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More "Mistletoe" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of mistletoe, tender and fair, grew high above the field," and such a little thing it was, with its dainty green leaves and waxen white berries, nestling for protection under the strong arm of a great oak, that the goddess passed it by. Assuredly no scathe could come to Baldur the Beautiful from a ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... in a spot where a forest of trees with whorled tops were slowly being strangled to death by immense orchids of every conceivable shape and color, and by a kind of creeping mistletoe which grew almost as they watched. Here also, the ground was covered with fluffy, grey-green moss which seethed constantly as if it were a carpet of maggots. Both Ivana and Nini warned Kirby on his life not to touch or go near the moss, and a moment ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... him fasten the skates on to her pretty feet. Happy cornet! And she plays billiards with her handsome cousin—a guardsman at least—and informs him that she is just eighteen to his love—and stands under the mistletoe and asks this enviable relation of hers to show her what the garroter's hug is like; and when he proceeds to do so she calls out in distress because his pointed waxed moustache has scratched her pretty cheek; and when Mr. Punch is there, at dinner, she and a sister darling pull crackers ...
— Social Pictorial Satire • George du Maurier
... round the ponds stood dark groves of pandanus palms, and among and beyond the palms tall grasses and forest trees, with here and there a spreading colabar festooned from summit to trunk with brilliant crimson strands of mistletoe, and here and there a gaunt dead old giant of the forest, and everywhere above and beyond the timber deep sunny blue and flooding sunshine. Sunny blue reflected, with the gaunt old trees, in the tiny gleaming seas among ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... it carried her bridal finery to and from the Philadelphia Centennial. In the quiet, uneventful years that followed it had reposed in a big, roomy old garret, undisturbed save at the annual spring house-cleaning, or when we children played "The Mistletoe Bough" and hid in it the skeleton which had descended to us as a relic of our grandfather's ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... Misprint preseraro. Misrepresent falsreprezenti. Miss manki. Miss Frauxlino. Missile jxetarmilo. Missing manka. Mission misio. Missionary misiisto. Mist nebuleto. Mistake eraro. Mistaken, to be trompigxi. Mistletoe visko. Mistress (house) mastrino. Mistress (lover) amantino. Mistress (school) instruistino. Mistrust malfido. Mistrust suspekti. Misty nebuleta. Misunderstand malkompreni. Misuse maluzi, malbonuzi. Mite akaro. Mite (coin) monereto. Mitre mitro. Mitigate ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... sly bough of mistletoe We must not, cannot miss, For, privileged beneath its shade, We hope for many ...
— Home Lyrics • Hannah. S. Battersby
... disclosed something lying in the corner, which on examination proved to be a dry bone. Whether it was human, or had come from the castle larder in bygone times, he could not tell. One bone was not a whole skeleton, but it made him think of Ginevra of Modena, the heroine of the Mistletoe Bough, and other cribbed and confined wretches, who had fallen into such traps and been discovered after a cycle ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... and incantations, the dexterous introduction, by a jocose old gentleman, of a mistletoe-bough into the festoons draping the chandelier, and divers other tricks, all of which were taken in excellent part by the victims thereof, and vociferously applauded by the spectators. The great hall-clock had rung out twelve strokes, ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... leg with their heads slanted in pensive contemplation. There were no vineyards, but orchards aplenty near the farmhouses, and all about there were other trees pollarded to the quick and tufted with mistletoe, not only the stout oaks, but the slim poplars trimmed up into tall plumes like the poplars in southern France. The houses, when they did not stand apart like our own farmhouses, gathered into gray-brown villages around some high-shouldered church with a bell-tower in front or at one corner of ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... leafy branches, and reached from below by a primitive ladder. This was the favourite sitting-room of the girls by day, and served for Pancho's bedroom at night. It was beautiful enough to be fit shelter for all the woodland nymphs, with its festoons of mistletoe and wild grape-vines; but Pancho was rather an unappreciative tenant, even going so far as to snore ...
— A Summer in a Canyon: A California Story • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... am sure I cannot think why, but it was his hobby—you had a remarkable foreshadowing of Christianity; the idea of the human sacrifice, the Atonement, the Communion of Saints, the mystic Vine, which he clumsily identified with the mistletoe, and what not else. He read portions of his privately-published Tales of Taliessin. In short such happiness radiated from his pink-cheeked face and recovered eyes that David regretted in no wise his own lapses into conventional, stereotyped religion. The ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... counseled the Birds that when the acorn first began to sprout, to pull it all up out of the ground and not allow it to grow. She said acorns would produce mistletoe, from which an irremediable poison, the bird-lime, would be extracted and by which they would be captured. The Owl next advised them to pluck up the seed of the flax, which men had sown, as it was a plant which ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... marriage into the family of Negrepelisse, and for him this meant a family connection with the Marquise d'Espard, and a political career in Paris. Here was a fair tree to cultivate in spite of the ill-omened, unsightly mistletoe that grew thick upon it; he would hang his fortunes upon it, and prune it, and wait till he could gather its ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... There were signs of the season in every corner of the plain but cosy little sitting-room. Mistletoe hung from the chandelier; gay bunting and strands of gold and silver tinsel draped the bookcase and the writing desk; holly and myrtle covered the wall brackets, and red tissue paper shaded all of the electric light globes; big candles and little candles flickered on the mantelpiece, ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon
... none of it, only showed me how, and Aunt Jane says I may tell you I am really trying to be good. I am helping her gild fir-cones for a Christmas-tree for the quire, and they will sing carols. Macrae brought some for us the day before yesterday, and a famous lot of holly and ivy and mistletoe and flowers, and three turkeys and some hams and pheasants and partridges. Aunt Jane sent the biggest turkey and ham in a basket covered up with holly to Mrs. White, and another to Mrs. Hablot, and they are doing the church with the holly and ivy. We are to ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... that could drive away evil spirits; yet it was also looked upon with some suspicion, perhaps also arising from its use by our heathen ancestors, so that, though admitted into houses, it was not (or very seldom) admitted into churches. And this character so far still attaches to the Mistletoe, that it is never allowed with the Holly and Ivy and Box to decorate the churches, and Gay's lines ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... pleasure bent, had a frugal mind, and after a wedding-breakfast, which lasted all day, he went to a theatre to ask for two free passes. When he came back his bride was gone. He sought her with all the ardour of the bridegroom in the ballad of "The Mistletoe Bough," and with more success. Madame Ling was reading a novel at home. Mr. Carlyle has quoted Tobias Smollett as to the undesirability of giving the historical muse that latitude which is not uncommon in France, and we prefer to leave the tale of Ling's where ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... a plant the use of which against witchcraft was more widely distributed, just as its medical virtues were also more extensively known. The vervain, indeed, was a sacred plant among the Greeks, as well as among the Druids, who gathered it with solemn religious ceremonies, as they did the sacred mistletoe. Vervain was most esteemed, however, as a love potion, but the connection between its virtues in this respect, and its power over witches and spirits of evil, opens up a branch of inquiry away from ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... the most beautiful of all the bars. From the store one can walk nearly a mile down the river quite easily. The path is bordered by a row of mingled oaks and firs, the former garlanded with mistletoe, and the latter embroidered with that exquisitely beautiful moss which I tried to describe in one of my ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... Muir, if she were not at this moment in the garret, might suddenly remember that she had left the door ajar, taking away the key; then she would rush back like a stout round whirlwind, and in a minute more Barrie would be a prisoner, almost like the fair bride in "The Mistletoe Bough," only there was more air in the garret than in the oak chest that shut with a spring. But Barrie was used to taking risks—risks insignificant compared with this, yet big enough to supply salt and sugar for the dry daily ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... think that no plant is genial unless it is prickly, and that prickly things represent appropriately to the eye the inward peace and good will that grows, like a cactus, perhaps within the heart. He did not put holly rigidly above his doors. No mistletoe drooped from the apex of the tentroom. Instead, he filled his flat with flowers, brought from English conservatories or from abroad. Crowds of strange and spotted orchids stood together in the drawing-room, staring upon the hurly-burly of furniture and ornaments. In the corners of the room ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... "inconstant moon" that then and thereafter remains fixed in the heavens as though it were a part of the solar system inaugurated by Joshua. Again the white-robed Druids filed past me, again I saw that improbable mistletoe cut from that impossible oak, and again cold chills ran down my back with the first strain of the recitative. The thumping springs essayed to beat time, and the private box-like obscurity of the vehicle lent a cheap enchantment to the ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... hotel I put up holly and mistletoe, and produced from my trunks a real Christmas pudding that my mother had made. We had it for supper, and ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... of her letters, (which neither is inserted,) is thus described:—'A piece of ruins upon it, the remains of an old chapel, now standing in the midst of the coppice; here and there an over-grown oak, surrounded with ivy and mistletoe, starting up, to sanctify, as it were, the awful solemnness of the place: a spot, too, where a man having been found hanging some years ago, it was used to be thought of by us when children, and by the maid- servants, with a degree of terror, (it being actually the habitation ...
— Clarissa, Volume 2 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... the streets, and silver mistletoe; The surging, jeweled, ragged crowds forever come and go. And here a silken woman laughs, and there a beggar asks— And, oh, the faces, tense of lip, like mad and mocking masks. Who thinks of Bethlehem today, and one lone winter night? ...
— The White Christmas and other Merry Christmas Plays • Walter Ben Hare
... on a grander scale than usual. The candles build famously, set in the chimney candelabra; the logs are all of the biggest, and as for the Yule himself, he is a veritable Brobdignag; the staircases drop flowers, and holly and mistletoe hang all about. Everything shines, and gleams, and glows. There is to be a boar's head, with, no lack of mustard and minstrelsy, and nothing eatable or drinkable that pertains to Christmas will be wanting. Carols, and waits, and contended ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... large bunch of mistletoe from one of the chandeliers. The children, one at a time, stand under the mistletoe, and guess how many berries there are on it. The berries are counted when all have guessed. The one coming ...
— Games for Everybody • May C. Hofmann
... bones." So saying, he tramped noisily out of the apartment, nearly knocking over a fleshy dame in ruffled cap and whitest apron, whose rosy cheeks were like winter apples, and who bore in her hands a huge mince-pie in which was stuck a sprig of mistletoe. ...
— Prince Lazybones and Other Stories • Mrs. W. J. Hays
... mineralo. minister : pastro, (polit.) ministro. mint : mento. minutes : (of meeting, etc.), protokolo. miracle : miraklo. mirror : spegulo. misery : mizero. mission : misio. mistake : erar'o, -i. mistletoe : visko. mite : akaro. mix : miksi. mob : popolamaso, popolacxo, fipopolo, kanajlaro. mock : moki. model : modelo. moderate : modera. modern : moderna. modest : modesta. molasses : melaso, sukerrestajxo. mole : talpo; digo. molest : gxeni, ...
— The Esperanto Teacher - A Simple Course for Non-Grammarians • Helen Fryer
... Synagogue at the United Council, but her swan-like neck was still bowed beneath the yoke of North London, not to say provincial, Judaism. So to-night there were none of those external indications of Christmas which are so frequent at "good" Jewish houses; no plum-pudding, snapdragon, mistletoe, not even a Christmas tree. For Mrs. Henry Goldsmith did not countenance these coquettings with Christianity. She would have told you that the incidence of her dinner on Christmas Eve was merely an accident, ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... partner's shoulder. Medora drifted by in company with a Mexican vaquero. Her white garments fluttered famously against the other's costume of yellow and black. She had let down her abundant dark hair and then carelessly caught it up again and woven into it a garland of mistletoe. She smiled on Abner with a plaintive, weary lifting of her eyebrows; she appeared to be "creating atmosphere" again, just as on the afternoon when he had first seen her pouring tea. She seemed a long way off. The occasion itself removed her one stage from him, and her costume another, and her ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... Samas' hand; For his bright face is rising in the east, And shifting clouds from sea and rising mist, The robes of purple, violet and gold, With rosy tints the form of Samas fold. The tamarisk and scarlet mistletoe, With green acacias' golden summits glow, And citron, olives, myrtle, climbing vine, Arbutus, cypress, plane-tree rise divine; The emerald verdure, clad with brilliant hues, With rose-tree forests quaffs the morning dews. The ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous
... in the house, this evening, and as this gives me room at the table, I am going to begin to answer your letter. George is out of town, and all the rest, including the servants, have gone to see the Mistletoe Bough. It is astonishing how slowly you get well; and yet with such heat and such smells as you have in Chicago, it is yet more astonishing that you live at all. I thought it dreadful to have the thermometer stand at 90 deg. in my bedroom, ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... Christmas Eve the Mass was sung; That only night in all the year Saw the staled priest the chalice rear. The damsel donn'd her kirtle sheen; The hall was dressed with holly green; Forth to the wood did merry men go, To gather in the mistletoe. Then open wide the baron's hall, To vassal, tenant, serf, and all; Power laid his rod of rule aside, And Ceremony doft'd his pride. The heir with roses in his shoes, That night might village partner choose; The lord, underogating, share The vulgar game of 'post and pair.' ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... stream out toward the higher back woods, I chanced to spy a bunch of snow in one of the great sour gums, that I thought was an old nest. A second look showed me tiny green leaves, then white berries, then mistletoe. ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... past a wretched custom-house, where two painted sentry-boxes leaned, past a squalid barnyard full of amber-coloured, unsavoury puddles and gaunt poultry, up to the thatched stone house where Grahame stood waiting. Over the door hung a withered branch of mistletoe, ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... at Mrs. Blodgett's, after the fashion of a second-rate English house of entertainment. The servants hung mistletoe about in various places, and woe to the unlucky wight that was caught under it. Hawthorne presents an amusing picture of his boy Julian, nine years old, struggling against the endearments of a chamber-maid, and believes that he himself was the only male person ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... gray beards; and last, but not least, that strange and lovely parasite, the Rhipsalis cassytha, which you mistake first for a plume of green sea-weed, or a tress of Mermaid's hair which has got up there by mischance, and then for some delicate kind of pendent mistletoe; till you are told, to your astonishment, that it is an abnormal form of Cactus—a family which it resembles, save in its tiny flowers and fruit, no more than it resembles the Ceiba-tree on which it grows; and told, too, that, strangely enough, ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... whereat the hag Smiled with hideous irony, Seized a switch of mistletoe, Smote me over ...
— Atta Troll • Heinrich Heine
... of knives in association with religious rites are interesting, as, for instance, the golden knife with which the old Druids cut the mistletoe with pomp and much mystic ceremony. The early Christians made use of the knife and symbolized the cross when feasting; indeed, the old country habit—which is now deemed a sign of vulgarity—of crossing the knife and fork after dining, took ...
— Chats on Household Curios • Fred W. Burgess
... occultists of other lands. The Druidic priests were well versed in astronomy and astrology, and the planets had an important part in the teachings. A portion of their ritual is said to have correspondences with the early Jewish rites and worship. Their favorite symbol—the mistletoe—was used as indicating re-birth, the mistletoe being the new life springing forth from the old one, typified by the oak. The Druids traveled into Ancient Britain and Ireland, and many traces of their religious ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson
... should either die where I sat, or go mad. That I did neither, was due to a divine inspiration which made me suddenly think of a device that I had once seen on a Druidical stone in Brittany—the sun, a hand with the index and little fingers pointing downwards, and a sprig of mistletoe. The instant I saw them in my mind's eye, the cords that held me ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... preparation for the greatest festival in all the year—the day when in most households there are many little mysteries afoot, when parcels come and go, and are smothered away so as to be ready when Santa Claus comes his rounds; when some are busy decking the rooms with holly and mistletoe; when the cook is busiest of all, and savoury smells rise from the kitchen, telling of good things to ...
— Brave and True - Short stories for children by G. M. Fenn and Others • George Manville Fenn
... could possibly be thought of the architectural line, to make a convent picturesque. It is built of graystone; but it is only once in a while that you can see the graystone, for the walls are almost completely covered with mistletoe and ivy and evergreen. There are the most delicious little arched windows with diamond panes peeping out from the mistletoe and evergreen, and always at all times of the year, a little Christmas wreath of ivy and holly-berries is suspended ...
— Our Boys - Entertaining Stories by Popular Authors • Various
... the chorus would seem to have been sung when the Druids went in search of the sacred mistletoe, which they called the "heal ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 2, December 1875 • Various
... time were white), and settled on a little blue flower, hoping to cover it up, so that Nanna might overlook it. The flower, however, cried out "forget-me-not, forget-me-not," and has ever since been known under that name. Loki then flew up into an oak and sat on a mistletoe. Here he was more successful. Nanna carried off the oath of the oak, but overlooked the mistletoe. She thought, however, and the divinities thought, that she had successfully accomplished her mission, and that Balder had ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... their welfare, are incidentally revealed in these letters. For instance, "The men had a wonderful Christmas Day (1916). They were like a happy lot of children. We decorated the ward with flags, holly and mistletoe, and paper flowers that the men made, and a tree in ...
— 'My Beloved Poilus' • Anonymous
... "The Mistletoe that is without root or strength. It grows on the eastern side of Valhalla. I passed it by without drawing an ...
— The Children of Odin - The Book of Northern Myths • Padraic Colum
... good mother lived, If 't were to live, to pass long dolorous hours Before his father's effigy in church; Of one who then used often come to hall, Ever at Yule-tide, when the great log flamed In chimney-place, and laugh and jest went round, And maidens strayed beneath the mistletoe, Making believe not see it, so got kissed— Of one that joined not in the morrice-dance, But in her sea-green kirtle stood at gaze, A timid little creature that was scared By dead men's armor. Nought there suffered change, Those empty shells of valor grew not old, Though something rusty. ...
— Wyndham Towers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... neighborhood roads," I said, and presently we were deeper than ever in woodland shades and sources of girlish wonderment. The humid depths showed every sort of green and gray, their trunks, bushes and boughs, bearded with hanging moss, robed with tangled vines and chapleted with mistletoe. We seemed to have got this earth quite to ourselves and ...
— The Cavalier • George Washington Cable
... condition of idleness is about as useless a thing as is to be found in nature. He prefers to live by some one else's labor. The world owes him a living and he manages somehow to get it. But he is an industrious collector, although he would walk a mile to get around work. He attaches himself, like the mistletoe, to whoever will support him. He is a true parasite. His tongue has but little end to it. It wags from morning to night; invents seemingly plausible theories of work, but never attempts them. He is full of advice to all who will listen. Can such a man be healthy? He cannot enjoy good health because ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... I not reason, think you, to look pale? These two have 'ticed me hither to this place:— A barren detested vale you see it is: The trees, though summer, yet forlorn and lean, O'ercome with moss and baleful mistletoe: Here never shines the sun; here nothing breeds, Unless the nightly owl or fatal raven:— And when they show'd me this abhorred pit, They told me, here, at dead time of the night, A thousand fiends, a thousand hissing snakes, Ten thousand swelling toads, as many urchins, ...
— The Tragedy of Titus Andronicus • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... of Western Australia, with brilliant orange-coloured flowers, Nuytsia floribunda, N.O. Loranthaceae; which is also called Tree Mistletoe, and, ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... of haute ecole was to be followed by an exhibition of "transportation throughout the ages," headed by a Gaulish chariot driven by a trooper with a long horsehair moustache and mistletoe wreath, and ending in a motor of which the engine had been taken out and replaced by a large placid white horse. Unluckily a heavy rain began while this instructive "number" awaited its turn, and we had to leave before Vercingetorix ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... England has a finished neatness; the fields are all divided by hedges or fences; the fruit trees are neatly pruned; the roads beautifully made, etc. Everything is the reverse in France: the fields are distinguished by the nature of the crops they bear; the fruit trees are overgrown with moss and mistletoe; and the roads ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin
... father was in the highest of spirits, and would have the house decorated with holly and mistletoe. He went out to a few parties, but he was always unwilling to leave my mother, though she wished him to go; then, when we were quite alone, the wind wailing, the snow falling and beating up against the windows, she would ask me to read to her the beautiful gospel ...
— My Mother's Rival - Everyday Life Library No. 4 • Charlotte M. Braeme
... with its sharp-spiked leaves and scarlet berries, and the white-berried, pale green mistletoe may be closely copied. All these and many more are made on the same principle, and in so simple a manner that even quite a little child may succeed in producing very ...
— Little Folks' Handy Book • Lina Beard
... note the singular order of vegetable parasites, the Loranthaceae, an order containing some thirty genera with four hundred species, and including the mistletoe, which is traditionally venerable in our island. The great group of catkin-bearing trees (Amentaceae), contains a great assemblage of plants, familiar in England, such as the hornbeam, hazel, oak, beech, Spanish chestnut, ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... many cases green matter is wanting in their tissues or is hidden by a livid tint that strikes the observer. Such are the Orobanchacc, or "broomropes," and the tropical Balanophorace. Nevertheless, other parasites, such as the mistletoe, have perfectly green leaves. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 430, March 29, 1884 • Various
... he was busy all morning under Jane's garrulous command, getting in bunches of holly and other evergreens from the hedgerows. His last journey had been to one of the farms on the Upper Hanyards in quest of mistletoe, which grew abundantly there in an ancient orchard. On getting back he had held a sprig over Jane's head for a certain familiar and laudable purpose, and had been rewarded with a smack that sounded like the dropping of an empty milk-pail. A little later I found him glowering in ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... make me give in," he said, "but I've had to make a complete surrender to the Little Colonel." That Christmas there was such a celebration at Locust that May Lilly and Henry Clay nearly went wild in the general excitement of the preparation. Walker hung up cedar and holly and mistletoe till the big house looked like a bower. Maria bustled about, airing rooms and bringing out ...
— The Little Colonel • Annie Fellows Johnston
... aunt, Mrs. Channing, who lived here with her son, William Henry Channing, the well-known anti-slavery orator. Here Higginson, as a youth, used to listen with keenest pleasure, to the singing of his cousin, Lucy Channing, especially when the song she chose was, "The Mistletoe Hung on the Castle Wall," the story of a bride shut up in a chest. "I used firmly to believe," the genial colonel confessed to the Radcliffe girls, in reviving for them his memories of the house, "that there was a bride ...
— The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees • Mary Caroline Crawford
... great hall of Hatfield House gleamed with the light of many candles that flashed upon the sconce and armor and polished floor. Holly and mistletoe, rosemary and bay, and all the decorations of an old-time English Christmas were tastefully arranged. A burst of laughter ran through the hall, as through the ample doorway, and down the broad stair, trooped the Motley train of the Lord of Misrule to open ...
— Historic Girls • E. S. Brooks
... Jean had been up and doing since five o'clock. He had decorated his cabin walls with ground pine and evergreen, and as a last touch had, with many chuckles, suspended from the ceiling an unusually perfect piece of mistletoe, which he had tramped into Oakdale early that morning to secure. He had cleaned his rifle first, then swept and scrubbed his cabin floor, and the pine table off which he ate, until the most critical housekeeper could have found no fault with the shining cleanliness of the place. The rousing ...
— Grace Harlowe's Third Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... lady who drew the favoured lot. The rest of the visitors assumed the rank of ministers of state or maids of honour. The festival was generally held in a large barn decorated with evergreens, and a large bough of mistletoe was not forgotten, which was often the source of much merriment. When the ceremony began, ...
— Old English Sports • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... terrible story of Ginevra, of the bride who was shut up in her trunk, and forever! She was shut up on hers, and knew not when she should be released! She had acted once in the ballad of the "Mistletoe Bough." She had been one of the "guests," who had sung "Oh, the Mistletoe Bough!" and had looked up at it, and she had seen at the side-scenes how the bride had laughingly stepped into the trunk. But the trunk then was only a make-believe of some boards in front of a sofa, ...
— The Peterkin Papers • Lucretia P Hale
... she seized the bull. Wales adopted and was proud of her in any costume. Welshmen North and South, united for the nonce, now propose her gallantry as a theme to the rival Bards at the next Eisteddfod. She is to sit throned in full assembly, oak leaves and mistletoe interwoven on her head, a white robe and green sash to clothe her, and the vanquished beast's horns on a gilded pole behind the dais; hearing the eulogies respectively interpreted to her by Colonel Fluellen Wythan at one ear, and Captain Agincourt Gower at the other. A splendid ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... are white with snow, And homes are hung with mistletoe; Old Earth is not half bad, I wis— What cheer! what cheer! How it ever seemed sad the wonder is— With a gift to give and a girl to kiss, My dear, my dear. So here's to the girl who never says no! Sing, Ho, a song of ...
— Myth and Romance - Being a Book of Verses • Madison Cawein
... were ringing their cheerful chimes In the old grey belfry tow'r, The choir were singing their carols betimes In the wintry midnight hour, The waits were playing with eerie drawl "The mistletoe hung in the castle hall," And the old policeman was stomping his feet As he quiver'd and shiver'd along on ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... the rains begin to fall heavily in November; there will be three or four days of steady downpour and then a clear and green week. December is also likely to be rainy; and in this month people enjoy the sensation of gathering for Christmas the mistletoe which grows profusely on the live oaks, while the poppies are beginning to blossom at their feet. By the end of January the rains come lighter. In the long spaces between rains there is a temperature and a feeling in the air much like that of Indian summer in ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... any source that Richard Perry Stanlock was entitled to the slightest credit for these magnificent doings. He spent Christmas at home in a quiet unassuming way amid the family decorations of holly and mistletoe, and a vast litter of presents, ...
— Campfire Girls in the Allegheny Mountains - or, A Christmas Success against Odds • Stella M. Francis
... horses could scent him. The nearer he approached the head of the arroyo, where the well was located, the thicker grew the desert vegetation. At length a dead palo verde, with huge black clumps of its parasite mistletoe thick in the branches, marked a distance from the well that Gale considered close enough. Noiselessly he crawled here and there until he secured a favorable position, and then rose to peep from ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... father lived till a 'underd, an' then on'y went through slippin' on a wet stone an' breakin' a bone in 'is back; an' my grandfather saw 'is larst Christmas at a 'underd an' ten, an' was up to kissin' a wench under the mistletoe, 'e was sich a chirpin' old gamecock. 'E didn't look no older'n you do now, an' you're a chicken compared to 'im. You've wore badly like, not knowin' ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... but a broken bubble, Trill the carol, troll the catch; Sooth, we'll cry, "A truce to trouble!" Mirth and mistletoe shall match. ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VII. (of X.) • Various
... ribbon shaken out and shimmering with opaline tints. Flower girls trooped forth making the air musical with their mellow cries of "Fiori! chi vuol fiori" and holding up their tempting wares—not bunches of holly and mistletoe such as are known in England, but roses, lilies, jonquils, and sweet daffodils. The shops were brilliant with bouquets and baskets of fruits and flowers; a glittering show of etrennes, or gifts to suit all ages and conditions, were set forth in tempting array, ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... usually found north of New Jersey and Pennsylvania. This is his playtime in the sunny South. He lives in flocks containing hundreds and even thousands of birds. They feed on the berries of the dogwood, china tree and mistletoe, and are the jolliest lot of birds it is possible ...
— Friends and Helpers • Sarah J. Eddy
... as gently as the water under the snowy breasts of many swans. The trees along the shore were freshly green and newly alive with the color and chatter of the paroquets. Looking and listening, he thought what a poetic notion it was that these vivid birds should carry the seed pearls of the mistletoe from one mighty oak to another, bearing the tiny treasures in the wax on ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... mistletoe, which Seraphine Dasher had mischievously suspended over the doorway, looked like a chaplet of pearls; the pointed stems of yew became frosted in silver; the variegated holly was transformed into branches of malachite, ornamented with a network of gold, ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... alive if Jack ever learns that such a plea was made, so I beg you whatever other rash acts you see fit to commit during your meteoric flight across my plane of existence, don't ever give me away. Firstly, because if I ever get a chance to do so, I'm positive that I should want to cling to you as the mistletoe does to the oak, and could not bear to be given away; and secondly, because I'm so attached to my own skin that I should really suffer pain if it was taken from me by force. Bob wants you to think it over, and let him know as to the whats and whens ...
— The Rejuvenation of Aunt Mary • Anne Warner
... distributed among the early Britons branches of the sacred mistletoe, which had been cut with solemn ceremony in the night from the oak trees in a forest that had ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... and crisp and bracing, and The Savins was gay with Christmas wreaths, with holly and mistletoe boughs. The rooms were in their annual state of disorder, for Christmas gifts and Christmas jokes were piled on all the tables and chairs. Gifford Barrett had been included in the revel of the evening ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... hard wood, who shall choose the kinds? There's beech, birch and maple; cherry, whitewood and ebony; ash and brown ash and white ash and black ash; ditto oak, drawn and quartered; there's rosewood, redwood, gopherwood and wormwood; mahogany, laurel, holly and mistletoe; cedar of Lebanon and pine of Georgia, not to mention chestnut, walnut, butternut, cocoanut and peanut, all of which are popular and available woods for finishing modern dwellings. If we choose from this list, which may ...
— The House that Jill Built - after Jack's had proved a failure • E. C. Gardner
... Mistletoe Bough (The). The song so called is by Thomas Haynes Bayley, who died 1839. The tale is this: Lord Lovel married a young lady, a baron's daughter, and on the wedding night the bride proposed that the guest should play "hide-and-seek." The bride hid in an ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... like to mistletoe, Which has no root, and cannot grow Or prosper, but by that same tree It clings about: so I by thee. What need I then to fear at all So long as I about thee crawl? But if that tree should fall and die, Tumble shall heaven, ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... The visitors received a joyous welcome, not a sort of empty every-day one. Plum pudding, roast beef, and mince pies and nuts were the order of the day, for beverage various kinds of drinks. Holly and mistletoe and evergreens obtained in nearly every house; in fact it was a joyous day from morn till night. Games of various kinds were played. Toys for children, rudimentary toys and picture books, cheap, and ...
— Some Reminiscences of old Victoria • Edgar Fawcett
... the mistletoe, the favourite Druidical plant, the sorcerer is entreated, in an old balled, to lay aside, to seek no more for vain enchantments, but to remember that he ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... heart, Baldur, upon whose beaming front the Gods Gazing, exulted; from whose lips mankind Shall gather counsel. Hand in hand with him Shall stand the blind God, Hoedur, now not blind, That, witless, slew him with the mistletoe, Yet loved him well. Others, both men and Gods, That dread Third Heaven attained, shall make abode With Him Who ever is, and ever was, Enthroned like Him upon its southern cliff, Drinking the light immortal. From beneath, Like winds from flowery wildernesses borne, The ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... use of her power did not occur to her until the preceding Christmas. Roast beef and plum pudding were a bitter mockery at Coombe Oaks—a sham and cold delusion, cold as snow. A "merry Christmas"—holly berries, mistletoe—and behind these—debt. Behind the glowing fire, written in the flames—debt; in the sound of the distant chimes—debt. Now be merry over the plum-pudding while the wolves gnash their teeth, wolves that the strongest bars cannot ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... forgot the mistletoe. So Loki, who always tried to do mischief, made an arrow of mistletoe, and gave it to the prince who shot and killed Baldur ...
— Famous Men of the Middle Ages • John H. Haaren
... to visit a solemn dolmen in a gloomy pine-wood, with mistletoe hanging from the trees, and the ghosts of ancient Druids haunting the spot. The cavalcade on such occasions was an imposing spectacle. Matilda being fond of horses likewise affected donkeys (or thought she did, till she tried to drive one), and usually went first in a small vehicle ...
— Shawl-Straps - A Second Series of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... French, Jealousy Marigold and Cyprus, Despair Marjoram, Blushes Marvel of Peru, Timidity Meadow Lychnis, Wit Meadowsweet, Uselessness Mercury, Goodness Mesembryanthemum, Idleness Mezereon, I Desire to Please Mignonette, You are Good Milfoil, War Milkwort, Hermitage Mint, Virtue Mistletoe, I Surmount Mock Orange, Counterfeit Monkshood, Deadly Foe Near Moonwort, Forgetfulness Morning Glory, Affectation Moschatel, Weakness Moss, Maternal Love Mosses, Ennui Motherwort, Concealed Love Moving Plant, ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... whose entire destiny is parasitic—which are not only sometimes, and impertinently, but always, and pertinently, out of place; not only out of the right place, but out of any place of their own? When is mistletoe, for instance, in the right place, young ladies, think you? On an apple tree, or on a ceiling? When is ivy in the right place?—when wallflower? The ivy has been torn down from the towers of Kenilworth; the weeds from the arches of the Coliseum, and from the ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... was quite as much hiding of funny shaped packages until the gift day should arrive, and the house was being decorated, inside and out, for the coming celebration. Mun Bun and Margy watched the servants hanging Christmas greens and mistletoe, although, unlike the older little Bunkers, they could not go into the swamps with the men to gather ...
— Six Little Bunkers at Mammy June's • Laura Lee Hope
... 'tis Yule! all eyes are bright, And joyous songs abound; Our log burns high, but it glows less bright Than the eyes which sparkle round. The merry laugh, and the jocund tale, And the kiss 'neath the mistletoe, Make care fly as fast as the blustering gale That wreaths the new fallen snow. 'Tis Yule! 'tis Yule! all eyes are bright, And joyous thoughts abound; The log burns high, but it glows less bright Than the eyes ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... generation, battling these identical popular errors in the pages of his Pseudodoxia Epidemica. In the like manner, Gerard's botanical evidence seems to have been of no use in persuading the public that mistletoe was not generated out of birdlime dropped by thrushes into the boughs of trees, or that its berries were not desperately poisonous. To observe and state the truth is not enough. The ears of those to whom it is proclaimed must be ready to ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... habit has reached a stage in some respects lower still. It has persisted in the downward course for so many generations that the young forms even have acquired the habit and usually begin life at once as parasites. The Mistletoe berries, which contain the seed of the future plant, are developed especially to minister to this degeneracy, for they glue themselves to the branches of some neighboring oak or apple, and there the young Mistletoe starts as ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... southeastern Arizona, being a succession of mountains and high, park-like mesas, broken here and there with valleys and watered by limpid streams. The highlands are wooded with pine, cedar, fir, juniper, oak, and other trees, while in the valleys are mistletoe-laden cottonwood as well as willow, alder, and walnut, which, with smaller growths, are interwoven with vines of grape, hop, and columbine, in places forming a veritable jungle. On every hand, whether on mountain or in valley, many varieties of cactus grow in profusion; and in springtime ...
— The North American Indian • Edward S. Curtis
... Minnie Marsh lays it in the drawer. She shuts the drawer with decision. I catch sight of her face in the glass. Lips are pursed. Chin held high. Next she laces her shoes. Then she touches her throat. What's your brooch? Mistletoe or merry-thought? And what is happening? Unless I'm much mistaken, the pulse's quickened, the moment's coming, the threads are racing, Niagara's ahead. Here's the crisis! Heaven be with you! Down she goes. Courage, courage! Face it, be it! For God's sake don't wait on the mat ...
— Monday or Tuesday • Virginia Woolf
... of the Guion house it was considered as the beginning of a glorious epoch; but, looking back now, Olivia could see how meager the results had been. Since those days a brilliant American society had sprung up on the English stem, like a mistletoe on an oak; but, while Henry and Charlotta Guion would gladly have struck their roots into that sturdy trunk, they lacked the money essential to parasitic growth. As for Victoria Guion, French life, especially the old royalist phase of it, ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... romantic symbolism of cherished belief. Among the glowing sunset clouds was hung the golden fleece of the Cholchis. The golden apples of the Hesperides grew there. The very lightning flash was but a celestial mistletoe growing mysteriously upon the limbs of this flame tree as it grows on the oaks in the forests beneath which they hunted. Secure in our better beliefs, we call their worship superstition, but it is well that they had it. ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... Christmas! Welcome, Yule! It brings the schoolboy home from school. [N.B.—Vulgarly pronounced 'schule' in the West of England.] Puddings and mistletoe and holly, With other contrivances for banishing melancholy: Boar's head, for instance—of which I have never partaken, But the name has associations denied ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... fancied that he could borrow a little from a distinguished companion. I have often seen this in life, (I am now an old and experienced rat,) I have seen a mean race following and flattering their superiors, ready to lick the dust from their feet, not from real admiration or attachment, but, like a mistletoe upon a forest tree, because they had no proper footing of their own, and liked to be raised on the credit of another. It is easier to them to fawn than to work, to flatter the great than to follow ...
— The Rambles of a Rat • A. L. O. E.
... the sender, sly reference to Cynthia's heightened color, and several attempts to pin on her dress a bunch of the flowers, and Susan declared that one of them would look stunning in her hair. They were put on the dining-room table in the centre of the wreath of holly, and under the mistletoe which hung from the chandelier. Whether Cynthia surreptitiously stole ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... is always a thing forgotten When all the world goes well; A thing forgotten, as long ago When the gods forgot the mistletoe, And soundless as an arrow of snow The arrow of ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... the poor girl, of course, underwent tortures before she was sure of their decision. Fred, who with his father and mother was to join in the great feast, brought Sally home from Wallacetown that same night, and took advantage of the mistletoe which Sylvia had hung up, right before them all. Thomas and Molly, both wonderfully citified already, appeared during the course of the next afternoon from opposite directions, and Molly played, and Thomas expounded scientific farming, ...
— The Old Gray Homestead • Frances Parkinson Keyes
... I can't write down all the extra things that Dora got, only one of them: At 7 o'clock just when Father was lighting the candles on the tree, a commissionaire brought some lovely roses with two sprays of mistletoe interwoven and beneath a nosegay of violets — — — of course from Dr. P. with a card, but she would not let anyone read that. All she said was: "Dr. P. sends everyone Christmas greetings; I believe he had really written: Merry Christmas," ...
— A Young Girl's Diary • An Anonymous Young Girl
... the high rim of Saukara. I see the place of the idea of the Deity incarnated by avatars in human forms; I see the spots of the successions of priests on the earth—oracles, sacrificers, brahmins, sabians, lamas, monks, muftis, exhorters; I see where druids walked the groves of Mona—I see the mistletoe and vervain; I see the temples of the deaths of the bodies of Gods—I ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... gently up a hillside, and on both margins of the graveled way, ancient elm trees stood at regular intervals, throwing their boughs across, to unite in lifting the superb groined arches, whose fine tracery of sinuous lines were here and there concealed by clustering mistletoe—and gray lichen masses—and ornamented with bosses of velvet moss; while the venerable columnar trunks were now and then wreathed with poison-oak vines, where red trumpet flowers insolently blared defiance to the waxen pearls ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... and submissive tact made the best of things; and that evening she began to decorate the hall, dining-room, and drawing-room with holly and mistletoe. Before the pair retired to rest, the true Christmas feeling, slightly tinged with a tender melancholy, permeated the house, and the servants were growing excited in advance. The servants weren't going to ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... Christmas Day. But with what a difference! It will not be, as with us, a mere opportunity for relatives to make up the quarrels they have picked with each other during the past year, and to eat and drink things that will make them ill well into next year. Holly and mistletoe there will be in the Municipal Eating Rooms, but the men and women who sit down there to General Cessation High-Tea will be glowing not with a facile affection for their kith and kin, but with communal anxiety for the welfare of the great-great-grand-children ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... moved, shouted out as he scraped (in his usual commanding way at dances when the folk didn't know the figures), "Top couples cross hands! And when I make the fiddle squeak at the end, every man kiss his pardner under the mistletoe!" ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy
... pulpit with sprays of holly. In the time of the 'Spectator'[1020] and of Gay,[1021] and later still,[1022] rosemary was also used, doubtless by old tradition, as referring in its name to the Mother of the Lord. Nor was mistletoe excluded.[1023] In connection with this plant, Stanley says a curious custom was kept up at York, which in 1754 had not long been discontinued. 'On the eve of Christmas Day they carried mistletoe to the high altar of the cathedral and proclaimed a ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... Zephyr wooes, Rhine rolls his beryl-coloured wave; than Rhine What river from the mountains ever came More stately! most the simple crown adorns Of rushes and of willows interwined With here and there a flower: his lofty brow Shaded with vines and mistletoe and oak He rears, and mystic bards his fame resound. Or gliding opposite, th' Illyrian gulf Will harbour us from ill." While thus she spake, She touched his eyelashes with libant lip, And breathed ambrosial odours, o'er his cheek Celestial warmth suffusing: grief dispersed, And ...
— Gebir • Walter Savage Landor
... else seemed capable of attendance, and Mellicent laid her head on her mother's lap, and never ceased crying, except for one brief interval, when she darted upstairs to peep inside the old oak chest, prompted thereto by a sudden reminiscence of the bride of the "Mistletoe Bough." There was no Peggy inside the chest, however; only a few blankets, and a very strong smell of camphor; so Mellicent crept back to her footstool, and cried with redoubled energy. In the kitchen the fat old cook sat with a hand planted on either knee, ...
— About Peggy Saville • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... Santa. The girls had fashioned all sorts of nonsensical gifts out of paper and cardboard and paste; no one was forgotten. Mrs. Lynch declared herself "as rich as rich" with bracelets and a necklace made of red berries. Mrs. Budge, forgetting, when Robin held a sprig of mistletoe over her head and daringly kissed her wrinkled cheek, that "things was going to sixes and sevens," laughed until her sides ached at Harkness in his silly clown's cap. Robin and Beryl, with much solemnity, exchanged purchases each ...
— Red-Robin • Jane Abbott
... to advantage to the museums. He showed Sam how to remove them without injuring them. A little further on they came to a wild growth of holly, crazy with berries and burnished thorny foliage, and near at hand a mistletoe bough loaded with tiny white ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... in the heel; the thigh of Adonis is pierced by the boar's tusk, while Odysseus escapes with an ugly scar, which afterwards secures his recognition by his old servant, the dawn-nymph Eurykleia; Sigurd is slain by a thorn, and Balder by a sharp sprig of mistletoe; and in the myth of the Sleeping Beauty, the earth-goddess sinks into her long winter sleep when pricked by the point of the spindle. In her cosmic palace, all is locked in icy repose, naught thriving save the ivy which ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... I have noticed that the mistletoe was a bad parasite on the pecans in some regions. ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Third Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... in the dark forest of an evening. And the forest,—it seemed an impenetrable mystery, a strange tangle of fantastic growths: the live-oak (chene vert), its wide-spreading limbs hung funereally with Spanish moss and twined in the mistletoe's death embrace; the dark cypress swamp with the conelike knees above the yellow back-waters; and here and there grew the bridelike magnolia which we had known in Kentucky, wafting its perfume over the waters, and wondrous flowers and vines and trees with French ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... vow not to harm Balder. All creation readily took the oath, for there was nothing on earth which did not love the radiant god. So the servants returned to Frigga, telling her that all had been duly sworn save the mistletoe, growing upon the oak stem at the gate of Valhalla, and this, they added, was such a puny, inoffensive thing that no harm could be feared ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... the thought of the morrow, at the thought of something more than the giving and receiving of presents, something more than the eating of food, something more than singing hymns that were delightfully familiar, something more than putting holly over the pictures and hanging mistletoe on to the lamp in the hall. Something there was in the day like going home, like meeting people again whom one had loved once, and not seen for many years, something as warm and romantic and lightly coloured and as comforting as the most inspired and impossible ...
— The Golden Scarecrow • Hugh Walpole
... had dropped in, was suddenly reminded of that lugubrious old ballad, "The Mistletoe Bough," and recited large worn fragments of it impressively. It tells of how a beautiful girl hid away in a chest during a Christmas game of hide-and-seek, and how she was found, a dried vestige, years afterwards. It took a very powerful hold upon Herr Heinrich's imagination. ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... evening gloom the shabbiness of the furniture could not be seen, and the fire-light danced playfully over the worn, comfortable-looking chairs drawn up to the hearth, on the holly and mistletoe which decorated the walls, and the great cluster of geranium and Christmas roses which the Adairs had sent to Janetta the day before. Everything looked homelike and comfortable, and perhaps it was no wonder that Wyvis—accustomed to the gloom of ...
— A True Friend - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... entertaining on New Year's Day with a real old-time dinner. An ideal number is either eight or twelve persons. Put the full quota of leaves in the dining-room table and pad it nicely. Cover with your best table cloth. A miniature tree or a bush of mistletoe or holly for a centre-piece is ...
— Mrs. Wilson's Cook Book - Numerous New Recipes Based on Present Economic Conditions • Mary A. Wilson
... from that time the quiet, vacant apartments of Mr. Rayne's house were crowded with a fashionable and merry throng. Young faces beamed with gladness as they glided under the "mistletoe" with their partners, to the strains of dreamy waltzes. The programmes were all filled by now, and the evening's pleasures fully started. Everyone raved about Honor, and with reason, it was quite amusing to see how demonstrative the majority of the young ladies present ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... So Loki, who always tried to do mischief, made an arrow of mistletoe, and gave it to the prince who shot ...
— Famous Men of the Middle Ages • John H. Haaren
... There was no doubt about that. But it had undergone a surprising transformation. The walls and ceiling were so hung with living green, that it looked a perfect grove; from every part of which, bright gleaming berries glistened. The crisp leaves of holly, mistletoe, and ivy reflected back the light, as if so many little mirrors had been scattered there; and such a mighty blaze went roaring up the chimney, as that dull petrifaction of a hearth had never known in Scrooge's time, or Marley's, or for many and many a winter season gone. Heaped ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various
... house—which rose like a geranium bloom against the subdued colours around—stretched the soft azure landscape of The Chase—a truly venerable tract of forest land, one of the few remaining woodlands in England of undoubted primaeval date, wherein Druidical mistletoe was still found on aged oaks, and where enormous yew-trees, not planted by the hand of man grew as they had grown when they were pollarded for bows. All this sylvan antiquity, however, though visible from The Slopes, was outside ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... of the literary pawnbroker comes to me from the (unpublished) letters of John Mistletoe, author of the "Dictionary of Deplorable Facts," that wayward and perverse genius who wandered the Third Avenue saloons when he might have been feted by the Authors' League had he lived a few years longer. Some ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... spending Christmas with some people in Suffolk, and every one in London assured me that at their house there would be the kind of a Christmas house party you hear about but see only in the illustrated Christmas numbers. They promised mistletoe, snapdragon, and Sir Roger de Coverley. On Christmas morning we would walk to church, after luncheon we would shoot, after dinner we would eat plum pudding floating in blazing brandy, dance with the servants, and listen ...
— Somewhere in France • Richard Harding Davis
... see?" said East, pointing to a lump of mistletoe in the next tree, which was a beech. He saw that Martin and Tom were busy with the climbing-irons, and couldn't resist the temptation of hoaxing. Arthur stared and wondered more ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... beneath the mistletoe As though she did not know it. She looks quite unconcerned, you know, And pretty, yes,—but, ...
— When hearts are trumps • Thomas Winthrop Hall
... cried, "I know foreign custom. I know everything. Mistletoe! Mistletoe! A kiss for ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... broad smooth carriage road curved gently up a hillside, and on both margins of the graveled way, ancient elm trees stood at regular intervals, throwing their boughs across, to unite in lifting the superb groined arches, whose fine tracery of sinuous lines were here and there concealed by clustering mistletoe—and gray lichen masses—and ornamented with bosses of velvet moss; while the venerable columnar trunks were now and then wreathed with poison-oak vines, where red trumpet flowers insolently blared defiance to the waxen ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... palmy steeps With him of race divine yet human heart, Baldur, upon whose beaming front the Gods Gazing, exulted; from whose lips mankind Shall gather counsel. Hand in hand with him Shall stand the blind God, Hoedur, now not blind, That, witless, slew him with the mistletoe, Yet loved him well. Others, both men and Gods, That dread Third Heaven attained, shall make abode With Him Who ever is, and ever was, Enthroned like Him upon its southern cliff, Drinking the light immortal. From beneath, Like winds from flowery wildernesses ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... Skulls and crossbones, sometimes skeletons or skeleton-like figures, are not uncommon among the sepulchral embellishments of an earlier period. Where one of these figures is found, the forty-day-fast story is likely to grow out of it, as the mistletoe springs from the oak ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... gone out the next morning soon after sunrise to look round the camp, when I saw several birds of a greyish colour, about the size of a common thrush. Their notes, too, reminded me, as they sang their morning song, of the mistletoe thrush. Presently they flew off together, some way up the stream. Turning round, I saw Chickango, Igubo, and several of Mr Fraser's blacks following, with guns in their hands, accompanied by a pack of dogs. I pointed out the birds ...
— In the Wilds of Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... today at Ashland, as at Hawarden, no tree is felled until it has been duly tried by the entire family and all has been said for and against the sentence of death. I heard Miss McDowell make an eloquent plea for an old oak that had been rather recklessly harboring mistletoe and many squirrels, until it was thought probable that, like our first parents, it might have a fall. It was a plea more eloquent than "O Woodman, spare that tree." A reprieve for a year was granted; and I thought, as I cast my ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... remembered, and things are on a grander scale than usual. The candles build famously, set in the chimney candelabra; the logs are all of the biggest, and as for the Yule himself, he is a veritable Brobdignag; the staircases drop flowers, and holly and mistletoe hang all about. Everything shines, and gleams, and glows. There is to be a boar's head, with, no lack of mustard and minstrelsy, and nothing eatable or drinkable that pertains to Christmas will be wanting. Carols, and waits, and ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... goodwill." She raised her blue eyes at the same moment to the Christmas decorations on the ceiling. They were standing before the parted drapery of the lance window. Midway between the arched curtains hung a spray of mistletoe—the conceit of a mischievous housemaid. Their ...
— A Phyllis of the Sierras • Bret Harte
... harnesses, shouted the prices of bright truck for tree ornaments, and pushed through the crowd, offering holly and mistletoe. Circles formed around men exhibiting mechanical turtles or boxing monkeys. From a furry sledge above a shop door, Santa Claus bowed and gesticulated, shaking the lines above his prancing reindeer. I had never ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... sleigh bells peal across the snow; The frost's sharp arrows touch the earth and lo! How diamond-bright the stars do scintillate When Night hath lit her lamps to Heaven's gate. To the dim forest's cloistered arches go, And seek the holly and the mistletoe; For soon the bells of Christmas-tide will ring ...
— The Upward Path - A Reader For Colored Children • Various
... I did neither, was due to a divine inspiration which made me suddenly think of a device that I had once seen on a Druidical stone in Brittany—the sun, a hand with the index and little fingers pointing downwards, and a sprig of mistletoe. The instant I saw them in my mind's eye, the cords that ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... for the way it all begun, Two for the way it all has run, What three'll be for I do forget, But what's to be has not been yet.... So holly and mistletoe, So holly and mistletoe, So holly and mistletoe, Over and over and ...
— Christmas - A Story • Zona Gale
... festive preparations. Stefan had failed her and she had failed her baby—these two ever present facts shadowed her world. She had bought presents for Lily and the baby, a pair of links for Stefan, books for Mrs. Farraday and Jamie, and trifles for Constance and Miss Mason, but the holly and mistletoe, the tree, the new frock and the Christmas fare which normally she would have planned with so much joy, were missing. Stefan's gift to her—a fur-lined coat—was so extravagant that she could derive no pleasure from it, ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... men and beasts—and slay them upon the altar of the thunder-god. There in the darkness was wrought many an evil deed, while human blood was poured forth and watered the roots of that gloomy tree, from whose branches depended the mistletoe, the fateful plant that sprang from the blood-fed veins of the oak. So gloomy and terror-ridden was the spot on which grew the tree that no beasts of field or forest would lodge beneath its dark branches, nor would birds nest or perch among ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... left, was decked with bunches of holly and other evergreens, and from the middle of the beam bisecting the ceiling hung the mistletoe, of a size out of all proportion to the room, and extending so low that it became necessary for a full-grown person to walk round it in passing, or run the risk of entangling his hair. This apartment contained Mrs. Dewy the tranter's ...
— Under the Greenwood Tree • Thomas Hardy
... which distinguishes them at first sight. In many cases green matter is wanting in their tissues or is hidden by a livid tint that strikes the observer. Such are the Orobanchacc, or "broomropes," and the tropical Balanophorace. Nevertheless, other parasites, such as the mistletoe, have perfectly ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 430, March 29, 1884 • Various
... magnolia; Maine, pine cone; Michigan, apple blossom; Minnesota, moccasin; Mississippi, magnolia; Montana, bitter root; Missouri, goldenrod; Nebraska, goldenrod; New Jersey, sugar maple (tree); New York, rose; North Dakota, goldenrod; Oklahoma, mistletoe; Oregon, Oregon grape; Rhode Island, violet; Texas, blue bonnet; Utah, Sego lily; Vermont, red ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... it jolly to have the house all to ourselves!" exclaimed Wynnette, who, mounted on the top of a step-ladder, was engaged in twining the mistletoe in and out among the branches of the chandelier that hung from the center of the ceiling. "It is awfully jolly—I mean it is truly comfortable—to have that scalawag—I mean that colonel—away. Odalite, I hope you won't take it ...
— Her Mother's Secret • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... served and of course it was in shapes of Christmas trees, and Santa Clauses, and sprigs of holly, and Christmas bells, and Patty's portion was a lovely spray of mistletoe bough. ...
— Patty's Success • Carolyn Wells
... not. I do not wish to show myself beaten before all Egdon, and the sport of a man like Wildeve. We have enough berries now, I think, and we had better take them home. By the time we have decked the house with this and hung up the mistletoe, we must think ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... and pale tinted reeds made border at the water's edge. Now in rounding a curve, we passed close to the cypress wood fringed with bush and sedge. Delicate brown festoons of vines hung from the branches; and, high out of reach, mats of mistletoe clung. It seemed one with our mood and our fancy when two round yellow eyes stared out of the shadows, two wide lazy wings were spread, and the bird of daylight slumber took soft, noiseless flight. We were just getting fully in the humour of our new way of travel, drifting on in ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... received the honour of the company; and the pea conferred a like privilege on the lady who drew the favoured lot. The rest of the visitors assumed the rank of ministers of state or maids of honour. The festival was generally held in a large barn decorated with evergreens, and a large bough of mistletoe was not forgotten, which was often the source of much merriment. When the ceremony began, some one repeated ...
— Old English Sports • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... the fourth was clad in a scarlet gown flecked with white wool to set forth the winter's snow, and broidered over with the burning brands of the Holy Hearth; and she bore on her head a garland of mistletoe. And these four damsels were clearly seen to image the four seasons of the year- -Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter. But amidst them stood a fountain or conduit of gilded work cunningly wrought, and full ...
— The Roots of the Mountains • William Morris
... the blood-born mistletoe In the shady smoke. But who are you, twittering to and fro ...
— New Poems • D. H. Lawrence
... consider the ideal Christmas game. In the first place, it must be a round game; that is to say, at least six people must be able to play it simultaneously. No game for two only is permissible at Christmas—unless, of course, it be under the mistletoe. Secondly, it must be a game into which skill does not enter, or, if it does, it must be a skill which is as likely to be shown by a child of eight or an old gentleman of eighty as by a 'Varsity blue. Such skill, for instance, as manifests itself at Tiddleywinks, that noble ...
— If I May • A. A. Milne
... drop every separate plum into it and stir it once for luck, or I'll not eat a single slice—for Carol is the dearest part of Christmas to Uncle Jack, and he'll have none of it without her. She is better than all the turkeys and puddings and apples and spare-ribs and wreaths and garlands and mistletoe and stockings and chimneys and sleigh-bells in Christendom. She is the very sweetest Christmas Carol that was ever written, said, sung or chanted, and I am coming, as fast as ships and railway trains can carry me, to ...
— The Birds' Christmas Carol • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... geranium, open woods and fields; New England. Erigenia, damp soil; New York, Pennsylvania. Quaker ladies, road-sides, fields; everywhere. Dandelion, road-sides, fields; everywhere. Azalea, New England woods and elsewhere. Benzoin—spice-bush—damp woods; New Jersey, Pennsylvania. American mistletoe, New Jersey ...
— Harper's Young People, April 13, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... rung; On Christmas Eve the Mass was sung; That only night in all the year Saw the staled priest the chalice rear. The damsel donn'd her kirtle sheen; The hall was dressed with holly green; Forth to the wood did merry men go, To gather in the mistletoe. Then open wide the baron's hall, To vassal, tenant, serf, and all; Power laid his rod of rule aside, And Ceremony doft'd his pride. The heir with roses in his shoes, That night might village partner choose; The lord, underogating, ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... scarlet holly on the streets, and silver mistletoe; The surging, jeweled, ragged crowds forever come and go. And here a silken woman laughs, and there a beggar asks— And, oh, the faces, tense of lip, like mad and mocking masks. Who thinks of Bethlehem today, and one lone winter night? Who knows that in a manger-bed ...
— The White Christmas and other Merry Christmas Plays • Walter Ben Hare
... parasite, the Rhipsalis cassytha, which you mistake first for a plume of green sea-weed, or a tress of Mermaid's hair which has got up there by mischance, and then for some delicate kind of pendent mistletoe; till you are told, to your astonishment, that it is an abnormal form of Cactus—a family which it resembles, save in its tiny flowers and fruit, no more than it resembles the Ceiba-tree on which it grows; ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... fern-seed[10] doth bestow, The kernel of the mistletoe; And here and there as Puck should go, With terror to affright him, She nightshade straws to work him ill, Therewith her vervain and her dill, That hindreth witches of their will, Of purpose to ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick
... exceedingly melancholy man, for he did sit away from the company during the most part of the evening. We afterwards heard that he had been keeping a secret account of all the kisses that were given and received under the mistletoe bough. Truly, I would not have suffered any one to kiss me in that manner had I known that so unfair a watch was being kept. Other maids beside were in a like way shocked, as Betty Marchant has since told me." But it seems that the melancholy widower was merely collecting ...
— The Canterbury Puzzles - And Other Curious Problems • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... The mistletoe hung in the castle hall, The holly branch shone on the old back wall And the baron's retainers are blithe and gay, ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... rains begin to fall heavily in November; there will be three or four days of steady downpour and then a clear and green week. December is also likely to be rainy; and in this month people enjoy the sensation of gathering for Christmas the mistletoe which grows profusely on the live oaks, while the poppies are beginning to blossom at their feet. By the end of January the rains come lighter. In the long spaces between rains there is a temperature and a feeling in the air much like that of Indian summer in ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... with all their might, making the more noise and revelry because the Parliament had forbidden the feast to be observed at all. It was easy to tell who was for the King and who for the Parliament, for there were bushes of holly, mistletoe, and ivy, at all the Royalist doors and windows, and from many came the savoury steam of roast beef or goose, while the other houses were shut up as close as possible and looked ...
— Under the Storm - Steadfast's Charge • Charlotte M. Yonge
... when the mistletoe makes raptures for young hearts and loving lips will soon come 'round again. Heaven grant us all to be young and confiding enough for all the love and joy and the glad music of the ...
— Oklahoma Sunshine • Freeman E. (Freeman Edwin) Miller
... Along the river-bottoms and low grounds the sycamore is found as clean-limbed, tall and stately as elsewhere. The cottonwood, too, is common, though generally dwarfed, scraggy and full of dead limbs. A willow still more scraggy, and having many limbs destroyed with mistletoe, is often found in the same places. The elder rises above the dignity of a shrub, or under-shrub, but can hardly be found a respectable tree. Two varieties of oak are common, and the alder forms here a fine tree along ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... which attends the fairest complexion. It was, she thought, the Britoness Vanda; but her countenance was no longer resentful—her long yellow hair flew not loose on her shoulders, but was mysteriously braided with oak and mistletoe; above all, her right hand was gracefully disposed of under her mantle; and it was an unmutilated, unspotted, and beautifully formed hand which crossed the brow of Eveline. Yet, under these assurances ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... beforehand by Mrs. Darling and Grace, that nothing might be wanting to add to the festivities of the happy re-union. If they could not deck the walls with holly and mistletoe grown on the island, they could have it brought from the mainland by the boys and girls when they came. Pictures, curtains, and books, were all made the most of; and to crown the whole, or rather, as the foundation of the whole, the house was ...
— Grace Darling - Heroine of the Farne Islands • Eva Hope
... supposed to be quite allowable for grown-up people, ladies and gentlemen, to kiss anyone they know on New Year's Day. A Belgian lady once told me that it brought good luck to kiss an officer of the army; but, of course, there are limits to this, as there are to kissing under the mistletoe in England. ...
— Peeps At Many Lands: Belgium • George W. T. Omond
... Grass Region of Kentucky Flute and Violin, and Other Kentucky Tales The Bride of the Mistletoe A Kentucky Cardinal. Aftermath. A Sequel to ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... and Sorrow are but names. But who, that bears a mind matured to thought, A heart to feel, shall look abroad this day And speak of happiness? The church is deckt With festive garlands, and the sunbeams glance From glossy evergreens; the mistletoe Pearl-studded, and the holly's lustrous bough Gleaming with coral fruitage; but we muse Of laurel blent with cypress. Gaze we down Yon crowded aisle? the mourner's dusky weeds Sadden the eye; and they who wear them ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... Teetzel very gallantly sent me over a huge turkey, an eighteen-pounder, and to-morrow I have to go into Buckhorn for my mail-order shipments. We have decorated the house with a whole box of holly from Victoria and I've hung a sprig of mistletoe in the living-room doorway. The children, of course, are on tiptoe with expectation. But I can't escape the impression that I'm merely acting a part, that I'm a Pagliacci in petticoats. Heaven knows I clown enough; no one can accuse me of not going through the gestures. But it seems like fox-trotting ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... gloom the shabbiness of the furniture could not be seen, and the fire-light danced playfully over the worn, comfortable-looking chairs drawn up to the hearth, on the holly and mistletoe which decorated the walls, and the great cluster of geranium and Christmas roses which the Adairs had sent to Janetta the day before. Everything looked homelike and comfortable, and perhaps it was no wonder that Wyvis—accustomed to the gloom of his own home, or the garish splendor ...
— A True Friend - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... his plough under an elm-tree, and, looking up, he perceived that from the fork upward one half of it was dead; mistletoe had sucked the life out of it, and lower and lower to the main body, deeper and deeper to the vital heart of it, the sap was being drawn away. An irresistible impulse impelled him to take the jack-knife from his pocket, and as far as he could reach cut away this alien and deadly growth. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... herself in white, With crystal buttons shining, A spangled scarf, all lacy-light About her shoulders twining; A bunch of pearly mistletoe, A twig of ruddy holly, She tucked among her curls, and oh, She was so ...
— Zodiac Town - The Rhymes of Amos and Ann • Nancy Byrd Turner
... we go, O'er the mountains, Under the boughs of mistletoe, Log huts we'll rear, While herds of deer and buffalo Furnish the cheer. File o'er the mountains—steady, boys For game afar We have our rifles ready, boys!— Aha! Throw care to the winds, Like chaff, boys!—ha! And join in ...
— Poems • George P. Morris
... a Willow, and he was very old, And all his leaves fell off from him, and left him in the cold; But ere the rude winter could buffet him with snow, There grew upon his hoary head a crop of Mistletoe. ...
— Verses for Children - and Songs for Music • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... approval of those good English folk who think that no plant is genial unless it is prickly, and that prickly things represent appropriately to the eye the inward peace and good will that grows, like a cactus, perhaps within the heart. He did not put holly rigidly above his doors. No mistletoe drooped from the apex of the tentroom. Instead, he filled his flat with flowers, brought from English conservatories or from abroad. Crowds of strange and spotted orchids stood together in the drawing-room, staring ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... Strenia. The same in Poitou and Perche, anciently the country of the Druids, is derived from their rites. For the Poitevins for Etrennes use the word Auguislanneuf, and the Percherons, Equilans, from the ancient cry of the Druids, Au guy l'an neuf, i.e. Ad Viscum, annul novus, or to the mistletoe the new-year, when on new-year's day the Pagans went into the forests to seek the mistletoe on the oaks. See Chatelain, notes on the Martyr. ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... beautiful Christmas. My father was in the highest of spirits, and would have the house decorated with holly and mistletoe. He went out to a few parties, but he was always unwilling to leave my mother, though she wished him to go; then, when we were quite alone, the wind wailing, the snow falling and beating up against the windows, she would ask me to read to her the beautiful gospel story of the star in the East and ...
— My Mother's Rival - Everyday Life Library No. 4 • Charlotte M. Braeme
... another feature of the work of preparation in which all were glad to take part, the gathering of the evergreens—red-berried holly, mistletoe with its glistening pearls, ground-pine, moss, and other wood treasures—for the decoration of parlor, hall, and dining-room, and, above all, of the old village church, a gleeful labor in which the whole neighborhood ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... given is, I am confident, absolutely free from every source of error. I do not remember that Mr. Rathbone had communicated with me since he sent me a plentiful supply of mistletoe a year ago last Christmas. The account I received from him was cut out of "The Sporting Times" of March 5, 1887. My own knowledge of the case came from "Kirby's Wonderful Museum," a work presented to me at least thirty years ago. I had not looked at the account, spoken of ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... and danced and blazed, and crackled and roared. Oh, it knew it was Christmas, that fire did, and the mistletoe and holly and running ...
— Mary Cary - "Frequently Martha" • Kate Langley Bosher
... because her husband had adopted the white convention of jealousy and monogamy. Only Tahitians like Tetuanui now knew anything about the order, and so many generations had they been taught shame of it that the very name was unspoken, as that of the mistletoe god was among the Druids after St. Patrick had accomplished his ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... past, still made the standard works and authorities in learning, beyond which there was no going,—not to the time when the national morality was still mystically produced at Stonehenge, in those national colleges, from whose mysterious rites the awful sanctities of the oak and the mistletoe drove back in confusion the sacrilegious inquirer,—not to that time, ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... garden beds empty. The park looked sodden, dank and cheerless. Summer was long dead and over, yet frosts had not begun, bringing suggestions of mistletoe ...
— The Upas Tree - A Christmas Story for all the Year • Florence L. Barclay
... the place, visiting his aunt, Mrs. Channing, who lived here with her son, William Henry Channing, the well-known anti-slavery orator. Here Higginson, as a youth, used to listen with keenest pleasure, to the singing of his cousin, Lucy Channing, especially when the song she chose was, "The Mistletoe Hung on the Castle Wall," the story of a bride shut up in a chest. "I used firmly to believe," the genial colonel confessed to the Radcliffe girls, in reviving for them his memories of the house, "that there was a bride shut up in the walls of this house—and there may ...
— The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees • Mary Caroline Crawford
... prognostic of any change of weather. The missel-thrush is a wild and wary bird, keeping generally in open fields and commons, heaths and unfrequented places, feeding upon worms and insects. In severe weather it approaches our plantations and shrubberies, to feed on the berry of the mistletoe, the ivy, or the scarlet fruit of the holly or the yew; and, should the redwing or the fieldfare presume to partake of these with it, we are sure to hear its voice in clattering and contention ...
— The Rain Cloud - or, An Account of the Nature, Properties, Dangers and Uses of Rain • Anonymous
... among the early Britons branches of the sacred mistletoe, which had been cut with solemn ceremony in the night from the oak trees in a forest that had been ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... submissive tact made the best of things; and that evening she began to decorate the hall, dining-room, and drawing-room with holly and mistletoe. Before the pair retired to rest, the true Christmas feeling, slightly tinged with a tender melancholy, permeated the house, and the servants were growing excited in advance. The servants weren't going to ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... Santa Claus again, and then his face seemed to shine like the sun, and there seemed to be wreaths of holly and bunches of mistletoe sticking all over him, and he sprang into his sleigh, the reindeer shook their horns, making the bells jingle like anything, and then, off on top of the snowflakes rode Santa Claus, ...
— Curly and Floppy Twistytail - The Funny Piggie Boys • Howard R. Garis
... weird Druid held his mistletoe; There, for the scorched son of the sand, coiled bright, The torrid snake was hissing sharp and low; And there the Western savage ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... fringe of light reeds and giant bulrushes. All round the ponds stood dark groves of pandanus palms, and among and beyond the palms tall grasses and forest trees, with here and there a spreading colabar festooned from summit to trunk with brilliant crimson strands of mistletoe, and here and there a gaunt dead old giant of the forest, and everywhere above and beyond the timber deep sunny blue and flooding sunshine. Sunny blue reflected, with the gaunt old trees, in the tiny gleaming seas among ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... reservation is a part of the great tableland of southeastern Arizona, being a succession of mountains and high, park-like mesas, broken here and there with valleys and watered by limpid streams. The highlands are wooded with pine, cedar, fir, juniper, oak, and other trees, while in the valleys are mistletoe-laden cottonwood as well as willow, alder, and walnut, which, with smaller growths, are interwoven with vines of grape, hop, and columbine, in places forming a veritable jungle. On every hand, whether on mountain or in valley, many varieties of cactus grow in profusion; and in springtime canon ...
— The North American Indian • Edward S. Curtis
... bakes, and boils, and steams, and broils, and fries, by a complicated apparatus which, whatever may be its other virtues, leaves no space for a Christmas fire. I like the festoons of holly on the walls and windows; the dance under the mistletoe; the gigantic sausage; the baron of beef; the vast globe of plum-pudding, the true image of the earth, flattened at the poles; the tapping of the old October; the inexhaustible bowl of punch; the life and joy of the old hall, when the squire and his household and his neighbourhood were ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... preparations were completed before the return of the church party, for the service had been unusually lengthy, and Esmeralda was champing with impatience before the latch-key clicked in the lock. There was great kissing and hugging beneath the mistletoe, and Bridgie was sent flying upstairs to take off her wraps, in preparation for ...
— More about Pixie • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... reach, They rise aloft and skim the air, and settle each by each Upon the very wished-for place, yea high amid the tree, Where the changed light through twigs of gold shines forth diversedly; As in the woods mid winter's chill puts forth the mistletoe, And bloometh with a leafage strange his own tree ne'er did sow, And with his yellow children hath the rounded trunk in hold, So in the dusky holm-oak seemed that bough of leafy gold, As through the tinkling shaken foil the gentle wind ...
— The AEneids of Virgil - Done into English Verse • Virgil
... put up holly and mistletoe, and produced from my trunks a real Christmas pudding that my mother had made. We had it for supper, and ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... was a hint dropped from any source that Richard Perry Stanlock was entitled to the slightest credit for these magnificent doings. He spent Christmas at home in a quiet unassuming way amid the family decorations of holly and mistletoe, and a vast litter of presents, oranges, apples, nuts, ...
— Campfire Girls in the Allegheny Mountains - or, A Christmas Success against Odds • Stella M. Francis
... be recollected that, during the Christmas festivities at Manor Farm, after a certain amount of kissing had taken place under the mistletoe, Mr. Pickwick was "standing under the mistletoe, looking with a very pleased countenance on all that was passing round him, when the young lady with the black eyes, after a little whispering with the other young ladies, made a sudden dart forward, and ...
— Pickwickian Manners and Customs • Percy Fitzgerald
... place of the idea of the Deity incarnated by avatars in human forms; I see the spots of the successions of priests on the earth—oracles, sacrificers, brahmins, sabians, lamas, monks, muftis, exhorters; I see where druids walked the groves of Mona—I see the mistletoe and vervain; I see the temples of the deaths of the bodies of ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... great stickler for the old English customs, and always had the yule-log brought in with great ceremony. With his own hands he suspended the mistletoe from the chandelier in the hall, which he always obtained from Dimmerly Manor in England. Lottie, without thinking, stood beneath, watching him, when, with a spryness not in keeping with his years, he sprang down and gave ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... which looked like cranes standing on one leg with their heads slanted in pensive contemplation. There were no vineyards, but orchards aplenty near the farmhouses, and all about there were other trees pollarded to the quick and tufted with mistletoe, not only the stout oaks, but the slim poplars trimmed up into tall plumes like the poplars in southern France. The houses, when they did not stand apart like our own farmhouses, gathered into gray-brown villages around some high-shouldered ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... for my father lived till a 'underd, an' then on'y went through slippin' on a wet stone an' breakin' a bone in 'is back; an' my grandfather saw 'is larst Christmas at a 'underd an' ten, an' was up to kissin' a wench under the mistletoe, 'e was sich a chirpin' old gamecock. 'E didn't look no older'n you do now, an' you're a chicken compared to 'im. You've wore badly like, not ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... meant now, but we had never heard those singular growths called "witches' brooms" before. Unlike mistletoe, the broom is not a plant parasite, but a growth from the fir itself, like an oak gall, or a gnarl on a maple or a yellow birch; but instead of being a solid growth on the tree trunk, it is a dense, abnormal growth of ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... lovely the room looked, for the table was a mass of roses fresh from Paris, and the walls and ceiling were green with mistletoe and holly. Moreover, the old room was warm with the hearts of friends and the cheer from blazing logs that crackled merrily up the blackened throat of my chimney. And there were kisses with this feast that came from the ...
— A Village of Vagabonds • F. Berkeley Smith
... frame. The contemplation of this figure, beautifully executed as it is, intuitively inculcates a serious consideration of the value and blessings of a temperate; and well-spent life; it induces a thoughtful reflection that a life of goodness alone insures an end of peace. The holly, the mistletoe, the ivy, the acorn shell, the leafless branch, and the fruitless vine encircle the brow-fit emblems of the period which marks an exchange of time for eternity. All the figures are rendered complete by a carved lion's foot, at the bottom of each, and above the feet is a connecting ...
— Young Americans Abroad - Vacation in Europe: Travels in England, France, Holland, - Belgium, Prussia and Switzerland • Various
... that she had left the door ajar, taking away the key; then she would rush back like a stout round whirlwind, and in a minute more Barrie would be a prisoner, almost like the fair bride in "The Mistletoe Bough," only there was more air in the garret than in the oak chest that shut with a spring. But Barrie was used to taking risks—risks insignificant compared with this, yet big enough to supply salt and sugar for the dry daily ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... Water Eloquence. May Flower Welcome. Marigold Sacred affection. Marigold and Cypress Despair. Mandrake Rarity. Mignonette Your qualities surpass your charms. Morning Glory Coquetry, Affectation. Mock Orange Counterfeit. Myrtle Love in absence. Mistletoe Insurmountable. Narcissus Egotism. Nasturtium Patriotism. Oxalis Reverie. Orange Blossom Purity. Olive Peace. Oleander Beware. Primrose Modest worth. Pink, White Pure love. " Red Devoted love. Phlox Our hearts are united. Periwinkle Sweet ...
— Your Plants - Plain and Practical Directions for the Treatment of Tender - and Hardy Plants in the House and in the Garden • James Sheehan
... sorts of nonsensical gifts out of paper and cardboard and paste; no one was forgotten. Mrs. Lynch declared herself "as rich as rich" with bracelets and a necklace made of red berries. Mrs. Budge, forgetting, when Robin held a sprig of mistletoe over her head and daringly kissed her wrinkled cheek, that "things was going to sixes and sevens," laughed until her sides ached at Harkness in his silly clown's cap. Robin and Beryl, with much solemnity, exchanged purchases ...
— Red-Robin • Jane Abbott
... am like to mistletoe, Which has no root, and cannot grow Or prosper, but by that same tree It clings about: so I by thee. What need I then to fear at all So long as I about thee crawl? But if that tree should fall and die, Tumble shall heaven, ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... under the mistletoe (Pale-green, fairy mistletoe), One last candle burning low, All the sleepy dancers gone, Just one candle burning on, Shadows lurking everywhere: Some one came, and ...
— Peacock Pie, A Book of Rhymes • Walter de la Mare
... There was no doubt about that. But it and his own adjoining sitting-room, into which he shuffled in his slippers, attracted by a great light there, had undergone a surprising transformation. The walls and ceiling were so hung with living green, that it looked a perfect grove. The leaves of holly, mistletoe, and ivy reflected back the light, as if so many little mirrors had been scattered there; and such a mighty blaze went roaring up the chimney, as that petrifaction of a hearth had never known in Scrooge's time, or Marley's, or for many and many a winter season gone. Heaped ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... else can hurt Baldur, for I have exacted an oath from all of them." "What," exclaimed the woman, "have all things sworn to spare Baldur?" "All things," replied Frigga, "except one little shrub that grows on the eastern side of Valhalla, and is called Mistletoe, and which I thought too young and feeble ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... presents—dictionaries, sugared crackers, and perfumed soap—and now that their vacation has begun, their little brown heads can be seen bobbing up and down in the blue sea. Their Christmas-tree will be the royal palm; and nipa boughs their mistletoe. ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... made in the dark forest of an evening. And the forest,—it seemed an impenetrable mystery, a strange tangle of fantastic growths: the live-oak (chene vert), its wide-spreading limbs hung funereally with Spanish moss and twined in the mistletoe's death embrace; the dark cypress swamp with the conelike knees above the yellow back-waters; and here and there grew the bridelike magnolia which we had known in Kentucky, wafting its perfume over the waters, and wondrous flowers and vines and trees with French names that bring back ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... running parallel to the coast, on which the long-leaved or peach-pines flourish. This region is generally called the Pine Barrens. Wild vines encircle the trees, and among them are seen the white berries of the mistletoe. In winter these Pine Barrens retain much of their verdure, and constitute one of the marked features of the country. Amid them are numerous swamps or morasses. One of great size, extending to not less than forty miles from north to south, and twenty-five ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... Scandinavian people were as wrong as those that we found in Mallet and Temple. But with all his misinformation, Warton managed to get at many truths about Icelandic poetry, and his presentation of them was fresh and stimulating. Already the Old Norse mythology was well known, even down to Valhalla and the mistletoe. Old Norse poetry was well enough known to call forth ...
— The Influence of Old Norse Literature on English Literature • Conrad Hjalmar Nordby
... his beryl-coloured wave; than Rhine What river from the mountains ever came More stately! most the simple crown adorns Of rushes and of willows interwined With here and there a flower: his lofty brow Shaded with vines and mistletoe and oak He rears, and mystic bards his fame resound. Or gliding opposite, th' Illyrian gulf Will harbour us from ill." While thus she spake, She touched his eyelashes with libant lip, And breathed ambrosial odours, o'er ...
— Gebir • Walter Savage Landor
... disagreement, with mutual respect, and some approaches to good-will; and Sir Duncan Yordas, being skillfully removed, spent his Christmas (without knowing much about it) in the best and warmest bedroom in the rectory. But Mordacks returned, as an honest man should do, to put the laurel and the mistletoe on his proper household gods. And where can this be better done than in that grand old city, York? But before leaving Flamborough, he settled the claims of business and charity, so far as he could see them, and so far as the state of ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... poor rogue! And so the poor lads came up to London hoping to find a gallant captain who could bring them to high preferment, and found nought but—Tom Fool! I could find it in my heart to weep for them! And so thou mindest clutching the mistletoe on nunk Hal's shoulder. I warrant it groweth still on the crooked May bush? And ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... most melancholy tunes, playing, with a more profound solemnity, the gloomiest psalms and lamentations. When he ventured upon secular music, he never performed anything more lively than "The Mistletoe Bough," or "Barbara Allen," and into each he threw a spirit so much more dismal than the original, as almost to induce his hearers to imitate the example of the disconsolate "Barbara," and "turn their faces to the wall" in ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... white strings of pop-corn to hang over it like wreaths of snow," he said, "so I am going down the lane for some mistletoe that grows in one of the highest trees. The berries are ...
— The Gate of the Giant Scissors • Annie Fellows Johnston
... And Sleep, I wot, will grudge us not his best: In winter earlier sink the suns to rest, And eke the sooner shall our toils be sped; When in the embers glowing There'll be love-charms worth the knowing, Or, at Yule-tide, mazes threaded, with the mistletoe o'erhead. ...
— Primavera - Poems by Four Authors • Stephen Phillips, Laurence Binyon, Manmohan Ghose and Arthur Shearly Cripps
... Guion house it was considered as the beginning of a glorious epoch; but, looking back now, Olivia could see how meager the results had been. Since those days a brilliant American society had sprung up on the English stem, like a mistletoe on an oak; but, while Henry and Charlotta Guion would gladly have struck their roots into that sturdy trunk, they lacked the money essential to parasitic growth. As for Victoria Guion, French life, especially the old royalist phase of it, which offers no crevices on its creaseless ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... smile illumined her happy young face, Her roguish eyes twinkled, and gayly Her Grace Crossed the old polished floor with a step light and quick, And her high slipper heels went clickety-click. She looked cautiously round,—she was all by herself; Like a mischievous elf, She took from a shelf A mistletoe spray with its berries like pearls; Then tossing her head and shaking her curls, In a manner half daring and yet half afraid, The madcap maid, with a smile that betrayed Expectant thoughts of her lover dear, Fastened the spray to ...
— The Jingle Book • Carolyn Wells
... trees would become so loaded with the white clinging snow that they would snap off and fall to the ground. Away would troop the birds in the day-time then to feast upon the scarlet berries of the holly, the pearly dew-like drops of the mistletoe, or the black coaly berries that grew upon the ivy-tod; and away and away they would fly again with wild and plaintive cries as Jack Frost would send a cutting blast in amongst them to scare them away. How the poor birds would look at the man cutting logs of wood to take ...
— Featherland - How the Birds lived at Greenlawn • George Manville Fenn
... strung with garlands of Christmas green that it looked like a bower. Bunches of mistletoe and holly added their colors to the holiday cheer. ...
— Maida's Little Shop • Inez Haynes Irwin
... Turdus viscivorus, Linnaeus. French, "Merle Draine," "Grive Draine."—I quite agree with the remarks made by Professor Newton, in his edition of 'Yarrell,' as to the proper English name of the present species, and that it ought to be called the Mistletoe Thrush. I am afraid, however, that the shorter appellation of Missel Thrush will stick to this bird in spite of all attempts to the contrary. In Guernsey the local name of the Mistletoe Thrush is "Geai," by which name Mr. Metivier mentions it in his 'Dictionary ...
— Birds of Guernsey (1879) • Cecil Smith
... past eleven, an' aw think ther's few but what'll be able to see monny a place where they've missed it. An' if soa we'd better mak th' best o'th' few days left to mak what amends we can. Owd Christmas comes in smilin', with his holly an' his mistletoe, an' his gooid tempered face surraanded wi' steam of plum puddin' an' roast beef—tables get tested what weight they can bear—owd fowk an' young ens exchange greetin's, punch bowls steam up; an' lemons an' nutmegs suffer theresen to be rubbed, ...
— Yorkshire Ditties, First Series - To Which Is Added The Cream Of Wit And Humour From His Popular Writings • John Hartley
... follows to its head. The peasants have cultivated patches of ground along the stream; the slopes are covered, first with chestnuts and then with hoary firs—a rare growth, in these parts—from whose branches hangs the golden bough of the mistletoe. And now the stream is ended and a dark ridge blocks the way; it is overgrown with beeches, under whose shade you ascend in steep curves. At the summit the vegetation changes once more, and you find yourself among magnificent stretches of pines that ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... says that a black rock will kill him; but it does not, although he flies before it. Glooskap declares that a handful of down will cause his death. The double entendre of the swoon is entirely wanting in the Western tale, as is the apparent harmlessness of the medium of death. In the Edda the mistletoe, the softest, and apparently the least injurious, of plants, kills Balder; in the Wabanaki tale it is a ball of down or a rush. The Chippewas change it, like savages, to a substantial root and a black rock, thereby manifesting an insensibility to the point ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... leaves and scarlet berries, and the white-berried, pale green mistletoe may be closely copied. All these and many more are made on the same principle, and in so simple a manner that even quite a little child may succeed in producing ...
— Little Folks' Handy Book • Lina Beard
... centre of the ceiling of this kitchen, old Wardle had just suspended, with his own hands, a huge branch of mistletoe, and this same branch of mistletoe instantaneously gave rise to a scene of general and most delightful struggling and confusion; in the midst of which, Mr. Pickwick, with a gallantry that would have done honour to a descendant of Lady Tollimglower ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... always says the old walls might fall in at any time; but since you told me about the lights being seen, I've been thinking that perhaps he has heard about them too, and that's why he won't come here if he can help it. But we can ask him. What is the 'Mistletoe Bough'? Is it ...
— Hunter's Marjory - A Story for Girls • Margaret Bruce Clarke
... old country 'tis Christ- mas, and to-night I'm thinking of the mistletoe and holly berries bright. The smoke above our chimbley pots I'd dearly love to see, And those dear folks down in Devon, how they'll talk ...
— The Verse-Book Of A Homely Woman • Elizabeth Rebecca Ward, AKA Fay Inchfawn
... fine in its new dress of holly berries, mistletoe and cedar. Across the front was hung in big red and white letters, "Unto us a Child is Born." Over the organ was suspended ...
— The Transformation of Job - A Tale of the High Sierras • Frederick Vining Fisher
... its leaves it harbors a small insect (coccus), whose sweet secretion is much relished by the ants. Dr. Beccari mentions an epiphytal plant growing on trees in Borneo, the seeds of which germinate, like those of the mistletoe, on the branches of the tree; and the seedling stem, crowned by the cotyledons, grows to about an inch in length, remaining in that condition until a certain species of ant bites a hole in the stem, which then produces a gall-like growth that ultimately constitutes ...
— Scientific American, Volume 40, No. 13, March 29, 1879 • Various
... you will be so good," said the mistletoe. "I have my roots fixed in you already; and I am growing day by day. Later on, I shall put forth little green blossoms. They're not much to look at; but then the berries will come, beautiful, juicy white berries: the blackbird ...
— The Old Willow Tree and Other Stories • Carl Ewald
... other and her hands were laid palm to palm as her body swayed backward and forward in rhythmic movement. "They go out in the woods and cut cart-loads of holly and mistletoe and pine and Christmas-trees, and dress the house, and the fires roar up all the chimneys, and they kill ...
— The Man in Lonely Land • Kate Langley Bosher
... tedious, this meant more than it does to-day. The visitors received a joyous welcome, not a sort of empty every-day one. Plum pudding, roast beef, and mince pies and nuts were the order of the day, for beverage various kinds of drinks. Holly and mistletoe and evergreens obtained in nearly every house; in fact it was a joyous day from morn till night. Games of various kinds were played. Toys for children, rudimentary toys and picture books, cheap, and such as the too knowing children of to-day would turn up their little noses at, and my ...
— Some Reminiscences of old Victoria • Edgar Fawcett
... broad-girthed Spanish onions, shining in the fatness of their growth like Spanish friars; and winking from their shelves in wanton slyness at the girls as they went by, and glanced demurely at the hung-up mistletoe. There were pears and apples, clustered high in blooming pyramids; there were bunches of grapes, made, in the shopkeepers' benevolence, to dangle from conspicuous hooks, that people's mouths might water gratis ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... head of the staircase we looked down into a hall gaily lit with paper lanterns. Holly and ivy wreathed the broad balustrade, and the old pictures around the walls. A bunch of mistletoe hung from a great chandelier that sparkled with hundreds of glass prisms, and under it a couple of footmen in gilt liveries and powder crossed at that moment with trays of ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... she was as horrid a little prig as Constance, who on her side felt a pang of envy as she thought of Rose going to church and singing hymns and carols to her father and mother, while she, after a struggle under the mistletoe, which made her hot and miserable, had to sit playing waltzes. One good-natured lady offered to relieve her, but she was too much afraid of the hero of the mistletoe to stir from her post, and the daughter of her kindly friend had no ...
— That Stick • Charlotte M. Yonge
... after this, on Christmas Eve, that Sara, coming into his special den with a gay little joke on her lips and a great bunch of mistletoe in her arms, was arrested by the sudden, chill ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... which completely covered the beds of limestone and in places hid the streams. The rest of the mountain was thickly wooded. Here were great oaks and splendid evergreens with trunks like mossy pillars, from the branches of which hung garlands of ivy and mistletoe, and persimmon trees, the odour of which pervaded every nook and corner of the wood—an illusive, fragrant something that made the heart glad. In places the wild muscadine and scuppernong vines stretched from tree to tree, making arbours which were ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... was when 'mid the maidens you would pull The fiery raisin with profound delight; When sprigs of mistletoe ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... husband's family, though the poor girl, of course, underwent tortures before she was sure of their decision. Fred, who with his father and mother was to join in the great feast, brought Sally home from Wallacetown that same night, and took advantage of the mistletoe which Sylvia had hung up, right before them all. Thomas and Molly, both wonderfully citified already, appeared during the course of the next afternoon from opposite directions, and Molly played, and Thomas expounded scientific farming, ...
— The Old Gray Homestead • Frances Parkinson Keyes
... advantage to the museums. He showed Sam how to remove them without injuring them. A little further on they came to a wild growth of holly, crazy with berries and burnished thorny foliage, and near at hand a mistletoe bough loaded with tiny ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... fir in a disused petrol-tin, and, after a visit to the canteen, decorated it with boxes of Turkish delight, sticks of chocolate, packets of chewing-gum, oranges, lemons, soap, and bits of Government candles. It was a Christmas tree of some distinction. And mistletoe? No, we couldn't find any mistletoe, but then, as Monty said, it would have no point on Gallipoli, there being no—just so; when we should be home again for Christmas of next year, we would claim an extra kiss ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... remember at Christmas—oh, ten years ago—and your grandfather had a party for you. There was mistletoe in the hall, and we danced and stopped under ...
— The Trumpeter Swan • Temple Bailey
... ticketed ready for distribution. And then the party invited to the servants' hall, and the great dinner, and the new clothing for the school-girls, and the church so gay, with their new dresses in the aisles, and the holly and the mistletoe. I know we are not in England, my dear uncle, and that you have lost one of your greatest pleasures—that of doing good, and making all happy ...
— The Settlers in Canada • Frederick Marryat
... beautiful pictures That hang on Memory's wall, Is one of a dim old forest, That seemeth best of all; Not for its gnarled oaks olden, Dark with the mistletoe; Not for the violets golden That sprinkle the vale below; Not for the milk-white lilies That lean from the fragrant ledge, Coquetting all day with the sunbeams, And stealing their golden edge; Not for the vines on the ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... worship, has at its roots an older, sterner, and perhaps bloody origin. For, searching back into the mists of antiquity, we find that those early and mysterious peoples whose priests we call the "Druids," to whom the mistletoe was sacred (and with which we decorate our houses at Christmas, the festival of "peace and good-will"), offered human sacrifices to their dark gods on high mountains and ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... who, from their knowledge of the arts and sciences of the day, were the ministers of religion and justice, as well as the teachers of youth to the whole community, and exercised an absolute control over the unlearned people whom they governed; they worshipped in oak groves, and the oak tree and the mistletoe were sacred to them; the heavenly bodies appear to have been also objects of their worship, and they appear to have believed in the immortality and transmigration of the soul; but they committed nothing to writing, and for our knowledge of them we have ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... in the large kitchen of the Maison Commune Estaminet, at a long table decorated with mistletoe and holly. The dinner—the result of two days' "scrounging" under the direction of George—was too good to be true. We toasted each other and sang all the songs we knew. Two of the Staff clerks wandered in and told us we were the best of all possible despatch riders. We drank to them uproariously. ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson
... that its rounded leaf presents a fresh green in February. It does not die away, it appears as green as spring, and pieces of the wall are ornamented with it as thickly as the iron-headed nails in old doors. One plant grows out of the hard stem of a hawthorn tree, as if it were a parasite like the mistletoe; probably there is some crack which the plant itself has hidden. If every plant and every flower were found in all places the charm of locality would not exist. Everything varies, and that gives the interest. These purplish stones, where ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... that tree at the conclusion of the service. On leaving the church of Saint Fiacre in Horto after the papal blessing the happy pair were subjected to a playful crossfire of hazelnuts, beechmast, bayleaves, catkins of willow, ivytod, hollyberries, mistletoe sprigs and quicken shoots. Mr and Mrs Wyse Conifer Neaulan will spend a quiet honeymoon in ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... twelve days of Christmas, provided everything was done conformably to ancient usage. Here were kept up the old games of hoodman blind, shoe the wild mare, hot cockles, steal the white loaf, bob apple, and snap dragon; the Yule-clog and Christmas candle were regularly burnt, and the mistletoe with its white berries hung up, to the imminent peril of all the ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... cannot think why, but it was his hobby—you had a remarkable foreshadowing of Christianity; the idea of the human sacrifice, the Atonement, the Communion of Saints, the mystic Vine, which he clumsily identified with the mistletoe, and what not else. He read portions of his privately-published Tales of Taliessin. In short such happiness radiated from his pink-cheeked face and recovered eyes that David regretted in no wise his own lapses ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... damsel donned her kirtle sheen; The hall was dressed with holly green; Forth to the wood did merry-men go To gather in the mistletoe. Then opened wide the baron's hall To vassal, tenant, serf, and all; Power laid his rod of rule aside, And ceremony doffed his pride. The heir, with roses in his shoes, That night might village partner choose; The lord underogating share The vulgar game of post-and-pair. ...
— In The Yule-Log Glow—Book 3 - Christmas Poems from 'round the World • Various
... delightful day of preparation for the greatest festival in all the year—the day when in most households there are many little mysteries afoot, when parcels come and go, and are smothered away so as to be ready when Santa Claus comes his rounds; when some are busy decking the rooms with holly and mistletoe; when the cook is busiest of all, and savoury smells rise from the kitchen, telling of good things to ...
— The Christmas Fairy - and Other Stories • John Strange Winter
... was forced to admit that a Jersey Christmas had its compensations. The doors of the back parlor, mysteriously locked for days, were opened and in the room, gay with holly, mistletoe, and laurestinus, appeared a most delightful little Christmas tree, itself rather foreign in appearance since it was a laurel growing in a big pot. Real English holly concealed the base and merry ...
— The Spanish Chest • Edna A. Brown
... wife of Balder, personified pure and tender love. Balder was the fair god who loved light and lived a life of purity and innocence. The evil Loke induced Balder's blind brother, der, to throw an arrow of mistletoe at him and he fell dead. When Nanna saw the body of her dead husband carried out to the funeral pyre, her heart ...
— Fritiofs Saga • Esaias Tegner
... Christmas party Under the mistletoe Along with a ripe, slack country lass Jostling to ...
— Look! We Have Come Through! • D. H. Lawrence
... your nature, in all act and look and speech? By that large induction only I your law of being reach. Now I hear of this wrong action—what is that to you and me? Sin within you may have done it—fruit not nature to the tree. Foreign graft has come to bearing—mistletoe grown on your bough— If I ever really knew you, then, my friend, I know you now. So I say, "He never did it," or, "He did not so intend"; Or, "Some foreign power o'ercame him"—so I judge the action, friend. Let ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... robins cowering on the lee side of the larger branches where the snow could not fall upon them, while two or three of the more enterprising were making desperate efforts to reach the mistletoe berries by clinging nervously to the under side of the snow-crowned masses, back downward, like woodpeckers. Every now and then they would dislodge some of the loose fringes of the snow-crown, which would come sifting down on them and send them screaming back to camp, where they ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... oranges and sweetmeats, those overcoat-pockets contain! What child ever lived who did not believe grandpa's pocket a cornucopia for all juvenile desires? The day passes on. The turkey never looked browner or juicier, and the blaze on the pudding-sauce never burned bluer; the kissing under the mistletoe was never more delightful, nor the blindman's-buff ever played with a greater zest: but the merriest Christmas must end. Your little girl, tired and sleepy, kneels at your feet, and you pass your fingers through her soft curls, while she repeats her simple prayer: "God ...
— Trifles for the Christmas Holidays • H. S. Armstrong
... robed majestically, and wearing a wreath of mistletoe in his flowing white wig. His false beard reaches almost to his waist. He carries a staff ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... robins, belated on their way down from the upper Meadows, linger in the Valley and make out to spend the winter in comparative comfort, feeding on the mistletoe berries that grow on the oaks. In the depths of the great forests, on the high meadows, in the severest altitudes, they seem as much at home as in the fields and orchards about the busy habitations of man, ascending the Sierra as the snow melts, following the green footsteps of Spring, until ...
— The Yosemite • John Muir
... account of Balder, the sun-god, who was slain because of the jealousy of Loki (fire). Loki knew that everything in nature except the mistletoe had promised not to injure the great god Balder. So he searched for the mistletoe until he found it growing on an oak-tree "on the eastern slope of Valhalla." He cut it off and returned to the place where the gods were amusing themselves ...
— Yule-Tide in Many Lands • Mary P. Pringle and Clara A. Urann
... Gordian knot nothing can untie. The tree once clasped in its coils is fated, yielding up its sap and life without a struggle to cast off its deadly enemy. Many trees are observed whose stems bear branches only, far above the surrounding woods, laden with bunches of alien foliage,—parasites like the mistletoe. Indeed, this forest seems like vegetation running riot, and with its clumps of dissimilar foliage fixed like storks' nests in the tops of the trees, recalling the same effect which one sees on the St. ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... Timidity Meadow Lychnis, Wit Meadowsweet, Uselessness Mercury, Goodness Mesembryanthemum, Idleness Mezereon, I Desire to Please Mignonette, You are Good Milfoil, War Milkwort, Hermitage Mint, Virtue Mistletoe, I Surmount Mock Orange, Counterfeit Monkshood, Deadly Foe Near Moonwort, Forgetfulness Morning Glory, Affectation Moschatel, Weakness Moss, Maternal Love Mosses, Ennui Motherwort, Concealed Love Moving Plant, Agitation Mulberry, White, Wisdom Mushroom, ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... Western Australia, with brilliant orange-coloured flowers, Nuytsia floribunda, N.O. Loranthaceae; which is also called Tree Mistletoe, and, ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... at the house, where there were feasting and dancing and much merry-making. One incident of it do I remember most distinctly,—that having, with consummate generalship, cornered Mistress Dorothy under a sprig of mistletoe, I suddenly found myself utterly bereft of the courage to carry the matter to a conclusion, and allowed her to escape unkissed, for which she laughed at me most unmercifully once the danger was passed, though she had feigned the utmost indignation while the ...
— A Soldier of Virginia • Burton Egbert Stevenson
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