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


The actual houses, of course, we could not drag to our fires, but we brought all their ill-fitting deal doors, their dreadful window sashes, their servant-tormenting staircases, their dank, dark cupboards, the verminous papers from their scaly walls, their dust and dirt-sodden carpets, their ill-designed and yet pretentious tables and chairs, sideboards and chests of drawers, the old dirt-saturated books, their ornaments their dirty, decayed, and altogether painful ornaments amidst which I remember there were sometimes even STUFFED DEAD BIRDS! we burnt them all.

There I passed a miserable winter. Our prison was not unlike the ergastulum at Placentia; ill-designed, damp, cold, filthy, swarming with vermin and crowded with wretches like myself.

She was dry-eyed and still speechless, but for all that she was a tigress. A strangely-cut silhouette they formed there upon the housetops, with a background of empty sky, their feet sinking in the warm leads. "I think I had better take it," he said. "Let go." Her fingers yielded the bracelet a tawdry, ill-designed affair of rubies and diamonds. He looked at it disapprovingly.

Construction and ornamentation were guided by no principle, but followed the caprice of the individual. Meaningless pilasters, entablatures, and contorted cornices replaced the simpler outline and subordinate enrichment of the time of Henri II., and until the great revival of taste under the "grand monarque," there was in France a period of richly ornamented but ill-designed decorative furniture.

Then further still by a lonely ill-laid road. And thus, with a mind pleasantly attuned to beauty and a quickening pulse, I drew near to Kelmscott. The great alluvial flat, broadening on either hand, with low wooded heights, "not ill-designed," as Morris said, to the south.

Of the Fijians the women alone are tattooed, possibly as a method of adornment. The tattooing of the people of Otaheite, seen by Cook, was surmised by him to have a religious significance, as it presented in many instances "squares, circles, crescents, and ill-designed representations of men and dogs." Every one of these people was tattooed upon reaching majority.