United States or Eritrea ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
There are men, calling themselves conjurors, who perform prodigies of agility with coins, playing-cards, and other articles of legerdemain, but they are not so quick as was Trowbridge in springing sidewise from the menacing snake. In still quicker movement, the heavy Colt at his side leaped from its holster.
"Here all alone at midnight all alone! Is it possible?" "No, it isn't possible," Fran returned satirically, "for I have company." Abbott warmly urged her to hasten back home; at the same time he drew nearer and discovered that her lap was covered with playing-cards.
We were all full of fight when the Sumter news came, and anxious to get in it; and I saw a heap of it, too, before I made the acquaintance of Nathan Bull. "There was some lively skirmishing on the morning of September twentieth, sixty-three, before the armies got together in earnest. It was real comical to see the boys tearing up their love-letters and playing-cards just before going into battle.
I followed her, as in a dream, along the corridor, into the room where the old Governor sat in his arm-chair beside a carved table, whereon were a decanter of wine, glasses half drained, and a litter of playing-cards.
When you were all babies in long clothes, some people used to believe that there were nuggets of gold to be picked up in the streets, and that in the flowery valleys, flowing with milk and honey, there grew groves of beet-trees, and forests of cabbages, and shady bowers of squash-vines; and they thought that through these fertile valleys strode men of curious mien, wild bandits and highway robbers, with red flannel shirts and many pockets filled with playing-cards and revolvers and bowie-knives; and that when you met these frightful persons and courteously asked the time of day, they were apt to turn and stab you to the heart by way of response.
There is reason to suppose that playing-cards, from wooden blocks, were produced at Venice long before the block-books, even as early as 1250; but there is no positive evidence that they were printed; and some insist that they were produced either by friction or stencil-plates.
The officer objected and begged that such an order as that should be given in writing. The duke rolled over and seized a sheaf of playing-cards. Pulling one out, he scrawled the necessary order, and that was taken to the commanders in the field. The Highlanders could not stand the cannon fire, and the English won. Then the fury of the common soldiery broke loose upon the country.
Unimaginative men, in their temporary sojourn they more often outraged or dispossessed nature in her own fastnesses than courted her for sympathy or solitude. There were playing-cards left lying behind boulders, and empty champagne bottles forgotten in forest depths.
The principal articles of importation into Tangier are, cotton goods of all kinds, cloth, silk-stuffs, velvets, copper, iron, steel, and hardware of every description; cochineal, indigo, and other dyes; tea, coffee, sulphur, paper, planks, looking-glasses, tin, thread, glass-beads, alum, playing-cards, incense, sarsaparilla, and rum.
They made one lively picture with the fruit and wine they loved, the birds they captured, the buckets of clear water drawn for pastime from the great well, and Jean Semur's painted conjuring book stolen from the old sorceress, his grandmother, out of which he told their fortunes; with the musical instruments of others; with their carefully hidden dice and playing-cards, worn or soiled by the fingers of the older gamesters who had discarded them.
Word Of The Day