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More "Fern" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... dusky red,—a deep, substantial hue, very well fit to be close to the ground,—while the yellow, and light, fantastic shades of green soar upward to the sky. These red spots are the blueberry and whortleberry bushes. The sweet-fern is changed mostly to russet, but still retains its wild and delightful fragrance when pressed in the hand. Wild China-asters are scattered about, but beginning to wither. A little while ago, mushrooms or toadstools were very numerous along the wood-paths ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... Florent turned round and strolled about, loitering among the flowers. They halted with some curiosity before several women who were selling bunches of fern and bundles of vine-leaves, neatly tied up in packets of five and twenty. Then they turned down another covered alley, which was almost deserted, and where their footsteps echoed as though they had been walking through a church. Here they found a little cart, scarcely larger than ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... mediaeval statistics it was apparently more grown than other cereals. The chief meat of the lower classes then, as to-day, was bacon from the innumerable herds of swine who roamed in the woods and wastes, but in bad years, when food was scarce, the poor ate nuts, acorns, fern roots, ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... his skiff under the crowding alders, gathered a big bunch of the purple flag lilies with their silky petals, and started homeward, whistling cheerily as he stepped briskly along the fern-carpeted wood path that wound up the hill under the beeches ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... do my thoughts no longer hover Over the mountains, on that northern shore, Resting their wings where heath and fern-leaves cover Thy noble heart for ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... unheeded. Sounds of labor not far off told that camp was being built. Presently the absent five returned, two of the Mayorunas carrying a crude but strong litter constructed from saplings and giant-fern leaves. McKay rose stiffly ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel
... closed. We then, as an act of mercy, stole a sheaf of oats from a neighbouring field, and cut the ears off for the horse with our penknives, after which we, in absolute hunger, ate as many grains as we could clean from the husks, and some fern, which we found very bitter. We looked very much like a group of vagrants sitting by the road-side, the possession of the oats being disputed with us by five lean pigs. When after another hour we really succeeded in getting something ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... of direction, of location, had not deserted him. In a little while he came out abreast of Cradle Bay. The Gower house, all brightly gleaming windows, loomed near. He struck down through the dead fern, ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... the fern leaves and pointed to the lank figure of the tall Alphian, who lay curled up on the grass as if asleep. "He brought me in that flying-machine there; but he has spent all his strength in trying to manage ...
— The Land of the Changing Sun • William N. Harben
... weapons, while the huntsmen brought their pikes, and spears, and javelins, and such other projectiles as were employed in those days in hunting wild beasts. The troop was divided into companies of one hundred, and for banners they bore tufts of grass on wisps of straw, or fern, or other herbage, tied at the top of a pole. The armament was rude, but the men were resolute and determined, and they made their appearance at the gates of the city upon the outside, just in time to co-operate with Remus in the rebellion which he ...
— Romulus, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... that pass. In truth, she would have had little of her lover's company, if she had liked the chaunt of the choristers better than the cry of the hounds: yet I know not; for they were companions from the cradle, and reciprocally fashioned each other to the love of the fern and the foxglove. Had either been less sylvan, the other might have been more saintly; but they will now never hear matins but those of the lark, nor reverence vaulted aisle but that of the greenwood canopy. They are twin ...
— Maid Marian • Thomas Love Peacock
... of the Central Alps the Roman used chiefly the Brenner route, which by a low saddle unites the deep reentrant valleys of the Adige and Inn rivers, and thus surmounts the barrier by a single pass. However, a short cut northward over the Chalk Alps by the Fern Pass made closer connection with Augusta Vindelicorum (Augsburg). The Romans seem to have been ignorant of the St. Gotthard, which, though high, is the summit of an unbroken ascent from Lake Maggiore up the valley of the Ticino on one side, and from Lake ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... fleecy lamb which thus did sever From the white flock, but pass'd unworried By angry wolf, or pard with prying head, Until it came to some unfooted plains Where fed the herds of Pan: ay great his gains Who thus one lamb did lose. Paths there were many, Winding through palmy fern, and rushes fenny, 80 And ivy banks; all leading pleasantly To a wide lawn, whence one could only see Stems thronging all around between the swell Of turf and slanting branches: who could tell The freshness of the ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... I have forgotten, sent me a collection of fossils—tiny mollusk shells beautifully marked, and bits of sandstone with the print of birds' claws, and a lovely fern in bas-relief. These were the keys which unlocked the treasures of the antediluvian world for me. With trembling fingers I listened to Miss Sullivan's descriptions of the terrible beasts, with uncouth, unpronounceable names, which once ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... when I was little I used to play here a lot and I pretended there were fairies—fern fairies and grass fairies and tree fairies. We'd play together. And when I grew older and began to wish for things that weren't—here, I'd come and tell the fairies because I did not want my mother to know, and, anyway, just telling about them made it seem as nice as having them. So I got to calling ...
— Highacres • Jane Abbott
... after. I keep quantities of both remedies close at hand, for three or four venomous snakes have been killed within a dozen yards of the house, and little G—— is perpetually exploring the long grass all around or hunting for a stray cricket-ball or a pegtop in one of those beautiful fern-filled ditches whose tangle of creepers and plumy ferns is exactly the favorite haunt of snakes. As yet he has brought back from these forbidden raids nothing more than a few ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various
... tree-ferns, practically the duplicates of the background beyond the globe. Nothing moved save small, fugitive creatures among their fronds. He swung the telescope still farther. The landscape swept by before his eyes. The tree-fern forest drew back. He saw the beginning of a vast and noisome morass, over which lay a thick haze as of a stream raised by the sun. He saw something move in that morass; something huge and horrible with a long and snake-like neck and the tiniest of heads at the end of it. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... ranged against the walls and sheltered by tall palms and flowering exotics. The music was heard to better advantage here than in the hall where the company had first been received; and as the Princess moved to a seat under the pale green frondage of a huge tropical fern and bade her two companions sit beside her, sounds of the wildest, most melancholy and haunting character began to palpitate upon the air in the mournful, throbbing fashion in which a nightingale sings when its soul is burdened with love. The passionate tremor that shakes ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... lived, or what evil deed he had done. Any man might kill him and never pay penalty for it. But, outlaw or not, the poor people loved him and looked on him as their friend, and many a stout fellow came to join him, and led a merry life in the greenwood, with moss and fern for bed, and for meat the King's deer, which it was death to slay. Tillers of the land, yeomen, and some say knights, went on their ways freely, for of them Robin took no toll; but lordly churchmen with money-bags ...
— Heroes Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... kinds of kangaroos, of the same species, but differing in size and colour. Beasts of prey have never been seen in the colony. The birds are, parrots, cockatoos, and a large one called emus, which have very long legs and scarcely any wings; they in general live upon fern, and weigh from seventy to eighty pounds; there are likewise a number of black swans. The woods abound with a number of dangerous reptiles, ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to India; of a Shipwreck on board the Lady Castlereagh; and a Description of New South Wales • W. B. Cramp
... short way off, stood before us on the grass and smiled as if her performance was now complete. The next thing she did, however, was to stoop straight down and pluck—quite as if it were all she was there for—a big, ugly spray of withered fern. I instantly became sure she had just come out of the copse. She waited for us, not herself taking a step, and I was conscious of the rare solemnity with which we presently approached her. She smiled and smiled, and we met; but it was all done in a silence by this time flagrantly ...
— The Turn of the Screw • Henry James
... is the point. That letter was from an old friend of mother's, Mrs. Leighton. She has a home up in the country, Sweet Fern Cottage I think they call it, or is it ...
— Peggy Raymond's Vacation - or Friendly Terrace Transplanted • Harriet L. (Harriet Lummis) Smith
... sketching apparatus, she with a volume of Sir Walter Scott, to read aloud to him while he sketched, or to read him to sleep with very often. And then what delight it had been to sit by his side while he lay at full length upon the mossy turf, or half-buried in fern—to sit by him supremely happy, reading or drawing, and looking up from her occupation every now and then to glance at the sleeper's handsome face ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... haunts of coot and hern, I make sudden sally And sparkle out among the fern, To bicker ...
— Beauties of Tennyson • Alfred Tennyson
... out the beauty of the land, the rolling plains, the soft low hills, the forests and moors folded and hidden in the swathing robe of the night; from the park and gardens floated upward the freshness of acres of thick sward and deep fern thicket, the fragrance of roses and a thousand flowers, the tender sighing of the wind through the huge oaks and beeches bordering the avenues, and reigning like kings over the ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... features in the botany of Cape York, is the occurrence of a palm, not hitherto mentioned as Australian. It is the Caryota urens (found also in India and the Indian archipelago) one of the noblest of the family, combining the foliage of the tree-fern with a trunk a foot in diameter, and sixty in height. It is found in the dense brushes along with three other palms, Seaforthia, Corypha, and Calamus. Another very striking tree, not found elsewhere by us, is the fine Wormia ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... of life. I was barely three. I can remember the majestic gum-trees surrounding us, the sun glinting on their straight white trunks, and falling on the gurgling fern-banked stream, which disappeared beneath a steep scrubby hill on our left. It was an hour past noon on a long clear summer day. We were on a distant part of the run, where my father had come to deposit salt. He had left home early in the dewy morning, carrying me in front ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... sportsmen, deer-stalkers, a piper and two deer-hounds, cooking their supper, and concluding it with the never-failing accompaniment of whisky-toddy. Let us fancy them reposing on a couch of dried fern and heather, and being awoke in the morning with the lively air of "Hey, Johnny Cope." While their breakfast is preparing, they wash and refresh themselves at a pure mountain stream, and are soon ready to issue forth ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... these discontents are soon forgotten; there amid tilth and pasture, gentle hills and leafy hollows of rural Devon, the eye rests and the mind is soothed. By lanes innumerable, deep between banks of fern and flower; by paths along the bramble-edge of scented meadows; by the secret windings of copse and brake and stream-worn valley—a way lies upward to the long ridge of Haldon, where breezes sing among the pines, or sweep rustling ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... decidedly in the affirmative. It is well known that these Aborigines in no instance cultivate the soil, but subsist entirely by hunting and fishing, and on the wild roots they find in certain localities (especially the common fern), with occasionally a little wild honey; indigenous fruits being exceedingly rare. The whole race is divided into tribes, more or less numerous, according to circumstances, and designated from the localities they inhabit; for although universally ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... thought Dick, and he dropped behind a great tuft of withered fern and waited and watched. Billy Seton crawled up without a sound, and lay beside him. Three minutes passed, and then Dick saw a shock of black hair pushed right under a low-growing blackthorn, a dozen yards ...
— The Wolf Patrol - A Tale of Baden-Powell's Boy Scouts • John Finnemore
... into our fern-house, which is just beyond here," she said. "We have got such exquisite maidenhairs and such a splendid Killarney fern. Come; you ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... hidden receptacle, and as the girls looked down into it they saw that it was half filled with curious little fern baskets. ...
— Billie Bradley on Lighthouse Island - The Mystery of the Wreck • Janet D. Wheeler
... patera filled with white anemones; on another table near by stood a silver one filled with the same flowers, pink and yellow. Each was circled round the edge with fringing masses of maiden-hair fern. Every lounge and chair had a low, broad foot-stool before it, ruffled with the chintz; and in one corner of the room were a square pink and white and green Moorish rug, with ten or a dozen chintz-covered pillows, ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson
... about with such a powerful flight over the water, and then hovered apparently motionless, as though looking at their beautiful bodies reflected on the bright surface. On one bank, too, a bright little green lizard was captured, and carefully secured, to place in one of the fern cases; besides which there were rose beetles, watchmen, spiders, and tiny flies, that Fred considered were neither curious nor pretty, but which Mr Inglis said were quite the contrary, being both curious and ...
— Hollowdell Grange - Holiday Hours in a Country Home • George Manville Fenn
... Down on Fern Avenue, which is a wide, grassy road and no avenue at all, Uncle Roger Allan is carefully painting his chicken coops. Roger Allan is a tall, twinkling, smooth-shaven old man, and he lives in a house as twinkling and as ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... those who fly to firearms if Nature sends a rare migrant creature of air, or earth, or water, in their way.” Go through our English lakes, as the writer did recently, after not having visited them for several years, and you will find, for instance, the falls of Lodore, where once the parsley-fern abounded, now entirely stript of it. Just as—to take a parallel case—in a certain stream in Borrowdale, where some years ago the writer caught so many trout that the widow, in whose cottage he lodged, offered to keep him any length of time gratis, so long ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... cottages, being frequently that of a cross, would hurt the eye by the sharp angles of the roof, were it not for the cushion-like vegetation with which they are rounded and concealed. Varieties of the fern sometimes relieve the massy forms of the stonecrop, with their light and delicate leafage. Windows in the roof are seldom met with. Of the chimney ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin
... return from this slight digression. The beautiful and purely local fern (Schizoea pusilla) growing in the pine barrens of New Jersey, affords quite as conclusive proof of the correctness of the Bible genesis of life as the phenomenal appearance of Japan clover in the South. It was at one time supposed ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... sea in the south, The hills of olive and slopes of fern Whiten and glow in the sun's long drouth, Under the heavens that beam and burn; And all the swallows were gather'd there Flitting about in the fragrant air, And heard no sound from the larks, but flew ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... had lost its way Amid the grass and fern; A passing stranger scooped a well Where weary men might turn; He walled it in, and hung with care A ladle at the brink; He thought not of the deed he did, But judged that Toil might drink. He passed again; and lo! the well, By summer never dried, Had cooled ten thousand parched tongues, And ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... property; for robberies of gardens and houses were daily and nightly committed. Damage was also received from the little stock which remained alive; the owners, not having wherewith to feed them, were obliged to turn them loose to browse among the grass and shrubs, or turn up the ground for the fern-root; and as they wandered without any one to prevent their doing mischief, they but too often found an easy passage over fences and through barriers which were now grown weak and perishing. It was however ordered, that the stock should ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins
... days the villagers sought high and low for the missing child, and then, on the morning of the third day, to the delight of the distracted parents, their boy was found sleeping peacefully upon a bed of fern within a few yards of the place where his mother had last seen him. He was perfectly well, quite happy, and entirely ignorant of the length of time that had elapsed. And he had a wonderful ...
— Legend Land, Vol. 1 • Various
... live? Oh, just anywhere—all about; among the fern, in the long grass, down on the sands, in all the places babies love to ...
— Piccaninnies • Isabel Maud Peacocke
... prefer to meet with a little resistance, and despise a bed that is made too comfortable. Self-sown ones often come up much more vigorously through the hard path than when the seed has fallen within the border. The way to grow the parsley fern is said to be to clap a good big stone on his crown very early in the spring, and let him struggle out at all corners from underneath it. It is undoubtedly a comfort to rock-plants and creeping things to be planted with a stone over their feet ...
— Last Words - A Final Collection of Stories • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... a gravelly slope, and across a strip of swale, through which flowed the stream that farther on widened into the Hollow. A small jungle of dog-roses, elder, and blackberry tangled the banks of the stream, spreading into flanks of cinnamon-fern that crept ...
— Roof and Meadow • Dallas Lore Sharp
... trenched by the Boers at great expense of labour; they were evidently expecting we should attack and perhaps turn them out of Majuba, although the slope of the hill on the south side is quite too precipitous for such an operation. I picked up some fern and plants near where Colley fell, as a memento. We took an hour and a half to get down again, meeting General Buller and his Staff walking up to inspect the hill, and I rode back ten miles to Volksrust blessed with a headache from the steep climb and strong air. The view from the top of Majuba, ...
— With the Naval Brigade in Natal (1899-1900) - Journal of Active Service • Charles Richard Newdigate Burne
... met above them in angry amazement; then one hand reached back to the willow branch, the girl dropped from sight, and he heard her rustle from branch to branch, and then heard the light, swift sound of running feet through the fern, and dying away in ...
— Fernley House • Laura E. Richards
... once to your cabin, or will cease to breed disaffection in my crew, and groundless alarm in my passengers, by instilling your own childish, ignorant fears. The ship has been underlogged a hundred miles, sir; and but for my caution in lying to for clear weather we should be groping among the Fern Isl——" ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... still, but for the sudden fall Of cupless acorns dropping to the ground, Or rabbit plunging through the fern-stems tall, Half-startled ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... intolerable thickets of Small pine, a groth much resembling arrow wood on the Stem of which there is thorns; this groth about 12 or 15 feet high inter lockd into each other and Scattered over the high fern & fallen timber, added to this the hills were So Steep that I was compelled to draw my Self up by the assistance of those bushes- The Timber on those hills are of the pine Species large and tall maney of them more than 200 feet high ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... Cor burn to the Tyne, our way lies eastward by the side of the river, which here, after splashing and sparkling over the shallows below Corbridge, narrows again to a deeper stream of swifter current, and flows between green meadows and leafy woods, fern-clad steeps and level haughs, all the way down to Ryton, where the picturesque aspect of the river ceases, and it becomes an industrial waterway. On this reach of the river are several ...
— Northumberland Yesterday and To-day • Jean F. Terry
... ribbon. Place them on their side with long ribbon streamers coming from underneath each one and in the center of the three place another white bell, open side up, holding an infant doll to represent the new year. Intertwine a few sprays of asparagus fern or smilax. ...
— Games For All Occasions • Mary E. Blain
... industrious skill interrupted only by little flirts and snatches of endearment, frugally cut short by the common-sense of the tiny house-wife. They had brought their work nearly to an end, and had already begun to line it with fern-down, the gathering of which demanded more distant journeys and longer absences. But, alas! the syringa, immemorial manor of the catbirds, was not more than twenty feet away, and these "giddy neighbors" ...
— My Garden Acquaintance • James Russell Lowell
... twilight close about their throats. Only my heart makes answer. Eager vines Go up the rocks and wait; flushed apple-trees Pause in their dance and break the ring for me; Dim, shady wood-roads, redolent of fern And bayberry, that through sweet bevies thread Of round-faced roses, pink and petulant, Look back and beckon ere they disappear. Only my heart, only my heart responds. Yet, ah, my path is sweet on either side All through the dragging day,—sharp underfoot ...
— Second April • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... balls and fringes, partially concealing bookshelves swollen with black school-texts. Her eye was arrested by crossed scabbards of fretted wood upon the dull green wall, and whereever there was a high flat eminence, some fern waved from a pot of crinkled china, or a bronze horse reared so high that the stump of a tree had to sustain his forequarters. The waters of family life seemed to rise and close over her head, and she ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... soil was undulating and fertile, presented many features of beauty; beyond it, all was sterile, bleak, and barren. Long tracts of brown heath-clad mountain or not less unprofitable valleys of tall and waving fern were all that the eye could discern, except where the broad Shannon, expanding into a tranquil and glassy lake, lay still and motionless beneath the dark mountains, a few islands, with some ruined churches and a round tower, alone breaking ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... the stream, she came at last to another wood—not a wild wood like the first, but a tame, domesticated wood. The dead limbs were cut away, and the ground was neatly brushed up under the trees. The brook flowed sedately between fern-bordered banks, under rustic bridges, and widened occasionally into pools carpeted with lily pads. Mossy paths set with stepping-stones led off into mysterious depths that the eye could not penetrate: the leaves were just out enough to half hide and to tantalize. The grass was starred with ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster
... will not deny that there was a certain mixture of roguery; for I had remarked, that if I chose for an irksome study a half-shaded old trunk, to the hugely curved roots of which clung well-lit fern, combined with twinkling maiden-hair, my friend, who knew from experience that I should not be disengaged in less than an hour, commonly resolved to seek, with his books, some other pleasant little spot. Now nothing disturbed me ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... the tarn sparkled like a mirror and on its farther side, where a clump of dark pines overhung a beach of silver sand, the hillslopes shone with yellow grass, relieved by the green of fern and belts of moss. The spot was picturesque; the old house, with its low, straight front and mullioned windows, round which creepers grew, had a touch of quiet beauty. Osborn was proud of Tarnside, although he sometimes ...
— The Buccaneer Farmer - Published In England Under The Title "Askew's Victory" • Harold Bindloss
... of their daily life, and the cold calculation, the lack of sentiment displayed in wooing, I think Puritan husbands and wives were happy in their marriages, though their love was shy, almost sombre, and "flowered out of sight like the fern." A few love-letters still remain to prove their affection: letters of sweethearts and letters of married lovers, such as Governor Winthrop and his wife Margaret; letters like the words of another Margaret—a queen—to ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... creation, they would stare fashionably at the antlered heads which the great slow deer raised out of a forest of bracken that promised to autumn lovers such cover as was never seen before. And now and again, as the amorous perfume of chestnut flowers and of fern was drifted too near, one would say to the other: "My dear! What a ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Seminary once held quite a place in literary circles, Cornelius C. Felton, afterward president of Harvard College, being its "chore boy" (the remains of his parents lie in the cemetery near by). Fanny Fern, the sister of N.P. Willis, the wife of James Parton, the celebrated biographer, as well as two sisters of Dr. Alexander Vinton, pursued their studies here, together with Miss Flint, who married Honorable Daniel P. King, member of Congress for the ...
— The Bay State Monthly - Volume 2, Issue 3, December, 1884 • Various
... it, and Basavriuk said, "You are just in time, Peter: to-morrow is St. John the Baptist's day. Only on this one night in the year does the fern blossom. I will await you at ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... of mignonette would be to her too gay a posy for the Lord's House and the Lord's Day. And balmier breath than was ever borne by blossom is the pure fragrance of green growing things,—southernwood, mint, sweet fern, bayberry, sweetbrier. No rose is half so fresh, ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... stock it had to bear, whether of trees, or corn, or cattle, hogs, or mushrooms, or mankind. The farm was not so large or rambling as to tire the mind or foot, yet wide enough and full of change—rich pasture, hazel copse, green valleys, fallows brown, and golden breast-lands pillowing into nooks of fern, clumps of shade for horse or heifer, and for rabbits sandy warren, furzy cleve for hare and partridge, not without a little mere for willows and for wild-ducks. And the whole of the land, with a general slope of liveliness and rejoicing, spread itself well to the sun, with a strong ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... act of kicking out a dung fire. Rajah headed directly toward them, the fire evidently being in the line of path he had chosen. This rare and unexpected freedom, this opportunity to go whither he listed, was as the giant fern he used to eat in the days when he was free and wild ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... against their enemies; but I have never seen any reason to believe that this is so with the three species observed by me, namely, Prunus laurocerasus, Vicia sativa, and V. faba. No plant is so little attacked by enemies of any kind as the common bracken-fern (Pteris aquilina); and yet, as my son Francis has discovered, the large glands at the bases of the fronds, but only whilst young, excrete much sweetish fluid, which is eagerly sought by innumerable ...
— The Effects of Cross & Self-Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom • Charles Darwin
... especially adapted to the gown of the matron, or wherever a touch of lavender is desired. It is effectively combined with violets, or lilies-of-the-valley and maidenhair fern. The petals are made of satin ribbon one and one-quarter inches wide and of the peculiar pinkish lavender orchid shade. There are five petals in all—each calls for seven inches of ribbon. If possible, three of the petals should be one or two shades ...
— Make Your Own Hats • Gene Allen Martin
... the hoarse wind is raving, Rocks where the weary floods murmur and wail, Wilds where the fern by the furrow is waving, Reeled with the echoes that rode on the gale; Far as the tempest thrills Over the darkened hills Far as the sunshine streams over the plain, Roused by the tyrant band, Woke all the mighty land, Girded for battle, from ...
— How the Flag Became Old Glory • Emma Look Scott
... bending to the light wind, which had just, as though in mischief, blotted out the dream-world in the water, and set it rippling eastwards in one sheet of living silver, broken only by a cloud-shadow at its further end. Fragrance was everywhere—from the trees, the young fern, the grass; and from the shining west, the shadowed fells, the brilliant water, there breathed a voice of triumphant beauty, of unconquered peace, which presently affected George ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... normal central capsule. A field of such poppies was grown, and M. Goeppert, with seed from this field, obtained still this monstrous form in great quantity. Deformities of ferns are sometimes sought after by fern-growers. They are now always obtained by taking spores from the abnormal parts of the monstrous fern; from which spores ferns presenting the same peculiarities invariably grow.... The most remarkable case is that observed by Dr. Godron, of Nancy. In 1861 that botanist observed, ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... dark eyes fixed on the setting sun. There was no sound save the breathing of her horse, the far sweet trailing song of a spotted sparrow, the undertones of some hidden rill welling up through matted tangles of vine and fern ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... walk," observing the wild flowers; a "fern walk," discerning the delicate tracery of the fern in its cool haunts; a "tree walk", noting the different trees—all are natural ways of interesting boys in ...
— Camping For Boys • H.W. Gibson
... handicraft, is fashioning a set of wagon- wheels, the track of which Wall soon be visible. The wild forest is shrinking back; the street has lost the aromatic odor of the pine-trees, and of the sweet-fern that grew beneath them. The tender and modest wild-flowers, those gentle children of savage nature that grew pale beneath the ever-brooding shade, have shrank away and disappeared, like stars that vanish in the breadth of light. Gardens are fenced in, and ...
— Main Street - (From: "The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... tutor, sympathising fully with the ardent pursuits of boyhood, had been over-indulgent in the matter of granting whole Wednesdays, instead of half-holidays. Any excuse sufficed. Skating on inland ponds in the winter; fishing in the bay, as the year wore on; and, latterly, digging for primrose or fern roots in Brattlesby Woods. But Philip Price was beginning to find out by results that too much play and not enough work was making dull scholars of his pupils, and he had determined to stand out firmly against any more indulgences in the future. It was high time that ...
— The Captain's Bunk - A Story for Boys • M. B. Manwell
... deep, umbrageous woodlands fragrant with fern, dreaming noons, shimmering in the heat, with the locust drowsily shrilling; warm and silver nights, made musical by the loves of many mocking-birds; the waste places green tangles of blossoming weed, the roads a-flutter with hovering yellow butterflies, ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... If Gerald had not thought of tying her hands someone would certainly have been scratched. As it was Mabel's hand was scraped between the cold rock and a passionate boot-heel. Nor will I tell you all that she said as they led her along the fern-bordered gully and through the arch into the wonderland of Italian scenery. She had but little language left when they removed her bandage under a weeping willow where a statue of Diana, bow ...
— The Enchanted Castle • E. Nesbit
... August, woodcocks are to be found in elevated spots, such as mountains covered with large trees, or in warm open places on their slopes. At the first approach of cold weather they leave the hills, and come down into the plains, concealing themselves in the underwood, or the fern, or in the high grass, when the snow begins to fall. The woodcock is a melancholy bird, and somewhat misanthropic. Its habits are eminently anti-social; it flies but little, so little indeed that its wings seem scarcely of any use, and ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... The woods were at first of recent growth, dense, and utterly impenetrable; the ground, instead of being clothed with grass and shrubs as in the woods of Europe, was everywhere carpeted with Lycopodiums (fern-shaped mosses). Gradually the scene became changed. We descended slightly from an elevated, dry, and sandy area to a low and swampy one; a cool air breathed on our faces, and a mouldy smell of rotting vegetation ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... looked out, wishing the children a happy Christmas. Then we dressed, for there was a great deal to do. Papa had many services in church, Chinese, English, and Dyak. I had the wreaths to make. The church had been decked with moss fern the day before, but the flowers must be added in the morning, or they would be faded. So Julia and I made a crown of French marigolds to hang on the cross over the altar, two large wreaths for either side, and one at the ...
— Sketches of Our Life at Sarawak • Harriette McDougall
... him. He then changed clothes with a peasant in order to conceal himself. The peasant was discovered by the pursuers, who now redoubled the diligence of their search. At last, the unhappy Monmouth was found, lying in the bottom of a ditch, and covered with fern; his body depressed with fatigue and hunger; his mind by the memory of past misfortunes, by the prospect of future disasters. Human nature is unequal to such calamitous situations; much more the temper of ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part F. - From Charles II. to James II. • David Hume
... when we had left the uplands of Boulogne behind us, lay along the skirts of that desolate marsh in which I had wandered, and so inland, through plains of fern and bramble, until the familiar black keep of the Castle of Grosbois rose upon the left. Then, under the guidance of Savary, we struck to the right down a sunken road, and so over the shoulder of a hill ...
— Uncle Bernac - A Memory of the Empire • Arthur Conan Doyle
... out of the village, and paused among the trees and fern on the summit of the hill above, to take breath, and to look down at the beautiful sea. Suddenly the captain gave his leg a resounding slap, and cried, "Never knew such a right thing in ...
— A Message from the Sea • Charles Dickens
... seen of its kind. In many places the trees formed long aisles and vaulted colonnades and arches so regular that it seemed as though they had been planted by the hand of man. Elsewhere the chaos of tree and shrub, flower and fern and twining root was so indescribable, that it seemed as if chance and haphazard had originated it all; but the mind of our hero was cast, if we may say so, in too logical a mould to accept such ...
— The Rover of the Andes - A Tale of Adventure on South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... of view this distinction is of small importance. AEsthetically, the Law of Crystallization is probably as useful in ministering to natural beauty as Vitality. What are more beautiful than the crystals of a snowflake? Or what frond of fern or feather of bird can vie with the tracery of the frost upon a window-pane? Can it be said that the lichen is more lovely than the striated crystals of the granite on which it grows, or the moss on the mountain side ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... a cotton-tail. A snake slid, hissing, out of sight under a jungle of fern. A butterfly, dull brown and ocher, settled upon a branch in the sunlight, where it began slowly opening ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... part of July when Margaret returned home. The forest trees were all one dark, full, dusky green; the fern below them caught all the slanting sunbeams; the weather was sultry and broodingly still. Margaret used to tramp along by her father's side, crushing down the fern with a cruel glee, as she felt it yield under her ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... "I thought fern would suit your hair better than anything else," said Tom; "and so I got these leaves," and he picked out ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... long and eight miles wide, with the shape of an oyster. The coconut plantation covered the west side. From the white beach the palms ran in serried rows quarter of a mile inland, then began a jungle of bamboo, gum-tree, sandalwood, plantain, huge fern, and choking grasses. The south-east end of the island was hillocky, with volcanic subsoil. There ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... was quite unacquainted with its mysteries—the fern-glades, the woodbine tangles, and the stream, that, if you listened attentively, you could hear faintly ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... and mark our progress towards the foot of the hill. I was particularly struck, during the walk, with the richness of the undergrowth in most places, and recognised many berries and plants that resembled those of my native land, especially a tall, elegantly formed fern, which emitted an agreeable perfume. There were several kinds of flowers, too, but I did not see so many of these as I should have expected in such a climate. We also saw a great variety of small birds of bright plumage, and ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... wicked Mal-sum thought in his heart, 'What would it matter even if he knew the truth? I shall slay him before he can harm me.' So he answered truly, 'By the stroke of a fern-root only can I be slain. ...
— The Magic Speech Flower - or Little Luke and His Animal Friends • Melvin Hix
... back, and, bending forward, rested its broad loop over his head. Upon the first his companion placed two more packs; then, stooping beneath the weight of 240 pounds, the packers at a jog-trot set off uphill and down, over rugged rocks and fallen timber, through fern-covered marsh and dense underbrush. Coming to an opening in the wood at the far end of the portage, they quickly tossed their burdens aside, and back again they ran. Nowhere could one see more willing workers. You heard no swearing or grumbling about the exceedingly ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... artistic, not in that sense. I tried her once with a harpsichord I picked up cheap in Wardour Street, and a reproduction of a Roman stool. The thing was an utter failure. A cottage piano, with a photo-frame and a fern upon, it is what the soul cries out for in connection with Robina. Dick is not artistic. Dick does not go with peacocks' feathers and guitars. I can see Dick with a single peacock's feather at St. Giles's Fair, when ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... rutty lane by this time, a lane with banks rich in ferns and floral growth, and here came Blanche and Eva and the youngest boy, released from Latin grammar and Greek delectus at an earlier hour than usual. The car was sent on to the wood, and Bessie and her two sisters produced their fern trowels, and began digging and delving for rare specimens—real or imaginary—assisted by Mr. Jardine, who had more knowledge but less enthusiasm ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... papers—on the Fern Owl; Mr. Rennie's interesting Notes on the Cleanliness of Animals; Mechanism of the Voice in Singing; the Vision of Birds of Prey; New species of British Snake; Animalculae in Snow; Habits of the Chameleon; Peculiarity of the Negro Stomach; Growth of Spanish ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 488, May 7, 1831 • Various
... she cried, and everyone gathered round to see what she had found. Even Susie peered into the hole, and poked a bit of fern gently at the toad, which sat there ...
— The Kitchen Cat, and other Tales • Amy Walton
... road beyond I continued to idiotize, unable to see dryads dancing in the moonlight (as she and I saw them in the same spot to-night), careless that Nature was distilling magic perfume for us from tree and fern and wild flower, our eyes shut to the fact that elves disguised as Indian lilies were using silvered ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... said Reggie, pressing the earth round the roots of the last fern and then rising; 'it's a jolly long time it has taken us. ...
— The Adventure League • Hilda T. Skae
... got these home. William just hates me in green, but I would have them. They make one think of fern-leaves and the deep woods, don't they?" said she, standing before the mirror with childish admiration of her ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... weiss ein Land, wo aus sonnigem Gruen Um versunkene Temple die Trauben bluehn, Wo die purpurne Woge das Ufer besauemt, Und von kommenden Saengern der Lorbeer traeumt; Fern lockt es und winkt dem verlangenden Sinn, Und ich kann nicht ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... width, pointed to the higher plant world that was to come. Between these gaunt towering trunks the graceful tree-ferns spread their canopies at heights of twenty, forty, and even sixty feet from the ground, and at the base was a dense undergrowth of ferns and fern-like seed-plants. Mosses may have carpeted the moist ground, but nothing in the nature of grass or ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... out of a dense fern-brake, slipped down a mossy-lipped stone, and ran across the path at their feet. From the valley arose the mellow song of meadow larks, while about them, in and out, through sunshine and shadow, fluttered ...
— Brown Wolf and Other Jack London Stories - Chosen and Edited By Franklin K. Mathiews • Jack London
... woods. Forest as a topographical suffix denotes a wild uncultivated tract of hilly or common land, more often than not quite bare of trees. The great expanse of Radnor Forest is well known to the writer and not even a thorn bush comes to the mind in picturing its miles of fern-clad billowy uplands. ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... gardens of Alcinous, with their perpetual summer—or of the Hesperides, (if they were flat, and not close to Atlas,) golden apples and all, I would give away in an instant, for one mossy granite stone a foot broad, and two leaves of lady fern. ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin
... extraordinary glow of radiance. Of course there were orchards after orchards of orange trees covered with fruit, white houses smothered in flowers, gardens overrun with roses, tall groups of eucalyptus trees giving an impression of elegant nakedness, long lines of pepper trees with frail fern-like branches, and these things continued for the rest of the way; but they would have been as nothing without that beautiful, great bland light. The twins had had their hot summers in Pomerania, and their July days in England, ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim
... to the place where my childhood had dwelt, To the hearth where in early devotion I knelt— The fern and the bramble grew wild in the hall, And the long grass of summer waved green on the wall: The roof-tree was fallen, the household had fled, The garden was ruined, the roses were dead, The wild bird flew scared from her ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 456 - Volume 18, New Series, September 25, 1852 • Various
... she had ceased to be a dryad in a wood, it was to become the Armida of an enchanted garden. She could have no idea of the figure she presented to a connoisseur in girls as from a background of palms, fern-trees, and banked masses of bloom she stared at him with lips half parted ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... head, he may not touch food with them or engage in any other employment; he is fed by another person with food cooked over a sacred fire. He cannot be released from the taboo before the following day, when he rubs his hands with potato or fern root which has been cooked on a sacred fire; and this food having been taken to the head of the family in the female line and eaten by her, his hands are freed from the taboo. In some parts of New Zealand the most sacred day of the year was that appointed for hair-cutting; ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... spills for centuries, perhaps silently adding, year by year, another layer of aromatic springiness to poor Tom's bed. Flinging his tired body on this grateful couch, burying his head in the crushed sweet fern of his pillow with one deep-drawn sigh of pleasure,—there, haunted by no past and harassed by no future, slept God's fool as sweetly ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin
... near it, and near, too, to the boys, who could now distinguish their long, erect ears, slender limbs, and graceful motions—resembling, in fact, those of the common hare. Their colour, however, was different. It was a rusty fern, lighter underneath, but in no part—not even under the tail—did any white appear. It was a beautiful sight to behold these innocent little creatures, now nibbling at the blades of grass, now leaping a few feet over the sward, and then settling comically upon their haunches. ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid
... chance assemblage of wild youth, who might see fit to take the work in hand. There were formalities that must be observed, songs to be chanted, prayers to be recited. It was necessary to bear in mind that when one deflowered the woods of their fronds of ie-ie and fern or tore the trailing lengths of maile—albeit in honor of Laka herself—the body of the goddess was being despoiled, and the despoiling must be done with all ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... eat a wheat-ear, because they call it here a fern-knacker; but since he knew it was a wheat-ear, he is extremely concerned. You are desired to acquaint Miss Smith that the Duchess was upon the brink of leaving off painting the first week she came here, but hath since ...
— Life And Letters Of John Gay (1685-1732) • Lewis Melville
... like a pressed fern," said Winnie. "Do you remember the fad we had for pressed flowers and skeleton leaves? We used to keep them inside all ...
— The Nicest Girl in the School - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... occupations they often considered it expedient to escape detection by assuming invisibility, and for this object sought the assistance of certain plants, such as the fern-seed[17]. In Sweden, hazel-nuts were supposed to have the power of making invisible, and it may be remembered how in one of Andersen's stories the elfin princess has the faculty of vanishing at will, by putting a wand in ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... of your readers want something odd and interesting in the way of plants let them try one of your Little Monarch Fern Balls. I have had rather hard luck with mine. I received the Fern Ball about a year ago, and every member of the family except myself condemned it at once as being "no good," but I kept it watered and ...
— The Mayflower, January, 1905 • Various
... know, surely, the Hemlock spruce of America; which, while growing by itself in open ground, is the most wilful and fantastic, as well as the most graceful, of all the firs; imitating the shape, not of its kindred, but of an enormous tuft of fern. ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... asseverating, "It is her home—she knows it—the place she loves like that." And when they had made their wide round, down the lane, up a grassy dell, into his park, where he had to show her some trees that must come down; when they had skirted the park, along its mossy, fern-grown wall, and under its overhanging branches, until, once more, they were on the common and the white of Valerie's cottage glimmered before them, he voiced this protest, saying to her, as he watched her eyes, ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... development of the race.—Considering which—the apparently cruel paradox and irony of it—Honoria swung down past the scattered hawthorns, thick with ruddy fruit, across the fragrant herbs and short, sweet turf, through the straggling fern-brakes, which impeded her progress, plucking at her skirts, careless of the rich colour and ample ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... long, on the second story. In this garden, which is perhaps a hundred feet square by forty in height, rise clumps of Italian cypress and laurel from beds of emerald turf and blooming hyacinths. In the centre a fountain showers over fern-covered rocks, and the gravel-walks around the border are shaded by tall camellia-trees in white and crimson bloom. Lamps of frosted glass hang among the foliage, and diffuse a mellow golden moonlight over ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... of science, not as some think to divest this universe of its wonder and mystery, but, as in the case before us, to point out the wonder and the mystery of common things. Those fern-like forms, which on a frosty morning overspread your windowpanes, illustrate the action of the same force. Breathe upon such a pane before the fires are lighted, and reduce the solid crystalline film to the liquid condition; then watch its subsequent resolidification. ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... rich red blood in Hester, and the flavor of the sweet-fern and the bayberry are not truer to the soil than the native sweetness of our little Phoebe! The Yankee mind has for the most part budded and flowered in pots of English earth, but you have fairly raised yours as a seedling ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... might be fair and full, after its kind; and at least some little bird might be the better for it. All around her, too, the life of the world that had so troubled her,—who could tell, in the tangle of green, where the good and the gift might ripen and fall? Every little fern-frond has ...
— A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life. • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... lofty pity for Vick, have stopped to allow her to get nearer to them. With their fine noses in the air, and their proud necks compassionately turned toward her, they are waiting, while she pushes, panting and shrieking, through the stout fern-stems; then, leap cruelly ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... Abgeschiednen betracht' ich gern, Stuend' ihr Verdienst auch noch so fern; Doch mit den edlen lebendigen Neuen Mag ich ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... And first her fern-seed doth bestow, The kernel of the mistletoe; And here and there as Puck should go, With terror to affright him, She night-shade strews to work him ill, Therewith her vervain and her dill, That hindreth witches of their will, ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... those ferns. They were not quite so slender and tapering and gothic as the ferns we see to-day. They were a trifle more lush and ragged, and their tips were sometimes almost rounded. But Ab noted little of fern or bird. It was only the general sensuousness that was upon him. The smell of the pines was a partial tonic to the healthy, half-awakened man, and, though he lay back upon the rugged wooden bed and half dozed again, nature had aroused him a trifle beyond the point of relapse into ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo
... must be the internal force and the external stimulus. Neither is enough by itself. A rose will not flower in the dark, and a fern ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... drive; the porch was bright with flowering plants arranged in tiers; a parlourmaid opened the door as though she conferred a privilege and, as Henrietta passed through the hall, she had glimpses of a statue holding a large fern and ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... if a glimpse of very rich park land is needed, it would be worth while to walk three miles north to Plashetts, which combines a vast tract of wood with a small park notable at once for its trees, its brake fern, its lakes, and its water fowl. But if one would gain it by rail, Isfield is ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... rock, and dingle buff with littered fern, green holly copse where lurked the woodcock, and arcades of zigzag oak, Frida kept her bridal robe from spot, or rent, or blemish. Passing all these little pleadings of the life she had always loved, at last she turned the craggy corner into the ledge ...
— Frida, or, The Lover's Leap, A Legend Of The West Country - From "Slain By The Doones" By R. D. Blackmore • R. D. Blackmore
... very much to one side. There was a look of mild astonishment on her large face, and well there might be. For though the arm-chair stood on a carpet, to the left of it, miraculously skirting the carpet-border, there was a dashing water-fall. On her right stood a Grecian pillar with a giant fern-tree on either side of it, and in the background towered a gaunt ...
— The Garden Party • Katherine Mansfield
... and under his guidance they followed the river-bank for some distance, and then turned aside into a wood in which Gilbert Fenton had never been before. He said so, with an expression of surprise at the beauty of the place, where the fern grew deep under giant oaks and beeches, and where the mossy ground dipped suddenly down to a deep still pool which reflected the sunlit sky through a break in the dark foliage ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... stood in the fading light, These men of battle, with grave, dark looks, As plain to be read as open books, While slowly gathered the shades of night. The fern on the slope was splashed with blood, And down in the corn, where the poppies grew, Were redder stains than the poppies knew; And crimson-dyed was ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... concealed, the upper one breaking upon the view of the delighted spectators and announcing Act II of the play. It is a night scene in a wood near Athens; mossy banks and green trees; clouds and twinkling stars in the heavens; forms of fairies sitting about like humming birds, or resting in nodding fern leaves. They sing in quick, short rhymes, suiting the ...
— Shakespeare's Christmas Gift to Queen Bess • Anna Benneson McMahan
... not there. In all probability he would never be there again to work. Another boy was sitting on his bench in the screen-room, another boy was watching rainbow coal and fern-marked slate. This thought in Bachelor Billy's mind was a sad one. He pushed the empty car on the carriage, and sat down on a bench by the window to consider the subject ...
— Burnham Breaker • Homer Greene
... of the observations made during his stay at Rio, when tropical nature was still a fresh and unexplored page to the young observer, are wonderful. Cabbage palms, liana creepers, luxuriant fern leaves—roads, bridges, and soil—planarian worms, frogs which climbed perpendicular sheets of glass, the light of fireflies, brilliant butterflies, fights between spiders and wasps, the victories of ants over difficulties, the habits of monkeys, ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... is, as far as I know, an early breeder at Naini Tal; common as the bird is I have only found one nest and that on the 24th April; it was a shallow slenderly built structure of fine roots, chiefly of maiden-hair fern, in a rough outer casing of twigs, placed on a horizontal bough overhanging a nullah about fifteen feet from the ground. The tree had moderately dense foliage, and was about twenty-five feet high in a small ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume
... case-knife, was discovered. It was the opinion of the surgeon, who afterwards examined the body, that the blade had been broken by coming in contact with one of the rib bones; and it was by this that he accounted for the slightness of the last mentioned wound. I looked carefully among the fern and long grass, to see if I could discover any other token of the murderer: Thornton assisted me. At the distance of some feet from the body, I thought I perceived something glitter. I hastened to the place, and picked up a miniature. I was just going to cry ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... says he believes will prove of as good account to him now as the other did at that rent. From the 'Change to Captain Cocke's, and there, by agreement, dined, and there was Charles Porter, Temple, Fern, Debasty, whose bad English and pleasant discourses was exceeding good entertainment, Matt. Wren, Major Cooper, and myself, mighty merry and pretty discourse. They talked for certain, that now the King do follow Mrs. Stewart wholly, ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... of bushy hollies which afforded a shelter from the wind, and sat down under it, some tufts of dead fern, crisp and dry, that remained from the previous season forming a sort of nest for them. But it was cold, nevertheless, on this March night, particularly for Grace, who with the sanguine prematureness of youth in matters of dress, had considered it spring-time, ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... Trevor proposed a stroll through the conservatories, and while the elders stopped to admire a fern or a rare exotic, Will and Gwenda roamed on under the palms and greenery to where a sparkling fountain rose, and flung its feathery spray into ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine
... away from mortal eyes danced the Fairy folk. Fire-flies hung in bright clusters on the dewy leaves, that waved in the cool night-wind; and the flowers stood gazing, in very wonder, at the little Elves, who lay among the fern-leaves, swung in the vine-boughs, sailed on the lake in lily cups, or danced on the mossy ground, to the music of the hare-bells, who rung out their merriest peal in honor of ...
— Flower Fables • Louisa May Alcott
... Broom Road, which curved and twisted through a lush growth of flowers and fern-like algarobas. The warm air was rich with perfume, and overhead, outlined against the stars, were fruit-burdened mangoes, stately avocado trees, and slender-tufted palms. Every here and there were grass houses. Voices and laughter rippled through ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London
... was young, every pore was open, and every stalk was swollen with racing currents of juice. God was palpably present in the country, and the devil had gone with the world to town. Flossy catkins of the later kinds, fern-sprouts like bishops' croziers, the square-headed moschatel, the odd cuckoo-pint,—like an apoplectic saint in a niche of malachite,—snow-white ladies'-smocks, the toothwort, approximating to human flesh, the enchanter's night-shade, ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... various species of heath-berries, cranberries, bilberries, &c., furnishing the poor with a source of profit, and the rich of luxury. What a pleasure it is to throw ourselves down beneath the verdant screen of the beautiful fern, or the shade of a venerable oak, in such a scene, and listen to the summer sounds of bees, grasshoppers, and ten thousand other insects, mingled with the more remote and solitary cries of the pewit and the curlew! Then, to think of the coach-horse, urged on his sultry stage, or the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 262, July 7, 1827 • Various
... since then, but I do not remember to have seen a landscape more beautiful in its peculiar English character than that which I now gazed on. It had none of the feudal characteristics of ancient parks, with giant oaks, fantastic pollards, glens covered with fern, and deer grouped upon the slopes; on the contrary, in spite of some fine trees, chiefly beech, the impression conveyed was, that it was a new place,—a made place. You might see ridges on the lawns which showed where hedges ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... are nearly equal in age, and similar in education, tastes, and sentiments." In another letter, written after she had lost both her sisters, she says, "Emily had a particular love for the moors; and there is not a knoll of heather, not a branch of fern, not a young bilberry leaf, not a fluttering lark or linnet, but reminds me of her. The distant prospects were Anne's delight; and, when I look round, she is in the blue tints, the pale mists, the waves and shadows of the horizon." Let any one, who would understand ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... Aros. Houses of course there were—three at least; but they lay so far on the one side or the other that no stranger could have found them from the track. A large part of the Ross is covered with big granite rocks, some of them larger than a two-roomed house, one beside another, with fern and deep heather in between them where the vipers breed. Any way the wind was, it was always sea air, as salt as on a ship; the gulls were as free as moorfowl over all the Ross; and whenever the way rose a little, your eye ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Jaquetta to come with him at once, and the log huts and fern trees danced before her eyes as the blue spectacles had done before mine; but she did not like to leave me, and Fulk would not encourage it, for we both thought her much too young and too tenderly brought up to be sent out to a wild settler's life alone ...
— Lady Hester, or Ursula's Narrative • Charlotte M. Yonge
... heat of the earth in this climate is 48 degrees, those tender trees which will bear bending down, are easily secured from the frost by spreading them upon the ground, and covering them with straw or fern. This particularly suits fig-trees, as they easily bear bending to the ground, and are furnished with an acrid juice, which secures them from the depredations of insects; but are nevertheless liable to be eaten by mice. See additional notes, ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... her pet "pash" Would be a nice car at the door, To motor all day without fagging— Not to drive nor to start up the thing. Oh! the joy to see someone else dragging A tow-rope or greasing a spring! Then a fifth murmured, "What about fishing? Fern and heather right up to your knees And a big salmon rushing and swishing 'Mid the smell of the red rowan trees." So the train of opinions drifted And thicker the atmosphere grew, Till piercing the voices uplifted Rang a sound ...
— Fanny Goes to War • Pat Beauchamp
... distant booming of the mountain. From this point to the Bosco the scenery is described as a dreary region, but the tract of the wood showed some beautiful places resembling an English park, with old oaks and abundant fern. "Here we found flocks browsing; they are much exposed to sheep-stealers, who do not touch travelers, calculating with justice that men do not carry much money to the summit of Etna." The party passed the Casa degli Inglesi, which registered a temperature of 31 deg., and then continued ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... woman wants to have her regular nap," she told them. "Frances, take Mrs. Kennedy to the fern walk and show her the famous 'Newbury Bubble' among the rocks. I want to be rid of you both ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1904 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... reflecting this massive and dusky barrier, appeared to partake of its colour. On the opposite side was a heathy hill, whose autumnal bloom had not yet faded from purple to russet; its surface was varied by the dark green furze and the fern, and in many places gray cliffs, or loose stones of the same colour, formed a contrast to the ruddy precipice to which they lay opposed. A natural road of beautiful sand was formed by a beach, which, extending all the way around the lake, separated its waters ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... till his back rested on the sloping ground—he raised one knee, and left the other foot over the verge where the tip of the tallest rushes touched it. Before he had been there a minute he remembered the secret which a fern had taught him. ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... Hypatia? Softly, dear, Let me breathe it in your ear— They are you, and only you. And those other nameless two Walking in Arcadian air— She that was so very fair? She that had the twilight hair?— They were you, dear, only you. If I speak of night or day, Grace of fern or bloom of grape, Hanging cloud or fountain spray, Gem or star or glistening dew, Or of mythologic shape, Psyche, Pyrrha, Daphne, say— I mean ...
— The Sisters' Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... village, and paused among the trees and fern on the summit of the hill above, to take breath, and to look down at the beautiful sea. Suddenly the captain gave his leg a resounding slap, and cried, "Never knew such a right thing in ...
— A Message from the Sea • Charles Dickens
... narrow lane,—so narrow, indeed, that only at certain points can two vehicles pass each other, and shut in by banks of sandstone,—we reach, on the right, a well in the rock, the latter green and grey with moss, lichen and fern, the water clear as crystal. It is, indeed, a lonely, quiet spot, fit place for musing meditation, in a poet’s wanderings. Just a cottage or two to remind one that there is a population, but not obtrusive. The rectory is the second, and larger, of two houses on the right, though now occupied ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... man and horse to tire. On Dunsmoor Heath, a hedge doth there enclose Grounds, on the right hand, there I did repose. Wit's whetstone, Want, there made us quickly learn, With knives to cut down rushes, and green fern, Of which we made a field-bed in the field, Which sleep, and rest, and much content did yield. There with my mother earth, I thought it fit To lodge, and yet no incest did commit: My bed was curtained ...
— The Pennyles Pilgrimage - Or The Money-lesse Perambulation of John Taylor • John Taylor
... everywhere the country was covered with beautiful trees, among them the pandanus palm, the tree-fern, the banyan, the bread-fruit tree, wild nutmeg, and superb bamboos. The natives also were very well-behaved and quiet, and were always inclined to treat us hospitably. Indeed, we might have travelled without the slightest risk from one end of the island to the ...
— Peter Trawl - The Adventures of a Whaler • W. H. G. Kingston
... loosely over the door, and the great day of the Sheep Eaters had passed. The silent night became more silent, the owl ceased calling to his mate, the coyote skulked into his lair, the birds ceased their chirping, the great forest trees seemed in a trance, not a flower or fern moved, all nature ...
— The Sheep Eaters • William Alonzo Allen
... are an admirable specimen of what may be effected by the skill of man. These gardens are on the south side of the river Yarra. On a hill in the centre of them is built the Government House. There are seen many varieties of trees and plants all carefully labelled. The fern tree bower is very ingenious. You see here the elk or staghorn fern, which grows as a parasite on the palm or the petosperum of New Zealand. The grass is kept beautifully fresh and green, and is a favourite resort. I have no further room to continue this ...
— Six Letters From the Colonies • Robert Seaton
... below where they slowly toiled along the faintly-marked track, worn where there was pasture by the feet of the mountain sheep, the river rushed, torrent-like, along in a greatly narrowed bed, whose perpendicular shrub and fern decked sides hid its leaping and tearing waters from the travellers' gaze. At rare intervals the river made a plunge over some mighty rock and flashed into sight, though its position was often revealed by a cloud of spray, ...
— Fix Bay'nets - The Regiment in the Hills • George Manville Fenn
... causing the exquisitely pinnated feathery fronds of the ferns to tremble incessantly. In another part was a little patch of mossy meadow, and again there were decaying logs out of which sprang various ferns in wild luxuriance, as one has seen them in deeply-shaded, low-lying woods. The maiden-hair fern was here seen ranging from leaves as large as one's thumb-nail to a species with leaves the size of pin-heads. There was a charming harmony in the whole arrangement; nothing seemed abrupt, each effect blended gracefully with those surrounding it, like well-balanced ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... of his whip Gordon urged the stage into the cold humidity of the gorge. Stenton and the plain were lost as it passed between close, dripping rocks, rank verdure, masses of gigantic, paleolithic fern. ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... The examples, fig. 3. and fig. 12., are both equally pure in line; but one is subdivided in the extreme, the other broad in the extreme, and both are beautiful. The Byzantine mind delighted in the delicacy of subdivision which nature shows in the fern-leaf or parsley-leaf; and so, also, often the Gothic mind, much enjoying the oak, thorn, and thistle. But the builder of the Ducal Palace used great breadth in his foliage, in order to harmonize with the broad surface of his mighty wall, and delighted ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... hundred years. Therefore I am forced to leave their part of the telling to Fancy, and you may believe or discredit as much or as little as you choose; only I am hoping that by this time you have acquired at least a sprinkling of fern-seed in your eyes. You may have forgotten that fern-seed is the most subtle of eye-openers known to Fancy; and that it enables you to see the things that have existed only in your imagination. It is very scarce nowadays, ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer
... leaves, pressed, make pretty draperies for these kinds of vases. Sprays of mixed leaves, oak leaves and acorns, small maple leaves, the holly leaf and berry, mixed ivy and fern leaves, and many other kinds of leaves and vines are ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... Through fern and brake head high, through sumac, willow, elder, buttonbush, gold-yellow and blood-red osiers, past northern holly, over spongy moss carpet of palest silvery green up-piled for ages, over red- veined pitcher ...
— Michael O'Halloran • Gene Stratton-Porter
... bath of verdancy and coolness even upon the most torrid day. The very light which filters through the dense foliage is tinged with green. The marbles are velvety and moist with moss, and the maidenhair fern drips lush and dank. Here Liszt drew inspiration from the harmonies of water notes blended with the chiming of distant bells, and Watteau showed in the many studies which he made in the garden how potent was its influence in investing his fetes champetres with the ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... a rich and fruitful valley, filled with cornfields and pastures. Through this vale winded a small river for many miles: much cattle were feeding on its banks. Here and there lesser eminences arose in the valley: some covered with wood, others with corn or grass, and a few with heath or fern. One of these little hills was distinguished by a parish church at the top, presenting a striking feature in the landscape. Another of these elevations, situated in the centre of the valley, was adorned with a venerable holly-tree, ...
— The Annals of the Poor • Legh Richmond
... converse with them, and said, the man they were in search of was dead, in an adjoining cove, whither they went and found his body. The ball had passed through the shoulder, and had cut the subclavian artery: the body was warm, and as his friends had left it covered with some boughs and fern, it was probable they did not intend either to bury or burn it. It proved to be the man who had thrown the fiz-gig; and as there was a necessity for firing on him, the taking place of the ball was rather to ...
— An Historical Journal of the Transactions at Port Jackson and Norfolk Island • John Hunter
... prison-house on the Drive, a house in which there was neither wholesome conversation nor privacy nor order. An ambition to live humanly and harmoniously in an apartment like this grew each moment in definiteness. She appreciated the delicacy of the centre-piece of maidenhair-fern, veiling with its cloud of green a few flame-like jonquils. She took a woman's joy in the immaculate napery and in the charm and variety of the china. Such housekeeping was an art, and quite impossible without the personal touch of the mistress, and, as she looked across towards Kate's ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... is true; Helen had not planned for the corncake at first—but there was the codfish. If the poor dear had had nothing but codfish! . . . Helen opened a jar of the treasured peach preserves, too; indeed, the entire supper table from the courageous little fern in the middle to the "company china" cup at Mrs. Raymond's plate was a remorseful apology for that midday codfish. If Mrs. Raymond noticed this, she gave no sign. Without comment, she ate the corncake and the peach preserves, and drank her tea from the china cup; ...
— The Tangled Threads • Eleanor H. Porter
... full many a word Ye echoed in the Sabbath calm; Love, warning, blessing, oft ye heard, And solemn prayer, and chanted psalm; And funeral dirge, as wild and high' Rose on the gale the caione-cry, Borne far and wide, o'er fern and brake, As passed the cortege o'er ...
— Lays from the West • M. A. Nicholl
... swim in a deep pool of the river, and enjoyed it to the full. The current was swift, and it was good to battle with it, and then to turn and swing downward past the fern-covered banks and under the shade of the trees with its flow. And while I was splashing in the pool, a franklin came running from his field with his hoe, ...
— A King's Comrade - A Story of Old Hereford • Charles Whistler
... discovered my passion for flowers, which they diligently search for among the stumps and along the lake shore. I have begun collecting, and though the season is far advanced, my hortus siccus boasts of several elegant specimens of fern; the yellow Canadian violet, which blooms twice in the year, in the spring and fall, as the autumnal season is expressively termed; two sorts of Michaelmas daisies, as we call the shrubby asters, of which the varieties here are truly elegant; and a wreath of the festoon ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... Bennett and Lindemann, through wild but picturesque moorland, carpeted with wild flowers,[87] and strewn with grey rocks and boulders. A species of pink heather grows freely here, the scent of which and the presence of bubbling fern-fringed brooks, and crisp bracing air, recalled many a pleasant morning after grouse in Bonnie Scotland. A raw-boned Aberdonian on the train remarks on the resemblance of the landscape to that of his own country and is flatly ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... And the creeping, round-leaved houstonia was here, with a superfluity of a weedy blue sage (Salvia lyrata). Here, also, as in Daytona, I found a strikingly handsome tufted plant, a highly varnished evergreen, which I persisted in taking for a fern—the sterile fronds—in spite of repeated failures to find it described by Dr. Chapman under that head, until at last an excellent woman came to my help with the information that it was "coontie" (Zamia integrifolia), famous as a plant out of which the Southern ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... hoods pricked with fern leaves whirled about these edifices in the airiest fashion. It was common to see them leap up to the height of two or three storeys from the lava pavement and rebound like balls, their faces meanwhile preserving that impressive dignity ...
— Honey-Bee - 1911 • Anatole France
... It ran as if between two twin borders of blue mist, that hemmed it in and closed it by the illusion of their approach. On either side the blue mist spread, and drifted away through the inlets of the wood, and became a rarer and rarer atmosphere, torn by the tree-trunks and the fern. The path led to a small circular clearing, a shaft that sucked the daylight down. It was as if the sunshine were being poured in one stream from a flooded sky, and danced in the dark cup earth held for it. The trees ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... her step-father knew almost as much about birds and squirrels as Miss Brent did about flowers, was not to be appeased till Amherst had scrambled into the pony-cart, wedging his long legs between a fern-box and a lunch-basket, and balancing a Scotch terrier's telescopic body ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... Limpy-toes, "don't touch any bushes except blueberry, cedar, pine, hemlock, sweet fern, bayberry, or peppermint. Those are all safe and you ...
— Grand-Daddy Whiskers, M.D. • Nellie M. Leonard
... enormous crags in threatening attitude far up the heights, the chasms and fissures brightened by a patch of young grass or a small tree, and, nearer the road, the scattered boulders luxuriantly covered with moss and fern, belong to both alike; and, while the bushes of snowy heather, the constant splash of the cascades falling over the rocks in feathery spray, and in the distance the hoary-headed monarchs of the range reaching up towards the sky, make this different from the familiar Welsh ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough
... Victoria—absorbed in her thoughts—driving over a wood road of many puddles that led to the Four Corners, near Avalon. The road climbed the song-laden valley of a brook, redolent now with scents of which the rain had robbed the fern, but at length Victoria reached an upland where the young corn was springing from the, black furrows that followed the contours of the hillsides, where the big-eyed cattle lay under the heavy maples and oaks or gazed ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the stable lantern to give them light, armed with stout sticks with which to poke among the dense undergrowth of laurel, holly, and hazel that formed such a close cover for the game of various sorts with which the wood was so thickly populated. Now and then from her form amid the withered fern a frightened hare leaped among their very feet. Startled rabbits scurried here and there over the soft moss and rustling leaves. The cry of a night-bird from time to time broke the intense stillness of the lonesome place, while more than once they were alarmed by a ...
— Two Little Travellers - A Story for Girls • Frances Browne Arthur
... labor not far off told that camp was being built. Presently the absent five returned, two of the Mayorunas carrying a crude but strong litter constructed from saplings and giant-fern leaves. McKay rose ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel
... enlacing limes, past the fine church, under the hanging woods of Houghton Hill—and here we found a mill, a big, timbered place, with a tiled roof, odd galleries and projecting pent-houses, all pleasantly dusted with flour, where a great wheel turned dripping in a fern-clad cavern of its own, with the scent of the weedy river-water blown back from the plunging leat. Oh, the joyful place of streams! River and leat and back-water here ran clear among willow-clad islands, all fringed deep with meadow-sweet and comfrey and butterbur ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... of the ground, huge fern-like plants with crimson scaled trunks. Toward a clump of ...
— The People of the Crater • Andrew North
... of air, or earth, or water, in their way.” Go through our English lakes, as the writer did recently, after not having visited them for several years, and you will find, for instance, the falls of Lodore, where once the parsley-fern abounded, now entirely stript of it. Just as—to take a parallel case—in a certain stream in Borrowdale, where some years ago the writer caught so many trout that the widow, in whose cottage he lodged, offered ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... Nature might linger for hours. Here is a powerful Brook, which dashes among rocks through a deep glen, hung on every side with a rich and happy intermixture of native wood; here are beds of luxuriant fern, aged hawthorns, and hollies decked with honeysuckles; and fallow-deer glancing and bounding over the lawns and through the thickets. These are the attractions of the retired views, or constitute a foreground for ever-varying pictures of the majestic Lake, forced ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... tinkling waters slipt Down through a frost-leaved forest-crypt, 190 Long, sparkling aisles of steel-stemmed trees Bending to counterfeit a breeze; Sometimes the roof no fretwork knew But silvery mosses that downward grew; Sometimes it was carved in sharp relief With quaint arabesques of ice-fern leaf; Sometimes it was simply smooth and clear For the gladness of heaven to shine through, and here He had caught the nodding bulrush-tops And hung them thickly with diamond drops, 200 That crystalled the beams of moon and sun, And ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... their effect in the sunny landscapes of the South. There they may be seen bending over fields tapestried with Passion-Flowers and verdurous with Myrtles and Orange-trees, and presenting their long shafts to the tendrils of the Trumpet Honeysuckle and the palmate foliage of the Climbing Fern. But the slender Palms, when solitary, afford but little shade. It is when they are standing in groups, their lofty tops meeting and forming a uniform umbrage, that they afford any important protection from the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... assended the first Spur of the mountain with much fatigue, the distance about 3 miles, through an intolerable thickets of Small pine, a groth much resembling arrow wood on the Stem of which there is thorns; this groth about 12 or 15 feet high inter lockd into each other and Scattered over the high fern & fallen timber, added to this the hills were So Steep that I was compelled to draw my Self up by the assistance of those bushes- The Timber on those hills are of the pine Species large and tall maney of them more than 200 feet high & from 8 to 10 feet through at the Stump those hills & ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... mortal eyes danced the Fairy folk. Fire-flies hung in bright clusters on the dewy leaves, that waved in the cool night-wind; and the flowers stood gazing, in very wonder, at the little Elves, who lay among the fern-leaves, swung in the vine-boughs, sailed on the lake in lily cups, or danced on the mossy ground, to the music of the hare-bells, who rung out their merriest peal in honor of ...
— Flower Fables • Louisa May Alcott
... a more beautiful and instructive example of this play of molecular force than that furnished by water. You have seen the exquisite fern-like forms produced by the crystallization of a film of water on a cold window-pane.[15] You have also probably noticed the beautiful rosettes tied together by the crystallizing force during the descent of a snow-shower on a very calm day. The slopes and summits of the Alps are loaded in ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... swelling uplands covered with massy foliage sloped down to its wild, irregular turf soil,—soil poor for pasturage, but pleasant to the eye; with dell and dingle, bosks of fantastic pollards; dotted oaks of vast growth; here and there a weird hollow thorn-tree; patches of fern and gorse. Hoarse and loud cawed the rooks; and deep, deep as from the innermost core of the lovely woodlands came the mellow note of the cuckoo. A few moments more a wind of the road brought the house in sight. ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of the Percys, from which this turret rises, is decorated with the lion of Brabant, and is seated on the brink of a cliff above the town. From this lofty structure the eye, stretching along the coast, may discern the castles of Dunstanbrough and Bamborough: the Fern Islands, dotted upon the face of the waters, the Port of Alemouth, and, at a little distance, the mouth of the river Coquet, with its island and ruined monastery. To the north, a richly cultivated country extends as ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745. - Volume I. • Mrs. Thomson
... happens; little ferns begin to grow and they live a very long time indeed. There is at Rothamsted a bottle of soil that was put up just like this as far back as 1874. For a number of years past a beautiful fern has been growing inside the bottle, and even now it is very healthy and vigorous. If, instead of being kept moist, the rich garden soil is left in a dry shed during the whole of the winter so that it gradually loses ...
— Lessons on Soil • E. J. Russell
... in the woods and hedges, scanning the strange forms of trees, and the poisonous growth of great water-plants, and the parasite twining of honeysuckle and briony. In one of these rambles he discovered a red earth which he made into a pigment, and he found in the unctuous juice of a certain fern an ingredient which he thought made his black ink still more glossy. His book was written all in symbols, and in the same spirit of symbolism he decorated it, causing wonderful foliage to creep about the text, and showing the blossom of certain mystical flowers, with emblems of strange creatures, ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... back into the kitchen to find her father sitting placidly in the rocking-chair by the window. He had lighted his corn-cob pipe, in which he always smoked a mixture of dried sweet-fern as being cheaper than tobacco, and his face wore something resembling a smile—a foxy smile—as he watched his youngest-born ploughing down the hill through the deep snow, while the more obedient Waitstill moved about the room, setting ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... below the spring where the maidenhair fern grew thick and spread out wide, perfect fronds on slender brown stems, shading fairy bowers; and where taller ferns grew high and leaned over like a delicate fairy forest; and where the wild violets grew so thick you could not see the ground beneath ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... a bed of fern and hay in the stable of the ox and the ass, and lay close to them for warmth. And, lo! in the middle of the night the ass brayed and the ox bellowed, ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book II - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... sea, and twenty miles from the nearest coast line. Several distinct levels in the present crater prove that it has eaten its way to its present depth. On the most elevated of these large trees now grow, evidences of many years' tranquillity; lower down we come to shrubs, and lastly to the fern, apparently the most venturesome of the vegetable kingdom; it seems to require nothing but rest and water, for we found it shooting out of crevices where the lava appeared to have undergone no decomposition. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... mummy-case, were tall dark green trees, oaks and ashes, and in between the trees and under them tangled bushes and creeping ivy. There were beech-trees too, but there was nothing under them but their own dead red drifted leaves, and here and there a delicate green fern-frond. ...
— The Story of the Amulet • E. Nesbit
... the sentry was heard, and at that moment, the glare of a lantern fell upon the trees, bordering a field opposite the window. Beyond that field the ground was broken and uneven, covered with tall bushes, fern, and masses of rock, and sloping upwards towards the neighbouring hills. The light drew nearer; the sentry challenged. It was the relief. Their heads in the embrasure of the window, Herrera and the gipsy ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... culinary vegetable. The tender shoots are likewise eaten. The stem is short and knobby, the lower part of each branch (if branches they may be called) prickly, and the blossom yellow. The term paku, applied to it by the Malays, shows that they consider it as partaking of the nature of the fern (filix) and Rumphius, who names it Sayor calappa and Olus calappoides, describes it as an arborescent species of osmunda. It is well depicted in Volume ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... blue, blue sky, as she had never dreamt of: clear sharp purple hills rose up against it. There was a clear rippling little fountain, bursting out of a rock, carved with old, old carvings, broken now and defaced, but shadowed over by lovely maidenhair fern and trailing bindweed; and in a niche above a little roof, sheltering a figure of the Blessed Virgin. Some way off stood a long low house propped up against the rich yellow stone walls and pillars of another old, old building, and ...
— Little Lucy's Wonderful Globe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... grassy level the little burn fell suddenly with a ringing sound into a basin of pure white granite—a drinking-cup with a yard-wide edge of daintiest silver sand. The young man made his way hastily across the water to a little bower beneath the western bank, overhung with birch and fern, half islanded by the swift rush of the mountain streamlet. Here a tiny circle of stones lay on the sand. Hugh Kennedy stooped to examine their position with the most scrupulous care. Five black at intervals, and a white one to the north with a ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... disguise of cast-off weeds, Which for that service had been husbanded, 10 By exhortation of my frugal Dame,— Motley accoutrement, of power to smile At thorns, and brakes, and brambles, and, in truth, More ragged than need was! O'er pathless rocks, Through beds of matted fern and tangled thickets, 15 Forcing my way, I came to one dear nook Unvisited, where not a broken bough Drooped with its withered leaves, ungracious sign Of devastation; but the hazels rose Tall and erect, ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... the locust, but stared hard at the spot where the fish had been laid down upon some fern leaves; but though the latter were still glistening with slime, ...
— First in the Field - A Story of New South Wales • George Manville Fenn
... quiet spirit-healing nook! Which all, methinks, would love; but chiefly he, The humble man, who, in his youthful years, Knew just so much of folly, as had made His early manhood more securely wise! Here he might lie on fern or withered heath, While from the singing lark (that sings unseen The minstrelsy that solitude loves best), And from the sun, and from the breezy air, Sweet influences trembled o'er his frame; And he, with many feelings, many thoughts, Made up a meditative joy, and found Religious meanings in the ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... mulga break the even line of the horizon, and, in the valleys, thickets or belts of bloodwood are seen. In these hollows one may hope to find feed for the camels, for here may grow a few quondongs, acacia, and fern-tree shrubs, and in rare cases some herbage. The beefwood tree, the leaves of which camels, when hard pressed, will eat, alone commands the summit of the undulations. As for animal life—well, one forgets that life exists, until occasionally reminded of the fact by a bounding ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... it was harder for her to tug Jonathan across to the other bars which guarded Cap'n Moseby's berry pasture; he could only toddle feebly when led by a strong hand. It was quite a puzzle for six-year-old Mirandy, but she got him across and under the other bars; then she set him down in a sweet-fern thicket, and bade him keep still; and he ...
— Young Lucretia and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins
... and August, woodcocks are to be found in elevated spots, such as mountains covered with large trees, or in warm open places on their slopes. At the first approach of cold weather they leave the hills, and come down into the plains, concealing themselves in the underwood, or the fern, or in the high grass, when the snow begins to fall. The woodcock is a melancholy bird, and somewhat misanthropic. Its habits are eminently anti-social; it flies but little, so little indeed that its wings ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... upon the green lawn successfully defying an unkind climate, the islands of mingled foliage in profuse, confused beauty, the gay flower beds, the clean gravel paths with their trim borders, the grotto in a shady corner, where fern and moss mingle, all dripping as if from recent showers and make you feel cool in spite of all thermometers, and I say to myself, "Without the Malee all this would not be." Neither with the Malee alone would this be, but something very different. I admit that. But is ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA
... to our raking. Above us, among the stones of the slope, hang bunches of Christmas fern; around the foot of the trees we uncover trailing clusters of gray-green partridge vine, glowing with crimson berries; we rake up the prince's-pine, pipsissewa, creeping-Jennie, and wintergreen red with ripe berries—a whole bouquet of ...
— The Hills of Hingham • Dallas Lore Sharp
... have been told, and do not doubt, That Devon lanes are dim with trees, And shagged with fern, and loved of bees, And all with roses pranked about; I do believe that other-where The woods are ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 5, 1920 • Various
... in a beautiful hall with everything he could desire at his command, and here he pleasantly passed the time ere he retired to rest. In the morning when he awoke, instead of finding himself on a couch in Fairy Hall, be found himself lying on a heap of fern on ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... interspaces, very large valleys, and gently-rising grounds about their sides. These hills, though of a rocky disposition, are, in general, covered, almost to their tops, with trees; but the lower parts, on the sides, frequently only with fern. At the bottom of the harbour, where we lay, the ground rises gently to the foot of the hills, which run across nearly in the middle of the island; but its flat border, on each side, at a very small distance from the sea, becomes quite steep. ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... half raised his hand to his throat. They boy laughed again, a laugh in which the snarl had nearly driven out the chuckle, and then, with another of his astonishing lightning movements, plunged out of view into a yielding tangle of weed and fern. ...
— Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches • Saki (H.H. Munro)
... unclean Hath my insect never seen; But violets and bilberry bells, Maple-sap and daffodels, Grass with green flag half-mast high, Succory to match the sky, Columbine with horn of honey, Scented fern, and agrimony, Clover, catchfly, adder's-tongue And brier-roses, dwelt among; All beside was unknown waste, All was picture as ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... reached the hut, and Raven took out the key from under the stone. Close by, there was a velvet fern frond ready to unfurl. He unlocked the door and they went in. Her last question he did not answer until he had thrown up windows and brought out chairs to the veranda at the west. When they were seated, he went on probing for his ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... I like the woods at night. Don't the fern and the needles smell fine? Lyd, what're you going to do after ...
— Lydia of the Pines • Honore Willsie Morrow
... did not correspond, and he left no mark upon me of any kind. The lesson learned, I used the knowledge certainly; but it did not take me into the region which he knew best. His grove of philosophy was close to the school, in K—— Park, which is a fine enclosure of forest trees, glades, brake-fern and deer. Here, in complete solitude, for we never saw a soul, my sentimental education was begun by this self-appointed professor. As I remember, he was a good-looking lad enough, with a round and merry face, high colour, bright eyes, a moist and laughing ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... remembers from the circumstance that he fabricated for him his first jacket, and that, though he succeeded in sewing on one sleeve to the hole at the shoulder, where it ought to be, he committed the slight mistake of sewing on the other sleeve to one of the pocket-holes. Poor Andrew Fern had heard that his townsman's sloop had been captured by a privateer, and, fidgety with impatience till he had communicated the intelligence where he thought it would tell most effectively, he called on the master's wife, to ask whether she had not heard that all the wind-bound ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... of fancy turn Where the tumbled pippins burn Like embers in the orchard's lap of tangled grass and fern,— There let the old path wind In and out and on behind The cider-press that chuckles ...
— Riley Farm-Rhymes • James Whitcomb Riley
... a cup-shaped structure, composed exteriorly of twigs, grass, and moss, and lined with stalks of maiden-hair fern and fine roots. It is usually placed high up in a fir tree. Colonel Rattray believes that the birds bring up two broods in the year. They lay first in May, and, as soon as the young are able to shift for themselves, a second nest is made. Thus in July both young birds at large and ...
— Birds of the Indian Hills • Douglas Dewar
... of his mind before night, but, like a wise man, not until he had thought the matter well over during a solitary walk. So he made his way through the woods and in due time came to the place where Dick had pointed out to him the ragged man, whom he had found skulking in the fern a short time before. Then it flashed across him suddenly that this man might be the deserter, and he blamed himself for his stupidity in not thinking of it at first. Once again he racked his brains to remember where he had seen the man before, for certainly he had seen ...
— The Drummer's Coat • J. W. Fortescue
... By-and-by a bennet, a bloom of the grass; in time to come the furrow, as it were, shall open, and the great buttercup of the waters will show a broad palm of gold. You never know what will come to the net of the eye next—a bud, a flower, a nest, a curled fern, or whether it will be in the woodland or by the meadow path, at the water's side or on the dead dry heap of fagots. There is no settled succession, no fixed and formal order—always the unexpected; and you cannot say, 'I will go and find this or that.' The sowing of ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... we had left the uplands of Boulogne behind us, lay along the skirts of that desolate marsh in which I had wandered, and so inland, through plains of fern and bramble, until the familiar black keep of the Castle of Grosbois rose upon the left. Then, under the guidance of Savary, we struck to the right down a sunken road, and so over the shoulder of a hill until, on a further slope beyond, we ...
— Uncle Bernac - A Memory of the Empire • Arthur Conan Doyle
... stream in which the Magnolia was resting, her bow against a fern bank, and presently the party was in a solitude that was almost oppressive. There was neither sign nor sound of human being, and the steamer was lost to sight around a bend ...
— The Moving Picture Girls Under the Palms - Or Lost in the Wilds of Florida • Laura Lee Hope
... well be prettier than the drive to Strathfield-saye, passing, as we do, through a great part of Heckfield Heath,* a tract of wild woodland, a forest, or rather a chase, full of fine sylvan beauty—thickets of fern and holly, and hawthorn and birch, surmounted by oaks and beeches, and interspersed with lawny glades and deep pools, letting light into the picture. Nothing can be prettier than the approach to the duke's lodge. And the entrance to the demesne, ...
— The Lost Dahlia • Mary Russell Mitford
... property of the woods which cover this island is, that they are every where of easy access, as there is no undergrowth, except in some of the deepest valleys, where the fern grows exceedingly high, and of which there are very large trees, with trunks of considerable solidity.[270] Some of the English who had been formerly here, had sowed turnips, which have spread much, as have also two or three plantations of small pompions; ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume X • Robert Kerr
... a bush that resembled a great tangle of sea-weeds, interspersed with fern-like shrubs and plants of large leafage shaped like that of the aloe or prickly-pear,—a curious animal about the size and shape of a deer. But as, after bounding away a few paces, it turned round and gazed at me inquisitively, ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Prance, Le Fevre, or Godfrey, in Somerset House or the adjacent Somerset Yard, on October 12. They were likely to know both the Queen's silversmith and 'the Queen's confessor,' and Godfrey they may have known. Prance and the sentries had, for each other, the secret of fern- seed, they walked invisible. This, of itself, is ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... strength, and although burdened with a load of instruments and papers of forty-five pounds weight, continued to pioneer his exhausted companions day after day through an almost impervious tea-tree scrub, closely interwoven with climbing grasses, vines, willows, fern and reeds. Here the Count was to be seen breaking a passage with his hands and knees through the centre of the scrub; there throwing himself at full length among the dense underwood, and thus opening by the weight of his body a pathway for his companions in distress. ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... eleven at night, when a loud-lunged urchin bawled out a false alarm of a local murder in the "latest edition," his whole life was one continual contest with organs, with or without monkeys or babies, shouting fern-vendors, brass bands, broken-winded concertinas, Italian brigands, choruses of family beggars, tearing milk-carts, itinerant twilight ballad-singers, and other disturbers of the public peace. (Groans.) And the result, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, January 25th, 1890 • Various
... robberies of gardens and houses were daily and nightly committed. Damage was also received from the little stock which remained alive; the owners, not having wherewith to feed them, were obliged to turn them loose to browse among the grass and shrubs, or turn up the ground for the fern-root; and as they wandered without any one to prevent their doing mischief, they but too often found an easy passage over fences and through barriers which were now grown weak and perishing. It was however ordered, that the stock should be kept up during the ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins
... his labour, painted the wide landscape in every direction. On mountain sides, and across the undulating lowland, wall or hedge mapped his conquests of nature, little plots won by the toil of successive generations for pasture or for tillage, won from the reluctant wilderness, which loves its fern and gorse, its mosses and heather. Near and far were scattered the little white cottages, each a gleaming speck, lonely, humble; set by the side of some long-winding, unfrequented road, or high on the green upland, trackless save for the feet ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... door, To motor all day without fagging— Not to drive nor to start up the thing. Oh! the joy to see someone else dragging A tow-rope or greasing a spring! Then a fifth murmured, "What about fishing? Fern and heather right up to your knees And a big salmon rushing and swishing 'Mid the smell of the red rowan trees." So the train of opinions drifted And thicker the atmosphere grew, Till piercing the ...
— Fanny Goes to War • Pat Beauchamp
... to be conscious of I know not what breath of creation. I know what this warm wet wind of the west betokens, I know how already, in this morning's sunshine, we could see all the hills touched and accentuated with little delicate golden patches of young fern; how day by day the flowers thicken and the leaves unfold; how already the year is a-tip-toe on the summit of its finished youth; and I am glad and sad to the bottom of my heart at the knowledge. If you knew how different I am ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a light to England? And isn't it the duty of parishes and millionaires to supply light?" She was plucking a fern-leaf to pieces. ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... each other, and Mr. MacAngus had given them, speaking as an old campaigner, some very useful if simple hints, such as always pitching the tent with its back to the wind; and keeping inside a supply of dry wood to light the fires with; and tying fern on Moses's head, against the flies; and carrying cabbage leaves in their own hats, against the heat; and walking with long staves instead of short walking sticks—after this he made them all sit round their fire, and sketched ...
— The Slowcoach • E. V. Lucas
... step; and this may be the reason why we meet with so many large trees as we do, blown down by the wind, even in the thickest part of the woods. All the ground amongst the trees is covered with moss and fern, of both which there is a great variety; but except the flax or hemp plant, and a few other plants, there is very little herbage of any sort, and none that was eatable, that we found, except about a handful of water-cresses, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... knife-grinder and I (for as long as his tent continued pleasantly to interrupt my little wilderness) sat on two stones, and smoked, and plucked grass and talked to the tune of the brown water. His children were mere whelps, they fought and bit among the fern like vermin. His wife was a mere squaw; I saw her gather brush and tend the kettle, but she never ventured to address her lord while I was present. The tent was a mere gipsy hovel, like a sty for pigs. But the grinder himself ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... trees Bending to counterfeit a breeze; Sometimes the roof no fretwork knew But silvery mosses that downward grew; Sometimes it was carved in sharp relief[20] 195 With quaint arabesques[21] of ice-fern leaf; Sometimes it was simply smooth and clear For the gladness of heaven to shine through, and here He had caught the nodding bulrush-tops And hung them thickly with diamond drops, 200 Which crystalled the beams of moon and sun, And made a star of every one: So mortal builder's most rare device ...
— Narrative and Lyric Poems (first series) for use in the Lower School • O. J. Stevenson
... of things seem to lie latent in the air, ready to appear and produce their kind, whenever they light on a proper matrix. The extremely small seeds of fern, mosses, mushrooms, and some other plants, are concealed and wafted about in the air, every part whereof seems replete with seeds of one kind or other. The whole atmosphere seems alive. There is everywhere acid to corrode, and seed to engender. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... Fern hollow—begging the indulgence of those who have read the earlier volume of this series—is a deep, richly vegetated ravine or gully forming one of a series of scenic convolutions of the surface of the earth which gave the neighboring ...
— Campfire Girls at Twin Lakes - The Quest of a Summer Vacation • Stella M. Francis
... not long to wait, for a fierce din inside the jungle, and the excited cries of the beaters, apprised us that game of some sort was afoot. We were eagerly watching, and speculating on the cause of the uproar, when a very fine half-grown tiger cub sprang out of some closely growing fern, and dashed across the narrow opening so quickly, that ere we had time to raise a gun, he had disappeared in some heavy jhamun jungle on the further side of ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... ferns waved gently along the hollows as the slight breeze touched them. They were queer, those ferns. They were not quite so slender and tapering and gothic as the ferns we see to-day. They were a trifle more lush and ragged, and their tips were sometimes almost rounded. But Ab noted little of fern or bird. It was only the general sensuousness that was upon him. The smell of the pines was a partial tonic to the healthy, half-awakened man, and, though he lay back upon the rugged wooden bed and half dozed again, nature had aroused him a trifle beyond the point of relapse into absolute, ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo
... The fern-bushes, therefore, had grown over it; and in several places trees of considerable size had shot up in the midst. These difficulties could scarcely have been surmounted by the utmost caution; and as Fanshawe's thoughts were too deeply fixed upon the ...
— Fanshawe • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... hundred yards and never shook a fern, moved a leaf, or broke a twig. Having reached the brink of the low precipice, they saw the grassy meadow below, the straggling trees, the brook, the group of Indians ...
— The Last Trail • Zane Grey
... enough to carry more than one or two such harvests under such primitive methods of agriculture as only are known to the natives. The lands so cleared were deserted and were soon covered with a strong growth of fern and coarse useless lalang grass, difficult to eradicate, and it is well known that, when a tropical forest is once destroyed and the land left to itself, the new jungle which may in time spring up rarely contains any of the valuable timber trees ...
— British Borneo - Sketches of Brunai, Sarawak, Labuan, and North Borneo • W. H. Treacher
... if to ask protection from man. On such a night as this we will request the reader to follow us toward a district that trenches upon the foot of a dark mountain, from whose precipitous sides masses of gray rock, apparently embedded in heath and fern, protrude themselves in uncouth and gigantic shapes. 'Tis true they were not then visible; but we wish the reader to understand the character of the whole scenery through which we pass. We diverge from the highway into a mountain road, which resembles the body of a serpent when in motion, going ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... made no comment as they went on. Presently they came to a deep rift in the moor through which a stream leaped sparkling. The girl scrambled down, waist-deep in yellow fern, but the other side was steep and stony and she was glad of help when he held out his hand. They made the ascent with some difficulty and on reaching the summit ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... engendereth bad and unwholesome blood, and with its exorbitant heat woundeth them with grievous, hurtful, smart, and noisome vapours. And, as in divers plants and trees there are two sexes, male and female, which is perceptible in laurels, palms, cypresses, oaks, holms, the daffodil, mandrake, fern, the agaric, mushroom, birthwort, turpentine, pennyroyal, peony, rose of the mount, and many other such like, even so in this herb there is a male which beareth no flower at all, yet it is very copious ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... down the path little animals came out of the fern to meet them; the very first that they met were Peter ...
— The Great Big Treasury of Beatrix Potter • Beatrix Potter
... but a shoal of wives upon the heath, And someone saw thy willy-nilly nun Vying a tress against our golden fern. ...
— Queen Mary and Harold • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... paradise, lift their proud and haughty heads above an impenetrable growth which, the guides tell us, is the home of tigers, rhinoceroses, panthers, bears, wild hogs, buffaloes, deer and all sorts of beasts, and snakes as big around as a barrel. Fern trees are lovely, and are found here in their greatest glory, but nevertheless we have foliage at home, and they are no more beautiful than our elms, oaks, and other trees that ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... am afraid I am too matter-of-fact to sympathise very clearly with this form of aestheticism; but here is a charming bit of forest scenery. Look at that old oak with the deer under it; the long and deep range of fern running up from it to that beech-grove on the upland, the lights and shadows on the projections and recesses of the wood, and the blaze of foxglove in its foreground. It is a place in which a poet might look for a ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... years ago, it was impossible to walk the streets without having an advertisement thrust into your hand, of a doctor "who was arrived at the knowledge of the 'Green and Red Dragon,' and had discovered the female fern-seed." Nobody ever knew what this meant; but the "Green and Red Dragon" so amused the people, that the doctor lived very comfortably upon them. About the same time there was pasted a very hard word upon every corner of the streets. This, to the ...
— Isaac Bickerstaff • Richard Steele
... breakfast is the daintiest and prettiest for the bride-elect. Have the table decorations in white. For the center have a large round basket of bride roses, and at each plate tiny French baskets filled with maidenhair fern and white pansies, or apple blossoms, for individual favors. Tie the handle of each basket with white gauze ribbon, looping the baskets together with the ribbon forming a garland for the table. Serve strawberries in large white tulips or bride roses, and have the ...
— Breakfasts and Teas - Novel Suggestions for Social Occasions • Paul Pierce
... under the crowding alders, gathered a big bunch of the purple flag lilies with their silky petals, and started homeward, whistling cheerily as he stepped briskly along the fern-carpeted wood path that wound up the hill under the beeches ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... wild rose, the fern, the lantana, and the honeysuckle, smiled round a succession of highly cultivated terraces, and on every eminence, stood a cluster of conically thatched houses, environed by green hedges, and partially ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... recall a curious imported flower with twisted inner tube which the natives call, with a characteristic touch of daring drollery, "the intestines of the clergyman." Spanish moss is named from a prominent figure of the foreign community "Judge Dole's beard." Some native girls, braiding fern wreaths, called my attention to the dark, graceful fronds which grow in the shade and are prized for such work. "These are the natives," they said; then pointing slyly to the coarse, light ferns burned in the sun they added, "these are the foreigners." After ...
— The Hawaiian Romance Of Laieikawai • Anonymous
... the unbreathable flame of oxygen, they paved the way for the more symmetrical life of those who should follow. If our lungs find in the atmosphere the aliment they need, it is thanks to the inconceivably incoherent forests of arborescent fern. We owe our brains and nerves of to-day to fearful hordes of swimming or flying reptiles. These obeyed the order of their life. They did what they had to do. They modified matter in the fashion ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... yellow as wax, with closed eyes and bluish eyelids, was turned towards the ceiling, no breathing could be discerned: he seemed a corpse. At his feet knelt the Malay, also wrapt in a red shawl. He was holding in his left hand a branch of some unknown plant, like a fern, and bending slightly forward, was gazing fixedly at his master. A small torch fixed on the floor burnt with a greenish flame, and was the only light in the room. The flame did not flicker nor smoke. The Malay did not stir at Fabio's entry, he merely turned his eyes upon him, and again bent ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... his present position appeared as a long circular perspective ending in a shining disk of quivering water at a distance of a hundred feet down. There was a lining of green moss near the top, and nearer still the hart's-tongue fern. ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... mountain is approached, a brown circle of barren eminences may be discerned toward the horizon. At the end of an hour the desert begins; the climate is inimical to life, even to that of plants. A tarn, the tint of burned topaz, lies coldly and sadly between stony slopes whereon a few tufts of fern and heather grow here and there. Half a league higher is a second tarn, which appears still more dismal in the rising mist. Around, patches of snow are sprinkled on the peaks, and these descending in rivulets produce morasses. The small country ponies, with a sure instinct, surmount the bog, and ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... a projection or peninsula of high land, jutting out from the abrupt hills that form the sides of the Trough of Bolland. These hills were rocky and bleak enough towards their summit; lower down they were clothed with tangled copsewood and green depths of fern, out of which a grey giant of an ancient forest-tree would tower here and there, throwing up its ghastly white branches, as if in imprecation, to the sky. These trees, they told me, were the remnants of that forest which existed in the days of the Heptarchy, ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... there was no little excitement on board, the news having oozed out that the sloop was bound for New Zealand, a place in those days little known, save as a wonderful country of tree-fern, pine, and volcano, where the natives were a fierce fighting race, and did not scruple to eat those whom they ...
— The Adventures of Don Lavington - Nolens Volens • George Manville Fenn
... he said, "what guide Me through trackless thickets led, Through thick-stemmed woodlands rough and wide. I found the water's bed. The watercourses were my guide; I traveled grateful by their side, Or through their channel dry; They led me through the thicket damp, Through brake and fern, the beaver's camp, Through beds of granite cut my road, And their resistless friendship showed: The falling waters led me, The foodful waters fed me, And brought me to the lowest land, Unerring to the ocean sand. The ...
— Graded Poetry: Seventh Year • Various
... She returned to where she had stood when first beholding it, and looked in the same direction, but nothing reappeared. The only object at all resembling a little boy or girl was the upper tuft of a bunch of fern, which had prematurely yellowed to about the colour of a fair child's hair, and waved occasionally in the breeze. This, however, did not sufficiently explain the phenomenon, and she returned to make inquiries ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... to rob us of the notion that we are a veritable cargo of Columbuses, coming to colonize some new and virgin land, until now utterly unknown to the rest of the world. The shores we have passed along have presented to us every possible variety of savage wilderness, rocks and bush and scrub and fern, but no appearance of settlement at all, not even any signs of ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... more. He was actively employed at that place, and wrote to me frequently, describing the family, to which he was much attached, the whimsicalities of his landlord—a thorough old Scotian, who amused himself by waking the echoes of the wilderness with the bagpipes,—the noble fern trees and the fine black cockatoos. He also continued his practice in surgery, but I believe he made no charge, as, not being duly licensed, he considered he had no right to do so. He returned to Ballaarat ...
— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills
... looked decked in her robe of virgin white. Hill and valley were one sheet of 'innocent snow;' and every twig, leaf, and blade of grass; every spray of the furze and heath; and every broad, drooping leaf of that beautiful fern the hart's tongue (Scolopendrium vulgare), was coated with hoar-frost, and sparkling in the rosy sunbeams like the flowers in a magic garden. At Sherbrook Lake, where a rivulet of clear water usually flows along the bottom of the ravine down to the sea, there ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 427 - Volume 17, New Series, March 6, 1852 • Various
... fern to rust; The shouldering hills to level dust,— This is the law of rhythmic nature, The ebb and flow of its may ...
— Song-waves • Theodore H. Rand
... most decidedly in the affirmative. It is well known that these Aborigines in no instance cultivate the soil, but subsist entirely by hunting and fishing, and on the wild roots they find in certain localities (especially the common fern), with occasionally a little wild honey; indigenous fruits being exceedingly rare. The whole race is divided into tribes, more or less numerous, according to circumstances, and designated from the ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... low wall and clinging fast with its many feet to the rough surface; a tuft of grass roots itself between two of the stones, where a pinch or two of wayside dust has been moistened into nutritious soil for it; a small bunch of fern grows in another crevice; a deep, soft, verdant moss spreads itself along the top and over all the available inequalities of the fence; and where nothing else will grow, lichens stick tenaciously to the bare stones and variegate the monotonous gray ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Bill), and several other respectable land-owners and farmers of the county of Wilts, to take into consideration the propriety of presenting Petitions to both Houses of Parliament, on behalf of the proprietors and occupiers of land. Thomas Grove, Esq. of Fern, one of the gentlemen who called the meeting, having taken the chair, Mr. Benett addressed them at a very considerable length in favour of a petition that he submitted for their adoption, expressive of the serious injury already sustained by the farmer, and the probable ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 3 • Henry Hunt
... her fern-seed doth bestow, The kernel of the mistletoe; And here and there as Puck should go, With terror to affright him, She night-shade strews to work him ill, Therewith her vervain and her dill, That hindreth witches of their will, ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... and his name was Sir Rudolf of Ruppertshain. It was a hot afternoon; the sunlight made a chequered pattern through the forest trees. His bag was heavy with game, and he whistled merrily as he strode between the oak-trees and bracken fern. He had a light heart and an easy conscience, few enemies and many friends, and added to these advantages was the exhilarating feeling ...
— Fairy Tales from the German Forests • Margaret Arndt
... Alps the Roman used chiefly the Brenner route, which by a low saddle unites the deep reentrant valleys of the Adige and Inn rivers, and thus surmounts the barrier by a single pass. However, a short cut northward over the Chalk Alps by the Fern Pass made closer connection with Augusta Vindelicorum (Augsburg). The Romans seem to have been ignorant of the St. Gotthard, which, though high, is the summit of an unbroken ascent from Lake Maggiore up the ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... yuzuri-ha symbolises hope that the father will not pass away before his son has become a vigorous man, well able to succeed him as the head of the family. Therefore, on every New Year's Day, the leaves of the yuzuriha, mingled with fronds of fern, are attached to the shimenawa which is then suspended before every ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... and an unusual melancholy seized upon Millicent as they moved down-hill across the long, sad-colored slopes of heather. Then they reached a bare wood where dead leaves that rustled in the rising wind lay in drifts among the withered fern and the slender birch trunks rose about them somberly. The light had almost gone, the gathering gloom reacted upon both of them, and there was in the girl's mind a sense of something left unsaid. Once or twice she glanced ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... put a teaspoon of cracked ice in the bottom of each shell; fill with the pulp, mixed thoroughly with powdered sugar and a little sherry, if desired; and place a maraschino cherry or bit of bright-colored jelly in the centre of each. Lay on paper doilies or surround with bits of asparagus fern. ...
— The International Jewish Cook Book • Florence Kreisler Greenbaum
... collegiate church, and at first contended vigorously for the scholastic theology as against the doctrines of the Reformers. His views were entirely changed, however, on the execution of Patrick Hamilton, abbot of Fern, in 1528. He had been chosen to meet Hamilton in controversy, with a view to convincing him of his errors, but the arguments of the Scottish proto-martyr, and above all the spectacle of his heroism at the stake, impressed Alesius so powerfully that he was entirely won ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... journeys about that fag end of the universe in the pursuit of knowledge. We read of his walking thirty-two miles in a soaking rain to the top of a mountain, and bringing home only a plant of white heather. On another day he walked thirty-six miles to find a peculiar kind of fern. Again he walked for twenty-four hours in hail, rain, and wind, reaching home at three o'clock in the morning. But at seven he was up and ready for work as usual. He carried heavy loads, too, when he went searching for minerals and fossils. In one ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... fancy turn Where the tumbled pippins burn Like embers in the orchard's lap of tangled grass and fern,— There let the old path wind In and out and on behind The cider-press that chuckles as ...
— Riley Farm-Rhymes • James Whitcomb Riley
... was surrounded by an atmosphere absolutely fatal to animal life; an atmosphere which, while it stimulated vegetable growth, no living thing could breathe and continue to live. Hence it was, that vegetation, gigantic almost beyond conception, covered its surface. Fern, which is now a pigmy plant, nowhere higher than a few feet, grew tall and overshadowing like great oaks, while oaks, it is fair to presume, towered thousands of feet towards the sky. These stupendous forests stood alone upon the surface of the earth; no animals ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... name to the pool, which, reflecting this massive and dusky barrier, appeared to partake of its colour. On the opposite side was a heathy hill, whose autumnal bloom had not yet faded from purple to russet; its surface was varied by the dark green furze and the fern, and in many places gray cliffs, or loose stones of the same colour, formed a contrast to the ruddy precipice to which they lay opposed. A natural road of beautiful sand was formed by a beach, which, extending all the way around the lake, separated its waters from the precipitous ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... left, but not a bird can you discover; and still they continue to start up, now here, now there, till you are ready to question whether, indeed, "eyes were made for seeing." The "snow-flakes" wear protective colors, and, like most other animals, are of opinion that, for such as lack the receipt of fern-seed, there is often nothing safer than to sit still. The worse the weather, the less timorous they are, for with them, as with wiser heads, one thought drives out another; and it is nothing uncommon, when times are hard, to see them stay quietly ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... The lower branches were white and shining, relieved here and there by brown patches of bark which curled up like old parchment as they shelled away from the inner bark. The ground beneath the tree was carpeted with a velvety moss with little plots of grass and clusters of maiden-hair fern growing on it. From under an overhanging rock on the bank a spring ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... march to-day is described as being through the most abominable country that can well be imagined, being a continuation of loose white sandy ranges, thickly covered with low bush from three to eight feet in height, broom, fern, grass-tree ('Xanthoraea'), pandanus, and "five-corner" bushes, being thickly matted together with prickly vine. Not a tree relieved the monotony of this waste, and what was worse, not a blade of grass was seen for miles. Several deep creeks were crossed, all running ...
— The Overland Expedition of The Messrs. Jardine • Frank Jardine and Alexander Jardine
... in a strange way, as if he liked her terse creed, and would fain have heard it a second time. Then suddenly he leant back with his head against a corner of the piano. The fronds of a maidenhair fern hanging in delicate profusion almost hid his face. He was essentially muscular in his thoughts, and did not make the most of his dramatic effects. The next remark was made by a pair of long legs ending off with patent-leather boots which were not quite new. The ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... Sat to sew, Just where a patch of fern did grow; There, as she yawned, And yawn wide did she, Floated some seed Down her gull-e-t; And look you once, And look you twice, Poor old Tillie Was gone in a trice. But oh, when the wind Do a-moaning come, 'Tis poor old Tillie Sick for home; And oh, when a voice In the mist ...
— Peacock Pie, A Book of Rhymes • Walter de la Mare
... took its rise. Here a stream of considerable force thundered along between high walls of rock. It was a picturesque spot; rowan-trees hung from clefts in the crags, their bright berries rivalling the scarlet of the hips and haws; green fronds of fern bent at the water's edge, and brilliant carpets of moss clothed the boulders. At one point a great tree-trunk, a giant of the fells, rotten through many years of braving the strong west wind, had fallen and lay across the torrent. It stretched from ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... four or five feet high, stretching away below, into the cup of the camp or citadel. I did not dare to stand up, lest I should be seen. I burrowed my way among the ferns over the wall into the hollow, worming my way towards the edge of the fern clump so that I could see. In a minute, I was gazing through the fern-stems into the camp itself; it was a ...
— Martin Hyde, The Duke's Messenger • John Masefield
... the door, To motor all day without fagging— Not to drive nor to start up the thing. Oh! the joy to see someone else dragging A tow-rope or greasing a spring! Then a fifth murmured, "What about fishing? Fern and heather right up to your knees And a big salmon rushing and swishing 'Mid the smell of the red rowan trees." So the train of opinions drifted And thicker the atmosphere grew, Till piercing the ...
— Fanny Goes to War • Pat Beauchamp
... the table to see how Lady Alice took the remark, but she was rearranging some geraniums and a spray of fern in her waistband, and did not seem to hear. She was a slight colorless girl of nineteen, with regular features, an unformed though rather graceful figure, ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... gloomy boughs Had charms for him; and here he loved to sit, His only visitant a straggling sheep, The stone-chat, or the glancing sand-piper; And on these barren rocks, with fern and heath And juniper and thistle sprinkled o'er, Fixing his downcast eye, he many an hour A morbid pleasure nourished, tracing here An emblem of his own unfruitful life; And, lifting up his head, he then would gaze On the more distant scene,—how lovely 't is Thou seest,—and ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... grove, copse, coppice, bocage[obs3], tope, clump of trees, thicket, spinet, spinney; underwood, brushwood; scrub; boscage, bosk[obs3], ceja[Sp], chaparal, motte [obs3][U.S.].; arboretum &c. 371. bush, jungle, prairie; heath, heather; fern, bracken; furze, gorse, whin; grass, turf; pasture, pasturage; turbary[obs3]; sedge, rush, weed; fungus, mushroom, toadstool; lichen, moss, conferva[obs3], mold; growth; alfalfa, alfilaria[obs3], banyan; blow, blowth[obs3]; floret[obs3], petiole; pin grass, timothy, yam, yew, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... prayer he said; So far was heard the mighty knell, The stag sprung up on Cheviot Fell, Spread his broad nostril to the wind, Listed before, aside, behind, Then couched him down beside the hind, And quaked among the mountain fern, To hear that sound so dull ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... warning. There was a rush for the boats by all but Janstins, who seemed as one amazed, and incapable of action at the sight of the monster. I could not leave him to the fate which threatened him, so, running to his assistance, I dragged him down behind some fern trees, where we hid out of sight of the mother-bird, who seemed bewildered by the unaccustomed sound of firearms, and perplexed at the death of her chick, for which she could not account. But we both knew that her inaction was momentary, ...
— Adventures in Southern Seas - A Tale of the Sixteenth Century • George Forbes
... ornamental trees. There is here a pleasing vista of flowering plants, tall palms, and varied trees; we examined an immense tea plant twelve feet in diameter, a fine clump of tree ferns, and a peculiar silver fern from New Zealand,—also a wax palm from New Granada, the leaves of which are covered with a wax substance from which good candles can be made; and a fernery with twenty-six thousand plants. There is also ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... she had never dreamt of: clear sharp purple hills rose up against it. There was a clear rippling little fountain, bursting out of a rock, carved with old, old carvings, broken now and defaced, but shadowed over by lovely maidenhair fern and trailing bindweed; and in a niche above a little roof, sheltering a figure of the Blessed Virgin. Some way off stood a long low house propped up against the rich yellow stone walls and pillars of another old, old building, and with a great ...
— Little Lucy's Wonderful Globe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... shady knoll o'erlooks a dale Where Earn meanders down the vale; A knoll enwreathed in oak and fern, The sweetest nook in all Strathearn. The morn there breaks with earliest ray, Here latest shines the lingering day, There summer reigns supremely fair, And winter ev'n is lovely there. Its eastern prospect looks entire ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... at great expense of labour; they were evidently expecting we should attack and perhaps turn them out of Majuba, although the slope of the hill on the south side is quite too precipitous for such an operation. I picked up some fern and plants near where Colley fell, as a memento. We took an hour and a half to get down again, meeting General Buller and his Staff walking up to inspect the hill, and I rode back ten miles to Volksrust blessed with a headache from the steep climb and strong air. The view ...
— With the Naval Brigade in Natal (1899-1900) - Journal of Active Service • Charles Richard Newdigate Burne
... meadows, harmonizing in their semi-unconsciousness with the large gray earth; mist hung in the sedges, floated evanescent upon the surface of the water, within reach of his oars, floated and went out in the sunshine. But on the verge of an oak wood, amid tangled and tawny masses of fern and grass, a hound stopped and looked up. Then the huntsman appeared galloping along the upland, and turning in his saddle, he ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... are mines of carbon once abstracted from the atmosphere by plants. In these coal-beds are often found fern leaves, toads, whole trees, and in short all forms of organized matter. These all existed as living things before the great floods, and at the breaking away of the barriers of the immense lakes, of which our present lakes were merely the deep ...
— The Elements of Agriculture - A Book for Young Farmers, with Questions Prepared for the Use of Schools • George E. Waring
... plains where the russet path met the highway was an old well. Here the brooding boys and girls were accustomed to bring their loves and quarrels; here they hoisted the bucket from its glittering black depths, poured water on tight bunches of anemone, fern, and Dutchman's breeches, took long, gasping country drinks, and played all the pranks youth plays when relaxed beside its subtle, laughing ally—water. As the Sunday sun went down the boys and girls discussed the strange phenomenon of the new house whose enigmatic walls ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... the Old Red Sandstone,—we find this second class not inadequately represented. In its lowest fossiliferous beds we detect a Lycopodite which not a little resembles one of the commonest of our club mosses,—Lycopodium clavatum,—with a minute fern and a large striated plant resembling a calamite, and evidently allied to an existing genus of Acrogens, the equisetaceae. In the Middle Old Red Sandstone there also occurs a small fern, with some trace of a larger; and one of its best preserved vegetable organisms ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... carved black wood, panels of Chinese embroidery in imperial yellow, and a neutral mauve carpet. The effect, with glittering iridescent pyramids of glass, massive frosted repousse silver, burnished gold-plate and a wide table decoration of orchids and fern, was tropical and intense. It was evident to Linda that the Feldts were ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... interest of the observations made during his stay at Rio, when tropical nature was still a fresh and unexplored page to the young observer, are wonderful. Cabbage palms, liana creepers, luxuriant fern leaves—roads, bridges, and soil—planarian worms, frogs which climbed perpendicular sheets of glass, the light of fireflies, brilliant butterflies, fights between spiders and wasps, the victories of ants over difficulties, the habits of monkeys, the little Brazilian boys practising ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... the jungle to try and make my way up the opposite side where the other monkeys had fallen. It was dangerous work, for the rocks were covered with a thin layer of earth which supported a dense growth of vegetation. If I tried to let myself down a steep slope by clinging to a thick fern it would almost invariably strip away with a long layer of dirt and send ...
— Camps and Trails in China - A Narrative of Exploration, Adventure, and Sport in Little-Known China • Roy Chapman Andrews and Yvette Borup Andrews
... a giant fern from Australia that measured thirty-two feet—the largest, so I wuz told, in Europe or America. Thirty-two feet! And there I have felt so good and even proud-sperited over my fern I took up out of ...
— Samantha at the World's Fair • Marietta Holley
... sweet and fresh, although not light to breathe as it is in spring. One felt something of ripeness, maturity, completion—those harvest perfumes that one gets so strong in Switzerland and Northern Italy, together with the heavier touch of sun-dried earth, decaying fruit, turning fern. When the birds fell silent Mavis took up their song, walked faster; and all things on the earth and in the heaven over the earth seemed to be adding themselves together to increase the sum of ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... radiating lines of spindling rubber trees, all underbrush cleared, all native growths vanished. From Kuala Lumpur to Kuala Kubu at the very foot of the mountain backbone of the Malay Peninsula, the same holds true. And where some area appears not under cultivation, the climbing fern and a coarse, useless "lalang" grass covers every inch of ground. One can hardly imagine a more complete blotting out of the native fauna and flora of any one limited region. And ever-extending roads for the ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... than the drive to Strathfield-saye, passing, as we do, through a great part of Heckfield Heath,* a tract of wild woodland, a forest, or rather a chase, full of fine sylvan beauty—thickets of fern and holly, and hawthorn and birch, surmounted by oaks and beeches, and interspersed with lawny glades and deep pools, letting light into the picture. Nothing can be prettier than the approach to the duke's lodge. And the entrance to the demesne, through a deep dell dark with magnificent firs, from ...
— The Lost Dahlia • Mary Russell Mitford
... and I was spending the autumn at a village by the New Forest. One day I came upon a man kneeling under a hedge, examining some object on the ground,—fern or flower, or perhaps insect. His costume showed that he was no native of the locality; I took him for a stray townsman, probably a naturalist. He wore a straw hat and a rough summer suit; a wallet hung ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... very happy now. All her pretty pictures, and little brackets, and her mother's stands and vases in the gray parlor, were hung with the lovely, wreathing, fairy stems of star-leaved, blossomy fern; and the sweet, dry scent was a perpetual subtle message. That day in the train from East Keaton was a day to pervade the winter, as this woodland breath pervaded the old city house. Sylvie could wait with what she had, sure that, sometime, more was coming. ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... riverside causeway, under enlacing limes, past the fine church, under the hanging woods of Houghton Hill—and here we found a mill, a big, timbered place, with a tiled roof, odd galleries and projecting pent-houses, all pleasantly dusted with flour, where a great wheel turned dripping in a fern-clad cavern of its own, with the scent of the weedy river-water blown back from the plunging leat. Oh, the joyful place of streams! River and leat and back-water here ran clear among willow-clad islands, all fringed deep with meadow-sweet and comfrey and butterbur ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... bite at the snake a few inches below its head, and the latter instantly retaliates by striking its enemy with its poisonous fangs. Then an extraordinary thing happens. The iguana will let go his hold and straightway make for a kind of fern, which he eats in considerable quantities, the object of this being to counteract the effects of the poison. When he thinks he has had enough of the antidote he rushes back to the scene of the encounter and resumes the attack; the snake always waits there ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... stones, even diving for them. In the shallow parts of the rivers and in the brooks, following the course of the stream, two stone walls a foot or two high are built. These walls converge at the lower end and form a channel, in which is placed horizontally a mat of stalks of the eagle fern (Pteris aquilina). When the fish attempt to cross this mat, through which the water passes freely, they are intercepted. Often the fish caught in this way are only an inch long, but none is too small for a Tarahumare ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... the dimness beyond the cavern-mouth, the cry was repeated, and presently was heard a panting and 'plaining, a snuffling and a shuffling, and into the light of the fire hobbled the old Witch. Beholding Jocelyn sitting cross-legged on his couch of fern, she paused and, leaning on her crooked stick, viewed him with her ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... immense flat slabs or blocks of rock, often split in a vertical direction. I saw long fissures of eight or ten feet in breadth, and from ten to fifteen feet in depth. In these clefts the flowers blossom earlier, and the fern grows taller and more luxuriantly, than ...
— Visit to Iceland - and the Scandinavian North • Ida Pfeiffer
... arms, to arms, ye leaves! By-and-by a bennet, a bloom of the grass; in time to come the furrow, as it were, shall open, and the great buttercup of the waters will show a broad palm of gold. You never know what will come to the net of the eye next—a bud, a flower, a nest, a curled fern, or whether it will be in the woodland or by the meadow path, at the water's side or on the dead dry heap of fagots. There is no settled succession, no fixed and formal order—always the unexpected; ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... of it. Thus we speak not of repose in a stone, because the motion of a stone has nothing in it of energy nor vitality, neither its repose of stability. But having once seen a great rock come down a mountain side, we have a noble sensation of its rest, now bedded immovably among the under fern, because the power and fearfulness of its motion were great, and its stability and negation of motion are now great in proportion. Hence the imagination, which delights in nothing more than the enhancing of the characters ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... children was indeed lovely. Perfectly level ground covered with the richest moss, out of which rose broad flat rocks, and along side of which, not many yards distant, ran a clear little stream on whose banks the feathery fern grew, and into which it dipped its graceful frond. On the other side of the stream the wood was more dense, but through it a broad path led to a bend ...
— 'Our guy' - or, The elder brother • Mrs. E. E. Boyd
... they can see the green feathery tops of the palm-trees before them. The palms have no branches, but only great clusters of fern-like leaves at the top of the tree, under which ...
— The Seven Little Sisters Who Live on the Round Ball - That Floats in the Air • Jane Andrews
... feet. The firs on the summit grew out to the very edge and stretched their dark arms over us. Every cranny of the rock was filled with tufts of white and pink flowers, and the moisture, trickling from above, betrayed itself in long lines of moss and fern. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... the grace and vitality of every hour of their existence. Suppose you have sense and cleverness enough to translate the essential character of this beauty into forms expressible by simple lines—therefore expressible by thread—you might then have a series of fern-patterns which would each contain points of distinctive interest and beauty, and of scientific truth, and yet be variable by fancy, with quite as much ease as the meaningless Indian one. Similarly, there is no form of leaf, of flower, or of insect, which might not become suggestive ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... Grey!" she cried, and everyone gathered round to see what she had found. Even Susie peered into the hole, and poked a bit of fern gently at the toad, which sat there ...
— The Kitchen Cat, and other Tales • Amy Walton
... gave a tug at mine, and I followed. We were in absolute darkness. Sometimes the frond of a giant fern brushed against my cheek, or the sharp-pointed leaf of a palm stung my face, but that was all. The girl led us steadily ...
— Anting-Anting Stories - And other Strange Tales of the Filipinos • Sargent Kayme
... day, two friends went out to a moor to gather fern, attended by a boy with a bottle of wine and a box of provisions. As they were straying about, they saw at the foot of a hill a fox that had brought out its cub to play; and whilst they looked on, struck by the strangeness ...
— Tales of Wonder Every Child Should Know • Various
... covered with large trees, or in warm open places on their slopes. At the first approach of cold weather they leave the hills, and come down into the plains, concealing themselves in the underwood, or the fern, or in the high grass, when the snow begins to fall. The woodcock is a melancholy bird, and somewhat misanthropic. Its habits are eminently anti-social; it flies but little, so little indeed that its wings seem scarcely of ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... of her sleeping sister to inhale a breath of morning breeze and murmur a morning prayer, as she gazed from her loophole over the woods with a vague, never-quenchable hope of seeing something, she became aware of something very stealthy below—the rustling of a fox, or a hare in the fern mayhap, though she could not see to the bottom of the quarry, but she clung to the bar, craned forward, and beheld far down a shaking of the ivy and white-flowered rowan; then a hand, grasping the root of a little sturdy birch, then a yellow head gradually drawn up, till ...
— Two Penniless Princesses • Charlotte M. Yonge
... at eve, The level sunshine glimmers with green light. Oh! 'tis a quiet spirit-healing nook! Which all, methinks, would love; but chiefly he, The humble man, who, in his youthful years, Knew just so much of folly, as had made His early manhood more securely wise! Here he might lie on fern or withered heath, While from the singing lark (that sings unseen The minstrelsy that solitude loves best), And from the sun, and from the breezy air, Sweet influences trembled o'er his frame; And he, with many feelings, many ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... delighted spectators and announcing Act II of the play. It is a night scene in a wood near Athens; mossy banks and green trees; clouds and twinkling stars in the heavens; forms of fairies sitting about like humming birds, or resting in nodding fern leaves. They sing in quick, short rhymes, suiting the tempo ...
— Shakespeare's Christmas Gift to Queen Bess • Anna Benneson McMahan
... a man variously and mysteriously alive, very different from every other man and especially from certain kinds of man. When you look at a larch wood with a floor of fern in October at the end of twilight, you are not content to have that wood described as so many hundred poles growing on three acres of land, the property of a manufacturer of gin. Still less was Borrow content to sit down at Oulton, while the blast howled amid the pines which nearly ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... arriving from every direction. There were the Blue Water Children, bright pebbles around their necks, and white sea shells in their blue hair. The Forest Children were crowned with maidenhair fern. The Tree Girl was the most beautiful of all in her silver cobweb frock and her cloudy hair. The Tree Man stood still in the shadow, but his long white beard gleamed out, and his deep eyes. Wild Thyme wore a rope of the flower that is named ...
— The Little House in the Fairy Wood • Ethel Cook Eliot
... received from the little stock which remained alive; the owners, not having wherewith to feed them, were obliged to turn them loose to browse among the grass and shrubs, or turn up the ground for the fern-root; and as they wandered without any one to prevent their doing mischief, they but too often found an easy passage over fences and through barriers which were now grown weak and perishing. It was ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins
... of the woods which cover this island is, that they are every where of easy access, as there is no undergrowth, except in some of the deepest valleys, where the fern grows exceedingly high, and of which there are very large trees, with trunks of considerable solidity.[270] Some of the English who had been formerly here, had sowed turnips, which have spread much, as have also two or three ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume X • Robert Kerr
... suddenly became conscious of what she was carrying, a little flower-pot, in which bloomed a handful of Roman hyacinths, their delicate and lovely blossoms nestling among the tender green of their own leaves, and a bit of hardy fern. It was her only treasure, which she had bought for a few pence in the market one morning, and she had nothing else to bring ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... whose name I have forgotten, sent me a collection of fossils—tiny mollusk shells beautifully marked, and bits of sandstone with the print of birds' claws, and a lovely fern in bas-relief. These were the keys which unlocked the treasures of the antediluvian world for me. With trembling fingers I listened to Miss Sullivan's descriptions of the terrible beasts, with uncouth, unpronounceable names, which once went tramping through the primeval forests, ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... the upper chambers, and found in one a rough bed of fern leaves, and, having supped from the scrip he carried with him, he composed himself to sleep, glad that at least a roof and thick walls shielded him from the freezing cold which ...
— King Arthur's Knights - The Tales Re-told for Boys & Girls • Henry Gilbert
... after this, Arthur thought that he had had about enough dancing for awhile, and went and sat by himself in a secluded spot under the shadow of a tree-fern in a temporary conservatory put up outside a bow-window. The Chinese lantern that hung upon the fern had gone out, leaving his chair in total darkness. Presently a couple, whom he did not recognize, for he only saw their backs, strayed ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... beneath was broken by the gilding of a ray of sunshine on a lower twig, or on a white trunk, but the floor of the vast arcades was almost entirely of the russet brown of the fallen leaves, save where a fern or holly bush made a spot of green. At the foot of the slope lay a stretch of pasture ground, some parts covered by "lady-smocks, all silver white," with the course of the little stream through the midst ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... that are the most violent cathartics you ever dreamed of. And a little silvery fern that tastes like vanilla flavored candy and paralyzes you stiff as a board on the third swallow. It's an hour before you come ...
— Space Prison • Tom Godwin
... bosom, as a mother reposes with her baby at her breast. The same security of life pervades every woody shrub: the alder and the birch have their catkins all ready for the first day of spring, and the sweet-fern has even now filled with fragrance its folded blossom. Winter is no such solid bar between season and season as we fancy, but only a slight check and interruption: one may at any time produce these March blossoms by bringing the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... of green glass. All up the slender stems of these tall tree-ferns were the most beautiful little plants, and many stems were twined, from the earth to their feather-like fronds, with tender creeping ferns—the fronds of which were so fine and close, that it seemed as if the tree-fern were wrapped up in a lovely little fern coat. Even crumbling dead trees, and decaying tree-ferns, did not look dead, because some beautiful moss, or lichen, or little ferns had clung to them, and made them more beautiful than ...
— Dot and the Kangaroo • Ethel C. Pedley
... cattle, hogs, or mushrooms, or mankind. The farm was not so large or rambling as to tire the mind or foot, yet wide enough and full of change—rich pasture, hazel copse, green valleys, fallows brown, and golden breast-lands pillowing into nooks of fern, clumps of shade for horse or heifer, and for rabbits sandy warren, furzy cleve for hare and partridge, not without a little mere for willows and for wild-ducks. And the whole of the land, with a general slope of liveliness and rejoicing, spread itself well to the sun, with a strong ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... of its flight, neither was he so active, however willing, in recovering the truant. Why, Dulcie found his own hat for him, and put it on his head to boot one day. He had deposited it on a stone, that he might the better look in the face a dripping rock, shaded with plumes of fern and tufts of grass, and formed into mosaic by tiny sprays of geranium faded into crimson and gold. It was a characteristic of Will that while he was so fanciful in his interpretation, the smallest, commonest text sufficed him. The strolls of these short ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... flowers and slender red stem of the dogs-bane, and the coarser stem and berry of the poke, which are both common in remoter and wilder scenes; and if "the sun casts such a reflecting heat from the sweet fern," as makes him faint, when he is climbing the bare hills, as they complained who first penetrated into these parts, the cool fragrance of the swamp pink restores him again, when ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... raking. Above us, among the stones of the slope, hang bunches of Christmas fern; around the foot of the trees we uncover trailing clusters of gray-green partridge vine, glowing with crimson berries; we rake up the prince's-pine, pipsissewa, creeping-Jennie, and wintergreen red with ripe berries—a whole bouquet of evergreens, exquisite, fairy-like forms that ...
— The Hills of Hingham • Dallas Lore Sharp
... radishes, thirty-eight inches of lettuce, four tomato plants, two hills of corn, three hills of beans and about four yards of early peas. In addition to this Ruth had squeezed a geranium into one corner and a fern into another and planted sweet alyssum around the whole business. Everyone out here planned to raise his own vegetables. It was supposed to cut down expenses but I noticed the market man ...
— One Way Out - A Middle-class New-Englander Emigrates to America • William Carleton
... grasses topped with red and yellow fern-like fronds grew rankly all about us to the height of several feet above ...
— Warlord of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... begin to the south, and so to proceed eastward, by the parishes of Greatham, Lysse, Rogate, and Trotton, in the county of Sussex; by Bramshot, Hadleigh, and Kingsley. This royalty consists entirely of sand covered with heath and fern, but is somewhat diversified with hills and dales, without having one standing tree in the whole extent. In the bottoms, where the waters stagnate, are many bogs, which formerly abounded with subterraneous trees, ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1 • Gilbert White
... witch crease built calf search script eaves squint half fern guess heave live talk kern start leap stick walk sperm wrath knee cliff chalk serve floor spleen writ lawn were czar have bronze daub herb haunch frank buzz fault strength flaunt slake snatch spawn sneak haunt smack dredge drift purse sharp clamp ...
— McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book • W. H. McGuffey
... sound, but feeling in her voice, and that is what aunt means; but you know she never says all she means,—she isn't one of the kind. Rachel is always doing little things for her, and bringing home bunches of sweet-fern and everlasting. Even if my plan upsets now, much will be gained,—for aunt can't get back her liking, I have found a dear friend, and Rachel a good place. Your name has been mentioned, but only as Charley. I am in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... him by his blood. They found his broken body at last. They took it up tenderly and with many tears, and laid it beneath the moss and fern. ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... immense crater of a volcano, the amphitheatre quite unbroken, and larger than that of Vesuvius, but covered with wood, and the bottom with very fine trees of various sorts and with fern—very wild and picturesque. There are several little hillocks, supposed to have been small craters; but although it is proved that this was a volcano from the lava under the soil and from its shape, there is no mention of it as an active volcano, ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... but I keep eatin' these here little plates of cut-up things and waiting for the real stuff, and first thing I know I get a spoonful of coffee in something like you put eye medicine into, and I know it's all over. Last time I was out I hid up a dish of these here salted almuns under a fern and et the whole lot from time to time, kind of absent like. It helped some, ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... indecent because of its pretense at decency. It is something like those poisoned tropical forests, fever-infested, which were in the land of my birth, beautiful outwardly, with great vivid flowers, high palms, towering trees of fern, all garlanded with creepers and lovely wild growth,—glades of fair shadow inviting to rest, yet poisonous so that to sleep ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... for us in ballads our homespun legends. They have imaged in verse the beauty of New England's hills and waters. As we read there comes the whiff of fragrance which transports us to the hillside pasture where the sweet fern and sorrel grow, or the salt breeze of the sea blows again on our cheeks, or the rippling Merrimac sings in our ears, or the heights of Katahdin or Wachusett, lift our eyes upward. Finally, our poets, in their characters, disprove the reproach that a democracy can produce ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... bright fall flowers raised their proud little heads; the old fence, broken down in places, where bushes burst through and half filled the gap; bright hips on the wild rosebushes, tufts of yellow fern leaves, brilliant handfuls of red and yellow which here a maple and there a pepperidge held out over the road; the bushy, bosquey, look which the uncut undergrowth gave the wood on either hand; the gleams of soft green light, the bands of shadow, the deeper ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... at her, he sprang down the knoll, and plunging through the grass and fern was soon ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... magnificence. She often went thither to wash the linen of the family beneath the shade of the two cocoa-trees, and thither too she sometimes led her goats to graze. While she was making cheeses of their milk, she loved to see them browse on the maiden-hair fern which clothes the steep sides of the rock, and hung suspended by one of its cornices, as on a pedestal. Paul, observing that Virginia was fond of this spot, brought thither, from the neighbouring forest, a great variety ...
— Paul and Virginia • Bernardin de Saint Pierre
... down upon La Bresse after our climb of two hours and more, we seem to be at the world's end. Our road has led us higher and higher by dense forests and wild granite parapets, tasselled with fern and foxglove, till we suddenly wheel round upon a little straggling town marvellously placed. Deep down it lies, amid fairy-like greenery and silvery streams, whilst high above tower the rugged forest peaks and far-off blue mountains, ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... him speak with trembling voice and gleaming eyes of the grand mountains and the silent corries around Ben-Nevis, the red deer trooping over the misty steeps, and the brown hinds lying among the green plumes of fern, and the wren and the thrush lilting ...
— Scottish sketches • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... green was young, every pore was open, and every stalk was swollen with racing currents of juice. God was palpably present in the country, and the devil had gone with the world to town. Flossy catkins of the later kinds, fern-sprouts like bishops' croziers, the square-headed moschatel, the odd cuckoo-pint,—like an apoplectic saint in a niche of malachite,—snow-white ladies'-smocks, the toothwort, approximating to human flesh, the enchanter's ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... For erect-growing plants: geraniums, heliotropes, phlox. If the position is a shaded one, the drooping plants might be of the following: tradescantia, Kenilworth ivy, senecio(A) or parlor ivy, sedums, moneywort,(A) vinca, smilax,(A) lygodium(A) or climbing fern. Erect-growing plants would be dracenas, palms, ferns, coleus, centaurea, spotted ...
— Manual of Gardening (Second Edition) • L. H. Bailey
... straight, Guapo would have bound it to a post and made it so; but it happened to come quite right without further trouble. The tube of the lesser one was now cleaned out thoroughly, and polished by a little bunch of the roots of a tree-fern, until it was as smooth and hard as ebony. A mouthpiece of wood was placed at the smaller end of the table, and a sight was glued on the outside. This "sight" was the tooth of an animal,—one of the long curving incisors of a rodent animal called ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... door to descend the narrow cork-screw stair, so dark and cool, I caught a glimpse, one turn down, by the feeble light that came through its chinks after it was shut behind us, of a tiny maiden-hair fern growing out of the wall. I stopped, and said to the ...
— The Seaboard Parish Volume 1 • George MacDonald
... slices of bread on top of the stove," she explained. "She said she always makes toast that way, and no one could tell the difference! I never heard of such a thing—did you, Manley? But I've been attending a cooking school ever since you left Fern Hill. I didn't tell you—I wanted it for a surprise. I could have done better with the toast before a wood fire—I think poor Arline was nearly distracted at the way I poked coals down from the grate; but she didn't say anything. ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower
... As fern grows in untilled grounds, and all manner of weeds, so do gross humours in an idle body, Ignavum corrumpunt otia corpus. A horse in a stable that never travels, a hawk in a mew that seldom flies, are both subject to diseases; which left unto ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... cave-guarded Spring, with years unwrinkled, Reflects the meek-eyed Genius of the place, Whose green, wild margin now no more erase Art's works; nor must the delicate waters sleep Prisoned in marble—bubbling from the base Of the cleft statue, with a gentle leap The rill runs o'er—and round, fern, flowers, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... were all here with the dreariness of decay superadded. A few paces from the cabin there was a rough inclosure, which, in the brief days of Tennessee's Partner's matrimonial felicity, had been used as a garden, but was now overgrown with fern. As we approached it, we were surprised to find that what we had taken for a recent attempt at cultivation was the broken soil about ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... their sweet faces, and their mimic shores steal down in quiet evenings to bathe themselves in the transparent waters—far into the depths of the great forest speeds the glad message of returning glory, and graceful fern, and soft velvet moss, and white wax-like lily peep forth to cover rock and fallen tree and wreck of last year's autumn in one great sea of foliage. There are many landscapes which can never be painted, photographed, or described, but which the mind carries away ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... the common way. The mouths of the beautiful tributary ravines are crossed either by graceful iron spans, which frame charming undercut glimpses of sparkling waterfalls and deep tangles of moss and fern, or by graceful stone arches draped with vines. There are terraced vineyards, after the fashion of the Rhineland, and the gentle arts of the florist and the truck-gardener are much in evidence. The winding river frequently sweeps at the base of rocky escarpments, but upon one side or ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... anything—took the Lamb in his arms, and, still stooping, carried the sleeping baby a dozen yards along the road to where a stile led into a wood. The others followed, and there among the hazels and young oaks and sweet chestnuts, covered by high strong-scented brake-fern, they all lay hidden till the angry voices of the men were hushed at the angry voice of the red-and-white lady, and, after a long and anxious search, the ...
— Five Children and It • E. Nesbit
... brought the vegetation into luxurious life; fern, acanthus, brambles, and all the densely intermingled growths that cover the ground about the ruins, spread forth their innumerable tints of green. Between shore and mountains, the wide plain smiled in ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... the turnips, and every two or three days, often under torrents of rain, Rachel and the two girls must change the hurdles, and put the hungry, pushing creatures on to fresh ground. On the top of the down, there was fern to be cut and carted for the winter fodder, and fallen wood to be gathered for fuel, under the daily ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Madame was again in her room, Jack came to me with a nosegay he had gathered, to beg me to arrange it properly, and put a paper frill round it. With some grass and fern-leaves, I made a tasteful bouquet, and added a frill, to Jack's entire satisfaction. He took it up-stairs, and we heard him knock at Madame's door. After a pause ("I'm sure she's crying again!" said Eleanor) Madame came ...
— Six to Sixteen - A Story for Girls • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... not far from where I am writing, at the foot of an unsuspecting fern, a song-sparrow has built her nest. It lies in a hollow among the dried leaves and grass, and is so artfully merged with its immediate surroundings that even though you know its precise location it still eludes you. Only yesterday ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... Bible, and a great sprig of the sweet, old-fashioned "lad's-love." A rose, a bunch of mignonette would be to her too gay a posy for the Lord's House and the Lord's Day. And balmier breath than was ever borne by blossom is the pure fragrance of green growing things,—southernwood, mint, sweet fern, bayberry, sweetbrier. No rose is half so fresh, so ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... strange to say, are at the tip of the beak. The toes are strong, and well adapted for digging, the hind one being a thick, horny spur. To add to the singularity of this creature, it has no tail whatever. The kirvi-kirvi conceals itself among the extensive beds of fern which abound in the middle island of New Zealand, and it makes a nest of fern for its eggs in deep holes, which it hollows out of the ground. It feeds on insects, and particularly worms, which it disturbs by stamping on the ground, and seizes ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... were hidden from the wallowing hippopotami by the crest of the knoll. The human squatting-place was a trampled area among the dead brown fronds of Royal Fern, through which the crosiers of this year's growth were unrolling to the light and warmth. The fire was a smouldering heap of char, light grey and black, replenished by the old women from time to time with brown leaves. Most of the men were asleep—they slept sitting with their foreheads on their ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... Brilliant Brown Catawba Champion Chautauqua Clinton Colerain Concord Dutchess Early Victor Elvira Empire State Fern Munson Hartford Iona Isabella Isabella Seedling Jefferson Jessica Lady Mills Missouri ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick
... stumble, fools blunder, and the truth dances on ahead through Life's woodland of mysteries—one instant revealing itself in a golden shaft of sunlight, hiding the next with smothered laughter in the black shadow of a fern, while seekers after it tramp past ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... consisting of three distinct vaults, defined by two rows of pillars, slender shafts resembling tall branchless trees, the capital of each being formed by a branching head like that of the palm. The trunks were covered with golden scales; the fern-like foliage at the summit was of a bright sparkling emerald. It was evident to my observation that the entire hall had been excavated from solid rock, and the pillars left in their places. Each of ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... discovered several new specimens not before met with in the island, such as the tree-fern, with its leaves spread out like the waters of a fountain, locust-trees, on the long pods of which the onagers browsed greedily, and which supplied a sweet pulp of excellent flavor. There, too, the colonists again found groups of magnificent kauries, their ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... odor made up of smells of strange saps, queer spicy scents of mould, exhalations of aromatic decay. Moreover, the views were glimpses of Paradise; and it was a joy to watch the torrents roaring down their gorges under shadows of tree-fern and bamboo. ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... observed the predominance of luxuriant vines, indicating our nearness to the tropic, wreathed gayly over the tall and branchless trunks of the trees: some, like the Bignonia, in a full blaze of crimson; others, like the Climbing Fern, draping the trees ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... in a succession of beaches. It is on the point, and mainly short of its wooded extremity, that the cottages of our settlement are dropped, as near the ocean as may be, and with as little order as birds' nests in the grass, among the sweet-fern, laurel, bay, wild raspberries, and dog-roses, which it is the ideal to leave as untouched as possible. Wheel-worn lanes that twist about among the hollows find the cottages from the highway, but foot-paths approach one cottage ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... the forests, deep green of fern and bush and understuff, told of the full tide of the year. Here and there a leaf trailed in the shallows, yellow as ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... is free, neat, copious, and a perpetual bloomer, as is also Corydalis lutea (yellow). The climbing fumitory comes up of itself from seed every year, and is now running over bushes, stakes, and strings, and is full of fern-like leaves and flesh-colored flowers. The long, scarlet wands of Pentstemon barbatus are conspicuous in the borders; this should be in every garden, it is so profuse and hardy. Many speedwells still remain in fine condition, notably Veronica longifolia; they are a ...
— Scientific American Suppl. No. 299 • Various
... half-a-dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field; ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... do you see now once again The glen And fern, the highland, and the thistle? And do you still remember when We heard the bright-eyed woodcock whistle Down by ...
— The Dog's Book of Verse • Various
... sleepy," he caught a frond of a tall Madeiran fern that was placed in its jardiniere on the step opposite him, winding the satin-green strip over his finger, "honestly, all in with sleepiness, and I'm going to sleep to-night as if it was the last quiet night's sleep I'd ever get. ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram
... not neglected, whereby the gain gotten by their purchase is yet much more increased to the benefit of the merchant. The poorest also will have glass if they may; but, sith the Venetian is somewhat too dear for them, they content themselves with such as are made at home of fern and burned stone; but in fine all go one way—that is, to shards at the last, so that our great expenses in glasses (beside that they breed much strife toward such as have the charge of them) are worst of all bestowed in mine opinion, because their pieces do turn unto no profit. If the philosopher's ...
— Chronicle and Romance (The Harvard Classics Series) • Jean Froissart, Thomas Malory, Raphael Holinshed
... a painter nor a poet) to describe this dell as it should be described; and I will therefore only beg of thee, gentle reader, who peradventure mayst not have lingered in this classical neighbourhood, to fancy a deep, deep dell, its steep sides fringed down with hazel and beech, and fern and thick undergrowth, and clothed at the bottom with the richest and greenest sward in the world. You descend, clinging to the trees, and scrambling as best you may,—and now you stand on haunted ground! ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... forced to leave their part of the telling to Fancy, and you may believe or discredit as much or as little as you choose; only I am hoping that by this time you have acquired at least a sprinkling of fern-seed in your eyes. You may have forgotten that fern-seed is the most subtle of eye-openers known to Fancy; and that it enables you to see the things that have existed only in your imagination. It is very scarce nowadays, and hard to find, ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer
... a stroll through the conservatories, and while the elders stopped to admire a fern or a rare exotic, Will and Gwenda roamed on under the palms and greenery to where a sparkling fountain rose, and flung its ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine
... most consummate liars that ever lived. He speaks himself of 'equivocating pretty genteelly' in regard to one of his peccadilloes. Pope's equivocation is to the equivocation of ordinary men what a tropical fern is to the stunted representatives of the same species in England. It grows until the fowls of the air can rest on its branches. His mendacity in short amounts to a monomania. That a man with intensely irritable nerves, and so fragile in constitution that his life ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... opposite the south end of Vancouver Island: the crooked oaks loaded with mistletoe, the tall wild cherry trees, the hazels with trunks thicker than a man's thigh, the evergreen arbutus, the bracken fern, blackberries, and black raspberries; and the game in these glades of trees and fern: small Columbian Mazama deer, large lynxes, bears, gluttons, wolves, foxes, racoons, and squirrels. Overhead soared huge Californian ...
— Pioneers in Canada • Sir Harry Johnston
... Banks and Dr Solander walked along the shore of the bay by themselves without anxiety, and collected numerous plants. They visited several huts, and found the inhabitants at dinner, their food consisting, at this time of the year, of fish and the root of a large fern. The roots were prepared by scorching them over a fire, and then beating them till the charred bark fell off. The remainder was a clammy, soft substance, not unpleasant to the taste, but mixed with three times its ...
— Captain Cook - His Life, Voyages, and Discoveries • W.H.G. Kingston
... Children ran across the road. Here and there one could see brown panelling inside the hall door.... The march that the mind keeps beneath the windows of others is queer enough. Now distracted by brown panelling; now by a fern in a pot; here improvising a few phrases to dance with the barrel-organ; again snatching a detached gaiety from a drunken man; then altogether absorbed by words the poor shout across the street at each other (so outright, so lusty)—yet all the while having for centre, ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... his head, to display a sleek coating of hair plastered down over his brow. In his white satin tie shone a dubious but large diamond, and there was the counter-attraction of geraniums and maidenhair fern in his button-hole. So fresh was the nosegay that he must have kept it in water during the passage! Or perhaps these vegetables had absorbed by mere contact with his tweeds, the subtle secret of his own immarcescibility. I remembered now that I had seen ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... number of drawings. In order to render the issue of the present cheap edition possible, it has been found necessary to restrict its size a little by the omission of chapters dealing with Glaciers, Ferns and Fern-seed, and the history of the Sea-squirts or Ascidians, which are contained in the original larger book. My hope is that this collection of papers, "about a number of things," may meet with as kind ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... Thornton and Florence made their appearance, looking very confused and awkward. Glenville preceded them, shouting and laughing. "Here they are, caught at last, and apparently quite pleased at keeping us all waiting, and quite unable to give any account of what they have been doing. One little fern has fallen before their united efforts in the space of half an hour or more. Hawkstone says he'll be shot if he lends you his boat to go a row in another time. ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith
... something to do and then do it?" said Mrs. Merrill after Mary Jane had made pictures on the window pane and rummaged through the mending basket and poked her finger into the canary's cage and fingered the forbidden little green balls on the ends of the fern leaves. "Little girls can't expect to have a good time when they do all the things they are not allowed to do. Go and play with Marie Georgiannamore, you haven't played with her ...
— Mary Jane: Her Book • Clara Ingram Judson
... crevices widened into caves; and mark, at a picturesque angle of the rock, what must have been once an insulated sea-stack, some thirty or forty feet in height, standing up from amid the rank grass, as at one time it stood up from amid the waves. Tufts of fern and sprays of ivy bristle from its sides, once roughened by the serrated kelp-weed and the tangle. The Highlanders call it M'Dougal's Dog-stone, and say that the old chieftains of Lorne made use of it as a post to which to fasten their dogs,—animals wild and gigantic ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... that for a time the two English lads forgot all about their guns, as they stopped hard by some watercourse to admire the graceful lace-fronded fern, or the wonderful displays of moss hanging from ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... pre-eminently spectacular, and its music is dramatic and declamatory rather than melodious. The prominent numbers of the first act are the solemn declaration of the Cardinal ("Wenn ew'ger Hass"), in which he replies to Eleazar's hatred of the Christian; the romance sung by Leopold ("Fern vom Liebchen weilen"), which is in the nature of a serenade to Rachel; the drinking-song of the people at the fountain, which is flowing wine ("Eilt herbei"); and the splendid chorus and march ("Leht, es nahet sich ...
— The Standard Operas (12th edition) • George P. Upton
... stimulating caves and crannies; the shimmering blue and green sea, with its long slow heave which rushed in foam and tumult up the rock-pools and gullies; the softer beauties of rounded down and flower-and fern-clad slopes honeycombed with rabbit holes; the little sea-gardens teeming with novel life; in all these he found his resource and a certain consolation for ...
— A Maid of the Silver Sea • John Oxenham
... a fern growing near, while, suddenly, for no particular reason, the color glowed again in the cheeks of the little art teacher. She ...
— Their Mariposa Legend • Charlotte Herr
... this was the name of the palfrey, had his stall crammed full of dried fern for litter, and was otherwise as well provided for as Highland ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... a sacrilege," he protested sharply, "like wadding up the petals of a rose or the leaves of a fern. ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... body, in all the constraint of a standing posture, he was held in the flexure of the rock like some of its fossils,—as unsuspected as a ganoid of the days of eld that had once been imprisoned thus in the sediment of seas that had long ebbed hence,—or the fern vestiges in a later formation finding a witness in the imprint in the stone of the symmetry of its fronds. He listened to the hue and cry for him; then to the sudden tramp of hoofs as a pursuing party went ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... house, and laid me down on the lit de fouaille—a wooden frame forming a sort of couch, and filled with dried fern, which forms the principal piece of furniture in every farm-house kitchen in the Channel Islands. Then he cut away the boot from my swollen ankle, with a steady but careful touch, speaking now and then a word of encouragement, as if I were ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... believe any of you happen to have just the same passion for the blue hyacinth which I have,—very certainly not for the crushed lilac-leaf-buds; many of you do not know how sweet they are. You love the smell of the sweet-fern and the bayberry-leaves, I don't doubt; but I hardly think that the last bewitches you with young memories as it does me. For the same reason I come back to damask roses, after having raised a good many of the rarer varieties. I like to go to operas and concerts, but there are queer ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... favor. The eye sees what it has the means of seeing, truly. You must have the bird in your heart before you can find it in the bush. The eye must have purpose and aim. No one ever yet found the walking fern who did not have the walking fern in his mind. A person whose eye is full of Indian relics picks them up in every field ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... sent gifts: some arrow-heads and a curiously fashioned vessel from the canon of the cave-dwellers; some chips from the petrified forest; a fern with wonderful fronds, root and all; and a sheaf of strange, beautiful blossoms carefully wrapped in wet paper, and ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... continents are small shrubs in Australia are trees. The tulip, the fern, the honeysuckle, and the lily are examples. They all grow in tree form and are of considerable size. There is no turf grass except that which is cultivated. The wild grasses are of the "bunch" or clump species, and some of ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... winds so sweet with birch and fern A sweeter memory blow; And there in spring the veeries sing The song of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... covered with ivy and tufted plants, now ruddy with autumnal tints, stood the ruined walls of a little chapel. In the dilapidated vault close by lay buried many of his ancestors, and under the little wavy hillocks of fern and nettles, slept many an humble villager. He sat down upon a worn tombstone in this lowly ruin, and with his eyes fixed upon the ground, he surrendered his spirit to the stormy and evil thoughts which ...
— The Evil Guest • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... pigeons, which are very numerous, and a bird not unlike the Guinea fowl, except in colour, (being chiefly white,) both of which were at first so tame as to suffer themselves to be taken by hand. Of plants that afford vegetables for the table, the chief are cabbage palm, the wild plantain, the fern tree, a kind of wild spinage, and a tree which produces a diminutive fruit, bearing some resemblance to a currant. This, it is hoped, by transplanting and care, will be much improved ...
— The Voyage Of Governor Phillip To Botany Bay • Arthur Phillip
... those at the top of the brow, rising out of the rich green scrub? Verily, again, we are in the Tropics. They are palms, doubtless, some thirty feet high each, with here and there a young one springing up like a gigantic crown of male-fern. The old ones have straight gray stems, often prickly enough, and thickened in the middle; gray last year's leaves hanging down; and feathering round the top, a circular plume of pale green leaves, like those of a coconut. But these are not ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... the ground, huge fern-like plants with crimson scaled trunks. Toward a clump of these the ...
— The People of the Crater • Andrew North
... for telling me that, Jacob, for I should never have supposed it; and I'll tell you what I'll also do. I'll load the cart with fern litter, and put it at the bottom of the pit; so that if I could get a heifer or calf worth taking, it may not be hurt by ...
— The Children of the New Forest • Captain Marryat
... How 'mid the hills last night I'd lain Beside a singing moorland burn; And waked at dawn, to feel the rain Fall on my face, as on the fern That drooped about my heather-bed; And how by noon the wind had blown The last grey shred from out the sky, And blew my homespun jacket dry, As I stood on the topmost stone That crowns the cairn on Hawkshaw Head, And caught a gleam of far-off sea; And heard the wind sing ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... grove had been his playground. Here was the oak under which Cornelia and he had gathered acorns. The remnants of the little brush house they had built still survived. His step quickened. He heard the rush of the little stream that wound through the grove. Then he saw ahead of him a fern thicket, and the brook flashing its water beyond. In his recollection a bridge had here crossed the streamlet. It had been removed. Just across, swayed the huge cypress. Drusus stepped forward. At last! He pushed carefully ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... make lovelier lace than she; And her grand-daughter Julie—just seven years old, Is learning already the bobbins to hold. Without drawings to follow, or patterns to trace, How can these poor cottagers fashion their lace? From the plant and the flower and unfolding fern And the frost on the pane their patterns they learn,— From gossamer web by the spider wove,— From natural taste and natural love For every form of beauty and grace, They've learned ...
— Abroad • Various
... cake. Two of the Tremletts would stand while they were eating, because they were afraid of the ants and the spiders that seemed to be crawling round. And Elizabeth Eliza had to keep poking with a fern-leaf to drive the insects out of the plates. The lady from Philadelphia was made comfortable with the cushions and shawls, leaning against a rock. Mrs. Peterkin wondered if she forgot she ...
— The Peterkin Papers • Lucretia P Hale
... Species of this sort, and all others, Time and Enquiry must discover. The first sort is the same Blue or Bilberry, that grows plentifully in the North of England, and in other Places, commonly on your Heaths, Commons, and Woods, where Brakes or Fern grows. ...
— A New Voyage to Carolina • John Lawson
... cliffs and highlands, the fair and luxuriant valleys where the pure bright waters of these hill-fed streams flow through a green tunnel of overarching trees, making a fertile paradise of flower and fern in their course. And the magnificent bold rocks and forelands of the coast, the streams broken into feathery spray falling down the precipitous face of the cliffs, creek and gully and cave, the wave-washed golden ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... that an upright fern in situ occurs with Sigillaria and Stigmaria, or that the affinities of Calamites and Lepidodendron (supposing that they are found in situ with Sigillaria) are so CLEAR, that they could not have been marine, like, ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... on our door-steps. He had a haunch of elk-meat on his back, one end resting on his head, with a cushion of green fern-leaves. He called me "Closhe tum-tum" (Good Heart), and gave me a great ...
— Life at Puget Sound: With Sketches of Travel in Washington Territory, British Columbia, Oregon and California • Caroline C. Leighton
... fallen of themselves; some were felled by the forester's axe; some were hollow, and the rabbits burrowed at their roots; some few were struck by lightning, and stood white and bare. There were hill-sides covered with rich fern, on which the morning dew so beautifully sparkled; there were brooks, where the deer went down to drink, or over which the whole herd bounded, flying from the arrows of the huntsmen; there were sunny glades, and solemn places where but little ...
— A Child's History of England • Charles Dickens
... oriental: he is quiet, patient, sober, long suffering, pleasant in speech, indolent but handy, far from speculative, and yet good at succedaneum: when his anger is kindled, it descends like lightning: unlike his dog, his wrath gives no notice by grumbling: he blazes up like one of his own fires of dried fern. Quarrels do not often take place among them, but when they do, they are dreadful. The laws of the country in which they sojourn have so far banished the use of knives from among them that they only grind ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 572, October 20, 1832 • Various
... well ask, for none but an artist's hand could have grouped together so harmoniously the daffodils and primroses, with trails of ivy and fern in their beds ...
— The Carved Cupboard • Amy Le Feuvre
... not. He is over at the horse show at Fern Dyke, and won't be back till late. And if he has been forgathering with his boon companions he won't be ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... walls had been and the painted mummy-case, were tall dark green trees, oaks and ashes, and in between the trees and under them tangled bushes and creeping ivy. There were beech-trees too, but there was nothing under them but their own dead red drifted leaves, and here and there a delicate green fern-frond. ...
— The Story of the Amulet • E. Nesbit
... noisy haunts of men, Whose ruts the solitary lime cart tracks, Whose hedge-sides, propp'd by many a mossy stone, Are checker'd o'er with foxglove's purple bloom, Or graceful fern, or snakehood's curling sheath, Or the wild strawberry's crimson peeping through. There, where it joins the far-outstretching heath, A lengthen'd nook presents its glassy slope, A couch with nature's velvet verdure ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... sunset-glow like flecks of gold in amber wine,—while here and there the distant glimmer of tossing fountains, or the soft emerald sheen of a prattling brook that wound in and out the grounds, amongst banks of moss and drooping fern, gave a pleasant touch of coolness and refreshment to the brilliant verdure ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... The demesne around the castle contained some well-grown and handsome timber, and as the soil was undulating and fertile, presented many features of beauty; beyond it, all was sterile, bleak, and barren. Long tracts of brown heath-clad mountain or not less unprofitable valleys of tall and waving fern were all that the eye could discern, except where the broad Shannon, expanding into a tranquil and glassy lake, lay still and motionless beneath the dark mountains, a few islands, with some ruined churches and a round tower, alone breaking the ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... considerable extent, of wild, heathy moorland; short turfy strips of common; dingles full of foxglove, harebell, and gnarled old stunted hawthorn bushes; and knolls, covered with waving crests of powerful feathery fern. It was intersected with gravelly paths and roads, whose warm color contrasted and harmonized with the woodland hues of everything about them; and roofed in by dark green vaults of the most magnificent beech foliage I have ever seen anywhere. The trees ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... to-day on our door-steps. He had a haunch of elk-meat on his back, one end resting on his head, with a cushion of green fern-leaves. He called me "Closhe tum-tum" (Good Heart), and gave me ...
— Life at Puget Sound: With Sketches of Travel in Washington Territory, British Columbia, Oregon and California • Caroline C. Leighton
... forest for a crop or two of rice, the soil, except in the flooded plains, being not rich enough to carry more than one or two such harvests under such primitive methods of agriculture as only are known to the natives. The lands so cleared were deserted and were soon covered with a strong growth of fern and coarse useless lalang grass, difficult to eradicate, and it is well known that, when a tropical forest is once destroyed and the land left to itself, the new jungle which may in time spring up rarely contains any of the valuable timber trees ...
— British Borneo - Sketches of Brunai, Sarawak, Labuan, and North Borneo • W. H. Treacher
... of the tropics. Now, look, even with all these conditions fulfilled, how diverse is life on this earth itself, the one place we really know—varying as much as from the oak to the cuttle-fish, from the palm to the tiger, from man to the fern, the sea-weed, or the jelly-speck. Every one of these creatures is a complex result of very complex conditions, among which you must never forget to reckon the previous existence and interaction of all the antecedent ones. Is it probable, then, even a priori, that ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen
... a crack-cracking as of men coming closer among the scrub of heather and fern which surrounded the Dower House, only it was quite momentary. The stick which she had half-lifted, an unconscious act of readiness for defence, tapped back on to the floor, and my sword-point made a sharper rattle, though I was unaware ...
— The Black Colonel • James Milne
... nearest coast line. Several distinct levels in the present crater prove that it has eaten its way to its present depth. On the most elevated of these large trees now grow, evidences of many years' tranquillity; lower down we come to shrubs, and lastly to the fern, apparently the most venturesome of the vegetable kingdom; it seems to require nothing but rest and water, for we found it shooting out of crevices where the lava appeared to have undergone no decomposition. Nowhere, I conceive, (not even in Iceland,) can be ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... 'the distinguished honor'—he is very good—of meeting me at the house of our mutual friend Deedles, the banker, and he does me the favor to inquire whether it will be agreeable to me to have Will Fern put down. He came up to London, it seems, to look for employment (trying to better himself—that's his story), and being found at night asleep in a shed, was taken into custody, and carried next morning before the Alderman. The Alderman observes (very properly) that he is determined ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various
... foot of the hill. I was particularly struck, during the walk, with the richness of the undergrowth in most places, and recognised many berries and plants that resembled those of my native land, especially a tall, elegantly formed fern, which emitted an agreeable perfume. There were several kinds of flowers, too; but I did not see so many of these as I should have expected in such a climate. We also saw a great variety of small birds of bright plumage, and many paroquets similar to the ...
— The Coral Island • R.M. Ballantyne
... the lych-gate—where the graves lie level with the coping, and the horseman can decipher their inscriptions in passing, at the risk of a twisted neck—the base of the churchyard wall is pierced with a low archway, festooned with toad-flax and fringed with the hart's-tongue fern. Within the archway bubbles a well, the water of which was once used for all baptisms in the parish, for no child sprinkled with it could ever be hanged with hemp. But this belief is discredited now, and the well neglected: and the events which led to ...
— I Saw Three Ships and Other Winter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... new. We went upon a surface so hard and level, that we had little care to hold the bridle, and were therefore at full leisure for contemplation. On the left were high and steep rocks shaded with birch, the hardy native of the North, and covered with fern or heath. On the right the limpid waters of Lough Ness were beating their bank, and waving their surface by a gentle agitation. Beyond them were rocks sometimes covered with verdure, and sometimes towering in horrid nakedness. Now and ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... go through with the business, I.E. to take part in the attack, he slashes a chip from the beam with his PARANG and passes under it. On the far side of the beam stands a chief holding a large frond of fern, and, as each man passes under, he gives him a bit of the leaf, while an assistant cuts a notch on a tally-stick for each volunteer. If for any reason any man is reluctant to go farther, he states his excuse, perhaps a bad dream or illness, or sore feet, and returns to the boats, ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... yellow flowers to dye their Easter eggs. On the other side of the road the land rose a little, and was so covered with stones that it seemed as if there were no earth left for things to grow in. Yet the mountain fern took root there and made the rocks gay with its ...
— The Irish Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... most common, often growing ten feet tall. We counted five varieties of ferns growing in profusion, among them brake ferns, sword-ferns, and maidenhair, most beautiful and luxuriant. The maidenhair fern grew in masses, covering dead trunks of trees and making solid walls of delicate ...
— Tenting To-night - A Chronicle of Sport and Adventure in Glacier Park and the - Cascade Mountains • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... daintiest and prettiest for the bride-elect. Have the table decorations in white. For the center have a large round basket of bride roses, and at each plate tiny French baskets filled with maidenhair fern and white pansies, or apple blossoms, for individual favors. Tie the handle of each basket with white gauze ribbon, looping the baskets together with the ribbon forming a garland for the table. Serve strawberries in large white tulips or bride roses, and have the ...
— Breakfasts and Teas - Novel Suggestions for Social Occasions • Paul Pierce
... crept and sewed Her violets in dead men's faces, And in a soft and snowy shroud Drew the scarred fields with gentle stitch; Though in the valley where the ditch Was hoarse with nettles, blind with mud, She stroked the golden-headed bud, And loosed the fern, she dared not here To touch nor tend this murdered thing; The wind went wide of it, the year Upon this breast stopped short of Spring: Beauty ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... with fern leaves whirled about these edifices in the airiest fashion. It was common to see them leap up to the height of two or three storeys from the lava pavement and rebound like balls, their faces meanwhile preserving that impressive dignity ...
— Honey-Bee - 1911 • Anatole France
... guavas, bananas, mangoes, breadfruit palms, and two or three fern-trees. The leaves of the latter are in shape like those of the English fern, but of gigantic proportions, and grow on the top of a stem thirty feet in height. The sugar-cane is the chief cultivated production of the island on all the more level parts. The fields are surrounded with ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... hills. The north wind resounds through the woods. White clouds rise on the sky: the trembling snow descends. The river howls afar, along its winding course. Sad, by a hollow rock, the grey-hair'd Carryl sat. Dry fern waves over his head; his seat is in an aged birch. Clear to the roaring winds he lifts his ...
— Fragments Of Ancient Poetry • James MacPherson
... Westminster, my Lord being gone before my coming to chapel. I and Mr. Sheply told out my money, and made even for my Privy Seal fees and gratuity money, &c., to this day between my Lord and me. After that to chappell, where Dr. Fern, a good honest sermon upon "The Lord is my shield." After sermon a dull anthem, and so to my Lord's (he dining abroad) and dined with Mr. Sheply. So, to St. Margarett's, and heard a good sermon upon the text "Teach us the old way," or something like it, wherein he ran over ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... he came to a point where the narrow bridlepath branched off the road and wound upward into the silent woods. Following this path until it became indistinguishable on a thick carpet of moss and leaves and coarse fern, he reached the big boulder at last; there he left Keno safely tied and hidden in a clump of alders. Then he went on, several rods down the trail, and took up his position directly across the stream ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Geological Survey • Robert Shaler
... obtain 'a peep at nature, if they can no more.' Far removed from green fields and leafy woods, they may, for instance, enjoy their leisure mornings in watching one of the most beautiful phenomena of vegetable development—the evolution of the circinate fronds of the fern; a plant in every respect associated with elegance and beauty. This kind of gardening has, therefore, become of late years one of the most fashionable, while at the same time one of the most ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 445 - Volume 18, New Series, July 10, 1852 • Various
... path where the undergrowth was in any way trodden was the one by which he and Robin alike approached the well, the old, half-obliterated track that once had been so freely used. All around the sides of the dell, fern and bramble, hazel and undergrowth of all kinds, grew in wild confusion. Search as he would, Cuthbert could find nothing like a path of any kind. Did Robin indeed trust to that tangled undergrowth to keep his secret hid? And if so, what chance was there of its being found unless the whole ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... great care, and fills us with apprehension. The necessity of providing change for her will probably take us across the water very early in the autumn; and this again unsettles home schemes here, and withers many kinds of fern. If they knew (by "they" I mean my daughter and Miss Hogarth) that I was writing to you, they would charge me with many messages of regard. But as I am shut up in my room in a ferocious and unapproachable condition, owing to the great accumulation of letters ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens
... base of the leaf, it is bipartite; if to the base, it is bisect. Thus, too, a pod of a cruciferous plant is a siliqua, if it is four times as long as it is broad, but if it be shorter than this it is a silicula. Such terms being established, the form of the very complex leaf or frond of a fern (Hymenophyllum Wilsoni) is exactly conveyed by the following phrase: 'fronds rigid pinnate, pinnae recurved subunilateral, pinnatifid, the segments linear undivided ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... see now once again The glen And fern, the highland, and the thistle? And do you still remember when We heard the bright-eyed woodcock whistle Down by the rippling, ...
— The Dog's Book of Verse • Various
... "Under that bunch of fern," he whispered; "just the colour of the dead leaves. Do you see? ... Don't you see that big woodcock squatted flat, bill pointed straight out and resting on ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... snap of extreme cold had passed and every green thing was hurrying to be ahead of its neighbour. Bija made endless cowslip balls out of the beautiful rose-pink primulas, while Roy and Mirak, following the shepherds' boys, came back with their hands full of young rhubarb shoots and green fern croziers, which they ate like asparagus. But this sort of thing could not last long, since they were close to the caravan route from Kandahar to Kabul; and sure enough, no sooner had the snow on the uplands melted than travellers began ...
— The Adventures of Akbar • Flora Annie Steel
... which are very steep and rugged, leaving, in the interspaces, very large valleys, and gently-rising grounds about their sides. These hills, though of a rocky disposition, are, in general, covered, almost to their tops, with trees; but the lower parts, on the sides, frequently only with fern. At the bottom of the harbour, where we lay, the ground rises gently to the foot of the hills, which run across nearly in the middle of the island; but its flat border, on each side, at a very small distance from the sea, becomes quite steep. ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... thick that we could guide ourselves neither by the sun nor by the stars. We were again struck during this day by the want of arborescent ferns in that country; they diminish visibly from the sixth degree of north latitude, while the palm-trees augment prodigiously towards the equator. Fern-trees belong to a climate less hot, and a soil but little mountainous. It is only where there are mountains that these majestic plants descend towards the plains; they seem to avoid perfectly flat grounds, as those through which run the Cassiquiare, the Temi, Inirida, ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... commissariat. This was packed up in sacks, which were again enclosed in long pockets, made of hides, and called "parfleshes," the use of which is to defend the canvas of the sacking from being torn by branches of fern and underwood. The sacks we secured on strong pack-saddles, between which and the back of the horse were some thick soft cloths. All our baggage-horses were furnished with trail ropes, which were allowed to ...
— California • J. Tyrwhitt Brooks
... irritating to him. He could not bear to hear him speak with trembling voice and gleaming eyes of the grand mountains and the silent corries around Ben-Nevis, the red deer trooping over the misty steeps, and the brown hinds lying among the green plumes of fern, and the wren and the ...
— Scottish sketches • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... hearing the frogs croak from the Lagherello and the crickets sing in the hot darkness. The hut was empty: shepherd and sheep and dogs were all gone up to the higher grounds amongst the hills. There were some dry fern-plants in a corner of it. I lay on these and stared at the planets above me throbbing in the intense blue of the skies: they seemed to throb, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... undid the wattled cotes, And from the stack a thin blue wreath of smoke Curled through the air across the ripening oats, And on the hill the yellow house-dog bayed As through the crisp and rustling fern the heavy ...
— Poems • Oscar Wilde
... it, though I am not sure whether two of them may not be the same, varied somewhat by soil and position. The third grows only in high situations, and is unknown upon the plains; it has leaves very minutely subdivided, and looks like a fern, but the blossom and seed are nearly identical with the other varieties. The peculiar property of the plant is, that, though highly nutritious both for sheep and cattle when eaten upon a tolerably full stomach, it is very fatal upon an empty one. Sheep and ...
— A First Year in Canterbury Settlement • Samuel Butler
... — After some trouble in procuring coolies, we started at eleven in a shower of rain, and found ourselves gradually passing into the valley, and exchanging rocks and firs for groves of walnut; and moss and fern for the more civilized strawberry and the wild carnation. The strawberries, though small, had a delicious flavour, and we whiled away the time by gathering them as we passed. About two o'clock we reached the village of Shupayon, and here began to ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight
... bush, glistening with its luscious black berries, and began nibbling at them. A gopher, coming to his supper bush, gave a little squeak of annoyance, and Peter saw the bright eyes of the midget glaring at him from under a big fern leaf. Peter wagged his tail, for the savagery of his existence was qualified by that mellowing sense of humor which had always been a part of his master. He yipped softly, in a ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... superintending gardener—the same that cheered the last hours of Mrs. Warren. He recognizes Vivien and salutes her gravely. Seeing that she is accompanied by a gentleman in khaki he discreetly withdraws out of hearing and tidies up a tree fern. Vivien and Michael seat themselves on two green iron chairs under the fronds and in front ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... witnessed, seemed fresh and beautiful as at first. As I wished to get another shot or two, we crept slowly on, concealing ourselves as much as possible, lest any birds perched on the boughs might see us and fly away. There was little difficulty in doing so amongst the huge fern and palm-like foliage which surrounded us. In a short time we heard ahead of us a strange chattering and rustling in the trees, and moving cautiously on, we caught sight of a number of dark objects moving about ...
— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston
... have been infants characterized by their enormous size at birth. Among the older writers, Cranz describes an infant which at birth weighed 23 pounds; Fern mentions a fetus of 18 pounds; and Mittehauser speaks of a new-born child weighing 24 pounds. Von Siebold in his "Lucina" has recorded a fetus which weighed 22 1/2 pounds. It is worthy of comment that so great is the ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... thing finished in this hasty world. But ah! this other, this that never ends, Still climbing, luring fancy still to climb, As full of morals, half divined, as life, Graceful, grotesque, with ever new surprise Of hazardous caprices, sure to please, Heavy as nightmare, airy light as fern, Imagination's ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... situations the following are suitable: tradescantia, parlour ivy, moneywort, vinca smilax, climbing fern, asparagus fern, dracaena, coleus, centaurea, sword fern, and Boston fern. For indoor boxes in winter, the following may be used: abutilon, calceolaria, cyclamen, violets, primroses, petunias, geraniums, freesia, and such foliage plants as dracaena, cannas, dusty ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education
... give my namesake's philosophy the lie. However that may be, intense and new was the animal delight, to plant my hinder claws at some tree-foot deep into the black rotting vegetable-mould which steamed rich gases up wherever it was pierced, and clasp my huge arms round the stem of some palm or tree-fern; and then slowly bring my enormous weight and muscle to bear upon it, till the stem bent like a withe, and the laced bark cracked, and the fibres groaned and shrieked, and the roots sprung up out of the soil; and then, with a slow circular wrench, the whole tree was twisted bodily out of the ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... by the skill of man. These gardens are on the south side of the river Yarra. On a hill in the centre of them is built the Government House. There are seen many varieties of trees and plants all carefully labelled. The fern tree bower is very ingenious. You see here the elk or staghorn fern, which grows as a parasite on the palm or the petosperum of New Zealand. The grass is kept beautifully fresh and green, and is a favourite resort. I have no further room to continue this letter, but, in my next, hope to say something ...
— Six Letters From the Colonies • Robert Seaton
... ascent till she had on her right the moorland running south to the Lochan valley and on her left Garple chafing in its deep forested gorges. Her eyes were quick and she noted with interest a weasel creeping from a fern-clad cairn. A little way on she passed an old ewe in difficulties and assisted it to rise. "But for me, my wumman, ye'd hae been braxy ere nicht," she told it as it departed bleating. Then she realized that she had come a certain distance. ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... enemies. The New Hollanders, near the sea, subsist on fish eaten raw, or nearly so; should a whale be cast ashore, it is never abandoned until its bones are picked; their substitute for bread, and that which forms their chief subsistence, is a species of fern roasted, pounded between stones, and mixed with fish. The general beverage of the negro tribes is palm-wine. No disgust is evinced by the Bosjesman Hottentots at the most nauseous food, and having shot an animal with a poisoned arrow, their ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 381 Saturday, July 18, 1829 • Various
... It was a charming but very simple pattern the lines of sand had assumed, not unlike the fronds of a delicate fern growing out of several small ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood
... cow. She had not pastured in the meadows about Chartres with blind eyes. She knew the paths north and south and east and west through the forest and the fern; and even in the dark of the tangled underbrush she could feel out the way quite plainly. But she said to herself, "I must not make the way too easy for these wicked men. I must punish them all I can now that it is ...
— The Book of Saints and Friendly Beasts • Abbie Farwell Brown
... Gently he leaned back till his back rested on the sloping ground—he raised one knee, and left the other foot over the verge where the tip of the tallest rushes touched it. Before he had been there a minute he remembered the secret which a fern had ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... indeed, which fell in harmoniously with its peculiar charm, and indeed added to it. A lawn, not immaculate of the sweet fault of daisies, sank slowly to a babbling little tributary of the Lythe, and beyond were fern-covered slopes, and heather, and furze, and pine-woods. The rector was a sensible Englishman, who objected to have things done after the taste of his gardener instead of his own. He loved grass like a village poet, and would have no flower-beds cut in his lawn. Neither ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... at his command, and here he pleasantly passed the time ere he retired to rest. In the morning when he awoke, instead of finding himself on a couch in Fairy Hall, be found himself lying on a heap of fern on the wild ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... sweetest lesson wouldst thou learn, Come thou with me to Love's enchanted bower: High overhead the trellised roses burn; Beneath thy feet behold the feathery fern, A leaf ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... a wind from out the darkness, With scent of flower and fern and herb and tree, And in its breath there came a sound of thunder, Storm-laden ...
— Eyes of Youth - A Book of Verse by Padraic Colum, Shane Leslie, A.O. • Various
... faces, and their mimic shores steal down in quiet evenings to bathe themselves in the transparent waters—far into the depths of the great forest speeds the glad message of returning glory, and graceful fern, and soft velvet moss, and white wax-like lily peep forth to cover rock and fallen tree and wreck of last year's autumn in one great sea of foliage. There are many landscapes which can never be painted, photographed, or described, but which ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... are stated to live on grubs, insects, ants and their eggs, kangaroos, when they can catch them, fern roots, various kinds of berries, and honey; caterpillars and worms also form part ...
— Peter Parley's Tales About America and Australia • Samuel Griswold Goodrich
... the castle court, His charger trampling many a prickly star Of sprouted thistle on the broken stones. He look'd and saw that all was ruinous. Here stood a shatter'd archway plumed with fern; And here had fall'n a great part of a tower, Whole, like a crag that tumbles from the cliff, And like a crag was gay with wilding flowers: And high above a piece of turret stair, Worn by the feet that now were silent, wound Bare to the sun, and monstrous ivy-stems Claspt the gray walls with ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester
... just before you saw me, when you were wading through the wet fern? I think I was only thinking how wet the ferns must have been. How little I thought then who the man was, with the dog! You were only 'the ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... with its rolling drifts is safer hunting than this forest world. What glory, doomed prisoners between the woods and the sea within the shadow of the great forests and a great fear? The smell of wildwood things, of flower banks, of fern mold, came dank and unwholesome to these men. Their {3} nostrils were for the whiff of the sea; and every sunset tipped the waves with fire where they longed to sail. And the shadow of the fear fell on Gudrid. ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... come from haunts of coot and hern, I make a sudden sally, And sparkle out among the fern, To bicker down ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... creation speaks to us of the deeper rest of the soul in God. On the shadowed path that leads up to the house of prayer, with mind and senses quickened to perceive the loveliness and significance of the smallest object, the fern on the bank and the lichen on the wall, we feel indeed that heaven is not so much a yonder, towards which we are to move, as a here and a now, which we ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... of slaves had followed this road. For a mile Dick Sand and his companions struck against these scattered bones at each step, putting to flight enormous fern-owls. Those owls rose at their approach, with a heavy flight, and ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... must have showered their fervid sunshine on him, as he journeyed through plains of rice, where all the broad reaches whitening to harvest filled him with intense and bitterest loneliness. What region of spice did not recall the noons when they two had trampled the sweet-fern on wide, high New England pastures, and breathed its intoxicating fragrance? and what forest of the tropics, what palms, what blooms, what gorgeous affluence of color and of growth, equalled the wood on the lake-shores, with its stately hemlocks, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... he jumped into the ditch regardless of the stinging-nettles, pushed his way up through the briars, tearing his sleeve, forced his way across the mound, and went on his hands and knees through the young green fern on the other side (just as Pan would have done) under the thick thorn bushes, and so out into the next field. It was the very field where he and Pan had wandered before, only another part of it. There was his arrow ever so far off, ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies
... of the village, and paused among the trees and fern on the summit of the hill above, to take breath, and to look down at the beautiful sea. Suddenly the captain gave his leg a resounding slap, and cried, "Never knew such a right thing in all my ...
— A Message from the Sea • Charles Dickens
... leaving White Horse the track skirts the eastern shores of Lakes Bennett and Lindemann, through wild but picturesque moorland, carpeted with wild flowers,[87] and strewn with grey rocks and boulders. A species of pink heather grows freely here, the scent of which and the presence of bubbling fern-fringed brooks, and crisp bracing air, recalled many a pleasant morning after grouse in Bonnie Scotland. A raw-boned Aberdonian on the train remarks on the resemblance of the landscape to that of his own country and ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... painting never. Colour is life.—We are now at the end of this magnificent avenue, and at the top of a steep eminence commanding a wide view over four counties—a landscape of snow. A deep lane leads abruptly down the hill; a mere narrow cart-track, sinking between high banks clothed with fern and furze and low broom, crowned with luxuriant hedgerows, and famous for their summer smell of thyme. How lovely these banks are now—the tall weeds and the gorse fixed and stiffened in the hoar-frost, which fringes round the bright prickly holly, ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... prone upon a cloak of woven camel-hair amid luxuriating fern and samphire, on the very edge of the shelf of cliff to which he had climbed. On either side of him squatted a negro from the Sus both naked of all save white loin-cloths, their muscular bodies glistening like ebony in the dazzling sunshine of ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... side the bracken and the lady-fern grew thick and high, almost overlapping the broad moss-grown path, across which the young rabbits popped away in their new brown coats, showing their little white linings in their lazy haste. A dog-rose had hung out a whole constellation of ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... overlooking a hill stream which was pouring noisily down in a flood made turgid by the rain, and the "rough bit of bog and boulder" was a sort of natural bridge across the torrent, formed by heaps of earth and rock, out of which masses of wet fern and plumy meadow-sweet sprang in tall tufts and garlands, which though beautiful to the eyes in day-time, were apt to entangle the feet in walking, especially when there was only the uncertain glimmer of ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... with dew Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through, Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern, And the beadbonny ash that sits over ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins
... a patch of fern, I saw what I had never dreamed of, what sent the blood from my heart in a cold shudder of fear: a girl, pale and dishevelled, was trying to part some vines. A twig crackled and she looked round, showing a face drawn with weariness and ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... look at that which had taken the doctor's attention, for he was gazing into a side nook that suggested, from a dry heap of fern-like growth and grass, that ...
— Dead Man's Land - Being the Voyage to Zimbambangwe of certain and uncertain • George Manville Fenn
... thicker, the light pierced down in golden arrows only, the silence was almost oppressive. Caroline stepped suddenly out of the tiny path, pushed aside a clump of fern, buried her arm up to the elbow in a hollow stump and produced a large crumbling ...
— While Caroline Was Growing • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... the brooks, following the course of the stream, two stone walls a foot or two high are built. These walls converge at the lower end and form a channel, in which is placed horizontally a mat of stalks of the eagle fern (Pteris aquilina). When the fish attempt to cross this mat, through which the water passes freely, they are intercepted. Often the fish caught in this way are only an inch long, but none is too small ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... rippling breeze usually wimples and dimples its laughing surface, but in calmer moods it reflects, as in a polished mirror, the lofty, overhanging mountains, with every stately pine, bounding rivulet; blossoming shrub, waving fern, and—high above all, on the right—the clinging, thread-like line of the snow-sheds of the Central Pacific. When the railroad was being constructed, three thousand people dwelt on its shores; the surrounding forests resounded with the music of axes and saws, and the terrific blasts ...
— History of the Donner Party • C.F. McGlashan
... known to the two cousins by name, and owned as familiar friends. On the other side, between two hills, each surmounted by its own rocky crest, lay nestled in woods the grey Church tower and cottages of the village of Fern Torr; and far away stretched the rich landscape of field, wood, and pasture, ending at length in the blue line of horizon, where sky and ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... shoes with fern-seed, This foolish little Nell, And in the summer sunshine Went dancing down the dell. For whoso treads on fern-seed,— So fairy stories tell,— Becomes invisible at once, So potent is its spell. A frog mused by the brook-side: "Can you see me!" she cried; ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, September 1878, No. 11 • Various
... Talks, by C. W. Naylor, has been out of print many years. The cloth-bound book, from which this reprint edition was produced, is the property of Sister Fern Stubblefield of Earlsboro, Okla. Originally owned by the late Nellie Poulos, the book was given in 1978 to Sister Stubblefield by T. Gus Poulos, the ...
— Heart Talks • Charles Wesley Naylor
... odor,—an odor made up of smells of strange saps, queer spicy scents of mould, exhalations of aromatic decay. Moreover, the views were glimpses of Paradise; and it was a joy to watch the torrents roaring down their gorges under shadows of tree-fern and bamboo. ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... who will see strange things," she said; and the prophecy was amply fulfilled. For as they went along the broad path, and came better into view of the splendid undulation of woodland and pasture and fern, when on the one hand they saw the Thames far below them flowing through the green and spacious valley, and on the other hand caught some dusky glimpse of the far white houses of London, it seemed to her that she had got into ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... Act II of the play. It is a night scene in a wood near Athens; mossy banks and green trees; clouds and twinkling stars in the heavens; forms of fairies sitting about like humming birds, or resting in nodding fern leaves. They sing in quick, short rhymes, suiting the ...
— Shakespeare's Christmas Gift to Queen Bess • Anna Benneson McMahan
... and faces all over with ashes, and wear cords round their necks for a hundred days in token that they are not eating good food.[581] They imagine that as soon as the soul quits the body at death, it mounts into a tree where there is a bird's nest fern, and sitting there among the fronds it laughs and mocks at the people who are crying and making great lamentations over his deserted tabernacle. "There he sits, wondering at them and ridiculing them. 'What are they crying for?' ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... and farmers of the county of Wilts, to take into consideration the propriety of presenting Petitions to both Houses of Parliament, on behalf of the proprietors and occupiers of land. Thomas Grove, Esq. of Fern, one of the gentlemen who called the meeting, having taken the chair, Mr. Benett addressed them at a very considerable length in favour of a petition that he submitted for their adoption, expressive of the serious injury already sustained by the farmer, and the probable ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 3 • Henry Hunt
... of the eastern sky sprang out ahead, where stunted spruces stood out against the sunshine and the intense heat of midday fell upon a bare table-land of rock and moss and fern. ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert W. Chambers
... and green as they slept. The silence was absolute, the forest's unconscious tribute to the Wonder Worker. Even the trout brook, running black as night among its white-capped boulders and delicate arches of frost and fern work, between massive banks of feathery white and green, had stopped its idle chatter and tinkled a low bell under the ice, as if only the Angelus could express the wonder of ...
— Secret of the Woods • William J. Long
... whole surface, and when that is dry, three coats of copal varnish, allowing each to dry before the next is put on. The effect is very handsome. And, even without painting the objects black, this same style of leaf and fern-work can be applied to earthen vases, wooden boxes, trays and saucers, for card-receivers. For these, you may get some good hints from the illustrations on subsequent pages. The same illustrations will apply to the "novelties in ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - No 1, Nov 1877 • Various
... haughty heads above an impenetrable growth which, the guides tell us, is the home of tigers, rhinoceroses, panthers, bears, wild hogs, buffaloes, deer and all sorts of beasts, and snakes as big around as a barrel. Fern trees are lovely, and are found here in their greatest glory, but nevertheless we have foliage at home, and they are no more beautiful than our elms, oaks, and other trees that ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... would have rejoiced over the trip, for it was carrying them back to the gleam of leaf-dappled streams and waving trees and deep, cool forests. It made their nostrils dilate with pleasure as they whirled past fern-filled ravines, out of which the rivulets stole with stealthy circuits under mossy rocks. They were both forest-born, and it was like getting back home out of a strange desert country to ...
— A Little Norsk; Or, Ol' Pap's Flaxen • Hamlin Garland
... as he saw the blue haze across the doorway, hiding the moss and a tiny fern that grew on the shaft ...
— Wulfric the Weapon Thane • Charles W. Whistler
... sweeping vista, and in the midst of an open space covered with the greenest sward, stood a mighty broad-armed oak, beneath whose ample boughs, though as yet almost destitute of foliage, while the sod beneath them could scarcely boast a head of fern, couched a herd of deer. There lay a thicket of thorns skirting a sand-bank, burrowed by rabbits, on this hand grew a dense and Druid-like grove, into whose intricacies the slanting sunbeams pierced; on that extended a long glade, formed by a natural avenue of oaks, ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... North Hill there stood a ruined lime-kiln whose walls were full of fern and coated with mother o' thyme. A bank of brier and nettles lay before the mouth. They hid the foot of the kiln and made a snug and secluded spot. Bridetown clustered in its elms far below; then the land rose again to protect the hamlet from the ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... and the wild peony with its variegated leaves. Many other delicate blossoms which we cannot stop to describe are there too. And the ferns! All kinds may be found by the initiated, and many are close at hand. The fern lined with gold or with silver, the running ferns, the ferns of lace-like fineness, the ferns as soft as velvet, all growing in the greatest profusion. And each day of the week a ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn
... a large park, studded with stately trees; here and there an avenue of Spanish chestnuts or a grove of oaks; sometimes a gorsy dell, and sometimes a so great spread of antlered fern, taller than the ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... home. William just hates me in green, but I would have them. They make one think of fern-leaves and the deep woods, don't they?" said she, standing before the mirror with childish admiration of her ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... incessantly. In another part was a little patch of mossy meadow, and again there were decaying logs out of which sprang various ferns in wild luxuriance, as one has seen them in deeply-shaded, low-lying woods. The maiden-hair fern was here seen ranging from leaves as large as one's thumb-nail to a species with leaves the size of pin-heads. There was a charming harmony in the whole arrangement; nothing seemed abrupt, each effect blended gracefully with those surrounding ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... a violent onslaught upon the tobacconists who sold cigarettes to minors, and this again was applauded by those who in their youth had avoided tobacco—because it was too expensive—and smoked sweet-fern and cornsilk behind the barn. He nagged the School Board until there went forth an edict prohibiting certain styles of dress; and the mothers of several unattractive maidens wrote letters to him, and called him a Christian. ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... evening here not long ago, and made me laugh well. She took me on Friday to see Fanny Fern, who hugged and kissed me, and whom it was rather pleasant to see after nearly, if not quite, thirty years' separation. She says nobody but a Payson could have written Stepping Heavenward, which is absurd. March 17th.—I ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... ones. Not that there is want of quantity even in the lower ranges, but it is a quantity of inferior things, and therefore more easily represented or suggested. On a Highland hill side are multitudinous clusters of fern and heather; on an Alpine one, multitudinous groves of chestnut and pine. The number of the things may be the same, but the sense of infinity is in the latter case far greater, because the number is of nobler things. ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... to three principal groups, based upon the form of the foliage: (1) Plain varieties, in which the leaves are nearly as they are in nature; (2) moss-curled varieties in which they are curiously and pleasingly contorted; and (3) fern leaved, in which the foliage is not curled, but ...
— Culinary Herbs: Their Cultivation Harvesting Curing and Uses • M. G. Kains
... many centuries ago, when the earth was even more beautiful than it is now, there grew in one of the many valleys a dainty little fern leaf. All around the tiny plant were many others, but none of them so graceful and delicate as this one I tell you of. Every day the cheery breezes sought out their playmate, and the merry sunbeams darted in and out, playing hide-and-seek among reeds and rushes; ...
— De La Salle Fifth Reader • Brothers of the Christian Schools
... white wrapper and blue net, sitting in a large chair, looking about her with the languid interest of an invalid in a new place. Her eyes brightened as they fell upon a glass of rosy laurel and delicate maidenhair fern that stood among the toast and eggs, strawberries and cream, ...
— A Garland for Girls • Louisa May Alcott
... are capable of any thing, they are in vines, which are in rows, four, five, or six feet apart, and sometimes more. Near Langon is Sauterne, where the best white wines of Bordeaux are made. The waste lands are in fern, furze, shrubbery, and dwarf trees. The farmers live on their farms. At Agen, Castres, Bordeaux, strawberries and pease are now brought to table; so that the country on the canal of Languedoc seems to have later seasons than that east and west of it. What can be the cause? To the ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... about him as he strolled through the darkening column, set thick with great bushes of sombre juniper among the yellowing fern, which stretched away on the left-hand side of the road leading to the Hall. He stood and watched the masses of restless discordant cloud which the sunset had left behind it, thinking the while of Mr. Grey, of his assertions and ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... dreamt of: clear sharp purple hills rose up against it. There was a clear rippling little fountain, bursting out of a rock, carved with old, old carvings, broken now and defaced, but shadowed over by lovely maidenhair fern and trailing bindweed; and in a niche above a little roof, sheltering a figure of the Blessed Virgin. Some way off stood a long low house propped up against the rich yellow stone walls and pillars of another old, old building, and with ...
— Little Lucy's Wonderful Globe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... feet from the level of the sea. Time and springs and summers have silenced and soothed away the startling crags and chasms, the threatening gestures of the earth at infinity, and clothed them over with a mantle of quietness and green fern and heather and dreams. When the Fifth Race was younger, its language was Alpine: in Gothic, in Sanskrit, in Latin, you can see the crags and chasms. French, Spanish and Italian are Pyrenean, much worn down. English is the Vosges. Chinese is hardly even the Welsh mountains. ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... the quiet, pretty, green meadow lane. She often walked there, and on this eventful morning Hugh saw her sitting in the midst of the fern leaves. He was by her side in a minute, and his dark, handsome face lighted up ...
— Dora Thorne • Charlotte M. Braeme
... by her house. Yes, there she was at the window, attending to her flowers and carefully shielding a much-prized little maidenhair fern with a bell glass from the rays of the sun, which beamed as though Phoebus had mistaken the season and thought it ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... sweet with birch and fern A sweeter memory blow; And there in spring the veeries sing The song ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... species of heath-berries, cranberries, bilberries, &c., furnishing the poor with a source of profit, and the rich of luxury. What a pleasure it is to throw ourselves down beneath the verdant screen of the beautiful fern, or the shade of a venerable oak, in such a scene, and listen to the summer sounds of bees, grasshoppers, and ten thousand other insects, mingled with the more remote and solitary cries of the pewit and the curlew! Then, to think of the coach-horse, urged on his sultry ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 262, July 7, 1827 • Various
... pines that had been dropping their polished spills for centuries, perhaps silently adding, year by year, another layer of aromatic springiness to poor Tom's bed. Flinging his tired body on this grateful couch, burying his head in the crushed sweet fern of his pillow with one deep-drawn sigh of pleasure,—there, haunted by no past and harassed by no future, slept God's fool as sweetly as ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin
... the faithful years return And hearts unwounded sing again, Comes Taffy dancing through the fern To lead the ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... and watched the precision and power of the Jacks as they clove, swung, and lopped. From the cliff he looked down at the long bunk-house, saw the blue smoke rising straight, curled at the top like the uncoiling frond of a new fern-leaf. Saw the Chinese cook, in his wadded coat of blue, disappear into the snow-covered mound that hid the provision shack, and watched the bounding pups refusing to be broken into harness by Siwash George. ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... and are collecting and buying ferns, with Ward's cases wherein to keep them (for which you have to pay), and wrangling over unpronounceable names of species (which seem to he different in each new Fern-book that they buy), till the Pteridomania seems to you somewhat of a bore: and yet you cannot deny that they find an enjoyment in it, and are more active, more cheerful, more self-forgetful over it, than ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... indigenous flora.... Among the minor valleys Birmal perhaps takes precedence by right of its natural beauty. Here are stretches of park-like scenery where grass-covered slopes are dotted with clumps of deodar and pine and intersected with rivulets hidden in banks of fern; soft green glades open out to view from every turn in the folds of the hills, and above them the silent watch towers of Pirghal and Shuidar ... look down from their snow-clad heights across the Afghan uplands to the hills beyond Ghazni." ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... lightest graces; she whose eye could embrace such vast proportions, had stooped to study the glowing illuminations painted upon the wings of the fragile butterfly. She had traced the symmetrical and marvellous network which the fern extends as a canopy over the wood strawberry; she had listened to the murmuring of streams through the long reeds and stems of the water-grass, where the hissing of the "amorous viper" may be heard; she had followed the wild leaps of the Will-with-a-wisp as it bounds over ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... from the wallowing hippopotami by the crest of the knoll. The human squatting-place was a trampled area among the dead brown fronds of Royal Fern, through which the crosiers of this year's growth were unrolling to the light and warmth. The fire was a smouldering heap of char, light grey and black, replenished by the old women from time to time with brown leaves. Most of the men were asleep—they slept ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... stranger's admiration of the views, the exquisite framings of the summer sea and sky made by tree, rock, and rising ground, and the walks so well laid out on the little headland, now on smooth turf, now bordering slopes wild with fern and mountain ash, now amid luxuriant exotic shrubs that attested the ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... alone for the night in a little garret—a mere fowl-house—upstairs, formed by the roof and gable walls, and hung with strings of apples and chestnuts. It was a poor sleeping-place—rough, chilly, and unclean. I ascended to it by a ladder; my cloak and a little fern formed my only bed. But I was glad to accept it, for it enabled me to be alone and to think ...
— Under the Red Robe • Stanley Weyman
... knoll o'erlooks a dale Where Earn meanders down the vale; A knoll enwreathed in oak and fern, The sweetest nook in all Strathearn. The morn there breaks with earliest ray, Here latest shines the lingering day, There summer reigns supremely fair, And winter ev'n is lovely there. Its eastern prospect looks entire Along the glades of Ochtertyre; Its south, a mountain forest shade ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... der Kaftern, Wo die Hottentotten trachten Holie Hottentottentitel Zu erwerben in den Schlachten, Wo die Hottentottentaktik Lasst ertonen fern und nah Auf dem Hottentottentamtam Hottentottentattratah; Wo die Hottentottentrotteln, Eh' sie stampfen stark und kuhn. Hottentottentatowirung An sioh selber erst vollzieh'n, Wo die Hottentotten tuten Auf dem ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... crutch! is it not autumn, when the fern is red, the water-flag yellow? Have I not hated that which ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... gentleman, now no more. He was actively employed at that place, and wrote to me frequently, describing the family, to which he was much attached, the whimsicalities of his landlord—a thorough old Scotian, who amused himself by waking the echoes of the wilderness with the bagpipes,—the noble fern trees and the fine black cockatoos. He also continued his practice in surgery, but I believe he made no charge, as, not being duly licensed, he considered he had no right to do so. He returned to Ballaarat in ...
— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills
... evidently saw nothing and whipped up unmercifully, also unsuccessfully, for the spirit stood directly in the path, and the amiable beast would not budge a foot. A lively skirmish followed, which ended in the Eastern gentleman being upset into a sweet-fern bush, while the better bred animal abased itself ...
— Eight Cousins • Louisa M. Alcott
... has nothing in it of energy nor vitality, neither its repose of stability. But having once seen a great rock come down a mountain side, we have a noble sensation of its rest, now bedded immovably among the under fern, because the power and fearfulness of its motion were great, and its stability and negation of motion are now great in proportion. Hence the imagination, which delights in nothing more than the enhancing ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... indiscriminate onslaught upon customs of dress. Why did God put spots on the pansy, or etch the fern leaf? And what are china-asters good for if style and color are of ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... in search of them; but, in Gowbarrow Park, the lover of Nature might linger for hours. Here is a powerful Brook, which dashes among rocks through a deep glen, hung on every side with a rich and happy intermixture of native wood; here are beds of luxuriant fern, aged hawthorns, and hollies decked with honeysuckles; and fallow-deer glancing and bounding over the lawns and through the thickets. These are the attractions of the retired views, or constitute a foreground for ever-varying pictures of the majestic Lake, forced to take a winding course ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... "bee-bonneted," but bird-bonneted, I go. Yes, this day shall be given to the king, as our country-folk say, when they go a-pleasuring. I am off with the little wool-gatherers, to see what thorn and brier and fern-stalk and willow-catkin ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... verbenas, mesembryanthemums. For erect-growing plants: geraniums, heliotropes, phlox. If the position is a shaded one, the drooping plants might be of the following: tradescantia, Kenilworth ivy, senecio(A) or parlor ivy, sedums, moneywort,(A) vinca, smilax,(A) lygodium(A) or climbing fern. Erect-growing plants would be dracenas, palms, ferns, coleus, ...
— Manual of Gardening (Second Edition) • L. H. Bailey
... lichens take possession of the trees and cover them with a unique decoration. The licorice fern often gains a foothold on the trees thus decorated, and grows luxuriantly, embedded in the deep growth ...
— The Mountain that was 'God' • John H. Williams
... all along the line. Our potatoes are buried in a jungle of autumn burdocks. Our radishes stand seven feet high, uneatable. Our tomatoes, when last seen, were greener than they were at the beginning of August, and getting greener every week. Our celery looked as delicate as a maidenhair fern. Our Indian corn was nine feet high with a tall feathery spike on top of that, but no sign of anything eatable about it ...
— Frenzied Fiction • Stephen Leacock
... some moments. The deer, in lofty pity for Vick, have stopped to allow her to get nearer to them. With their fine noses in the air, and their proud necks compassionately turned toward her, they are waiting, while she pushes, panting and shrieking, through the stout fern-stems; then, leap cruelly away ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... Somerset, and Wilts.] Stretch'd the BLACK MOUNTAIN'S dreary chain! When eastward turn'd the straining eye, Great MALVERN met the cloudless sky: Southward arose th'embattled shores, Where Ocean in his fury roars, And rolls abrupt his fearful tides, Far still from MENDIP'S fern-clad sides; From whose vast range of mingling blue, The weary, wand'ring sight withdrew, O'er fair GLAMORGAN'S woods and downs, O'er glitt'ring streams, and farms, and towns, Back to the TABLE ROCK, that lours O'er old ...
— The Banks of Wye • Robert Bloomfield
... of Gondo, I find "Viola (saxatilis?) name yet wanted;—in the most delicate studding of its round leaves, like a small fern more than violet, and bright sparkle of small flowers in the dark dripping hollows. Assuredly delights in shade ...
— Proserpina, Volume 2 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... ravine, well shaded by mahogany-trees, the ground covered with the luxuriant vegetation of that tropical region, a little stream bubbling and leaping and dashing down one of the high rocks that flanked the hollow, and rippling away through the tall fern towards the rear of the spot where we had halted, at the distance of a hundred yards from which the ground was ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... preparing ferns for skeleton-leaf bouquets it is not necessary to place them in the macerating bowl before bleaching, as the texture of the fern is so delicate as to be ruined by maceration. Before bleaching, the fern should be pressed, and as it becomes dry and brittle, more care is required in the bleaching process than for skeleton leaves. Hang ...
— Harper's Young People, July 13, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... Spearmint, Mustard. These, excepting the two last, are not the natural product of the Land, but they are transplanted hither: By which I perceive all other European Plants would grow there: They have also Fern, Indian Corn. Several sorts of Beans as good as these in England: right Cucumhers, Calabasses, and several sorts of Pumkins, &c. The Dutch on that Island in their Gardens have Lettice, Rosemary, Sage, and all other Herbs and Sallettings that we ...
— An Historical Relation Of The Island Ceylon In The East Indies • Robert Knox
... oaks, intersected with those smooth and sunny glades, that seem as if they must be cut for dames and knights to saunter on. Then again the undulating ground spread on all sides, far as the eye could range, covered with copse and fern of immense growth. Anon you found yourself in a turfy wilderness, girt in apparently by dark woods. And when you had wound your way a little through this gloomy belt, the landscape still strictly sylvan, would beautifully expand with every combination ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... to look into the depth while lying upon a slab of stone that stretches some distance beyond the side of the pit! Bushes with twisted and fantastic arms, growing, they or their ancestors, from time immemorial in the clefts of the rock, reach towards the light, and the elfish hart's-tongue fern, itself half in darkness, points down with frond that never moves in that eternal stillness which all the winds of heaven pass over, to a thicker darkness whence comes the everlasting wail and groan ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... the billowy prairies of America, from the level of the sea-shore to the lofty valleys and table-lands of the Andes and the Himalayas, it is successfully cultivated. The emigrant clears the primaeval forest of Canada, or the fern-brakes of New Zealand, and there the corn seed sown will spring up as luxuriantly as on the old loved fields of home." [1] All this should teach us to see in the harvest the result, not of our skill and cleverness, but of the good God's lovingkindness. Ask yourselves now, my brothers, whether ...
— The Life of Duty, v. 2 - A year's plain sermons on the Gospels or Epistles • H. J. Wilmot-Buxton
... and "Fanny Fern" both delighted the public with individual styles of writing, vastly successful when ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... and gaining sweet woodland scenes of light and shade at every step, as the eye dived into the deep green stillness between the large old trunks, carefully freed from underwood, and with their feet carpeted with moss, and flowers, and fern. It was called the deer's track, from the fact that along it, morning and evening, all the bucks and does which had herded on that side of the park might be seen walking stately down to or from a bright, clear-running trout-stream, that wandered along about a quarter of a mile farther ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... that had dined in the valley making their way up the dry bed of a stream, through a gorge which cleft a line of precipitous hills. On either hand the bank rose steeply, giving no footing for man or beast. The road was a difficult one; for here a tall, fern-crowned rock left but a narrow passage between itself and the shaggy hillside, and there smooth and slippery ledges, mounting one above the other, spanned the way. In places, too, the drought had left pools of dark, still water, difficult to avoid, and not infrequently the entire party must ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... the crest of the nearest hill between her and the City. The wind being from her, she did not even hear the hoof-beats until the horse had turned from the glare of the sun into the shadow of the fern-bordered lane. The first she knew of it, she glanced over her shoulder and saw the red-cloaked figure riding toward her along the ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... regretfully among the fern-decked rocks before quite finishing the ascent to the actual outside world, the mercury lost little ...
— Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills • Luella Agnes Owen
... foot of this path, concealed amongst the bushes, crouched two sentries. At another point also, where, from the loftiest part of the platform, a view was obtained over the tree-tops up the defile between the mountains, other two watchers were stationed, stretched at full length amongst the fern, and peering out through laurel bushes, with whose dark foliage their bronzed physiognomies were confounded beyond ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... to listen To the harp of Wainamoinen. Came the trout with graceful motions, Water-dogs with awkward movements, From the water-cliffs the salmon, From the sea-caves came the whiting, From the deeper caves the bill-fish; Came the pike from beds of sea-fern, Little fish with eyes of scarlet, Leaning on the reeds and rushes, With their heads above the surface; Came to hear the harp of joyance, Hear the songs of ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... of secondary capsules being added to the normal central capsule. A field of such poppies was grown, and M. Goeppert, with seed from this field, obtained still this monstrous form in great quantity. Deformities of ferns are sometimes sought after by fern-growers. They are now always obtained by taking spores from the abnormal parts of the monstrous fern; from which spores ferns presenting the same peculiarities invariably grow.... The most remarkable case is that observed by Dr. Godron, of ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... the primeval trees. And surely would have had I not seen close to me a vast and smoothly slanting ledge of rock which the stars shining on made silvery, and on which no tree could grow, scarce even a tuft of fern, so like a floor it lay in a wide oval amid ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... the 'Denes,' which is no more, they tell me, than a hollow place, even as the word 'den' is," says John Ridd. "It is a pretty place," he adds, "though nothing to frighten any body, unless he hath lived in a gallipot." The valley is well protected from the wind, and "there is shelter and dry fern-bedding and folk to be seen in the distance from a bank whereon the sun shines." Here John Ridd came to consult the wise woman toward the end of March, while the weather was still cold and piercing. In ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... not through dry-shod? For wilding brooch shall wet your breast The rain-fresh goldenrod. Oh, never this whelming east wind swells But it seems like the sea's return To the ancient lands where it left the shells Before the age of the fern; And it seems like the time when after doubt Our love came back amain. Oh, come forth into the storm and rout And be my ...
— A Boy's Will • Robert Frost
... ourselves at the entrance of an immense cavern formed in the lava. It was some hundred feet square, and from fifteen to twenty high. When lighted up by the torches, it had a very wild and picturesque appearance. The horses were tethered in one part, while we all went out and collected grass and fern leaves for our beds, and a good supply of fuel for our fire. Having cooked our supper, we sat round the fire, while one of the natives, who spoke English very well, told us some of the wonderful tales about Pele, the goddess of ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... in all the constraint of a standing posture, he was held in the flexure of the rock like some of its fossils,—as unsuspected as a ganoid of the days of eld that had once been imprisoned thus in the sediment of seas that had long ebbed hence,—or the fern vestiges in a later formation finding a witness in the imprint in the stone of the symmetry of its fronds. He listened to the hue and cry for him; then to the sudden tramp of hoofs as a pursuing party ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... delightful talk, We rested from our walk. Beyond the shadow, large and staid, Cows chewed with drowsy eye Their cud complacently: Elegant deer walked o'er the glade, Or stood with wide bright eyes Gazing a short surprise; And up the fern slope nimble ...
— My Beautiful Lady. Nelly Dale • Thomas Woolner
... except that I was quite alone, and had come from a long way over the mountains. In the course of time they grew tired, and I very sleepy. I made signs as though I would sleep on the floor in my blankets, but they gave me one of their bunks with plenty of dried fern and grass, on to which I had no sooner laid myself than I fell fast asleep; nor did I awake till well into the following day, when I found myself in the hut with two men keeping guard over me and an old woman cooking. ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... Christmas," cried everyone in Spanish or Visayan, and "Merry Christmas" we responded, though June skies bending down toward tropical palms and soft winds just rustling the tops of tall bamboos, so that they cast flickering fern-like shadows over thatched nipa roofs, but ill suggested Christmas to an ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel
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