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More "Birch" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... superior intelligence. Insatiable in their thirst for adventure, they were willing to assume all manner of risks or privations. Spring might find them at Lake Champlain, autumn at the head-waters of the Mississippi, a trusty birch-bark having carried them the thousand miles between. Their work did not figure very heavily in the colony's annual balance-sheet of progress with its statistics of acreage newly cleared, homes built and harvests stowed safely away. But according to their own ideals of service they valiantly ...
— The Seigneurs of Old Canada: - A Chronicle of New-World Feudalism • William Bennett Munro
... and the larks sang loud in the blue clear air; the birch-wood clothed itself in tender green; the stream, with its melting snow-drifts, wound down the mountains singing on its way; but no plough furrowed the loosened earth, and from the heights was heard no wood-horn calling the cattle at feeding time. All was still and dead in the habitations of men. ...
— Strife and Peace • Fredrika Bremer
... have a school, and to this end had hired an elderly Irishman, who gave hard lessons and a taste of the birch to children who had exhausted themselves in the mills and had no zest for learning. Mr. Dale had taken on more than two hundred pauper children from the workhouses and these were a ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... the yellow cane, which grew plentifully both in the islands of the Greek Archipelago and in Southern Italy, as notably at Cannae in Apulia, where it gave a name to the scene of the great battle. The virga was also used, a rod commonly of birch, a tree the educational use of which had been already discovered. The walls of Pompeii indeed show that the practice of Eton is truly classical ...
— Roman life in the days of Cicero • Alfred J[ohn] Church
... you are mistaken, you lazy, ill-behaved wench. The new frock I had bought you shall be given to Nannie Cameron, and you shall wear your old one to the kirk. How will that suit your vanity? And you may be off to bed now directly, without any supper. There are twigs enough for a birch rod, my lady, if bed does not bring you to a better frame of mind. Run in now, and don't let me see your face before ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... for them under a birch-tree near the keeper's lodge. The keeper's wife served them with smiles and curtsies, and then discreetly disappeared. Falloden waited on Constance as a squire on his princess; and all round them lay the green encircling rampart of the wood. In the man's every action, ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Ben; "I saw a man from Lot Ten last week, and he said that the French were eating their seed-grain, and feeding their cattle, or such as were left alive, on birch and beech tops." ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... shall rave to see thee; restore me, oh restore me then to Bellfont, happy Bellfont, still blest with Sylvia's presence! permit me, oh permit me into those sacred shades, where I have been so often (too innocently) blest! Let me survey again the dear character of Sylvia on the smooth birch; oh when shall I sit beneath those boughs, gazing on the young goddess of the grove, hearing her sigh for love, touching her glowing small white hands, beholding her killing eyes languish, and her charming bosom rise and fall with short-breath'd ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... Wrangler, but stage-fright made her burst into tears at the critical moment. Somehow or other the truth leaked out; the Duffer and John were sent up to the Head Master and "swished." Each collected a few twigs of the birch, carefully preserved to ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... until their return. Among other things which lay strewed about here, were a spearshaft, eight feet in length, recently made and ochred; parts of old canoes, fragments of their skin-dresses, &c. For some distance around, the trunks of many of the birch, and of that species of spruce pine called here the Var (Pinus balsamifera) had been rinded; these people using the inner part of the bark of that kind of tree for food. Some of the cuts in the trees with the axe, were evidently made the preceding year. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 387, August 28, 1829 • Various
... that Philip knew anything about were quite small, and were called canoes. They were made either of birch bark fastened over a light wooden frame, or of logs that had been ...
— Four American Indians - King Philip, Pontiac, Tecumseh, Osceola • Edson L. Whitney
... had crossed the creek that morning, and had not yet returned. These were the two men who had been so inhumanly murdered. Immediate search was made for the canoe, and it was found a little above the spot where the men were hiding. It was a very large buoyant birch canoe, constructed for the transportation of a numerous household, with all their goods, and such game ...
— David Crockett: His Life and Adventures • John S. C. Abbott
... thought I, why should not others be amused also? In a few days Dr. Birch's young friends will be expected to reassemble at Rodwell Regis, where they will learn everything that is useful, and under the eyes of careful ushers continue the business ...
— The Rose and the Ring • William Makepeace Thackeray
... empty torrents, or occupying the concave recesses of the bank, gave at once beauty and variety to the landscape. Above these scattered woods rose the hill, in barren, but purple majesty; the dark rich hue, particularly in autumn, contrasting beautifully with the thickets of oak and birch, the mountain ashes and thorns, the alders and quivering aspens, which checquered and varied the descent, and not less with the dark-green and velvet turf, which composed the level part ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... on the very verge of the line with a dense fence of stunted trees just before him and the wilderness of snow beyond, sloping up to the crest, outlined in white against the solid gray sky. The Spartans of the forest were around him—fir, pine, spruce, birch, and trembling little aspens up there among the stoutest. All were of one height, clean-shaven by the volleys of the wind-driven sand and pebbles that clipped off any treetop that aspired above the mass. In solid numbers was their ...
— Bull Hunter • Max Brand
... stars shone in the tips of the birch trees. Ridgeley did not come, and when they went back to the house, they found that he had been called to New York on an urgent case. He would not return ...
— The Gay Cockade • Temple Bailey
... master-piece of an education, was not fortunate in his teachers. Saint- Laurent, to whom he was first confided, was, it is true, the man in all Europe best fitted to act as the instructor of kings, but he died before his pupil was beyond the birch, and the young Prince, as I have related, fell entirely into the hands of the Abbe Dubois. This person has played such an important part in the state since the death of the King, that it is fit ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... meadows and troubled mill waters, yellow barn-roofs and weather-gray old farm-walls, two grassy mounds threw their slopes to the margin of the stream. Here the bull-dogs held revel. The hollow between the slopes was crowned by a bending birch, which rose three-stemmed from the root, and hung a noiseless green shower over the basin of green it shadowed. Beneath it the interminable growl sounded pleasantly; softly shot the sparkle of the twisting ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... no catalpa-tree, nor trumpet-creeper (Tecoma); nothing answering to sassafras, nor to benzoin-tree, nor to hickory; neither mulberry nor elm; no beech, true chestnut, hornbeam, nor iron-wood, nor a proper birch-tree; and the enumeration might be continued very much further by naming herbaceous plants and others familiar ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... settlements and to bury the dead. They proceeded to the Minnesota river opposite the Lower Agency, and found and buried sixteen corpses the first day. The next day they continued their search, finding and burying fifty-four. That night they encamped on the open prairie, near the upper timber of the Birch Coolie creek, three miles from the Lower Agency. At about four o'clock of the next morning, September 2, one of their sentinels shouted, "Indians!" and almost immediately, a shower of balls rained upon the camp. From this first fire, and during the confusion ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... enough, there was the beautiful hollow, close by the road-side. The sides were so steep that it was by no means safe to run down into it, and the great oak trees and the small ones, with the pine, the walnut, and the silvery birch, grew thick and close all around, save that one small opening from the road, a little archway among the overhanging ...
— No and Other Stories Compiled by Uncle Humphrey • Various
... interests are well represented in the House of Commons. The borough has had the good sense to prefer a merchant townsman, Sir Thomas Birch, and the son of a merchant, and friend and co-minister of the late Sir Robert Peel, Mr. Cardwell, to a soldier, and the dreamy poetical son of a Protectionist duke. A place like Liverpool ought to find in its own body better men than young lords or old soldiers. But young Liverpool ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... outcasting consists in seating the culprit on the ground and drawing the tribal mat over his head, from which the turban is removed; after this the messengers of the eight companies inflict a few taps with slippers and birch brooms. It is alleged that unfaithful women were formerly tied naked to trees and flogged with birch brooms, but that owing to the fatal results that occasionally followed such punishment, as in the case of the five kicks among Chamars (tanners) and the scourging ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... though promising snow—careered out of the north and followed me along my way. I was soon out of the cultivated basin of the Allier, and away from the ploughing oxen and such-like sights of the country. Moor, heathery marsh, tracts of rock and pines, woods of birch all jewelled with the autumn yellow, here and there a few naked cottages and bleak fields,—these were the characters of the country. Hill and valley followed valley and hill; the little green and stony cattle-tracks wandered in and out of one another, split into ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... decoction of alkanet-root. Methylated spirits and a small quantity of dragon's blood will also produce a mild red. Any yellow wood can be improved by an alcoholic solution of Persian berries, fustic, turmeric, or gamboge. An aqueous decoction of barberry-root will serve the same purpose. Birch when preferred a warm tint may be sponged with oil, very slightly tinted with rose-madder or Venetian red; the greatest care should be used, or it will be rendered unnatural in appearance by becoming too red. Maple which is of a dirty-brown ...
— French Polishing and Enamelling - A Practical Work of Instruction • Richard Bitmead
... Barly, closing one eye, and nodding his head a number of times. "There is indeed. But those days are over, Mr. Frye. When I was a child I had the fear of God put into me. It was put into me with a birch rod. But nowadays, Mr. Frye, the children neglect their sums, and grow up wild as nettles. I don't know ...
— Autumn • Robert Nathan
... am beginning to worship Thackeray. At seven and thirty, he will be one of my passions, I know. Now and then I come to a sentence that goes to my heart. No, do not read him yet awhile, unless it is some of the little things. There is 'Dr. Birch and his Young Friends;' and if you want to be amused you must read his continuation of 'Ivanhoe.' But then you will have neither heroines nor heroes left. And if you and Miss Daisy want to laugh beyond measure, get the 'Rose and the Ring,' ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... the horses were, and urged me to take the one belonging to the chief, since it was clever and gentle. At first I had compunctions of conscience, but no choice was left me, and I had to do it. I made a rude bridle of birch bark, and jumping on the horse, came here just a little ...
— Three Young Pioneers - A Story of the Early Settlement of Our Country • John Theodore Mueller
... Stairway and sat down in the little rock chapel. There was a picnic at the Lovers' Leap, and I had that side of the island to myself. I was leaning back, half asleep, in the deep shadow, when the sound of voices roused me; a birch-bark canoe was passing close in shore, and two were in it,—Jeannette and our surgeon. I could not hear their words, but I noticed Rodney's expression as he leaned forward. Jeannette was paddling slowly; her cheeks were flushed, and her eyes brilliant. Another moment and a ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... outside rudely fashioned to the likeness of a boat. If they were making a periagua, they left the stern "flat"—that is, cut off sharply without modelling; if they were making a canoa, they pointed both ends, as a Red Indian points his birch-bark. The bottom of the boat in either case was made flat, for convenience in hauling over shoals or up rapids. The inside of the boat was hollowed out by fire, with the help of the Indians, who were very expert at the management of the flame. For oars they had paddles made of ash or ...
— On the Spanish Main - Or, Some English forays on the Isthmus of Darien. • John Masefield
... two careful studies of this kind of one bough of every common tree,—oak, ash, elm, birch, beech, etc.; in fact, if you are good, and industrious, you will make one such study carefully at least three times a week, until you have examples of every sort of tree and shrub you can get branches of. You are to make two studies ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... mean the short birch for me, Steele," said the factor gloomily. "Lac Bain is just now the emptiest, most fallen-to-pieces, unbusiness-like post between the Athabasca and the Bay. We've had two bad seasons running, and everything has gone wrong. Colonel ...
— Philip Steele of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • James Oliver Curwood
... the fields of the homestead; on three sides Valleys and mountains and hills, but on the fourth side was the ocean. Birch-woods crowned the summits, but over the down-sloping hillsides Flourished the golden corn, and man-high was waving the rye- field." TEGNER, Frithiof Saga ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... The cedar will burn all right, but it is a good thing to have the birch. We shall have a supper worth while in a few minutes. Stacy, get busy ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in Alaska - The Gold Diggers of Taku Pass • Frank Gee Patchin
... prevents its rising. Most ovens require heating an hour and a half for bread. A brisk fire should be kept up, and the doors of the room should be kept shut, if the weather is cold. Pine and ash, mixed together, or birch-wood, is the best for heating an oven. To ascertain if your oven is of the right temperature, when cleaned, throw in a little flour; if it browns in the course of a minute, it is sufficiently hot; if it turns black directly, wait several minutes, before putting in the things that are to be ...
— The American Housewife • Anonymous
... [The author has somewhat altered part of a beautiful unpublished fragment of Coleridge:— "Where is the grave of Sir Arthur Orellan,— Where may the grave of that good knight be? By the marge of a brook, on the slope of Helvellyn, Under the boughs of a young birch tree. The Oak that in summer was pleasant to hear, That rustled in Autumn all withered and sear, That whistled and groan'd thro' the Winter alone, He hath gone, and a birch in his place is grown. The knight's bones are dust, His good sword is rust; His spirit is with, ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... existence precisely the same whether we live in a fine mansion with lap-dogs to tend, or sort rags in a workhouse? Does it make much difference whether we shall hide our gray heads beneath lace or a handkerchief striped with blue and red; whether we sweep a crossing with a birch broom, or the steps of the Tuileries with satins; whether we sit beside a gilded hearth, or cower over the ashes in a red earthen pot; whether we go to the Opera or look on in the ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... I'll give you a stick," he called to her; "it's a help when you're climbing." He pulled down a slender birch, and, setting his foot on it, broke it off at the root. She stopped, with an impatient gesture, and waited while he tore off handfuls of leaves and ...
— The Way to Peace • Margaret Deland
... with anything the Thames can show at Nuneham or Cliefden. The angler, too, is as fortunate as the lover of the picturesque. The trout that have hidden themselves all summer, or at best have cautiously nibbled at the worm- bait, now rise freely to the fly. Wherever a yellow leaf drops from birch tree or elm the great trout are splashing, and they are too eager to distinguish very subtly between flies of nature's making and flies of fur and feather. It is a time when every one who can manage it should be by the water-side, and should take with him, ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... of ancient clematis Towards the silver birch inclined, And deep in thorny fastnesses The ...
— The Verse-Book Of A Homely Woman • Elizabeth Rebecca Ward, AKA Fay Inchfawn
... strip of bark from the birch tree, and rolled it into a cup. "Your needle and thread, Mademoiselle,—if ...
— The Road to Frontenac • Samuel Merwin
... by the birch-tree's root In the heather. The hare was running with nimble foot O'er the heather. Was ever brighter a sunshine-day, Before, behind me, and every ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... beastes skinnes as well the men as women, but that the women go somewhat straiter and closer in their garments than the men do, with their wastes girded: they paint themselues with certaine Roan colours: (M97) their boates are made of the barke of birch trees, with the which they fish and take great store of Seales, and as farre as we could vnderstand since our comming thither, that is not their habitation, but they come from the maine land out of hotter countreys, to catch the saide seales and ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of - the English Nation. Vol. XIII. America. Part II. • Richard Hakluyt
... he halted at a farm house, some miles north of the town, got a job on the woodpile, and astonished the farmer by the amount of birch he could saw in an hour. He took his pay in the shape of a bountiful dinner, and—after half an hour's smoke and talk with the farmer, to whom he gave a few pamphlets from the store in his knapsack—said good-bye to all hands and once more set his face northward ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... oxyacantha) with pollen from a crimson not-weeping variety, and three young trees, "now six or seven years old, show a decided tendency to be pendulous, but as yet are not so much so as the mother-plant." According to Mr. MacNab,[45] seedlings from a magnificent weeping birch (Betula alba), in the Botanic Garden at Edinburgh, grew for the first ten or fifteen years upright, but then all became weepers like their parent. A peach with pendulous branches, like those of the weeping willow, has been found capable of propagation ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... that when I had grown old enough to take notice, I was apparently capable of holding extended conversations in an unknown dialect with birds and red squirrels. Once I fell asleep in my cradle, suspended five or six feet from the ground, while Uncheedah was some distance away, gathering birch bark for a canoe. A squirrel had found it convenient to come upon the bow of my cradle and nibble his hickory nut, until he awoke me by dropping the crumbs of his meal. It was a common thing for birds to alight on my cradle in ...
— Indian Child Life • Charles A. Eastman
... Piskaret drew a long breath, grasped his war-club, and stealthily pushing aside the loose birch-bark door-flap of the nearest lodge, peeped inside. By the ember light he saw that every Iroquois, man and woman, was fast asleep, under furs, on spruce ...
— Boys' Book of Indian Warriors - and Heroic Indian Women • Edwin L. Sabin
... comforted her, and ran about so merrily, bringing fresh, fragrant birch-twigs for their beds, shaking out their blankets of reindeer-skins, and helping her so kindly, that the good dame quite forgot to be cross, and before she knew it, was telling them her very, very best story, that ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 5, March, 1878 • Various
... modern aspect cover the continent from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Ocean. Among the kinds of forest trees whose remains are found in the continental deposits of the Cretaceous are the magnolia, the myrtle, the laurel, the fig, the tulip tree, the chestnut, the oak, beech, elm, poplar, willow, birch, and maple. Forests of Eucalyptus grew along the coast of New England, and palms on the Pacific shores of British Columbia. Sequoias of many varieties ranged far into northern Canada. In northern Greenland there were luxuriant forests of magnolias, figs, and cycads; and a similar ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... tells its own tale. There is nothing bold or vicious or vulpine in it, and his timid, harmless character is published at every leap. He abounds in dense woods, preferring localities filled with a small undergrowth of beech and birch, upon the bark of which he feeds. Nature is rather partial to him, and matches his extreme local habits and character with a suit that corresponds with his surroundings,—reddish gray in summer ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... the leaves and twigs of the dwarf birch-tree; and this, transformed into its own white flesh, becomes the food of the Arctic fox. The herbage, sparse though it be, does not grow in vain. The seeds fall to the earth, but they are not suffered to decay. They are ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... extreme regions of North America, many degrees beyond the limit where the ground at the depth of a few feet remains perpetually congealed, are covered by forests of large and tall trees. In a like manner, in Siberia, we have woods of birch, fir, aspen, and larch, growing in a latitude [10] (64 degs.) where the mean temperature of the air falls below the freezing point, and where the earth is so completely frozen, that the carcass of an animal ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... companies have been out, and I am beginning to feel that I am at home alone quite too much. Faye was in Washington two months, and almost immediately after he got back he was ordered to command the paymaster's escort from Helena here, and now he is off again for the summer! The camp is on Birch Creek not far from the Piegan Agency. The agents become frightened every now and then, and ask for troops, more because they know the Indians would be justified in giving trouble ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... descended, we were in Birch Creek water, and had we followed the watercourse would have reached the Yukon; but we would have travelled hundreds of miles and would have come out below Fort Yukon, while we were bound for Circle City. So there was another and a yet ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... a cool breeze waved the clinging foliage of birch and elm, rippling the lake near the shore and tossing the waves far out on its bosom, which gleamed white along their crests. This was the real Lake Champlain, for it is a very turbulent mass of water and rarely presents a picture of such calm and quiet beauty as we beheld on the preceding evening. ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... dear, friendly hollows and the largest of these was their favourite stamping ground. Here they were assembled on this particular evening. There was a grove of young spruces in this hollow, with a tiny, grassy glade in its heart, opening on the bank of the brook. By the brook grew a silver birch-tree, a young, incredibly straight thing which Walter had named the "White Lady." In this glade, too, were the "Tree Lovers," as Walter called a spruce and maple which grew so closely together that ...
— Rainbow Valley • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... his eyes.—"My vig, why it's water!" exclaimed he—"water, I do declare, with worms[21] in it—I can't eat such stuff as that—it's not man's meat—oh dear, oh dear, I fear I've made a terrible mistake in coming to France! Never saw such stuff as this at Bleaden's or Birch's, or anywhere in the city." "I've travelled three hundred thousand miles," said the fat man, sending his plate from him in disgust, "and never tasted such a mess as this before." "I'll show them up in The Times," cried Mr. Jorrocks; "and, look, what stuff is here—beef ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees
... the rude hearth of his Big Rattle camp, brooding in a sort of tired contentment over the spitting fagots of var and glowing coals of birch. ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... a little scrubby thing, that looked very like a birch rod. I proceeded to examine it most minutely, while Collins waited with all the intense anxiety of a man whose character ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 1 • Charles James Lever
... first you climb a rough, rather narrow road up from the river, that the trees close about you very gradually, that there is a little church with a green turret and a fine view of the Nestor, and that there a broad solemn avenue of silver birch leads you forward, gently and without any sinister omens. Then again the forest clears and there are fields of corn and, built amongst the thin scattering of trees, the village of N——. It was here, on passing the first houses of the village, that I felt the heat to be almost ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... escape between him, Stevenson and Clarke, was carried out on 1st May, 1759. Major Stobo met the fugitives under a wind-mill, probably the old wind-mill on the grounds of the General Hospital Convent. Having stolen a birch canoe, the party paddled it all night, and, after incredible fatigue and danger, they passed Isle-aux-Coudres, Kamouraska, and landed below this spot, shooting two Indians in self-defence, whom Clarke buried after having scalped them, saying to the Major: "Good sir, by your permission, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... thickest end, and are set up at three or four inches apart. The stakes are connected by one or more battens nailed along them, or by wires. They are cut eight or nine feet in length, so as to allow of a good six feet above ground when set up. Red, black, and white birch are used, also red and white ti-tree, the last variety being most esteemed, as it is more durable. A stake-fence ought to be proof against both pigs and cattle, and is reckoned to be good for seven years; if of white ti-tree ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... rays, though still hot, slanted much as the two rose into oak woodlands to the right of the pike and beyond it. Here the air was cool and light. As they ascended higher, and oaks gave place to chestnut and mountain-birch, wide views opened around and far beneath. In the south spread the green fields and red fallows of Clearwater, bathed in the sheen of the lingering sun. Miles away two white points ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... shall not find! Beech and birch and oak agree Here to dwell in company. Hazel, elder, few men could Name the kinds of underwood. Summer and winter haunt together, And golden light with misty weather. 'Tis summer where this beech is seen Defenceless in its virgin green; All its leaves ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... these trees, in the way of joists or planks, were levelled with earth and gravel. There were betwixt the trees, growing naturally on their own roots, some stakes fixed in the earth, which, with the trees, were interwoven with ropes, made of heath and birch twigs, up to the top of the Cage, it being of a round or rather oval shape; and the whole thatched and covered over with fog.[110] This whole fabric hung, as it were, by a large tree, which reclined from ...
— The Jacobite Rebellions (1689-1746) - (Bell's Scottish History Source Books.) • James Pringle Thomson
... mountains, mountains everywhere the eyes turned. And wherever there was a place to nestle an exquisite farmhouse did nestle. I used to think that England had the monopoly of beautiful farmhouses, but these Vermont ones, though as different as a birch from an oak, are just as perfect. Even Jack, whose every drop of blood is English ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... had lighted his pipe and sought a seat that creaked under his ponderous weight. He opened the door of the stove and threw two or three large pieces of yellow birch in it. ...
— The Peace of Roaring River • George van Schaick
... parted, the latter keeping to the sunny thoroughfare, the former plunging into the narrow, heavily shaded track that ran through ravine and over ridge, now beside the water and now in close woods of birch and hemlock. The road was bad, but Selim and his master bent to it grimly, with no nice avoidance of rut or stone or sunken place. To the horse there was before him food and rest, to the man his home. They took at the same pace the much of rough and the little of smooth, ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... to the time it was your rods and cloaks made a little tent for me where there'd be a birch tree making shelter and a dry stone; though from this day my own fingers will be making a tent for me, spreading out my hairs and they knotted with the rain. [Lavarcham and Old Woman come in stealthily on ...
— Deirdre of the Sorrows • J. M. Synge
... when we were paddling home to our tents among the birch trees, one of these unexpected storms came up; and Patrick, thoughtful of my comfort as ever, insisted on giving me his coat to put around my dripping shoulders. The paddling would serve instead of a coat for him, he said; it would keep him warm to his bones. As I slipped ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke
... certain shady spot about half a mile from the monastery, beneath a group of birch-trees, and overhung with ...
— Prince Lazybones and Other Stories • Mrs. W. J. Hays
... face of the hill fell, an abrupt promontory, to the woods of the plain. Its face was scored by the weather, and the dry drainage channels were headlong cascades of grey pebbles. Clumps of heather, sparse oak scrub with young leaves of bronze, contorted birch, and this year's croziers of the bracken (heaven knows their secret for getting lush aromatic sap out of such stony poverty), all made a tough life which held up the hill, steep as it was; though the hill was going, for the roots of some of the oaks were ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... hand, applied; Nor from their seats departed, till they found That butt was out and heard the mournful sound." He praised a poacher, precious child of fun! Who shot the keeper with his own spring gun; Nor less the smuggler who th' exciseman tied, And left him hanging at the birch-wood side, There to expire;—but one who saw him hang Cut the good cord—a traitor of the gang. His own exploits with boastful glee he told, What ponds he emptied and what pikes he sold; And how, when blest with sight ...
— The Parish Register • George Crabbe
... though he now belonged to these strange people, all of whom were laughing and applauding his words, from the German Princess in the Royal box to the straight-backed Tommy in the pit. Instead of the painted scene before her, she saw the birch-trees by the river at home, where he had first read her the speech to which they were now listening so intensely—the speech in which the hero tells the girl he loves her. She remembered that at the time she had thought ...
— The Exiles and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... their rice at Rangoon; and now that they had not only been disturbed, but driven from their homes, he resolved to be revenged on them. The first conflict took place on the 16th of May, when Captain Birch dislodged the enemy from the village of Kemmendine, a war-boat station three miles above Rangoon. Nothing daunted, however, the enemy, as their numbers increased, gradually approached the British position, and threw up stockades ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... the horses climbed the crest of the long hill the lady in green was by his side on the box. He looked anxiously ahead, and there, in a hedge of young alder bushes, he saw something stirring, and, unless he was greatly mistaken, a birch broom lay on ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin
... green birch trees—amid whose boughs hung gay lamps—and the rose bushes which surrounded a fountain of perfumed water, and Eva had already followed the Swiss knight across the threshold when she saw among the branches at the end of the room the Countess Cordula, at whose feet several young nobles ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... for the instruction of the reader that this birch taken from the fir trees as it saps out of cracks in the bark was the only liniment that the frontiersman had to heal his wounds at that time, and it was one of the best liniments that I have ever seen applied to a ...
— Chief of Scouts • W.F. Drannan
... its native trees and immediately replant saplings of certain introduced varieties about the farmyard or along the streets. In this way a forest growth of oak, elm, beech, butternut, hemlock, basswood, and birch is cleared off to give room for saplings of soft maple, cottonwood, and brittle willow. It is felt that the inexpensiveness of leaving the forest trees standing would derogate from the dignity that should invest ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... opened the door and led the way into a long library where in the fireplace a pine backlog, crisscrossed by sturdy forelogs of birch and maple, awaited the touch of a match. It was given, and the room was filled with a flaring light that made the soft lamplight seem pale ...
— David Dunne - A Romance of the Middle West • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... of the Saguenay, under the shadow of savage and inaccessible rocks, feathered with pines, firs, and birch-trees, they built a cluster of wooden huts and store-houses. Here they left sixteen men to gather the expected harvest of furs. Before the winter was over, several of them were dead, and the rest scattered through the woods, living on ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... fireplace, with its long, soot-blackened crane, hung with hooks of various sizes, the massive iron andirons, strong enough to hold the great birch and birchen logs, that often taxed the strength of a full-grown man to lift and adjust in their places, occupied a large part of one side of the room, and served as a kind of family altar, about which the family, with their guests and friends, always assembled, in quiet ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 4, April, 1886 • Various
... important ambassadorial posts and at one time was Assistant Secretary of State in charge of American Republic Affairs. In recent years, Mr. Braden has given leadership to many patriotic organizations and efforts, such as For America and The John Birch Society; and, in testimony before various committees of Congress, he has given much valuable information about communist ...
— The Invisible Government • Dan Smoot
... sun set, the raven went to sleep. Then the wood-worm made his way softly up the pine-tree to the raven's nest, and bound his feet together with grass and pieces of birch-bark. ...
— The Book of Nature Myths • Florence Holbrook
... Deerslayer," March at length observed; "here is a beech by the side of a hemlock, with three pines at hand, and yonder is a white birch with a broken top; and yet I see no rock, nor any of the branches bent down, as I told you ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... them did not lay an embargo upon their growth, in the same heartless manner as it does upon the west coast of Scotland, where, the moment a tree gets higher than a mop handle, its top becomes curved over by the gales, with the same graceful sweep as that which a successful stable-boy gives a birch broom after a day's soaking. I hope, for my hospitable friend's sake, it may not prove true in his case; but I saw an ostrich-feathery curve upon the tops of some of his trees, which looked ominous. Having spent a very pleasant day, and enjoyed good cheer ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... character of the surrounding landscape changed. We began to see glimpses ahead of us of the waters of Loch Laggan. Presently the loch, fringed with birch trees, was directly below the road. On the opposite side were mountains descending to its silvery surface, some of them bare, some green with larches, and upward from a wooded promontory wreaths of smoke were rising. Then between the wreaths I distinguished a tall gray ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... its attractive waxy white flowers, and potentilla, with bloom of gold, are shrubs which lend a charm to much of the mountain-section. Black birch and alder trim many of the streams, and the mountain maple is thinly scattered from the foothills to nine thousand feet altitude. Wild roses are frequently found near the maple, and gooseberry bushes fringe many a brook. Huckleberries flourish ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... drinking vessels of various makes—Venetian, Turkish, Tscherkessian, which had reached Bulba's cabin by various roads, at third and fourth hand, a thing common enough in those bold days. There were birch-wood benches all around the room, a huge table under the holy pictures in one corner, and a huge stove covered with particoloured patterns in relief, with spaces between it and the wall. All this was quite familiar to the two young men, who ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... clipt out by scissors; written, it appeared, by Mr. Everett's nephew; some of whose remarks, especially his wish that I might once be in New England, and see people "praying," amused me much! The Cotton Letter, &c., I have now got to the bottom of; Birch's copy is in the Museum here,—a better edition than I had. Of "Levered" and the other small American Documents—alas, I get cartloads of the like or better tumbled down at my door, and my chief ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... earth. Among the heaped-up stones that lay, And soon a tiny birch had birth, And grew in ...
— Fleurs de lys and other poems • Arthur Weir
... card is fastened on one or more trees of each variety within certain prescribed limits. These cards may be made as fanciful or as rustic as desired. Birch bark is very appropriate for them, and for either birch bark or a conventional card a pretty element may be added by writing some appropriate quotation or verse, after the Japanese custom. The main object of each card, however, is to bear a number. Each player is provided with a card or slip of ...
— Games for the Playground, Home, School and Gymnasium • Jessie H. Bancroft
... out of the tent. In the open ground, on the way to a solitary birch-tree, we could see a group of soldiers.... Sara pointed to ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... them from each other: In the sycamore, the bark is mottled; in the white birch, it is dull white; in the beech, it is smooth and gray; in the hackberry, it is covered with numerous corky warts; in the blue beech, the trunk of the tree is fluted, as in Fig. 54, and in the ironwood, the bark peels in thin ...
— Studies of Trees • Jacob Joshua Levison
... they showed. They were valuable, for, in Scattergood's rude printing, one could read upon them the owner of every piece of timber, every farm, the acreage in each piece of timber, with a careful estimate of the amount of timber to the acre—also its proportions of spruce, beech, birch, maple, ash. ...
— Scattergood Baines • Clarence Budington Kelland
... grave of Sir Arthur O'Kellyn? Where may the grave of that good man be?— By the side of a spring, on the breast of Helvellyn, Under the twigs of a young birch tree! The Oak that in summer was sweet to hear, And rustled its leaves in the fall of the year; And whistled and roar'd in the winter alone, Is gone,—and the birch in its stead is grown.— The Knight's bones are dust, And his good sword rust;— ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... it by the interest of Mr. Montague, afterwards Earl of Halifax, who was then at the head of the treasury. He had been introduced to Mr. Montague by Congreve, who with others was desirous of honouring the descendant of so great a poet. Dr. Birch describes him as a man somewhat advanced in years, but unable to give any account of the works of his ancestor which are wanting. The family has been since very imperfectly traced."—Chalmers's ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 17, No. 483., Saturday, April 2, 1831 • Various
... hours of play, should be regulated according to the standard authorities laid down in Strutt, a copy of whose invaluable work, decorated with plates, was deposited in the school-house. Above all, he exhorted the pedagogue to abstain from the use of birch, an instrument of instruction which the good Squire regards with abhorrence, as fit only for the coercion of brute natures that cannot ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... tale has nothing to do; the Doomster, as I have said, had the handling of them with birch. What I have described of this kirk-session's cognisance of those rough fellows' ill behaviour is designed ingeniously to convey a notion of its strict ceremony and its wide dominion,—to show that even in the heart of Arraghael ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... aside her hat. She sat leaning against the crisp trunk of a silver birch. Her hands were in her lap. Her dress was crumpled up, displaying her crossed feet and the tantalizing line of her slim ankles. Against the copper green of the tree trunk the mass of her hair was pressed, gold upon the shadow of ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... 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 the smoke of a small town or of an isolated farmhouse ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... bow, O Hiawatha, Take your arrows, jasper-headed, Take your war-club, Puggawaugun, And your mittens, Minjekahwan, And your birch canoe for sailing, And the oil ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... were plastered over the rough hewn cedar lath, others were just of the smaller size trees split in two and the interstices filled in. Many were lined with birch bark, with borders of beautiful ash and silver birch. Chimneys were used now, great wide spaces at one end filled in with seats. In winter furs were hung about and often dropped over the windows at night, which were always closed with tight board shutters as soon as dusk set ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... of the immortality of the soul, says Mr. Birch,[161] is as old as the inscriptions of the twelfth dynasty, many of which contain extracts from the Ritual of the Dead. One hundred and forty-six chapters of this Ritual have been translated by Mr. Birch from the text of the Turin papyrus, the ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... the laurel bright, The Bard the myrtle bough, And smooth shillalas yield delight To many an Irish brow. The Fisher trims the hazel wand, The Crab may tame a shrew, The Birch becomes the pedant's hand, But Bows are ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 184, May 7, 1853 • Various
... I can remember her, she has suffered from 'a birch-tree growing inside me from my belly up; it presses against my chest, ...
— Reminiscences of Tolstoy - By His Son • Ilya Tolstoy
... first necessary to select the trees which would afford a strong and supple bark for the work. Now the last storm had brought down a number of large birch-trees, the bark of which would be perfectly suited for their purpose. Some of these trees lay on the ground, and they had only to be barked, which was the most difficult thing of all, owing to the imperfect tools which ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... year. I'm afraid it doesn't fit very well." He smiled from out of the light of a sudden lamp-post. "You'll find a birch footstool some day pretty soon. I noticed your feet didn't reach. By the way," he broke off, "pardon me for quoting from you, but I don't think back-season debutantes are like out-of-demand best-sellers—not all of them. Anyhow, all best-sellers ...
— The Fifth Wheel - A Novel • Olive Higgins Prouty
... the minds of the boys still more by applying punishment to the most degraded part, adding contumely to tyranny. Of course, it is intended that a boy who is sent to school should gain by precept and example; but is he to learn benevolence by the angry look and the flourish of the vindictive birch,—or forbearance, by the cruelty of the ushers,—or patience, when the masters over him are out of all patience, or modesty, when his nether parts are exposed to general examination? Is he not daily ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Frederick Marryat
... observed by some lurking foe. "Trust the Oak," said she; "trust the Oak, and the Elm, and the great Beech. Take care of the Birch, for though she is honest, she is too young not to be changeable. But shun the Ash and the Alder; for the Ash is an ogre,—you will know him by his thick fingers; and the Alder will smother you with her web of hair, if you let her near you at night." All this was uttered without pause or alteration ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... agent had called his place "The Shack" because it was built entirely of logs, and a woman could not have made it more comfortable. Keith stood in the big living-room. At one end was a strong fireplace in which kindlings and birch were already laid, waiting the touch of a match. Brady's reading table and his easy chair were drawn up close; his lounging moccasins were on a footstool; pipes, tobacco, books and magazines littered the table; and out of this cheering disorder rose triumphantly the amber shoulder of ...
— The River's End • James Oliver Curwood
... durable; but if you take a piece of dry leather, and try to rub it over with oil or grease, you cannot make it enter the pores of the leather; the black colour is produced by rubbing it over with a solution of green vitriol, the sulphate of iron. Russian leather is tanned in an infusion of birch bark, and is said to be afterwards mixed with a quantity of birch tar, to give it that odour for which it is peculiar, which renders it valuable for book-binding, on account of preventing it from being ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 334 Saturday, October 4, 1828 • Various
... me to die like a rat in a hole. I have stood the pains of hell for thirty-eight hours, and can't stand them any longer. They shan't take me alive. Box and that hound Carruthers' papers are covered with brush and leaves under the last birch in the bush, where I finished that meddlesome fool of a lawyer. You know why you ought to give a lot to Regy's boy. It's all over. Curse the lot of you. Here goes, but mind you kill that damnable Squire, or I'll come when I'm dead and ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... ever forget it as long as they live. The hit does that; for a kick is a very striking thing, that's a fact. There has been no good scholars since birch rods went out o' ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... Prideaux, who took part in the Monmouth rebellion, was a son of Sir Edmund Prideaux, the purchaser of Ford Abbey. (See Birch's Life of Tillotson.) Tillotson appears to have been a chaplain to Sir E. Prideaux at Ford Abbey, and a ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 81, May 17, 1851 • Various
... used, the difference in cost being caused by the grade and amount of labor needed, the kind of wood chosen and its abundance and the fineness of grain and the seasoning. Mahogany costs more than stained birch, and walnut than gum wood, but there are certain people who for some strange reason feel that they are getting something a little smarter and better if it is tagged "birch mahogany" than if it were simply called birch. Some of the furniture is well stained and some shockingly done, the would-be ...
— Furnishing the Home of Good Taste • Lucy Abbot Throop
... from Kant's saying that nature is beautiful when it looks like art, and art beautiful when it looks like nature, Schiller gives a large number of concrete illustrations of his theory. Thus a vase is beautiful when, without prejudice to the vase-idea, it looks like a free play of nature. A birch is beautiful when it is tall and slender, an oak when it is crooked; the shape in either case expressing the nature of the tree when it follows nature's law. 'Therefore', he concludes his illustrations, 'the empire ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... Littered the stalls, and from the mows Raked down the herd's grass for the cows; Heard the horse whinnying for his corn; And sharply clashing horn on horn, Impatient down the stanchion rows, 15 The cattle shake their walnut bows; While peering from his early perch Upon the scaffold's pole of birch, The cock his crested helmet bent And down his ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... birch, Of birch so supple and keen, And daintily ties them up into rods The finest ...
— King Winter • Anonymous
... and Venice—where he was noticed by almost every person of rank and reputation, and whence he brought away many a valuable article to enrich his own collection. He was born in the year 1690, and died of a second stroke of the palsy, under which he languished for three years, in 1754. Dr. Birch has drawn a very just and interesting character of this eminent man, which may be found in Nichol's Anecdotes of Bowyer, 562. 7. Mr. Edwards, the late ornithologist, has described him in a simple, but appropriate, manner. "He seemed," says ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... Betty, William Henry West (the young Roscius) Beyle, M., his 'Histoire de la Peinture en Italie' His account of an interview with Lord Byron at Milan Bible, the, read through by Lord Byron before he was eight years old Biography 'Bioscope, or Dial of Life,' Mr. Grenville Penn's Birch, Alderman Blackett, Joseph, the poetical cobbler His posthumous writings Blackstone, Judge, composed his Commentaries with a bottle of port before him Blackwood's Magazine Blake, the fashionable tonsor Bland, Rev. Robert Blaquiere, Mr. Bleeding, Lord Byron's prejudice against Blessington, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... deep and sandy beds, and occasionally over small stony plains. At noon we were at some distance from the creek, but then went towards it. The gum-trees were no longer visible, but melaleucas, from fifteen to twenty feet high, lined its banks like a copse of young birch. We now observed a long but somewhat narrow sheet of water, to which we rode; our suspicions as to its quality being roused by its colour, and the appearance of the melaleuca. It proved, as we feared, to be slightly brackish, but not undrinkable. Near the edge of the water, ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... of the river there were birch and beechen thickets in glory of leaf; big water-lilies spread their white beauty against the old black timbers of the water-mills; and in the quaint, ancient places of the old streets, under the gables ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... the cinchona bedewed by the cool clouds of Guaranda; and last of all, among the trees, the polylepis. The twisted, gnarled trunk of this tree, as well as its size and silvery foliage, reminded us of the olive, but the bark resembles that of the birch. It reaches the greatest elevation of any tree on the globe. Then followed shrubby fuchsia, calceolaria, eupatoria, and red and purple gentians; around and on the Arenal, a uniform mantle of monocotyledonous plants, with scattered tufts of valeriana, viola, and geranium, all with rigid leaves ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... three feet of the third strake under the wale were found to be stove in, and the timbers within started. The farther they proceeded in removing the sheathing, the more they discovered the decayed state of the ship's hull. The chief damage was repaired with a birch tree, which had been cut down when they were there before, and was the only one in the neighbourhood large enough for the purpose; but Captain King gave orders that no more sheathing should be ripped off, being apprehensive that further decayed ...
— Captain Cook - His Life, Voyages, and Discoveries • W.H.G. Kingston
... from behind the piano and stood in front of him, as erect as a silver birch, and as slim and young. There was a great indignation all ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... equipments. There were not more than twenty-five thousand regularly marching. Already on the previous day the guard had shown signs of demoralization. The Emperor alone seemed impassive. For days he had shared the common hardships; clad in a long Polish coat of marten fur, a stout birch staff in his hand, without a sign of either physical or nervous exhaustion he had marched silently for long distances among his suffering men. If we picture him standing at Krasnoi, weighing how long he dared to brave an enemy which if consolidated and hurled upon his lines would have annihilated ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... and exposure; but enough of both has been preserved till this time by constant submergence in the water and in the unusually moist soil above it to betray without any serious question the nature of the materials used and the mode of their employment. One of the corner-posts was a black birch and the bark on it is in a good state of preservation at and below the surface of ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 5 • Various
... about her helplessly. She found herself in a small spinney of young birch-trees, filling up the extremity of a triangular field into which she had come. Not a sign of the hounds, or, indeed, of any living creature was to be seen in any direction. She did not feel inclined to go on—or even to go back home with her broken stirrup-leather. ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... on an errand—not a particularly romantic one, as it happened, only to pay a bill for Miss Todd at a farm-house a few miles away. If the errand was prosaic the farm and its surroundings looked attractive; it stood on a hill with a beautiful group of birch-trees behind it, and a small stream came rippling down at the bottom of the garden. The path from the high road was blocked by a cart left standing with a load of straw, so it would be impossible to ride the horses up to the door. ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... mountains, but many ranges of hills. Norway monopolizes almost entirely the mountain system of the great northern peninsula, but the large forests of pine, fir, and birch, which cover so much of the country, are common to both. Though iron is found in large deposits in Norway, it is still more abundant in Sweden, where it is chiefly of the magnetic kind, yielding when properly smelted the best ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... we had got down to the table-land, I found myself suddenly in front of a long, quaint, double log cottage, set between two immense bowlders, and roofed with layers of birch bark, covered with turf, which was blue with wild pansies. It was as if it were built under a bed of heart's-ease. It was very old, and had evidently been a house of some pretension, for there was much curious carving about the doors, and indeed about the whole front, the ...
— Elsket - 1891 • Thomas Nelson Page
... we pace, hoping and despairing, till a faint, most delicate odor, indescribably suggestive of woodland freshness, catches the roused sense; or else one silvery star peeps out from under an upturned birch-leaf. Then down on hands and knees; tear up brush to right and left, the brown skeletons of the withered foliage. The ground is white with stars. Some are touched with delicate pink, some creamy white,—but all breathing out the evanescent secret of the early ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... that they usually set forth; more convenient for their purpose was a postern in the wall which enclosed the greater part of Rivenoak; the approach to it was from the back of the house, across a paddock, and through a birch copse, where stood an old summer-house, now rarely entered. Constance, with her own key, had just unlocked the door in the wall; she paused ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... with the conception of an "impossible" as little as with the actual visible facts of his ragged shirt-sleeves and faded, earth-stained overalls. They toiled upwards in silence for some moments, the man still chewing on his birch-twig. He noticed her sidelong half-satirical glance at it. "Don't you want one?" he asked, and gravely cut a long, slim rod from one of the saplings in the green wall shutting them into the road. As he gave it to her he explained, "It's the kind ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... the buried bushes, across the trickly, thawing streams, through a thick swamp, close with alder and birch, on up the slope into woods more largely spaced, where great oaks towered among the fir and the spruce, and tall white birches glimmered in the dusk—all still and as yet dead. And on far up the mountain slope until beneath the Altar they came to a little circle, hedged ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... suffered considerable injury during the siege. The defenders used the lead from the chapter-house roof to cover the keep of the castle, and possibly also to make bullets. Finally, on December 18th, through the treachery of Colonel Birch, the governor of the city, Hereford was once more taken, and this time the whole place was overrun by a rabble of ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Hereford, A Description - Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • A. Hugh Fisher
... owned a hardwood tract, and Parker set his little crew at work chopping birch saplings and fashioning from them huge sleds, strongly bolted. As for himself, he entered into a contract with the local blacksmith, threw his coat off and went to work on some contrivances, round which the settlement's ...
— The Rainy Day Railroad War • Holman Day
... they beheld a number of dark objects on the lake before them. It was a fleet of Iroquois canoes, heavier and slower craft than those of the Algonquins, for they were made of oak-or elm-bark, instead of the light paper-birch used ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... a crown of white birch bark and her braid of hair, twined with running ever-green, fell to her waist. Patty was wreathed with columbines and decked with some turkey feathers that she had put in her basket as too pretty to throw away. Waitstill looked rather conscious in her unusual finery, but Patty sported it with ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... earache, which would be more to the point. To his direct mind no diplomacy was needed; all that was necessary was a few blunt questions. Nora could answer them as she chose. Nora, his baby, his little girl that used to run around barefooted and laugh when he applied the needed birch! How children grew up! And they never grew too old for the ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... as she worked a strip of white birch bark into the roof of the new home she and Whitefoot had been building out of the old home of Melody the Wood Thrush, "this finishes the roof. I don't think any water will get through it even in ...
— Whitefoot the Wood Mouse • Thornton W. Burgess
... obtained his permit, built his boats,—whether light, roomy bateaux made of boards, or birch-bark canoes, or pirogues, which were simply hollowed out logs. He loaded them with paint, powder, bullets, blankets, beads, and rum, manned them with hardy voyageurs, trained all their lives in the ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... tribes used to feed during famine times on the inner bark of cedar and white birch, as well as on the inner bark of the slippery elm and basswood, but these cannot be got without injury to ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts
... knelt above them breathless, he looked up to the maple-twigs, over which a faint reddish bloom had been cast in the night, beyond to the lower slopes of the mountain, delicately patterned with innumerable white stems of young birch-trees, and clasped his hands to see that a shimmer of green hung in their tops like a mist. His lips quivered, he laid his hand upon a tuft of grass with glossy, lance-like blades, and ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... heaps more directly—hundreds." She stretched out her hand vaguely towards an enchanting distance—hill beyond hill, wood beyond wood; everywhere the glimmer of water in the hollows; everywhere the sparkle of fresh leaf, the shining of the birch trunks among the firs, the greys and purples of limestone rock; everywhere, too, the disfiguring stain of fire, fire new or old, written, now on the mouldering stumps of trees felled thirty years ago when the railway was making, now on the ...
— Lady Merton, Colonist • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... family visiting. It is on St. Nicholas Eve that their young people become half wild with joy and expectation. To some of them it is a sorry time; for the saint is very candid, and, if any of them have been bad during the past year, he is quite sure to tell them so. Sometimes he carries a birch-rod under his arm, and advises the parents to give them scoldings in place of confections, ...
— Christmas - Its Origin, Celebration and Significance as Related in Prose and Verse • Various
... here in Lancashire, in the Elizabethan age,—more, I think, than now. These suburban residences, however, are of much later date than Elizabeth's time. Among other places, Mr. B. called at the Hazels, the residence of Sir Thomas Birch, a kinsman of his. It is a large brick mansion, and has old trees and shrubbery about it, the latter very fine and verdant,—hazels, holly, rhododendron, etc. Mr. B. went in, and shortly afterwards Sir Thomas Birch came out,—a very frank and hospitable ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... carriage, the long ditches, overgrown with mugwort, wormwood, and mountain ash; and as he watched the fresh fertile wilderness and solitude of this steppe country, the greenness, the long slopes, and valleys with stunted oak bushes, the grey villages, and scant birch trees,—the whole Russian landscape, so long unseen by him, stirred emotion at once pleasant, sweet and almost painful in his heart, and he felt weighed down by a kind of pleasant oppression. Slowly his thoughts wandered; their outlines were as vague and indistinct as the outlines ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... peasants make ready To sleep by the roadside. They light a large fire, And collecting some farthings 110 Send two of their number To buy them some vodka, The rest cutting cups From the bark of a birch-tree. The vodka's provided, Black bread, too, besides, And they all begin feasting: Each munches some bread And drinks three cups of vodka— But then comes the question 120 Of who can, in Russia, Be happy ...
— Who Can Be Happy And Free In Russia? • Nicholas Nekrassov
... was a silence the while the flaxen-haired woman eyed her interrogator less disdainfully. "Yes, by poling- boat and birch-bark. I'm not fleeing the law; I'm ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... corners was all kinds of junk that might be more or less useful to have: a couple of lawn-mowers, an old sleigh hoisted up on the rafters of the carriage house, a weird old buggy, a plow, a grindstone, a collection of old chairs and sofas that had seen better days, a birch-bark canoe—things like that. ...
— The House of Torchy • Sewell Ford
... very picture of an old dame, with a black bonnet, high-crowned and crescent shaped in front, with a white muslin cap below, a buff handkerchief crossed over her shoulders, a dark short-sleeved gown, long mittens covering her arms, and a checkered apron; a regular orthodox birch-rod by her side, and a black cat at her feet. But her head was shaking with palsy, and she hardly seemed to understand what Lizzie screamed into her ear ...
— The Carbonels • Charlotte M. Yonge
... who had been separated from the rest; and, with some difficulty, I induced him to return. We had got back to our rooms, when one of the ushers discovered the whole party. The master was called up, and, with birch in hand, went round the room, and inflicted summary punishment on all offenders. The next morning they were called up by name, their crime announced, and severe tasks being inflicted, they were all sent to Coventry for ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston
... into two equal parts, sat about a hundred persons, all devoutly listening to their minister, who stood before them on what might he called a small, natural pulpit of living stone. Up to it there led a short flight of steps, and over it waved the canopy of a tall, graceful birch tree. The pulpit stood in the middle of the channel, directly facing the congregation, and separated from them by the clear, deep, sparkling pool, into which the scarce-heard water poured over the blackened rock. The water, as it left the pool, separated into two streams, and flowed on each ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... to a small, clear, swift brook, crossed by a big white-birch log. Elizabeth Ann was horribly afraid to set foot on it, but with little Molly's hand holding tightly to hers she was ashamed to say she was afraid. Ralph skipped across, swinging the pail to show how easy it was for him. Ellen followed more slowly, ...
— Understood Betsy • Dorothy Canfield
... poor. She resolved to ask her father and Levine about it and turned a somersault into the water. She swam about until tired, then turned over on her back to rest. Lying so a shadow drifted across her face and she raised her head. A gray birch bark canoe floated silently beside her. In it, in a gray bathing suit, ...
— Lydia of the Pines • Honore Willsie Morrow
... style, is to be found in all these books when they are good books. Compare a paragraph or two of the early Burroughs on his birch-clad lake country, or Thoreau upon Concord pines, with the "natural history paragraph" that English magazines used to publish, ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... Their manner of taking these birds resembles something a sport called bat-fowling. They find out their haunts among the rocks and cliffs in the night, when, taking with them torches made of the bark of the birch tree, which is common here, and grows to a very large size, (this bark has a very unctuous qaality, and emits a bright and clear light, and in the northern parts of America is used frequently instead of a candle) they bring the boat's side as near ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr
... the tangled paths by the tiny pond! Oh, the little sandy spot below the tumbledown dike, where I used to catch gudgeons! And you tall birch-trees, with long hanging branches, from beyond which came floating a peasant's mournful song, broken by the uneven jolting of the cart, I send you my last farewell!... On parting with life, to you alone I stretch out my hands. Would I might once more inhale the fresh, bitter ...
— The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... Sharp was also in attendance, and remained in the public room with the Yeomen, while the Co- Secretary was indulged with a private interview with the Magistrate, Mr. Alderman Birch, in the parlour. Mr. Newman, the City Solicitor, was also called into council, and remained iu consultation with Secretary Murray some time; there was much marching and countermarching in and out of the office on the part of the Secretary and the Yeomen, but ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... storm has blown over. So we galloped thither in hot haste, and when we got there not a trace of the forest was to be seen. At last I asked a maize-reaper I fell in with, where on earth the Talpadi forest was? Over there, said he, pointing to a spot where some fifty birch-trees were withering in the sand like so many broomsticks, all set nicely in a row. And that, if you please, was the Talpadi forest which I had planted at a very great cost! You had better tell the man to plant out a ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... there were any Englishmen concealed in it. He replied that he did not know, they might search for themselves. At length they opened the garret door and ascended the stairs, but Henry had concealed himself among a heap of birch-bark vessels, which had been used in making maple sugar, and thus escaped. Fatigued and exhausted, he lay down on a mat and went to sleep, and while in this condition he was surprised by the wife of Langlade, who remarked that ...
— Old Mackinaw - The Fortress of the Lakes and its Surroundings • W. P. Strickland
... of plain, river, lake, and mountain turn from the iron clasp of icy winter to kiss the balmy lips of returning summer, and to welcome his bridal gifts of sun and shower! The trees open their leafy lids to look at the brooks and streamlets break forth into songs of gladness—"the birch-tree," as the old Saxon said, "becomes beautiful in its branches, and rustles sweetly in its leafy summit, moved to and fro by the breath of heaven "—the lakes uncover their sweet faces, and their mimic shores steal ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... alert and expectant, till, suddenly, she bursts up a few yards from you, and goes humming through the trees,—the complete triumph of endurance and vigor. Hardy native bird, may your tracks never be fewer, or your visits to the birch-tree less frequent! ...
— Bird Stories from Burroughs - Sketches of Bird Life Taken from the Works of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... PADDYWHACK AND DR. BIRCH.—Everyone knows what "the Assisted Education (Ireland) Bill" is. Why should not an Assisted Education (England) Bill be brought in to enable public school-boys to secure, without payment of any additional fee beyond that included for "swishing" ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 102, February 27, 1892 • Various
... footing. He rolled stumbling down the precipice a few yards. Luke's fate seemed inevitable. His feet were entangled in the stirrup, he could not free himself. A birch tree, growing in a chink of the precipice, arrested his further fall. But for this timely aid all had been over. Here Luke was enabled to extricate himself from the stirrup and to regain his feet; seizing the bridle, he dragged his faulty ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... But if penance may be commuted with priests so it may with gendarmes. Delinquents contrived to purchase their escape from the bastinado by a sum of money, and French gallantry substituted with respect to females the birch for the cane. I saw an order directing all female servants to be examined as to their health unless they could produce certificates from their masters. On the 25th of December the Government granted twenty-four hours longer to persons who were ordered ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... pleasantly by the President. The articles of the Constitution and By-Laws were discussed seriatim, and adopted, and then the Constitution, as a whole, was adopted. A letter was presented by Mrs. Lucy Stone, from the proprietor of the Birch House, Water Street, offering to entertain a few delegates—free. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... day and Susan arrived. She looked very meek to the barbarian of fifteen, so he soon began his antics. He was called to the platform, told to lay aside his jacket, and, thereupon, with much astonishment received from the mild Quaker maiden, with a birch rod applied calmly but with precision, an exposition of the argumentum ad hominem based on the a posteriori method of reasoning. Thus Susan departed from her principles, ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... through the landscape in long curves. From the south bow window in the hotel, the mother and daughter followed its course through tangled underwood and birch forest; sometimes it disappeared, and then shone out again, and at last became fully visible. There was a great deal of traffic going on, the hum ...
— Captain Mansana and Mother's Hands • Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson
... sugar making from the sap of the hard or sugar maple was first taught by the aborigines to the white settlers. In my day the Sioux used also the box elder for sugar making, and from the birch and ash is made a dark-colored sugar that was used by them as a carrier in medicine. However, none of these yield as freely as the maple. The Ojibways of Minnesota still make and sell delicious maple sugar, put up in "mococks," or birch-bark packages. Their wild rice, ...
— The Indian Today - The Past and Future of the First American • Charles A. Eastman
... 29th January we reached the shore of Pine Island Lake, and saw in our track the birch lodge of an Indian. It was before sunrise, and we stopped the dogs to warm our fingers over the fire of the wigwam. Within sat a very old Indian and two or three women and children. The old man was singing to ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... for the cows; Heard the horse whinnying for his corn; And sharply clashing horn on horn, Impatient down the stanchion rows, 15 The cattle shake their walnut bows; While peering from his early perch Upon the scaffold's pole of birch, The cock his crested helmet bent And down his querulous ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... safe distance while Billy secured the clothes and went into the timber. From a birch tree he pulled off a pile of bark, and as he stripped he put his old clothes on it. McTabb could hear the crackling and snapping of the fire when Billy reappeared arrayed in Indian Joe's "second best"— buckskin trousers, a worn ...
— Isobel • James Oliver Curwood
... is a small tarn, or more properly the expanded bed of a stream, art having aided nature in its formation: it is edged by rocks and cliffs fringed with the usual trees of the neighbourhood; it is a wild and pretty spot, not unlike some birch-bordered pool in the mountains of Wales or Scotland, sequestered and picturesque. It was dark before I got back, with heavy clouds and vivid lightning approaching from the south-west. The day had been very hot (3 p.m., 90 degrees), and the evening the same; but the barometer ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... had reached the post assigned to it, high up on the hill; or that Tytler had worked round to the village in the enemy's rear. Some attacks which were made upon the Afghans were repulsed, with loss. Major Birch and Lieutenant Fitzgerald were killed, and Captain Maclean wounded; and between thirty and forty of the rank and file were killed, or wounded. As the fort and its defenses could not have been carried by direct attack, without immense loss of life; it was determined ...
— For Name and Fame - Or Through Afghan Passes • G. A. Henty
... the hard glebe, constricted by its bare and gnarled roots, they draw sustenance from afar; and not another knoll on which the sun so delights to pour his beams. Weeks before any other Sycamore, and almost as early as the alder or the birch—the GLORY OF MOUNT PLEASANT, for so we schoolboys called it, unfolded itself like a banner. You could then see only the low windows of the dwelling—for eaves, roof, and chimneys all disappeared—and then, when you stood beneath, was not the sound of the bees like the very sound of the sea itself, ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... assemble themselves together, both men, women, and children, olde and young, all indifferently, and goe into the woodes and groves, hilles and mountaines, where they spend the night in pastyme, and in the morning they returne, bringing with them birch bowes and braunches of trees to deck their assembly withal. . . . They have twentie or fourtie yoke of oxen, every oxe having a sweete nosegay of flowers tyed on the tippe of his hornes, and these draw home ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... a long inlet of the sea, extending up country over a score of miles. The district is hilly, and is covered by a forest of rather small trees, spruce and birch, but further inland the hills are generally bare. There are comparatively few European residents ...
— Report by the Governor on a Visit to the Micmac Indians at Bay d'Espoir - Colonial Reports, Miscellaneous. No. 54. Newfoundland • William MacGregor
... good school at Midsummer. The two years at th' academy 'ud ha' done well enough, if I'd meant to make a miller and farmer of him, for he's had a fine sight more schoolin' nor I ever got. All the learnin' my father ever paid for was a bit o' birch at one end and the alphabet at th' other. But I should like Tom to be a bit of a scholard, so as he might be up to the tricks o' these fellows as talk fine and write with a flourish. It 'ud be a help to me wi' these lawsuits, and ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... upon the question. A committee had been appointed to inquire into a sale of the estate which had belonged to the late earl of Denventwater. It appeared by the report, that the sale had been fraudulent; a bill was prepared to make it void; Dennis Bond, esquire, and Serjeant Birch, commissioners for the sale of the forfeited estates, were declared guilty of notorious breach of trust, and expelled the house, of which they were members: George Robinson, esquire, underwent the same sentence on account ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... the preparation of which constitutes a distinct industry, are either of larch, Spanish chestnut, ash, willow, birch, or beech—larch or chestnut being preferred. Women clear the poles of the bark, and men sharpen them at one end, which is dipped in creosote before being used. The ground is cleared, and the poles are stuck in against the old ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... some original and broadly human elements which have caused it, notwithstanding its dreary, artificial style, to be highly appreciated in other countries, in South American countries especially. The secret of its appeal lies largely in this, that in Harvey Birch, a brave man who serves his country without hope or possibility of reward, Cooper has strongly portrayed a type of the highest, the ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... the shell may be kept from a week to a fortnight, by the following process. Cover them with water, and wash them clean with a birch broom. Then lay them with the deep or concave part of the shell undermost, and sprinkle each of them well with salt and Indian meal. Fill up the tub with cold water. Repeat this every day; first pouring off the ...
— Directions for Cookery, in its Various Branches • Eliza Leslie
... arrived on Saturday and is now on exhibition on our third floor. The showing is unsurpassed. Here you will find something to suit you, whether you wish oak, mahogany, walnut or birch. We invite you to pay us ...
— Business Correspondence • Anonymous
... that grows and flies, where the rabbits, the lizards, and the birds live their life as they please, either ignorant of intruding man or strangely little incommoded by his neighbourhood. And yet there is nothing forbidding or austere in these wide solitudes. The patches of graceful birch-wood; the miniature lakes nestling among them; the brakes of ling—pink, faintly scented, a feast for every sense; the stretches of purple heather, glowing into scarlet under the touch of the sun; the scattered farm-houses, so mellow in colour, ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Egypt, and the Orient, will be apparent when we remember that the dawn of art in these countries lies hidden in the shadow of unnumbered ages, while ours stands out in the light of the very present. This is well illustrated by a remark of Birch, who, in dwelling upon the antiquity of the fictile art, says that "the existence of earthen vessels in Egypt was at least coeval with the formation of a written language."[1] Beyond this there ...
— Origin and Development of Form and Ornament in Ceramic Art. • William Henry Holmes
... introduce the element of sheer tragedy into luxurious life. In his Conspiracy of Pontiac, Parkman tells with rare eloquence the character of the Ojibwa Indians: "In the calm days of summer, the Ojibwa fisherman pushes out his birch canoe upon the great inland ocean of the North; ... or he lifts his canoe from the sandy beach, and, while his camp-fire crackles on the grass-plot, reclines beneath the trees, and smokes and laughs away the sultry hours, in a lazy luxury of enjoyment.... ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... snow bank. The close covering of feathers upon its feet serves not only to keep the feet warm, but also as snow-shoes. In the evenings these birds may frequently be seen in the tops of such trees as maple, birch, cherry, and poplar, the buds of which form the greater part of their ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education
... Pacific and south of Hudson Bay were big lakes and rapid rivers—lakes whose names we did not know; lakes bigger than Champlain, with unnamed rivers between them. We did not propose to be boated around in a big birch-bark by two voyagers among blankets and crackers and ham, but each provided himself a little thirteen-foot cedar canoe, twenty-nine inches in the beam, and weighing less than forty pounds. I cannot tell ...
— Crooked Trails • Frederic Remington
... shone in the tips of the birch trees. Ridgeley did not come, and when they went back to the house, they found that he had been called to New York on an urgent case. He would not ...
— The Gay Cockade • Temple Bailey
... their cabin, watching the spring rain falling soft and warm, melting the snow so quickly that its thickness might be seen visibly diminishing; or, again, in the month of May, standing at the edge of the forest, listening to the nightingales singing on the delicate golden branches of the perfumed birch tree. ...
— The Little Russian Servant • Henri Greville
... fibers, and a cap and shoes of coonskin to match. The shoes were cut from a bedroom-slipper pattern that Tish traced in the sand on the beach, and the cap had an eagle feather in it. He made a birch-bark knapsack to hold the fish he smoked and a bow and arrow that looked well but would not shoot. When he had the outfit completed, he put it on, with the stone hatchet stuck into a grapevine belt and the bow and arrow over his shoulder, and he ...
— Tish, The Chronicle of Her Escapades and Excursions • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... had through a handsomely laid out circuitous approach between two hills. An extensive fruit and vegetable garden lies to the east of the house; a hawthorn hedge dotted here and there with some graceful young maple and birch trees, fringes the roadside; a thorn shrubbery of luxuriant growth encircles the plantation of evergreens along the side of the mound which slopes down to the road, furnishing a splendid croquet lawn. One of the ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... 17, 1673, in very simple fashion, in two birch-bark canoes, with five white voyageurs and a moderate supply of smoked meat and Indian corn, the two travelers set out to solve a perplexing problem, by tracing the course of the great river. Their only guide was a crude map based on scraps of information which they had ...
— French Pathfinders in North America • William Henry Johnson
... the larks sang loud in the blue clear air; the birch-wood clothed itself in tender green; the stream, with its melting snow-drifts, wound down the mountains singing on its way; but no plough furrowed the loosened earth, and from the heights was heard no wood-horn calling the cattle at feeding time. All was still and dead in the ...
— Strife and Peace • Fredrika Bremer
... of Sir Arthur O'Kellyn? Where may the grave of that good man be?— By the side of a spring, on the breast of Helvellyn, Under the twigs of a young birch-tree! The oak that in summer was sweet to hear, And rustled its leaves in the fall of the year, And whistled and roared in the winter alone, Is gone,—and the birch in its stead is grown.— The knight's bones are dust, And ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... Prince, kicking the ragga ball, or sailing miniature praus out into the river, and off toward the shimmering straits. But often they sat cross-legged and dropped bits of chicken and fruit between the palm sleepers of the wharf to the birch-colored crocodiles below, who snapped them up, one after another, never taking their small, cruel eyes off the brown faces that peered down ...
— Tales of the Malayan Coast - From Penang to the Philippines • Rounsevelle Wildman
... where the waters, descending from the Cralich and the lofty mountains of Kintail, issue eastwards through a narrow gorge into Loch Affric. It was a place remarkably well adapted for the purpose of a resisting party. A rocky boss, called Torr-a-Bheathaich, then densely covered with birch, closes up the glen as with a gate. The black mountain stream, "spear-deep," sweeps round it. A narrow path wound up the rock, admitting of passengers in single file. Here lay Murchison with the best ...
— History Of The Mackenzies • Alexander Mackenzie
... with a lash. Now, if I know anything of mankind, these gentlemen might very well spare their reproof and correction, for there is not through all Nature another so callous and insensible a member as the world's posteriors, whether you apply to it the toe or the birch. Besides, most of our late satirists seem to lie under a sort of mistake, that because nettles have the prerogative to sting, therefore all other weeds must do so too. I make not this comparison out of the least design to detract from these worthy writers, for it ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift
... or three of our number with white clay and put on them birchen hats which we sewed up for the occasion; fastened a piece of fur to their chins for a beard and altered their costumes as much as lay within our power. The white of the birch-bark was made to answer for their white shirts. Their merchandise consisted of sand for sugar, wild beans for coffee, dried leaves for tea, pulverized earth for gun-powder, pebbles for bullets and clear water for the dangerous ...
— Indian Boyhood • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... previously visited the adjoining coast of Labrador, and there had encountered their first "natives", members of some Algonkin tribe from Canada, who had come north for seal fishing (Cartier is clever enough to notice and describe their birch-bark canoes). After examining the west coast of Newfoundland, Cartier's ships sailed on past the Magdalen Islands (stopping every now and then off some islet to collect supplies of sea birds, for the rocky ground was covered with them as thickly as a meadow with grass).[3] He reached the north coast ...
— Pioneers in Canada • Sir Harry Johnston
... within the memory of any body in the settlement. Annette is venturesome, and since a child has shown a keen delight in going upon boats, or paddling a canoe; so, one day, during the visit which I have mentioned, she went into a birch that swung in a little pond, formed behind her uncle's premises by the over-flowing of the stream's channel. Untying the canoe, she seized the blade and began to paddle about in the lazy water. Presently she reached the eddies, which, since a ...
— Annette, The Metis Spy • Joseph Edmund Collins
... days, by sloping desks with safety inkpots and scientifically adjustable seats, "with grave misgivings." And though he never birched a boy in his life, and was, I am convinced, morally incapable of such a scuffle, he retained the block and birch in the school through all his term of office, and spoke at the Headmasters' Conference in temperate approval of corporal chastisement, comparing it, dear soul! to ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... than the other, for the same preference is unhesitatingly accorded to the same effect in nature herself. Whatever beauty there may result from effects of light on foreground objects, from the dew of the grass, the flash of the cascade, the glitter of the birch trunk, or the fair daylight hues of darker things, (and joyfulness there is in all of them), there is yet a light which the eye invariably seeks with a deeper feeling of the beautiful, the light of the ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... others, many of which bear brilliant flowers, but have not yet been botanized; and I can only give such barbarous names as chumpaka, Kamooning, marbow, seum, dadap; and, loveliest of all, the waringhan, a species of ficus, graceful as a birch; and underneath these again great ferns, ground orchids, and flowering shrubs of heavy, delicious odor, are interlocked and interwoven. Oh that you could see it all! It is wonderful; no words could describe it, far less mine. Mr. Darwin says so truly that a visit to the tropics (and ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... well observed, that this imperious authority is often attended by very dangerous consequences, and particularly our way of chastising. How much more decent would it be to see their classes strewed with green leaves and fine flowers, than with the bloody stumps of birch and willows? Were it left to my ordering. I should paint the school with the pictures of joy and gladness; Flora and the Graces, as the philosopher Speusippus did his. Where their profit is, let them there have their pleasure too. Such viands as are proper and wholesome for children, should ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... many who didn't. Henry James, for instance, wrote a review of "Drum Taps" in the Nation, November 16, 1865. In the lusty heyday and assurance of twenty-two years, he laid the birch on smartly. It is just a little saddening to find that even so clear-sighted an observer as Henry James could not see through the chaotic form of Whitman to the great vision and throbbing music that seem so plain to us to-day. Whitman ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... times, and put into the care of the most trust-worthy of your attendants to guard, by multiplying them against the accidental losses to which they will be exposed. A further guard would be, that one of these copies be on the cuticular membranes of the paper-birch, as less liable to injury from ...
— History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, Vol. I. • Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
... rested, on their annual migration from sea to moor; where the kingfisher's nest of fish-bones lay hidden; where the otter had her home beneath the bank, and its inland vent-hole behind a silver birch. ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... his pebbled shore, O'erhung with wild-woods, thickening green; The fragrant birch and hawthorn hoar, 'Twin'd amorous round the raptur'd scene: The flowers sprang wanton to be prest, The birds sang love on every spray; Till too, too soon, the glowing west, Proclaim'd the speed of ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... under her, and the Heaven over her, in a misty and rainy season. She sent then unto a French Priest, that he would speak unto her Squaw Mistress, who then, without condescending to look upon her, allow'd her a little Birch-Rind, to cover her Head from the Injuries of the Weather, and a little bit of dried Moose, which being boiled, she drunk the Broth, and ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... tent. In the open ground, on the way to a solitary birch-tree, we could see a group of soldiers.... Sara ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... his son Michael to endure hardship. Peter Strogoff was a huntsman by profession. Summer and winter—in the burning heat, as well as when the cold was sometimes fifty degrees below zero—he scoured the frozen plains, the thickets of birch and larch, the pine forests; setting traps; watching for small game with his gun, and for large game with the spear or knife. The large game was nothing less than the Siberian bear, a formidable and ferocious animal, in size equaling its fellow of the frozen seas. Peter Strogoff had ...
— Michael Strogoff - or, The Courier of the Czar • Jules Verne
... Tommy brought us ashore, and after leaving Martin with his broken limb in his mother's arms at the gate of Sunny Lodge, he took me over to the Presbytery in order that Father Dan might carry me home and so stand between me and my father's wrath and Aunt Bridget's birch. ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... which are laid their paddles, tent-poles, and some blades of whalebone; above these they place a number of little pieces of network, made of thin slips of whalebone, and, lastly, a quantity of twigs of birch and of the andromeda tetragona. Their deer-skins, which are very numerous, can now be spread without risk of their touching the snow; and such a bed is capable of affording not merely comfort but ...
— Journal of the Third Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage • William Edward Parry
... changing picture,—budding birch trees along the river-bank; men ploughing in the valley; shepherds tending flocks that looked like dots of cotton wool on the green hillsides. Sometimes bands of gay folk from the King's house rode by to the hunt, spurs jingling, horns braying, falcons at their wrists. Sometimes ...
— The Thrall of Leif the Lucky • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... face, in pitiful contrast to the ruggedly healthy one of the child's bearer. Fascinatedly she watched as Richard set his burden carefully down upon the grass, close to the edge of the pool, the boy's back against a big white birch trunk. The two were not so far below her but that she could see the expression on their faces, though she could ...
— The Twenty-Fourth of June • Grace S. Richmond
... Liverpool interests are well represented in the House of Commons. The borough has had the good sense to prefer a merchant townsman, Sir Thomas Birch, and the son of a merchant, and friend and co-minister of the late Sir Robert Peel, Mr. Cardwell, to a soldier, and the dreamy poetical son of a Protectionist duke. A place like Liverpool ought to find in its own ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... noon we struck the sources of the White River, pleasant springs on a hillside, bubbling forth among the first trees we had seen since we left the Laramie. Then we descended into a fine shady valley: all our old friends were there in thickets—the box-elder, willow, birch and cottonwood, the alder, osier and wild cherry, currant, gooseberry, buffalo-berry and clematis. As we went on, brushing through the thick foliage, the hills on either side became higher, and grew into bastions, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... in gathering the ingredients for his medicine, he selected whatsoever came to hand such as spruce needles, the inner bark of the willow, a strip of birch bark, and a quantity of moss- berries, which he made the hunters dig up for him from beneath the snow. A few frozen roots completed his supply, and he led the ...
— Lost Face • Jack London
... the love of aggrandizement took possession of his heart, and, marrying under its influence, misery soon followed; and here, in a little wood of tall firs, he raised this simple fabric: moss warmed it within, and the bark of the birch defended it without; a stream of rock-water once flowed in a bed of pebbles before the door, in which the young willow dipped its leaves; and, at a little distance from a bed of wild roses, the labernum gracefully rose, and suspended her yellow flowers; and adjoining ...
— Poems • Sir John Carr
... Brayton. It was the second time Isom had seen him lurking about, and the boy's impulse was to hurry back to the mill. But it was still peace, and without his gun Crump was not dangerous; so Isom rose and ran on, and, splashing into the angry little stream, shot away like a roll of birch bark through the tawny crest of a big wave. He had done the feat a hundred times; he knew every rock and eddy in flood-time, and he floated through them and slipped like an eel into the mill-pond. Old ...
— The Last Stetson • John Fox Jr.
... surged uppermost in Alan again, and after that, for an hour or more, something lived for him in the glow of the fire which Olaf kept burning. It was the memory of Mary Standish, her quiet, beautiful eyes gazing at him, her pale face taking form in the lacy wisps of birch-smoke. His mind pictured her in the flame-glow as she had listened to him that day in Skagway, when he had told her of this fight that was ahead. And it pleased him to think she would have made this same fight for Alaska if she had lived. It was a thought which brought ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... irresistibly drawn into the adventurous life of the trapper and fur-trader. The fur trade became the accepted basis of colonial life; the voyageur and courier de bois, clad in skins, paddling up ice-rimmed streams in their birch-bark canoes, fraternizing with Indians who were their only companions in that bleak interior, and married often to dusky squaws, became assimilated to the savage life about them and reverted to the ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... and unlucky inscription, that reckless wit, Bonnel Thornton, instantly wrote a squib, under the obvious pseudonym of the "Rev. Busby Birch." In these critical and political remarks (which he entitled "City Latin") the gay scoffer professed in his preface to prove "almost every word and every letter to be erroneous and contrary to the practice ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... finer work than that of any of them. Bryant pulsing the first interior verse-throbs of a mighty world—bard of the river and the wood, ever conveying a taste of open air, with scents as from hayfields, grapes, birch-borders—always lurkingly fond of threnodies—beginning and ending his long career with chants of death, with here and there through all, poems, or passages of poems, touching the highest universal truths, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... patch of the woods to the light of the sun. These forests abounded with game, and had long been the hunting ground of the red men. The river swarmed with water-fowl of various names and plumage, and often the Indian's birch canoe darted over ...
— From Farm House to the White House • William M. Thayer
... lady's reverence cheered; Rent from its trunk, torn from its park, The luckless tree again is reared— (Small sign of honour or of grace!) To mark the parish market-place! Long as St. Idloes' town shall be A patroness of poesy— Long as its hospitality The bard shall freely entertain, My birch! thy ...
— The Poetry of Wales • John Jenkins
... grunds—black be his cast! [*Fate] he's nae gentleman, nor drap's bluid o' gentleman, wad grudge twa gangrel [*Vagrant] pair bodies the shelter o' a waste house, and the thristles by the roadside for a bit cuddy,. [*Donkey] and the bits o' rotten birk [*Birch] to boil their drap parritch wi'. Weel, there's ane abune a'—but we'll see if the red cock craw not in his bonnie barn-yard ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... and flasks of green and blue glass, carved silver cups, and gilded drinking vessels of various makes—Venetian, Turkish, Tscherkessian, which had reached Bulba's cabin by various roads, at third and fourth hand, a thing common enough in those bold days. There were birch-wood benches all around the room, a huge table under the holy pictures in one corner, and a huge stove covered with particoloured patterns in relief, with spaces between it and the wall. All this was quite familiar ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... slain, List the Saxon's silvery laughter, and his humming hives of gain. Swiftly sped the tawny runner o'er the pathless prairies then, Now the iron-reindeer sooner carries weal or woe to men. On thy bosom, Royal River, silent sped the birch canoe Bearing brave with bow and quiver on his way to war or woo; Now with flaunting flags and streamers—mighty monsters of the deep— Lo the puffing, panting steamers through thy foaming waters sweep; And behold the grain-fields golden, where the bison grazed ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... the best trees for the small lawn is the Cut-Leaved Birch. It grows rapidly, is always attractive, and does not outgrow the limit of the ordinary lot. Its habit is grace itself. Its white-barked trunk, slender, pendant branches, and finely-cut foliage never fail to challenge admiration. In fall ...
— Amateur Gardencraft - A Book for the Home-Maker and Garden Lover • Eben E. Rexford
... ringstraked horse and the cavalry of the State—two men in tatters—and the herald who bore the silver stick before the King, would trot back to their own place, which lay between the tail of a heaven-climbing glacier and a dark birch-forest. ...
— The Kipling Reader - Selections from the Books of Rudyard Kipling • Rudyard Kipling
... Dynasty, the Saitic period; the translator has also used in his work, the Egyptian manuscripts of the Louvre to assist in the elucidation of his readings of the Papyrus of Turin. His work is an advance on that of Dr. Samuel Birch, given in 1867, in the Vth volume of Baron von Bunsen's work on Egypt's Place in Universal History. A new translation of the Book of the Dead is now passing through the English press, by P. Le Page Renouf, Esq., but only a few chapters ...
— Scarabs • Isaac Myer
... He had heard it on the long traverse, in the stillness of the lone night, at lakeside camps built far from any other human being. His imagination had heard it on the summer breeze as he paddled across a sun-drenched lake in his birch-bark canoe. ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... Touch-me-not and the herb Robert adopt a different plan, and convert their seed-cases into pistols for the firing of seeds at as wide range as twenty feet or more. The maple, the ash, the hornbeam, the elm and the birch have yet another method of escape from the home acre. Their seeds are winged, and torn off in a gale are frequently borne two hundred yards away. And stronger wings than these are plied in the cherry tree's service. The birds bide the time when a blush upon ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various
... legislators blue, Pouring their moral poison-gas On all the joys our fathers knew; The very flowers in the grass Are safe no more, and, lad and lass, 'Ware the old birch-rod and the cane! Here comes our modern Hudibras!— Don't make the ...
— A Jongleur Strayed - Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane • Richard Le Gallienne
... meadow I heard the cannon sounding again at a great distance, and this perhaps sobered me, for presently all desire of laughter left me, and I turned into the road which led through the birch thicket, anxious to accomplish my mission and have done with it as ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... the maples in flame. Song birds, the glory of the St. Lawrence valley, were no longer to be heard, but the waters literally swarmed with duck and the forests were alive with partridge. Where to-day nestle church spires and whitewashed hamlets were the birch wigwams and night camp fires of Indian hunters. Wherever Cartier went ashore, Indians rushed knee-deep to carry him from the river; and one old chief at Richelieu signified his pleasure by presenting the whites with two Indian children. Zigzagging leisurely, now along the ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... nearly so incapable as they let men make them out to be. I never built a house before, but I am sure this one of mine is going to be a success. After we have eaten I am going to look for birch-bark to make the covering, but there's one thing ...
— A Mating in the Wilds • Ottwell Binns
... now been for many years the permanent senior officer of the Post Office, married my sister, whom he took with him into Cumberland, where he was stationed as one of our surveyors. He has been my friend for more than forty years; as has also Peregrine Birch, a clerk in the House of Lords, who married one of those daughters of Colonel Grant who assisted us in the raid we made on the goods which had been seized by the Sheriff's officer at Harrow. These have been the oldest and dearest ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... inhabitants of the place were greatly excited, and were running to and fro. The globe was lowered to within three hundred feet of the earth. As they neared the spot, two of the anchors were dropped, and soon caught in the birch tree tops. The ship strained tremendously at the cables for a moment or two, and then rode easily at anchorage, three hundred feet above ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... just seen widow Platts (formerly Sarah Birch), a poor, fat, decent woman, who keeps a small greengrocer's shop, in West Bar, Sheffield. She says she was born in Spring Street in the same town, on the 29th Sept. 1781; well remembers wondering why she was so much looked at when a girl: and her surprise, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 65, January 25, 1851 • Various
... warriors slain, List the Saxon's silvery laughter, and his humming hives of gain. Swiftly sped the tawny runner o'er the pathless prairies then, Now the iron-reindeer sooner carries weal or woe to men. On thy bosom, Royal River, silent sped the birch canoe, Bearing brave with bow and quiver, on his way to war or woo; Now with flaunting flags and streamers—mighty monsters of the deep— Lo the puffing, panting steamers, through thy foaming waters sweep; And behold the grain-fields golden, where the bison grazed of eld; See the fanes of ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... minutes calmly awaiting their uprising; though with but small success for their pains. At such times, under an abated sun; afloat all day upon smooth, slow heaving swells; seated in his boat, light as a birch canoe; and so sociably mixing with the soft waves themselves, that like hearth-stone cats they purr against the gunwale; these are the times of dreamy quietude, when beholding the tranquil .. beauty and brilliancy of the ocean's skin, one forgets the tiger ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... a hard, rocky path among thick oak, pine, and silver-birch. Now and then the little greenish-white light will-o'-the-wisped ahead, flickering hither, yon. No one spoke a word. Every footstep had to be laid down with care. After three minutes' progress, the Master stopped, turned, held ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... azure silk spotted with diamond stars and striped with black bands. On the other side of the river, in a wide, natural meadow, the moonlight rested quietly on the pastures, where it was spread out like a sheet. Some birch-trees scattered here and there over the savannas, sometimes blending, according to the caprice of the winds, with the background, seemed to surround themselves with a pale gauze—sometimes rising up again from their chalky ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... had been taking short trial runs, to test our pace and powers of endurance; and Birch (my fellow-"hare") and I had more than once surveyed the course we proposed to take on the occasion of the "great hunt," making ourselves, as far as possible, acquainted with the bearings of several streams, ploughed fields, and high walls to be ...
— Parkhurst Boys - And Other Stories of School Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... birches—the crimson ray would often rest on the end of his long nose, and the word "rum" be passed tittering along the benches. For some men are born to the mill, and others to the mitre, and still others to the sceptre; but Mr. Daaken was born to the birch. His long, lanky legs were made for striding after culprits, and his arms for caning them. He taught, among other things, the classics, of course, the English language grammatically, arithmetic in all its branches, book-keeping in the Italian manner, and the elements of algebra, geometry, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... reader, let us walk toward the simple stone seat, which some shepherd boy has erected under yon silvery-stemmed birch tree, where the sound of the waterfall comes only in a pleasant monotone, and where the most romantic part of old Scotland is spread beneath our feet. There you see the eternal foam of the torrent, ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... injury by the weather, until their return. Among other things which lay strewed about here, were a spearshaft, eight feet in length, recently made and ochred; parts of old canoes, fragments of their skin-dresses, &c. For some distance around, the trunks of many of the birch, and of that species of spruce pine called here the Var (Pinus balsamifera) had been rinded; these people using the inner part of the bark of that kind of tree for food. Some of the cuts in the trees with ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 387, August 28, 1829 • Various
... go home with these lads, and tell their mother all about the race and the milk. Mammy must always know the truth,' now speaking to the children. 'And tell her, too, from me that I have got the best birch rod in the parish; and that if she ever thinks her children want a flogging she must bring them to me, and, if I think they deserve it, I'll give it them better than she can.' So Phillis led the children towards the dairy, somewhere in the back yard, and ...
— Cousin Phillis • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... of white blossom should not be painted, because they make no picture, just as birches with their foliage are unfit for the foreground of a picture, because the delicate foliage does not adequately balance the white trunk. Said Goethe, "Ruysdael never placed a foliaged birch in the foreground, but only broken birch stems, without leaves. Such a trunk suits the foreground admirably, for its bright form ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... Miss Diana. Ye have the cat show and the horse show and the military tournaments where the privates look grand as generals and the generals try to look grand as floor-walkers. And ye have the Sportsmen's Show, where the girl that measures 36, 19, 45 cooks breakfast food in a birch-bark wigwam on the banks of the Grand Canal of Venice conducted by one of the Vanderbilts, Bernard McFadden, and the Reverends Dowie and Duss. And ye have the French ball, where the original Cohens and the Robert ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... not to birch boys in the future, but to fine their parents. Several soft-hearted boys have already indicated that it will hurt ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, October 31, 1917 • Various
... the sun between cool groves, and only at intervals the vehicle of the cruising tourist is seen far away and faintly audible along its ample sweep. A little upon one side, and you find a district of sand and birch and boulder; a little upon the other lies the valley of Apremont, all juniper and heather; and close beyond that you may walk into a zone of pine trees. So artfully are the ingredients mingled. Nor must it be forgotten that, in all this part, you ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the Sea into the Country; this Bay is 1/2 a League Wide at the Entrance, and lies in West 2 1/2 Miles, and hath good Anchorage in every part of it, in 10, 8, and 7 fathoms clear ground, and affords plenty of exceeding good Wood and Water. The Wood is of the Birch kind, but of a diffrent Quality to that in England or North America; here are likewise of the Winter Bark tree and some few others, Wild Selary, some Berrys like Cranberrys, but growing on Bushes, very few Wild Fowls of any Sort, and no Fish Except Shell Fish, such as Muscels, Limpets, ...
— Captain Cook's Journal During the First Voyage Round the World • James Cook
... they please, either ignorant of intruding man or strangely little incommoded by his neighbourhood. And yet there is nothing forbidding or austere in these wide solitudes. The patches of graceful birch-wood; the miniature lakes nestling among them; the brakes of ling—pink, faintly scented, a feast for every sense; the stretches of purple heather, glowing into scarlet under the touch of the sun; the scattered farm-houses, so mellow in colour, ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... by the glory I gazed on, I began painfully comparing the Nelly I remembered and the Helen I had found. My Helen was not quite so tall, but at twenty girls grow. She did not sway with the yielding grace of a young white birch; but she was slim and straight, and girlish angles round easily to curves. Though I felt a subtle and wondrous change, I could not trace or track ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... have been a stirring spectacle. The shores of the Penobscot River were then a trackless wilderness; the placid bosom of the river itself had seldom been traversed by a heavier craft than the slender birch-bark canoe of the red man; yet here was this river crowded with shipping, the dark forests along its banks lighted up by the glare of twoscore angry fires. Through the thickets and underbrush parties of excited men broke their way, seeking for a common point of meeting, out of range of the ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... standing straight in her stirrups to scan the distance under a small, inverted hand. East and north the pine forest girdled the vlaie; west and south hardwood timber laced the sky-line with branches partly naked, and the pine's outposts of white birch and willow glimmered like mounds of crumpled gold along the edges ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... the window, and looking in, he saw the young girl seated on an armchair made of rough birch boughs, with a little prayer-book on her knee; her fair arm supporting her head, while a mass of golden ringlets half veiled her face, which was as pale as an alabaster statue; the extreme sadness of its expression rendering her beauty ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... and Flemish painters (in spite of their exquisite pots and pans, and cabbages and carrots, their birch-brooms, in which you can count every twig, and their carpets, in which you can reckon every thread) do not interest me; their landscapes too, however natural, are mere Dutch nature (with some brilliant exceptions), fat cattle, clipped trees, boors, and windmills. Of course I am ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... man was cursing, two more men came from obscurity with fish dangling from birch twigs. The pudgy man made an obviously herculean struggle and a meal was prepared. As he was drinking his cup of coffee, he suddenly spilled it and swore. The little ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... on the condition of the world in Old Testament times. But at length, leaving this subject as fresh as we found it, he told me that he had lived about this lake twenty or thirty years, and yet had not been to the head of it for twenty-one years. He faces the other way. The explorers had a fine new birch on board, larger than ours, in which they had come up the Piscataquis from Howland, and they had had several messes of trout already. They were going to the neighborhood of Eagle and Chamberlain Lakes, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... ways and customs seemed very disagreeable to our friend Daffydowndilly. The whole day long this terrible schoolmaster sat at his desk overlooking the scholars, or stalked about the school-room with a certain awful birch rod in his hand. Now came a rap over the shoulders of a boy whom Mr. Toil had caught at play; now he punished a whole class who were behindhand with their lessons; and, in short, unless a lad chose to attend quietly and constantly to his book, he ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education
... himself to me: but imagine our conversation—he spoke in Latin and I in French: however we understood each other very well. It is on the whole a dreary country except where enlivened by lakes: some parts are pine forests and birch forests, but others are featureless ground with boulder stones, like the ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... us. A little after noon we struck the sources of the White River, pleasant springs on a hillside, bubbling forth among the first trees we had seen since we left the Laramie. Then we descended into a fine shady valley: all our old friends were there in thickets—the box-elder, willow, birch and cottonwood, the alder, osier and wild cherry, currant, gooseberry, buffalo-berry and clematis. As we went on, brushing through the thick foliage, the hills on either side became higher, and grew into bastions, castles, donjon-keeps and fantastic clustered chimneys, like Scott's description ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... restful place, your Highland home, with the beautiful purple hills rolling away in the distance, and the glorious moors covered with fragrant heather, and the gurgling of the river that runs between birch and fir and willow, making music all day long for those who have the ears to listen, and the hearts to understand the pretty love tune it sings! You know Frenchmen always have more or less sympathy with the Scotch—some old association, perhaps, with the romantic times ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... saw a man from Lot Ten last week, and he said that the French were eating their seed-grain, and feeding their cattle, or such as were left alive, on birch and beech tops." ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... I could carry, she showed me where the horses were, and urged me to take the one belonging to the chief, since it was clever and gentle. At first I had compunctions of conscience, but no choice was left me, and I had to do it. I made a rude bridle of birch bark, and jumping on the horse, came here just a ...
— Three Young Pioneers - A Story of the Early Settlement of Our Country • John Theodore Mueller
... whole. It is about seventy feet high. Coast from hence the woody shores of Tomys and Glena; they are upon the whole much the most beautiful ones I have anywhere seen; Glena woods having more oak, and some arbutuses, are the finer and deeper shades; Tomys has a great quantity of birch, whose foliage is not so luxuriant. The reader may figure to himself what these woods are, when he is informed that they fill an unbroken extent of six miles in length, and from half a mile to a mile and a half in breadth, all hanging ...
— A Tour in Ireland - 1776-1779 • Arthur Young
... "birch" or corporal punishment at all. I do not advocate it, but I am certain that the demoralising effect of a few' days' imprisonment is far in excess of the demoralisation that follows a reasonable application of ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... in the course of which a given art was brought from one part of the world to another. Hence, when we find the art duly installed in a particular place, and utilizing the local product, the bamboo in the south, let us say, or the birch in the north, as it naturally does, we easily slip into the error of supposing that the local products of themselves called the art into existence. Similar needs, we say, have generated similar expedients. ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... workman nor hindered a shepherd. I gave alike to the widow and to the married woman, and have not preferred the great to the small in my gifts." And we have the high authority of the late Dr. Samuel Birch for the statement that the inscriptions of the twelfth dynasty abound in injunctions of a high ethical character. "To feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, bury the dead, loyally serve the king, formed the first duty of a pious man and faithful subject." [29] The ...
— The Evolution of Theology: An Anthropological Study - Essay #8 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... was also in attendance, and remained in the public room with the Yeomen, while the Co- Secretary was indulged with a private interview with the Magistrate, Mr. Alderman Birch, in the parlour. Mr. Newman, the City Solicitor, was also called into council, and remained iu consultation with Secretary Murray some time; there was much marching and countermarching in and out of the office on the part of the Secretary and the Yeomen, but no public application on the ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... is preserved in Dr. Birch's "Life of Boyle," p. 272. Boyle's labours were so exhausting to his naturally weak frame, and so continuous from his eager desire for investigation, that this advertisement was concocted by the advice of his physician, ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... Whitefoot, as she worked a strip of white birch bark into the roof of the new home she and Whitefoot had been building out of the old home of Melody the Wood Thrush, "this finishes the roof. I don't think any water will get through it ...
— Whitefoot the Wood Mouse • Thornton W. Burgess
... ran at first along the edge of the forest, then along a broad forest clearing; they caught glimpses of old pines and a young birch copse, and tall, gnarled young oak trees standing singly in the clearings where the wood had lately been cut; but soon it was all merged in the clouds of snow. The coachman said he could see the forest; the examining magistrate could ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... description of his own schoolmaster, evidently a type of his kind, who "knew of the human soul thus much, that it had a faculty called memory, and could be acted on through the muscular integument by appliance of birch rods." After four years of most unsatisfactory school life, Tennyson returned home, and was fitted for the university by his scholarly father. With his brothers he wrote many verses, and his first efforts appeared in a little volume called ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... City of London Tavern: at the mention of white bait, his lips smack together with joy, and he lisps out instinctively Blackwall: talk of a rump steak and Dolly's, his eyes grow wild with delight; and just hint at the fine green fat of a fresh killed turtle dressed at Birch's, and his whole soul's in arms for a corporation dinner. Reader, I have been led into this strain of thinking by an excursion I am about to make with Alderman Marigold and family, 89to enjoy the pleasures of a Sunday ordinary in the suburbs of the metropolis; an old fashioned custom that ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... of the Wanagiska, and see if there are any moose tracks there. When I was a young woman, I came here with your father's father, and we pitched our tent near this spot. In the night there came three different moose. Bring me leaves of the birch and cedar twigs; I will make medicine for ...
— Indian Boyhood • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... careful studies of this kind of one bough of every common tree,—oak, ash, elm, birch, beech, etc.; in fact, if you are good, and industrious, you will make one such study carefully at least three times a week, until you have examples of every sort of tree and shrub you can get branches of. You are to make two studies of each bough, for ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... original form was held by so competent an authority as the late M. Gaston Paris to have been one of the earliest, if not the very earliest, of French prose texts. (Cf. M. Paris's review of Suchier and Birch-Hirschfield's Geschichte der Franz. Litt.) The adventure in question is a 'Gawain' adventure; we do not know whence it was derived, and it may well have been included in an early version of the romance. Apart from the purely literary question, from the strictly critical point ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... emerging from the wood, they found themselves in the valley of the Darl. The river here was narrow and winding, but full of life; rushing, and clear but for the dark sky it reflected; with high banks of turf and tall trees; the silver birch, above all others, in clustering groups; infinitely picturesque. At the turn of the river, about two hundred yards distant, Coningsby observed the low, dark roof of the fishing-cottage on its banks. They descended from the woods to the margin of the stream by a flight ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... speckled pride, The salmon, monarch of the tide, The ruthless pike, intent on war, The silver eel, and mottled par. Devolving from thy parent lake, A charming maze thy waters make, By bowers of birch, and groves of pine, And edges flower'd with ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... next proceeding was to cut a short stick, about two feet in length, which she pointed at both ends, making one point thinner than the other. This thin point she thrust through the bird, and stuck it up before the fire to roast, placing a small dish, made of birch bark, below ...
— Silver Lake • R.M. Ballantyne
... that climb or dig. Yet it is very pretty like all the rest, and tells its own tale. There is nothing bold or vicious or vulpine in it, and his timid, harmless character is published at every leap. He abounds in dense woods, preferring localities filled with a small undergrowth of beech and birch, upon the bark of which he feeds. Nature is rather partial to him, and matches his extreme local habits and character with a suit that corresponds with his surroundings,—reddish gray in summer and white ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... been a careful dentist to the stumps of his farm. It is beautifully stumpless, and slopes verdantly, or varied with yellow harvest, down to the lake and up to the forest primeval. He has preserved a pretty grove of birch and maple as shelter, ornament, partridge-cover, and perpendicular wood-pile. Below his house and barns is the lovely oval of the lake, seen across the fair fields, bright with wheat, or green with pasture. A road, hedged with briskly-aspiring young spruces, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... considerable quantity of excellent wood, either green or dry, the latter lying along the shore on both sides the straits, which are almost covered with the trees, that, having grown on the banks, have been blown down by the high winds. These trees are somewhat like our birch, but are of so considerable a size, that the trunks of some of them are two feet (surely an error, yards must be intended) and a half in diameter, and sixty feet in length. Many of these we cut down for our carpenters use, and found that, when properly ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... distance of about five miles on the left of the town the course of the river was interrupted by a small and thickly wooded island, along whose sandy beach occasionally rose the low cabin or wigwam which the birch canoe, carefully upturned and left to dry upon the sands, attested to be the temporary habitation of the wandering Indian. That branch of the river which swept by the shores of Canada was (as at this day) the only navigable one for vessels of burden, while that on the opposite coast abounded in ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... the wood-box first?" That was certainly a question, and it was also a question whose neck would be broken first, to judge from the way in which they rushed out of the room. But they came back safely, strange to say, Nibble in advance, with a huge stick of yellow birch nearly as large as himself, while Brighteyes followed ...
— Five Mice in a Mouse-trap - by the Man in the Moon. • Laura E. Richards
... my son, will never go back on ye like some folks I've hearn tell of. Allers find 'em the same. See that yaller birch over thar?—Well, I've knowed that birch over forty-two year and he ain't altered a mite, 'cept his clothes ain't as decent as they was, and his shoes is give out 'round the roots. You kin see whar the bark's busted 'long 'round his toes,—but his heart's ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith
... down below, and the ash and birch and oak and willow, and all the rest of it. I thought all the trees and flowers would be foreign; and there's nothing strange about them anywhere, only that they grow close to ...
— The Crystal Hunters - A Boy's Adventures in the Higher Alps • George Manville Fenn
... scattering the dirt over the leaves toward the fire. When the first flames came along, they redoubled their efforts amid the flying sparks and suffocating smoke, but without avail. The sparks and great pieces of flaming birch curls carried the flames over the road into the woods beyond the men, fairly surrounding ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... paper it appears that the matters chiefly used in tanning are the bark of the oak, containing from 6.04 to 4.37 per cent. of tannin according to the season, that of willows, of the elm, and the birch. The leaves of the arbutus, employed in the governments of Kasan, Viatka, and Perm, contain about 16 per cent. of tannin, while the root of wild sorrel (Rumex acetosella) contains 12 per cent. For removing the hair from hides, a lye made from ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 561, October 2, 1886 • Various
... the Borders, and would pass through a narrow defile, which he mentioned, where he could be attacked with great advantage. Sir James gave instant orders to march to the spot; and, with that genius for scheming, for which he was so remarkable, commanded his men to twist together the young birch-trees on either side of the passage to prevent the escape of the enemy. This finished, he concealed his archers in a hollow way, near the gorge ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends - Scotland • Anonymous
... the winding ways of the river there were birch and beechen thickets in glory of leaf; big water-lilies spread their white beauty against the old black timbers of the water-mills; and in the quaint, ancient places of the old streets, under the gables and beams, pots of basil, and strings of green pease, ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... of aim. The bows which I procured commonly consisted of a badly worked, slightly bent, elastic piece of wood, with the ends drawn together by a skin thong. Only some old bows had a finer form. They were larger, and made with care, for instance, they were covered with birch-bark, and strengthened by an artistic plaiting of sinews on the outer side. The arrows are of many kinds, partly with bone or wooden, and partly with iron, points. Feathers are generally wanting. The shaft is a clumsily worked piece of wood. Crossbows are occasionally used. We have even seen ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... forest. I know that first you climb a rough, rather narrow road up from the river, that the trees close about you very gradually, that there is a little church with a green turret and a fine view of the Nestor, and that there a broad solemn avenue of silver birch leads you forward, gently and without any sinister omens. Then again the forest clears and there are fields of corn and, built amongst the thin scattering of trees, the village of N——. It was here, on passing the first houses of the village, that I felt the ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... sapling slenderness, once more she caught from the air an inspiration. She would incase Kedzie in a sheath of soft, white kid marked with delicate lines and set off with black gloves and a hat of green leaves. And this she would call "The White Birch." ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... Most of the wood-pulp used in England is obtained from pine-trees, but poplar, lime, birch, and beech wood are also used. It is chiefly imported as wood-pulp. The pulp is prepared as follows:—The bark and roots are first removed, and the logs then sawn into boards, from which the knots are removed. The pieces of wood are afterwards put through ...
— Nitro-Explosives: A Practical Treatise • P. Gerald Sanford
... walked Andy. There were parts of those hills where he walked that probably nobody, not even the Indian, ever traversed. Anything could happen there—where the woods are dark with pine or sunny with birch, and where echoes are the only memory (and they never last long). It was so far away, up in through there; as I've said, anything could happen there and we would never hear of it. All day long the cold brooks run down, brown from the juices ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... Bhurjapatra is a species of birch, the bark of which resembles that of the tree common in Europe, in being separable into fine smooth layers; but these are of a fine chesnut colour. This bark is imported into the low country in considerable quantity, and is used both in the religious ...
— An Account of The Kingdom of Nepal • Fancis Buchanan Hamilton
... boy, little Petter Nord. He was short and round; he was brown-eyed and smiling. His hair was paler than birch leaves in the autumn; his cheeks were red and downy. And he was from Vaermland. No one, seeing him, could imagine that he was from any other place. His native land had equipped him with its excellent qualities. ...
— Invisible Links • Selma Lagerlof
... as if by enchantment, are carpeted with verdure; the pine, the oak, and the birch, from the neighbouring forest, contribute their young shoots and leaves; the prickly broom its yellow flowers. The facades of the houses are hidden under their various hangings, the rich suspend from their windows ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... desolate settlement, where the trail that came up from the railroad thirty miles away forked off into two wavy ribands that melted into a waste of snow. Lander's consisted then of five or six frame houses and stores, a hotel of the same material, several sod stables, and a few birch-log barns; and its inhabitants considered it one of the most promising places in Western Canada. That, however, is the land of promise, a promise that is in due time usually fulfilled, and the men of Lander's were, for the most part, shrewdly practical optimists. ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... with deep and sandy beds, and occasionally over small stony plains. At noon we were at some distance from the creek, but then went towards it. The gum-trees were no longer visible, but melaleucas, from fifteen to twenty feet high, lined its banks like a copse of young birch. We now observed a long but somewhat narrow sheet of water, to which we rode; our suspicions as to its quality being roused by its colour, and the appearance of the melaleuca. It proved, as we feared, to be slightly brackish, but not undrinkable. Near the edge of the water, or rather about ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... River of Conne, then branches into two Arms, one still tending to the North, and the other to the Eastward; the Water is very shallow for some Distance from the Head of both. About these Arms, and the Bay of Conne, are great Plenty of all Sorts of Wood, common to this Country, such as Firr, Pine, Birch, Witch-Hasle, Spruce, &c. ...
— Directions for Navigating on Part of the South Coast of Newfoundland, with a Chart Thereof, Including the Islands of St. Peter's and Miquelon • James Cook
... I don't think it can all be fancy. I am sure I mind the lake, with the swans sailing, on it, and the wee green islets, and the branches of the birch trees drooping down into the water. Don't ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... "have a language of their own, but their books are written in the Shanskrit tongue, although the character is sometimes Cashmeerian. They write chiefly upon Tooz [birch-bark], which is the bark of a tree; it easily divides into leaves, and remains perfect for many years." (Ayeen Akbery, II. 147.) A sketch of Kashmiri Grammar by Mr. Edgeworth will be found in vol. x. of the J. A. S. B., and a fuller one by Major Leech in vol. xiii. Other ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... and Rand took their own turns at the poles to relieve the aching and untried muscles of the younger Scouts. Soon after leaving the sandy banks and tundra of the lower stream, the creek began to wind its way through dense forests of spruce, poplar and oak with the ghostly bark of the birch lighting up the dim that marks the tangled wildwood of more southern climates, showing how little the sunlight of these northern climes ...
— The Boy Scouts on the Yukon • Ralph Victor
... that likes birds; if you'll come with me, I'll show 'ee what no man ever seed afore"; and Caleb, fired with curiosity, followed him away to a distance from home, out from the downs, into the woods and to a place where he had never been, where there were bracken and heath with birch and thorn-trees scattered about. On cautiously approaching a clump of birches they saw a big, thrush-like bird fly out of a large nest about ten feet from the ground, and settle on a tree close by, where it was joined by its mate. ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... on fire last Tuesday night. He reckons it was caused by a defective flue, for the fire caught in the north wing. This is one of Plum's bon mots, however. He tries to make light of it, but the wood he has been using all winter was white birch, and when he got a big dose of hickory at the same place last week it was so dark that he didn't notice the difference, and before he knew it he had a bigger fire than he had allowed. In the midst of a pleasant flow of conversation gas collected in the wood and caused ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... trees, and Balsamides stopped. We were quite out of earshot from the road, and it would be hard to imagine a more desolate place than it appeared, between two and three o'clock on that March night, the bare twigs of the birch-trees wriggling in the bleak wind, the faint light of the decrescent moon, that seemed to be upside down in the sky, falling on the white rocks, and on the whitened branches torn down by the winter's storms, lying like bleached bones upon the ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... father's dreaming, played with the little Prince, kicking the ragga ball, or sailing miniature praus out into the river, and off toward the shimmering straits. But often they sat cross-legged and dropped bits of chicken and fruit between the palm sleepers of the wharf to the birch-colored crocodiles below, who snapped them up, one after another, never taking their small, cruel eyes off the brown faces that ...
— Tales of the Malayan Coast - From Penang to the Philippines • Rounsevelle Wildman
... said Gladys, with a faint touch of ironical humour. 'Well, let us go up to the birch wood. We shall see the moon rising shortly, if you care about anything so commonplace as the rising of a moon. To Australia? And when will ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... prettier than the drive to Strathfield-saye, passing, as we do, through a great part of Heckfield Heath,* a tract of wild woodland, a forest, or rather a chase, full of fine sylvan beauty—thickets of fern and holly, and hawthorn and birch, surmounted by oaks and beeches, and interspersed with lawny glades and deep pools, letting light into the picture. Nothing can be prettier than the approach to the duke's lodge. And the entrance to the demesne, through a deep ...
— The Lost Dahlia • Mary Russell Mitford
... in it a sort of despair. A little crisp rustle ran along the bushes; the leaves fluttered, then hung quite still. And he heard a voice—Alicia's—speaking. "My lovely, lovely world!" And moving forward a step, he saw her standing on the river-bank, braced against the trunk of a birch-tree, her head thrown back, and her arms stretched wide apart as though to clasp the lovely world she had apostrophised. To have gone up to her would have been like breaking up a lovers' interview, and he turned round instead and ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy
... the king's men, came to drive them to their homes again. But there were hundreds and hundreds of children, and only a few soldiers with wooden swords; for this was a very peaceable nation, and armed even its police with only birch rods. So one of the biggest boys blew a tin trumpet, and called all ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... from Meta Incognita. We had divers shewes of study or Moscovie glass, shining not altogether unlike to crystal. We found an herb growing upon the rocks whose fruit was sweet, full of red juice, and the ripe ones were like currants. We found also birch and willow growing like shrubs low to the ground. These people have great store of furs as we judged. They made shows unto us the 30th of this present, which was the second time of our being with them, after they perceived we would have skins and furs, that they would go into the country and ...
— Voyages in Search of the North-West Passage • Richard Hakluyt
... benumbing frost forced me to accelerate my steps. I heard the roar of distant waters—another bewildered step, and I was on the ice-borders of the ocean. Countless herds of seals dashed splashing into the stream. I followed the sea-shore, and saw again naked rocks, land, forests of birch and pine-trees. I moved forwards for a few minutes—it was burning hot: around me were richly cultivated rice-fields under mulberry-trees, in whose shadow I sat down, and looking at my watch, I ...
— Peter Schlemihl • Adelbert von Chamisso
... play as children on the sands of Manorbier his brothers built castles but he always built churches. He received an elementary education from the chaplains of his uncle, the Bishop of St. David's; he seems to have been slow at learning when a child, and his tutors goaded him on not by the birch rod, but by sarcasm—by declining "Stultus, stultior, stultissimus." His higher education was not obtained in Wales, and it is singular that he does not notice any place of learning in Wales in all his writings. He studied at Gloucester, and ...
— Mediaeval Wales - Chiefly in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries: Six Popular Lectures • A. G. Little
... charge there, gave the word, and the marine leg, gravely, deliberately descended. There is a magnificent audacity about that sort of performance. The leg was ninety feet long, steel-booted, framed of great timbers, heavy enough to have wrecked the barge like a birch baric canoe if it had got away. It went down bodily into the hold and the steel boot was buried in wheat. Then Pete threw another lever, and in a moment another endless series of cups was carrying the wheat aloft. It went over the cross-head and down a spout, then stretched out in a golden ribbon ...
— Calumet "K" • Samuel Merwin and Henry Kitchell Webster
... of the blue lakelet, the fountain of thy life, I have launched my birchen boat; and yielding to thy current, have floated softly southward. I have passed the meadows where the wild rice ripens on thy banks, where the white birch mirrors its silvery stem, and tall coniferae fling their pyramid shapes, on thy surface. I have seen the red Chippewa cleave thy crystal waters in his bark canoe—the giant moose lave his flanks in thy cooling flood—and the stately wapiti bound gracefully along thy banks. ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... Wise Woman of the Bush Hovel, and her I had never seen; but I thought I could not do better in my extremity than go to her for counsel. So, shouldering my father's tools, I journeyed west until I came to her place, and found her trying to break in a new birch-broom that was still too green and full of sap to be easily mastered; and she was in a very bad temper. Good day, Great-Aunt,' I said, I am your Great-Niece Viola.' I have no more use for great nieces,' she snapped, than for little ones.' ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon
... on the fjeld to its rest in the fjord; or to follow the Ericht and the Halladale through the heather. The Ziller and the Salzach shall be my guides through the Tyrol; the Rotha and the Dove shall lead me into the heart of England. My sacrificial flames shall be kindled with birch-bark along the wooded stillwaters of the Penobscot and the Peribonca, and my libations drawn from the pure current of the Ristigouche and the Ampersand, and my altar of remembrance shall rise upon the rocks beside the ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... sixteen, her graceful body had retained most of the lines and slender curves of childhood; and she was long of limb and broad of shoulder. Her head was poised alertly above her strong young throat, and she was as straight as a fir-tree and as supple as a birch. A life out-of-doors had given to her skin a tone of warm brown, which, in a land that expected women to be lily-fair, was like a mask added to her disguise. The blackness of her hair was equally unconnected ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... peculiarities of nature: its complete irregularity, its vistas, in whose perspective the quiet cattle are peacefully browsing; its refreshing glades, where the grey rocks arise from amid the nodding fern; the silvery shafts of the old birch trees; the knotted trunks of the hoary oak, the grotesque but graceful branches which never shed their honours under the tyrant pruning-hook; the soft green sward; the chequered light and shade; the wild luxuriant weeds; the lichen and the moss—all, all are beautiful alike in the green freshness ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume I. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... desperate tears, with which you looked up, after having performed some blunder, whilst the doctor held you to public scorn before the class, and cracked his great clumsy jokes upon you—helpless, and a prisoner! Better the block itself, and the lictors, with their fasces of birch-twigs, than the maddening torture of ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... red-skinned savage roams at liberty, engaged throughout life in war or the chase, by the side of a broad stream which made its way towards a distant lake, an old man and a boy reclined at length beneath a wigwam, roughly formed of sheets of birch-bark placed against several poles stuck in the ground in a circular form, and fastened together at the top. The sun was just rising above a wood, composed of maple, birch, poplar, and willow, fringing the opposite bank of the river; while rocky hills of no great elevation formed the sides of ...
— The Trapper's Son • W.H.G. Kingston
... subjects were landscapes with birch and beech trees, and the varying phases of the heath and of solitary and unfrequented scenes. Her works are all in private collections. Among them are "The Forester's Cottage," "Autumn in Doorwerth," "The Old Birch," and the "Old ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... winter are the elements which go to the making of the characteristic features of the tundras. Their flora is far nearer those of northern Siberia and North America than that of central Europe. Mosses and lichens cover them, as also the birch, the dwarf willow, and a variety of shrubs; but where the soil is drier, and humus has been able to accumulate, a variety of herbaceous flowering plants, some of which are familiar also in western Europe, ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... its ways, as the world had forgotten them; killed their meat as they found it; feasted in plenty and starved in famine, and searched unceasingly for the yellow lure. They crisscrossed the land in every direction, threaded countless unmapped rivers in precarious birch-bark canoes, and with snowshoes and dogs broke trail through thousands of miles of silent white, where man had never been. They struggled on, under the aurora borealis or the midnight sun, through temperatures that ranged from one hundred degrees above zero to eighty ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... a safe distance while Billy secured the clothes and went into the timber. From a birch tree he pulled off a pile of bark, and as he stripped he put his old clothes on it. McTabb could hear the crackling and snapping of the fire when Billy reappeared arrayed in Indian Joe's "second best"— ...
— Isobel • James Oliver Curwood
... example has a special message to women, and exhorts them to see to it that, in the cultivation of the so-called womanly excellence of gentleness, they do not let it run into weakness, nor, on the other hand, aim at strength, to the loss of meekness. The yielding birch- tree, the 'lady of the woods,' bends in all its elastic branches and tossing ringlets of foliage to the wind; but it stands upright after storms that level oaks and pines. God's strength is gentle strength, and ours is likest His when it is meek and lowly, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... "Birch and keyre 'tis wal veyre a spyunyng deye a towme. I am the geyest mayed of all that brought the somer houme. Justice Deyruse in my lopp, and senscal ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 192, July 2, 1853 • Various
... silver Trent, The whispering birch by every zephyr bent, The woody island, and the naked mead, The lowly hut half hid in groves of reed, The rural wicket, and the rural stile, And frequent interspersed, the woodman's pile. Above, below, where'er I turn my eyes, Rocks, waters, woods, in grand succession ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... in a narrow loamy ravine overgrown with dwarfish trees. The ravine was deep and had washed-out clay slopes. High above it stretched a muddy, uneven strip of grey sky, which poured an unceasing rain upon the soaked red clay, upon the small wet birch trees, and the group of soldiers, who had lost their way and driven by inertia were hurrying ...
— The Shield • Various
... smoke at twilight? Have you heard the birch log burning? Are you quick to read the noises of the night? You must follow with the others for the young men's feet are turning To the camps of proved ...
— Camping For Boys • H.W. Gibson
... still less so to haul the vessel up to the top, we were in danger of even this resource being cut off from us. In this manner, incredible as it may seem, we managed to keep body and soul together till the eleventh day; our only sustenance, the pork, the cat, water, and the bark of some young birch trees, which latter, in searching for a keg of tamarinds, which we had hoped to find, we had latterly ...
— Thrilling Stories Of The Ocean • Marmaduke Park
... Amy declared afterwards. The car, which fortunately had decreased its speed to negotiate an abrupt turn in the road, suddenly shot down a slope at the left, turned around once and stopped with a disconcerting abruptness, its radiator against a four-inch birch tree. Clint and Amy picked themselves from the bottom of the tonneau and stared, more surprised than frightened. Behind them, on the level road, a wheel—present investigation showed that it was the ...
— Left Tackle Thayer • Ralph Henry Barbour
... in white, who appeared in the attitude of lamentation. But the impression was only momentary, and whenever he looked steadily to the point where he conceived the figure appeared, it always proved that he had mistaken some natural object, a white crag, or the trunk of a decayed birch-tree with its silver bark, for the appearance ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... and most biting laws, The needful bits and curbs to headstrong weeds, 20 Which for this fourteen years we have let slip; Even like an o'ergrown lion in a cave, That goes not out to prey. Now, as fond fathers, Having bound up the threatening twigs of birch, Only to stick it in their children's sight 25 For terror, not to use, in time the rod Becomes more mock'd than fear'd; so our decrees. Dead to infliction, to themselves are dead; And liberty plucks justice ...
— Measure for Measure - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... cauliflowered god exclaim, mournfully shaking the powder out of his ambrosial curls, "What strange new folly is this? What new deity do you worship? Know ye what ye do? Know ye that your new idol hath little Latin and less Greek? Know ye that he has never tasted the birch at Eton, nor trodden the flags of Carfax, nor paced the academic flats of Trumpington? Know ye that in mathematics, or logic, this wretched ignoramus is not fit to hold a candle to a wooden spoon? See ye not how, from describing law humours, he now, forsooth, will attempt ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... The fragrant birch, above him, hung Her tassels in the sky; And many a vernal blossom sprung, And nodded, ...
— The Universal Reciter - 81 Choice Pieces of Rare Poetical Gems • Various
... permanent senior officer of the Post Office, married my sister, whom he took with him into Cumberland, where he was stationed as one of our surveyors. He has been my friend for more than forty years; as has also Peregrine Birch, a clerk in the House of Lords, who married one of those daughters of Colonel Grant who assisted us in the raid we made on the goods which had been seized by the Sheriff's officer at Harrow. These have been the oldest and dearest friends of my life, ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... to get a play day for his former acquaintances. But instead of that he found himself hors'd up in a trice, though he appeal'd in vain to the priviledges of the University, pleaded adultus and invoked the mercy of the spectators. Nor was he let down till the master had planted a grove of birch in his back-side for the terrour and publick example of all waggs that divulge the secrets of Priscian and make merry with their teachers. This stuck so with Triplet that all his life-time he never forgave the doctor, but sent him every New Year's tide an anniversary ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... Maxim was eccentric, but the tradition that an unfortunate affair of the heart once drove him into the woods to make away with himself, but a bird on the roof of a logger's hut, making plaintive sounds, interrupted him, and he sat down and wrote the tune "Hallowell," on a strip of white birch bark, is more likely legendary. The following words, said to have inspired his minor tune, are still set to it in ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... American factors. The frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization. The wilderness masters the colonist. It finds him a European in dress, industries, tools, modes of travel, and thought. It takes him from the railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe. It strips off the garments of civilization and arrays him in the hunting shirt and the moccasin. It puts him in the log cabin of the Cherokee and Iroquois and runs an Indian palisade around him. Before long he has gone to planting Indian corn ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... brought, nails driven, cows stoned out of our way, letters carried, twine and knives kept ready, lost things found, luncheon carried to picnics, three-year-olds that cry led out of meeting, butterflies and birds' nests and birch-bark got, the horse taken round to the stable, borrowed things sent home,—and all with ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... pebbled shore, O'erhung with wild woods, thickening green; The fragrant birch and hawthorn hoar Twined amorous round the raptured scene: The flowers sprang wanton to be pressed, The birds sang love on every spray, Till too, too soon the glowing west Proclaimed the ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... gig, funny, skiff, dingy, scow, cockleshell, wherry, coble^, punt, cog, kedge, lerret^; eight oar, four oar, pair oar; randan^; outrigger; float, raft, pontoon; prame^; iceboat, ice canoe, ice yacht. catamaran, hydroplane, hovercraft, coracle, gondola, carvel^, caravel; felucca, caique^, canoe, birch bark canoe, dugout canoe; galley, galleyfoist^; bilander^, dogger^, hooker, howker^; argosy, carack^; galliass^, galleon; polacca^, polacre^, tartane^, junk, lorcha^, praam^, proa^, prahu^, saick^, sampan, xebec, dhow; dahabeah^; nuggah^; kayak, keel boat [U.S.], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... the heart once drove him into the woods to make away with himself, but a bird on the roof of a logger's hut, making plaintive sounds, interrupted him, and he sat down and wrote the tune "Hallowell," on a strip of white birch bark, is more likely legendary. The following words, said to have inspired his minor tune, are still set to it in ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... one of the charm doctors to superintend the raising of a needfire. It was done by friction, thus: upon any small island, where the stream of a river or burn ran on each side, a circular booth was erected, of stone and turf, as it could be had, in which a semicircular or highland couple of birch, or other hard wood, was set; and, in short, a roof closed on it. A straight pole was set up in the centre of this building, the upper end fixed by a wooden pin to the top of the couple, and the lower end in an ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 323, July 19, 1828 • Various
... took a curl of birch bark and made a little wigwam, and because the voice came from the skies he painted the wigwam with blue mud, and to show that it came from the Sunland he painted a red sun on it. On the floor he ...
— Woodland Tales • Ernest Seton-Thompson
... dared. Back of the house the land climbed into a little ridge, with great, gray rocks here and there, spots of cool, restful color amid the lavish green and gold and purple of nature's carpeting. To the north swept hills clothed with the deep, rich green of hemlock, the faint green flutter of birch, the dense foliage of sugar maples. To the east, in the valley, a singing silver brook flashed in and out among somber boulders, the land ascending to sunny hilltop pastures beyond. But toward the south from the homestead lay the gem of the scenery; ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr
... he is needed here on the farm since uncle cannot work as he used, and that he shall neither go away to marry, nor bring a wife home here. They had a bitter quarrel one day. I was gathering sassafras and birch buds for her and they did not know I was there. And Rachel said if he married Clarissa, she would persuade uncle not to leave him any part of the farm. Ought not the ...
— A Little Girl in Old Philadelphia • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... 'ee what no man ever seed afore"; and Caleb, fired with curiosity, followed him away to a distance from home, out from the downs, into the woods and to a place where he had never been, where there were bracken and heath with birch and thorn-trees scattered about. On cautiously approaching a clump of birches they saw a big, thrush-like bird fly out of a large nest about ten feet from the ground, and settle on a tree close by, where it was joined by its mate. The old man pointed out ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... Elizabeth Crews, aged 77 years, of 32 East Street, Holborn, who died on Wednesday last. Alice Mathieson stated that she was landlady of the house where deceased lived. Witness last saw her alive on the previous Monday. She lived quite alone. Mr. Francis Birch, relieving officer for the Holborn district, stated that deceased had occupied the room in question for thirty-five years. When witness was called, on the 1st, he found the old woman in a terrible state, and the ambulance ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... little crisp rustle ran along the bushes; the leaves fluttered, then hung quite still. And he heard a voice—Alicia's—speaking. "My lovely, lovely world!" And moving forward a step, he saw her standing on the river-bank, braced against the trunk of a birch-tree, her head thrown back, and her arms stretched wide apart as though to clasp the lovely world she had apostrophised. To have gone up to her would have been like breaking up a lovers' interview, and he turned ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy
... its long, soot-blackened crane, hung with hooks of various sizes, the massive iron andirons, strong enough to hold the great birch and birchen logs, that often taxed the strength of a full-grown man to lift and adjust in their places, occupied a large part of one side of the room, and served as a kind of family altar, about which the family, with their guests ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 4, April, 1886 • Various
... me, mister," said Mr Lathrope, reflectively, "that you'll find that thar jolly-boat a heap bigger and a pile heavier than them birch-bark canoes of the lumber men and Injuns I was a talkin' about; and yet, they're heavy enough to cart along fur any raal sort o' distance, you bet, ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson
... very simple fashion, in two birch-bark canoes, with five white voyageurs and a moderate supply of smoked meat and Indian corn, the two travelers set out to solve a perplexing problem, by tracing the course of the great river. Their only guide was a crude map based on scraps of information which they had gathered. Besides ...
— French Pathfinders in North America • William Henry Johnson
... it's no more work to keep things shipshape than to let 'em go helter-skelter. Now here's a basket. Load into it as many of those birch logs as you can carry and bring 'em ...
— Walter and the Wireless • Sara Ware Bassett
... beneath the horizon of maternity were moving now and their color was dark. Nature had as many moods as Joan and often looked distant and terrible. Poor little blue-eyed "sister of the sun and moon!" She likened herself so bravely to the other children of her Mother—to the stars, to the fair birch-trees, where emerald showers now twinkled down over the silver stems, to the uncurling fronds of the fern, to the little trout in the coomb-stream; and yet she was not ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... are pleased, thought I, why should not others be amused also? In a few days Dr. Birch's young friends will be expected to reassemble at Rodwell Regis, where they will learn everything that is useful, and under the eyes of careful ushers continue the business of ...
— The Rose and the Ring • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of creation, you will find how curious journeyman Nature has been to trim up the vegetable beaux; observe how sparkish a periwig adorns the head of a beech, and what a fine doublet of white satin is worn by the birch." The fault is not in any inaptness of the images, nor in the mere vulgarity of the things themselves, but in that of the associations they awaken. The "prithee, undo this button" of Lear, coming where it does and expressing ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... planted trees of many kinds from many climes, until he has an arboretum hardly equaled anywhere. There are pines in endless variety—from the Sierra and from the seashore, from New England, France, Norway, and Japan. There flourish the cedar, spruce, hemlock, oak, beech, birch, and maple. There in peace and plenty are the sequoia, the bamboo, and the deodar. Eucalypts pierce the sky and Japanese dwarfs ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... march that still lengthen'd before him, He stopp'd by the way in a sylvan retreat; The light shady boughs of the birch-tree waved o'er him, The stream of the mountain fell soft at ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... the tea-tree is thick in proportion to the size of the tree, and is composed of a great number of layers of very thin bark, in appearance not unlike the bark of the birch-tree; but it is so very soft, that nothing this country affords can be better calculated for the purpose for which it was intended: Bannelong, however, desired to have a blanket for the child, which was given him, and the next day, a net made in ...
— An Historical Journal of the Transactions at Port Jackson and Norfolk Island • John Hunter
... occasionally met, at the house of a relative in an adjoining town, a stout, red-nosed old farmer of the neighborhood. A fine tableau he made of a winter's evening, in the red light of a birch-log fire, as he sat for hours watching its progress, with sleepy, half-shut eyes, changing his position only to reach the cider-mug on the shelf near him. Although he seldom opened his lips save to assent to some remark of his host ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... excuse his flight told so frightful a story of the fate of his comrades that his hearers were seized with a panic, shamefully abandoned their post, and set out for the settlements, leaving a writing on a piece of birch-bark to the effect that all the rest were killed. They had left a supply of bread and pork, and while the famished eleven rested and refreshed themselves they were joined by Solomon Keyes, the man who, after being ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... kheties and level ground. The plants evidently increase in interest as we advance in the interior, Compositae and Labiatae being most numerous. A large tree occurs not uncommonly, which is either a Birch or a Prunus, most probably from the venation of its leaves, the latter; the bark is exactly like that of a Birch. Close to Premsong's I gathered a Clematis, Valerian and a fine Botrychium, a Carex and a Cuscuta. The mountain on the base of which Premsong's house is situated, ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... have availed myself of the help of Prof. Lushington's translation in "Records of the past," edited by Dr. S. Birch. Translator.] ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... to live in a town, these pilgrimages had to be suspended. The wearisome work on which I was engaged would not permit of them. But I used to look now and then, from a window, in the evening at a birch-tree at some distance; its graceful boughs drooped across the glow of the sunset. The thought was not suspended; it lived in me always. A bitterer time still came when it was necessary to be separated from those I loved. There is little indeed ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... studies of this kind of one bough of every common tree,—oak, ash, elm, birch, beech, etc.; in fact, if you are good, and industrious, you will make one such study carefully at least three times a week, until you have examples of every sort of tree and shrub you can get branches of. You are to make two studies of ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... resembles in color." Menge says that it is common in Prussia, where it is seen in great numbers on fir trees, whose spotted bark it resembles in color, so that it is not easily seen. We have found them, most commonly, upon birch trees, and in this situation their color adaptation is perfect. Both the spider and the peeling bark of the tree are of a light silvery brown, covered with little blackish marks. On the bark these marks are, of course, irregular, while ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... knowledge become service, service become joy. I see fear prohibit glands from secreting, hope bring back colour to the face and tone to the blood. I see something not material make Jekyl into Hyde; and thank God, make Hyde over into Jekyl again, when birch rods and iron bars have no effect whatever. I have seen love do physical things which the mere intellectual convictions cannot—make hearts beat and eyes sparkle, that would not respond even to digitalis and strychnine. ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... and for the moment disappeared in the deep fringe of evergreens which lined the shore. Fairly in the twinkling of an eye a rude frame of bent poles was made, above which were spread strips of unrolled birch bark from the cargo of the canoe. Over the spaces left uncovered by the supply of bark sheets there were laid down long mats made by Indian hands from dried reeds and bulrushes, affording no inconsiderable protection against the weather. Inside the lodge, bales of goods and packages of provisions ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... took her by the arm. She was trembling all over. He took a thin steel chain and padlock from his pocket, passed the links around her steel-bound wrists, and fastened her to a young birch tree. ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert Chambers
... belonging to them personally, and their husbands will not touch them without having previously obtained their permission."[179] Among the Menomini a woman in good circumstances would possess as many as from 1,200 to 1,500 birch-bark vessels, and all of these would be in use during the season of sugar-making.[180] ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... shoulders, and possessed of a nose and a pair of lips whose coarseness communicated to his face rather a sullen expression. Behind the portmanteau came a small dispatch-box of redwood, lined with birch bark, a boot-case, and (wrapped in blue paper) a roast fowl; all of which having been deposited, the coachman departed to look after his horses, and the valet to establish himself in the little dark anteroom or kennel where already he had stored a cloak, a bagful of livery, and ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... apologies, and encouragement to go through my part with spirit and constancy, he stood up near the fire, whilst I went to fetch the instruments of discipline out of a closet hard by: these were several rods, made each of two or three strong twigs of birch tied together, which he took, handled, and viewed with as much pleasure, as I did with a kind of ...
— Memoirs Of Fanny Hill - A New and Genuine Edition from the Original Text (London, 1749) • John Cleland
... heart comprehend why he should appear to his own wife as if he were some frightful monster. He is perplexed, amazed, and finally enraged at the look of loathing in the wide eyes of his own mate. It was a little thing—his innocent remark about a birch fence—that revealed to her that she was living with a stranger. Grief never possesses a man as it does a woman, except when the grief is exclusively concerned with his own bodily business, as ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... furniture in the old-fashioned snug parlor was so essential as we? How could the fragrant hickory and birch sticks have sent their cheering light and warmth over the faces of the happy family circles ...
— Who Spoke Next • Eliza Lee Follen
... time was an emporium of Catholic books, pictures and images, one of those peculiarly Lower Canadian stores in the vicinity of the Rue Notre Dame, existing side by side with Indian curio shops, and rendering it possible for the emigrant and tourist to purchase maple sugar, moccasins, and birch bark canoes at the same time that he invested in purple ribbon bookmarks, gaily painted cards of the Virgin, and tiny religious valentines with rosy bleeding hearts, silver arrows and chubby kneeling infants. Amulets and crucifixes, Keys of Heaven and lives of ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... it might be possible for a tunnel to run down into the water, shady spots where willows and alders overhung the lake; places where birch and hazels grew close up to the patches of rushes and reed-mace, with its tall broken pokers standing ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... marches, an avenue for an army; but, its days of glory over, it now lies grilling in the sun between cool groves, and only at intervals the vehicle of the cruising tourist is seen far away and faintly audible along its ample sweep. A little upon one side, and you find a district of sand and birch and boulder; a little upon the other lies the valley of Apremont, all juniper and heather; and close beyond that you may walk into a zone of pine trees. So artfully are the ingredients mingled. Nor must it be forgotten that, in all this part, you come continually forth upon a hill-top, ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the cot of Le Brun stood in a birch-grown hollow, not far off, where a stream cascaded into the St. Lawrence, and had worn down the precipitous bank of earth. It was a wild picture. The gable of the cot was stained Indian red down to the eaves, and a stone chimney was embedded irregularly in its log ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... shows shapely beards and comely faces and toilettes ranged about the wall. The bowl is lit, and the punch is burnt and sent round in scalding thimblefuls. So a good hour or two may pass with song and jest. And then we go home in the moonlight morning, straggling a good deal among the birch tufts and the boulders, but ever called together again, as one of our leaders winds his horn. Perhaps some one of the party will not heed the summons, but chooses out some by-way of his own. As he follows the winding sandy road, he hears the flourishes ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Fazl, "have a language of their own, but their books are written in the Shanskrit tongue, although the character is sometimes Cashmeerian. They write chiefly upon Tooz [birch-bark], which is the bark of a tree; it easily divides into leaves, and remains perfect for many years." (Ayeen Akbery, II. 147.) A sketch of Kashmiri Grammar by Mr. Edgeworth will be found in vol. x. of the J. A. S. B., and a fuller one by Major ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... frame, to protect it from injury by the weather, until their return. Among other things which lay strewed about here, were a spearshaft, eight feet in length, recently made and ochred; parts of old canoes, fragments of their skin-dresses, &c. For some distance around, the trunks of many of the birch, and of that species of spruce pine called here the Var (Pinus balsamifera) had been rinded; these people using the inner part of the bark of that kind of tree for food. Some of the cuts in the trees with the axe, were evidently made the preceding year. Besides these, we were elated by ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 387, August 28, 1829 • Various
... of mail, and a huge bundle of newspapers were deposited in the bow. Holliday waved his hand. The Druro churned the water and swung out into midstream again. Bennie looked curiously after her. To the north lay a sandy shore dotted by a scraggy forest of dwarf spruce and birch. A few fishing huts and a mass of wooden shanties fringed the forest. To the east, seaward, many miles down that great stretch of treacherous, sullen river waited a gray bank of fog. But overhead the air was crystalline ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train
... face and tore deep through the skin before he could lift his wide-flung arms to protect it. And then, almost before he realized what had happened, she stood back, groping blindly away from him until her hands found a birch sapling. She clung to it with a desperately tight clasp as if to hold herself erect. A little spot of red flecked her own lip where her locked teeth had cut through. She swayed a moment, dizzily, the too-tight little waist gaping at her throat ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... constricted by its bare and gnarled roots, they draw sustenance from afar; and not another knoll on which the sun so delights to pour his beams. Weeks before any other Sycamore, and almost as early as the alder or the birch—the GLORY OF MOUNT PLEASANT, for so we schoolboys called it, unfolded itself like a banner. You could then see only the low windows of the dwelling—for eaves, roof, and chimneys all disappeared—and then, when you stood beneath, was not the sound of the bees like the very sound of the ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... explored by Captain Kelly, at the expense of a merchant whose name is borne by Birch's River, and that of his wife by Sarah Island. It is an inlet of the sea, on the western coast: by water, about 200 miles from Hobart Town. It penetrates the country twenty miles to its junction with Gordon River, where, diverging to the right, Sarah Island becomes visible—once the principal ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... wretch o'ertaken in his track, With stolen chattels on his back, Will hung his head in fear and shame, And to the awful presence came,— A great, green, bashful simpleton, The butt of all good-natured fun. With smile suppressed, and birch upraised, The thunderer faltered,—"I'm amazed That you, my biggest pupil, should Be guilty of an act so rude! Before the whole set school to boot— What evil genius put you to't?" "'Twas she herself, sir," sobbed the lad, "I did not mean ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... lessons begin,' thought Hollyhock; 'let them wait until that woman puts the birch on to them; then perhaps they 'll see who's right—I, the faithful, noble girl, who would not desert her father, or they, who have just gone off to Ardshiel for ...
— Hollyhock - A Spirit of Mischief • L. T. Meade
... had reached firm ground. "She will be very tall," I said, "very tall and exquisite,—like a young birch-tree, you know, when its new leaves are whispering over to one another the secrets of spring. Yes, that is a ridiculous sounding simile, but it expresses the general effect of her—the coup d'oeil, so to speak,—quite perfectly. Moreover, her hair will be a miser's ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... shoved over in a birch, an' ye must be perlite enough to return the call," replied Jim, in the most ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... beseeching the junior Mr. Brown, who is standing with his back against the door, to prevent egress, just to permit them to depart; which, after a slight contest, he does—they rushing, pell-mell, to the drawing-room, there to find an old birch-broom blazing in the grate, and the recess covered with two sheets suspended by forks. In front of the sheets is a table; whilst in front of that table, stand the wondering little crowd, speculating as to what the burning broom can have to do with it, when a dwarf old ...
— Christmas Comes but Once A Year - Showing What Mr. Brown Did, Thought, and Intended to Do, - during that Festive Season. • Luke Limner
... disappeared from view behind a clump of birch trees. Then leaving the highway he walked slowly along the trail leading to ...
— Under Sealed Orders • H. A. Cody
... Forest, Edward the Saint's old hunting-ground; its bottoms choked with beech and oak, and birch and alder scrub; its upper lands vast flats of level heath; along the great trackway which runs along the lower side of Chobham Camp, some quarter of a mile broad, every rut and trackway as fresh at this day as when the ancient Briton, ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... contributions with that awe so natural in youthful aspirants, and at once so comic and pathetic to writers of a little experience. The names of many of Cave's staff are preserved in a note to Hawkins. One or two of them, such as Birch and Akenside, have still a certain interest for students of literature; but few have heard of the great Moses Browne, who was regarded as the great poetical light of the magazine. Johnson looked up to him as a leader in his craft, and was graciously taken by Cave to an alehouse ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... the great booby held Jan to receive his thwacks from the strap which the Dame had of late years substituted for the birch rod. And as Jan writhed, he chuckled as heartily as before, it being an amiable feature in the character of such clowns that, so long as they can enjoy a guffaw at somebody's expense, the subject of their ridicule is not a matter of much ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... we'd got settled down on our claim, I went up on the hill lookin' for a likely piece of birch to make an ax-handle out of. But it was pretty hard to find the right kind, and I kept a-goin' and kept a-goin' for nigh on two hours. Wasn't in no hurry to make my choice, you see, for I was headin' down to the Forks, where I was goin' to borrow a log-bit from Old Joe Gee. When I started, I'd put ...
— Dutch Courage and Other Stories • Jack London
... not understand the life we lead; If we asked Dr. Birch to play, no doubt he'd rather read; He hates all scrambling restlessness, and chattering, scuffling noise; If he could catch us we should fare no ...
— Verses for Children - and Songs for Music • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... new frock I had bought you shall be given to Nannie Cameron, and you shall wear your old one to the kirk. How will that suit your vanity? And you may be off to bed now directly, without any supper. There are twigs enough for a birch rod, my lady, if bed does not bring you to a better frame of mind. Run in now, and don't let me see your face before six ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... windy upland perch, Mine eyes have seen the forest break in bloom, The rose-red maple and the golden birch, The dusty yellow of the elms, the gloom Of the tall poplar hung with tasseled black; Ah, I have watched, till eye and ear and brain Grew full of dreams as they, the moted plain, The sun-steeped wood, the ...
— Lyrics of Earth • Archibald Lampman
... approached Seville, some low hills appeared on the left, near the river. Dazzling white villages were planted at their foot, and all the slopes were covered with olive orchards, while the banks of the stream were bordered with silvery birch trees. This gave the landscape, in spite of the African warmth and brightness of the day, a gray and almost wintry aspect. Soon the graceful Giralda, or famous Tower of Seville, arose in the distance; but, from the windings of the river, we were half an hour in reaching ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... of Wakoa, the dog sale—seven fat caribou were roasting on great spits at Post Lac Bain, and under them were seven fires burning red and hot of seasoned birch, and around the seven fires were seven groups of men who slowly ...
— Back to God's Country and Other Stories • James Oliver Curwood
... but many ranges of hills. Norway monopolizes almost entirely the mountain system of the great northern peninsula, but the large forests of pine, fir, and birch, which cover so much of the country, are common to both. Though iron is found in large deposits in Norway, it is still more abundant in Sweden, where it is chiefly of the magnetic kind, yielding when properly smelted the ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... in this year, when he was elected President of the Royal Society in succession to Sir Cyril Wyche, and he held the office for two years. Pepys had been admitted a fellow of the society on February 15th, 1664-65, and from Birch's "History" we find that in the following month he made a statement to ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... Now the white birch beckons. How its face shines in the light of the early morning! But dark or light I can distinguish it from all its fellows. Always white of face and clean of life. So I hear it ...
— The Children's Six Minutes • Bruce S. Wright
... certainly," replied his uncle. "Johnny, if you demonstrate your power of strength so forcibly and practically, some one will apply oil of birch to you." ...
— Eric - or, Under the Sea • Mrs. S. B. C. Samuels
... than oats, more boulders than trees, and more snow than anything. It was a solitary, thinly peopled region, mostly of bare hills, and partially cultivated glens, each with its small stream, on the banks of which grew here and there a silver birch, a mountain ash, or an alder tree, but with nothing capable of giving much shade or shelter, save cliffy banks and big stones. From many a spot you might look in all directions and not see a sign of human or any other ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... for days—they set about preparing a shelter. With a little search, whooping to each other lest they stray away, they found a big dry stub that some gale had snapped off a few feet above the snow. While Mooka scurried about, collecting birch bark and armfuls of dry branches, Noel took off his snow-shoes and began with one of them to shovel away the snow in a semicircle around the base of the stub. In a short half-hour he had a deep hole there, with the snow banked up around it to the height of his head. Next with his ...
— Northern Trails, Book I. • William J. Long
... from an illustration in Arundale- Bonomi-Birch's Gallery of Antiquities from the British Museum, pl. 31. The king thus represented is Thutmosis II. of the XVIIIth dynasty; the spear, surmounted by a man's head, which the double holds in his hand, probably recalls the human victims formerly ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... across the green and sunny meadow, Where the grass hangs thick with glistening dew,— In the birch-wood's flickering light and shadow, Where, between green ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... the immortality of the soul, says Mr. Birch,[161] is as old as the inscriptions of the twelfth dynasty, many of which contain extracts from the Ritual of the Dead. One hundred and forty-six chapters of this Ritual have been translated by Mr. Birch from the text of the Turin papyrus, the most complete in Europe. Chapters ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... of another way to accomplish his purpose. None presented itself; so with glowing words he appealed to their nobler selves, telling them all the great need of the travelers who were obliged to pass that way. First he appealed to a fine birch ...
— Allegories of Life • Mrs. J. S. Adams
... most unexpected and unwelcome directions and often from all points of the compass in turn. Usually ready-made camps, overhanging cliffs, were available. When they were not, my ingenuity rose to the occasion and I thatched together twigs of willow or birch, or even spruce or pine, though the latter were stiffer and more difficult to fit tightly together. Beginning at the bottom, I worked upward, lapping each successive layer over the one beneath, as in laying shingles, and pointing the tips of the leaves or needles downward, ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills
... replaced by fences, or better still open palings, especially about houses which are occupied during the fall of the leaf, and in the winter. Trees for planting near houses should be chosen in the following order: Conifers, birch, acacia, beech, oak, elm, lime, and poplar. Pine trees are the best of all trees for this purpose, as they collect the greatest amount of rainfall and permit the freest evaporation from the ground, while their branchless stems offer the least resistance to ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 611, September 17, 1887 • Various
... formed the centre of the upper part of the room. Yorke supported the great boy whose back was bared, while the daunted faces and eager eyes were strained eagerly from around. The head-master took his place, and his birch was raised in the air to come down with a heavy stroke, when a commotion was heard at one of the desks, and Stephen Bywater ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... reliefs in the fine publication undertaken by the Society of Biblical Archaeology. This work, which is not yet (1883) complete, is entitled The Bronze Ornaments of the Gates of Balawat, Shalmaneser II. 859-825, edited, with an introduction, by Samuel BIRCH, with descriptions and translations by Theophilus G. PINCHES, folio, London. The three first parts are before us. The motive reproduced above belongs to the ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... rain had fallen the day before, and now wherever the ground was not paved the grass shone green. The birch trees in the gardens looked as if they were strewn with green fluff, the wild cherry and the poplars unrolled their long, balmy buds, and in shops and dwelling-houses the double window-frames were being removed and ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... anything for the Church from a hymn book or a hassock or a pew to a pulpit or a screen or a spire you go to Fortune, East and Sabre, Tidborough. Similarly in the scholastic line, anything from a birch rod to a desk—Fortune, East and Sabre, by return and the best. No, they're the great, the great, church and school-furnishing people. 'Ecclesiastical and Scholastic Furnishers and Designers' they call themselves. And they're IT. No really decent church or really ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... suddenly, she bursts up a few yards from you, and goes humming through the trees,—the complete triumph of endurance and vigor. Hardy native bird, may your tracks never be fewer, or your visits to the birch-tree ...
— Bird Stories from Burroughs - Sketches of Bird Life Taken from the Works of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... the most remarkable things about him. Stupid chickens are not the only birds captured. Once I read in the snow the story of his hunt after a crow—wary game to be caught napping! The tracks showed that quite a flock of crows had been walking about an old field, bordered by pine and birch thickets. From the rock where he was sleeping away the afternoon the fox saw or heard them, and crept down. How cautious he was about it! Following the tracks, one could almost see him stealing along from stone to bush, from bush to grass clump, so ...
— Ways of Wood Folk • William J. Long
... removing the sheathing, eight feet of a plank in the wale were found to be so very rotten as to make it necessary to shift it. The carpenters were sent on shore in search of a tree large enough for the purpose: luckily they found a birch, which was the only one of sufficient size in the whole neighbourhood of the bay. The crews were employed in various necessary occupations: amongst which, four men were set apart to haul the seine for salmon, which were caught in ...
— Narrative of the Voyages Round The World, • A. Kippis
... weeping thorn (Crataegus oxyacantha) with pollen from a crimson not-weeping variety, and three young trees, "now six or seven years old, show a decided tendency to be pendulous, but as yet are not so much so as the mother-plant." According to Mr. MacNab,[45] seedlings from a magnificent weeping birch (Betula alba), in the Botanic Garden at Edinburgh, grew for the first ten or fifteen years upright, but then all became weepers like their parent. A peach with pendulous branches, like those of the weeping willow, has been found capable of propagation ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... in Latin or Welsh. Many volumes of chronicles, charters, and historical poems have been published by the Government, by the Corporation of Cardiff, by J. Gwenogvryn Evans, by H. de Grey Birch, and others. But, so far, we have not had the interesting chronicles and poems translated into English as they ought to be, and published in well ...
— A Short History of Wales • Owen M. Edwards
... told of one of the lakes that lie on the border of this valley. It is small—half a mile long and a quarter wide—but its depth is fathomless. It is bordered and shadowed by tall and stately pines, quaking-asp and birch trees, and its waters are pure and ice-cold the year round. They are medicinal, too, and as yet almost unknown to white men. Will heard the legend of the lake from the lips of an ...
— Last of the Great Scouts - The Life Story of William F. Cody ["Buffalo Bill"] • Helen Cody Wetmore
... he unrolled a precious chart, scratched on birch bark with some rude weapon, such as ...
— Marguerite De Roberval - A Romance of the Days of Jacques Cartier • T. G. Marquis
... eyes an autograph letter of her sister, Miss Pinkerton, was an object of as deep veneration as would have been a letter from a sovereign. Only when her pupils quitted the establishment, or when they were about to be married, and once, when poor Miss Birch died of the scarlet fever, was Miss Pinkerton known to write personally to the parents of her pupils; and it was Jemima's opinion that if anything could have consoled Mrs. Birch for her daughter's loss, it would have been that pious ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... Fig. 244, A and B, two laths of hardwood (beech, birch or mahogany answer splendidly) are shown. They are made the same length and the same width as the edges of the screen, the corners being slightly ...
— Woodwork Joints - How they are Set Out, How Made and Where Used. • William Fairham
... just been at a neighbouring farm-house, where there lived one of Mr. Walsingham's tenants; a man of the name of Birch, a respectable farmer, who was originally from Ireland, and whose son was at sea with Captain Walsingham. The captain had taken young Birch under his particular care, at Mr. ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... swelling meant. 'Sir,' answered Scarborough, 'your blood will run no longer.' Waller repeated some lines of Virgil, and went home to die. As the disease increased upon him, he composed himself for his departure; and calling upon Dr. Birch to give him the holy sacrament, he desired his children to take it with him, and made an earnest declaration of his faith in Christianity. It now appeared what part of his conversation with the great could be remembered with delight. He related, that being present when the Duke of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 542, Saturday, April 14, 1832 • Various
... conveyance for America. It is a noisy, dirty, mechanical contrivance, capable of great speed; it is the only vehicle in which one could approach that distant smudge on the landscape with any sense of the eternal fitness of things. A coach and four would be as far behind the times on this highway as a birch-bark canoe on yonder lake. In America an automobile is beautiful because it is in perfect harmony with the spirit of the age and country; it is twin brother to the trolley; train, trolley, and automobile may travel side by side as members of one ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... of passage have gone; a happy journey and 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
... bit of birch back, she wrote the name and dropped the bark into the heart of the glowing fire. "It is gone forever," she said, her hand again on Myra's shoulder. "Now what shall be the new Camp Fire name of ...
— The Torch Bearer - A Camp Fire Girls' Story • I. T. Thurston
... pleasant times in Scotland? Ah, it is a restful place, your Highland home, with the beautiful purple hills rolling away in the distance, and the glorious moors covered with fragrant heather, and the gurgling of the river that runs between birch and fir and willow, making music all day long for those who have the ears to listen, and the hearts to understand the pretty love tune it sings! You know Frenchmen always have more or less sympathy with the Scotch—some old association, perhaps, with the romantic times of Mary ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... of paying attention to the daughter of a Hindoo woman and old Sneezum, the bullock contractor of Bunderjumm. One day I had been at work in one of the plantations, and just as I was marking with my hand-axe a birch tree to be felled, a thought came into my head. I left the cross half executed, and threw the axe on the bank, hurried home, and locked myself in the study. Pen and paper were lying before me, and in a moment I had got deep into the introduction of my ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... grass for the cows; Heard the horse whinnying for his corn; And sharply clashing horn on horn, Impatient down the stanchion rows, 15 The cattle shake their walnut bows; While peering from his early perch Upon the scaffold's pole of birch, The cock his crested helmet bent And down ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... the topmost source—fons et origo—of our chosen river. This single spring, crystal-clear and ice-cold, gushing out of the hillside in a forest of spruce and yellow birch and sugar maple, gave us the clue that we must follow for a week ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... many books, both printed and manuscript, are as necessary as they are impossible to be attained in my present way of life. However, to acquire a general insight into my subject and resources, I read the life of Sir Walter Raleigh by Dr. Birch, his copious article in the General Dictionary by the same hand, and the reigns of Queen Elizabeth and James the First in Hume's History of England." Beriton, January 1762. (In a month's absence from the Devizes.)—"During this interval of repose, I again turned ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... the "dining camp" and take their places at a long pine table, painted turkey red, on ordinary wooden kitchen chairs, also red! The floral decoration is of laurel leaves in vases made of preserve jars covered with birch bark. Glass and china is of the cheapest. But there are a long centerpiece of hemstitched crash and crash doilies, and there are "real" napkins, and at each plate a birch bark napkin ring with a number ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... time, Nor, as perchance thou rashly deem'st, the Cairn Of some old British Chief: 'tis nothing more Than the rude embryo of a little dome Or pleasure-house, which was to have been built Among the birch-trees of this rocky isle. But, as it chanc'd, Sir William having learn'd That from the shore a full-grown man might wade, And make himself a freeman of this spot At any hour he chose, the Knight forthwith Desisted, and the quarry and the ...
— Lyrical Ballads with Other Poems, 1800, Vol. 2 • William Wordsworth
... town. But as the love for decoration arose, he would deck his roofs as nature had decked hers, till the grey sheets of the cathedral slates should stand out amid pinnacles and turrets rich with foliage, as the grey mountain sides stood out amid knolls of feathery birch and towering pine. ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... plateau, are scattered villages built on limestone foundations—tiny fortresses, like Rumigny and Champlat, the scene of hard-fought battles. Almost the entire surface is covered with forests of pine and oak and birch. These are the woods of Le Roi, Courton, Pourcy, and Reims, where hand-to-hand fighting went on for more than a fortnight, British, Italians, and French succeeding at first in checking the enemy and then in forcing him back, in those titanic combats. They were, in reality, ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... Ohio from Lake Erie commenced at the extreme southwestern end of that inland sea. The voyagers entered Maumee Bay and ascended the Maumee River, hauling their birch canoes around the rapids between Maumee City and Perrysburgh, and between Providence and Grand Rapids. Surmounting these obstacles, they reached the site of Fort Wayne, where the St. Joseph and St. Mary rivers unite, and make, according to the author of the "History ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop
... a leading member of a small association of literary men, artists and students who graduated together from the Peers' School. They call themselves for no obvious reason the Shirakaba or Silver Birch Society. The intelligent and consistent efforts of these young men to introduce vital Western work in literature, philosophy, painting, sculpture, draughtsmanship and music, and the large measure of success they have attained is of some significance. Several members of ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... we spent taking down our pictures and all our birch bark ornaments, and packing our books and getting ready to move. We were up against the housing problem, that's what ...
— Roy Blakeley's Camp on Wheels • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... [Footnote 2: Dr. Thomas Birch, in a letter dated June 15, 1764, says that this letter was by Mr. Philip Yorke, afterwards Earl of Hardwicke, who was author also of another piece in the Spectator, but his son could not remember what ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... resolutely wound the offending sweater about a great white birch tree that stood at ...
— The Story of Sugar • Sara Ware Bassett
... Mr. Birch has contributed a number of spirited illustrations that bring clearly before the eye the forms of Roland and his friend Oliver, of Ogier, the Dane, and other famous knights and paladins, as well as the scenes of their ...
— Queer Stories for Boys and Girls • Edward Eggleston
... They have been domesticated for thousands of years in several quarters of the world; the earliest known record of pigeons is in the fifth Aegyptian dynasty, about 3000 B.C., as was pointed out to me by Professor Lepsius; but Mr. Birch informs me that pigeons are given in a bill of fare in the previous dynasty. In the time of the Romans, as we hear from Pliny, immense prices were given for pigeons; "nay, they are come to this pass, that they can reckon up their pedigree ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... high for me, no water too deep; and, when there was mischief going, I was the ring-leader of the band. Father racked his head for days together to find a punishment that I should remember; but it was all no good: he wore out three or four birch-rods on my back; his hands pained him merely from hitting my hard head; and bread and water was a welcome change to me from the everyday monotony of potatoes and bread-and-butter. After a sound drubbing followed by half a day's fasting, I felt more like ...
— The Path of Life • Stijn Streuvels
... my daughter, was born July the 29th, the day of the monthly Fast, between six and seven, or about half an hour after six in the morning, 1646." This, with subsequent entries on the same leaf, was copied by Birch, Jan. 6, 1749-50, when the Bible was shown him by Mrs. Foster, granddaughter to Milton (daughter to his youngest daughter Deborah), then keeping a chandler's shop in Cock Lane, near Shoreditch Church. It was the Bible in which Milton had ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... in sight of Loughveigh lying cradled among the rocks, and got a glimpse of the white tower of Glenveigh Castle. There is a small skirting of wood near the castle where the silver barked birch prevails from which the glen takes its name, interspersed with holly trees, which grow here in profusion, and some dark yews, prim and stately, drawn up like sentinels to ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... have been making these astonishing revelations, the Egyptologists have not been behindhand. Such scholars as Lepsius, Brugsch, de Rouge, Lenormant, Birch, Mariette, Maspero and Erman have perfected the studies of Young and Champollion; while at the same time these and a considerable company of other explorers, most notable of whom are Gardner Wilkinson and Professor Flinders Petrie, have brought to light a vast accumulation of new material, much ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... turned round. The heavy, gloomy oak wainscot, which extended over the walls upstairs and down in the dilapidated "Old-Grove Place," and the massive chimney-piece reaching to the ceiling, stood in odd contrast to the new and shining brass bedstead, and the new suite of birch furniture that he had bought for her, the two styles seeming to nod to each other across three centuries ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... the heart of Lochiel's fair forest, Where Scotch firs are darkest and amplest, and intermingle Grandly with rowan and ash;—in Mar you have no ashes; There the pine is alone or relieved by birch and alder."—p. 22. ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... the tent. In the open ground, on the way to a solitary birch-tree, we could see a group of soldiers.... Sara pointed to ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... tree in the foreground, the tender foliage, and soft, hazy gleams into the depths of the forest, afford the materials for a delightful picture, the more precious in our sight that it is so truly a representation of our native land, so thoroughly American. The broken birch canoe adds to the beauty of nature a most effective and pathetic touch, by briefly figuring the melancholy history of a fast-departing race. Gone forever are the moccasoned feet that pressed that mossy soil, and the dusky forms that flitted to and fro among the ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... a couple of lawn-mowers, an old sleigh hoisted up on the rafters of the carriage house, a weird old buggy, a plow, a grindstone, a collection of old chairs and sofas that had seen better days, a birch-bark canoe—things ...
— The House of Torchy • Sewell Ford
... of glistening birch-barks below the men, the warehouse with its picketed lane, the tall flag-staff, the block-house stockade, the half-bred women chatting over the low fences of the log-houses, the squaws wandering to and fro in picturesque ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White
... nobody was 'round t' see 'n' know 'n' tell just what I got 'n' how I got it. She 's been a secret these five year; stuck t' her tighter 'n' Erne Moore holds th' gals down t' Pickanock dances, 'n' that 's closer 'n' a burl on a birch. Fact is, I never told nobody 'fore now; 'n' I wouldn't be tellin' it t' youse now, only just 'fore we come up here I got a letter from one o' th' two brothers we blindfolded, sayin' his brother was dead an' he goin' t' Californy t' live, 'n' ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... carefully, Peggy pulled a long bulrush from a clump that grew at the side of the bog. Then she walked along the edge, skirting with care the deceitful green that looked so fair and lovely, till she came to where a slender birch hung its long drooping branches out over the bog. Clinging to one of these branches, Peggy leaned forward as far as she dared, and began to angle for her hat. "He rises well," she muttered, "but he doesn't bite ...
— Three Margarets • Laura E. Richards
... grass and brushwood; also on the leaves and bark of young trees, particularly the willow, poplar, ash, and birch. In autumn they likewise browse on heath, and the lichens which cover the bark of trees. In winter, when the ground is covered with snow, fodder is provided ...
— Delineations of the Ox Tribe • George Vasey
... Silver birch and purple pine, Crumpled fern and crimson rose, Flash to feel their beauty thine, Clasp and fold thee, warm and close: Every beat and gleam of wings Holds thee in its bosom furled; All that chatters, laughs, and sings, Darts ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... of Iroquois had found a hiding-place on a rocky islet in the middle of the Sept Chutes. He concealed himself from his foes, but could not escape, and in the end died of starvation and sleeplessness. The dying man peeled off the white bark of the birch, and with the juice of berries wrote upon it his death song, which was found long after by the side of his remains. His grave is now a marked spot on the Ottawa. La Complainte de Cadieux had seized the imagination of Amelie. She sang it exquisitely, and to-night needed no pressing to do so, ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... was sudden quiet in the noisy company. It was as if they stood at the threshold of a great cathedral, so still and majestic were the woods. Through the dense greenness of the pines there was an occasional flash of a silver birch. The scarlets and yellows of oak and maple trees gleamed here and there, making a rich background for the somber company ...
— Molly Brown's Senior Days • Nell Speed
... our downward course, the Pleistocene period, we at length find ourselves among familiar species. On old terrestrial surfaces, that date before the times of the glacial period, and underlie the boulder clay, the remains of forests of oak, birch, hazel, and fir have been detected,—all of the familiar species indigenous to the country, and which still flourish in our native woods. And it was held by the late Professor Edward Forbes, that the most ancient of his five existing British floras,—that ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... the hill, breaking a switch of birch as he ran. He hastened to Walter Skinner's horse, cut him loose from his tether, and struck him sharply with the birch rod. Away galloped the horse down the valley, while Humphrey hastened back to his place in the tree. "Fortune ...
— A Boy's Ride • Gulielma Zollinger
... I happen to know a good deal on such matters, and I have been applied to this day by James Birch, the head water-bailiff of our river (Ribble), to obtain some information for him on the subject, as he seems seriously bent on making the experiment, provided the reward be an adequate one; for, to be successful, it would involve the necessity of his making the voyage himself, and it ...
— Essays in Natural History and Agriculture • Thomas Garnett
... often such style, is to be found in all these books when they are good books. Compare a paragraph or two of the early Burroughs on his birch-clad lake country, or Thoreau upon Concord pines, with the "natural history paragraph" that English magazines used to publish, ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... say for the instruction of the reader that this birch taken from the fir trees as it saps out of cracks in the bark was the only liniment that the frontiersman had to heal his wounds at that time, and it was one of the best liniments that I have ever seen applied to a sore of ...
— Chief of Scouts • W.F. Drannan
... sending forth spokes of flaming light which threw the old trees into striking relief as they stood there with their dense crowns of green showing against a blue patch of sky. The light and shimmer of that patch contrasted sharply with the heavy pink cloud which lay massed above a young birch-tree visible on the horizon before us, while, a little further to the right, the parti-coloured roofs of the Kuntsevo mansion could be seen projecting above a belt of trees and undergrowth—one side of them reflecting ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... either by cooking or in whatever form circumstances and the material may require. The first requisite for cooking purposes is heat; this necessitates the use of fuel. The fuels chiefly used for household purposes are wood, coal, kerosene oil and gas. Soft woods, such as pine or birch, are best for kindling and for a quick fire. Hard woods, oak, ash, etc., burn more slowly, retain the heat longer, and are better adapted for ...
— Public School Domestic Science • Mrs. J. Hoodless
... darkened all the heavens. Then the sky opened, and the noise of the tempestuous forest was drowned in long, rolling detonations of thunder, and the wild lightning flamed down upon us, and set the forest on fire. Crouching down under the bent trunk of a birch-tree, with my beloved on my lap, I sheltered her from the streaming rain, and warmed her naked feet in my hands. What cared I, though the very heavens broke above me, and the earth rocked to its foundations? The soft, warm arms of ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... which, coming immediately from the banks of Newfoundland, are attended with a cloudy sky, and thick atmosphere. These may tend to mitigate the heats of summer, but are very disagreeable in the other seasons. The coldness of the climate is plainly to be perceived in the birch tree, which is here common in the woods; and the want of the mocking bird, the red bird, and a great variety of others, that visit you in the glimmer from South America. The fox squirrel too is scarce, and the gray ...
— Travels in the United States of America • William Priest
... to the window, and looking in, he saw the young girl seated on an armchair made of rough birch boughs, with a little prayer-book on her knee; her fair arm supporting her head, while a mass of golden ringlets half veiled her face, which was as pale as an alabaster statue; the extreme sadness of its expression rendering ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... remember our entering the forest. I know that first you climb a rough, rather narrow road up from the river, that the trees close about you very gradually, that there is a little church with a green turret and a fine view of the Nestor, and that there a broad solemn avenue of silver birch leads you forward, gently and without any sinister omens. Then again the forest clears and there are fields of corn and, built amongst the thin scattering of trees, the village of N——. It was here, on passing the first houses of ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... This package is a mixture of all the varieties above mentioned, to the number of 122; with a box of birch bark, containing twenty-nine little infants' scalps of various sizes; small white ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... of cunning your frank schoolboys are! How they cheat mamma! how they hoodwink papa! how they humbug the housekeeper! how they cringe to the big boy for whom they fag at school! what a long lie and five years' hypocrisy and flattery is their conduct towards Dr. Birch! And the little boys' sisters? Are they any better, and is it only after they come out in the world that the little darlings learn a ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... main river run innumerable smaller rivers, there called CREEKS. On the sides of these creeks the land is, in places, clear of rocks; it is, in these places, generally good and productive; the trees that grow here are the birch, the maple, and others of the deciduous class; natural meadows here and there present themselves; and some of these spots far surpass in rural beauty any other that my eyes ever beheld; the creeks, abounding towards their sources in water-falls of ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... came into the shadow of the island, the keel grunted upon sand, and they got out. There was a little crescent of white beach, with an occasional exclamatory green reed sticking from it, and above was a fine arch of birch and pine. They hauled up the boat as far as they could, and sat down to wait for the tide to turn. Firm earth, in spite of her awful spiritual forebodings, put Margaret in a more cheerful mood. Furthermore, the woods ...
— Aladdin O'Brien • Gouverneur Morris
... citron-yellow leaves from the elms and maples; here and there were spots of a darker foliage. It was very pleasant, very clean to walk on this tigerskin-carpet, and to watch the leaves fall down like snow; the birch looked even lighter and more graceful with its branches almost bare and the roan-tree was wonderful with its heavy scarlet cluster of berries. And the sky was so blue, so blue, and the wood seemed so much bigger, one ...
— Mogens and Other Stories - Mogens; The Plague At Bergamo; There Should Have Been Roses; Mrs. Fonss • Jens Peter Jacobsen
... yet low note that sounds something like 'skeek-skeek' comes from a birch, and another 'skeek-skeek' answers from an elm. It is like the friction of iron against iron without oil on the bearings. This is the tree-climber calling to his mate. He creeps over the boles of the birch, and where the larger limbs join the trunk, trailing his tail along the bark, ...
— The Amateur Poacher • Richard Jefferies
... something better than that," said Shep. "Half of these trees are birch trees, and we used birch bark on the roof. What's the matter with calling the place Birch ...
— Guns And Snowshoes • Captain Ralph Bonehill
... drank of it from time immemorial till the fatal deluge of the firewater burst upon the red men and swept their whole race away from the cold fountains. Endicott and his followers came next, and often knelt down to drink, dipping their long beards in the spring. The richest goblet then was of birch-bark. Governor Winthrop, after a journey afoot from Boston, drank here out of the hollow of his hand. The elder Higginson here wet his palm and laid it on the brow of the first town-born child. For many years it was the watering-place, and, ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... down quietly beside my fire, slipping on a great roll of birch bark which blazed up brightly, filling the woods with light. There, under a spruce, where a dark shadow had been a moment agone, stood the mother, her eyes all ablaze with the wonder of the light; now staring steadfastly ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... tall brass andirons or claw-footed chair and table. Sometimes he glanced shyly at the mother, but getting no answering smile kept silence. Once or twice the girl whispered a word to him, as the logs fell and a sheet of flame from the hickory and the quick-burning birch set free the stored-up sunshine of many a summer day. A moment later, the ...
— Mr. Kris Kringle - A Christmas Tale • S. Weir Mitchell
... President. The articles of the Constitution and By-Laws were discussed seriatim, and adopted, and then the Constitution, as a whole, was adopted. A letter was presented by Mrs. Lucy Stone, from the proprietor of the Birch House, Water Street, offering to entertain a few delegates—free. She also read ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... Hare, Frederick Maurice, and many more whom I did not know then, though I came to know several of them afterwards. Anybody who had anything of his own to produce was welcome in Bunsen's house, and among the men whom I remember meeting at his breakfast parties, were Rawlinson, Layard, Hodgson, Birch, and many more. Those breakfast parties were then quite a new institution to me, and it is curious how entirely they have gone out of fashion, though Sir Harry Inglis, Member for Oxford, Gladstone, Member for Oxford, Monckton Milnes ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller
... But boldness breeds boldness, and shortly I plunged into a Vineyard, in the full light of the moon, and captured a gallon of superb grapes, not even minding the presence of a peasant who rode by on a mule. Denny and Birch followed my example. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... indeed, of a Freshman, who, just escaped the trammels of "home, sweet home," and the pedagogue's tyrannical birch, for the first time in his life, with the academical gown, assumes the toga virilis, and feels himself a Man.—Alma ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... ancient Puritan, and the snow of his white beard drifting down to his very girdle? What boy would dare to play; or whisper, or even glance aside from his book; while Master Cheever is on the lookout behind his spectacles? For such offenders, if any such there be, a rod of birch is hanging over the fireplace, and a heavy ferule lies on the ...
— Grandfather's Chair • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... sieve,' thought she, and was about to give up in despair when there came a rush of wings through the air, and on every twig of the birch trees which grew by the bank was ...
— The Orange Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... your shallows, you are somber in your deeps, And below your shining surface there's a heart that never sleeps; But all day you pass me, dancing, and at evening time you dream, And I didn't think you liked me," sang the birch- ...
— Cross Roads • Margaret E. Sangster
... Scotland? Ah, it is a restful place, your Highland home, with the beautiful purple hills rolling away in the distance, and the glorious moors covered with fragrant heather, and the gurgling of the river that runs between birch and fir and willow, making music all day long for those who have the ears to listen, and the hearts to understand the pretty love tune it sings! You know Frenchmen always have more or less sympathy with the Scotch—some old association, perhaps, with the romantic ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... cataracts and pools. The old road, which ran almost parallel to the river and close upon its edge, was extremely narrow, and wound its way beneath a wall of enormous crags, surmounted by a natural forest of birch, oak, and pine. An army cooped up in that gloomy ravine would have as little chance of escape from the onset of an enterprising partisan corps, as had the Bavarian troops when attacked by the Tyrolese in the steep defiles of the Inn. General Mackay, however, had made ...
— Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers and Other Poems • W.E. Aytoun
... number of stocks of red birch, white birch and scrub oak grafted with European hazels and chinkapins, but the grafts all died. The grafting was done as an experiment in the hope that we might possibly utilize our waste lands which are covered with birch and scrub oak by ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various
... which, on minds of a different cast, makes no extraordinary impression. I have some favourite flowers in spring, among which are the mountain-daisy, the hare-bell, the fox-glove, the wild brier-rose, the budding birch, and the hoary hawthorn, that I view and hang over with particular delight. I never hear the loud, solitary whistle of the curlew in a summer noon, or the wild mixing cadence of a troop of grey plovers, in an autumnal ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... commented on pleasantly by the President. The articles of the Constitution and By-Laws were discussed seriatim, and adopted, and then the Constitution, as a whole, was adopted. A letter was presented by Mrs. Lucy Stone, from the proprietor of the Birch House, Water Street, offering to entertain a few delegates—free. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... day's march. The sky now became overcast; but this, I think, added to the effect of the scene. The road to Tarbet is superb. It is on the very verge of the lake—hard, level, rocky, with low stone bridges constantly flung across it, and fringed with birch trees, just then budding into spring, behind which, as through a slight veil, you saw the huge shadowy form of Ben Lomond. It lifts its enormous but graceful bulk direct from the edge of the water without any projecting ...
— Liber Amoris, or, The New Pygmalion • William Hazlitt
... than I knew. I heard voices a little way off, and thought they came from our party; but all at once some one walked round the very tree I was leaning against, and, handing me the prettiest little birch-bark canoe, about six inches long, filled with blackberries, said, "Wouldn't ...
— Harper's Young People, September 14, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... mountain stream was now foaming down it, leaping from rock to rock and filling the glen with babbling murmurs. He, however, made shift to scramble up its sides, working his toilsome way through thickets of birch, sassafras, and witch-hazel, and sometimes tripped up or entangled by the wild grapevines that twisted their coils or tendrils from tree to tree, and spread a kind of network in ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... spent with the march that still lengthen'd before him, He stopp'd by the way in a sylvan retreat; The light shady boughs of the birch-tree waved o'er him, The stream of the mountain fell soft at ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... shadows of the night, they beheld a number of dark objects on the lake before them. It was a fleet of Iroquois canoes, heavier and slower craft than those of the Algonquins, for they were made of oak-or elm-bark, instead of the light paper-birch used by the latter. ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... d'Arc, were a line of pornographic novels and beyond packets of picture post-cards entitled Theatreuses, Le Bain de la Parisienne, Les Seins des Marbre, and so on. Then Langton drew Graham's attention to one or two other books, one of which had a gaudy cover representing a mistress with a birch-rod in her hands and a number of canes hung up beside her, while a girl of fifteen or so, with very red cheeks, was apparently about to be whipped. "Good Lord," said Langton, "the French are beyond me. This window is a study ...
— Simon Called Peter • Robert Keable
... cried Grania, 'one on each side of the stream, and we will travel on foot.' So they went on till they reached Galway, and there Diarmid cut down a grove, and made a palisade with seven doors of wattles, and gathered together the tops of the birch trees and soft rushes for a ...
— The Book of Romance • Various
... day, but the cold was intense, and I think we were all glad that Pong was a closeable car. That Winter's reign had begun was most apparent. There was a bleak look upon the country's face: birch-rods that had been poplars made us gaunt avenues: here and there the cold jewellery of frost was sparkling. I fell to wondering how far south we must go to ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... two shining peel out of the pool, and sat eating my lunch on the edge of the Leap, with my back to the road. Forty feet beneath me the water lay black and glossy, behind the dotted foliage of a birch-tree. My rod stuck upright from the turf at my elbow, and, whenever I turned my head, neatly bisected the countenance and upper half of Seth Truscott, an indigenous gentleman of miscellaneous habits and a predatory ...
— Noughts and Crosses • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... shore, and landed. The wigwams were in shape like those of the North American Indians composed of a number of long sticks stuck in the ground in a circle, and bending inwards till their other ends met, and were secured together with a band. Instead of being covered with birch bark, these were thatched very neatly with dry grass or reeds, and formed very warm abodes. In the centre a pile of ashes showed where their fires were placed. Their canoes were very like those ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... of solid rock, some of those on the west arising abrupt and separate, one, Mount Pisa, distinctly leaning towards the east. Much of the surrounding country has been burned over, being now grown up with white birch and poplar, and at the narrows the angles in the cliffs are marked by lines of slender birch reaching from the water's edge to the summit. A short distance above, two large brooks enter from the east. Many of the long, low points which reach out into the lake are spruce ...
— A Woman's Way Through Unknown Labrador • Mina Benson Hubbard (Mrs. Leonidas Hubbard, Junior)
... five. Some of them who had finished their houses earlier than the rest, had already commenced gathering their provisions for the winter. These consisted of the leaves and soft twigs of several species of trees—such as willow, birch, and mulberry—and we saw collections of these floating in the water in front ...
— The Desert Home - The Adventures of a Lost Family in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... mountains. As the first grow higher the second diminish. This is the land of ferns and mosses. The air feels soft, slightly damp, and smells of moist leaves. It is as different to the sharp dry air of the Canterbury ranges as velvet is to canvas; it soothes, and in hot weather relaxes. The black birch with dark trunk, spreading branches, and light leaves, is now mingled with the queenly rimu, and the stiff, small-leaved, formal white pine. Winding and hanging plants festoon everything, and everything is bearded with long streamers of moss, not grey but rich green and golden. ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... the fisher in his skiff, And the hunter on the moss, Hear their call from cape and cliff, See their hands the birch-leaves toss. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... Vikings. Though she was sixteen, her graceful body had retained most of the lines and slender curves of childhood; and she was long of limb and broad of shoulder. Her head was poised alertly above her strong young throat, and she was as straight as a fir-tree and as supple as a birch. A life out-of-doors had given to her skin a tone of warm brown, which, in a land that expected women to be lily-fair, was like a mask added to her disguise. The blackness of her hair was equally unconnected ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... to feed on the pads, stems and roots of water lilies, and his long legs enable him to wade out to get them. For the most part his food consists of leaves and tender twigs of young trees, such as striped maple, aspen, birch, hemlock, alder and willow. His great height enables him to reach the upper branches of young trees. When they are too tall for this, he straddles them and bends or breaks them down to get at the upper branches. His front teeth are big, broad and sharp-edged. With these he strips ...
— The Burgess Animal Book for Children • Thornton W. Burgess
... broke out by thousands in the purple depths of the autumn sky. The moon rose and silvered with soft light the white stems of the birch-trees, which hung in graceful groups along the ...
— The Man-Wolf and Other Tales • Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian
... the trembling urchin, glad of any message that might serve to divert the dreaded birch from himself, entered the, uproarious "Siminary," caught his forelock, bobbed down his head to the master, and pitched his "two sods" into a little'heap of turf which lay in the corner of ...
— The Poor Scholar - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... you can imagine how furious that made Georgie! And when Ma told us that, she simply set her lips,—you know Ma! And then she said that she was going to see Father Birch with Georgie this afternoon, to ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... Birch, formerly tutor to the Prince of Wales, scarcely of sufficient calibre for the office, and not qualified ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume III (of 3), 1854-1861 • Queen of Great Britain Victoria
... was another king coming—that was his hunch—and he got it. And I tell you-all I got a hunch. There's a big strike coming on the Yukon, and it's just about due. I don't mean no ornery Moosehide, Birch-Creek kind of a strike. I mean a real rip-snorter hair-raiser. I tell you-all she's in the air and hell-bent for election. Nothing can stop her, and she'll come up river. There's where you-all track my moccasins in the near future if you-all want to find me—somewhere ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... had fallen the day before, and now wherever the ground was not paved the grass shone green. The birch trees in the gardens looked as if they were strewn with green fluff, the wild cherry and the poplars unrolled their long, balmy buds, and in shops and dwelling-houses the double window-frames were being removed and the ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... lad, compared to the time when the country about here was a great pine and birch forest, before this ...
— Dick o' the Fens - A Tale of the Great East Swamp • George Manville Fenn
... voyageur flying from a band of Iroquois had found a hiding-place on a rocky islet in the middle of the Sept Chutes. He concealed himself from his foes, but could not escape, and in the end died of starvation and sleeplessness. The dying man peeled off the white bark of the birch, and with the juice of berries wrote upon it his death song, which was found long after by the side of his remains. His grave is now a marked spot on the Ottawa. La Complainte de Cadieux had seized the imagination of Amelie. She sang ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... that there are secret springs which can only be detected by the twigs of the divining-rod; and having discovered with what comparative ease the whole mechanism of his little government could be carried on by the admission of the birch-regulator, so, as he grew richer and lazier and fatter, the Philhellenic Institute spun along as glibly as a top kept in vivacious movement by the perpetual ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... wandered down to the Dryad's Bubble and was curled up among the ferns at the root of the big white birch where she and Gilbert had so often sat in summers gone by. He had gone into the newspaper office again when college closed, and Avonlea seemed very dull without him. He never wrote to her, and Anne missed the letters that never came. To be sure, Roy wrote twice a week; his letters ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... of Sethos I., the father of Rameses II., long enough before the time of the bronze tablet of Aristagoras, on which was inscribed the circuit of the whole earth, and all the sea and all rivers. (Tylor, p. 90, quoted from Birch's Archaeologia, vol. xxxiv. p. 382.) Sesostris was the first to distribute ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... till this time by constant submergence in the water and in the unusually moist soil above it to betray without any serious question the nature of the materials used and the mode of their employment. One of the corner-posts was a black birch and the bark on it is in a good state of preservation at and below ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 5 • Various
... months, they built wooden huts in winter. They clothed themselves in long robes, and wore caps which were doffed reverentially in the presence of their rulers. They fed on millet and on horseflesh, and drank mead and a liquor extracted from the birch tree. Their punishments continued to be most barbarous, quartering alive being a common practice. Their superstitions were interesting. Serpents were 'taboo,' so was a hut which had been struck by lightning, whilst the howlings ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... embroidered linen center piece with lace edge under which showed red crepe tissue paper—vase of red and white carnations. Place Cards ornamented with hand painted cherries and hatchets. Favors, miniature artificial cherry trees (with a tiny paper hatchet at the base) growing in (imitation) birch-wood candy boxes, which should be filled with ...
— Games For All Occasions • Mary E. Blain
... three feet, and at Bear Lake, in latitude 64 degrees, not more than twenty inches. The frozen substratum does not of itself destroy vegetation, for forests flourish on the surface, at a distance from the coast.") In a like manner, in Siberia, we have woods of birch, fir, aspen, and larch, growing in a latitude (64 degrees) where the mean temperature of the air falls below the freezing point, and where the earth is so completely frozen, that the carcass of an animal embedded in it is perfectly preserved. (5/10. See Humboldt "Fragmens ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... this region was Canada, then possessed by the French, who carried on an extensive trade with the Indians, who brought their furs down to Montreal in their birch canoes. The French finally settled in the country of the savages, and married among the natives, thenceforward entirely devoting themselves to the life of the trapper and hunter. These marriages produced a race of half-breeds ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... red man's craftiness with a white man's superior intelligence. Insatiable in their thirst for adventure, they were willing to assume all manner of risks or privations. Spring might find them at Lake Champlain, autumn at the head-waters of the Mississippi, a trusty birch-bark having carried them the thousand miles between. Their work did not figure very heavily in the colony's annual balance-sheet of progress with its statistics of acreage newly cleared, homes built and harvests stowed safely away. ...
— The Seigneurs of Old Canada: - A Chronicle of New-World Feudalism • William Bennett Munro
... melting fast, you enjoy the countless rejoicing waterfalls; the gentle breathing of warm winds; the colors of the young leaves and flowers when the bees are busy and wafts of fragrance are drifting hither and thither from miles of wild roses, clover, and honeysuckle; the swaths of birch and willow on the lower slopes following the melting of the winter avalanche snow-banks; the bossy cumuli swelling in white and purple piles above the highest peaks; gray rain-clouds wreathing the outstanding brows ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... The Birch is the queen of trees, with her feathery foliage, scarcely visible in spring but turning to leaves of gold in autumn; the pendulous twigs tinged with purple, and silver stems so brilliantly marked with black ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... Rev. Henry Etough, of Pembroke-hall, Cambridge. He received his education among the Dissenters, and Archbishop Secker and Dr. 'Birch were among his schoolfellows. Through the interest of Sir Robert Walpole, he was presented to the rectory of Therfield, in Hertfordshire; where he died, in his seventieth ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... following the windings of the Monongahela river from its rise among the mountains of Western Virginia till, far away in the north, it met the flood of the Alleghany, at the present site of the city of Pittsburg. The voyage, in a birch canoe, required, in the figurative language of the Indians, "two paddles, ...
— Daniel Boone - The Pioneer of Kentucky • John S. C. Abbott
... I had grown old enough to take notice, I was apparently capable of holding extended conversations in an unknown dialect with birds and red squirrels. Once I fell asleep in my cradle, suspended five or six feet from the ground, while Uncheedah was some distance away, gathering birch bark for a canoe. A squirrel had found it convenient to come upon the bow of my cradle and nibble his hickory nut, until he awoke me by dropping the crumbs of his meal. It was a common thing for birds to alight on my cradle in ...
— Indian Child Life • Charles A. Eastman
... Bang! "The March of the Pilgrims" came to an abrupt end. John Lansing Birch laid down his viola and bow, whirled about, and flung out his arms in despair. "Oh, this crowd is hopeless!" he groaned. "Never mind any other instrument, providing yours is heard. This march is supposed to die away in the distance! You murder it ...
— The Second Violin • Grace S. Richmond
... a conical cap made of small fir branches, which reached below the breast but left an opening for the face. In her hair was fastened an implement made of deer-bone with which she scratched herself. For the first four days she might neither wash nor eat, but a little water was given her in a birch-bark cup painted red, and she sucked up the liquid through a tube made out of the leg of a crane, a swan, or a goose, for her lips might not touch the surface of the water. After the four days she was allowed, during the rest of the period ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... the course of which a given art was brought from one part of the world to another. Hence, when we find the art duly installed in a particular place, and utilizing the local product, the bamboo in the south, let us say, or the birch in the north, as it naturally does, we easily slip into the error of supposing that the local products of themselves called the art into existence. Similar needs, we say, have generated similar expedients. No doubt there is some truth in this principle; but I doubt if, on the whole, ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... do the girls stir the cocoons with those whisks of peeled birch?" inquired Pierre curiously. "What ...
— The Story of Silk • Sara Ware Bassett
... and slowly trotted back toward camp. Stronger than the physical restraint of the stick was the clutch of the camp upon her. Unseen and occultly, the gods still gripped with their power and would not let her go. White Fang sat down in the shadow of a birch and whimpered softly. There was a strong smell of pine, and subtle wood fragrances filled the air, reminding him of his old life of freedom before the days of his bondage. But he was still only a part-grown ...
— White Fang • Jack London
... "You're the boy that likes birds; if you'll come with me, I'll show 'ee what no man ever seed afore"; and Caleb, fired with curiosity, followed him away to a distance from home, out from the downs, into the woods and to a place where he had never been, where there were bracken and heath with birch and thorn-trees scattered about. On cautiously approaching a clump of birches they saw a big, thrush-like bird fly out of a large nest about ten feet from the ground, and settle on a tree close by, where it was joined by its mate. The old man pointed out that it was a felt or fieldfare, ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... during the last century, and forest-fires have devastated portions at different times; yet there is still an abundance left. Whitney speaks of the region as abounding in oak of various kinds, chestnut, white ash, beech, birch, and maple, with some butternut and walnut trees. The vigorous growth of the primeval forest indicated the strength and richness of the soil which has since been turned to such profitable use by the farmers. The houses in which ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 1, October, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... Bellfont, still blest with Sylvia's presence! permit me, oh permit me into those sacred shades, where I have been so often (too innocently) blest! Let me survey again the dear character of Sylvia on the smooth birch; oh when shall I sit beneath those boughs, gazing on the young goddess of the grove, hearing her sigh for love, touching her glowing small white hands, beholding her killing eyes languish, and her charming bosom rise and fall with ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... or dig. Yet it is very pretty like all the rest, and tells its own tale. There is nothing bold or vicious or vulpine in it, and his timid, harmless character is published at every leap. He abounds in dense woods, preferring localities filled with a small undergrowth of beech and birch, upon the bark of which he feeds. Nature is rather partial to him, and matches his extreme local habits and character with a suit that corresponds with his surroundings,—reddish gray in summer and white ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... Government is now more anxious than ever to take prompt and decided action in our favour." Slidell asked if it was impossible to stir Parliament but acknowledged that everything depended on Palmerston: "that august body seems to be as afraid of him as the urchins of a village school of the birch ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... kicking the ragga ball, or sailing miniature praus out into the river, and off toward the shimmering straits. But often they sat cross-legged and dropped bits of chicken and fruit between the palm sleepers of the wharf to the birch-colored crocodiles below, who snapped them up, one after another, never taking their small, cruel eyes off the brown faces that peered ...
— Tales of the Malayan Coast - From Penang to the Philippines • Rounsevelle Wildman
... the stars shone in the tips of the birch trees. Ridgeley did not come, and when they went back to the house, they found that he had been called to New York on an urgent case. He would not return until ...
— The Gay Cockade • Temple Bailey
... confidence of his Indian guides that the French would not dare to detain him was justified. Next day Hendry paddled on up the river and advanced more than twenty miles, camping at night by "the largest Birch trees ...
— The Conquest of New France - A Chronicle of the Colonial Wars, Volume 10 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • George M. Wrong
... of this literary composition has also been given by Dr. Samuel Birch, in his Introduction to the ...
— Egyptian Literature
... bare below the knee, and to him the charge of the flock was committed, with signs which he evidently understood and replied to with a gruff 'Ay, ay!' The three went on the way, over the slope of a hill, partly clothed with heather, holly and birch trees, as it rose above the moss. Hob led the pony, and there was something in his grim air and manner that hindered any conversation between the two young people. Only Hal from time to time gathered a flower for the young lady, scabious and globe ...
— The Herd Boy and His Hermit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... pleasant spot), is a small tarn, or more properly the expanded bed of a stream, art having aided nature in its formation: it is edged by rocks and cliffs fringed with the usual trees of the neighbourhood; it is a wild and pretty spot, not unlike some birch-bordered pool in the mountains of Wales or Scotland, sequestered and picturesque. It was dark before I got back, with heavy clouds and vivid lightning approaching from the south-west. The day had been very hot (3 p.m., 90 degrees), ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... a stirring spectacle. The shores of the Penobscot River were then a trackless wilderness; the placid bosom of the river itself had seldom been traversed by a heavier craft than the slender birch-bark canoe of the red man; yet here was this river crowded with shipping, the dark forests along its banks lighted up by the glare of twoscore angry fires. Through the thickets and underbrush parties of excited men broke ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... ever like to put down the predominance of this handsome girl, in whose cleverness he delighted. Why not? A man's mind—what there is of it—has always the advantage of being masculine,—as the smallest birch-tree is of a higher kind than the most soaring palm,—and even his ignorance is of a sounder quality. Sir James might not have originated this estimate; but a kind Providence furnishes the limpest personality with a little gunk or starch ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... the silver Trent, The whispering birch by every zephyr bent, The woody island, and the naked mead, The lowly hut half hid in groves of reed, The rural wicket, and the rural stile, And frequent interspersed, the woodman's pile. Above, below, where'er ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... pines growing up to the border of the amphitheatre on all sides; blackberry vines and sumach bushes overran the gradines almost to the margin of the pool which filled the centre; at the edge of the water some clumps of willow and white birch leaned outward as if to mirror their tracery in its steely surface. But of the life that the thing inarticulately recorded, there was not the slightest ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... northward ten days, always ascending, and they were coming now to a wooded country. They crossed several creeks, flowing down from the higher mountains, and along the beds of these they found cottonwood, ash, box elder, elm, and birch. On the steeper slops were numerous cedar brakes and also groves of yellow pine. There was very little undergrowth, but the grass grew in abundance. Although it was now somewhat dry, the horses and mules ate it eagerly. ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... eastwards through a narrow gorge into Loch Affric. It was a place remarkably well adapted for the purpose of a resisting party. A rocky boss, called Torr-a-Bheathaich, then densely covered with birch, closes up the glen as with a gate. The black mountain stream, "spear-deep," sweeps round it. A narrow path wound up the rock, admitting of passengers in single file. Here lay Murchison with the best of his people, while inferior adherents were ...
— History Of The Mackenzies • Alexander Mackenzie
... who were about to die so horrible a death in destroying all about them. They spoke of what time it was, of the softness of the night and the beauty of the sky; they spoke of the shadows under the birch-trees, of the gulf shining in the late evening's fading golden light, of the river's freshness and the sweetness of springtime in the North. That is what they talked about. ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux
... even far into the era of the Reformation a yearly holiday was observed under the name of "The Procession of the Rods," in which all the pupils of the schools went out in the summer to the woods, and came back heavily laden with birch-twigs, cracking jokes ...
— The Life and Times of Ulric Zwingli • Johann Hottinger
... boiled, and carve out into as many pieces as there are guests to eat of them, in the cabbin of him who gives the treat. But every one, before entering the cabbin, takes care to bring with him his Oorakin, or bowl, made of bark of birch-tree, either polygone shaped, or quite round; and this is practised at all their entertainments. These pieces of dogs flesh are accompanied with a small Oorakin full of the oil or fat of seal, or of elk's grease, ...
— An Account Of The Customs And Manners Of The Micmakis And Maricheets Savage Nations, Now Dependent On The Government Of Cape-Breton • Antoine Simon Maillard
... he himself found amusement in duck-shooting and in chatting with some straggling Chippewas, who were about launching their canoes for a six weeks' hunting and fishing excursion. It happened that Captain Glazier had never before seen birch bark canoes, and they were therefore regarded by him with considerable interest, their use in the future being indispensable to the success of his undertaking. Now the Captain possesses, in common with most men ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... most impenetrable places,—leading you over logs and through brush, alert and expectant, till, suddenly, she bursts up a few yards from you, and goes humming through the trees,—the complete triumph of endurance and vigor. Hardy native bird, may your tracks never be fewer, or your visits to the birch-tree less frequent! ...
— Bird Stories from Burroughs - Sketches of Bird Life Taken from the Works of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... forest. She sat on the bank of a narrow stream; she had a red handkerchief on her head and a small basket was lying on the ground near her hand. At a little distance could be seen a cluster of log cabins, with a water-mill over a dammed pool shaded by birch trees and looking bright as glass in the twilight. He approached her silently, his hatchet stuck in his iron belt, a thick cudgel in his hand; there were leaves and bits of twig in his tangled hair, in his matted beard; bunches of rags he had wound round the links fluttered from his waist. A faint ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... dictionaries may be had in Jesuits' bark; a treatise upon duels in touchwood; the history of opposition in wormwood; Shakespeare's works in cedar, his commentators in rotten wood; the reviewers in birch, and the history of England ...
— A Lecture On Heads • Geo. Alex. Stevens
... the market-place about a hundred yards, leaving an open space or lane between them of about five yards' distance; then the offender, being naked to the waist, was brought to one end of the lane or open place. The people had rods or switches of birch given to as many as would take them; the offender was to run or go, as he pleased (and one of them walked but a Spanish pace), from one end of the lane of people to the other, twice or thrice forward and backward; and all the way as he went, the people who had the switches lashed the offender ...
— A Journal of the Swedish Embassy in the Years 1653 and 1654, Vol II. • Bulstrode Whitelocke
... worship, or in any Anglican place of worship, you'd know that whenever you want anything for the Church from a hymn book or a hassock or a pew to a pulpit or a screen or a spire you go to Fortune, East and Sabre, Tidborough. Similarly in the scholastic line, anything from a birch rod to a desk—Fortune, East and Sabre, by return and the best. No, they're the great, the great, church and school-furnishing people. 'Ecclesiastical and Scholastic Furnishers and Designers' they call themselves. And they're IT. No ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... "dining camp" and take their places at a long pine table, painted turkey red, on ordinary wooden kitchen chairs, also red! The floral decoration is of laurel leaves in vases made of preserve jars covered with birch bark. Glass and china is of the cheapest. But there are a long centerpiece of hemstitched crash and crash doilies, and there are "real" napkins, and at each plate a birch bark napkin ring with a number on it. Mrs. Worldly looks at her napkin ring as though it ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... sun between cool groves, and only at intervals the vehicle of the cruising tourist is seen far away and faintly audible along its ample sweep. A little upon one side, and you find a district of sand and birch and boulder; a little upon the other lies the valley of Apremont, all juniper and heather; and close beyond that you may walk into a zone of pine trees. So artfully are the ingredients mingled. Nor must it be forgotten that, in all this part, you ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... But at length the sun gained power—or, rather, the cloud-screen which our atmosphere had drawn between him and us was removed—and life immediately kindled under his warmth. But what is life, and how can solar light and heat thus affect it? Near our elm was a silver birch, with its leaves rapidly quivering in the morning air. We had here motion, but not the motion of life. Each leaf moved as a mass under the influence of an outside force, while the motion of life was inherent and molecular. ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... wood-fires were lighted and there was snow and rain outside, and yams and chestnuts to roast in the ashes, and stories to be told and talked over in the glow of the red birch-log and snapping, flaming hickory sticks, the child used to feel as if she and Uncle Tom were even nearer together and more comfortable than at ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... master's wife next them; and in each pew, close to the mother's elbow, is the little wooden cage for the youngest child, still too young to sit alone. All boys are held too young to sit alone also; for, though the emigrants left in Holland the aged deaconess who there presided, birch in hand, to control the rising generation in Sunday meetings, yet the urchins are now herded on the pulpit- and gallery-stairs, with four constables to guard them from the allurements of sin. And there ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... ten of the bowmen of the Woodlanders and the Wolf—huntsmen, cragsmen, and scourers of the Waste; men who could shoot the chaffinch on the twig a hundred yards aloof; who could make a hiding-place of the bennets of the wayside grass, or the stem of the slender birch-tree. With these must needs be Bow-may, who was the closest shooter of ...
— The Roots of the Mountains • William Morris
... a wisp of birch and did as I was told, but there was nothing to be seen, and when the doctor took the pot out into the yard, and carefully examined it, he found nothing there, and brought the little clay ...
— Devon Boys - A Tale of the North Shore • George Manville Fenn
... for as the horses climbed the crest of the long hill the lady in green was by his side on the box. He looked anxiously ahead, and there, in a hedge of young alder bushes, he saw something stirring, and, unless he was greatly mistaken, a birch broom lay on the ground ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Chicopee was settled about 1638, was set off from Springfield as an independent township in 1848, and was chartered as a city in 1890. Chicopee Falls was the home of Edward Bellamy. The name of the city is an Indian word meaning "cedar-tree" or "birch-bark place." ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... were other wild deeds in history, and in the story of the "Raiders," memories of hunts for Covenanters, and great killings. But now all is peace, and I should have thought Loch Trool forgotten by the world if, in a dell of birch, rowan, hazel trees, and great pines like green umbrellas, I had not ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... ladyship pointed to a little scrubby thing, that looked very like a birch rod. I proceeded to examine it most minutely, while Collins waited with all the intense anxiety of a man whose character depended on ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 1 • Charles James Lever
... east, towards Moscow and the army of Russia, which bars the way thither. The sun of latter summer, sinking behind our backs, floods the whole prospect, which is mostly wild, uncultivated land with patches of birch-trees. NAPOLEON'S army has just arrived on the scene, and is making its bivouac for the night, some of the later regiments not having yet come up. A dropping fire of musketry from skirmishers ahead keeps snapping through the air. The Emperor's tent stands ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... to express his obligations to the following writers, from whose published works he has drawn freely: MM. Botta and Flandin, Mr. Layard, Mr. James Fergusson, Mr. Loftus, Mr. Cullimore, and Mr. Birch. He is glad to take this occasion of acknowledging himself also greatly beholden to the constant help of his brother, Sir Henry Rawlinson, and to the liberality of Mr. Faux, of the British Museum. ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 1. (of 7): Chaldaea • George Rawlinson
... arboretum hardly equaled anywhere. There are pines in endless variety—from the Sierra and from the seashore, from New England, France, Norway, and Japan. There flourish the cedar, spruce, hemlock, oak, beech, birch, and maple. There in peace and plenty are the sequoia, the bamboo, and the deodar. Eucalypts pierce the sky and Japanese dwarfs hug ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... Saitic period; the translator has also used in his work, the Egyptian manuscripts of the Louvre to assist in the elucidation of his readings of the Papyrus of Turin. His work is an advance on that of Dr. Samuel Birch, given in 1867, in the Vth volume of Baron von Bunsen's work on Egypt's Place in Universal History. A new translation of the Book of the Dead is now passing through the English press, by P. Le Page Renouf, Esq., but only a ...
— Scarabs • Isaac Myer
... boys, four in all, fairly carved a farm out of the big forest that covered the cold rocky hills. Giant work it was for them in such heavy timber—pine, hemlock, maple, beech and birch—the clearing of a single acre being a man's work for a year. The place where the maples were thickest was reserved for a sugar grove, and from it was made all of the sweet material they needed, and some besides. Economy of the very strictest kind had to be used in every direction. Main strength ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... nature is beautiful when it looks like art, and art beautiful when it looks like nature, Schiller gives a large number of concrete illustrations of his theory. Thus a vase is beautiful when, without prejudice to the vase-idea, it looks like a free play of nature. A birch is beautiful when it is tall and slender, an oak when it is crooked; the shape in either case expressing the nature of the tree when it follows nature's law. 'Therefore', he concludes his illustrations, 'the empire of taste is the empire of freedom; the beautiful ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... moved by, were the infantry of our brigade. Among them I recognized my old school-teacher, Alfonso Smith, who had just joined the army. I had many times quailed under his fierce eye and writhed under his birch rod. The strain to which he was subjected under these circumstances was doubly trying, waiting inactive for his first baptism of fire. His eye was restless as we passed; perhaps he had a presentiment, as he received his death-wound before the ...
— The Story of a Cannoneer Under Stonewall Jackson • Edward A. Moore
... clashing, grinding sounds that ever grated the ears of a Vandal; thus, rasped, scratched, wrenched, bridled, fangled, birchen, hardened, strengthened, quickened, &c. almost frighten us when written as they are actually pronounced, as rapt, scratcht, wrencht, bridl'd, fangl'd, birch'n, strength'n'd, quick'n'd, &c.; they become still more formidable when used contractedly in the solemn style, which never ought to be the case; for here instead of thou strength'n'st or strength'n'd'st, thou quick'n'st or quick'n'd'st, we ought to pronounce ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... so many novelties, I was well supported by Mr. F. Leyland, the junior partner of Messrs. Bibby's firm, and by the intelligent and practical experience of Captain Birch, the overlooker, and Captain George Wakeham, the Commodore of the company. Unsuccessful attempts had been made many years before to condense the steam from the engines by passing it into variously formed chambers, tubes, &c., to be there condensed by surfaces kept cold by the circulation ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... the second son of Simon Butler, Esq., of Appletree, in the county of Northampton, by Miss Ann Birch, daughter of Thomas Birch, Esq., of Gorscot, in the county of Stafford. His family, for amplitude of possessions, and splendor of descent and alliances, had vied with the noblest and wealthiest of this kingdom, but was reduced to slender circumstances at the time of his birth. A tradition ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... strikes us in the wildest natural landscapes,—in the relative shapes of rocks, the harmony of colours in the heaths, ferns, and lichens, the leaves of the beech and the oak, the stems and rich brown branches of the birch and other mountain trees, varying from verging autumn to returning spring,—compared with the visual effect from the greater number of artificial plantations?—From this, that the natural landscape is effected, as it were, by a single energy modified ab intra in ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... black-spotted leaves, and deep-grey crested dog- violets. On one side was a perfect grove of the broad-leaved, waxen- belled Solomon's seal, sloping down to moister ground where was a golden river of king-cups, and above was a long glade between young birch-trees, their trunks gleaming silvery white, the boughs over head breaking out into foliage that looked yellow rather than green against the blue sky, and the ground below one sheet of that unspeakably intense purple blue ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... along the bushes; the leaves fluttered, then hung quite still. And he heard a voice—Alicia's—speaking. "My lovely, lovely world!" And moving forward a step, he saw her standing on the river-bank, braced against the trunk of a birch-tree, her head thrown back, and her arms stretched wide apart as though to clasp the lovely world she had apostrophised. To have gone up to her would have been like breaking up a lovers' interview, and he turned round instead ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy
... by the Society of Biblical Archaeology. This work, which is not yet (1883) complete, is entitled The Bronze Ornaments of the Gates of Balawat, Shalmaneser II. 859-825, edited, with an introduction, by Samuel BIRCH, with descriptions and translations by Theophilus G. PINCHES, folio, London. The three first parts are before us. The motive reproduced above belongs to the plate marked ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... TO CHOOSE FROM.—HEAL & SON'S Stock comprises handsomely Japanned and Brass-mounted Iron Bedsteads, Children's Cribs and Cots of new and elegant designs, Mahogany, Birch, and Walnut-tree Bedsteads, of the soundest and best Manufacture, many of them fitted with Furnitures, complete. A large Assortment of Servants' and Portable Bedsteads. They have also every variety of Furniture for the complete furnishing ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 231, April 1, 1854 • Various
... my fire, slipping on a great roll of birch bark which blazed up brightly, filling the woods with light. There, under a spruce, where a dark shadow had been a moment agone, stood the mother, her eyes all ablaze with the wonder of the light; now staring steadfastly ...
— Wood Folk at School • William J. Long
... will ever forget it as long as they live. The hit does that; for a kick is a very striking thing, that's a fact. There has been no good scholars since birch rods went out o' school, ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... that love was lost, she sat with her father, oppressed and cold as it had been a vault. Even in his preoccupation he could not fail to see how ill she seemed that morning: it appeared to him that she had the look of a mountain birch stricken by the first ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... fireplace there were birch logs ready to be kindled. At her suggestion he put a match to them for the cheeriness they gave while she lighted a green shaded lamp which radiated a soft glow over the heavy mahogany library table ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... however, could their actions be thus described. Two soldiers who had just returned from an expedition to the Indian country, started for St. Paul on the evening of their return, carrying with them their blankets which they meant to sell for "refreshment". But their birch canoe upset and before aid could reach ...
— Old Fort Snelling - 1819-1858 • Marcus L. Hansen
... anything like it?" said Master Byles Gridley to himself. "I shall have all the young folks in Oxbow Village to take care of at this rate. Susan Posey in trouble, too! Well, well, well, it's easier to get a birch-bark canoe off the shallows than a big ship off the rocks. Susan Posey's trouble will be come at easily enough; but Myrtle Hazard floats in deeper water. We must make Susan Posey tell her own story, or let her tell it, for it will all come ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... a certain tree into a kind of cloth; some are used in medicines, as the Peruvian bark for Quinine; others in dyeing, as that of the alder; others in spicery, as cinnamon, &c.; the bark of oak, in tanning; that of a kind of birch is used by the ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... forgotten them; killed their meat as they found it; feasted in plenty and starved in famine, and searched unceasingly for the yellow lure. They crisscrossed the land in every direction, threaded countless unmapped rivers in precarious birch-bark canoes, and with snowshoes and dogs broke trail through thousands of miles of silent white, where man had never been. They struggled on, under the aurora borealis or the midnight sun, through ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... no beauty in the scene as they wearily led two packhorses through the thin, scattered trees, with Benson lagging a short distance behind. They had spent some time crossing a wide stretch of rolling country dotted with clumps of poplar and birch, which was still sparsely inhabited; and now they were compelled to pick their way among fallen branches and patches of muskeg, for the ground was marshy and their feet sank among the ...
— The Intriguers • Harold Bindloss
... to state here that the lands which grow hardwood timber will usually grow clover. By hardwood timber is meant such trees as maple, beech, birch, oak, elm, basswood, butternut and walnut. Where forests are found comprising one or more varieties of these trees anywhere on this continent, and especially comprising several of them, the conclusion is safe that medium red clover ...
— Clovers and How to Grow Them • Thomas Shaw
... green; for stony as seems the hard glebe, constricted by its bare and gnarled roots, they draw sustenance from afar; and not another knoll on which the sun so delights to pour his beams. Weeks before any other Sycamore, and almost as early as the alder or the birch—the GLORY OF MOUNT PLEASANT, for so we schoolboys called it, unfolded itself like a banner. You could then see only the low windows of the dwelling—for eaves, roof, and chimneys all disappeared—and then, when you stood beneath, was not the sound of the bees like the very ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... Goodwin, Renouf, Chabas, Brugsch, Ebers, Maspero, and Groff have all made original studies on it. The present translation is, however, a fresh one made by Mr. Griffith word for word, and shaped as little as possible by myself in editing it. The copy followed is the publication by Birch in "Select Papyri," part ii. pls. ix. to xix. Before considering the details of the story, we should notice an important question about its age and composition. That it is as old as the XIXth Dynasty in ...
— Egyptian Tales, Second Series - Translated from the Papyri • W. M. Flinders Petrie
... to the Giant's Stairway and sat down in the little rock chapel. There was a picnic at the Lovers' Leap, and I had that side of the island to myself. I was leaning back, half asleep, in the deep shadow, when the sound of voices roused me; a birch-bark canoe was passing close in shore, and two were in it,—Jeannette and our surgeon. I could not hear their words, but I noticed Rodney's expression as he leaned forward. Jeannette was paddling slowly; her cheeks were flushed, and her eyes brilliant. Another moment and a point hid ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... morning wind was blowing fresh from the clover-fields, rose-gardens, and new-leafed black birch and sassafras. Such a well-kept, clean world of open country it looked to Patsy as her eye followed the road before her, on to the greening meadows and wooded slopes, that her heart joined the chorus of song-sparrow and meadow-lark, ...
— Seven Miles to Arden • Ruth Sawyer
... Henry James, for instance, wrote a review of "Drum Taps" in the Nation, November 16, 1865. In the lusty heyday and assurance of twenty-two years, he laid the birch on smartly. It is just a little saddening to find that even so clear-sighted an observer as Henry James could not see through the chaotic form of Whitman to the great vision and throbbing music that ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... is a narrative which will bear retelling, and to which Mr. Henty, whose careful study of details is worthy of all praise, does full justice.... His adventures are told with much spirit; the escape when the birch canoes have been damaged by an ...
— Tales of Daring and Danger • George Alfred Henty
... of its native trees and immediately replant saplings of certain introduced varieties about the farmyard or along the streets. In this way a forest growth of oak, elm, beech, butternut, hemlock, basswood, and birch is cleared off to give room for saplings of soft maple, cottonwood, and brittle willow. It is felt that the inexpensiveness of leaving the forest trees standing would derogate from the dignity that should invest ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... if chaplain in both houses of the Legislature. There is a tradition that the Doctor was somewhat strict and severe in his requirements of the young catechists, and on occasions he resorted to the birch to enforce his teachings. "After punishing several of them one winter day, his feet slipped as he stepped from the icy threshold of the school, and he fell at full length, his hat and wig rolling off his head. There-upon ...
— Annals and Reminiscences of Jamaica Plain • Harriet Manning Whitcomb
... wanted to become acquainted with them, as well as with the little flowers that grew at their feet; and he tried to teach her how to know each separate kind by the bark and leaf and manner of growth. The pine and hemlock and fir were easily learnt; the white birch, too; beyond those, at first, she was perpetually confounding one with another. Mr. Van Brunt had to go over and over his instructions never weary, always vastly amused. Pleasant lessons these were! Ellen thought so, and Mr. ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell
... and berries laid up for a time of scarcity were the property of the wife, and the husband would not touch them without her permission. In many cases such property was very extensive. Among the Menomini Indians, for instance, a woman of good circumstances would own as many as from 1200 to 1500 birch-bark vessels.[140] In the New Mexican pueblo what comes from outside the house, as soon as it is inside is put under the immediate control of the women. Bandelier, in his report of his tour in Mexico, tells ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... stove smoke occasionally beyond all endurance. Since you will need but little fire to keep you warm, you can use a funnel made of boards, barrel-staves, old spout, and the like. Old tin cans, boot-legs, birch-bark, and stout paper can be made to do service as elbows, with the assistance of turf, grass-ropes, and large leaves. But I forewarn you there is not much fun, either in rigging your stove and funnel, or in sitting by it and waiting for the storm to ...
— How to Camp Out • John M. Gould
... down his birch-bark moose-horn and bellowed a weird signal to Cummins, who opened a crack of his door to listen, ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... heifer were close by each other, browsing on the sweet birch undergrowth that grew thick there. When I came up they both stopped and stood looking at me with their great earnest eyes, so wistfully, as if they wondered ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... an evil spirit, who punished 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 of the peninsula were it not for the abundance of flies and mosquitoes. ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 822 - Volume XXXII, Number 822. Issue Date October 3, 1891 • Various
... Island, and the red men prayed for water. It is true that they could get it at Lake Ronkonkoma, but some of them were many miles from there, and, beside, they feared the spirits at that place: the girl who plied its waters in a phosphor-shining birch, seeking her recreant lover; and the powerful guardians that the Great Spirit had put in charge to keep the fish from being caught, for these fish were the souls of men, awaiting deliverance into another form. The people gathered about their villages in bands and besought ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... be done daily, hourly, momently, in order that the draught of life may steadily increase. And to do this unflinchingly, a man must be his own schoolmaster, must recognise that he is always in need of wisdom, must be ready to practise any austerities, to use the birch-rod unhesitatingly against himself, in order to gain his end. It becomes evident to any one who regards the subject seriously, that only a man who has the potentialities in him both of the voluptuary and the stoic has any chance of entering the Golden Gates. He must be capable of ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins
... the water was knee-deep; and I think we kept this day mostly the direction west and northwest. The woods that we traversed consisted in the beginning mostly of oaks, but after three or four hours' marching it was mostly birch trees. It snowed the whole day, so it was very heavy marching over the hills; and after seven leagues, by guess, we arrived at a little house made of bark in the forest, where we lighted a fire and stopped for ...
— Narratives of New Netherland, 1609-1664 • Various
... tent, made with poles stuck into the ground, in a circle, fastened together at the top, and covered on the outside with skins of wild animals, or with birch bark. The Indians light a fire of sticks and logs on the ground, in the middle of the wigwam, and lie or sit all round it; the smoke goes up to the top and escapes. In the winter, they bank it up with snow, and ...
— Lady Mary and her Nurse • Catharine Parr Traill
... for a season. He found them an exceedingly good tempered and very communicative people. They told him that there was another town higher up the river, and Cartier determined upon visiting that congregation of birch bark tents or huts, pitched on a spot of land called Hochelaga, now the site of Montreal. At Hochelaga the "new Governor" met with a magnificent reception. A thousand natives assembled to meet him on the shore, and the compliment was returned by presents of "tin" beads, and other trifles. ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... that was ever found of him. But it was supposed that the child had subsisted, perhaps for weeks, on the berries and other sustenance such as a forest-child knew how to find in the woods. I forgot to say, above, that a piece of birch or other bark was found, which he appeared to have gnawed. It was thought that the cry of "Father! father!" which the mother and little sister heard in the night-time, was really the little fellow's voice, then within hearing of his home; but he wandered away again, and at last sank ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... each of us was to go (though, as a matter of fact, he never acted according to such instructions, but always followed his own devices). Then he unleashed the hounds, fastened the leashes to his saddle, whistled to the pack, and disappeared among the young birch trees the liberated hounds jumping about him in high delight, wagging their tails, and sniffing and gambolling with one another as they dispersed ...
— Childhood • Leo Tolstoy
... at a neighbouring farm-house, where there lived one of Mr. Walsingham's tenants; a man of the name of Birch, a respectable farmer, who was originally from Ireland, and whose son was at sea with Captain Walsingham. The captain had taken young Birch under his particular care, at Mr. ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... were found to be stove in, and the timbers within started. The farther they proceeded in removing the sheathing, the more they discovered the decayed state of the ship's hull. The chief damage was repaired with a birch tree, which had been cut down when they were there before, and was the only one in the neighbourhood large enough for the purpose; but Captain King gave orders that no more sheathing should be ripped off, being ...
— Captain Cook - His Life, Voyages, and Discoveries • W.H.G. Kingston
... suspicion at the approaching carriage, the long ditches, overgrown with mugwort, wormwood, and mountain ash; and as he watched the fresh fertile wilderness and solitude of this steppe country, the greenness, the long slopes, and valleys with stunted oak bushes, the grey villages, and scant birch trees,—the whole Russian landscape, so long unseen by him, stirred emotion at once pleasant, sweet and almost painful in his heart, and he felt weighed down by a kind of pleasant oppression. Slowly his ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... sketch of his character. Stretched out as if to guard the countess, as a miser guards his hoard, that enormous hand was covered with hair so thick, it presented such a network of veins and projecting muscles, that it gave the idea of a branch of birch clasped with a growth ...
— The Hated Son • Honore de Balzac
... Brahmanas! That chief, induced by my request, will, without doubt, give thee as much wealth as thou desirest.' Thus addressed, O king, Gautama cheerfully set out from that place, eating on the way, to his fill, fruits sweet as ambrosia. Beholding the sandal and aloe and birch trees that stood along the road, and enjoying their refreshing shade, the Brahmana proceeded quickly. He then reached the city known by the name of Meruvraja. It had large porches made of stone, and high ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... most considerable papers communicated to the society, which have, hitherto, not been published, are inserted, in their proper order, as a supplement to the Philosophical Transactions. By Thomas Birch, D. D. secretary to the Royal ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... found themselves outside of the battle-field in a narrow loamy ravine overgrown with dwarfish trees. The ravine was deep and had washed-out clay slopes. High above it stretched a muddy, uneven strip of grey sky, which poured an unceasing rain upon the soaked red clay, upon the small wet birch trees, and the group of soldiers, who had lost their way and driven by inertia were ...
— The Shield • Various
... cluster of slender birch trees deep in the forest, she seated herself on a fallen trunk and unrolled her crocheting. Through the thin foliage the sun filtered over her hair and spangled the ground at her feet. A breeze as gentle as herself whispered above her head in friendly commune with the ...
— The Return of Blue Pete • Luke Allan
... the lake was quite covered with the citron-yellow leaves from the elms and maples; here and there were spots of a darker foliage. It was very pleasant, very clean to walk on this tigerskin-carpet, and to watch the leaves fall down like snow; the birch looked even lighter and more graceful with its branches almost bare and the roan-tree was wonderful with its heavy scarlet cluster of berries. And the sky was so blue, so blue, and the wood seemed so much bigger, one could look so far between the trunks. And then of course ...
— Mogens and Other Stories - Mogens; The Plague At Bergamo; There Should Have Been Roses; Mrs. Fonss • Jens Peter Jacobsen
... fiercely at the air with her thin hands. Her eyes started out, foam was on her lips, and she shook in her fury like a birch-tree in the wind, looking so evil that Asmund drew ...
— Eric Brighteyes • H. Rider Haggard
... wood, so I can cook good," she ordered when they came back. "I want pine or birch. ...
— The Huntress • Hulbert Footner
... arises the harmony that strikes us in the wildest natural landscapes,—in the relative shapes of rocks, the harmony of colours in the heaths, ferns, and lichens, the leaves of the beech and the oak, the stems and rich brown branches of the birch and other mountain trees, varying from verging autumn to returning spring,—compared with the visual effect from the greater number of artificial plantations?—From this, that the natural landscape is effected, as it were, by a single ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... flooded in moonlight and the birch trees wavered their stark shadows across it like supplicating arms. Suddenly I heard the soft padded sound of snow falling upon snow, to slowly perceive a figure, the slender figure of a young child attempting to arouse itself ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... had been progressing for some time before the captain's arrival. In front of the bluff of rock blazed a fire made of birch and maple, and on a spit before this a huge piece of venison was roasting. A hideous old woman, with eyes like a rattlesnake, and draggled hair coloured like the moss upon an aged fir, stood by the spit, which every few moments she turned. ...
— The Four Canadian Highwaymen • Joseph Edmund Collins
... that dace or perch? Said Alderman Birch; I take it for herring, Said Alderman Perring. This jack's very good, Said Alderman Wood; But its bones might a man slay, Said Alderman Ansley. I'll butter what I get, Said Alderman Heygate. Give me some stewed carp, ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... received from head-quarters, that all officers absent on leave should instantly return to duty. This was a disagreeable piece of intelligence, particularly at that hour, but necessitas non habet legem, as Dr. Birch used to tell our hero at school—the orders were imperative. Long and loud were the laments and remonstrances of the party, we are assured. After ordering Dart to be saddled, the Lieutenant stepped into the hall to have a moment's survey ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 557., Saturday, July 14, 1832 • Various
... most biting laws,— The needful bits and curbs to headstrong steeds,— Which for this fourteen years we have let sleep, Even like an o'ergrown lion in a cave, That goes not out to prey. Now, as fond fathers, Having bound up the threat'ning twigs of birch, Only to stick it in their children's sight For terror, not to use, in time the rod Becomes more mock'd than fear'd; so our decrees, Dead to infliction, to themselves are dead; And liberty plucks justice by the nose; The baby beats the nurse, and ...
— Measure for Measure • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... scow, cockleshell, wherry, coble^, punt, cog, kedge, lerret^; eight oar, four oar, pair oar; randan^; outrigger; float, raft, pontoon; prame^; iceboat, ice canoe, ice yacht. catamaran, hydroplane, hovercraft, coracle, gondola, carvel^, caravel; felucca, caique^, canoe, birch bark canoe, dugout canoe; galley, galleyfoist^; bilander^, dogger^, hooker, howker^; argosy, carack^; galliass^, galleon; polacca^, polacre^, tartane^, junk, lorcha^, praam^, proa^, prahu^, saick^, sampan, xebec, dhow; dahabeah^; nuggah^; kayak, keel boat [U.S.], log canoe, pirogue; quadrireme^, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... I'm daring a rampageous river that runs the devil knows where; My hand is athrill on the paddle, the birch-bark bounds like a bird. Hark to the rumble of rapids! Here in my morris chair Eager and tense I'm straining — isn't it most absurd? Now in the churn and the lather, foam that hisses and stings, Leap I, keyed for the struggle, fury and fume and roar; Rocks are spitting like ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service
... in all, fairly carved a farm out of the big forest that covered the cold rocky hills. Giant work it was for them in such heavy timber—pine, hemlock, maple, beech and birch—the clearing of a single acre being a man's work for a year. The place where the maples were thickest was reserved for a sugar grove, and from it was made all of the sweet material they needed, and some besides. Economy of the very strictest kind had to be used in every direction. Main strength ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... brook, that you can ford all the year round, if it does not utterly dry up in the summer heats, when you want it most; or, at best, it is a fussy little tormenting river, that won't and can't sail a sloop. What are you going to do about it? You are going to wind up your lead and line, shoulder your birch canoe, as the old sea-kings used, and thrid the deep forests, and scale the purple hills, till you come to water again, when you will unroll your lead and line for another essay. Is that fickleness? What else can you do? Must you launch your bark on the unquiet stream, against whose pebbly bottom ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... John Birch, the farmer who had sheltered him, was so fearful of punishment, that he hanged himself, in a few days' time, and even before he was apprehended. But nothing was done to Grace Howe, of Bridgeball, who had been Wade's greatest comforter; neither was anything done to us; although Eliza had added ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... traditionary habitat, it is not there. Round and round we pace, hoping and despairing, till a faint, most delicate odor, indescribably suggestive of woodland freshness, catches the roused sense; or else one silvery star peeps out from under an upturned birch-leaf. Then down on hands and knees; tear up brush to right and left, the brown skeletons of the withered foliage. The ground is white with stars. Some are touched with delicate pink, some creamy white,—but all breathing out the evanescent secret of the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... from time immemorial, till the fatal deluge of the fire-water burst upon the red men, and swept their whole race away from the cold fountains. Endicott, and his followers, came next, and often knelt down to drink, dipping their long beards in the spring. The richest goblet, then, was of birch-bark. Governor Winthrop, after a journey afoot from Boston, drank here, out of the hollow of his hand. The elder Higginson here wet his palm, and laid it on the brow of the first town-born child. For many years it was the watering-place, ...
— A Rill From the Town Pump (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... The green-birch fire snapped merrily in the range. The draft sang in the flue. Outside, a soft, feathery snow was falling, for winter came early in the uplands of Vermont this past year. To Cora McBride, however, the winter meant only hardship. Within another week she must go into town and secure ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... youth where I spent my best years, or at least the years of most enjoyment. It was then a wild moor, with some natural beauty, a picturesque den leading from the house to the noble river, wooded with native birch and scrubby oak, with some tall larches and magnificent horse-chestnuts, and even a few immemorial Spanish chestnuts planted by the old Peterboroughs, now all gone. Along that river bank were some of the broadest haughs with which I am acquainted, and some of the ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... their usefulness as implements of persuasion, being now employed exclusively as foot-gear. The lissom birch thrives ungarnered in the thicket, where grace and gentleness supply the whilom vigor of its sway. The unyielding barrel-stave, that formerly occupied a place of honor and convenience in the household, is now relegated, a harmless thing, to a forgotten corner of the ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... make you feel fit. First thing you do when you shake out of your blankets is jump in an' have a swim. Gee, it's great to swim when the morning mist is still on the water an' the sun just strikes the tops of the birch trees. Ever smelt bacon cooking? I mean out in the woods, in a frying pan over some sticks of pine and beech wood.... Some great old smell, isn't it?... And after you've paddled all day, an' feel tired and ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... o'ertaken in his track, With stolen chattels on his back, Will hung his head in fear and shame, And to the awful presence came—— A great, green, bashful simpleton, The butt of all good-natured fun. With smile suppressed, and birch upraised, The thunderer faltered—"I'm amazed That you, my biggest pupil, should Be guilty of an act so rude! Before the whole set school to boot—— What evil genius put you to't?" "'Twas she herself, sir," sobbed the lad; "I did not mean to be so bad; But when Susannah ...
— Little Masterpieces of American Wit and Humor - Volume I • Various
... world, in which men and women of genius can be raised, and that is all. It is with man as it is with vegetation. In the valley you find the oak and elm tossing their branches defiantly to the storm, and as you advance up the mountain side the hemlock, the pine, the birch, the spruce, the fir, and finally you come to little dwarfed trees, that look like other trees seen through a telescope reversed—every limb twisted as through pain—getting a scanty subsistence from the miserly crevices of the rocks. You go on ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... hardly equaled anywhere. There are pines in endless variety—from the Sierra and from the seashore, from New England, France, Norway, and Japan. There flourish the cedar, spruce, hemlock, oak, beech, birch, and maple. There in peace and plenty are the sequoia, the bamboo, and the deodar. Eucalypts pierce the sky and Japanese dwarfs ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... in plowing corn, raked hay, wielded the shovel and the hoe, and chopped wood. At six years old he began to go to school—the typical district school. "The first date," he once said, "I remember inscribing upon my writing-book was 1818." The ferule, or the birch-rod, was in those days the assistant schoolmaster, and young Barnum made its acquaintance. He was, however, an apt and ready scholar, particularly excelling in mathematics. One night, when he was ten years old, he was called ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... the advance of the Irish reserve, whose heavy and sustained fire compelled the Knight of Ardenvohr to forego his advantage, and content himself with repulsing the enemy. The Marquis of Montrose, in the meanwhile, availing himself of some scattered birch trees, as well as of the smoke produced by the close fire of the Irish musketry, which concealed the operation, called upon Dalgetty to follow him with the horse, and wheeling round so as to gain the right flank and even the rear of the enemy, he commanded his six trumpets ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... and flourished through its long generation, had fallen beneath the weight of years, been buried in green moss, and nourished the roots of others as gigantic. Hark! A light paddle dips into the lake, a birch canoe glides around the point, and an Indian chief has passed, painted and feather-crested, armed with a bow of hickory, a stone tomahawk, and flint-headed arrows. But the ripple had hardly vanished from the water, when a white flag caught the breeze, over a castle ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... nothing of those movements of peoples, in the course of which a given art was brought from one part of the world to another. Hence, when we find the art duly installed in a particular place, and utilizing the local product, the bamboo in the south, let us say, or the birch in the north, as it naturally does, we easily slip into the error of supposing that the local products of themselves called the art into existence. Similar needs, we say, have generated similar expedients. No doubt there is some truth in this principle; but I doubt if, on the whole, history tends ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... of white soap, cut small, dissolved in four pints of water, rather hot, in a large basin; make the solution into a lather, by beating it with birch rods, or wires. Introduce the feathers, and rub well with the hands for five or six minutes. After this soaping, wash in clean water, as hot as the hand ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... attended them at least twice a year—but they were sufficiently exotic to make him feel important. He sat at a glass-covered table in the Art Room of the Inn, with its painted rabbits, mottoes lettered on birch bark, and waitresses being artistic in Dutch caps; he ate insufficient lettuce sandwiches, and was lively and naughty with Mrs. Sassburger, who was as smooth and large-eyed as a cloak-model. Sassburger and he had met two days before, ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... graceful White-Birch tree, With bark so light, so tough and tight That Indians wrought Canoes we're taught, ...
— Mother Truth's Melodies - Common Sense For Children • Mrs. E. P. Miller
... wigwam, a description of the manner and stages of its construction may be interesting. Poles, twelve or fourteen feet long, are placed in the ground, these meeting at the top, and leaving an opening through which the smoke may escape. Over the poles are placed nets, made of flags, or birch bark, and, sometimes, the skins ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie
... man could always put down when he liked. Sir James had no idea that he should ever like to put down the predominance of this handsome girl, in whose cleverness he delighted. Why not? A man's mind—what there is of it—has always the advantage of being masculine,—as the smallest birch-tree is of a higher kind than the most soaring palm,—and even his ignorance is of a sounder quality. Sir James might not have originated this estimate; but a kind Providence furnishes the limpest personality with a little gunk or starch in ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... river. The houses on the other shore, each surrounded with its patch of cleared land, were sadly distant from one another. Behind the clearings, and on either side of them to the river's bank, it was always forest: a dark green background of cypress against which a lonely birch tree stood out here and there, its bole naked and white as the column of a ...
— Maria Chapdelaine - A Tale of the Lake St. John Country • Louis Hemon
... have gone; a happy journey and 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
... and after that, for an hour or more, something lived for him in the glow of the fire which Olaf kept burning. It was the memory of Mary Standish, her quiet, beautiful eyes gazing at him, her pale face taking form in the lacy wisps of birch-smoke. His mind pictured her in the flame-glow as she had listened to him that day in Skagway, when he had told her of this fight that was ahead. And it pleased him to think she would have made this same fight for Alaska ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... Assyria is furnished by the magnificent bronze gates of Balawat, now in The British Museum. See Birch and Pinches, The Bronze Ornaments of the Palace ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... somewhere about eleven o'clock. The night was intensely still, without a zephyr stirring among the trees, and of that wavering darkness caused by a half-clouded moon. On the black and green water close to the bank rocked a light birch-bark canoe, a ticklish craft, which a puff might overturn. The young man who had urged the necessity for silence was groping round it, fumbling with the sharp bow, in which he fixed a short pole or "jack-staff," with some object—at present no ...
— Camp and Trail - A Story of the Maine Woods • Isabel Hornibrook
... Quebec last Thursday, and went by railway to Riviere de Loup. There I had a fall, and hurt my ribs. Next day I drove over the, new, Temiscouata road to the Lake, and thence took a birch bark canoe and two men and paddled down the Lake, and down the river Madawasca to Little Falls, where I arrived in a drenching storm of rain at one o'clock in the morning—having had 'perils by water.' ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... preceding evening; but to his astonishment a mountain stream was now foaming down it, leaping from rock to rock, and filling the glen with babbling murmurs. He, however, made shift to scramble up its sides, working his toilsome way through thickets of birch, sassafras, and witch-hazel, and sometimes tripped up or entangled by the wild grapevines that twisted their coils from tree to tree, and spread a kind ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... larger than some boxes he had seen. It was about eight feet long by six in width, and the ceiling was so low that, even kneeling, his head touched it. His match burned out, and he lighted another. This time he saw a candle stuck in a bit of split birch that projected from the wall. He crept to it and lighted it. For a moment he looked about him, and again he blessed Fingers. The little scow was prepared for a voyage. Two narrow bunks were built at the far end, one so close above the other that Kent grinned as he thought of squeezing ...
— The Valley of Silent Men • James Oliver Curwood
... feet on the ground, he hitched the horse to the trunk of a little birch and waved his ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... at a farm house, some miles north of the town, got a job on the woodpile, and astonished the farmer by the amount of birch he could saw in an hour. He took his pay in the shape of a bountiful dinner, and—after half an hour's smoke and talk with the farmer, to whom he gave a few pamphlets from the store in his knapsack—said ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... 77 years, of 32 East Street, Holborn, who died on Wednesday last. Alice Mathieson stated that she was landlady of the house where deceased lived. Witness last saw her alive on the previous Monday. She lived quite alone. Mr. Francis Birch, relieving officer for the Holborn district, stated that deceased had occupied the room in question for thirty-five years. When witness was called, on the 1st, he found the old woman in a terrible state, and the ambulance and coachman had to be disinfected ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... jewelled lamps in great black galleries, Garlanded with beauty, and burning all the night; All the doors were shadowy with orpin and St. John's wort, Long fennel, green birch, and lilies ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... brilliance of the eye was each separate pupil. Four spots of down on either of his two cheeks: a blue spot, a purple spot, a green spot, a yellow spot. Fifty strands of bright-yellow hair from one ear to the other, like to a comb of birch twigs or like to a brooch of pale gold in the face of the sun. A clear, white, shorn spot was upon him, as if a cow had licked it. A [10]fair, laced[10] green[a] mantle about him; a silver pin therein [11]over his white breast, so that the eyes of men could not look ...
— The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Tain Bo Cualnge • Unknown
... their rights, wrestled lovingly with their errors, mediated in their quarrels, and was idolized by them as was no other of his race. Pokanoket, Massasoit and Canonicus were his hosts and guardians during the winter and spring; and in summer he descended the river in a birch-bark canoe to the site of the present city of Providence, so named by him in recognition of the Divine mercies; and there he pitched his tent beside the spring, hoping to make the place "a shelter for persons ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... the winter," said the old goblin, "and also about the fir and the birch-trees, and the ghost stories, and of the tingling frost. You shall tell your tales, for no one over there can do it so well; and we will sit in the stone rooms, where the pine logs are burning, and drink mead out of the ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... other, and leave little space between them and its banks. The Morumbidgee itself, with an increased breadth, averaging from seventy to eighty yards, presents a still, deep sheet of water to the view, over which the casuarina bends with all the grace of the willow, or the birch, but with more sombre foliage. To the west, a high line of flooded-gum trees extending from the river to the base of the hills which form the west side of the valley before noticed, hides the near elevations, and thus shuts in the whole space. ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... it," he said, "that with such wide knowledge of things new as well as old; and such general information as you possess, you aren't even up to the name of a play, and that you've come out with such a whole string of words. Why, the real name of the play is: 'Carrying a birch and begging for punishment'". ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... from laburnum trees, And clothed the lilac, the birch and broom; I've wakened the sound of humming-bees, And decked all nature ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... coniferae, especially of the Lawsoniania and the Douglassi— the latter being one of the finest accessions to our list of conifers. It is graceful in form, and perfectly hardy. I also interspersed with these several birch-trees, whose slender and graceful habit of growth forms so fine a contrast to the dense foliage of the conifers. To thus paint, as it were, with trees, is a high source of pleasure in gardening. Among my various enjoyments this has ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... in endless beauty, unblighted by the chilling blasts of northern climates. In these vallies, the oak, the ash, and the beech, exhibit the peculiar magnificence of forest scenery, while, on the neighbouring hills, the birch waves its airy foliage round the dark masses of rock which terminate the view. Nothing can be conceived more striking than the scenery which this variety of rock and wood produce in every part of this romantic forest. At times you pass through an unbroken mass of aged timber, surrounded by the native ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... is wild and rugged. It is a lofty eminence covered with huge boulders of sandstone, between which rise birch trees and oaks, their foliage already yellowed by autumn. These tall trees stand out from the background of red light, which the sun has left in the west, resembling the reflection of a ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... there were families by four or five. Some of them who had finished their houses earlier than the rest, had already commenced gathering their provisions for the winter. These consisted of the leaves and soft twigs of several species of trees—such as willow, birch, and mulberry—and we saw collections of these floating in the water in front of ...
— The Desert Home - The Adventures of a Lost Family in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... Him who made earth and heaven: but they found nothing which they thought would suit the blessed St. Boniface, save that they stayed a little at the place which is called Ruohen-bah, 'the rough brook,' to see if it would suit; but it would not. So they went back to their birch huts to fast and pray ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... arranged, Piskaret drew a long breath, grasped his war-club, and stealthily pushing aside the loose birch-bark door-flap of the nearest lodge, peeped inside. By the ember light he saw that every Iroquois, man and woman, was fast asleep, under furs, on spruce boughs around ...
— Boys' Book of Indian Warriors - and Heroic Indian Women • Edwin L. Sabin
... but from it I got an idea, and soon I had half the tribe at work building me great meat caches. And of all they hunted I got the lion's share and stored it away. Nor was Moosu idle. He made himself a pack of cards from birch bark, and taught Neewak the way to play seven-up. He also inveigled the father of Tukeliketa into the game. And one day he married the maiden, and the next day he moved into the shaman's house, which was ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... Professor Dawkins concludes that the nearest approach at the present day to the Post-Pliocene climate of Western Europe is to be found in the climate of the great Siberian plains which stretch from the Altai Mountains to the Frozen Sea. "Covered by impenetrable forests, for the most part of Birch, Poplar, Larch, and Pines, and low creeping dwarf Cedars, they present every gradation in climate from the temperate to that in which the cold is too severe to admit of the growth of trees, which decrease in size as the traveller advances ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... main frame and cross supports are numbered and matched, I to IIII, and at the feed end they are numbered V to VIII but were mis-matched in the original assembly. Further rigidity is achieved by means of hand-forged lag screws. The arch of the frame is birch and the arch arm maple. The 14-inch doffer roller is made of chestnut.[17] The iron shafts are square and turned down at the bearings. The worker rollers are fitted with sprockets and turned by a hand-forged chain. The comb plate, stamped ...
— The Scholfield Wool-Carding Machines • Grace L. Rogers
... Sarah. Bernouilli. Berthelot. Berwick (Duke of). Berwickshire. Berwick-upon-Tweed. Beryllium. Besancon. Bessemer, Sir Henry. Bet and Betting. Betrothal. Beyle. Bezique. Bhagalpur. Bible Christians. Bichromates and Chromates. Bidder. Bigamy. Bijapur. Bikanir. Bilaspur. Bilbao. Billiards. Binomial. Birch. Birkenhead. Birmingham. Birney, James G. Biron, Armand de Gontaut. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... mushroom; and the colour, when you can see it for dust, a cold, sombre, grayish green. One olive is as like another as one mop-stick is like another. The tree has no picturesqueness, no variety. It is not high enough to be grand, and not irregular enough to be graceful. Put it beside the birch, the beech, the elm, or the oak, and you will see the poetry of the forest, and its poorest ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 434 - Volume 17, New Series, April 24, 1852 • Various
... Pfingsten, Pentecost, is celebrated as a summer festival. In Northern Germany house doors are wreathed with birch twigs, while young birch trees are placed upright on the ...
— A Book Of German Lyrics • Various
... "whizz" of his reel, the rush of a brown mountain stream with its fringe of silver birch and stunted alder, the white side of a leaping salmon, and the gasp of that noble fish towed deftly into the shallows at last, afforded him a natural and unmixed pleasure. He loved the heather dearly, the wild hillside, ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... storm that was upon them might last for days—they set about preparing a shelter. With a little search, whooping to each other lest they stray away, they found a big dry stub that some gale had snapped off a few feet above the snow. While Mooka scurried about, collecting birch bark and armfuls of dry branches, Noel took off his snow-shoes and began with one of them to shovel away the snow in a semicircle around the base of the stub. In a short half-hour he had a deep hole ...
— Northern Trails, Book I. • William J. Long
... cherry, ash and other trees. It is made by steeping it in a strong solution of saltpetre and cutting it in small pieces. It is also called German tinder. Thome says that Boletus laricis and Polyporus fomentarius yield the "amadou" of commerce. Then, again, the birch Polyporus, P. betulinus, is used for razor strops. We need not say anything on the uses of fungi as articles of food. This subject has been exhausted by many able mycologists, and, excepting the mere mention of some mushrooms that are edible, the authors have ...
— Among the Mushrooms - A Guide For Beginners • Ellen M. Dallas and Caroline A. Burgin
... soft and indistinct lay in the valley and on the hills. Summer lingered in the garden but on the ridge the nights were cool and in the swamplands, Hughie said, already the maples were coloring with a hint of colder weather. Here and there on birch and poplar ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... accompanied the silence. Not a leaf moved on the bushes of those far-swelling fields or on the hill that hid their summit; the air was like the moonlight, so fragrantly cool with the odors of the damp fern and birch. The straight, supple figure of Girard still stood in the roadway, bareheaded, with that powerful effect which he had, even here, of absorbing all ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... singing and hardly breathed, they stood so still. They looked at St. Nicholas with big, big eyes. In one hand St. Nicholas carried two large packages; in the other, a birch rod. ...
— The Dutch Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... Brunt was at home. Ellen wanted to become acquainted with them, as well as with the little flowers that grew at their feet; and he tried to teach her how to know each separate kind by the bark, and leaf, and manner of growth. The pine and hemlock and fir were easily learnt; the white birch too; beyond those at first she was perpetually confounding one with another. Mr. Van Brunt had to go over and over his instructions; never weary, always vastly amused. Pleasant lessons these were! Ellen thought so, and Mr. Van Brunt ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Susan Warner
... The birch-bark canoe, made by the Indians of the northern rivers and lakes, is really a work of art. It is a model of lightness, and when we consider its frailty, and then the way in which it can be managed in the most turbulent currents, our admiration is divided ...
— Healthful Sports for Boys • Alfred Rochefort
... clean; the coffee-pot was simmering on the stove; a Black-forest clock ticked in the corner; on some hanging shelves stood two painted China figures, a few cups, and about a dozen books; and behind the little looking-glass on the wall there was a fly-flap, and a birch rod carefully bound round with red ribbon. It was the first comfortable room that they had ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... generally have black heads and legs, and their fine grey fur is interspersed with numerous black and white long hairs. They breed perfectly true, and have long been kept in warrens. When they escape and cross with common rabbits, the product, as I hear from Mr. Wyrley Birch, of Wretham Hall, is not a mixture of the two colours, but about half take after the one parent, and the other half after the other parent. Secondly, chinchillas or tame silver-greys (I will use the former name) have short, paler, mouse or slate-coloured ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... this testimony in their favor, the girls proceeded to deposit the body in a shell, ingeniously, and not inelegantly, fabricated of the bark of the birch; after which they lowered it into its dark and final abode. The ceremony of covering the remains, and concealing the marks of the fresh earth, by leaves and other natural and customary objects, was conducted with the same simple and silent ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... be kept from a week to a fortnight, by the following process. Cover them with water, and wash them clean with a birch broom. Then lay them with the deep or concave part of the shell undermost, and sprinkle each of them well with salt and Indian meal. Fill up the tub with cold water. Repeat this every day; first pouring off the liquid of ...
— Directions for Cookery, in its Various Branches • Eliza Leslie
... half a bow-shot from the house on that side (i.e. due north thereof) was a little hazel-brake, and round about it the trees were smaller of kind than the oaks and chestnuts he had passed through before, being mostly of birch and quicken-beam and young ash, with small wood betwixt them; so now he passed through the thicket, and, coming to the edge thereof, beheld the Lady and the King's Son walking together hand in hand, full ...
— The Wood Beyond the World • William Morris
... day low clouds and slanting rain Have swept the woods and dimmed the plain. Wet winds have swayed the birch and oak, And caught and swirled away the smoke, But, all day long, the wooden clock Went ...
— Songs, Merry and Sad • John Charles McNeill
... to the frozen solitude long after all other birds have retired from the desolate scenery. Their food consists of the tender shoots of pines, the seeds of plants, the berries of the arbutus and bilberry, the buds of the birch and alder, the buds of the heather, leaves, and grain. The nest is very simply constructed, consisting of dried grasses placed upon the ground and ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... to speak of Agnes Anne's. But I resolved that I should keep a bright look-out and make the little villains behave. For at an early age our Eden Valley boys were just savages, ready to mock and rend any one of themselves who was a little better dressed, who wore boots instead of clogs with birch-wood soles, or dared to speak without battering the King's English out ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... large. His literary success led to political preferment, and he entered the diplomatic service as Secretary to the French Embassy at Naples in 1823. That same year he was married at Geneva to an English lady, Marianne Birch. His second volume of poetry now appeared, the Nouvelles Meditations. He was transferred to Florence in 1824. In 1825 he published his continuation of Byron, Le Dernier Chant du Pelerinage de Childe Harold. A passage in this poem gave ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... the forest. I know that first you climb a rough, rather narrow road up from the river, that the trees close about you very gradually, that there is a little church with a green turret and a fine view of the Nestor, and that there a broad solemn avenue of silver birch leads you forward, gently and without any sinister omens. Then again the forest clears and there are fields of corn and, built amongst the thin scattering of trees, the village of N——. It was here, on passing the first houses of the village, that I felt the heat to be almost unbearable; it seemed ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... we had made ourselves secure, but the heat was not oppressive, and the general character of the plateau, both in its temperature and in its vegetation, was almost temperate. The beech, the oak, and even the birch were to be found among the tangle of trees which girt us in. One huge gingko tree, topping all the others, shot its great limbs and maidenhair foliage over the fort which we had constructed. In its shade we continued our discussion, while Lord John, who had quickly taken command ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... "our pleasant times in Scotland? Ah, it is a restful place, your Highland home, with the beautiful purple hills rolling away in the distance, and the glorious moors covered with fragrant heather, and the gurgling of the river that runs between birch and fir and willow, making music all day long for those who have the ears to listen, and the hearts to understand the pretty love tune it sings! You know Frenchmen always have more or less sympathy with the Scotch—some ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
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