|
|
|
More "Backwoods" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... by the name of the Almighty, He would hunt this ravening evil that had scathed and torn him so; He would seize it by the vitals; he would crush it day and night; he Would so pursue its footsteps, so return it blow for blow, That Old Brown, Osawatomie Brown, Should be a name to swear by, in backwoods ...
— Poems of American Patriotism • Brander Matthews (Editor)
... much mischief for idle hands in Lindsay as anywhere else. The worst tragedy I ever heard of happened on a backwoods farm, fifteen miles from a railroad and five from a store. However, I expect your mother's son to behave himself in the fear of God and man. In all likelihood the worst thing that will happen to ...
— Kilmeny of the Orchard • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... zenith of June when MacPhairrson went away. When he returned, hobbling up with his tiny bundle, the backwoods world was rioting in the scarlet and gold of young October. He was quite cured. He felt singularly well. But a desperate loneliness saddened his home-coming. He knew his cabin would be just as he had left it, there on its steep little foam-ringed ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... in the backwoods of Michigan or Minnesota, and transport it to a quiet spot by a well sheltered harbor of Lilliputian size. Cover the roofs of some buildings with iron, shingles or boards from other regions. Cover the balance with thatch of long grass, and erect chimneys that just peer above the ridge poles. ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... some fourscore years ago, it was 1837 to be precise, a party of distinguished visitors arrived in what was then the little backwoods community of Ann Arbor. The interest of the loiterers at the country tavern and the corner grocery was no doubt aroused by their coming, for Ann Arbor we may suppose was not different from other small places; and this curiosity could hardly have ...
— The University of Michigan • Wilfred Shaw
... usual. The women, too, exchanged visits and, on occasion, gathered at one place for quilting or other mutually shared activities.[10] Furthermore, the frontier journalists often noted the fine hospitality and congeniality of their backwoods hosts.[11] ...
— The Fair Play Settlers of the West Branch Valley, 1769-1784 - A Study of Frontier Ethnography • George D. Wolf
... looking at it, Major," answered Life, to whom the backwoods manner of talking was now a thing of the past. Deck had taught him how to speak correctly, and for this the tall Kentuckian was exceedingly grateful. He often declared that it was Deck who had made him fit to be an ...
— An Undivided Union • Oliver Optic
... spoke in the Indian language, but that being probably unknown to the reader, we will try to convey in English as nearly as possible the slightly poetical tone of the one and the rough Backwoods' style ...
— The Prairie Chief • R.M. Ballantyne
... peculiar; but it was thought best not to startle the authorities with the admission that the man had not been baptized at all. They could easily believe that a State like Ohio, which some of them doubtless regarded as still in the backwoods and mainly tenanted by the aborigines, might have omitted, in days gone by, to require a Taufschein; but that an unbaptized Christian should offer himself to be married in Germany would perhaps have so paralyzed their powers of belief that ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... make him a clergyman, or try to do so—perhaps it is the best thing to do with him, for he could buy a living with the money his grandfather left him, but there is no knowing what the boy will think of it when the time comes, and for aught we know he may insist on going to the backwoods of America, as so many other young men are doing now." . . . But, anyway, he would like making an organ, and this could do him no harm, so the sooner ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... of them in my long service in the Legislature. The hayseeds think we are like the Indians to the National Government—that is, sort of wards of the State, who don't know how to look after ourselves and have to be taken care of by the Republicans of St. Lawrence, Ontario, and other backwoods counties. Why should anybody be surprised because ex-Governor Odell comes down here to direct the Republican machine? Newburg ain't big enough for him. He, like all the other upstate Republicans, wants to get hold of New York City. New York is ...
— Plunkitt of Tammany Hall • George Washington Plunkitt
... "uncouth" and "barbaric"—something which one might expect from an "uncivilised Goth," a rough backwoods-man who had no respect for the established rules of classical art and who built his "modern horrors" to please his own low tastes without a decent regard for the examples of the Forum ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... people who give balls, there's only one thing I care about, and that is that they shouldn't belong to the police and should give good suppers. It's all superb at their house, it seems. The wife is astonishing. She talks the French of the backwoods; and people say she was tattooed when she was a child. That's why she can't wear low dresses. It's most amusing, and she is so entertaining. They want to get plenty of people, you see. You will do it for me, won't ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... left no money? He'd been taking care of a whole family grandfather had beside ours; and paying back some people grandfather did out of a lot of money on a timber deal fifty years ago; and making it up to a little village in the backwoods that grandfather persuaded to bond itself for a railroad that he ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... liberty, here, of citing an instance of this. In 1861, when I found myself on the West Coast of Mexico, a dozen backwoods families determined upon settling in Sonora (forming an oasis in the desert); a plan which was frustrated by the invasion at that time of the European powers. Many native farmers awaited the arrival of these immigrants in order to take them under their protection. The value of land in consequence ...
— Lineage, Life, and Labors of Jose Rizal, Philippine Patriot • Austin Craig
... grass. From this the human settler draws an abundant supply of hay for his stock in winter, and ought to feel deeply indebted to the persevering beaver for the boon. They are known as "wild meadows," and are of frequent occurrence in the backwoods. It is evident that they were formed by the following process:—They are found in valleys through which, in ages past, a brook trickled. A party of beavers arriving, and finding an abundance of food on the side of the hills, would set to work to form a dam of sufficient strength ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... There were still deer and bear to be shot there, there was wonderful fishing, and, more to the point in the present instance, as fine a brand of solitude as civilization can ask to lay its hands on. It was modified, and mitigated too, by a backwoods family—a man and his wife, a daughter or two, and half a dozen sons, who lived there the year round, of course; so that by telegraphing two or three days in advance, you could be met by a buckboard at the nearest railroad station for the twenty-five-mile ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... of the American people than that of any other, not even excepting Washington and Hamilton. The latter, though they established American independence, remained in a personal sense English gentlemen till their death. Lincoln was born in the backwoods in rude poverty, received no education but what he acquired by his own unaided efforts, and lived and died a man of the people, the ideal type of ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... the old gentleman is said to have invoked the backwoods 'Chandlers' and 'Hoveys,' I will obligingly translate for you, as possibly you may not be able to read it in the original Sanscrit! Oh! don't tell me that you 'won't trouble me,' and all that. I will bore you, and nobody can ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... fitful wind, he heard the wail of the catamount or panther, the saddest and most mournful sound that ever broke the solitude of forest gloom. A sound at times so like the shrieking wail of a child in mortal agony, that heard close at hand it has caused the face of many a brave wife of the backwoods settler, even when all her loved ones were safe with her within the strong walls of the log house, to blanch with terror and to cry out with fear. Its despairing wail seemed to poor Oowikapun as the echo of the ...
— Oowikapun - How the Gospel Reached the Nelson River Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young
... sheep or drive cattle, or chop down trees in the backwoods," she replied, lifting demure eyebrows. "Oh, Dick, don't be foolish. See—there's mother ...
— Viviette • William J. Locke
... brief, pointed way that served to convince better than eloquence. These are the characteristics that make for success in practise before our Courts of Appeal; and Jefferson's success shows that they serve better than bluster, even with a backwoods bench composed ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... not sorry for you! I just mean, you couldn't have had so terribly much fun, after you were eighteen or so. Schoenstrom must have been a little dull, after very many years there. This stuff about the charm of backwoods villages—the people that write it seem to take jolly good care to stay in ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... least a year old. Beside them was a boy of about nine. In the background was a miserable hovel made of crude lumber and patched windows. This couple and their baby had been discovered by a geological survey outfit living in the backwoods hills. Relief, aid, and help were being rushed, and the legislature was considering ways and means of their schooling. Neither of ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... the best chances now for intensive cultivation are in New Jersey, in the backwoods of the Middle states now made accessible by ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall
... (“Buffalo Bill”), the scout, guide, and Indian fighter, was born on the 26th of February, 1846, in a primative log-cabin in the backwoods of Iowa. In 1852, the family removed to Kansas, where the father of young Cody, two years later, became a martyr to the Free State cause. From the moment the family was thus deprived of its support, ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... surgeon, who had found the ball but could not stop the hemorrhage. A little girl sat on the bed, and every now and then put forth a hand and timidly stroked her father's clay-cold wrist. On the floor, on a mattress matching the one on which the boy lay, was stretched a gaunt giant from some backwoods or mountain clearing. Margaret knelt beside him and he smiled up at her. "I ain't much hurt, and I ain't sufferin' to amount to nothin'. Ef this pesky butternut wouldn't stick in this here hurt place—" She cut the shirt from a sabre wound with ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... much all men know: Despite compromise, war and struggle, the Negro is not free. In the backwoods of the Gulf States, for miles and miles, he may not leave the plantation of his birth; in well-nigh the whole rural South the black farmers are peons, bound by law and custom to an economic slavery, from which the only escape ...
— The Negro Problem • Booker T. Washington, et al.
... canceled many of the land grants, put a tariff on farming implements, and abolished slavery. These barriers were raised too late. A call for help ran through the western border of the United States. The sentinels of the frontier answered. Davy Crockett, the noted frontiersman, bear hunter, and backwoods politician; James Bowie, the dexterous wielder of the knife that to this day bears his name; and Sam Houston, warrior and pioneer, rushed to the aid of their countrymen in Texas. Unacquainted with the niceties of diplomacy, ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... mountaineer's face was contorted into a spasm of pain and his labored breathing demanded a respite of silence. Then slowly he declared with the unvarnished candor of the backwoods: "Joe's ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... of parents and children. It is true that the habits of a community can make such cruelty rare, but these habits, I fear, are only to be produced through the prolonged reign of law. Experience of backwoods communities, mining camps and other such places seems to show that under new conditions men easily revert to a more barbarous attitude and practice. It would seem, therefore, that, while human nature remains as it is, there will be more liberty for all in a community where ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... a blue cotton umbrella, though there may have been under it at times and seasons. Skeletons of the species, much faded as to color, much weakened as to whalebone, may still be found here and there in backwoods settlements, where they are known as "umbrells;" there are but ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 2, April 9, 1870 • Various
... returned, he rose and lay down with the feeling that his heart was broken. He of course shunned all society, and never again recovered any real zest for it. He sometimes thought of imitating his grandfather under like circumstances with a difference—he thought of flying, not to London, but to the backwoods of America, or some place where he should never see a white face, and becoming a "wild man," a savage—a personage of whom he always believed himself to share many of the characteristics. Only consideration for his little girls deterred him from such a course. Although an excessively affectionate ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... bringing them into the fold of human service. I wonder how often the inhabitant of the snug Queen Anne cottage in the suburbs remembers the picturesque toil and varied hardship that it has cost to hew and drag his walls and floors and pretty peaked roofs out of the backwoods. It might enlarge his home, and make his musings by the winter fireside less commonplace, to give a kindly thought now and then to the long chain of human workers through whose hands the timber of his house has passed, since it first felt the stroke of the axe in the snow-bound winter ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... crouching there. Oswald began to feel the water squelching in his boots, so we held our breath and listened. Oswald laid his ear to the road like a Red Indian. You would not do this in time of peace, but when your country is in danger you care but little about keeping your ears clean. His backwoods' strategy was successful. He rose and ...
— The Wouldbegoods • E. Nesbit
... escape. James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) was born at Burlington, N.J., but was reared in the wild country around Otsego Lake, in central N.Y., on the yet unsettled estates of his father. It was here he learned the backwoods lore, which in combination with his romantic genius, made him one of the ...
— The Greatest Highway in the World • Anonymous
... overnight here they took a stage, and for a whole day travelled over pleasant roads, through sweet-scented forests of spruce and balsam, broken here by clearings and thrifty farms, until at last the journey ended in the pretty little backwoods settlement of Presque Isle. ...
— Wakulla - A Story of Adventure in Florida • Kirk Munroe
... we will go to St. Helen's green island, and I will let you go free; but I will put a scarlet collar about your neck before I let you go, that, if any one finds you, they may know that you are my squirrel. Were you ever in the green forest, nurse? I hear Papa talk about the 'Bush' and the 'Backwoods;' it must be very pleasant in the summer, to live among the green ...
— Lady Mary and her Nurse • Catharine Parr Traill
... gasp and a short roar, as the pincers slipped. And no wonder, for it was a three-fanged grinder of the largest size, situate in the remote backwoods ...
— The Lonely Island - The Refuge of the Mutineers • R.M. Ballantyne
... gazing up at Henri, whom she subjugated at once by a look charged with passion, "why, my dear boy, I am married; we are in Paris, not in the savannah, the pampas, the backwoods of America.—My dear Henri, my first and only love, listen to me. That husband of mine, a second clerk in the War Office, is bent on being a head-clerk and officer of the Legion of Honor; can I help his being ambitious? Now for the very reason that made him leave us our liberty—nearly ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... the strange creature in the kitchen may account for it. The man was a primitive savage from the backwoods of San Pedro, and this was his fetish. When his companion and he had fled to some prearranged retreat—already occupied, no doubt by a confederate—the companion had persuaded him to leave so compromising an article of furniture. But the mulatto's heart was with it, and ...
— The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge • Arthur Conan Doyle
... by a circumstance truly agreeable. I have had the happiness of seeing Captain Michael Cresap marching at the head of a formidable company of upwards of one hundred and thirty men from the mountains and backwoods; painted like Indians; armed with tomahawks and rifles; dressed in hunting shirts and moccasins; and, tho' some of them had travelled hundreds of miles from the banks of the Ohio, they seemed to walk ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge
... do about it? You know well enough that I can't afford to marry her. I suppose it's the best thing for me that she has gone off to the backwoods somewhere, for while she was here I could not help seeing her, and after all ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... pines, whose soft brown tassels covered the ground all around it, stood the negro meetinghouse. It was built of unhewn logs, its crevices chinked with clay, and was large enough to seat about two hundred persons. Though its exterior resembled a backwoods barn, its interior had a neat and tasteful appearance. Evergreen boughs hid its rough beams and bare shingled roof, and long wreaths of pine leaves hung in graceful festoons from its naked walls and narrow windows. On the two sides of a wide aisle, which ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... are no rocking-chairs in Triana, as there were none in our backwoods, and the little maids tilted to and fro on the fore legs and hind legs of their chairs and lulled their charges to sleep with seismic joltings. When the street turned into a road it turned into a road a hundred feet wide; one of those roads which ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... was Harlson. His backwoods training would not allow of that. In every class encounter, in every fray with townsmen, it is to be feared in almost every hazing, after his own gruesome experience—for they hazed then vigorously—he was a factor, and beefsteak had been bound upon his ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... 2. Mordecai lived and died at Scituate, close by the place of his birth. 3. Mordecai moved, and settled in Pennsylvania, in the neighborhood which afterward became Berks County, while it was still wilderness. 4. John moved into the wilds of Virginia. 5. Abraham went to the backwoods of Kentucky shortly after Boone's settlement. 6. Thomas moved first into the sparsely settled parts of Indiana, and thence went onward to a similar ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... There are heaps and heaps of railway sleepers down in the wood heap, and we could pile them up into a hut. It's only what people do out in Canada. Gibbie's always telling us tales of women who emigrate to the backwoods, and build colonies of log-cabins. Ave, you're not going to sleep ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... if you were lost in the backwoods," I said, laughing. "How you manage to keep out of this charming place when you have only three steps to take to get into it is more than I have yet been able to discover. You hide away mighty well so long as I am on the premises, I know; but I had a hope that you peeped ...
— The Aspern Papers • Henry James
... guess. People who live in the backwoods and miles from a railroad are not apt to be leaders of fashion. Doubtless her hands will be red and her face will be red and her ...
— The Man in Lonely Land • Kate Langley Bosher
... backwoods of Cambodia live two mysterious sovereigns known as the King of the Fire and the King of the Water. Their fame is spread all over the south of the great Indo-Chinese peninsula; but only a faint echo of it has reached the West. ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... vengeance for this deadly insult and, as they imagined, murder of their leader, but their impulse was checked by a stern command from behind. Glancing in that direction, they saw themselves covered by a long, brown rifle-barrel, held by a white man clad in the leathern costume of the backwoods. At the same time half a dozen laborers who, home-returning from the fields, had noticed that something unusual was taking place, came hurrying to the scene of disturbance. Wisely concluding that under ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... blood-curdling scenes or nothing startling or sensational in the plot or characters. The story, however, may be regarded as a biting sarcasm on a hypocritical society in which a gang of instructors of dark character at a middle school in a backwoods town plays a prominent part. The hero of the story is made a victim of their annoying intrigues, but finally comes out triumphant by smashing the petty red tapism, knocking down the sham pretentions ...
— Botchan (Master Darling) • Mr. Kin-nosuke Natsume, trans. by Yasotaro Morri
... who wanted to learn. True, I had once read in some story, perhaps fictitious, how a nobleman had found a boy reading Newton's "Principia," and not only expressed his pleased surprise at the performance, but actually got the boy educated. But there was no nobleman in sight of the backwoods of Nova Scotia. I read in the autobiography of Franklin how he had made his way in life. But he was surrounded with opportunities from which I was cut off. It does seem a little singular that, well known as my tastes were to those ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... grandson, the great Jonathan Edwards, in December, 1734, preached the sermons which created the initial wave of a great religious movement. This religious revival spread slowly through generally lax New England, and through the no less lax Jerseys, and through the backwoods settlements of Pennsylvania, until it finally swept the southern colonies. At the time, 1738, the Rev. George Whitefield was preaching in Carolina, and acceptably so to his superior, Alexander Garden, the Episcopal ...
— The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut • M. Louise Greene, Ph. D.
... to make the opening prayer. It was considered a good prayer, generally speaking, but it was criticised as not containing anything attractive to young people. He was understood to be on his way to take charge of a backwoods church down in Aroostook County, where probably his prayers would be more acceptable ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... to his chatter, a trifle too noisy to seem fully natural; and her smile, in the beginning mistrusting, wary, was softening and brightening. But she did not get on with the tea especially well. At home, in the backwoods village, where this beverage was still held a rarity, the dainty luxury of well-to-do families, to be brewed only for honored guests and on great holidays—there over the pouring of the tea officiated the eldest man of the family. Later, when Liubka ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... rael satisfaction tae read yir letter frae the backwoods—or was't a public-hoose in New York? ma memory's no what it used to be—tellin' hoo ye were aye thinkin' o' yer auld granny, and wantin' tae come hame and be a comfort tae her if she wud send ye out ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren
... peeping out at the window, and a half-blind one standing by, begging for a report of what's taking place. Before you married, Alfred, I'll bet you selected a better place than that when you wanted to kiss a girl. That fellow lives in a big town and I live here in the backwoods, but I can learn ...
— Dixie Hart • Will N. Harben
... as the list expanded. They felt that it was like this Bishop—an unimportant and commonplace figure in Methodism, not to be mentioned in the same breath with Simpson and Janes and Kingsley—that he should begin with the backwoods counties, and thrust all these remote and pitifully rustic stations ahead of their own metropolitan charge. To these they listened but listlessly—indifferent alike to the joy and to the dismay which he was scattering among the ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... your property by right of law, no matter whoever built the shack in the start. He was only a squatter at the best," and Lub looked wise when he laid down this principle in common law which is often so exceedingly difficult to practice in the backwoods, where right of possession is nine ...
— Phil Bradley's Mountain Boys - The Birch Bark Lodge • Silas K. Boone
... guess you're right, Mary," she said. "It doesn't seem to be very civilized here in the backwoods— and such queer people live here, too. But now! let ...
— Ruth Fielding at Snow Camp • Alice Emerson
... the day, that a sister's influence is illimitable, and she felt besides an added weight of responsibility towards her motherless sister and brothers. "I don't know, papa," she said at last, "unless we all take to the backwoods, live in a wigwam, and feast on the fruits of the chase. Edward chafes a good deal under ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam
... Collomsville, Lycoming County, have had arms loving pilgrims of note from all over the State to learn the last dying secrets of the Kentucky rifles, which, despite their name, were mostly made in Pennsylvania. Often the backwoods arms enthusiast would insist that the shutters be closed and the smith's work carried on by candle-light, lest a passing hechs cast a glance upon the barrel, which would ever afterward be deprived of the power to kill. The proud owner of a cherished gun would never leave it near ...
— A Catalogue of Early Pennsylvania and Other Firearms and Edged Weapons at "Restless Oaks" • Henry W. Shoemaker
... necessitate the bird flying open-mouthed among the oaks and other trees beneath which it finds the yellow underwings and cockchafers on which it feeds, and I have more than once watched it hunting its victims with the beak closed. I noticed this particularly when camping in the backwoods of Eastern Canada where the bird goes by ...
— Birds in the Calendar • Frederick G. Aflalo
... one of the beat men I over knew," said Phoebus. "He was a remarkable instance of energy combined with softness of disposition. In my opinion, however, he ought never to have visited Europe: he was made to clear the backwoods, and govern man by the power of his hatchet and the mildness of his words. He was fighting for freedom all his life, yet slavery made and slavery destroyed him. Among all the freaks of Fate nothing is more surprising than that this Transatlantic ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... religion to the injured man and his family. After partaking of their plain but hospitable fare, he went to the barn for his faithful horse. While he is preparing to mount him we shall attempt to describe this backwoods preacher's appearance. ...
— The Kentucky Ranger • Edward T. Curnick
... Thomas, was a notable man. His parents were poor, and in early life he went into the backwoods of Virginia as a surveyor. He is described as a person of great stature and strength. His mind was equally robust. He was a natural mathematician, and was remarkable for hardihood and perseverance. His temper was equable, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... coast the first united efforts of human industry were made. The tongue of arid land was the cradle of those English colonies which were destined one day to become the United States of America. The centre of power still remains here; whilst in the backwoods the true elements of the great people to whom the future control of the continent belongs are gathering ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... you are alive! (and may not be long.) What's to be done now? Joe was a nice fat little boy, and the bear might be hungry. He wasn't afraid: pooh!—no. A little backwoods boy afraid? They are made of different stuff than the little ruffled-collar boys that tag about with the nursery maid at ...
— Little Ferns For Fanny's Little Friends • Fanny Fern
... story," replied the visitor, "but I always had the idea that we should meet again. Your photograph has been with me all over the world. In the backwoods of Canada, in the bush of Australia, it has been my one comfort and guiding star. If ever I was tempted to do wrong, I used to take your photograph out ...
— Short Cruises • W.W. Jacobs
... Mrs. Hammond said: "Now, Nick, I am expecting your Aunt Ella and Uncle Alfred today, and I want you to be on your guard while they are here, and not act as if you were a backwoods boy who does not know anything. I especially want you to be gentlemanly; for Uncle Alfred is such a stranger to us yet that he will not understand you, and will think less of your papa and myself for seeing you rude and ill-mannered. You see, you owe it to yourself ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... stick, turning it over and over in his hand like some backwoods denizen receiving a letter for the first time in forty years and scared to open it. Then Natalie detected a loose end to the stick and suggested that it might contain something of value. Rolfe stripped a rice leaf from the cane, opened it, and found a message written ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... of them more or less obviously absurd to Yan; but she had also a smattering of backwoods lore and Yan gleaned ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... that Mr. AUGUSTUS JOHN will be able to accompany Lord BEAVERBROOK to Canada this summer, so that his lordship may gratify his lifelong ambition to be painted by Mr. JOHN, with the primeval backwoods for a setting, in the character of a coureur-des-bois, of the type immortalized by Sir ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, June 30th, 1920 • Various
... World of fancy and fiction so graphically described in Indian stories and tales of backwoods life? And where are the vast prairies and almost boundless forests of sober fact, where the bear, the wolf, and the buffalo roamed at will—the famous hunting-grounds of the Red Indians and the trappers ...
— The Story of Garfield - Farm-boy, Soldier, and President • William G. Rutherford
... militia company in guarding Continental stores here [Fort Burd] in 1778." The term "Big Knives" or "Long Knives" may have had reference either to the long knives carried by early white hunters, or the swords worn by backwoods militia officers. See Roosevelt's Winning of the West, ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... the most outre things in connection with our rides about the countryside was Culhane's attitude toward life and the natives and passing strangers as representing life. Thus one day, as I recall very well, we were riding along a backwoods country road, very shadowy and branch-covered, a great company of us four abreast, when suddenly and after his very military fashion there came a "Halt! Right by fours! Right dress! Face!" and presently ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... the tall grass, and crawled to trees. The families screened themselves as best they could. The onset was long and fiercely urged; ever and anon, amid the din and smoke, the braves would rush out, tomahawk in hand, towards the center; but they were repulsed by the cool intrepidity of the backwoods riflemen. Still they fought on, determined on the destruction of the destined victims who offered such desperate resistance. All at once an appalling sound greeted the ears of the women and children in the center; it was a cry from their defenders—a cry for powder! "Our powder is giving out!" ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... that, wherever he may be—whether in the backwoods of America, or digging for gold in California, or wandering about the United Kingdom—there is little fear that he will quit his place of safety to dare the dangerous ground of West Lynne. Had I been you, sir, I should have laughed at ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... tents grew less comfortless, for Elizabeth interpreted literally the general's permission to do here what she chose. The eyes of the soldiers followed both women with delight, and one rugged fellow, a backwoods man, whose cheerfulness not even a broken leg and a great gash in his forehead could destroy, volunteered the statement: "By George! whether in peace or war we need our women." This was responded to by a cheer from the inmates of his tent. The demonstration ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 6 • Various
... publican. My mess consisted of a Colonial, an Irishman, a Hollander, a German, a Boer, and a Jew. It must not be imagined, however, that we were a cosmopolitan crowd, for the remaining hundred and ninety-four were nearly all true Boers, mostly of the backwoods type, extremely conservative, and inclined to be rather condescending in their attitude towards the clean-shaven town-dwellers. The almost universal respect inspired by a beard or a paunch is a poor tribute ...
— With Steyn and De Wet • Philip Pienaar
... that policeman of the backwoods forced upon Mexico by Napoleon, could only grind his teeth, ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... easy familiarity of the backwoods. He treated the boy and man who rode with him as comrades of at least a year's standing, and they felt in return that he was one of them, a man to be trusted. They retained all the buoyancy which the receipt of the dispatch had ...
— The Guns of Shiloh • Joseph A. Altsheler
... last from the peaks and entered a tiny hamlet of the backwoods, where he found among other things a two-weeks-old Richmond newspaper. Looking eagerly through its meager columns to see what had happened while he was buried in the hills, he learned that there was no new stage in the war—no other great battle. The armies were facing each other across ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... beauty," said Alfred to himself, as he watched the graceful rider disappear. "What spirit! Now, I wonder who she can be. She had on moccasins and buckskin gloves and her hair tumbled like a tomboy's, but she is no backwoods girl, I'll bet on that. I'm afraid I was a little rude, but after taking such a stand I could not weaken, especially before such a haughty and disdainful little vixen. It was too great a temptation. What eyes she had! Contrary to what I expected, this little frontier settlement ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... story was naturally laid in those backwoods with which I was familiar, and the story itself was founded on the adventures and experiences of myself and my companions. When a second book was required of me, I stuck to the same regions, but changed ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... is one story about Stephen, better worth telling still, and that is how the Voice that guided him all over the world sent him one day 'preaching to nobody' in a lonely forest clearing in the far backwoods of America. ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... shut my eyes and almost fancy I see your home in the backwoods. There are your two sisters running about ...
— Our American Cousin • Tom Taylor
... best friend there, Mr. Zebina Allen. The way to make his permanent home in the Quaker City seemed to be opening before him. That I should go with him for a few days to Philadelphia when he returned, to "see how the land lay," as he expressed it in backwoods phrase, was one of his favorite ideas. He made so much of this point that I finally consented ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... returned the compliment. First class, indeed! Men with turpentine clothes, or rags, on; women chewing snuff, etc., etc. If I looked, acted and talked like some of the people that I saw on that train, I should certainly feel myself an appropriate subject for an ox-cart in the backwoods, rather than for a first class coach on a railroad; yet these are the people who object to respectable, well-dressed, intelligent and Christian men and women riding in a decent coach, ...
— The American Missionary - Volume 42, No. 1, January 1888 • Various
... of pioneer Americans who, even before the discovery of gold, were already drifting across the Sierras and down into Oregon and California with their oxen and great wagons. With here and there a Rocky Mountain trapper or a buckskin-clad scout of the Kit Carson type, in the main they are backwoods farmers. All carry the long rifle ...
— The Acorn-Planter - A California Forest Play (1916) • Jack London
... not answer, for she was thinking. This uncouth boy was the son she had put her faith in. She loved him best of all things on earth, but for the moment she saw him in the hard light of disillusionment. A loutish backwoods child, like Dennis Hanks or Tom Sparrow or anybody else. He had been a comfort to her, for he had been quick to learn and had a strange womanish tenderness in his ways. But she was leaving him, and he would grow up like his father before him to a life of ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... law-abiding as a young English gentleman generally is. He had gone away from home very young, and spent several years in wandering before he would address himself to serious life. He had been in Canada and in the backwoods, and though California was not known then as now, had spent a few months at the gold diggings, in the rude life and strife which English families, not yet acquainted with farming in Manitoba and ranches in the far West, heard of with horror, and where only those ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... man, but so far as his own language could carry him he was an educated one. Thus while he developed the sterner qualities by hard work and a rough life, he did not bring back the coarse habits of the backwoods and the camp-fire, but was able to refine his manners and improve his mind in the excellent society and under the hospitable roof of ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... determination to seek his fortune in the then almost unknown Canadian West had been growing upon him, and as it grew he shrank more and more from disclosing his plans to his fiancee. Had she been one of the country girls of the neighbourhood, a daughter of the sturdy backwoods pioneers, bred to hard work in field and barnyard, he would have hesitated less. But she was sprung from gentler stock. It seemed almost profane to think of her in the lonely life of a homesteader on the bleak, unsettled plains—to ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... alert now, descried in this naught more poetical than the fact that Selwyn considered that his sister resembled a man of his acquaintance. As for that fairest of all spring flowers, it had never gladdened the backwoods range ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... strangely penetrating powers. In stature the young man was almost as tall as Humphrey, but of a much slighter build; yet he was wiry and muscular, as could well be seen, and plainly well used to the life of the wild woodlands. His dress was that of the backwoods, dressed deerskin being the chief material used. Both travellers wore moccasins on their feet, and carried the usual ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green
... what every settler who builds himself a hut in the backwoods must feel, Bert. It is the work of every wood-cutter and charcoal-burner; it is a good deal like the work of every miner. You have been brought up too ...
— The Treasure of the Incas • G. A. Henty
... feature of backwoods education to which Dorsey had not aspired. Crawford had doubtless introduced it as a refinement which would put to shame the humble efforts of his predecessor. One of the scholars was required to retire, and then to re-enter the room as a polite gentleman is supposed to enter ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... just how I feel, my lad," continued Griggs, in his calm, dry manner. "I'm like that countryman of mine who was hard up for tuck, out in the backwoods, and when some one asked him afterwards how he managed to live, he said he ...
— The Peril Finders • George Manville Fenn
... A Backwoods Boyhood, in Moores, Abraham Lincoln; Choosing Abe Lincoln Captain, in Schauffler, Lincoln's Birthday; Following the Surveyor's Chain, in Baldwin, Abraham Lincoln; His Good Memory of Names, in Gallaher, Best Lincoln Stories; Lincoln ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... this is, that you cannot give your man as much soil as he has on the prairies or in the Canadian lumber lands. This, no doubt, is true, but the squatter who settles in the Canadian backwoods does not clear his land all at once. He lives on a small portion of it, and goes on digging and delving little by little, until, after many years of Herculean labour, he hews out for himself, and his children after him, a freehold estate. Freehold estates, ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... breath, thankful that he had not stirred. He was aware of neither sound nor motion, yet not many paces distant stood a tawny, gray-brown animal whose round, moon-like face, pale savage eyes and tufted ears proclaimed it to be a lynx, or, as it is more commonly known in the backwoods settlements, a lucivee. ...
— Followers of the Trail • Zoe Meyer
... that they have to do either a good deal of outdoor work or a good deal of what might be called natural outdoor play do not need the athletic development. In the Civil War the soldiers who came from the prairie and the backwoods and the rugged farms where stumps still dotted the clearings, and who had learned to ride in their infancy, to shoot as soon as they could handle a rifle, and to camp out whenever they got the chance, were better fitted for military work than any set ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... beg for hospitality at the gate of a wealthy planter, who was a Frenchman by birth. He bade me sit down beside his fire, and we began to talk with that freedom which befits persons who meet in the backwoods, two thousand leagues from their native country. I was aware that my host had been a great leveller and an ardent demagogue, forty years ago, and that his name was not unknown to fame. I was therefore not ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... played hooky from school, disobeyed Isaac's commandments. To the mountains or the sea, or in hot water with the neighbours and the town authorities—it was all the same; he was everywhere save where the dull plod of work obtained. And work was work in those backwoods days, and he, Frederick, had done the work. Early and late and all days he had been at it. He remembered the season when Isaac's wide plans had taken one of their smashes, when food had been scarce on the ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London
... by Ella Barnwell. Heaven forbid, sweet lady, that it be thou as met with this terrible misfortune!—but ef it be, by the Power that made me, I swar to follow on thy trail; and ef I meet any of thy captors, then, Betsey, I'll just call on you for a backwoods sentiment." ...
— Ella Barnwell - A Historical Romance of Border Life • Emerson Bennett
... A firm of enterprising Agents offer bracing and profitable occupation (coupled with the use gratis, of two broken spades, an old manure-cart, and an axe without a handle) in a peculiarly romantic and unhealthy district in the backwoods of West-Torrida. Photograph, if desired, of Agent's residence (distant several hundred miles away.) Excellent opening for young men fresh from first-class public school or college-life: who should, of course, be prepared to "rough it" a little before making competence or large fortune, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, July 19, 1890 • Various
... bank-notes. The bank-notes were in fact practically worthless, for the State finances were suffering a violent reaction from the extravagant legislation of 1836 and 1837. One of the popular ways of attacking an obnoxious political doctrine in that day was writing letters from some imaginary backwoods settlement, setting forth in homely vernacular the writer's views of the question, and showing how its application affected his part of the world. These letters were really a rude form of the "Bigelow ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 5, April, 1896 • Various
... apple having a slightly different flavour to what it had in this country. You could always distinguish an American apple by its peculiar piquancy—a sub-acid piquancy, a wild strawberry piquancy, a sort of woodland, forest, backwoods delicacy of its own. And so on, and so on—"talk, talk, ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... a boy to get much of an education in the backwoods districts of the American colonies in 1777, and especially so in such a primitive country as that which lay along the Catawba River in South Carolina. The colonies were at war with England, and all the care of the people was needed to protect their farms from attacks by the enemy, and to give ...
— Historic Boyhoods • Rupert Sargent Holland
... and the frontier had retired to a comfortable distance from the sea-board. The Indian had already grown legendary to town dwellers, and Freneau fetches his Indian Student not from the outskirts of the settlement but from the remote backwoods ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... sickle, the scythe, and the flail to do their office in due course; and if the man were well-to-do, he swung the cradle in his rye and wheat, rejoicing in the sweep of the knife and the fulness of the swathe. Then, too, there was the driving of the rivers, when the young men ran the logs from the backwoods to the great mills near and far: red-shirted, sashed, knee-booted, with rings in their ears, and wide hats on their heads, and a song in their mouths, breaking a jamb, or steering a crib, or raft, down the rapids. And the voyageur also, who brought furs out of the North down the great lakes, came ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... of whom to make converts, but, gathering several hundred of the peasants from the neighborhood, he managed to imbue them with an absolute faith in his divine mission, and emigrated with them to the backwoods of Pennsylvania, in Butler County. After about ten years they removed to the banks of the Wabash, in Indiana; then, in 1825, returned to Pennsylvania, and settled finally in Beaver County, some sixteen miles below Pittsburg, calling their ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... naturalized itself at once on our soil as a natural expedient for scattered frontier populations unprovided with settled institutions. By a natural process of evolution, adapting itself to other environments and uses, the backwoods camp-meeting has grown into the "Chautauqua" assembly, which at so many places besides the original center at Chautauqua Lake has grown into an important and most characteristic ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... as are "livings" among poor curates, and, when met with, were equally as small; and so it happened, that as the landowners usually resided, like Mr. Honeywood, among their own people, a gentleman would occasionally be as badly off for a neighbour, as though he had been a resident in the backwoods of Canada. This evil, however, was productive of good, in that it ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... tone of his entire being is not a little elevated, and all his perceptions and susceptibilities quickened. I feel that some such statement is necessary to justify the interest that I felt in this backwoods maiden. A slightly pale face it was, strong and well arched, with a tender, wistful expression not ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... invoked the saints, and cursed his director for his medley of directions many a time, before he stumbled at length on Mr. Boone's house. He was invited to sit down and dine, in the simple backwoods phrase, which is still the passport ...
— The First White Man of the West • Timothy Flint
... seemed to have imagined that they were about visiting some backwoods wilderness, some savage tract of country, "remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow," for they brought almost everything with them that men of elegant leisure could require, as if the hotel were but four walls ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various
... Meshach has not a single Old-World notion) produced in a single generation. We ourselves have known a parallel instance in the children of a British soldier who deserted during the War of 1812; in tone of thought, accent, dialect, and physique they were unmistakably Yankee. If the backwoods Americanize men so fast, is it wonderful that two centuries of the Western Hemisphere should have produced a breed so unlike the parent Bull? It is time Bull began to reconcile himself ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... to stand out as a light shining in the darkness. In Germanic eyes Ottokar's fault was that of being a Slav, successful and of great ability. I cannot agree with the German chronicler's estimate of Rudolph. We are expected to accept him as a modest sort of backwoods peer, the kind that wears flannel next its skin and keeps its small estates unencumbered. We have also a pretty picture in verse of this Rudolph. He is described as meeting a priest carrying the Host, on the bank of a foaming mountain torrent somewhere among the Alps where the ruins of the Habsburg ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... first great sorrow of his life befell the little boy. His mother died of a fever that appeared among the settlers, leaving Abraham and his sister Sarah, a little girl of eleven, to do the housework and the heavy chores of a backwoods farm. The following year Thomas Lincoln went away to Kentucky to marry again, and he brought back with him a big hearted woman named Sally Johnson, who had three children ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards
... Indian corn. His drowsy lids snap at some trivial sound, With lazy yawns he slips towards the ground, Then with an idle whistle lifts his load And shambles home along the country road That stretches on, fringed out with stumps and weeds, And finally unto the backwoods leads, Where forests wait with giant trunk and bough The axe ...
— Flint and Feather • E. Pauline Johnson
... positive answer that no inquest had been held, or any body found, which could by any possibility be that of the young Englishman. The only alternative appeared to be that he had taken the first opportunity to break all the old ties, and had slipped away to the backwoods or to the States to commence life anew under an altered name. Why he should do this no one professed to know, but that he had done it appeared only too probable from the facts. Hence many a deep growl of righteous anger rose from the brawny smacksmen ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... pleasure, the administration of justice, the practice of medicine and of the law, and the performance of the charges of the Church of England a long time ago. Such persons would bring their lines of demarcation with them, and in their new milieu of backwoods settlers and small traders would find no difficulty in drawing them again. But it was a very long time ago. The little knot of gentry-folk soon found the limitations of their new conditions; years went by in decades, aggrandizing none of them. They took, perforce, to the ways of the country, ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... would then make the best of our way home from our distant hunting-grounds; transporting our spoils, sometimes in canoes along the rivers, sometimes on horseback over land, and our return would often be celebrated by feasting and dancing, in true backwoods style. I have given you some idea of our hunting; let me now give you a sketch ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... very unlike, in many respects, to what we are accustomed to suppose a backwoods hunter should be. He did not possess that quiet gravity and staid demeanour which often characterize these men. True, he was tall and strongly made, but no one would have called him stalwart, and his frame indicated grace and agility rather than strength. ...
— The Dog Crusoe and His Master - A Story of Adventure in the Western Prairies • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... Cutler and his three friends were passing the time quite pleasantly over a bottle of backwoods nectar—commonly called whiskey. They seemed well pleased, too, with some recent exploit of theirs, and were evidently congratulating themselves upon their dexterity; for, as the "generous liquid" reeked warmly to ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... the flatboats of their owners. Even the "gunnels" were sometimes used in Cincinnati as foundations for houses. In later days the flatboat, if in reasonably good condition, was not unlikely to be sold to persons engaged in trading down the Mississippi. Loaded with grain, flour, meats, and other backwoods products, it would descend to Natchez or New Orleans, where its cargo could be transferred to ocean-going craft. But in any case its end was the same; for it would not have been profitable, even had it been physically possible, to move the heavy, ungainly craft upstream over long distances, ...
— The Old Northwest - A Chronicle of the Ohio Valley and Beyond, Volume 19 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Frederic Austin Ogg
... "and would you imagine it, he seems to think that everything here goes on as it does in his d——d little backwoods ranch at home; talks about the pretty girls who walk alone in the street; says how sensible it is; and how French parents are misrepresented in America; says that for his part he finds French girls,—and he confessed to only knowing one,—as jolly as American girls. ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... skin of one hanging upon a tree by the route we would take in the morning, a buster, he skinned him yesterday. There was an entire absence, of braggadocio in Big Tom's talk, but somehow, as he went on, his backwoods figure loomed larger and larger in our imagination, and he seemed strangely familiar. At length it came over us where we had met him before. It was in Cooper's novels. He was the Leather-Stocking exactly. And yet he was an original; for he assured us that he had never read ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... these early settlers is described with sympathetic accuracy by Theodore Roosevelt. "Louisiana was added to the United States because the hardy backwoods settlers had swarmed into the valleys of the Tennessee, the Cumberland and the Ohio by hundreds of thousands.... Restless, adventurous, hardy, they looked eagerly across the Mississippi to the fertile solitudes where the Spaniard was the nominal, and the Indian the real master; and ...
— The American Empire • Scott Nearing
... dutiful indeed, but dead as the days when daughters obeyed, and honored their fathers! Beggarly foreign professors wiped all that out of the minds of wealthy girls at boarding schools—just as they changed their backwoods pronunciation of French and Italian. Don't evade ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... of a stranger who was once dangling his legs over the edge of the station platform at a small backwoods town, when a native called out to him "Hist!" (hoist), pointing to the ground under the stranger's feet. He "histed" obediently, which is to say that he voluntarily threw into play the spinal center for leg flexion; and then, looking down, saw a rattler ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... rough place. No mining hamlet in the placer gulches of California, nor any backwoods village I ever saw, approached it in picturesque, devil-may-care abandon. It was a lawless draggle of wooden huts and houses, built in crooked lines, wrangling around the boggy shore of the island for a mile or so in the general form of ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... interest first invested the American Indians, French writers saw in them the prototypes of the Germans described by Tacitus. Not only Voltaire and Rousseau, but Montesquieu himself, regard them curiously, as if in the backwoods dwelt the future dominators of the world. Comparisons were drawn between their manners, their religion, their customs, and those of the Goths and the Franks, and litterateurs indulged the fancy that in delineating the Hurons of the Mississippi they were preparing for posterity a literary ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... a backwoods doctor, Dunwody," said Jamieson at length, as he began rebandaging the limb. "I reckon there's a heap of good surgeons up North that could make a finer job of this. God knows, I wish they'd had it, and not me. But with what's ...
— The Purchase Price • Emerson Hough
... breathing her last. Yes, that poisonous breath, which has so long pervaded like numbing miasma the free air of the world, will soon be out of her foolish, hypocritical old body; and though it may still linger on here and there in provincial backwoods and suburban fastnesses, from the great air centres of civilization it will have ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... son of Jake Benton, the backwoods holiness preacher of the Ozarks. At the age of twenty-one he had become the husband of Eva Gray, who was two years younger than he. This union had been a blessed happy one. If all of Chicago's homes were like that of Harry Benton, it might ...
— The Deacon of Dobbinsville - A Story Based on Actual Happenings • John A. Morrison
... have frequently heard a long-legged, sallow-looking backwoodsman talk of having come lately from Paris, or Mecca, when instead of meaning the capital of La grande nation, or the city of "the holy prophet," he spoke of some town containing a few hundred inhabitants, situated in the backwoods of Kentucky, or amidst the gloomy forests of Indiana. The Americans too speak in prospective, when they talk of great places; no doubt "calculating" that, one day, all the mighty productions of the old world will be surpassed by ...
— A Ramble of Six Thousand Miles through the United States of America • S. A. Ferrall
... had traveled, me and my folks alone, And quick we went to workin' a piece of land of our own; Small was our backwoods quarters, and things looked mighty cheap; But every thing we put in there, we put in ...
— Farm Ballads • Will Carleton
... he determined to tell the fresh story of the backwoods and the prairies, found a pattern ready to his hand in the Waverley novels, so Ibsen availed himself of the "well-made play" of Scribe when he wrote the 'League of Youth,' which is his earliest piece in prose presenting contemporary life and character ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... with her son Paddy, a lad under ten years old, and little for his age. One midwinter night she was taken desperately ill, and Paddy, reckless of the terrors of the midnight solitudes, ran wildly to get help. The moon was high and full, and the lifeless backwoods road was a narrow, bright, white thread between the silent black masses of the spruce forest. Now and then, as he remembered afterwards, his ear caught a sound of light feet following him in the dark beyond the roadside. But his plucky little heart was too full ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... but one room: bare pine floor, small work-bench, wall bunk with amazingly neat bed, frying-pan and ash-stippled coffee-pot on the shelf behind the pot-bellied cannon-ball stove, backwoods chairs—one constructed from half a barrel, one from a tilted plank—and a row of books incredibly assorted; Byron and Tennyson and Stevenson, a manual of gas-engines, a book by Thorstein Veblen, and a spotty treatise on "The Care, Feeding, Diseases, and Breeding of Poultry ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... avalanches, the Two-leaved Pine most of all. Gaps two or three hundred yards wide, extending from the upper limit of the tree-line to the bottoms of valleys and lake basins, are of common occurrence in all the upper forests, resembling the clearings of settlers in the old backwoods. Scarcely a tree is spared, even the soil is scraped away, while the thousands of uprooted pines and spruces are piled upon one another heads downward, and tucked snugly in along the sides of the clearing in two windrows, like lateral moraines. The pines lie with branches wilted and drooping like ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... coloured sectional map of some new township marked out in squares. These are the advertisements of an Atlantic or Australian line, or of both; and the editor is their agent. When the young ploughman resolves to quit the hamlet for the backwoods of America or the sheepwalks of Australia, he comes here to engage his berth. When the young farmer wearies of waiting for dead men's shoes—in no other way can he hope to occupy an English farm—he calls here and pays his passage-money, ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... time for about a month when I was 21. It happened because I had nothing to do while visiting my mother before returning to University except help with housework and prepare meals. The food available in the backwoods of central B.C. didn't appeal to me because it was mostly canned vegetables, canned milk, canned moose meat and bear meat stews with lots of gravy and greasy potatoes. I decided to pass on it altogether. I remember rather enjoying that time as a fine ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
... history of Massachusetts, which was followed by "Redwood" and "The Linwoods, or Sixty Years Since in America." Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes studied New England village life in "Elsie Venner," and Sylvester Judd that of the Maine backwoods in "Margaret." Mr. T.W. Higginson has written "Malbone." Mr. W.D. Howells, Rev. Edward Everett Hale, and Miss E.S. Phelps are still ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... the backwoods!" said Ernest Wilton lightly, as he quickened his steps to join Seth Allport, who had hailed out to the two stragglers to "hurry up," for the "lazy lubbers" that they were; the ex-mate of the Susan Jane having awaited with some considerable ...
— Picked up at Sea - The Gold Miners of Minturne Creek • J.C. Hutcheson
... that beautiful world beyond the prairie for two years, and never did the charm of the backwoods's life pall on the growing girl, who did not miss the city sights and sounds, but exulted in the new experiences as, "with the other children on the farm, she dropped corn in the sun-warmed furrows, while a man followed behind with a hoe covering it up; and ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... know that you have read a deal more than have we who come from the backwoods," said he. "You have studied natural science and much else, still I wonder if any of you can tell me what the stones ...
— The Emperor of Portugalia • Selma Lagerlof
... Red Head was the other name of the Reverend Sylvanus Septimus Cobb during his student days—nothing more piratical than that. Sylvanus obtained the most valuable part of his training in the Canadian backwoods. During his student days he combined the theory of theology with the practice of "logging," in proportions which were mutually beneficial, and which greatly aided his success as a minister on his return to the ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... friend, "and would you imagine it, he seems to think that everything here goes on as it does in his d——d little backwoods ranch at home; talks about the pretty girls who walk alone in the street; says how sensible it is; and how French parents are misrepresented in America; says that for his part he finds French girls,—and he confessed to only knowing ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... and David C. Busler, near Collomsville, Lycoming County, have had arms loving pilgrims of note from all over the State to learn the last dying secrets of the Kentucky rifles, which, despite their name, were mostly made in Pennsylvania. Often the backwoods arms enthusiast would insist that the shutters be closed and the smith's work carried on by candle-light, lest a passing hechs cast a glance upon the barrel, which would ever afterward be deprived ...
— A Catalogue of Early Pennsylvania and Other Firearms and Edged Weapons at "Restless Oaks" • Henry W. Shoemaker
... of backwoods education to which Dorsey had not aspired. Crawford had doubtless introduced it as a refinement which would put to shame the humble efforts of his predecessor. One of the scholars was required to retire, and then to re-enter the room as a polite gentleman is supposed to enter a drawing-room. ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... are heaps and heaps of railway sleepers down in the wood heap, and we could pile them up into a hut. It's only what people do out in Canada. Gibbie's always telling us tales of women who emigrate to the backwoods, and build colonies of log-cabins. Ave, you're not going ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... sallow-looking backwoodsman talk of having come lately from Paris, or Mecca, when instead of meaning the capital of La grande nation, or the city of "the holy prophet," he spoke of some town containing a few hundred inhabitants, situated in the backwoods of Kentucky, or amidst the gloomy forests of Indiana. The Americans too speak in prospective, when they talk of great places; no doubt "calculating" that, one day, all the mighty productions of the old world will be surpassed by their ingenuity ...
— A Ramble of Six Thousand Miles through the United States of America • S. A. Ferrall
... brutality into which the primitive sincerity of the sect sometimes degenerated. He thought the habit of plain-speaking had to be jealously guarded to keep it from becoming rude-speaking, and he matched with stories of his own some things I had heard my father tell of Friends in the backwoods who were ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... the world thinks," Gillespie said, and he spoke of the small backwoods settlement as if it were some great center of opinion such as in great communities dispenses fame and infamy, and makes its judgments supremely dreaded. "Besides," he faltered, "no one is knowing but ourselves to his coming back. ...
— The Leatherwood God • William Dean Howells
... often, and we had long conversations together, but he never mentioned Harlesden or his wife. I fancy that he supposed me ignorant of the matter, or thought that if I had heard of it, I should never connect the respectable Dr. Black of Harlesden with a poor garreteer in the backwoods of London. He was a strange man, and as we sat together smoking, I often wondered whether he were mad or sane, for I think the wildest dreams of Paracelsus and the Rosicrucians would appear plain and sober fact ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... marvelous way of skimming around any kind of work with their hands. They'll work their brains till they haven't got any more backbone than a caterpillar, but as for manual labor, it's old-timey and out of fashion. I wonder how these farms would ever have been carved out of the backwoods, if the old Puritans had sat down on the rocks with their noses in a lot of books, and tried to figure out just how little work they could do, and ...
— Beautiful Joe • Marshall Saunders
... AUGUSTUS JOHN will be able to accompany Lord BEAVERBROOK to Canada this summer, so that his lordship may gratify his lifelong ambition to be painted by Mr. JOHN, with the primeval backwoods for a setting, in the character of a coureur-des-bois, of the type immortalized by ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, June 30th, 1920 • Various
... beasts, together with costly foreign rugs. The same strange mixture of rudeness and refinement was to be seen everywhere throughout the room. The table standing in the centre of the floor, ready for the evening meal, was made of unplaned boards, rudely put together by the unskilled hands of the backwoods. Yet it was set with the finest china, the rarest glass, and the richest silver that the greatest skill of the old world could supply. The chairs placed around the table were made of unpainted wood from the forest, with seats woven ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... repeated, whereas the conscript would get both pay and plunder out of government, while taking excellent care that government got precious little out of him. A shrewd, slow-spoken, self-reliant specimen, was Flint; yet something of the fresh flavor of the backwoods lingered in him still, as if Nature were loath to give him up, and left the mark of her motherly hand upon him, as she leaves it in a dry, pale lichen, on the bosom of ...
— On Picket Duty and Other Tales • Louisa May Alcott
... resistless desire. Yet it was not until the French gave up this region that they could even venture lawlessly into it, and it was not until it fell from Great Britain to the new power of the United States that the borderers began openly to press into the backwoods, singly as hunters and trappers, in families as neighborhoods as the founders of villages and towns. The pioneers felt that they were going to take their own wherever they found it, from the savages who could not and would not use it, and they were right, for the land ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... land of the palms!" announced the manager. "You know I spoke of tentative plans for a drama down there when we were in the backwoods. Now I have everything arranged, and we will leave on a steamer for St. Augustine one ...
— The Moving Picture Girls Under the Palms - Or Lost in the Wilds of Florida • Laura Lee Hope
... of the expeditions to and skirmishes at the Forks of the Ohio was that England and France were at war, although they had not declared war on each other. A chance musket shot in the backwoods of Virginia started a conflict which reverberated in Europe, disturbed the peace of the world for seven years, and had serious consequences in the French and English colonies of North America. The news of Washington's disaster at Fort Necessity ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... to death, the poor woman scarcely knew what she was doing; but she had the fighting instinct of all backwoods people, and her first motion was to snatch 30 off the wall, where it lay in a deer's-horn rest, a large horse pistol. With this in hand she ran to meet her children. Some hunter had broken the bear's fore leg with a bullet a few days before, which accounted for its strange, ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... McRae," she cried. "Here's my respected parent can't make up his mind about a piece of backwoods he owns away back of beyond somewhere, so I just steered him down here. He was just saying on the way down that he would rather have the firm of Brians and McRae do his business than any one he knew of. Weren't you, Papa? Now ...
— The End of the Rainbow • Marian Keith
... would show the neighbors the proper Old Country way of treating a servant. Sarah Emily was far from the Old Country type, however, and William seemed to have forgotten that servants had a place of their own since he had lived so long in the backwoods. When the family would arrange themselves at table, with the maid standing properly behind her mistress, Mr. Gordon would wait for her to be seated before asking the blessing, regarding her with gentle inquiring eyes, and finally requesting her in a mildly remonstrating ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... his infancy he may have laid him down on the lone Nantucket beach, to nurse at his maternal sea; though in after life he had long followed our austere Atlantic and your contemplative Pacific; yet was he quite as vengeful and full of social quarrel as the backwoods seaman, fresh from the latitudes of buck-horn handled Bowie-knives. Yet was this Nantucketer a man with some good-hearted traits; and this Lakeman, a mariner, who though a sort of devil indeed, might ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... negroes, to whom full political equality was conceded in North America? And shall a highly intellectual woman be vested with lesser rights than the rudest, least cultured man,—an ignorant day-laborer of the backwoods of Pomerania, or an ultramontane canalman, for instance, and all because accident let these come into the world as men? The son has greater rights than his mother, from whom, perchance, he derives his best qualities, the very qualities that alone ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... these were the staple items. Anything else was regarded as an "extra." A rather monotonous diet, undoubtedly; but it would not be easy to prescribe a better one for men working twelve hours a day, in the open air, through the still, steady cold of a Canadian winter in the backwoods. ...
— The Young Woodsman - Life in the Forests of Canada • J. McDonald Oxley
... all. It must have! History shows it. It didn't take a hundred years after Toussaint L'Ouverture and Dessalines, in Haiti, for the blacks to shuck off French civilization and go back to grass huts and human sacrifice—to make another little Central Africa out of it, in the backwoods districts, at any rate. And we—have had a thousand, Beatrice, since ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... doublin' the fence corner? Ye're a fine lot of jays up here in th' backwoods! Do I know him? Full well I do! An' that shows, ye what honest workin'men has got to come to, these days. Didn't ye see him sittin' there on that castin'? Th' bosses put him there to keep tricks on ye. If ye have the nerve of a bunch of hoboes, ye'll watch yer chances and step ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... the land of their birth. They manage the marts of London, the commerce of India, the fur-trade of America, and the mines of Mexico. Over all the American wilderness you will meet them, side by side with the backwoods-pioneer himself, and even pushing him from his own ground. From the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Sea, they have impressed with their Gaelic names rock, river, and mountain; and many an Indian tribe owns a ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 422, New Series, January 31, 1852 • Various
... had a harsh untunable voice, his father's, but harsher, and he spoke the drawling dialect of the backwoods. ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... men spoke in the Indian language, but that being probably unknown to the reader, we will try to convey in English as nearly as possible the slightly poetical tone of the one and the rough Backwoods' style ...
— The Prairie Chief • R.M. Ballantyne
... alacrity, and prove that their BELIEF in honest doctrines is a very different thing from their daily PRACTICE of the same. They join with vigor in the shoutings, and their "amens" drown all others, while their excitable natures, worked upon by the wild eloquence of the backwoods' preacher, seem to give evidence of a firm desire to lead Christian lives, and the spectator is often deceived by their apparent earnestness and sincerity. Such ideas are, however, quickly dispelled by a visit to a shanty-boat, and a glimpse ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop
... their features; few are negro in type as the Mpongwe, and none are purely "nigger" like the blacks of maritime Guinea and the lower Congoese. And they bear the aspect of a people fresh from the bush, the backwoods; their teeth are pointed, and there is generally a look of grotesqueness and surprise. When I drank tea, they asked what was the good of putting sugar in tobacco water. The hair is not kinky, peppercorn-like, and crisply woolly, like that of the ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... that if I wore a boot this evening, I should be taken with those torments again before the night was out." This last letter ended thus: "As a relief to my late dismal letters, I send you the newest American story. Backwoods Doctor is called in to the little boy of a woman-settler. Stares at the child some time through a pair of spectacles. Ultimately takes them off, and says to the mother: 'Wa'al Marm, this is small-pox. 'Tis Marm, small-pox. But I am ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... recluse was Harlson. His backwoods training would not allow of that. In every class encounter, in every fray with townsmen, it is to be feared in almost every hazing, after his own gruesome experience—for they hazed then vigorously—he was a factor, and beefsteak ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... 'em," he said, "but she's a right-down finger-print from the backwoods. Nathaniel St. John cables from New York that he doesn't know her, but will be pleased to make her acquaintance, if we'll frank her over. I tell these people they can sue her—but, man, you might as well sue ...
— The Man Who Drove the Car • Max Pemberton
... the easy familiarity of the backwoods. He treated the boy and man who rode with him as comrades of at least a year's standing, and they felt in return that he was one of them, a man to be trusted. They retained all the buoyancy which the receipt of the dispatch had given them, and Dick, his heart beating high, scarcely ...
— The Guns of Shiloh • Joseph A. Altsheler
... have been disposed of in the present Parliament, but it is not one of the questions upon which the welfare of the country will immediately depend. Everyone admits the need for reform; the abolition of the "backwoods-man" must come; but it is the men of most experience in public affairs who regularly attend sittings of the House of Lords, and they contribute even now a valuable element in promoting useful legislation as well as in revising and amending the Bills initiated in another place. Most ...
— Rebuilding Britain - A Survey Of Problems Of Reconstruction After The World War • Alfred Hopkinson
... silence, the roads have been neglected, and have become rather difficult for a car. The relief works in famine time have been mainly road-making, and there are smooth hard roads through the hills in all directions, so the people complain of roads that would not be counted so very bad in the Canadian backwoods. However, the difficulty being of a rocky nature, we left the car at the house of a dumb man, the only one of the inhabitants spared by Adair. He and his sister, also dumb, lived together on the mountain solitudes. She is dead, and a relative, the daughter of one of the evicted people, has ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... with the feeling that his heart was broken. He of course shunned all society, and never again recovered any real zest for it. He sometimes thought of imitating his grandfather under like circumstances with a difference—he thought of flying, not to London, but to the backwoods of America, or some place where he should never see a white face, and becoming a "wild man," a savage—a personage of whom he always believed himself to share many of the characteristics. Only consideration for his little girls deterred him from such a course. Although an excessively ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... Snow Camp; Or, Lost in the Backwoods," the third volume of the series, are told the mid-winter sports of our heroine and her friends; and later, after the school year is concluded, we find them all at the seaside home of one of the Briarwood girls, and follow them through the excitement and incidents of "Ruth Fielding ...
— Ruth Fielding on Cliff Island - The Old Hunter's Treasure Box • Alice Emerson
... Cooper, when he determined to tell the fresh story of the backwoods and the prairies, found a pattern ready to his hand in the Waverley novels, so Ibsen availed himself of the "well-made play" of Scribe when he wrote the 'League of Youth,' which is his earliest piece in prose presenting contemporary life and character in Norway. There is obvious significance ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... old gentleman is said to have invoked the backwoods 'Chandlers' and 'Hoveys,' I will obligingly translate for you, as possibly you may not be able to read it in the original Sanscrit! Oh! don't tell me that you 'won't trouble me,' and all that. I will bore you, and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... is breathing her last. Yes, that poisonous breath, which has so long pervaded like numbing miasma the free air of the world, will soon be out of her foolish, hypocritical old body; and though it may still linger on here and there in provincial backwoods and suburban fastnesses, from the great air centres of civilization it ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... out very well while it is green, but has not substance enough for a backlog when dry. Seasoning green timber or men is always an experiment. A man may do very well in a simple, let us say, country or backwoods line of life, who would come to nothing in a more complicated civilization. City life is a severe trial. One man is struck with a dry-rot; another develops season-cracks; another shrinks and swells with ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... once read in some story, perhaps fictitious, how a nobleman had found a boy reading Newton's "Principia," and not only expressed his pleased surprise at the performance, but actually got the boy educated. But there was no nobleman in sight of the backwoods of Nova Scotia. I read in the autobiography of Franklin how he had made his way in life. But he was surrounded with opportunities from which I was cut off. It does seem a little singular that, well known as my tastes were to those ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... year old. Beside them was a boy of about nine. In the background was a miserable hovel made of crude lumber and patched windows. This couple and their baby had been discovered by a geological survey outfit living in the backwoods hills. Relief, aid, and help were being rushed, and the legislature was considering ways and means of their schooling. Neither of them ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... heard women talk of greenhorns and backwoods boys in those days when I had lived a life in which women played an important, a disturbing, and a baleful part for every one but the boy who lived his strange life on the tow-path or in the rude cabin; and now these outcast women came back ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... foreign-born children. It had been the money with her! Unfortunately it is not the woman—nor the man either, for that matter—who drives around in a car, that will buckle down and do this nation's work! I also knew there were others like myself who think this backwoods bushland God's own earth and second only to Paradise—but few! And these young girls that quake at their loneliness and yet go for a pittance and fill a mission! But was not my wife ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... cookery; and it is safe to predict that the habits of the people will undergo in time the necessary changes. That health is possible to Americans ought not to be questioned. Of despair we will not listen to a word. In crossing the ocean, in the backwoods-experience which everywhere precedes cultivation, in the excitement which has followed the obliteration of social monopolies and the throwing open of the wealth of a continent to free competition, the old traditional precautions have been ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... grown prematurely coarse in feature and soured in mind by daily toil and care; the whole household squalid, cheerless, and utterly void of elevating inspirations... Only when the family had "moved" into the malarious backwoods of Indiana, the mother had died, and a stepmother, a woman of thrift and energy, had taken charge of the children, the shaggy-headed, ragged, barefooted, forlorn boy, then seven years old, "began to feel like a human being." Hard work was his early lot. When a mere boy he had to help in ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... disobeyed Isaac's commandments. To the mountains or the sea, or in hot water with the neighbours and the town authorities—it was all the same; he was everywhere save where the dull plod of work obtained. And work was work in those backwoods days, and he, Frederick, had done the work. Early and late and all days he had been at it. He remembered the season when Isaac's wide plans had taken one of their smashes, when food had been scarce on the table of a man who owned a ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London
... War of 1812 broke out the clearings of the original settlers had been extended, and some of the loyalists still lived, grown grey with time and hardened by the rough life of the backwoods. Their sons, many of whom had faint recollection of their early homes across the line, had grown up in an atmosphere of strictest loyalty to the British crown, and had put in long years in clearing the farms on ...
— History of Farming in Ontario • C. C. James
... policeman of the backwoods forced upon Mexico by Napoleon, could only grind his teeth, which ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... was soon at the door. He was dressed plainly, and, with his reddish-brown hair and mud-bespattered face, looked like a hard- working countryman just in from the backwoods. ...
— Fifty Famous People • James Baldwin
... Hartman," I said. "You're a better man any day than I—or you were. But here you are, hidden in the backwoods with owls (one of them was making a horrid noise outside), and nothing to show. Now ...
— A Pessimist - In Theory and Practice • Robert Timsol
... for she was thinking. This uncouth boy was the son she had put her faith in. She loved him best of all things on earth, but for the moment she saw him in the hard light of disillusionment. A loutish backwoods child, like Dennis Hanks or Tom Sparrow or anybody else. He had been a comfort to her, for he had been quick to learn and had a strange womanish tenderness in his ways. But she was leaving him, and he would grow up like his father before him to ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... too bad of Alec, for he had been engaged a year, and had already cleared (he was a lumberer) space enough in the backwoods to start a farm, and he was now on a short visit to his betrothed to report progress and pursue his suit. So he had no business to get his heart entangled with the line, and his legitimate affections disengaged with the string he was clearing, under Circe's azure eyes; and why need he, ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... know she's not 'chummed' with anybody yet) and showed her where the push-button was in the wall. And at that," finished Heavy, grinning broadly, "I'm not sure that she understood how the 'juice' was turned on. She must have come from the backwoods." ...
— Ruth Fielding in Moving Pictures - Or Helping The Dormitory Fund • Alice Emerson
... village—an individual, in short, no other or better than Bob Smith—should venture to express an opinion concerning the manners, customs, or anything else appertaining to, or in any wise connected with, the Ultima Thule of backwoods Georgians. There were two propositions which witnessed their own truth to the mind of Mr. Suggs: the one was that a man who had never been at Augusta could not know anything about that city, or any place, ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume V. (of X.) • Various
... of Thomas, was a notable man. His parents were poor, and in early life he went into the backwoods of Virginia as a surveyor. He is described as a person of great stature and strength. His mind was equally robust. He was a natural mathematician, and was remarkable for hardihood and perseverance. His temper was equable, but his passions were strong and his anger terrible. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... the farm Sir John has never had a desire to return, even in sympathy. With a fine sense of humour he has never relished reminiscences of the backwoods and the smoke of the log heaps. His published "Reminiscences" are a fine contribution to our political history, but they show no real sympathy with the rude pioneer life from which the writer came and to which he owes a debt that he could very well discharge, if ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... miles of scrub and underwood are diversified chiefly by crude advertisements. Here you are asked to purchase Duke's Mixture; there Castoria Toilet Powder is thrust upon your unwilling notice. In the few cities which you approach the frame-houses and plank-walks preserve the memory of the backwoods. In vain you look for the village church, which in Europe is never far away. In vain you look for the incidents which in our land lighten the tedium of a day's journey. All is barren and bleak monotony. The thin ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... service in the Legislature. The hayseeds think we are like the Indians to the National Government—that is, sort of wards of the State, who don't know how to look after ourselves and have to be taken care of by the Republicans of St. Lawrence, Ontario, and other backwoods counties. Why should anybody be surprised because ex-Governor Odell comes down here to direct the Republican machine? Newburg ain't big enough for him. He, like all the other upstate Republicans, wants to get hold of New York City. New York is ...
— Plunkitt of Tammany Hall • George Washington Plunkitt
... movements of the curious little rock hoppers and petrels. These made burrows in the ground under the basaltic debris at the foot of the cliffs, just like rabbits, popping in and out of their subterranean retreats in the same way as people travelling in the American backwoods have noticed the "prairie dogs" do; but, both the brothers, as well as the men from the Pilot's Bride, were too busy getting the hut finished while daylight lasted and carrying up the stores from the beach to the little building afterwards, ...
— Fritz and Eric - The Brother Crusoes • John Conroy Hutcheson
... it's impossible to see you and remember any such promise. Besides, it's sober truth,' he replied, growing bolder still. 'Let me get you some tea. Isn't it rather lively here? Doesn't it make you regret having buried yourself in the backwoods at the very ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... Yankee, hern in the backwoods of Maine, sallow, and with a long face;—the other was a short little Cockney, who had first clapped his eyes on ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... with a real or supposed knowledge of backwoods life served in the war. They operated in groups and formed a very unequal force—good, bad, and indifferent. Some were under the Federal authority. Others belonged to the different States. As a distinct ...
— The War With the United States - A Chronicle of 1812 - Volume 14 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • William Wood
... no rocking-chairs in Triana, as there were none in our backwoods, and the little maids tilted to and fro on the fore legs and hind legs of their chairs and lulled their charges to sleep with seismic joltings. When the street turned into a road it turned into a road a hundred feet wide; one of those roads which Charles III., when he came ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... upon which to frame manners and ideals which are among man's highest achievements, patriarchal society had its own dangers, and has now so nearly succumbed to them, that to see its institutions in working order we have to penetrate into Albania or amongst the least modern backwoods of the Slav-speaking east. To take only the leading instance, Greek tribal society dissolved within historic times under the double attack of individualism, industrial and commercial, at the one end, and of the federalism of the city state, ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... gentlemen—we—we're an ornary lot of backwoods fellers, livin' away out here in the mountains and the brush, but God Almighty 'ain't forgot us, all the same. He sent a little youngster once to put a heartful of happiness into men, and He's sent this little skeezucks here to show us boys ...
— Bruvver Jim's Baby • Philip Verrill Mighels
... that rattlesnakes live in these holes also; but we cannot certify our reader of the truth of this,—still it is well to be acquainted with a report that is current among the men of the backwoods. If it be true, we are of opinion that the doggie's family is the most miscellaneous and remarkable on the face of—or, as Henri said, in the ...
— The Dog Crusoe and his Master • R.M. Ballantyne
... In the "backwoods" of Pennsylvania stood a little mill. The miller appertaining unto this mill was a Pennsylvania Dutchman—a species of animal in which for some centuries sauerkraut has been usurping the place of sense. In Hans Donnerspiel the usurpation was not complete; he still knew ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... man and a team of two powerful backwoods horses and a big sled for axes and food, he had come back into the woods to cut the heavy spruce timber which grew around the lake. A half-mile back from the lake, on the opposite shore, he had his snug log camp and his warm little barn full of hay. He and his man had everything ...
— Children of the Wild • Charles G. D. Roberts
... early history of Massachusetts, which was followed by "Redwood" and "The Linwoods, or Sixty Years Since in America." Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes studied New England village life in "Elsie Venner," and Sylvester Judd that of the Maine backwoods in "Margaret." Mr. T.W. Higginson has written "Malbone." Mr. W.D. Howells, Rev. Edward Everett Hale, and Miss E.S. Phelps are still ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... a motley crowd, ragged, swaggering, jolly. There were husky, big-limbed youths, and bold-faced, loud-tongued girls. To-morrow they would start up-country to some backwoods barony in the kingdom of cotton, and work till Christmas time. Today was the last in town; there was craftily advanced money in their pockets and riot in their hearts. In the gathering twilight they marched noisily through the ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... much ability comes from the country—why a Lincoln comes from the backwoods while you, flourishing in a great city, can barely keep your place as ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... two miles away from any living being, I could be happy with my children. I find a kind of comfort when I am at work from daybreak to sundown, and know that it is all my own." I believe that life in the backwoods has an allurement to those who have been used to it that dwellers ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... the ball but could not stop the hemorrhage. A little girl sat on the bed, and every now and then put forth a hand and timidly stroked her father's clay-cold wrist. On the floor, on a mattress matching the one on which the boy lay, was stretched a gaunt giant from some backwoods or mountain clearing. Margaret knelt beside him and he smiled up at her. "I ain't much hurt, and I ain't sufferin' to amount to nothin'. Ef this pesky butternut wouldn't stick in this here hurt place—" She cut the shirt from a ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... depends, of course, upon your own observation or experience; you are sure to be familiar with something that most people know hazily, if at all. Bank clerk, chess player, bridge player, stenographer, journalist, truck driver, backwoods-man, mechanic—all have special knowledge of one kind or another and can use the ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... are distress and poverty enough, as part of the same body suffering from the same cause; but there is much to redeem. In the west it exhibits a people, not in the centre of Africa, the steppes of Asia, the backwoods of America—not some newly-discovered tribes of South Australia, or among the Polynesian Islands—not Hottentots, Bushmen, or Esquimaux—neither Mahommedans nor Pagans—but some millions of our ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... rarely gets very close to a backwoods people unless he possesses sincerity, democracy, and an inborn love of the woods—three virtues without which a man may remain always a ...
— The Lady of Big Shanty • Frank Berkeley Smith
... on paper, marshaling his facts in a brief, pointed way that served to convince better than eloquence. These are the characteristics that make for success in practise before our Courts of Appeal; and Jefferson's success shows that they serve better than bluster, even with a backwoods bench ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... its banks in the spring, the wind from the meadows is laden with a strong scent of musk, and by its freshness advertises me of an unexplored wildness. Those backwoods are not far off then. I am affected by the sight of the cabins of the musk-rat, made of mud and grass, and raised three or four feet along the river, as when I read of the barrows of Asia. The musk-rat is the beaver of the settled States. Their number has even increased ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... change in the family life. Losses in business, and other circumstances, induced Mr Redfern to give up his home and to remove with his family to Canada. Though this decision was made contrary to the advice of his sister, she would not forsake him and his children: so she had come with them to the backwoods. ...
— Christie Redfern's Troubles • Margaret Robertson
... observe that, wherever he may be—whether in the backwoods of America, or digging for gold in California, or wandering about the United Kingdom—there is little fear that he will quit his place of safety to dare the dangerous ground of West Lynne. Had I been you, sir, I should have laughed ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... been seen once since in the backwoods of America. His fate seemed still to follow him, and his good temper appeared immortal—his situation was more peculiar than pleasant. He was seated on a log, three hundred miles from any civilised habitation, smiling blandly at a broken axe (his only one), the half of which was tightly grasped ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 21, 1841 • Various
... pastures where the stumps are still standing, and arable lands well cleared. The little town itself has a thriving look. Its public buildings and its villas have risen, as by the sweep of an enchanter's wand, in these backwoods to the south ...
— The Zeit-Geist • Lily Dougall
... arduous course of education; he has a flexible mind, capable of much expansion, and convertible towards far loftier studies and activities than those of his early life; and if he came to Washington a backwoods humorist, he has already transformed himself into as good a statesman (to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the good people of Tecumseh mentally ticked them off, one by one, as the list expanded. They felt that it was like this Bishop—an unimportant and commonplace figure in Methodism, not to be mentioned in the same breath with Simpson and Janes and Kingsley—that he should begin with the backwoods counties, and thrust all these remote and pitifully rustic stations ahead of their own metropolitan charge. To these they listened but listlessly—indifferent alike to the joy and to the dismay which he was scattering among the ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... just rescued from the Shawnees, was a comely maiden. Though attired in the homespun garb of the backwoods, she would have attracted attention in any society. If not beautiful, she certainly was handsome, being possessed of a countenance rich with expression, and a form of perfect grace. Blue eyes, golden hair, a well-turned head, small nose and a health-tinted ...
— The Riflemen of the Miami • Edward S. Ellis
... democratic and autocracy-hating Andrew Lewis. Nor was it any affectation; for we were soon to learn he could keep up with hardy borderers on long forest marches, and at that, proceed afoot and carry his own blanket and equipment like any backwoods volunteer. ...
— A Virginia Scout • Hugh Pendexter
... boundary, bounds, confine, enclave, term, bourn, verge, curbstone^, but, pale, reservation; termination, terminus; stint, frontier, precinct, marches; backwoods. boundary line, landmark; line of demarcation, line of circumvallation^; pillars of Hercules; Rubicon, turning point; ne plus ultra [Lat.]; sluice, floodgate. Adj. definite; conterminate^, conterminable^; terminal, frontier; bordering. Adv. thus far, thus far and no further. Phr. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... the week at the outpost in the American backwoods where we dwelt—when the other young fellows were cleaning gulls or arranging snow-shoes for the day's work, Lumley was wont to ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... remember the manner in which the record of his extraordinary success was deliberately omitted from the second edition of a work which records the minutest contrivance of any English amateur,—the first edition having already mentioned the "young artist living in the backwoods,"—will recognize in it something of the old style in which the mother-country used to treat ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... landscape the element of the picturesque is in a serious deficiency. What is old is the wild and savage, the backwoods and the wild mountain, with no trace of human presence or association to give it sentiment; what is new is still in the crude and angular state in which the utilities are served, and the comfort of the man and his belongings most considered. Nothing is less ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... Illinois Central had built its tracks through to Blixton I probably would have arrived at a civilized hour," laughed Dick. "As it was, I had to come in on a wood-burning, backwoods road and the train was only five hours and a half behind schedule. Then, from a sleepy policeman I got directions that enabled me to find this place after an hour's hard work." To what effect? Only to be pounced upon by you as though ...
— The Young Engineers on the Gulf - The Dread Mystery of the Million Dollar Breakwater • H. Irving Hancock
... he averred finally. "Rather neat and tasty, if I do say it myself. 'Introducing The Pilgrim!' Hum-m-m. You can't quite appreciate it of course, but—oh, Flash, I wish you could have seen that big boy standing there in the door of that little backwoods tavern, just as I saw him, about a ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... resistance at Fort Detroit in 1763, and it is possible that Brant was in the thick of the fight in this vicinity. It is possible, too, that he was with Colonel Bouquet in August at the battle of Bushy Run, near Fort Pitt. In this engagement, after two days of strenuous backwoods fighting, the Indians were finally worsted. Pontiac's star had begun to set. With hopeless odds against him, the stubborn chief of the Ottawas kept up the struggle until the following year, but at last he was compelled ...
— The War Chief of the Six Nations - A Chronicle of Joseph Brant - Volume 16 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • Louis Aubrey Wood
... been in the backwoods for more than a month, ostensibly to fish and look at coal lands, but, really, to get away for a while, as his custom was, from his worse self to the better self that he was when he was in the mountains—alone. As usual, he had gone in with bitterness and, as usual, ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.
... us out into the cleared backwoods to visit some of our children. The country was charming; woods and green valleys, with every now and then rich orchards laden with rosy apples; the long Concession roads, forming at times magnificent avenues, in which here and there a maple, which had caught a cold blast, prematurely ...
— God's Answers - A Record Of Miss Annie Macpherson's Work at the - Home of Industry, Spitalfields, London, and in Canada • Clara M. S. Lowe
... a G. A. R. veteran was dying. He had come from the Civil War straight to a farm which, though it was officially within the city-limits of Zenith, was primitive as the backwoods. He had never ridden in a motor car, never seen a bath-tub, never read any book save the Bible, McGuffey's readers, and religious tracts; and he believed that the earth is flat, that the English are the Lost Ten Tribes of ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... tucked away among her belongings. Originally it had been her intention to teach, and she had done so one term in a backwoods school when she was eighteen. With the ending of the term she had returned to Granville, studied that winter, and got her second certificate; but at the same time she had taken a business-college course, and the following June ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... Ohio, where he was born somewhat more than a half-century ago. His father was a famous hunter and rifle shot, and it was doubtless his exploits and those of his associates, with their tales of adventure which gave the son his taste for the breezy backwoods and for depicting the stirring life of the early settlers on ...
— The Wilderness Fugitives • Edward S. Ellis
... it happened, that as the landowners usually resided, like Mr. Honeywood, among their own people, a gentleman would occasionally be as badly off for a neighbour, as though he had been a resident in the backwoods of Canada. This evil, however, was productive of good, ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... it. . . . But you shiver: you are cold. No? Then weary, perhaps—yes, and hungry. I've a backwoods hunger, for my part. Let us ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... that cling to them most tenaciously. Scholars and scientists and business men who have learned to employ scientific methods are constantly watching for something new. They welcome new discoveries and new ideas, but the man in the backwoods of ignorance has a fence around the limits of his mind and it is hard for anything to get inside it. He is open to conviction, but like the Scotsman, he would like to see the person who could "convict" him. It is hard work to get a new idea ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney
... and spring. From all directions came in the people on horseback, in wagons, and afoot. On the court-house green assembled, in indiscriminate confusion, people of all classes,—the hunter from the backwoods, the owner of a few acres, the grand proprietor, and the grinning, heedless negro. Old debts were settled, and new ones made; there were auctions, transfers of property, and, if ...
— Civil Government in the United States Considered with - Some Reference to Its Origins • John Fiske
... woman peeping out at the window, and a half-blind one standing by, begging for a report of what's taking place. Before you married, Alfred, I'll bet you selected a better place than that when you wanted to kiss a girl. That fellow lives in a big town and I live here in the backwoods, but I can learn him a ...
— Dixie Hart • Will N. Harben
... culture, nor ask what is the mode in Rome or in Paris, but that house and weather and manner of living which poverty and the fate of birth have made at once so odious and so dear, in the gray unpainted wood cabin, on the corner of a New Hampshire farm, or in the log-hut of the backwoods, or in the narrow lodging where he has endured the constraints and seeming of a city poverty, will serve as well as any other condition as the symbol of a thought which pours itself indifferently ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... Jackson. Whether as a youth, or as a man pursuing his career of village lawyer in the backwoods of a frontier settlement, he was about the last person of whom one would predict that he should arise to a great position and unbounded national popularity. His birth was plebeian and obscure. His father, of Scotch-Irish descent, lived in a miserable hamlet in North ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XII • John Lord
... long story," replied the visitor, "but I always had the idea that we should meet again. Your photograph has been with me all over the world. In the backwoods of Canada, in the bush of Australia, it has been my one comfort and guiding star. If ever I was tempted to do wrong, I used to take your photograph ...
— Short Cruises • W.W. Jacobs
... trees produced an apple having a slightly different flavour to what it had in this country. You could always distinguish an American apple by its peculiar piquancy—a sub-acid piquancy, a wild strawberry piquancy, a sort of woodland, forest, backwoods delicacy of its own. And so on, and so on—"talk, talk, ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... If we inquire what the world thought of it, we have still more to raise our wonder; for, not to mention the excitement it caused in England, the movement and its party-names were known to the police of Italy and to the backwoods-men of America. And so it proceeded, getting stronger and stronger every year, till it came into collision with the Nation and that Church of the Nation, which it began by professing ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... Coldevin was talking. He nodded to the others and finished what he was saying before he paused. The Attorney, this peculiar nonentity, who neither said nor did anything himself, took a wicked pleasure in listening to this uncouth person from the backwoods. He had happened upon Coldevin far up in Thranes Road; he had spoken to him, and Coldevin had said that he was going away soon, perhaps to-morrow. He was going back to Torahus; he was mainly going in order to resign his position; he had accepted a situation farther north. But ...
— Shallow Soil • Knut Hamsun
... an opportunity to acquire information, when he could obtain it at first hand, and hence as they sat beside the fire, watching the rosy flames dance and play at tag, he put many more questions to the backwoods boy concerning the secrets of the profession, and learned various new things that up to this time he had ...
— Canoe Mates in Canada - Three Boys Afloat on the Saskatchewan • St. George Rathborne
... we had traveled, me and my folks alone, And quick we went to workin' a piece of land of our own; Small was our backwoods quarters, and things looked mighty cheap; But every thing we put in there, we put in ...
— Farm Ballads • Will Carleton
... women of these classes was shabbier still, their costumes, for the most part, comprising stamped cotton and white dimity gowns, coarse shift (osnaburg), country cloth, and black quilted petticoats. In the backwoods and the primitive German settlements the women all wore the short gowns and petticoats, also tight-fitting calico caps. In summer, when employed in the fields, they wore only a linen shift and a petticoat of home-made linsey. All their ...
— History and Comprehensive Description of Loudoun County, Virginia • James W. Head
... himself, as he breathed with relief the outside air again, "that was the rudest thing I ever knew a lady to do. She is a lady, there is no doubt of that. There is nothing of the backwoods about her. But she might at least have answered me. What have I done, I wonder? It must be something terrible and utterly unforgivable, whatever it is. Great heavens!" he murmured, aghast at the thought, "I hope that girl isn't going up ...
— One Day's Courtship - The Heralds Of Fame • Robert Barr
... words reached the ears of Matheson, and set up a curious train of thought as he drove in his cab to his office in the Rue Laffitte. The words carried him back to a forest-clearing in the backwoods of Ontario, where he and his half-brother had made holiday camp some eighteen years before. They were comparing ambitions—two young men unusually alike in features but very different in temperament and will-power. John Riviere, the elder of the two, was dreaming ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... land grants, put a tariff on farming implements, and abolished slavery. These barriers were raised too late. A call for help ran through the western border of the United States. The sentinels of the frontier answered. Davy Crockett, the noted frontiersman, bear hunter, and backwoods politician; James Bowie, the dexterous wielder of the knife that to this day bears his name; and Sam Houston, warrior and pioneer, rushed to the aid of their countrymen in Texas. Unacquainted with the niceties of diplomacy, impatient at the formalities of international law, they soon made it known ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... introduced;" but this state of ignorance is, fortunately, not very common. It should be met by the surprised rejoinder of the Hoosier school-mistress: "Don't yer know enough to speak when yer spoken to?" Let every woman remember, whether she is from the backwoods, or from the most fashionable city house, that no such casual conversation can hurt her. It does not involve the further acquaintance of these two persons. They may cease to know each other when they ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... you have read a deal more than have we who come from the backwoods," said he. "You have studied natural science and much else, still I wonder if any of you can tell me what the ...
— The Emperor of Portugalia • Selma Lagerlof
... beauty, which time, and, perhaps, care, had mellowed but not obliterated, while her conversation indicated high cultivation. She had evidently mingled in refined society in this country and in Europe, and it was a strange freak of fortune that reduced her to a menial condition in the family of a backwoods planter. ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... small stick, turning it over and over in his hand like some backwoods denizen receiving a letter for the first time in forty years and scared to open it. Then Natalie detected a loose end to the stick and suggested that it might contain something of value. Rolfe stripped a rice ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... well as nations. But in those days there were but three banks in the Union, and each had been established against violent opposition, Hamilton, in particular, having carried the Bank of New York through by unremitting personal effort. The average man preferred his stocking. Representatives from backwoods districts were used to such circulating mediums as military warrants, guard certificates, horses, cattle, cow-bells, land, and whiskey. They looked askance at a bank as a sort of whirlpool into which wealth would disappear, and bolt out at the bottom into the pockets of a ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... superstitions, most of them more or less obviously absurd to Yan; but she had also a smattering of backwoods lore and Yan gleaned ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... indeed, but dead as the days when daughters obeyed, and honored their fathers! Beggarly foreign professors wiped all that out of the minds of wealthy girls at boarding schools—just as they changed their backwoods pronunciation of French and Italian. ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... oft carry in their train great consequences. The firing of a gun in the backwoods of Pennsylvania, Macaulay tells us, started the Seven Years' War which set the world in conflagration, causing men to fight each other on every shore of the seven seas and giving new masters to the most ancient of empires. We see to-day fifteen nations engaged in the most terrific ...
— Have faith in Massachusetts; 2d ed. - A Collection of Speeches and Messages • Calvin Coolidge
... type (for Meshach has not a single Old-World notion) produced in a single generation. We ourselves have known a parallel instance in the children of a British soldier who deserted during the War of 1812; in tone of thought, accent, dialect, and physique they were unmistakably Yankee. If the backwoods Americanize men so fast, is it wonderful that two centuries of the Western Hemisphere should have produced a breed so unlike the parent Bull? It is time Bull began to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... became a character in the country. He was, in fact, what is colloquially known as "an old poison oaker." This is an individual who sinks so low in the scale of civilization that he lives out in the backwoods or poison oak brush and becomes animal in type. His hair grew to his shoulders, his beard was unkempt, his finger nails were as long as claws and filthy with dirt. Rags of unknown antiquity partially covered his limbs, vermin infested his body and he stayed with the most degraded ...
— Hunting with the Bow and Arrow • Saxton Pope
... his boyhood? The story of his life has been told so often that nothing new can be said about him. Yet every fresh reading of the story fills the reader anew with wonder and admiration at what was accomplished by the poor backwoods boy. ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden
... on the Western border, Where he went to escape from 'law and order,' For Tom was a terrible fellow, was he, He drunk, and he swore, and he fou't[B] like the Old Harry—and Tom he had a wife: Fit partner she was of his backwoods life. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... is not at present Veronica's ambition. Veronica's conviction is that she would look well in a coronet: her own idea is something in the ducal line. Robina talked for about ten minutes. By the time she had done she had persuaded Dick that life in the backwoods of Canada had been his dream from infancy. She is that sort ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... Princess di Sereno, she had been a good deal spoiled—by every one except the Prince. Vaguely, and like a petted child, she had taken it for granted that all men were glad to be "nice" to her, and she thought the "forest creature" was showing himself a backwoods creature—rude ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... Marsh and I had a long talk over her that night, and we put our heads together to concoct a nice little bit of punishment for her. You know she's horridly shy, and as gauche as if she lived in the backwoods, and we meant to 'send her to Coventry.' We had it all arranged, and a whole lot of girls would have joined us, for it's contrary to the spirit of a place like this to allow girls of the Priscilla Peel type to become popular or ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... were thrown out that it would surpass anything ever witnessed in London. In this they were not far out of the way; for all who witnessed the scene admitted that it could scarcely have been surpassed. My own idea of an illumination, as I had seen it in the backwoods of my own native land, dwindled into nothing when compared with this ...
— Three Years in Europe - Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met • William Wells Brown
... dog; no "hunter's home" would be complete without one, but Louis scouted the idea of adding things as unfitting as plush table-covers and upholstered footstools. The table went bare, and he fashioned a footstool for his mother out of a log, in true backwoods fashion. ...
— The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson for Boys and Girls • Jacqueline M. Overton
... a mystery!" thought the confidence man. "Can she have lived all her life in the backwoods, or what? I ...
— From Farm to Fortune - or Nat Nason's Strange Experience • Horatio Alger Jr.
... soul's idealism, had turned their backs for ever on the world and its glittering shows, and had shut themselves up as monks of "enclosed" or "silent" orders,—others he had known, who, rushing away from what we call civilisation, had encamped in the backwoods of America, or high up among the Rocky Mountains, and had lived the lives of primeval savages in their strong craving to assert a greater manliness than the streets of cities would allow them to enjoy,—and all were moved by the same mainspring of action,—the overpowering ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... admiration, and send her back to Mrs. Blyth, Mat was watching her over the painter's shoulder. And when young Thorpe, who had devoted himself to helping her in communicating with the visitors, nodded to her as she left the room, his friend from the backwoods was close behind him. ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... less at home in the backwoods and prairies of his fatherland, than upon the broad seas which divide it from the Old World. Tastes differ; and there are those—possibly the majority of his readers—who prefer the Indian associations of The Last of the Mohicans, The ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal Vol. XVII. No. 418. New Series. - January 3, 1852. • William and Robert Chambers
... take such, entertainment only as he might find in the cottage of laborers, he would have as much cause to complain of the rudeness of the people, and more of their drunkenness and profligacy than in these backwoods: although in England the poor are a part of society whose institutions are matured by the experience of two thousand years. But in their manners and morals, but especially in their knowledge and proud independence of mind, ...
— The Land We Live In - The Story of Our Country • Henry Mann
... President of the United States, born near Hodgensville, Kentucky; spent his boyhood there and in the Indiana forests, and picked up some education in the backwoods schools; passed some years in rough work; he was clerk in a store at New Salem, Illinois; became village postmaster and deputy county surveyor, and began to study law; from 1834 to 1842 he led the Whigs in the ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... our distant hunting-grounds; transporting our spoils, sometimes in canoes along the rivers, sometimes on horseback over land, and our return would often be celebrated by feasting and dancing, in true backwoods style. I have given you some idea of our hunting; let me now give you ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... of the beat men I over knew," said Phoebus. "He was a remarkable instance of energy combined with softness of disposition. In my opinion, however, he ought never to have visited Europe: he was made to clear the backwoods, and govern man by the power of his hatchet and the mildness of his words. He was fighting for freedom all his life, yet slavery made and slavery destroyed him. Among all the freaks of Fate nothing is more surprising than that this Transatlantic ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... standing alone by the wayside under nodding pines, with its streamlet and water-tank; its backwoods, toll-bar, and well-trodden croquet ground; the ostler standing by the stable door, chewing a straw; a glimpse of the Chinese cook in the back parts; and Mr. Hoddy in the bar, gravely alert and serviceable, and equally anxious to lend or borrow books;—dozed all day ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Oswald began to feel the water squelching in his boots, so we held our breath and listened. Oswald laid his ear to the road like a Red Indian. You would not do this in time of peace, but when your country is in danger you care but little about keeping your ears clean. His backwoods' strategy was successful. He rose and ...
— The Wouldbegoods • E. Nesbit
... imagined, murder of their leader, but their impulse was checked by a stern command from behind. Glancing in that direction, they saw themselves covered by a long, brown rifle-barrel, held by a white man clad in the leathern costume of the backwoods. At the same time half a dozen laborers who, home-returning from the fields, had noticed that something unusual was taking place, came hurrying to the scene of disturbance. Wisely concluding that under these circumstances discretion was ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... time, brief as it was, could not be compared in celerity with the flight of the Nicaraguans, who betook themselves to the backwoods with an impetuosity seldom seen outside of a race-course. There was no loss of life so far as the British were concerned, and the only casualties resulting to the Nicaraguans were colds caught through the overheating of themselves in their feverish desire to explore ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... there are not many men, red-skinned or white, who know the country you have to traverse better than our friend Jean Baptiste Boulanger, woodman, voyageur, trader in peltries, and everything else that can make a man at home in the backwoods." ...
— The King's Warrant - A Story of Old and New France • Alfred H. Engelbach
... Baptists' Association A Visit to the House of a Refugee The Indian Bride, a Refugee's Story Mr. Hanselpecker Burning of Miramichi The Lost One—a tale of the Early Settlers The Mignionette Song of the Irish Mourner A Winter's Evening Sketch The School-mistress's Dream Library in the Backwoods The Indian Summer The Lost Children—a Poem Sleigh Riding Aurora Borealis ...
— Sketches And Tales Illustrative Of Life In The Backwoods Of New Brunswick • Mrs. F. Beavan
... was until the Empress ordered otherwise. The actor has probably abandoned his art, which gives him undesirable publicity. And some day, if father dares disobey the Empress, there'll be a mysterious murder in a backwoods ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
Copyright © 2025 Diccionario ingles.com
|
|
|
