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Dickie sensed his embarrassment and noting that neither man appeared to enjoy himself, strove to make her guests feel more at home. Both men she knew were vitally interested in the operation of the cannery. And Gregory, at her request, had brought up the balance-sheet. A discussion of business affairs would relieve the situation and at the same time rescue McCoy from Aunt Mary's checker-board.
It had been designed on the plan of a checker-board, and most of the houses were surrounded by well-kept gardens and flourishing orchards. Primitive as it was, the country boy looked at it with wondering admiration. The houses, which were really very simple, were palaces to him, when he thought of his father's log cabin.
I know that you are good soldiers from the way you take care of yourselves. But so fine a house ought to have a better checker-board than a barrel-head, with grains of corn for men. Who are the owners of the house?" "Me and him," said Shorty, indicating himself and Si. "Very good," said the General; "both of you report at my Headquarters to-morrow morning at 10 o'clock. Good night."
And in front as a great mellow bell boomed the half-hour a swarm of black, human leaves were blown over the checker-board of paths under the courteous trees. Some of these black leaves were very old with cheeks furrowed like the first ripples of a splashed pool.
At that moment the city's multitudinous blocks seemed like the many squares of an oriental checker-board; the problem he put to himself was how to cross the city and reach the vicinity of the river; there to make a final effort to look for What? A hopeless quest! His face burned with fever; he did not heed it.
The first gardens were the vergers and preaux, little checker-board squares of a painful primitiveness as compared with later standards. These squares, or carreaux, were often laid out in foliage and blossoming plants as suggestive as possible of their being made of carpeting or marble.
These are very superb structures. Let us add a quantity of fine, amusing, and varied streets, like the Rue de Rivoli, and I do not despair of Paris presenting to the eye, when viewed from a balloon, that richness of line, that opulence of detail, that diversity of aspect, that grandiose something in the simple, and unexpected in the beautiful, which characterizes a checker-board.
Up and down the endless checker-board of empty streets and avenues she had roamed, gleaning what joys were to be had in the metallic atmosphere, the stunted copses, the marshy pools spotted with the blue shields of fleur-de-lys. For even here, in the refuse corner of the great city, Nature doled out niggardly gifts of green growth proofs of her unquenchable bounty.
He looked down upon a big and irregular checker-board covered with numbers of mad white lines, which radiated from a white center and seemed to run frantically in all directions save one. Across that course, and running parallel beneath three of them was a straight silver thread.
A flying nymph whose airy steps even the sand can not stay for long. Down through this Happy Valley ran Market Street, a bias cut across the city that was to be. Market Street is about all that saved that city from making a checker-board of its ground-plan.
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