|
|
|
More "Chess" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... adapted to the purpose because it gives way certainly, though very slowly, to the pressure of the glass. In order that it may have room to change its form, grooves are cut through it in both directions, so as to leave it in the form of squares, like those on a chess-board. ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... standing on the same squares of the chess-board where we left them, we say they are all in the SAME place, or unmoved, though perhaps the chessboard hath been in the mean time carried out of one room into another; because we compared them only to the parts of the chess-board, which keep the same distance ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books I. and II. (of 4) • John Locke
... have transmitted his or her distinguishing traits through a series of lives that cover more than two centuries, to our own contemporary. Inherited qualities move along their several paths not unlike the pieces in the game of chess. Sometimes the character of the son can be traced directly to that of the father or of the mother, as the pawn's move carries him from one square to the next. Sometimes a series of distinguished fathers follows in a line, or a succession of superior mothers, as the black or ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... Chartres, that Catherine was more unconquered than invulnerable as to love, was paying court to her. The play of all these passions strangely complicated those of politics,—making, as it were, a double game of chess, in which both parties had to watch the head and heart of their opponent, in order to know, when a crisis came, whether the one would betray ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... presence of Miss Flora Cooper makes Willow Valley a new place. At least six hours are taken from the length of the days, though I have given up my afternoon slumber, and play chess and backgammon instead of drumming on the table or piano. Now am I relieved from that tedious companion, my own self. I never liked him very well; I had rather do any thing than have a sober talk with a serious ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various
... conceived as existing and studying to perfect itself, but without rulers a Utopia is impossible though the theory of its matrimony be complete. And the difficulty in this question is not simply the difficulty of a complicated chess problem, for example, in which the whole tangle of considerations does at least lie in one plane, but a series of problems upon different levels ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... when he and the rector started on long fishing tramps; and in the evenings, when Willie had gone to bed, and his cook was reading "The Death Beds of Eminent Saints" by the kitchen fire, Mr. Denner worked out chess problems by himself in his library, or read Cavendish and thought of next Saturday; and besides all this, he went once a week to Mercer, and sat waiting for clients in a dark back office, while he studied ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... Rooms, frescoed with illustrations of Goethe, Schiller, and Wieland; there is the room where Goethe and the Grand-Duke used to play chess together; there is the conservatory opening from it where they liked to sit and chat; everywhere in the pictures and sculptures, the engraving and intaglios, are the witnesses of the tastes they shared, the love they both had for Italy, and for beautiful Italian things. The prince was not so great ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... belonged to Goethe, a lead pencil used by Emerson, an autograph letter of Matthew Arnold, and a chip from a tree felled by Mr. Gladstone. Its library contains a number of rare books, including a fine collection on chess, of which game several of the members are ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... midnight he found his wife and his old friend Willoughby Crane playing chess in the ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... has discovered a tenth muse and writes impassioned verses to the Goddess of Chess whom he apostrophises as 'Sublime Caissa'! Zukertort and Steinitz are his heroes, and he is as melodious on mates as he is graceful on gambits. We are glad to say, however, that he has other subjects, and ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... growled West, "you won't play chess, you won't eat things. You just drive a chap to study!" As spring came in the school talk turned to baseball and rowing. For the former Joel had little desire, but rowing attracted him, and he began to allow himself the unusual ...
— The Half-Back • Ralph Henry Barbour
... of wide bench, which, covered with a neat plaid, looks quite sofa-like. A little pine table, with oilcloth tacked over the top of it, stands in one corner of the room, upon which are arranged the chess and cribbage boards. There is a larger one for dining purposes, and as unpainted pine has always a most dreary look, F. went everywhere in search of oilcloth for it, but there was none at any of the bars. At last, "Ned," the Humboldt Paganini, remembered ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... specially entertaining in an old-family-history way, with a view to keeping his patient within doors for a safe period. He had conceived a great liking for Frowenfeld, and often, of an afternoon, would drift in to challenge him to a game of chess—a game, by the way, for which neither of them cared a farthing. The immigrant had learned its moves to gratify his father, and the doctor—the truth is, the doctor had never quite learned them; but he was one of those ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... trouble him. The slaughter of thousands of men on the battle-field did not disturb his equanimity. He was unalterably fixed in his purposes, unscrupulous in the means employed, shrewd, keen and far-sighted in his measures, Europe being to him but a great chess-board, on which his hand moved kings, knights, and pawns with mechanical inflexibility. To him the end justified the means, however lacking in justice or mercy ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... down-dropped eyes and a pretty sacred smile on her lips, and now, when she spied on the other side of the street the figure of the vicar, she tripped slantingly across the road to him, as if by the move of a knight at chess, looking everywhere else, and only perceiving him with glad surprise at the very last moment. He was a great frequenter of tea parties and except in Lent an assiduous player of bridge, for a clergyman's duties, so he very properly held, were not confined to visiting the poor and exhorting the sinner. ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... they had been gathering for forty years and more, looked up and laughed as he passed; the ladies shopping in the streets paused to chat with him; and even the dry-goods clerks and lawyers, playing chess or draughts under the China trees that shaded the sidewalks, were willing to be interrupted long enough to exchange jokes ...
— Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches • Joel Chandler Harris
... authorship, come into view, when the history of thought and of inquiry in each of its branches, or in any considerable number of them, has to be presented, the necessities of the case are terribly widened. Chess is a specialty and a narrow one. But I recollect a statement in the Quarterly Review, years back, that there might be formed a library of twelve hundred volumes upon chess. I think my deceased friend, Mr. Alfred Denison, collected between two and three ...
— On Books and the Housing of Them • William Ewart Gladstone
... which had been left in the hall, leaning against the wall, was a perfect treasure to those who most craved active exercise. They practiced all sorts of gymnastics on this ladder, and cooled the fever in their blood with fatigue. Chess finally became the standard amusement, and those who did not understand the game watched it nevertheless with as much apparent relish as if they understood it. Chess books were bought and studied as carefully as any work ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... in the low country of Flanders. You have no grasp of what all the noise and struggle means, for you cannot see over the shoulders of the crowd. But in Lorraine you have only to ascend a hill and the moves in the chess game of war ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... Mary's favor. Panic seized him, and he turned his back on Miss Maine and devoted himself to Mary. Miss Maine went to stay with some neighbors, the Colemans. One night she was caught at the Mandisons by a storm. Mary asked Windham to entertain her, and he went and asked her to play chess. She declined coldly, and Windham turned away with such a look that Mary wondered what Agnes could have said so unkind. And the next day Miss Maine spoke so gently to him that it warmed him all through. Still he persistently ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. VI., No. 6, May, 1896 • Various
... Lebanon of old. Into a quietness as of fallen bloom Their feet sank in that chamber; and, all round, Soft hills of Moorish cushions dimly drowsed On glimmering crimson couches. Near the lamp An ebony chess-board stood inlaid with squares Of ruby and emerald, garnished with cinquefoils Of silver, bears and ragged staves; the men, Likewise of precious stones, were all arrayed— Bishops and knights and ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... is bored with the sameness of his chess every evening. He would like to bring literary and scientific people about the Court, vary the society, and infuse a more useful tendency into it. The Queen however has no fancy to encourage such people. This arises from a feeling ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume 1 (of 3), 1837-1843) • Queen Victoria
... of a plain, set round about with a margin of green downs. They were large enough to have the charm of vague, indefinite extension, and yet all could be distinctly seen. Large squares of green corn that was absorbing its yellow from the sunlight; chess squares, irregularly placed, of brown furrows; others of rich blood-red trifolium; others of scarlet sainfoin and blue lucerne, gardens of scarlet poppies here and there. Not all of these, of course, ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... (le moi), as M. Nicole says, had so wide a dominion; who was the centre of so many orbs. What affairs had he not to manage! what designs, what projects, what secrets! what interests to unravel, what wars to undertake, what intrigues, what noble games at chess to play and to direct! Ah! my God, grant me a little time; I want to give check to the Duke of Savoy—checkmate to the Prince of Orange. No, no, you shall not have a moment, not a single moment. ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... ever been to Turin, by the way? To that city which reminds one of nothing so much as a gigantic chess-board set down upon the banks of the yellow river—that city with never-ending, straight streets, all running at right angles to each other, and whose extremities frame in delicious pictures of wooded hill or snow-capped Alp; whose inhabitants ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 2, February, 1891 • Various
... courts and gardens of proportionate size. All these plots were assigned to different heads of families. Each square plot is encompassed by handsome streets for traffic; and thus the whole city is arranged in squares just like a chess-board, and disposed in a manner so perfect and masterly that it is impossible to give a description that should do ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... be overcome in setting words to sounds were like a game of chess—a pleasing diversion. In a month he knew as much of the science of music as many men did who had grubbed at the work a lifetime. "The finances! Get your principles right and then 'tis a mere matter of detail, requiring only concentration—I ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... as his business prospered, Franklin found more and more time for study and self-improvement. In 1733 he began the acquisition of languages, teaching himself to read French fluently, and then passing on to Italian and Spanish. Chess was always a favorite amusement with him; and we can imagine the grave philosopher playing a cautious and invulnerable game, with now and then, when least expected, a brilliant sally. But his conscience seems always ...
— Benjamin Franklin • Paul Elmer More
... and breathe the open air. Every day Henriette, when her father was out, allowed him to race up and down the stairs, played at hide-and-seek with him in the passages, let him dance her round and round the lower rooms. Or else she played games with him, cards, chess, tric-trac; or he lay and listened to her while she told him fairy tales; listened with a dreamy half-understanding, with a certainty, underlying all his impatience, that there was nothing to live for now. ...
— Angelot - A Story of the First Empire • Eleanor Price
... Cheerfulness gajeco. Cheer up rekuragxigi. Cheese fromagxo. Chemise cxemizo. Chemist apotekisto. Chemist-shop apoteko. Chemistry hxemio. Cheque cxeko. Cherry cxerizo. Cherub kerubo. Chess-pieces sxakoj. Chess-board sxaka tabulo. Chest of drawers komodo. Chest (box) kesto. Chest brusto. Chestnut (edible) kasxtano. Chevalier kavaliro. Chew macxi. Chicane cxikani. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... instrument; if that fail, he takes the height of his lord with a hawking pole. He follows the man's fortune, not the man, seeking thereby to increase his own. He pretends he is most undeservedly envied, and cries out, remembering the game, chess, that a pawn before a king is most played on. Debts he owns none but shrewd turns, and those he pays ere he be sued. He is a flattering glass to conceal age and wrinkles. He is mountain's monkey that, climbing a tree and skipping from bough to bough, gives you back his ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... mouse until someone said it was." The doctor turned and looked searchingly at Hoskins, who still sat quietly over his chess. ...
— Breaking Point • James E. Gunn
... silence was never actually enforced; and as long as the members amused themselves in a reasonably quiet manner, and without turning the place into a bear-garden, they were allowed to converse over their games of chess or draughts, and exchange their opinions on the news of ...
— The Triple Alliance • Harold Avery
... the one. He's been hoverin' 'round, like an old buzzard, for three or four years now, playin' chess with the old man while he lasted, but always with his pop-eyes fixed on Marion. And since she's been left alone he'd been callin' reg'lar once a week, urging her to be his tootsy-wootsy No. 3. He was the main wheeze in some ...
— Torchy and Vee • Sewell Ford
... therefore, as Louis XIII had his, and these two powerful rivals vied with each other in procuring, not only from all the provinces of France, but even from all foreign states, the most celebrated swordsmen. It was not uncommon for Richelieu and Louis XIII to dispute over their evening game of chess upon the merits of their servants. Each boasted the bearing and the courage of his own people. While exclaiming loudly against duels and brawls, they excited them secretly to quarrel, deriving an immoderate satisfaction or genuine regret from the success or defeat of their ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... passed in chess, music and conversation, and after an early tea Dr. and Mrs. Peters bade good-by to their entertainers and ...
— Her Mother's Secret • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... at a depth of about three thousand feet, the river boiled through the rocky gorge until it reached the village of Perewelle at the base of the line of mountains, whose cultivated paddy-fields looked no larger than the squares upon a chess-board. On the opposite side of the river rose a precipitous and impassable mountain, even to a greater altitude than the facing ridge upon which I stood, forming as grand a foreground as the eye could desire. Above, below, around, there was the bellowing ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... a chap called Cloyster. James Orlebar Cloyster. The Reverend brought him down to teach boxing. For my own part, I don't fancy anything in the way of brutality. The club, so I thought, had got on very nicely with more intellectual pursuits: draughts, chess, bagatelle, and what-not. But the Rev. wanted boxing, and boxing it had to be. Not that it would have done for him or me to have mixed ourselves up in it. He had his congregation to consider, and I am often on duty ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... their intercourse was still more subtle, and now they sat without exchange of glance or gesture, silent as chess players, looking up the narrow water into a sunset exquisite in the delicacy of its silvery plumes, fleeces pink and dusk, and illimitable distances of palest green seen through fan-rays of white light shot down ...
— Bylow Hill • George Washington Cable
... up and down, some, squatted Upon their hams, were occupied at chess; Others in monosyllable talk chatted, And some seem'd much in love with their own dress. And divers smoked superb pipes decorated With amber mouths of greater price or less; And several strutted, others slept, and some Prepared for supper ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... trophy outside to freeze, and found the Trio had decamped to the Little Cabin. He glanced up anxiously to see if the demijohn was on the shelf. Yes, and Kaviak sound asleep in the bottom bunk. The Colonel would climb up and have forty winks in the top one before the Boy got in for their game of chess. He didn't know how long he had slept when a faint scratching pricked through the veil of slumber, and he said to himself, "Kaviak's on a raid again," but he was too sodden with sleep to investigate. Just before he dropped off again, however, opening a heavy eye, he saw ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... Shuffle-board, chess, and backgammon, with exercise and pleasant converse, will while away the intervening hours so quickly, that, if you do not keep a bright look-out, you will be surprised by the dinner-bell before you think of your toilet, which, if a luxury to you on shore, will be thrice welcome at ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... Was it possible, he asked himself, for a man to have two natures, quite distinct in tastes? He worried himself almost to distraction over the question; but as there was no one to answer it, he drove it from his mind by spending the evening at the Hamiltons' teaching Jessie to play chess. ...
— Duncan Polite - The Watchman of Glenoro • Marian Keith
... a few hours on the 8th there was a lull and the store of ice was replenished, but the 9th and 10th were again spent indoors, repairing and refitting tents, poles and other sledging gear during the working hours, and reading or playing chess and bridge in the leisure time. Harrisson carved an excellent set of chessmen, distinguishing the "black" ones by a stain of ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... years when he entered as office-boy into the employment of Briggs & Livingstone—the firm at the time of which I am now writing was Lynde, Livingstone & Co. Mr. David Lynde lived in a set of chambers up town, and dined at his club, where he usually passed the evenings at chess with some brother antediluvian. A visit to the theatre, when some old English comedy or some new English ballet happened to be on the boards, was the periphery of his dissipation. What is called society saw nothing of him. He was a rough, breezy, ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... Lucas, was all devotion and meekness. Don Juan saw that this young girl was a woman to make a long fight with a passion before yielding to it, so he hoped to keep from her any love but his until after his death. It was a serious jest, a game of chess which he had reserved ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... stay quiet, dusted the carriage, arranged his hair, remoulded his hat, encouraged his moustache, and in rather less than a quarter of a minute was ready to conduct her. Italians are born knowing the way. It would seem that the whole earth lay before them, not as a map, but as a chess-board, whereon they continually behold the changing pieces as well as the squares. Any one can find places, but the finding of people is ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... drawback. For the mind of the reader, always bent to pick up clews, receives no impression of reality or life, rather of an airless, elaborate mechanism; and the book remains enthralling, but insignificant, like a game of chess, not a work of human art. It seemed the cause might lie partly in the abrupt attack; and that if the tale were gradually approached, some of the characters introduced (as it were) beforehand, and the book started in the tone of a novel of manners and experience briefly treated, ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... collection of books of every description, was, as might have been expected, peculiarly rich in works of fiction. I was plunged into this great ocean of reading without compass or pilot; and unless when some one had the charity to play at chess with me, I was allowed to do nothing save read, from morning to night. As my taste and appetite were gratified in nothing else, I indemnified myself by becoming a glutton of books. Accordingly, I believe, I read almost all ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 571 - Volume 20, No. 571—Supplementary Number • Various
... of the great work of Firdausi. Even the distant land of Hindustan was explored in the search after varied knowledge, and contributed to the learning and civilization of the time the fables of Bidpai and the game of chess. ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson
... you have only to reckon how much you will give to avoid chapel." And yet they were very nice fellows. If they began by riding on John's back round the quad, they did not give him the cold shoulder—quite the reverse. He was asked everywhere to wine; he beat them all at chess; and they invaded him at all hours. "It does little good sporting his oak," wrote his mother, describing how Lord Desart and Grimston climbed in through his window while he was hard at work. "They say midshipmen and Oxonians have more lives than a cat, and they ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... of Hertfordshire are many, if we include several so small as hardly to deserve the name. They are the Ash, Beane, Bulbourne, Chess, Colne, Gade, Hiz, Ivel, Lea, Maran, Purwell, Quin, Rhee, Rib, ...
— Hertfordshire • Herbert W Tompkins
... astounded Dickens by outlining the entire plot of "Barnaby Rudge" when only a few of the first chapters had been published; if he wrote imaginatively of science, he in fact demonstrated in "Maelzel's Chess Player" that a pretended automaton was operated by a man. "Hop Frog" and "The Cask of Amontillado" are old-world stories of revenge. "The Island of the Fay" and "The Domain of Arnheim" are landscape studies, the one of calm ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... my eyelids I constructed chess-boards and played both sides of long games through to checkmate. But when I had become expert at this visualized game of memory the exercise palled on me. Exercise it was, for there could be no real contest when the same player played both sides. I tried, and tried vainly, ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... the head of a game of chess. The generals of the Danes were beaten at it, and they were vexed; and Cennedigh was killed on a hill near Fermoy. He put the Holy Gospels in his breast as a protection, but he was struck through them with a reeking dagger. It ...
— The Kiltartan History Book • Lady I. A. Gregory
... his memory with indelible infamy. The story, in substance, I understand to be this—That Lord Braxfield once tried a man for forgery at the Circuit at Dumfries, who was not merely an acquaintance, but an intimate friend of his Lordship, with whom he used to play at chess: That he did this as coolly as if he had been a perfect stranger: That the man was found guilty: That he pronounced sentence of death upon him; and then added, "Now, John, I think I have checkmated ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... amongst the trout on the Chess! I wrote for permission to spend one afternoon only upon certain private waters, and the noble owner by return of post sent me an order for two days. It was June. The meadows, hedgerows—ay! and even the prosaic railway embankments—were decked with floral colouring, and at Rickmansworth ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... increased. The seas ran mountains high. The hurricane, like an executioner hastening to his victim, began to dismember the craft. There came, in the twinkling of an eye, a dreadful crash: the top-sails were blown from the bolt-ropes, the chess-trees were hewn asunder, the deck was swept clear, the shrouds were carried away, the mast went by the board, all the lumber of the wreck was flying in shivers. The main shrouds gave out although they were turned in, and stoppered ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... hangs heavy on my hands, and the chess-board has ceased to have any attraction. I wish to amuse myself in a tilt with the parson. Your empty terrors will not unman my courage. I am well aware that those who have come off short in this world look forward to eternity; but they will be sadly disappointed. ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... time playing at chess with Helen, and had the best of the game, but at that moment he made a false move, was check-mated, rose hastily, threw the men together on the board, and forgot to regret his shameful defeat, or to compliment Helen upon her victory. Lady Castlefort, having just discovered ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... sleeplessness and its cause already referred to—an opening so felicitous that it was afterwards imitated by Froissart. And so, Chaucer continues, as he could not sleep, to drive the night away he sat upright in his bed reading a "romance," which he thought better entertainment than chess or draughts. The book which he read was the "Metamorphoses" of Ovid; and in it he chanced on the tale of Ceyx and Alcyone—the lovers whom, on their premature death, the compassion of Juno changed into the seabirds that bring good luck to mariners. ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... the Kiefel. He also kneaded bread in the hand, until it became as plastic as clay. This he modelled into snuffboxes (with strips of rag for hinges, and a piece of whalebone for a spring), draughts, chess-men, pipe-bowls, and other articles. When dry, they became hard and serviceable; and he sold them among the prisoners and the prison officials. He obtained thus a number of comforts not afforded by the ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... softly. Why blame me? What business is it of mine. Do I love the cripple? Have I robbed the bank and murdered my double? This is not my game; it is Frontignac's. Would you have me kick over his chess board?" ...
— A Gentleman Vagabond and Some Others • F. Hopkinson Smith
... pure logic, in the form of contest. Far more so than chess, which is merely sustained effort of concentration. Are you ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... for the girl and boy! for morning after morning their hands would be together tying up the same vines, or clearing out the same flower bed; day after day at the doctor's orders Traverse attended Clara on her rides; night after night their blushing faces would be bent over the same sketch book, chess ...
— Hidden Hand • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... dreamed that we were no more than the toys of chance, the valueless shuttles between a rich man's gold and the kisses of a courtesan. We that likened ourselves to the conquerors of worlds were no better than petty pawns on an unfriendly chess-board, making moves of which we knew nothing, in obedience to forces of which we were as ignorant as children. All we knew, all we cared to know, in our then mood, was that we had come to the point where it was ordained that we were to meet and ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... afternoon exercise was then taken, and the evening meal, of tea, next partaken of. If it was school night, the voluntary pupils went to their tasks, the masters to their posts; reading men producing their books, writing men their desks, artists painted by candle-light, and cards, chess, or draughts, combined with conversation, and an evening's glass of grog, and a cigar or pipe, served to bring round ...
— Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal; • Sherard Osborn
... creature's back." I confess I found her rather disquieting company. The evening drew on. Lamps were brought by a man with a nondescript face and very quiet footsteps. Seaton was told to bring out the chess-men. And we played a game, she and I, with her big chin thrust over the board at every move as she gloated over the pieces and occasionally croaked "Check!" after which she would sit back inscrutably staring ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... uninterested third party, led them into their former habits of easy chat, and, after having served awhile as the channel of communication through which they chose to address each other, set them down to a pensive game at chess, and very dutifully went to tease papa, who was still busied with his drawings. The chess-players, you must observe, were placed near the chimney, beside a little work-table, which held the board and men, the Colonel ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... and yesterday you walked three miles out, on the Southern turnpike, and came back soaked to the knees. To-day the storm is slightly increasing, but you are dry thus far, and wish to remain so; exercise is a humbug; you will give it all up, and go to the Chess-Club. Don't go to the Chess-Club; come ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... previous night, was the old Jacobin, the old senator, the old Carbonaro, laughing at the guillotine, the cannon, and the dagger—M. Noirtier, playing with revolutions—M. Noirtier, for whom France was a vast chess-board, from which pawns, rooks, knights, and queens were to disappear, so that the king was checkmated—M. Noirtier, the redoubtable, was the next morning 'poor M. Noirtier,' the helpless old man, at the tender mercies of the weakest creature in the household, that is, his grandchild, Valentine; ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... lofty-souled, That city guarded and controlled, With towering Sal trees belted round,(65) And many a grove and pleasure ground, As royal Indra, throned on high, Rules his fair city in the sky.(66) She seems a painted city, fair With chess-board line and even square.(67) And cool boughs shade the lovely lake Where weary men their thirst may slake. There gilded chariots gleam and shine, And stately piles the Gods enshrine. There gay sleek people ever ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... certain that the life and fortune of every one of us would, one day or other, depend upon his winning or losing a game at chess. Don't you think that we should all consider it to be a primary duty to learn at least the names and the moves of the pieces; to have a notion of a gambit, and a keen eye for all the means of giving ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... those which arise through a community of interests, are all dispersed, and the broadest, most express, and most positive interdictions are promulgated against their revival under any pretext whatever.[2250] France is cut up into geometrical sections like a chess-board, and, within these improvised limits, which are destined for a long time to remain artificial, nothing is allowed to subsist but isolated individuals in juxtaposition. There is no desire to spare organized bodies where the cohesion is great, and least ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... I am all fair and above-board, and no hole-and-corner gambling for me. And what tale has he to tell? Why that "Another night, not using his special light at the time, two other passengers began a game of chess under its rays." Which they had no right whatever to do. But I winked at it, and when the first officer was coming his rounds I winked at them; but this friendly act on my part they did not heed, and consequently ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, July 25, 1891 • Various
... give a list of his amusements—Pickwick, chivalric romances, the Daily Telegraph, Staunton's games of chess, and finally analysis of the Dock Company's bill of charges ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... hurried: I can make excellent impromptus at leisure, but on the instant could never say or do anything worth notice. I could hold a tolerable conversation by the post, as they say the Spaniards play at chess, and when I read that anecdote of a duke of Savoy, who turned himself round, while on a journey, to cry out "a votre gorge, marchand de Paris!" I said, "Here is a trait of ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... So the books, chess-boards, and dominoes were all put away, and a new steel pen and a sheet of notepaper, neatly embossed with the heading "Crichton House School" in old English letters, having been served out to everyone, each boy prepared himself to write down such things as filial affection, strict ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... addressed themselves to their meal. So, having blithely breakfasted, they first of all sang some dainty and jocund ditties, and then, as they were severally minded, composed them to sleep or sat them down to chess or dice, while Dioneo and Lauretta fell a ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio
... Victor's arrangements, sent him word to defend Marengo to the very last extremity. He himself needed time to prepare his game on this great chess-board inclosed between the Bormida, ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... of character or intellect, that we attain to worthy pleasures. Men and women contend for each other in the lists of love, like rival mesmerists; the active and adroit decide their challenges in the sports of the body; and the sedentary sit down to chess or conversation. All sluggish and pacific pleasures are, to the same degree, solitary and selfish; and every durable bond between human beings is founded in or heightened by some element of competition. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Saint-Pol, Constable of France, perished on the scaffold. Besides these a score of the greater nobles of France had fallen, nor could the scarlet of the Cardinalate shield Balue from its vengeance. If these, the great ones of the chess-board, were beyond the pale of mercy, what hope would there be for a simple pawn like Stephen La Mothe, if once he fell beneath that inflexible ban? And yet to the courtier the King's question could have but ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... want, it really seemed that he had provided for everything. If he liked, he could go to church on Friday morning; hunt otters from twelve to one on Saturday; toboggan or dig for badgers on Monday. He had the different suits necessary for those who attend a water-polo meeting, who play chess, or who go out after moths with a pot of treacle. And even, in the last resort, he ...
— The Holiday Round • A. A. Milne
... near the base of the stone-ladders; a practice unquestionably taken from the original, unsophisticated, domestic defences of this wary and enterprising race. Among a great many of these chevaux-de-frise, I remarked certain iron images, that resemble the kings of chess-men, and which I took, at first, to be symbols of the calculating qualities of the owners of the mansions—a species of republican heraldry—but which the brigadier told me, on inquiry, were no more than a fashion that had descended from the custom of having stuffed images ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... Cousin Chilian, who had been playing a rather prolonged game of chess with a visitor. But Bentley kept on with them, and said good-night with a polite bow, adding, "She must come again, Mr. Leverett, we had such ...
— A Little Girl in Old Salem • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... SPECIAL TIMES FOR YOUR RECREATIVE STUDY.—Cultivate some hobby as a relief from your concentrated study of books. Music, some games of cards, chess, billiards, or other relaxations, are admirable means of recuperation. When you indulge in recreation or recreative reading, do not let the mind worry about problems of your previous studies. Make your recreative ...
— How to Study • George Fillmore Swain
... they said, from sea, and come with sunburned skins from a very long voyage to the South; and one of them had a board and chessmen under his arm, and they were complaining that they could find no one who knew how to play chess. This was the year that the Tournament was in England. And a little dark man at a table in a corner of the room, drinking sugar and water, asked them why they wished to play chess; and they said they would play any man for ...
— Tales of Wonder • Lord Dunsany
... company of chess-men, standing on the same squares of the chess-board where we left them, we say they are all in the SAME place, or unmoved, though perhaps the chessboard hath been in the mean time carried out of one room into another; because we compared them only to the parts of the chess-board, which ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books I. and II. (of 4) • John Locke
... "Young Chevalier" when France took it into her head to make a pawn of him in the political chess-game with England. As a man he was beneath contempt; as a "King"—well, he was a Roi pour rire; but at least the Royal House he represented might be made a useful weapon against the arrogant Hanoverian who sat on his father's ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... he could tell a tale would serve a man for wages, Sing a song would put the joy of dancin' in two sticks; But Saints between themselves and harm that saw him in his rages, Blazin' and oratin' over chess and politics. ...
— The Dreamers - And Other Poems • Theodosia Garrison
... Chess is a game which can only be played by two persons at the same time. The requisites are a board consisting of 64 squares of alternate black and white, and 32 pieces of wood, ivory, bone or other composition, which ...
— Entertainments for Home, Church and School • Frederica Seeger
... their experience teaches is, that Nature makes no leaps,—does nothing per saltum. The greatest brain that ever lived, no doubt, was only a small fraction of an idea ahead of the second best. Just look at the chess-players. Leaving out the phenomenal exceptions, the nice shades that separate the skilful ones show how closely their brains approximate,—almost as closely as chronometers. Such a person is a "knight-player,"—he must have ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... dining at my club with two friends, one of them a young Dutch attache, the other a barrister of my Inn. We did ourselves pretty well, and took our cigars into the smoking-room, which was crowded. Some men in a corner were playing chess; the club bore, decent enough in peace but positively lethal in war, was demonstrating to a group of impatient listeners that the Staff work at G.H.Q. was all wrong, when, catching sight of me, he came up and said, "Hullo, old man, back from the ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... are far more amusable, far more jovial and open-hearted. They have their coffee-houses every night, and their religious festivities periodically; they play at all sorts of complicated games, resembling draughts and chess, and find means ingeniously to vary their sports. If they compromise their dignity, they succeed in whiling away their leisure time far more successfully than the pride-stuffed Levantine. One of their amusements—called the game of plaff—is worth mentioning, especially as it is not only ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various
... with, dialecticians of varying creeds—himself seated in the middle, and the doctrinaires in four pulpits around him; here is the Mint; here is the house of the Turkish queen, with its elaborate carvings and decorations; here is the girls' school, with a courtyard laid out for human chess, the pieces being slave-girls; here is a noble mosque; here is the vast court where the great father of his people administered justice, or what approximated to it, and received homage. Here are the spreading stables and riding ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas
... and set me in the seventh heaven of satisfaction. My father (for I can scarcely say myself) was trying at this time a "straddle" in wheat between Chicago and New York; the operation so called, is, as you know, one of the most tempting and least safe upon the chess-board of finance. On the Thursday, luck began to turn against my father's calculations; and by the Friday evening I was posted on the boards as a defaulter for the second time. Here was a rude blow: my father ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... magic of its own brightness. The boughs were waving over head, covered with many-colored foliage, and the sun, glancing through, not only enriched the tints above, but checkered the mossy path along which they wandered like a chess-board of brown and gold. Some of the late autumn birds uttered their short sweet songs from the copse hard by, and the musical wind came sighing up from the valley, as if nature had furnished Eolus with a harp. It was in short quite a ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... these prefer passing their lives in making huge efforts to become second-class chess-players, or to pocket ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... all decision until we are better informed," was the advice of that Fabius in a dressing-gown, whose prudent reflections revealed to him the meaning of these moves on the Tourainean chess-board. He tried to enlighten Birotteau on the dangers of his position; but the wisdom of the old "sly-boots" did not serve the passions of the moment, and ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... volumes number seventeen. If we continue to partake as largely of the gale of public favour as hitherto, we shall not despair of an evergreen old age. We know the value of this favour, and shall strive to maintain it accordingly. It is to us like the Queen of Chess: ...
— The Mirror Of Literature, Amusement, And Instruction, No. 496 - Vol. 17, No. 496, June 27, 1831 • Various
... most majestically bleeds us instead," answered Aristo, "that she may have treasure to give them. We are not so troublesome as they; the more's the pity. No offence to you, however, or to the emperor, or to great Rome, Cornelius. We are over our cups; it's only a game of politics, you know, like chess or the cottabus. Maro bids you 'parcere subjectis, et debellare superbos;' but you have changed your manners. You coax the Goths ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... in any game," Thornly replied. "I rather think it comes from my chess training. When a child begins that pastime, as you might say, in his cradle, with such a teacher as father, it's ...
— Janet of the Dunes • Harriet T. Comstock
... know. Nothing particular, I guess. Oh, yes, I learned her name was Ellison before she was married, but the sisters don't consult her about family matters at all. They do about clothes, though. And she knows a lot. Why, Chess, she's having the loveliest things made, if they are mourning, and the sisters, they ask her about everything they order—to wear, I mean. And, just think! Mrs. Schuyler never wears any jewels but pearls! It's a whim, you know, or it was her husband's whim, or something, ...
— Vicky Van • Carolyn Wells
... English artillery, falling back on their centre, and stationing their cannon, which our gunners had begun to dismount, higher up the hill. But the remainder of their line did not change; they had squares of red and squares of black touching each other at the corners like the squares of a chess-board, in the rear of the deep road; and in attacking them we would come under their crossfire. Their artillery was in position on the brow of the hill, and in the hollow on the hill-side toward Mont-St.-Jean their ...
— Waterloo - A sequel to The Conscript of 1813 • Emile Erckmann
... truth, it was, that though more than fifty persons were variously engaged therein, their number was lost in the immense space. Of these, at one end of the longer and lower table beneath the dais, some squires of good dress and mien were engaged at chess or dice; others were conferring in the gloomy embrasures of the casements; some walking to and fro, others gathered round the shovel-board. At the entrance of this hall the porter left Marmaduke, after exchanging a whisper with a gentleman ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... world, as in a game of chess; We serve our friends but where our profit is. When fortune smiles, we're yours, and yours alone; But when she frowns, the servile herd are gone. So, in a play, they act with mimick art, Father, or son, or griping miser's ...
— The Satyricon • Petronius Arbiter
... "set down," "reserved," or "put off," because counsel are engaged elsewhere? How often has he heard the same advocate in four or five causes in the same week, in the same court, changing positions like the queen of an active chess-board; profiting his fame and pocket by means of only a hurried glance at the elaborate brief which his junior has "got ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... has been hinted, was a place deposited in the block upon a corn-field. There was no suburb in the modern sense, or transitional intermixture of town and down. It stood, with regard to the wide fertile land adjoining, clean-cut and distinct, like a chess-board on a green tablecloth. The farmer's boy could sit under his barley-mow and pitch a stone into the office-window of the town-clerk; reapers at work among the sheaves nodded to acquaintances standing on the pavement-corner; the red-robed judge, when he condemned a sheep-stealer, pronounced ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... victorious humor, in the early days of June, Year 1547. Johann Friedrich of Saxony had been, by some Imperial Court-Council or other,—Spanish merely, I suppose,—doomed to die. Sentence was signified to him while he sat at chess: "Can wait till we end the game," thought Johann;—"PERGAMUS," said he to his comrade, "Let us go on, then!" Sentence not to be executed till ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle
... fishing-lines, nets, and other purposes, from the supply of hibiscus bark previously laid in. We have also manufactured more than a dozen pairs of serviceable moccasins, with no other materials than cocoa-nut cotton and bread-fruit bark. Browne has made a chess-board, and rudely but elaborately carved a complete set of men, of gigantic size, in which he has evinced much skill and ingenuity, and a vast deal of perseverance. The castles are mounted upon the backs of elephants, which Johnny innocently mistook for enormous swine with ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... "Your sea-chess?" interrogated Snowball, elevating his woolly cranium above the water, so as also to command a view. "Golly! I b'lieve it am. How he come dar? You leff 'im on ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... him from Adam or Eve," said the Comte de Kergarouet. "Trusting to that crazy child's tact, I got him here by a method of my own. I know that the boy shoots with a pistol to admiration, hunts well, plays wonderfully at billiards, at chess, and at backgammon; he handles the foils, and rides a horse like the late Chevalier de Saint-Georges. He has a thorough knowledge of all our vintages. He is as good an arithmetician as Bareme, draws, dances, and sings well. The devil's in it! what more do you want? If that is not ...
— The Ball at Sceaux • Honore de Balzac
... Bolkonski, through whom he hoped to obtain a post on the commander in chief's staff. Berg and Boris, having rested after yesterday's march, were sitting, clean and neatly dressed, at a round table in the clean quarters allotted to them, playing chess. Berg held a smoking pipe between his knees. Boris, in the accurate way characteristic of him, was building a little pyramid of chessmen with his delicate white fingers while awaiting Berg's move, and watched his opponent's face, evidently thinking about the game as he always thought only of whatever ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... A note has just been given me calling me to Earl, who is ill, but not seriously. Barbara has prescribed for him a game of chess. The desire to see you again has got into my blood. I think I shall be in the new West ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... Vizier's Albanian guards were lounging. In an antechamber, which opened from the gallery, a number of officers were smoking, and in the middle, on the floor, two old Turks were seriously engaged at chess. ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... the throne. He was continued in his former employment, with the same stipend; but though he was daily admitted to the presence of the queen, assisted her private studies, and partook of her diversions; sometimes read to her in the learned languages, and sometimes played with her at draughts and chess; he added nothing to his twenty pounds a year but the prebend of Westwang, in the church of York, which was given him the year following. His fortune was, therefore, not proportionate to the rank which his offices and reputation gave him, or to the favour in which he seemed to stand with ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... been said, when Disko thought of cod he thought as a cod; and by some long-tested mixture of instinct and experience, moved the We're Here from berth to berth, always with the fish, as a blindfolded chess-player moves on ...
— "Captains Courageous" • Rudyard Kipling
... was reading and playing at chess. To the romances and poetry, which I chiefly delighted in, I had always added the study of history, especially as connected with military events. I was encouraged in this latter study by a tolerable acquaintance with geography, and by the opportunities I ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... horseback. Fresh from college, they made our lessons in Latin, Greek, and mathematics so easy that we studied with real pleasure and had more leisure for play. Henry Bayard's chief pleasures were walking, riding, and playing all manner of games, from jack-straws to chess, with the three younger sisters, and we have often said that the three years he passed in Johnstown were the most delightful ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... to a far corner and showed her a set of wonderful carved chess-men that he had bought that morning; and photographs of his friends at Eton, and of the school, and of some of the masters. He talked very earnestly and elaborately about these dull matters, and passed by the opportunities which her ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... mutual change.] Interchange. — N. interchange, exchange; commutation, permutation, intermutation; reciprocation, transposition, rearrangement; shuffling; alternation, reciprocity; castling [at chess]; hocus-pocus. interchangeableness[obs3], interchangeability. recombination; combination 48[ref], 84.. barter &c. 794; tit for tat &c. (retaliation) 718; cross fire, battledore and shuttlecock; quid pro quo. V. interchange, exchange, counterchange[obs3]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... or qualify as much as within his to assert. But, in reality, the law of the contest between us, as suggested by some instinct of propriety in my own mind, would not allow me to proceed in such a method. What he said was like a move at chess or draughts, which it was childish to dispute. The move being made, my business was—to face it, to parry it, to evade it, and, if I could, to overthrow it. I proceeded as a lawyer who moves as long as he can, not by blank denial of facts, (or coming to an issue,) but by demurring, ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... the device of the golden falcon on his shield would have to do with him, Sir Geraint began to seek ease and pleasure, for there was no one who would joust with him. He began to stay at home and never went beyond his wife's bower-chamber, but sat and delighted in playing chess, or hearing the bards of the court sing songs of glamour and wizardry, or tell him tales of ancient warriors and lovers, ...
— King Arthur's Knights - The Tales Re-told for Boys & Girls • Henry Gilbert
... wore, and how she looked, and what she had said, either about the colony or anything else. The officers, both civil and military, found themselves able to devote their powers of entertainment more and move to the ladies; and the liability to be called off in the midst of the game of chess, the poem, the song, or the dance, seemed only to make their attentions more precious, because more precarious, than those of the guests who knew themselves to be hostages, and who had abundance of time for gallantry, if ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... charge of this section of the work. In this office every laborer's work was planned out well in advance, and the workmen were all moved from place to place by the clerks with elaborate diagrams or maps of the yard before them, very much as chessmen are moved on a chess-board, a telephone and messenger system having been installed for this purpose. In this way a large amount of the time lost through having too many men in one place and too few in another, and through waiting ...
— The Principles of Scientific Management • Frederick Winslow Taylor
... body, and shut himself up in his room for months, unable to endure contact with the outer world, or even that of the loving home circle which environed him with anxious tenderness. He could not read or write: a favorite piece of music from his young sister's piano, a game of chess with his mother in the evening, were his only recreations—his only excitement the letters which still came from Venice, for which he looked with a sick longing, at which one cannot wonder on reading them and remembering what a companionship it was that ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... So Hapley turned to chess, and found it a little more soothing. He soon mastered the moves and the chief gambits and commoner closing positions, and began to beat the Vicar. But then the cylindrical contours of the opposite king began to resemble Pawkins standing ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... doth descend upon us, And brings on their long night! Their evil stars Deliver them unarmed into our hands. And from their drunken dream of golden fortunes 20 The dagger at their heart shall rouse them. Well, The Duke was ever a great calculator; His fellow-men were figures on his chess-board, To move and station, as his game required. Other men's honour, dignity, good name, 25 Did he shift like pawns, and made no conscience of it: Still calculating, calculating still; And yet at last his calculation proves Erroneous; the whole game is lost; and lo! His own life will ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... its cause already referred to—an opening so felicitous that it was afterwards imitated by Froissart. And so, Chaucer continues, as he could not sleep, to drive the night away he sat upright in his bed reading a "romance," which he thought better entertainment than chess or draughts. The book which he read was the "Metamorphoses" of Ovid; and in it he chanced on the tale of Ceyx and Alcyone—the lovers whom, on their premature death, the compassion of Juno changed into the seabirds ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... the East and West is just as certain as that of the North and South. Discord would reign supreme, and States and parts of States become petty sovereignties, mere pawns, to be moved on the political chess board by the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... not get to sleep: he never felt more wakeful in his life; so he lit the lamp and got out the chess-board, and played himself a game of chess. But even that did not enliven him: it seemed slow somehow; so he gave chess up and tried to read. He did not seem able to take any sort of interest in reading either, so he put on his coat again and went ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... French Broad River, or the ramp and terrace of Biltmore House, just as I saw them when writing the words which served to recall them to me. With the visions, too, has come a recurrence to our long talks, our work among the books, our games of chess, our cups of tea, our walks, our rides, and our drives. It is therefore a pleasure to me that the book so naturally gravitates to you, and that I may make it a remembrance of those past weeks of companionship, and an earnest of the present ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... he asked Bluebell if she could play chess; and, on her replying in the affirmative, ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... number existed in spite of family admixtures, may have transmitted his or her distinguishing traits through a series of lives that cover more than two centuries, to our own contemporary. Inherited qualities move along their several paths not unlike the pieces in the game of chess. Sometimes the character of the son can be traced directly to that of the father or of the mother, as the pawn's move carries him from one square to the next. Sometimes a series of distinguished fathers follows in a line, or a succession of superior mothers, as the black ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... the low-toned chat. Leaning on their muskets, they let their thoughts go wandering far away, for all men know that bloody work is coming. The engineers are hammering at their bulky pontoons now, and down at the water's edge the clumsy boats are moored, waiting for chess and balk carriers to be told off, and the crews to man the heavy sweeps. Up on the heights to the rear, planted thickly on every knoll and ridge, are the black-mouthed guns, and around them are grouped the squads of ghostly, grisly, fog-dripping cannoneers. One may ...
— A War-Time Wooing - A Story • Charles King
... Sam Griggs severely, puckering his old, smooth, lined face, "are you a chess automaton or a human pincushion? Cherry's crying her heart out for you—calling 'Bob, Bob,' every second, with them holding her hands and keeping her from coming ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... snow, however, beyond serving as an ornamental fringe to the distance, plays but a very poor part at this season of the year in Iceland. While I write, the thermometer is above 70. Last night we remained playing at chess on deck till bedtime, without thinking of calling for coats, and my people live in their shirt-sleeves, and—astonishment at ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... Tens to instruct the Hundreds how to convince the Thousands of the propriety of doing that and many other things. Of course one will respect him only the more if when that matter is off his mind he relaxes at such a school instead of over a chess-board; as it will increase our love for Miss M. to find that making 'my good Jane (from Tyne-mouth)'—'happier and—I hope—wiser' is an amusement, or more, after the day's progress towards the 'novel for next year' which is to inspire thousands, beyond ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... late William Blades accepts the common interpretation of "W.C. 74." Some bibliographers argue that the date refers to the introduction of printing in England, and quote the colophon of the first edition of the "Chess" book in support of this theory. But the date of this work refers to the translation and not to the printing, which was executed at Bruges, probably in 1476. Caxton did not settle at Westminster until late in that year, and possibly not until 1477. ...
— Printers' Marks - A Chapter in the History of Typography • William Roberts
... few husbands and fathers joined us at lunch; but at dinner we were nearly always a company of bachelors, dropping in an hour or so before we wished to dine, and ordering from a bill of fare what we liked. Some dozed away the intervening time; some read the evening papers, or played chess; I preferred the chance society of the Turkish room. I could be pretty sure of finding Wanhope there in these sympathetic moments, and where Wanhope was there would probably be Rulledge, passively willing to listen and agree, and Minver ...
— Quaint Courtships • Howells & Alden, Editors
... When the chess-board is a Florentine palace, and the pieces are fifteenth-century human beings, such complications are likely to occur. The Lady Lisa had more than once given evidence that she was not carved of wood or ivory. But for three years the situation had remained the ...
— Unfinished Portraits - Stories of Musicians and Artists • Jennette Lee
... to believe in the sincerity of the sentiments here expressed, when we consider that Lord Haldane belonged to the inner circle of the Cabinet and therefore must have known the secret chess-moves of Grey's policy. Furthermore, he did not resign, as did three other members of the Cabinet—Lord Morley, Burns, and Charles Trevelyan—when, on Aug. 4, Sir Edward's false game was shown up and when ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... feeble to take a man's part in life, contented himself by formulating creeds of weakness that befitted his state. Men were the pieces with which he played his game—they were of varied values, certainly, as are the pieces on a chess table, but they were pieces on the chess table and nothing more. All of which does not mean that Jim McIver was cruel or unkind. Indeed, he was genuinely and generously interested in many worthy charities, and many a man had appealed to him, and not in vain, for help. But to have permitted these ...
— Helen of the Old House • Harold Bell Wright
... a simple manoeuvre was equivalent to a "fools' mate" at chess, and was a lesson to Jolliffe's never to despise their enemy. They were not to be caught napping again, however, and, by dint of steady, persistent, concentrated play, they too got a goal and equalised matters. Then, after a considerable period, during ...
— Dr. Jolliffe's Boys • Lewis Hough
... adding a suggestion of the post-hypnotic recollection of these points. In process mathematics particularly, this aid had been of singular service, and it was now invariably invoked by such players of chess and games of manual dexterity as were still to be found. In fact, all operations conducted under finite rules, of a quasi-mechanical sort that is, were now systematically relieved from the wanderings of imagination and emotion, ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... curse of Italy! There should be extradition treaties all over the world to bring this arch-conspirator to justice. The door of his conscience had been knocked at by a thousand bleeding ghosts, and nothing had opened to them. What was Italy in his eyes? A chess-board; and Italians were the chessmen to this cold player with live flesh. England nourished the wretch, that she might undermine the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... a hundred thousand failures, a gray-haired, neat man, who had been everything and done nothing, and who now said evasively that he was "in the collection business." He read Dickens and played a masterful game of chess. He liked to have it thought that his past was brave with mysterious splendors. He spoke hintingly of great lawyers. But he had been near to them only as a clerk for a large law firm. He was grateful to any one for noticing him. Like most of the ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... maps, and a few pencil-drawings, appeared. All seemed as if he had just quitted the spot a few minutes before; the pencil lay across a half-finished sketch; two or three wild plants were laid within the leaves of a little book on botany; and a chess problem, with an open book beside it, still waited for solution on a little board, whose workmanship clearly enough betrayed it to be ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... good old yeoman, reached the hall of Frithiof, he found the hero sitting with Bjoern at a game of chess. Gladly was he greeted by the young man, who pointed to the High Chair, the chief seat at the board, and bade him sit and drink a horn of mead while ...
— Told by the Northmen: - Stories from the Eddas and Sagas • E. M. [Ethel Mary] Wilmot-Buxton
... See G. Villani, 1. ix. c. 62. v. 48. One.] She predicts also the fate of Ricciardo da Camino, who is said to have been murdered at Trevigi, where the rivers (Sile and Cagnano meet) while he was engaged in playing at chess. ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... Hardly on one occasion did we hustle them, and the policy, deprecated by most commanders of lower formations, of snatching at the first morsels of abandoned territory always cost us heavy casualties. Between war and chess there is a close analogy. In front of Nieppe Forest there were now a hopeless crowding of the pieces, moves aimlessly made from square to square, and the reckless calling of 'check,' which to a good opponent means time and renewed chances ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose
... were chess, in which he excelled; music, especially that of the school of Schubert and Mozart—he entertained very decided opinions about the "music of the future"—and whist, which he rarely missed playing after dinner, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 2 of 8 • Various
... sons-in-law with them, the Cid told them the news, and took counsel with them in what manner they should go out against this great power of the Moors. And when they had taken counsel the Cid went to sleep upon his seat, and the Infantes and the others sate playing at tables and chess. Now at this time the men who were keepers of the lion were cleaning the court, and when they heard the cry that the Moors were coming, they opened the den, and came down into the palace where the Cid was, and left the door of the court open. And when the lion had ate his meat and ...
— Chronicle Of The Cid • Various
... he done?" It was like a game of chess, both opponents well matched. Uncle Felix was too big to be caught napping by clever questions that hid traps. The children felt the danger in the air, and watched their uncle with quivering admiration. Only their uncle stood alone, ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... swiftly went To the Place of the Orient, And the stout Queen sneered, "Ah, well! You are proud and prude, ma belle! But I think I will hazard a guess I shall see you one day playing chess ...
— Pike County Ballads and Other Poems • John Hay
... in chess, music and conversation, and after an early tea Dr. and Mrs. Peters bade good-by to their entertainers and ...
— Her Mother's Secret • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... that other man, if there be one!" Le Gardeur rose and walked angrily across the room two or three times. Angelique was playing a game of chess with Satan for her soul, and felt that ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... be a wise man indeed who, being an habitual whist-player, is aware that he is a bad one. In games of pure skill, such as chess, and, in a less degree, billiards, a man must be a fool who deceives himself upon such a point; but in whist there is a sufficient amount of chance to enable him to preserve his self-complacency for some time—let ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... at which he looked upon his business as a means of support or of material comfort. Business had become for him an intellectual pursuit, a study in enterprise and increment. The field of commerce lay before him like a chess-board; the moves interested him like the manoeuvres of a game. More money was more power, a greater advantage in the game, the means of shaping men and events and markets to his own ends and uses. It was his will that set fleets afloat and determined the havens they were bound ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... to the waist; and yesterday you walked three miles out, on the Southern turnpike, and came back soaked to the knees. To-day the storm is slightly increasing, but you are dry thus far, and wish to remain so; exercise is a humbug; you will give it all up, and go to the Chess-Club. Don't go to the Chess-Club; come with ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... knows how to read, write, and calculate, which is more than we can say of the English. They are a grave, honest, benevolent people, but not remarkable for their industry. Their favorite amusements, when assembled together, consist in reading history or poetry, in singing, or playing at chess, in which game they take great delight, priding themselves on their skill. They are refined enough to admire poetry and music: I think I need say no more. ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... now till Monday week (Ten peerless days in all) I take my stand Vested in some degage mode of breek (The chess-board touch, with squares that almost speak), And lightly sketch my Slice into the Sand, As based on bigger men, but ...
— The Sunny Side • A. A. Milne
... you if you seriously propose to familiarise Axcester with all the orgies of a Continental Sabbath? Already the prisoners spend Sunday in playing chess, draughts, cards, dominoes; practices which I connive at, only insisting that they are kept out of sight, but from which I endeavour to wean them—those at least who have a taste for music—by encouraging them to, take ...
— The Westcotes • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... been a moment in that act when I thought James Lewis suspected me. I had just taken my seat opposite him at the chess table, when he gave a little jerk at his chair, exclaiming under his breath, "Blast that ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... had gone, Mrs. Graham called him to her. "Come and sit here," she said, pointing to a footstool at her feet. Ninian was trying to solve a chess problem and was ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... decks ceased in time. Our own party of nine had the poop to ourselves, and were very comfortable; we soon got to like the life, and generally arranged some way of spending each day agreeably. We had a fair library, chess, backgammon, whist, etc., and when we got into the Tropics and had occasional calms, we went out in the captain's gig; then further south we had shooting matches at Cape pigeons and albatrosses, and in all our amusements the captain and Lapworth ...
— Five Years in New Zealand - 1859 to 1864 • Robert B. Booth
... went with them, and thus the three sons of Usnach were all in Alba. Then the story goes on to say that Fergus, one of Conor's nobles, goes to seek the exiles, and Naisi and Deirdre, while playing at the chess, hear from the shore 'the cry of a man of Erin.' It is against Deirdre's will that they finally leave Alba with Fergus, who says, "Birthright is first, for ill it goes with a man, although he be great and prosperous, if he does not see ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Andalusia. She was a model of devotion and grace. Don Juan foresaw that this would be a woman who would struggle long against a passion before yielding, and therefore hoped to keep her virtuous until his death. It was a jest undertaken in earnest, a game of chess which he meant to reserve till his old age. Don Juan had learned wisdom from the mistakes made by his father Bartolommeo; he determined that the least details of his life in old age should be subordinated to one object—the success of the drama which was ...
— The Elixir of Life • Honore de Balzac
... been said to occur in some such direct hereditary way," H. L. Hollingworth[164] observes, "or as the result of unexplained mutation or deviation from type, are: mathematical aptitude, ability in drawing,[165] musical composition,[166] singing, poetic reaction, military strategy, chess playing. Pitch discrimination seems to depend on structural factors which are not susceptible of improvement by practice.[167] The same may be said of various forms of professional athletic achievement. Color blindness seems to be an instance of the conspicuous ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... may be on a very big scale or on a small scale. The quality which the man possesses may be that which enables him to run a hundred yards in nine and three-fifths seconds, or to play ten separate games of chess at the same time blindfolded, or to add five columns of figures at once without effort, or to write the "Ode to a Grecian Urn," or to deliver the Gettysburg speech, or to show the ability of Frederick at ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... their father, nor Lorcan, their grandfather, would have been so quiescent towards the foreigners for the sake of wealth, nor would they have given them even as much time as would have sufficed to play a game of chess[210] on the green of Magh Adhair. Mahoun kept his temper, and contented himself with reproaching Brian for his recklessness, in sacrificing the lives of so many of his faithful followers to no purpose. Brian ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... her seat, preparing for a tense hour. She, too, had marked the time; it had been on the verge of twenty minutes after eight as she left the store. "What right has the only doctor in the country to play chess, anyway? And with old Hell-Fire Packard at that? Two precious old rascals they are, I'll be bound. But a rascal of a doctor is better than no doctor at all, and— Ah, a good, open bit ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory
... home from your Oriental jaunt, she will be able to comply with your request. Meantime, Percy, come into the study; I want a cigar and game of chess." ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... the circumstances of life that trouble or weigh upon us, it is the way we take them. If a man is playing a difficult game of chess, the more intricate the moves the more thoughtfully he looks over his own and his opponent's men, and the more fully he is aroused to make the right move toward a checkmate. If, when the game became difficult, the player stopped to be depressed and disheartened, his opponent would probably ...
— The Freedom of Life • Annie Payson Call
... in front of an enclosed room at the back. The illustration shows the front overlooking the court, while beyond is the Octagon Tower, the residence of the chief Sultana. In the court a portion of the marble pavement is made to represent a pachisi or chess board, and it is said the game was played with slave girls, who were used instead of the customary chessmen. The Octagon Tower is built out over the river Jumna, as will be seen ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... possess all the manner of an old lady of sixty: she would flirt with three men at a time, and have a ready answer for them when teasing her; would move like an accomplished actress, manipulate gracefully, play whist, chess, and other games, and talk about getting married. This child, for such I must call her, was a greater mental giant than O'Brien, with his moving mountain of flesh, and far more entertaining than twenty Tom ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 458 - Volume 18, New Series, October 9, 1852 • Various
... the mountain to the valley beneath, and in its fury snaps asunder the trunks of large trees as if they were but slender reeds, and carries the wooden houses from one side of a river to the other as easily as we could move the pieces on a chess-board. After an hour had passed, they told Rudy that it was all over, and he might go to sleep; and, fatigued with his long walk, he readily slept at the word ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... breathe the open air. Every day Henriette, when her father was out, allowed him to race up and down the stairs, played at hide-and-seek with him in the passages, let him dance her round and round the lower rooms. Or else she played games with him, cards, chess, tric-trac; or he lay and listened to her while she told him fairy tales; listened with a dreamy half-understanding, with a certainty, underlying all his impatience, that there was nothing to live for now. ...
— Angelot - A Story of the First Empire • Eleanor Price
... four genera; and this very fact makes me feel positive I am right! I do not quite understand some of your terms; but sometime I must get you to explain the homologies; for I am intensely interested on the subject, just as at a game of chess." ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... The Colonel and I are too old to alter the habit of a lifetime, and besides we both love that long evening playing chess. There's always a roaring wood fire and a steaming pot of coffee, and your mother always plays Beethoven for ...
— Uncle Noah's Christmas Inspiration • Leona Dalrymple
... with great difficulty extracted. It measured seven feet; about one foot of it, the part attached to the head, was hollow, and the size of my wrist; the remainder was solid, and very heavy, being indeed the exquisite ivory of which the eastern people manufacture their beautiful chess-men. But to return to our sea-combat, which continued a long time, the shark evidently getting worsted. Possibly the bottom, which was clear, was favourable for his enemy; whose blow, if he succeeds ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 538 - 17 Mar 1832 • Various
... together in groups, and coteries; some to converse, others to play ecarte or vingt-un; here and there a solitary individual burying himself in a book; or a pair, almost as unsocial, engaging in the selfish duality of chess. ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... that, Uncle Eric; and I shall always be glad if you will tell me how I can make your time pass more pleasantly. I know this house must seem gloomy enough at best. Let us try a game of chess; we have not played since you came ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... find backgammon boards with backs lettered as if they were two folio volumes. The origin of it was thus; Eudes, bishop of Sully, forbade his clergy to play at chess. As they were resolved not to obey the commandment, and yet dared not have a chess-board seen in their houses or cloisters, they had them bound and lettered as books, and played at night, before they went to bed, instead of reading the New Testament or the Lives ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 286, December 8, 1827 • Various
... its little conventional way," he said. "It's on the regular English pattern. Our acrostics are a trifle smarter, but all run into one form. The great acrostic writer isn't born. If acrostics were as big a thing as chess, then we should have masters who would ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... is often too lightly called, should rather be regarded as a phase in the world's economic history and an occurrence of moment for the future peace of all nations than the mere game on the diplomatic chess-board many writers appear to consider it. According to French critics, and they may be taken as representative of the feeling everywhere prevalent during the seven years the incident lasted, its origin was a ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... man to have two natures, quite distinct in tastes? He worried himself almost to distraction over the question; but as there was no one to answer it, he drove it from his mind by spending the evening at the Hamiltons' teaching Jessie to play chess. ...
— Duncan Polite - The Watchman of Glenoro • Marian Keith
... resembles the Bornou game, played with beans and holes in the sand. Citizens and the more civilised are fond of "Bakkis," which, as its name denotes, is a corruption of the well-known Indian Pachisi. None but the travelled know chess, and the Damal (draughts) and Tavola (backgammon) of ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... preoccupations: be sure there will be something there of which you can avail yourself. From the village priest I learned that, along with his fondness for hunting and drinking and the lower forms of gaming, the Count has a taste for more intellectual amusements, and chiefly for the game of chess. He is a most excellent player, and doesn't often find a worthy antagonist. His bosom friend, one Captain Ferragant, who is now living at the chateau, has no skill at chess, so the Count has been put to sending ...
— The Bright Face of Danger • Robert Neilson Stephens
... that, when Johnson died, they were not on speaking terms. His explanation is that Johnson irritated him by an allusion to his being beaten by Omai, the Sandwich Islander, at chess. Mrs. Piozzi's marginal note on Omai is: "When Omai played at chess and at backgammon with Baretti, everybody admired at the savage's good breeding and at ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... when their intercourse was still more subtle, and now they sat without exchange of glance or gesture, silent as chess players, looking up the narrow water into a sunset exquisite in the delicacy of its silvery plumes, fleeces pink and dusk, and illimitable distances of palest green seen through fan-rays of white light shot down from ...
— Bylow Hill • George Washington Cable
... what there is in a Japanese house for servants to do. There are no fires to lay, no furniture to polish and clean, no carpets to sweep, and no linen to wash and mend; so Japanese servants spend much time chatting to each other, or sewing new kimonos together, or playing chess. As a rule, there are many more servants than are necessary to do the work. This is because servants are very cheap. There are always plenty of girls who are ready to fill the lower places if they can obtain food and clothes for their services, ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Japan • John Finnemore
... twenty-eight—nearing twenty-nine. Imagine yourself by nature versed in the arts of finance, capable of playing with sums of money in the forms of stocks, certificates, bonds, and cash, as the ordinary man plays with checkers or chess. Or, better yet, imagine yourself one of those subtle masters of the mysteries of the higher forms of chess—the type of mind so well illustrated by the famous and historic chess-players, who could sit with their backs to a group of rivals playing fourteen ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... trial had become by now as academic as a game of chess, to all but the lonely, homesick parents. The prosecuting attorney knew that the mother was not telling the truth; the judge and the jury knew that she was not telling the truth. But unless this could be geometrically ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... to me, but now we've made up. Dorry is so awfully in love with her that I never can get him to come into the room when she is here, and he blushes when we tease him about her. But this is a great secret. Dorry and I play chess every evening. He almost always beats unless papa comes behind and helps me. Phil has learned too, because he always wants to do every thing that we do. Dorry gives him a castle, and a bishop, and a knight, and four pawns, and then beats him ...
— What Katy Did At School • Susan Coolidge
... a laugh. "I am not going to have you starve yourself to death up in my room. There, jump up and come and shut the door, and then have a good long read. I'll get back to you as soon as I can, and then we will have a good game at draughts or chess. But I mustn't be up here too much, or it will make the girls suspicious. There, ...
— The New Forest Spy • George Manville Fenn
... has permeated both Judaism and Christianity. Christianity has probably received from it, through Judaism, its doctrine of angels and devils, and its tendency to establish evil in the world as the permanent and equal adversary of good. Such a picture as that by Retzsch of the Devil playing chess with the young man for his soul, such a picture as that by Guido of the conflict between Michael and Satan, such poems as Milton's Paradise Lost and Goethe's Faust, could perhaps never have appeared in Christendom, had it not been for ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... mechanics, and good nature, made me a sort of wide bench, which, covered with a neat plaid, looks quite sofa-like. A little pine table, with oilcloth tacked over the top of it, stands in one corner of the room, upon which are arranged the chess and cribbage boards. There is a larger one for dining purposes, and as unpainted pine has always a most dreary look, F. went everywhere in search of oilcloth for it, but there was none at any of the bars. At last, "Ned," the ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... of Philidor, Musician and Chess-Player. By George Allen, Greek Professor in the University of Pennsylvania. With a Supplementary Essay on Philidor as Chess-Author and Chess-Player, by Tassilo von Heydebrand und der Lasa, Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary of the King of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... from the fleshless and skeleton perfection of the problemed forms, which start at your slightest touch from the formal squares of the chess board,—forms which confuse me with their complexity, bewilder me in the mazes of their ceaseless combinations, dazzle me with their chill erudition, and appal me with want of life,—and smile acceptance on the glowing gifts ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... But days and nights passed without any explanation being sent, or any secret message bidding me be patient. She used to come down to the drawing-room for an hour in the morning; in the evening she was present at dinner, and then would play piquet or chess with her father. During all this time she was so well watched that I could not exchange a glance with her. For the rest of the day she remained in her own room—inaccessible. Noticing that I was chafing at the species of captivity in which I was compelled ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... this time that Octavia began to teach Felice to play chess. The child hated it. It must have taken a sort of magnificent patience to teach her. For a long time no one save Mademoiselle D'Ormy had known what a struggle it meant for that gay little invalid to make herself lovely for that afternoon hour over the chess board. Yet, when the Major entered he ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... soon as you were in shape you would try to get this place back. That was natural. And you would have to come and talk to me about it. I was sure I could convince you that I was partly human. So you see this is no surprise to me. Lord, no! Why, I've been playing chess for two years—old Donald ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... he proposed me the "Regle des Jeux de la Societe"— piquet, bezique, ecarte, whist, dice, draughts, and chess. ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... late when we returned to the khan, we found everybody still up. The room in which we were to sleep (there was only one room) was filled with a crowd of loiterers, and tobacco smoke. Some were playing games similar to our chess and backgammon, while others were looking on, and smoking the gurgling narghile, or water-pipe. The bicycles had been put away under lock and key, and the crowd gradually dispersed. We lay down in our clothes, ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... them that do know the way." So he buried all the books at which offence could be taken, leaving only his own law-books, and Isoult's "Romaunts" that she had when a girl, and Dr Thorpe's "Game of the Chess," and Robin's "Song of the Lady Bessy," and the "Little Gest of Robin Hood," and ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... music, both individual and concerted, orchestra practice, part-singing, glee-clubs and so on; or morrice and other folk-dances, now happily being widely revived. And lastly there are indoor games, some of which, like chess (cards are probably best confined to the sanatorium), have a high training value, and others afford a useful occasional outlet to high spirits; and entertainments got up by some society, or perhaps by a single form, for the rest of the "house" or school, such as a concert ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... reply, I can only confess that Catherine's diplomacy and her conquests do not interest me. It is clear to me that neither she nor the statesmen with whom she played this mischievous kind of political chess had any notion of the real history of their own times, or of the real forces that were moulding Europe. The French Revolution, which made such short work of Catherine's Voltairean principles, surprised and scandalized her as much as it surprised ...
— Great Catherine • George Bernard Shaw
... there were plenty of winter games for those who could play them, amongst which we may mention chess, cards, ...
— Old English Sports • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... all over it. At the further end was a long black buffet or dresser, thickly covered with gold cups, silver salvers, and other such valuables. All this Alleyne examined with curious eyes; but most interesting of all to him was a small ebony table at his very side, on which, by the side of a chess-board and the scattered chessmen, there lay an open manuscript written in a right clerkly hand, and set forth with brave flourishes and devices along the margins. In vain Alleyne bethought him of where he was, and of those laws of good breeding and decorum which should restrain ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Chetah a chess board in a box ten inches square with a miniature tree six inches high on its cover. The figure of a man in chains leaning upon a spade near a wheelbarrow, stood under the tree. The expression of the face, ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... seldom came and made himself agreeable; playing an occasional game of chess, and more often regaling Daisy with a history of his expeditions. Other visitors Daisy had from Melbourne, now and then; but her best friend for real service, after her father and Juanita, was Dr. Sandford. He took great care of his little patient's comfort and happiness; which ...
— Melbourne House, Volume 1 • Susan Warner
... very distinctly, because he was fond of chatting with the boys, who used to gather round the railings of his garden, and occasionally he would ask one or two of them to have tea with him. I have a faint recollection that he gave us some of our first notions of chess, but I am not sure of this. I . . . remember him a tall, spare, dark-complexioned man, usually dressed in black. In person he was not unlike another Norwich man, who obtained in those days a very different notoriety from that which now belongs to Borrow's name. ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... as the others. Do you not know, we keep a card hung up on Lilias's window-shutter, and we write down every month's invitations—in stormy weather they are not many—and we fulfil them in rotation. You don't often want me in the evenings, for you've quite given me up at chess, and you only condescend to backgammon when it is mid-winter and there has been no curling, and the book club is all amiss. Lilias insists upon the card, because the parties are by no means always merry affairs, and she says ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... persistence of his race. In spite of the prejudices of eighteen hundred years, he rose to the highest position that can be occupied by a citizen. During his administration England again became a Continental power and played her game of European chess. I have never regarded Beaconsfield as a man controlled by principle, or by his heart. He was strictly a politician. He always acted as though he thought the clubs were looking at him. He knew all the arts belonging to his trade. ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... meeting at morning Mass in church or chapel, taking their meals in common, riding, hunting, hawking, playing at bowls, tennis, or stool-ball, or any other pastime, in such parties as suited their inclinations; and spending the evening in the great hall, in conversation varied by chess, dice, and cards, recitals of romance, and music, sometimes performed by the choristers of the Royal chapel, or sometimes by the company themselves, and often by one or other of the two kings, who were both proficients as well ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... field but by a deluge from a fire-engine; when stumbling down-stairs, guided by the banisters, she finally dismayed her father, who thought her long ago in safety, by emerging from the house, dragging after her a marble-topped chess table, when half the upper windows ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... ugliness which was not altogether displeasing. The materials for its structure had all been drawn at different periods from the same stone quarry, and the chequered look of new bits and old bits had a hint of the chess-board. Here Samson Mountain dwelt on his own land in the midst of ...
— Julia And Her Romeo: A Chronicle Of Castle Barfield - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... brightly lighted drawing-room and halted in the following chamber, where the walls were adorned with white garlands and the curtains and upholstering were of blue watered-silk. Beyond, in a small drawing-room. Miss Mary sat down to play chess with Maryan; Cara took her place near them in the character of observer, and Irene unrolled in the lamp-light a piece of church stuff, very old and time-worn, which the baron had brought her as a rarity, and which she intended to repair ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... under the bank were forgotten soon, in the warm luxury of the drawing-room and the bright tea-table, and the comfort of sugared peaches. And then Matilda and Norton played chess all the evening, talking to Mrs. Laval at intervals. The tulip bed and the hyacinth bed were proposed, and approved; a trip to Poughkeepsie was arranged, to see Maria; and Norton told of Miss Redwood's doings in Lilac Lane. ...
— Opportunities • Susan Warner
... of him as finishing his game of chess calmly while the officers of the Terror waited to conduct him to the guillotine. He is exactly—oh, but exactly!—grandmamma's idea of a gentleman. I wish she had seen ...
— The Reflections of Ambrosine - A Novel • Elinor Glyn
... Flemish Tavern: boors and burghers hale Drawn round a table, o'er a board of chess, Smoking their heavy pipes, and drinking ale, Blowing from ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... he seen cause after cause "set down," "reserved," or "put off," because counsel are engaged elsewhere? How often has he heard the same advocate in four or five causes in the same week, in the same court, changing positions like the queen of an active chess-board; profiting his fame and pocket by means of only a hurried glance at the elaborate brief which his junior has "got ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... easy to play a game at chess with a far superior player, then at least one learns something; but impossible to sit at a chess board with a child who throws all into confusion. The national chessboard is very confused in the White ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... persons who could attend to half a dozen different conversations going on together, and take a rational part in them all, and indulge, all the time, in a distinct consecutive train of thought beside. I dare say, Mr. Morphy, the chess-player, would find no difficulty in it. But Devereux was not by any means competent to the feat, though there was one conversation, perhaps, the thread of which he would gladly have caught up and disentangled. So the talk at top and bottom and both sides of the table, ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... Chilian, who had been playing a rather prolonged game of chess with a visitor. But Bentley kept on with them, and said good-night with a polite bow, adding, "She must come again, Mr. Leverett, we had ...
— A Little Girl in Old Salem • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... time like a babe at blind play with a set of chess men, not knowing king from pawn nor one rule of the game. Senator Floud—who was but a member of their provincial assembly, I discovered—sought an early opportunity to felicitate me on my changed estate, though he seemed not a little amused ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... the piano, improvising. Madame stood before the fireplace, arranging the pieces on a chess board. In the center of the room was a table littered with books, magazines and ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... Malemute Kid and Prince fell to solving chess problems from the torn page of an ancient magazine. The Kid had just returned from his Bonanza properties and was resting up preparatory to a ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... Theodore's shoes, and done—with what I feel in my bones to be very inferior skill and taste—all the reading, writing, condensing, transcribing and advising that he has been accustomed to do. I have driven with the bonhomme; played chess and cribbage with him; beaten him, bullied him, contradicted him; forced him into going out on the water under my charge. Who shall say, after this, that I haven't done my best to discourage his advances, put myself in a bad light? As yet, my efforts are vain; ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various
... Dasaratha, lofty-souled, That city guarded and controlled, With towering Sal trees belted round,(65) And many a grove and pleasure ground, As royal Indra, throned on high, Rules his fair city in the sky.(66) She seems a painted city, fair With chess-board line and even square.(67) And cool boughs shade the lovely lake Where weary men their thirst may slake. There gilded chariots gleam and shine, And stately piles the Gods enshrine. There gay sleek people ever throng To festival and dance and song. A mine is she of gems ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... six years before I ever saw her. Uncle Chess says he heard it, and then forgot it, you know the way you do? I've been to Portland and Uncle Chess was bully. His old lawyer, whom he consulted at the time I left there, was dead, but we dug up the license bureau ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... earth. Then she roused herself from her long abstraction and looked through the window of her cabin, watching what seemed to be the gradual rising of the land towards the air-ship, showing in little green and brown patches like the squares of a chess-board,—then the houses and towns, tiny as children's toys—then the azure gleam of the sea and the boats dancing like bits of cork upon it,—then finally the plainer, broader view, wherein the earth with its woods and hills and rocky promontories appeared ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... the respectable race of ants began and with the ant-heap they will probably end, which does the greatest credit to their perseverance and good sense. But man is a frivolous and incongruous creature, and perhaps, like a chess player, loves the process of the game, not the end of it. And who knows (there is no saying with certainty), perhaps the only goal on earth to which mankind is striving lies in this incessant process of attaining, in other words, in life itself, and not in the thing to be attained, which must ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... provides for the soldier's intellectual and social needs. The piano and the phonograph, the billiard tables, draughts and chess boards, tables for games, library, and reading room keep him busy; and the concerts, stimulating lectures, moving pictures, educational classes, and debating societies provide him with recreational and ...
— With Our Soldiers in France • Sherwood Eddy
... flourish about less funny perhaps but decidedly more brilliant jests, until at last we retire one by one from the conversation and watch him with savage, weary eyes over our pipes. He invariably beats me at chess, invariably. People talk about him and ask my opinion of him, and if I venture to criticise him they begin to look as though they thought I was jealous. Grossly favourable notices of his books and his pictures crop up in the most ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... in young people when they are learning some game. Besides to do anything, or know anything, which is harmless, is beneficial. A man will not be a worse workman because he can play at cricket, or at chess; or because he is a good draughtsman, or can touch some musical instrument with skill. He is likely to have more self-respect, and to be a better citizen. He cannot succeed in anything without attention and endurance. And these are the qualities which will enable him to behave reasonably ...
— The Claims of Labour - an essay on the duties of the employers to the employed • Arthur Helps
... the latter had long been the scene of Adam's happiest hours, for he used to sit in it when he played chess with Costa. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... provisional defective marriage law a Utopia may be conceived as existing and studying to perfect itself, but without rulers a Utopia is impossible though the theory of its matrimony be complete. And the difficulty in this question is not simply the difficulty of a complicated chess problem, for example, in which the whole tangle of considerations does at least lie in one plane, but a series of problems upon different levels ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... assisted Antonio to depose his brother: and Prospero forgave them; and, upon their engaging to restore his dukedom, he said to the king of Naples, "I have a gift in store for you too;" and opening a door, shewed him his son Ferdinand, playing at chess with Miranda. ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... was then taken, and the evening meal, of tea, next partaken of. If it was school night, the voluntary pupils went to their tasks, the masters to their posts; reading men producing their books, writing men their desks, artists painted by candle-light, and cards, chess, or draughts, combined with conversation, and an evening's glass of grog, and a cigar or pipe, served to bring round ...
— Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal; • Sherard Osborn
... noticed that in one hand he held a small tea-pot. And in the left- hand corner, bent over a little table, and absorbed in their game, sat two other young men, correctly attired in English clothes, but obviously Chinese from their eyebrows to their toes, playing chess. ...
— The Orange-Yellow Diamond • J. S. Fletcher
... and near the base of the stone-ladders; a practice unquestionably taken from the original, unsophisticated, domestic defences of this wary and enterprising race. Among a great many of these chevaux-de-frise, I remarked certain iron images, that resemble the kings of chess-men, and which I took, at first, to be symbols of the calculating qualities of the owners of the mansions—a species of republican heraldry—but which the brigadier told me, on inquiry, were no more than a fashion that had descended from the custom of having stuffed images before the ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... that I cultivated the Fynes only in the country, in their holiday time. This was the third year. Of their existence in town I knew no more than may be inferred from analogy. I played chess with Fyne in the late afternoon, and sometimes came over to the cottage early enough to have tea with the whole family at a big round table. They sat about it, an unsmiling, sunburnt company of very few words indeed. Even the children were ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... comforts, even little luxuries for the boys. Here are concerts,—the best and best-known artists come out and give their services to cheer up Tommy. Here the padres will hold five or six services in an evening for the benefit of the five or six relays of men who can attend. Here are checker-boards, chess sets, cards, games of all sorts. Here is a miniature departmental store where footballs, mouth organs, pins, needles, buttons, ...
— Private Peat • Harold R. Peat
... a very pretty woman," observed Mr. Wyllys, as he seated himself at the chess-board, opposite his daughter, after the brother and sister ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... CHESS PATTERN.—Work a square in cross stitch, with three stitches, making three of a dark shade and six of white, working as many squares as you require, and leaving spaces equal to those occupied by cross stitch, which you must fill up with Irish stitch, working across the canvas. You can ...
— The Ladies' Work-Table Book • Anonymous
... loth to find himself in the fresh air again. Some progress had been made like the opening of a chess-match between masters, and yet the more Steel thought of it the more muddled and bewildered did he become. No complicated tangle in the way of a plot had ever been anything like the skein ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... position in Greece, it will be well to cast a glance on the attitudes maintained by the other Balkan States and the views entertained towards them by the Entente Powers. One must know all the possible combinations on the Balkan chess-board before one can profitably study or estimate the real place ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... the Master very rarely fails to come back to his original proposition, though he, like myself, is fond of zigzagging in order to reach it. Men's minds are like the pieces on a chess-board in their way of moving. One mind creeps from the square it is on to the next, straight forward, like the pawns. Another sticks close to its own line of thought and follows it as far as it goes, with no heed for others' opinions, as the bishop sweeps ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... in his hearing, he seldom failed to point out how necessary it was to arrest the object of your curiosity in its first transit, and to tell his favourite story of Snuffy Davie and Caxton's Game at Chess."Davy Wilson," he said, "commonly called Snuffy Davy, from his inveterate addiction to black rappee, was the very prince of scouts for searching blind alleys, cellars, and stalls for rare volumes. He had the ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... motion had been pretty lively during the passage across the Bay of Biscay; and by this time they had thoroughly settled down and become almost as perfectly at home in the ship as though they had been born on salt water. The gentlemen chatted, smoked, walked the poop, and played chess together, romped with the children, or read aloud to the ladies whilst they reclined in their deck-chairs and pretended to work, and otherwise made themselves generally useful. This was the usual disposition of their day from about nine a.m. to about eight o'clock p.m., the married ladies very ...
— The Missing Merchantman • Harry Collingwood
... expect," she said, "to be befriended for my own sake, and don't I deserve it? I cannot conceive how you can be amused by a wicked old hag and a girl, if possible, still more foolish. We are continually disputing about that silly wretch" (pointing to M. de Beaufort, who was playing chess); "let us take him with ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... next deal pass without any further attempt to discover Dodds's opinion about tommyrot. I was trying to think out what Mrs. Dodds meant by accusing me of wanting to play chess. It struck me as an entirely gratuitous and, using the word in its original sense, impertinent suggestion. Nothing I had said seemed in any way to imply that I was thinking of chess. As a matter of fact, I detest the game and never play it. I suppose ...
— Lalage's Lovers - 1911 • George A. Birmingham
... artillery, falling back on their centre, and stationing their cannon, which our gunners had begun to dismount, higher up the hill. But the remainder of their line did not change; they had squares of red and squares of black touching each other at the corners like the squares of a chess-board, in the rear of the deep road; and in attacking them we would come under their crossfire. Their artillery was in position on the brow of the hill, and in the hollow on the hill-side toward Mont-St.-Jean their cavalry ...
— Waterloo - A sequel to The Conscript of 1813 • Emile Erckmann
... end of the day the rain ceased and the wind began to drop perceptibly. Von Koren had already made up his mind that he would not be able to get off that day, and had settled down to play chess with Samoylenko; but after dark the orderly announced that there were lights on the sea and that a rocket had ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... Norah; "he makes me mad when he speaks to you in that condescending way of his, Daddy. I'll be calmer to-morrow." She smiled up at her father. "Have a game of chess?" ...
— Mates at Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... near the window, the inlaid chess table in the corner beside the white marble mantel, even the folds of the handsome lace curtains, seemed petrified into their present positions. For thirty years the mantle mirror had been reflecting the Dresden clock and candelabra, and the ...
— The Pleasant Street Partnership - A Neighborhood Story • Mary F. Leonard
... permeated both Judaism and Christianity. Christianity has probably received from it, through Judaism, its doctrine of angels and devils, and its tendency to establish evil in the world as the permanent and equal adversary of good. Such a picture as that by Retzsch of the Devil playing chess with the young man for his soul, such a picture as that by Guido of the conflict between Michael and Satan, such poems as Milton's Paradise Lost and Goethe's Faust, could perhaps never have appeared in Christendom, had it not been for the influence of the system of Zoroaster on ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... opponent's left, center and right in a desperate effort to pierce the wall of gray, and once or twice his heroic veterans almost succeeded in battering their way through. But at every crisis Lee rose to the emergency and moved his regiments as a skillful chess player manipulates his pieces on the board, now massing his troops at the danger point and now diverting his adversary's attack by a swift counter-stroke delivered by men unacquainted with defeat. Both his hands were heavily swathed ...
— On the Trail of Grant and Lee • Frederick Trevor Hill
... employer had merely bidden him be ready to meet her there, without surprise. There was as yet no lightning move up on the chess board, and in vain he studied her resolute, smiling face. "All I can tell you," murmured Justine to her handsome Mentor, in the seclusion of Ram Lal's back room, "is that this Madame Berthe Louison comes to spend the day in looking over Hugh Johnstone's art treasures. Nadine and I are ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... leaped to meet her. He could not talk much, but he lay looking at her and breathing in a sweet contentment. After awhile he was well enough to sit up half-dressed in a steamer chair and play chess with her. ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... hurry and passion of real fighting. It also made the game brisker. We have since also made a limit, sometimes of four minutes, sometimes of five minutes, to the interval for adjustment and deliberation after one move is finished and before the next move begins. This further removes the game from the chess category, and approximates it to the likeness of active service. Most of a general's decisions, once a fight has begun, must be made in such brief intervals of time. (But we leave unlimited time at the outset ...
— Little Wars; a game for boys from twelve years of age to one hundred and fifty and for that more intelligent sort of girl who likes boys' games and books • H. G. Wells
... must go back to those stirring times in Europe when Napoleon, the great conqueror, was in the height of his career, and was disposing of countries at his will, much as a chess-player moves the king, queen, and knights upon his board. In 1807 one of his armies, led by Marshal Junot, was marching on Lisbon, with the purpose of punishing Portugal for the crime of being a friend of the ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume III • Charles Morris
... into the saloon, where they found Thelma being initiated into the mysteries of chess by Duprez, while Macfarlane and Lorimer looked idly on. She glanced up from the board as her father and Errington entered, and smiled at them both with ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... just a space jockey, doing his job in this screwball fight out here in the empty reaches. Back on Earth, there was no war. The statesmen talked, held conferences, played international chess as ever. Neither side bothered the other's satellites, though naturally they were on permanent alert. There just wasn't going to be any Moon station for a while. Nobody knew what there might be on the Moon, but if one side couldn't have it, then the ...
— Slingshot • Irving W. Lande
... at home, tonight," said the colonel; "you were out last evening, and going out much tires you, I know. What do you say to a quiet game at chess?" ...
— The Coquette's Victim • Charlotte M. Braeme
... mind, Strathmore's thoughts floated onward to a piece of statecraft then numbered among the delicate diplomacies and intricate embroglie of Europe, whose moves absorbed him as the finesses of a problem absorb a skilful chess-player, and from thence stretched onwards to his future, in which he lived, like all men of dominant ambition, far more than he lived in his present. It was a future brilliant, secure, brightening in its lustre, and strengthening ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... his legs, as he slewed round, showed like the lower limb of the letter O. Through the closed skylight windows I could get a sort of watery view of the cuddy passengers—as they were then called—reading, playing at chess, playing the piano, below. There were some scores of steerage and 'tween-deck passengers, deeper yet in the bowels of the ship, but hidden out of ...
— The Honour of the Flag • W. Clark Russell
... No! though your father sues: see how you stand Stiff as Lot's wife, and all the good knights maimed, I trust that there is no one hurt to death, For our wild whim: and was it then for this, Was it for this we gave our palace up, Where we withdrew from summer heats and state, And had our wine and chess beneath the planes, And many a pleasant hour with her that's gone, Ere you were born to vex us? Is it kind? Speak to her I say: is this not she of whom, When first she came, all flushed you said to me Now had you got a friend of your own age, Now could you share your thought; ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... two old men, with long, white beards, were sitting inside playing chess, as quietly as mice, with their eyes fixed ...
— The Book of Stories for the Storyteller • Fanny E. Coe
... symbolical—is to minister to the needs of the three parts of man—body, mind, and soul. At the bar which stands at one end of the hut men buy food, drink (strictly non-alcoholic), and tobacco. In the body of the room men play draughts, chess, anything except cards, read papers and write letters. Often there are concerts and lectures. Sometimes there are classes which very few men attend. So ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... play not a word was spoken by either party, the two sheiks squatting opposite each other, and making their moves with as much gravity as a pair of chess-players engaged in some grand tournament of ...
— The Boy Slaves • Mayne Reid
... he was often summoned; and as both the fakir and he were very fond of chess and were good players, they used to sit up half the night playing, and at last a little room in the house began to be called the king's room, and whenever he stayed late he used to sleep there and go home again in ...
— The Olive Fairy Book • Various
... thousand Turks, and eight hundred thousand Mongols, if one may credit the reports—met at Ancyra. The Ottomans were defeated, and Bajazet was taken prisoner. Led into the presence of Tamerlane, he found the Mongol quietly playing chess with his son. Asia Minor submitted to the conqueror, who penetrated as far as Smyrna. An old man, he was looking towards China as another field for invasion, when he died (1405). Bajazet died soon ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... truth, and alleviates, perhaps, to a royal ear, the harshness of instruction. With a similar design, to admonish kings that they are strong only in the strength of their subjects, the same Indians invented the game of chess, which was likewise introduced into Persia under the reign ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... her interests. So I took up my hat, and deliberately walked out of the front door. "Tell him," said I to Jemima, "that I'm not at home." And so I went away direct to Fisher's, meaning to send him back to Lupex as my friend; but Fisher was at his chess-club. ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... decorated with beautiful flowers on a white ground) into drawing-room doors, and also into walls which, being panel papered, offer opportunities of introducing centre pieces of the same character as the doors; elegant chess and work-tables, folding and cheval-screens, panels for cabinets, chiffoniers and book-cases, slabs for pier and console-tables, glove-boxes, covers for books, music, albums, &c. The most common cause of failure is, that the drawings inside are not ...
— Young's Demonstrative Translation of Scientific Secrets • Daniel Young
... Tom.—Tom was right in that, for one person can no more quarrel without an adversary, than one person can play at chess, or fight a duel. 'I hoped you would be glad to shake hands with an old friend. Don't let us rake up bygones,' said Tom. 'If I ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... mighty conjurors created a man out of brass and wood, and leather, and endowed him with such ingenuity that he would have beaten at chess, all the race of mankind with the exception of the great Caliph, Haroun Alraschid. (*22) Another of these magi constructed (of like material) a creature that put to shame even the genius of him who made it; for so great were its reasoning ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... were no sedentary games in our repertoire. Cards were unknown. The General was said to like a quiet game of whist in his own room, but if he had a pack of cards, it was probably the only one on the Farm. There was no prejudice against cards or chess or any other game so far as I know, but no one cared for any form of amusement that separated two or four from all the others. I imagine that even courting, the divine solitude of two, must have been handicapped by this persistent penchant ...
— My Friends at Brook Farm • John Van Der Zee Sears
... and wonderful things that the pirates must have stolen from other ships: Kashmir shawls as thin as a cobweb, embroidered with flowers of gold; jars of fine tobacco from Jamaica; carved ivory boxes full of Russian tea; an old violin with a string broken and a picture on the back; a set of big chess-men, carved out of coral and amber; a walking-stick which had a sword inside it when you pulled the handle; six wine-glasses with turquoise and silver round the rims; and a lovely great sugar-bowl, made of mother ...
— The Story of Doctor Dolittle • Hugh Lofting
... monsieur le marechal, I used to hate the great before I knew you, and I hate them still more, since you make me feel so strongly how easy it would be for them to have themselves adored."[3] On another occasion he happened to be playing at chess with the Prince of Conti, who had come to visit him in his cottage.[4] In spite of the signs and grimaces of the attendants, he insisted on beating the prince in a couple of games. Then he said with respectful ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... country carts and country riders by families crowding it on market-days, and making every yard of the old street a picture such as delights the traveller from cities whose plan is conveniently but not picturesquely that of a chess-board. The baths, like those of Schlangenbad, are in great favor with nervous women, and like that neighborhood too, so has this its miniature Olivet and Calvary, the devout legacy of some unknown crusader, who also founded at Ahrweiler ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... may be here briefly noticed. First: a German metrical version of the Game of Chess, moralized, called Der Schachzabel. This is an extraordinary, and highly illuminated MS. upon paper; written in a sort of secretary gothic hand, in short rhyming verse, as I conceive about the year 1400, or 1450. The embellishments are large and droll, and in several of them we distinguish ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... through which we passed spoke with but one meaning. I saw it as the chess-board of the War of the Rebellion. I imagined the towns fortified and besieged, the hills topped with artillery, the forests alive with troops in ambush, and in my mind, on account of their strategic value to the enemy, I destroyed the bridges over ...
— Captain Macklin • Richard Harding Davis
... unquestionably taken from the original, unsophisticated, domestic defences of this wary and enterprising race. Among a great many of these chevaux-de-frise, I remarked certain iron images, that resemble the kings of chess-men, and which I took, at first, to be symbols of the calculating qualities of the owners of the mansions—a species of republican heraldry—but which the brigadier told me, on inquiry, were no more ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... pastimes, and bold shepherds' presumptions. We call ourselves kings and queens to make mirth; but when we see a king or queen we stand amazed. At chess there are kings and queens, and they of wood. Shepherds are no more, nor no less, wooden. In theatres workmen have played emperors; yet the next day forgotten neither their duties nor occupation. For our boldness in borrowing their names, and in not seeing Your Majesty for our ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... from San-Lucar in a remote part of Andalusia. She was a model of devotion and grace. Don Juan foresaw that this would be a woman who would struggle long against a passion before yielding, and therefore hoped to keep her virtuous until his death. It was a jest undertaken in earnest, a game of chess which he meant to reserve till his old age. Don Juan had learned wisdom from the mistakes made by his father Bartolommeo; he determined that the least details of his life in old age should be subordinated to one object—the ...
— The Elixir of Life • Honore de Balzac
... found in the composer's work. But as a rule Gretry is happiest in his delicate little pastorals and fantastic comedies, and, for all their slightness, his works bear the test of revival better than those of many of his more learned contemporaries. Philidor (1726-1797) was almost more famous as a chess-player than as a composer. He had the advantage of a sound musical education under Campra, one of the predecessors of Rameau, and his music has far more solid qualities than that of Gretry or Monsigny. His treatment of the orchestra, too, was more scientific than that of his contemporaries, but ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... ill, she would have sent for the doctor," said gossip number one; "now the doctor has been playing chess in my house all day. He said to me, laughing, that in these days there is only one disease, and that, ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... smoking and enjoying themselves over a glass of cold grog—the gunner taking the watch on deck the doctor was piping any thing but mellifluously on the double flageolet, while the Spanish priest, and aide—de—camp to the general, were playing at chess, and wrangling in bad French. I could hear Mr Treenail rumbling and stumbling in his stateroom as he accoutred himself in a jacket similar to those of the armed boat's crew whom I had passed, and presently he stepped into the gunroom, armed ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... we may be quartered there for the next two or three years. How it will turn out I know no more than the man in the moon: a soldier is a mere machine, and is moved by his superiors just as a chessman by a chess-player. Should there be any skrimmaging, our men are in high spirits, and will, I think, soon make the Ameers put their pipes in their pockets. Ours is the first European army that has been on the Indus since the ...
— Campaign of the Indus • T.W.E. Holdsworth
... they were the invention of a lady of the Palace in the tenth century, who substituted imitation leaves of gilt paper for real leaves, which had previously been adopted for playing some kind of game. There are also various games played with chequers, some of great antiquity; and there is chess, that is to say, a game so little differing from our chess as to leave no doubt as to the common origin of both. In all of these the money element comes in; and it is not too much to say that more homes are broken up, and more misery ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... his turn came—when gifts upon gifts were offered to him—sets of silken handkerchiefs (he couldn't bear the touch of a silk handkerchief!), a cabinet of cards and chips and counters of all sorts (he never played cards), an inlaid chess-table and ivory men (the game was unknown to him), a gorgeous scarf-pin (he abominated jewelery), a five pound box of candy (he never ate it), his feelings so mounted within him, that since he would not express, ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... Chopin had taken, the reader will recognise the "clever [geistreiche], musical Dr. Hermann Franck," the friend of many musical and other celebrities, the same with whom Mendelssohn used to play at chess during his stay in Paris. From Hiller I learned that Franck was very musical, and that his attainments in the natural sciences were considerable; but that being well-to-do he was without a profession. In the ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... contained. Yet Philip said there was a world in those books. The room was a small and singularly cosy one, and here, when Mr. Faringfield was not occupied at the mahogany desk, we children might play at chess, draughts, cards, and other games. From this room, one went back into the dining-room, another apartment endeared to me by countless pleasant memories. Its two windows looked Southward across the side grounds (for the hall and ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens
... while they were in the act of close reefing the topsails, and the brig cast to port. She drifted about three or four hundred yards, and struck at last on a half-tide rock, from which all their efforts were unavailing to haul her off again, and at low water she bilged, and parted in two abreast the chess tree. ...
— Narratives of Shipwrecks of the Royal Navy; between 1793 and 1849 • William O. S. Gilly
... that everybody knew everybody at the Cafe Procope, and that the specialty of the establishment was dominoes—just as the specialty of the Cafe de la Regence is chess. There were games going on before long at almost every table, and groups of lookers-on gathered about those who enjoyed the reputation of being ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... and country seats, as we beheld from this unhappy spot. No blight had fallen on old Essex; all was prosperity and riches, healthfully distributed. Before us lay our native town, extending from the foot of the hill to the harbor, level as a chess board, embraced by two arms of the sea, and filling the whole peninsula with a close assemblage of wooden roofs, overtopped by many a spire, and intermixed with frequent heaps of verdure, where trees threw up their shade from unseen trunks. ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Frohman usually sat alone about the tenth row back. He rarely rose from his seat, but by voice and gesture indicated the moves on his dramatic chess-board. When it became necessary for him to go on the stage he did so with alacrity. He suggested, by marvelously simple indications and quick transitions, the significance of the scene or the ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... bloodhounds shall not lightly find, yet easy of access unto them that do know the way." So he buried all the books at which offence could be taken, leaving only his own law-books, and Isoult's "Romaunts" that she had when a girl, and Dr Thorpe's "Game of the Chess," and Robin's "Song of the Lady Bessy," and the "Little Gest of ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... kingdoms waste, Taken no princes captive, led no triumphs Of weeping women through long walls of trumpets; Say rather I am no one, or an atom; Say rather, two great gods in a vault of starlight Play ponderingly at chess; and at the game's end One of the pieces, shaken, falls to the floor And runs to the darkest corner; and that piece Forgotten there, left motionless, is I.... Say that I have no name, no gifts, no power, ...
— American Poetry, 1922 - A Miscellany • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... is like moving a piece at chess it may be taken, but it forms the beginning of a game ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... contrived and a provisional defective marriage law a Utopia may be conceived as existing and studying to perfect itself, but without rulers a Utopia is impossible though the theory of its matrimony be complete. And the difficulty in this question is not simply the difficulty of a complicated chess problem, for example, in which the whole tangle of considerations does at least lie in one plane, but a series of problems upon different levels ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... when the service was removed, Sir Lemuel challenged Lady Belgrade for a game of chess, and told his daughter to show Mr. Scott those chromoes of the Madonnas of Raphael which had arrived in the last ...
— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth
... courage, for as soon as I get excited or hurt I never think of being afraid, but go it half-mad-like, wanting to do all the mischief I can to whoever it is that has hurt me; but what I shall always want will be the cool, calm chess-player's head that helps a man to take advantage of every move the enemy makes, and check him. I shall always be the fellow who shoves out his queen and castle and goes slashing into the adversary till he smashes him or gets too ...
— The Kopje Garrison - A Story of the Boer War • George Manville Fenn
... Reading-Room,' at 599 Broadway, near Houston-street, supplies an important desideratum in that quarter of the metropolis. In addition to a well-stocked library and reading-room, there are coffee, conversation, chess, and cigar-apartments, and all the belongings of a first establishment after its kind. . . . WE had clipped for insertion, from a Baltimore journal, a poem in honor of OLE BULL, entitled 'The Bewitched Fiddle,' which we have unluckily ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... but they are not free from one-sided views and generalisations resting on insufficient data. He has, however, the credit of having contributed a new idea of history and the method of writing it. The completed work was to have extended to 14 vols. B. was one of the greatest chess-players in Europe. ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... storm-wind which rushes from the mountain to the valley beneath, and in its fury snaps asunder the trunks of large trees as if they were but slender reeds, and carries the wooden houses from one side of a river to the other as easily as we could move the pieces on a chess-board. After an hour had passed, they told Rudy that it was all over, and he might go to sleep; and, fatigued with his long walk, he readily slept ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... name of our rook in chess is taken from that of this same bird; though first perverted from ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... all these follies were practised, they would not suffer men to play at chess! Velly says, "A statute of Eudes de Sully prohibits clergymen not only from playing at chess, but even from having a chess-board in their house." Who could believe, that while half the ceremonies of religion consisted in the grossest buffoonery, a prince preferred death rather than cure himself by a ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... struggle, grim and momentous. He recognized that until now General Rojas had never been to him a flesh-and-blood person, that he had not appreciated that his rescue meant actual life and happiness. He had considered him rather as one of the pieces in a game of chess, which Peter and himself were secretly playing against the Commandant of the San Carlos prison. And now, here, confronting him, was a human being, living, breathing, suffering, the daughter of this chessman, bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh, demanding of the stranger by what right he made himself ...
— The White Mice • Richard Harding Davis
... a coup in war, I believe, to take the enemy's capital, isn't it? like taking a queen at chess. We keep on taking capitals, but I can't say it seems to make much difference. The Boers set no store by them apparently; neither Bloemfontein nor Pretoria have been seriously defended, and they go on fighting after their loss just as ...
— With Rimington • L. March Phillipps
... of the people? Ye gods, but you watch these same people for a few years. You say they run the government! They and their government are run by Wall street, which owns the United States senate, body and soul. The people are pawns on a chess board, moved by the players, and they only talk, while the Wall street owners act. Let me tell you a story. I once had a dog trained so that he would lay down and roll over for a cracker, and would hold a piece of meat on his nose until his mouth would water ...
— Peck's Bad Boy With the Cowboys • Hon. Geo. W. Peck
... of playing a game of chess with this great man. It was during the Christmas holidays, and I had come down to Roughborough for a few days to see Alethea Pontifex (who was then living there) on business. It was very gracious of him to take notice of me, for if I was a light of literature at all it was of the ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... is difficult," said he, "to know what to make of those who are all day long cramming themselves with food and are without anything to apply their minds to! Are there no dice and chess players? Better, perhaps, join in that pursuit than do ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous
... other with a shrug of his shoulders. "I mean to amuse myself. I shall move you about like pieces on a chess-board, and have a pretty game with you. How to checkmate the king with a knight and a princess, in any number of moves you like—that is the problem; and my princess has a strong power over the king where she is ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... Livingstone—the firm at the time of which I am now writing was Lynde, Livingstone & Co. Mr. David Lynde lived in a set of chambers up town, and dined at his club, where he usually passed the evenings at chess with some brother antediluvian. A visit to the theatre, when some old English comedy or some new English ballet happened to be on the boards, was the periphery of his dissipation. What is called society saw ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... affair—a matter which might ground them more effectively than any rule of the law enforcement bodies. And Jellico took to pacing the room, while Tang and Wilcox who had started a game of four dimensional chess made countless errors of move, and Stotz glared moodily at the wall, apparently too sunk in his own gloomy thoughts to rise from the mess table in ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... over a chess-board, but could see only a large felt hat and a red beard. We threaded our way among the tables till we came ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... People who talk English, drink beer, like jokes and beat me at chess or table-tennis are people for my money, even if they look like tigers ...
— Accidental Death • Peter Baily
... been to Turin, by the way? To that city which reminds one of nothing so much as a gigantic chess-board set down upon the banks of the yellow river—that city with never-ending, straight streets, all running at right angles to each other, and whose extremities frame in delicious pictures of wooded hill or snow-capped Alp; whose inhabitants recall the grace and courtesy of the Parisians, ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 2, February, 1891 • Various
... to sleep: he never felt more wakeful in his life; so he lit the lamp and got out the chess-board, and played himself a game of chess. But even that did not enliven him: it seemed slow somehow; so he gave chess up and tried to read. He did not seem able to take any sort of interest in reading either, so he put on his ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... for the soldier's intellectual and social needs. The piano and the phonograph, the billiard tables, draughts and chess boards, tables for games, library, and reading room keep him busy; and the concerts, stimulating lectures, moving pictures, educational classes, and debating societies provide him with recreational ...
— With Our Soldiers in France • Sherwood Eddy
... in that act when I thought James Lewis suspected me. I had just taken my seat opposite him at the chess table, when he gave a little jerk at his chair, exclaiming under his breath, "Blast ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... worked in those early years as if we really believed the portentous statement from Aristotle which we found quoted in Boswell's Johnson and with which we illuminated the wall of the room occupied by our Chess Club; it remained there for months, solely out of reverence, let us hope, for the two ponderous names associated with it; at least I have enough confidence in human nature to assert that we never really believed that "There ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... who, some thousand years before Christ, crossed the blue-green Nile, followed by other boats filled with her priests and princes, her officers, her mourning women. North and south, the flaps are of chess-board pattern in squares of pink and green; behind one of which was hidden the small room which held naught but a crystal pitcher and crystal basin, filled to the brim with water for the ablutions at the Hour of Nazam, which ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... which indulged these flighty monks includes 'games played with six and ten pieces, tossing up, hopping over diagrams, dice, jackstraws,[38] ball, sketching, racing, marbles, wrestling,' etc; to which a like list (Tevijja, II) adds chess or checkers ('playing with a board of sixty-four squares or one hundred squares'), ghost stories, and unseemly wrangling in regard to belief ("I am orthodox, you are heterodox"), earning a living by prognostication, by taking omens 'from a mirror' ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... chess the rest of the day. Max won consistently. He utilizes a fianchetto that is utterly impregnable. If he wins tomorrow, I ...
— Competition • James Causey
... holiday was to go to a cricket match, which he did as if he was going to church, and he watched critically, applauded sparingly, and was darkly offended by any unorthodox play. His convictions upon all subjects were taciturnly inflexible. He was an obstinate player of draughts and chess, and an earnest and persistent reader of the British Weekly. His wife was a pink, short, wilfully smiling, managing, ingratiating, talkative woman, who was determined to be pleasant, and take a bright hopeful view of everything, ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... his attendants every morning to know the distance run, the state of the wind, and other particulars connected with their progress. He read a great deal, dressed towards four o'clock, and then came into the public saloon; here he played at chess with one of the party; at five o'clock the Admiral announced that dinner was on the table. It is well known that Napoleon was scarcely ever more than fifteen minutes at dinner; here the two courses alone took up nearly an hour and a half. This was a serious annoyance ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... circumstances of life that trouble or weigh upon us, it is the way we take them. If a man is playing a difficult game of chess, the more intricate the moves the more thoughtfully he looks over his own and his opponent's men, and the more fully he is aroused to make the right move toward a checkmate. If, when the game became difficult, ...
— The Freedom of Life • Annie Payson Call
... difficult to believe in the sincerity of the sentiments here expressed, when we consider that Lord Haldane belonged to the inner circle of the Cabinet and therefore must have known the secret chess-moves of Grey's policy. Furthermore, he did not resign, as did three other members of the Cabinet—Lord Morley, Burns, and Charles Trevelyan—when, on Aug. 4, Sir Edward's false game was shown up and when treaties grew out of those "conversations" and alliances out of those ententes, ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... I. Indeed, it is the only game that I remember. I dislike cards. They bore me to death. So dus chess. People love to call them intellectual pastimes; but, surely, if a man wants exercise for his intellect, there are enough problems in this complicated universe for him to worry his brains over, with more profit to himself and the world. And as for the pastime—I consider that when ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... weird business—a swiftly played chess game, almost noiseless; for wherever Ali Baba charged the enemy drew off, while the rest came closer until they were ...
— The Lion of Petra • Talbot Mundy
... ever load his memory with indelible infamy. The story, in substance, I understand to be this—That Lord Braxfield once tried a man for forgery at the Circuit at Dumfries, who was not merely an acquaintance, but an intimate friend of his Lordship, with whom he used to play at chess: That he did this as coolly as if he had been a perfect stranger: That the man was found guilty: That he pronounced sentence of death upon him; and then added, "Now, John, I think I have checkmated you now." A more unfeeling and brutal conduct it is hardly ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... old French ivory to-day (Poor perished beauty's deathless mirror-cases!) Reveal to me the delicate amorous play Of reed-like flowering folk with pointed faces. Lovers ride hawking; over chess delight; The Castle of Ladies renders up its keys, Its roses all being flung; a gracious knight Kneels to his garlander mid orchard-trees. Passionate pilgrims, do ye keep so fast Your dream of miracles and heights? Ah, ...
— The Hours of Fiammetta - A Sonnet Sequence • Rachel Annand Taylor
... old. They will see us out, I am inclined to think. Their energy, their intelligence—when these show above the groundwork—are monstrous. I have known a Russian learn Chinese within six months. English! they learn it while you are talking to them. The children play at chess and study the violin ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... up from a bed of gall or bog-myrtle I shared with John Splendid after a late game of chess, and fared out on a little eminence looking over the scene. Not a soldier stirred in his plaid; the army was drugged by the heavy fir-winds from the forest behind. The light of the morning flowed up wider and whiter from the Cowal hills, the birds woke to ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... a coward and a liar, for he had never ridden the flame, but had sent Sigurd to do it for him, and pretended that he had done it himself. And she said he would never see her glad in his hall, never drinking wine, never playing chess, never embroidering with the golden thread, never speaking words of kindness. Then she rent all her needlework asunder and wept aloud, so that everyone in the house heard her. For her heart was broken, and her pride was broken in ...
— The Red Fairy Book • Various
... her four-and-twenty ladies would play their games of chess. Many a game had Janet won ...
— Stories from the Ballads - Told to the Children • Mary MacGregor
... never had a governess at all like you. They were old, and cross, and ugly, and didn't love to play chess, and could not sing, and I hated them! But I do like you, and I will try ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... was fair," said a lady's voice. "I firmly believe, and I've said it all along, that you let me beat you. Why, you taught me chess yourself, and how is it possible that I could catch up to my master in ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... as its name implies, is devoted to chess. Germans patronize it to a great extent. Politics do not enter into the precincts sacred ...
— The Dodge Club - or, Italy in 1859 • James De Mille
... a mere pawn on the political chess-board and his master occasionally has him elected to office. Then the master tells him how to decide, not all, but ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... lantern, bagatelle, tivoli, and dolls, a very merry morning might be spent. The young people then dispersed in search of their own peculiar amusements. Some of the young men went into the billiard-room, and a few chess parties were formed. Some began to act charades for the edification of such among the elders as would choose to make an audience. A still larger party adjourned to the school-room to play at houses with their dolls, and two tables were soon spread with ground plans of three ...
— Louis' School Days - A Story for Boys • E. J. May
... religious subjects, the whole courtly company which lives and breathes in the legends of the Round Table, kings and knights, poets, minstrels, and fair damsels, hawking, jousting, banqueting and playing chess, everything which stirred the poet's imagination, is depicted. The spirit of the romances which in modern times enchanted the English Pre-Raphaelites, six centuries ago provided food and stimulus to the industrious illuminators whose names have long ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... L. Hollingworth[164] observes, "or as the result of unexplained mutation or deviation from type, are: mathematical aptitude, ability in drawing,[165] musical composition,[166] singing, poetic reaction, military strategy, chess playing. Pitch discrimination seems to depend on structural factors which are not susceptible of improvement by practice.[167] The same may be said of various forms of professional athletic achievement. Color blindness seems to be an instance ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... Anglo-German artist, one Webb, and was eager to secure it, though he objected to the price. However, on the morning of his departure the secretary drove up on an outside car to announce that the artist would take fifty pounds, which Forster gave. This was "The Chess-players," which now hangs ...
— John Forster • Percy Hethrington Fitzgerald
... professional dancing girls, but dancing as a social amusement is naturally regarded with disfavor. Children have various games peculiar to themselves, which are abandoned as childish things at a given age. Riddles and enigmas occupy a good deal of time among the higher classes. Chess also occupies much time, but it is much to be feared that the vice of gambling stimulated by the Chinese, who have introduced both cards and dice, is taking the ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... winter in the halls where they eat; where they entertain each other, either with music or discourse. They do not so much as know dice, or any such foolish and mischievous games: they have, however, two sorts of games not unlike our chess; the one is between several numbers, in which one number, as it were, consumes another: the other resembles a battle between the virtues and the vices, in which the enmity in the vices among themselves, and their agreement against virtue, is not unpleasantly represented; together with ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... rest; and Lord Anglesea solicited admirably, and I did wonders. But, after all, the matter was put off till Monday, and then we are to be at it again. I dined with Lord Mountjoy, and looked over him at chess, which put me in mind of Stella and Griffyth.(2) I came home, and that dog Patrick was not within; so I fretted, and fretted, and what ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... from now till Monday week (Ten peerless days in all) I take my stand Vestured in some degage mode of breek (The chess-board touch, with squares that almost speak), And lightly sketch my Slice into the Sand, As based on bigger men, but ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 22, 1914 • Various
... said, "every sin has its antithesis. It's like a chess board—the human mind—with the black men ranged on one side and the white on the other, ready to move, to advance, skirmish, threaten, manoeuvre, attack, and check each other, and the intervening squares represent the checkered battlefield of ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... admirably built, leaving nothing whatever to be desired. The cabins are roomy, and comfortably fitted up; there is an excellent library, containing the classics of European literature; various musical instruments, from a beautiful grand-piano [24] to flutes and guitars; then chess, draughts, etc.—all for the recreation of ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... picture of all that he went through, in the most minute details. During the day we see the pilgrims crowded together on deck, some drinking and singing, others playing dice or cards or that unfailing pastime for ship-life, chess. Talking, reading, telling their beads, writing diaries, sleeping, hunting in their clothes for vermin; so they spend their day. Some for exercise climb up the rigging, or jump, or brandish heavy weights: some ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... head. He will come into a room where we are jesting perhaps, and immediately begin to flourish about less funny perhaps but decidedly more brilliant jests, until at last we retire one by one from the conversation and watch him with savage, weary eyes over our pipes. He invariably beats me at chess, invariably. People talk about him and ask my opinion of him, and if I venture to criticise him they begin to look as though they thought I was jealous. Grossly favourable notices of his books and his pictures crop up in the most unlikely places; indeed I ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... brother: and Prospero forgave them; and, upon their engaging to restore his dukedom, he said to the King of Naples, "I have a gift in store for you, too"; and, opening a door, showed him his son Ferdinand playing at chess with Miranda. ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... later, Captain Koenig, in paying a visit to the cabin found the latter studying over a chess board. ...
— The Boy Allies with Uncle Sams Cruisers • Ensign Robert L. Drake
... keen interest. A long ladder, which had been left in the hall, leaning against the wall, was a perfect treasure to those who most craved active exercise. They practiced all sorts of gymnastics on this ladder, and cooled the fever in their blood with fatigue. Chess finally became the standard amusement, and those who did not understand the game watched it nevertheless with as much apparent relish as if they understood it. Chess books were bought and studied as carefully ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... pile-driving and wattling and willow mattrasses in the diary, with the improvements he thought advisable, and some very scientific suggestions by which the river could be made to checkmate itself, like an automaton chess-player. He hung over the guards continually, observing all that was to be observed, and recorded the same under separate headings, such as "currents," "velocity," "flood-rises," with statistics without end showing ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... attain to worthy pleasures. Men and women contend for each other in the lists of love, like rival mesmerists; the active and adroit decide their challenges in the sports of the body; and the sedentary sit down to chess or conversation. All sluggish and pacific pleasures are, to the same degree, solitary and selfish; and every durable bond between human beings is founded in or heightened by some element of competition. Now, the relation that has the least root in matter ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... others. He was an ardent student of the game of man and woman, had made considerable progress at it—remarkable progress, in view of his bare twenty years. He had devised as many "openings" as an expert chess player. None seemed to fit this difficult case how to make love to a girl of his own class whom his conventional, socially ambitious nature forbade him to consider marrying. As he observed her in the moonlight, he said to himself: "I've got to look out ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... him, of course, and freely, because he was her father and it was her duty to bear with him; but she felt the injustice deeply, for all that. Then, when she went up into the nursery, Alick and Betty made a frantic uproar, merely because she insisted on teaching them the moves in chess, when they perversely wanted to play Halma! So, feeling baffled and sick at heart, she had put on her hat and run out all alone to a quiet lane near her home, where she could soothe her troubled mind by thinking over the ingratitude and lack of ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... sat all day in the sunshine, studying the week's Paris newspapers with dim, kindly eyes, or played interminable chess games with his wife on ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... the next steps, and a reconciliation was determined upon as giving time for reflection. Cassius went to sup with Antony, and Brutus with Lepidus. This shows plainly that the good of the republic was not the cause nearest the hearts of the principal actors; but that each, like a wary player at chess, was only anxious lest some adversary should get ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... gloomily eying his own reflection in the broad polished rim of a silver fruit-dish that stood near him. Giacomo, the butler, had long ago left the room; we were entirely alone. I thought over my plans for a moment or two; the game was as interesting as a problem in chess. With the deliberation of a prudent player I ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... He felt no trace of remorse now for the past; the sense of injustice swallowed all that. Every day seemed to drive that past further off, and to increase the sense of detachment from that other man and his works; yet every night a hand, like the hand of some remorseless chess player, put ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... of whom there were many and fair. Some were feeding in the streets their sparrow-hawks and moulting falcons; others were giving an airing to their tercels, [16] their mewed birds, and young yellow hawks; others play at dice or other game of chance, some at chess, and some at backgammon. The grooms in front of the stables are rubbing down and currying the horses. The ladies are bedecking themselves in their boudoirs. As soon as they see the knight coming, whom they recognised with his dwarf and damsel, they go out ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... It has not taken them long to see how ridiculous an athlete makes himself who hides behind the excuse of sickness or lack of training. They are impressed by the way in which the non-apologetic spirit is invading the less athletic games, even down to such a sedentary affair as chess. This remarkable rule, for example, was proposed in the recent chess match between Lasker ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... she knew, without being seen to look, just what his play of feature and various expressions were; all the while she was calmly embroidering, or idly gazing out of the window, or skilfully playing chess with Mr. ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... Three or four stout, blond girls plodded back and forth, from tables to front shop, bearing trays of cakes and steaming cups of coffee. There was a rumble and clatter of German. Every one seemed to know every one else. A game of chess was in progress at one table, and between moves each contestant would refresh himself with a long-drawn, sibilant mouthful of coffee. There was nothing about the place or its occupants to remind one of America. This dim, smoky, ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... her long abstraction and looked through the window of her cabin, watching what seemed to be the gradual rising of the land towards the air-ship, showing in little green and brown patches like the squares of a chess-board,—then the houses and towns, tiny as children's toys—then the azure gleam of the sea and the boats dancing like bits of cork upon it,—then finally the plainer, broader view, wherein the earth with its woods and hills and rocky promontories appeared to heave up like a billow crowned ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... has the illusion of freewill. Doubtless the pieces in that chess game, which Eastern monarchs are said to play with human figures, come to think they move of themselves. The knight chuckles as he makes his tortuous jump at the queen, and the bishop swoops down on the ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... of the second day from the setting in of the storm, Miss Deane challenged Edward to a game of chess. He accepted at once, and with an air of quiet satisfaction brought out the board, ...
— Elsie's Kith and Kin • Martha Finley
... have treasure to give them. We are not so troublesome as they; the more's the pity. No offence to you, however, or to the emperor, or to great Rome, Cornelius. We are over our cups; it's only a game of politics, you know, like chess or the cottabus. Maro bids you 'parcere subjectis, et debellare superbos;' but you have changed your manners. You coax the Goths ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... myself," said she, "till Miss Stanhope called yesterday. However, I like her very much, and I have promised to go and play chess with some of them." ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... somewhat complicated products of human industry are regarded as living beings, and in their manner endowed with magical properties. A multiplicity of celebrated objects have proper names, such as the drinking-cup, the lance, the sword, and the shield of Arthur; the chess-board of Gwendolen, on which the black pieces played of their own accord against the white; the horn of Bran Galed, where one found whatever liquor one desired; the chariot of Morgan, which directed itself to the place to which one wished to go; the pot ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... married six years before I ever saw her. Uncle Chess says he heard it, and then forgot it, you know the way you do? I've been to Portland and Uncle Chess was bully. His old lawyer, whom he consulted at the time I left there, was dead, but we dug up the license bureau and found what we were after. She had been married ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... the large meeting-room of the club fronting the street, now filled with members, many of whom had dropped in for half an hour on their way back to their offices. Of these some of the older and more sedate men, like Judge Bowman and Mr. Pancoast, were playing chess; others were seated about the small tables, reading, sipping toddies, or chatting together. A few of the younger bloods, men of forty or thereabouts, were standing by the uncurtained windows watching the belles of the town in their flounced dresses ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... a pretty game out of doors, and chess is delightful in a drawing-room. Battledore and shuttlecock and hunt-the-slipper have also their attractions. Proverbs are good, and cross questions with crooked answers may be very amusing. But none of these games are ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... outside the field of general news. They go to the dazzling levels of society, to scandal and crime, to sports, pictures, actresses, advice to the lovelorn, highschool notes, women's pages, buyer's pages, cooking receipts, chess, whist, gardening, comic strips, thundering partisanship, not because publishers and editors are interested in everything but news, but because they have to find some way of holding on to that alleged host ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... wisdom, and whoever came to visit me, I received with great hauteur and dignity." At seventeen he undertook the management of the flocks and herds of the family, (p. 24.) At nineteen he became religious, and "left off playing chess," made a kind of Budhist vow never to injure living thing and felt his foot paralyzed from having accidentally trod upon an ant, (p. 30.) At twenty, thoughts of rebellion and greatness rose in his mind; at twenty-one, he seems ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... shrewd, artisan nature flash out into fire—not always celestial, nor always, either, infernal. So he agitated and lived—how, I know not. That he did do so, is evident from the fact that he and Katie are at this moment playing chess in the cabin, before my eyes, and making love, all the while, as if they had not been ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... moral duel, goes on. In such passages every power at the writer's command is needed; unerring directness of thought, and words which clothe this thought as an athlete's garments fit the body. Everything must count, and the movement of the narrative must be sustained to the utmost. The chess-playing scene between Elfride and Knight in A Pair of Blue Eyes is an illustration. Sergeant Troy displaying his skill in handling the sword—weaving his spell about Bathsheba in true snake fashion, is another example. Still more brilliant is the gambling scene in The Return ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... great and spacious palaces, with courts and gardens of proportionate size. All these plots were assigned to different heads of families. Each square plot is encompassed by handsome streets for traffic; and thus the whole city is arranged in squares just like a chess-board, and disposed in a manner so perfect and masterly that it is impossible to give a description that should do ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... enclosed room at the back. The illustration shows the front overlooking the court, while beyond is the Octagon Tower, the residence of the chief Sultana. In the court a portion of the marble pavement is made to represent a pachisi or chess board, and it is said the game was played with slave girls, who were used instead of the customary chessmen. The Octagon Tower is built out over the river Jumna, as will be seen ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... of this History and farther! Never before, among the rational sons of Adam, were Armies sent out on such terms,—namely without a General, or with no General understanding the least of his business. The English have a notion that Generalship is not wanted; that War is not an Art, as playing Chess is, as finding the Longitude, and doing the Differential Calculus are (and a much deeper Art than any of these); that War is taught by Nature, as eating is; that courageous soldiers, led on by a courageous ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... mind and body; but his intervals of ease seem to have been passed in the society of those who were well disposed to cheat him, as far as they could, into a forgetfulness of his fallen condition. He played much at chess, whist, piquet, and ombre; he took exercise for awhile on horseback, latterly, on account of weakness, in his carriage; he even walked, when at Blenheim, unattended about his own grounds, and took great delight in the performance of private theatricals. We have ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 550, June 2, 1832 • Various
... the meal was at an end. The Sabbath was observed strictly by the majority of the emigrants. I heard an old woman express her surprise that, "The ship didna gae doon," as she saw some one pass her with a chess-board on the holy day. Some sang Scottish psalms. Many went to service, and in true Scottish fashion came back ill pleased with their divine. "I didna think he was an experienced preacher," ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... manoeuvres, or intrigues of the chief actors; the vulgar notions of Prince Bismarck's incessant wiles, or of Louis Napoleon's base designs against his neighbors may be discarded as relatively subordinate. The incidents that marked the gigantic game of chess played (not in Europe only) from the overthrow of the Orleans dynasty to the death of Friedrich III. and the fall of Bismarck in the winter of last year were neither the outcome of individual Machiavelianism nor entirely attributable to chance; both were all but in equal degree cause and effect. ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... presented in person above one of the great stone chimney-pieces, in company with his wife, Macee de Leodepart, - I like to write such an extraordinary name. Carved in white stone, the two sit playing at chess at an open window, through which they appear to give their attention much more to the passers-by than to the game. They are also exhibited in other attitudes; though I do not recognize them in the composition ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... rapture had somewhat subsided, Cousin Mary proposed that they should try some games, by way of variety. Chess, checkers, backgammon, Chinese puzzles, dominoes, jack-straws, etc., were mentioned, and each one of them was declared by different members of the group to be exceedingly entertaining; but Charlie Bolton said that ...
— Holidays at the Grange or A Week's Delight - Games and Stories for Parlor and Fireside • Emily Mayer Higgins
... Orchids with you, after examining only three or four genera; and this very fact makes me feel positive I am right! I do not quite understand some of your terms; but sometime I must get you to explain the homologies; for I am intensely interested on the subject, just as at a game of chess." ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... supper began; how weary it seemed to him, that long and jovial supper, with the ale that ran in a continual stream, the wine that ceaselessly circled round, the jokes, and bustle, and laughter, the welcome to guests arriving; the cards, and chess, and games that succeeded it, the drinking, and drinking, and drinking, till the ladies again left; then drinking ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies
... was sometimes made of vicuna wool, sometimes of bats' skins, sleek as velvet. Nothing which he had worn could be used by another; when he laid it aside it was burned. To while away the time the Spaniards taught him to play chess, at which he became expert, spending upon it many of the tedious hours of his imprisonment. Soon after the return of Hernando Pizarro the three cavaliers came back from Cuzco. They had travelled ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... the county into two parts of quite different physical character; for to the south almost the whole land is hilly (the longer slope of the Chiltern system lying in this direction), well wooded, and pleasantly diversified with narrow vales. The chief of these are watered by the Wye, Misbourne and Chess streams. The beech tree is predominant in the woods, in so much that William Camden, writing c. 1585, supposed the county to take name from this feature (A.S. boc, beech). In the south a remnant of ancient forest is preserved as public ground under the name of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... weather bow, and held the ship from nearing the shore. At last he cried, "Cut away the cable!" A few strokes of the axes were heard, and then the cable flew out of the hawsehole in a blaze of fire, from the violence of the friction, and disappeared under a huge wave, which struck us on the chess-tree, and deluged us with water fore and aft. But we were now on the other tack, and the ship regained her way and we had evidently increased our distance from the land. "My lads," said the captain to the ship's company, "you have behaved well, and I ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... you, friend," said the curate, "that this is done to divert our idle thoughts; and as in well-ordered states games of chess, fives, and billiards are allowed for the diversion of those who do not care, or are not obliged, or are unable to work, so books of this kind are allowed to be printed, on the supposition that, what indeed is the truth, there can be nobody so ignorant as to ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... been slain. Now he felt he might rest, and sought the cool of an orchard, where were already gathered his nephew Roland, with Oliver his comrade, Geoffrey of Anjou his standard bearer, and many other famous Knights. They lay about on white carpets doing what they best liked—some played games, chess or draughts, but these were mostly the old men who were glad to be still: the young ones fenced and tilted. Under a pine tree, close to a sweet-briar, a seat of massive gold was placed, and on it sat the Emperor of the fair country of France, a strong man, with ...
— The Book of Romance • Various
... every well-devised expedient to cheat the long and weary days is at once abandoned; the chess-board and the new novel are alike forgotten, and the very quarter-deck walk, with its merry gossip and careless chit-chat, becomes distasteful. One blue and misty mountain, one faint outline of the far-off shore, has dispelled all thought of these; and with straining ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... vied with each other in procuring, not only from all the provinces of France, but even from all foreign states, the most celebrated swordsmen. It was not uncommon for Richelieu and Louis XIII to dispute over their evening game of chess upon the merits of their servants. Each boasted the bearing and the courage of his own people. While exclaiming loudly against duels and brawls, they excited them secretly to quarrel, deriving an immoderate satisfaction or genuine regret from the success or defeat of their ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... have I seen a king on chess (His rooks and knights withdrawn, His queen and bishops in distress) Shifting about, grow less and less, With here ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
Copyright © 2026 Free-Translator.com
|
|
|
