United States or Tonga ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


There stood beneath the tree two handsome peacocks. While one of the pair strutted about with a head turned aside as if dazzled by his own bright-tinted tail feathers, the other bird soared slowly upward. He sat quiet and unconscious of his gay plumage. He seemed content to perch there on a large limb in the warm sunshine.

Shining scraps of mountain minerals garnets and bright-tinted quartz and beryls, heaped artistically, rather than scientifically, on a base of jasper and malachite and dark basalt and glistening spar and curious fossils; these not gathered by any means in a single summer or in ordinary ramblings, but treasured long, and standing, some of them, for friendly memories balanced on the one side a like grouping of shells and corals and sea-mosses on the other, upon a broad bracket-mantel put up over a little corner fireplace; for Miss Craydocke's room, joining the main house, took the benefit of one of its old chimneys.

The green enamelled dragon-fly, grasshoppers and beetles, flies and wasps, moths and butterflies, bright-tinted mandarin ducks, peacocks, and ostriches, tortoises cut in pebbles or made of pasteboard, shrimps and crabs, do all coldly furnish forth the lunch-table as favors and bonbonnieres.

Yet, with the starry night overhead, and the flare of torches lighting up a seething mass of faces below, of bronzed limbs and bright-tinted rags dangling at every altitude from the palm rafters and decayed stairway, the scene was more weirdly fascinating than as one generally sees it in mosques or in the open daylight.

It was about four o'clock on that November afternoon when the new official of the new station looked out at the dark red land and the bright-tinted cloud. It was intensely cold. The ruts of the roads, which were not made of logs here, were frozen stiff. The young man stood a minute at his door with his hands in his pockets, sniffed the frost, and turned in with an air of distaste.

The light above, made more brilliant by the bright-tinted rocks, and the shadows below, more gloomy by reason of the somber hues of the brown walls, increase the apparent depths of the canyons, and it seems a long way up to the world of sunshine and open sky, and a long way down to the bottom of the canyon glooms.

Big canoes, manned by dark-skinned men in white turbans and loin-cloths, floated round our ship, or lay poised on the clear depths of aquamarine water, with fairy freights forests of coral white as snow, or red, pink, violet, in massive branches or fern-like sprays, fresh from their warm homes beneath the clear warm waves, where fish as bright-tinted as themselves flash through them like "living light."

The privet hedges were almost black green; and the mould in the dismal borders that they screened looked as though it had never known rain or hose water and as if it could no more grow bright-tinted flowers than the asbestos of a gas stove which it resembled in consistency and colour.

The tendency to or habit of varying in the direction of rich colouring and beautiful or fantastic ornament, might, for all we know to the contrary, have descended to humming-birds from some diminutive, curiously-shaped, bright-tinted, flying reptile of arboreal habits that lived in some far-off epoch in the world's history.

In a bright-tinted hammock I fetched from Madeira, Jack used to lie under the apple-trees that June and July, with my aunt for company; better could hardly have been. When I came from town in June, with news of what the farmers and their long rifles had done at Bunker Hill, it was a little too much for Jack's strength, and he burst into tears. But Dr.