Diccionario ingles.comDiccionario ingles.com
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Spruce   Listen
adjective
Spruce  adj.  (compar. sprucer; superl. sprucest)  
1.
Neat, without elegance or dignity; smart; trim; formerly applied to things with a serious meaning; now chiefly applied to persons. "Neat and spruce array."
2.
Sprightly; dashing. (Obs.) "Now, my spruce companions." "He is so spruce that he can never be genteel."
Synonyms: Finical; neat; trim. See Finical.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Spruce" Quotes from Famous Books



... 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

... The spruce trees rustled amid their umbrageous boughs. The sob of the saxophone still came through the window. I saw Stella tremble through all her tall young body. A tear fell upon the floor and rebounded against one of ...
— Maw's Vacation - The Story of a Human Being in the Yellowstone • Emerson Hough

... 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

... 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 I ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon

... 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 ...
— For the Faith • Evelyn Everett-Green

... 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

... 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. That is just the dismal retreat he has been seeking. ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet

... 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

... 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 most of the ...
— The Red Man's Continent - A Chronicle of Aboriginal America, Volume 1 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Ellsworth Huntington

... 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

... 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 ...
— The Doctor of Pimlico - Being the Disclosure of a Great Crime • William Le Queux

... 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

... 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

... 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

... 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 was resumed, becoming more general. Presently Marrineal ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... 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

... spruce little lisping rebel named Ross would appear with a book, and a body-guard, consisting of a big Irishman, who had the air of a Policeman, and carried a musket barrel made into a cane. Behind him were two or three ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy

... 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 ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • 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

... 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 ...
— The Blood of the Conquerors • Harvey Fergusson

... 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

... 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 the ...
— Northern Trails, Book I. • William J. Long

... 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

... 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 doctors, too, profess ...
— Sketches of the East Africa Campaign • Robert Valentine Dolbey

... 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

... 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

... 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

... 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 been odd in any other nature but ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte

... 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

... 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 ...
— Twenty-Seven Years in Canada West - The Experience of an Early Settler (Volume I) • Samuel Strickland

... 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

... 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 ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various

... 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



Words linked to "Spruce" :   neaten, dashing, Picea sitchensis, Siberian spruce, spiffy, white spruce, spruceness, spruce bark beetle, wood, tittivate, smarten up, big-cone spruce, Norway spruce, douglas spruce, yellow spruce, spruce grouse, Colorado blue spruce, Picea rubens, coniferous tree, titivate, jaunty, embellish, spiff up, Picea, Brewer's spruce, Engelmann's spruce, Picea breweriana, stylish, spruce gall aphid, snappy, Picea pungens, Sitka spruce



Copyright © 2024 Diccionario ingles.com