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More "Bracken" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... green bracken lying, Close by the welcoming sea, Dream I, and let all my dreaming Drift as ...
— A Woman's Love Letters • Sophie M. Almon-Hensley
... and the light of the moon high aloft was mingled with the light of the earliest dawn; and as it happed he looked down, and lo! close to his feet the face of the Bride as she lay beside her grand-sire, her head pillowed on a bundle of bracken. She was sleeping soundly like a child who has been playing all day, and whose sleep has come to him unsought and happily. Her hands were laid together by her side; her cheek was as fair and clear as ...
— The Roots of the Mountains • William Morris
... to the muirs, mither, to hunt the deer, Ranging far frae frowning faces, and the douce folk here; Crawling up through burn and bracken, louping down the screes, Looking out frae craig and headland, drinking up ...
— Andromeda and Other Poems • Charles Kingsley
... untiring in her activity. Hither and thither she went, beating down the high bracken and tangles of weeds, poking with her stick into every hole and corner, and going further and further into the wood in the certainty that the body ...
— The Czar's Spy - The Mystery of a Silent Love • William Le Queux
... bewildered by the space, the sunshine, and the breeze, the great rabbit sat and stared about him; then suddenly old instincts came crowding back upon his rabbit brain, He saw furze and bracken, and rabbits' burrows all about him, he felt the turf under his feet, and life calling to ...
— Anxious Audrey • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... said, pushing the door of the cottage wider open. 'I've just tidied up, and I was fetching in a handful of bracken. It flames ...
— Miss Mouse and Her Boys • Mrs. Molesworth
... happen to them. But the miles fled under their swift feet. The trim villas near the township gave place to scattered farms. These in their turn became further and further apart, and then they entered a wide belt of timber, ragged and wind-swept gums, with dense undergrowth of dogwood and bracken fern. The metalled road gave place to a hard, earthern track, on which the spinning tyres made no sound; it curved in and out among the trees, which met overhead and cast upon it a waving pattern of shadows. Grim things had once happened ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... fewer as the ground rises, there are wide spaces of bracken and little woods or copses, every one of which is called a 'shaw.' Then come the firs, whose crowded spires, each touching each, succeed for miles, and cover the hill-side with a solid mass of green. They seem so close together, so thickened and matted, impenetrable to footsteps, ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... woods enchaunted, Starlit and pixey-haunted, Where 'twixt the bracken and the trees The goblins lie and take their ease By winter ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... they were running among trees—great old trees with dying bracken undergrowth. The palish, gnarled trunks showed ghostly, and like old priests in the hovering distance, the fern rose magical and mysterious. It was a night all darkness, with low cloud. The ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... prowling among the trees. He was evidently looking for something. His search so earnest and troubled that the caution he had heretofore displayed had deserted him. Stooping, poking among the leaves and bracken, rising, moving toward another tree, stooping again—repeating endlessly this same proceeding, the watchers soon ...
— The Brass Bound Box • Evelyn Raymond
... chase, greenwood, brake, grove, copse, coppice, bocage[obs3], tope, clump of trees, thicket, spinet, spinney; underwood, brushwood; scrub; boscage, bosk[obs3], ceja[Sp], chaparal, motte [obs3][U.S.].; arboretum &c. 371. bush, jungle, prairie; heath, heather; fern, bracken; furze, gorse, whin; grass, turf; pasture, pasturage; turbary[obs3]; sedge, rush, weed; fungus, mushroom, toadstool; lichen, moss, conferva[obs3], mold; growth; alfalfa, alfilaria[obs3], banyan; blow, blowth[obs3]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... himself and his deer. It may have paid us to let this be done if we were sure of peace, but now that we have seen what modern warfare means, when it breaks out on a big scale, we may surely begin to think that people who make bracken grow in place of wheat, in order to improve what auctioneers call the amenities of their rural residences, are putting their personal gratification first in a question ...
— International Finance • Hartley Withers
... Sybilla sat down on a worn grey rock which thrust itself through the green turf. William Douglas stood beside her pulling a blade of bracken to pieces. The girl had been wearing a broad flat cap of velvet, which in the coolness of the twilight she had removed and now swung gently to and fro in her hand as she looked to the north, where small as a toy and backed by the orange glow ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... bracken-harvest's gathered and the frost is on the loam When the dream goes out in silence and the ebb runs out in foam, Mary, Mary Shepherdess, she ...
— The Haunted Hour - An Anthology • Various
... the great rock. Descending further, the bleak aspect of Nature is transformed. The heather gives place to dwarf shrubs; the bare, weather-beaten rocks are clothed with blackberry bushes, or hidden amid luxurious bracken. Dark hollies clinging to detached rocks present varied and life-like forms. The air has suddenly become still. The butterflies hover over the foxgloves. The wild strawberry is at your feet. The sloeberries ripen around you. The sea before you might be the Mediterranean, ...
— A Child of the Glens - or, Elsie's Fortune • Edward Newenham Hoare
... before him. So quick was the turn, that the giant behind him lost the yard he had gained. Down through a grey beechwood, over a teeming brook, into a sodden drift of leaves, up through a welter of bracken, on to the silence of pine-needles, over the top of the ridge into the cursed undergrowth again, panting, straining, sobbing for breath, his temples bursting, his hands and arms bleeding, unutterable agony in his side, Lyveden tore like a madman. The pace was too awful to last. Always ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... month. "The bearded woman" of every circus side-show is an evidence of the curious interest in which these women are held. The accompanying illustration is a representation of a "bearded woman" born in Bracken County, Ky. Her beard measured ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... to the platform on which the convent stands—or by the alternative and longer route which I took on the homeward way, and which follows the old water conduit built by the monks into a forest of enormous chestnuts, oaks, hollies and Calabrian pines, emerging out of an ocean of glittering bracken. ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... arrived at a delicious green nook, where the shade of the trees overhead was exceptionally dense, and where the ferns by the side were somewhat torn and trodden. Casting his eye on the ground to the left, a metal clasp, gleaming silvery among the bracken, happened to attract his cursory attention. Something about that clasp looked strangely familiar. He paused and stared hard at it. Surely, surely he had seen those metal knobs before. A flash of recognition ran electric through his brain. Why, yes; it was the fastener of Montague Nevitt's pocket-book—the ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... retraced his steps, and hid himself in the bracken, for he knew from the descriptions given him that the Slyme ale-house lay there below him—the last place on the English border at which Alastair had been seen or heard of. The Slyme ale-house had an ill repute, and was said ...
— Border Ghost Stories • Howard Pease
... one of the most picturesque features of the place. The decorations consist of devices placed at intervals on the walls. These devices are made up of Highland weapons, Highland plaids, Highland bonnets bearing the chief's feather or the badge of the clan. Doubtless tufts of purple heather and russet bracken, with bunches of the coral berries of the rowan, will supplement other adornments as the occasion calls for them; and when the lights gleam, the pipers strike up, and the nimble dancers foot it with grace and glee through ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, (Victoria) Vol II • Sarah Tytler
... brackens, that pasture, that wood! Purple, yellow, and green, you have now seen, sir, for the first time in your life. Widening and widening over your head, all the while you have been gazing on the heather, the broom, the bracken, the pastures, and the woods, have the eternal heavens been preparing for you a vision of the sacred Blue. Is not that an Indigo Divine? Or, if you scorn that mercantile and manufacturing image, steal that blue from the sky, and let the lady of your ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... as we passed. A score of times we had to dismount on account of the roughness of the ground to lead our horses along the steep incline of the mountainsides, and each time Donald set his teeth and dragged his shattered ankle through bracken and over boulder by sheer dour pluck. Hunger gnawed at our vitals, for in forty-eight hours we had but tasted food. Deadly weariness hung on our stumbling footsteps, and in our gloomy hearts lurked the coldness of despair. Yet hour after hour we held our silent course, clambering like ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... plains; none of the flowers or trees with which we are familiar, except conifers, are found in any region. Ferns grow in great abundance, and have now reached many of the forms with which we are acquainted. Thickets of bracken spread over the plains; clumps of Royal ferns and Hartstongues spring up in moister parts. The trees are conifers, cycads, and trees akin to the ginkgo, or Maidenhair Tree, of modern Japan. Cypresses, yews, firs, and araucarias ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... arms filled with masses of dried bracken and coarse grass, turned sharply on hearing Vickers's call and stared hard and long in the direction which the young solicitor pointed out. His small, crafty eyes became dilated to their full extent—suddenly they contracted again with a look of cunning satisfaction, ...
— Scarhaven Keep • J. S. Fletcher
... set off again through the forest, at a more moderate pace now, for the way ran no longer clear. The word "forest" to a stay-at-home means a tract of soft, springy turf, with tall trees and pleasant glades and clumps of bracken that shelter rabbits and other small creatures of the woodland. But the forest of the West Indies bears to our English forest the relation of a giant to a dwarf. The fronds of the bracken grow to feet where we have inches; weeds ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... opened and Dodge and a companion, who subsequently proved to be E. M. Bracken, alias "Bradley," an agent employed by Howe and Hummel, left the room, went to the elevator and descended to the dining-room upon the second floor. Jesse watched until they were safely ensconced at breakfast and then returned to the fourth floor where he tipped the ...
— True Stories of Crime From the District Attorney's Office • Arthur Train
... awning above it, is enshrined in a spacious half hemisphere of glass which forms a pavilion commanding the garden, and, beyond it, a barren but lovely landscape of hill profile with fir trees, commons of bracken and gorse, and ...
— Misalliance • George Bernard Shaw
... little gate that was never closed. He would dine lightly, and go for a ten-mile stretch among the oaks, surprise the deer asleep, listen to the hum of distant London, and watch the fairy battle between the lurid reflection of its million lights and the little stars.... There were places in the bracken where.... ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... majestically grand that even its familiarity did not detract from its beauty in the eyes of the little party as it rode laughingly by. The early leaves were just beginning to drop from off the parent stems; the ferns and bracken, which grew in abundance on either side of the road, were just assuming their peculiar fading, golden hue, whilst the hardier leaves were just beginning to bedeck themselves in the full glory ...
— Heiress of Haddon • William E. Doubleday
... palms, and gigantic bamboos. Brambles, speedwells, forget-me-nots, and nettles grow mixed with figs, balsams, peppers, and huge climbing vines. The wild English strawberry is found on the ground, while above tropical orchids like the dendrobiums cover the trunks of the oaks. The bracken and the club-moss of our British moors grow associated with tree-ferns. And English ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... when I came behind her and looked the same way, I could see nothing but the sheep's trough or the midden, or father's breeches hanging on a clothes-line. And then if she saw a lump of heather or bracken, or any common stuff of that sort, she would mope over it, as if it had struck her sick, and cry, "How sweet! how perfect!" just as though it had been a painted picture. She didn't like games, but I used to make her play "tig" and such like; but it was no fun, for I could ...
— The Great Shadow and Other Napoleonic Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... rare sight in England to see land in a natural uncultivated state devoid of vegetation. The hills are covered with grasses and bushes, the moors with ling and heather, commons with grass, bracken and gorse, a garden tends to become smothered in weeds, and even a gravel path will not long remain free from grass. It is clear that soil is well suited for the growth of plants. We will make a few experiments ...
— Lessons on Soil • E. J. Russell
... past, and found that the road descended into a deep hollow, whence between high banks, covered with gorse and bracken and many a summer flower, it led again up a hill thick planted with firs; at the lowest point was a bridge over a streamlet, offering on either hand a view of soft green meadows. A spot of exquisite retirement: happy who lived here in security from ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... port. Such beauty and charm are on the edge of pain; you cannot disentangle them from it. They intoxicate, and pierce to tears. The warm morning sun sparkled on a still blue sea, and burned the gorse and bracken by the steep path's edge to fragrance. So steep the path was that they had to push their bicycles up it with bent backs and labouring steps, so narrow that they had to go in single file. It was never meant for cyclists, only for walkers; ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... smooth and brown with velvet moss, curved gently down to form a basin into which fell the water from the tiny stream whose musical flowing had called to him through his window. Around, and somewhat back beneath tall sentinel trees, crept the bushes and bracken of the mountain; but, above, the foliage opened and the sun shone in, turning the brown-green water of the pool to gold. With a sigh of pure delight the laughter-weary professor stepped into its cool brightness—and with a gasp of something very different, stepped quickly out again. But, quick ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... cart was springless) down to the beach to gather seaweed. All day long we worked, "Eddy" and I, taking load after load to the top of the island; and the next day too was occupied in carting up seaweed or "vraic," as the natives call it, except that we also took up two or three loads of withered bracken, leaves, and other rubbish, which I burned and spread ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling
... those charming reminiscences of George Borrow which appeared in The Athenæum. {25} I have been reading them, I may add, under the happiest conditions for enjoying them—amid the self-same heather and bracken where I have so often listened to Lavengro’s quaint talk of all the wondrous things he saw and heard in his wondrous life. So graphically has Mr. Hake depicted him, that as I walked and read his paper I seemed to ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... the children of the poor gathered blackberries for preserves and home made wine; when the wild stock flowered in St. Ouen's Bay; when the bracken fern was gathered from every cotil, and dried for apple-storing, for bedding for the cherished cow, for back-rests for the veilles, and seats round the winter fire; when peaches, apricots, and nectarines made the walls sumptuous red and gold; when the wild plum and crab-apple ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... be found in the 'fern web,' 'bracken clock' of Scotland; the tiny cockchafer, with brown wing-cases and dark-green thorax, which abounds in some years in the hay-meadows, on the fern, or on the heads of umbelliferous flowers. The famous Loch-Awe fly, described as an alder-fly with a rail's wing, seems to be ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... in shaded situations on piles of rotting straw or in the woods, especially on detritus of the bracken. The spores are many of them ellipsoidal; some are spherical; all are decidedly spinulose, perhaps might appear plicate-rugulose when dry or shrunken. Calcareous nodules very large and ...
— The North American Slime-Moulds • Thomas H. (Thomas Huston) MacBride
... and beyond, across the trees, to remoter country, wild bare hills and dark wooded lands meeting the grey still sky. Immediately beneath his feet the ground sloped steep down to the valley, a hillside of close grass patched with dead bracken, and dotted here and there with stunted thorns, and below there were deep oak woods, all still and silent, and lonely as if no one ever passed that way. The grass and bracken and thorns and woods, all were brown and grey ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... in a remarkable way. The pheasants—several of them—were pecking amongst the bracken, and Mag, perched on an oak bough overhead, was looking round, as was her custom, when her glance fell upon a fox, lurking treacherously amongst the long grass, evidently making ready to ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... Daniel Boone statue were executed by Miss Enid Yandell, by birth a Kentuckian, but now of New York. The statues of James Monroe, James Madison, George Rogers Clark, on Art Hill, were, respectively, done by Julia M. Bracken, Chicago; Janet Scudder, Terre Haute, and Elsie Ward, Denver. The reclining figures over the central door of the Liberal Arts Building were by Edith B. Stephens, of New York, and the east and north spandrels of the Machinery Building were done by ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... Shaw, of Caledonia sugar estate, in Province Wellesley, which is worth describing. It was constructed at the foot of a small hill, about a mile away from the estate, where there was a considerable area of secondary jungle and gigantic bracken fern, a favourite resort of tigers. A trench, about four or five feet wide, was opened in the sloping ground for a distance of ten or twelve feet; stout stakes were driven in the trench close to the sides, projecting ...
— Prisoners Their Own Warders - A Record of the Convict Prison at Singapore in the Straits - Settlements Established 1825 • J. F. A. McNair
... each other; her tears, too, ran down her cheeks; and were both quite silent. Noticing the difficulty with which he walked, and feeling the same extreme lassitude in her own limbs, she proposed that they should rest for a moment where the bracken was brown and shriveled beneath an oak-tree. He assented. Once more he gave a great sigh, and wiped his eyes with a childlike unconsciousness, and began to speak without a trace of his previous anger. The idea came to her that they were like the children in the fairy tale who were lost ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... the one side and the ranges around the Sugar Loaf on the other. In places the cliffs are precipitous, but, generally, the lower slopes furnish pasture-land and occasional woods, while the upper parts are covered with bracken fern, with a few trees and copses. The priory stands on a gentle slope at the base of the Black Mountains, elevated a short distance above the stream. Its original name was Llanhodeni, or "the Place by the Hodeni." It was founded by two hermits in the ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... members turned sharply round and fled away across the grass, plunging into the thick bracken and bush, and disappearing from sight in less time than ...
— Seven Little Australians • Ethel Sybil Turner
... account, if need be, of two men. After that, nothing. It were better—so much better—not to live if one were only ten minutes too late.... Now he was in the forest again, and now as he rode quickly down the steep sandy road among the bracken, he heard the hoarse rush of the river in his ears, and knew the end was well-nigh come.... Now the house was in sight, and now he cried aloud some wild inarticulate sound of thankfulness and joy. All was as peaceful as ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... sick (the poor without charge), improving their schools, and visited from time to time by patients from abroad, drawn here by his fame as an oculist. Among these last came a Mr. Taufer, a resident of Hong-Kong, and with him his foster-child, Josephine Bracken, the daughter of an Irish sergeant. The pretty and adventurous girl and the banished patriot fell ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... beautiful pleasaunce for the inhabitants of Midhurst; thickly carpeted with bracken and heather and broken by many picturesque knolls and hollows. The famous burned and ruined mansion lies on the west, close to the town and river. This beautiful old house was destroyed in 1793 through the carelessness of some workmen employed in repairing the woodwork of ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... only was clear: Rosinante could trust to her five wits better than I to mine. So leaving her to take what way she pleased, I rode on, till at length we approached the woods I had descried. Presently we were jogging gently down into a deep and misty valley flanked by bracken and pines, from which issued into the crisp air of morning a most delicious aromatic smell, that seemed at least to prove this valley ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... or a willow. These conical fruits, however, did not produce seeds; but the leaves of which they were composed bore upon their surfaces sacs full of spores or sporangia, such as those one sees on the under surface of a bracken leaf. Now, it is these sporangia of the Lepidodendroid plant Flemingites which were identified by Mr. Carruthers with the free sporangia described by Professor Morris, which are the same as the large sacs of which I have spoken. ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... very near the tree. He crept stealthily on his hands and knees through the bracken, and as stealthily climbed the wedge of outcrop, and then leaped like a wild cat on the tree. With incredible activity he lifted the balancing stone, and as the tree began to move, in a flash of perception transferred it to ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... on his green native braes of the Nith, He pluck'd the wild bracken, a frolicsome boy; He sported his limbs in the waves of the Frith; He trod the green heather in gladness and joy;— On his gallant grey steed to the hunting he rode, In his bonnet a plume, on his bosom a star; He chased the red deer to its mountain ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... o'clock. Here we made a deviation on foot to the Telega Warna (Colour-changing Lake) while the ponies rested for the downward journey. The path is a difficult one, and the lake itself is less interesting than the lovely vegetation by which it is surrounded. Ferns and bracken cover the hillside, pollipods predominating, orchids cling to tree stems, and higher up, the curious nest-fern and various forms of plant life attract attention. Tree is woven to tree by a network of ...
— Across the Equator - A Holiday Trip in Java • Thomas H. Reid
... already filled with kindly, placid shadows. A wind that blew across it from the misty blue sea beyond was making wild music in the rugged firs above his head as he stood in an angle of the weather-grey longer fence, knee-deep in bracken. It had been by these firs he had halted twenty years ago, turning for one last glance at the valley below, the home valley which he had never seen since. But then the firs had been little more than vigorous ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... morning, the air fresh and sweet, the sun comfortably warm, a little too warm, perhaps, presently, when they had trodden the narrow path by the Tongue Ghyll, and were beginning to wind slowly upwards over rough boulders and last year's bracken, tough and brown and tangled, towards that rugged wall of earth and stone tufted with rank grasses, which calls itself Dolly Waggon Pike. Here they all came to a stand-still, and wiped the dews of honest labour from their foreheads; and here Maulevrier flung himself down upon a big boulder, ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... a great boar lying in a tangled thicket of boughs and bracken, a dark place where the sun never shone, nor could the rain pierce through. Then the noise of the men's shouts and the barking of the dogs awakened the boar, and up he sprang, bristling all over his back, and with fire shining ...
— Tales of Troy: Ulysses the Sacker of Cities • Andrew Lang
... cottage was a girl of thirteen, a very pretty little girl, with a fair, fresh face, sunshiny hazel eyes, and hair of that golden brown colour which the bracken wears in autumn. She seemed to have dressed in rather a hurry, for her long black frock was not quite perfectly fastened, the muslin scarf round her shoulders was just a little crooked, and the black ribbon which tied the bright hair had not managed to catch it all, so that a few curly locks ...
— Two Maiden Aunts • Mary H. Debenham
... Lord, For all Thy Golden Silences,— For every Sabbath from the world's turmoil; For every respite from the stress of life;— Silence of moorlands rolling to the skies, Heath-purpled, bracken-clad, aflame with gorse; Silence of grey tors crouching in the mist; Silence of deep woods' mystic cloistered calm; Silence of wide seas basking in the sun; Silence of white peaks soaring to the blue; Silence of dawnings, when, their matins ...
— 'All's Well!' • John Oxenham
... hills and had sat for a few minutes on the summit watching the sun go down behind the level ridges that lead inward from the Start. While they were sitting there in silence, Arthur suddenly slipped away over the brim of a little hollow full of bracken on the edge of the wood. A moment later Gabrielle heard him laughing, and walked over quietly to see what he was doing. She saw him crouched, quite unconscious of her presence, among the ferns at the bottom of the hollow. He had caught ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... came to the little isle of sheep, where the surf burst all about it in the midst of the sea, and it was all green with bracken, and all wet with dew, and the moon enlightened it. They ran the boat into a cove, and set foot to land; and the man came heavily behind among the rocks in the deepness of the bracken, but the Poor Thing went before him like a smoke in the light of the moon. So they came to ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... way, or I shall fire." They made way for me. I charged down hill by the way I had come. Some one cried "Stop en." Another shouted "Shoot en, maister." There came a great bang of a gun over my head. But I was going down hill like a rabbit, into the gorse, into the bracken, into the close cover of the heath. Glancing back, I saw a dozen excited people rushing down the rampart after me. Some flung stones; some ran to catch horses to chase me. But I had the start of them. I was ...
— Martin Hyde, The Duke's Messenger • John Masefield
... shovel in hand, with his gown looped to his knee, fresh from the fields or the garden. The lush green water-meadows speckled with the heavy-fleeced sheep, the acres of corn-land reclaimed from heather and bracken, the vineyards on the southern slope of Crooksbury Hill, the rows of Hankley fish-ponds, the Frensham marshes drained and sown with vegetables, the spacious pigeon-cotes, all circled the great Abbey round with the visible ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... A gentle breeze stirred the air and the surface of the lakes lay shimmering in the soft autumnal light. The blue sky, flecked with white cloudlets, the purple of the heather, the dark hues of the bogs, the varied greens of bracken, ferns and grass, the gold of ripening grain, and the grey of the mountain boulders, together formed a harmony of colour which charmed the eye ...
— Fifty Years of Railway Life in England, Scotland and Ireland • Joseph Tatlow
... swung round into a side road, and we curved upward through deep lanes worn by centuries of wheels, high banks on either side, heavy with dripping moss and fleshy hart's-tongue ferns. Bronzing bracken and mottled bramble gleamed in the light of the sinking sun. Still steadily rising, we passed over a narrow granite bridge and skirted a noisy stream which gushed swiftly down, foaming and roaring amid the gray boulders. Both road and stream wound up through a ...
— The Hound of the Baskervilles • A. Conan Doyle
... its glassy surface cold and glittering like steel. Walking a little in the rear of Adam, Eve shuddered as her eyes fell on the depths, over whose brink the narrow path they trod seemed hanging. Instinctively she shrank closer to the cliff-side, to be caught by the long trails of bramble which, with bracken and gorse, made the steep descent a bristly wall. Insensibly affected by external surroundings, unused to such complete darkness, the sombre aspect of the scene filled her with nervous apprehension: every bit of jutting rock she stumbled ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... instance of the futility of comparisons, I will mention one experience. I was returning home late one afternoon when a poorly-dressed, sunburnt woman overtook me. She bore on her head a basket of bracken, and her appearance was such that in any other country I should have expected a demand for alms. Greeting me, however, cheerfully and politely, she at once entered into conversation. She had seen me at church on Sunday, and went on to speak of the pastor, with what esteem both Catholics and ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... was outside; the murmur descends from aloft. There was a frost last night and the leaves will soon fall. A beech leaf detaches itself now and then and flutters peacefully and waywardly to the ground, careless whether it finds its grave in the bracken or on the road where it will be trodden underfoot. The bramble is beginning to turn to blood. It is strange that leaves should show such character. Here is a corner on which there are not two of the same tint, but they ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... broken and mournful, from the west—these above me, as I stand by the old lichened gate of the high wind-swept field at the top of the wold. In front a stretch of rough common, the dark-brown heather, the young gorse, bluish-green, the rusty red of soaked bracken, the pale ochre-coloured grass, all blent into a rich tint that pleases the eye with its wild freshness. To the left, the wide flat level of the plain, with low hills rising on its verge; to the right, a pale pool of water at the bottom of a ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... moor she loved, its darkness, its silence, the smells it gave out, the promise of warmth and fertility in its bosom. She could not clearly see the ground, but her feet knew it: heather, grass, stones, and young bracken were to be overcome; here and there a rock or thorn-bush loomed out blacker than the rest in warning; sometimes a dip in the earth must be avoided; once or twice dim grey objects rose up and became sheep that bleated out of her way, and always, as she ran, she mounted. ...
— Moor Fires • E. H. (Emily Hilda) Young
... mother was a most wonderful creature. She was by all odds the biggest thing alive—that is, the biggest that stood on legs, and moved. He was confident of this for a space of perhaps two minutes, when they came to the end of the fen. And here was a sudden snort, a crashing of bracken, the floundering of a huge body through knee-deep mud, and a monstrous bull moose, four times as big as Noozak, set off in lively flight. Neewa's eyes all but popped from his head. And ...
— Nomads of the North - A Story of Romance and Adventure under the Open Stars • James Oliver Curwood
... it. It entered into each clinging grasp he gave her hand as he helped her up or down some steep or rugged bit of path—into the lingering look of her brown eyes, which thanked him, smiling—into the moments of silence, when they rested amid the springing bracken, and the whole scene of mountain, cloud and water spoke with that sudden tragic note of all supreme beauty, in a world of 'brittleness.' But they were not often silent. There was so much to say. They ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Columbian Exposition, and executed on an independent commission the statue of "Illinois Welcoming the Nations." There are to be five portrait statues placed in front of the Educational Building at St. Louis, each to be executed by a well-known artist. One of these is to be the work of Miss Bracken, who is the only woman among them. Miss Bracken has modelled an heroic portrait statue of President Monroe; beside the figure is a globe, on which he points out the junction of ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... are many places where a horse would be a source of danger. The sides of the valley are closely wooded for the first seven or eight miles north of Pickering, but the surrounding country gradually loses its cultivation, at first gorse and bracken, and then heather, taking the place of ...
— Yorkshire—Coast & Moorland Scenes • Gordon Home
... millinery and chiffonery in that chamber. The spaces that were not piled high with vesture gave resting spots for cardboard boxes and packing-paper. Antoinette stood in a corner gazing at the spoil with a smile of beatific idiocy. I strode through the cardboard boxes which crackled like bracken, and remained dumb as a fish before these mysteries. Carlotta tried on hats. She shewed me patent leather shoes. She exhibited blouses and petticoats until my eyes ached. She ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... the slope you came to a beautiful bit of old forest country, the trees of all ages, some of them very ancient; there were open glades running into the heart of the woodland, with thorn thickets and stretches of bracken. Hidden away in the depth of the woods, and approached only by green rides, were the ruins of what must have been a big old Jacobean mansion; but nothing remained of it except some grassy terraces, a bit of a fine facade of stone with ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... "Well, father, the bracken will be fit to cut in a month. I have ordered loads to be prepared for me in all parts of the forest. The soil of the woodlands is everywhere green with the curling fronds; and where I do not cut, the foresters and miners will be preparing heaps to ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... o' the deer and the rae, O' the gowany glen and the bracken-clad brae, Where blooms our ain thistle, in sunshine and shade— Dear badge o' the land o' the bonnet ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... over the deep ruts left by the carts which had carried the bracken the previous autumn, as the stout pony threw himself into the collar with a will. On either side of the narrow lane were high, sandy banks, riddled with rabbit-holes and crowned with a tangle of brambles ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay
... railing that ran round the crescent and used it as a lever. The rotten planks gave way. One of them uncovered the lock, which he attacked with a big knife, containing a number of blades and implements. A minute later, the gate opened on a waste of bracken which led up to a long, dilapidated building, with a turret at each corner and a sort of a belvedere, built on a taller ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... cut of the glen there was very little snow, only a few veins and patches here and there, threading and seaming the steep, as if a white-footed hare had been coursing about. Little stubby brier shoots, and clumps of russet bracken, and dead heather, ruffling like a brown dog's back, broke the dull surface of withered herbage, thistle stumps, teasels, rugged banks, and naked brush. Down in the bottom the noisy brook was scurrying over its pebbles ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... over, the sun shone with sudden brilliance into my very eyes. The storm was breaking up, and vanishing in the west. I threw down my spoon, and ran, hatless as usual, from the house. The sun was on the edge of the hollow; I made straight for him. The bracken was so wet that my legs almost seemed walking through a brook, and my body through a thick rain. In a moment I was sopping; but to be wet was of no consequence to me. Not for many years was I able to believe that damp ...
— The Flight of the Shadow • George MacDonald
... they are cut by numerous long and leafy combes (notably Cockercombe and Seven Wells' Combe), which afford easy ascents; but on the W. the slopes are much steeper and barer. Their tops are covered with bracken, heather, scrub oak, and quantities of whortle berries, the ripening of the last marking the beginning of the summer holidays for the village children, who then go "whorting." The most conspicuous summits in order from S.E. to N.W. are Cothelstone ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade
... white bed and his wife's face lying amidst brown hair upon the pillow were illuminated, and listening he could almost hear the corncrake in the fields, the fern-owl sounding his strange note from the quiet of the rugged place where the bracken grew, and, like the echo of a magic song, the melody of the nightingale that sang all night in the alder by the little brook. There was nothing that he could say, but he slowly stole his arm under his wife's neck, and played with the ringlets of ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... fields; it covered everything with the softest of warmly tinted light. There was a morning frost, and thin sheets of ice crackled in the dykes. An invigorating breeze stirred gently, as if but half- awakened, and tenderly ruffled fronds of bracken, sliding softly upward from moss and roots, tremulously caressing the sweet-smelling grass, to sweep grandly over the hill-crest in ripples and eddies, increasing in ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... He had gone out alone, his mood pleasing itself best with solitude, and had lost his way and found himself crossing strange land. Being wearied and somewhat out of sorts, he had flung himself down among the heather and bracken, where he was well out of sight, and could lie and look up at the gray of the sky, his hands clasped ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... a sapling anigh, and himself sat down on the grass, and pondered many things; as to what folk were about at Upmeads, and how his brethren were faring; and it was now about five hours after noon, and the sun's rays fell aslant through the boughs of the noble oaks, and the scent of the grass and bracken trodden by the horse-hoofs of that company went up into the warm summer air. A while he sat musing but awake, though the faint sound of a little stream in the dale below mingled with all the lesser noises of the forest did its best to soothe him ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris
... bramble. In its depths they could hear the monotonous trickle of water. It was really the source of the spring that afterwards reappeared fifty yards nearer the road, and trickled into an unfailing pool known as the Burnt Spring, from the brown color of the surrounding bracken. It was the water supply of the ranch, and the reason for Mr. Medliker's original selection of that site. Johnny lingered for an instant, looked carefully around, and then lowered himself into the fissure. A moment later he reached ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... quite palatial—boasting a real floor made of puncheons, or hewn logs. A bunk, against the wall, was made of a second log set four feet from the log wall, with a hammock mattress of sacking stuffed with dried bracken stretched between them. There was the usual huge fireplace of granite rocks used for both warmth and cooking, and a box pantry-cupboard ...
— Down the Mother Lode • Vivia Hemphill
... All in vain. When I had set it free it was mangled as if a wolf had gnawed it; the iron teeth had bitten through the fur, and the flesh, and the bone; it had lost so much blood, and it was in so much pain, that it could not live. I laid it down in the bracken, and put water to its mouth, and did what I could; but it was of no use. It had been too much hurt. It died as the sun rose; a little, harmless, shy, happy thing, you know, that never killed any creature, and only asked to nibble a leaf or two, or sleep in a little ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... distance of several feet, when the said fish is held only by a tiny golden palmer on the finest gut, is not a likely manoeuvre. The grayling behaved well for a couple of yards or so, and then bethought himself of plunging, the consequence being that I lost my hook, and he dropped into a tuft of bracken in a ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... night, as he knew, would never deepen to real obscurity. It would keep all of a piece till dawn, like a sort of gray dusk, heavy and impenetrable beneath the trees, but quite transparent on the heath and in the glades; and then it would become all silvery and trembling; the wet bracken would glisten faintly, high branches of beech trees would glow startlingly, each needle on top of the lofty firs would change to a tiny sword of fire—just as he had seen happen so often years ago, when as an undisciplined lad he lay out in ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... things than the stillness of a summer's noon such as this, a summer's noon in a broken woodland, with the deer asleep in the bracken, and the twitter of birds silent in the coppice, and hardly a leaf astir in the huge beeches that fling their cool shade over the grass. Afar off a gilded vane flares out above the grey Jacobean gables of Knoll, the chime of a village clock ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... was a waterfall, where gorgeous tree-ferns rose in natural bowers, while others further still leant over the lotus-covered stream, their giant leaves trailing in the slow-moving current. Tangled masses of bracken rioted in wild abundance over a velvety green sod, overshadowed by waving magnolias. Through the trees bright-plumaged birds were flitting from branch to branch in songless flight, flashing their brilliant colours through the sunny leaves. In places the water splashed over moss-grown rocks ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... land better than I do when I am away from it. I can call to mind its innumerable beauties, and in fancy saunter once more through the summer woods, among the bracken, the bluebells, and the foxglove. I can wander by the banks of the Brock, where the sullen trout hide in the clear depths of the pools. I can walk along the path—the path to Paradise—still lined with the blue-eyed speedwell and red campion; I know where the copse is carpeted ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... the pine-wood he caught sight of Sir Geoffrey Clouston, the Duchess's brother, jerking two spent cartridges out of his gun. He jumped from the cart, and having told the groom to take the mare home, made his way towards his guest through the withered bracken ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... I went sick; recovered; and went sick again, drifting down-stream, and to India. But first Thornhill, Bracken the machine-gunner, and I ...
— The Leicestershires beyond Baghdad • Edward John Thompson
... be off. The waiting-maids, who have escorted me to the door, fall on all fours as a final salute, and remain prostrate on the threshold—as long as I am still in sight down the dark pathway, where the rain trickles off the great over-arching bracken ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... prisoner opened the gate, and followed excitedly. What happened next no living eye but the prisoner's ever saw. Montague Nevitt was not destined to issue from that wood alive. Two days later his breathless body was found, all stiff and stark, hidden among the brown bracken at the bottom of the dell, where the murderer no doubt had thrust it away out of his sight on that fatal ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... upon the deep woods, It lets down curtains of mist And sheets of rain, that drip Crystal beads among the trees. Way above, the branches lash and moan And weave. Below, it is still, Still as the undersea. Soft fern and feathery bracken Loom through the mist Like branching coral, And drifting leaves float down Like snowy fishes, ...
— A Little Window • Jean M. Snyder
... harder drew their breath, For their souls were strong within them, stronger than the grasp of death. Soon we heard a challenge-trumpet sounding in the pass below, And the distant tramp of horses, and the voices of the foe; Down we crouch'd amid the bracken, till the Lowland ranks drew near, Panting like the hounds in summer when they scent the stately deer. From the dark defile emerging, next we saw the squadrons come, Leslie's foot and Leven's troopers marching to the tuck of drum; Through the scatter'd ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... dingles of mossy green sloped down on one side of the road, breaking into what are sometimes called "coombs" running precipitously towards the sea-coast, and slackening his pace a little he paused, looking through a tangle of shrubs and bracken at the pale suggestion of a glimmer of blue which he realised was the shining of the sunlit ocean. While he thus stood, he fancied he heard a little plaintive whine as of an animal in pain. He listened attentively. The ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... they have to break through the ground, but when they arise from the summit of the bulb above ground, they are from the first quite straight; and this is a fact which deserves notice. The rachis of the bracken fern (Pteris aquilina), and of some, probably many, other ferns, likewise rises above ground under the form of an arch. No doubt other analogous instances could be found by careful search. In all ordinary cases ...
— The Power of Movement in Plants • Charles Darwin
... Edwin Bonnheim[68], treasurer and manager of Weinstock, Lubin & Co.; Russell D. Carpenter, auditor of Hale Brothers, Inc.; J. O. Bracken, manager of the California Commercial Association; C. H. Bentley of the California Fruit Canners Association; all testified that the increase in express and freight charges has worked great hardship upon the State. They showed that in ...
— Story of the Session of the California Legislature of 1909 • Franklin Hichborn
... moulding all his swelling muscles, consider his red sweeping moustache, his red beard, his intense blue eyes staring out of a red face; dress Liosha in flaming maize and purple, leaving a breast free, and twist a gold torque through her hair, dark like the bronze-black shadows under autumn bracken; strip naked-fair the five nesting bits of humanity—it was an unpresented scene from Lohengrin or ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... turned down a foot-road leading from his garden to Folly Clough, and thus secured the quiet ever found in those deeply-wooded seams that plough into the very heart of the moors. Following the water-worn path which wound in tortuous ascent under clustering trees and between slopes of bracken, the two soon gained the head of the Clough, and climbed towards the banks of the Green Fold Lodge, a stretch of water into which drained the moisture of vast tracts of uplands, its overflow rushing through flood-gates and pouring its volume through the ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... Pond has been enlarged, and is supplied by New River water. From this site a view of surprising beauty is seen—broken ground covered by bracken and gorse, bushes and trees, with the blue outlines ...
— Hampstead and Marylebone - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... his native land better than I do when I am away from it. I can call to mind its innumerable beauties, and in fancy saunter once more through the summer woods, among the bracken, the bluebells, and the foxglove. I can wander by the banks of the Brock, where the sullen trout hide in the clear depths of the pools. I can walk along the path—the path to Paradise—still lined with the blue-eyed speedwell and red campion; I know where the copse ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... where afterwards his murderers were hanged. I visited it late at night, when the young moon was beginning to struggle through the cloudy sky, and looked down into the ravine which Cobbett declared was the most horrid place God ever made; but no sign of ghostly visitant could be caught among the bracken, no sound of the dead voices was audible in the air. It is the way with ghosts—they seldom appear where they might be looked for. It is the unexpected in the world of shadows, as in the workaday world, ...
— Real Ghost Stories • William T. Stead
... little paths running out to promontories of the cliff and, at a sudden turn, she would find herself in what looked almost like danger. Below her the rock was at an angle to harbour hawthorn trees all in bud, blazing gorse bushes, bracken stiffly uncurling itself and many kinds of grasses, but there were nearly two hundred feet between her and the river, now at flood, and she felt that this was something of an adventure. She followed each little path in turn, half fearfully, for she was used to a policeman at every corner; but she ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... short, for her foot had caught on something, and she nearly stumbled. Janetta stopped also, and the two sisters uttered a sudden cry of surprise. For what Nora had stumbled over was a wooden horse—a child's broken toy—and deep in the bracken before them, with one hand beneath his flushed and dimpled cheek, there lay the loveliest of all objects—a ...
— A True Friend - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... drew near they found the tower true to its name, without a glimmer of light. 'Let alone for that,' said the King, whose grating voice they heard above all the others; 'very soon we will have a fire.' He sent some of his men to gather brushwood, ling, and dead bracken; meantime he began to beat at the door with his axe, crying like a madman, 'Richard! Richard! Thou graceless wretch, come out of ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett
... the shadow of the great rock. Descending further, the bleak aspect of Nature is transformed. The heather gives place to dwarf shrubs; the bare, weather-beaten rocks are clothed with blackberry bushes, or hidden amid luxurious bracken. Dark hollies clinging to detached rocks present varied and life-like forms. The air has suddenly become still. The butterflies hover over the foxgloves. The wild strawberry is at your feet. The sloeberries ripen around you. The sea before you might be the Mediterranean, ...
— A Child of the Glens - or, Elsie's Fortune • Edward Newenham Hoare
... am summoned here as a crown witness. My name is Thomas Bracken. I went, heart and soul ...
— The Wearing of the Green • A.M. Sullivan
... 1872.—We crossed a rivulet at Chama's village ten yards wide and thigh deep, and afterwards in an hour and a half came to a sedgy stream which we could barely cross. We hauled a cow across bodily. Went on mainly south, and through much bracken. ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... under a big rock. The grass was short and green, and there were clothes-props cut from bracken stems, with lines of plaited rushes, and a heap of tiny clothes ...
— The Great Big Treasury of Beatrix Potter • Beatrix Potter
... silvery sward beside the Stony Bottom there lay the ruffled body of a dead sheep. All about the victim the dewy ground was dark and patchy like dishevelled velvet; bracken trampled down; stones displaced as though by straggling feet; and the whole spotted with ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... these people coming than I made up my mind (for no reason that I can tell) to go through with my adventure; and when the first came alongside of me, I rose up from the bracken and asked him the way ...
— Kidnapped • Robert Louis Stevenson
... deep cut of the glen there was very little snow, only a few veins and patches here and there, threading and seaming the steep, as if a white-footed hare had been coursing about. Little stubby brier shoots, and clumps of russet bracken, and dead heather, ruffling like a brown dog's back, broke the dull surface of withered herbage, thistle stumps, teasels, rugged banks, and naked brush. Down in the bottom the noisy brook was scurrying over its pebbles ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... history of his life, unfolding to her the story of his hopes and ambitions, describing to her the very home where he was born, and the dark-eyed sister whom he had loved, and with whom he had played over the daisied fields, and through the carpeted woods, and all among the richly tinted bracken. One day he was told she was dead, and that he must never speak her name; but he spoke it all the day and all the night,—Beryl, nothing but Beryl,—and he looked for her in the fields and in the woods and among the bracken. It seemed as if he had unlocked the casket of his heart, closed ...
— Stories By English Authors: London • Various
... all this hopeful, hopeless craving to leave something permanent? The Islands, here, will outlast anything you can build. I come back after fifteen years, and they are unchanged; they would be unchanged were I to come back after a hundred. The same rocks, the same bracken, the same hum of the tides; the same flowers; the same blue here, below us, the same outline of a spear-head there, beyond St. Ann's, where the tide forces through the slack water; the same streak of yellow ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... love the land where bracken grows And heath-clad mountains rise; Where peaks still fringed with winter snows Tower in the summer skies. Oh! I have seen the red and green Of fir and rowan tree, And heard the din of flooded linn, With bleating on the lea. But ...
— Deep Down, a Tale of the Cornish Mines • R.M. Ballantyne
... through the darkening wood to a wild-looking creature prowling among the trees. He was evidently looking for something. His search so earnest and troubled that the caution he had heretofore displayed had deserted him. Stooping, poking among the leaves and bracken, rising, moving toward another tree, stooping again—repeating endlessly this same proceeding, the watchers soon tired ...
— The Brass Bound Box • Evelyn Raymond
... futility of comparisons, I will mention one experience. I was returning home late one afternoon when a poorly-dressed, sunburnt woman overtook me. She bore on her head a basket of bracken, and her appearance was such that in any other country I should have expected a demand for alms. Greeting me, however, cheerfully and politely, she at once entered into conversation. She had seen ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... of the tobacco plantations and in the swampy malarial region where the ground never gets dry I slept beside bonfires. I learned of the natives to safeguard against fever by placing withered leaves on bark or wilted bracken leaves between myself and the ground. At a little settlement called Olginka I slept on an accumulation of logs outside the village church. On this occasion I wrapped myself up in all the clothes I possessed, and so saved myself from the damp. ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... David Thompson. He describes well the forests of remarkable trees on this portion of the Pacific coast, opposite the south end of Vancouver Island: the crooked oaks loaded with mistletoe, the tall wild cherry trees, the hazels with trunks thicker than a man's thigh, the evergreen arbutus, the bracken fern, blackberries, and black raspberries; and the game in these glades of trees and fern: small Columbian Mazama deer, large lynxes, bears, gluttons, wolves, foxes, racoons, and squirrels. Overhead soared huge ...
— Pioneers in Canada • Sir Harry Johnston
... field-glass. Even then I was not allowed to smoke, and while I was baked to a blister with the sun, I was wet through with black peat water. Never a deer could we see, or could HUGH see, rather, for I am short-sighted, and cannot tell a stag from a bracken bush. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, May 14, 1892 • Various
... this path, lad; but I have travelled pretty well all over the Highlands, and, just as you found to be the case in Lancashire, there are few villages I do not know. I will first pull you a couch of this dead bracken, and then be off; an hour's sleep will do you almost as ...
— Bonnie Prince Charlie - A Tale of Fontenoy and Culloden • G. A. Henty
... Thro' moss, and bracken, and purple bloom, With a glitter of gorses here and there, Shoulder deep in the dewy bloom, My love, I follow you everywhere! By faint sweet signs my soul divines, Dear heart, at dawning you came this way, By the jangled bells of the columbines, And the ruffled ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... more on his green native braes of the Nith, He pluck'd the wild bracken, a frolicsome boy; He sported his limbs in the waves of the Frith; He trod the green heather in gladness and joy;— On his gallant grey steed to the hunting he rode, In his bonnet a plume, on his bosom a star; He chased ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... golden lights and blue shadows on their snow-clad summits, slanted obliquely into the rich plain before them, bathing with rosy splendour the leafless, snow-sprinkled trees, and fading gradually into shadow in the distance. To the south, too, they beheld a deep-shaded amphitheatre of heather and bracken; the course of the Esk, near Penicuik, winding about at the foot of its gorge; the broad, brown expanse of Maw Moss; and, fading into blue indistinctness in the south, the wild heath-clad Peeblesshire hills. In sooth, that scene ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... borrowed from summer, and the air is as warm and balmy as June. Great flocks of sea-gulls wheeled screaming round the cliffs, their wings flashing in the sunshine; red admiral and tortoise-shell butterflies still fluttered over late specimens of flowers, and the bracken was brown and golden underfoot. The girls were wild with the delight of a few hours' emancipation from school rules, and flew about gathering belated harebells, and running to the top of any little eminence to get the view. After about a mile on the hills, they dipped down a steep sandy ...
— A Patriotic Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... word conveys a wrong idea, for there is no street, merely a cottage here and there, dropped haphazard, and situated without regard to its aspect. These cottages lie all on one's left hand; to the right a stretch of grass soon merges into bracken and bush, and then the beech woods enclose both, and surge down into the valley and rise up again beyond, a great wave of green; as I saw it then, not yet touched with the first flame ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... few stiller things than the stillness of a summer's noon such as this, a summer's noon in a broken woodland, with the deer asleep in the bracken, and the twitter of birds silent in the coppice, and hardly a leaf astir in the huge beeches that fling their cool shade over the grass. Afar off a gilded vane flares out above the grey Jacobean gables of ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... be drowned by the splash of the little waterfall. The pool into which it fell was deep enough to keep any one from breaking in upon them too suddenly, and through a rift in the leaves a piece of bluest sky peered down. White of waterfall, sleepy brown of pool, dusky under an eyelash of bracken, and blue of sky—Patsy, who noticed all ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... somewhat declamatory, and his unusual gestures impressed me hugely. It is likely that at times he forgot my presence, or ceased, at all events, to remember that his companion was his child. His massive, silver-headed malacca cane did great execution among the bracken, I remember. ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... greenwood, brake, grove, copse, coppice, bocage^, tope, clump of trees, thicket, spinet, spinney; underwood, brushwood; scrub; boscage, bosk^, ceja [Sp.], chaparal, motte [U.S.]; arboretum &c 371. bush, jungle, prairie; heath, heather; fern, bracken; furze, gorse, whin; grass, turf; pasture, pasturage; turbary^; sedge, rush, weed; fungus, mushroom, toadstool; lichen, moss, conferva^, mold; growth; alfalfa, alfilaria^, banyan; blow, blowth^; floret^, petiole; pin grass, timothy, yam, yew, zinnia. foliage, branch, bough, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... of the island broke suddenly into bosky valleys soft with trees and bracken, and cliff-ringed bays, with wide-spread arms of tumbled rock whose outer ends were tiny ...
— Pearl of Pearl Island • John Oxenham
... uncoupled another. This was served the same way, and at Resaca the cars were run on a siding. The "General," commanded by Andrews, was now forward, with one car, while the "Texas," commanded by Captain Fuller, and driven by Peter Bracken, was running tender forward, with Fuller standing on the brake board, or bumper. The locomotives were about evenly matched. Both had five-foot ten-inch drivers, and both were running under all the pressure their ...
— Stories Of Georgia - 1896 • Joel Chandler Harris
... relative to her. As a matter of fact, she knew afterwards that she could not have been alone more than five minutes. It was like an eternity. She listened in vain for any human sound, even for the far-off sweep of the scythe in the bracken, or the call of the laborer to his horses. The tension of those ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... round into a side road, and we curved upward through deep lanes worn by centuries of wheels, high banks on either side, heavy with dripping moss and fleshy hart's-tongue ferns. Bronzing bracken and mottled bramble gleamed in the light of the sinking sun. Still steadily rising, we passed over a narrow granite bridge, and skirted a noisy stream which gushed swiftly down, foaming and roaring amid the gray boulders. Both road and stream wound up through a valley ...
— Hound of the Baskervilles • Authur Conan Doyle
... open space lay before us—some hundreds of yards across—all green turf and low bracken growing to the very edge of the cliff. Round this clearing there was a semi-circle of trees with curious huts built of foliage piled one above the other among the branches. A rookery, with every nest a little house, would best ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the wind and mixed with the heavy perfume of the elder, whose mingled odour is like the odour of the room of the dead, a vapour of incense and corruption. I stood at the edges of the wood, gazing at all the pomp and procession of the foxgloves towering amidst the bracken and shining red in the broad sunshine, and beyond them into deep thickets of close undergrowth where springs boil up from the rock and nourish the water-weeds, dank and evil. But in all my wanderings I avoided one part of the wood; it was not till ...
— The Great God Pan • Arthur Machen
... blazed near the spot where she had seated herself. Ere long some venison steaks were broiled in the flames. At Archie's earnest request Marjory tried to eat, but could with difficulty swallow a few morsels. A bower of green boughs was quickly made for her, and the ground thickly piled with fresh bracken, and Marjory was in a very few minutes sound asleep after the fatigue and excitement of ...
— In Freedom's Cause • G. A. Henty
... enclosure, ready to hand, and cutlasses resharpened on the grindstone belonging to the tool-chest and placed close to their owners' hands, the remainder of the little company stretched themselves out on beds of bracken, which had been cut during the day, and in a few minutes were fast asleep, completely worn out by the fatigue and excitement of a ...
— A Chinese Command - A Story of Adventure in Eastern Seas • Harry Collingwood
... said, and walked about the Heath for nearly an hour. The fresh smell of spring exhilarated them, and they sat for a little while on a seat which was perched on rising ground so that they were able to see far beyond the common. Young bracken fronds were thrusting their curled heads upwards through the old brown growth; and the buds on the blackened boughs were bursting from their cases and offering delicate green leaves to the sunlight; and the ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... as not: Though little her mug would matter, now I'm blind; And by this there'll scarce be a stump in her yellow gums, And not a red hair to her nodding poll— That shock of flame a shrivelled, grizzled wisp Like bracken after a heathfire; that creamy skin, Like a plucked hen's. But she'd a merry eye, The giglet; and that coppertop of hers Was good to think on of a nippy morning: While you—but you were ...
— Krindlesyke • Wilfrid Wilson Gibson
... over the autumn sun was drawn a grey purple mist, and gloom settled upon the Maremma. And as the elements paled and were silent, a hush overspread wild nature, not a beast in the thicket, not a bird on the bough, stirred. Sighs siffled through the bracken and the heather, and the roar of the distant sea died away in moaning ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... their swift feet. The trim villas near the township gave place to scattered farms. These in their turn became further and further apart, and then they entered a wide belt of timber, ragged and wind-swept gums, with dense undergrowth of dogwood and bracken fern. The metalled road gave place to a hard, earthern track, on which the spinning tyres made no sound; it curved in and out among the trees, which met overhead and cast upon it a waving pattern of shadows. Grim things had once happened to Norah ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... kettle sang cosily. Gun-racks lined the walls, and dressers laden with valuable china, and these were seasonably adorned with sprigs of holly, ivy, and fir. A kissing-bush, even, hung from the bacon-rack that crossed the ceiling, with many hams wrapped in bracken, a brace of pheasants, and a 'neck' of harvest corn elaborately plaited: and almost directly beneath it stood a circular table with a lamp and a set of dominoes, the half of them laid out in an unfinished game. The floor ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... win her spurs at the outset or run the awful risk of being left behind even yet. Her conduct proved satisfactory, and by the time they reached the other side of the pond, and had climbed the steep bank, clinging to the bracken and dog-wood, friendly relations had been once more established. When the boys had once got over the disgrace of feeling that a girl was tagging after them, and took Elizabeth on her own merits, these three generally got on very amicably. She ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... was scored by the weather, and the dry drainage channels were headlong cascades of grey pebbles. Clumps of heather, sparse oak scrub with young leaves of bronze, contorted birch, and this year's croziers of the bracken (heaven knows their secret for getting lush aromatic sap out of such stony poverty), all made a tough life which held up the hill, steep as it was; though the hill was going, for the roots of some of the oaks were exposed, empty coils of rope from which the ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... children I Was nurtured, being, as was deem'd, the child Of Hermes, or some mountain deity; For these with the wild nymphs are wont to lie Within the holy caverns, where the bee Can scarcely find a darkling path to fly Through veils of bracken and ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang
... crossing the fields again, turned past the side of the cottage into the coppice behind. And, sitting down on a log, her hands pressed to her cheeks and her elbows to her breast, she stared at the sunlit bracken and the flies chasing each other over it. Love! Was it always something hateful and tragic that spoiled lives? Criss-cross! One darting on another, taking her almost before she knew she was seized, then darting away and leaving her wanting to be seized again. Or darting on her, who, when seized, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Teampull Bennachad, in Lewis; Tempull Ronan, in North Rona; and the Beehive Cells, in Eilan na Naoimh (Nun's Island.) These old Strathearn churches would seldom be larger than 12 feet wide by 20 long, built of undressed land stones (like a field dyke), and thatched with heather, bracken, or sedge. The great storehouse of reliable material with minimum of controversy relative to the early Christianity of Scotland is Warren's Liturgy and Ritual of the ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... they walked back to Braeside. It was a pretty walk across a bit of moorland, through the heather and bracken, here and there a moss-grown rock, here and there across the path a ...
— Hunter's Marjory - A Story for Girls • Margaret Bruce Clarke
... saffron-hued seaweed clothed the boulders, and the bright sea pinks blossomed. On their right the Skrae, now clearer than amber, mingled its waters with the sea loch. On their left was a steep bank clad with bracken, climbing up to perpendicular cliffs of basalt. These ended abruptly above the valley and the cove, and permitted a view of the Atlantic, in which, far away, the isle of the Lewis lay like a golden shield in the faint haze of the early ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... 1891 the poet went on a tour in Devonshire, and began his Akbar, and probably wrote June Bracken and Heather; or perhaps it was composed when "we often sat on the top of Blackdown to watch the sunset." He wrote to Mr ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... up in front of his feet, the air was full of butterflies, a sweet fragrance rose from the wild grasses. The sappy scent of the bracken stole forth from the wood, where, hidden in the depths, pigeons were cooing, and from afar on the warm breeze, came the rhythmic chiming of ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... had made the acquaintance of two young ladies in employment in Clapham, Miss Flossie Bright and Miss Edna Bunthorne, and it was resolved therefore to make a cheerful little cyclist party of four into the heart of Kent, and to picnic and spend an indolent afternoon and evening among the trees and bracken between Ashford and Maidstone. ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... pleasant to accept. Going to Scotland or coming from it, Waterdale of course lies full in the way. He took it last on his way home, which was more convenient, and arrived there in the latter part of September, when the hills were golden with the yellow bracken. The Cumberland hills are a little cold, in my opinion, without the heather, which clothes with such a flush of life and brightness our hills in the north. The greenness is chilly in the frequent rain; one feels how sodden and slippery it is—a moisture ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... silver birch drew a shaft of light upon their sombre background. Here were no English woodlands, no stretches of pale green turf, no vistas opening beneath flattened boughs, with blue distant hills and perhaps a group of antlers topping the bracken. The wild life of these forests crawled among thickets or lurked in sinister shadows. No bird poured out its heart in them; no lark soared out of them, breasting heaven. At rare intervals a note fell on the ear—the scream of hawk or ...
— Fort Amity • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... fire." They made way for me. I charged down hill by the way I had come. Some one cried "Stop en." Another shouted "Shoot en, maister." There came a great bang of a gun over my head. But I was going down hill like a rabbit, into the gorse, into the bracken, into the close cover of the heath. Glancing back, I saw a dozen excited people rushing down the rampart after me. Some flung stones; some ran to catch horses to chase me. But I had the start of them. I was down the hill, over the hedge, in the lane, in no time. There, a hundred yards away, I saw ...
— Martin Hyde, The Duke's Messenger • John Masefield
... sweet-briars that overhung a curve of the brook; their stems were gemmed with the pearls of the gentle rain that had fallen a little while before. Walter had once written a poem describing them. The wind was sighing and rustling among the frosted brown bracken ferns, then lessening sorrowfully away down the brook. Walter had said once that he loved the melancholy of the autumn wind on a November day. The old Tree Lovers still clasped each other in a faithful embrace, and the White Lady, now a great white-branched ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... way of making a night of it. The parson who had been in at the death and who, during the settlement of my affair, had been busy in the stables, now joined us at dinner. He was but lately come from Cambridge, at which seat of learning the chief books appeared to be Bracken's Farriery and Gibson on the Diseases of Horses, with Hoyle's Whist as lighter reading for leisured hours. He was a hard rider, a hard swearer, and a hard drinker, and, after being double japanned, as he called it, by a friendly bishop, had been pitchforked by ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... the waaste: theer warn't not fead for a cow: Nowt at all but bracken an' fuzz, an' looak at it now— Warn't worth nowt a haacre, an' now theer's lots o' fead, Fourscore yows upon it an' some on it ...
— Enoch Arden, &c. • Alfred Tennyson
... we set off again through the forest, at a more moderate pace now, for the way ran no longer clear. The word "forest" to a stay-at-home means a tract of soft, springy turf, with tall trees and pleasant glades and clumps of bracken that shelter rabbits and other small creatures of the woodland. But the forest of the West Indies bears to our English forest the relation of a giant to a dwarf. The fronds of the bracken grow to feet where we have inches; weeds that ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... hill. The noise of the wind over the heath was shrill, and as if it whistled for joy at finding a night so congenial as this. Sometimes the path led her to hollows between thickets of tall and dripping bracken, dead, though not yet prostrate, which enclosed her like a pool. When they were more than usually tall she lifted the baby to the top of her head, that it might be out of the reach of their drenching fronds. On higher ground, where the wind ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... country, bushes which caught his clothes as if they were trying to stop him in the interests of law and order, branches which lashed him across the face, and rabbit-holes half hidden in the bracken, and still he kept his lead. He was increasing it. He must win now. The man behind was panting in deep gasps, for the pace had been warm and he was not in training. Barrett cast a glance over his shoulder, and as he looked the keeper's foot caught in a hole and he ...
— The Pothunters • P. G. Wodehouse
... dark and solid grandeur protects and fosters the tenderest of green carpets. See the moss of palest green, its long fronds appearing like ferns, or note those real ferns and coarser bracken fighting the brambles for supremacy or trying to flout that little wild rose ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... strangely with the wild tones of the storm. The air was mottled with pine-tassels and bright green plumes, that went flashing past in the sunlight like birds pursued. But there was not the slightest dustiness; nothing less pure than leaves, and ripe pollen, and flecks of withered bracken and moss. I heard trees falling for hours at the rate of one every two or three minutes: some uprooted, partly on account of the loose, water-soaked condition of the ground; others broken straight across, where some weakness caused by ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... Oh-I-Am the Wizard went over Three-Tree Common, his shoe became unstringed, and he bent down to refasten it. Then he saw Wry-Face, the gnome, hiding among the bracken and looking as mischievous as anything. In one hand he held a white fluff-feather. Now these feathers are as light as anything, and will blow in the wind; and whatever they are placed under, whether light or heavy, they are bound to topple over as ...
— The Book of Stories for the Storyteller • Fanny E. Coe
... in her activity. Hither and thither she went, beating down the high bracken and tangles of weeds, poking with her stick into every hole and corner, and going further and further into the wood in the certainty that the ...
— The Czar's Spy - The Mystery of a Silent Love • William Le Queux
... Thee, Lord, For all Thy Golden Silences,— For every Sabbath from the world's turmoil; For every respite from the stress of life;— Silence of moorlands rolling to the skies, Heath-purpled, bracken-clad, aflame with gorse; Silence of grey tors crouching in the mist; Silence of deep woods' mystic cloistered calm; Silence of wide seas basking in the sun; Silence of white peaks soaring to the blue; Silence of dawnings, when, their matins sung, The little birds ...
— 'All's Well!' • John Oxenham
... insect's partiality for rosebuds and blossoms, which it greedily devours. In the north of England, where it is much used as a killing bait for trout, the insect is commonly known by the name of 'bracken-clock,' a name of the same import with the Staffordshire term 'fernshaw,' each signifying 'fern-beetle.'" Another correspondent says—Scarabaeus horticola, called "the chovy" in Norfolk, is there deemed very injurious to apple-trees, and other trees and plants, as it ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 566, September 15, 1832 • Various
... his elbows on his knees and sat staring at the pond. Overhead the trees were whispering; behind him, in and out of their holes the rabbits whisked; far off he could hear the twitter of a swallow; the foxglove was dead, the bracken was turning brown, the cones from the fir trees were lying on the ground. As he watched, a strange thing happened. Slowly and slowly the pond lengthened out and out, stretching away and away until ...
— Very Short Stories and Verses For Children • Mrs. W. K. Clifford
... the brittle bedding of dried bracken and grass the beast had left burned quickly, cleansing with both fire and smoke. When they raked the ashes out with branches, Asaki and Nymani brought in handfuls of leaves which they crumpled and threw on the floor, spreading an aromatic ...
— Voodoo Planet • Andrew North
... dear friends, from all this there follow one or two points, which I touch very briefly. One is, that it is possible for men not to see Christ, though He stands there close before them. It is possible to grope at noonday as at midnight, to see only 'bracken green and cold grey stone' on the hillside, where another man sees the chariots of fire and the horses of fire. It is possible for you—and, alas! it is the condition of some of my hearers—to look upon Christ and to turn away and say, 'I see ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... with kindly, placid shadows. A wind that blew across it from the misty blue sea beyond was making wild music in the rugged firs above his head as he stood in an angle of the weather-grey longer fence, knee-deep in bracken. It had been by these firs he had halted twenty years ago, turning for one last glance at the valley below, the home valley which he had never seen since. But then the firs had been little more than vigorous ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... is help of any sort for such horrors of despair let them take it where they find it," he found himself saying aloud to the emptiness of the stretches of heath and bracken. "The ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... in the sheltered, southern bay of Monkshaven, and already the bracken was sending up pushful little shoots of young green, curled like a baby's fist, while the primroses, bunched together in clusters, thrust peering faces impertinently above the green carpet of the woods. Sara stopped to pick a handful, tucking ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... the bracken and the lady-fern grew thick and high, almost overlapping the broad moss-grown path, across which the young rabbits popped away in their new brown coats, showing their little white linings in their lazy haste. A dog-rose had hung out a whole constellation of pale ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... thousandth bowl! Show ye, prove ye, ye are true all, Join ye to your clans your cheer! Nor heed though wife and child pursue all, Bidding you to fight, forbear. Sinew-lusty, spirit-trusty, Gallant in your loyal pride, By your hacking, low as bracken Stretch the foe the turf beside. Our stinging kerne of aspect stern That love the fatal game, That revel rife till drunk with strife, And dye their cheeks with flame, Are strange to fear;—their broadswords ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... the matter broke upon him, however, when he suddenly became aware that a spot in the confused scene which he had taken to be a clump of withered bracken was in reality a red cow! Looking a little more narrowly at objects he soon perceived a hut among the rocks. It was so small and rude and rugged as almost to escape detection. A furious barking soon told that he had been seen, and two collie ...
— The Eagle Cliff • R.M. Ballantyne
... habit, lad," he said when the first scene ended and the clown began his dance. With a few deft touches, ripping down one side of the tunic and wreathing a girdle of ivy and bracken, he changed the whole outline of the figure. With the hairy tunic draped as a cloak, and the ungainly plumed head-dress arranged as a warrior's crest, the character which had been almost ridiculous became heroic, as the author of the masque evidently had intended. The little King's beautiful voice ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey
... was not made by withered bracken or bramble leaves, and had nothing to do with the stealthy fall of a poacher's heavy boot. It came again more clearly, and Thurston was almost sure that it was the rustle of a woven fabric, such as a woman's dress. To confirm this opinion a soft laugh followed. He ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... And set Golumpus going on the grass: He knows the corner where it's best to wait And hear the crashing woodland chorus pass; The corner where old foxes make their track To the Long Spinney; that's the place to be. The bracken shakes below an ivied tree, And then a cub looks out; and "Tally-o-back!" He bawls, and swings his thong with volleying crack,— All the clean thrill of autumn in his blood, And hunting surging through him like a flood In joyous welcome from the untroubled past; ...
— Counter-Attack and Other Poems • Siegfried Sassoon
... more or less protected in one way or another from the attacks of animals. These neglected spots are overgrown with gorse, brambles, nettles, blackthorn, and mullein, as well as with the bitter spurges, and the stringy inedible bracken. So, too, while in our meadows we purposely propagate tender fodder plants, like grasses and clovers, we find on the margins of our pastures and by our roadsides only protected species; such as thistles, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... Martin, the woodcutter, wading in the bracken and looking about him in rather a lost fashion. The man seemed to be talking ...
— The Trees of Pride • G.K. Chesterton
... time thereafter, when the children of the poor gathered blackberries for preserves and home made wine; when the wild stock flowered in St. Ouen's Bay; when the bracken fern was gathered from every cotil, and dried for apple-storing, for bedding for the cherished cow, for back-rests for the veilles, and seats round the winter fire; when peaches, apricots, and nectarines made the walls sumptuous red ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... in which we lay there stretched out an avenue of timber trees, whereunder the bracken, breast high, had been cut to make a ride. Upon this bracken, and upon this smooth channel in the midst the late sun streamed toward us, a soft wash of gold. Behind all this the sky, pale to whiteness ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... the warm wind far and near. Before her, divided from the grove by a narrow, roughly fenced road, Mollie saw a wide, undulating plain, its surface covered somewhat scantily with coarse grass and occasional clumps of bracken. There were gum trees, large and small, their thin blue-green leaves hanging limply from the grey boughs, and throwing but little shade on the ground beneath. Some distance away a creek wound between wide banks of shingly sand and ...
— The Happy Adventurers • Lydia Miller Middleton
... stands—or by the alternative and longer route which I took on the homeward way, and which follows the old water conduit built by the monks into a forest of enormous chestnuts, oaks, hollies and Calabrian pines, emerging out of an ocean of glittering bracken. ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... were running among trees—great old trees with dying bracken undergrowth. The palish, gnarled trunks showed ghostly, and like old priests in the hovering distance, the fern rose magical and mysterious. It was a night all darkness, with low ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... them, as the elephant moved off. The rider, unslinging his rifle and laying it across his thighs, glanced from side to side as they proceeded. The forest grew more open. The undergrowth thinned; and occasionally they came to open glades carpeted with tall bracken and looking almost like an English wood. But the great boughs of the giant trees were matted thick with the glossy green leaves of orchid plants, from which drooped long trails of delicate mauve and ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... of a black forest; the tree-trunks stood like those great columns in an Egyptian hall whence God in an older mood received the praise of men; the top of it sloped the way of an ancient wind. Here they all halted and lighted a fire of branches, striking sparks from flint into a heap of bracken. They eased them of their armour, and sat round the fire, and Camorak stood up there and addressed them, and Camorak said: "We go to war with Fate, who has doomed that I shall not come to Carcassonne. And if we turn aside but one of the dooms ...
— A Dreamer's Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... the plant against their enemies; but I have never seen any reason to believe that this is so with the three species observed by me, namely, Prunus laurocerasus, Vicia sativa, and V. faba. No plant is so little attacked by enemies of any kind as the common bracken-fern (Pteris aquilina); and yet, as my son Francis has discovered, the large glands at the bases of the fronds, but only whilst young, excrete much sweetish fluid, which is eagerly sought by innumerable ants, chiefly belonging to Myrmica; and these ants ...
— The Effects of Cross & Self-Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom • Charles Darwin
... his steps, and hid himself in the bracken, for he knew from the descriptions given him that the Slyme ale-house lay there below him—the last place on the English border at which Alastair had been seen or heard of. The Slyme ale-house had an ill repute, and was said to be haunted moreover; none would lie there ...
— Border Ghost Stories • Howard Pease
... dislike of the man, she turned her back upon, him, and patting Cleopatra's neck, cantered quickly ahead to join the rest of the field which was now moving towards another cover, while the hounds ran through some low thickets of brushwood and tangled bracken. ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... though to-day be to us, who can tell for the morrow? During the full moon there is no night, only a change to silver light from golden; and the forest is full of delight. There are wood-cutters' huts in the ravines where the water falls, soft beds of torn bracken and fragrant grasses where great trees make a shelter from the heat; and for food, that is easily arranged. A basket of rice with a little salt-fish and spices is easily hidden in a favourable place. You only want a jar to cook it, and there is enough for two for ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding
... of her with her lips parted, as if she saw something wonderful; but when I came behind her and looked the same way, I could see nothing but the sheep's trough or the midden, or father's breeches hanging on a clothes-line. And then if she saw a lump of heather or bracken, or any common stuff of that sort, she would mope over it, as if it had struck her sick, and cry, "How sweet! how perfect!" just as though it had been a painted picture. She didn't like games, but I used to make her play "tig" ...
— The Great Shadow and Other Napoleonic Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Far down below there was a waterfall, where gorgeous tree-ferns rose in natural bowers, while others further still leant over the lotus-covered stream, their giant leaves trailing in the slow-moving current. Tangled masses of bracken rioted in wild abundance over a velvety green sod, overshadowed by waving magnolias. Through the trees bright-plumaged birds were flitting from branch to branch in songless flight, flashing their brilliant colours through the sunny leaves. In places the water splashed over moss-grown ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... eagerly round him, and then, with a sudden quickening of the heart, walked on over the springy heather to where she sat. She turned when the rustling his footsteps made through the bracken was near enough to arrest her attention, and looked up at him as he came. Then she rose slowly and stood waiting for him. He came up to her without a word, and seized both her hands, devouring her face with his eyes. Something he saw there repelled him. Slowly he let her hands fall, ...
— Stories by English Authors: Orient • Various
... army was the command of General Reynolds, with headquarters at Cheat Mountain Pass,( 3) three miles from Huttonville on the Staunton pike. Here Colonel Sullivan's 13th Indiana, part of Loomis' battery, and Bracken's Indiana Cavalry were camped. On Cheat Mountain, at the middle mountain-top, about nine miles to the southeast of Huttonville on the Staunton pike, were the 14th Indiana, 24th and 25th Ohio, and parts of the same battery and cavalry, Colonel ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... old castle, with the daylight shining through the empty windows. Beyond the houses, again, lie successive lines of hills, at this moment lit up by shafts of sunlight that lend a glowing warmth and richness to the fine colors of a late autumn. The hills are red and brown with rusted bracken and heather, and here and there the smooth waters of the bay catch a tinge of other and varied hues. In one of the fishing-smacks that lie almost underneath the shadow of the tall crag on which the castle ruins stand, an artist has put a rough-and-ready easel, and is apparently ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... within the clean, cold hell Of glazed and aching silence he was trapped; And, closing in, the blank walls of his cell Crushed stifling on him ... when the bracken snapped, Caught in his clutching fingers; and he lay Awake upon his back among the fern, With free eyes travelling the wide blue day, Unhindered, unremembering; while a burn Tinkled and gurgled somewhere out of sight, Unheard of him; till suddenly aware ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)
... more powerfully dominated by the sense of locality—is more expressive of the manners of the time and mood of the race—than those rough Border lays of moonlight rides, on reiving or on rescue bound, and of death fronted boldly in the press of spears or 'behind the bracken bush.' These are not tales of the infancy of a people. Scotland had already attained to something of national unity of blood and of sentiment before they came to birth. For generations and centuries she had to keep her head and her ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... on curds and whey,' cried the daring young Donald; 'your cheeks will grow more pink, and your brow more white with our simple fare. Your bed shall be made on the fresh green bracken and my plaid shall wrap you round. Will ye come to the Highlands with me, ...
— Stories from the Ballads - Told to the Children • Mary MacGregor
... with mirth, full of quaint turns of thought and speech; all the country round London has for me bright memories of our wanderings—Richmond, where we tramped across the park, and sat under its mighty trees; Windsor, with its groves of bracken; Kew, where we had tea in a funny little room, with watercress ad libitum; Hampton Court, with its dishevelled beauties; Maidenhead and Taplow, where the river was the attraction; and, above all, Broxbourne, where he ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... sound; and that sudden bright melody and the bright colour of the sunlit translucent leaves seem like one thing. Nature is still, and I am still, standing concealed among trees, or moving cautiously through the dead russet bracken. Not that I am expecting to get a glimpse of the badger who has his hermitage in this solitary place, but I am on forbidden ground, in the heart of a sacred pheasant preserve, where one must do one's prowling warily. Hard by, almost within a stone's-throw of the wood-grown earthwork on which ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... CLERCK.). Not a hedge but shelters a few at its foot, amidst grass, in quiet, sunny nooks. In the open country and especially in hilly places laid bare by the wood-man's axe, the favourite sites are tufts of bracken, rock-rose, lavender, everlasting and rosemary cropped close by the teeth of the flocks. This is where I resort, as the isolation and kindliness of the supports lend themselves to proceedings which might not be tolerated by the ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... empty fields, Among the bracken of the glen, Her yellow wreath October yields, To crown the ...
— Rhymes a la Mode • Andrew Lang
... only the broken brushwood and the crushed bracken told of the struggle that had taken place, and of the boy's agony of grief and rage. Brian resolved to follow and find him. He did not like the thought of leaving him to bear his shame alone. Besides, he understood Hugo's nature, and he was afraid—though ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... We crossed the stream by a little foot-bridge, and took a bypath across the meadows; up the slope you came to a beautiful bit of old forest country, the trees of all ages, some of them very ancient; there were open glades running into the heart of the woodland, with thorn thickets and stretches of bracken. Hidden away in the depth of the woods, and approached only by green rides, were the ruins of what must have been a big old Jacobean mansion; but nothing remained of it except some grassy terraces, a bit of a fine facade of stone with empty windows, half-hidden ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... into a steady gallop and the fields began to drift by under us, and a great wind arose full of fresh breath. We left the clay lands where the bracken grows and came to a valley at the edge of the chalk. As we went down into it we saw the fox go up the other side like a shadow that crosses the evening, and glide into a wood that stood on the top. We saw a flash of primroses in the wood and we were out the other side, hounds ...
— Tales of Wonder • Lord Dunsany
... is a wilderness of fern, or bracken, as high as your waist. Hidden in the midst of this unlikely place Jones has found the dagger. It is as if the party, going down the avenue, had ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... grateful. The last few miles was weary work for the men. Remember they had marched or fought, or more often both, every day since our quiet night at Landrecies. The road, too, was the very roughest pave, though I remember well a little forest of bracken and pines we went through. Being "a would-be literary bloke," I murmured "Scottish"; being tired I forgot it from the moment after I saw it ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson
... sister's beauty. It is stiller than it was outside; the murmur descends from aloft. There was a frost last night and the leaves will soon fall. A beech leaf detaches itself now and then and flutters peacefully and waywardly to the ground, careless whether it finds its grave in the bracken or on the road where it will be trodden underfoot. The bramble is beginning to turn to blood. It is strange that leaves should show such character. Here is a corner on which there are not two of the same tint, ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... driving: "You shouldn't be on the box at all; I never saw such a wild driver." "Drive!" said Jehu, in a voice of thunder. "Why, man, once every year, I drive the mail-coach down that steep hill-side among the bracken. And this is the day for it!" So saying, the humorous fellow made as if to whip the horses down the cliff, and the terrified tourist shrieked aloud. "Seeing I've such a nervous passenger," said the driver, with a guffaw, "I had better break my own ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... of the squalid hovels and wood piles of charcoal burners; and still they pursued their way till they cleared the dense forest and beheld before them a long range of hills blue in the distant air. Towards sundown they came on a stony moorland, rough with heather and bracken and tufts of bent; and when there was but one long band of red light parting the distant land from the low sky, they descried a range of thick posts standing high and black against the red in the heavens. As they drew near, these, they discovered, ...
— A Child's Book of Saints • William Canton
... language at him, he drove him from the branch—from the tree, from one tree after another as the little traitor tried to take refuge—he drove him from the rose-garden—over the laurel hedge and into the pheasant cover in the wood. Perhaps he killed him and left him slain in the bracken. I could not see. But having beaten him once and forever he came back to me, panting—all fluffed up—and with blood thirst only just dying in his eye. He came down on to my table—out of breath as he agitatedly ...
— My Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... leafy carpet, by the silent woods they came, Where the golden bracken lingered and the maples were aflame. On the stream the starlight shimmered, o'er their wings the moonbeams shone, Music filtered through the forest—and the ...
— The Verse-Book Of A Homely Woman • Elizabeth Rebecca Ward, AKA Fay Inchfawn
... brace of good pistols, and they with care shall give account, if need be, of two men. After that, nothing. It were better—so much better—not to live if one were only ten minutes too late.... Now he was in the forest again, and now as he rode quickly down the steep sandy road among the bracken, he heard the hoarse rush of the river in his ears, and knew the end was well-nigh come.... Now the house was in sight, and now he cried aloud some wild inarticulate sound of thankfulness and joy. All was as peaceful as ever, and Alice, unconscious, stood white-robed ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... the Babe, and nearly jumped out of his boots. A gray thing had come right at him, with an ugly, scurrying rush. The bushes and bracken being thick, he had not got a very clear view of it—and he did not stop to try for a better one. In two seconds he was back at Uncle Andy's side, where the latter sat smoking on his favorite ...
— Children of the Wild • Charles G. D. Roberts
... through the gap by Morfe Bridge and went up the fields to the road on Greffington Edge. She lay down among the bracken in the place where Roddy and she had sat two years ago when they had met Mr. Sutcliffe coming down ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... this wood I don't remember," he said, looking about him as we scrambled up the bridle path. Bracken up to our waists was on both sides, and it grew and hung over so thickly that the path was barely visible. As we reached the top of the track he gave a low whistle. Instantly the whistle was answered. A moment later half a dozen men rose up out of ...
— The Four Faces - A Mystery • William le Queux
... her interest once in a remarkable way. The pheasants—several of them—were pecking amongst the bracken, and Mag, perched on an oak bough overhead, was looking round, as was her custom, when her glance fell upon a fox, lurking treacherously amongst the long grass, evidently making ready to spring upon ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... and birch. From a clearing in this wood a thin column of pale blue smoke was rising through the still air. A hut in the shape of a cone stood a few yards from the road. It was thatched from the ground upward with heather and bracken, leaving only a low aperture as door. Near the hut a small fire of hazel sticks crackled under the pot that swung from a forked triangle of oak limbs. Fagots were stacked at one end of the clearing; a pile of loose bark lay near. It was a charcoal pit, and behind a ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... one of their customary walks. The crystalline October sunshine, in which every distant tree and, seaward, each slowly travelling steamer, seemed to gain a new clearness of outline, lay upon the deep-ploughed fields, the yellowing bracken, and the red-gold of the bending trees, while the west wind, which had strewn the sea with white-flecked waves, brought down the leaves to form a carpet for their feet, and played strange music along the wood-crested ...
— The Zeppelin's Passenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the sap in each root and rhizome, Primrose yellow and snowdrop cold, Windyflowers when the chiffchaff flies home, Lenten lilies with crowns of gold. Soon the woods will be blithe with bracken, April whisper of lambs at play; Spring will triumph—and our old black hen (Thank the Lord!) will begin ...
— Punch, Volume 156, January 22, 1919. • Various
... an afternoon in autumn, with a sound of wintry breakers on the shore, the tall woods copper-colour, the thickets dishevelled, and the nuts, in the corries of Ardkinglas, the braes of Ardno, dropping upon bracken burned to gold. Until he was out of the glen and into the open land, the traveller could scarcely conceive that what by his chart was no more than an arm of the ocean could make so much ado; but when he found the ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... on the descent of a cutting in the sand, where their cordial postillion at a trot bumped the chariot against the sturdy wheels of a waggon, which sent it reclining for support upon a beech-tree's huge intertwisted serpent roots, amid strips of brown bracken and pendant weeds, while he exhibited one short stump of leg, all boot, in air. No one was hurt. Diana disengaged herself from the shoulder of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... been on the floor of a throne; And, alas for auld Scotland, her sons and her daughters! Thy wish was their welfare, thy cause was their own. But 'lorn may we sigh where the hill-winds awaken, And weep in the glen where the cataracts foam, And sleep where the dew-drops are deep on the bracken; Thy foot has the land of thy fathers forsaken, And more—never more will it ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... on through the midsummer woods, heavy with bright leaves and waist-deep with bracken; little brooks, clean as whistles, piped away among immaculate stones, and limpid light broken by delicious shadows ...
— Aladdin O'Brien • Gouverneur Morris
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