Bottom. What beard were I best to play it in?
Quince. Why, what you will.
Bottom. I will discharge it in either your straw-coloured beard, your orange-tawny beard, your purple-in-grain beard, or your French-crown-colour beard, your perfect yellow
Midsummer Night’s Dream,
Act I. Sc. 2.
“What coloured beard comes next by the window?”
“A black man’s, I think.”
“I think a red: for that is most in fashion.”
RAM ALLY.
Truly, until I beheld that tax-gatherer of the Orient, I had no idea that the “purple-in-grain” beard existed outside a poet’s fancy!
The road took us along the left bank of the river, whose soil-stained waters churned their way through a wild and rocky gorge. On our left the mountain rose bare and steep, fringed with a few straggling bushes, and here and there a clinging patch of rose-coloured primula. Part of the conglomerate cliff had come down and obliterated the road, but a party of coolies was busily at work, and, after about an hour’s delay, we triumphantly bumped our way past.