United States or Iran ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
But who shall dare to speak of the jewellery that bedecked a Roman matron en grande tenue of the pearl and pendant earrings, the necklaces of pearl and diamonds, the gold snake armlets with their emerald eyes, the bangles and finger-rings, the brooches and buckles on the shoulders and down the sleeves, the gems scattered among the hair, the chains and châtelaines strung with all manner of glittering articles?
Old brooches, miniatures painted on ivory, silhouettes, hair rings, necklaces, ear-rings, chains, and finger-rings. "Did you wear this?" asked Ann with a longing voice, slipping an immense sapphire ring on her forefinger. "In Mr. Hepburn's day," she answered, taking up a small case, which she unfastened and gave me.
In these apparently natural vanities and vagaries Falco humored me, enquiring of his friends concerning friseurs of acclaimed reputation, buying me any gaudy fabrics he saw, also presenting me with caskets of necklaces, amulets, bracelets, finger-rings and earrings. He rallied me on my oriental tastes, but aided me to gratify them.
It staid up under the roof of the house. One day the Squirrel said to his mother, "O mother! I want you to go to the house of the Datu who is called 'sultan, and take these nine kamagi and these nine finger-rings to pay for the sultan's daughter, because I want to marry her." Then the mother went to the sultan's house and remained there an hour. The sultan said, "What do you want?"
There was a sprinkling of jauntily-dressed clerks, privileged to leave New Orleans in the dull season; and there were some still more richly-dressed gentlemen, with the finest of cloth in their coats, the whitest of linen and raffles, the brightest of diamonds in their studs, and the most massive of finger-rings. These last were "sportsmen."
It is difficult to conceive what fire and devilry they get into these hammering finales; all go together, voices, hands, eyes, leaves, and fluttering finger-rings; the chorus swings to the eye, the song throbs on the ear; the faces are convulsed with enthusiasm and effort.
The sergeant-painter and the deputy sergeant-painter were, indeed, conventional performers enough; as mechanical in their dispensation of wigs, finger-rings, ruffles, and simpers, as the figure of the armed knight who struck the bell in the Residence tower.
But even in some of the Mycenæan tombs iron appears in the shape of finger-rings; and in East Cretan tombs of the latest Minoan period iron swords have been found.
He sent them on another occasion, a short letter, which ran as follows: "MOST HONORABLE, MOST STEADFAST, As, during the present frost, you have but little exercise in the trenches as you cannot pass your time in twirling your finger-rings, seeing that they have all been sold to pay your soldiers' wages as you have nothing to rub your teeth upon, nor to scour your stomachs withal, and as, nevertheless, you require something if only to occupy your minds, I send you the enclosed letter, in hope it may yield amusement.
So at midnight, the heart of the metropolis of modern civilization was secretly trod by this jaunty barbarian in broadcloth; a sort of prophetical ghost, glimmering in anticipation upon the advent of those tragic scenes of the French Revolution which levelled the exquisite refinement of Paris with the bloodthirsty ferocity of Borneo; showing that broaches and finger-rings, not less than nose-rings and tattooing, are tokens of the primeval savageness which ever slumbers in human kind, civilized or uncivilized.
Word Of The Day