"Heather" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... time of year when the heather is red. It grew over the sand-hills in thick clumps. From low tree-like stems close-growing green branches raised their hardy ever-green leaves and unfading flowers. They seemed not to be made of ordinary, juicy flower substance, but of dry, hard scales. They were very insignificant in ...
— Invisible Links • Selma Lagerlof
... Laura spoke in haste: "Good folk, I have no coin; To take were to purloin: I have no copper in my purse, I have no silver either, And all my gold is on the furze That shakes in windy weather Above the rusty heather." "You have much gold upon your head," They answered altogether: "Buy from us with a golden curl." She clipped a precious golden lock, She dropped a tear more rare than pearl, Then sucked their fruit globes fair or red: Sweeter than honey from the rock, Stronger than man-rejoicing wine, ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... father's men Three days we've fled together, For should he find us in the glen, My blood would stain the heather. ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... sprinkle the ground, the petals exquisitely varied on the reverse side, and the stamens of bright salmon color; the large double anemones have come forth, certain that it is spring; on the higher crags by the wayside the Mediterranean heather has shaken out its delicate flowers, which fill the air with a mild fragrance; while blue violets, sweet of scent like the English, make our path a perfumed one. And ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... grazing and lazily whisked her tail. Lucy's heart began to beat more quickly. She felt that her father, too, looked upon that scene as the most typical of his home. Other places had broad acres and fine trees, other places had forest land and purple heather, but there was something in those green flats that made them seem peculiarly their own. She took her father's hand, and silently their eyes looked onwards. A more peaceful look came into Fred Allerton's worn face, ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham
... of me in the broad Jutland dialect I had neither heard nor spoken in half a lifetime, and so astonished me that I nearly fell off my chair. Sheep, peat-stacks, cairn, and hills all vanished together, and in place of the sweet heather there was the table with the tiresome papers. I reached out yearningly after the heath; I had not seen it for such a long time,—how long it did seem!—and—but in the same breath it was all there again in the smile that lighted up Frands's broad ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... said, sleepily, "the auld padre gave them the Breton name—ombre chevalier. In Scotland and England—if ever ye hae the good luck to go there—ye will hear talk of graylin'. Aye, the bonny graylin'... an' the purple heather... an' the cry o' the whaups.... Lad, ye hae much to see an' hear yet, for all the cruising ye hae done.... Aye, the graylin', an' the white mantle o' the mountain mist... an' the voices o' the night... ...
— The Call Of The South - 1908 • Louis Becke
... are both beautiful, especially the latter, in a little bay with a jutting promontory, a rocky hill covered with evergreens, and shrubs, and heather, and affording grand and various prospects of the still blue sea and the white and shining coast with ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... which as Eleanor said was almost filled up with the road, and the brook which rushed along its course to meet the river; itself almost as large as another river. Where the people could be found to go to a church in such a region, she could not imagine. Heather clothed the hills; fairy cascades leaped down the rocks at every turning, lovely as a dream; the whole scene was wild and lonely. Hardly any human habitations or signs of human action broke the wild reign of nature all the valley ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume I • Susan Warner
... and followed it over the trackless moor, whining and yelping all the time in its eagerness. Had we not all three been fleet of foot and long of wind, we could not have persisted in the continuous, rapid journey over the roughest of ground, with the heather often well-nigh ...
— The Mystery of Cloomber • Arthur Conan Doyle
... sky, a world of heather, Purple of foxglove, yellow of broom: We two among them wading together, Shaking out ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... within a chrystal flowerbell rocked Hum a lovelay to the westwind at noontide. Both alike, they buzz together, Both alike, they hum together Through and through the flowered heather. ...
— The Suppressed Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... of her kindly precautions, the nervous sheep scuttled across the road on to the heather-clad common, bleating plaintively: then their scuttle became a run. At sight of this flying column, Tim stopped, put his head on one side, and prepared ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... there, if we went there, maybe we'd find it," said the Cock-grouse to the Hen-grouse as they went together, clucking through the heather. ...
— The Boy Who Knew What The Birds Said • Padraic Colum
... think I should like to be a shepherd." And straightway she fell into a reverie, this foolish Rose, and fancied herself wrapped in a plaid, lying in a broad meadow, spread with heather as with a mantle, and here and there gray rocks, and sheep moving slowly about ...
— Hildegarde's Holiday - a story for girls • Laura E. Richards
... pure enjoyment wealthy, Blithe as a beautiful bird she sings, For body and mind are hale and healthy. Her eyes they thrill with right goodwill - Her heart is light as a floating feather - As pure and bright as the mountain rill That leaps and laughs in the Highland heather! Go search the world and search the sea, Then come you home and sing with me There's no such gold and no such pearl As a bright and ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... the recovery of the nigger, and then rush out to the pursuit. Romescos heads the party. With dogs, horses, guns, and all sorts of negro-hunting apparatus, they scour the pinegrove, the swamp, and the heather. They make the pursuit of man full of interest to those who are fond of the chase; they allow their enthusiasm to bound in unison with the ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... replied the lawyer, "which it would ill become me to put.—But at any rate, if you knew this country formerly, ye cannot but be marvellously pleased with the change we have been making since the American war—hill-sides bearing clover instead of heather—rents doubled, trebled, quadrupled—the auld reekie dungeons pulled down, and gentlemen living in as good houses as you will see ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... best;—is the right thought, as well as the calmest thought? Would it be just to say (which would be the material analogy) that you have the best view of some great rocky island when you have sailed away from it till it has turned to a blue cloud on the horizon; rather than when its granite and heather are full in view, close at hand? I am not sure that in every case the calmer thought is the right thought, the distant view the right view. You have come to think indifferently of the personal injury, of the act of foul cruelty and falsehood, which once roused you to flaming ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... grateful tongue to join The lark at his matin hymn, And thence on faith's own wing to spring And sing with cherubim! To pray from a deep and tender heart With all things praying anew, The birds and the bees and the whispering trees, And heather bedropt with dew.— To be one with those early worshippers, ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... well enough read in Herbert Spencer, felt a sort of silence fall for an instant on my mind. The next, I was pricking Modestine forward, and guiding her like an unruly ship through the open. In a path, she went doggedly ahead of her own accord, as before a fair wind; but once on the turf or among heather, and the brute became demented. The tendency of lost travellers to go round in a circle was developed in her to the degree of passion, and it took all the steering I had in me to keep even a decently straight ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Miss Campion's invitation. I was rather apprehensive of the effect these country stations would have on my fastidious curate; and I narrowly watched him, as we left our car on the hills, and strode through soft yellow mud and dripping heather to some mountain cabin. And I think there was a little kindly malice in my thoughts when I allowed him enter first, and plunge into the night of smoke that generally filled these huts. Then the saying of Mass on a deal table, with a horse collar overhead, and ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... walked also to a clear mountain torrent which comes thundering down among great boulders and dense tropical vegetation at the foot of the mountains, as clear and cold as if it were a Highland stream dashing through the purple heather. [*Since my visit there have been three fatal outbreaks of this epidemic, three thousand deaths having occurred among the neighboring miners and coolies. So firmly did the disease appear to have established ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... and there out of the bushes, pouring forth their caroling to the clear ether; and Marsa, spurring her thoroughbred, would dash in a mad gallop toward a little, almost unknown grove of oaks, with thickets full of golden furze and pink heather, where woodcutters worked, half buried in the long grass peppered with blue cornflowers and ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... Heart (cards) kero. Heart, by parkere. Heart, to learn by parkeri. Hearth fajrujo, hejmo. Heartrending korsxiranta. Heartsease violo. Hearty korega. Heat hejti. Heat varmeco. Heath stepo, erikejo. Heather (plant) eriko. Heathen idolano. Heathenism idolservo. Heaven cxielo. Heaviness multepezeco. Heavy peza. Hebdomadary cxiusemajna. Hebraism Hebreismo. Hebrew Hebreo. Hectare hektaro. Hectogramme hektogramo. Hectolitre hektolitro. Hedge plektobarilo. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... they walked back to Braeside. It was a pretty walk across a bit of moorland, through the heather and bracken, here and there a moss-grown rock, here and there across the path a tiny ...
— Hunter's Marjory - A Story for Girls • Margaret Bruce Clarke
... the cows wandered father than ever they had done before, and never stopped till they had reached a moor where the heather was burning. The fire was fierce, but the cows took no heed, and walked steadily through it, Covan the Brown-haired following them. Next they plunged into a foaming river, and Covan plunged in after ...
— The Orange Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... exception to this rule, being unhealthy all the year through. Even vegetation suffers here from the south-east monsoon; and a nutmeg-plantation exposed to its dry, parching influence, has the appearance of a plantation of heather-brooms more than of any thing else.[9] The natives do not appear to suffer from the climate, but seem to be as healthy and long-lived as Asiatics generally. Of the character of these natives, I can say little that is favourable. They are indolent, proud, though ...
— Trade and Travel in the Far East - or Recollections of twenty-one years passed in Java, - Singapore, Australia and China. • G. F. Davidson
... see the scarlet gleaming! Now, Macdonald—now or never!— Woe is me, the clans are broken! Father, thou art lost for ever! Chief and vassal, lord and yeoman, there they lie in heaps together, Smitten by the deadly volley, rolled in blood upon the heather; And the Hanoverian horsemen, fiercely riding to and fro, Deal their murderous strokes at random.— Ah my God! where am I now? Will that baleful vision never vanish from my aching sight? Must those scenes and sounds of terror haunt me still by day and night? Yea, the earth hath no oblivion for ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... she went lame on one foreleg; but beyond this, and a good many scratches, there was nothing wrong. My own appearance need not here be dilated upon. I was cleaning off what they call in Ireland "the biggest of the filth" with a bunch of heather, when from a cottage a little bit down the lane in which I was standing a small barelegged child emerged. It saw me, uttered one desperate howl, and fled back into the house. I abandoned my toilet and led the mare to the ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... scarcely any heather in my native county. No," said Peter, "no. To tell you the truth, it is the usual thing. It ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... flower, smaller but more pickable, is just now waving, the rock rose or frostweed, bearing two sorts of flowers: the conspicuous yellow ones, somewhat resembling small evening primroses, while all the ground between is covered with an humble member of the rock rose family—the tufted beach heather with its intricate branches, reminding one more of a club-moss than a true flowering plant. Not a scrap of sand in the enclosure is left uncovered, and the various plants are set closely, like the grasses and wild flowers of a meadow, the sand pinweed that we gather, together with sea ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... handsome girl once, and her fine, high-bred face was still almost beautiful. It was covered with innumerable tiny wrinkles, but her dark eyes were bright, and her cheeks bore a fixed pink flush, the birth-mark of the land of heather. Her hair, glossy black, with not a thread of gray, was parted in the middle and lay on either side in perfectly even waves. Her figure was slim and stiffly straight, her hands long and slender. She looked every inch a woman of refinement, and also a woman who would ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... sunk only to be abandoned, and the agriculturist has fared little better than the miner. Early in the last century, a Mr Knight made an heroic effort to enclose a large portion of the moor for the purposes of cultivation. The heather, however, is still triumphant. The only memorial of his ambition is a ruined mansion at Simonsbath. The hills are all of considerable altitude—well over 1200 ft.—but with the exception of Dunkery ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade
... garb by Love bestow'd? With roses crown'd and sprigs of heather, With mandolin and dart enbow'd Shall Cupid and I go together— Land of the madrigal and ode, Of rainbow ...
— Calvert of Strathore • Carter Goodloe
... of woodland that surge up to the walls of Windsor. East and south is that beautiful and still lonely country that lies between the oldest Wessex and the sister, and ultimate vassal, kingdom of Sussex; the country of the Meonwaras, a region of heather hills and quiet pine combes that stretch down to the Solent Sea and ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... to play In their fairy town secure; Ev'ry frisker Flirts his whisker At a pink-eyed girl demure. Ev'ry maid In silk arrayed At her partner shyly glances, Paws are grasped, Waists are clasped As they whirl in giddy dances. Then together Through the heather 'Neath the moonlight soft they stroll; Each is very Blithe and merry, Gamboling with laughter droll. Life is fun To ev'ry one Guarded by our magic charm For to dangers We are strangers, Safe from any thought ...
— The Emerald City of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... ice-fields, but outside these are river valleys and lake districts affording pasturage, and arable land capable of producing root crops. The climate is changeable, mild for the latitude, but somewhat colder than Scotland. There are few trees, and these small; cranberries grow among the heather, and Iceland moss is a plentiful article of food. The island exports sheep and ponies; the fisheries are important, including cod, seals, and whales; sulphur and coal are found; the hot springs are ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... barren Ithaca above the gilded invitation of Calypso? History has only one Ulysses. Sally's voice was lilting like a bird's as she walked happily. The song was one of those old ballads that have been held intact since the stock learned to sing them in the heather of the Scotch highlands before there was ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... droop above my head, And a large flint-stone weighs upon my feet, Around me beeches and high chesnuts shed Their leaves and prickly nuts; a sheep-fold bleat Comes from beyond the river to my bed: Go shed one tear upon my heather-bloom, And it shall comfort me within ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... passage between the Island of Cerigotto and Candia; but that the sloop passed between Cerigotto and Pauri, and was lost on a rock, on the south-west part of that passage, which rock does not appear to be laid down in Heather's Chart, by which the said sloop ...
— Narratives of Shipwrecks of the Royal Navy; between 1793 and 1849 • William O. S. Gilly
... us, but our limbs are palsied, and our feet must brush the heather no more. Lo, how beautifully those fast-travelling pointers do their work on that black mountain's breast; intersecting it into parallelograms and squares and circles, and now all a-stoop on a sudden, ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... unashamed. It was a countryside savagely invaded by forges and mine shafts and gaunt black things. It was scarred and impeded and discoloured. Even before that invasion, when the heather was not in flower it must have been a black country. Its people were dour uncandid individuals, who slanted their heads and knitted their brows to look at you. Occasionally one saw woods brown and blistered by the gases from chemical works. Here and there remained old rectories, closely reminiscent ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... in the clinging billow's clasp, From sea-weed fringe to mountain heather, The British oak with rooted grasp Her slender handful holds together; With cliffs of white and bowers of green, And Ocean narrowing to caress her, And hills and threaded streams between;— Our little ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... can foresee my adventures. I can tell of my march over the heather, of my delight as the breezy air sweeps over the moors, and helps to bronze my already ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, July 30, 1892 • Various
... said, smiling; "only I had first to settle Lady Temple, little guessing who was her treasure of a governess! Last night I had nearly opened, on another false scent; I fell in with a description that I could have sworn was yours, of the heather behind the parsonage. I made a note of the publisher in ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... blew so fiercely that it was difficult to make any progress at all. Overhead was a dark roof composed of heavy masses of cloud, forming long parallel lines of gray right to the horizon. On each side of the rough, water-worn road the heather made a low wall, two or three feet high, and stretched right away to the horizon in every direction. In the lulls, between the fierce blasts, I could hear the trickle of the water in the rivulets deep down in the springy cushion of heather. ...
— Yorkshire—Coast & Moorland Scenes • Gordon Home
... deep cut of the glen there was very little snow, only a few veins and patches here and there, threading and seaming the steep, as if a white-footed hare had been coursing about. Little stubby brier shoots, and clumps of russet bracken, and dead heather, ruffling like a brown dog's back, broke the dull surface of withered herbage, thistle stumps, teasels, rugged banks, and naked brush. Down in the bottom the noisy brook was scurrying over its pebbles brightly, or plunging into gloom of its own production; and away at the ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... gathered in every hollow, But the purple hillocks enjoyed fine weather As we marched with our fiddles over the heather - How it comes back!—to ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... succeeded by solitude and silence. Little by little the bay of the hounds, the shouts of the hunters, and the occasional sound of the horn grew fainter; the birds once more appeared, and sent forth short calls to their timid friends. I began again to notice who my neighbors were, as to daisies and heather which resided around the stone on which I sat, and the exclusive circle of a fairy-ring at a little distance, which, like many exclusive ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... there a lark high in the air. Sometimes I used to hear a farmer speaking sharp and loud to his servants; but it was so far away that it only reminded me pleasantly that other people were hard at work in some distant place, while I just sat on the heather and did nothing.' ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... the Saxon offspring of Chad or Chid; Hellinglye (Ella-inga-leah), the home of the sons of Ella, of whom we have written before; Heathfield and Framfield on opposite sides, open heaths in the wood, covered with heather and sparsely peopled; Mayfield to the north, once the abode of the great Saint Dunstan, and the scene of his conflicts with Satan; Hothly to the south, where, at the date of our tale, lived the Hodleghs, ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... 'mid cowslips blowing, When I was six and you were four; When garlands weaving, flower-balls throwing, Were pleasures soon to please no more. Through groves and meads, o'er grass and heather, With little playmates, to and fro, We wandered hand in hand together; But that was sixty ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... it make what people think when your conscience is clear. You do feed your horse, you feed him well, so what's the odds," inquired the Rev. Hugh Grantley, son of granite, child of the heather, looking with lifted brows at ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... slipper and a dressing-gown are excellent companions, agree well together, and never give their master a moment's uneasiness; hence their value; similarly, a stout high-low and a good leathern legging, buttoned well over the ankle beneath, and the knee above, will carry a man through heather or gorse, on foot or on horseback, and will prove "marvellous good wear;" they ought to be, as indeed they commonly are, dear friends to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... upon a well-laid main road, and along this we trotted on to a tempting stretch of heath-land. There was a heavy mist, but the scent of the heather in the early morning was delightful, and there was something exhilarating in the dull thud of the hoofs upon the springy turf. The negro was a natural horseman, and he seemed to enjoy the ride every bit as much as ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer
... them as they rode along. At other times, to turn aside the branches, he passed close to her, and Emma felt his knee brushing against her leg. The sky was now blue, the leaves no longer stirred. There were spaces full of heather in flower, and plots of violets alternated with the confused patches of the trees that were grey, fawn, or golden coloured, according to the nature of their leaves. Often in the thicket was heard the fluttering ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... de Mortsauf (Le Lys dans la Vallee), Balzac compares her to the fragrant heather gathered on returning from the Villa Diodati. After studying carefully his long period of association with Madame Hanska, one can see the importance which the Villa Diodati had in his life. This is only another incident, small though it be, showing how this woman impressed ...
— Women in the Life of Balzac • Juanita Helm Floyd
... demonstrated by my investigations at Lochlee and elsewhere. {28a} It would be still more necessary in a substratum of timbers that was intended (as will be afterwards explained) to bear the weight of a superincumbent cairn. Underneath the layers of horizontal woodwork some portions of heather, bracken, and brushwood were detected, and below this came a succession of thin beds of mud, loam, sand, gravel, and finally the blue clay which forms the solum of the river valley. {28b} The piles penetrated this latter, but not deeply, ...
— The Clyde Mystery - a Study in Forgeries and Folklore • Andrew Lang
... the power to release us momentarily from the airless prison of our own egotism. How often it is a child's hand which first opens that iron door, and draws us forth into the sunshine! With Wentworth it had been so. The pure air of the moorland, the scent of the heather and the sea seem indissolubly mingled with the remembrance of those whom we have loved. For did we not in their company walk abroad into a new world, breathe a new air, while Self, the dingy turnkey, for once ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... the weald to where the gentle curves of the South Downs formed an undulating horizon. In a cleft of the hills a haze of smoke marked the position of Lewes. Immediately at our feet there lay a rolling plain of heather, with the long, vivid green stretches of the Crowborough golf course, all dotted with the players. A little to the south, through an opening in the woods, we could see a section of the main line from London to Brighton. In the immediate foreground, under ...
— The Poison Belt • Arthur Conan Doyle
... was nothing but the heather and the mountain cave for Alexander Gordon for many a day. He had wealth of adventures, travelling by night, hiding and sleeping by day. Sometimes he would venture to the house of one who sympathised with the ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... of these plants are not very important as dyes, and could not probably now be collected in sufficient quantities. Some few, however, are important, such as woad, weld, heather, walnut, alder, oak, some lichens; and many of the less important ones would produce valuable colours if experiments were made with the right mordants. Those which have been in use in the Highlands are most of them good dyes. Among these are Ladies Bedstraw, whortleberry, ...
— Vegetable Dyes - Being a Book of Recipes and Other Information Useful to the Dyer • Ethel M. Mairet
... after, Hake's manly tones rose on the still air like the sound of an organ, while he sang one of the ancient airs of his native land, wherein, like the same airs of modern days, were sounded the praises of Scotland's heather hills and brawling burns—her bonny daughters and ...
— The Norsemen in the West • R.M. Ballantyne
... they cannot get it; when once they can, they will stay where the beer is, and not go padding the wet and weary hoof through peat-hogs, over rocks, and along stupid and fatiguing acclivities, rugged with heather. Oh, preserve me from Deer-stalking; it is a sport of which I cherish only ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, May 14, 1892 • Various
... up and move on, sit down and get up again. It is about four o'clock; about six I can start for home, and see if I happen to meet anyone. Two hours to wait; a little restless already, I brush the dust and heather from my clothes. I know the places I pass by, trees and stones stand there as before in their solitude; the leaves rustle underfoot as I walk. The monotonous breathing and the familiar trees and stones mean much to me; I am filled with a strange ...
— Pan • Knut Hamsun
... land there's a sky like a feather, Blue in some places, or white as a star; And there's a fragrance—a plant that's called heather Grows in the spot where the butterflies are. Dear, there are pastures as gay as glad laughter, Dotted with hundreds of woolly white sheep, Dear, you can pat them, for they'll follow after ...
— Cross Roads • Margaret E. Sangster
... was soft and brown, and her cheeks were of a faint, pearly rosiness. You would never have thought of her as what people of strictly categorical minds would call a bad woman. I think a wholly normal man must have looked upon her as a child looks at a heather-bell—gladly and gratefully, and with a pleased amazement. She was small and slight. Women of the majordomo type must have regarded her as still a child. Her breasts were little, her neck and shoulders delicate, and she had a trick of lifting her left hand to her heart when she ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... of brain fever and insanity, Marriott put on his cap and macintosh and left the house. The morning air on Arthur's Seat would blow the cobwebs from his brain; the scent of the heather, and above all, the sight of the sea. He roamed over the wet slopes above Holyrood for a couple of hours, and did not return until the exercise had shaken some of the horror out of his bones, and given him a ravening ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... for no one but the immaculate colonel, the chevalier sans peur et sans reproche, dared to go about the country 'such a figure.' A minute afterwards he walked in, in a student's felt hat, a ragged heather-coloured coatee, and old white 'regulation drills,' shrunk half-way up his legs, a pair of embroidered Indian mocassins, and an enormous meerschaum ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... nosing between Jura and Islay, and about midday we touched at a little port, where we unloaded some cargo and took on a couple of shepherds who were going to Colonsay. The mellow afternoon and the good smell of salt and heather got rid of the dregs of my queasiness, and I spent a profitable hour on the pier-head with a guide-book called Baddely's Scotland, and one of Bartholomew's maps. I was beginning to think that Amos might be able to tell me ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... water in search of prey: but before noon even those had slipped away, and there reigned a stillness which might be heard—such a stillness (to compare small things with great) as broods beneath the rich shadows of Amyas's own Devon woods, or among the lonely sweeps of Exmoor, when the heather is in flower—a stillness in which, as Humboldt says, "If beyond the silence we listen for the faintest undertones, we detect a stifled, continuous hum of insects, which crowd the air close to the earth; a confused swarming murmur ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... you find real hare-bells, such as grow on the bonny Highland hills among the heather? I wish papa would let me go to the Upper Province, to see the beaver meadows, and gather the ...
— Lady Mary and her Nurse • Catharine Parr Traill
... the list extends from the imposing and sometimes gigantic oaks, elms, beeches, and willows to shrubs and heather growth of the ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... months had not elapsed since that brown creature had kicked up its little heels, and twirled its tail, and shaken its shaggy mane in all the wild exuberance of early youth and unfettered freedom on the heather hills of its ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... bases of the crags, the different shades of the green leaves, the masses of flowers, pink, blue, or white, the climbing plants with their bell-like blossoms, and the shot velvet of the mosses, the purple-tinted blooms of the heather,—everything was either brought into relief or made fairer yet by the enchantment of the light or by the contrasting shadows; and this was the case most of all with the sheet of water, wherein the house, the trees, the granite peaks, and ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... there, on our right, was a splendid fellow lording it alone on the very crest of the hill within range. I did not stop to consider, but raised my gun to my shoulder and fired instantly. But just as I pulled the trigger, someone sprang up from the heather between me and the stag—sprang up, uttered a cry, and reeled and fell"—the last words were spoken with a gasp, and the Tenor stopped for an instant, and then continued in a hoarse broken whisper to which his companion ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... forgotten that there was a time when I was not Irish, but for the moment I am of the turf, turfy. Francesca is really as much in love with Ireland as I, only, since she has in her heart a certain tender string pulling her all the while to the land of the heather, she naturally avoids comparisons. Salemina, too, endeavours to appear neutral, lest she should betray an inexplicable interest in Dr. La Touche's country. Benella and I alone are really free to speak the ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... welcome back again! Titmouse and blackcap and a hedge-sparrow or so live now alone in the bush and undergrowth: tuitui! All is so curiously changed—the dwarf birch bleeds redly against the grey stones, a harebell here and there shows among the heather, swaying and whispering a little song: sh! But high above all hovers an eagle with outstretched neck, on his way to the ...
— Pan • Knut Hamsun
... the self-sown firs grow in close ranks. The ground below them is bare but for tussocks of coarse grass and ruddy beds of fallen fir needles. On the right, the fir wood is broken by coppices of silver-stemmed birches, and spaces of heather—that shows a purple-brown against the gray of the reindeer moss out of which it springs. Tits swung and frolicked among the tree-tops, and a jay flew off noisily with a flash of azure wing-coverts and volley ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... the onset; and, as his followers were pressing forward, shouting Rosslyne! Rosslyne! "Cry Moubray," said the expiring chieftain; "Rosslyne is gone!" The Highland clans had also their appropriate slogans. The Macdonalds cried Frich, (heather); the Macphersons Craig-Ubh; the Grants ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... the table, spread out his feet to the right, pitched his left elbow a long distance to the left, and, his head resting on his left hand, turned over the pages with his right hand idly. His eye caught titles such as: "The Door was Shut," "My Mother's Voice," "The Heather Mother," "The Only Treasure," "Religion and Business," "Hope to the End," "The Child of our Sunday School," "Satan's Devices," and "Studies of Christian Life and Character, Hannah More." Then he saw an article about some architecture in Rome, and he read: "In the Sistine picture there is ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... Find it he did, soon after dawn, and not far from the sand pits. An enormous hole had been made by the impact of the projectile, and the sand and gravel had been flung violently in every direction over the heath, forming heaps visible a mile and a half away. The heather was on fire eastward, and a thin blue smoke rose ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... fruit already you never dreamed of. Beet-root and turnips will not succeed on every soil. It must be long before a remunerative crop of these can be gathered from the breezy upland which for centuries, till the heather was burned, has worn a robe of uncommercial but ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... snowy garlands of the wild cherry, and beneath with wide spaces covered with young green bracken, whose soft irregular masses on the undulating ground had somewhat the effect of the waves of the sea. These alternated with stretches of yellow gorse and brown heather, sheets of cotton-grass, and pools of white crowfoot, and all the vegetation of a mountain side, only that the mountain ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... examining plans for a village hospital. For, in case any serious illness should break out again among them, a simple little hospital was to be built upon the brow of the hill, where the wind sweeps across leagues of meadow-land and heather. ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... mornings of late summer shone upon her. The heather was at its purplest, the furze at its yellowest, the grasshoppers chirped loud enough for birds, the snakes hissed like little engines, and Elfride at first felt lively. Sitting at ease upon Pansy, in her orthodox riding-habit and nondescript hat, she ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... the Wall, among the heather, will weep because your notion of justice was more to you than the favour ...
— Puck of Pook's Hill • Rudyard Kipling
... him—"it should suffice!" They were now on the heights of Pleinmont; no one was moving, though voices of men and beasts could be plainly heard in the distance. "They feast to-night to the Gods," said Hilda; "we need fear only some belated laggard!" The heather was not yet springing, but Jean could see that gorse was on the bloom, which he considered a favourable omen: they stepped out bravely on the short springy turf. Tita's steps were slower than those of the young ...
— The Forest of Vazon - A Guernsey Legend Of The Eighth Century • Anonymous
... dream; I ken'd there wad be sorrow; I dream'd I pu'd the heather green, On the dowie ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... 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 ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... the very bosom of the valley, a soft mist hangs, increasing the sense of distance, and softening back one hill and wood behind another, till the great brown moor which backs it all seems to rise out of the empty air. For a thousand feet it ranges up, in rude sheets of brown heather, and grey cairns and screes of granite, all sharp and black-edged against the pale blue sky; and all suddenly cut off above by one long horizontal line of dark grey cloud, which seems to hang there motionless, and yet is growing to windward, and dying to leeward, for ever rushing out of the invisible ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... his way, and once he left the path to take a short cut, but his foot slipped into a boghole and he had to come back to it. And how long he was going he did not know, or what way he went, but at last he was up on the bare mountain, with nothing but the rough heather about him, and he could neither hear the hounds nor any other thing. But their cry began to come to him again, at first far off and then very near, and when it came quite close to him, it went up all of a sudden into the air, and there was the sound of hunting over his head; then it went away ...
— Stories of Red Hanrahan • W. B. Yeats
... Eugenie, after bowing to Madame Grandet, "you are always beautiful and good, and truly I do not know what to wish you." So saying, he offered her a little box which his servant had brought and which contained a Cape heather,—a flower lately imported into Europe and ...
— Eugenie Grandet • Honore de Balzac
... whom—though they teased her a little and called her "Grannie"—they all turned in the end for help and advice. Jess was slightly out of her element in a southern setting. Her appropriate background was moorland and heather and gray loch, and driving clouds and a breeze with fine mist in it, that would make you want to wrap a plaid round your shoulders and turn to the luxury of a peat fire. Quite unconsciously she suggested all ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... beneath heavy plaids, prowling in and out among the animals, and flavouring the air with fumes of whiskey. There was its corn market down the main street, with hum of chaffering over open sacks. There was its general market in the street too, with heather brooms on which the purple flower still flourished, and heather baskets primitive and fresh to behold. With women trying on clogs and caps at open stalls, and 'Bible stalls' adjoining. With 'Doctor Mantle's Dispensary for the cure of all Human ...
— The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices • Charles Dickens
... came across, the first morning after their arrival. Audrey had arranged her own and Michael's books on the empty shelves; the little mirror, and indeed the whole mantelpiece, was festooned and half hidden with branches laden with deep crimson rowan-berries, mixed with heather and silvery-leafed honesty; a basket of the same rowan-berries occupied the centre of the round table; an Oriental scarf draped the ugly horsehair sofa, and a comfortable-looking rug was thrown over the shabby easy-chair. The fishing-tackle, butterfly-nets, pipes, and all other heterogeneous ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... not to enjoy for long the fruits of his victory. His hardships in the wilderness when flying from his enemies, and his great suffering and lack of food when he fled in the Scotch heather like a hunted animal, had made him fall prey to a terrible malady—the disease of leprosy. So great was the love in which the Scots held him that even this did not make them shun him with the fear that is shown toward ordinary sufferers from this disease. Surrounded by friends, Bruce gradually wasted ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards
... to the task of putting as broad a stretch of moor between the prison and myself as the remaining hours of darkness would allow. Setting my face to the wind once more, I ran until I fell from exhaustion. Then, after five minutes of panting among the heather, I made another start, until again my knees gave way beneath me. I was young and hard, with muscles of steel, and a frame which had been toughened by twelve years of camp and field. Thus I was able to keep up this wild flight for another three ...
— The Exploits Of Brigadier Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... village of my own, no birthplace, any more than I had a father or mother—the village where I spent my childhood was called Chavanon; it is one of the poorest in France. Only sections of the land could be cultivated, for the great stretch of moors was covered with heather and broom. We lived in a little house down ...
— Nobody's Boy - Sans Famille • Hector Malot
... Countess of Buchan, bold and firm in general, could not successfully resist the influence of Nature's sadness. She sat comparatively alone; a covering had, indeed, been thrown over some thick poles, which interwove with brushwood, and with a seat and couch of heather, which was still in flower, formed a rude tent, and was destined for her repose; but until night's dark mantle was fully unfurled, she had preferred the natural seat of a jutting crag, sheltered from ...
— The Days of Bruce Vol 1 - A Story from Scottish History • Grace Aguilar
... bassoon; golden daffodils violent as the sound of a cornet; bouquets of pink roses and daisies, charmful and pure as the notes of a flute; white faille, soft draperies of tulle, garlands of white lilac, sprays of white heather, delicate and resonant as the treble voices of children singing carols in dewy English woods; berthas, flounces, plumes, stomachers, lappets, veils, frivolous as the strains of a German waltz played on ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... sodger lad, D'ye mind our Summer meetin'? And noo, ye'll gang. The heather's dead ... I canna keep ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... gods divided earth into waste and pasture. Pleasant pastures They made to be green over the face of earth, orchards They made in valleys and heather upon hills, but Harza They doomed, predestined and foreordained to be ...
— Time and the Gods • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... Patrick Toolis, with that love of fine words which marks the Irish peasant, said that the charred interior of the scattered remains proves that the trees were "desthroyed intirely by a grate confiscation." The heather, of two kinds, is brilliantly purple, and the Royal fern grows everywhere in profusion, its terra-cotta bloom often towering six feet high. The mountains are effectively arranged, and imposing by their massiveness, height, and rugged grandeur. Some of the roads are tolerable, those ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... the Tennysons moved to a farmhouse near Haslemere, at that time not a centre of literary Londoners. "Sandy soil and heather-scented air" allured them, and the result was the purchase of land, and the building of Aldworth, Mr Knowles being the architect. In autumn Tennyson visited Lyme Regis, and, like all other travellers thither, made a pilgrimage ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... seemed to grow more delicate every year. Day after day the faithful nurse might have been seen trudging across the country, carrying little Olive in her arms, to strengthen the child with the healing springs of Bridge of Allan, and invigorate her weak frame with the fresh mountain air—the heather breath of beautiful Ben-Ledi. Among these influences did Olive's childhood dawn, so that in after-life they never faded ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... in huge mounds of fine sweet earth, as they do in the gorge of the Tay about Dunkeld, and all the way up Strathmore, where they form long grassy mounds—tomauns as they call them in some parts of Scotland—askers as they call them in Ireland. These mounds, with their sweet fresh turf rising out of heather and bog, were tenanted— so Scottish children used to believe—by fairies. He that was lucky might hear inside them fairy music, and, the jingling of the fairy horses' trappings. But woe to him if he fell asleep upon the mound, for he would be spirited away into fairyland for ...
— Town Geology • Charles Kingsley
... tartans were dyed with bark of alder for black, bark of willow for flesh colour. A lichen growing on stones supplied their violets and crimson.[311] The lichen on the birch-tree gives a good brown; heather ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... town, past the station, and finally he stopped in the shadow of a crag of rock which sprang abruptly three hundred feet into the air. Its summit was crowned by the frowning walls of the great fort which commands the harbour, and along the face of the cliff, blue with heather, a narrow footpath wound deviously upward. He ascended this for a little way, and then stopped, his elbows on the wall which guarded it. Before him stretched the bay, shielded by its jetty, and beyond rolled the white-capped ocean. That way ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... moor extended for a distance of nearly a mile. On this two or three score of cattle, and a dozen shaggy little horses, were engaged in an effort to keep life together, upon the rough herbage that grew among the heather and blocks of stones, ...
— Both Sides the Border - A Tale of Hotspur and Glendower • G. A. Henty
... the sonata he had chosen was like a breath of pure, heather-scented air floating in upon the gas-laden atmosphere of the heated room; and at the first strains of the delicious melody the people below stopped talking, and turned their eyes up to the front of the gallery, where the tall, ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... heard the sound of voices in the near distance. I immediately fell flat on the ground, for I did not wish to be seen. A minute later I knew that two men were coming toward me, and I judged would pass close beside me. However, I lay still. I was partly covered by the heather which grew abundantly just there, and in the dim light could not be distinguished by the ordinary passer-by from the many great gray rocks which were ...
— The Birthright • Joseph Hocking
... the delicate Indian pipe which gleams out from the darkest aisles of the forest? If we lift up its hanging head we will find a perfect flower, and its secret is discovered. Traitor to its kind, it has dropped from the ranks of the laurels, the heather, and the jolly little wintergreens to the colourless life of a parasite,—hobnobbing with clammy toadstools and slimy lichens. Its common names are ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... But all seemed silent and he turned back to his willows. The beauty of the landscape about him was much too familiar a thing that he should have felt or seen its charm. The violet hue of the distant woods, the red gleaming of the heather-strewn moor, with its patches of swamp from which the slow mist arose, the pretty little village with its handsome old church and attractive rectory—Janci had known it so long that he never stopped to realise how very charming, in its gentle melancholy, ...
— The Case of The Pool of Blood in the Pastor's Study • Grace Isabel Colbron and Augusta Groner
... broom, heather, shamrock, and edelweiss, they would be able to see clover, alfalfa, arbutus, and mignonette when they came back home. If they could see black robins in Wales and Germany, the robin redbreast here at home would surely be thought worthy of notice. If they could see stalactites and stalagmites ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... designed for the wagoners, whose loud talking, conversation, and laughter were audible from an adjoining apartment. Any one who has travelled knows that there is no one who indulges in better cheer than wagoners. A fat marmot, flanked by white partridges and heather-cocks, was turning on a long spit before the fire; on the stove, two huge carps from Lake Lauzet and a trout from Lake Alloz ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... gratified in God's beautiful and diversified works. The grave and golden clouds, the dark and rosy tints of the sunset sky, the gorgeous rainbow and the modest Aurora, the flashing flower and the lowly heather, the towering pine and the creeping vine, the rich green field of summer and the calm gray forest of winter, the thousand million forms of the hill-and-dale landscape, and the equally diversified colors and forms of birds and beasts, confer ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... seemed about fifteen feet long. At his appearance the crowd drew back in terror. But soon all eyes were turned towards the Virgin Orberosia, who, in the first light of the dawn, clothed in white, advanced over the purple heather. With an intrepid though modest gait she walked towards the beast, who, uttering awful bellowings, opened his flaming throat. An immense cry of terror and pity arose from the midst of the Penguins. But the virgin, unloosing her linen girdle, put it round the dragon's neck and ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... impressive when it is quite clear as when it contains and supports great clouds, and large blue spaces are seen between them. On the hillsides the fields here and there are yellow and the corn is in sheaves. The birds are mostly dumb, the glory of the furze and broom has passed, but the heather is in flower. The trees are dark, and even sombre, and, where they are in masses, look as if they were in solemn consultation. A fore-feeling of the end of summer steals upon me. Why cannot I banish this anticipation? Why cannot I rest and take delight in what is before me? ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... contributions from Julie, the reason being that she was stronger in health whilst she lived at Aldershot than during any other period of her life. The sweet dry air of the "Highwayman's Heath"—bared though it was of heather!—suited her so well, she could sleep with her hut windows open, and go out into her garden at any hour of the evening without fear of harm. She liked to stroll out and listen to "Retreat" being sounded at sundown, especially when it was the ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... on the harmonious vibration of many nerves, that the whole delight of the moment must depend. Who can forget how, when he has chanced upon some attitude of complete restfulness, after long uneasy rolling to and fro on grass or heather, the whole fashion of the landscape has been changed for him, as though the sun had just broken forth, or a great artist had only then completed, by some cunning touch, the composition of the picture? And not only a change of posture ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... grander in the bold contours of its cloud-capped tors, but the wildness of Exmoor is blended with a sweet and gentle charm which is all its own. It presents us with a panorama of misty woods, gleaming water, and glowing heather; a combe-furrowed moorland clothed with scrub oaks and feathery larches. After leaving this forest shrine the Exe enters Devonshire, where, after flowing through richly wooded and fertile valleys, it sweeps past the ancient town of Tiverton, where it is swelled by the waters ...
— Exeter • Sidney Heath
... was cleared,—the stranger's bed, Was there of mountain heather spread, Where oft a hundred guests had lain, And dreamed their forest sports again. But vainly did the heath-flower shed Its moorland fragrance round his head; Not Ellen's spell had lulled to rest The fever of his ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... shall come, come again, calling up the moorfowl, Spring shall bring the sun and rain, bring the bees and flowers, Red shall the heather bloom over hill and valley, Soft flow the stream thro' the even-flowing hours; Fair the day shine, as it shone upon my childhood— Fair shine the day on the house with open door; Birds come and cry there, ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... with kingcups: to-day all this young verdure smiled clear in sunlight; transparent emerald and amber gleams played over it. On Nunnwood—the sole remnant of antique British forest in a region whose lowlands were once all sylvan chase, as its highlands were breast-deep heather—slept the shadow of a cloud; the distant hills were dappled, the horizon was shaded and tinted like mother-of-pearl; silvery blues, soft purples, evanescent greens and rose-shades, all melting into fleeces of ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... Harveys the pheasant as usual with my kind regards. I think you should write to Mr. Dalton of Bury telling him that I have been unwell, and that I send my kind regards and respects to him. I send dear Hen a paper in company with this, in which I have enclosed specimens of the heather, the moss and the fern, or 'raineach,' ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... against the nobility which smouldered in the French peasantry. Cobbett looked back as fondly to the surroundings of his youth as any nobleman could look back to Eton or to his country mansion. He remembered the 'sweet country air' round Crooksbury Hill, the song of birds, and the rambles through heather and woodland. He loved the rough jovial sports; bull-baiting and prize-fighting and single-stick play. He had followed the squire's hounds on foot, and admired without jealousy the splendid gardens of the bishop's palace at Farnham. ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... have a most extraordinary way of boasting, you know. You may take your sunrise on the mountain, but I prefer this moonlight in the heather. A glass about half full of water, please. Thank you, very kind I assure you." The Briton sat and sipped his Scotch while the Major paced up and down the room, hands behind him, deep in thought. But soon he took ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... yowes to the knowes, Ca' them where the heather grows, Ca' them where the burnie ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... came east and settled with her in sight of the Atlantic where she could see the waters that washed the Scotland shore. But she still pined, and finally to save her life, John Macduff took her back to the heather hills of the mother-land, where she soon recovered ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... sackcloth woodman's petticoat, belted at the waist with a leather strap; and when he turned and grinned, his red lips showed under his sackcloth-coloured beard. His cap was sackcloth too, with a flap behind, to keep twigs and bark out of his neck. He navigated the tug among pools of heather-water that splashed in their faces, and through clumps of young birches that slashed at their legs, and when they hit an old toadstooled stump, they never knew whether it would give way in showers of rotten wood, ...
— Rewards and Fairies • Rudyard Kipling
... stone effigies of knights whose names are almost forgotten, carry one away from the familiar impressions of a present-day Yorkshire town, and almost suggest that one is living in mediaeval times. One can wander, too, on the moors a few miles to the north and see heather stretching away to the most distant horizon and feel that there, also, are scenes which have been identically the same for many centuries. The men of the Neolithic and Bronze Ages may have swept their eyes over landscapes so similar that they would find the moorlands quite ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home
... as Demdike, having paused at a broad green patch on the hill-side, was now busied in tracing a circle round it with his staff. He then spoke aloud some words, which the superstitious beholders construed into an incantation, and after tracing the circle once again, and casting some tufts of dry heather, which he plucked from an adjoining hillock, on three particular spots, he ran quickly downwards, followed by his hound, and leaping a stone wall, surrounding a little orchard at the foot of ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... AEgina and the Attic shore beyond. And when Theseus was full fifteen years old she took him up with her to the temple, and into the thickets of the grove which grew in the temple-yard. And she led him to a tall plane-tree, beneath whose shade grew arbutus, and lentisk, and purple heather-bushes. And there she sighed, and said, 'Theseus, my son, go into that thicket and you will find at the plane-tree foot a great flat stone; lift it, and bring me ...
— The Heroes • Charles Kingsley
... bright head "dookies," silver bangles, and glowing dark eyes of the vendors making a brave show above the massed glory of colour in their baskets. Huge bunches of pink proteas, spiked lilies of every hue, bales of heather and waxen white chinckerichees filled the air with heavy perfume. The sellers came pressing to the passing carriages, soliciting custom in the soft clipped speech of the Cape native. Bellew, for all he was so distrait, had the graceful inspiration ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... awake that night, and throughout Christendom a sombre murmur hung in the keen air over the countryside like the belling of bees in the heather, and this murmurous tumult grew to a clangour in the cities. It was the tolling of the bells in a million belfry towers and steeples, summoning the people to sleep no more, to sin no more, but to gather in ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... further before we saw the two Miss Scotts advancing along the hillside to meet us. The morning's studies being over, they had set off to take a ramble on the hills, and gather heather-blossoms with which to decorate their hair for dinner. As they came bounding lightly, like young fawns, and their dresses fluttering in the pure summer breeze, I was reminded of Scott's own description of his children ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... said Miss Elizabeth, rousing herself. "Some day we'll go—you and I together, Katie. We'll cross the sea, and wander through the countries that we read about in books, and among the great cities that have stood for hundreds and hundreds of years. Wouldn't you like to see Scotland, Katie, and the heather hills that grannie tells us about; and the great castles that they used to hold against all comers in the old times, and the parks, and the deer, and the gardens full of wonderful flowers, and the lakes and the mountains—only we can see ...
— David Fleming's Forgiveness • Margaret Murray Robertson
... a geek she gave her head, And sic a toss she gave her feather; Man, saw ye ne'er a bonnier lass Before, among the blooming heather?" ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper
... of Beauchamp but that he is now in Scotland, chin-deep in heather, killing grouse against time for a bet of some hundreds, which he has persuaded some simpleton to make with him. No man knows better than Beauchamp how to get paid for amusing himself. I had never heard, and don't believe, that ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 553, June 23, 1832 • Various
... in vain attempted to engage his youthful companion in carousal, or, at least, in conversation. Halbert Glendinning pleaded fatigue, and expressed himself unwilling to take any liquor stronger than the heather ale, which was at that time frequently used at meals. Thus every effort at jovialty died away, until the Baron, striking his hand against the table, as if impatient of the long unbroken silence, cried out aloud, "What, ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... after hour and even day after day, to wind. A continual succession of insignificant shaggy hills, divided by the course of ten thousand brooks, through which we had to wade, or by the side of which we encamped at night; infinite perspectives of heather, infinite quantities of moorfowl; here and there, by a stream side, small and pretty clumps of willows or the silver birch; here and there, the ruins of ancient and inconsiderable fortresses—made the unchanging characters of the scene. Occasionally, but only in the distance, we could perceive ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... gun? A lad from over the Tweed. Then let him go, for well we know He comes of a soldier breed. So drink together to rock and heather, Out where the red deer run, And stand aside for Scotland's pride - The man that carries the gun! For the Colonel rides before, The Major's on the flank, The Captains and the Adjutant Are in the foremost rank. But when ...
— Songs of Action • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the elevation, seven hundred feet above the sea, stunts the trees and limits the garden produce; the house is gaunt and hungry-looking. It stands, with the scanty fields attached, as an island in a sea of morass. The landscape is unredeemed by grace or grandeur—mere undulating hills of grass and heather, with peat bogs ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... read it in some green solitude, far away among the lonely hills and tracts of furzy common that extend for miles and miles around my native place. It was a delicious autumn morning, bright and fresh and joyous as spring. The purple heather was all abloom along the slopes of the hill-sides. The golden sandcliffs glittered in the sun. The great firwoods reached away over heights and through valleys—"grand and spiritual trees," pointing ever upward with warning finger, like the Apostles in ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... have seen upon some dreary moor, or at the foot of some 'scaur' on the hillside, the bleached bones of a sheep, lying white and grim among the purple heather. It strayed, unthinking of danger, tempted by the sweet herbage; it fell; it vainly bleated; it died. But what if it had heard the shepherd's call, and had preferred to lie where it fell, and to die where it lay? We talk about 'silly sheep.' Are there any of them so foolish as men and women listening ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... how my old mither greeted for Scotland! I mind how a sprig of heather would bring the tears to her eyes; and for twenty years I dared not whistle "Bonnie Doon" or "Charlie Is My Darling" lest it break her heart. 'Tis a pain you've not had, ...
— Adventures In Friendship • David Grayson
... those ages of darkness and blood, When the minister's home was the mountain and wood; When in Wellwood's dark valley the standard of Zion, All bloody and torn, 'mong the heather ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... upon the lip of a heather-edged bluff which fell sheer for perhaps two hundred feet into a pinewood. Beyond, by mammoth terraces, the glory of the forest sank step by colossal step into the purple distance, from which distant in turn a thread of silver argued the ocean. There never was such a staircase. The grandeur ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... by stamping upon it with their bare feet, stacked it about in little rows to dry in the sun, one sod leaning against the other, looking in the moonlight like a great host of wee brown fairies grouped in couples for a midnight dance on the carpet of purple heather. Now the time had come to convert it into such money as it ...
— Waysiders • Seumas O'Kelly
... travel far and wide, dear, but you'll come back again, You'll come back to your father and your mother in the glen, Although we should be lyin' 'neath the heather grasses then— You'll be comin' back, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... his way over the rough moorland road. The high ridge of tableland extended far to the north; the landes, purple and gold with the low heather and furze which covered them, unsheltered by any tree, except where crossed in even lines by pollard oaks of immense age, their great round heads so thick with leaves that a man might well hide ...
— Angelot - A Story of the First Empire • Eleanor Price
... a shieling on the moors, and the heather-cock for food, and a Hamilton plaid to wrap his heart's darling, and a fire of peats to sit by, and this hand empty but for love and his claymore?—Would the beauty of the world have come to ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... Mannor Water, she's going to prove, after all, nothing better than a rifler: she just wets her singles in the blood of the partridge, and then breaks away, and lets her fly; and what good can the poor bird do after that, you know, except pine and die in the first heather-cow or whin-bush she can ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... and instructing the chorus at the Dionysiac festivals at Athens (see LITURGY and FINANCE). The name is given to an assistant to the professor of music at the university of Oxford, whose office was founded, with that of the professor, in 1626 by Dr William Heather. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... rushing under the stern of the aeropile came the Wealden Heights, the line of Hindhead, Pitch Hill, and Leith Hill, with a second row of wind-wheels that seemed striving to rob the downland whirlers of their share of breeze. The purple heather was speckled with yellow gorse, and on the further side a drove of black oxen stampeded before a couple of mounted men. Swiftly these swept behind, and dwindled and lost colour, and became scarce moving specks that were ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... which I had the benefit of seeing by a blue blaze from the zenith, and the tone of infinite scorn, in which he slowly repeated the words, "custom-house officers," were incomparable. "Afraid of them!" said he, as he rose from the wet heather, "as much afraid as the cat is of the mice. No, those are ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... Half-terrified at this strange appearance, Richard hurried onward, and at a turn of the path stumbled upon something which horribly accounted for the curious action of the old man. A dead body lay upon its face in the heather; beside it was a heavy riding whip stained at the handle with blood, and an open pocket-book. Richard took up the book, and read, in gold letters on the ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... occupation of a young lady, trying to paint those ever-varying, unpaintable mountain peaks, which change their hues with every change of the sky—swimming, riding, roving far and wide over hill and heather—pleasures all more or less masculine in their nature, and which were a subject ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon |
