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More "Cactus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... little brown ants that harbor under logs in the uplands, but now they came for the first time on one of the hills of the great, fat, luscious Wood-ant, and they all crowded around to lick up those that ran out. But they soon found that they were licking up more cactus-prickles and sand than ants, till their Mother said in Grizzly, ...
— The Biography of a Grizzly • Ernest Seton-Thompson
... heavens floated a flock of birds flying back to us.... 'Spring! welcome spring!' I shouted aloud: 'welcome, life and love and happiness!' And at that instance, with sweetly troubling shock, suddenly like a cactus flower thy image blossomed aflame within me, blossomed and grew, bewilderingly fair and radiant, and I knew that I love thee, thee only—that I am all ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... land which the sunlight floods and fills, To the north the open country, southward the Cyprus Hills; Never a bit of woodland, never a rill that flows, Only a stretch of cactus beds, and the wild, sweet prairie rose; Never a habitation, save where in the far south-west A solitary tepee lifts its solitary crest, Where Neykia in the doorway, crouched in the red sunshine, Broiders her buckskin mantle with the ...
— Flint and Feather • E. Pauline Johnson
... and then a mass Of dry red cactus ruled the land: The sun rose right above and fell, As falling molten from the skies, And no winged thing was seen to pass." ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes
... coppice shrubs (as you might call them), and we know tomillares, or undergrowth; but in Corsica nature heaps these together with both hands, and the Corsican, in despair of separating them, calls them all macchia. Cistus, myrtle and cactus; cytisus, lentisk, arbutus; daphne, heath, broom, juniper and ilex—these few I recognised, but there was no end to their varieties and none to their tangle of colours. The slopes flamed with heather bells red as blood, or were snowed white with myrtle blossom: wild roses trailed everywhere, ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... short. He had seen something that brought back to him with a rush the realization of his whereabouts. Seated in the shelter of a cactus tree, not fifty yards away, was King Mtetanyanga, wearing his three opera hats, one upon another, in the form of a triple crown, and drinking his own rum with Raguet, under the shade of Raguet's umbrella. Prone at their feet crouched ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various
... North Eagle seemed to know just what would interest the white boy—all the romance of the trail, the animals, the game, the cactus beds, the vast areas of mushrooms growing wild, edible and luscious, the badger and gopher holes, and the long, winding, half obliterated buffalo trails that yet scarred the distant reaches. It was only when he ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson
... for the open, to give a better chance to his preponderating numbers. Akbar carried the town with a rush, and then dashed in pursuit. But the country was intercepted by lanes, {111} bordered on both sides by cactus hedges, and the horsemen of Akbar were driven back into a position in which but three of them could fight abreast, the enemy being on either side of the cactus hedges. The Emperor was in front of his men, having by his ...
— Rulers of India: Akbar • George Bruce Malleson
... now beyond the line of haphazard shacks and adobe buildings that bordered the one street, into the jungle of mesquite and cactus growing in the dry waste of sand that almost surrounded the settlement—and ...
— The Mission of Janice Day • Helen Beecher Long
... ship. Farragut was ordered to take a party of men to capture the pirates, and at three o'clock the next morning, they set out in the barges, and after landing on the island, had no easy time to find the pirate camp, as they had to cut their way through thickets of trailing vines, thorny bushes and cactus plants and in such intense heat that some of the men fainted from exhaustion. They found the camp, but their prey had fled! Evidently the approaching vessels had been seen, and the pirates were gone. The sailors at once searched their camp, ...
— Ten Boys from History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... story, but at last I gathered that he had been watching my mistress, who used to meet a sort of vagabond whom my steward had hired the month before, behind the neighboring cactus woods, or in the ravine where the oleanders flourished. The night before, Mohammed had seen her go out without seeing her return, and he repeated, in an exasperated manner:—'Gone, mo'ssieuia; she ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... was nobody to be seen if we hadn't been in a box. Of course no one comes there but stately old farmers and their smart daughters. I saw one with a Gainsborough hat, and a bunch of cock's feathers, with a scarlet cactus cocking it ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... thinking they must all have lost their wits together, I was unconsciously being dragged and pulled along till we came to a kind of ruined marble staircase, down which they hurried me into something still resembling a spacious chamber; for though the wild fig-tree and cactus pushed their fantastic branches through gaps in the walls, these stood partly upright as yet, discovering in places the dull red glow of ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... arms; but the resistless steed that bore us onward, though quivering and panting with the effort, always contrived to find the narrow opening toward liberty. Occasionally our route lay through enormous fields of cactus and yucca trees, twelve feet in height, and, usually, so hideous from their distorted shapes and prickly spikes, that I could understand the proverb, "Even the Devil ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... fast enough to suit the Blackfeet. An old fellow commenced to shout at him, and motion for him to go faster. But he didn't wish to go faster; the ground was thickly grown to prickly-pear cactus, and he had to pick his ...
— Boys' Book of Frontier Fighters • Edwin L. Sabin
... of Angels was all but empty. Upon it the lassitude of early afternoon lay heavily. The spider-legged music-racks of the Mexican string orchestra, the empty platform chairs, the deserted side-tables along the pictured wall, the huge cactus scrawled over with pin-etched initials,—all the impedimenta of ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... undulating plain, in the midst of which nestled the smiling village of Khan Yunus, a beautiful sight, and one never to be forgotten. Everywhere was green; fields of young barley rippled in the light breeze, palms and almond trees nodded to the morning, and between the rows of cactus and prickly pear ran the slim grey ribbon of the caravan road ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... through; the Isabelle fish, it is violet and green and gold, like a queen. Under my feet, see, Colorado! sand white like the snow of your winter, fine, shining with many bright sparks. And this is a garden; for all on every hand flowers are growing. You have seen a cactus, that some lady keeps very careful in her window, tending that it die not? Yes! Here is the white ground covered with these flowers completely, only of more size hugely, crimson, pale, the heart of a rose, the heart of a young maiden. Sea-anemones are these, ...
— Nautilus • Laura E. Richards
... Gould's admirable account of a hunting trip for them—"To the Gulf of Cortez," published in a preceding volume of the Club's book—will be remembered, and the curious fact stated by his Indian guide that the sheep break holes in the hard, prickly rinds of the venaga cactus with their horns, and then eat out ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various
... "It looks so much different in the summer time, but still seems queer to me with its heaps of rocks and no trees except the stiff old Joshuas. I wonder why they are called that. Even they don't seem like trees to me. They look like giant cactus plants, and just ...
— Tabitha's Vacation • Ruth Alberta Brown
... day I never hear of some new frontier being developed without pricking up my ears and quivering like a circus horse when he hears a band play. There are some desert products that can't be rooted out—sagebrush and cactus and the ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... rare or distant that one could hardly hope to get hold of them without the help of Sindbad the sailor. Once, as it happened, the Professor forgot himself so far as to mention accessible things. Who could ever believe that a seed dipped and dried twenty-one times in the juice of a species of cactus would sprout and flower and fruit all in the space of an hour? I was determined to test this, not daring withal to doubt the assurance of a Professor whose name appeared ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... America—the ash, elm, beech, oak, fir and walnut. The orchards, above those of oranges and lemons, are of figs and olives. The cork-oak covers considerable tracts, but is less attended to than in Spain. A non-European aspect is imparted by the tufts of cactus and aloes which abound in ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... turtles decided they would climb out of the river and go hunt some food, for there was a kind of cactus around there that they like very much. But one of the turtles had a baby and she didn't like to wake it up and take it with her because it was sleeping so nicely. So they just went along ...
— The Unwritten Literature of the Hopi • Hattie Greene Lockett
... the 'bus, Ash," smilingly replied the leader of the drummers, a man named Pritchard. "If you'll send the 'bus over to the Cactus House with our ...
— The Young Engineers in Arizona - Laying Tracks on the Man-killer Quicksand • H. Irving Hancock
... fine vineyards. The ashfield of ten square miles above Nicolosi, created by the eruption of 1669, which was entirely barren in 1835, is now planted with vines almost to the summits of Monte Rosso, at a height of three thousand feet" Ueber den Sicilianischen Ackerbau, p. 19.] But the cactus is making inroads even here, while the volcanic sand and molten rock thrown out by Vesuvius soon become productive. Before the great eruption of 1631 even the interior of the crater was covered with vegetation. George Sandys, who visited Vesuvius in 1611, after it had reposed ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... into patches—each hedged off in squares in which flourished all sorts of vegetables, including sweet corn and potatoes and several other less familiar varieties. In pastures, fenced in with mathematical regularity by hedges of the African cactus thorn, herds of humped cattle were feeding contentedly in the mellow glow of the setting sun, occasionally lowing softly, which latter made Billy, as he expressed it, "long ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... was sad and silent. Pepet led the way, the bimbau between his lips buzzing like a gad-fly. From time to time he stopped to throw a stone at a bird or at a puffed-up black lizard darting among the opuntia cactus. Little impression did death make upon him! Margalida walked at her mother's side, silent, abstracted, her eyes opened very wide, beautiful bovine eyes, which looked in every direction reflecting not a single thought. ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... house. Are there not dull days enough in the year for you to write and read in, that you should waste this glittering season when Florida and Cuba seem to have left their glittering seats and come to visit us with all their shining hours, and almost we expect to see the jasmine and cactus burst from the ground instead of these last gentians and asters which have loitered to attend this latter glory of the year? All insects are out, all birds come forth, the very cattle that lie on the ground seem to have great ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... end of the four days we turned in at a deep bay and came to anchor. The country was the usual proposition—very light-brown, brittle-looking mountains, about two thousand feet high; lots of sage and cactus, a pebbly beach, and not a sign of anything fresh ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White
... Monocotyledons, and Dicotyledons. Here is a casual list of plants that then grew in the latitude of London and Paris: the palm, magnolia, myrtle, Banksia, vine, fig, aralea, sequoia, eucalyptus, cinnamon tree, cactus, agave, tulip tree, apple, plum, bamboo, almond, plane, maple, willow, oak, evergreen oak, laurel, beech, cedar, etc. The landscape must have been extraordinarily varied and beautiful and rich. To one botanist it suggests Malaysia, to another ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... no walks hereabouts, and the hills, three miles distant, are too remote for my reduced vitality. The intervening region is a plain of rock carved so smoothly, in places, as to appear artificially levelled with the chisel; large tracts of it are covered with the Indian fig (cactus). In the shade of these grotesque growths lives a dainty flora: trembling grasses of many kinds, rue, asphodel, thyme, the wild asparagus, a diminutive blue iris, as well as patches of saxifrage that ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... see it all in my mind's eye by your eloquent description. You are quite right in supposing that I like compliments; but I am particular about their quality; and I dont need to be told I am pretty in comparison with a hideous cactus. You would not have condescended to make such a speech long ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... there is plenty of soil and moisture, plenty of chance for yuccas to thrive, and you will find it turned into a tree and the thorn merely a dull blade-ending. Follow the sahuaro and the pitahaya into the tropics again, and with their cousin, the organ cactus, you will find them growing a soft thorn that would hardly ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... government, and, perhaps, grant it to some one of his officers, or pawn it to foreign sympathizers for military stores. The neighborhood of Rivas was dotted with ranch-houses, distenanted by these means,—rank grass growing in the court-yards, the cactus-hedges gapped, and the crops swept away by the foragers. Perhaps, had these men been let alone, jealousy toward foreigners would not, of itself, have made them enemies; but General Walker was obliged to provide arms and provisions for his soldiers, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... like a miracle out of the Arabian Nights. Your backyard becomes voluptuous with pomegranate and almond trees, lemon groves, and hedges of flowering cactus, dazzling banks of azaleas, marble- basined fountains, in which chestnut-and-white pond-herons step daintily amid exotic water-lilies, while golden pheasants strut about on alabaster terraces. The whole effect rather suggests ...
— The Toys of Peace • Saki
... are bunches of cactus with prickly leaves. Look out! don't catch your toe in those sea-ferns. Even that sweet green maiden-hair fern might pin down your foot so firmly that it would take a fish's sharp tooth to set ...
— Lord Dolphin • Harriet A. Cheever
... curious-shaped parcel, and Penelope kept enjoining her to be very careful, and not to turn it over. When at last she did undo the wrappings, and the box inside, and found a tiny red flower-pot with a baby cactus in it, ...
— The Carroll Girls • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... walking, the girls came to a road, or something that passed for a road. There was no sign of life on it, but there was something that made them start, then stop and look at each other. Beside the rough path, in a tangle of vines and thorny cactus, stood the ruin of a tiny chapel. A group of noble palms towered above it; from the stony bank behind it bubbled a little fountain. The door of the chapel was gone; it was long since there had been glass in the windows, and the ...
— Rita • Laura E. Richards
... loose from the stake, and she raised up in a sitting posture, "Would ye's moind lettin' me help ye to yer fate, Miss?" said Mike. "O, I'm so tired and weak I can't stand," said the girl. "They have almost killed me dragging me over the cactus." ...
— Thirty-One Years on the Plains and In the Mountains • William F. Drannan
... the ruddy, horizontal rays of the sun were casting long grotesque shadows of the tall-branched plants of the cactus family that stood up, some like great fleshy leaves, rudely stuck one upon the other, and some like strangely rugged and prickly fluted columns, a body of Indians, about a hundred strong, rode over the plain towards the rocks where Dr Lascelles and ...
— The Silver Canyon - A Tale of the Western Plains • George Manville Fenn
... beside. There was the moonlight on the sea and above all Valma and Mallorca, the most delightful place in the world, and all this kept me terribly far away from philosophy and theology. Fortunately I have found some superb convents here all in ruins, with palm-trees, aloes and the cactus in the midst of broken mosaics and crumbling cloisters, and this takes me back to Spiridion. For the last three days I have had a rage for work, which I cannot satisfy yet, as we have neither fire nor lodging. There is not an inn in Palma, no house to let and no furniture to be bought. ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... & 23. 1847. Within a circle formed by two serpents, one of which is a rattlesnake, the American army, commanded by General Taylor, is repulsing the attack of the Mexicans. Beneath are branches of cactus and oak. F. A. SMITH DEL. (delineavit.) C. C. ...
— The Medallic History of the United States of America 1776-1876 • J. F. Loubat
... think the horticulturist insane, who took a delicate fern and planted it in arid soil, on a hilltop, far from shade, and expected it to thrive and bear blossoms like the cactus. ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... tracks, then, now through narrow gullies in brown and barren mountains, now striking some village path amidst peach trees and marguerites, Jose Medina drove Martin Hillyard down to the edge of the sea. Here amongst cactus bushes in flower, with turf for a carpet, a camp had been prepared near to one of the two tiny villages. Jose Medina was king in this region. The party arrived in the afternoon of the twenty-sixth day of the month, all of the colour of saffron ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... water; while on shore a soft, pleasant vegetation presented to the eye the whole range of shades in green, from the bluish, sickly green of the idrys to the dark, metallic green of the stenia. Farther inland, tall grapes, lianes, aloes, and cactus formed impenetrable thickets, out of which rose, like fluted columns, gigantic cocoa-palms, and the most graceful trees on earth, areca-palms. Through clearings here and there, one could follow, as far as ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... by the flexile vivacity of the feathery willow acacia? The same white lilies, or their deliciously sweet July representatives, are contrasted well with scarlet geranium, vivid and glowing, or with the flames of the cactus, and toned down by the bluish lavender of the wistaria. This makes a bouquet eminently suited for church—its colors forming Ruskin's sacred chord, and typifying the union of purity, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... displayed in architectural matters by the wealthier residents. The walls surrounding the little compounds are sometimes adorned with house-leeks or cactus, tastefully set out along the top; and, in other cases, with ornamental tiles. The walls of the houses are decorated with paintings depicting, in bright colors, scenes of the chase, birds, ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... miles from the town, is a very beautiful cemetery, and is to Hong Kong what Mount Auburn is to Boston,—not quite so extensive, but superior in its collection of flowers and trees, which must have been gathered and naturalized here at a great cost. The varieties of the cactus family are remarkable in numbers and mode of training. The same may be said of the camphor-tree, the aloes, tall and graceful cypresses, mingling with which are Cape jasmines, hydrangeas, magnolias, and the scarlet geranium, tall ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... on a ledge of rock midway between earth and heaven, the cliff falling almost sheer to the valley two hundred feet and more, the mountain rising behind straight toward the sky; all the rocks covered with cactus and dwarf fig-trees, the convent draped in smothering roses, and in front a terrace with a fountain in the midst; and then—nothing—between you and the sapphire sea, six miles away. Below stretches the Eden valley, the Concha d'Oro, gold-green fig orchards alternating with smoke-blue olives, ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... openest country I had yet seen hereabouts—a basin of wave-like veldt, just growing thinly green under the spring rains, spangled with budding mimosa-thorn. Scarred here and there with the dry water-courses they call sluits, patched with heaves of wire-fenced down, livened with a verandah, blue cactus-hedged farmhouse or two, losing itself finally in a mazy fairyland of azure mountains—this valley was the nearest approach to what you would call a smiling country I had ...
— From Capetown to Ladysmith - An Unfinished Record of the South African War • G. W. Steevens
... one-card draw, and the nocturnal stimulation of towns from undue lethargy; but, hitherto, it had not been famed as a stronghold of aesthetics. Lonny Briscoe's brush had removed that disability. Here, among the limestone rocks, the succulent cactus, and the drought-parched grass of that arid valley, had been born the Boy Artist. Why he came to woo art is beyond postulation. Beyond doubt, some spore of the afflatus must have sprung up within him in spite of the desert soil of San Saba. The tricksy ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... understood English pretty well. Naab laughed, and while Hare ate breakfast he talked of the sheep. The flock he had numbered three thousand. They were a goodly part of them Navajo stock: small, hardy sheep that could live on anything but cactus, and needed little water. This flock had grown from a small number to its present size in a few years. Being remarkably free from the diseases and pests which retard increase in low countries, the ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey
... for me," commented Billie as he kept himself well hidden behind a giant cactus. "It reminds me of Ali Baba and the forty thieves. I hope I have better luck than ...
— The Broncho Rider Boys with Funston at Vera Cruz - Or, Upholding the Honor of the Stars and Stripes • Frank Fowler
... plant, when mature, resembles a cactus. The flattened hypocotyl is fleshy, enlarged in the upper part, and bears two rudimentary cotyledons. It breaks through the ground in an arched form, with the rudimentary cotyledons closed or in contact. ...
— The Power of Movement in Plants • Charles Darwin
... of the Author Frontispiece A Dasylirion, 1 Cottonwood, 4 Cereus Greggii, a small cactus with enormous root, 5 Fronteras, 7 Remarkable Ant-hill, 8 Church Bells at Opoto, 10 Also a Visitor, 11 A Mexican from Opoto, 12 Rock-carvings near Granados, 15 The Church in Bacadehuachi, 17 Aztec Vase, Found in the Church of Bacadehuachi, ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... is a joyous trysting-place, my love, With no inconstant climate to distract us; Pure azure is the sky that laughs above These admirable bowers of prickly cactus, Where we may nestle, conjugating amo (Dear old ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, April 21, 1920 • Various
... is found this beautiful symbol:—'There is a species of Cactus, from whose outer bark, if torn by an ignorant person, there exudes a poisonous liquid; but the natives, who know the plant, strike to the core, and there find a sweet, refreshing juice, that renews their strength.' Surely the preceding extracts ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... to a place where Wildfire had doubled on his trail and had turned up a side canyon. The climb out was hard on Slone, if not on Nagger. Once up, Slone found himself upon a wide, barren plateau of glaring red rock and clumps of greasewood and cactus. The plateau was miles wide, shut in by great walls and mesas of colored rock. The afternoon sun beat down fiercely. A blast of wind, as if from a furnace, swept across the plateau, and it was laden with red dust. Slone walked here, where he could have ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... completely overshadowed by enormous cypress-trees, all of which seemed extremely ancient, while some appeared quite dead and withered. There was, in addition to these trees, a thick undergrowth of long rank grass and stunted shrubs, among which an outrageously prickly variety of the cactus made itself conspicuously apparent to the touch; while, more than half hidden by the undergrowth, there were dotted here and there a few sepulchral stones and monuments in the very last stage of irretrievable dilapidation. Add to these sombre surroundings the ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... on one side from the hill above, bordered by the graceful and variously shaped trees of the tropics—the tall maple arrow, surrounded by its flowering crown of yellow; the Spanish needle, with its dagger-like leaves; the quilled pimploe, a species of cactus; and numberless others, from the branches of which hung lilac and purple wreaths in rich festoons—while the sweet notes of the feathered songsters ever and anon burst forth, and here and there could be seen tiny humming-birds flitting ...
— The Missing Ship - The Log of the "Ouzel" Galley • W. H. G. Kingston
... trifle while the guanacoes were in sight. Concealing ourselves as much as possible behind rocks and bushes, and here and there an evergreen quillay-tree, we got nearer and nearer to them. Sometimes we got behind clumps of the great chandelier-like cactus, whose sturdy green twisted stems ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... level, rising gradually to the foot of the rock, which then rose steeply up. A few houses were scattered about, surrounded by gardens. Hedges of cactus lined the road. Parties of soldiers and sailors, natives with carts, and women in picturesque costumes passed along. The vegetation on the low ground was abundant, and Bob looked with delight at ...
— Held Fast For England - A Tale of the Siege of Gibraltar (1779-83) • G. A. Henty
... the wilderness meant thousands of dollars to the stockholders somewhere up in God's country, who would some day hold them to account for them. They dragged their chains through miles and miles of jungle, and over flat alkali beds and cactus, and they reared bridges across roaring canons. We know nothing about them and we care less. When their work is done we ride over the road in an observation-car and look down thousands and thousands of feet into the depths they have bridged, and we never give them a thought. They ...
— Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... wound in and out among the mesquite and the cactus to the house. Beside this trail, behind a clump of prickly pear, the Ranger sat down and waited. The hour-hand of his watch crept to ten, to eleven, to twelve. Roberts rose occasionally, stretched himself to avoid any chance of cramped muscles, and counted stars ...
— Oh, You Tex! • William Macleod Raine
... midst of an almost tropical climate. This difference in climatic features between the top and bottom of the canon is equal to the change which the traveller experiences in a trip from the pine forests of the northern United States to the cactus-covered plains ...
— The Western United States - A Geographical Reader • Harold Wellman Fairbanks
... Slender cypresses rise up from amidst brightly verdant groves of orange, fig, pomegranate, plum, and peach trees. Tall mulberry trees, umbrageous planes, and ash trees glance down upon thickets and hedges of blossoming myrtles, oleanders, and the aguus cactus. From amidst this garden-paradise, which occupies the whole higher portion of the entire extent of the valley, rise here and there white villas, with ornaments upon their roofs and balconies, with small towers, which show a mediaeval ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... his hands into his coat-pockets, and with a frowning countenance went off in search of Rais Ali. Mariner-like, he descried him afar on the horizon of vision, as it were, bearing down under full sail along a narrow path between two hedges of aloes and cactus, which led ...
— The Pirate City - An Algerine Tale • R.M. Ballantyne
... coast of Opeki was not built in a day. Nor was it ever built. For before the Bradleys could mark out the foul-lines for the base-ball field on the plaza, or teach their standing army the goose step, or lay bamboo pipes for the water-mains, or clear away the cactus for the extension of the King's palace, the Hillmen paid Opeki ...
— Cinderella - And Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... the Hindu, so that an elegant union of the keen and naked Jain asceticism with the mellower and richer fancy of the luxurious Mohammedan has resulted in a perfect work of that art which makes death lovely by recalling its spiritual significance. Besides, a holy silence broods about the cactus and the euphorbian foliage, so that a word will send the paroquets, accustomed to such unbroken stillness, into hasty flights. The tomb proper is in the chamber at the centre, enclosed by delicately-trellised ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... The snow-covered peaks of a lofty range rose skyward in the west. To the north was the solitary butte from which the town received its name. To the south was a line of dimpled foothills, while eastward stretched a barren vista of cactus, sand, and sagebrush. A shallow stream flowed between alkali-coated banks on two sides of the town. In the spring when melting mountain snows filled it to overflowing, it ran swift and yellow; but in the ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... seen or heard of what the captain had come across) and say in his slow way, "The blue chalice flower was about the shape of that magnolia, only twice as big, and just the colour of the gentians in the border, and it had a great white tassel hanging out like the cactus in the parlour window, and all the leaves were yellow underneath; and ...
— A Great Emergency and Other Tales - A Great Emergency; A Very Ill-Tempered Family; Our Field; Madam Liberality • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... company and there isn't the means. I can't even make you an apple-pie bed, when you sleep in a single blanket; and a booby-trap needs a door. And when there are only two people, and no one else to laugh, it's no fun to stick a cactus in a fellow's chair. Tuck, too! What do you know about tuck? What can you know about tuck when there's no shop for chocolate and Turkish Delight and things like that? Tinned stuff is all very well, but it gets jolly ...
— The Flamp, The Ameliorator, and The Schoolboy's Apprentice • E. V. Lucas
... at pleasure. Mrs. Boulte put on a big terai hat, and walked across to the Vansuythens's house to borrow last week's Queen. The two compounds touched, and instead of going up the drive, she crossed through the gap in the cactus-hedge, entering the house from the back. As she passed through the dining-room, she heard, behind the purdah that cloaked the drawing-room door, her husband's voice, saying—"But on my Honor! On my Soul and Honor, I tell you she doesn't care for me. She told me so last night. I ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... of dried venison that the elder produced from his wallet, the two Seminoles sat, concealed behind a thick cluster of cactus, watching the river for any signs of pursuit, and forming plans for future action. Cat-sha told Chitta that he had left his band in their most inaccessible stronghold among the bayous and deep morasses of the ...
— The Flamingo Feather • Kirk Munroe
... lighter, and looked out upon the bright garden, the alms-houses, and the church tower. The upper part of the window was occupied by Katherine's large cage of canary birds, and below was a stand of flower-pots, a cactus which never dreamt of blossoming, an ice-plant, and a columnia belonging to Katherine, a nourishing daphne of Helen's, and a verbena, and a few geranium cuttings which she had brought from Dykelands, looking very miserable under cracked tumblers ...
— Abbeychurch - or, Self-Control and Self-Conceit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... lofty rim that in reality is a considerable chain of mountains. The bowl is two or three miles long and as much wide, with tall grass growing on the small hills inside and thousands upon thousands of curious cactus-like trees. Several mountain streams tumble down from the gorges between the peaks and, uniting, flow out of the big gap in one stream, the river Turkwel, which separates Uganda ...
— In Africa - Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country • John T. McCutcheon
... a sharp incline, Gloriana called our attention to a view panoramic and matchless beneath the glamour of sunset. Below us lay the mission town, its crude buildings aglow with rosy light; to the left was the canon, a frowning wilderness of manzanita, cactus and chaparral; to the right towered the triune peak of the Bishop, purple against an amber sky; in the distance were the shimmering waters of the Pacific. Upon the face of the landscape brooded infinite peace, and the soft shadows ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... crackled beneath a cactus that filled up the niche in the wall, and in black wood frames against the oak-stained paper hung Steuben's "Esmeralda" and Schopin's "Potiphar." The ready-laid table, the two silver chafing-dishes, the crystal door-knobs, the parquet and the furniture, all ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... insect, a species which has the habit of feeding upon the cactus, is used for a dye stuff, for which service the brightly colored body is appropriated. Although the creature is deliberately planted where it is to feed, and thus is in a way submitted to culture, it cannot fairly be said to have been entered in the domesticated circle of man. In a similar ...
— Domesticated Animals - Their Relation to Man and to his Advancement in Civilization • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... there in that cactus-bordered country of black, lava hills where I was born an' where I belong!" said Rathburn grimly, sliding into a chair on the opposite side ...
— The Coyote - A Western Story • James Roberts
... 9 A.M. we started. Our road lay at first over a ridge of high hills, from which we saw nothing of the ship. We then crossed a sandy plain covered with the cactus, which severely wounded my feet. Afterwards passed through some wooded ravines, and over an extensive marsh intersected with brooks. Towards the evening a horseman overtook us, who seeing the tired condition of the steward, his feet bleeding, and also suffering from a gash on his head, ...
— Narratives of Shipwrecks of the Royal Navy; between 1793 and 1849 • William O. S. Gilly
... lowland surface, the canal sage grew thick, a gray-green expanse stretching unbroken to the distant cliff that was the other side of the canal. Occasionally above its smoothness thrust the giant barrel of a canal cactus. ...
— Rebels of the Red Planet • Charles Louis Fontenay
... "Never mind whether Cactus Ike is going to sleep there or not," said Mr, Kent sharply. "You tell Ike he can bunk in with the rest of the boys. He's no better ...
— Jack Ranger's Western Trip - From Boarding School to Ranch and Range • Clarence Young
... and particularly because he'd had a government contract for a long while, ran a big gang of men and critters, and had made a lot of money. Likewise he had a girl, who lived at the fort, and was mighty nice to look at, and restful to the eye after a year or so of cactus-trees and mesquite and buffalo-grass. She was twice as nice and twice as pretty as the women at the post, and as for money—well, her dad could have bought and sold all the officers in a lump; but they and their wives looked down on her, and she didn't mix with ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... which led down to the garden and was decorated by lemon and pomegranate trees in tubs, and with cactus and aloe and flowering plants, stood a young girl of about twenty, scattering millet from two plates held by a barefooted child of twelve. At her feet were assembled hens, turkeys, ducks, pigeons, sparrows and daws. She called to the birds to come to breakfast, and cocks, hens ...
— The Precipice • Ivan Goncharov
... as Senora Mendez took one of the little buttons out of the silver tray. Carefully paring the fuzzy tuft of hairs off the top of it—it looked to me very much like the tip of a cactus plant, which, indeed, it was—she rolled it into a little pellet and placed it in her mouth, chewing it slowly like a ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve
... enjoyed, however, some bold and wonderful mountain scenery, and obtained glimpses through the flying murk of the vast plains and the base of Suswa. On a precipitous canon cliff we found a hanging garden of cactus and of looped cactus-like vines that was a marvel to behold. We ran across the hartebeeste on our way home. Our men were already out of meat; the hartebeeste of yesterday had disappeared. These porters are a good deal like the old-fashioned Michigan lumberjacks—they ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... white dust of death. Shadeless and colourless, to the limit of vision, it rose and fell in long billowing waves; as if some wizard, in the morning of the world, had smitten a living ocean to lifeless sand, where nothing flourished but the camel thorn and the ak plant and gaunt cactus bushes—their limbs petrified in ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... natives of the Samoa Islands use similar tackle with great success. The Indians of the northwest coast make fish-hooks of epicea wood, and those of Arizona utilize for the same purpose the long spikes of the cactus. It is very probable that European as well as American races knew how to use wood in the same manner. During the lapse of centuries, however, these fragile objects have been reduced to dust, and we are unable to make any further ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... coolness around. Having heard that Santa Cruz was a very poor place, we were astonished to find it really a fine city with handsome houses, spreading backwards a considerable distance from the sea, with gardens and villas beyond, and outside all cactus plantations and cultivated terraces rising up the slopes of the mountains. I was proceeding with Mr Henley in search of the consul, who was to arrange matters about the ship, when I felt a hand placed on my shoulder, and I heard ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... minute pieces of marble forming a far-more-lovely-than possible faded purple and lilac rug. Also, the pathetically trodden-down-to-bits porphyry discs in the doorway. And the little cippus of a Roman girl who lived sixteen years and twenty-eight days. Against the apse, outside, the great python of a cactus. ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee
... this I was treated to a surprise. Right ahead of me lay a barren waste of sand extending to the right and left as far as I could see. Its width in the direction that I was going I judged to be about twenty miles. On its farther border the cactus plain began again, sloping gradually upward to the horizon, along which was a fringe of cedar trees—the willows of my vision! In that country a cedar will not grow within thirty miles of ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... of green (hoist side), white, and red; the coat of arms (an eagle with a snake in its beak perched on a cactus) is centered in the ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... robbed: the quires were hidden in his vest suddenly and he walked on in confidence, also in a great seriousness, going his way melancholy as a camel, his head turned from the many temptations that the way offered to him—the flower in the cactus hedge was one. He passed it without picking it, and further on he allowed a strange crawling insect to go by without molestation, and feeling his mood to be exceptional he fell to thinking that his granny would laugh, were ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... spirit of the scene appeared before him: the sun, and wind, and sky; the vast, vast spaces of waving grass, broken by the beds of dried-up streams, strewn here and there with mimosas and thorns, here dim with the growth of vangueria bushes, here sharp and gray-green with cactus; this giant land, infinite, sunlit, and silent, spoke to him in a ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... marshes, they came upon a sacrificial stone which they recognized as one upon which some years before one of their priests had immolated a captive {126} chief. From a crevice in this stone, where a little earth was imbedded, there grew a cactus, upon which sat an eagle holding in its beak a serpent. A priest ingeniously interpretated this symbolism as a prophecy of signal and long-continued victory, and, forthwith diving into the lake, he had an interview with Tlaloc, the god of waters, ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... name Golden Horn, and was vastly astonished to find her here against this unknown island. Far up the coast I could see—with the surges dashing up like the explosion of shells, and the cliffs, and the rampart of hills grown with grass and cactus. A bold promontory terminated the coast view to the north, and behind it I could glimpse a more fertile and wooded country. The sky was partly overcast by the volcanic murk. It fled before the Trades, and the red sun alternately blazed ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... We passed the divide between the Colorado and Gila rivers, and arrived at Gila City that afternoon, eighteen miles. Our route was the old overland stage route on the south side of the Gila. Here we first saw that peculiar and picturesque cactus, so characteristic of the country, called by the Indians "petayah," but more generally known as the "suaro," and recognized by botanists as the ...
— Frontier service during the rebellion - or, A history of Company K, First Infantry, California Volunteers • George H. Pettis
... without water or tea. Hi Lang shows the girls how to extract food and moisture from a cactus plant. "This is heavenly!" gasps Emma, and wonders why they did not bring an artesian well. Shouts and screams ...
— Grace Harlowe's Overland Riders on the Great American Desert • Jessie Graham Flower
... to countenance all day long. The last four-and-twenty hours of our journey have been very tiring. The scenery has been so monotonous; endless long undulating plains like the waves of the sea, covered with grass quite dried up, a few flowers, and a bee-shaped cactus. The heat was very oppressive, a hot sirocco, wind blowing which; obliged us to keep our windows shut on account of the fine alkaline dust. E—— had her window open last night, and awoke this morning to find herself ...
— A Lady's Life on a Farm in Manitoba • Mrs. Cecil Hall
... before they did reach it they knew what it was—a thicket of cacti some two miles long and of unknown depth. The plants were eight or ten feet high, and the broad thick leaves, spiked, as only the leaves of the cactus are, looked to be welded together. But that was from a distance. When the boys reached the thicket they saw that the plants in reality were some feet apart, although there appeared to be no end ...
— The Valiant Runaways • Gertrude Atherton
... that affect sensation, thinking, self- awareness, and emotion. Hallucinogens include LSD (acid, microdot), mescaline and peyote (mexc, buttons, cactus), amphetamine variants (PMA, STP, DOB), phencyclidine (PCP, angel dust, hog), phencyclidine analogues (PCE, PCPy, TCP), and others ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... noted that we had not seen cactus nor sandy wastes, nor were the trees thorny, while many of the wild trees yielded good fruit. It is also to be noted that we did not see snow on the mountains, nor were there any mosquitos or ants in the land, which are very harmful, ...
— The First Discovery of Australia and New Guinea • George Collingridge
... away from—from back there in that cactus-bordered country of black, lava hills where I was born an' where I belong!" said Rathburn grimly, sliding into a chair on the opposite side of the table ...
— The Coyote - A Western Story • James Roberts
... word "Mexico" what picture does it evoke in a resident of New York? Likely as not, it is some composite of sand, cactus, oil wells, greasers, rum-drinking Indians, testy old cavaliers flourishing whiskers and sovereignty, or perhaps an idyllic peasantry la Jean Jacques, assailed by the prospect of smoky industrialism, and fighting for the Rights of Man. What does the word "Japan" evoke? Is it a vague horde of slant-eyed ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... their wonderful greenness denotes a cooler climate and more copious rains, also their slopes and valleys are densely wooded, and Kauai obviously has its characteristic features, one of which must certainly be a superabundance of that most unsightly cactus, the prickly pear, to which the motto nemo me ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... the sandy plain over which we rode. On this grew the short, stubby buffalo-grass, the dust-colored sage-brush, and cactus in rank profusion. Over to the right, perhaps a mile away, a long range of foothills ran down to the horizon, with here and there the great canons, through which entrance was effected to the upland country, each canon bearing ...
— Last of the Great Scouts - The Life Story of William F. Cody ["Buffalo Bill"] • Helen Cody Wetmore
... mud. He traveled carefully, freezing on occasion when huge shadows moved above him. He was in fifty feet of water and he liked that better because it was easier to go unnoticed. He avoided a patch of electric cactus, for the spines would have electrocuted him even through the suit, and he went far around an area of white bull-root, shaped like women's legs, because he knew the bull-root was always infested with swamp-razors that would cut through ...
— The Wealth of Echindul • Noel Miller Loomis
... write and read in, that you should waste this glittering season when Florida and Cuba seem to have left their glittering seats and come to visit us with all their shining hours, and almost we expect to see the jasmine and cactus burst from the ground instead of these last gentians and asters which have loitered to attend this latter glory of the year? All insects are out, all birds come forth, the very cattle that lie on the ground seem to have great thoughts, and Egypt and ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... house than a great fear fell upon him that he might be robbed: the quires were hidden in his vest suddenly and he walked on in confidence, also in a great seriousness, going his way melancholy as a camel, his head turned from the many temptations that the way offered to him—the flower in the cactus hedge was one. He passed it without picking it, and further on he allowed a strange crawling insect to go by without molestation, and feeling his mood to be exceptional he fell to thinking that his granny would laugh, ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... his slow way, "The blue chalice flower was about the shape of that magnolia, only twice as big, and just the colour of the gentians in the border, and it had a great white tassel hanging out like the cactus in the parlour window, and all the leaves were yellow underneath; and it ...
— A Great Emergency and Other Tales - A Great Emergency; A Very Ill-Tempered Family; Our Field; Madam Liberality • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... army. There were gray rocks, rendered green in certain parts by the waters of the sea, when it lashed the shore in storms and tempests. Beyond the shore, strewed over with these rocks like tombs, ascended, in form of an amphitheater, among mastick-trees and cactus, a sort of small town, full of smoke, confused noises and terrified movements. All on a sudden, from the bosom of this smoke arose a flame, which succeeded, by creeping along the houses, in covering the whole surface of ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... one type of it. The single varieties, which were despised of old, are now prime favorites—preferred by many to any other kind. The old very double "show" and "fancy" varieties are largely grown, but they share public favor with the "decoratives," the pompones, and the cactus, and, as I have said, the single forms. Which of these forms is most popular it would be hard to say. All of them have enthusiastic champions, and the best thing to do ...
— Amateur Gardencraft - A Book for the Home-Maker and Garden Lover • Eben E. Rexford
... circle of the horizon with eyes that were trained to note every aspect of the wilderness. On his right the plains melted away in gentle swell after swell, until they met the horizon. Their brown surface was broken only by the spiked and thorny cactus and ...
— The Texan Scouts - A Story of the Alamo and Goliad • Joseph A. Altsheler
... the hot winds come in the summer and burn the buffalo grass to a tinder and the monotony of the plains weighs on you as it does now, there's a common, low-growing cactus scattered over the prairie that blooms into the gayest red ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... and kept dry; all the old leaves should be taken off, as, in their decay, they cause dampness, and the roots wrapped in dry moss or cloth. The same means may be used for the pulpy plants, such as the cactus: any dry flexible substance, not subject to dampnes, as hairwool etc. may be used to pack them. These pulpy plants, if large, should be separated from the others, so that they may not be tainted ...
— Movement of the International Literary Exchanges, between France and North America from January 1845 to May, 1846 • Various
... in this way:—"Red Larry was a bull-puncher back of Lone County, Montana," or "There was a man riding the trail met a jack-rabbit sitting in a cactus," or "'Bout the time of the San Diego land boom, a woman from ...
— American Notes • Rudyard Kipling
... so—at least, I mean that it is all nonsense. Do look at that vegetable lobster of a thing, that cactus." ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... nobody to be seen if we hadn't been in a box. Of course no one comes there but stately old farmers and their smart daughters. I saw one with a Gainsborough hat, and a bunch of cock's feathers, with a scarlet cactus cocking it ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... number. The rebel leader, instead of awaiting the attack in the town, made for the open, to give a better chance to his preponderating numbers. Akbar carried the town with a rush, and then dashed in pursuit. But the country was intercepted by lanes, {111} bordered on both sides by cactus hedges, and the horsemen of Akbar were driven back into a position in which but three of them could fight abreast, the enemy being on either side of the cactus hedges. The Emperor was in front of his men, having by his side the gallant Rajput prince, Raja Bhagwan ...
— Rulers of India: Akbar • George Bruce Malleson
... pool of water, which trickled out from under the roots of a single large tree. For an acre or so around it there were bushes growing as high as the horses, but when light came, no other growth but that of short buffalo grass and prickly cactus could ...
— Wild Bill's Last Trail • Ned Buntline
... its almost no smell and placed it in his heart pocket. Language of flowers. They like it because no-one can hear. Or a poison bouquet to strike him down. Then walking slowly forward he read the letter again, murmuring here and there a word. Angry tulips with you darling manflower punish your cactus if you don't please poor forgetmenot how I long violets to dear roses when we soon anemone meet all naughty nightstalk wife Martha's perfume. Having read it all he took it from the newspaper and put it ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... produced. Those under notice are known as Carmine, Crimson Lake, Scarlet Lake, Purple Lake, Chinese Lake, Florentine Lake, Hamburgh Lake, Roman Lake, Venetian Lake, &c., and are obtained from the "coccus cacti," an insect found on a species of cactus, from the juice of which it extracts its nourishment. This coccus is a native of Mexico, where two kinds are recognised, under names which signify wild cochineal and fine cochineal. The latter may be considered a cultivated ...
— Field's Chromatography - or Treatise on Colours and Pigments as Used by Artists • George Field
... before dinner, in response to a summons from Tilly's voice she stepped out on to the little balcony leading from her room. The balcony overlooked an inner court, and was hung with riotous moon-vines. Down in the court a silvery fountain played among palms and banana trees. Here and there a cactus plant thrust spiny arms into the air. Somewhere else queen's wreath and devil's ivy made a tiny bower of loveliness. While everywhere were electric lights and roses, matching one against ...
— The Sunbridge Girls at Six Star Ranch • Eleanor H. (Eleanor Hodgman) Porter
... address known. When he comes to New York he occasionally drops into the writer's office for a cigar and a friendly chat about old times. And as he sits there and talks so modestly and with such quiet humor about his adventures with the Texas Rangers among the cactus-studded plains of the Lone Star State, it is hard, even for one who knows the truth, to realize that this man is one of the greatest of detectives, or rather one of the most capable, resourceful, adroit, and quick-witted knights of adventure ...
— The Lock and Key Library/Real Life #2 • Julian Hawthorne
... Mr. Smithson might give her fine houses and costly upholstery; but only the Tropic of Cancer could give her larger and brighter stars, a world of richer colouring, a land of perpetual summer, nights luminous with fire-flies, gardens in which the fern and the cactus were as forest trees, and where humming-birds flashed among the foliage like living flowers; nay, where the flowers themselves took the forms of the animal world and seemed instinct with life ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... You see these two boys? Well, they are natives of Gomera, the smallest of the Canary Islands. They were raised in a district where at times there is no living thing within sight, and the vast wilderness in the winding mountains is broken only by the crimson flower of the cactus growing in the ...
— Ralph on the Overland Express - The Trials and Triumphs of a Young Engineer • Allen Chapman
... was roofed with shingles, and up the posts and along the edge of which there climbed a profusion of the multiflora rose. The garden sloped away from the house, and contained an abundance of both flowers and fruits. There was the aloe, and more than one kind of cactus, growing freely in the open air, with many other plants which would need the hothouse or greenhouse in a colder climate. Fig-trees, vines, standard peach, and nectarine trees were in great abundance, while a fence of the sharp Kangaroo Island acacia ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... in the glaring sunshine of that May morning, after they had unsaddled at Moreno's, after the sergeant, wearied with the vigils of two successive nights, had gone to sleep in the coolest shade he could find, there came riding across the sun-baked, cactus-dotted plain at the west a young man who had the features of the American and the grave, courteous bearing of ...
— Foes in Ambush • Charles King
... in from Gad's Hill; and Henry W. Longfellow, without knocking, entered the sitting-room, his hair white as if he had walked through the snow with his hat off; and William H. Prescott, with his eyesight restored, happened in from Mexico, a cactus in his buttonhole; and Audubon set a cage of birds on the table—Baltimore oriole, chaffinch, starling and bobolink doing their prettiest; and Christopher North thumped his gun down on the hall floor, and hung his 'sporting jacket' on the hat-rack, and ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... was something in the breath of Nature that was delightful. The scent of violets was worth all the incense in the world; all the splendid marbles and priestly vestments seemed hard and cold when compared with the glorious colors of the cactus and the wild forms of the golden and gigantic aloes. The Favonian breeze played on the brow of this beautiful hill, and the exquisite palm-trees, while they bowed their rustling heads, answered in responsive chorus to the ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... pathetically trodden-down-to-bits porphyry discs in the doorway. And the little cippus of a Roman girl who lived sixteen years and twenty-eight days. Against the apse, outside, the great python of a cactus. ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee
... beyond the line of haphazard shacks and adobe buildings that bordered the one street, into the jungle of mesquite and cactus growing in the dry waste of sand that almost surrounded the settlement—and he ...
— The Mission of Janice Day • Helen Beecher Long
... [FN68] A kind of cactus, of which they make needles, grows abundantly on the mountains round Ollantay-tampu. It is called ahuarancu. They set fire to the cacti as a war signal. Zegarra calls it a thistle. The word in the Justiniani ...
— Apu Ollantay - A Drama of the Time of the Incas • Sir Clements R. Markham
... composed largely of hot-headed youths trained to the use of arms, each of whom has a code of honor as sensitive as a mimosa plant and as prickly as a cactus, the lot of their commanders is not happy. It may have been Ojeda's treasured talisman which saved him from several sudden deaths during the following weeks, but Juan de la Cosa privately believed it was partly the memory of the pig. The young man had what might in another time and civilization ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey
... 18th, at 8 A.M., we drive over the bridge which crosses Cherry Creek, and then cross six miles of uninhabited prairie, seamed with gulches, and brown with withered herbage and cactus—no verdure except along the canals, where several species of Artemisia and a prickly poppy with a large white flower grow profusely. We then begin to mount the bare foot-hills, among which are curious ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... time that whatever they decided to do out there in the wilderness meant thousands of dollars to the stockholders somewhere up in God's country, who would some day hold them to account for them. They dragged their chains through miles and miles of jungle, and over flat alkali beds and cactus, and they reared bridges across roaring canons. We know nothing about them and we care less. When their work is done we ride over the road in an observation-car and look down thousands and thousands ...
— Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... that cheerful and varied type which has inspired so many gifted landscape painters. No trees and little rivers, no cottages and flowering paths delight one's eye. It is impossible to say: "Take the turn to the left after passing the cactus bush, and keep straight on till you come to the asparagus bed; and then you'll see the front trench on ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... Mediterranean. The town itself stands back some couple of miles from the sea, from which it is separated by sand dunes. It is surrounded by gardens and plantations; most of these are bordered by thick cactus hedges, which played a prominent part in the days of trench warfare. The surrounding country is by no means level, but consists of rolling arable land with low ridges and some hills. The most prominent feature is the hill, Ali Muntar, a commanding height south-east ...
— With the British Army in The Holy Land • Henry Osmond Lock
... excellent order, turning at intervals and discharging their muskets, while every now and then their guns were faced about and unlimbered, and round-shot and grape sent among our ranks. As we advanced, the vegetation became thicker, and we were confronted at times by high hedges of prickly-pear and cactus, growing so close together that it was impossible to make our way through. This occasioned several detours, the sepoys lining the hedges and firing at us through loopholes and openings, cursing the gore log[1] and ...
— A Narrative Of The Siege Of Delhi - With An Account Of The Mutiny At Ferozepore In 1857 • Charles John Griffiths
... been, or are, in cultivation in the gardens of the few specialists who take an interest in Cactuses; but these are practically unknown in English horticulture. It is not, however, very many years ago that there was something like a Cactus mania, when rich amateurs vied with each other in procuring and growing large collections of the rarest ...
— Cactus Culture For Amateurs • W. Watson
... said the patriotic skipper, "if they ain't gone and histed a Mexican cactus flag, then I'm blowed." He seriously thought of hauling down his beloved national colors again, resenting the insult of hoisting a foreign flag on American soil. He pocketed the affront, however, remarking ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... glamour I could not resist. Over the wall of the garden the orange-trees lifted their mounds of impenetrable foliage; and the blossoms of the pomegranates, sprinkled against such a background, were like coals of fire. The fig-bearing cactus grew about the house in clumps twenty feet high, covered with pale-yellow flowers. The building was large and roomy, with a court-yard, around which ran a shaded gallery. The farmer who was issuing therefrom as I approached wore the shawl and Turkish trousers of the old generation, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... Colorado and Gila rivers, and arrived at Gila City that afternoon, eighteen miles. Our route was the old overland stage route on the south side of the Gila. Here we first saw that peculiar and picturesque cactus, so characteristic of the country, called by the Indians "petayah," but more generally known as the "suaro," and recognized by botanists as the ...
— Frontier service during the rebellion - or, A history of Company K, First Infantry, California Volunteers • George H. Pettis
... buckled or pinned together instead of growing out of each other, (note the singular imposition in many of them, the prickly pear for instance, of the fruit upon the body of the plant, so that it looks like a swelling or disease,) and often farther opposed by harsh truncation of line as in the cactus truncatophylla. All these circumstances so concur to deprive the plant of vital evidences, that we receive from it more sense of pain than of beauty; and yet even here, the sharpness of the angles, the symmetrical order and strength of the spines, the fresh and even color of the body, are ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... ten feet high, blossomed in a corner, unheeded among loftier beauties. And at the very mouth of the fissure a huge banana leaned across, and flung out its vast leaves, that seemed translucent gold against the sun; under it shone a monstrous cactus in all her pink and crimson glory, and through the maze of color streamed the deep blue of the peaceful ocean, laughing, ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... that the speaker might possibly have the power to enforce his sentence diverted my attention from the slate, and I looked round. In front of the Jack-in-a-box stood a tiny red flower-pot and saucer, in which was a miniature cactus. My thoughts flew back to a bazaar in London where, years ago, a stand of these fairy plants had excited my warmest longings, and where a benevolent old gentleman whom I had not seen before, and never saw again, bought this one and gave it to me. Vague memories ...
— The Brownies and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... Once, when Dave sighted moving persons in the distance, Bowers drove the craft up to three thousand feet above the earth. But soon, under the glass, these suspects turned out to be a party of wretched refugees, hurrying, ragged, barefooted, starving, gaunt and cactus-torn, to safety within the American ...
— Dave Darrin at Vera Cruz • H. Irving Hancock
... tea. And Judy had forgone three meals! He shut his lips tightly, and a light of almost heroic resolve came into his eyes. Round at the side of the house was the window to the pantry; he had often gazed longingly up at it, but had never ventured to attempt the ascent, for there was a horrible cactus creeper up the wall. ...
— Seven Little Australians • Ethel Sybil Turner
... creek in a hurry. The cowboys threw lassoes over the hind feet of the elephants, and tried to hold them, and the elephants bellowed, and dragged the cowboys and their ponies right amongst the other animals, and in about a minute, as the boss canvasman said when he came to, and they were picking the cactus thorns out of him: "Hell was just ...
— Peck's Bad Boy at the Circus • George W. Peck
... your hair curl. You're right, I ain't your brother. I'm Nick Struve— Wolf Struve if you like that better. I lied you into believing me your brother, who ain't ever been anything but a skim-milk quitter. He's dead back there in the cactus somewhere, and I ...
— A Texas Ranger • William MacLeod Raine
... creamy stone and rose-red brick perched on a ledge of rock midway between earth and heaven, the cliff falling almost sheer to the valley two hundred feet and more, the mountain rising behind straight towards the sky; all the rocks covered with cactus and dwarf fig-trees, the convent draped in smothering roses, and in front a terrace with a fountain in the midst; and then—nothing—between you and the sapphire sea, six miles away. Below stretches the Eden valley, the Concha ...
— Black Spirits and White - A Book of Ghost Stories • Ralph Adams Cram
... unimportant, as they still are used to some extent in the firing of black-ware or cooking pots. The latter, while still hot from a preliminary burning, if coated externally with the mucilaginous juice of green cactus, internally with pinon gum or pitch, and fired a second or even a third time with resinous wood-fuel, are rendered absolutely fire-proof, semi-glazed with a black gloss inside, and wonderfully durable. Tradition represents that by far the ...
— A Study of Pueblo Pottery as Illustrative of Zuni Culture Growth. • Frank Hamilton Cushing
... now on what had been the debatable ground, as much the enemy's as ours, and had not gone far before we were suddenly aware of a group of Spanish horsemen over the hedge of cactus to the left of the road, brightly dressed young fellows wearing the blue linen and red facings of the guarda civile, who at the sight of us turned and dashed back through the fields as though to give news of our approach. Then there was a freshly macheted opening in the ...
— The Surrender of Santiago - An Account of the Historic Surrender of Santiago to General - Shafter, July 17, 1898 • Frank Norris
... is life! Here is youth! Here the poet's world-wish,— Cool waters at play with the gold-gleaming fish; While cactus a mellower glory receives From light colored softly by blossom and leaves; And nestling alder is whispering low, In lap of ...
— Poems • Mary Baker Eddy
... operates on conversation of the higher kind like frost on expanding buds. It had its effect, and Grace chafed secretly, but could not interfere. It was done very cleverly. Henry was bitterly annoyed; but his mother, who saw his rising ire in his eye, carried him off to see a flowering cactus in a hot-house that was accessible from the drawing-room. When she had got him there, she soothed him and lectured him. "You are not a match for that man in these petty acts of annoyance, to which a true gentleman and a noble rival ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... land of my birth," sang the Canary bird; "I will sing of thy dark-green bowers, of the calm bays where the pendent boughs kiss the surface of the water; I will sing of the rejoicing of all my brothers and sisters where the cactus ...
— Andersen's Fairy Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... the sun, and wind, and sky; the vast, vast spaces of waving grass, broken by the beds of dried-up streams, strewn here and there with mimosas and thorns, here dim with the growth of vangueria bushes, here sharp and gray-green with cactus; this giant land, infinite, sunlit, and silent, spoke to him in a ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... took place in the appearance of the country. The timber became still more scarce, and the soil drier and more sandy. Species of cactus (opuntia) appeared along the route, with several other plants new to the eyes of most of us, and which to those of Besancon were objects of extreme interest. But that which most gratified us was the appearance of a new ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... pine and pinon, rising, here and there, into loftier growth. It was as if man, with his imperious interventions, had set those thin steel parallels as an irrefragable boundary to the mutual encroachments of forest and desert, tree and cactus. A single, straggling trail squirmed its way into the woodland. One might have surmised that it was winding hopefully if blindly toward the noble mountain peak shimmering in white splendor, mystic and wonderful, sixty miles away, but seeming in that lucent air to ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... a Mr. Peek, where the luminous affection reminds one of the chromatic hallucinations produced by the intoxicant cactus buds called mescal ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... and broke into a swift gallop, which we kept up till morning, reaching our destination a little while before sunrise. There was here a fine plantation of trees not far from the house, surrounded by a deep ditch and a cactus hedge, and after we had taken mate and then breakfast at the house, where the people received us very kindly, we proceeded to conceal our horses and ourselves in the plantation. We found a comfortable little grassy hollow, partly shaded with the surrounding trees, ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson
... when I started for Castel del Monte. It was spring, and I was going to see my love. The land about on either side, as I went, was faintly flushed with peach-blossom shining among the hoary stones. By the cliff edge the spiny cactus threw out strange withered arms. A whitethorn without spike or spine gracefully wept ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... so adroitly followed the sinuosities of a pretty sharply-inclined plane, and swept very close to the villages of Thembo and Tura-Wels. The latter forms part of the Unyamwezy, a magnificent country, where the trees attain enormous dimensions; among them the cactus, which grows to ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... from the town, is a very beautiful cemetery, and is to Hong Kong what Mount Auburn is to Boston,—not quite so extensive, but superior in its collection of flowers and trees, which must have been gathered and naturalized here at a great cost. The varieties of the cactus family are remarkable in numbers and mode of training. The same may be said of the camphor-tree, the aloes, tall and graceful cypresses, mingling with which are Cape jasmines, hydrangeas, magnolias, and the scarlet geranium, tall and hedge-like, barked by white, variegated, and scarlet ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... there seemed about them nothing but a vast expanse of flat levels,—the table-lands of Nebraska. There was little that was beautiful in the landscape, which was principally made up of wide reaches of sand, dotted with cactus and grease-wood and with the droll cone-shaped burrows of the prairie-dogs, who could be seen gravely sitting on the roofs of their houses, or turning sudden somersaults in at the holes on top as the train whizzed by. They passed and repassed ...
— Clover • Susan Coolidge
... which we are accustomed to see only as a cactus-like green-house plant, attains the size and strength of a small timber-tree; its quadrangular stem becomes circular and woody, and its square fleshy shoots take the form of branches, or rise with a rounded top as ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... always covered with a strong home-made rag carpet, the walls generally hung with colored prints and lithographs, illustrating religion or royalty, and as many greenhouse plants as the owner can afford to decorate the windows. I have seen, even beyond Umea, some fine specimens of cactus, pelargonium, calla, and other exotics. It is singular that, with the universal passion of the Swedes for flowers and for music, they have produced no distinguished painters ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... a range of round-topped hills, 15 or 16 hundred feet high, covered with a grey-brownish coating, relieved only here and there by patches of dead green, and furrowed by clefts, within which the bright red of tile-roofed houses is discernible. Half-withered cactus trees, the only plants which take root in the ungenial soil, impart no life to the dreary landscape. The hills continue rising in undulating outlines, and extend into the interior of the country, where they unite with the ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... snorting sounds in the bright and gorgeous moonlight. I forgot to say that Wm. MacLaggan was the largest and ugliest goat ever known to the memory of man, and had been taught every vice and wickedness any goat could be taught, and it is as natural for a goat to imbibe sin as it is for him to eat a cactus, or ...
— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke
... great plain rolling away to the Sierras in the background. The railroad track traversed it in a thin line. There were no trees—only here and there a clump of cactus or chaparral, a tuft of dog-grass or a few patches of dogwood. At intervals in the distance one could see a hacienda standing in majestic solitude in a cup of the hills. In the blue sky floated little banderillos of white cloud, while a graceful hidalgo appeared ...
— Further Foolishness • Stephen Leacock
... two whole days were necessary to clean it. It had contained practically no furniture; he had made it look like a place in which to live. He had improved and beautified its surroundings. He had planted a little corn and set out some young banana trees; he had gathered many species of cactus from the neighboring hills and had built up a fine bed of the strange plants in his patio. Passionately fond of pets, he had two magnificent greyhounds and a pug—all brought from Guatemala—a black collie, doves, hens and ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr
... Meanwhile, Danglars, who had cared little for curiosities, was mechanically tearing off the blossoms of a splendid orange-tree, one after another. When he had finished with the orange-tree, he began at the cactus; but this, not being so easily plucked as the orange-tree, pricked him dreadfully. He shuddered, and rubbed his eyes as though awaking ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... in the heart of a lonely land, you cannot go so far that life and death are not before you. Painted lizards slip in and out of rock crevices, and pant on the white hot sands. Birds, hummingbirds even, nest in the cactus scrub; woodpeckers befriend the demoniac yuccas; out of the stark, treeless waste rings the music of the night-singing mockingbird. If it be summer and the sun well down, there will be a burrowing owl to call. Strange, furry, tricksy ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... was scarcely perceptible at the wrist; the heart was beating with excessive rapidity. The patient was suffering great pain. His mind was clear, but he was oppressed with a dreadful anxiety. Up to the time I saw him he had received absolutely no treatment, excepting the application of a cactus poultice to the leg, since there was no whisky at the ranch where he was wounded. I at once made free incisions, five or six in number, from one to two inches in depth, and about three inches in length. These cuts gave him very little pain, nor was there much bleeding, though there was an enormous ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 841, February 13, 1892 • Various
... it not in a livery of verdure. The leaves of the agave are mottled with scarlet, and the dull green of the cactus is still further obscured by its thickly-set spines. The blades of the yuccas are dimmed by dust, and resemble clusters of half-rusty bayonets; and the low scrubby copses of acacia scarce offer a shade to the dusky agama and the ground rattlesnake. ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid
... hard day's work to a strong man. At the end of it he lay gasping and sick, aching in every limb, almost blind with glare and over-exertion, weary to death—and entirely happy. Thank God he would be able to stand up in a moment and rest behind a big cactus. Then he would have a spell of foot-work for a change, and, though crouching double, would not be doing any crawling until he had crossed the plateau ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... carefully preserve amid the pressure of our modern social enthusiasms certain fundamental emphases which are characteristic of its genius. It must stress the possibility and the necessity of the inward transformation of the lives of men. We know now that a thorny cactus does not have to stay a thorny cactus; Burbank can change it. We know that a crab-apple tree does not have to stay a crab-apple tree; it can be grafted and become an astrakhan. We know that a malarial ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... eyes glittering with excitement. "The tail of a scorpion! I thought so! And Sowerby would have it that it represented the stem of a Cactus or Prickly Pear!" ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer
... hollow, every earth hummock and sagebush had to be used as cover. The hunter wriggled through the grass flat on his face, pushing himself along for perhaps a quarter of a mile by his toes and fingers, heedless of the spiny cactus. When near enough to the huge, unconscious quarry the hunter began firing, still keeping himself carefully concealed. If the smoke was blown away by the wind, and if the buffaloes caught no glimpse of ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt
... mouth would have been pretty but for a trace of moustache. Upon the whole, aided by the resources of the toilet, her appearance at distance was such, that some might have thought her, if anything, rather beautiful, though of a style of beauty rather peculiar and cactus-like. ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... been likened to a perpetual autumn. The immediate environs are very fertile and produce a great variety of fruits, including many of the temperate zone, but the surrounding country is arid and sterile, producing scanty crops of barley, Indian corn and pease. The cochineal insect is found on the cactus which grows in abundance in the vicinity, and the town is known throughout Ecuador for its manufacture of boots and shoes, and for a cordage made from cabuya, the fibre of the agave plant. Ambato was destroyed by an eruption of Cotopaxi in 1698, and has been badly damaged ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... proved asylum of the spineless. Nature has flung them broadcast. She starts low down among the plants, thorn and thistle, gorse and cactus. Then she turns to the sea-urchins and caterpillars and beetles, then she fashions the globe-fish and thorny devil-lizard, then she comes to the birds—spikes are their only weapons—lastly, in me and mine, she reaches the ...
— "Wee Tim'rous Beasties" - Studies of Animal life and Character • Douglas English
... I've served out this enlistment, And my time in the Reserves, Why, I am going to treat yours truly To the treat that he deserves. For I am tired chasing Villa, In this God-forsaken land, When there's nothing much but cactus And the ...
— Rhymes of the Rookies • W. E. Christian
... the cactus and the thistles of Mexico's fair lands, Where the cattle roam in thousands, a-many a herd and brand, There is a grave with neither headstone, neither date nor name,— There lies my partner sleeping in the land ...
— Cowboy Songs - and Other Frontier Ballads • Various
... that this was Richard Saltire's business on the farm—to rid the land of that bane and pest of the Karoo, the prickly-pear cactus. The new governmental experiment was the only one, so far, that had shown any good results in getting rid of the pest. It consisted in inoculating each bush with certain poisons, which, when they entered the sap of the plant, shrivelled and withered it to the ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... valley with its carpet of green, enlivened with splashes of yellow from the wild mustard blossoms. Across the swift flowing ford of the Salinis river, through deep ravines and mountain gorges, and over miles and miles of sun-baked sand and dreary waste of stunted cactus and sagebrush, the ...
— Where Strongest Tide Winds Blew • Robert McReynolds
... attaining gigantic size; lycopodiums, a hundred feet high; the huge sigillaria, found in our coal mines; tree ferns, as tall as our fir-trees in northern latitudes; lepidodendra, with cylindrical forked stems, terminated by long leaves, and bristling with rough hairs like those of the cactus. ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... you; I am not in the least fatigued, and have no desire to be pitched into a bush of prickly cactus, or rolled down ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... command of Brigadier-General Joseph H. Pendleton. The expeditionary force from Monte Cristi, under Colonel Dunlop, advanced along the highway, which was little more than a muddy trail through a jungle of cactus and thorny brush, and several Americans were shot from ambush. Repeatedly small detachments of rebels made a stand upon some favorable piece of ground, until routed by the marines. The decisive encounter took place on July 1, 1916, at Guayacanes, ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich
... about this, time, in allusion to the marriage of her eldest, sister, and the funeral of John Wadge, an old and valued friend of the family. It was hoped that the cactus which had belonged to J.W. would have blossomed in time for the wedding; but the first flower only opened a fortnight afterwards, on the morning of his own funeral: and when, in a few years, the marriage of the beloved writer of the lines was so speedily ...
— A Brief Memoir with Portions of the Diary, Letters, and Other Remains, - of Eliza Southall, Late of Birmingham, England • Eliza Southall
... a veritable African sirocco which raised the dust in a spiral column as the carriage passed. They reached the hottest, the most sheltered portions of the Corniche,—a genuinely tropical temperature, where dates, cactus, the aloe, with its tall, candelabra-like branches, grow in the fields. When he saw those slender trunks, that fantastic vegetation shooting up in the white, hot air, when he felt the blinding dust crunching under the wheels like ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... around her breathed, And freshness of young nature's play, The sensitive plant shrank not away, And cactus' swords were sheathed. ...
— Fringilla: Some Tales In Verse • Richard Doddridge Blackmore
... well-watered garden soil - and how many charming varieties of barberries are cultivated - the thorny shrub loses much of its armor, putting forth many more leaves, in rosettes, along more numerous twigs, instead. Even the prickly-pear cactus might become mild as a lamb were it to forswear sandy deserts and live in marshes instead. Country people sometimes rob the birds of the acid berries to make preserves. The wood furnishes a ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... one side, with dark and shaded gray on the other. I took a long look at Pike's peak, and was a little disappointed. (I suppose I had expected something stunning.) Our view over plains to the left stretches amply, with corrals here and there, the frequent cactus and wild sage, and herds of cattle feeding. Thus about 120 miles to Pueblo. At that town we board the comfortable and well-equipt Atchison, Topeka and Santa ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... Jones, as he spoke, seized a torch, extinguished it, and handed it to Dick. Equipped as he had directed, they set out, half crawling, half swimming, to avoid the volumes of smoke hovering in the thick, cactus-like leaves of the wild laurel. Presently they emerged, after toil and misery, that excitement alone enabled the boy to support, into what seemed a cleared space. But as soon as their eyes could distinguish clearly, they found themselves on the edge of a wide pond. The fire was now behind ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... said I loudly and rudely. Then I took my hat and went away. Miss Hicks asked me very eagerly to drop in again. Me? I'd as soon have dropped on a Mexican cactus. It couldn't ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... excused for her scepticism, for the youth had also large ignorance in some of the commoner things of life, and, moreover, allowed himself to be taken in easily. Laure seems to have traded a good deal on his credulity for the sake of fun. One day she gave him a so-called cactus seedling, supposed to have come from the land of Judaea. Honore preserved it preciously in a pot for a fortnight, only to discover at length that this plant was ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... hedges of great height and density, and as even as a brick wall at the top and sides. There are also alleys forming long vistas between the trunks and beneath the boughs of oaks, ilexes, and olives; and there are shrubberies and tangled wildernesses of palm, cactus, rhododendron, and I know not what; and a profusion of roses that bloom and wither with nobody to pluck and few to look at them. They climb about the sculpture of fountains, rear themselves against pillars and porticos, run brimming ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... gardener gave almost vicious orders by telephone and the worker did his best, but it is not a handy way to direct a garden. When the last rosebush is in, including some that Will is gloomily certain will never grow, I think I shall go away for a rest to some place where there is only cactus and sage and sand. ...
— The Smiling Hill-Top - And Other California Sketches • Julia M. Sloane
... boat up on a small sandy beach, and then started off into the country, and by noon we had caught three large tortoises which we found feeding on cactus plants. Then, as we were resting and eating, we suddenly heard the report of a heavy gun, and then another and another. We clambered up the side of a rugged hill, from the summit of which we could see the harbour, a mile distant, and there was the Britannia ...
— "Old Mary" - 1901 • Louis Becke
... a study of the immediate landscape. It had not changed as we progressed: ocean, sand, low dunes crowned with impenetrable tangles of wild bay, sparkleberry, and live-oak, with here and there a weather-twisted palmetto sprawling, and here and there the battered blades of cactus and Spanish-bayonet thrust menacingly forward; and over all the vultures, sailing, sailing—some mere circling motes lost in the blue above, some sheering the earth so close that their swiftly sweeping shadows slanted ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... Spanish called it, clothes the foot-hills and mountain sides with a close growth through which deer and bears alone can travel and make trails or runways. Great stretches of buckthorn in the north, and of sage-brush in the south, cover the wild lands, while in the sandy desert tall, prickly cactus, yucca, and mesquite grow with the sage-brush ...
— Stories of California • Ella M. Sexton
... manuscripts is found this beautiful symbol:—'There is a species of Cactus, from whose outer bark, if torn by an ignorant person, there exudes a poisonous liquid; but the natives, who know the plant, strike to the core, and there find a sweet, refreshing juice, that renews their strength.' Surely the preceding extracts prove ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... the Isabelle fish, it is violet and green and gold, like a queen. Under my feet, see, Colorado! sand white like the snow of your winter, fine, shining with many bright sparks. And this is a garden; for all on every hand flowers are growing. You have seen a cactus, that some lady keeps very careful in her window, tending that it die not? Yes! Here is the white ground covered with these flowers completely, only of more size hugely, crimson, pale, the heart of a rose, the heart ...
— Nautilus • Laura E. Richards
... a flat cactus country, and for some time had been approaching the grove of willows into which she now turned. Some wooden barns, a corral, an adobe house, and outhouses marked the place as one of the more ...
— A Daughter of the Dons - A Story of New Mexico Today • William MacLeod Raine
... suggestion without enthusiasm and with very little show of pleasure. They found a table on the terrace in a retired corner, surrounded with flowering cactus plants and drooping mimosa, and overhung by a giant oleander tree. He talked to her easily but in gossiping fashion only, and always with the greatest respect. It was not until the arrival of their coffee that he ventured to become ...
— Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... he ejaculated in shrill surprise and reined in his horse to gaze. The young hobo was running and, not far ahead, the Ground Hog was fleeing before him. They ran through bushy gulches and over cactus-crowned ridges where the sahuaros rose up like giant sentinels; until at last, as he came to the sandy creek-bed, the black hobo stood ...
— Silver and Gold - A Story of Luck and Love in a Western Mining Camp • Dane Coolidge
... came to a place where Wildfire had doubled on his trail and had turned up a side canyon. The climb out was hard on Slone, if not on Nagger. Once up, Slone found himself upon a wide, barren plateau of glaring red rock and clumps of greasewood and cactus. The plateau was miles wide, shut in by great walls and mesas of colored rock. The afternoon sun beat down fiercely. A blast of wind, as if from a furnace, swept across the plateau, and it was laden with ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... a smile of greeting—a beautiful woman, pale with her suffering, pale as the flower of a night-blooming cactus, but warm with the vitality given to women who love. The pink light of dusk ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... Berg Brothers, Omaha. Strictly business. Known among the trade as the human cactus. Canceled a ten-thousand-dollar order once because the grateful salesman called ...
— Emma McChesney & Co. • Edna Ferber
... and were tired besides and in no condition for running. Roosevelt and his mentor picketed them in a hollow, half a mile from the game, and started off on their hands and knees. Roosevelt blundered into a bed of cactus and filled his hands with the spines; but he came within a hundred and fifty feet or less of the buffalo. He drew up and fired. The bullet made the dust fly from the hide as it hit the body with a loud crack, but ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... around our footsteps. They were much needed, for we were now compelled to share the astonishment of our guide that in the darkness we had succeeded in making our way over the rugged hills covered with cactus plants and bushy thickets between the railway and the coast, and along a railway viaduct which we had passed on our way to the station without having any idea of it. It was the last adventure of the voyage of the Vega, and my first landing on ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... because a girl had refused him! He had been trying all along not to think of Dorothy Ray, but by the time he had reached the summit of the hill,—that little round of red sand, where only a single yellow cactus had had the courage to precede him,—he knew that his hour of reckoning had come. He had gambled, yes; but it was for her sake he had gambled; he had lost, yes, but it was she he ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... scarp on the south of the garden a plantation of aloes, yuccas and cactus has been made. These are in great variety, and some of them in flower. It was especially pleasant to see the independence which the gardener has shown in placing a fine clump of rhubarb in one place where ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... suddenly missing! Of the desperate hunt, the half-mad mother's frantic searching, her agonies when the long-delayed start must be made, her screams when she was driven away with her tinier child in her arms, knowing that behind one of those thousands of mesquite or cactus bushes, the little yellow head must be pillowed on the sand, the little ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... better she liked it. There was a cheery bit of color in its blazing letters, and she was partial to bits of color. That's why she kept plants all winter in the little sitting-room at home, and nursed one cactus that gave out a scarlet bloom once in so ...
— Abijah's Bubble - 1909 • F. Hopkinson Smith
... competition with terrestrial forms. The red creeper was quite a transitory growth, and few people have seen it growing. For a time, however, the red weed grew with astonishing vigour and luxuriance. It spread up the sides of the pit by the third or fourth day of our imprisonment, and its cactus-like branches formed a carmine fringe to the edges of our triangular window. And afterwards I found it broadcast throughout the country, and especially wherever there was ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... fertile gardens and fields. Then suddenly the cultivation ended abruptly on the edge of a sandy desert that, seamed with nullahs, or deep, steep-sided ravines, and dotted with tall clumps of thorny cactus, stretched away to the horizon. The road became a barely discernible track; but the two sowars cantered on, confidently heading for the spot where the ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly
... padre, Don Lucas de Alacuesta. It was a large house, situated near the outskirts of the town, with an extensive garden, enclosed by a high wall, rendered still higher by a stockade of the organ cactus that grew ...
— The Tiger Hunter • Mayne Reid
... of sand, isn't it?" she whispered. "Sand and cactus,—no roses blooming here upon the ...
— Sunny Slopes • Ethel Hueston
... the plain from east to west. A thicket of cactus covered part of its summit. Toward ...
— Thrilling Adventures by Land and Sea • James O. Brayman
... day. Nor was it ever built. For before the Bradleys could mark out the foul-lines for the base-ball field on the plaza, or teach their standing army the goose step, or lay bamboo pipes for the water-mains, or clear away the cactus for the extension of the King's palace, the Hillmen paid ...
— Cinderella - And Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... additional motive for their presence. Under cultivation, in well-watered garden soil—and how many charming varieties of barberries are cultivated—the thorny shrub loses much of its armor, putting forth many more leaves, in rosettes, along more numerous twigs, instead. Even the prickly pear cactus might become mild as a lamb were it to forswear sandy deserts and live in marshes instead. Country people sometimes rob the birds of the acid berries to make preserves. The ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... pine is too soft for most purposes. In the gardens we found a large blue hydrangea very common: the fuschia is the usual hedge. Mixed with that splendid shrub, aloes, prickly pear, euphorbia, and cactus, serve for the coarser fences; and these strange vegetables, together with innumerable lizards and insects, tell us we are ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... plant of the cactus family, as native to America as is Ashley's peculiar sense of beauty which you won't acknowledge. It is as ugly to look at, the plant is, all spines and thick, graceless, fleshy pads; as ugly as Ashley life looks to you. And this crabbed, ungainly plant-creature is faithfully, religiously ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... not. You ought to see it in the early spring, when everything is vivid green, and the cactus is in bloom—the red-flowered kind that looks so pretty against the sides of the gray buttes. Why, you can gallop for miles with your horse's hoofs sinking into beds of ...
— The Honorable Percival • Alice Hegan Rice
... settlement called Eden Valley. Imagination must have had a heap to do with its name, but one thing is certain: the serpent will find the crawling rather bad if he attempts to enter this Eden, for the sand is hot; the alkali and the cactus are there, so it must be a serpentless Eden. The settlers have made a long canal and bring their water many miles. They say the soil is splendid, and they don't have much stone; but it is such a flat place! I wonder how they get the water to ...
— Letters on an Elk Hunt • Elinore Pruitt Stewart
... had confessed in her eyes her love for him. What was he going to do about it? That was the question he had to face and to settle; and he went out alone and tramped over the brown hills and across arroyos and through clumps of sage brush and juniper and cactus, and argued it ...
— Emerson's Wife and Other Western Stories • Florence Finch Kelly
... hidden song-bud open bright As the resplendent cactus of the night That floods the gloom ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... which one looks down over precipices of red rock with the prickly pear clinging to their clefts and ledges, or across a rift of sea to the huge bare front of the Testa del Cane with gigantic euphorbias, cactus, and orange-gardens fringing its base. A bribe administered to Talleyrand is said to have saved the political existence of Monaco at the Congress of Vienna: but it is far more wonderful that, after all the annexations of late years, it should still remain an independent, ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... been produced from mutation and never through normal variability. Possibly there is some quibble on the definition of mutation or of variation. The Americans are prone to believe any new things, witness their swallowing the thornless cactus produced by that man in California—I forget his name—which Kew exposed by asking for specimens to exhibit in the Cactus House....—I am, my dear ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... a mass Of dry red cactus ruled the land: The sun rose right above and fell, As falling molten from the skies, And no winged thing was seen ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes
... anyone who should address him; while the rubbish he would then talk to ladies had a certain grace about it—such as absolutely astonished Hester once she happened to overhear some of it, and set her wondering how the phenomenon was to be accounted for of the home-cactus blossoming into such a sweet company-flower—wondering also which was the real Cornelius, he of the seamy side turned always to his own people, or he of the silken flowers and arabesques presented to strangers. Analysis of anything he said would have ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... familiarly the Traveller's Friend, Urania being, I believe, its botanic name. We found it to differ from most other trees in having all its branches in one plane, like the sticks of a fan or the feathers of a peacock's tail." I may further mention, that the specimen which showed me the abrupt cactus-like terminations of Ulodendron repeated the evidence of Messrs. Lindley and Hutton's specimen regarding the arrangement of the cone scars on opposite sides, and showed also that these scars ascended to within little more than an inch of the ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... duly made and provided!" The field member of the firm slapped his thigh and laughed loudly. "Then to forget the whole fracas and shake hands on it! That's handsome! Mr. Gray, I'm here to say there's a lot of boys going to lay off you like you was a cactus." ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... instead of the bed of the Amazons, the distant line of the Santarem hills on the southern bank of the river, and lower than the northern chain, representing the Jura range. As if to complete the comparison, I found Alpine lichens growing among cactus and palms, and a crust of Arctic cryptogamous growth covered rocks, between which sprang tropical flowers. On the northern flank of this Serra I found the only genuine erratic boulders I have seen in the whole ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... at the last, with the standard in his hand. The castle itself not high, but strong, brown and battered. Beyond it, the gallows, and the place of death. Below it, a desolation of tumbling rock and ruin, where wild flowers struggled for a holding in spring, and the sharp cactus sent out ever-green points between the stones. Far down, a confusion of low, brown houses, with many dark towers standing straight up from them like charred trees above underbrush in a fire-blasted forest. Beyond all, the still loneliness of far mountains. That was the scene, and those ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... one day last autumn, Horace and Sylvia found a plantation of our one New England cactus, the prickly pear (Opuntia opuntia). We have it here and there in our rocky pasture; but in greater heat and with better underfeeding it seemed a bit of a tropical plain dropped on the eastern coast. Do you know the thing? The leaves are shaped like the fans of a lobster's tail and sometimes ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... montebaxos, or coppice shrubs (as you might call them), and we know tomillares, or undergrowth; but in Corsica nature heaps these together with both hands, and the Corsican, in despair of separating them, calls them all macchia. Cistus, myrtle and cactus; cytisus, lentisk, arbutus; daphne, heath, broom, juniper and ilex—these few I recognised, but there was no end to their varieties and none to their tangle of colours. The slopes flamed with heather bells red as blood, or were snowed white ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... horizon to horizon was one vast span of blue, whitening as it dipped earthward. Miles upon miles to the east and southeast the desert unrolled itself, white, naked, inhospitable, palpitating and shimmering under the sun, unbroken by so much as a rock or cactus stump. In the distance it assumed all manner of faint colors, pink, purple, and pale orange. To the west rose the Panamint Range, sparsely sprinkled with gray sagebrush; here the earths and sands were yellow, ochre, and rich, ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... specimens for the Department's gardens in California, where they are bearing prolifically. The arid sands of the southwest, where nothing but cactus and sage-brush formerly would grow, have been found to be excellent soil for the jujube, and it is the hope of Uncle Sam's food experts to see the entire Arizona and New Mexico deserts dotted with jujube orchards, with income to their owners. The jujube is delicious eaten ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall
... copse, and a hillock completely screened the spot used as the battalion parade-ground, from the view of one approaching the Camp, and the magnificent sight of the Gungapur Fusiliers under arms would burst upon him only when he rounded the corner of a wall of palms, cactus, and bamboos, and entered by a narrow gap between it and a clump ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... and thin try to burn him." Then he went up to the girl, cut her loose from the stake, and she raised up in a sitting posture, "Would ye's moind lettin' me help ye to yer fate, Miss?" said Mike. "O, I'm so tired and weak I can't stand," said the girl. "They have almost killed me dragging me over the cactus." ...
— Thirty-One Years on the Plains and In the Mountains • William F. Drannan
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