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"There, that will do for the Downy," continued the Doctor, as the children finished the table; "only I ought to tell you that I have a friend who calls him the Flying Checker-board, because he looks when he flies as if he were checkered all over in squares of two colors black and white. The Red-head is a much gayer bird, with three colors ha! there goes one now!
Indeed, so far as its physical aspect is concerned, with its flat, unvaried surface, covered chiefly with wooden houses, few or none of which pretend to architectural beauty,—its irregularity, which is neither picturesque nor quaint, but only tame,—its long and lazy street, lounging wearisomely through the whole extent of the peninsula, with Gallows Hill and New Guinea at one end, and a view of the almshouse at the other,—such being the features of my native town, it would be quite as reasonable to form a sentimental attachment to a disarranged checker-board.
On the floor itself are five hundred, perhaps a thousand, men, gathered for the most part in small groups about little stands upon the summit of which is a rallying legend, talking, laughing, screaming, good-natured, indifferent, excited, running hither and thither in response to changing figures in the checker-board squares on the great wall opposite calm, cynical one moment, the next violently agitated, shouting, gesticulating, rushing together, shaking their fists in a tumult of passion which presently subsides.
Sometimes they are drawn from primitive structures and fabrics, as the checker-board pattern, with its likeness to the plaitings of rush mattings, and the volute and spiral ornaments, which recall the curves and involutions of wattle and wicker work. Again, decoration may employ in its service details that in themselves are genuinely representative art.
Four or five miles across the Tappan Zee the blue of the mountain was splattered with the white of straggling houses. To the left was a checker-board of farms, an area hundreds of square miles in extent basking in the rays of a cloudless sun. Yet beyond, the Orange mountains lifted their rounded slopes.
When the noon whistle blew Bannon and Max were standing near the annex. Already the bins and walls had been raised more than a foot above the foundation, which gave it the appearance of a great checker-board. "Looks like business, doesn't it," said Max.
Your feet will be dusty from your long walk, and you must have a fresh pair for the second day. Where is your rain-coat?" "Rain-coat? Why, I never thought of it." "A checker-board would not keep the rain from wetting you should there come up a sudden shower. You must have it in, no matter what you leave at home." "Paul and Fritz did not say they would take their rain-coats in their knapsacks."
It is usual in Bath to see the old sign of the checker-board on the doorposts of taverns. It was originally a token that the game might be played there, and is now merely a tavern-sign. 31 Hertford Street, Mayfair, May 16th, 1860. I came hither from Bath on the 14th, and am staying with my friends, Mr. and Mrs. Motley.
Down long and sinuous lanes twisted the hunted and the harriers, always in and out of the moon in a perpetual queen's move over a checker-board of glints and patches. Ahead, the quarry, minus his leather jerkin now and half blinded by drips of sweat, had taken to scanning his ground desperately on both sides.
This terraced mountain, therefore, seemed to me like a colossal checker-board, upon whose colored squares, the two great forces, Life and Death, were playing their eternal game. There is a pathos in this evanescent beauty. What lies about us in one place so gray and ghostly was once as bright and beautiful as that which we perceive a hundred feet away. But nothing here retains supremacy.
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