"Patchwork" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... upon her." She taught the women to knit, to sew, and to cut out; the sale of the articles enabling her to buy other materials, and to continue the industrial education thus begun. She also taught the men to make straw hats, men's and boys' caps, gray cotton shirts, and even patchwork—anything to keep them out of idleness, and from preying on their own thoughts. Out of the earnings of the prisoners in this way, she formed a fund, which she applied to furnishing them with work on their discharge; thus enabling them again to begin the world honestly, ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... needle-craft, found riotous expansion in quilt-piecing. A thrifty economy, too, a desire to use up all the fragments and bits of stuffs which were necessarily cut out in the shaping, chiefly of women's and children's garments, helped to make the patchwork a satisfaction. The amount of labor, of careful fitting, neat piecing, and elaborate quilting, the thousands of stitches that went into one of these patchwork quilts, are to-day almost painful to regard. Women revelled in intricate and difficult ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... grumbled Arthur, getting out of bed like a badly made parcel, with sheet, blanket, and patchwork quilt rolled round him; and as he shut the window with a bang he could see his brother and Will ...
— Menhardoc • George Manville Fenn
... and a half months' hard work, the ladies of a certain Dorcas Society were so delighted with the completion of a beautiful silk patchwork quilt for the dear curate that everybody kissed everybody else, except, of course, the bashful young man himself, who only kissed his sisters, whom he had called for, to escort home. There were just a gross ...
— The Canterbury Puzzles - And Other Curious Problems • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... are now gayly decorated with glowing masses of pelargoniums and vincas, belts of rich coleuses and fiery alternantheras, patchwork of feverfew and mesembryanthemum, and scroll-work of house leeks, but amid this gay checkering it is wonderful how few flowers there are for cutting for bouquets. As tender plants, except the few that may have ...
— Scientific American Suppl. No. 299 • Various
... good children or good nuns. But in Prussia, all that is best in the civilised machinery is put at the service of all that is worst in the barbaric mind. Here again the Prussian has no accidental merits, none of those lucky survivals, none of those late repentances, which make the patchwork glory of Russia. Here all is sharpened to a point and pointed to a purpose, and that purpose, if words and acts have any meaning at all, is the destruction of liberty ...
— The Barbarism of Berlin • G. K. Chesterton
... myself warm until five o'clock struck. Then I went to the inn door and sounded a loud rat-tat with the knocker. No one answered, so I knocked still louder. At length I heard a slow and laborious shuffling of feet in the passage, and an old woman, wrapped in a patchwork quilt and wearing a white nightcap, opened the door. She regarded ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... eighty-one years your speakers have been accustomed to make the toast announced the point from which they start, but to which they never return. [Laughter.] So I shall not stick to my text, but only be particular to have all I say my own, and not make the mistake of a minister whose sermon was a patchwork from a variety of authors, to whom he gave no credit. There was an intoxicated wag in the audience who had read about everything, and he announced the authors as the minister went on. The clergyman gave an ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... and fragments that have escaped hebdomadal burnings, from a visit that I paid to Woodbridge in the summer of 1889, and from reminiscences and unpublished letters furnished by friends of FitzGerald, I purpose to weave a patchwork article, which shall in some ways supplement Mr Aldis Wright's edition of his Letters. {70} Those letters surely will take a high place in literature, on their own merits, quite apart from the interest that attaches to the translator ...
— Two Suffolk Friends • Francis Hindes Groome
... feeling showed on his face. His voice and his laughter rumbled from his throat, leaving his face unchanged, only his pupils waxed and waned like a cat's in the dark. He was covered with a patchwork of skins and tatters of cloth, and as he set meat before us, venison, it came to me that he must hunt his food in the dark, always in the dark. That cold whiteness was not of the good God's sunlight. As we ate, Dan told him some of our story, and the Nameless Man sat, a handful ...
— The McBrides - A Romance of Arran • John Sillars
... she was often found sitting on the stairs outside Nat's door while he was practising. This pleased him very much, and he played his best for that one quiet little listener; for she never would come in, but preferred to sit sewing her gay patchwork, or tending one of her many dolls, with an expression of dreamy pleasure on her face that made Aunt Jo say, with tears in her eyes: "So like my Beth," and go softly by, lest even her familiar presence mar the child's ...
— Little Men - Life at Plumfield With Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... is often evinced by the straws, And the course of the wind by the flight of a feather; So a speaker is known by his ands and his ors, Those stitches that fasten his patchwork ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... hung a pot with "creeping Jew" and inchplant, the tendrils at least a yard long. In the other window was a blowzy-looking canary in a cage. A corpulent tortoise-shell cat occupied the turkey-red cushion in one generous rocking chair, There was a couch with a faded patchwork coverlet, several other chairs, and in a glass-fronted case standing on the mantlepiece a model of a brigantine in full sail, at least ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... cloak. Then old Speckle, squawking all the way, flew over to Grannie's bed! She ran the whole length of it. She left a little path clear across the patchwork quilt. Larry stood in one corner of the room waving his arms. Eileen was flapping her apron in another, while Grannie Malone chased old Speckle with the broom. At last, with a final squawk, she flew out of the door, ...
— The Irish Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... affairs, great prairie schooners, hooded in canvas to keep out the rain. Some of them were miracles of patchwork, racked and strained and broken till scarcely a sound bit of iron or wood remained, but, all splinted and bound with strips of the cowboy's indispensable rawhide, they wabbled crazily along, with many a shriek and groan, threatening ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... into a very cheerful and wonderfully clean kitchen, where Mrs. Groves was busy with her baking, and the loaves of fresh bread looked very inviting. She was as pleasant and hospitable as her husband, and after shaking up a funny-looking patchwork cushion in a rocking-chair for the young lady to sit down on she told the little girls that she would get them a couple of crickets if they would wait a minute, and disappeared into the ...
— Among the Trees at Elmridge • Ella Rodman Church
... This is what ranks its writer with the master-spirits of the age! This is what has been described, over and over again, in terms which would require some qualification if used respecting Paradise Lost! It is too much that this patchwork, made by stitching together old odds and ends of what, when new, was but tawdry frippery, is to be picked off the dunghill on which it ought to rot, and to be held up to admiration as an inestimable specimen of art. And what must we think of a system by means of which verses ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... as possible, country divided by hedges. Perhaps nothing in the whole compass of landscape is so utterly unpicturesque and unmanageable as the ordinary English patchwork of field and hedge, with trees dotted over it in independent spots, gnawed ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... you to make yourself at home." With a laugh he glanced about the bare little room,—at the uncovered rafters, the rough log walls, and the empty cupboard with its swinging doors. In one corner there was a pallet hidden by a ragged patchwork quilt, and facing it a small pine table upon which stood an ash-cake ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... Pastille pastelo. Pastime amuzajxo. Pastor pastro. Pastoral kampa. Pastry pasteco. Pastry-shop kukejo. Pasture herbejo, pasxtejo. Pasturage pasxtajxo, pasxtejo. Pat frapeti. Patch fliki. Patchwork flikajxo. Patella genuosto. Patent patento. Patentee patentito. Paternal patra. Paternity patreco. Path vojo, vojeto. Pathetic kortusxanta. Pathology patologio. Pathos patoso. Patience pacienco. Patient pacienca. Patient, ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... discussions in English, as well as all the accounts of trials published up to that time. His work he dedicated to the two judges at Taunton, Sir John Walter and Sir John Denham, and to the archdeacon of Wells and the chancellor of the Bishop of Bath and Wells. The book was, indeed, a truly remarkable patchwork. All shades of opinion from that of the earnestly disbelieving Scot to that of the earnestly believing Roberts were embodied. Nevertheless Bernard had a wholesome distrust of possessions and followed Cotta in thinking that catalepsy and other related diseases accounted for many of them.[26] ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... be there now, taking off her bonnet and shawl, in the quaint clean chamber, with the heavy oak rafters, and the jasmine coming in at the window, and glancing with pardonable pride at the fair face reflected in the mirror. But as she laid her things on the patchwork coverlet, it seemed to her that the lace veil became fine white linen, and was folded about a figure that lay in the bed; and when she looked round the room again everything was draped in white—white blinds hung before the windows, and even the old oak ...
— The Brownies and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... mere dress could make a girl glad like that. All the troubles of the days that were past went over her in a great wave of agony, and overwhelmed her soul. In soft silk and lace petticoat and camisole with her pretty white arms and shoulders shaking with great sobs she buried her face in the old patchwork quilt that her hostess had brought from her village home, and gave way to a grief that had been long in growing. The other girl now thoroughly alarmed, laid the satin on a chair and went over to the little stranger, gathering her up in a strong embrace, ...
— Exit Betty • Grace Livingston Hill
... assembled group, Uncle Israel dismounted nimbly enough, and directed the men to take his bed upstairs, which they did, while Harlan and Dorothy stood by helplessly. Here, under his profane and involved direction, the structure was finally set in place, even to the patchwork quilt, fearfully and wonderfully made, ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... cents I paid for that tie, not three weeks ago," he concluded. "Does your grandmother make patchwork quilts? If she does, she ...
— Murder in the Gunroom • Henry Beam Piper
... cabin at the big map of the United States as they had been, the red and green and blue and yellow patchwork of vanished political divisions. The colors gleamed through the transparent overlay on which this ...
— The Return • H. Beam Piper and John J. McGuire
... girl sat on a stool sewing patchwork. This particular pattern was called a lemon star and had eight diamond-shaped pieces of two colors, filled in with white around the edge, making a square. Her grandmother was coming to "join" it for her, and have it quilted ...
— A Little Girl in Old New York • Amanda Millie Douglas
... delightful "jack-knife times," as Star called them, when the Captain sat fashioning all sorts of wonderful trifles with his magic knife, the child sitting at his elbow and watching him with happy eyes. There were "story times," instituted years before, as soon as Star had learned to sew on patchwork; for as for sewing without a story to listen to, "that," said Star, "is against my nature, Daddy. And you don't want me to do things that are against my nature, do you?" So whenever the squares of gay calico came out, and the golden head bent to and fro over them, like a paradise bird hovering ...
— Captain January • Laura E. Richards
... its pages. However, the view they take of the matter rather pleases me than otherwise. If they like, I am not unwilling they should think a dozen ladies and gentlemen aided at the compilation of the book. Strange patchwork it must seem to them—this chapter being penned by Mr., and that by Miss or Mrs. Bell; that character or scene being delineated by the husband, that other by the wife! The gentleman, of course, doing the rough work, the lady getting up the finer parts. ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... title of Light and Shade in War (ARNOLD). Whether it is Mr. MALCOLM ROSS who supplies the light, and Mr. NOEL ROSS the shade, or vice versa, we are given no means of ascertaining. Between them they have certainly put together an agreeable patchwork of small and easily read pieces, most of which have already appeared in journalistic form. It is perhaps parental prejudice that makes Mr. Punch consider the best of the bunch to be "Abdul," one of three slight sketches that originally saw the light ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 3, 1917 • Various
... way up-stairs to the front room, and paused at the door, to let him enter first. It was scantily furnished with an old deal box, a few chairs, and a tent bedstead, without hangings or cross-rails, which was covered with a patchwork counterpane. The dim light admitted through the curtain which he had noticed from the outside, rendered the objects in the room so indistinct, and communicated to all of them so uniform a hue, that he did not, at first, perceive the ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... logical texture and cohesion in his pages; development, evolution, growth; one thing follows another naturally, and each paragraph follows from what went before. But most of his later writings are a kind of patchwork; unrelated ideas are in juxtaposition; the incongruities are startling. All those chapters, I suppose, were read as lectures to miscellaneous audiences in which the attention soon became tired or blunted if required to follow a closely reasoned argument. Pictures and parables and ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... outcome of some happy accidental suggestion at the very last moment. "Robert," "Les Huguenots," "Le Prophete," in the forms we have them, are quite different from those in which they were first cast. These operas have therefore been called "the most magnificent patchwork in the history of art," though this is a harsh phrasing of the fact, which somewhat outrides justice. Certain it is, however, that Meyerbeer was largely indebted to ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... turning from his station at the window. Below them now, less than half a mile down on the patchwork of the Nile valley, men were standing, staring up, collecting in little groups, gesticulating toward the strange thing that had materialized in ...
— Invaders from the Infinite • John Wood Campbell
... was preparing with a concert from a number of long drums, kettledrums, and horns. He wore on his head an ornament like a bishop's mitre, covered with strings of coral. His tobe was of green silk, crimson silk, damask, and green silk velvet, sewn together like a piece of patchwork. He wore English cotton stockings, and sandals of neat workmanship. His subjects as they approached prostrated themselves, rubbing their heads with earth, and kissing the ground repeatedly, till their faces were covered with the ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... finish your practicing, I want you to come to my room and do a square of your patchwork. You know I let you off last Saturday to ...
— Chicken Little Jane • Lily Munsell Ritchie
... scarlet or yellow; for careless beauty one must look to the heaps of blossoms piled up in the corners (later to be used on the beds as a fertiliser), which are always beautiful, and doubly so when reflected in a canal. From a balloon, in the flowering season, the tulip gardens must look like patchwork quilts. ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... with mother, and our little tea-parties, and the Dutch dolls we made up in the long front chamber. O, don't you remember, Laura? What different pieces we have got into our remembrances already! I feel as if I was making patchwork. Some-time, may-be, I shall tell somebody about living here. Well, they will be beautiful stories! Homesworth is an elegant place to live in. You will see when you come ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... scene-shifter, who knew her family, I learned something of poor Semantha's private life. Poor child! from the very first she had rested her bright brown eyes upon the wrong side of life,—the seamy side,—and her own personal share of the rough patchwork, composed of dismal drabs and sodden browns and greens, had in it just one small patch of rich and brilliant colour,—the theatre. Of the pure tints of sky and field and watery waste and fruit and flower, she knew nothing. ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... our covers, at last, we felt to the full, the new spirit of adventure that had spread its irridescent wings over the house. There was Granfa, snoring under Mary Ellen's patchwork quilt; there was the trusty Mary Ellen, herself, stowed away in the scullery; there was Mrs. Handsomebody, on missionary duty among the blacks; here were we—The Seraph expressed our feelings exactly just ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche
... Eliza was sewing patchwork, not because it was needed but simply as a protest against the frivolous lace Catherine was crocheting. Eliza listened with a frown and Catherine with a smile, as the girls explained their errand. To be sure, ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... largest tree of the New England forest, conspicuous by its great height, massive trunk and branches, and by its magnificent, wide-spreading, dome-shaped or pyramidal, open head. The sunlight, streaming through the large-leafed, rusty foliage, reveals the curiously mottled patchwork bark; and the long-stemmed, globular fruit swings to every ...
— Handbook of the Trees of New England • Lorin Low Dame
... first Archie and then his observer, a young officer named Carleton, taking their seats, the word given, and then all other sound shut out by the dull roar of the engine—-it was always like that. Lines of trees, patchwork patterns made by the fields, and oddly grouped farm buildings swept along beneath the soaring plane, growing smaller with uncanny rapidity. The day's work started. That was all it amounted to. In the ...
— The Brighton Boys with the Flying Corps • James R. Driscoll
... means and ways to stop this waste. What is done to-day in this direction is mere patchwork, and utterly inadequate. As an illustration of what could be done to-day, may be cited the canalization and the laying out of vast fields in the capital of the Empire, on whose value, however, experts are of divided opinion. Socialist society will solve the question more ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... is that there is no national plan, but rather a patchwork, that resembles Joseph's coat of many colors. Each city engineer has designed his own type of apparatus and had it made to order. Also, each company is fenced in by law within a six-mile circle, so that ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... this in the following terms: 'Tatian however, their former leader, put together, I know not how, a sort of patchwork or combination of the Gospels and called it the "Diatessaron," which is still current ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday
... Parlin opened the nursery door at home, she found Jennie building block houses, to Flyaway's great delight, while at the other end of the room sat Dotty Dimple, resolutely sewing patchwork. ...
— Dotty Dimple's Flyaway • Sophie May
... long to get ready. A few possessions—a skillet, several pans, the water buckets, the fire shovel, a few clothes, a homespun blanket, a patchwork quilt, and several bearskins—were packed on the back of one of the horses. Nancy and Sally rode on the other horse. Abe and his father walked. At night ...
— Abe Lincoln Gets His Chance • Frances Cavanah
... bravely started on the last stage of their journey. Captains Burke and Brooke-Popham had engine failure about ten miles out of Oxford, and, landing in a ridge-and-furrow field, broke a tail skid. Most of the day was consumed in getting this skid mended, patchwork fashion, by a coachbuilder in Oxford, to procure whose aid Captain Brooke-Popham returned to Oxford by earth. When the machine flew again it was forced to land at once, this time with serious damage. The other three officers had all been compelled by the bumpy ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... happened because her window was right across the alleyway from ours. The Ponsonby house was next to us, on the right, and between us were only a fence, a hedge of box, and a sprawly acacia tree that shaded Miss Ponsonby's window, where she always sat sewing—patchwork, as I'm alive—when she wasn't working around the house. Patchwork seemed to be Miss Ponsonby's sole and only dissipation ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... in Aunt Jane's room, ten minutes hemming, ten minutes seaming, and ten minutes basting patchwork squares together. I ...
— Mary Marie • Eleanor H. Porter
... herself respectably for a day or two; but the house was rather dull, she missed Nelly, wanted to run in the street, and longed to see mamma. She amused herself as well as she could with picture-books, patchwork, and the old cat; but, not being a quiet, proper, little Rosamond sort of a child, she got tired of hemming neat pocket-handkerchiefs, and putting her needle carefully away when she had done. She wanted to romp and shout, and slide ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... appeal. The magazines are coming to find their greatest usefulness in the news field in gathering up the loose ends of scattered paragraphs which the daily newspapers have no time to weave together into a pattern. In the magazine the patchwork of daily journalism is assembled into more meaningful designs. Local news is sifted of its provincialism to become matter of national concern. Topics which you rapidly skimmed in the afternoon newspaper three or four weeks ago are re-discussed in the weekly or monthly ...
— If You Don't Write Fiction • Charles Phelps Cushing
... examination is sufficient to testify to the fragmentary nature of the Nibelungenlied. We can discern through the apparent unity of texture of the work as we now possess it the patchwork where scribe or minstrel has interpolated this incident or joined together these passages to secure the necessary unity of narrative. Moreover, in none of the several versions of the Siegfried epic do we get the 'whole story.' One supplements another. And while we shall follow the Nibelungenlied ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... it is," said Miss Ruth. "Susie,"—to a little girl sitting close beside her,—"why can't some of you girls get together one afternoon in the week and make a patchwork quilt ...
— Miss Elliot's Girls • Mrs Mary Spring Corning
... ranged solemnly along the mantel-shelf. Even the spittoon was an original note, and instead of sawdust contained sea-shells. And as for the hearthrug, it would merit an article to itself, and a coloured diagram to help the text. It was patchwork, but the patchwork of the poor; no glowing shreds of old brocade and Chinese silk, shaken together in the kaleidoscope of some tasteful housewife's fancy; but a work of art in its own way, and plainly a labour of love. The patches ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... appears to be impossible, and the other characters mostly conventional, The Dangerous Age makes a very charming entertainment at the Vaudeville, a patchwork of humour and pathos ingeniously woven together; of which the humour was as fresh and jolly as anything I have heard on the stage, and the pathos put me in greater danger of being caught "blubbering like a seal" than I have ever been before. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 13, 1914 • Various
... now looms in a purified light, and figures in my imagination as a thing to be desired. We used to live there so quietly—I and an old landlady who is now dead. How my heart aches to remember her, for she was a good woman, and never overcharged for her rooms. Her whole time was spent in making patchwork quilts with knitting-needles that were an arshin [An ell.] long. Oftentimes we shared the same candle and board. Also she had a granddaughter, Masha—a girl who was then a mere baby, but must now be a girl of thirteen. This little piece of mischief, how she used to ...
— Poor Folk • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... bedstead, in a small attic of one of the meanest houses in the lowest portion of a provincial town in the south of England, a woman lay dying. The curtainless window and window—panes, stuffed with straw, the scanty patchwork covering to the bed, the single rickety chair, the unswept floor, the damp, mildewed walls, the door falling from its hinges, told of pinching poverty. On the opposite corner to the bedstead there was a heap of straw, to serve as another bed, and against the wall a much-battered sea-chest and ...
— The Ferryman of Brill - and other stories • William H. G. Kingston
... from my collar to the floor, which was the length for my coat. My waist and arms I measured myself. As the largest piece of cloth made in the island was only about the size of a yard of wide ribbon, my clothes looked like a patchwork quilt; only, the cloth was all ...
— The Elson Readers, Book 5 • William H. Elson and Christine M. Keck
... blotting-pad. It was all carefully and neatly done, for Mr Morris's mathematical brain led him to square the paper parallelograms, as he would have termed them, with the greatest exactitude, before going away to his own desk to gaze back over the blue and white patchwork before him, and give utterance once more to his thoughts regarding the puzzledom which would exist the next morning when the boys ...
— Glyn Severn's Schooldays • George Manville Fenn
... The Philistine School of Art was represented by a Zoological hearthrug; three Windsor chairs offered accommodation to the visitor; a table of the kitchen pattern was covered by a square of green baize; and a slippery hair-cloth sofa, with a knobbly bolster and a patchwork cushion, supported the long, thin, black clad figure of the Reverend Julius Fraithorn, who ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... dinner and father's hand had not motioned Dabney towards the decanter and ice and siphon on the sideboard. "I must confess that the inspiration came from a kind of rage when Goodloe said to me how much it was to be regretted that all the great gardens in the North are being made out of a sort of patchwork of English, French, Italian and even Japanese influences. You couldn't expect anything more of the inhabitants of the part of the country in the veins of whose people flow just about that mixture of blood, but in the Harpeth Valley we have been Americans for ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... country work always. And Aunt Sukey would probably be knitting. Rosemary sewing together scraps for a patchwork quilt and the negro girl, Henny, seated on a stool, would be engaged in winding off the yarn from ...
— Her Mother's Secret • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... purposes of hospitality; but in the state bed, overshadowing so large a portion of the floor, the births and, as far as may be, the deaths, of the household take place. At the Corneys', the united efforts of some former generation of the family had produced patchwork curtains and coverlet; and patchwork was patchwork in those days, before the early Yates and Peels had found out the secret of printing the parsley-leaf. Scraps of costly Indian chintzes and palempours were intermixed with commoner black and red ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. I • Elizabeth Gaskell
... a roughly-made but comfortable garden sofa, and was knitting on a strong stocking in sweet composure. A gay-coloured parallelogram stared out from the grass beside him; for there, covered with a patchwork quilt, lay, in a great basket, the baby, the little girl, the pride of the household, fast asleep. So the curate could not be said to be exactly idle, though he was taking a delicious morning rest. His wife meanwhile—a ...
— Little Tora, The Swedish Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Mrs. Woods Baker
... me in the shape of an ideal but impossible patchwork quilt. We learned to sew patchwork at school, while we were learning the alphabet; and almost every girl, large or small, had a bed-quilt of her own begun, with an eye to future house furnishing. I was not over fond of sewing, but I thought it best ...
— A New England Girlhood • Lucy Larcom
... such "purple patches" of history as Macaulay left us, with their hard and fast divisions of men into sheep and goats, and minute biographies of fops, pedants, and grandees, narrated in the same resonant, rhetorical, unsympathetic, and falsely emphatic style—this generation would have a very patchwork idea of past ages and a narrow sense of the resources of our English language. There is room for both literary schools, and we need teachers of many kinds. We must not ask of any kind more than they can give. Macaulay has led millions who read no one else, or who never read before, to know something ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... the hospital he was startled by the change in the vessel. As a father who has left a little girl at home comes back to find her a grown woman, so he saw an almost finished ship where he had left a patchwork ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... with a little window in it looking on the courtyard. In its small proportions, it was not unlike the kind of place usually assigned to a gate-porter in Paris. Certain keys were hanging on the wall, to which he now added the gate key; and his patchwork-covered bed was in a little inner division or recess. The whole had a slovenly, confined, and sleepy look, like a cage for a human dormouse; while he, looming dark and heavy in the shadow of a corner by the window, looked like the human ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... be carried home for the amusement of cottage children. The noises of hobnailed shoes on the oak floors, and of unrestrained clownish and churlish voices everywhere, were tremendous. Here a fat cottager might be seen standing on a lovely quilt of patchwork brocade, pulling down, rough in her cupidity, curtains on which the new-born and dying eyes of generations of nobles had rested, henceforth to adorn a miserable cottage, while her husband was taking down the bed, larger perhaps, ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... beneath a tattered piece of carpet under the table, there still remained five little bodies to be bedded. For them an old straw mattress, limp enough to be rolled up and thrust under the bed, was at night extended on the floor. With this, and a patchwork quilt, the five were left to pack themselves together as best they could. So that, if Ginx, in some vision of the night, happened to be angered, and struck out his legs in navvy fashion, it sometimes came to pass that ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins
... snowflakes, which had fallen from time to time, and kept themselves busy making a patchwork quilt for mother Earth, now melted away, and the white quilt was torn into shreds. The bare ground was all there was to be seen, except now and then a dot of the white coverlet. It was Spring, and everything began to wake up. The sun wasn't half so sleepy, and didn't walk off ...
— Little Prudy's Sister Susy • Sophie May
... and Abner had been tucked up; old looking-glasses, that had reflected their shining, soapy faces, and Mamie's best chip Sunday hat; an old sewing-machine, that had been worn out in active service; old patchwork quilts; an old accordion, to whose long drawn inspirations Mamie had sung hymns; old pictures, books, and old toys. There were one or two old chromos, and, stuck in an old frame, a colored print from the "Illustrated London News" of a Christmas gathering in an old ...
— A Millionaire of Rough-and-Ready • Bret Harte
... tin cans, tin spoons, etc., sewed on to skirt and waist in fantastic patterns, making music as she walked, and on her head a battered old coffee pot, with artificial flowers which had outlived their usefulness sticking out of the spout; and her winning partner was arrayed in rag patchwork of ...
— Adopting An Abandoned Farm • Kate Sanborn
... of Our Lady at Rye is a great cruciform building with clerestory, transepts, and central tower, but without western doors, the chief entrance being in the north transept. The church is of all dates from the Norman time onward, a very English patchwork, here due to the depredations, not so much of time, as of the French who have so often raided and burnt the town. The oldest part is the tower, which is Norman, as are, though somewhat later, the transepts, where certain details show the ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton
... low bed opposite the fire, a confusion of dirty patchwork, lean-ribbed ticking, and coarse sacking, the lawyer, hesitating just within the doorway, sees a man. He lies there, dressed in shirt and trousers, with bare feet. He has a yellow look in the spectral darkness of a candle that has guttered down until ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... My heart sank; patchwork was the thing my mother had tried to have me do, and I hated it. I remember now some mussed up, dirty-looking blocks, stuffed behind a bureau at home—to ...
— Kristy's Rainy Day Picnic • Olive Thorne Miller
... the police had given Hardcastle his opportunity; the hurricane lamp flew between them, going out where it fell, and for a minute the revolvers spat harmlessly in the remaining patchwork of moonshine ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... remembered that he had caught sight of Kate standing at the top of the rock talking to Peter M'Shane. In a few days they would come to him to be married, and he hoped that Peter and Kate's marriage would make amends for this miserable patchwork, for Ned Kavanagh and Mary Byrne's marriage ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... about the only thread which connects us with the prehistoric past. By picking up and piecing out the scattered remnants of language, we form a patchwork of wondrous design. Oblige us by considering the derivation of the word "sarcophagus," and see if it be not suggestive of potted meats. Observe the significance of the phrase "sweet sixteen." What a world of meaning lurks in the expression ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... you to note now, and to note with a little care, that you cannot rationally accept a part of one theory and a part of the other, and so make up a patchwork to suit yourselves. Take, for example, the one question, Is man lost or is he not? He is not half lost or sort of lost: he is either lost or he is not lost. Which is true? If he is not "lost," then he does not need to be "saved." He may need something else; but he does not need that, ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... have been built within no long time, although the thatch, the quaint gables, and the old oaken framework of the others diffused an air of antiquity over the whole assemblage. The church itself was undergoing repair and restoration, which is but another name for change. Masons were making patchwork on the front of the tower, and were sawing a slab of stone and piling up bricks to strengthen the side-wall, or possibly to enlarge the ancient edifice by an additional aisle. Moreover, they had dug an immense pit in the churchyard, long and broad, and fifteen feet deep, two thirds of which ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... thought, letting Joker stroll across the park towards a little lake, shining amidst bracken and bushes, a jewel dropped from heaven. A couple of stiff-necked swans floated in motionless trance upon it; black water-hens flapped in flashing, splashing flight to safety as Christian came near; a string of patchwork coloured mandarin-ducks propelled themselves in jerks towards her, confident that any human being meant food. Two gigantic turquoise dragon-flies rose, with a dry crackle of talc-like wings, from a dead log under Joker's feet. One of them swung round the horse's ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... her footsteps, which not a human soul heard but herself. Under the thatched roofs her mind's eye beheld relaxed tendons and flaccid muscles, spread out in the darkness beneath coverlets made of little purple patchwork squares, and undergoing a bracing process at the hands of sleep for renewed labour on the morrow, as soon as a hint of pink nebulosity appeared on ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... the scent of those great tallow candles, never," said she; "and then to think of the coarse sheets and patchwork bedquilts—oh, it's dreadful!" ...
— The English Orphans • Mary Jane Holmes
... portrayal of an otter, and a very fancy stag of unlimited points dazzled the eye. The ceiling was decorated with an elaborate and most effective design in wood—a fashion very common in Srinagar, consisting of a sort of patchwork panelling of small pieces of wood, cut to length and shape, and tacked on to a backing in geometrical designs. At a little distance the effect is rich and excellent, but close inspection shows up the tintacks and ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... not be supposed to make use of the humdrum literature of the day; who introduces obsolete words and coins new ones, and makes a patchwork of all languages; makes use of execrable phrases, and invents a style that may be called his own.' The Doctor compares ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... perpetual litter of papers; a ramshackle wash-hand stand, on which a broken vegetable dish served as a receptacle for soap and such objects; a bed, which bred remarkable crops of fleas, and to which clung an old patchwork quilt, but which was otherwise poor in adornment; a chair, and an old travelling-box. As I have already mentioned, a trap-door in the floor gave access to this apartment. There was ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... easy to see that his "reconstruction" is as hopeless as that of the famous Greek frieze, outwardly whole andyet always a patchwork. So he chafes continually under what he believes to be the tyranny and despotism of an undefined autocracy, which, in a general way, he calls "the Government," but which really refers to the distribution of certain local offices in his ...
— Colonel Carter of Cartersville • F. Hopkinson Smith
... was gay with a bright, silk spread of "crazy" patchwork, and piled generously with dainty cushions, too evidently made for ornamental purposes than for use. But Kent piled the cushions recklessly around her, tucked her smudgy skirts close, went and got a towel, which he immersed recklessly in the water ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower
... own. There were, undoubtedly, old traditions, known to the men who in the sixth and seventh centuries may have written the tales that we have, known even to men who in the tenth and eleventh centuries copied them and commented upon them; but the romances as they now stand do not look like pieces of patchwork, but like the works of men who had ideas to convey; and to me at least they seem to bear approximately the same relation to the Druid legends as the works of the Attic tragedians bear to the archaic Greek legends on which their tragedies were based. ...
— Heroic Romances of Ireland Volumes 1 and 2 Combined • A. H. Leahy
... Such odds and ends! I cannot congratulate you upon your kindred, for I do not get on at all with these patchwork combinations, that are one-third man and the other two-thirds a vulgar fraction of bull or hawk or goat or serpent or ape or jackal or what not. Priapos is the only male myth who comes here in anything like the semblance of a complete human ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... America also depends on its farms and natural resources. American farmers took heart in 1961—from a billion dollar rise in farm income—and from a hopeful start on reducing the farm surpluses. But we are still operating under a patchwork accumulation of old laws, which cost us $1 billion a year in CCC carrying charges alone, yet fail to halt rural poverty or boost ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... cliffs, clothed on one hand with trees, save for a big red and yellow gash where the stone was being quarried, and on the other with bare rock, topped by the Downs spreading far out of sight. Landwards the river was trapped into docks, spanned by low bridges and made into the glistening part of a patchwork of water, brick and iron. Red-roofed old houses, once the haunts of fashion, were clustered near the water but divided from it now by tram-lines, companion anachronisms to the steamers entering and leaving the docks, but by the ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... At length a brigantine worthy of Robinson Crusoe floated on the waters of the Chenonceau. They laid in what provision they might, gave all that remained of their goods to the delighted Indians, embarked, descended the river, and put to sea. A fair wind filled their patchwork sails and bore them from the hated coast. Day after day they held their course, till at length the favoring breeze died away and a breathless calm fell on the face of the waters. Florida was far behind; France ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... shoulder; but if you knew Jean at all, you would not do either. First you would notice an old wooden cradle, painted blue, that stood in a corner. A button-eyed, blank-faced rag doll, the size of a baby at the fist-sucking age, was tucked neatly under the red-and-white patchwork quilt made to fit the cradle. Hanging directly over the cradle by a stirrup was Jean's first saddle,—a cheap pigskin affair with harsh straps and buckles, that her father had sent East for. Jean never had liked that saddle, even when it was new. She used to ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... to attempt the reduction of such a patchwork system to any single principle, astronomical or moral, as some have tried to do—a system originating from no single point as to country or to time. The gradual growth of many ages, its diversities are due to many local ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... file along a tiny track worn threadbare amid the brown, lumpy grass: and, as the man came round the mountain's shoulder, a narrow valley opened out beneath him—a scanty patchwork of green fields, and, here and there, a whitewashed farm, flanked by a dark cluster of ...
— Victorian Short Stories • Various
... and Trot and the Glass Cat had started for the hidden island in the far-off river to get the Magic Flower, Dorothy wondered again what she could give Ozma on her birthday. She met the Patchwork Girl ...
— The Magic of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... in it. Much scrubbing had removed from it the objections manifest in Glad's room above. There was a small red fire in the grate, a strip of old, but gay carpet before it, two chairs and a table were covered with a harlequin patchwork made of bright odds and ends of all sizes and shapes. The fog in all its murky volume could not quite obscure the brightness of the often rubbed window and its harlequin curtain drawn ...
— The Dawn of a To-morrow • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... would try and work in the old good thing with the new, not as patchwork though, but making the new thing grow out in such a way as to ...
— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps
... the wish and desire of philosophy itself; so native and so pure a simplicity, as we by experience see to be in them, could never enter into their imagination, nor could they ever believe that human society could have been maintained with so little artifice and human patchwork. I should tell Plato that it is a nation wherein there is no manner of traffic, no knowledge of letters, no science of numbers, no name of magistrate or political superiority; no use of service, riches or poverty, no contracts, no successions, no dividends, no properties, no employments, but those ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... looked up from her seventeenth patchwork quilt, and answered, with a sympathetic glance ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag, Vol. 5 - Jimmy's Cruise in the Pinafore, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... taken down in rough notes at the museum, of a specimen of patchwork—even like the patchwork counterpanes of our great-grandmothers—stitched together by dusky slender fingers in the days of the great ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... and followed him to the cold hospitality of the spare room, a place of peril but beautifully clean. There was a neat rag carpet on the floor, immaculate tidies on the bureau and wash table, and a spotless quilt of patchwork on the bed. But, like the dungeon of mediaeval times, it was a place for sighs and reflection, not for rest. Half an inch of frost on every window-pane glistened in the dim light ...
— Darrel of the Blessed Isles • Irving Bacheller
... patchwork is good economy. It is indeed a foolish waste of time to tear cloth into bits for the sake of arranging it anew in fantastic figures; but a large family may be kept out of idleness, and a few shillings saved, by thus using scraps ...
— The American Frugal Housewife • Lydia M. Child
... given the licensed and unlicensed fool Charter to challenge me at every turn. The jester's laughing bauble blunts my sword, His gibes cut deeper than its fearful edge; And I, a man, a soldier, and a prince, Before this motley patchwork of a man, Stand all appalled, as if he were a glass Wherein I saw my own deformity. O Heaven! a tear—one little tear—to wash This aching ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker |
