Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 23, 2025
One of the doctor's medical books lay open on the table, half of the leaves gutted out, I suppose, for pipelights. In the midst of all this the lamp still cast a smoky glow, obscure and brown as umber. I went into the cellar; all the barrels were gone, and of the bottles a most surprising number had been drunk out and thrown away.
As the cab drew up before the address indicated, the fog lifted a little and showed him a dingy street, a gin palace, a low French eating-house, a shop for the retail of penny numbers and twopenny salads, many ragged children huddled in the doorways, and many women of different nationalities passing out, key in hand, to have a morning glass; and the next moment the fog settled down again upon that part, as brown as umber, and cut him off from his blackguardly surroundings.
The west had become a vast sea of gold, a pure and placid sea of many-tinted gold, bounded and intersected and broken into innumerable wide bays and narrow inlets by great cloud-promontories, purple and rose and umber. Directly opposite, just above the crest-line of the hills, hung the nearly full moon, pale as a mere phantom of itself.
At present port is tolerably free from adulteration, though its casks and those of an inferior red wine of Spain after voyaging to England sometimes find their contents a little mixed. Oporto is the seat of the wine-trade, and its huge warehouses are filled with stores of port ripening to a good old age, when the garnet will be exchanged for a dark umber tint.
The green of the upland pasture and the brown of the ploughland beyond were veiled by a shimmering twilight haze, in which the varied tints of the sky harmoniously blended, till the umber and indigo shadows of night loomed over the hills, and the daffodil flame flickered and vanished over the last red ember of the afterglow. Thus the first calm day of early spring drew to its close.
About the little porch were carved initials and dates, at various heights, from the stature of nine to that of eighteen. Inside were old unpainted desks, unpainted, but browned with the umber of human contact, and hacked by innumerable jack-knives.
I never have seen one so brilliant, and brilliant is the word, for her skin was so transparent that it bore no umber in the painting. Neither could I render the real effect of it as I wished. I had no colours to paint such freshness, such delicate tints, which were hers alone, and which I had never seen in any other woman.
I took a step forward another and another, but she did not move; when, following the direction of her gaze, I found her eyes were fixed with a strange fascination at the great bough above her a huge gnarled and knotted bough, with here and there a tuft of foliage upon it, while its great thick bark was tinted and shady with rich brown and umber mosses, and "Good heavens!"
It dawned upon Stella Fyfe in the fullness of the season, when the first cool October days were upon them, and the lake shores flamed again with the red and yellow and umber of autumn, that she had been playing with fire and that fire burns. This did not filter into her consciousness by degrees.
The atmosphere grew smoky; forest fires painted the sky with burnt umber, and through this veil the sun shone like a copper shield. Then a gorgeous moonlight followed. There was blood upon that moon, and all the shores were like veins in moss-agate and the sea like oil.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking