A livid tint began to mottle his face.

The clouds above them, beautiful with changing sunset lights, were no longer mirrored on a still lagoon, but mottled the broken surfaces of the river with hues of bronze and purple, between the leaves of the creeping water-plants which clogged the movement of the oars; for they had exchanged the liquid azure pavement of their "Città Nobilissima" for the brown tide of the Brenta.

Little dark spots mottled the white dust of the road.

The wan white morning sun mottled the earth with long shadows and streaks of light.

Presently another, and another, and many others, mottled the blue field of the heavens, curving and wheeling silently earthward.

In the deep woods it flickers through the branches, mottling the ground with silver patches, and throwing into grand relief the trunks of trees, like sentinels on duty.

Sunshine and storm, the light clouds which mottled the sky and the black heaps which foreboded the tempest, the lightning and the rainbow, all in turn served to awaken the slumbering faculties, and to rouse the torpid intellect to greater activity.

Coffee cups and sticky little liqueur glasses were scattered on the table on which a sunbeam shone, mottling the tablecloth and making the glasses sparkle.

Then the noble trees are hushed in the hazy light, and drip with balsam; the cones are ripe, and the seeds, with their ample purple wings, mottle the air like flocks of butterflies; while deer feeding in the flowery openings between the groves, and birds and squirrels in the branches, make a pleasant stir which enriches the deep, brooding calm of the wilderness, and gives a peculiar impressiveness to every tree.

It was growing late; the evening air grew more motionless and cool; the russet gold of the sunshine mottled only the hill-tops now; in the valleys there was a duskier brown, deepening every moment.

The French captain, however, brought his frigate's head round, and the two rode side by side within easy pistol-shot, pouring broadsides into each other in one of those murderous duels which, could they all be recorded, would mottle our charts with blood.