certainly his own image, because "carved in ebony." Might it not naturally be ascribed to their situation? When they come among Europeans, they are ignorant of their language, religion, manners, and customs. Are any pains taken to teach them these? Are they treated as men? Does not slavery itself depress the mind, and extinguish all ...
— The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African - Written By Himself • Olaudah Equiano
... three o'clock, gray and chill. There had been a good deal of snow, and, except where it was brushed away from the foot-path, it lay white and unbroken, the black trunks of the trees among it looking like pillars of ebony in the ivory-paved courts of a temple. Up in the sky winter was passing with all his somber train, the clouds flying rapidly in great grotesque masses, and seeming to touch the tops of the trees like ...
— The Hallam Succession • Amelia Edith Barr
... tell you," she replied. "I do not know. It is something in the wine. In another hour Aziz will be again as you saw him. But see." And, opening a little ebony box, she produced a phial half ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... large, flat, gold watch-key, a crack in his voice, a wig, and very dirty wristbands. Still you stand in awe at the mere sight of him,—an awe that is very much encouraged by a report made to you by a small boy, that "Old Bid" keeps a large ebony ruler in his desk. You are amazed at the small boy's audacity; it astonishes you that any one who had ever smelt the strong fumes of sulphur and ether in the Doctor's room, and had seen him turn red vinegar blue, (as they say he does,) should call ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... as much as to say, "Speak not to me, I am holier than thou." I found his negroes, however, far more conversable. One of them was old and ugly, the other about twenty, and as well looking as it is possible for a negro to be. His colour was perfect ebony, his features exceedingly well formed and delicate, with the exception of the lips, which were too full. The shape of his eyes was peculiar; they were rather oblong than round, like those of an Egyptian figure. Their expression was thoughtful ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... tears. She sprang out of bed and threw the window nearest to her open to the night. The winter night was mild, and a full moon sailed the southern sky. Not a sound on the water, not a light in the palaces; a city of ebony and silver, Venice slept in the moonlight. Kitty gathered a cloak and some shawls round her, and sank into a low chair, still crying and half conscious. At his inn, some few hundred yards away, between ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... mile ahead and yet prominently asserting itself to their view because of a certain widening and straightening of the canon here, a bold head of cliffs stood out like a monster carving in ebony. Up there, at the top of these cliffs, was the southern end ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory
... that the enemy had protected the ford with stakes on the banks and across the bed of the river. Certain stakes still exist there, which are the subject of a paper in the Archaeologia, 1735, by Mr. Samuel Gale. The stakes are as hard as ebony; and it is evident from the exterior grain that the stakes were the entire bodies of young oak trees. Caesar places the ford eighty miles from the coast of Kent where he landed, which distance agrees very well with the position of ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... my head and looked. The clouds, high around the horizon, were thinning overhead, and the moon, herself invisible, yet lightened the darkness below. The sandy lane stretched behind us like a ribbon of twilight,—nothing to be seen but it and the ebony mass of bush and tree lining it on either side. We hastened on. A minute later and we heard behind us a sound like the winding of a small horn, clear, shrill, and sweet. Sparrow and I wheeled—and saw nothing. The trees ran down to the very edge of ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... of olive shadow about them were bounded by thick arching lines of eyebrow. Magnificent mental power, well-nigh amounting to genius, seemed to dwell in the swarthy forehead beneath the double curve of ebony hair that lay upon it like a crown, and gleamed in the light like a varnished surface; but like many another actress, Coralie had little wit in spite of her aptness at greenroom repartee, and scarcely any education in spite of her boudoir experience. ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... the novelist, who was a lover of the violin and an expert in such matters, in 1872 had thought this instrument to be worth 600 pounds, so that its value had trebled in less than twenty years. The celebrated violinist, Ole Bull, owned a Stradivarius violin, dated 1687, and inlaid with ebony and ivory, which is said to have been made for a king of Spain. In the "Tales of a Wayside Inn" Longfellow speaks ...
— Among the Great Masters of Music - Scenes in the Lives of Famous Musicians • Walter Rowlands
... room in Chicopee. She forgot for a moment the stern, dark face watching her so jealously, and so hardening toward her as he saw how pale she grew, and heard her exclamation of surprise when she first recognized the note, and remembered that in turning over the contents of the ebony box she must have dropped it upon ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... an epicure and the tastes of a savant, he surrounded himself with the most luxurious elegance. The book-cases of carved ebony that run along two sides of the apartment, were filled with rare books, accumulated during his travels, some of them worth their weight in gold. Doors of plate glass protected their antique and often gorgeous bindings, and medallions ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... dark: at first it seemed to have an altogether ebony blackness. Overhead was a black firmament. The only touch of light in the scene was a faint greenish glow at the edge of the sky in one direction, which threw into prominence a horizon of undulating black hills. ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... numerous, and for the following classification I am indebted to my learned friend the Rev. Alexander Crummell, Episcopal missionary and Principal of the Mount Vaughn High School at Cape Palmas: Teak, ebony, lignum vitae, mahogany, brimstone, rosewood, walnut, hickory, oak, cedar, ...
— Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party • Martin Robinson Delany
... which, after the fashion of the day, his open doublet exposed to view above his breeches. He threw off his felt hat, adorned with an old red plume, in order to rub his hand over his bald head. Again he looked at his daughter, who, beneath the brown rafters of that leather-hung room, with its ebony furniture and portieres of silken damask, and its tall chimney-piece, the whole so softly lighted, was still his very own. The poor father felt the tears in his eyes and hastened to wipe them. A father who loves his daughter longs to keep her always ...
— The Hated Son • Honore de Balzac
... seemed almost incredible, no less than 1,800 tons. Her cargo, brought through Indian seas from the coast of Malabar, was valued when she started at 500,000l. She was lined with glowing woven carpets, sarcenet quilts, and lengths of white silk and cyprus; she carried in chests of sandalwood and ebony such store of rubies and pearls, such porcelain and ivory and rock crystal, such great pots of musk and planks of cinnamon, as had never been seen on all the stalls of London. Her hold smelt like a garden of spices for all the benjamin and cloves, the ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... tall, broad, strong, and yet as graceful and agile as a deer. Coal black he was in colour, and his neck, and his shoulder, and his quarters, and his fetlocks—how can I describe him all to you? The sun shone upon him as on polished ebony, and he raised his hoofs in a little, playful dance so lightly and prettily, while he tossed his mane and whinnied with impatience. Never have I seen such a mixture of strength and beauty and grace. I had often ...
— The Great Shadow and Other Napoleonic Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... jingling of spurs. Then he would know that knights and ladies were riding down the road which ran beside the trees. Soon the knights would appear on horses, brown, black, and white, with gaily ornamented saddles, and bridles from which hung silver bells. Often the saddles were made of ivory or ebony, set with rubies or emeralds. The knights wore helmets laced with slender gold chains, and coats of mail made of tiny links of steel, so fine and light that all together hardly weighed more than a coat of cloth. ...
— King Arthur and His Knights • Maude L. Radford
... knowledge of great secrets and the future of man. This it was, when we missed the caravan, tried for a short cut and wandered to this desolate ravine, that ate into my soul, and, in five days, has changed my beard from ebony to silver.' ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... harmless as it may appear, or as much as it is used, with varied phrases of meaning, according to the attitude of the speaker, has been one of the greatest barriers to the progress of the Negro, especially of the women and girls. It has colored everything they have to do. Their place, like the ebony of their skin, is a dark place. In the home, and in social life, "their place" is confined to colored society, colored schools and colored churches. Be it understood, I am not reflecting upon colored society, but am pointing out the limitations that ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 1, January, 1889 • Various
... the owner of the rare pelt. "Sea-otter" it was known to the English and American hunters. But it is like neither the otter nor beaver, though its habits are akin to both. Its nearest relative is probably the fur seal. Like the seal, its pelt has an ebony shimmer, showing silver when blown open, soft black tipped with white, when examined hair by hair. Six feet, the full-grown sea-otter measures from nose to stumpy tail, with a {66} beaver-shaped face, teeth like a cat, and short webbed feet. Some hunters say the sea-otter ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... eight degrees northward from the line, from whence the inhabitants resorted to them in canoes, hollowed out of the solid trunk of a tree, and raised at both ends so high above the water, that they seemed almost a semicircle; they were burnished in such a manner that they shone like ebony, and were kept steady by a piece of timber, fixed on each side of them, with strong canes, that were fastened at one end to the boat, and at the other to the end ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... is, Etching. "This beautiful virgin, sitting at a table, has before her a copperplate, lying on a sand-bag; and near it stands a little monkey, placing a lighted lamp before her. She is attended by Prudence and Diligence, and Practice is setting the tools on an oil-stone. Her chair is of ebony, adorned with figures of Sincerity and Assiduity, wrought in ivory, and mutually embracing; behind which stands Judgment, showing her a little further, Painting, accompanied by Apollo and Diana; he holding up his torch, in order to enlighten Sculpture, and she hers reversed, with purpose to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... us that Miss Chauncey had large claims against the government, dating back sixty or seventy years, but nobody could ever find the papers; and I felt sure that they must be hidden away in some secret drawer. The brass handles and trimmings were blackened, and the wood looked like ebony. I wanted to climb up and look into the upper part of this antique piece of furniture, and it seemed to me I could at once put my hand on a package of "papers relating to ...
— Deephaven and Selected Stories & Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... walls. Yet Bostil peered long into the shadows. Then he looked up. The ragged ramparts far above frowned bold and black at a few cold stars, and the blue of its sky was without the usual velvety brightness. How far it was up to that corrugated rim! All of a sudden Bostil hated this vast ebony pit. ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... Yes, she knew the carriage would be round directly; but Ellerton need not fear that she would be late. And then, when the old servant had closed the door, she went up to her husband's chair, leaning over it and embracing it with her two arms, while she rested her cheek against the carved ebony back. "This is where he will sit this evening," she said. "Good-bye, God bless you, dear;" and ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... his uncle go on a voyage to the islands of the Eastern seas to seek specimens in natural history, and their adventures there are full of interest and excitement. The descriptions of Mr. Ebony, their black comrade, and of the scenes of savage ...
— Condemned as a Nihilist - A Story of Escape from Siberia • George Alfred Henty
... appearance, as well as in the manners and customs of its thrifty inhabitants. Here, and throughout the entire country, one feels impressed with the evident peace, plenty, and content. As to the products of this locality, they are mostly figured porcelain, embroidered silks, japaned goods, ebony and shell finely carved and manufactured into ornaments. Every little low house has a shop in front, and is, as usual, quite open to the street; but small as these houses are, room is nearly always found in the rear or side for a little flower-garden, fifteen ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... the way across the basement to a cubbyhole next to the coal room, entered and came out with a narrow, deep drawer of ebony inlaid with mother-of-pearl.... ...
— Murder at Bridge • Anne Austin
... other domestic art-work—all more than a century old, and mostly lying as lumber. There were suites of tapestry hangings, common and fine; green and scarlet leather-work, on which the gilding was still but little injured; venerable damask curtains; quilted silk table-covers, ebony cabinets, worked satin window-cushions, carved bedsteads, and embroidered bed-furniture which had apparently screened no sleeper for these many years. Downstairs there was also an interesting collection of armour, together with several huge trunks and coffers. A great many of them had been recently ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... must be done to them. Some foreigners put in glass windows in place of the thick, cottony paper windows of the Chinese. The paper windows shut out the cold, it is true, but, being opaque, they also shut out the sunlight. And how gorgeously they are furnished! Such ebony chairs, such wonderful carved tables! Now and then we meet some one who has picked up an old opium divan, a magnificent, huge bench of carved ebony, with marble seat and marble back, very deep, capable of holding two ...
— Peking Dust • Ellen N. La Motte
... men, many particulars and secrets respecting their religion were discovered, and many circumstances of the nature of the country: Particularly that it contained mines of copper, azure, and amber, and that it produced ebony, cedar, frankincense, and other rich gums, and spice of several kinds, but wild, and which might be brought to perfection by cultivation; as cinnamon of a good colour but bitter, ginger, long pepper, abundance of mulberry trees for making silk which bear leaves all the year, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr
... buried under their caps, counting long rosaries which measured their time of waiting; priests from Lyons, recognisable by the shape of their hats; others reserved and severe in air, sitting at the great ebony table which filled the middle of the room, and turning over some of those pious journals printed at Fouvieres, just above Lyons, the Echo of Purgatory, the Rose-bush of Mary, which give as a present to all yearly ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... Scipio, nodding cheerfully, while the stained-glass windows flung flecks of red and blue on his honest ebony features. "An' Cai Tamblyn all de while no better'n a fool. 'Him,' he'd sneer, not playin' up, but pullin' his cross face. Dat's a lesson if ebber dere was one. Cai Tamblyn left with fifty, an' me with three time fifty. 'To my faithful servant, Scipio Johnson. . . .' And so Miss Marty, when ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... little cove where his boat-house stood a road swept windingly to his house through a garden of luxuriant verdure. Mango and limes, breadfruit and cocoanut, pomme de Cythere, orange and papaws, banana and alligator-pear, candlenut and chestnut, mulberry and sandalwood, tou, the bastard ebony, and rosewood, the rose-apple with purple tasseled flowers and delicious fruit, the pistachio and the badamier, scores of shrubs and bushes and magnificent tree-ferns, all on a tangled sward of white spider-lilies, great, sweet-smelling plants, an acre of them, and with them other ferns ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... when the light was on, she saw what looked like a miniature roulette wheel, not one of the elaborate affairs of bright metal and ebony, but one of those that can almost be packed into a suitcase and carried ...
— Constance Dunlap • Arthur B. Reeve
... Polyhymnia, the Julia, and others, and we have not found one-tenth of all their works; and then, let any lover of art go to Florence and see Michael Angelo's Penseroso, or to the Cathedral of Mainz, and behold the Virgin by Albert Durer, who has created a living woman out of ebony, under her threefold drapery, with the most flowing, the softest hair that ever a waiting-maid combed through; let all the ignorant flock thither, and they will acknowledge that genius can give mind to drapery, to armor, to ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... enabled him to renovate the whole gallery, which up to this time had been neglected and shabby. The floor was carefully waxed, the ceiling whitened, the wood-work painted to resemble the grain and knots of oak. A long table in ebony and two cabinets by Boulle completed the decoration, and gave to this gallery a certain air that was full of character. In the course of two years the liberality of devout persons, and legacies, though small ones, from pious penitents, filled the shelves of the ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... prosecutable in any court of law, but flattering to the fancy and a great alleviation of idle hours. A man's claim to his own past is yet less valid. A paper might turn up (in proper story-book fashion) in the secret drawer of an old ebony secretary, and restore your family to its ancient honours, and reinstate mine in a certain West Indian islet (not far from St. Kitt's, as beloved tradition hummed in my young ears) which was once ours, and is now unjustly some ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... than six weeks; and the same time may be allowed for the return home. We will furnish Paul with a little venture from my neighbourhood, where he is much beloved. If we were only to supply him with some raw cotton, of which we make no use for want of mills to work it, some ebony, which is here so common that it serves us for firing, and some rosin, which is found in our woods, he would be able to sell those articles, though useless here, to ...
— Paul and Virginia • Bernardin de Saint Pierre
... she collected ferns on the sly, but never before had they seen her bring home such a prize. Usually she found only crumpled things like old bits of wrinkled brown paper which she called "specimens." This one was marvellously beautiful. It had a dainty, slender stalk of ebony black, and its hundred tiny leaves quivered like a shower of green water-drops in the air. There was actual joy in every trembling ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... off. There were fifty sleek, black warriors, and in their midst, lithe and active as a young forest god, strode Tarzan of the Apes, his brown skin contrasting oddly with the ebony of his companions. Except for color he was one of them. His ornaments and weapons were the same as theirs—he spoke their language—he laughed and joked with them, and leaped and shouted in the brief wild dance that preceded their departure from the village, ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... tea-drinking people had disappeared. Many of the crowding chairs had been taken away from the little tables and pushed back against the irregular wall of the house. The floor was being slowly inlaid with strips of shadow-ebony and moon-silver. Even the perfume of the flowers seemed changed. Those which had some quality of mystery and sensuous sadness in their scent ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... small, dark, cunning eyes, which no man of any penetration could look upon without feeling that they were significant of duplicity, cruelty, and fraud. His hair, though long, and falling over his neck, was black as ebony; for although Time had left his impress upon the general features of his face, it had not discolored a single hair upon his head; whilst his whiskers, on the contrary, were like snow—a circumstance which, in connection with his sinister ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... that is a thing you never do. Even when you put on that hat, and tie those ribbons—Miss Champion, I wish you would hold my hand—in a bow under your chin, you don't consult the mirror. But you shall sit with it in your left hand, your elbow resting on an Eastern table of black ebony inlaid with mother-of-pearl. You will turn it from you, so that it reflects something exactly in front of you in the imaginary foreground. You will be looking at this unseen object with an expression of sublime affection. And ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... is said to have written that novel on a diet of oatmeal and cold water, to that of the luxurious author whose seances with the Muses are decorously conducted in irreproachable interiors, with much garnishing, old rose and ivory, ebony carvings, and inlaid desks, at which the marvelous being who now and then condescends to "dictate" a "best seller," is apt to be surprised by a local photographer. But as a noted educator defined a University as "a log,—with Mark Hopkins sitting on the other end," so the ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... which had said to her "it is strange he does not find some nice girl to marry," left a disquieting effect. Ann had only that day suggested the same idea, and Bob had laughed to her about it the previous evening. Even Aunt Timmie, the ebony font of wisdom, had but recently looked slyly at her, remarking: "'Foh long we's gwine to have a weddin' in a private cyar!" (Aunt Timmie had never seen a private car, but it typified her idea of grandeur). She now strolled on beneath the trees, beneath giant clinging wild grape and trumpet ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... took his walking-stick Of fine and polished ebony. Set in the close-grained wood Were quaint devices; Patterns in ambers, And in the clouded green of jades. The top was of smooth, yellow ivory, And a tassel of tarnished gold Hung by a faded cord from a hole Pierced in the hard wood, Circled with silver. For years the Poet had wrought upon ...
— Sword Blades and Poppy Seed • Amy Lowell
... guled quarterings.— Beside her couch, an antique table, weighed With gold and crystal; here, a carven chair, Whereon her raiment,—that suggests sweet curves Of shapely beauty,—bearing her limbs' impress, Is richly laid: and, near the chair, a glass, An oval mirror framed in ebony: And, dim and deep,—investing all the room With ghostly life of woven women and men, And strange fantastic gloom, where shadows live,— Dark tapestry,—which in the gusts—that twinge A grotesque cresset's slender star of light— Seems moved of cautious hands, assassin-like, That wait ...
— Myth and Romance - Being a Book of Verses • Madison Cawein
... the chance of trying a more attractive subject. There, on the top of a rough wooden case, which evidently contained the machinery, was the wonderful clock. The dial was crowned by a glass pedestal placed on rock-work in carved ebony; and on the top of the pedestal sat the inevitable figure of Time, with his everlasting scythe in his hand. Below the dial was a little platform, and at either end of it rose two miniature sentry-boxes, with closed doors. Externally, this was ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... a chair of ebony enriched by cunning Etruscan art—four mounted knights charging across its heavy back in armor of wrought gold. She stopped, facing the company, between two columns of white marble beautifully sculptured. Upon each a vine rose, limberly and with soft leaves in ...
— Vergilius - A Tale of the Coming of Christ • Irving Bacheller
... comfortable apartment, which served pleasantly for all small gatherings, and had that social air so impossible in a stately banqueting-chamber—a perfect gem of a room, hung with gilt leather, relieved here and there by a choice picture in a frame of gold and ebony. Here the draperies were of a dark crimson cut velvet, which the sunshine brightened into ruby. The only ornaments in this room were a pair of matchless Venetian girandoles on the mantelpiece, and a monster Palissy dish, almost as elaborate in ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... Swinhoe. "The emperor is seated on his ebony throne, attired in a yellow robe wrought over with dragons in gold thread, his head surmounted with a spherical crown of gold and precious stones, with pearl drops suspended round on light gold chains. His eunuchs ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 12 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... our furniture will be a little antiquated, one would not run too much into that taste in so small an apartment. For the library I have the old oak chairs now in the little armoury, eight in number, and we might add one or two pair of the ebony chairs you mention. I should think this enough, for many seats in such a room must impede access to the books; and I don't mean the library to be on ordinary occasions a public room. Perhaps the tapestry-screen would suit better here than in the drawing-room. ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... a negro on board, a very remarkable man, by the name of Cacasotte. Though carved in ebony, he had great beauty of countenance, and wonderful grace and strength of person. His native, mental endowments were also of a high order. This man, Cacasotte, as soon as the barge was taken, assumed to be greatly overjoyed. He danced, sang and laughed, declaring that he ...
— Christopher Carson • John S. C. Abbott
... lap of Europe. Knowledge of the New World, with its many peoples, products, and peculiarities, tended to dispel the silly notions of medieval ignorance; and the goods of every land were brought for the comfort of the European—American timber for his house, Persian rugs for his floors, Indian ebony for his table, Irish linen to cover it, Peruvian silver for his fork, Chinese tea, ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... came out grinning, showing his white teeth. As I caught sight of him I thought, surely, this is a fiend from the lower regions. Take one of those prisoners with his striped clothes, a light burning on his head, his face black and shining like ebony, behold him in the weird darkness of the mines, and if he does not call to your mind the picture of one of the imps of Eternal Night there is nothing in this world that will. This prisoner was the runner ...
— The Twin Hells • John N. Reynolds
... together, Pons had exchanged a good clock for a better one, till at last he possessed a timepiece in Boule's first and best manner, for Boule had two manners, as Raphael had three. In the first he combined ebony and copper; in the second—contrary to his convictions—he sacrificed to tortoise-shell inlaid work. In spite of Pons' learned dissertations, Schmucke never could see the slightest difference between the magnificent clock in Boule's first manner ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... &c., were growing abundantly; and they were able to supply us with seven pecul, or 933 pounds of sweet potatoes, without sensibly diminishing their crop. They showed me samples of birds' nests, bees' wax, garu wood (lignum aloes), and ebony, collected in the vicinity, chiefly from Gunong Gading. Several peculs of birds' nests and bees' wax, and the wood in large quantity, could now be brought to market; and no doubt, when demand stimulates industry, the quantities would ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... island produced palms, cocoa-nut trees, various almond trees, wild coffee, the ebony tree, the tacamahac, as well as numerous resinous or gum trees, the banana, sugar-cane, yams, aniseed, and lastly a plant called "Binao," which is used by the natives as bread. Cockatoos, wood pigeons, ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... and sewing under the directing eye of a severe-looking matron; on the second floor are generally situated the show- and reception-rooms. The first saloon is sombre: the ceiling appears, in the daytime, blackened by gas; the walls are wainscoted in imitation ebony with gold fillets, and large panels above the chair-rail are filled with verdure tapestries of the most dismal green, chosen expressly to throw into relief the freshness and gayety of the dresses; on the chimney-piece, and reflected in the glass, is a clock surmounted by a monumental ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... date. Very frequently they were made to contain the store of house-linen which a bride took to her husband upon her marriage. In the 17th century Boulle and his imitators glorified the marriage-coffer until it became a gorgeous casket, almost indeed a sarcophagus, inlaid with ivory and ebony and precious woods, and enriched with ormolu, supported upon a stand of equal magnificence. The Italian marriage-chests (cassone) were also of a richness which was never attempted in England. The main ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... 267. MABA GEMINATA.—The ebony wood of Queensland. The heart wood is black, and the outside wood of a bright red color. It is close-grained, hard, heavy, elastic and tough, and takes a ...
— Catalogue of Economic Plants in the Collection of the U. S. Department of Agriculture • William Saunders
... dirty gray in color, conical as to crown, sloping as to brim, and dilapidated as to general appearance, the hat that is irrefragable proof that its wearer is a Boy. This head-gear he wore over the queue of his forefathers, braided, ebony, shining, and hanging half-way down his ...
— Emerson's Wife and Other Western Stories • Florence Finch Kelly
... full, they had "Hobson's choice"—was at the end of a very long passage, at the back of the house, and overlooking the yard. It was a large apartment, and in one of its several recesses stood the bed, a gigantic, ebony four-poster, with spotlessly clean valance, and, what was of even greater importance, well-aired sheets. The other furniture in the room, being of the same sort as that in the majority of old-fashioned hostels, needs no description; ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... down on either side like the funnel of a cabin stove, exciting the greatest wonder and the liveliest curiosity to know how the skin of the shoulder obtained the elasticity requisite to exhibit such a phenomenon. On the top of the cylinder was a beautifully polished ebony pedestal, about two inches high on one side, tapering away to nothing at the other, so that whatever might be placed thereon, would lie at an angle of forty-five degrees. This pedestal did duty for a neck; and upon it was placed a thing ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... you my aeroplanes, if you like," she returned, gaily, and held up the two ebony canes which had been hidden by the tall grass. They told the story of Mercy Curtis' look of pain, but once she had had to hobble on crutches and, as she pluckily declared, canes ...
— Ruth Fielding and the Gypsies - The Missing Pearl Necklace • Alice B. Emerson
... appeared to them in that unhallowed spot, and by the depth and dignity of her wild prayer, the two watchers had eyes for her alone. Therefore it happened that not until his arm was about to drag her away, did either of them perceive a huge man, black as ebony in colour, clad in a cloak of leopard skins and carrying in his right hand a broad-bladed spear who, following the shadow of the trees, had crept upon the priestess from the farther ...
— Elissa • H. Rider Haggard
... he said, "that Olivia relishes the topic. I merely wish to say that Sandy is an exception to any rule which you may formulate in derogation of the negro. Sandy is a gentleman in ebony!" ...
— The Marrow of Tradition • Charles W. Chesnutt
... their shoulders, where their ebony fur was frosted with gray. Age had not yet affected their quick, flowing movement but they were getting old—they were only a few weeks short of his own age. He could not remember when they had not ...
— Space Prison • Tom Godwin
... carved bench and upon a cushion of cloth of gold, and who bent over a frame of embroidery, which she was busy weaving in threads of silver and gold. And the hair of that damosel was as black as ebony and her cheeks were like rose leaves for redness, and she wore a fillet of gold around her head, and she was clad in raiment of sky blue silk. And near by was a table spread with meats of divers sorts and likewise with several wines, both white and red. And all the goblets were of silver ...
— The Story of the Champions of the Round Table • Howard Pyle
... be out of view. By morning his advanced posts would be sniping at the thin khaki line. Night ... an ebony pall pierced by a score of brilliant burning houses. Fantastic, grotesque. Crimson glows upon which tired eyes rested unthinking, uncaring, the mind worn under the ceaseless repetition: "When will we stop? Why don't they let us fight it out? God, we'd make a mess of him anyhow." Then someone ...
— Norman Ten Hundred - A Record of the 1st (Service) Bn. Royal Guernsey Light Infantry • A. Stanley Blicq
... I held in my hand against Brigitte's bosom. I was no longer master of myself, and in my delirious condition I know not what might have happened; I threw back the bedclothing to uncover the heart, when I discovered on her white bosom a little ebony crucifix. ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... to go in; for although she has lost no friends, she longs to see the 'improvements in mourning,' which she can do by 'cheapening a few articles, and buying a penny-worth of black pins.' The worthy pair enter, take an ebony chair at the counter, while a clerk in a suit of sables addresses the lady, and in sepulchral tones inquires if he 'can have the melancholy pleasure of serving her.' 'How deep would you choose to go, Ma'am? Do you wish to be very poignant? ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... sat in his great ebony chair—with its crimson cushions. His face looked more cadaverous and sunken than usual; the fine features looked as if they were carved in old ivory, they were so fixed and rigid; as he held out his hand to Olivia there was no smile of welcome on his face—the melancholy ...
— Doctor Luttrell's First Patient • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... was lit, for the darkness had fallen, and by its light I saw the old man seated in a chair of ivory and ebony at a table of stone on which were spread mystic writings of the words of Life and Death. But he read no more, for he slept, and his long white beard rested upon the table like the beard of a dead man. The soft light from the lamp fell on him, on the papyri and the gold ring upon his ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... crest of the ridge from the other side, the old man vanished like a ghost among the trees. When I was nearly at the top I reached the edge of a small patch of burned forest. In the half darkness the charred stumps and skeleton trees were as black as ebony. As I was about to move into the open I saw an object which at first seemed to be a curiously shaped stump. I looked at it casually, then something about it arrested my attention. Suddenly a tail switched nervously and I realized that the "stump" was an enormous wild boar standing head-on, ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... its light on De Thou. The young man was kneeling on a cushion, surmounted by a large ebony crucifix. He seemed to have fallen asleep while praying. His head, inclining backward, was still raised toward the cross. His pale lips wore a calm and ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... from head to foot in a long black mantle, sat on the farther side. There were a few implements of her profession about her—one or two big books, a crystal bowl containing some black fluid very clear and sparkling, an ebony wand, and a dusky mirror in a silver frame. She fixed her bright bead-like eyes upon her guests as they advanced, and asked in her cracked, ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... in processions, precedes the Esquire-Bedells, carrying an ebony mace, tipped with silver; his gown, as well as those of the Marshal and School-Keeper, is made of black prince's stuff, with square collar, and square ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... reclines on the quarter-deck of the schooner, toying lightly ever and anon with the luscious fruits of the vicinity, held in baskets of solid gold by Nubian slaves? or at intervals, with daring grace, guides an ebony velocipede over the polished black walnut decks, and in and out the intricacies of the rigging. Who is it? well may be asked. What name is it that blanches with terror the cheeks of the Patagonian navy? Who but the Pirate Prodigy—the relentless Boy Scourer of Patagonian seas? Voyagers slowly ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... Much used by turners and for all parts of musical instruments, for handles on whips and fancy articles, draught-boards, engraving blocks, cabinet work, etc. The wood is often dyed black and sold as ebony; works well and stands well. Most abundant in the lower Mississippi Valley and Gulf States, but occurring eastward to Massachusetts and ...
— Seasoning of Wood • Joseph B. Wagner
... walking on a path betwixt two deep waters, which never moved, shining as black as ebony where the eyelight fell. But they saw ere long that this path kept growing narrower and narrower. At last, to Alice's dismay, the black waters met in front ...
— Cross Purposes and The Shadows • George MacDonald
... of maroon and royal blue velvets, its lace and twisted cords with heavy tassels, and hassocks crowded on the sombrely brilliant rugs sacred in mosques. There was a mantle in colored marbles, cabinets of fretted ebony, tables of onyx and floriated ormolu, ivories and ornaments ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... division of the box consisted of woods of about four inches square, all polished. Among these were mahogany of five different sorts, tulip-wood, satin-wood, cam-wood, bar-wood, fustic, black and yellow ebony, palm-tree, mangrove, calabash, and date. There were seven woods, of which the native names were remembered; three of these, Tumiah, Samain, and Jimlake, were of a yellow colour; Acajou was of a beautiful deep crimson; Bork and Quelle were apparently fit for cabinet work; and Benten was the ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... by. In one of the smallest provincial towns, in a humble household, lived a poor maiden of the Jewish faith, as a servant. Her hair was black as ebony, her eye dark as night, yet full of light and brilliancy so peculiar to the daughters of the east. It was Sarah. The expression in the face of the grown-up maiden was still the same as when, a child, she sat on the schoolroom form listening with thoughtful eyes ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... the Kasr-al-Kholaifa, or hall of the khalifs, "the roof and walls of which were of gold, and solid but transparent blocks of marble of various colours: on each side were eight doors fixed on arches of ivory and ebony, ornamented with gold and precious stones, and resting on pillars of variegated marble and transparent crystal:—and in the centre was fixed the unique pearl presented to An-nassir by the Greek Emperor." The mosque and baths attached to the palace ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... that little Jane had already searched, and scattering about them the pungent fragrance of the sweet-fern thickets,—the breath of summer itself; then returning for a sober pace or two, would take off his hat, thrust a hand through the masses of his hair that looked like carved ebony, and show Vivia that his shadow was exactly as long as her own. And Vivia saw that all this beating and longing and burning had loosened and shot into manhood a nature that under the snow of its eightieth winter would yet be that of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... character. I have come hither with no sinister purpose, and am entitled, at the hands of a gentleman, to the consideration of an honorable antagonist, even if you deem me one at all. And perhaps, if you think upon the blue chamber and the ebony cabinet, and ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... that Miss Chauncey had large claims against the government, dating back sixty or seventy years, but nobody could ever find the papers; and I felt sure that they must be hidden away in some secret drawer. The brass handles and trimmings were blackened, and the wood looked like ebony. I wanted to climb up and look into the upper part of this antique piece of furniture, and it seemed to me I could at once put my hand on a package of ...
— Deephaven and Selected Stories & Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... one vessel they placed as many balls as there were noble youths in the city, and into the other as many as there were maidens; and all the balls were white save only seven in each vessel, and those were black as ebony. ...
— Old Greek Stories • James Baldwin
... glance it seemed to be an oratory or chapel. A large gold and ebony crucifix hung on the wall. There was a prie-dieu of heavy dark mahogany in the centre of the tiled floor; there was a low ottoman or couch, covered with a mantle of dark violet velvet, like a pall; there were two quaintly carved stiff chairs; a religious, almost ascetic, air pervaded the apartment; ...
— Maruja • Bret Harte
... and put it out. I think that the black-and-white hall surprised Ortega. I had closed the front door without noise and stood for a moment listening, while he glanced about furtively. There were only two other doors in the hall, right and left. Their panels of ebony were decorated with bronze applications in the centre. The one on the left was of course Blunt's door. As the passage leading beyond it was dark at the further end I took Senor Ortega by the hand and led him along, unresisting, like a child. For some reason or other I ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... design. Went home early and bought some more enamel paint—black this time—and spent the evening touching up the fender, picture-frames, and an old pair of boots, making them look as good as new. Also painted Gowing's walking-stick, which he left behind, and made it look like ebony. ...
— The Diary of a Nobody • George Grossmith and Weedon Grossmith
... first made its acquaintance, and one of the famous houses of the town. And it was no wonder it was famous, for such a collection of Oriental furniture, bric-a-brac, and objects of art never was seen outside of a museum. There were ebony cabinets, book-cases, tables, and couches wonderfully carved and inlaid with mother-of-pearl. There were beautiful things in bronze and jade and ivory. There were all sorts of strange rugs and curtains and portieres. As to the china-ware and the ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... hath sett so manie Trays full of Spearmint, Peppermint, Camomiles, and Poppie-heads in the blue Chamber to dry, that she will not care to move them, nor have the Window opened lest they shoulde be blown aboute. I wish I had turned the Key on my ebony Cabinett. ...
— Mary Powell & Deborah's Diary • Anne Manning
... irregular. M. d'O was a widower, and had this only child; consequently, Esther was heiress to a large fortune. Her excellent father loved her blindly, and she deserved his love. Her skin was snow white, delicately tinted with red; her hair was black as ebony, and she had the most beautiful eyes I have ever seen. She made an impression on me. Her father had given her an excellent education; she spoke French perfectly, played the piano admirably, and was passionately ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... seat, he planted his big gold-headed ebony cane between his knees, put his hat on the head of his cane, gave it a twirl, and looking over sidewise at her, smiled with an equal mixture of real ...
— The Mettle of the Pasture • James Lane Allen
... probably from weakness. His pulse was beating feebly and his face was ashen. Wilson stooped to place his hands upon his shoulders, when he caught sight of that which had doubtless led the stranger to undertake the strain of opening the safe—a black ebony box, from which protruded through the opened cover the golden head of a small, quaint image peering out like some fat spider from its web. In falling the head had snapped open so that from the interior of the thing a tiny roll of parchment had slipped out. Wilson, picking this up, put it in ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... left alone— Left to that undisturbed repose Which in an ebon vapor flows Among the cypresses that stand A stone-cast from the sombre strand— Among the trees whose shadows wake, But not to life, within the lake, That stand, like statues of the Past, And will, while that ebony ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... Park was less than two miles from the Abbey Inn; but the road, which according to a sign-board led "to Hainingham," followed a tortuous course through the valley, and when at last I came to what I assumed to be the gate-lodge, a thunderous ebony cloud crested the hill-top above, and its edge, catching the burning rays of the sun, glowed fiercely like the pall of Avalon in the torchlight. Through the dense ranks of firs cloaking the slopes a breeze presaging the coming storm whispered evilly, and ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... he had ever known seemed so breathtakingly beautiful. Her skin had been caressed by a lifetime's freedom in the sun; her long, dark hair had the sheen of polished ebony; and in the firm, healthy curves of her body he saw the sensuous grace of a ...
— Impact • Irving E. Cox
... mirror! and what a queer one!" exclaimed the maiden, as she bent forward to look, and found her lovely, earnest face reflected from a square, slightly defaced mirror that was set in an ebony frame richly ...
— Mona • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... buff waistcoat with gilt buttons, over which his watch-chain was gracefully arranged. His pantaloons were strapped clown very tightly over his polished boots; a shining new silk hat was on one side of his head; and in his hand he was dangling an ebony cane. In spite, however, of all these gaudy trappings, he could not muster up an easy air; and, as he knocked, he had that look proverbially attributed to dogs who are ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... everything, and in spite of everything. Rain beat in drenching floods against the sallow, hailstorms lashed her branches, snow enshrouded her, hoar-frost bespangled her,—the little Emperor was quite unmoved. As the bark weathered from ebony to rusty olive, chameleon-like, he changed with it. This was the only outward sign ...
— "Wee Tim'rous Beasties" - Studies of Animal life and Character • Douglas English
... her over the path to where the remains of the wharf projected into a sea as black, and as solid apparently, as ebony, and across which the moon flung a narrow way like a chalk mark. Millie Stope seated herself on the boarding and he found a place near by. She leaned forward, with her arms propped up and her chin couched on her palms. Her potency increased rather than diminished with association; ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... borrowed, and hair cut, and chins shaved, until we feared our Christmas guests would look like convicts. Then the Dandy producing blacking brushes, boots that had never seen blacking before, shone like ebony. After that a mighty washing of hands took place, to remove the blacking stain; and then the Quarters settled down to a general "titivation," Tam "cleaning his nails for ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... the unclean refuse with our foot. What a swarming there is beneath it, what a tumult of busy workers! The Silphae, with wing-cases wide and dark, as though in mourning, fly distraught, hiding in the cracks in the soil; the Saprini, of polished ebony which mirrors the sunlight, jog hastily off, deserting their workshop; the Dermestes, of whom one wears a fawn-coloured tippet, spotted with white, seek to fly away, but, tipsy with their putrid nectar, tumble ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... custom. The particular god and the precise material I left to his choice, my only stipulation being that it should be made of wood. He therefore first attempted to work in boxwood. Meanwhile, during my absence in the country, Sicinius Pontianus, my step-son, wishing to gratify me,[22] procured some ebony tablets from that excellent lady Capitolina and brought them to his shop, exhorting him to make what I had ordered out of this rarer and more durable material: such a gift, he said, would be most gratifying to me. ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... which have been filled with bitumen and natron resemble black simulacra carved in ebony; corruption cannot attack them, but the appearance of life is wholly lacking; the bodies have not returned to the dust whence they came, but they have been petrified in a hideous shape, which one ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... protected the ford with stakes on the banks and across the bed of the river. Certain stakes still exist there, which are the subject of a paper in the Archaeologia, 1735, by Mr. Samuel Gale. The stakes are as hard as ebony; and it is evident from the exterior grain that the stakes were the entire bodies of young oak trees. Caesar places the ford eighty miles from the coast of Kent where he landed, which distance agrees very well with the position of Oatlands, ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... Donnegan stood by while the big Negro silently tended to the horses—removing the packs and preparing them for the night. Still in silence he produced a small lantern and lighted it. It showed his face for the first time—the skin ebony black and polished over the cheekbones, but the rest of the face almost handsome, except that the slight flare of his nostrils gave him a cast of inhuman ferocity. And the fierceness was given point by a pair of arms of gorilla length; broad shoulders padded with rolling muscles, and the ...
— Gunman's Reckoning • Max Brand
... Cheswardine had politely but firmly declined, there had been a certain coolness and quite six tears. Vera had caused it to be understood that even if Cheswardine was NOT interested in music, even if he did hate music and did call the Broadwood ebony grand ugly, that was no reason why she should be deprived of a pretty and original music-stool that would keep her music tidy and that would be HERS. As for it not going with the Chippendale, that was ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... a mule, covered over with silk, and an ebony collar hanging down from his neck, whom they kissed and ...
— The Forbidden Gospels and Epistles, Complete • Archbishop Wake
... this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling, By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore, "Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou," I said, "art sure no craven, Ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the Nightly shore— Tell me what thy lordly ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... the whole was held rather cheap in consequence. They are the days when in Liverpool the privateers were daily fitting out or bringing in the "prizes," and when, in Lord Street Offices, distant cargoes of "living ebony" were put to auction by steady, intensely respectable, Church-going merchants. But especially they are the days of war and the fortunes of war; days of pressgangs, to kidnap unwilling rulers of the waves; of hulks and prisons filled to overflowing, even in a mere commercial port like ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... of Coamo. I led him instantly to one side. I was afraid that if I did not take him up he would surrender to Paget or to Jimmy. I bade him conduct me to his official residence. He did so, and gave me the key to the cartel, a staff of office of gold and ebony, and the flag of the town, which he had hidden behind his writing-desk. It was a fine Spanish flag with the coat of arms embroidered in gold. I decided that, with whatever else I might part, that flag would always be mine, that the chance ...
— Notes of a War Correspondent • Richard Harding Davis
... had come up from the village, and her ebony suitor was expected. With that and their delight at Miss Elsie's improvement, the whole staff was ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... ear stood upright was a mass of sparkling emeralds. Upon the very top of the structure was perched a figure representing the Scarecrow himself, and upon his extended arms, as well as upon his head, were several crows carved out of ebony and having ruby eyes. You may imagine how big this ear of corn was when I tell you that a single gold kernel formed a window, swinging outward upon hinges, while a row of four kernels opened to make the front entrance. Inside there were five ...
— The Emerald City of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... large, superbly furnished room, with its book-cases of ebony and wedgewood, its costly pictures and bronzes, and recalled the Villa with its luxury and splendour, and the vast sums which Sir Stephen had spent during the last few months. It seemed difficult to realise that the ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... a person with a dark skin might have a grateful heart: and the colonel, who dealt little in innuendo, said, "Come, don't you be so hard on jet, you ebony!" ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... clouds, high around the horizon, were thinning overhead, and the moon, herself invisible, yet lightened the darkness below. The sandy lane stretched behind us like a ribbon of twilight,—nothing to be seen but it and the ebony mass of bush and tree lining it on either side. We hastened on. A minute later and we heard behind us a sound like the winding of a small horn, clear, shrill, and sweet. Sparrow and I wheeled—and saw nothing. The trees ran down to the very edge of ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... to enter it. Family portraits that hung there, were turned to the walls, and portraits of French actresses and Italian singers were stuck to the back of the canvasses. Then he displaced a beautiful little ebony cabinet which had been in the family three hundred years; and set up in its stead a Cyprian temple of his own, in miniature, with crystal doors, behind which hung locks of hair, rings, notes written on blush-coloured paper, and other love-tokens kept as sentimental ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... splendor of a November sky that this morning burst through the lattice for me, on my bed? According to terrestrial calculations, above the horizon, in the east, there rose one rod of rainbow [20] hues, crowned with an acre of eldritch ebony. Little by little this topmost pall, drooping over a deeply daz- zling sunlight, softened, grew gray, then gay, and glided into a glory of mottled marvels. Fleecy, faint, fairy blue and golden flecks came out on a background of [25] cerulean hue; while the ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... reply to his note, and went to call upon Miss Ethelynda Lewis. Miss Lewis dwelt in a luxurious apartment-house on Riverside Drive, where a colored maid showed him into a big parlor, full of spindle-legged gilt furniture upholstered in flowered silk. Also the room contained an ebony grand piano, and a bookcase, in which he had time to notice the works of Maupassant ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... my bric-a-brac dealer was a veritable Capharnaum. All ages and all nations seemed to have made their rendezvous there. An Etruscan lamp of red clay stood upon a Boule cabinet, with ebony panels, brightly striped by lines of inlaid brass; a duchess of the court of Louis xv. nonchalantly extended her fawn-like feet under a massive table of the time of Louis xiii., with heavy spiral supports of oak, and carven designs of chimeras ...
— The Mummy's Foot • Theophile Gautier
... along the river bank plucking the ripe mulberries, and idly watching the terns and kingfishers busily seeking their suppers over the glassy water; and at night we sat on deck while the moon rose higher in the quiet sky, and the dark river banks assumed a clearer ebony as she rose above the lofty fringe of trees, until the towing-path lay a track of pure silver reaching away to the dim belt of woodland which ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... In this room is a painting of the head of Queen Mary, in a charger, taken the day after the execution. Many other interesting portraits grace the walls of this room. But by far the finest apartment in the building is the Drawing-room, with a lofty ceiling, and furnished with antique ebony furniture. After passing through the Library, with its twenty thousand volumes, we found ourselves in the Study, and I sat down in the same chair where once sat the Poet; while before me was the table upon which was written the "Lady of the Lake," "Waverley," and other ...
— Three Years in Europe - Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met • William Wells Brown
... uproar while this was going on had been tremendous, but it was suddenly stilled as four men in dark clothes entered the room. Each held in his hand the well known symbol of his office, the little ebony staff surmounted by ...
— Colonel Thorndyke's Secret • G. A. Henty
... trade cardamomum in Malabar, Calecut, and Cananor, [that plant] being used throughout the Orient to sweeten the breath. From the coasts of Sofala, Melinde, and Mozambique, they get gold, ivory, amber, and ebony, which they also get from Champ, whose mountains apparently raise no other [varieties of] woods. From Bengala they get civet, and mother-of-pearl. The best benzoin is that of Ceylan and Malaca; but as the Dutch have but little trade in those parts, they get along ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 27 of 55) • Various
... windows in place of the thick, cottony paper windows of the Chinese. The paper windows shut out the cold, it is true, but, being opaque, they also shut out the sunlight. And how gorgeously they are furnished! Such ebony chairs, such wonderful carved tables! Now and then we meet some one who has picked up an old opium divan, a magnificent, huge bench of carved ebony, with marble seat and marble back, very deep, capable of holding two people ...
— Peking Dust • Ellen N. La Motte
... and put off into the slow current. A haggard, eerie fragment of moon slinked westward. Stars glinted in the flawless chilly blue. The surface of the river was like polished ebony—a dream-path wrought of gloom and gleam. The banks were lines of dusk, except where some lone cottonwood loomed skyward like a giant ghost clothed with a mantle that glistered and darkled in ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... and finally, undiscovered, but pallid and remorseful, gained the casement. Softly raising his head, he peeped within. The room was full of music; he seemed to grow blind for a moment, when lo! upon the kitchen-table sat the mysterious songster, an ebony-hued negress, scouring the tinware, and singing away. Just as he was peering through the window, the ebony songster discovered him. The soldier's limbs sank beneath him, and the ...
— Incidents of the War: Humorous, Pathetic, and Descriptive • Alf Burnett
... elephants were feasted, as the Romans were in the habit of feasting themselves, in grand style. Splendid couches were placed, ornamented with paintings and covered with tapestry. Before the couches, upon tables of ebony and cedar, was spread the banquet, in vessels of gold and silver. When the feast was prepared, the twelve elephants marched in; six gentleman elephants dressed in the robes of men, and six lady elephants attired in ...
— What the Animals Do and Say • Eliza Lee Follen
... bring home such a prize. Usually she found only crumpled things like old bits of wrinkled brown paper which she called "specimens." This one was marvellously beautiful. It had a dainty, slender stalk of ebony black, and its hundred tiny leaves quivered like a shower of green water-drops in the air. There was actual joy in every trembling ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... changed in exterior, for Louis, always a scorner of outward show, wore, on the present occasion, an old dark blue hunting dress, not much better than the plain burgher suit of the preceding day, and garnished with a huge rosary of ebony which had been sent to him by no less a personage than the Grand Seignior, with an attestation that it had been used by a Coptic hermit on Mount Lebanon, a personage of profound sanctity. And instead of his cap with a single image, he now wore a hat, ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... Beside her couch, an antique table, weighed With gold and crystal; here, a carven chair, Whereon her raiment,—that suggests sweet curves Of shapely beauty,—bearing her limbs' impress, Is richly laid: and, near the chair, a glass, An oval mirror framed in ebony: And, dim and deep,—investing all the room With ghostly life of woven women and men, And strange fantastic gloom, where shadows live,— Dark tapestry,—which in the gusts—that twinge A grotesque cresset's slender star of light— Seems moved of cautious hands, ...
— Myth and Romance - Being a Book of Verses • Madison Cawein
... Alexandria, Jerusalem, Tyre, and Damascus. Ivory, gold, gems, precious stuffs, teak and cedar wood, Lebanon pine, apes, peacocks, sandal-wood, camel's hair, goat's hair, frankincense, pearl, dyes, myrrh, cassia, cinnamon, Balm of Gilead, calamus, spikenard, corn, ebony, figs, fir, olives, olive-wood, wheat, amber, copper, lead, tin, and precious stones were the chief articles of exchange. A very little sufficed the poor; the rich were housed in ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... and a soil capable of producing the most varied vegetation of the tropics, a liberal policy is all that the country lacks. The products of the Philippine Islands consist of sugar, coffee, hemp, indigo, rice, tortoise-shell, hides, ebony, saffron-wood, sulphur, cotton, cordage, silk, pepper, cocoa, wax, and many other articles. In their agricultural operations the people are industrious, although much labour is lost by the use of defective implements. The plow, of a very simple construction, has been ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: Explorers • Various
... Asplenium pinnatifidum Scott's Spleenwort. Asplenium ebenoides Green Spleenwort. Asplenium viride Maidenhair Spleenwort. Asplenium Trichomanes Maidenhair Spleenwort. Asplenium Trichomanes (Fernery) Ebony Spleenwort. Asplenium platyneuron Bradley's Spleenwort. Asplenium Bradleyi Mountain Spleenwort. Asplenium montanum Rue Spleenwort. Asplenium Ruta-muraria Rootstock of Lady Fern (Two parts) Sori ...
— The Fern Lover's Companion - A Guide for the Northeastern States and Canada • George Henry Tilton
... the great round tower of living wood, half ebony, half silver, with its mighty cloud above of flake-jet leaves tinged with frosty fire at ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... or indication of human life and habitation. She looked in vain for the settlement, for the rugged ditches, the scattered cabins, and the unsightly heaps of gravel. In the glamour of the moonlight they had vanished; a veil of silver-gray vapor touched here and there with ebony shadows masked its site. A black strip beyond was the river bank. All else was changed. With a sudden sense of awe and loneliness she turned to the cabin and its sleeping inmates—all that seemed left to her in the vast and stupendous domination of ...
— Devil's Ford • Bret Harte
... band; and when the doctor went to his place, leaving his patient seated at the side-table, feeling as if he were in a dream, Wilkins carried out his orders with military precision; for, every time a piece was played, he conducted in regular musical fashion, flourishing a little ebony baton, and turning over the leaves of the book before him on the stand, but never once glancing at the notes, his eyes, glimmering through his glasses, being fixed upon the lad, to whom the scene appeared more dreamlike than ever, ...
— The Queen's Scarlet - The Adventures and Misadventures of Sir Richard Frayne • George Manville Fenn
... brought two great crosses and a jewel of diamonds, presents from the Viceroy to the King. She had 537 tons of spices. The pepper alone was represented by Burleigh as worth L102,000. It fell to the Crown's share. She carried fifteen tons of ebony, beside tapestries, ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... which was rove a long green silk rope, with one end secured by a cleat on the wall, and the other dangling loose, and squirming, whenever a current of air struck it, like a long, slim snake. Around the sides of the room, which were paneled with cedar, stood four or five quaint ebony armoires, and as many cabinets, clocks, and bookcases, with here and there a woman's work-stand, some of them curiously inlaid with pearl and silver. The walls were hung with a great number of pictures of all kinds ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... was a negro woman, very neatly dressed, with a very good-looking negro child, about nine months old, in her arms. It was of the darkest ebony in colour, and its dress rather surprised me. It was a chali frock, of a neat fawn coloured pattern, with fine muslin trousers edged with Valenciennes lace at the bottom; and very pretty did its little tiny black feet look, relieved by these expensive unnecessaries. ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... clothes, who could only be the surviving half-breed, was running as one does run when Death is the pacemaker. Behind him, only a few yards in his rear, bounded the huge ebony figure of Zambo, our devoted negro. Even as we looked, he sprang upon the back of the fugitive and flung his arms round his neck. They rolled on the ground together. An instant afterwards Zambo rose, looked at the prostrate man, ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... presents we ask for we're sure to receive; You must wait just as still till I say the 'Amen,' And by that you will know that your turn has come then. Dear Jesus, look down on my brother and me. And grant as the favor we are asking of Thee! I want a wax dolly, a tea-set and ring, And an ebony work-box that shuts with a spring. Bless papa, dear Jesus, and cause him to see That Santa Claus loves us far better than he; Don't let him get fretful and angry again At dear brother Willie, and Annie, Amen!" "Peas Desus 'et Santa Taus tum down to-night, ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... old ebony face," he said angrily to the negro, in a manner which proved that his equanimity was considerably disturbed. "You jest stow that, and hold your rampagious cacklin', or I'll soon make you rattle your ivories to another toon, I ...
— Picked up at Sea - The Gold Miners of Minturne Creek • J.C. Hutcheson
... front room. There were bedrooms at the back of the house, to be let to patrons of the establishment. At the opposite end of the front room from the windows was the ever-present idolatrous shrine. On either side of the room were elegantly-carved ebony chairs, with marble or agate panels. Rich Chinese pictures decorated the walls. Toward the back of the room hung the sign, '283 Licensed Eating House.' There was a large table in the centre of the room. Toward the front, on either side, in alcoves, ...
— Heathen Slaves and Christian Rulers • Elizabeth Wheeler Andrew and Katharine Caroline Bushnell
... confined the drapery of his robe. Round his throat and far down on his bare breast hung a necklace more than a span deep, composed of pearls and agates, and his upper arm was covered with broad gold bracelets. He rose from the ebony seat with lion's feet, on which he sat, and beckoned to a servant who squatted by one of the walls of the sitting-room. He rose and without any word of command from his master, he silently and carefully placed on the high-priest's bare ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... as black as ebony, Brisbane met Wayne Shandon in White Rock. A man lived there, whom Shandon could trust, an old friend of his father, and at his house the meeting was held with little difficulty or danger. In less than two hours Brisbane had put himself in possession ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory
... door resounded twice to the sharp blow of a saber-hilt, and the ayah's pock-marked ebony took on a shade of gray, she stood like a queen with an army at her back and neither blanched ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... have produced a little soil, upon which a spontaneous growth of shrubbery has sprung up; the flat roofs have usually a collection of little urn-shaped turrets round the battlement, between which are stretched clothes-lines. Here the ebony daughters of Eve, with their bullet-heads and polished faces and necks, may be seen at all hours hanging up washed clothes, their capacious mouths ornamented with long cigars, at which ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... partially covered by three good-sized mats. There was a writing-table on one side of the room with an ebony-and-gold crucifix standing upon it. Opposite to it, on the other side of the room near the fireplace, was a bookcase. On the shelves were volumes of Shakespeare, Dante, Emerson, Wordsworth, Browning, Christina Rossetti, Newman's "Dream of Gerontius" and "Apologia," Thomas a Kempis, several ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... Charley, with a glance at the grinning ebony face, the very picture of health. "He never had a real ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... cry came to them across the water, out of the blackness that brooded upon the harbor, did any of the four give sign of excitement. The Babu started, and rose to his feet shivering; the others still squatted, mute and motionless as statues of ebony, neither by gesture nor murmur betraying their consciousness that at any moment, by tocsin from the fort, a thousand fierce and relentless warriors might be launched like ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... the room to where there stood on a shelf a little ebony cabinet, clamped with dull silver of foreign workmanship. He unlocked it, and withdrew from it a letter, the paper faintly yellowed and brittle with the passage ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... four, who was much about the age of Arthur Maguire. Margaret was a girl whom it was almost impossible to know and not to love. Though then but seventeen, her figure was full, rich, and beautifully formed. Her abundant hair was black and glossy as ebony, and her skin, which threw a lustre like ivory itself, had—not the whiteness of snow—but a whiteness a thousand times more natural—a whiteness that was fresh, radiant, and spotless. She was arch ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... bright red hind wings, seen only during flight. It is solitary and excessively shy in its habits, living always in concealment among the dense foliage near the surface of the ground. The yonng are intensely black, like grasshoppers cut out of jet or ebony, and gregarious in habit, living in bands of forty or fifty to three or four hundred; and so little shy, that they may sometimes be taken up by handfuls before they begin to scatter in alarm. Their gregarious ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... a dining room, decorated and furnished in austere good taste. Inlaid with ebony trim, tall oaken sideboards stood at both ends of this room, and sparkling on their shelves were staggered rows of earthenware, porcelain, and glass of incalculable value. There silver-plated dinnerware gleamed under rays pouring from light fixtures ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... beautiful bulbs; how smooth they are, how well formed; there is that air of melancholy about them which promises to produce a flower of the colour of ebony. On their skin you cannot even distinguish the circulating veins with the naked eye. Certainly, certainly, not a light spot will disfigure the tulip which I have called into existence. And by what name shall we call this offspring of my sleepless ...
— The Black Tulip • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... his elbows on the wooden rail. The mists in the valley below had been swept away; overhead the stars shone out of an ebony sky very bright as on some clear winter night of frost, and of all that gigantic amphitheater of mountains which circled behind them from right to left there was hardly a hint. Perhaps here some extra cube of darkness showed where ...
— Running Water • A. E. W. Mason
... Sam, his ebony face shining, stood behind trying to look over his shoulder. He couldn't make it out and his curiosity got ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... work, profusely carved with nymphs and Cupids, and armed men, among festoons of fruits embossed in high relief. Deeply drilled worm-holes set a seal of antiquity upon the blooming faces and luxuriant garlandslike the touch of Time who 'delves the parallels in beauty's brow.' On the shelves of an ebony cabinet close by he showed us a row of cups cut out of rock-crystal and mounted in gilt silver, with heaps of engraved gems, old snuff-boxes, coins, medals, sprays of coral, and all the indescribable lumber ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... squint a little. I've been watching the two rows of date-palms along the curb, with their willow-plume head-dress stirring lazily in the morning breeze. Well back from the smooth and shining asphalt, as polished as ebony with its oil-drip and tire-wear, is a row of houses, some shingled and awninged, some Colonial-Spanish, and stuccoed and bone-white in the sun, some dark-wooded and vine-draped and rose-grown, but all immaculate and finished ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... entered his father's treasuries, to look about him, and coming upon an inner compartment and finding the semblance of a door, opened it and passed in. And lo! he found himself in a little closet, wherein stood a column of white marble, on the top of which was a casket of ebony; he opened this also and saw therein another casket of gold, containing a book. He read the book and found in it an account of our lord Mohammed (whom Allah bless and preserve!) and how he should be sent in the latter days[FN513] ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... him was a chariot of ebony drawn by two plunging, coal-black horses. A robust Egyptian, who shifted from one foot to the other and talked to his horses continually, drove therein alone. As he approached, the Hebrew woman raised herself so suddenly that ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... fingers soon exposed to view. The old trader took things philosophically. Knowing that it was absolutely impossible to escape, he sat quietly down on a stone, rested his chin on his hands, heaved one or two deep sighs, and thereafter seemed to be nothing more than an ebony statue. ...
— Martin Rattler • R.M. Ballantyne
... across the moon-filled night, so large a meteor that it made light even against that silver. A mass within Ian made a slow turn, with effort, with thrilling, changed its inclination. He saw that disdain, that it was shallow and streaked with ebony. He moved with a kind of groan. "Was there—is there—wickedness?... What, O ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... soon came in sight of tall cliffs which overlooked the sea, and which formed a natural harbour, wherein lay a vessel richly beseen. Its sails were of spun silk, and each plank and mast was fashioned of ebony. Dismounting, Gugemar made his way to the shore, and with much labour climbed upon the ship. Neither mariner nor merchant was therein. A large pavilion of silk covered part of the deck, and within this ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... ebenus, [Delta]. DC.—A small tree of Jamaica, where the wood is known as green ebony, and is used for making various small articles. It is imported into this country under the name of cocus wood, and is used with us for making flutes and other wind instruments. Mr. Worthington Smith considers that the wood equals bad box for ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 497, July 11, 1885 • Various
... course of the day on which land was discovered we reached the mouth of Demarara River, and received a pilot on board, and a queer-looking fellow, for a pilot I thought him. He was a negro, with a skin dark as ebony, which shone with an exquisite polish. His costume was simplicity itself consisting of an old straw hat, and a piece of coarse "osnaburg" tied around the waist! But he was active and intelligent, notwithstanding his costume and color, and ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... uncle Dick go on a voyage to the remoter islands of the Eastern seas, and their adventures there are told in a truthful and vastly interesting fashion, which will at once attract and maintain the earnest attention of young readers. The descriptions of Mr. Ebony, their black comrade, and of the scenes of savage life, ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... country village. To counterbalance those foreign sentinels, there mounted guard on the other side of the mirror two stout warders of Scottish lineage; a jug, namely, of double ale, which held a Scotch pint, and a quaigh, or bicker, of ivory and ebony, hooped with silver, the work of John Girder's own hands, and the pride of his heart. Besides these preparations against thirst, there was a goodly diet-loaf, or sweet cake; so that, with such auxiliaries, the apartment seemed victualled against a siege ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... by side on couches in the vestibule, which was a lofty chamber, panelled in ivory and ebony, with inset opals of enormous size and a ceiling of dull silver. The Duchess was a short, spare, grey-haired and rather homely-looking woman in a black demi-toilette with priceless old lace. Lady Muscombe was about twenty-six, tall, with a beautiful figure and a pale, piquant ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... of domestics at the end of the apartment opened, and a body of slaves advanced, carrying trays of ivory and gold, and ebony and silver, covered with the choicest dainties, curiously prepared. These were in turn offered to the Caliph and the Sultana by their surrounding attendants. The Princess accepted a spoon made of a single pearl, the long, thin golden handle of which was ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli
... sonnets and canzoni for her to sing but invented new patterns for her gowns; and Cristoforo Romano laid down the sculptor's chisel to play the lyre or viol for her pleasure. For her the wise man of Pavia, Lorenzo Gusnasco, fashioned cunningly wrought instruments, lutes and viols inlaid with ebony and ivory, and organs inscribed with Latin mottoes; and the wonderful tenor, Cordier, the priest of Louvain, sang his sweetest and most entrancing strains in the ducal chapel. For her amusement the court jesters laughed and chattered and played their foolish tricks—Diodato, who had followed ...
— Beatrice d'Este, Duchess of Milan, 1475-1497 • Julia Mary Cartwright
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