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More "Spruce" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... twenty minutes. The waters fairly swarmed with them, and we could always get enough for the "pot" in a half-hour's fishing at any time during the trip. The Abwees were canoeing, not hunting or fishing; though, in truth, they did not need to hunt spruce-partridge or fish for bass in any sporting sense; they simply went out after them, and never stayed over half an hour. On a point we stopped for lunch: the Scotchman always struck the beach a-cooking. He had a "kit," which was a big camp-pail, and inside of it were more ...
— Crooked Trails • Frederic Remington
... stiffly up under loads of pretty things which threaten to make the tapers turn bottom upward! Part and parcel of all this was I, Christopher, most reckless of rheumatism, most careless of dignity, the round, bald top of my head to be seen emerging everywhere from the thick boughs of the spruce, now devising an airy settlement for some gossamer-robed doll, now adjusting far back on a stiff branch Tom's new little skates, now balancing bags of sugar-plums and candy, and now combating desperately ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... hatchet she had attacked the under branches of the spruce and low pine trees, and soon had a good heap of these dead sticks near the tent. She turned over a flat stone that lay near by for a hearth. Before the other girls and Mrs. Havel were dressed and had washed ...
— Wyn's Camping Days - or, The Outing of the Go-Ahead Club • Amy Bell Marlowe
... wretched puritan's garb of mine is hardly worth brushing," said Wildrake; "and but for this hundred-weight of rusty iron, with which thou hast bedizened me, I look more like a bankrupt Quaker than anything else. But I'll make you as spruce as ever was a ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... Theophilus mentions are asserted by some writers (with whom I do not agree) to be those commonly known as the "Norway spruce," a species of pine of lofty proportions sometimes rising to the height of 150 feet with a trunk from four to five feet in diameter. It lives to a great age believed to exceed in many instances 450 years. The leaves (needles, thorns) are short but ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... tanquam te. His manner is lofty, his discourse peremptory, his tongue filed, his eye ambitious, and his general behaviour, vain, ridiculous and thrasonical. He is too picked, too spruce, too affected, too odd, and, as it were, too peregrinate, as ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... usual structure of logs, laid lengthwise, and rudely plastered at each point of contact with adobe, the material from which the chimney, which entirely occupied one gable, was built. It was pierced with two windows and a door, roofed with smaller logs, and thatched with long half cylinders of spruce bark. But the interior gave certain indications of the distinction as well as the peculiar experiences of its occupant. In place of the usual bunk or berth built against the wall stood a small folding camp bedstead, and upon ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... three hundred thousand copies per week, and is growing in the public favor. From the profits of his business Mr. Bonner has built a splendid marble publishing-house at the corner of William and Spruce Streets, in New York, from which the "Ledger" is now issued. It is one of the most complete establishments in the world, and is fitted up with every convenience necessary to the performance of the work upon the paper in the most perfect and expeditious manner. Mr. ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... beautifully clear water. Upon either side the valley, the hills rose about 1400 feet; at that season (September) the summits were in some places capped with snow. The sides of the hills, sloping towards the glen, were either covered with forests of spruce firs, or broken into patches of prairie grass and sage bush, the latter about as high as the strongest heather, and equally tough ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... myself. "What!" said I, "you pitiful sluggard, have you so managed matters as to have no hope left? Have you lost your wits together with your estate? Don't you see me, who have risen from the same condition? What a complexion I have, how spruce and well dressed, what portliness of person? I have every thing, {yet} have nothing; and although I possess nothing, still, of nothing am I in want." "But I," {said he}, "unhappily, can neither be a butt nor submit to blows."[42] ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence
... fashionable table with scraps and songs and theatrical slip-slop. The second-rate actors have their second-rate friends and admirers, with whom they likewise spout tragedy and talk slip-slop; and so down even to us; who have our friends and admirers among spruce clerks and aspiring apprentices, who treat us to a dinner now and then, and enjoy at tenth hand the same scraps and songs and slip-slop that have been served up by our more fortunate brethren at the tables ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... "Antiquarian Repertory" (ed. 1807), i. 251-270, the reader will find an interesting account of the Trained Bands and the Artillery Company. Old writers are fond of sneering at the City warriors. The following passage is from Shirley's "Witty Fair One," v. 1:—"There's a spruce captain newly crept out of a gentleman-usher and shuffled into a buff jerkin with gold lace, that never saw service beyond Finsbury or the Artillery-Garden, marches wearing a desperate feather ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various
... and he settled down to work with praiseworthy energy. He had considerable shrewdness, and it was plain that he would eventually become as good a merchant as his father. He was little older than Lucy, but his fair hair and his clean-shaven face gave him a more youthful look. With his spruce air and well-made clothes, his conversation about hunting and golf, few would have imagined that he arrived regularly at his office at ten in the morning, and was as keen to make a good bargain as any of the men he came ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham
... canyon filled with fir and spruce trees, he stopped in this haven to rest his tired eyes. When his vision had cleared, his heart gave a bound; he thought he could see a moccasin track ahead in the trail. He was off like a deer, ...
— The Sheep Eaters • William Alonzo Allen
... skill their nets in the emerald waters. Two hundred white winters and more have fled from the face of the Summer Since DuLuth, on that wild, somber shore, in the unbroken forest primeval, From the midst of the spruce and the pines, saw the smoke of the wigwams up-curling, Like the fumes from the temples and shrines of the Druids of old in their forests. Ah, little he dreamed then, forsooth, that a city would stand on that hill-side, ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... shabby, and the gendarmes could not have been impressed with respect by it. On the other hand, had I used the best style of public equipage, the likatchi, the kind which consists of an elegant little sledge, a fine horse, and a spruce, well-fed, well-dressed driver, it is probable that they would not have let me pass at all. Ladies are not permitted, by etiquette, to patronize these likatchi, alone, and no man will take his wife or a woman whom he respects to drive ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... hundreds of Mr. Robinson's Irish emigrants camped on the plains. Many had built themselves huts of pine and spruce boughs; some with slabs and others with logs of trees. Three or four Government store-houses and a house for the Superintendent, the Hon. Peter Robinson, were in course of erection. I had letters of introduction to that gentleman, and also to the Hon. T. A. Stewart, and Robert Reid, Esq. The ...
— Twenty-Seven Years in Canada West - The Experience of an Early Settler (Volume I) • Samuel Strickland
... drummer-boys practising in a distant courtyard; the men at drill on the parade; the two soldiers carrying a basket between them, who winked to each other as he went by, and slily pointed to their throats; the spruce serjeant who hurried past with a cane in his hand, and under his arm a clasped book with a vellum cover; the fellows in the ground-floor rooms, furbishing and brushing up their different articles of dress, who stopped to look at him, and whose voices as they spoke together echoed loudly ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... fashionable cut and finest cloth. Black broad-cloth frocks, and satin or velvet vests, were quite common. Individuals thus attired formed a majority of the guests—for in young settlements the "hotel" or "tavern" is also a boarding-house, where the spruce "storekeepers" and better class of clerks take their meals—usually sleeping in ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... flattery is beastly. Afterwards to St. James's Park, seeing people play at Pell Mell; where it pleased me mightily to hear a gallant, lately come from France, swear at one of his companions for suffering his man (a spruce blade) to be so saucy as to strike a ball while his master was playing on ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... to the bazaar, and purchasing here and there—at one place a vest, at another a shawl, and at another a turban—I threw off my dress of a dervish, hastened to the bath, and after a few minutes under the barber, came out like a butterfly from its dark shell. No one would have recognised in the spruce young Turk, the filthy dervish. I hastened to Constantinople, where I lived gaily, and spent my money; but I found that to mix in the world, it is necessary not only to have an attaghan, but also to have the courage to use it; and in several broils which took place, ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat
... fellow-countrymen—(Mr. Marble was observed by the chairman to bite his lips, to keep in a good round laugh, when those words, fellow-countrymen, came out)—I tell you what it is, the things that are wanted now are boots, and shoes, and stockings, and jackets—and not gingerbread, and sugar plums, and spruce beer, ...
— Mike Marble - His Crotchets and Oddities. • Uncle Frank
... come in competition, By virtue of some sly petition: Yet mum for that; hope still the best, Nor let such cares disturb thy rest. Methinks I hear thee loud as trumpet, As bagpipe shrill or oyster-strumpet; Methinks I see thee, spruce and fine, With coat embroider'd richly shine, And dazzle all the idol faces, As through the hall thy worship paces; (Though this I speak but at a venture, Supposing thou hast tick with Hunter,) Methinks I see a blackguard ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... grievous load, And Chelsea, flower'd and spruce, And antique thingummies in spode; The only thing that none ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 25, 1914 • Various
... them up a hill, and as Faith, with a little tired sigh, seated herself on a moss-covered rock, she looked about with a little exclamation of wonder. Close beside the trail was a rough shelter made of the boughs of spruce and fir trees, and near at hand was piled a quantity of wood ready for a fire. There was a clearing, and the rough shelter was shaded by two ...
— A Little Maid of Ticonderoga • Alice Turner Curtis
... hills were literally carpeted with flowers. I could not learn that any skilled botanist had ever visited Kamchatka and classified its flora. Among the arboreal productions the alder and birch were the most numerous. Pine, larch, and spruce grow on the Kamchatka river, and the timber from them is brought to Avatcha from ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... rocks fringing the land within, and another dark strip fringing the barren Eilean Chaisteil outside,—lay the Betsey, looking wonderfully diminutive, but evidently a little thing of high spirit, taut-masted, with a smart rake aft, and a spruce outrigger astern, and flaunting her triangular flag of blue in the sun. I pointed first to the manse, and then to the yacht. The minister shook ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... too fast, Mrs Minx, and are a little too Confident: For tho 'tis my place to attend, yet 'tis I that give a Credit and Reputation to all you do; I walk along the Streets so boldly, and so spruce, and so all-to-be-sented with sweet Powder, cocking my Beaver and looking big, that I make the greatest Gallant I meet give me the Wall, as if I were a Person of Quality; And when any comes hither they are won by my complemental ...
— The London-Bawd: With Her Character and Life - Discovering the Various and Subtle Intrigues of Lewd Women • Anonymous
... and also among the whip gentry, this word signifies natty, spruce, dashing; e.g. he is quite varmint; he sports a varmint hat, ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... <complaisant, elegant, trim, dapper, spruce, genteel, urbane, well-bred, gracious, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... level we encountered a steeper ascent than any I had yet climbed. Here the character of the forest began to change. There were other trees than pines, and particularly one kind, cone-shaped, symmetrical, and bright, which Dick called a silver spruce. I was glad it belonged to the conifers, or pine-tree family, because it was the most beautiful tree I had ever seen. We climbed ridges and threaded through aspen thickets in hollows till near sunset. Then Stockton ordered a ...
— The Young Forester • Zane Grey
... serenity of nature. Surely good courage will not flag here on the Atlantic border, as long as we are flanked by the Fur Countries. There is enough in that sound to cheer one under any circumstances. The spruce, the hemlock, and the pine will not countenance despair. Methinks some creeds in vestries and churches do forget the hunter wrapped in furs by the Great Slave Lake, and that the Esquimaux sledges are drawn by dogs, and in the twilight of the northern night, the hunter does not ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... ounces of hops, let them boil half an hour in one gallon of water, strain the hop water then add sixteen gallons of warm water, two gallons of molasses, eight ounces of essence of spruce, dissolved in one quart of water, put it in a clean cask, then shake it well together, add half a pint of emptins, then let it stand and work one week, if very warm weather less time will do, when it is drawn off to bottle, add one spoonful of ...
— American Cookery - The Art of Dressing Viands, Fish, Poultry, and Vegetables • Amelia Simmons
... price of a week's sustenance to see her for a moment! To leave my work and go without food was the least of it! I must traverse the streets of Paris without getting splashed, run to escape showers, and reach her rooms at last, as neat and spruce as any of the coxcombs about her. For a poet and a distracted wooer the difficulties of this task were endless. My happiness, the course of my love, might be affected by a speck of mud upon my only white waistcoat! Oh, to miss the sight of her because ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... the pound was imposed upon the importation of foreign brown linen yarn, instead of much higher duties, to which it had been subjected before, viz. of 6d. the pound upon sail yarn, of 1s. the pound upon all French and Dutch yarn, and of 2:13:4 upon the hundred weight of all spruce or Muscovia yarn. But our manufacturers were not long satisfied with this reduction: by the 29th of the same king, chap. 15, the same law which gave a bounty upon the exportation of British and Irish linen, of which the price did ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... Laborers found rarely a more liberal employer than he. He was generous in the wages he gave; he allowed more resting hours than any of his neighbors; he was less exacting in his demands; he always reserved the finest lambs and chickens to supply his table in that season; he had the best of spruce beer in Summerfield, and the clearest crystal water. And while with these mitigations, the toils of the harvesters were still hot and heavy to be borne, there was that in their fare, in their songs, and animation, which told of as much happiness, as may crown the ...
— Summerfield - or, Life on a Farm • Day Kellogg Lee
... of our abode among these islands we found reasonable quantity of wood, both fir, spruce, and juniper; which, whether it came floating any great distance to these places where we found it, or whether it grew in some great islands near the same place by us not yet discovered, we know not. But we judge that it groweth ...
— Voyages in Search of the North-West Passage • Richard Hakluyt
... evidently very great. Large quantities of wood pipe have been removed from trenches in Boston, New York City. Philadelphia, Baltimore, and elsewhere, usually in perfectly sound condition. It was commonly made of logs of spruce, yellow pine, or oak, from 12 to 18 ft. long, 12 to 24 in. in diameter, and with a bore from 3 to 6 in. in diameter. Some 6-in. pipe taken up in Philadelphia had an external diameter of 30 in. The ends were usually bound with wrought-iron collars, and adjacent lengths were ...
— The Water Supply of the El Paso and Southwestern Railway from Carrizozo to Santa Rosa, N. Mex. • J. L. Campbell
... seemed to hesitate. "Well," he began slowly, "I've often heard my father tell it. When they came to that tree with the mark on it, grandfather said, 'Boys, we have reached our home. Let us thank God.' He went up to a big spruce tree, drove his ax in to the butt, then kneeled down with the two little boys beside him, and I have heard my father say that when he looked away up between the big trees and saw the bit of blue sky there, he thought God was listening at that blue hole between ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... the bark carefully away from the hindquarters of a spruce tree and remove the tenderloin. One of last year's Christmas trees is excellent for the purpose. Chop it up fine and place in a saucepan. Add boiling water and let it simper two hours. Season with a pinch of salt, and if this is not satisfactory, ...
— The Silly Syclopedia • Noah Lott
... yarn, and they dragged their provisions and blankets on sleds or toboggans. At night they would use their snow-shoes to shovel a wide, circular pit in the snow, clearing it away to the bare earth. In the centre of the pit, they would build their camp fire, and sleep around it on piles of spruce boughs, secure from the winter wind. The leaders, usually members of the nobility, fared on these expeditions as rudely as their men, and outdid them in courage and endurance. Some of the most noted chiefs of the wood-rangers were scions ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... appointed, as I stood in the hall, a tall, clean-shaven, rather spruce young man entered and spoke to the concierge, who at once ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux
... form the two sides of the house, bent till they met, and lashed together at the top. To these other poles were bound transversely, and the whole was covered with large sheets of the bark of the oak, elm, spruce, or white cedar, overlapping like the shingles of a roof, upon which, for their better security, split poles were made fast with cords of linden bark. At the crown of the arch, along the entire length of the house, an opening a foot wide was left for the admission of light and the escape of smoke. ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... Devonshire; and Anna might wander about the old house and grounds as she chose, and feel how much better she had loved it in its tumble-down state, the state she had known as a child, when her mother lived there and was happy. Everything was aggressively spruce now, indoors and out. Susie's money and Susie's taste had rubbed off all the mellowness and all the romance. Anna was glad to leave it again, and be taken to Marienbad, or any place where there was royalty, for Susie loved royalty. But what a ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... created a sort of endless canopy which the sun was unable to penetrate. The cool, dry wind that swept the slope would account, however, for the surprising absence of moisture in soil and vegetation in the dense shade of the trees. Oak, elm, spruce, even walnut, and other trees of a sturdy character indigenous to the temperate zone were identified. What appeared to be a clump of cypress trees, fantastic, misshapen objects that seemed to, shrink back in terror from the assaulting breakers, stood out in bold relief ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... may on high days and holidays visit the people of the new district, generally takes up its quarters among the operatives of the old town. Merchants, retail traders, and artisans have common interests which unite them together. On Sundays only, the masters make themselves spruce and foregather apart. On the other hand, the labouring classes, which constitute scarcely a fifth of the population, mingle with ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... hardii (Taylor), is a plethodontid of relict distribution in the spruce-fir vegetational formation from 8500 to 9600 feet elevation in Otero and Lincoln counties, New Mexico. The salamanders on which most of this report is based were collected three, four, and six miles northeast of Cloudcroft in the Sacramento Mountains. Additional individuals were collected on ...
— Natural History of the Salamander, Aneides hardii • Richard F. Johnston
... friction at first, then smoothly and swiftly as if they had never stopped. Summer reddened into autumn; autumn bronzed into fall. The maples and poplars were bare. The oaks alone kept their rusted crimson glory, and the cloaks of spruce and hemlock on the shoulders of the hills grew dark with wintry foliage. Keene's transitions of mood became more frequent and more extreme. The gulf of isolation that divided him from us when the black days came seemed wider and more unfathomable. ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke
... rapidly in the Alexander, notwithstanding the precautions of smoking the ship, washing with vinegar, and distributing porter, spruce-beer, and wine among the seamen. On the 2d of September six men and a boy, on the 5th eight, and on the 8th ten, were disabled by it from performing any duty. An increase of this kind, in the midst of all the efforts that could be made to counteract the malignity of the disorder, gave but too ...
— The Voyage Of Governor Phillip To Botany Bay • Arthur Phillip
... before noon next day, and was over in little more than half an hour. Soames—pale, spruce, sad-eyed in the witness-box—had suffered so much beforehand that he took it all like one dead. The moment the decree nisi was pronounced he left the Courts ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... they came to a growth of spruce so dense that it formed a shelter from both snow and wind, with a thick carpet of brown needles under foot. They were shut out from the stars, and in the darkness MacVeigh began to whistle cheerfully. He ...
— Isobel • James Oliver Curwood
... operations immediately, to find the rate of the time-keeper, and to make other observations. The remainder of the empty water-casks were also sent on shore, with the cooper to trim, and a sufficient number of sailors to fill them. Two men were appointed to brew spruce beer; and the carpenter and his crew were ordered to cut wood. A boat, with a party of men, under the direction of one of the mates, was sent to collect grass for our cattle; and the people that ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... music-case under his arm. He had an eternal interest for Jeremy because, whenever he was mentioned, the phrase was: "Poor little Mr. Dawson!" Why he was to be pitied Jeremy did not know. He looked spruce and bright enough, and generally whistled to himself as he walked; but "poor" was an exciting adjective, and Jeremy, when he passed him, felt a little shudder of drama ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole
... stems of flax, straw, the Spanish and African esparto grass, and especially wood; but much more paper is made of wood than of all the rest together. Poplar, gum, and chestnut trees, and especially those trees which bear cones, such as the spruce, fir, balsam, and pine are used. There are two methods of manufacturing wood pulp; the mechanical, by grinding up the wood, and the chemical, by treating it chemically. By the mechanical method the wood is pressed against a large ...
— Makers of Many Things • Eva March Tappan
... slept he caused birch, spruce, and cottonwood trees to spring up in the low places, and when the people awoke in the morning they clapped their hands in delight, for the birds were singing in the tree-tops and the green leaves with the sunlight flickering through them made it seem like a ...
— A Treasury of Eskimo Tales • Clara Kern Bayliss
... wild goose honked. White-winged gulls soared gracefully overhead. Now and again a seal rose to gaze for an inquisitive moment at the passing boat, and once a flock of ducks settled upon the waters. The air was redolent with the pungent odour of spruce and balsam fir—the perfume of the forest—and Shad, lounging contentedly at the bow of the boat, drank in ...
— The Gaunt Gray Wolf - A Tale of Adventure With Ungava Bob • Dillon Wallace
... degradation of its own dignity. The sharp retort, the sly innuendo, the dexterous hint, the hard, keen subtlety, the rough common sense, all valuable in their degree, and all profitable to their possessor, are only of an inferior grade. Let the true orator come forth, and the spruce pleader is instantly flung into the background. Let the appeal of a powerful mind be made to the jury, and all the small address, and practical skill, and sly ingenuity, are dropped behind. The passion of the true orator communicates its ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... poet pens his odes and sonnets spruce With quills plucked from the ordinary goose, While critics write their sharp incisive lines With quills snatched from ...
— Cobwebs from a Library Corner • John Kendrick Bangs
... on snow-shoes. Their way was over the ice of Lake Champlain, for more than a century the great thoroughfare of war-parties. They bivouacked in the forest by squads of twelve or more; dug away the snow in a circle, covered the bared earth with a bed of spruce boughs, made a fire in the middle, and smoked their pipes around it. Here crouched the Christian savage, muffled in his blanket, his unwashed face still smirched with soot and vermilion, relics of ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman
... and then every schoolboy walked across to Camden and back, as if it had been a pilgrimage or religious duty, while meantime there was always a kind of Russian carnival on the ice, oxen being sometimes roasted whole, and all kinds of "fakirs," as they are now termed, selling doughnuts, spruce-beer, and gingerbread, or tempting the adventurous with thimblerig; many pedestrians stopping at the old-fashioned inn on Smith's Island for hot punch. Juleps and cobblers, and the "one thousand and one American fancy ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... winding away too far for the roar of its rushing waters to reach our ears. No sound of civilization came to us, and no life was to be seen unless a crow chanced to fly overhead in search of some morsel of food. Large forest trees there were none. Tall, straight saplings of poplar, spruce and pine pointed their slender fingers heavenward, and ...
— A Woman who went to Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... appear'd, what a shout rent the air! The spruce widow affords the most excellent cheer; For comfort in quarters there's nothing can beat her, So up rose the lads with a welcome to greet her: The muse with true gallantry led her to place, And Truth said good humour was writ in ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... particularly of the evergreen class. Their branches brushed into the carriage as we passed along, and left with us that pleasant woodsy smell belonging to fresh leaves. One of the ladies, catching a bit of green from one of these intruding branches, said it was cedar, and another thought it spruce. 'Let me discourse on a theme I understand,' said the President. 'I know all about trees, by right of being a backwoodsman. I'll show you the difference between spruce, pine, and cedar, and this shred of green, which is neither one ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... shoes on the great square flags of the ground-floor rooms. She ran in to see who it was. Confused at being caught by a priest with a fruit in one hand and another in her mouth, she made no answer to the questions of the handsome young abbe. She had never imagined such an abbe,—dapper and spruce as hands could make him, in dazzling linen and fine black ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... ago, Was moving home at two, sedate and slow, Old, and fatigued with pleading at the bar, And grumbling that he lived away so far, When suddenly he chanced his eye to drop On a spruce personage in a barber's shop, Who in the shopman's absence lounged at ease, Paring his nails as calmly as you please. "Demetrius"—so was called the slave he kept To do his errands, a well-trained adept— "Find out about that man for me; enquire His name and rank, his patron or his ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... Spruce gum, warmed on the fire, and mixed with a little linseed oil, is also excellent. For a genuine fly trap, ...
— Camp Life in the Woods and the Tricks of Trapping and Trap Making • William Hamilton Gibson
... It was Steel, spruce and serene as ever, a pink glow upon his mobile face, a pink flower in his reefer jacket, a jaunty Panama straw covering his white hairs, and buckskin shoes of kindred purity upon his small and well-shaped feet. Langholm greeted him in turn, only trusting ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... this, here is my second: "Nor can any lover of nature enter the old piles of Oxford and English cathedrals without feeling that the forest overpowered the mind of the builder, and that his chisel, his saw and plane, still reproduced its ferns, its spikes of flowers, its locust, elm, pine, and spruce." ...
— A Cathedral Courtship • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... fault that all that piece of the earth had grown so dusty and untidy; it was Mother Nature's own fault for being so long coming with those big buckets of hers. How could any land, however willing, look spruce and green and clean with no rain for four months? No wonder there was such a commotion, and it was such a noisy, vigorous business, when at last the rain did come! Every tree and every blade and every flower had a special ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... She found a beautiful spruce tree, which had evidently been growing all these years on purpose for a Christmas tree, so straight it stood, and so wide and ...
— Kristy's Rainy Day Picnic • Olive Thorne Miller
... force seems to uplift one as on wings; and one flies, and everything else flies, but contrariwise—both the verst stones, and traders riding on the shafts of their waggons, and the forest with dark lines of spruce and fir amid which may be heard the axe of the woodcutter and the croaking of the raven. Yes, out of a dim, remote distance the road comes towards one, and while nothing save the sky and the light clouds through which the moon is cleaving her way seem ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... children are going to do," said Meg as she and Bobby walked down Spruce Avenue, "but I am awfully glad they found homes for the kittens; Mr. Fritz will be glad, too. I don't believe he wanted them drowned, but he didn't know what to ...
— Four Little Blossoms at Oak Hill School • Mabel C. Hawley
... in the open season, which lasted from May to October, were low and muddy; the country through which it flowed, known as the barren lands, was for the most part flat and densely wooded with a stunted growth of black spruce, jackpine, tamarack, poplar, willow, and birch. The river was the only highway: much of the forest which lay back from its banks was entirely unexplored on account of its swamps and the closeness of its underbrush. There were places within ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... several thousand feet of butternut lumber from my farmland through my own sawmill and used it for a variety of purposes. It is probably the strongest wood for its weight except spruce. I have used it successfully to make propellers which operate electric generators for deriving power from the wind. Because butternut is so light and, properly varnished, resists weathering and decay to so great an ...
— Growing Nuts in the North • Carl Weschcke
... he get it but up where he lives?" she asked. "Rufous never has to worry about food. It is all around him. You see, so far as known, he lives wholly on the thick parts of the needles, which you know are the leaves, of fir and spruce trees, and on the bark of tender twigs. So you see he is more of a tree dweller than any of the Squirrel family. While Rufous has the general shape of Danny and his relatives, he has quite a long tail. Now ...
— The Burgess Animal Book for Children • Thornton W. Burgess
... salmon was unexceptionable, and had completed the most arduous day's walk in his journal, nearly thirteen miles, in a state of dust and heat far from agreeable to a stoutish gentleman of forty, who usually looked as spruce as if he came out of a band-box. Hanmer and he seemed really glad to see each other. On those "oxless" shores, where, as Byron says, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... snow on the ground and they scraped bare a place for their camp-fire beside a big stump and gathered enough fuel from windfalls for the night. Then they rolled a log beside the fire for a seat and built a soft bed with fragrant branches of hemlock and spruce. They roasted the chicken over a thick bed of glowing coals and baked potatoes in the ashes of the fire. The chicken was carved with their pocket knives and they got along without forks or plates. By using bark gathered from a birch and softening it over their fire they made cups with which they ...
— Dick in the Everglades • A. W. Dimock
... found in magnificent wildness and disarray, her hair quite unkempt. Great pines, shooting up immense distances in the sky skirted the path and flung their green-gray, trailing mosses abroad on the breeze; crowds of fir, spruce, hemlock, and cedar trees stood waving aloft their rich, dark banners; clusters of tall, white birches, scattered here and there, relieved and brightened the sombre evergreen depths, and the maple with its affluent foliage crowned each swell of the densely covered land. Here and ...
— Adele Dubois - A Story of the Lovely Miramichi Valley in New Brunswick • Mrs. William T. Savage
... had become more a signature than a person to her. Nevertheless, the memory of her girlish triumph the last time they had met caused her to hasten her toilet and put in an appearance in the private salon she had at the hotel in something less than half an hour. There she found the young banker very spruce in his frock coat and silk hat, which he had furnished himself with in America and assumed the day of his arrival on English soil. He was taking a vacation, he promptly explained to Adelle, in which, of course, he should do several pieces of important business. But he gave the girl to understand ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... was fuel to the already boiling blood of Stockington. The week following, what was their astonishment to find a much frequented ruin gone! it was actually gone! not a trace of it; but the spot where it had stood for ages, turfed, planted with young spruce trees, and fenced off with post and rail! The exasperated people now launched forth an immensity of fulminations against the churl Sir Roger, and a certain number of them resolved to come and seat themselves in the street of the hamlet and there dine; but ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... abiding-place, with a retinue of human servants to minister to his comfort. Yet he was modest and unassuming, and appeared really to enjoy his life of hard work; varying his struggles with a kernel of hard corn on the ground, where his color shone out like a flower against the green, with a rest on a spruce-tree, where ...
— A Bird-Lover in the West • Olive Thorne Miller
... the edge of a beaver meadow, feasting on trout fresh caught from a deep pool beneath a short fall. And in the morning, still following the stream, they came to the trappers' cabin, set in a grove of young spruce. ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... reply, being plainly at a loss to understand how there could be any doubt about the matter. Alice went to the round drawing-room, where she found Mr. Parker examining a trophy of Indian armor, and presenting a back view of a short gentleman in a spruce blue frock-coat. A new hat and pair of gloves were also visible as he stood looking upward with his hands behind him. When he turned to greet Alice lie displayed a face expressive of resolute self-esteem, with eyes whose watery brightness, together with the bareness of ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... August evening was so hot and close that the crowded cars were stifling. Nobody ever knew just why trains stopped at Millward siding. Nobody was ever known to get off there or get on. There was only one house nearer to it than four miles, and it was surrounded by acres of blueberry barrens and scrub spruce-trees. ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... well have been just beyond the spruce thicket, Thayer reflected. The description was too accurate to be artistic; it amounted to mere photography. As far as his own eyes could see, the earth lay buried in a deep, soft blanket of snow, and the air above was misty with flakes which neither fell nor scurried before the wind, but ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... looped, Bear Creek tumbled out of the southeast, and roved between noble borders of silver spruce into the shadows of the Blue Mountains of the north, half a dozen miles across and ten long of grazing and farm land, rich, loamy bottom ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand
... paused before she came to the door, to watch the smoke curling up from the chimney straight as a column, for there was not a breath of air stirring. The sun was almost gone, and the strong bluish light was settling on everything, giving even the green spruce-trees a ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... days when it was the abode of fashion,—the far-off days when fashion itself had not become old-fashioned and got improved into Smart Society,—this haunted half-mile or more still retains many fine old residences of brown stone and of red brick, which are spruce and well-kept. One such, on the west side of the street, of red brick, with a high stoop of brown stone, is a boarding-house, and in it is an apartment to which, on a certain clear, cold afternoon in October, the reader's presence in the spirit ...
— The Mystery of Murray Davenport - A Story of New York at the Present Day • Robert Neilson Stephens
... his, but they did not turn aside. "I think I'm going there with some one else," she said softly, and before her vision of this eager lover there popped a spruce ...
— Moor Fires • E. H. (Emily Hilda) Young
... with his little dreadful air of fervid solemnity—and I don't know whether I dreamed it or whether it was really there—very spruce and strutting about the lawns of Amerley Park at that garden-party they ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair
... mountainous, and evergreen country, this style of cottage is peculiarly appropriate. It takes additional character from bold and picturesque scenery, with which it is in harmony. The pine, spruce, cedar, or hemlock, or the evergreen laurel, planted around or near it, will give it increased effect, while among deciduous trees and shrubs, an occasional Lombardy poplar, and larch, will harmonize ...
— Rural Architecture - Being a Complete Description of Farm Houses, Cottages, and Out Buildings • Lewis Falley Allen
... city newspapers are located in or around Printing House Square, immediately opposite and east of the City Hall. One of the greatest curiosities of this square is a huge engine, which runs a large number of presses. It is situated in Spruce street, between William and Nassau streets, and occupies the basement of the building in which it is located. There are two engines here—one of 150 horse power, which is used during the day, and a smaller one of ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... that Cartier was much surprised to see him out and well. He contrived to make him relate the particulars of his recovery, and thus found out that a decoction of the bark and foliage of the white spruce-tree furnished the savages with a remedy. Having recourse to this enabled the French captain to arrest the progress of the disease among his own people, and, in a short time, to bring about ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... was, and imperfectly educated, he aspired to be a lawyer; and at eighteen years of age he became a law-student in the office of Mr. Spruce McCay in Salisbury, North Carolina. Two years later, in 1787, he was admitted to the bar. Not making much headway in Salisbury, he wandered to that part of the State which is now Tennessee, then an almost unbroken wilderness, exposed to Indian massacres and depredations; and finally ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XII • John Lord
... it is to this day. Like Cain, I was branded—branded by Nature with the stamp of abnormal ugliness, as I was gifted by Nature with iron and abnormal strength and considerable intellectual powers. So ugly was I that the spruce young men of my College, though they were proud enough of my feats of endurance and physical prowess, did not even care to be seen walking with me. Was it wonderful that I was misanthropic and sullen? Was it wonderful that I brooded and worked alone, and had ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... waste dominion yields, Stript her last robes, with gold and purple gay.— So droops my life, of your soft beams despoil'd, Youth, Health, and Hope, that long exulting smil'd; And the wild carols, and the bloomy hues Of merry Spring-time, spruce on every plain Her half-blown bushes, moist with sunny rain, More pensive thoughts in my sunk heart infuse Than Winter's grey, and desolate domain, Faded, like my lost Youth, ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... the higher hills. Towering, broken crags loomed ahead darkly in the gathering gloom. The vast riven facets cut the sky-line, and black patches of pine forests, and spruce, gave a ghostly, threatening outlook. They must have been riding over two hours when Scipio realized they were passing over a narrow cattle track on the summit of a wooded hill. Then presently their horses began a steep shelving descent which required great caution to ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... row of hemlocks and Norway spruce bordered the road, and, with the aid of a stone wall, shut off from the highway a prosperous-looking vegetable garden. Farther along, a flower garden glowed in the fantastic coloring which gardens acquire when planted for the love of flowers rather than for definite artistic ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger
... you git religion, Sir, the thing can't never be; Nut but wut I respeck," sez she, "your intellectle part, But you wun't noways du for me athout a change o' heart: Nothun religion works wal North, but it's ez soft ez spruce, Compared to ourn, for keepin' sound," sez she, "upon the goose; A day's experunce'd prove to ye, ez easy 'z pull a trigger, It takes the Southun pint o' view to raise ten bales a nigger; You'll fin' thet human natur, South, ain't wholesome ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... being tapped, the men left in camp have been busy enough building the rude shanties of logs and spruce boughs that are to shelter them while they remain in the bush, cutting quantities of fire-wood, and swinging the great kettles into place on the iron bar that rests on two forked posts solidly fixed in the ground. Sometimes great shallow pans of iron, ...
— Harper's Young People, May 4, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... sooner been converted to the vernacular, and disappeared, than another stranger entered the room. He had evidently been lurking in the passage: it was a man of smallish stature, singularly gaunt, angular, and haggard, but dressed in a spruce suit of black, tight, new, and glossy. In short, he looked like Romeo's apothecary gone to Stultz with the money. He fluttered in with pale cheek and apprehensive body, saying hurriedly, "Now, my dear sir, be calm: pray be calm. I have come down all the ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... not get fat and unwieldy, as well as any other part of the human frame. Some of our best poets have written in paroxysms of hunger, and I really believe that Addison would have had more point if he had had less victuals; and if you do not restrict yourself to a sheep's trotter and spruce beer, your style will betray your luxury." But soon came an increase of the very thing feared for her fame, in the form of an invitation from Lady Abercorn and the marquis to pass the chief part of every year with them. This was accepted, and thus she met her fate. Lord ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... this gallant and spruce company (for every man had donned his best, and dressed himself with the utmost care) came Caron La Boulaye. He walked alone, for although their comrade in death, he was their comrade in nothing else. Their heads might ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... most remarkable company that ever was seen proceeded down the Via Ripetta towards the Porta del Popolo. All eyes were turned upon them, and people asked each other if these were maskers left from the Carnival. Signor Pasquale Capuzzi, spruce and smug, all elegance and politeness, wearing his gay Spanish suit well brushed, parading a new yellow feather in his conical hat, and stepping along in shoes too little for him, as if he were walking amongst eggs, was leading pretty Marianna on his arm; her ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... guidance, to try to keep straight any more? Bereft of her love, Robert had sunk steadily. Gambling, drink, morphia, billiards, and cigars—he had taken to them all; until now in the wretched figure of the outcast on the Embankment you would never have recognised the once spruce figure of Handsome Hardrow. ...
— Happy Days • Alan Alexander Milne
... products of the country. There were tin mines, he found, in parts of the island, and iron in small quantities; but copper was imported from the Continent. The vegetation resembled that of France, save that he saw no beech and no spruce pine. Of more consequence were the people and the distribution of them. The Britons of the interior he conceived to be indigenous. The coast was chiefly occupied by immigrants from Belgium, as could be traced in the nomenclature of places. The ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... of mean finery or shabby splendour, as now it does. 'Voluble' was an epithet which had nothing of slight in it, but meant what 'fluent' means now; 'dapper' was what in German 'tapfer' is; not so much neat and spruce as brave and bold; 'plausible' was worthy of applause; 'pert' is now brisk and lively, but with a very distinct subaudition, which once it had not, of sauciness as well; 'lewd' meant no more than unlearned, as the lay or common ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... strewed about here, were a spearshaft, eight feet in length, recently made and ochred; parts of old canoes, fragments of their skin-dresses, &c. For some distance around, the trunks of many of the birch, and of that species of spruce pine called here the Var (Pinus balsamifera) had been rinded; these people using the inner part of the bark of that kind of tree for food. Some of the cuts in the trees with the axe, were evidently made the preceding year. Besides these, we were elated by other ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 387, August 28, 1829 • Various
... which suddenly appears through bud-variation on a Provence-rose, with the gall of red moss growing from the inoculated leaf of a wild rose, with each filament symmetrically branched like a microscopical spruce-fir, bearing a glandular tip and secreting odoriferous gummy matter.[708] Or compare, on the one hand, the fruit of the peach, with its hairy skin, fleshy covering, hard shell and kernel, and on the other hand one of the more complex galls with its epidermic, spongy, and woody ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... rock under a friendly dwarf spruce they lay still as two rabbits, watching with round eyes, eager but unafraid, the antics of three brown wolf cubs that were chasing the flies and tumbling over some invisible plaything before ...
— Northern Trails, Book I. • William J. Long
... in a wood, walking through lines of spruce firs of deep golden green in the yellow beams. One of these trees among its well-robed fellows fronting them was all lichen-smitten. From the low sweeping branches touching earth to the plumed top, the tree was dead-black as its shadow; ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... force, perhaps a hundred and fifty strong, fell in one solid mass on the mob, knocking men over right and left, and laying heads open at every blow. The panic-stricken crowd fled up Chatham Street, across the Park, and down Spruce and Frankfort Streets, punished terribly at every step. The space around the building being cleared, a portion of the police rushed inside, where the work of destruction was going on. The sight of the blue-coats in their midst, ...
— The Great Riots of New York 1712 to 1873 • J.T. Headley
... never showed signs of disapproving it, for they knew that my designs were honourable and virtuous; and I know that they often said as much to Leonisa, in order to dispose her to receive me as her betrothed; but she had set her heart on Cornelio, the son of Ascanio Rotulo, whom you well know—a spruce young gallant, point-de-vice in his attire, with white hands, curly locks, mellifluous voice, amorous discourse—made up, in short, of amber and sugar-paste, garnished with plumes and brocade. ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... Street line, which had been but recently started, was paying six hundred dollars a day. A project for a West Philadelphia line (Walnut and Chestnut) was on foot, as were lines to occupy Second and Third Streets, Race and Vine, Spruce and Pine, Green and Coates, Tenth and Eleventh, and so forth. They were engineered and backed by some powerful capitalists who had influence with the State legislature and could, in spite of great public protest, obtain franchises. ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... three all-important features in flying machine construction, viz.: lightness, strength and extreme rigidity. Spruce is the wood generally used for glider frames. Oak, ash and hickory are all stronger, but they are also considerably heavier, and where the saving of weight is essential, the difference is largely in favor of spruce. This will be seen in ...
— Flying Machines - Construction and Operation • W.J. Jackman and Thos. H. Russell
... of Nova Scotia, a maritime province, there is a ridge called North Mountain, overlooking the Bay of Fundy on one side and the fertile Annapolis valley on the other. On the northern slope of the range grows the hardy spruce-tree, well adapted for ship-timbers, of which many vessels of all classes have been built. The people of this coast, hardy, robust, and strong, are disposed to compete in the world's commerce, and it is nothing ...
— Sailing Alone Around The World • Joshua Slocum
... Daddy!" exclaimed Dotty; "I'm so glad there are a lot of flower-beds and nice big shrubs, and lovely blue spruce trees and lots of things that ...
— Two Little Women • Carolyn Wells
... OR DOUBLE SPRUCE.) Leaves about 1/2 in. long, erect, stiff, somewhat 4-sided, very dark green or whitish-gray; branchlets pubescent. Cones persistent, 1 to 1 1/2 in. long, ovate or ovate-oblong, changing from dark purple to dull reddish-brown; scales ...
— Trees of the Northern United States - Their Study, Description and Determination • Austin C. Apgar
... his bed, and the little room looked spruce. Chris walked into one of the niches made by the projecting windows, pushed up the ...
— Mr. Wicker's Window • Carley Dawson
... seen everything," he remarked. "But yellow pine, spruce, tamarack, apples, oaks, palms, oranges, cedars, joshua trees and cactus—just to name a few—all growing on ...
— Masters of Space • Edward Elmer Smith
... this day and till the middle of the next forenoon, concealing the landscape almost entirely; but we had hardly got out of the streets of Bangor before I began to be exhilarated by the sight of the wild fir and spruce tops, and those of other primitive evergreens, peering through the mist in the horizon. It was like the sight and odor of cake to a schoolboy. He who rides and keeps the beaten track studies the fences chiefly. Near Bangor, the fence-posts, on account of the frost's heaving them in the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... appeared at the entrance. Although much grown, I recognized them at first sight; they were the child who was found near the parapet of the Louvre, and his young guide. But the dress of the latter was greatly changed: his blouse of gray cloth was neat, and even spruce, and was fastened round the waist by a polished leather belt; he wore strong shoes, but made for his feet, and had on a new cloth cap. Just at the moment I saw him, he held in his two hands an enormous bunch of lilacs, ...
— An "Attic" Philosopher, Complete • Emile Souvestre
... would be a fearful shock to the present generation, but we were accustomed to decency, order, and reverence; and it was no wonder that my father was walking about the churchyard, muttering that he never saw such a place, while my brothers were full of amusement. Their spruce looks in their tall hats, bright ties, dark coats, and white trowsers strapped tight under their boots, looked incongruous with the rest of the congregation, the most distinguished members of which were farmers in drab coats with huge mother-of-pearl buttons, ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... ridgepole from either side other and smaller poles at an angle of forty or fifty degrees. The sloping poles were about a foot and a half apart. These poles were like the scantling or inside framework of a wooden house and they covered it all with spruce and birch bark, beginning at the bottom and allowing each piece to overlap the one beneath it, after the fashion of a shingled roof. They secured pieces partly with wooden pegs and partly with other and heavier wooden poles leaned against them. One end of the shelter was closed up with bark ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... she,— "Without you git religion, Sir, the thing can't never be; Nut but wut I respeck," sez she, "your intellectle part, But you wun't noways du for me athout a change o' heart: Nothun religion works wal North, but it's ez soft ez spruce, Compared to ourn, for keepin' sound," sez she, "upon the goose; A day's experunce'd prove to ye, ez easy 'z pull a trigger, It takes the Southun pint o' view to raise ten bales a nigger; You'll fin' thet human natur, South, ain't wholesome more 'n skin-deep, An' once't a darkie's took with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... on each side of the front step. A servant threw open the door of the breakfast room, and Delme mechanically entered it. It was filled with strangers; on some of these the spruce undertaker was fitting silk scarfs; while others were busy at the ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... were carried ashore, and placed upon an elevated rock on one side of the cove, close to the Resolution. A party of men, with an officer, was sent to cut wood, and to clear a place for the conveniency of watering. Others were employed to brew spruce-beer, as pine-trees abounded here. The forge was also set up, to make the iron-work wanting for the repairs of the fore-mast. For, besides one of the bibs being defective, the larboard trestle-tree and one of the cross-trees ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... old. Mrs. George Wyllys has moved, it seems; her children are evidently at home in a door-yard on the opposite side of the street, adjoining the Hubbard "Park." On the door of that bright-coloured, spruce-looking brick house, you will see the name of W. C. Clapp; and there are a pair of boots resting on the window-sill of an adjoining office, which probably belong to the person of the lawyer, himself. Now, we ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... further discrimination: <complaisant, elegant, trim, dapper, spruce, genteel, urbane, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... are two hard woods which may be added to the list. Sugar, particularly, is a good-working wood, but maple is more difficult. Spruce, on the other hand, is the strongest and toughest wood, considering its weight, which is but a little more ...
— Carpentry for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... could bring to mind; There were things in crates and boxes, there was stuff in bags and bales, There were tea-chests wrapped in matting, there were Eastern-looking frails, There were baulks of teak and greenheart, there were stacks of spruce and pine, There was cork and frozen carcasses and casks of Spanish wine, There was rice and spice and cocoa-nuts, and rum enough was there For to warm all London's innards up and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 4th, 1920 • Various
... useful young fellow enough, and clean and spruce; but lately, he has become shabby and dirty, and is going ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... Only look at him. He is as spruce as if he had only just come out of a band-box. But hush, not a word. There, that's a dear. Lean your head against my shoulder. Don ...
— Hardscrabble - The Fall of Chicago: A Tale of Indian Warfare • John Richardson
... ordinary level. I have often sailed over them, and 'twas strange to see each familiar footpath and strawberry bank far down beneath the shining waves. As the creek goes onward to the river the intervale disappears, and the banks become grey and steep, crowned with the tall and slender stems of the spruce and cedar. New Brunswick is rich in minerals, and veins of coal and iron abound at this place; but many years must elapse ere mines are worked to any extent. A few are in operation at present; but while the pine waves the wealth ...
— Sketches And Tales Illustrative Of Life In The Backwoods Of New Brunswick • Mrs. F. Beavan
... four inches wide, and three inches in thickness. At the head, and at the foot, is to be screwed a notched two-inch board, three inches wide, as in Fig. 8. The mortises are to be one inch wide and deep, and one inch apart, to revive slats made of ash, oak, or spruce, one inch square, placed lengthwise of the couch. The slats being small, and so near together, and running lengthwise, make a better spring frame than wire coils. If they warp, they can be turned. They must not be fastened at the ends, except by insertion ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... opposite the creek, the water was as smooth as glass, undisturbed by the slightest breath of wind so as to cause a ripple; and numbers of baby puffins and young penguins, their spruce little downy bodies clad in bright new coats of silky feathers, were scattered in groups over the mirror-like expanse, diving and coming up again in a moment in the centre of a series of expanding circles that gradually grew wider and wider in diameter, as ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson
... yander, half a mile in from Radnor road, with a thick spruce wood atween them and all the rest of the world. They never go away anywheres, except to church—they never miss that—and nobody goes there. There's just old Thomas, and his sister Janet, and a niece of theirs, ...
— Kilmeny of the Orchard • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... one of these spruce young thrushes, evidently out on his travels alone for the first time. He was in a state of great excitement,—jerked himself about, "huffed" at me, then flew with some difficulty into a tree, where he stood and watched me in a charmingly naive and childlike manner, utterly forgetting ...
— Upon The Tree-Tops • Olive Thorne Miller
... upon the dark, star-tremulous sky; sculptured buttresses of snow, enclosing hollows filled with diaphanous shadow, and sweeping aloft into the upland fields of pure clear drift. Then came the swift descent, the plunge into the pines, moon-silvered on their frosted tops. The battalions of spruce that climb those hills defined the dazzling snow from which they sprang, like the black tufts upon an ermine robe. At the proper moment we left our sledge, and the big Christian took his reins in hand to follow us. Furs and greatcoats were abandoned. ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... wrapped in pieces of old bagging and fastened on the end of long spruce poles, which we had brought along specially for this purpose. A wire from the battery had, of course, been connected with one of the primers buried in the dynamite. Pole, wire, and dynamite were thrust down through cracks in the ice at several ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary
... new set of people fill the streets. The goods in the shop-windows are invitingly arranged; the shopmen in their white neckerchiefs and spruce coats, look as it they couldn't clean a window if their lives depended on it; the carts have disappeared from Covent-garden; the waggoners have returned, and the costermongers repaired to their ordinary ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... you?" called out Max, stopping the use of his handy spruce blade, as he turned his head toward the one who appeared to ...
— The Strange Cabin on Catamount Island • Lawrence J. Leslie
... almost perpendicularly from the water, are clothed with wood from the base to the summit, and are of most varied shape and outline. They surpass in grandeur the banks of the Wye, and are more thickly clothed with wood, in which, the beech, and birch, and maple, have almost displaced the spruce, and no green could be more fresh and delicate. These mountains are on each side of the Arm, to its extremity, which is nearly closed by a round, or conical hill, similarly covered with trees; on either ...
— Extracts from a Journal of a Voyage of Visitation in the "Hawk," 1859 • Edward Feild
... sour. At various cavern doors sat groups of the billeted soldiers. Now and then squads marched up and down, monotonously clad in khaki and dun-coloured helmets. Officers, some only recognizable by the Sam Browne belt, others spruce and point-device, passed by. Here and there a shop was open, and the elderly proprietor and his wife stood by the doorway to get the afternoon air. Women and children straggled rarely through the streets. The Boche had left the little town alone for some time; they had other things to do with their ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... cool ones would glance over the top of my head, past my side, over my shoulder, but never meet my eye. The gentle-modest would turn their faces south if I were coming east, flit down a passage if I were about to halve the pavement with them. There was the spruce young bookseller would play the same tricks; the butcher's daughters; the upholsterer's young men. Hand in glove when doing business out of sight with you; but caring nothing for a' old woman when playing the genteel away from ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... oaks, elms, and horse-chesnuts, beyond the little village, which did not seem to contain more than seven or eight cottages, each half-buried in trees, or overgrown with creepers, except one red brick house, that flared in all the pride of newness, and of the gaudy flowers in its spruce little garden. In the middle of the irregular square, or rather of the wide part of the village road, for it could not be called a street, stood a tall May-pole, still adorned with two or three faded remnants of the streamers which had decorated it a month before. On an eminence beyond ...
— Ellen Middleton—A Tale • Georgiana Fullerton
... sez he, "A Norway spruce, a willer, a sycamore, and a pine. Dum it all, what do they want to put on such names as them onto trees that grow right ...
— Samantha at the World's Fair • Marietta Holley
... Barker returned to the outer ward of the financial stronghold he had penetrated, with its curving sweep of counters, brass railings, and wirework screens defended by the spruce clerks behind them, he was again impressed with the position of the man he had just quitted, and for a moment hesitated, with an inclination to go back. It was with no idea of making a further appeal to his old comrade, but—what would have ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... of matters journalistic, Marrineal lapsing tactfully into the role of attentive listener again, until there appeared in the lower room a dark-faced man of thirty-odd, spruce and alert, who, upon sighting them, came confidently forward. Marrineal ordered him a drink and presented him to the two journalists as Mr. Ely Ives. As Mr. Ives, it appeared, was in the secret of Marrineal's journalistic connection, the talk ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... of streets, we came to a humble but neat-looking dwelling house, with an apology for a garden in front. Tables and seats were arranged beneath some trees; "spruce beer" was advertised for sale, but there were indications that other kinds of refreshments could be obtained. The place wore a comfortable aspect. We nodded smilingly to each other, as much as to say, "This will do!" ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... school, where all were spruce and neat, Poor Charlotte went with naked feet. Some showed their pity, some their pride, While Charlotte hid her face ...
— Slovenly Betsy • Heinrich Hoffman
... years ago, Was moving home at two, sedate and slow, Old, and fatigued with pleading at the bar, And grumbling that he lived away so far, When suddenly he chanced his eye to drop On a spruce personage in a barber's shop, Who in the shopman's absence lounged at ease, Paring his nails as calmly as you please. "Demetrius"—so was called the slave he kept To do his errands, a well-trained adept— "Find out ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... and passing away the time the best they could, some playing seven up, others playing billiards, and others looking on. Some of the truly good people in town thought the boys were pretty tough, and they wore long faces and prayed for the blockade to raise so the spruce looking chaps ...
— Peck's Sunshine - Being a Collection of Articles Written for Peck's Sun, - Milwaukee, Wis. - 1882 • George W. Peck
... "hard." Any wood that is not specially disposed to warp, and that can be smoothly wrought, may be used. Those you mention are all good; so are half a dozen more,—the different kinds of ash, yellow-pine, butternut, white-wood, cherry, cedar, even hemlock and spruce in some situations. There are several important points to be religiously observed if you leave the wood, whatever the variety, in its unadorned beauty. It must be the best of its kind; it must be seasoned to its inmost fibre; it must be wrought skilfully, tenderly cared for, and, finally, ...
— Homes And How To Make Them • Eugene Gardner
... pleasant to the eye:—(they were not the Duke's own liveries; for when he went about outside town he used a plainer sort)—and the Duke's dark blue, with his fair curls and his great hat which he waved as he went, and my Lord Essex's spruce figure in his buff, all made a very pretty picture as they went up the ...
— Oddsfish! • Robert Hugh Benson
... day's march of the Indian town, and had lain down in a thicket of spruce bushes after having looked in vain for some signs of a prisoner, as we had done during each of the four days while we were directly behind the band and at no time ...
— The Minute Boys of the Mohawk Valley • James Otis
... that meandered among the spruce and pine, skirting the edges of the mountain meadows and keeping within the timber, Cheyenne finally reached the main ridge of the range. Occasionally he dismounted and examined ...
— Partners of Chance • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... meeting and its informality did strike me as so singularly stimulating as to verge upon the riotous. The manner of playing was entirely new to me in the beginning. All conventions bind with a heavy chain, but none with a heavier than the Philadelphia variety. Spruce Street nights had never been so free and so vociferous and so late, and, being a good Philadelphian, I am not sure if the nights that succeeded have yet lost for me their novelty. As a consequence, if, in looking back, my days appear to be wholly monopolized by work, my nights seem consecrated ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... said Willet, "and as I've no mind to be beaten about by it, suppose we build a spruce shelter in the gorge here and wait ...
— The Masters of the Peaks - A Story of the Great North Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... to the left, close to the inn, and then go straight on; it is the third house past Poret's. There is a small spruce fir close to the gate; you ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... garden-walk. Their frame was of tall and strong saplings, planted in a double row to form the two sides of the house, bent till they met, and lashed together at the top. To these other poles were bound transversely, and the whole was covered with large sheets of the bark of the oak, elm, spruce, or white cedar, overlapping like the shingles of a roof, upon which, for their better security, split poles were made fast with cords of linden bark. At the crown of the arch, along the entire length of the house, an opening a foot wide was left for the admission of light and the escape of smoke. ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... low, the charming power that lives Within it makes the music that it gives. It dims! it brightens! it will shape itself. And see! a graceful dazzling little elf. He lives! he moves! spruce mannikin of fire, What more can we? what more can ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... four was approaching, comprised of a spruce, dress-coated manager; a short thick-set, broad-faced man who was doubtless the long-overdue detective; a professional-appearing gentleman with a black bag, obviously the house-physician; and the policeman that I had summoned from his stroll below. ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... afternoon sun hung in the bowl of a cloudless heaven, filmy with heat, but the hot rays were met by the high altitude of the ranch country and lost their force like a blow half struck. And among the spruce trees it was cool and green, and clear blue water rippled over ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead
... she had attacked the under branches of the spruce and low pine trees, and soon had a good heap of these dead sticks near the tent. She turned over a flat stone that lay near by for a hearth. Before the other girls and Mrs. Havel were dressed and ...
— Wyn's Camping Days - or, The Outing of the Go-Ahead Club • Amy Bell Marlowe
... together, they stopped aghast. They looked at each other with blank dismay, They simply hadn't a word to say. He thought with a shiver: "Can this be she?" She thought with a shudder: "This can't be he?" This simpering dandy, so sleek and spruce; This languorous lily in garments loose; They sought to brace from the awful shock: Taking a seat, they tried to talk. She spoke of Bergson and Pater's prose, He prattled of dances and ragtime shows; She purred of pictures, ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... a land Where the trees together stand Closely as the blades of wheat When the summer is complete. Rolling like an ocean wide Over vale and mountainside, Balsam, hemlock, spruce and pine,— All those mighty trees are mine. There's a river flowing free,— All its waves belong to me. There's a lake so clear and bright Stars shine out of it all night; Rowan-berries round it spread ...
— Songs Out of Doors • Henry Van Dyke
... head pillowed upon a pile of calico. A little further up the street and near the one tall-spired white church Mrs. Mears, the village gossip, may be sitting on the veranda of a small house almost hid by luxuriantly growing Norway spruce, and idly rocking while she chats with the widow Sloper, who lives there, and whose mission in life is to cut and fit the best "go to meetin'" gowns of female Sandgate. Both dearly love to talk over all that's going on, and whether this or that village ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... entirely concealed by his person, so that, to all appearance, he seemed to be gliding away only attached to the horse by the reins in his well-guarded hands. The way led through noble woods of Scotch and Spruce fir, sometimes catching sight of a lofty mansion of stone, or passing a low thatched building of wood with numberless little sash windows, where some of the nobles still reside, and which are the remnants of more simple times. And now "the sun rose clear o'er trackless fields ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... clerk, Mr. Timmis, at the suggestion of my good friend Mr. Wallis, offered me, as a treat, a row in the boat they had engaged for the occasion; which, as a matter of course, I did not refuse: making myself as spruce as my limited wardrobe would permit, I trotted at their heels to the foot of London-bridge, the ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... shocked by rumours of a canoe trip through Canadian waterways. Hereupon the usually benevolent Dennis protested as he glanced approvingly at the well-kept Tuscan landscape. "Crocker needn't rub it in," he opined. "Why, it's the same scrubby spruce tree from the Plains of Abraham to James's Bay-and Emma, who hated being bored! Why, it's marriage by capture; it's barbaric." "It's worse; it's rheumatic," shuddered Harwood as he declined Marsala and took whisky. "But he'll have to bring her back ...
— The Collectors • Frank Jewett Mather
... the kitchen, and, bending because it was too low for him, scrupulously parted his wet black hair, that it irritated Mrs. Morel. He put on a turn-down collar, a black bow, and wore his Sunday tail-coat. As such, he looked spruce, and what his clothes would not do, his instinct for making the most of his good ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... hold it back in spring until all danger of late frosts is past. Northeast exposures are best as a general rule. Choose a slope away from the prevailing wind if possible. If this is impracticable it is often advisable to plant a wind break of pine, spruce, or a quick, thick growing native tree to protect the orchard ...
— Apple Growing • M. C. Burritt
... sharply and took the path to the right. Half way down she came to a sort of projection in the cliff, partly sheltered from the rain by a clump of spruce-trees. Seating herself on this, with the grey sea sending its flying spray almost up in her face, she drew forth her letter, broke the ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... crosses our due north line at Mars Hill, thence doubling round it toward the south it crosses the Roostic between the Great and Little Machias, the Allegwash at the outlet of First Lake, a branch of the St. John south of Black River, and passes into Canada between "Spruce Hills" on the right and "Three Hills" on the left, thus crossing a tract of country south of the St. John 100 by 50 miles. We have not a copy of the act of incorporation of New Brunswick, and can not, therefore, say that the route ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 3: Martin Van Buren • James D. Richardson
... hired a horse and gig With promises to pay; And he pawned his horns for a spruce new wig, To redeem as he came away: And he whistled some tune, a waltz or a jig, And drove off ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... deciduous woods, lay on the starboard side, warm-looking and welcome to the eyes. This shore, as then seen, reminded me more than any other ever did of the Spanish coast on the approach to Gibraltar,—the spruce woods answering in hue to olive-groves, the other to the green of vines. Meanwhile, the palpitating sheen on the land, the star-sprinkled blueness of the sea, together with the softness of the delicious day, brought vividly to mind those days ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... pinon trees in that country, but because there are so few of them in the canyon of the stream. There are all sorts higher up on the slopes,—long-leaved yellow pines, thimble cones, tamarack, silver fir, and Douglas spruce; but in the canyon there is only a group of the low-headed, gray nut pines which the earliest inhabitants of that country ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... Vermont,—abundant, filling swamps acres in extent, alone or associated with other trees, mostly black spruce; growing depressed and scattered on Katahdin at an altitude of 4000 feet; Massachusetts,—rather common, at least northward; Rhode Island,—not reported; Connecticut,—occasional in the northern half of the state; reported as far south as Danbury ...
— Handbook of the Trees of New England • Lorin Low Dame
... continued her search. "Here's yer grandpa's watch-fob, but I'm skeered fer you to wear it, you might lose it. It's a family remnant—been handed down two generations. What about this here red comforter? It would sorter spruce you up, an' keep you warm, besides; you know you 've had a cold fer a week, an' yer pipes is all stopped up." So it was decided, and ...
— Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch • Alice Caldwell Hegan
... massive of living things, furnished most of them. But the largest happen to be the two giant incense cedars, which stand on either side of the main entrance. These are eight feet and ten inches in diameter. Then there are two columns on the south side, both cut from a spruce that was four feet seven inches through at ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... we reach the foot of the lake, stands a spruce and rather large house of modern aspect, but with several gables and much overgrown with ivy,—a very pretty and comfortable house, built, adorned, and cared for with commendable taste. We inquired whose it was, and the coachman said it was "Mr. ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... bottom upward! Part and parcel of all this was I, Christopher, most reckless of rheumatism, most careless of dignity, the round, bald top of my head to be seen emerging everywhere from the thick boughs of the spruce, now devising an airy settlement for some gossamer-robed doll, now adjusting far back on a stiff branch Tom's new little skates, now balancing bags of sugar-plums and candy, and now combating desperately with some contumacious ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... "You're all remarkably spruce," he commented. "Can any one tell me why almost every maid I have met in my house this day turns and flees as though I were the plague? Sarah is the only one who doesn't shun me, and her mind appears to be ...
— Mates at Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... decaying bodies. The living remnant had fled in despair six weeks before my arrival. When we renewed our journey on November 20, the weather became comparatively mild, and our course lay through rich, well-watered valleys with groves of spruce and pine. Edmonton, which we reached on November 26, is the headquarters of the Hudson Bay Company's Saskatchewan trade and the residence of a ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... Roman palace crammed with art. It had no number in the list of gems Weeded away, long since pushed out and banished, Before insipid Guidos over-sweet And Dolce's rose sensationalities, And curly chirping angels, spruce as birds. And yet the motive of this thing ill-hewn And hardly seen did touch me. O, indeed, The skill-less hand that carved it had belonged To a most yearning and bewildered brain: There was such desolation in the work; And through its utter ...
— The Speaker, No. 5: Volume II, Issue 1 - December, 1906. • Various
... and they heaped up the leaves and rubbish and started a blaze. The other girls brought more fuel and soon a hot fire was leaping against the side of the rock and its circle of warmth cheered them. They got green branches of spruce and pine and brushed away the snow and banked it up in a wall all about the platform, which served them for a camp. Then they scraped the fire out from the rock, threw on more branches (for the green ones would burn now that the fire was so hot) and crowded in ...
— Ruth Fielding at Snow Camp • Alice Emerson
... is a fjord thrusting its way through the jaws of strong, sharp hills of red sandstone piled up in broken and stratified masses above grey slate rock. On these hills cling forests of spruce and larch in woolly masses that march down the combes to the very water's edge. It is wild scenery, ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... crossed; the tops of these are often occupied by swamps filled with a thick growth of cedars. Deep and small basins occur, which are occupied by lakes that give rise to rivers flowing to the St. Lawrence or to the St. John. These are intermingled with thickets of dwarf spruce, and the streams are sometimes bordered by marshes covered by low alders, and sometimes cut deep into rocky channels. In this apparent labyrinth one positive circumstance marks the line of division, or the ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Tyler - Section 2 (of 3) of Volume 4: John Tyler • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... quivers, the gutters smoke, the buildings tremble as the heavy drays pass and collide at the corners of the narrow streets. Suddenly the marquis stops; he has found what he wanted. Between a charcoal dealer's dark shop and an undertaker's establishment, where the spruce boards leaning against the wall cause him to shudder, is a porte-cochere surmounted by a sign, the word "BATHS" on a dull lantern. He enters and crosses a damp little garden where a fountain weeps in a basin of artificial rockwork. ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... be asked," answered the Spirit. "I will try what can be done for you." So saying, he went to the side of the little maiden Musk-rat, and whispered certain words in her ear. When he had done this, he went to the forest near them, cut down a young pine-tree, dug up a root of the hemlock, took a spruce cone, an oak acorn, a hickery nut, and a birch-leaf, and laid them all in the fire which the Nanticoke had kindled. While they were burning, he walked round the fire muttering many words in an unknown tongue, and striking the earth repeatedly with ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 2 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... shaving next morning when his colleague entered, spruce as ever in attire, but looking rather weary. The little man flung himself at full length ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... not troubling us: we went dutifully every Sunday to the green-and-white schoolhouse under the tall spruce trees, and heard a sermon preached by a young man from the college, who had a deep and intimate knowledge of Amos and Elisha and other great men long dead, and sometimes we wished he would tell us more about the people who are living now and leave the dead ones alone. But it is always safer ...
— The Next of Kin - Those who Wait and Wonder • Nellie L. McClung
... She and Old Aaron lived in a little gray cube of a house that had its front face set straight to the edge of Charlotte Street. However, the north side of the cube looked into a great green yard where tall spruce trees, overrun with trumpet vines and woodbine, shaded long beds of flowers that love semi-shady places. The rear of the house overlooked an old-fashioned garden enclosed with a white-washed picket fence. Always were there ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers
... from whose low limbs dangle the tempting wares, and a stump serves as a chopping-block. Under the shrubbery, where the sun cannot penetrate, are stored home-made firkins full of yellow butter, and great cheeses, and heaps of substantial home-baked bread. Kegs of hard cider and spruce beer and perhaps more potent brews are abroach, and behind the haggling and jesting and bustle you may catch the sound of muskets or the whoop of the Indians from afar. Meanwhile, in the settlements, ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... may be that the vengeful spirit of Francois Breault set out in company with Corporal Blake to witness the consummation of his vengeance. That first night, as he sat close to his fire in the shelter of a thick spruce timber, Blake felt the unusual and disturbing sensation of a presence somewhere near him. The storm was at its height. He had passed through many storms, but to-night there seemed to be an uncannily concentrated fury in its beating ...
— Back to God's Country and Other Stories • James Oliver Curwood
... was like a great many other country villages. There were farm-houses, with their stack-yards and clusters of out-buildings, with their yew-trees and apple-orchards. Cottages, with low bulging white-washed walls and thatched roofs, were interspersed among others of a more spruce and modern build, with slated roofs, and neat little gardens. Then there were two or three shops which sold all things likely to be wanted in everyday village life, eatables and wearables nestling together in strange companionship; and, besides these, were houses which would ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... come, that's heaw it is; so we lose'n their custom till sich times as summat turns up at they can raise a trifle to pay up wi'. . . . He has nobbut one razzor, but it'll be like to do." Hearken this, oh, ye spruce Figaros of the city, who trim the clean, crisp whiskers of the well-to-do! Hearken this, ye dainty perruquiers, "who look so brisk, and smell so sweet," and have such an exquisite knack of chirruping, and lisping, and sliding over the smooth edge of the under lip,—and, sometimes, agreeably ...
— Home-Life of the Lancashire Factory Folk during the Cotton Famine • Edwin Waugh
... peavies and poles, And we're drenched with the spume of the chutes; We gather our herds at the head, Where the axes have toppled them loose, And down from the hills where the rivers are fed We harry the hemlock and spruce. ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VI. (of X.) • Various
... have probably ensued, but it was prevented by the spruce toastmaster, who gave a sentiment, and turning to the two politicians, "Pray, gentlemen," said he, "let us have done with these musty politics: I would always leave them to the beer-suckers in Butcher ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie
... head, Ramon could look into the heart of the mountains whence the stream issued through a narrow canyon, with steep, forested ridges on either side, and little level glades along the water, set with tall, conical blue spruce trees, pines with their warm red boles, and little clumps of aspen with gleaming white stems, and trembling leaves of ...
— The Blood of the Conquerors • Harvey Fergusson
... their angry echoes. Again the canoes were launched and the wild flotilla glided on its way, now in the shadow of the heights, now on the broad expanse, now among the devious channels of the Narrows, beset with woody islets where the hot air was redolent of the pine, the spruce, and the cedar,— till they neared that tragic shore where, in the following century, New England rustics battled the soldiers of Dieskau, where Montcalm planted his batteries, where the red cross waved so long amid the smoke, and where, at length, the summer night was hideous ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop
... their rich fragrance, mixed with the delicate scent of the feathery ceanothus, (New Jersey tea.) The vivid greenness of the young leaves of the forest, the tender tint of the springing corn, were contrasted with the deep dark fringe of waving pines on the hills, and the yet darker shade of the spruce and balsams on the borders of the creeks, for so our Canadian forest rills are universally termed. The bright glancing wings of the summer red-bird, the crimson-headed woodpecker, the gay blue-bird, and noisy but splendid ...
— Canadian Crusoes - A Tale of The Rice Lake Plains • Catharine Parr Traill
... a shower of blessings, and again urging his horse to speed, reaches his second place of destination. It is a stately mansion. A spruce waiter hastens to answer his ring, but the lady herself meets him as he enters ...
— Friends and Neighbors - or Two Ways of Living in the World • Anonymous
... here is my second: "Nor can any lover of nature enter the old piles of Oxford and English cathedrals without feeling that the forest overpowered the mind of the builder, and that his chisel, his saw and plane, still reproduced its ferns, its spikes of flowers, its locust, elm, pine, and spruce." ...
— A Cathedral Courtship • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... said to preserve a decidedly spruce appearance at the State Dinners. Fish is nothing ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 6, May 7, 1870 • Various
... was that of "a hard case, and addicted to drink," I found also in hospital in Korogwe, recovered from an operation for abscess of the liver, and living in hospital with his wife. Spruce and rather jumpy he insisted on exhibiting his operation wound to me, paying heavy compliments to English skill in surgery; not, mark you, that he had any but the greatest contempt that all German ...
— Sketches of the East Africa Campaign • Robert Valentine Dolbey
... grand parade, With marching train-band, guild, and trade: The burgomaster in robes arrayed, Gold chain, and mace, and gay cockade, Great keys carried, and flags displayed, Pompous marshal and spruce young aide, Carriage and foot and cavalcade; While big drums thundered and trumpets brayed, And all the bands of the canton played; The fountain spouted lemonade, Children drank of the bright cascade; ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. V, August, 1878, No 10. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... time the coachman, a spruce middle-aged man, who had long wanted to marry the clever, pretty laundry-maid, going to the pump to get water for his horses overheard her giving orders to the three feathers, and peeping through the keyhole as the butler had done, saw her sitting at her ease in ...
— English Fairy Tales • Flora Annie Steel
... plants come under this class, and are excellent climbers. One of the most remarkable is the Marcgravia umbellata, the stem of which in the tropical forests of South America, as I hear from Mr. Spruce, grows in a curiously flattened manner against the trunks of trees; here and there it puts forth claspers (roots), which adhere to the trunk, and, if the latter be slender, completely embrace it. When ...
— The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants • Charles Darwin
... wings.—Ver. 736. Clarke renders 'ut tersis niteant talaria plantis,' 'that his wings shine upon his spruce feet.'] ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... deer and moose going down before the snow. All the next day there was one old bull moose kept just ahead of us. We knew he was old because of his size and his being alone. Two or three times we passed other bulls with two or three cows and their calves of that season yarding among the young spruce, but the old bull kept on steadily down the mountain. His years had made him weather-wise. The third day the wind shifted the snow, and we saw him on the round crown of ...
— The Trail Book • Mary Austin et al
... never having held intercourse with Europeans, such an article would most likely have been taken out for use again. All the birch trees in the vicinity of the lake had been rinded, and many of them, and of the spruce fir, or var, had the bark taken off, to use the inner part of it for food, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 388 - Vol. 14, No. 388, Saturday, September 5, 1829. • Various
... despite the flame of desire in his bowels, just nosed and tasted, eating no more than an ordinary workaday ration. Long before the final stage of bone-gnawing he actually walked away and curled himself down at the roots of a big spruce where the ground rose slightly, some fifty paces distant from the place ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... ordered. Three minutes later he was joined by his friend. Until the trail took them down into a draw grown up in spruce Chuck's gun remained very much in evidence. Any unbiased spectator without a knowledge of the facts would have said that he was keeping a close watch ...
— The Heart of the Range • William Patterson White
... was, they felt, but the presage of the great and substantial triumphs that Lee and his veterans must win. Higher rose their confidence and more secure became their calculations; and the vivid contrast between the ragged, shoeless and incongruous army of the South with the sleek, spruce garrison surrendered to them, only heightened the zest of the victory and the ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... pay?' said the spruce scribe, gathering up his desk and pens and sealing-wax all ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... and that when he takes off his hat one notices that he is getting a little bald. His skin is pink and unwrinkled, and his hair and moustache are so light that one does not notice whether they are turning grey or not, and he looks as spruce as ever. Baxendale always has been particular about his appearance, and he is never so pleased as when you ask him the name of his tailor. But his reply in that case is deprecating, implying that he doesn't think very ...
— War-time Silhouettes • Stephen Hudson
... feelin' quite excited, for I'd got to have a sneakin' sort o' pity for the miserable critter. 'It's a twin roar to the one he gave that day when he mistook Hairy Sam for a grizzly b'ar, an' went up a spruce-fir like a squirrel.' Sure enough, in another moment Miffy burst out o' the woods an' came tearin' across the open space straight for the gap, followed by a dozen ...
— Twice Bought • R.M. Ballantyne
... against an early thaw in the stream, while the bore was being equipped with a five-foot flume. You all know what that means, hundreds of miles from navigation or a main traveled road. To get that necessary lumber, he felled trees in a spruce grove up the ravine; every board was hewn by hand. And about two-thirds of those sluice-boxes, the bottoms fitted with riffles, were finished. Afterwards, at that camp where he stopped for dogs, I learned that aside ...
— The Rim of the Desert • Ada Woodruff Anderson
... in the Alexander, notwithstanding the precautions of smoking the ship, washing with vinegar, and distributing porter, spruce-beer, and wine among the seamen. On the 2d of September six men and a boy, on the 5th eight, and on the 8th ten, were disabled by it from performing any duty. An increase of this kind, in the midst of all the efforts that could be made to ...
— The Voyage Of Governor Phillip To Botany Bay • Arthur Phillip
... Michigan and southern Birches. Illinois, 140 feet high and Dogwood. 8 feet thick at the butt [A]; does Pine. not transplant well; best rais'd the Elm. from seeds—the lumbermen Chesnut. call it yellow poplar.) Linden. Sycamores. Aspen. Gum trees, both sweet and sour. Spruce. Beeches. Hornbeam. Black-walnuts. Laurel. ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... beach a quarter of a mile long, with rocks at each end. On the shore above lay 1000 Frenchmen under Lieutenant Colonel de Saint Julien, with eight cannons, on swivels, planted to sweep every part of the beach. The intrenchments, behind which the troops were lying, were covered in front by spruce and fir trees, felled and laid on the ground ...
— With Wolfe in Canada - The Winning of a Continent • G. A. Henty
... was decked off with palm, spruce, pine, myrtle, ivy and holly to garnish home, hall and shop in honor of Jesus, who had been crucified nearly sixteen hundred years before for telling the truth and tearing down the vested ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... semicircular row; and so as to enclose a small space in front of the aperture. To hold the stakes all the more firmly, large stones were piled up against them, and the uprights themselves were closely wattled together by the broad flat branches of the spruce pines that grew near. In this way was constructed a fence that a cat could not have crawled through, much less a bear. One aperture only was left in it, and that was directly in front—a hole at about the height of a man's knee ...
— Bruin - The Grand Bear Hunt • Mayne Reid
... a tincture of Calvinism for stiffening a line of battle,' said Saxon. 'Look at the Swede when he is at home. What more honest, simple-hearted fellow could you find, with no single soldierly virtue, save that he could put away more spruce beer than you would care to pay for. Yet if you do but cram him with a few strong, homely texts, place a pike in his hand, and give him a Gustavus to lead him, there is no infantry in the world that can stand against him. On the other hand, ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Peboean[18]—the winter— Laughed along the stormy waters, Danced upon the windy headlands, On the storm his white hair streaming, And his steaming breath, ascending, On the pine-tops and the cedars Fell in frosty mists of silver, Sprinkling spruce and fir with silver, Sprinkling all the ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... said, settling himself comfortably in the corner by the door, while the elder of his companions—a tall, spare American—crossed his long legs and lighted a thin black cigar, and the younger—a spruce young Englishman wearing an eye-glass and a small mustache—wrapped himself in his rugs, took a clean pocket-handkerchief from his dressing-case, and opened a large bundle of ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... poles and bark had been built by the men during his absence. In it were all the stores, as well as a quantity of spruce boughs and hemlock tips for bedding. The chill evening air was filled with a delicious fragrance of burning cedar, mingled with the pleasant odor of boiling coffee. Several white-fish nailed to oak planks were browning before a bed of glowing coals, while slices of a lake-trout were sizzling ...
— The Copper Princess - A Story of Lake Superior Mines • Kirk Munroe
... wound forbidding it. Goguelat replied that he was more ingenious than the other thought for, and had propped up the weapon in the ground and fallen on the point—"just like Nebuchadnezzar," he added, winking to the assistants. The doctor, who was a little, spruce, ruddy man of an impatient temper, pished and pshawed and swore over his patient. "Nothing could be made of him!" he cried. "A perfect heathen. If we could only find the weapon!" But the weapon had ceased to exist. A little resined twine was perhaps blowing about in the Castle gutters; ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... very neat and spruce; it had suffered a restoration lately. The walls were stripped of their old plaster and pointed, so that the inside is now rougher than the outside, a thing the ancient builders never intended. The altar ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... his father-in-law's house in his spruce little trap with a pair of sleek roans, exactly like those of a certain prince. He looked attentively at the carts in the yard and while going up to the porch took out a clean pocket handkerchief and tied a knot ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... green pine or spruce. The thin ends of three of the stoutest were lashed together; on being erected, they formed a tripod against which the other poles were leant, while their butts, placed in a circle, were spread an equal distance apart. Over ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... just finished rooting, and was starting off. A slight whistle brought him to a standstill, and I drew a bead behind his shoulder, and low down, resting the rifle across the crooked branch of a dwarf spruce. At the crack he ran off at speed, making no sound, but the thick spatter of blood splashes, showing clear on the white snow, betrayed the mortal nature of the wound. For some minutes I followed the trail; and then, topping a ridge, I saw the dark bulk lying ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt
... offered its sanctuary to the worshipers in King's Chapel, after that edifice was burned, for them to hold their Christmas services. It was with the implicit understanding that there was to be no spruce, holly, or other greens used on that ...
— Yule-Tide in Many Lands • Mary P. Pringle and Clara A. Urann
... sick of the scurvy at Stadacona, so that Cartier was much surprised to see him out and well. He contrived to make him relate the particulars of his recovery, and thus found out that a decoction of the bark and foliage of the white spruce-tree furnished the savages with a remedy. Having recourse to this enabled the French captain to arrest the progress of the disease among his own people, and, in a short time, to bring about ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... on this occasion, did not seem to be much the worse for it. Indeed, in looking at the two men cursorily, a stranger might have said that the condescension was all on the other side. Mr. M'Carthy was dressed quite smartly. His black clothes were spruce and glossy; his gloves, of which he still kept on one and showed the other, were quite new; he was clean shaven, and altogether he had a shiny, bright, ebon appearance about him that quite did a credit to his side of ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... more and the party of six had settled into deep chairs, into a mammoth davenport, before a blazing fire of spruce and birch. Cigars, liqueurs, coffee, the things men love after dinner, were there; one had the vaguest impression of two vanishing Japanese persons who might or might not have brought trays and touched the fire and placed tiny tables at each right hand; an atmosphere of completeness was ...
— Joy in the Morning • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... performance of this ceremony extends through a period of four days and four nights. The day preceding is spent in preparation: the head of the family of the sick person makes ready for a feast, and helpers build a corral of pinon and spruce branches. This corral is circular, about forty yards in diameter and six feet high, with an opening at the east. To the west, close to the fence, is the medicine kozhan. The latter part of each morning of the four days is spent by the medicine-man and his assistants ...
— The North American Indian • Edward S. Curtis
... Later we were shocked by rumours of a canoe trip through Canadian waterways. Hereupon the usually benevolent Dennis protested as he glanced approvingly at the well-kept Tuscan landscape. "Crocker needn't rub it in," he opined. "Why, it's the same scrubby spruce tree from the Plains of Abraham to James's Bay-and Emma, who hated being bored! Why, it's marriage by capture; it's barbaric." "It's worse; it's rheumatic," shuddered Harwood as he declined Marsala and took whisky. "But he'll have to ...
— The Collectors • Frank Jewett Mather
... back of the pasture. But no sooner had he fairly entered these thickets than he found his further progress barred by the steel-meshed fence. This was a bitter disappointment, for he had expected to go striding through miles of alder swamp and dark spruce woods, fleeing the hated world of men and bondage, before setting himself to get acquainted with his new followers. His high-strung temper was badly jarred. He drew off, shaking his vast antlers, and went shambling with spacious stride ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... of the front step. A servant threw open the door of the breakfast room, and Delme mechanically entered it. It was filled with strangers; on some of these the spruce undertaker was fitting silk scarfs; while others were ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... plenty of servants and a carriage and an opera-box, and make some of my acquaintance who have married for love, or for rank, or for anything but money, die for envy of my jewels. You do not think I would take him for himself. Why, he is very smooth and spruce as far as his dress goes; but as to his face, he looks as if he had tumbled headlong into a volcano, and been thrown up again ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... until they came to a growth of spruce so dense that it formed a shelter from both snow and wind, with a thick carpet of brown needles under foot. They were shut out from the stars, and in the darkness MacVeigh began to whistle cheerfully. He unstrapped his pack and spread out one of his blankets close to the ...
— Isobel • James Oliver Curwood
... she cried, jumping up to meet a pretty girl and a spruce young man, who had also jumped up. "George and ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... for me, an' bring a harnser, an' I'll give yer somethink when yer gits back.' An' all the gents was a-sittin' at breakfast, with the winders wide open an' the smell of 'am an' eggs comin' through strong, an' they larfed fit to split theirselves, an' one on 'em tried to kiss Kitty Spruce, an' she spanked his face ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... Piskaret drew a long breath, grasped his war-club, and stealthily pushing aside the loose birch-bark door-flap of the nearest lodge, peeped inside. By the ember light he saw that every Iroquois, man and woman, was fast asleep, under furs, on spruce boughs around ...
— Boys' Book of Indian Warriors - and Heroic Indian Women • Edwin L. Sabin
... the thing you had under your coat was a saw. I saw you hide something under the woodpile here, but I'm so dumb that I didn't think much of it at the time. Now, the log over the gully was a spruce log, wasn't it?" ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys as Sergeants - or, Handling Their First Real Commands • H. Irving Hancock
... playing seven up, others playing billiards, and others looking on. Some of the truly good people in town thought the boys were pretty tough, and they wore long faces and prayed for the blockade to raise so the spruce-looking ...
— Peck's Compendium of Fun • George W. Peck
... second: "Nor can any lover of nature enter the old piles of Oxford and English cathedrals without feeling that the forest overpowered the mind of the builder, and that his chisel, his saw and plane, still reproduced its ferns, its spikes of flowers, its locust, elm, pine, and spruce." ...
— A Cathedral Courtship • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... breakfast-table. There was fresh groundsel, too, for Miss Maylie's birds, with which Oliver, who had been studying the subject under the able tuition of the village clerk, would decorate the cages, in the most approved taste. When the birds were made all spruce and smart for the day, there was usually some little commission of charity to execute in the village; or, failing that, there was rare cricket-playing, sometimes, on the green; or, failing that, there was always something to do in the garden, or about the plants, to which ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... the brow of the blue-grass knoll a quarter of a mile eastward. Deacon Gramps was, at the close of this peaceful summer day, indulging in a mental congratulation of himself on being so favorably situated in life. Everybody recognized Farmer Gramps as being the wealthiest man in all Spruce Township. He owned the finest and fattest horses that were driven to Mount Olivet Church. His cattle roamed the forests for miles around, and his hogs cracked acorns ...
— The Deacon of Dobbinsville - A Story Based on Actual Happenings • John A. Morrison
... and we come to a very commonplace house, and then, after a cinematograph office and another calle, to the Palazzo Benzon, famous a hundred years ago for its literary and artistic receptions, and now spruce and modern with more of the striking blue posts, the most vivid on the canal. In this house Byron has often been; hither he brought Moore. It is spacious but tawdry, and its plate-glass gives one a shock. Then the Rio Michiel and ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... or night, so drinking a mint julep and lighting a cigar, he joined the throng. He fumed and fretted for over an hour and a half, when he saw Mrs. Maroney coming down the street, looking very warm. He met her and she excused herself by saying that she had called on a lady friend who lived on Spruce street, just above Twentieth, and finding her sick had been unable to get away; that she had walked back very fast ...
— The Expressman and the Detective • Allan Pinkerton
... interest in the craft was limited pretty strictly to his activities as hunter, trapper and lumberman. Just now he was all lumberman. He was acting as what is called a "timber-cruiser," roaming the remoter and less-known regions of the wilderness to locate the best growths of spruce and pine for the winter's lumbering operations, and for the present his keen faculties were set on the noting of tree growths, and water-courses, and the lay of the land for the getting out of a winter's cutting. ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... the mighty river a low chain of hills, fringed at the base with a scattered growth of scrubby spruce, birch, willow, and cotton-wood. Timber line was only two hundred feet above the river brink; beyond that height, rocks and moss covered with ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... when his colleague entered, spruce as ever in attire, but looking rather weary. The little man flung himself at full length on ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... a mushroom 'Mark,' Young guns, intolerably spruce, Have cast thee from the social 'park'; Which, to their humbled patriarch, Must ...
— Rhymes of the East and Re-collected Verses • John Kendall (AKA Dum-Dum)
... desperate assumption. He was a slightly built young man of about twenty-five, with black hair and eyes, a small, carefully trained moustache, and a dark olive skin. His physiognomy was not displeasing, but his expression had a harsh and supercilious tinge. In attire he erred towards the immaculately spruce. ...
— Four Max Carrados Detective Stories • Ernest Bramah
... the long and patient revision which its author gave it, year after year, keeping it in his desk, and then sending it, a mere pamphlet, with no flourish of trumpets, into the world. Many an ancient figure came to lend animation to the scene. Horace Walpole in his lace coat and spruce wig went mincing by; the mother of Gray, with her sister, measured lace for the customers who came to her little shop in London; the wags of Pembroke College, graceless varlets, raise an alarm of fire that they may see the frightened poet ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... day, too early for the nocturnal roamings and voices of the creatures of the night. Like the basin of a great amphitheater the frozen lake lay revealed in the light of the moon and a billion stars. Beyond it rose the spruce forest, black and forbidding. Along its nearer edges stood hushed walls of tamarack, bowed in the smothering clutch of snow and ice, shut in ...
— The Wolf Hunters - A Tale of Adventure in the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... are encouraging, but I cannot afford to collect plants. I have to work for a living, and plants would not pay unless I collect nothing else, which I cannot do, being too much interested in zoology. I should like a botanical companion like Mr. Spruce very much. We are anxiously expecting accounts of the taking ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... newes of ye daye, and praise General! Mac Lellan, and gossipp of ye laste greate partie, where Dorsey dyd serve so well ye terrapines and steamed oysters, and howe thatt itt is verament and trewe thatt Miss Porridge is to live, after hir marriage, in a howse in Locust strete, or peradventure in Spruce, or in Pyne, for in this towne all the stretes are of woode, albeit ye houses are ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... that there would be spoils, that he must even touch this hedged young goddess. So as she stood, doubleted, breeched, and in his long red hose, he hovered round her. Soon she was lightened of her load of glory, and as spruce as ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... and spruce" Doctor of Laws, William Parry, who had been busying himself at about the same time with his memorable project against the Queen of England, proved as successful as Balthazar Gerard, the fate of Christendom would have been still darker. Fortunately, that member of Parliament had ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... set of people fill the streets. The goods in the shop-windows are invitingly arranged; the shopmen in their white neckerchiefs and spruce coats, look as it they couldn't clean a window if their lives depended on it; the carts have disappeared from Covent-garden; the waggoners have returned, and the costermongers repaired to their ordinary 'beats' in the suburbs; clerks are at their offices, ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... flowed in velvet waves down to the waiting river, murmuring its trysting joy; a full-robed choir of oak and elm and maple kept their eternal places in a grander loft than man could build them, while pine and spruce and cedar, disrobing never, but snatching their bridal garments from the winter storm, swelled the ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... me think of our first Tree, in some way," said Polly softly, with glistening eyes, looking up at the beautiful branching spruce, its countless arms shaking out brilliant pendants, and gay with streamers and candles, wherever a decoration could be placed, the whole tipped with a shining star. "Oh, Bensie, ...
— Five Little Peppers Grown Up • Margaret Sidney
... thicker these coverings. Such facts only show that in the matter of adaptation among living organisms, there is a factor at work other than chemistry and physics—not independent of them, but making a purposive use of them. Cut off the central shoot that leads the young spruce tree upwards, and one of the shoots from the whirl of lateral branches below it slowly rises up and takes the place of the lost leader. Here is an action not prompted by the environment, but by the morphological needs of the tree, and it illustrates how different is its unity from the ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... soap. I want shaving very badly. I shaved last in France. How it would pass the time here. Had I a comb now and a razor, I might shave and curl my hair, and keep making a continual toilet all through the two days, and look spruce as a robin when I get out. I'll ask the Squire for the things this very night when he drops in. Hark! ain't that a sort of rumbling in the wall? I hope there ain't any oven next door; if so, I shall be scorched out. ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... joyous and beautiful; the priest in his bright, silver chasuble, dotted with gilt crosses, the deacon, the chanters in holiday surplice of gold and silver, the spruce volunteer singers with oiled hair, the joyous melodies of holiday songs, the ceaseless blessing of the throng by the priests with flower-bedecked tern candles with the constantly repeated exclamations: ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... the reader is not to take the words au pied de lettre. By taking up slops from the purser, and by aid of the ship's tailor, we had been enabled to walk the quarter-deck without actual holes in our dress; but the dresses themselves were grotesque, for the imitation of our spruce uniform was villainous, and our hats were deplorable; they were greased with oil, and broken, and sewed, and formless, or rather multiform: bad as were our fittings-out, we had ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... the rise and leveled to the tree-girdled mesa. Young Pete stared. This was the most beautiful spot he had ever seen. Ringed round by a great forest of spruce, the Blue Mesa lay shimmering in the sunset like an emerald lake, beneath a cloudless sky tinged with crimson, gold, and amethyst. Across the mesa stood a cabin, the only dwelling in that silent expanse. And this was to be his home, and the big man beside him, gently urging the horse, ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... as the heavy drays pass and collide at the corners of the narrow streets. Suddenly the marquis stops; he has found what he wanted. Between a charcoal dealer's dark shop and an undertaker's establishment, where the spruce boards leaning against the wall cause him to shudder, is a porte-cochere surmounted by a sign, the word "BATHS" on a dull lantern. He enters and crosses a damp little garden where a fountain weeps in a basin of artificial rockwork. That ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... were of wolfskin, and on his shoulder he carried an axe, with broad, shining blade. He was a mighty woodsman now, and could make a spray of chips fly around him as he hewed his way through the trunk of spruce-tree. ...
— The First Christmas Tree - A Story of the Forest • Henry Van Dyke
... fallen, on the watry fields; And Nature to the waste dominion yields, Stript her last robes, with gold and purple gay.— So droops my life, of your soft beams despoil'd, Youth, Health, and Hope, that long exulting smil'd; And the wild carols, and the bloomy hues Of merry Spring-time, spruce on every plain Her half-blown bushes, moist with sunny rain, More pensive thoughts in my sunk heart infuse Than Winter's grey, and desolate domain, Faded, like my lost Youth, that ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... history. They tell us about plants and animals that are now extinct—the dinosaur, for example. They can also tell of ancient climates. Coral found in rocks in Greenland suggests it must have once been warm. Remains of fir and spruce trees have been found ...
— Let's collect rocks & shells • Shell Oil Company
... a grievous load, And Chelsea, flower'd and spruce, And antique thingummies in spode; The only thing that none bestowed ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 25, 1914 • Various
... on a projecting point of rock, almost totally overgrown with ivy. This ivy, Mr. Milestone observed, required trimming and clearing in various parts; a little pointing and polishing was necessary for the dilapidated walls; and the whole effect would be materially increased by a plantation of spruce fir, the present rugged and broken ascent being first converted into a beautiful slope, which might be easily effected by blowing up a part of the rock with gunpowder, laying on a quantity of fine mould, and covering the whole with an ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VII • Various
... moment, just at the end of the Thanksgiving dinner, when, heralded by a slam in the wood-shed, a hoppytyskip in the hall, the dining-room door flung widely open on Carol's eyes twinkling like a whole skyful of stars through the shaggy, dark branches of a young spruce-tree. It made young Derry Willard laugh right ...
— Fairy Prince and Other Stories • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... say, We began the backward way; And the ebbing luster died From the soldier at my side, As in all his spruce attire Failed the everlasting fire. Midmost of the homeward track Once we listened and looked back; But the city, dusk and mute, Slept, and there ...
— Last Poems • A. E. Housman
... to the stairs, smiling to himself. Christmas at Spindrift was fun. The entire scientific staff and their families joined in, first in cutting their own trees from the stand of spruce at the back side of the island, then in decorating the big tree in the Brant library. On Christmas Eve there was a Yule log to be brought in and presents to be exchanged, although the Brants waited until morning to open their gifts ...
— The Egyptian Cat Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... time appointed, as I stood in the hall, a tall, clean-shaven, rather spruce young man entered and spoke to the concierge, who at once ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux
... as any other part of the human frame. Some of our best poets have written in paroxysms of hunger, and I really believe that Addison would have had more point if he had had less victuals; and if you do not restrict yourself to a sheep's trotter and spruce beer, your style will betray your luxury." But soon came an increase of the very thing feared for her fame, in the form of an invitation from Lady Abercorn and the marquis to pass the chief part of every year ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... any other, Nature has provided still another element of popularity and distinction. East of this splendid rampart spreads a broad area of rolling plateau, carpeted with wild flowers, edged and dotted with luxuriant groves of pine, spruce, fir, and aspen, and diversified with hills and craggy mountains, carved rock walls, long forest-grown moraines and picturesque ravines; a stream-watered, lake-dotted summer and winter pleasure paradise of great size, bounded on the north and west by snow-spattered monsters, and on the ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... really she! It was in a long lane bordered on both sides by dark spruce and beeches decked out in the golden brown tints of autumn. The sunbeams, distinctly bluish in the fine mist, slantingly penetrated the dark spruce, and fell in golden radiance upon the pale green moss, and the blue ether and the brown and green foliage shone in a brilliance ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... spruce and scholarly, hugely pleased with himself, because he had an article in The National Review, on the strenght of the colonies in war time; and some lines entitled "Baby's Boredom" in Fireside Chat, concerning which he had already announced his intention of standing the champagne for ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... evergreen class. Their branches brushed into the carriage as we passed along, and left us with that pleasant woody smell belonging to leaves. One of the ladies, catching a bit of green from one of these intruding branches, said it was cedar, and another thought it spruce. ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... and squirrel were brought down together, and carried right into the garden, where the former was placed upon one of the flower-beds, and disappeared at once; the latter held up to a branch of the ornamental spruce, into which it ran, and then there was a scuffling noise, and Dexter ran away back to the stable, afraid to stop, lest the little ragged jacketed animal should leap back upon him, and make him more weak than ...
— Quicksilver - The Boy With No Skid To His Wheel • George Manville Fenn
... the side of steep cliffs, overhanging a mountain stream, they were not frightened. But when they began to grow tired, and the trail led them into a dark forest, where the sun came through the thick boughs and shone only in patches of light upon the slippery spruce needles, they ...
— The Swiss Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... the night had come. It was but twenty-four hours since they had sat in their canvas chairs discussing politics by starlight on the saloon deck of the Korosko; only twelve since they had breakfasted there and had started spruce and fresh upon their last pleasure trip. What a world of fresh impressions had come upon them since then! How rudely they had been jostled out of their take-it-for-granted complacency! The same shimmering silver stars, as they had looked upon last night, the same thin crescent ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... boat. The three men were delighted beyond measure to know that we had made the crossing in safety and that their wait under the upturned 'James Caird' was ended. Curiously enough, they did not recognize Worsley, who had left them a hairy, dirty ruffian and had returned his spruce and shaven self. They thought he was one of the whalers. When one of them asked why no member of the party had come round with the relief, Worsley said, "What do you mean?" "We thought the Boss or one of the others ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... never minded an Accident that once happened to a spruce Mercer on Ludgate-Hill, have neglected a Scene of Life that is very entertaining. A genteel young Lady, very richly apparelled, made a full stop, in a Hackney-Coach, at the Door of this sharp-sighted Citizen; who, with his wonted Civility, ...
— The Tricks of the Town: or, Ways and Means of getting Money • John Thomson
... Native Police, a smart body of 380 natives, officered by eleven or twelve Englishmen. To Colonel Colin Harding, C.M.G., was due the credit of recruiting and drilling this smart corps, and it was difficult to believe that these soldierly-looking men, very spruce in their dark blue tunics and caps, from which depend enormous red tassels, were only a short time ago idling away their days ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... barley which ventures so far north: the limit of rye is 67 degrees, of oats, 65 degrees, of wheat, 64 degrees, on the west side of the peninsula, and from 1 to 2 degrees less on the east. In Southern Norway, the spruce-fir ceases to grow beyond the line of 2900 feet above the sea-level; while in Switzerland, it is commonly met with at the height of 5500 feet, and in some situations, 7000; shewing that the influences which affect the growth of grain do not similarly ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 438 - Volume 17, New Series, May 22, 1852 • Various
... "I ain't heard you talk that way afore since you shipped aboard this General Minot craft along of me. That's the way you used to poke fun at me aboard the old Wild Ranger when we was makin' port after a good v'yage. What's happened to spruce you up so? Doctor ain't told you any special good news about them legs of yours, has he, Cap'n? Limpin' Moses, I wisht that ...
— Fair Harbor • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... the left, close to the inn, and then go straight on; it is the third house past Poret's. There is a small spruce fir close to the gate; you ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... was reflected there. He even claimed that he got a splinter in his hand, so doing! Upside down or wedged across a channel under water, trees were all the same to Hervey Willetts. He lived in trees. He knew nothing whatever about the different kinds of trees and he could not tell spruce from walnut. But he could hang by one leg from a rotten branch, the while playing a harmonica. He was for the boy scout movement, because he was for movement generally. As long as the scouts kept ...
— Tom Slade's Double Dare • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... and palms growing almost side by side with the birch, the pine, and the spruce. Among other things, their attention was attracted to some beautiful fern trees, which were fully twenty feet high, and there were climbing plants in great profusion, some of them clinging to the trees, and ...
— The Land of the Kangaroo - Adventures of Two Youths in a Journey through the Great Island Continent • Thomas Wallace Knox
... such a lagoon, a devious outlet of the basin of which the lake occupied the principal expanse, reached through three miles of no-man's route, framed in green hills forest-clad up to their summits. The camp was a shelter of spruce bark, open wide in front and closed at the ends, drawn on three faces of an octohedron facing the fireplace. The beds were made of layers of spruce and other fir branches spread on the ground and covered with the fragrant twigs of the arbor vitae. Two huge maples overhung the ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... destruction had been raging among these beeches, spruce and oaks. Great tangles of their cut boughs were cluttering the ground, as though a band of gigantic woodcutters had just passed by. The trunks had been severed a little distance from the ground with a clean and glistening stroke, ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... a wild goose honked. White-winged gulls soared gracefully overhead. Now and again a seal rose to gaze for an inquisitive moment at the passing boat, and once a flock of ducks settled upon the waters. The air was redolent with the pungent odour of spruce and balsam fir—the perfume of the forest—and Shad, lounging contentedly at the bow of the boat, drank in ...
— The Gaunt Gray Wolf - A Tale of Adventure With Ungava Bob • Dillon Wallace
... The spruce Breton, a very petit-maitre in appearance by contrast with his companion, but nevertheless of a down-right manner quite equal to Danton's in brutality, though dispensing with the emphasis of foulness, shrugged ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... the elderly were in their prime, then, thirty years since, when yon royal George was still fighting the dragon. As for you, my pretty lass, with your saucy hat and golden tresses tumbled in your net, and you, my spruce young gentleman in your mandarin's cap (the young folks at the country-place where I am staying are so attired), your parents were unknown to each other, and wore short frocks and short jackets, at the date of this five-shilling piece. Only to-day I met ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... That's all. A Norway spruce cone. When it is dry its scales are open. I filled them with grass seed and put the cone in a small tumbler so that the lower end might be damp all the time. The dampness makes the scales close and starts the seed to sprouting. This has ...
— Ethel Morton's Enterprise • Mabell S.C. Smith
... Cairns waiting for her in the passage. Always punctilious in his dress to-day he was exceptionally spruce, his tie very new, and clothes without ...
— Grey Town - An Australian Story • Gerald Baldwin
... diffused a faint aromatic fragrance, refreshing as the scent of vinegar, into the long, unfloored room, which certainly needed something of the kind. It reeked with stale tobacco-smoke, the smell of cookery, and the odors of frowsy clothes. A row of bunks, filled with spruce twigs and old brown blankets, ran down one side of it, a very rude table down the other, and a double row of men with bronzed faces, in dusty garments, sat about the latter, eating voraciously. Fifteen minutes was, ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... nailed. They built a chimney of stones rounded by the water's action, and for a hearth found a slab of granite which they sunk in the earth before the fireplace. The bunk was a frame of young pines with canvas stretched across, and cushioned with spruce boughs and buffalo robes. She watched as they nailed up shelves of small, split trunks and sawed the larger ones into sections for seats. The bottom of the wagon came out and, poised on four log supports, made ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... perpendicularly to a height of from ninety to a hundred and fifty feet before putting forth a single limb, which frequently is more massive than the growth which men call a tree in the forests of Michigan. Scattered between the giants, like subjects around their king, one finds noble fir, spruce, or pines, with some Valparaiso live oak, black oak, ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... the range, till he came out above a magnificent valley. Descending the slope, he entered a forest of towering spruce, while on all sides the snow was trampled with tracks as wide as a snow-shoe. There came to him a noise which, as he proceeded, increased till it filled the woods. It was a frightful din, as though a thousand ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... at the mouth of the Columbia, and various expeditions in the interior, had now given the Astorians some idea of the country. The whole coast is described as remarkably rugged and mountainous; with dense forests of hemlock, spruce, white and red cedar, cotton-wood, white oak, white and swamp ash, willow, and a few walnut. There is likewise an undergrowth of aromatic shrubs, creepers, and clambering vines, that render the forests almost impenetrable; together with berries of various kinds, such as gooseberries, ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... they had scraped each wall, Pulled out the stately pews, and smartened all, "It will be well," declared the spruce ...
— Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with - Miscellaneous Pieces • Thomas Hardy
... "signboards" by which a hunter can keep trace of the points of the compass when in the woods, without noticing the sun, which of itself is often a great help. Three fourths of the moss on trees grows on the north side; the heaviest boughs on spruce trees are always on the south side, and the topmost twig of every uninjured hemlock ...
— The Daughter of the Chieftain - The Story of an Indian Girl • Edward S. Ellis
... not so simple as to go into his projects—she began to smell a rat. "This Trim," quoth she, "is an odd sort of a fellow; methinks he makes a strange figure with that ragged, tattered coat appearing under his livery; can't he go spruce and clean, like the rest of the servants? The fellow has a roguish leer with him which I don't like by any means; besides, he has such a twang in his discourse, and an ungraceful way of speaking through the nose, that one can hardly understand him; I wish the fellow be not tainted with some ...
— The History of John Bull • John Arbuthnot
... about this at once," Mr. Lewis said. "It may take a little time—conditions, as a result of the armistice, are again somewhat unsettled in the logging industry. Airplane spruce production is dead—dead as a salt mackerel—and fir and cedar slumped with it. However we shall do our best. Have you a price in mind, Mr. ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... see him, with his little dreadful air of fervid solemnity—and I don't know whether I dreamed it or whether it was really there—very spruce and strutting about the lawns of Amerley Park at that ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair
... nipped at his blood, and lighted a fresh cigar, half-turning to shield himself from a wind that was growing out of the east. As the match flared in the cup of his hands for an instant there came from the black gloom of the balsam and spruce at his feet a wailing, hungerful cry that brought a startled breath from his lips. It was a cry such as Indian dogs make about the tepees of masters who are newly dead. He had never heard such a cry before, and yet he knew that it was a wolf's. It impressed him with an awe which was new to ...
— The Danger Trail • James Oliver Curwood
... from its stirrup and turned in his saddle, pulling the leg up to a restful position. Then he spat, musingly, and looked back down the canon aimlessly, throwing his eyes from side to side where the grey granite ledges showed through the tall spruce and pine trees. ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... mingling of tenderness and admiration in the glance she bent upon him. He was a goodly youth to look at, tall and strongly knit in figure, upright as a young spruce fir, with a keen, dark-skinned face, square in outline and with a peculiar mobility of expression. The eyes were black and sparkling, and the thick, short, curling hair was sombre as the raven's wing. There was no lack of intellect in the face, but the chief characteristic ...
— For the Faith • Evelyn Everett-Green
... to the side of the little maiden Musk-rat, and whispered certain words in her ear. When he had done this, he went to the forest near them, cut down a young pine-tree, dug up a root of the hemlock, took a spruce cone, an oak acorn, a hickery nut, and a birch-leaf, and laid them all in the fire which the Nanticoke had kindled. While they were burning, he walked round the fire muttering many words in an unknown tongue, and striking the earth repeatedly ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 2 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... to the rock under a friendly dwarf spruce they lay still as two rabbits, watching with round eyes, eager but unafraid, the antics of three brown wolf cubs that were chasing the flies and tumbling over some invisible plaything before ...
— Northern Trails, Book I. • William J. Long
... do it again." This time Essper made the very wood echo. In a few minutes a horseman galloped up; he was as spruce a cavalier as ever pricked gay steed on the pliant grass. He was dressed in a green military uniform, and a gilt bugle hung by his side; his spear told them that he was hunting the wild boar. When he saw Vivian and Essper he suddenly pulled up his ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... if you chose; in fact, you could hardly do otherwise. The first day of my hunt I started west. I climbed a hill devoted to pasture, passed through the bars, and faced my mountain. It presented a compact front of spruce-trees closely interlaced at the ground, and of course impassable. But a way opened in the midst, the path of a mountain brook, deserted now and dry. I sought an alpenstock. I abandoned all impedimenta. I started up that stony ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... was treated with as much tender care as if she were a reigning princess on tour. She protested indignantly because they would not allow her to rough it along with them. They made soft beds of spruce tips at their camping sites and they gave her the post of honor in ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... foliage. In one of these natural parlours they paused for their mid-day repast—mid-day in the world without, but here, where only vagrant gleams of the spring sun pierced the forest solitudes, gloomy with spruce and pine, there was a sense of morning in the air. This appearance was heightened by the delicate curtains of cobweb, strung with shining pearls, which still might be seen after the fog at early dawn. There was no sound except sometimes that of an invisible bird, singing in ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam
... awakened their angry echoes. Again the canoes were launched and the wild flotilla glided on its way, now in the shadow of the heights, now on the broad expanse, now among the devious channels of the Narrows, beset with woody islets where the hot air was redolent of the pine, the spruce, and the cedar,— till they neared that tragic shore where, in the following century, New England rustics battled the soldiers of Dieskau, where Montcalm planted his batteries, where the red cross waved so long amid the smoke, and where, at length, the summer night was hideous with carnage, ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop
... over and laughed like a child each time. Often I complained about the stone house at Riverby, that Father in planning it did not plan to use the winter sunshine; not only were the windows not placed right but there were spruce trees in the way. "You write a book on 'Winter Sunshine' and you let none in your house," I told him and he said that if he had the winter sunshine in his house he might not have written the book. A statement which has a large element of fundamental ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... the coachman, a spruce middle-aged man, who had long wanted to marry the clever, pretty laundry-maid, going to the pump to get water for his horses overheard her giving orders to the three feathers, and peeping through the keyhole as the butler had done, saw her sitting at her ease ...
— English Fairy Tales • Flora Annie Steel
... He presented a spruce appearance in his smart, well-cut evening coat, with the red button of the Legion d'Honneur in his lapel, and to the ladies who wished him "bon soir" as they filed out he drew his heels together and ...
— The Doctor of Pimlico - Being the Disclosure of a Great Crime • William Le Queux
... topmost source—fons et origo—of our chosen river. This single spring, crystal-clear and ice-cold, gushing out of the hillside in a forest of spruce and yellow birch and sugar maple, gave us the clue that we must follow for ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... seemed either to be of the same texture as what had become his everyday experience, and so baffled him with its nearness, or else was only the meaningless ramblings of an idle pen. And this, he thought to himself, looking covertly up at the spruce clear-cut profile at the window, this is what Herbert ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... bell-rope. The old people of the village came stooping along the street. Children with bright faces tripped merrily beside their parents or mimicked a graver gait in the conscious dignity of their Sunday clothes. Spruce bachelors looked sidelong at the pretty maidens, and fancied that the Sabbath sunshine made them prettier than on week-days. When the throng had mostly streamed into the porch, the sexton began to toll the bell, ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... canoes. In the northern parts where birch trees were plentiful, the canoe was of birch bark stretched over a light wooden frame, sewed with strips of deerskin, and smeared at the joints with spruce gum to make it watertight. In the South tree trunks hollowed out by fire and called dugouts were used. In the West there were "bull boats" made of skins stretched over wooden frames. For winter travel the Northern and Western Indians ...
— A Brief History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... previous night, while Jimmie and Sir Lucius were dining at Morley's, Victor Nevill emerged from his rooms in Jermyn street, and walked briskly to Piccadilly Circus. He looked quite unlike the spruce young man of fashion who was wont to disport himself in the West End at this hour, for he wore tweeds, a soft hat, and a rather shabby overcoat. He took a cab in Coventry street, and gave the driver a northern address. As he rode through the Soho district he occasionally pressed ...
— In Friendship's Guise • Wm. Murray Graydon
... is said to preserve a decidedly spruce appearance at the State Dinners. Fish is nothing if ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 6, May 7, 1870 • Various
... across the beautiful river and away into the country, along red clay roads which were often lined with spruce, and always with grass cropped down to a lawnlike shortness by the sheep and kept bright green by ...
— The City and the World and Other Stories • Francis Clement Kelley
... not my intention here to describe a day's shooting. Let it suffice to say that a little before nightfall we arrived at a place where was a snowy mound capped by a clump of spruce firs of small size but ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... and in the collective spars and timbers of these ships, all the forests of the globe are represented, as in a grand parliament of masts. Canada and New Zealand send their pines; America her live oak; India her teak; Norway her spruce; and the Right Honorable Mahogany, member for Honduras and Cam-peachy, is seen at his post by the wheel. Here, under the beneficent sway of the Genius of Commerce, all climes and countries embrace; and yard-arm ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... banks, or disappear for a moment behind a clump of willows, only to reappear in broader volume. Beyond, seemingly at no distance at all, yet bordered by miles of turf and desert, the patches of vivid green interspersed with the darker colouring of spruce, and the outcropping of brown rocks, the towering peaks of a great mountain-chain swept up into the clear blue of the sky, black almost to their summits, which were dazzling with the white of unmelted ...
— The Strange Case of Cavendish • Randall Parrish
... catspaw out of the downhaul, and we began to boom-end the sail, it shook the ship to her centre. The boom buckled up and bent like a whip-stick, and we looked every moment to see something go; but, being of the short, tough upland spruce, it bent like whalebone, and nothing could break it. The carpenter said it was the best stick he had ever seen. The strength of all hands soon brought the tack to the boom-end, and the sheet was trimmed down, and the preventer and ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... tired to fix a date for the resumption of his own name or the taking of another. Flinging himself on his couch of moss and trailing ground-spruce, with the ferns closing over him, and the pines over them, ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... two tunnels. A temporary platform was laid on the bottom chord angles of the ribs, on which the concrete was dumped, the same as on the form carriages. The lagging used was 3 by 3-in. dressed pine or spruce 16 ft. long, and was placed as the concreting of the arch proceeded above the 15 deg. line on the side-wall and above the sidewalk on the core-wall. After the arch had reached such a height that the concrete could not be passed over the lagging directly from the main platform, it was cast ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, Vol. LXVIII, Sept. 1910 • James H. Brace and Francis Mason
... limit of the great evergreen forest of North America wild animals are so rare that a family of hunting Indians can scarcely find a living in a thousand square miles. Today the voracious maw of the daily newspaper is eating the spruce and hemlock by means of relentless saws and rattling pulp-mills. In the wake of the lumbermen settlers are tardily spreading northward from the more favored tracts in northern New England and southern Canada. Nevertheless ...
— The Red Man's Continent - A Chronicle of Aboriginal America, Volume 1 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Ellsworth Huntington
... had of late years been introduced'. The teapot and the mug of ale jointly possessed the breakfast table, and meat and pudding smoked on the board every noon. Formerly one might see at church what was the cut of a coat half a century ago, now dress was spruce and modern.[481] As a proof of the spirit of improvement among farmers, Marshall instances the custom in the Midlands of placing their sons as pupils on other farms to widen their experience. 'Their entertainments ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... nesting, and the cool, clean air blew down from the snowy Grampians, bracing the walkers like a draught of iced wine. They even climbed some of the nearer hills, forcing their way through the tangled spruce-branches and undergrowth to the summit, from where the distant North Sea itself was visible, lying like a grey ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... gum, as the muskrat had done. Last spring the same Indian caught a bear in a deadfall. On the animal's side was a long rip from some other bear's claw, and the wound had been smeared thickly with soft spruce resin. This last experience corresponds closely with one of my own. I shot a bear years ago in northern New Brunswick that had received a gunshot wound, which had raked him badly and then penetrated the leg. ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... foggy morning, with a drizzling mist. No matter; it was their wedding-day, thought Will, and no one could be more cheerful than he as he donned his becoming sailor suit and brushed his curly hair, and made himself look as spruce and neat as any jack-tar in the land. Rain and mist were nothing to this son of the briny ocean, the sunshine was in his heart, and he could scarcely believe in the wonderful good fortune which was to give him the ...
— A Girl of the People • L. T. Meade
... section of our fair world with such an immensity of kingly trees. Towering into the sky to unthinkable heights, they stand as living monuments to the fecundity of natural life. Imagine, if you can, the vast wide region of the West coast, hills, slopes and valleys, covered with millions of fir, spruce and cedar trees, raising their verdant crests a hundred, two hundred or two hundred and fifty feet into ...
— The Centralia Conspiracy • Ralph Chaplin
... ran low, and to make matters worse the pestilence of scurvy came upon the camp. In February almost the entire company was stricken down and nearly one quarter of them had died before the emaciated survivors learned from the Indians that the bark of a white spruce tree boiled in water would afford a cure. The Frenchmen dosed themselves with the Indian remedy, using a whole tree in less than a week, but with such revivifying results that Cartier hailed the discovery as a genuine ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro
... mine, who from the inability to walk a mile for some years, was believed to be restored by the use of this medicine to a good state of health, so as to walk ten miles a day. In addition to this medicine I drank, as my common beverage with my meals, spruce beer. I had so high an opinion of this medicine in the gout, and of spruce beer as an antiscorbutic, that I contemplated with much satisfaction, and with very little doubt, the perfect restoration of my health and strength; but I was miserably deceived; for in September 1788 I was seized ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... family includes the various species of pine, tamarack, spruce, hemlock, fir, juniper, larch, cypress, and cedar. A few members of the family thrive in the warmer parts of the temperate zone, but for the greater part they flourish between the fortieth and sixtieth parallels. Most of the species found in low ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway
... Peter loafed against a spruce post, and moodily contemplated the stamping animals in the enclosure. His hat was in his hand, and the mountain breeze assailed his blond hair, which, rumpled and curly, gave him something of the appearance ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows. We require an infusion of hemlock, spruce or arbor vitae in our tea. There is a difference between eating and drinking for strength and from mere gluttony. The Hottentots eagerly devour the marrow of the koodoo and other antelopes raw, as a matter ...
— Walking • Henry David Thoreau
... and saw a bed made of a great heap of the tips of limbs of spruce, a bed softer than down and more fragrant than any ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... four of the same lists, or one line one week in all six lists combined, being more than 1,000 papers. We also have lists of papers by States, throughout the United States and Canada. Send 10 cents for our 100 page pamphlet. Address GEO. P. ROWELL & CO., Newspaper Advertising Bureau, 10 Spruce Street, New York. ...
— Scientific American, Volume 40, No. 13, March 29, 1879 • Various
... will sometimes find groves of young balsam firs or spruce,—hundreds of the same species of sapling growing so close together that a rabbit may not pass between. The slender trunks, almost touching each other, are bare of branches. Only at the top is there light and air, and the race is ever upward. One year some slight advantage ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... markings of darker brown and black with white hairs; but they would be at least three inches long when full grown, and would have a queer habit of rearing and drawing leaves to their mouths when feeding. I was told I would find them in August, on leaves of spruce, pine, cherry, birch, alder, sycamore, elm, or maple; that they pupated in the ground; and the moths were common, especially around lights in city ...
— Moths of the Limberlost • Gene Stratton-Porter
... swaggering, proud and vain, They seem to think they may well disdain With the peasant a glass of his wine to drain But, soft—to the left o' the fire I see Three riflemen, who from the Tyrol should be Emmerick, come, boy, to them will we. Birds of this feather 'tis luck to find, Whose trim's so spruce, ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... it came back to earth with awful force, and I felt the ground tremble as it crushed a wide way through the woods. It finally brought up at the bottom of a gulch with a wreckage of hundreds of noble spruce trees that it had crushed down ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... ships, At the black wharves no more, nor at the weedy slips, She comes to port with cargo from many a storied clime. No more to the rough-throat chantey her windlass creaks in time. No more she loads for London with spices from Ceylon,— With white spruce deals and wheat and apples from St. John. No more from Pernambuco with cotton-bales,—no more With hides from Buenos Ayres she clears ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... sometimes to leave the path on his way to school, when he saw the delving old figure in the ploughed field, and discovered, even at a distance, that his jaws were still and his brow knotted, run up to him, and proffer as a substitute for the beloved weed a generous piece of spruce-gum. The old man always took it, and spat it out when the ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... we all know, and she really looked quite spruce; so much so, that when she flew home, the new wife nearly burst with envy, and asked her at once where she had ...
— Tales Of The Punjab • Flora Annie Steel
... which the fish went in thousands, was broad, deep, and rapid. Its banks were clothed with spruce-fir and dense underwood. There was little of the picturesque or the beautiful in the scenery. It was a ...
— Fort Desolation - Red Indians and Fur Traders of Rupert's Land • R.M. Ballantyne
... of Yosemite Park, richer and wilder become the forests and streams. At an elevation of 6000 feet above the level of the sea the silver firs are 200 feet high, with branches whorled around the colossal shafts in regular order, and every branch beautifully pinnate like a fern frond. The Douglas spruce, the yellow and sugar pines and brown-barked Libocedrus here reach their finest developments of beauty and grandeur. The majestic Sequoia is here, too, the king of conifers, the noblest of all the noble race. These colossal trees are as wonderful in ...
— The Yosemite • John Muir
... store, would as likely be napping on a counter, his head pillowed upon a pile of calico. A little further up the street and near the one tall-spired white church Mrs. Mears, the village gossip, may be sitting on the veranda of a small house almost hid by luxuriantly growing Norway spruce, and idly rocking while she chats with the widow Sloper, who lives there, and whose mission in life is to cut and fit the best "go to meetin'" gowns of female Sandgate. Both dearly love to talk over all that's going on, and ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... blush,—he never blushed,—but he looked "voolish" enough to warrant the suspicion that his errand was a tender one, and he had no other reason to give for his spruce appearance ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... chiefly among the coniferous evergreens, embracing the Pine, the Fir, the Spruce, and the Cypress. Though many of the deciduous trees assume more or less of this outline, it is the normal and characteristic form of the Pines and their kindred species. It is a peculiarity of the pyramidal trees, with a few exceptions, to remain always disfigured, after ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... paid for securing in any gaol a Negro boy Mungo about 14 years old and well built"—the owner Benjamin De Wolfe of Windsor to be notified. That year the executors of Colonel Henry Denny Denson of West Falmouth debit themselves with L75 received for "Spruce," L60 for "John" and L30 for "Juba" and credit themselves with L2.11.6 paid for taking two of these to ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... a long log between them, one at each end. It looked large, but it was really not very heavy, as it was hollow and decayed. They hove it up, with great effort, upon the fire, and its fall upon the heap threw up a large, bright column of sparks and flame. Another boy had the top of a young spruce, which he had cut off with his knife, by dint of great labor; it made a great roaring and crackling when it was put upon the fire. And, finally, behind all the rest, there came a little boy not so big as Oliver, tugging away at a long branch, which ...
— Jonas on a Farm in Winter • Jacob Abbott
... thinner than we can See from the sea-betroth'd Venetian, Were all of ice, not made to overlast One supper, and betwixt two cowslips cast. A prettier hath not yet been told, So neat the glass was, and so feat the mould. A little spruce elf then (just of the set Of the French dancer or such marionette), Clad in a suit of rush, woven like a mat, A monkshood flow'r then serving for a hat; Under a cloak made of the Spider's loom: This fairy (with them, held a lusty groom) Brought in his bottles; neater were there none; And every bottle ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... her room, wondering what friend this could be whom Ezra had brought with him. She had noticed that he was roughly clad, presenting a contrast to the young merchant, who was vulgarly spruce in his attire. Evidently he intended to pass the night at the Priory, since they had let the trap go back to the village. She was glad that he had come, for his presence would act as a restraint upon the Girdlestones. In spite of her guardian's amiability at breakfast, she could ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... one swimming circle glides Swift without stop: the old bashaws click time, As if on polish'd ice; in trance sublime The iman hoar with some spruce courtier slides. Nor rank nor age from capering refrain; Nor can the king his royal foot restrain! He too must reel amid the frolic row, Grasp the grand vizier by his beard of snow, And teach the aged man once more to bound amain!" ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... Mrs. Jardine, and obtained a few sidelights on Liosha's defensive methods. What they lacked in subtlety they made up in physical effectiveness. There were not many spruce young gentlemen who, after a week's residence in that establishment, did not adopt a peculiarly deferential attitude ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... village, which was like a great many other country villages. There were farm-houses, with their stack-yards and clusters of out-buildings, with their yew-trees and apple-orchards. Cottages, with low bulging white-washed walls and thatched roofs, were interspersed among others of a more spruce and modern build, with slated roofs, and neat little gardens. Then there were two or three shops which sold all things likely to be wanted in everyday village life, eatables and wearables nestling together ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... the original reality, the silver, ivory, or wooden "osculatory" of the mediaeval Church?[94] So with "Ash-Wednesday," a single syllable opens a whole chapter of Church history. Again, the Latin headings to the psalms of the Psalter; with what an impatient gesture can we imagine a spruce reviser brushing these away as so much trash! They are not trash, they are way marks that tell of times when devout men loved those catchwords, as we love the first lines of our favorite hymns. A few of the headings, ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... was very neat and spruce; it had suffered a restoration lately. The walls were stripped of their old plaster and pointed, so that the inside is now rougher than the outside, a thing the ancient builders never intended. The altar is fairly draped with good hangings behind, and the chancel fitted with new oak ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... a useful young fellow enough, and clean and spruce; but lately, he has become shabby and dirty, and is ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... other things which lay strewed about here, were a spearshaft, eight feet in length, recently made and ochred; parts of old canoes, fragments of their skin-dresses, &c. For some distance around, the trunks of many of the birch, and of that species of spruce pine called here the Var (Pinus balsamifera) had been rinded; these people using the inner part of the bark of that kind of tree for food. Some of the cuts in the trees with the axe, were evidently made the preceding ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 387, August 28, 1829 • Various
... Bartholomew, Charlton, Fairlop Oak, and Barnet; there were also lotteries. Besides these amusements, which were all for the lower orders as well as for the rich, they had their mug-houses, whither the men resorted to drink beer, spruce, and purl; and for music there was the street ballad-singer, to say nothing of the bear-warden's fiddle and the band of marrow-bones and cleavers. Lastly, for those of more elevated tastes, there was the ringing of the church bells. Now, with the exception ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... British intervention had been effectual. But it was not until the next morning, the second of his imprisonment, that the cell door opened once more, this time to admit the portly figure of John Weeks and the spruce person ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... of water, a quarter of a pound of hops, and a tea-cupful of ginger. Boil them together till all the hops sink to the bottom. Then dip out a bucket full of the liquor, and stir into it six quarts of molasses, and three ounces and a half of the essence of spruce. When all is dissolved, mix it with the liquor in the kettle; strain it through a hair sieve into a cask; and stir well into it half a pint of good strong yeast. Let it ferment a day or two; then bung up the cask, and you ...
— Directions for Cookery, in its Various Branches • Eliza Leslie
... the town the day I left Kronstadt. The field where it is held is right opposite Hotel "No. 1," and the whole place was crowded with country-folks in quaint costumes—spruce, gaily-dressed people mixed up with Wallack cattle-drivers and other picturesque rascals, such as gipsies and Jews, and here and there a Turk, and, more ragged than all, a sprinkling of refugee Bulgarians. Though it was a scene of strange incongruities—a very ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... large, and portions near the line With rocky soil and stunted spruce and pine, With scarce a wigwam or a ranger's hearth, We left untilled, and deemed of little worth; The petals of this desert rose unfold, When man ...
— Gleams of Sunshine - Optimistic Poems • Joseph Horatio Chant
... boy I was fortunate enough to be raised on a farm in Butler County, Iowa, that was well protected by a good Norway spruce, white pine and Scotch pine windbreak. The Norway spruce and white pine are still there and if anything better than they were thirty years ago. At that time my father fed from one to five carloads of stock every winter back of this grove, and I honestly believe that he fed his steers at a cost ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... marched that afternoon only four or five miles,—to Greenfield meadows,—where they stopped to encamp, dug away the snow, laid spruce-boughs on the ground for beds, and bound fast such of the prisoners as seemed able to escape. The Indians then held a carousal on some liquor they had found in the village, and in their drunken rage murdered a negro man belonging to Williams. In spite of ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... wire the leading and all the lateral shoots excepting one. But we believe that they were too old when experimented on; and some were pinched too severely, and [page 188] some not enough. Only one case succeeded, namely, with the spruce-fir. The leading shoot was not killed, but its growth was checked; at its base there were three lateral shoots in a whorl, two of which were pinched, one being thus killed; the third was left untouched. These lateral shoots, when operated on (July 14th) stood at an angle of 8o above the ...
— The Power of Movement in Plants • Charles Darwin
... sail-makers and coopers to repair the sails and casks in; to land our empty casks, to fill water, and to cut down wood for fuel; all of which were absolutely necessary occupations. We also began to brew beer from the branches or leaves of a tree, which much resembles the American black- spruce. From the knowledge I had of this tree, and the similarity it bore to the spruce, I judged that, with the addition of inspissated juice of wort and molasses, it would make a very wholesome beer, and supply the want of vegetables, which ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... shadow from the spruce there, Ranald," she cried, pointing to a deep, black turn in the road. For answer there came from behind them the long, mournful hunting-cry of the wolf. He was on their track. Immediately it was answered by a chorus of howls from the bush on the swamp side, but still ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education
... a delightful day for a sleigh-ride, for every bush and tree was covered with a white fleece of snow, and the morning sun added a tiny sparkle to every crystal. A thicket of spruce was changed to a grove of towering white cones and an alder swamp to a fantastic fairyland. It was all new to Frank, and as he drove away with that bright and vivacious girl for a companion it is needless to say he enjoyed it ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... not far removed from animals—for neither "Wynyeri," the boy in question, nor any of his tribe, could by any possibility have seen a white man before 1892. And yet this little chap in a few months is as spruce and clever as any white boy of the same size, and, far from showing any fear or respect, evinces a distinct inclination to boss any white children with whom he comes in contact. The Australian aboriginal is indeed a puzzle: he lives like a beast of the field, using neither clothes ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... makes six dead from the one cabin—six from eighteen, an' Promont'll make seven to-morrow. Do ye mind how we begged 'em to quit that dug-out an' build a white man's house, an' drink spruce tea, an' work! They're too —— lazy. They lie around in that hole, breath bad ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... never rounded the Cape, that the extreme heat of an Indian climate is so favourable to the growth of hair as to put those wights who are afflicted with dark chevelures, which was my case, to the inconvenient necessity of chin-scraping twice on the game day, when they wish to appear particularly spruce of an evening. Now I intended to have shaved before the play began, but in the hurry of dressing had forgotten all about it; and upon inspecting my visage in a glass, after I had donned Lady Macbeth's night-gear, the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... to the lawn looking his most spruce; he had evidently tried to tidy himself, having shaved and put on a clean collar of extraordinarily antiquated make. His clothes might have had "American ready-made" written upon them. He advanced towards them slowly, leaning heavily ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... had no regrets and few aspirations. But the coolness of the twilight gave him the sense of being a better man than he knew himself to be. Ebie went to sit under the ministrations of the Reverend Erasmus Teends at twelve by the clock on Sunday. He was a regular attendant. He always was spruce in his Sunday blacks. He placed himself in the hard pews so that he could have a view of his flame for the time being. As he listened to the minister he thought sometimes of her and of his work, and of the turnip-hoeing on the morrow, but oftenest ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... to watch her there. He reeled from the room, and reaching the landing again, sank down there, ignominiously, sitting on the carpet, his back to the wall, a wreck of his spruce, dapper self, having bodily and spiritually reached the bounds ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... great and noble an accomplishment. But the committing of such high and brave sensed poems to a schoolboy (whose main business is to search out cunningly the Antecedent and the Relative; to lie at catch for a spruce Phrase, a Proverb, or a quaint and pithy Sentence) is not only to very little purpose, but that having gargled only those elegant books at school, this serves them instead of reading them afterwards; ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... absolutely still air not a twig moves. A rare raven passes overhead, and his cry, changed from a hoarse croak to a sweet liquid note, reverberates like the musical glasses. There is no more delightful sound in the wilderness than this occasional lapse into music of the raven. We wound through the scrub spruce and willow and over the niggerhead swamps, a faint tinkle of bells, a little cloud of steam; for in the great cold the moisture of the animals' breath hangs over their heads in the still air, and on looking back it stands awhile ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... was broad daylight, I went down to breakfast. I found the officers already assembled at one of the long tables in the mess-hall. Our party were calm, and even somewhat merry. We had retained one colored man to wait on us. He was a spruce-looking mulatto from Charleston, very active and efficient on ordinary occasions, but now completely demoralized by the thunder of the guns and crashing of the shot around us. He leaned back against the wall, almost white with fear, his eyes closed, and his whole expression one of perfect despair.[18] ...
— Reminiscences of Forts Sumter and Moultrie in 1860-'61 • Abner Doubleday
... first, then smoothly and swiftly as if they had never stopped. Summer reddened into autumn; autumn bronzed into fall. The maples and poplars were bare. The oaks alone kept their rusted crimson glory, and the cloaks of spruce and hemlock on the shoulders of the hills grew dark with wintry foliage. Keene's transitions of mood became more frequent and more extreme. The gulf of isolation that divided him from us when the black days came seemed wider and more unfathomable. Dorothy and John Graham were ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke
... old-time evening-school instructor. I had not seen him for more than three years, during which time he had developed a pronounced tendency to baldness, though his apple face had lost none of its roseate freshness. He looked spruce as ever, his clothes spick and span, his "four-in-hand" tastefully tied, his collar and cuffs immaculate. His hazel eyes, however, had a worn and ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... until its farthest edge touches the shore of the arm. The "Point" has been wisely set aside for a public park, and except where a fort or two, built to command the entrance to the harbour, intrudes upon it, the forest of spruce and fir with its labyrinth of roads and paths and frequent glades of soft waving grass, extends from shore to shore, making a wilderness that a boy's imagination may easily people with Indians brandishing tomahawk and ...
— Bert Lloyd's Boyhood - A Story from Nova Scotia • J. McDonald Oxley
... when we sat around a big camp-fire near our tents in the valley, and saw the full moon come up and look down upon us from behind Sentinel Rock, and heard the intermittent booming of Yosemite Falls sifting through the spruce trees that towered around us, and felt the tender, brooding spirit of the great valley, itself touched to lyric intensity by the grandeurs on every hand, steal in upon us, and possess our souls—surely ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... this quietest of seaside villages late in June, when the busy herb-gathering season was just beginning, was also to arrive in the early prime of Mrs. Todd's activity in the brewing of old-fashioned spruce beer. This cooling and refreshing drink had been brought to wonderful perfection through a long series of experiments; it had won immense local fame, and the supplies for its manufacture were always giving out and having to be replenished. For various reasons, the ...
— The Country of the Pointed Firs • Sarah Orne Jewett
... of all was the Christmas Tree. How big it was! a large stout Spruce in the upper part of the hall. It bore a gift for every child in the town. Two little girls had the whooping cough, and could not come out; but there were two playthings for them also, given to their brothers ...
— Two Christmas Celebrations • Theodore Parker
... wagons drew Into a halt that would sometimes last Even the space of an hour or two— As the dusty, thirsty travelers made Their noonings there in the beeches' shade By the old black Aunty's spring-house, where, Along with its cooling draughts, were found Jugs of her famous sweet spruce-beer, Served with her gingerbread-horses there, While Aunty's snow-white cap bobbed 'round Till the children's rapture knew no bound, As she sang and danced for them, quavering clear And high the chant of her ...
— A Child-World • James Whitcomb Riley
... Mr. Elieson is running storage battery locomotives in London. Mr. Julien has also been experimenting with a car in New York, and I believe one is in course of construction for a line in the city of Boston. Messrs. W. Wharton, Jr. & Co. have a storage battery car running at Philadelphia on Spruce and Pine streets, and this energetic firm is now fitting up another car with two trucks, each carrying an independent motor, similar to ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 620, November 19,1887 • Various
... flowers, this northern country is one of exceeding beauty. The dark green forests of spruce, larch and pine, broken now and then by a grove of poplars or silver birches, the secluded valleys and the rounded hills are strangely restful and give one a sense of infinite peace. It is a place to go for ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... red apples into which he longed to set his own sharp teeth; and he would cut in two his lead-pencil for a girl, when he would not for a boy. Had he not some of the beautiful auburn tresses of Cynthia Rudd in his skate, spruce-gum, and wintergreen box at home? And yet the grand sentiment of life was little awakened in John. He liked best to be with boys, and their rough play suited him better than the amusements of the shrinking, fluttering, timid, and sensitive little girls. John had not learned then that ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... I didn't have no hatchet, but I had a good huntin' knife along with me, and I managed to whittle down a good-sized spruce, which I trimmed so's to make a sort of ladder of it. When that was done I lowered the butt end of it into the hole, and Handsome—that was who it was in the bottom of the hole—he climbed up so's I could get hold of him, and then I pulled him out. There wasn't ...
— A Woman at Bay - A Fiend in Skirts • Nicholas Carter
... living-room, and, in spite of my preconceived dislike, I had to admit that the man was presentable. A big fellow he was, tall and dark, as Gertrude had said, smooth-shaven and erect, with prominent features and a square jaw. He was painfully spruce in his appearance, and his manner was almost ...
— The Circular Staircase • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... David stood up thar as straight an' han'some as a young spruce on a still day—not a quiver in ary twig. The Clarke boy was a leetle pale an' when he raised his pistol I could see a twitch in his lips. He looked kind o' stiff. I see they was one thing' 'bout shootin' he hadn't learnt. ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... as in spirit. His jacket and cap were of wolfskin, and on his shoulder he carried an axe, with broad, shining blade. He was a mighty woodsman now, and could make a spray of chips fly around him as he hewed his way through the trunk of spruce-tree. ...
— The First Christmas Tree - A Story of the Forest • Henry Van Dyke
... honor. It was such a surprise to us, and so kind in Captain McAndrews to give it, for he is a bachelor. Supper was served in his own quarters, but dancing was in the vacant set adjoining. The rooms were beautifully decorated with flags, and the fragrant cedar and spruce. Mrs. Adams, wife of the commanding officer, superintended all of the arrangements and also assisted in receiving. The supper was simply delicious—as all army suppers are—and I fancy that she and other ladies of the garrison were responsible ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... is a long inlet of the sea, extending up country over a score of miles. The district is hilly, and is covered by a forest of rather small trees, spruce and birch, but further inland the hills are generally bare. There are comparatively few European ...
— Report by the Governor on a Visit to the Micmac Indians at Bay d'Espoir - Colonial Reports, Miscellaneous. No. 54. Newfoundland • William MacGregor
... should not get fat and unwieldy, as well as any other part of the human frame. Some of our best poets have written in paroxysms of hunger, and I really believe that Addison would have had more point if he had had less victuals; and if you do not restrict yourself to a sheep's trotter and spruce beer, your style will betray your luxury." But soon came an increase of the very thing feared for her fame, in the form of an invitation from Lady Abercorn and the marquis to pass the chief part of every year with them. This was accepted, and thus she met her fate. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... but the pace was slow, and the low moon would shortly drop behind the spruce fringe of the ridges. Then the burden-bearer would have to stumble forward through confused blackness—so he hastened his steps until his own breath rattled into an exhausted rasp and his own heart hammered with the ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... was dug, and, sprinkling its depth with leaves and soft branches of spruce, the dwarf drew the body over, and lowered it slowly, awkwardly, into the grave. Then he covered all but the huge, unlovely face, and, kneeling, peered down ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... under the void where the roof shut off the stars, and talked of the pine-woods, of logging, measuring, and spring-drives, and of moose-hunting on snow-shoes, until our mouths had a wild flavor more spicy than if we had chewed spruce-gum by the hour. Spruce-gum is the aboriginal quid of these regions. Foresters chew this tenacious morsel as tars nibble at a bit of oakum, grooms at a straw, Southerns at tobacco, or school-girls at ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... beginning in the land of my birth it had been a thing as familiar as the dial and as necessary. The farms along our road were only stumpy recesses in the wilderness, with irregular curving outlines of thick timber—beech and birch and maple and balsam and spruce and pine and tamarack—forever whispering of the unconquered lands that rolled in great billowy ridges ...
— The Light in the Clearing • Irving Bacheller
... have emphasized in recent times the need of larger forest reserves and closer government supervision. Under the most favorable conditions, the pine requires from seventy-five to one hundred years to yield timber twenty-five feet in length and ten inches in diameter at the top. Spruce will reach the same size in seventy-five to eighty years. In the higher altitudes of the central part of the country the pine requires one hundred and fifty years, and rarely exceeds one hundred feet in height, and it decreases toward the coast ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... is not all that can be wished as a shade-producer, he is in all his varieties a beautiful object to look upon. First, I think, in point of magnificence towers the Himalayan spruce, ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... last robes, with gold and purple gay.— So droops my life, of your soft beams despoil'd, Youth, Health, and Hope, that long exulting smil'd; And the wild carols, and the bloomy hues Of merry Spring-time, spruce on every plain Her half-blown bushes, moist with sunny rain, More pensive thoughts in my sunk heart infuse Than Winter's grey, and desolate domain, Faded, like my lost Youth, that no bright ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... can any lover of nature enter the old piles of Oxford and English cathedrals without feeling that the forest overpowered the mind of the builder, and that his chisel, his saw and plane, still reproduced its ferns, its spikes of flowers, its locust, elm, pine, and spruce." ...
— A Cathedral Courtship • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... umbrella on the veranda, and aunt Helen led me into the dining-room, where a spruce maid was making a pleasant clatter in laying the table. Caddagat was a very old style of house, and all the front rooms opened onto the veranda without any such preliminary as a hall, therefore it was necessary to pass through the dining-room to my bedroom, which was a skillion ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... and a few moments later heard the crashing of bodies in the undergrowth. Fifty seconds more and he was in the arena. MacDonald was fighting three men in a space over which the spruce-tops grew thinly. The moon shone upon them as they swayed in a struggling mass, and as Aldous sprang to the combat one of the three reeled backward and fell as if struck by a battering-ram. In that same moment MacDonald went down, and ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... should you see? I startled you. Happen I look a wee bit muggerishlike— A ragtag hipplety-clinch: but I've been travelling Mischancy roads; and I'm fair muggert-up. Yet, why should that stagnate you? Where's the sense Of expecting a mislucket man like me To be as snod and spruce as a young shaver? But I'm all right: there's naught amiss with Jim, Except too much of nothing in his belly. A good square meal, and a pipe, and a decent night's rest, And I'll be fit as a fiddle. I've hardly slept ... Well, now I'm home, I'll make ...
— Krindlesyke • Wilfrid Wilson Gibson
... dynamite were wrapped in pieces of old bagging and fastened on the end of long spruce poles, which we had brought along specially for this purpose. A wire from the battery had, of course, been connected with one of the primers buried in the dynamite. Pole, wire, and dynamite were thrust ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary
... Cree kept the pace so well that it took me some hours before I again Caught sight of them. After a hard ride of six-and-thirty miles, we halted for dinner on the banks of English Creek. Close beside our camping-place a large clump of spruce-pine stood in dull contrast to the snowy surface. They looked like old friends to me—friends of the Winnipeg and the now distant Lake of the Woods; for from Red River to English Creek, a distance of 750 miles, I-had seen but a solitary pine-tree. After a short dinner We resumed our rapid way, ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... and full on the wild heights of the island of Mount Desert. They entered a bay that stretched inland between iron-bound shores, and gave it the name of St. Sauveur. It is now called Frenchman's Bay. They saw a coast-line of weather-beaten crags set thick with spruce and fir, the surf-washed cliffs of Great Head and Schooner Head, the rocky front of Newport Mountain, patched with ragged woods, the arid domes of Dry Mountain and Green Mountain, the round bristly backs of the Porcupine Islands, and the ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... him, therefore, to watch Defago turn over the canoe upon the shore, pack the paddles carefully underneath, and then proceed to "blaze" the spruce stems for some distance on either side of an almost invisible trail, with the careless remark thrown in, "Say, Simpson, if anything happens to me, you'll find the canoe all correc' by these marks;—then strike doo west into the sun to hit the home ...
— The Wendigo • Algernon Blackwood
... was thus being settled by Mrs. Rachel, were sauntering through the shadows of the Haunted Wood. Beyond, the harvest hills were basking in an amber sunset radiance, under a pale, aerial sky of rose and blue. The distant spruce groves were burnished bronze, and their long shadows barred the upland meadows. But around them a little wind sang among the fir tassels, and in it there was ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... last we came into the valley where Hubbard died and where we had suffered so much. Man changes with the fleeting years and a civilized world changes, but the untrod wilderness never changes. Before us lay the same rushing river I remembered so well, the same starved forest of spruce with its pungent odor, and there was the clump of spruce trees in which our last camp was pitched just as I had seen it last. Malone and Blake remained by the river bank while I approached alone what to me was sacred ground. Time fell ...
— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace
... black slouch hat, and a pair of light blue pants thrust into the tops of heavy boots which were seldom blacked, but often splashed with Cairo mud. But everybody stepped respectfully aside to let him pass, and the spruce young staff officers never failed to salute. It was ...
— Rodney The Partisan • Harry Castlemon
... with there. These important duties being done, he strolls to an exhibition, or to a print-shop, and looks over a portfolio of caricatures; thence he keeps on moving to a fashionable hotel, to take white spruce beer(!) and sandwiches; here, after arranging his parties for the evening, be returns home to dress. After looking over the cards which have been left for him, he proceeds to his toilette with his valet, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... Stranger's House. The old men went from hut to hut announcing the newcomers. Victuals and pipes and tobacco were sent to the Stranger's House for them. This structure looked like a small barn and was made of rived spruce. Inside, the chief sat on a pile of unthrashed wheat. He had a head and face which reminded Jack of the old Roman emperors shown in the Historical Collections. There was remarkable dignity in his deep-lined face. His name was Thunder Tongue. The house had no windows. Many skins hung from its ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... and camping outfit and set out for that region of country, although it was more than two hundred miles away. Here he found tracks in abundance, and so before he made his little hunting lodge in the midst of a spruce grove, he set his traps for the fierce wolves in a spot which seemed to be a rallying place of theirs. As they are very suspicious and clever, he carefully placed two traps close together and sprinkled them over with snow, leaving visible only the dead rabbits which served ...
— Oowikapun - How the Gospel Reached the Nelson River Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young
... ground rapidly in the Alexander, notwithstanding the precautions of smoking the ship, washing with vinegar, and distributing porter, spruce-beer, and wine among the seamen. On the 2d of September six men and a boy, on the 5th eight, and on the 8th ten, were disabled by it from performing any duty. An increase of this kind, in the midst of all the efforts that could be made to counteract the malignity ...
— The Voyage Of Governor Phillip To Botany Bay • Arthur Phillip
... as Ned Parker was able to get out of doors again, he was heard of in every house in the village, making himself agreeable after his own fashion,—drinking hard cider with the old farmers, praising their wives' gingerbread and spruce-beer, holding skeins for the girls, going on picnics, huckleberryings, fishing-excursions, apple-bees, riding Old Boker, his father's horse, bare-backed down the street, playing ball on the green, and frequenting singing-school with one pretty girl and another, till all Deerfield shook its head ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... looked out, and saw that it was a servant-maid of fifteen or sixteen, who was indeed extremely winsome and spruce. As soon however as the maid caught a glimpse of Chia Yn, she speedily turned herself round and withdrew out of sight. But, as luck would have it, it happened that Pei Ming was coming along, and seeing the servant-maid in front of the ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... only the barley which ventures so far north: the limit of rye is 67 degrees, of oats, 65 degrees, of wheat, 64 degrees, on the west side of the peninsula, and from 1 to 2 degrees less on the east. In Southern Norway, the spruce-fir ceases to grow beyond the line of 2900 feet above the sea-level; while in Switzerland, it is commonly met with at the height of 5500 feet, and in some situations, 7000; shewing that the influences which affect the growth of grain do not similarly affect that of trees—proximity ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 438 - Volume 17, New Series, May 22, 1852 • Various
... universally used by the fur traders for navigating the intricate and often-obstructed rivers. The canoe was between thirty and forty feet long, and several feet in width; constructed of birch bark, sewed with fibres of the roots of the spruce tree, and daubed with resin of the pine, instead of tar. The cargo was made up in packages, weighing from ninety to one hundred pounds each, for the facility of loading and unloading, and of transportation at portages. ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... seeming to hurry and yet going about any matter as if it was the first thing to be done; her little orderly methods. She kept her mother's room neat, she put the books back in their places; there was a cluster of autumn leaves in a vase, or a sprig of spruce or cedar that for a long while would put forth new leaves. She was very glad now that she had taken so much pains. Was she rather unpolished when they had first come from Laconia. But her ...
— The Girls at Mount Morris • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... we passed along, and left us with that pleasant woody smell belonging to leaves. One of the ladies, catching a bit of green from one of these intruding branches, said it was cedar, and another thought it spruce. ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... grew up out of thinly frozen slime, while no sound made by either bird or beast broke the impressive silence of the primeval solitude. At last, when the day was nearly spent, I crawled toward a larger muskeg, which spread out from a running creek, and knelt in congealed mire behind a blighted spruce, listening intently, for a sound I recognized set my heart beating. All around, dwindling in gradations as the soil grew wetter, the firs gave place to willows, and there was mud and ice cake under them. Peering hard into the deepening shadows, I saw what I had expected—a patch of ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... have been just beyond the spruce thicket, Thayer reflected. The description was too accurate to be artistic; it amounted to mere photography. As far as his own eyes could see, the earth lay buried in a deep, soft blanket of snow, and the air above was misty with flakes which neither fell nor scurried before the wind, ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... on the 19th of November, 1792, she sent him to a day-school, where she paid about five shillings a quarter, the common rate of the respectable day-schools at that time in Scotland. It was kept by a Mr Bowers, whom Byron has described as a dapper, spruce person, with whom he made no progress. How long he remained with Mr Bowers is not mentioned, but by the day-book of the school it was at least twelve months; for on the 19th of November of the following ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... most invite our notice, would interfere with the main object of our visit. We have come for a special purpose, and we can only allude to a very few of the species to which our attention may be supposed to be directed. A white spruce, in rich luxuriance, measuring, as the branches trail upon the sward, upwards of sixty feet in circumference; the Himalayan white pine, with its deep fringe-like foliage, twenty-five feet in height; the Cephalonian fir, with leaves as pungent ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... ponderous hat-roof—I mean of slates, garnished with bay windows—observe its heavy jaws of areas, its hard, close mouth of a door; its dark, deep sunken eyes of windows peering out from the heavy brow of dark stone coping that supports the slate hat in question: what a contrast to the spruce mock gentility of its neighbour, with a stand-up collar of white steps, a varnished face, and a light, jaunty, yet stiff air, like a city ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 385, Saturday, August 15, 1829. • Various
... topped the rise and leveled to the tree-girdled mesa. Young Pete stared. This was the most beautiful spot he had ever seen. Ringed round by a great forest of spruce, the Blue Mesa lay shimmering in the sunset like an emerald lake, beneath a cloudless sky tinged with crimson, gold, and amethyst. Across the mesa stood a cabin, the only dwelling in that silent expanse. And this was to be his home, and the big man beside him, gently urging the ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... with the bitterness of this scene, I wandered instinctively beyond the luminous zone projected around the chateau through the apertures of the resplendent windows. I walked rapidly toward a double row of spruce trees, crossed by a rustic bridge thrown over a small brook which divided the garden from the park, and where the shade was more dense. I had just reached this somber spot, when a hand was laid on my arm and stopped me; at the same time a short and troubled ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... was much struck by the lifelessness of the scene. The great river stretched away northward, the hills rose abruptly from the water's edge, everywhere extended the superb spruce forest, here fortunately unburnt; but there seemed no sign of living creature outside of our own numerous, noisy, and picturesque party. River, hills, and woods were calm and silent. It was impressive, if disappointing; and, when ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... though trappers think it gives a taint which scares their game away. The paddles were and are of all shapes and sizes, long and short, broad and narrow, spoon-blade and square; and they were and are made of all kinds of wood, from the lightest spruce to the much heavier but handsomer bird's-eye maple. Sails were and are only used with light winds dead aft, and not often in birch-barks even then, because there is no ...
— All Afloat - A Chronicle of Craft and Waterways • William Wood
... the Senior Tutor of St. Boniface: and two scholars came in. (He knew they were scholars, because this was his hour for seeing scholars.) One was a heavy-looking young man in a frock coat and tall hat. The other was a spruce youth, who looked as if nature had intended him for an attorney's clerk; ...
— The Casual Ward - academic and other oddments • A. D. Godley
... having found the track, he went in hot haste after Mr. Rabbit. And both ran hard, till, night coming on, Rabbit, to protect himself, had only just time to trample down the snow a little, and stick up a spruce twig on end and sit on it. But when Wild Cat came up he found there a fine wigwam, and put his head in. All that he saw was an old man of very grave and dignified appearance, whose hair was gray, and whose majestic (sogmoye) appearance was heightened by a pair of long and venerable ears. ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... hook out here, an' I've heard 'im tell of a lot o' pranks that they had over thar. He said thar was an old bachelor that, kept a dry-goods store who never had had much to do with women. He was bashful-like, but thar was one young woman that he had his eye on, an' now an' then he'd spruce up an' go to see 'er or take 'er out to meetin', but Jeff said he was too weak-kneed to pop the question, an' the gal went off on a visit to Alabama and got married. Now, the old bach' had a gang o' friends that ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... ceremonies, with their martial music, the presence of spectators, etc., are intended to stimulate the interest and excite the military spirit of the command. Also, being occasions for which the soldiers dress up and appear spruce and trim, they inculcate habits of tidiness,—they teach a lesson in cleanliness of ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... subsided, not a few rabbits were caught in trees, mostly spruce-firs and larches. For salmon, they were taken everywhere—among grass, corn, and potatoes, in bushes, and hedges, and cottages. One was caught on a lawn with an umbrella; one was reported to have been ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... the top of the street," Everett determined, "cross over, and then present myself." But as he again approached with courage screwed to the sticking-place, a spruce hansom dashed up before him. Two very "masher" young men sprang out. They stood for a moment laughing together while one found the fare. The other glanced at Everett, and, as it seemed to my too sensitive young friend, with a certain amusement. "Is it possible that this little boy is coming ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 3, March, 1891 • Various
... deary me, is that what they call the fashion?" cried Mrs Asplin, holding the girl in outstretched arms, and turning her slowly round and round, to take in the details of her attire. "You look so spruce, child, that I hardly knew you; but there, it won't be long, I expect, before the true Peggy peeps out. Come in, darling. There's a new rug in the hail; don't trip over it! We have been saying we needed it for five years back, but it was bought only last week, to smarten ...
— More About Peggy • Mrs G. de Horne Vaizey
... Max," I declared. So I did, through the spruce woods and over the field as fast as my feet could carry me, thanking my stars that there was a Max to go to in ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... midnight by the dying fire, 5 Watching the spruce boughs glow and pale, I heard outside a tumult dire, And the fierce ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... backbones. With strong ale brewed in vats and in tuns; Ping, Drangollie, and the Draget fine, Mead, Mattebru, and the Metheling. Red wine, the claret and the white, with Tent and Alicant, in whom I delight. Wine of Languedoc and of Orleans thereto: Single beer, and other that is double: Spruce beer, and the beer of Hamburgh: Malmsey, Tires, ...
— Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine • William Carew Hazlitt
... as the scent of vinegar, into the long, unfloored room, which certainly needed something of the kind. It reeked with stale tobacco-smoke, the smell of cookery, and the odors of frowsy clothes. A row of bunks, filled with spruce twigs and old brown blankets, ran down one side of it, a very rude table down the other, and a double row of men with bronzed faces, in dusty garments, sat about the latter, eating voraciously. Fifteen minutes was, at the outside, the ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... about girls and society and dances and theatres, and nothing about work. Remember, I am footing the bills. When I was your age I got up at 4 in the morning and toiled away in the fields till sundown, and then I was too tired to spruce up and play at being a gentleman. If you're going to be a doctor, you'd better ...
— The Mermaid of Druid Lake and Other Stories • Charles Weathers Bump
... we found her spruce and prim with her best black silk bonnet, something in shape like a coal-scuttle, her stick in her hand, and her shoes on her feet. We drove up the chair in fine style. There were several cottages close by, and the neighbors ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 3 (of 12) - Classic Tales And Old-Fashioned Stories • Various
... was by no means unable to define the spirit. They talked naturally more with Verena than with her mother; and while they were so engaged Mrs. Tarrant explained to her who they were, and how one of them, the smaller, who was not quite so spruce, had brought the other, his particular friend, to introduce him. This friend, Mr. Burrage, was from New York; he was very fashionable, he went out a great deal in Boston ("I have no doubt you know some of the ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... to safeguard against an early thaw in the stream, while the bore was being equipped with a five-foot flume. You all know what that means, hundreds of miles from navigation or a main traveled road. To get that necessary lumber, he felled trees in a spruce grove up the ravine; every board was hewn by hand. And about two-thirds of those sluice-boxes, the bottoms fitted with riffles, were finished. Afterwards, at that camp where he stopped for dogs, I learned that aside from a few days ...
— The Rim of the Desert • Ada Woodruff Anderson
... track To follow down or struggle back. The sun has set on fair Naushon Long ere my western blaze is gone; The ocean disk is rolling dark In shadows round your swinging bark, While yet the yellow sunset fills The stream that scarfs my spruce-clad hills; The day-star wakes your island deer Long ere my barnyard chanticleer; Your mists are soaring in the blue While mine are sparks of ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Bent Wade far up the valley of White River under the shadow of the Flat Top Mountains. It was beautiful country. Grassy hills, with colored aspen groves, swelled up on his left, and across the brawling stream rose a league-long slope of black spruce, above which the bare red-and-gray walls of the range towered, glorious with the blaze of sinking sun. White patches of snow showed in the sheltered nooks. Wade's gaze rested longest on ...
— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey
... a time the coachman, a spruce middle-aged man, who had long wanted to marry the clever, pretty laundry-maid, going to the pump to get water for his horses overheard her giving orders to the three feathers, and peeping through the keyhole as the butler had done, saw her sitting ...
— English Fairy Tales • Flora Annie Steel
... horse trying to escape from its own pursuing harness and carriage the Senior Surgeon poured increasing speed into both his own pace and the pace of his tormentor. Up hill,—down dale,—screeching through rocky echoes,—swishing through blue-green spruce-lands,—dodging indomitable boulders,—grazing lax, treacherous embankments,—the great car scuttled homeward. Huddled behind his steering wheel like a warrior behind his shield, every body-muscle taut with strain, every facial muscle diabolically calm, the Senior Surgeon met and parried ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... office for a specimen copy, when he can see for himself the great value it will be in his family, and he will thank us in his heart for calling his attention to it. Address James Elverson, publisher, GOLDEN DAYS, corner and Spruce Streets, Philadelphia, Penna. ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls - Volume VIII, No 25: May 21, 1887 • Various
... or German oak, those of the lower deck and half-deck of pitch-pine and Norwegian fir. All the deck planks are of Norwegian fir, 4 inches in the main-deck and 3 inches elsewhere. The beams are fastened to the ship's sides by knees of Norwegian spruce, of which about 450 were used. Wooden knees were, as a rule, preferred to iron ones, as they are more elastic. A good many iron knees were used, however, where wood was less suitable. In the boiler and engine room the beams of the lower deck had to be raised about 3 feet to give ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... North-Western Rhodesia Native Police, a smart body of 380 natives, officered by eleven or twelve Englishmen. To Colonel Colin Harding, C.M.G., was due the credit of recruiting and drilling this smart corps, and it was difficult to believe that these soldierly-looking men, very spruce in their dark blue tunics and caps, from which depend enormous red tassels, were only a short time ago idling away their days ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... squirrels, and this she "tried out" in a golden dish, over the fire. The oil thus got she used to anoint his healing wound. She used a dressing of clay and leaves; and when the fever flushed him she made him comfortable on his bed of spruce-tips, bathed his forehead and cheeks, and gave him cold water from a spring that trickled down over the moss some fifty feet to ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... and again over his spectacles suspiciously, and would, I dare say, have joined hands with my enemy the police officer, as to the probabilities affecting my moral character. Everything else was done by Mr. Prime, who I was pleased to notice was as spruce as ever in his personal appearance. His gloves, his boots, his cravats, and Ike, the beautifully ugly Ike, ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... rise and leveled to the tree-girdled mesa. Young Pete stared. This was the most beautiful spot he had ever seen. Ringed round by a great forest of spruce, the Blue Mesa lay shimmering in the sunset like an emerald lake, beneath a cloudless sky tinged with crimson, gold, and amethyst. Across the mesa stood a cabin, the only dwelling in that silent expanse. And this was to be his home, and the big man beside him, gently urging the horse, was ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... AMERICAN SPRUCE. In the spring of the year, this valuable extract is obtained from the young shoots and tops of the pine or fir trees; and in autumn, from their cones. These are merely boiled in water, to the consistence of honey or ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... of hops, let them boil half an hour in one gallon of water, strain the hop water then add sixteen gallons of warm water, two gallons of molasses, eight ounces of essence of spruce, dissolved in one quart of water, put it in a clean cask, then shake it well together, add half a pint of emptins, then let it stand and work one week, if very warm weather less time will do, when it is drawn off to bottle, add one spoonful of ...
— American Cookery - The Art of Dressing Viands, Fish, Poultry, and Vegetables • Amelia Simmons
... with reviving faith to urge them, opened wide and heartily, and began to twinkle again. The bar was in festive array: Christmas greens, red berries, ribbons, tissue-paper and gleaming tinfoil—flash of mirrors, bright colour, branches of pine, cedar and spruce from the big balsamic woods. It was crowded with lumber-jacks—great fellows from the forest, big of body and passion, here gathered in celebration of the festival. John Fairmeadow, getting all at once ...
— Christmas Eve at Swamp's End • Norman Duncan
... a horse and gig With promises to pay; And he pawned his horns for a spruce new wig, To redeem as he came away: And he whistled some tune, a waltz or a jig, And drove off at the ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... approximately 6000 ft. in the Yangtsze basin, there exist in districts remote from the traffic of the great rivers, extensive forests of conifers, like those of Central Europe in character, but with different species of silver fir, larch, spruce and Cembran pine. Below this altitude the woods are composed of deciduous and evergreen broad-leafed trees and shrubs, mingled together in a profusion of species. Pure broad-leafed forests of one or two species are rare, though ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... the garden as she was desired, and found the six lizards, which she put into her apron and brought to the faery. Another touch of the wonderful wand soon converted them into six spruce footmen in dashing liveries, with powdered hair and pig-tails, three-cornered cocked hats and gold-headed canes, who immediately jumped up behind the carriage as nimbly as if they had been footmen and nothing else ...
— Cinderella • Henry W. Hewet
... blackberry root, black cherry bark, spruce boughs, wintergreens, sarsaparilla roots; steep in a large vessel till all the goodness is out; strain, and when lukewarm put in a cup of yeast, let work, bottle up, ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... Sir Thomas Hardy, and I commenced operations by purchasing shares in a dice-board, a vingt et un table, and a quino table.[12] Jack Mallet and I, also, set up a shop, on a capital of three dollars. We sold smoked herring, pipes, tobacco, segars, spruce beer, and, as chances of smuggling it in offered, now and then a little Jamaica. All this time, the number of the prisoners increased, until, in the end, we got to have a full prison, when they began to send them ...
— Ned Myers • James Fenimore Cooper
... search of the noisy intruder, and by good luck I found him. I beckoned Carlotta, who glided down, and there, with our heads together and holding our breath, we watched the queerest little love drama imaginable. Our cicada stood alert and spruce, waving his antenna with a sort of cavalier swagger, and every now and then making his corslet vibrate passionately. On the top of a blade of grass sat a brown little Juliet—a most reserved, discreet little Juliet, but evidently much interested in Romeo's serenade. When he sang she ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... the Creek of Pinon Pines; that is not because it is unusual to find pinon trees in that country, but because there are so few of them in the canyon of the stream. There are all sorts higher up on the slopes,—long-leaved yellow pines, thimble cones, tamarack, silver fir, and Douglas spruce; but in the canyon there is only a group of the low-headed, gray nut pines which the earliest inhabitants of that ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... broadly. "Why, by Henry," he declared, "I ain't heard you talk that way afore since you shipped aboard this General Minot craft along of me. That's the way you used to poke fun at me aboard the old Wild Ranger when we was makin' port after a good v'yage. What's happened to spruce you up so? Doctor ain't told you any special good news about them legs of yours, has he, Cap'n? Limpin' Moses, I wisht that ...
— Fair Harbor • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... are spruce and painted, and they can be moved if necessary. We met one coming down the road, the lace curtains in the windows and a cat looking out and brushing its whiskers. The house was set on rollers and being pulled along. Isn't it a splendid idea, Mamma? Fancy if I could have the east wing ...
— Elizabeth Visits America • Elinor Glyn
... fall in large flakes; a storm signal, and one they liked little. The temperature was falling. It was quite dark at three o'clock in the afternoon, and they were obliged to travel by snow-light. When camp was finally made, after halting for the night in a thicket of pine and spruce trees, the men were cold, tired ...
— The Trail of a Sourdough - Life in Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... stomachs with bark from young trees and tender tips of twigs. It was very coarse food, but it would take away that empty feeling. Mrs. Grouse burst out of the snow and hurried to get a meal before dark. She had no time to be particular, and so she ate spruce buds. They were very bitter and not much to her liking, but she was too hungry, and night was too near for her to be fussy. She was ...
— Old Granny Fox • Thornton W. Burgess
... teach history. They tell us about plants and animals that are now extinct—the dinosaur, for example. They can also tell of ancient climates. Coral found in rocks in Greenland suggests it must have once been warm. Remains of fir and spruce trees have been found ...
— Let's collect rocks & shells • Shell Oil Company
... set out with silver-branched candlesticks and all the Governor-General's fine collection of plate, but the servants waited in heavy fur-coats and caps. Of course no flowers could be used in that temperature, so the silver vases held branches of spruce, hemlock, and other Canadian firs. The French cook had to be very careful as to what dishes he prepared, for anything with moisture in it would freeze at once; meringues, for instance, would be frozen into uneatable cricket-balls, and ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... are included chiefly among the coniferous evergreens, embracing the Pine, the Fir, the Spruce, and the Cypress. Though many of the deciduous trees assume more or less of this outline, it is the normal and characteristic form of the Pines and their kindred species. It is a peculiarity of the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... it would be called, could not have been made of the spruce, but rather feeble octogenarian at the other end of the piazza. He was evidently absorbed in the novel he held so conspicuously open, and which, from the smiles now and then disturbing the usual placidity of ...
— The Circular Study • Anna Katharine Green
... is a beautiful public park on one of the wooded islands near Stockholm. There one finds forests of gigantic oaks, dense groves of spruce, smiling meadows, winding roads and shady paths. Through the tree-branches one catches a glimpse of the blue waters of the fjord, rippling and sparkling in the sun; little steamers go puffing briskly to and fro; and great vessels sail slowly down to ...
— Gerda in Sweden • Etta Blaisdell McDonald
... the old house and grounds as she chose, and feel how much better she had loved it in its tumble-down state, the state she had known as a child, when her mother lived there and was happy. Everything was aggressively spruce now, indoors and out. Susie's money and Susie's taste had rubbed off all the mellowness and all the romance. Anna was glad to leave it again, and be taken to Marienbad, or any place where there was royalty, for Susie loved royalty. But what a life it was, going round ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... coverings. Such facts only show that in the matter of adaptation among living organisms, there is a factor at work other than chemistry and physics—not independent of them, but making a purposive use of them. Cut off the central shoot that leads the young spruce tree upwards, and one of the shoots from the whirl of lateral branches below it slowly rises up and takes the place of the lost leader. Here is an action not prompted by the environment, but by the morphological needs of the tree, and it illustrates ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... goes out, JILL runs to the window, but has no time to do more than adjust the curtains and spring over to stand by her father, before CHARLES comes in. Though in evening clothes, he is white and disheveled for so spruce a ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... him, with his little dreadful air of fervid solemnity—and I don't know whether I dreamed it or whether it was really there—very spruce and strutting about the lawns of Amerley Park at that garden-party they took ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair
... the people of the new district, generally takes up its quarters among the operatives of the old town. Merchants, retail traders, and artisans have common interests which unite them together. On Sundays only, the masters make themselves spruce and foregather apart. On the other hand, the labouring classes, which constitute scarcely a fifth of the population, mingle with the ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... Cordelia pushed open her little gate, hung crookedly in a very compact and prim spruce hedge, she stopped in amazement and said, "Well, for ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... to eat. So they kept dipping their net, hoping to catch some salmon. At last one little salmon was caught. It was a thin, white-looking little fish. The Indians now knew that in two or three days they would have plenty. They hung their little fish on a spruce bough, and they kept visiting it, singing to it with delight. The white men did not wait for the ...
— Stories of American Life and Adventure • Edward Eggleston
... that if he managed to scramble up he would have some difficulty in getting down, and would get a terrible fright at least. White stood at the bottom of the tree, looking at his companions as they rode on one of the higher branches of a fine spruce fir. ...
— Emilie the Peacemaker • Mrs. Thomas Geldart
... fragrance, mixed with the delicate scent of the feathery ceanothus, (New Jersey tea.) The vivid greenness of the young leaves of the forest, the tender tint of the springing corn, were contrasted with the deep dark fringe of waving pines on the hills, and the yet darker shade of the spruce and balsams on the borders of the creeks, for so our Canadian forest rills are universally termed. The bright glancing wings of the summer red-bird, the crimson-headed woodpecker, the gay blue-bird, and noisy but splendid ...
— Canadian Crusoes - A Tale of The Rice Lake Plains • Catharine Parr Traill
... chesnut, hornbeam, yew, laurels, hollies, birches, Gordonia, {83c} Michelias, etc, most of them species hitherto unnoticed by botanists; but some exactly the same as in Europe, such as the yew, holly, hornbeam, walnut, Weymouth pine, (Pinus strobus, W.) and common spruce fir, (Pinus picea, W.) As, however, the greater part are of little value, from the inaccessible nature of the country, I shall ...
— An Account of The Kingdom of Nepal • Fancis Buchanan Hamilton
... was no longer young, according to the severe standards of that time of early marriages and correspondingly early "old-maidenhood," but so much the better, as she was therefore of suitable age for the elderly though spruce and prosperous widower. She was, withal, a decidedly personable woman with the elegant manners and conversation of the inner circles of the exclusive, stately society in which she had been nurtured—just the woman, the fair prophetesses said, to ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... green stalks, and the air was full of the deliciously penetrating odour of the mimosa and sweetbriar. Down one special alley, where the white philadelphus, or 'mock orange' grew in thick bushes on either side, intermingled with ferns and spruce firs, whose young green tips exhaled a pungent, healthy scent that entered into the blood like wine and invigorated it, Sir Roger de Launay was pacing to and fro with a swinging step which, notwithstanding ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... It has none of the smug mercantile primness of the northern cities, but a look of state, as of quondam wealth and importance, a little gone down in the world, yet remembering still its former dignity. The northern towns, compared with it, are as the spruce citizen rattling by the faded splendors of an old family-coach in his newfangled chariot—they certainly have got on before it. Charleston has an air of eccentricity, too, and peculiarity, which formerly were ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... blankets on sleds or toboggans. At night they would use their snow-shoes to shovel a wide, circular pit in the snow, clearing it away to the bare earth. In the centre of the pit, they would build their camp fire, and sleep around it on piles of spruce boughs, secure from the winter wind. The leaders, usually members of the nobility, fared on these expeditions as rudely as their men, and outdid them in courage and endurance. Some of the most noted chiefs of the wood-rangers were scions of the noblest families; and though living most of the ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... directly in front of them was a wigwam, so cunningly built in behind a growth of small spruce trees that unless one knew of its whereabouts it might be easily passed by. The Indian girl laughed at Anne's exclamation, and nodded at her in a ...
— A Little Maid of Massachusetts Colony • Alice Turner Curtis
... preconceived dislike, I had to admit that the man was presentable. A big fellow he was, tall and dark, as Gertrude had said, smooth-shaven and erect, with prominent features and a square jaw. He was painfully spruce in his appearance, and his ...
— The Circular Staircase • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... the Squire, calling up a spruce embodiment of blue cloth, brass buttons, and pink cravat,—"I say! here's Cilly off the hooks to get hold of the new teacher. Whereabouts do you s'pose ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... evening was so hot and close that the crowded cars were stifling. Nobody ever knew just why trains stopped at Millward siding. Nobody was ever known to get off there or get on. There was only one house nearer to it than four miles, and it was surrounded by acres of blueberry barrens and scrub spruce-trees. ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... audible,—a voice at which all the weary animals pricked their ears, they knew not, most of them, why. But when the cars and cages were run out into the fields, where the tents were to be raised, there drew down from spruce-clad hills a faint fragrance which thrilled the bear's nostrils, and stirred formless longings in his heart, and made his ears deaf to the wild music of the falls. That fragrance, imperceptible to nostrils less sensitive than his, was the breath of his native wilderness, a ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... structure of logs, laid lengthwise, and rudely plastered at each point of contact with adobe, the material from which the chimney, which entirely occupied one gable, was built. It was pierced with two windows and a door, roofed with smaller logs, and thatched with long half cylinders of spruce bark. But the interior gave certain indications of the distinction as well as the peculiar experiences of its occupant. In place of the usual bunk or berth built against the wall stood a small folding camp bedstead, and upon a rude deal table that held a tin wash-basin and pail lay two ivory-handled ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... in such good time that Kit had rubbed down the pony and made him as spruce as a race-horse, before Mr Garland came down to breakfast; which punctual and industrious conduct the old lady, and the old gentleman, and Mr Abel, highly extolled. At his usual hour (or rather at his usual minute and second, for he was the soul ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... of ye laste greate partie, where Dorsey dyd serve so well ye terrapines and steamed oysters, and howe thatt itt is verament and trewe thatt Miss Porridge is to live, after hir marriage, in a howse in Locust strete, or peradventure in Spruce, or in Pyne, for in this towne all the stretes are of woode, albeit ye ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... "you empty it before breaking camp, and in the evening fill it again. Plenty of hemlock or spruce handy, whenever you choose to stretch out ...
— The Boy Scouts of Lenox - Or The Hike Over Big Bear Mountain • Frank V. Webster
... woven saplings over which canvas was nailed. They built a chimney of stones rounded by the water's action, and for a hearth found a slab of granite which they sunk in the earth before the fireplace. The bunk was a frame of young pines with canvas stretched across, and cushioned with spruce boughs and buffalo robes. She watched as they nailed up shelves of small, split trunks and sawed the larger ones into sections for seats. The bottom of the wagon came out and, poised on four log supports, made ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... next he threw the saddle on and mounted. "I must be going back, or they will decide I am not coming till to-morrow, and quickly eat my supper." He spoke jauntily from his horse, arm akimbo, natty short jacket put on for to-day's courting, gray steeple-hat silver-embroidered, a spruce, pretty boy, not likely to toil severely at wood contracts so long as he could hold soul and body together and otherwise be merry, and the hand of that careless arm soft on his pistol, lest Don Ruz should ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... exhibition, it has shown new life, new shoots have appeared, and two tufts of green now decorate the otherwise dry and withered log, and the yucca promises to bloom again before the winter is over. One of the most perfect specimens of the Douglass spruce ever seen is in the collection, and is a decided curiosity. It is a recent arrival from the Rocky Mountains. Its bark, two inches or more in thickness, is perforated with holes reaching to the-sap-wood. Many of these contain acorns, or the remains of acorns, which ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 360, November 25, 1882 • Various
... fallen, I suppose, in the first crash, and which was nearest to the pond, taking a more easterly direction, sank among our screen of chestnuts and firs, knocking down one spruce-fir, breaking off the head of another, and stripping the two corner chestnuts of several branches in its fall. This is not all: the maple bearing the weathercock was broken in two, and what I regret more than all the rest is, that all the ...
— A Book of Sibyls - Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen • Anne Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie)
... were wrapped in pieces of old bagging and fastened on the end of long spruce poles, which we had brought along specially for this purpose. A wire from the battery had, of course, been connected with one of the primers buried in the dynamite. Pole, wire, and dynamite were thrust down through cracks in the ice at several places in the adjacent floes. ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary
... instinct, had already rigged with four little sloops to sail about on the ends of the projecting arms, on Mondays, tacking after shirts and stockings. Then they went to the barn, and David showed how he was going to cover the sides with spruce shingles, so that he could have a warm place to work in in the winter. Then they went over the fields, and planned a garden for the next spring; and then they went down to the shore, and, where a little arm of the sea made in, David showed where ...
— Five Hundred Dollars - First published in the "Century Magazine" • Heman White Chaplin
... portions near the line With rocky soil and stunted spruce and pine, With scarce a wigwam or a ranger's hearth, We left untilled, and deemed of little worth; The petals of this desert rose unfold, When man discovers mines of ...
— Gleams of Sunshine - Optimistic Poems • Joseph Horatio Chant
... going about any matter as if it was the first thing to be done; her little orderly methods. She kept her mother's room neat, she put the books back in their places; there was a cluster of autumn leaves in a vase, or a sprig of spruce or cedar that for a long while would put forth new leaves. She was very glad now that she had taken so much pains. Was she rather unpolished when they had first come from Laconia. But her ...
— The Girls at Mount Morris • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... for a moment behind a clump of willows, only to reappear in broader volume. Beyond, seemingly at no distance at all, yet bordered by miles of turf and desert, the patches of vivid green interspersed with the darker colouring of spruce, and the outcropping of brown rocks, the towering peaks of a great mountain-chain swept up into the clear blue of the sky, black almost to their summits, which were dazzling with the white of unmelted snow. Marvellous, ...
— The Strange Case of Cavendish • Randall Parrish
... they made A grand parade, With marching train-band, guild, and trade: The burgomaster in robes arrayed, Gold chain, and mace, and gay cockade, Great keys carried, and flags displayed, Pompous marshal and spruce young aide, Carriage and foot and cavalcade; While big drums thundered and trumpets brayed, And all the bands of the canton played; The fountain spouted lemonade, Children drank of the bright cascade; Spectators of every rank and ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. V, August, 1878, No 10. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... I cleaned up about one hundred and twenty dollars from the Fourth to Labor Day," says he. "But there was lots of good days when I didn't git any parties at all. You see, I look kind of old and shabby. So does the Curlew; and the spruce young fellers with the new boats gits the cream of the trade. But it don't take ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... Where day never shuts his eye, Up in the broad fields of the sky. There I suck the liquid air, All amidst the gardens fair Of Hesperus, and his daughters three That sing about the golden tree. Along the crisped shades and bowers Revels the spruce and jocund Spring; The Graces and the rosy-bosomed Hours Thither all their bounties bring. There eternal Summer dwells; And west winds with musky wing About the cedarn alleys fling Nard and cassia's balmy smells. Iris there with humid bow ...
— L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Comus, and Lycidas • John Milton
... Abies communis and pectinata, by pinching with wire the leading and all the lateral shoots excepting one. But we believe that they were too old when experimented on; and some were pinched too severely, and [page 188] some not enough. Only one case succeeded, namely, with the spruce-fir. The leading shoot was not killed, but its growth was checked; at its base there were three lateral shoots in a whorl, two of which were pinched, one being thus killed; the third was left untouched. These lateral shoots, when operated on (July 14th) stood ...
— The Power of Movement in Plants • Charles Darwin
... watch the smoke curling up from the chimney straight as a column, for there was not a breath of air stirring. The sun was almost gone, and the strong bluish light was settling on everything, giving even the green spruce-trees ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... delivery had to be scrapped. Two of the types manufactured proved to be unsatisfactory and were condemned, with an estimated loss of twenty-six million dollars. Finally the bitter cold of the winter made it difficult to secure the indispensable spruce from the northwestern forests, and lumbering operations were hampered by extensive strikes, which were said to have resulted ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... vigilant eye of a sentinel. To Major John Bliss, who was in command at Fort Snelling from 1833 to 1836, the name "Black Starvation" might well have been applied. The negro servant, Hannibal, who clandestinely sold spruce beer to the soldiers was confined in the Black Hole for forty-eight hours; and Private Kelly, who refused to do his part in the fatigue party spent more than seventy-two hours in the Black Hole before the pangs of starvation persuaded ...
— Old Fort Snelling - 1819-1858 • Marcus L. Hansen
... moon is the time to cut alders, spruce, or other undergrowth, because the roots then die ...
— Current Superstitions - Collected from the Oral Tradition of English Speaking Folk • Various
... shore, the sky was murky with the smoke of unseen forest fires, and through this the afternoon sun broke feebly, throwing a vague radiance to earth, and unreal shadows. To the sky-line of the four quarters—spruce-shrouded islands, dark waters, and ice-scarred rocky ridges—stretched the immaculate wilderness. No sign of human existence broke the solitude; no sound the stillness. The land seemed bound under the unreality of the unknown, wrapped in the brooding mystery ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London
... differentiate this national park from any other, Nature has provided still another element of popularity and distinction. East of this splendid rampart spreads a broad area of rolling plateau, carpeted with wild flowers, edged and dotted with luxuriant groves of pine, spruce, fir, and aspen, and diversified with hills and craggy mountains, carved rock walls, long forest-grown moraines and picturesque ravines; a stream-watered, lake-dotted summer and winter pleasure paradise of great size, bounded on the north and west by snow-spattered ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... service, and our coming was celebrated by a dinner of wild goose, plum pudding, and coffee. After the voyage from Halifax it seemed good to rest a little with the firm earth under foot, and where the walls of one's habitation were still. Through the open windows came the fragrance of the spruce woods, and from the little piazza in front of the house you could look down and across Lake Melville, and away to the blue mountains beyond, where the snow was still lying ...
— A Woman's Way Through Unknown Labrador • Mina Benson Hubbard (Mrs. Leonidas Hubbard, Junior)
... nestling below Great hills white with lingering snow, With its tin-roofed chapel stood Half hid in the dwarf spruce wood; ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... of a mile long, with rocks at each end. On the shore above lay 1000 Frenchmen under Lieutenant Colonel de Saint Julien, with eight cannons, on swivels, planted to sweep every part of the beach. The intrenchments, behind which the troops were lying, were covered in front by spruce and fir trees, felled and laid on the ground with ...
— With Wolfe in Canada - The Winning of a Continent • G. A. Henty
... given the price of a week's sustenance to see her for a moment! To leave my work and go without food was the least of it! I must traverse the streets of Paris without getting splashed, run to escape showers, and reach her rooms at last, as neat and spruce as any of the coxcombs about her. For a poet and a distracted wooer the difficulties of this task were endless. My happiness, the course of my love, might be affected by a speck of mud upon my only white waistcoat! ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... Jardine, and obtained a few sidelights on Liosha's defensive methods. What they lacked in subtlety they made up in physical effectiveness. There were not many spruce young gentlemen who, after a week's residence in that establishment, did not adopt a ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... bark carefully away from the hindquarters of a spruce tree and remove the tenderloin. One of last year's Christmas trees is excellent for the purpose. Chop it up fine and place in a saucepan. Add boiling water and let it simper two hours. Season with a pinch of salt, and if ...
— The Silly Syclopedia • Noah Lott
... looking at a figure in the upper left-hand corner, "that came from station 'D,' on the corner of Spruce ...
— Bert Wilson on the Gridiron • J. W. Duffield
... roar this blazed up. In a moment it was a column of fire stretching skyward. The sight was terrible to behold. Then like a whirlwind the arms of fire reached out and enveloped another tree, and sparks flying with the wind lodged in a spruce nearby and converted it into a roaring furnace. And thus in the space of a minute a forest ...
— The Boy Scout Fire Fighters • Irving Crump
... favourable to any of the European kinds of grain; but produces great plenty of maize, which the people bake into bread, and brew into beer, though their favourite drink is made of molasses hopped, and impregnated with the tops of the spruce-fir, which is a native of this country. The ground raises good flax and tolerable hemp. Here are great herds of black cattle, some of them very large in size, a vast number of excellent hogs, a breed of small horses, graceful, swift, and hardy; and large flocks of sheep, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... goodness you'd keep your goods in better order. In front of your store, on sidewalk and gutter, are old fruits, potatoes, and sundry other things too old to be quite nice. So spruce things up, and you will be ...
— Marjorie's Busy Days • Carolyn Wells
... at peace. Their bells call softly back and forward to one another on Sunday mornings and such is the harmony between them that even the episcopal rooks in the elm trees of St. Asaph's and the presbyterian crows in the spruce trees of St. Osoph's are known to exchange perches on ...
— Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich • Stephen Leacock
... and scenic peculiarities of Fowler township. Bare, sterile, famished-looking, as far as horticultural and herbaceous crops are concerned, yet rich in pasture and abounding in herds—with vast rocks crested and plumed with rich growths of black balsam, maple, and spruce timber, and with huge boulders scattered carelessly over its surface and margining its streams, St. Lawrence County presents to-day features of savage grandeur as wild and imposing as it did ere the foot of a trapper had profaned ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... monotonously from the scant eaves of the little church of the Sidon Brethren at West Woodlands. Hewn out of the very heart of a thicket of buckeye spruce and alder, unsunned and unblown upon by any wind, it was so green and unseasoned in its solitude that it seemed a part of the arboreal growth, and on damp Sundays to have taken root again and sprouted. There were moss and ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... there is no luxury equal to that of lying before a good fire on a good spruce bed, after a good supper, and a hard moose chase in a fine clear frosty moonlit starry night. But to enter into the spirit of this, you must understand what a moose chase is: the man himself runs the moose down by pursuing the track. ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... the shop. The one was a stout, angry-looking person of middle age, very dark, and very full about the lower part of the face, which was not concealed by the closely cut black beard. His companion was a diminutive little man, very thin and very spruce, not less than fifty years old. His face was entirely shaved and was deeply marked with lines and furrows. A pair of piercing grey eyes looked through big gold-rimmed spectacles. As he took off his hat, a few thin, sandy-coloured locks fluttered a ...
— A Cigarette-Maker's Romance • F. Marion Crawford
... them nor at the sky, nor might she pick berries. It was believed that if she were to look at the sky, the weather would be bad; that if she picked berries, it would rain; and that when she hung her towel of cedar-bark on a spruce-tree, the tree withered up at once. She went out of the house by a separate door and bathed in a creek far from the village. She fasted for some days, and for many days more she might not ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... of the brown and yellow bark, not only of the prostrate trees, but of the many killed by crowding and unable to seek the earth with the natural instinct of death. And above, the green of hemlock and spruce was perennially fresh and young, glistening and fragrant. Here and there was a small clearing where the clans had erected their ingenious and hideous totem poles, out of place in the ancient beauty ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... But it came back to earth with awful force, and I felt the ground tremble as it crushed a wide way through the woods. It finally brought up at the bottom of a gulch with a wreckage of hundreds of noble spruce trees that it had crushed down and swept ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... the spray of the falls floats here and there, spreading out in broad sheets over the damp earth, and gathering into filmy ropes and patches as the breeze catches it among the spruce, pine and maple trees above the edge of the falls. A short distance ahead the water glitters again where the river makes a slight turn and plunges over another precipice. It is like the flashing of distant shields. Overhead drift massed ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... are fringed with the beautiful swamp-oak, a tree of the Casuarina family, with a form and character somewhat intermediate between that of the spruce and that of the Scotch fir, being less formal and Dutch-like than the former, and ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... with death any one who might dare to look upon them. The height of land or plateau which constitutes the interior of the Labrador peninsula is from 2,000 to 2,500 feet above the sea level, fairly heavily wooded with spruce, fir, hackmatack, and birch, and not at all the desolate waste it has been pictured by many writers. The barrenness of Labrador is confined to the coast, and one cannot enter the interior in any direction without being struck by the latent possibilities ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 822 - Volume XXXII, Number 822. Issue Date October 3, 1891 • Various
... women, darling of my heart, we are free at last, we roll in wealth, we need never scrimp again. It's a case for Veuve Cliquot!" and he got out a pint of spruce-beer and made sacrifice, he saying "Damn the expense," and she rebuking him gently with reproachful but humid ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... rather long—not of that pronounced length which inevitably challenges the decision of the bystander as to whether the wearer be fool or poet, but still long enough to fall a little carelessly round the head and so take off from the spruce conventional effect of the owner's irreproachable ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... City and Suburban Bank, and it puzzled her to think why a bank manager should live with such a seedy-looking person, who smoked clay pipes and sipped whiskey and water all the evening when he was at home. For Roxdal was as spruce and erect as his fellow-lodger was round-shouldered and shabby; he never smoked, and he confined himself to a small glass ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various
... narrow quarters. Supplies ran low, and to make matters worse the pestilence of scurvy came upon the camp. In February almost the entire company was stricken down and nearly one quarter of them had died before the emaciated survivors learned from the Indians that the bark of a white spruce tree boiled in water would afford a cure. The Frenchmen dosed themselves with the Indian remedy, using a whole tree in less than a week, but with such revivifying results that Cartier hailed the discovery as a genuine miracle. ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro
... glass rings low, the charming power that lives Within it makes the music that it gives. It dims! it brightens! it will shape itself. And see! a graceful dazzling little elf. He lives! he moves! spruce mannikin of fire, What more can we? what ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... on the bag, but to make sure he was right he looked at them again before he entered the big Bellhaven Hotel by its Forty-second-Street door. At sight of him a bell boy ran across the lobby and took from him his burden. The boy followed him, a pace in the rear, to the desk, where a spruce young gentleman awaited their coming. "Can I get a room with bath for the night—a quiet inside room where I'll be able to sleep as late as I please ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... titles of a few of them. Mr. Sylvester D. Judd discussed the question of "Protective Adaptations of insects from an Ornithological Point of View;" Mr. William C. Rives talked of "Summer Birds of the West Virginia Spruce Belt;" Mr. John N. Clark read a paper entitled "Ten Days among the Birds of Northern New Hampshire;" Harry C. Oberholser talked extemporaneously of "Liberian Birds," and in a most entertaining and instructive manner, every word ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [December, 1897], Vol 2. No 6. • Various
... as a horse cantered down a glade, under an ardent sky, amid blooms never seen since then. She was whisked back into that distant, unreal world by the figure of a young Romany standing beside a spruce-tree, and by her father's voice which uttered the startling words: "He says he ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the Athabasca has suffered much from forest fires. What we see is largely second growth,—Banksian pine, fir, spruce, birch, and aspen. The aspen is the first deciduous tree to leaf. Tall, slender, delicate, its bole is clean as an organ-pipe and its terraced feathery branches seem to ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... little grove about a mile from my house, to see the grave of a beautiful little child, that was buried on the summit of a little hill, covered with pines, spruce and other evergreens. ...
— Parker's Second Reader • Richard G. Parker
... Whittington! You've hit the nail on the head this time. You'll have to spread your blanket on the soft side of a pine board. If you want something real luxurious you can go into the woods and cut an armful of spruce boughs to strew ...
— Jim Spurling, Fisherman - or Making Good • Albert Walter Tolman
... and crawl through the snow. When I reached the point for which I was aiming, the bear had just finished rooting, and was starting off. A slight whistle brought him to a standstill, and I drew a bead behind his shoulder, and low down, resting the rifle across the crooked branch of a dwarf spruce. At the crack he ran off at speed, making no sound, but the thick spatter of blood splashes, showing clear on the white snow, betrayed the mortal nature of the wound. For some minutes I followed the trail; ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt
... no fun in bein' a rusticator anyway, down there by the sea-wall on a hot day, settin' up agin' a spruce tree admirin' the lan'scape, with ants an' pitch ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... twenty minutes, Soames waited, walking slowly up and down. When, at last, coming from the direction of Westminster, he saw the familiar spruce figure. ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... "It's not a bad little hole. Old Mrs. NUBBLES keeps things wonderfully spruce. This is one of the cottages ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 22, 1892 • Various
... apparently had been looking around more or less since they came ashore, "there are plenty of spruce and hemlock and fir trees close by. We can make our beds like hunters always used to do, away ...
— Afloat - or, Adventures on Watery Trails • Alan Douglas
... sleep is a sure solvent of distress. There whirls not for him in the night any so hideous a phantasmagoria as will not become, in the clarity of next morning, a spruce procession for him to lead. Brief the vague horror of his awakening; memory sweeps back to him, and he sees nothing dreadful after all. "Why not?" is the sun's bright message to him, and "Why not indeed?" his answer. After hours ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... in the lounge half-an-hour or so, when I looked up, and then, to my surprise, saw Pennington, smartly dressed, and looking very spruce for his years, crossing from the bureau with a number of letters in his hand. It was apparent that he had just received them ...
— Hushed Up - A Mystery of London • William Le Queux
... Milestone observed, required trimming and clearing in various parts; a little pointing and polishing was necessary for the dilapidated walls; and the whole effect would be materially increased by a plantation of spruce fir, the present rugged and broken ascent being first converted into a beautiful slope, which might be easily effected by blowing up a part of the rock with gunpowder, laying on a quantity of fine mould, and covering the whole with ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VII • Various
... had pined for any kind of civilization rather than a continuance of the eternal snows, wondered if this were any better. Jim pitched the tent under some spruce-trees and high up on a ...
— Colorado Jim • George Goodchild
... weight. A restless tramp is Mooween, who scatters his records over forty miles of hillside on a summer day, when his lazy mood happens to leave him for a season. Here, on the other side, are the bronze-green petals of a spruce cone, chips from a squirrel's workshop, scattered as if Meeko had brushed them hastily from his yellow apron when he rushed out to see Mooween as he passed. There, beyond, is a mink sign, plain as daylight, where Cheokhes ...
— Wood Folk at School • William J. Long
... was so clear and pleasant, and the horse seemed to like the idea of the ride so much himself, as he stood snorting and pawing at the garden-gate, that I had a great desire to go. So I was sent upstairs to Peggotty to be made spruce; and in the meantime Mr. Murdstone dismounted, and, with his horse's bridle drawn over his arm, walked slowly up and down on the outer side of the sweetbriar fence, while my mother walked slowly up and down on the inner to keep him company. I recollect Peggotty and I peeping out ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... and virtuous; and I know that they often said as much to Leonisa, in order to dispose her to receive me as her betrothed; but she had set her heart on Cornelio, the son of Ascanio Rotulo, whom you well know—a spruce young gallant, point-de-vice in his attire, with white hands, curly locks, mellifluous voice, amorous discourse—made up, in short, of amber and sugar-paste, garnished with plumes and brocade. She never cared to bestow a look on my less dainty face, nor to be touched in the ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... low, marshy, meadow land, covered with rank grass and frosted with saline incrustations; while south of the building extended spacious grounds, studded here and there with noble groups of deodars, Norway spruce, and various ornamental shrubs, and bounded by a tall impenetrable hedge of osage orange. Before the house, which faced the ocean and fronted east, the lawn sloped gently down to a terrace surmounted by a granite balustrade; and just ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... and to cry, "To the devil with the world!"? At such moments a great force seems to uplift one as on wings; and one flies, and everything else flies, but contrariwise—both the verst stones, and traders riding on the shafts of their waggons, and the forest with dark lines of spruce and fir amid which may be heard the axe of the woodcutter and the croaking of the raven. Yes, out of a dim, remote distance the road comes towards one, and while nothing save the sky and the light clouds through which the moon is cleaving her way seem halted, the brief ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... and snow still lingered in patches. I tried for trout in the head of a large, partly open pool, but did not get a rise; too much ice in the stream, I concluded. Very soon my attention was attracted by a strange note, or call, in the spruce woods. The President had also noticed it, and, with me, wondered what made it. Was it bird or beast? Billy Hofer said he thought it was an owl, but it in no way suggested an owl, and the sun was shining brightly. It was a sound such as a boy ...
— Camping with President Roosevelt • John Burroughs
... piles of Oxford and English cathedrals without feeling that the forest overpowered the mind of the builder, and that his chisel, his saw and plane, still reproduced its ferns, its spikes of flowers, its locust, elm, pine, and spruce." ...
— A Cathedral Courtship • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... spectacle, and Bessie was left at liberty to enjoy it, and also to take note of the many gay and fashionable folk who enrich and embellish Ryde in the season; for Mr. Cecil Burleigh was entirely engrossed with another person. The party they had joined consisted of a very thin old gentleman, spruce, well brushed, and well cared for; of a languid, pale lady, some thirty years younger, who was his wife; and of two girls, their daughters. It was one of these daughters who absorbed all Mr. Cecil Burleigh's attention, and Bessie recognized her at once as that most beautiful ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... of the Hoffman spur, immediately above the great Tuolumne canon, there are ten lovely lakelets lying near together in one general hollow, like eggs in a nest. Seen from above, in a general view, feathered with Hemlock Spruce, and fringed with sedge, they seem to me the most singularly beautiful and interestingly located lake-cluster ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... of us worked our way leisurely through the crowd toward the side-street down which Anazeh had led his party. We found them looking very spruce and savage, four abreast, drawn up in the throat of an alley, old Anazeh sitting his horse at their head like a symbol of the ancient order waiting to assault the new. My horse was close beside him, held by Ahmed, ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... were dry and they heaped up the leaves and rubbish and started a blaze. The other girls brought more fuel and soon a hot fire was leaping against the side of the rock and its circle of warmth cheered them. They got green branches of spruce and pine and brushed away the snow and banked it up in a wall all about the platform, which served them for a camp. Then they scraped the fire out from the rock, threw on more branches (for the green ones would burn now that the fire was so hot) and crowded in between ...
— Ruth Fielding at Snow Camp • Alice Emerson
... puritan's garb of mine is hardly worth brushing," said Wildrake; "and but for this hundred-weight of rusty iron, with which thou hast bedizened me, I look more like a bankrupt Quaker than anything else. But I'll make you as spruce as ever was a canting rogue of ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... of trees, noting buds, branches, and foliage of spruce, cedar, horse-chestnut, etc. (See ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education
... overhanging a mountain stream, they were not frightened. But when they began to grow tired, and the trail led them into a dark forest, where the sun came through the thick boughs and shone only in patches of light upon the slippery spruce needles, ...
— The Swiss Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... peeresses and their daughters, &c. The simplest pew below belongs to the Lord Chamberlain, the Lord Steward, peers and their sons, or members of Parliament, &c. The Chapel Royal, like the State-rooms, is fresh and spruce from renewal. It has, however, wisely avoided all departure from the original character of the building, which has nothing but the carved roof and the great square window to distinguish it from any other chapel ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... gummed up with them," Father repeated over and over and laughed like a child each time. Often I complained about the stone house at Riverby, that Father in planning it did not plan to use the winter sunshine; not only were the windows not placed right but there were spruce trees in the way. "You write a book on 'Winter Sunshine' and you let none in your house," I told him and he said that if he had the winter sunshine in his house he might not have written the book. A statement ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... under hemlock trees. At Ithaca it is not always associated with hemlock trees. The largest specimens found here were in the border of mixed woods where hemlock was a constituent. It has been found near and under white pine trees in lawns, around the Norway spruce and under the Norway spruce. The plants are from 5—15 cm. high, the cap from 5—12 cm. in diameter, and the stem 6—8 mm. ...
— Studies of American Fungi. Mushrooms, Edible, Poisonous, etc. • George Francis Atkinson
... form of an irregular 5-sided prism (Fig. 3). The smallest side of the prism is designed to serve as a flat keel. The axis is formed of a metallic float, from whence start radii that form the skeleton of the framework, and that are designed for connecting the center with five long spruce beams that form the angles of the prism. To these beams are affixed the cross pieces that form the openwork sides. Five long pieces of wood parallel with the beams, but not so strong as they, protect the cross pieces and secure them against breakage in the middle. All the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 455, September 20, 1884 • Various
... 1819. The frost was so severe that the verdure around White Mead, and throughout all the low parts of the Forest, was entirely destroyed. There was not a green leaf left on any oak or beech, large or small, and all the shoots of the year were altogether withered. The spruce and silver firs were all injured: in short all trees but Scotch fir and poplar suffered severely.—August 10th. The plantations had recovered from the effects of the frost—the oak more effectually than the beech, and had made more vigorous and thriving shoots ...
— The Forest of Dean - An Historical and Descriptive Account • H. G. Nicholls
... the part an air of Spanish loftiness. He looked, spake, and moved like an old Castilian. He was starch, spruce, opinionated, but his superstructure of pride seemed bottomed upon a sense of worth. There was something in it beyond the coxcomb. It was big and swelling, but you could not be sure that it was hollow. You might wish to see it taken down, but you felt that ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... fell with the swell, a varnished gunwale glistened in the sunlight. It was fully four fathoms and a half in length, and was undoubtedly a ship's boat; and, being a ship's boat, was probably built of hard wood, and therefore vastly superior to the spruce ...
— Bobby of the Labrador • Dillon Wallace
... as so singularly stimulating as to verge upon the riotous. The manner of playing was entirely new to me in the beginning. All conventions bind with a heavy chain, but none with a heavier than the Philadelphia variety. Spruce Street nights had never been so free and so vociferous and so late, and, being a good Philadelphian, I am not sure if the nights that succeeded have yet lost for me their novelty. As a consequence, if, in looking back, my days appear to be wholly monopolized by work, my nights seem consecrated ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... perforce most of their effects behind. They became disheartened and apathetic. The Intendant at Louisbourg says that they will not take the trouble to clear the land, and that some of them live, like Indians, under huts of spruce-branches.[101] The Governor of Isle St. Jean declares that they are dying of hunger.[102] Girard, the priest who had withdrawn to this island rather than break his oath to the English, writes: "Many of them cannot protect ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... such open flattery is beastly. Afterwards to St. James's Park, seeing people play at Pell Mell; where it pleased me mightily to hear a gallant, lately come from France, swear at one of his companions for suffering his man (a spruce blade) to be so saucy as to strike a ball while his master was playing on ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... Interviewer: Mrs. Bernice Bowden Person interviewed: Julia Grace 819 N. Spruce Street, Pine ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Arkansas Narratives Part 3 • Works Projects Administration
... him fairly by the throat and shook him to and fro. And now was I minded to choke him outright, but, even then, spied a cavalier who spurred his horse against me. Hereupon I dashed the breathless Gregory aside and turned to meet my new assailant, a spruce young gallant he, from curling lovelock to Spanish boots. I remember cursing savagely as his whip caught me, then, or ever he could reach me again, I sprang in beneath the head of his rearing horse ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... my deear, we waant some breakfast. Wot'll 'ee 'ave, Jasper? 'Am rasher, my deear, or a few pilchers? Or p'raps Tamsin 'ave got some vowl pie? This es my maid, Tamsin, this es, by the blessin' of Providence—my one yaw lamb, tha's wot she es. As spruce a maid as there es in the country, my deear. An' I forgot, you dunnaw Jasper, do 'ee, Tamsin? This es Jasper Pennington, a godly young man who, like Esau of ould, 'ave bin rubbed of his birthright an' hes blessin'. He's a-goin' to jine us, Tamsin, 'n' then 'ee'll ...
— The Birthright • Joseph Hocking
... gold-gleaming fields, by pale-green marsh-meadows and red-blooming buckwheat. And with an abrupt descent from the road you come to the Drau far below, flowing with deep roar between steep banks thickly set with towering young spears of spruce, and tussling with rocky boulders; yet from the road one could not look down upon its battles there in the cool canyon, so precipitous are its banks, so densely black rises the legion of spruces. Only when a brook storms under ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... close, neighboring, adjacent, contiguous. Neat, tidy, orderly, spruce, trim, prim. Needful, necessary, requisite, essential, indispensable. Negligence, neglect, inattention, inattentiveness, inadvertence, remissness, oversight. New, novel, fresh, recent, modern, late, innovative, unprecedented. Nice, fastidious, dainty, finical, squeamish. ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... Prue was right about her own house. Two coats of paint outside gave it a decidedly spruce appearance, while, inside, that lady's vision as to its capabilities had been more than realized. The blending of roughness and luxury, of camp and home characteristics, gave the large central apartment a quaintness that had real charm for eyes weary of ...
— Sara, a Princess • Fannie E. Newberry
... however, there were more than a thousand logs in the glut; and the ends stood up like a porcupine's quills, at every conceivable angle. The obstructing logs in the throat of the fall bore the pressure rather lengthwise than across the fibre. These sticks were of yellow spruce, fifty feet long, and fully three feet through. Such logs, when green, will bear an enormous strain. From the way the exposed ends sprang we knew they were buckling like steel rods, yet ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... many people favoured Joyce with glances of admiration, especially a spruce-looking young constable who officially held up the traffic to allow us to cross the road. He paid no attention at all to me, but I consoled myself with the reflection that he was missing an excellent chance ...
— A Rogue by Compulsion • Victor Bridges
... tidy, orderly, trim, clean, cleanly; tasteful, trim, finished, artistic, nice, excellent, adroit; dainty; spruce; dapper, natty. Antonyms: dowdy, slovenly, slatternly, untidy, tawdry, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... while the people slept he caused birch, spruce, and cottonwood trees to spring up in the low places, and when the people awoke in the morning they clapped their hands in delight, for the birds were singing in the tree-tops and the green leaves with the sunlight flickering ...
— A Treasury of Eskimo Tales • Clara Kern Bayliss
... shore, and that probably was the reason I had hitherto neglected it. There was a strip of woodland belonging to the Oaklands estate through which a part of the road lay. There had been a recent fall of snow and this was still clinging heavily to the trees, especially to the spruce and hemlocks, bringing strangely to mind the muffled, mysterious figures of the Sisters of Charity and Nuns, as I used to see them gliding about the streets of the old world cities. Here and there interspersed ...
— Medoline Selwyn's Work • Mrs. J. J. Colter
... and all we had to do was to place them on their ends against the conical framework of poles. In a few minutes we had a serviceable wigwam formed. As after our fatigues we were anxious to have comfortable couches, we cut down the tops of a number of small spruce firs, with which we covered the floor, using our knapsacks for pillows, and before long three of us ...
— Snow Shoes and Canoes - The Early Days of a Fur-Trader in the Hudson Bay Territory • William H. G. Kingston
... dangle the tempting wares, and a stump serves as a chopping-block. Under the shrubbery, where the sun cannot penetrate, are stored home-made firkins full of yellow butter, and great cheeses, and heaps of substantial home-baked bread. Kegs of hard cider and spruce beer and perhaps more potent brews are abroach, and behind the haggling and jesting and bustle you may catch the sound of muskets or the whoop of the Indians from afar. Meanwhile, in the settlements, all ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... hear of a cent less. Howard wants I should save every penny, so's at least one of the younger children can have more of an education than James an' Sally an' Austin an' Ruth. I don't look at it that way—seems to me it ain't fair to give one child more than another. I want to spruce up this place a little, an' lay by to raise the ...
— The Old Gray Homestead • Frances Parkinson Keyes
... cheese, and we lost her; and after we had eaten at this cheese seven years, we came upon a great dun mare, alive and kicking. Well, once after that I was going to drive this mare to the mill, and her backbone snapped in two; but I wasn't put out, not I; for I took a spruce sapling, and put it into her for a backbone, and she had no other backbone all the while we had her. But the sapling grew up into such a tall tree, that I climbed right up to the sky by it, and when I got there I saw a lady ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten
... that one jumpy moment, just at the end of the Thanksgiving dinner, when, heralded by a slam in the wood-shed, a hoppytyskip in the hall, the dining-room door flung widely open on Carol's eyes twinkling like a whole skyful of stars through the shaggy, dark branches of a young spruce-tree. It made young Derry Willard laugh right ...
— Fairy Prince and Other Stories • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... he had helped the others put up the fragrant spruce pine-tree which reached to the ceiling, helped to dress it midst jolly chatter and joyous confusion, helped to hide the innumerable presents for the morrow's findings; and on Christmas morning had as eagerly dumped the contents of his stocking as had Jack and Janet, or the ...
— The Man in Lonely Land • Kate Langley Bosher
... the drive up to the house-door, and a sweep, or small oval plot, of turf, surrounded by gravel; and a gate at the corner of this sweep opened into a grove of the grandest old spruce-firs in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... good old Roaring Brook!" Doctor Joe stopped for a moment with half closed eyes, to listen to the rush of water over the rocks, where Roaring Brook tumbled down into The Jug. "It's the sweetest music I've heard since I left here! And the smell of the spruce trees! And such a scene! Thomas, my friend, it's a rugged land where we live, but it's God's own land, just as He made it, beautiful, ...
— Troop One of the Labrador • Dillon Wallace
... mountain stream, they were not frightened. But when they began to grow tired, and the trail led them into a dark forest, where the sun came through the thick boughs and shone only in patches of light upon the slippery spruce needles, they grew ...
— The Swiss Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... Lombardy, flooded with sunlight, filled with swirling vapour, but never wholly hidden from our sight. For the blast kept shifting the cloud-masses, and the sun streamed through in spears and bands of sheeny rays. Over the parapet our horses dropped, down through sable spruce and amber larch, down between tangles of rowan and autumnal underwood. Ever as we sank, the mountains rose—those sharp embattled precipices, toppling spires, impendent chasms blurred with mist, that make the entrance into Italy sublime. Nowhere do the Alps exhibit their full stature, their ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... hot after him, and he knew not how to defend himself. His photograph was implored. He was waylaid by journalists shabby and by journalists spruce, and the resulting interviews made him squirm. He became a man of mark at Pickering's. Photographers entreated him to sit free of charge. What irritated him in the whole vast affair was the continual insistence upon his lack of ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... butt ends up as shown in the right-hand shelter (Fig. 13), or lay a number of poles as shown in the left-hand figure (Fig. 12) and thatch this with browse as illustrated by the left-hand shelter in Fig. 13, or take elm, spruce, or birch bark and shingle as in Fig. 14. These shelters may be built for one boy or they may be made large enough for several men. They may be thatched with balsam, spruce, pine, or hemlock boughs, or with cat-tails, rushes (see Figs. 66 ...
— Shelters, Shacks and Shanties • D.C. Beard
... the feathery ceanothus (New Jersey tea). The vivid greenness of the young leaves of the forest, the tender tint of the springing corn, was contrasted with the deep dark fringe of waving pines on the hills, and the yet darker shade of the spruce and balsams on the borders of the creeks, for so our Canadian forest rills are universally termed. The bright glancing wings of the summer red-bird, the crimson-headed woodpecker, the gay blue-bird, and noisy but splendid plumed jay might be seen among the branches; the air was filled with beauteous ...
— Lost in the Backwoods • Catharine Parr Traill
... old Peter's hand, used sometimes to leave the path on his way to school, when he saw the delving old figure in the ploughed field, and discovered, even at a distance, that his jaws were still and his brow knotted, run up to him, and proffer as a substitute for the beloved weed a generous piece of spruce-gum. The old man always took it, and spat it out when the boy's ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... in pine trees in Southern Michigan at an elevation of forty feet. In all cases the nests are placed high in hemlocks or pines, which are the bird's favorite resorts. From all accounts the nests of this species are elegantly and compactly made, consisting of a densely woven mass of spruce twigs, soft vegetable down, rootlets, and fine shreds of bark. The lining is often intermixed with horse hairs and feathers. Four eggs of greenish-white or very pale bluish-green, speckled or spotted, have usually ...
— Birds Illustrated by Colour Photography, Vol II. No. 4, October, 1897 • Various
... darkest corner of the room. McEwan had not noticed her protest, it had all happened so instantaneously. He followed Stefan's direction, and faced the canvas expectantly. There was a long silence. Mary, watching, saw the spruce veneer of metropolitanism fall from their guest like a discarded mask—the grave, steady Highlander emerged. Stefan's moment of malice had flashed and died—he stood biting his nails, already too ashamed to glance in Mary's direction. At last McEwan turned. ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... let me through, and I saw him. He stood, spruce, frock-coated, dapper, as he always was, with his face pressed against and into the grill, and either hand raised and clenched tightly round a bar of the trap. His posture was as of one caught and striving frantically to release himself; yet the narrowness ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... same time shot up into the air so high that for an instant I saw the treetops beneath it. But it came back to earth with awful force, and I felt the ground tremble as it crushed a wide way through the woods. It finally brought up at the bottom of a gulch with a wreckage of hundreds of noble spruce trees that it had crushed down and swept ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... need any advice. Why don't you give her your own tree? That little Norway spruce is just the thing. Come along, and ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 2, December, 1877 • Various
... where Dorsey dyd serve so well ye terrapines and steamed oysters, and howe thatt itt is verament and trewe thatt Miss Porridge is to live, after hir marriage, in a howse in Locust strete, or peradventure in Spruce, or in Pyne, for in this towne all the stretes are of woode, albeit ye ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... went in to see bout gittin' my washin' done, and gosh all spruce gum, thar was one of them pig tailed heathen Chineeze, he jist looked fer all the world like a picter on Aunt Nancy Smith's tea cups. I wuz sort of sot back fer a minnit, coz 'I sed to myself—I don't spose ...
— Uncles Josh's Punkin Centre Stories • Cal Stewart
... salmon-trout and wild strawberries. The town contains about six hundred inhabitants, and has a pleasant seat along the bay. Its principal industry seems to be lumber, or deals, which mean three-inch plank, in which shape most of the pine and spruce exported from the Dominion find their way to England. Here they also put up salmon and lobsters for the American market—America meaning the United States. Two steamers touch here weekly, and there is a daily mail and telegraphic communication with the outside ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... specimen copy, when he can see for himself the great value it will be in his family, and he will thank us in his heart for calling his attention to it. Address James Elverson, publisher, GOLDEN DAYS, corner Ninth and Spruce Streets, Philadelphia, Penna. ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls - Volume XIII, No. 51: November 12, 1892 • Various
... shock to the present generation, but we were accustomed to decency, order, and reverence; and it was no wonder that my father was walking about the churchyard, muttering that he never saw such a place, while my brothers were full of amusement. Their spruce looks in their tall hats, bright ties, dark coats, and white trowsers strapped tight under their boots, looked incongruous with the rest of the congregation, the most distinguished members of which were farmers in drab coats with huge mother-of-pearl buttons, and long gaiters buttoned ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of the incessant rains, it is pervaded by a rich golden gloom, the result of the constant rotting of the brown and yellow bark, not only of the prostrate trees, but of the many killed by crowding and unable to seek the earth with the natural instinct of death. And above, the green of hemlock and spruce was perennially fresh and young, glistening and fragrant. Here and there was a small clearing where the clans had erected their ingenious and hideous totem poles, out of place in the ancient beauty of ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... across in your jacket," said the Elector, laughing. "Remember always that you are the servant of the master, and those spruce fellows but the lackeys of the servant, although I must say that the servant is a much richer, more magnificent man than his master. Run and ...
— The Youth of the Great Elector • L. Muhlbach
... than any other castle I ever visited. But in five minutes I had altered it to suit myself. I had ploughed up the flower-beds, dug a sunken garden, planted a wind screen of fir, spruce, and Pine, and with a huge brick wall secured warmth and privacy. So pleased was I with my changes, that when I departed I was sad and downcast. The boat-house of which Mrs. Farrell had spoken was certainly an ideal work-shop, ...
— The Log of The "Jolly Polly" • Richard Harding Davis
... we camped out on the snow and slept on spruce boughs while we were after the moose, the dogs used to be a great comfort to us. They slept at our feet and kept us warm. Poor brutes, they mostly had a rough time of it. They enjoyed the running and chasing as much as we did, but when it ...
— Beautiful Joe • Marshall Saunders
... "exceeding proud, neat, and spruce" Doctor of Laws, William Parry, who had been busying himself at about the same time with his memorable project against the Queen of England, proved as successful as Balthazar Gerard, the fate of Christendom would have ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... same hour young Melicent, wrapped all about with a flame-coloured veil and crowned with marjoram, was led by a spruce boy toward a threshold, over which Demetrios lifted her, while many people sang in a strange tongue. And then she paid ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... thunder. He was an impressionist study, wasn't he, Fergy? We asked what was up, or rather down, for elevation had no part in him. It appeared that a match was on for this afternoon, between the Baked Beans and the Sweet Peas, the Corners and the Spruce Point team. The Beans were all here except the pitcher and first-baseman, brothers, who were to come over by themselves, as they lived at some distance from the rest of the team; and this telegram conveyed the cheering information, that, instead of coming over, they had ...
— The Merryweathers • Laura E. Richards
... ones on opposite sides of the tree; after which, by introducing a wooden wedge, the bark is easily detached. These plates are usually ten or twelve feet long and two feet nine inches broad. To form the canoe, they are stitched together with fibrous roots of the white spruce about the size of a quill, which are deprived of the bark, split and suppled in water. The seams are coated with resin of the ...
— Among the Trees at Elmridge • Ella Rodman Church
... they heard loud calls, and saw the other boys coming in. X-Ray was wielding the spruce blade now; and in the bow Ethan held up two long strings of glistening and still squirming trout, as trophies to their united prowess with hook, ...
— Phil Bradley's Mountain Boys - The Birch Bark Lodge • Silas K. Boone
... is sometimes resorted to is to place the articles in the top of an evergreen tree, such as the pine, hemlock, or spruce. The thick boughs are so arranged around the packages that they can not be seen from beneath, and they are tied to a limb to prevent them from being blown out by the wind. This will only answer for such articles as will not ...
— The Prairie Traveler - A Hand-book for Overland Expeditions • Randolph Marcy
... whereof Thackeray wrote in the far-off days when it was the abode of fashion,—the far-off days when fashion itself had not become old-fashioned and got improved into Smart Society,—this haunted half-mile or more still retains many fine old residences of brown stone and of red brick, which are spruce and well-kept. One such, on the west side of the street, of red brick, with a high stoop of brown stone, is a boarding-house, and in it is an apartment to which, on a certain clear, cold afternoon in October, the reader's presence in ...
— The Mystery of Murray Davenport - A Story of New York at the Present Day • Robert Neilson Stephens
... highlands of the Rockies, a morning clear, cold, and tense, with a bell-like quality in the frosty air to make the cracking of a snow-laden spruce-bough resound like a pistol-shot. For Denver and the dwellers on the eastern plain the sun is an hour high; but the hamlet mining-camp of Argentine, with its dovecote railway station and two-pronged siding, still lies in the steel-blue depths of ...
— A Fool For Love • Francis Lynde
... Some of our best poets have written in paroxysms of hunger, and I really believe that Addison would have had more point if he had had less victuals; and if you do not restrict yourself to a sheep's trotter and spruce beer, your style will betray your luxury." But soon came an increase of the very thing feared for her fame, in the form of an invitation from Lady Abercorn and the marquis to pass the chief part of every year with them. This was accepted, and thus she met her fate. Lord ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... certain elevation, decreasing with the latitude, but approximately 6000 ft. in the Yangtsze basin, there exist in districts remote from the traffic of the great rivers, extensive forests of conifers, like those of Central Europe in character, but with different species of silver fir, larch, spruce and Cembran pine. Below this altitude the woods are composed of deciduous and evergreen broad-leafed trees and shrubs, mingled together in a profusion of species. Pure broad-leafed forests of one or two species are rare, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... than Irish shealing, though your pockets were full of gold. Through these haunts the ragged and penniless may walk unfearing, for they have nothing to dread from the lawless,—more, perhaps, from the law; but the wealthy, the respectable, the spruce, the dainty, let them beware the spot, unless the policeman is in sight or day ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... a curious mingling of tenderness and admiration in the glance she bent upon him. He was a goodly youth to look at, tall and strongly knit in figure, upright as a young spruce fir, with a keen, dark-skinned face, square in outline and with a peculiar mobility of expression. The eyes were black and sparkling, and the thick, short, curling hair was sombre as the raven's wing. There was no lack of intellect in the face, but the chief characteristic ...
— For the Faith • Evelyn Everett-Green
... hearsay. There was to be a Christmas Tree! It would be like a birthday party, with this above ordinary birthdays, that there were to be presents for every one. One of the children invited lived in a little white house, with a spruce fir-tree before the door. The spruce fir did this good service to the little house, that it helped people to find their way to it; and it was by no means easy for a stranger to find his way to any given house in this little town, especially if the house were small and white, and stood ...
— The Brownies and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... to the river, these woods, and overhung it—each bank a mute monotonous screen of foliage, unbroken by glade or clearing; pine and spruce and hemlock, maple and alder; piled plumes of green, motionless, brooding, through which no sunrays broke, though here and there a silver birch drew a shaft of light upon their sombre background. ...
— Fort Amity • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... on until they came to a growth of spruce so dense that it formed a shelter from both snow and wind, with a thick carpet of brown needles under foot. They were shut out from the stars, and in the darkness MacVeigh began to whistle cheerfully. He unstrapped his pack and spread out one of his blankets close to ...
— Isobel • James Oliver Curwood
... her search. "Here's yer grandpa's watch-fob, but I'm skeered fer you to wear it, you might lose it. It's a family remnant—been handed down two generations. What about this here red comforter? It would sorter spruce you up, an' keep you warm, besides; you know you 've had a cold fer a week, an' yer pipes is all stopped up." So it was decided, and Billy ...
— Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch • Alice Caldwell Hegan
... world that Tim, finding that she still sobbed, should endeavour to console her. As Miss La Creevy sat on a large old-fashioned window-seat, where there was ample room for two, it was also natural that Tim should sit down beside her; and as to Tim's being unusually spruce and particular in his attire that day, why it was a high festival and a great occasion, and that was the most natural thing ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... too cold to set out the young Hope Plants. Hope poles for their support should be out in readiness and stuck in the ground at proper intervals. For this purpose the best poles are Spruce, or Heart of Oak, or if the Hope Plants live till midsummer, the Sea Beach. Weeping Willow, and Pine, of ...
— Cupid's Almanac and Guide to Hearticulture for This Year and Next • John Cecil Clay
... trapper and lumberman. Just now he was all lumberman. He was acting as what is called a "timber-cruiser," roaming the remoter and less-known regions of the wilderness to locate the best growths of spruce and pine for the winter's lumbering operations, and for the present his keen faculties were set on the noting of tree growths, and water-courses, and the lay of the land for the getting out of a winter's cutting. On this ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... You'd think she was working the whole show!' However, he turned up at a little before five o'clock, spruce and dapper and well dressed and groomed as usual. He was shown, as before, into the blue drawing-room. Miss Rowly, who sat there, rose as he entered, and coming across the room, greeted him, as he thought, effusively. He actually winced when she called ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... into his projects—she began to smell a rat. "This Trim," quoth she, "is an odd sort of a fellow; methinks he makes a strange figure with that ragged, tattered coat appearing under his livery; can't he go spruce and clean, like the rest of the servants? The fellow has a roguish leer with him which I don't like by any means; besides, he has such a twang in his discourse, and an ungraceful way of speaking through the ...
— The History of John Bull • John Arbuthnot
... crusader went out to the Holy Land, O, Christ, take the maiden's soul in hand, And to your kingdom bring her! I'll return, mayhap, when the spruce trees bloom. ...
— Plays: The Father; Countess Julie; The Outlaw; The Stronger • August Strindberg
... elbow on the arm of his chair, and her chin in her hand as she looked up at him, Charlotte at first had a dozen questions to ask concerning Cousin Frank and Mrs. Wellington, and Spruce Street affairs generally. But after a little, Uncle Landor began to ask the questions, and ...
— The Pleasant Street Partnership - A Neighborhood Story • Mary F. Leonard
... to work for the people of Ha-arts, the earth. He divided this creation into six parts, and each had its home in a spring in the heart of a great mountain upon whose summit was a giant tree. One was in the spruce tree on the Mountain of the North; another in the pine tree on the Mountain of the West; another in the oak tree on the Mountain of the South; and another in the aspen tree on the Mountain of the East; the fifth was on the cedar tree on the Mountain of the Zenith; and the last in an ...
— Myths and Legends of California and the Old Southwest • Katharine Berry Judson
... land of Nova Scotia, a maritime province, there is a ridge called North Mountain, overlooking the Bay of Fundy on one side and the fertile Annapolis valley on the other. On the northern slope of the range grows the hardy spruce-tree, well adapted for ship-timbers, of which many vessels of all classes have been built. The people of this coast, hardy, robust, and strong, are disposed to compete in the world's commerce, and it is nothing against the master mariner if the birthplace mentioned on his ...
— Sailing Alone Around The World • Joshua Slocum
... of hops and a spoonful of ginger to a gallon of water. When well boiled, strain it and put in a pint of molasses, or a pound of brown sugar, and half an ounce or less of the essence of spruce; when cool, add a teacupful of yeast, and put into a clean tight cask, and let it ferment for a day or two, then bottle it for use. You can boil the sprigs of spruce fir in place of ...
— The Whitehouse Cookbook (1887) - The Whole Comprising A Comprehensive Cyclopedia Of Information For - The Home • Mrs. F.L. Gillette
... following the trail of a herd of caribou one day, when far ahead a strange clacking sound came ringing across the snow in the crisp winter air. I ran ahead to a point of woods that cut off my view from a five-mile barren, only to catch breath in astonishment and drop to cover behind a scrub spruce. Away up the barren my caribou, a big herd of them, were coming like an express train straight towards me. At first I could make out only a great cloud of steam, a whirl of flying snow, and here and there the angry shake of wide antlers or the gleam of a black muzzle. The loud clacking ...
— Wilderness Ways • William J Long
... reverence for Mr. Augustus Tomlinson increased by a sight of his abode. He found him settled in a polite part of the town, in a very spruce parlour, the contents of which manifested the universal genius of the inhabitant. It hath been objected unto us, by a most discerning critic, that we are addicted to the drawing of "universal geniuses." We plead Not Guilty in former instances; we allow the soft impeachment ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Enth. Any quantity of it. What shall it be? They've "Anti-Bass Beer," or "Spruce Stout;" or perhaps you'd like to try their "Pennyroyal Porter?" I'm rather partial to it ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 17, 1892 • Various
... bark and make an awful scratching with their claws sometimes; my bare feet were soundless. Up and up I went, slowly, for it was dreadfully rough. They were not on the sofa. I could see plainly through the needles. Then I saw the spruce would have been better, for they were standing in front of the parlour door and Peter had one hand on the knob. His other arm was around my sister Sally. Breathlessly I leaned as far ...
— Laddie • Gene Stratton Porter
... sure of it. Only look at him. He is as spruce as if he had only just come out of a band-box. But hush, not a word. There, that's a dear. Lean your head against ...
— Hardscrabble - The Fall of Chicago: A Tale of Indian Warfare • John Richardson
... blooming, Peggy; and so smart as she is too! Deary, deary me, is that what they call the fashion?" cried Mrs Asplin, holding the girl in outstretched arms, and turning her slowly round and round, to take in the details of her attire. "You look so spruce, child, that I hardly knew you; but there, it won't be long, I expect, before the true Peggy peeps out. Come in, darling. There's a new rug in the hail; don't trip over it! We have been saying we ...
— More About Peggy • Mrs G. de Horne Vaizey
... or they will decide I am not coming till to-morrow, and quickly eat my supper." He spoke jauntily from his horse, arm akimbo, natty short jacket put on for to-day's courting, gray steeple-hat silver-embroidered, a spruce, pretty boy, not likely to toil severely at wood contracts so long as he could hold soul and body together and otherwise be merry, and the hand of that careless arm soft on his pistol, lest Don Ruz should abruptly dislike him too much; for Luis contrived a tone for his small-talk ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... a wood, walking through lines of spruce firs of deep golden green in the yellow beams. One of these trees among its well-robed fellows fronting them was all lichen-smitten. From the low sweeping branches touching earth to the plumed top, the tree was dead-black as its shadow; ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... hill-tops and the highlands. Then old Peboean[18]—the winter— Laughed along the stormy waters, Danced upon the windy headlands, On the storm his white hair streaming, And his steaming breath, ascending, On the pine-tops and the cedars Fell in frosty mists of silver, Sprinkling spruce and fir with silver, Sprinkling all the ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... we waant some breakfast. Wot'll 'ee 'ave, Jasper? 'Am rasher, my deear, or a few pilchers? Or p'raps Tamsin 'ave got some vowl pie? This es my maid, Tamsin, this es, by the blessin' of Providence—my one yaw lamb, tha's wot she es. As spruce a maid as there es in the country, my deear. An' I forgot, you dunnaw Jasper, do 'ee, Tamsin? This es Jasper Pennington, a godly young man who, like Esau of ould, 'ave bin rubbed of his birthright an' hes blessin'. He's a-goin' to jine us, Tamsin, 'n' ...
— The Birthright • Joseph Hocking
... into the carriage as we passed along, and left us with that pleasant woody smell belonging to leaves. One of the ladies, catching a bit of green from one of these intruding branches, said it was cedar, and another thought it spruce. ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... mattress vine) against the base of Machinery Palace. Honeysuckle against the base of the Varied Industries Palace. Lawson cypress. Libocedrus decurrens (incense cedar). Acacia floribunda. Acacia latifolia. Albizzia lophantha. Abies menzies (fir). Picea Engelmanni (spruce). Picea excelsa (from Norway) (spruce). Pittosporum. Rhododendrons (notice how they work upon the pink walls) (for color). Cinerarias (for color). Cyclamen (for color). Dracaena indivisa (cabbage palm). Woodwardias. ...
— Palaces and Courts of the Exposition • Juliet James
... manner. The peculiar beckoning twist of this presumptuous individual's chin and henna-stained beard summoning me to come out and "perform" reminds me of nothing so much as some tamer of wild animals ordering a trained baboon to spruce himself up and dance for the edification of the circus-going public. Signifying my unwillingness to be thus made a circus of over and over again, the officer beckons even more peremptorily than before, and even makes a feint of coming and ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... He was generous in the wages he gave; he allowed more resting hours than any of his neighbors; he was less exacting in his demands; he always reserved the finest lambs and chickens to supply his table in that season; he had the best of spruce beer in Summerfield, and the clearest crystal water. And while with these mitigations, the toils of the harvesters were still hot and heavy to be borne, there was that in their fare, in their songs, ...
— Summerfield - or, Life on a Farm • Day Kellogg Lee
... a short distance before finding a little cove, bordered with overhanging spruce and cedars, at the head of which they made a landing on a ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... under a sheltering pine where no snow covered the soft mat of needles, and while Mescal dried the blankets and roasted the last portion of meat he made a wind-break of spruce boughs. When they had eaten, not forgetting to give Wolf a portion, Hare fed Silvermane the last few handfuls of grain, and tied him with a long halter on the grassy bank. The daylight failed and darkness came on apace. The old familiar roar of the wind in the ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey
... so snug and homelike. She paused before she came to the door, to watch the smoke curling up from the chimney straight as a column, for there was not a breath of air stirring. The sun was almost gone, and the strong bluish light was settling on everything, giving even the green spruce-trees a curious burnished tone. ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... distance. The Tennessee warbler was singing; but perhaps the pleasantest incident of the walk to the Profile House—in front of which the mountain footpath is taken—was a Blackburnian warbler perched, as usual, at the very top of a tall spruce, his orange throat flashing fire as he faced the sun, and his song, as my notebook expresses it, "sliding up to high Z at the end" in his quaintest and most characteristic fashion. I spent nearly three hours in climbing the mountain ...
— The Foot-path Way • Bradford Torrey
... we sat around a big camp-fire near our tents in the valley, and saw the full moon come up and look down upon us from behind Sentinel Rock, and heard the intermittent booming of Yosemite Falls sifting through the spruce trees that towered around us, and felt the tender, brooding spirit of the great valley, itself touched to lyric intensity by the grandeurs on every hand, steal in upon us, and possess our souls—surely that was ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... in contiguous drops the flood comes down, Threatening with deluge the devoted town; To shops, in crowds, the daggled females fly, Pretend to cheapen goods, but nothing buy; The Templar spruce, while every spout's abroach, Stays till 'tis fair, yet seems to call a coach; The tucked-up sempstress walks with hasty strides, While streams run ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 38, Saturday, July 20, 1850 • Various
... farther north than the quail, and is found throughout the United States. With us he affects high and rocky ground, but northward he keeps at a lower level. At the White Mountains, the regions of this species and of the Canada grouse or spruce partridge are as well defined in height as those of the maples and the "black growth." Still farther north I have observed that our partridge frequents the lowest marshy ground, thus equalizing his ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... connections to make them count for much. The Fifth and Sixth Street line, which had been but recently started, was paying six hundred dollars a day. A project for a West Philadelphia line (Walnut and Chestnut) was on foot, as were lines to occupy Second and Third Streets, Race and Vine, Spruce and Pine, Green and Coates, Tenth and Eleventh, and so forth. They were engineered and backed by some powerful capitalists who had influence with the State legislature and could, in spite of great public protest, obtain franchises. Charges of corruption were in the air. It was argued that ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... reminds me that I am almost neglecting a reference to Alaska's vast resources in forests, metals, furs, and fish. There are 300,000,000 of acres densely wooded with spruce, red and yellow cedar, Oregon pine, hemlock, fir, and other useful varieties of timber. Canoes are made from single trees, sixty feet ...
— Oregon, Washington and Alaska; Sights and Scenes for the Tourist • E. L. Lomax
... man, of middle height and mild appearance, with little short legs and little fat hands; he wore a roomy and excessively spruce frock-coat, a high broad cravat, snow-white linen, a gold chain on his silk waistcoat, a gem-ring on his forefinger, and a white wig on his head; he spoke softly and persuasively, trod noiselessly, and had ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... suitable?" The answer to this question was given from the experiments of the essayist during the last forty years. The deciduous plants tried were the buckthorn, Osage orange, honey-locust, privet and barberry. The evergreens were the Norway spruce, hemlock, ...
— The Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56, No. 2, January 12, 1884 - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... of my infant wanderings still lives unfaded, or with fresher dyes. A new sense comes upon me, as in a dream; a richer perfume, brighter colours start out; my eyes dazzle; my heart heaves with its new load of bliss, and I am a child again. My sensations are all glossy, spruce, voluptuous, and fine: they wear a candied coat, and are in holiday trim. I see the beds of larkspur with purple eyes; tall hollyhocks, red or yellow; the broad sunflowers, caked in gold, with bees buzzing round them; ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... proceeded. He had not walked far until he came to a precipitous bluff formed by two branching cañons, and it seemed at first impossible for him to proceed farther. Soon, however, he noticed a tall spruce tree, which grew beside the precipice from the foot to the summit, for the day had now begun to dawn and he could see objects more clearly. At this juncture Qastcèëlçi again appeared to him and said: "How is it, my grandchild, that you are still here? Get on the top of that spruce ...
— The Mountain Chant, A Navajo Ceremony • Washington Matthews
... pow-wow going on. Cigars were exchanged for tobacco. Friendship was pledged in socks. The Germans brought out some beer and the English some rum. Finally, on Christmas Day, there was a great concert and dance. The Germans were spruce, elderly men, keen and well fed, with buttons cleaned for the occasion. They appeared to have plenty of supplies, and were fully equipped with everything necessary for a winter campaign. A third battalion, wisely but churlishly, refused these seasonable advances, and shot four men who ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson
... to cover a district extending from Canal Street on the north to Wall Street on the south; but Edison soon realized that this territory was too extensive for the initial experiment, and he decided finally upon the district included between Wall, Nassau, Spruce, and Ferry streets, Peck Slip and the East River, an area nearly a square mile in extent. One of the preliminary steps taken to enable him to figure on such a station and system was to have men go through this district on various days and ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... steamer. All the way over the lake we kept the shores of Michigan in sight, beaches of white sand alternating with others of limestone shingle, and the forests behind, a tangled growth of cedar, fir, and spruce in impenetrable swamps, or a scanty, scrubby growth upon a sandy soil. Two hours were spent at Thunder Bay, where the steamer stopped for a supply of wood, and we went steaming on toward Mackinaw, a hundred miles away. At sunset of that day the shores of the green rocky island dawned ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 1, October, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... washed down with a draught of water, from Nature's own cup—the joined hands—Adolay lay down under the canoe. Cheenbuk retired to a neighbouring spruce-fir and stretched himself under its branches. Need we add that sleep closed ...
— The Walrus Hunters - A Romance of the Realms of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... sister back quickly a dozen steps, and they hid behind a giant spruce to watch. The scene that followed was like the holiday spectacle in a London Terminus, except that the passengers had no luggage. The other difference was that they seemed intent upon some purpose not wholly for their own advantage. It seemed, too, they had ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... and up the hill toiled, and to the door of a sort of spruce-looking lanthorn of a house, without tree or shrub near it. But still it might be good to sleep in; and, nothing daunted by the maid's prophecies and ominous voice, we determined to try our fate. Sir Culling got down and rubbed his hands; while, after his man's knocking at the door ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... strange to see each familiar footpath and strawberry bank far down beneath the shining waves. As the creek goes onward to the river the intervale disappears, and the banks become grey and steep, crowned with the tall and slender stems of the spruce and cedar. New Brunswick is rich in minerals, and veins of coal and iron abound at this place; but many years must elapse ere mines are worked to any extent. A few are in operation at present; but while the pine waves the wealth of her green plumage to the ...
— Sketches And Tales Illustrative Of Life In The Backwoods Of New Brunswick • Mrs. F. Beavan
... deftly cutting the outline of a thistle on a spruce staff he was carving for the boy. Donald watched him in silence as he worked in the fading light. The sun had set behind the chain of near hills, and the plateau where they were camping was gray with shadows. Through ...
— The Story of Wool • Sara Ware Bassett
... German oak, those of the lower deck and half-deck of pitch-pine and Norwegian fir. All the deck planks are of Norwegian fir, 4 inches in the main-deck and 3 inches elsewhere. The beams are fastened to the ship's sides by knees of Norwegian spruce, of which about 450 were used. Wooden knees were, as a rule, preferred to iron ones, as they are more elastic. A good many iron knees were used, however, where wood was less suitable. In the boiler ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... groundsel, too, for Miss Maylie's birds, with which Oliver, who had been studying the subject under the able tuition of the village clerk, would decorate the cages, in the most approved taste. When the birds were made all spruce and smart for the day, there was usually some little commission of charity to execute in the village; or, failing that, there was rare cricket-playing, sometimes, on the green; or, failing that, there was always something ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... always thwarted and opposed them. But so it was, as great men and princes are said to call in their flatterers when dinner has been served, so the Athenians, upon slight occasions, entertained and diverted themselves with their spruce speakers and trim orators, but when it came to action, they were sober and considerate enough to single out the austerest and wisest for public employment, however much he might be opposed to their wishes and sentiments. ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... and a late April wind was whipping down the valley. It swayed the tops of the tall pine and spruce trees as they shouldered up from the swift brook below. It tossed into driving spray the water of Break Neck Falls where it leaped one hundred feet below with a thundering roar and swirl. It tossed as well the thin grey hair, long beard, ...
— Under Sealed Orders • H. A. Cody
... through the snow. When I reached the point for which I was aiming, the bear had just finished rooting, and was starting off. A slight whistle brought him to a standstill, and I drew a bead behind his shoulder, and low down, resting the rifle across the crooked branch of a dwarf spruce. At the crack he ran off at speed, making no sound, but the thick spatter of blood splashes, showing clear on the white snow, betrayed the mortal nature of the wound. For some minutes I followed the trail; and then, topping a ridge, I saw the dark bulk lying motionless ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt
... Rainbow Valley the wind might be rollicking and boisterous. Here it always went gently. Little, winding, fairy paths ran here and there over spruce roots cushioned with moss. Wild cherry trees, that in blossom time would be misty white, were scattered all over the valley, mingling with the dark spruces. A little brook with amber waters ran through it from the ...
— Rainbow Valley • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... the son, father, and grandfather; while the undulations and hollows, which seventy or eighty years since must have looked only like wrinkles in the black morasses, being now drained and limed, are skirted with deep woods, particularly of spruce, which thrives wonderfully, and covered with excellent grass. We drove in the droskie and ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... went into the part devoted to forestry first, there are several acres outdoors as well as inside devoted to this display, and what didn't we see there in trees, plants, woods of every kind, forest growth tree planting, all sorts of useful wood, pine, spruce, hemlock, cedar, all the hard woods, and everything made of wood; wood pulp, barrels, ...
— Samantha at the St. Louis Exposition • Marietta Holley
... for a job that will send him shuttling from one planet to another. To achieve it they study, they sweat, they make all out efforts to meet and suck up to anybody they think might help. Finally, when and if they get an interview for one of the few openings, they spruce up in their best clothes, put on their best party manners, present themselves as the sincere, high I.Q., ambitious young men that they are—and then flunk their chance. I decided I might as ...
— Ultima Thule • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... see three or four white sails. Far away beyond a group of islands rose a trail of smoke that told some small steamer was passing. A gull was circling over the cove, and a black crow cawed dismally from the top branch of a tall spruce. ...
— Frank Merriwell's Cruise • Burt L. Standish
... Great forests of these trees, with cedars almost as large as the redwoods, are in the northern counties also. You may have seen sugar-pine cones which are over a foot long, the largest of all found, while redwood cones are the smallest. Another great tree is the Douglas spruce, the king of spruce trees, growing in both Sierra ...
— Stories of California • Ella M. Sexton
... "Where should he get it but up where he lives?" she asked. "Rufous never has to worry about food. It is all around him. You see, so far as known, he lives wholly on the thick parts of the needles, which you know are the leaves, of fir and spruce trees, and on the bark of tender twigs. So you see he is more of a tree dweller than any of the Squirrel family. While Rufous has the general shape of Danny and his relatives, he has quite a long tail. Now I guess this ...
— The Burgess Animal Book for Children • Thornton W. Burgess
... made me think hard was the way that government man got results from the I.W.W. in the lumber country. You see, the government had to have an immense amount of timber for ships, an' spruce for aeroplanes. Had to have it quick. An' all the lumbermen an' loggers were I.W.W.—or most of them. Anyhow, all the strikin' lumbermen last summer belonged to the I.W.W. These fellows believed that under the capitalistic order of labor ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... common spruce fir, especially the lateral ones, when attacked by a particular species of aphis, are very apt to be developed into ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters
... when Blake and Harding led two packhorses through a thin spruce wood, with Benson lagging a short distance behind. They had spent some time crossing a wide stretch of rolling country, dotted with clumps of poplar and birch, which was still sparsely inhabited, and now they had reached the edge of the timber belt that cuts off the prairie from ...
— Blake's Burden • Harold Bindloss
... and Samson were alone on a cliff-protected shelf, and the painter had just blocked in with umber and neutral tint the crude sketch of his next picture. In the foreground was a steep wall, rising palisade-like from the water below. A kingly spruce-pine gave the near note for a perspective which went away across a valley of cornfields to heaping and distant mountains. Beyond that range, in a slender ribbon of pale purple, one saw the ridge of a more ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... in the deep drifts, she seemed powerless to move. The thought of the hungry children, however, made her turn to the gods. Then the branches of spruce trees seemed to urge ...
— The Later Cave-Men • Katharine Elizabeth Dopp
... slowly and with a little friction at first, then smoothly and swiftly as if they had never stopped. Summer reddened into autumn; autumn bronzed into fall. The maples and poplars were bare. The oaks alone kept their rusted crimson glory, and the cloaks of spruce and hemlock on the shoulders of the hills grew dark with wintry foliage. Keene's transitions of mood became more frequent and more extreme. The gulf of isolation that divided him from us when the black days came seemed wider and more ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke
... gaudy dress and decorations gay, The tinsel-trappings of a vain array. The spruce trimm'd jacket, and the waving plume, The powder'd head emitting soft perfume; These may make fops, but never can impart The soldier's hardy frame, or daring heart; May in Hyde-Park present a splendid train, But are not weapons for a dread campaign; ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... such moments a great force seems to uplift one as on wings; and one flies, and everything else flies, but contrariwise—both the verst stones, and traders riding on the shafts of their waggons, and the forest with dark lines of spruce and fir amid which may be heard the axe of the woodcutter and the croaking of the raven. Yes, out of a dim, remote distance the road comes towards one, and while nothing save the sky and the light clouds through which the moon is cleaving her way seem ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... gentlemen, with gold brooches, and party-coloured inside waistcoats; sundry elderly ladies sat at card-tables, discussing the "lost honour by an odd trick they played," with heads as large as those of Jack or Jill in the pantomime; spruce clerks in public offices, (whose vocation the expansive tendency of the right ear, from long pen-carrying, betokened) discussed fashion, "and the musical glasses" to some very over-dressed married ladies, who preferred flirting to five-and-ten. The tea-table, over which the amiable hostess ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 2 • Charles James Lever
... forty miles, containing inexhaustible quantities of timber. We noticed tall cedar and oaks of every description; one kind more interesting than the others, being a white oak from twenty to forty feet in the body. Pine and spruce, with superior white ash and walnut, were found, and the most gigantic cotton-woods, particularly on the Sonoita. * * * * "The mountains in the neighborhood are filled with minerals, and the precious metals are ...
— Memoir of the Proposed Territory of Arizona • Sylvester Mowry
... Hall was a dense plantation of spruce and larch. The man who planned the estate evidently possessed both taste and spirit. It presented a beautiful and pleasing picture. A sense of homeliness was given by a number of Alderney cattle and young hunters ...
— The Stowmarket Mystery - Or, A Legacy of Hate • Louis Tracy
... was a fifty-pound cub that stole a string of trout from under Bill's nose, waded the creek and went away while Old Bill was throwing his gun into the brush and hitching frantically along a fallen spruce under the impression that he was climbing a tree. As for himself, he was getting too old and rheumatic to hunt, but he had had a little sport with bears in his time. He recalled with especial glee a little incident of ten or a dozen years ago. He had been over on the Iron Fork hunting ...
— Bears I Have Met—and Others • Allen Kelly
... of servants and a carriage and an opera-box, and make some of my acquaintance who have married for love, or for rank, or for anything but money, die for envy of my jewels. You do not think I would take him for himself. Why, he is very smooth and spruce as far as his dress goes; but as to his face, he looks as if he had tumbled headlong into a volcano, and been thrown up ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... beard and neglected dress of a Shylock should be admitted into the list. I would also occasionally lay aside the small clothes, and assume the dress of a woman. I would often trip it along with the appearance and gesture of a spruce milliner; and I would often stalk with the solemn air and sweeping train of a duchess. But of all the infinite shapes of human dress, I must confess that, my favourite is the kind of doublet that prince Harry ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... silvery bells was heard while the cariole was still at some distance on the trail. Cordially were they welcomed, and strong arms speedily carried them into the cosy wigwam where, in the center, burned a great fire of dry spruce and birch wood. ...
— Algonquin Indian Tales • Egerton R. Young
... easily. Cedar is preferred for the woodwork, and when it can possibly be obtained, is always used. But in the section of the country where I lived, as we were north of the cedar limit, the canoe-makers used pieces of the spruce tree, split very thin, as the best substitute for ...
— By Canoe and Dog-Train • Egerton Ryerson Young
... great families of trees, the maple, the beech, the birch, the hemlock, the spruce, the oak, and so on and on and on. So many alike, and yet each one different. ...
— Dew Drops, Vol. 37, No. 7, February 15, 1914 • Various
... fort is one immense level swamp, thickly covered with willows, and dotted here and there with a few clumps of pine-trees. The only large timber in the vicinity grows on the banks of Hayes and Nelson Rivers, and consists chiefly of spruce fir. The swampy nature of the ground has rendered it necessary to raise the houses in the fort several feet in the air upon blocks of wood; and the squares are intersected by elevated wooden platforms, ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... accomplish what it had done fifty years earlier. I feel certain that it started full of expectations, as it felt itself guided along the familiar road which followed the windings of the lake, with the high wooded banks towering over it, and then along a mile of highroad between dense plantations of spruce and Scotch fir, until the treeless, stonewalled open country of Northern Ireland was reached. The hopes of the old carriage must have risen high as the houses of the little town came into view; first one-storied, white-washed ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... another at the head of Vesey Street, and others at the head of Barclay, Murray, and Warren. On the Park Row or Chatham Street side a barricade stretched across Beekman Street; another, in the shape of a right angle, stood in Printing House Square, one face opposite Spruce Street, the other looking across the Presbyterian churchyard and Nassau Street;[62] another ran across Frankfort Street; another at the entrance of Centre Street; and still another near it, ...
— The Campaign of 1776 around New York and Brooklyn • Henry P. Johnston
... cut it over. By the time it is done a new growth has sprung up, and an intermediate one is large enough to cut; so the chopping goes on year after year. The first or primeval growth is pine. That is most valuable. After the pines are cut, spruce and hemlock spring ...
— Illustrated Science for Boys and Girls • Anonymous
... the moment the service was over. This was fuel to the already boiling blood of Stockington. The week following, what was their astonishment to find a much frequented ruin gone! it was actually gone! not a trace of it; but the spot where it had stood for ages, turfed, planted with young spruce trees, and fenced off with post and rail! The exasperated people now launched forth an immensity of fulminations against the churl Sir Roger, and a certain number of them resolved to come and seat themselves in the street of the hamlet and there dine; but a terrific thunderstorm, which ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... lived was one of a row of semi-detached villas on the north side of the Common. The door was opened to them by their host himself. So far from looking battered and emitting last breaths, he appeared particularly spruce. He had just returned from Church, and was still wearing his gloves and tall hat. He squeaked with surprise when he saw who ...
— Psmith in the City • P. G. Wodehouse
... slim umbrella to admire the brilliant yellow of the renewed sheets, standing out in vivid blots against the tarnished verdigris of the old. To pass from Blackpool to the West, however, is a tardy process; and when Rainham reached the spruce, little house in one of the most select of the discreet and uniform streets which adjoin Portman Square, he found the clatter of teacups for the most part over. There were, in fact, only two persons in the long room, which, with its open Erard, and its innumerable bibelots, ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... sent the volumes tumbling to the floor. He picked them up and looked at his watch. It was noon. The freight would lie here for an hour or more, until the east-bound passenger went by. Claude left the car and walked slowly up the platform toward the station. A bundle of little spruce trees had been flung off near the freight office, and sent a smell of Christmas into the cold air. A few drays stood about, the horses blanketed. The steam from the locomotive made a spreading, deep-violet stain as it curled up against ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... country is one of exceeding beauty. The dark green forests of spruce, larch and pine, broken now and then by a grove of poplars or silver birches, the secluded valleys and the rounded hills are strangely restful and give one a sense of infinite peace. It is a place to go for tired nerves. ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... devious outlet of the basin of which the lake occupied the principal expanse, reached through three miles of no-man's route, framed in green hills forest-clad up to their summits. The camp was a shelter of spruce bark, open wide in front and closed at the ends, drawn on three faces of an octohedron facing the fireplace. The beds were made of layers of spruce and other fir branches spread on the ground and covered with the fragrant twigs of the arbor vitae. Two huge maples overhung ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... course, a six-inch shell was dropped within about one hundred feet of his vessel. Then he stopped. A boat put off from the "San Jacinto," and made for the "Trent." Up the side of the merchant-vessel clambered a spruce lieutenant, and demanded the immediate surrender of the two commissioners. The captain protested, pointed to the flag with the cross of St. George waving above his head, and invoked the power of her Britannic ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... true word spoken from the chest," I sighed, just as Uncle Peter made his first cast and cleverly wound about eight feet of line around a spruce ...
— Back to the Woods • Hugh McHugh
... the light would be something; to go like this, to carry with her only the memory of a dark looming house without cheer was unthinkable. The gate was never locked. If she but went into the garden and round by the spruce tree to the back of the ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... after that he lay hidden under a fallen tree in the snow and bitter cold; but even there he was not safe, and the gamekeeper took him deeper into the forest, where a big spruce grew on a hill in the middle of a frozen swamp. There no one would seek him till he could make a shift to get him out of the country. The hill is still there; the people call it the King's Hill, and not after ...
— Hero Tales of the Far North • Jacob A. Riis
... opened its office first in humble quarters in Spruce street, and since then it has occupied rooms in Beekman, John and Reade streets. These down-town locations have served some valuable purposes. They were accessible to the teachers and workers in passing to and from the South, and in the shipment of goods ...
— The American Missionary - Vol. 44, No. 3, March, 1890 • Various
... the 16th June. They keep above 5000 feet. I never observed any in the lower ranges. The nest is not a difficult one to find, being large and of loose construction; from 15 to 30 feet up a medium-sized tree close to the trunk or sometimes in a large fork. They never seem to build in the spruce firs which abound about Murree. They are by no means shy birds, and hop about the trees close by while their nest is being examined. Five is the ordinary number of eggs, which differ very much in appearance and size: the longest I have measures 1.25 ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume
... and grades of dress, ranging from the spruce blue and buff of some of the officers, through the gray homespun and linsey-woolsey of the farmer privates, to the buckskin of the trappers and huntsmen, so there were all manner of weapons, all styles of head-gear and equipment, all fashions of faces. There were Germans ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... some point,—an arrangement doubtless prompted by the deep snows and severe cold of this latitude. The typical Canadian dwelling-house is also presently met with on entering the Dominion,—a low, modest structure of hewn spruce logs, with a steep roof (containing two or more dormer windows) that ends in a smart curve, a hint taken from the Chinese pagoda. Even in the more costly brick or stone houses in the towns and vicinity this style is adhered to. It is so universal that one wonders if the reason ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... Street, Second Street, and so on in order, in the plain Quaker fashion which had thus entitled the days of the week and the months of the year. Eight were to lie parallel with High, and to be called after the trees of the forest,—Spruce, Chestnut, Pine. In the midst of the city, at the crossing of High and Broad Streets, was to be a square of ten acres, to contain the public offices; and in each quarter of the city was to be a similar open space for walks. The founder intended to allow no house to be built ...
— William Penn • George Hodges
... much. Man changes with the fleeting years and a civilized world changes, but the untrod wilderness never changes. Before us lay the same rushing river I remembered so well, the same starved forest of spruce with its pungent odor, and there was the clump of spruce trees in which our last camp was pitched just as I had seen it last. Malone and Blake remained by the river bank while I approached alone what to me was sacred ground. Time fell away, and I believe that I expected, when I stepped beside ...
— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace
... or ornament, and if they are, what plants are most suitable?" The answer to this question was given from the experiments of the essayist during the last forty years. The deciduous plants tried were the buckthorn, Osage orange, honey-locust, privet and barberry. The evergreens were the Norway spruce, ...
— The Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56, No. 2, January 12, 1884 - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... 'tis well: If ever ye get a wife, i'faith I'll tell. Sirrah, at home we have a servingman; He is[240] not humour'd bluntly as Coomes is, Yet his condition[241] makes me often merry: I'll tell thee, sirrah, he's a fine neat fellow, A spruce slave; I warrant ye, he will[242] have His cruel garters[243] cross about the knee, His woollen hose as white as th'driven snow, His shoes dry-leather neat, and tied with red ribbons, A nosegay bound with laces in his hat— Bridelaces, ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VII (4th edition) • Various
... i. 251-270, the reader will find an interesting account of the Trained Bands and the Artillery Company. Old writers are fond of sneering at the City warriors. The following passage is from Shirley's "Witty Fair One," v. 1:—"There's a spruce captain newly crept out of a gentleman-usher and shuffled into a buff jerkin with gold lace, that never saw service beyond Finsbury or the Artillery-Garden, marches wearing a desperate feather in his lady's beaver, ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various
... soon followed by the ouzel, which is the first bird to visit a glacier lake, as the sedge is the first of plants. So the young lake grows in beauty, becoming more and more humanly lovable from century to century. Groves of aspen spring up, and hardy pines, and the hemlock spruce, until it is richly overshadowed and embowered. But while its shores are becoming enriched, the soil-beds creep out with incessant growth, contracting its area, while the lighter mud-particles deposited ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... garden of spruce and cedar had heretofore marked the bounds of his excursions. His father had often allowed him to go out alone in the boat or Peter's canoe, but only when he was watching from the fields or the shore, and then he ...
— The End of the Rainbow • Marian Keith
... he caved in at once and obeyed the policeman's orders, that worse might not overtake him. So he sat tight and waited, and then Teddy Pegram and his dog and his air-gun crept out of the woods with a load of ten birds. They roosted in the spruce firs, you understand, and 'twas as easy to slay them as blackbeetles, for Teddy's eyes, helped by the moon, marked 'em above ...
— The Torch and Other Tales • Eden Phillpotts
... remembers sitting in the best room of a well-to-do farmer, and watching, with great interest, the carpet rise and fall with the gusts of wind outside. To avoid such unhappy consequences, farmers have been accustomed to bank up the house outdoors in the fall with dry leaves, spruce-boughs, or manure, usually to a point on the woodwork. This, of course, closes the cellar windows for the winter for the sake of keeping out the wind. A concrete wall, at the present price of cement, ...
— Rural Hygiene • Henry N. Ogden
... his gold chain and seals conspicuously, and wears his spectacles easily, and drops them in a genteel manner on the silk ribbon that is suspended around his neck; and if he is altogether neat and spruce, as becomes an ecclesiastic of some standing in his diocese, is that a reason why he should be stared at, and why men should put their hands in their pockets and whistle, and why rather perky young fellows should cry "Hallo!" and whisper, ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... Hampshire, and Vermont,—abundant, filling swamps acres in extent, alone or associated with other trees, mostly black spruce; growing depressed and scattered on Katahdin at an altitude of 4000 feet; Massachusetts,—rather common, at least northward; Rhode Island,—not reported; Connecticut,—occasional in the northern half of the state; reported as far south ...
— Handbook of the Trees of New England • Lorin Low Dame
... despair, of spiritual or political tyranny or servitude, were never taught by such as shared the serenity of nature. Surely good courage will not flag here on the Atlantic border, as long as we are flanked by the Fur Countries. There is enough in that sound to cheer one under any circumstances. The spruce, the hemlock, and the pine will not countenance despair. Methinks some creeds in vestries and churches do forget the hunter wrapped in furs by the Great Slave Lake, and that the Esquimaux sledges are drawn by ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... foot or used canoes. In the northern parts where birch trees were plentiful, the canoe was of birch bark stretched over a light wooden frame, sewed with strips of deerskin, and smeared at the joints with spruce gum to make it watertight. In the South tree trunks hollowed out by fire and called dugouts were used. In the West there were "bull boats" made of skins stretched over wooden frames. For winter travel the Northern and Western Indians ...
— A Brief History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... too long the track To follow down or struggle back. The sun has set on fair Naushon Long ere my western blaze is gone; The ocean disk is rolling dark In shadows round your swinging bark, While yet the yellow sunset fills The stream that scarfs my spruce-clad hills; The day-star wakes your island deer Long ere my barnyard chanticleer; Your mists are soaring in the blue While mine are sparks ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... two," she said, "and rolls and butter and poached heggs; and see as the heggs is well done, and the toast buttered fine and thick. Now then, look spruce, ...
— Sue, A Little Heroine • L. T. Meade
... slayer of bears. It was notorious in the canyon that the only bear Old Bill ever saw was a fifty-pound cub that stole a string of trout from under Bill's nose, waded the creek and went away while Old Bill was throwing his gun into the brush and hitching frantically along a fallen spruce under the impression that he was climbing a tree. As for himself, he was getting too old and rheumatic to hunt, but he had had a little sport with bears in his time. He recalled with especial glee a little incident of ten or a dozen years ago. He had been over on the ...
— Bears I Have Met—and Others • Allen Kelly
... instalment of Loyalist emigrants arrived at Navy Island, and during the summer they continued to arrive, until about 5,000 had settled between Parrtown (St. John) and St. Anne's. The peninsula now occupied by the city of St. John was then almost a wilderness, covered with shrubs, scrubby spruce, and marsh. Large numbers of emigrants also arrived at Annapolis, Port Roseway, and other points; and Governor Parr, in a letter to Lord North in September, 1783, estimates the whole number that had arrived in Nova Scotia and the island of St. John ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... the dull period of the afternoon, the quiet, waiting period which comes between three or four o'clock and the sunset, and Bill and his wife sat in the shadow of the mighty silver spruce before their door. The great tree was really more of a home for them than the roof they ...
— Ronicky Doone • Max Brand
... following pertinent fact. Shortly after my arrival in America, in the winter of 1907, the most active disseminator of socialistic literature in New York sent me, by way of a challenge, a new and very spruce volume, which contained the most important of his previous leaflets and articles, collected and republished, and claiming renewed attention. The first of these—and it was signalised by an accompanying advertisement ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... the American Journal of Science for September, 1868, to which the reader is referred for other physical observations. The barometric anomaly, noticed particularly on the Lower Amazon, was also observed by Herndon, Castelnau, Chandlers, Spruce, and Wallace.] ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... Lake lay Happy Camp—so named because here was found the uppermost fringe of the timber line, where men might warm themselves by fire again. Scarcely could it be called timber, for it was a dwarf rock-spruce that never raised its loftiest branches higher than a foot above the moss, and that twisted and grovelled like a pig-vegetable under the moss. Here, on the trail leading into Happy Camp, in the first sunshine of half a dozen days, Old Tarwater ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... fruitless attempts to ring up his young friend since the fateful morning in St. James's Park, ran him to earth one afternoon at his club, smooth and spruce and unruffled ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... rein, and his next to lead her to meet her discomfited master, who was crippling towards him, his clothes much soiled with his fall, his eyes streaming with tears, from pain as well as mortification, and altogether exhibiting an aspect so unlike the spruce and dapper importance of his ordinary appearance, that the honest smith felt compassion for the little man, and some remorse at having left him exposed to such disgrace. All men, I believe, enjoy an ill natured joke. The difference is, that an ill natured person can drink out ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... abundance. Earlier in the summer the hills were literally carpeted with flowers. I could not learn that any skilled botanist had ever visited Kamchatka and classified its flora. Among the arboreal productions the alder and birch were the most numerous. Pine, larch, and spruce grow on the Kamchatka river, and the timber from them is brought to Avatcha from the ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... Wade far up the valley of White River under the shadow of the Flat Top Mountains. It was beautiful country. Grassy hills, with colored aspen groves, swelled up on his left, and across the brawling stream rose a league-long slope of black spruce, above which the bare red-and-gray walls of the range towered, glorious with the blaze of sinking sun. White patches of snow showed in the sheltered nooks. Wade's gaze rested longest on the ...
— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey
... and cozy. The air was perfumed with the spicy fragrance of spruce mingled with the pleasant odour of the woodfire, the incense of the wilderness. Outside he could hear the seas breaking upon the cliff off the Duck's Head and over the reef, and listening to the pounding seas outside, and the cheerful ...
— Left on the Labrador - A Tale of Adventure Down North • Dillon Wallace
... he was, and imperfectly educated, he aspired to be a lawyer; and at eighteen years of age he became a law-student in the office of Mr. Spruce McCay in Salisbury, North Carolina. Two years later, in 1787, he was admitted to the bar. Not making much headway in Salisbury, he wandered to that part of the State which is now Tennessee, then an almost unbroken wilderness, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XII • John Lord
... an angel-like divine countenance, a saint, an humble mind, a meet spirit clothed in rags, beg, and now ready to be starved? To see a silly contemptible sloven in apparel, ragged in his coat, polite in speech, of a divine spirit, wise? another neat in clothes, spruce, full of courtesy, empty of grace, wit, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... smart fellows, clean-shaven and even spruce in their new blue coats and scarlet trousers. Now the war had put its dirt upon them and seemed to have aged them by fifteen years, leaving its ineffaceable imprint upon their faces. They had stubble beards upon their chins, and their cheeks were sunken and hollow, ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... most careful observer, would have recognised in the two dusty figures, the once spruce forms of Captain Thomas Tomb ...
— The Pirate's Pocket Book • Dion Clayton Calthrop
... quieter than a cat, for they break bark and make an awful scratching with their claws sometimes; my bare feet were soundless. Up and up I went, slowly, for it was dreadfully rough. They were not on the sofa. I could see plainly through the needles. Then I saw the spruce would have been better, for they were standing in front of the parlour door and Peter had one hand on the knob. His other arm was around my sister Sally. Breathlessly I leaned as far as I could, ...
— Laddie • Gene Stratton Porter
... be called torrents, being precipitated as it were in one leap from the Lebanon to the Mediterranean. Olives, vines, and corn cover the maritime plain, while in ancient times the heights were clothed with impenetrable forests of oak, pine, larch, cypress, spruce, and cedar. The mountain range drops in altitude towards the centre of the country and becomes merely a line of low hills, connecting Gebel Ansarieh with the Lebanon proper; beyond the latter it continues without interruption, till at length, above the narrow Phoenician coast road, it rises ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... took charge of the younger group and led them through the garden to where some young spruce trees hid the wall. Here a surprise awaited them in the shape of two of the largest of the growing trees festooned with ribbons and laden with strange fruit in the shape of coloured toy balloons that bobbed about and tugged at their moorings ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... blanket and unfolded it until Lorraine saw that it was a full-size bed blanket of heavy gray wool. The man's ingenuity seemed endless. Without seeming to have any extra luggage, he had nevertheless carried a very efficient camp outfit with him. He took his hunting knife, went to the spruce grove and cut many small, green branches, returning with all he could hold in his arms. She watched him lay them tips up for a mattress, and was secretly glad that she knew this much at least of camp comfort. He spread the blanket ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... stepped into the cavern and looked around. A rude couch had been made of the boughs of spruce and white pine, and saplings had been roughly hewn into ...
— Boy Scouts on the Great Divide - or, The Ending of the Trail • Archibald Lee Fletcher
... of rather spruce looking young men alighted from an eastern train in Paris and, strolling forth in the crowd of passengers, looked about them ...
— Our Pilots in the Air • Captain William B. Perry
... stillness of the desolation. It was too late for the life of day, too early for the nocturnal roamings and voices of the creatures of the night. Like the basin of a great amphitheater the frozen lake lay revealed in the light of the moon and a billion stars. Beyond it rose the spruce forest, black and forbidding. Along its nearer edges stood hushed walls of tamarack, bowed in the smothering clutch of snow and ice, ...
— The Wolf Hunters - A Tale of Adventure in the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... the step was let down, and Mr. Elton, spruce, black, and smiling, was with them instantly. Emma thought with pleasure of some change of subject. Mr. Elton was all obligation and cheerfulness; he was so very cheerful in his civilities indeed, that she began to think he must have received ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... this level we encountered a steeper ascent than any I had yet climbed. Here the character of the forest began to change. There were other trees than pines, and particularly one kind, cone-shaped, symmetrical, and bright, which Dick called a silver spruce. I was glad it belonged to the conifers, or pine-tree family, because it was the most beautiful tree I had ever seen. We climbed ridges and threaded through aspen thickets in hollows till near sunset. Then Stockton ordered a halt ...
— The Young Forester • Zane Grey
... see you, smug and spruce, There at Chicago, burrowed in a Chair, Not made to measure and a deal too loose, And see you lift your little arm and swear Democracy shall be no more! If it's a fair And civil question, and not too abstruse, Were you elected as a "robber ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... shining water over the whole valley. The trees, or most of them, that stand about the banks have grown since the Duke saw the water. There are old oaks on the northern shore, but the southern and eastern sides were planted with spruce and other conifers at the end of the eighteenth century and beginning of the nineteenth, when all that remained of the victor of Culloden was his horrible nickname and his obelisk above the lake. The trees are glorious in December ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... bitter skirmish of winds, carrying powdered snow dust, nipped round the gateways of the dormitories and Tait McKenzie's fine statue of Whitefield stood sharply outlined against a cold blue sky. I lunched at a varsity hash counter on Spruce Street and bought tobacco in a varsity drug store, where a New York tailor, over for the day, was cajoling students into buying his "snappy styles" in time for Christmas. There is no more interesting game than watching a lot of college men, trying to pick out those who may ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... couple of streets, we came to a humble but neat-looking dwelling house, with an apology for a garden in front. Tables and seats were arranged beneath some trees; "spruce beer" was advertised for sale, but there were indications that other kinds of refreshments could be obtained. The place wore a comfortable aspect. We nodded smilingly to each other, as much as to say, "This will ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... so cool at this altitude that a fire will soon seem grateful," he remarked, lighting the fragrant boughs of spruce and hemlock which filled the fireplace and drawing chairs before ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... blue-grass knoll a quarter of a mile eastward. Deacon Gramps was, at the close of this peaceful summer day, indulging in a mental congratulation of himself on being so favorably situated in life. Everybody recognized Farmer Gramps as being the wealthiest man in all Spruce Township. He owned the finest and fattest horses that were driven to Mount Olivet Church. His cattle roamed the forests for miles around, and his hogs cracked acorns on ...
— The Deacon of Dobbinsville - A Story Based on Actual Happenings • John A. Morrison
... far-off days when it was the abode of fashion,—the far-off days when fashion itself had not become old-fashioned and got improved into Smart Society,—this haunted half-mile or more still retains many fine old residences of brown stone and of red brick, which are spruce and well-kept. One such, on the west side of the street, of red brick, with a high stoop of brown stone, is a boarding-house, and in it is an apartment to which, on a certain clear, cold afternoon in October, the reader's presence in the spirit is ...
— The Mystery of Murray Davenport - A Story of New York at the Present Day • Robert Neilson Stephens
... in the least; and, indeed, the old man seemed to indulge less frequently in his violent outbreaks of furious passion, and to have laid aside his rugged untamable fierceness, since his marriage. There he sat beside his beautiful Annunciata, spruce and prim, in the richest, gayest apparel, smirking and smiling, challenging in the sweet glances of his grey eyes,—from which a treacherous tear stole from time to time,—those who were present to say if any one of them could boast of such a wife as his. Instead ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... closing with the fellow, got him fairly by the throat and shook him to and fro. And now was I minded to choke him outright, but, even then, spied a cavalier who spurred his horse against me. Hereupon I dashed the breathless Gregory aside and turned to meet my new assailant, a spruce young gallant he, from curling lovelock to Spanish boots. I remember cursing savagely as his whip caught me, then, or ever he could reach me again, I sprang in beneath the head of his rearing horse and seizing the ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... is an old woman who wants the popular pastor to get her husband work in the Navy Yard. No sooner is she disposed of, with a word of comfort, than a spruce-looking young man steps forward. He is a book agent, and his glib tongue runs so fast that the preacher subscribes for his book without looking at it. As the agent retires a shy young girl comes forward and asks for the preacher's autograph. It is given cheerfully. Two old ladies ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... is a crime. Well, I only bought in on this timber because a friend of mine wanted me to come in with him; and, figuring I didn't know nothing about it, I allowed I certainly would lose for once—I couldn't tell a pine tree from a spruce to save ...
— The Man Next Door • Emerson Hough
... on the way to Golconda, if Golconda's yours when you get there?" said Markham. "Why, Watkins, the young spruce and poplar alone on that tract are worth twice the price I ask for the whole. A pulp-mill, which you could knock together for a few shillings, on one of those magnificent water-powers, would make you all ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... I was thru with my trubbel with wimmin's warin apparel for one day, so I started hum. I'd ony got to the corner of Spruce street, wen a grate strappin perliceman cum up to me, and clappin me on the shoulder, sed: "I've got you, sunny, this time; cum along, now, or I'll be after makin you." I seen discreshun was the better part of valler, so I let him leed me. Wen ...
— The Bad Boy At Home - And His Experiences In Trying To Become An Editor - 1885 • Walter T. Gray
... horse and gig With promises to pay; And he pawned his horns for a spruce new wig, To redeem as he came away: And he whistled some tune, a waltz or a jig, And drove off ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... send him shuttling from one planet to another. To achieve it they study, they sweat, they make all out efforts to meet and suck up to anybody they think might help. Finally, when and if they get an interview for one of the few openings, they spruce up in their best clothes, put on their best party manners, present themselves as the sincere, high I.Q., ambitious young men that they are—and then flunk their chance. I decided I might as well ...
— Ultima Thule • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... the charming power that lives Within it makes the music that it gives. It dims! it brightens! it will shape itself. And see! a graceful dazzling little elf. He lives! he moves! spruce mannikin of fire, What more can we? what more can ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... of the lungs. If Bergenheim were to see him sweating and panting like this in this bleak wind, he would give me a sound blowing-up. Upon my word, it is becoming comical! There are no more young girls! I shall see her appear presently as spruce and conceited as if she had been playing the finest trick in the world. It will do for once; but if we sojourn in these quarters some time yet, she must be educated and taught to say, 'If you please' and 'Thanks.' ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard
... kept its reputation good and yielded abundantly to the solicitation of Herbert's flies. The trout were large and in excellent condition and were quickly made ready for the trapper's treatment. A large piece of bark, peeled from a giant spruce standing near, and laid upon the ground, served for the table,—against the dark bark of which the tin dishes freshly scoured in the sand of the beach gleamed bright. The venison and trout were cooked as only one accustomed to the woods can do it, and the ...
— How Deacon Tubman and Parson Whitney Kept New Year's - And Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... saturated with tar, all kinds of threads, fish-line, threads rubbed with tarred lampblack, fine threads plaited together in strands, cotton soaked in boiling tar, lamp-wick, twine, tar and lampblack mixed with a proportion of lime, vulcanized fibre, celluloid, boxwood, cocoanut hair and shell, spruce, hickory, baywood, cedar and maple shavings, rosewood, punk, cork, bagging, flax, and a host of other things. He also extended his searches far into the realms of nature in the line of grasses, plants, canes, and similar products, ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... observatories were carried ashore, and placed upon an elevated rock on one side of the cove, close to the Resolution. A party of men, with an officer, was sent to cut wood, and to clear a place for the conveniency of watering. Others were employed to brew spruce-beer, as pine-trees abounded here. The forge was also set up, to make the iron-work wanting for the repairs of the fore-mast. For, besides one of the bibs being defective, the larboard trestle-tree and one ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... inches wide, and three inches in thickness. At the head, and at the foot, is to be screwed a notched two-inch board, three inches wide, as in Fig. 8. The mortises are to be one inch wide and deep, and one inch apart, to revive slats made of ash, oak, or spruce, one inch square, placed lengthwise of the couch. The slats being small, and so near together, and running lengthwise, make a better spring frame than wire coils. If they warp, they can be turned. They must not be fastened ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... there was plenty of grass for our steeds. We contented ourselves with forming a lean-to, but did not light a fire lest it should betray our whereabouts. Having eaten a little more pemmican, we formed our beds of spruce-fir tops, ...
— Afar in the Forest • W.H.G. Kingston
... comes from Bergin, Swinsound, Mott, Longland, Dranton, &c. (which experienc'd work-men call the dram) being long, strait and clear, and of a yellow more cedry colour, is esteemed much before the white for flooring and wainscot, for masts, &c. those of Prussia, which we call spruce, and Norway (especially from Gottenberg) and about Riga, are the best; unless we had more commerce of them from our Plantations in New England, which are preferable to any of them; there lying rotting at present at Pascataway, ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... the people slept he caused birch, spruce, and cottonwood trees to spring up in the low places, and when the people awoke in the morning they clapped their hands in delight, for the birds were singing in the tree-tops and the green leaves with the sunlight flickering through them made it seem like a fairy land. And they were ...
— A Treasury of Eskimo Tales • Clara Kern Bayliss
... could, in fact, scarcely be called flight. The steady vibration of the wings simply bore them upwards, ten, twenty or thirty feet, until they were caught by a breeze, or by the steadier wind that was moving at an elevation equal to the height of the surrounding pine and spruce trees. So far as we were able to discover, their wings were of the same use to them, in transporting them from their former home, that the 'wings' of many seeds are, in scattering them; both are wholly at ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... the lofty cabin, under the void where the roof shut off the stars, and talked of the pine-woods, of logging, measuring, and spring-drives, and of moose-hunting on snow-shoes, until our mouths had a wild flavor more spicy than if we had chewed spruce-gum by the hour. Spruce-gum is the aboriginal quid of these regions. Foresters chew this tenacious morsel as tars nibble at a bit of oakum, grooms at a straw, Southerns at tobacco, or ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... child. That's all. A Norway spruce cone. When it is dry its scales are open. I filled them with grass seed and put the cone in a small tumbler so that the lower end might be damp all the time. The dampness makes the scales close and starts the seed to sprouting. This has been ...
— Ethel Morton's Enterprise • Mabell S.C. Smith
... these woods, and overhung it—each bank a mute monotonous screen of foliage, unbroken by glade or clearing; pine and spruce and hemlock, maple and alder; piled plumes of green, motionless, brooding, through which no sunrays broke, though here and there a silver birch drew a shaft of light upon their sombre background. Here were no English woodlands, no stretches ...
— Fort Amity • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Skinner, the ideal wood for aeroplane construction is clear Pacific Coast spruce. I've been reading up on the subject. Inasmuch as this war must be won in the air, you can imagine the number of aeroplanes the country must turn out in the next eighteen months. Stu-pen-dous, Skinner, simply stu-pen-dous! Try to visualize the wastage alone in the aeroplanes on the battle fronts; ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... by enemies 'tis said, The laurel, which adorns thy head, Must one day come in competition, By virtue of some sly petition: Yet mum for that; hope still the best, Nor let such cares disturb thy rest. Methinks I hear thee loud as trumpet, As bagpipe shrill or oyster-strumpet; Methinks I see thee, spruce and fine, With coat embroider'd richly shine, And dazzle all the idol faces, As through the hall thy worship paces; (Though this I speak but at a venture, Supposing thou hast tick with Hunter,) Methinks I see a blackguard rout Attend thy coach, and hear them shout In approbation ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... Mountains common. Rare on Vancouver Island. Brooks says common resident in the spruce zone ...
— Catalogue of British Columbia Birds • Francis Kermode
... glance over the top of my head, past my side, over my shoulder, but never meet my eye. The gentle-modest would turn their faces south if I were coming east, flit down a passage if I were about to halve the pavement with them. There was the spruce young bookseller would play the same tricks; the butcher's daughters; the upholsterer's young men. Hand in glove when doing business out of sight with you; but caring nothing for a' old woman when playing the genteel away from ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... transparent threads spreading from one to the other. No birds were to be heard; everything seemed asleep, the espalier covered with straw, and the vine, like a great sick serpent under the coping of the wall, along which, on drawing hear, one saw the many-footed woodlice crawling. Under the spruce by the hedgerow, the curie in the three-cornered hat reading his breviary had lost his right foot, and the very plaster, scaling off with the frost, had left white scabs ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... Nova Scotia, a maritime province, there is a ridge called North Mountain, overlooking the Bay of Fundy on one side and the fertile Annapolis valley on the other. On the northern slope of the range grows the hardy spruce-tree, well adapted for ship-timbers, of which many vessels of all classes have been built. The people of this coast, hardy, robust, and strong, are disposed to compete in the world's commerce, and it is nothing against the master mariner if the birthplace mentioned on his certificate ...
— Sailing Alone Around The World • Joshua Slocum
... sun there,"—a very roundabout way to accomplish a very simple end. As years passed on, trees sprang up and grew apace, and too often the churches became overhung and heavily shadowed by dense, sombre spruce, cedar, and fir trees. A New England parson was preaching in a neighboring church which was thus gloomily surrounded. He gave out as his text, "Why do the wicked live?" and as he peered in the dim light at his manuscript, he exclaimed abruptly, "I hope they will live ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... morning when his colleague entered, spruce as ever in attire, but looking rather weary. The little man flung himself at full ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... stone pick or hatchet. It is said that the women of the North American tribes used a hoe made of an elk's shoulder-blade and a handle of wood. In Sweden the earliest records of tillage represent a huge hoe made from a stout limb of spruce with the sharpened root. This was finally made heavier, and men dragged it through the soil in the manner of ploughing. Subsequently the plough was made in two pieces, a handle having been added. Finally a pair of cows yoked together were compelled to drag the plough. Probably ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... which exudes from the spruce-fir, and is used by some polishers in the making of ...
— French Polishing and Enamelling - A Practical Work of Instruction • Richard Bitmead
... lamp hung from the ceiling and the little room exactly suited its mistress both were neat and clean, trim and spruce, simple and yet nice. Snowy transparent curtains enclosed the bed as a protection against the mosquitoes, a crucifix of delicate workmanship hung above the head of the couch, and the seats were covered with good cloth of various colors, fag-ends from the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... daylight, I went down to breakfast. I found the officers already assembled at one of the long tables in the mess-hall. Our party were calm, and even somewhat merry. We had retained one colored man to wait on us. He was a spruce-looking mulatto from Charleston, very active and efficient on ordinary occasions, but now completely demoralized by the thunder of the guns and crashing of the shot around us. He leaned back against the wall, almost white with ...
— Reminiscences of Forts Sumter and Moultrie in 1860-'61 • Abner Doubleday
... beech, birch, ash, hackmatack, hemlock, spruce, bass-wood, maple, interweave their foliage in the natural wood, so these mortals blended their varieties of visage and garb. A Tartar-like picturesqueness; a sort of pagan abandonment and assurance. ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... pleasure, relief, was found also in the restful deadness of the wooded sides of the hills when he came near them. Grey there was of deciduous trees in the basin of the river, and dull green of spruce firs that grew up elsewhere. Intense light has the effect of lack of light, taking colour from the landscape. Even the green of the fir trees, as they stood in full light on the hill summits, was faded in ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... overgrown with ivy. This ivy, Mr. Milestone observed, required trimming and clearing in various parts; a little pointing and polishing was necessary for the dilapidated walls; and the whole effect would be materially increased by a plantation of spruce fir, the present rugged and broken ascent being first converted into a beautiful slope, which might be easily effected by blowing up a part of the rock with gunpowder, laying on a quantity of fine mould, and covering the whole with ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VII • Various
... George was right. He said everybody was right. You would hardly have recognized in this shrunken figure and wattled face the spruce and dressy old man whom Ma Minick used to spoil so delightfully. "You know best, George. You know best." He who used to stand up to George until Ma Minick was moved to say, "Now, Pa, you don't ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... included chiefly among the coniferous evergreens, embracing the Pine, the Fir, the Spruce, and the Cypress. Though many of the deciduous trees assume more or less of this outline, it is the normal and characteristic form of the Pines and their kindred species. It is a peculiarity of the pyramidal trees, with a few exceptions, to remain always disfigured, after the loss of an important ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... recommended to purify the blood." His office consisted of a room about ten feet square, located in what was then known as the Sun building, an edifice ten by forty feet, situated at the corner of Spruce and Nassau streets, where the Tribune is now published. His "factory" was at his residence in Hudson street. He put up a large gilt sign over the Sun office, five or six feet wide by the length of the building, which attracted much attention, as ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... row to form the two sides of the house, bent till they met, and lashed together at the top. To these other poles were bound transversely, and the whole was covered with large sheets of the bark of the oak, elm, spruce, or white cedar, overlapping like the shingles of a roof, upon which, for their better security, split poles were made fast with cords of linden bark. At the crown of the arch, along the entire length of ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... embellishment of the breakfast-table. There was fresh groundsel, too, for Miss Maylie's birds, with which Oliver, who had been studying the subject under the able tuition of the village clerk, would decorate the cages, in the most approved taste. When the birds were made all spruce and smart for the day, there was usually some little commission of charity to execute in the village; or, failing that, there was rare cricket-playing, sometimes, on the green; or, failing that, there was always something to do ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... whom he kills another hour discussing the merits of the different animals he meets with there. These important duties being done, he strolls to an exhibition, or to a print-shop, and looks over a portfolio of caricatures; thence he keeps on moving to a fashionable hotel, to take white spruce beer(!) and sandwiches; here, after arranging his parties for the evening, be returns home to dress. After looking over the cards which have been left for him, he proceeds to his toilette with his valet, and is dressed about seven, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... positions of great strength around the quaint little Polish town of Kozienice. From this town for perhaps ten miles west, and I know not how far north and south there is a belt of forest of fir and spruce. Near Kozienice the Russian infantry, attacking in flank and front, fairly wrested the enemy's position and drove him back into this jungle. The Russians simply sent ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... pink wild roses and columbine hung in profusion over the spring which gushed out of the bank. Away to the east were the sand-hills of the Assiniboine—the bad lands of the prairie, their surface peopled with stiff spruce trees that stand like sentries looking, always looking ...
— The Black Creek Stopping-House • Nellie McClung
... old barns. Sometimes they crawled into wagon sheds and slept upon loads of grain or produce that had been gotten ready for the morrow's marketing. More frequently they bivouacked in the open, under the blue canopy of heaven, merely sheltered a little by a friendly spruce or pine, with the silver moon for a lamp, and the bright stars for candles. The great shaggy beast and the little dark man slept in one bed, as it were. Pedro usually pillowed his head upon Black Bruin and so the bear had to lie very still and not disturb his master, ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes
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