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More "Bracken" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... dingles, and beyond, across the trees, to remoter country, wild bare hills and dark wooded lands meeting the grey still sky. Immediately beneath his feet the ground sloped steep down to the valley, a hillside of close grass patched with dead bracken, and dotted here and there with stunted thorns, and below there were deep oak woods, all still and silent, and lonely as if no one ever passed that way. The grass and bracken and thorns and woods, all were ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... the silvery sward beside the Stony Bottom there lay the ruffled body of a dead sheep. All about the victim the dewy ground was dark and patchy like dishevelled velvet; bracken trampled down; stones displaced as though by straggling feet; and the whole ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... reaped, lay in tawny stubble. The path ran by this and by a lichened stone wall. Overhead, swallows were skimming. Heath and bracken, rolled the colored hills. The air swam cool and golden, with a smell of ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... large, circular enclosure, crammed to the very top of its girdling bank with furze-bushes, bracken, low hazel, and stunted Scotch firs. Its primary idea was woodcock, its second rabbits; beaters were in the habit of getting through it somehow, but a ride feasible for fox hunters had never so much as occurred to it. Into this, with practical assistance from the country boys, the deeply reluctant ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... The waiting-maids, who have escorted me to the door, fall on all fours as a final salute, and remain prostrate on the threshold—as long as I am still in sight down the dark pathway, where the rain trickles off the great over-arching bracken ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... gut, is not a likely manoeuvre. The grayling behaved well for a couple of yards or so, and then bethought himself of plunging, the consequence being that I lost my hook, and he dropped into a tuft of bracken in a niche ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... only genuine ones), of whom I can affirm only one thing, that they haunted certain brains, and have haunted, among others, my own and my friends'—yours, dear Arthur Lemon, along the dim twilit tracks, among the high growing bracken and the spectral pines, of the south country; and yours, amidst the mist of moonbeams and olive-branches, dear Flora Priestley, while the moonlit sea moaned and rattled against the moldering walls of the house whence Shelley set ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... the tree. He crept stealthily on his hands and knees through the bracken, and as stealthily climbed the wedge of outcrop, and then leaped like a wild cat on the tree. With incredible activity he lifted the balancing stone, and as the tree began to move, in a flash of perception ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... away from our work to-day, For the breeze sweeps over the down; And it's hey for a game where the gorse blossoms flame, And the bracken is bronzing to brown. With the turf 'neath our tread and the blue overhead, And the song of the lark in the whin; There's the flag and the green, with the bunkers between - Now will you be over ...
— Songs of Action • Arthur Conan Doyle
... better than I to mine. So leaving her to take what way she pleased, I rode on, till at length we approached the woods I had descried. Presently we were jogging gently down into a deep and misty valley flanked by bracken and pines, from which issued into the crisp air of morning a most delicious aromatic smell, that seemed at least to prove this valley not ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... in our warrens and wild places, most of the plants are thus more or less protected in one way or another from the attacks of animals. These neglected spots are overgrown with gorse, brambles, nettles, blackthorn, and mullein, as well as with the bitter spurges, and the stringy inedible bracken. So, too, while in our meadows we purposely propagate tender fodder plants, like grasses and clovers, we find on the margins of our pastures and by our roadsides only protected species; such as thistles, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... amber tints, so various and so harmonious in their delicate gradations that the eye of the artist was gladdened by their decay. The hawthorns in Wimperfield Park glowed in the distance like patches of crimson flame, and the undulating sweeps of bracken showed golden-brown against the green-sward; while the oaks-symbolic of all that is solid, ponderous, and constant in woodland nature, slow to bloom and slow to die—had hardly a faded leaf to murk ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... them, met in conclave, partly to gather nuts in the woods near by, partly to discuss class matters, but chiefly to enjoy the crisp autumn weather. The woods were still gorgeous in russets and reds, in spite of the recent heavy frosts, and there was a smell of burning leaves and dry bracken in the air. The girls skipped about ...
— Grace Harlowe's Plebe Year at High School - The Merry Doings of the Oakdale Freshmen Girls • Jessie Graham Flower
... that he had certainly seen a man slinking off the path into the covert; and the Corporal at once hurried to the spot in the hope that it might be the idiot. Making his way through the thicket he presently came upon a man lying down in some bracken and evidently anxious to conceal himself. The fellow was ragged, unkempt and bearded, but he was not the idiot, and he seemed terrified at being discovered, stammering out something about meaning no harm, and ...
— The Drummer's Coat • J. W. Fortescue
... and secretly I too thought they were wicked. We had been taught to believe that we alone were responsible for our sins, and it did not occur to me that the causes of my wickedness might lie beyond my control. The beauty of the scented pines and the new green of the bracken took my breath and filled my heart with a joy that changed immediately to overwhelming grief; for I could not help contrasting this glorious kind of life with the squalid existence to which I must return so soon. I realised so fiercely the force ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... country road, a good deal rutted, and seldom repaired. Opposite the gates rose the steep slope of a heathery hill, along the flank of which the girls were now walking. On their right lay a piece of rough moorland, covered with heather, patches of bracken, and coarse grass. A few yards to the right, it sank in a steep descent. Such was the disposition of the ground for some distance along the road—on one side the hill, on the other a narrow level, ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... Walter looked, and deemed that he beheld something through the grass and bracken on the other side of those two, an ugly brown and yellow body, which, if it were not some beast of the foumart kind, must needs be the monstrous dwarf, or one of his kin; and the flesh crept upon ...
— The Wood Beyond the World • William Morris
... And, alas for auld Scotland, her sons and her daughters! Thy wish was their welfare, thy cause was their own. But 'lorn may we sigh where the hill-winds awaken, And weep in the glen where the cataracts foam, And sleep where the dew-drops are deep on the bracken; Thy foot has the land of thy fathers forsaken, And more—never more will ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... northern counties witches are said to dislike the bracken fern, "because it bears on its root the initial C, which may be seen on cutting the root horizontally."[26] and in most places equally distasteful to them is the yew, perhaps for no better reason than ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... a tone of deep satisfaction, and crawled out of a patch of tall dried bracken, and came forward to ...
— The Wolf Patrol - A Tale of Baden-Powell's Boy Scouts • John Finnemore
... shade in which we lay there stretched out an avenue of timber trees, whereunder the bracken, breast high, had been cut to make a ride. Upon this bracken, and upon this smooth channel in the midst the late sun streamed toward us, a soft wash of gold. Behind all this the sky, pale to whiteness immediately overhead, deepened to the ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... winter. They are free from the dangerous alternation of sunshine and frost. Put things of doubtful hardihood under a north wall, with plenty of sandy soil or ashes over their roots, some cinders on that, and perhaps a little light protection, like bracken, in front of them, and their chances will not be bad. Apropos to tender things, if your little garden is in a cold part of the British Isles, and has ungenial conditions of soil and aspect, don't try to keep tender things out of doors in winter; but, if it is in the ...
— Last Words - A Final Collection of Stories • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... top of the down, The wild heather round me and over me June's high blue, When I look'd at the bracken so bright and the heather so brown, I thought to myself I would offer this book to you, This, and my love together, To you that are seventy-seven, With a faith as clear as the heights of the June-blue heaven, And a fancy as summer-new ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... by are few," she answered. "We are too far off the beaten track. Only on Saturdays and holiday times there are trippers, fearful creatures who pick the bracken, walk arm in arm, and sing songs. Tell me why you look as though ...
— The Double Life Of Mr. Alfred Burton • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... drew back coldly and let her hand fall from his arm. She took a few steps forward, stopped, ran back to him again, crushed his face and head in a close embrace, and then seemed to dip like a bird into the tall bracken, and ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... "purple light," intense enough to perpetuate the brief flower-flush of August on the heather, or the rare sunset-smile of June; out of his heart must well the freshness, that in latter spring and early summer brightens the bracken, nurtures the moss, and cherishes the starry flowers that spangle for a few weeks the pasture of the moor-sheep. Unless that light and freshness are innate and self-sustained, the drear prospect of a Yorkshire moor will be found as barren of poetic as of agricultural interest: where the love ...
— Poems • (AKA Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte) Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell
... lichens; and many of the less important ones would produce valuable colours if experiments were made with the right mordants. Those which have been in use in the Highlands are most of them good dyes. Among these are Ladies Bedstraw, whortleberry, yellow iris, bracken, bramble, meadow sweet, alder, heather and many others. The yellow dyes are most plentiful and many of these are good fast colours. Practically no good red, in quantity, is obtainable. Madder is the only reliable red dye among plants, and that is no longer indigenous in England. Most of the ...
— Vegetable Dyes - Being a Book of Recipes and Other Information Useful to the Dyer • Ethel M. Mairet
... might be expected. A hardy race of trout will sometimes rise freely to the artificial fly when the natural fly is destroyed, and the angler is almost blinded with dusty snowflakes. All through midsummer the Scotch rivers lose their chief attractions. The bracken has not yet changed its green for the fairy gold, the hue of its decay; the woods wear a uniform and sombre green; the waters are low and shrunken, and angling is almost impossible. But with September the pleasant season returns for people who love "to be quiet, and ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... bitterness of the anti-septo pill on his tongue, Ross helped Ashe limp upstream to the cave. He left the older man outside while he cleaned up the floor of the cave and then made his companion as comfortable as he could on a bed of bracken. The fire Ross had longed for was built. They stripped off their sodden clothing and hung it to dry. Ross wrapped a bird he had shot in clay and tucked it under the hot ...
— The Time Traders • Andre Norton
... said, pushing the door of the cottage wider open. 'I've just tidied up, and I was fetching in a handful of bracken. ...
— Miss Mouse and Her Boys • Mrs. Molesworth
... regions with his field-glass. Even then I was not allowed to smoke, and while I was baked to a blister with the sun, I was wet through with black peat water. Never a deer could we see, or could HUGH see, rather, for I am short-sighted, and cannot tell a stag from a bracken bush. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, May 14, 1892 • Various
... a real floor made of puncheons, or hewn logs. A bunk, against the wall, was made of a second log set four feet from the log wall, with a hammock mattress of sacking stuffed with dried bracken stretched between them. There was the usual huge fireplace of granite rocks used for both warmth and cooking, and a box ...
— Down the Mother Lode • Vivia Hemphill
... old stone bridge that crosses the stream just below the mill-house; 'it's such a lovely day one feels loath to miss any of it, and the scenery here looks so bright and cheerful after the endless brown heather and russet bracken about Dunbude. Not that Exmoor isn't beautiful in its way, too—all Devonshire is beautiful alike for that matter; but then it's more sombre and woody in the north, and much less spring-like than this lovely quiet South ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... misfortunes reached a climax when he used his last bullet on a rabbit and missed it. He went on for twelve hours, and in the darkness under a mass of dripping bracken began to think of Farleys less as a place of peril than as a refuge, even though known for what he was. But he pushed that thought away as other men push temptation and tried to sleep under his saturated tent. In the morning he was on the trail with the ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... could see the lights of Inverness beginning to glimmer as we passed. A score of times we had to dismount on account of the roughness of the ground to lead our horses along the steep incline of the mountainsides, and each time Donald set his teeth and dragged his shattered ankle through bracken and over boulder by sheer dour pluck. Hunger gnawed at our vitals, for in forty-eight hours we had but tasted food. Deadly weariness hung on our stumbling footsteps, and in our gloomy hearts lurked the coldness ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... of this valley is the most beautiful I know of in the lower Himalaya, and the Cheer Pine (P. longifolia) is abundant, cresting the hills; which are loosely clothed with clumps of oaks and other trees, bamboos, and bracken (Pteris). The slopes are covered with red clay, and separate little ravines luxuriantly clothed with tropical vegetation, amongst which flow pebbly streams of transparent cool water. The villages, which are merely scattered ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... though here and there a silver birch drew a shaft of light upon their sombre background. Here were no English woodlands, no stretches of pale green turf, no vistas opening beneath flattened boughs, with blue distant hills and perhaps a group of antlers topping the bracken. The wild life of these forests crawled among thickets or lurked in sinister shadows. No bird poured out its heart in them; no lark soared out of them, breasting heaven. At rare intervals a note fell on the ear—the scream ...
— Fort Amity • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Mountains on the one side and the ranges around the Sugar Loaf on the other. In places the cliffs are precipitous, but, generally, the lower slopes furnish pasture-land and occasional woods, while the upper parts are covered with bracken fern, with a few trees and copses. The priory stands on a gentle slope at the base of the Black Mountains, elevated a short distance above the stream. Its original name was Llanhodeni, or "the Place by the Hodeni." It was founded by two hermits ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... June. Great flocks of sea-gulls wheeled screaming round the cliffs, their wings flashing in the sunshine; red admiral and tortoise-shell butterflies still fluttered over late specimens of flowers, and the bracken was brown and golden underfoot. The girls were wild with the delight of a few hours' emancipation from school rules, and flew about gathering belated harebells, and running to the top of any little eminence to get the view. After about a mile on the hills, they ...
— A Patriotic Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... the bracken and gorse which tangled their feet and scratched their bare shins at every step. That mile over the Heath was the most trying yet. The hares seemed to have picked out the very cruellest track they could find; and when, presently, the "Firm" ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... relation, the last time of the times, had passed into vagueness; there was perhaps even an impression that if they were inscrutable to their friends they were not wholly crystalline to each other and themselves. What had occurred for Granger at all events in connexion with the portrait was that Mrs. Bracken, his intending model, whose return to America was at hand, had suddenly been called to London by her husband, occupied there with pressing business, but had yet desired that her displacement should not interrupt her sittings. The young man, at her request, ...
— Some Short Stories • Henry James
... If there is help of any sort for such horrors of despair let them take it where they find it," he found himself saying aloud to the emptiness of the stretches of heath and bracken. "The old nurse ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... stiller than it was outside; the murmur descends from aloft. There was a frost last night and the leaves will soon fall. A beech leaf detaches itself now and then and flutters peacefully and waywardly to the ground, careless whether it finds its grave in the bracken or on the road where it will be trodden underfoot. The bramble is beginning to turn to blood. It is strange that leaves should show such character. Here is a corner on which there are not two of the same tint, but they spring from the same root, and the circumstances of light and shade under which ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... pine woods. "The country"—to quote an account written some years ago—"was drenched in sunset; white towering thunder-clouds descending upon and mingling with the crimson of the heath, the green stretches of bracken, the brown pools upon the common, everywhere a rosy suffusion, a majesty of light interweaving heaven and earth and transfiguring all dear familiar things—the old farm-house, the sand-pit where the children played and the sand-martins nested, the wood-pile by the farm ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... kingdom. His earnest words on his return to take the rule of this unhappy realm were these: 'Let God but grant me life, and there shall not be a spot in my realm where the key shall not keep the castle, and the bracken bush the cow, though I should lead the life of a ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge
... off again through the forest, at a more moderate pace now, for the way ran no longer clear. The word "forest" to a stay-at-home means a tract of soft, springy turf, with tall trees and pleasant glades and clumps of bracken that shelter rabbits and other small creatures of the woodland. But the forest of the West Indies bears to our English forest the relation of a giant to a dwarf. The fronds of the bracken grow to feet where we have inches; weeds that with us would shelter a mouse would there oonceal an elephant, ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... Yorkshire moors. One smells the smell of burning furze, one tastes the resinous breath of pine-trees, one feels beneath one's feet the tough fibrous stalks of the ling and the resistant stems and crumpled leaves of the bracken. ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... beneath the shadows of the tall elms, the stillness of the night was broken only by the quick scurry of a rabbit into the tall bracken or the harsh cry of some night-bird startled ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... under rustling poplars—rode many leagues, and forded many streams. The night was hot, it was the month of June; and it thundered continually, but with no rain. At this point and that bands of men joined us, mysteriously, and in silence; until from the hill with its bracken and walnut trees, we saw the lights of Cahors below us, and the glimmer of the winding Lot, and heard the bells of the ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman
... Hindhead; and Johnny, reclining, novel in hand, in a swinging chair with a little awning above it, is enshrined in a spacious half hemisphere of glass which forms a pavilion commanding the garden, and, beyond it, a barren but lovely landscape of hill profile with fir trees, commons of bracken and ...
— Misalliance • George Bernard Shaw
... topics, he thought—lay around them. He praised the pine-woods, the deep lasts of bracken, the crimson leaves that spotted the hurt-bushes, the serviceable beauty of the turnpike road. The outdoor world was not very familiar to him, and occasionally he went wrong in a question of fact. Mrs. Honeychurch's mouth twitched ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... During the full moon there is no night, only a change to silver light from golden; and the forest is full of delight. There are wood-cutters' huts in the ravines where the water falls, soft beds of torn bracken and fragrant grasses where great trees make a shelter from the heat; and for food, that is easily arranged. A basket of rice with a little salt-fish and spices is easily hidden in a favourable place. You only want a jar to cook it, and there is ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding
... on the edge of the common, beyond the small brook that ran in the dip at the bottom of the garden, carrying the garden path in continuation from the plank bridge on to the common. He had cut the rough turf and bracken, leaving the grey, dryish soil bare. But he was worried because he could not get the path straight, there was a pleat between his brows. He had set up his sticks, and taken the sights between the big pine trees, but for some reason everything seemed wrong. He looked ...
— England, My England • D.H. Lawrence
... ye'se get a bed o' green bracken; My plaidie will hap thee and me; Ye'se lie in my arms, bonnie Lizie, If ye'll gae to the ...
— Ballads of Scottish Tradition and Romance - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Third Series • Various
... hill, forest above forest, and beyond it a great noble range, unwooded and high against heaven, guarding it, which I for my part knew when first I knew anything of this world. There is a high place under fir trees, a place of sand and bracken, in South England whence such a view was always present to eye in childhood and "There," said I to myself (even in childhood) "a man should make his habitation." In those valleys is the ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... stately avenue of elms and beeches, with bracken and ferns covering mossy glades in the distance, and then Roy and Dudley flung themselves off their ponies before an old stone house with ivy-covered walls and turrets. Everything had been brightened up for their visit. The flowers on the terraces were one mass ...
— His Big Opportunity • Amy Le Feuvre
... and with much shouting woke up the inhabitants of the cottage whence it proceeded, promising to reward them liberally if they would only show us our way back. Three of them consented to do this, and provided themselves accordingly with pine-torches, wrapped round with bracken and leaves. One, a very fine man, dressed in white, with his arm extended above his head, bearing the light, led the way; another walked in front of my horse, while the third brought up the rear. They conducted us down the most frightfully steep paths until we had descended beneath the clouds, ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... sports were really a pretty sight. I see it all in my mind's eye now. I often wonder I have not made a picture of it. The high cliff stretching overhead, and covered with bushes and bracken, amongst which nestled the red-tiled cottages. Then below the cliff the level green, covered with strong, hardy fishermen and their sunburnt wives, and surrounding the green, on the sand-hills, the visitors old and young, dressed in bright colours and ...
— Christie, the King's Servant • Mrs. O. F. Walton
... those charming reminiscences of George Borrow which appeared in The Athenæum. {25} I have been reading them, I may add, under the happiest conditions for enjoying them—amid the self-same heather and bracken where I have so often listened to Lavengro’s quaint talk of all the wondrous things he saw and heard in his wondrous life. So graphically has Mr. Hake depicted him, that as I walked and read his paper I seemed to hear the fine East-Anglian ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... for ever staring out in front of her with her lips parted, as if she saw something wonderful; but when I came behind her and looked the same way, I could see nothing but the sheep's trough or the midden, or father's breeches hanging on a clothes-line. And then if she saw a lump of heather or bracken, or any common stuff of that sort, she would mope over it, as if it had struck her sick, and cry, "How sweet! how perfect!" just as though it had been a painted picture. She didn't like games, but I used to make her play ...
— The Great Shadow and Other Napoleonic Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... country-house was like. The Cronins lived in a dim, red brick, eighteenth-century house. It stood in the middle of a large park, and the park was surrounded by old grey walls and Ned liked to lean on these walls, for in places they had crumbled, and admire the bracken in the hollows and the wind-blown hawthorn-trees growing on the other side of the long, winding drive. He had long wished to walk in the park and now he was there. The hawthorns were in bloom and the cuckoo was calling. The sky was dark ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... and mysterious, with green shadows, and the swing of rope vines, and the sudden remoteness of glimpsed skies. The earth was soft and moist under foot; so the dampness of it rose to the nostrils. Vines and head-high bracken and feather growths covered the ground. In every shallow ravine were groves of tree ferns forty feet tall. A silence dwelt there, a different silence from that of the veldt at night; compounded of a few simple elements, ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al
... iron posts which supported a railing that ran round the crescent and used it as a lever. The rotten planks gave way. One of them uncovered the lock, which he attacked with a big knife, containing a number of blades and implements. A minute later, the gate opened on a waste of bracken which led up to a long, dilapidated building, with a turret at each corner and a sort of a belvedere, built on a taller tower, in ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... into two parts by a ravine passing immediately under the old Castle and traversing its entire length. The further side is called the Deer Park, inclosed and stocked by Sir John Glynne in 1739. Its banks and glades, richly timbered, and overgrown with bracken, afford from various points beautiful views over the plain of Chester, with the bold projections of the Frodsham and Peckforton hills. Along the bottom of the hollow flows Broughton brook. Two Waterfalls occur in its course through the Park: the lower is called the Ladies' Fall: near ...
— The Hawarden Visitors' Hand-Book - Revised Edition, 1890 • William Henry Gladstone
... wild tones of the storm. The air was mottled with pine-tassels and bright green plumes, that went flashing past in the sunlight like birds pursued. But there was not the slightest dustiness; nothing less pure than leaves, and ripe pollen, and flecks of withered bracken and moss. I heard trees falling for hours at the rate of one every two or three minutes: some uprooted, partly on account of the loose, water-soaked condition of the ground; others broken straight across, ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... a foot-road leading from his garden to Folly Clough, and thus secured the quiet ever found in those deeply-wooded seams that plough into the very heart of the moors. Following the water-worn path which wound in tortuous ascent under clustering trees and between slopes of bracken, the two soon gained the head of the Clough, and climbed towards the banks of the Green Fold Lodge, a stretch of water into which drained the moisture of vast tracts of uplands, its overflow rushing through flood-gates and pouring its volume through ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... to a wild-looking creature prowling among the trees. He was evidently looking for something. His search so earnest and troubled that the caution he had heretofore displayed had deserted him. Stooping, poking among the leaves and bracken, rising, moving toward another tree, stooping again—repeating endlessly this same proceeding, the watchers soon tired of simply ...
— The Brass Bound Box • Evelyn Raymond
... the command of General Reynolds, with headquarters at Cheat Mountain Pass,( 3) three miles from Huttonville on the Staunton pike. Here Colonel Sullivan's 13th Indiana, part of Loomis' battery, and Bracken's Indiana Cavalry were camped. On Cheat Mountain, at the middle mountain-top, about nine miles to the southeast of Huttonville on the Staunton pike, were the 14th Indiana, 24th and 25th Ohio, and parts of the same battery and cavalry, Colonel Nathan ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... the rain ceased, however, and quickening my steps, I began to think I should be driven to pay for a night's lodging after all. Presently I came to a kind of open moor, covered with bracken, bramble, and brilliant patches of heath. A rabbit scampered across the road, but there was no one to be seen, although a railway ran close at hand through a cutting on the right. I could see the tops of the signal-posts ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... heart in silence as if in a moment the trees should fly like woodpeckers, the sky flash and flutter its blue like a jay's wing, and the very earth leap like a squirrel for his amazement. Presently he came to an open space where the young bracken was springing round a pool. He flung himself down in the frondage, and the spice of it in his nostrils was as if he were feeding upon summer. He was happy until he caught sight of his own reflection in the pool, and then he could not bear to stay any longer in this ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... through the underwood up the side of the hill, when suddenly she disappeared from his sight, behind some bracken. When he got there he could see her nowhere, but looking about him found a fox's earth, but so well hidden that he might have passed it by a thousand times and would never have found it unless he had made particular search ...
— Lady Into Fox • David Garnett
... are my only brother's children." Here Katherine paused with a sense of relief; they had reached a stile where a footway led across some fields and a piece of common overgrown with bracken and gorse. It was the short-cut to Castleford, by which Cecil had led her to the ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... declined swiftly to the main road. Straight in front of him were the palings of Falmer Park, and the tenantless down with its long smooth curves, was broken up into sudden hillocks and depressions. Dells and dingles, some green with bracken, others half full of water lay to right and left of the path, which, as it approached the corner of the park, was more strongly marked than when it lay over the big open spaces. It was somewhat slippery, too, after the torrent of yesterday, and ...
— The Blotting Book • E. F. Benson
... and took wing with a cry, half in protest at being wakened from its sleep, half in alarm at my presence. A rabbit rushed from a sheltering hole in such a hurry that, as I could tell by its clatter among the bracken, it nearly fell over itself, as rabbits clumsily do, making fluffy, ...
— The Black Colonel • James Milne
... On either side the bracken and the lady-fern grew thick and high, almost overlapping the broad moss-grown path, across which the young rabbits popped away in their new brown coats, showing their little white linings in their lazy haste. A dog-rose had hung out a ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... first half of the way runs across a flat sandy tract called Mallory Heath, where the short greensward encroaches on the road, and where the eye roaming east or west or north can discern nothing except a limitless expanse of heather, broken here and there by patches of gorse and bracken, or by clumps of touselled and wind-thinned pines and Scotch firs. The tawny-coloured, sandy, track is difficult to follow in the dark, and there are posts set up at intervals on the skirts of the way for travellers' guidance. These posts show out white against a starless night, ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... without charge), improving their schools, and visited from time to time by patients from abroad, drawn here by his fame as an oculist. Among these last came a Mr. Taufer, a resident of Hong-Kong, and with him his foster-child, Josephine Bracken, the daughter of an Irish sergeant. The pretty and adventurous girl and the banished patriot fell in love ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... no sooner seen these people coming than I made up my mind (for no reason that I can tell) to go through with my adventure; and when the first came alongside of me, I rose up from the bracken and asked ...
— Kidnapped • Robert Louis Stevenson
... overgrown with bramble. In its depths they could hear the monotonous trickle of water. It was really the source of the spring that afterwards reappeared fifty yards nearer the road, and trickled into an unfailing pool known as the Burnt Spring, from the brown color of the surrounding bracken. It was the water supply of the ranch, and the reason for Mr. Medliker's original selection of that site. Johnny lingered for an instant, looked carefully around, and then lowered himself into the fissure. A moment ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... and bracken, and purple bloom, With a glitter of gorses here and there, Shoulder deep in the dewy bloom, My love, I follow you everywhere! By faint sweet signs my soul divines, Dear heart, at dawning you came this way, By the jangled bells of the columbines, ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... o'er a leafy carpet, by the silent woods they came, Where the golden bracken lingered and the maples were aflame. On the stream the starlight shimmered, o'er their wings the moonbeams shone, Music filtered through the forest—and the Little ...
— The Verse-Book Of A Homely Woman • Elizabeth Rebecca Ward, AKA Fay Inchfawn
... level among the heather and bracken of Craddock Moor, four or five miles north of Liskeard, you may find to-day the remains of three ancient stone circles known as "The Hurlers." Antiquaries will tell you that the Druids first erected them, but the people of the countryside ...
— Legend Land, Vol. 1 • Various
... the Squire's way of making a night of it. The parson who had been in at the death and who, during the settlement of my affair, had been busy in the stables, now joined us at dinner. He was but lately come from Cambridge, at which seat of learning the chief books appeared to be Bracken's Farriery and Gibson on the Diseases of Horses, with Hoyle's Whist as lighter reading for leisured hours. He was a hard rider, a hard swearer, and a hard drinker, and, after being double japanned, ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... had been able to walk home to Bracken-Braes, and Michael and Isabel sat by her bedside. All her strength was gone, and she lay at the mercy of the rustle of a leaf, or a shadow across the window. Thus hour after hour passed, till it was again twilight. "I hear ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... flowers or trees with which we are familiar, except conifers, are found in any region. Ferns grow in great abundance, and have now reached many of the forms with which we are acquainted. Thickets of bracken spread over the plains; clumps of Royal ferns and Hartstongues spring up in moister parts. The trees are conifers, cycads, and trees akin to the ginkgo, or Maidenhair Tree, of modern Japan. Cypresses, yews, firs, and araucarias (the Monkey ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... with the daylight shining through the empty windows. Beyond the houses, again, lie successive lines of hills, at this moment lit up by shafts of sunlight that lend a glowing warmth and richness to the fine colors of a late autumn. The hills are red and brown with rusted bracken and heather, and here and there the smooth waters of the bay catch a tinge of other and varied hues. In one of the fishing-smacks that lie almost underneath the shadow of the tall crag on which the castle ruins stand, an artist has put a rough-and-ready easel, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... From the mute elm-trees, hanging on air Like tattered flags along the walls Of chapels deep in sunlit prayer. Once more ... Within its flawless glass To-day reflects that other day, When, under the bracken, on the grass, We who were lovers happily lay And hardly spoke, or framed a thought That was not one with the calm hills And crystal sky. Ourselves were nought, Our gusty passions, our burning wills Dissolved in boundlessness, and we Were almost ...
— The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems • Aldous Huxley
... longing to get further away from the town and enjoy what remained of the afternoon on higher ground and in purer air; he would go up to Hampstead, he thought, and see the lights sweeping over the rusty bracken on the heath, or walk down over Highgate Hill, and past the quaint old brick houses with their high-trim laurel hedges and their last century wrought-iron gateways and lamps in which the light of ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... craving to leave something permanent? The Islands, here, will outlast anything you can build. I come back after fifteen years, and they are unchanged; they would be unchanged were I to come back after a hundred. The same rocks, the same bracken, the same hum of the tides; the same flowers; the same blue here, below us, the same outline of a spear-head there, beyond St. Ann's, where the tide forces through the slack water; the same streak of yellow yonder on the ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... door opened and Dodge and a companion, who subsequently proved to be E. M. Bracken, alias "Bradley," an agent employed by Howe and Hummel, left the room, went to the elevator and descended to the dining-room upon the second floor. Jesse watched until they were safely ensconced at breakfast and then returned to the fourth floor where he tipped the chambermaid, told her that ...
— True Stories of Crime From the District Attorney's Office • Arthur Train
... walked along, picking their way among boulders and bracken and heather, he was asking her whether the heart-breaking accidents and bitter disappointments of salmon-fishing were not greater than its rewards; as to which she ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... immediately secured, Ruth pushed her way into enchantment. The river winds in and out through exquisite coves entangled in a wilderness of brambles and lace-like ferns that are almost transparent as they bend and dip toward the silvery waters; while, climbing over the rocky cliffs, run bracken and the fragrant yerba-buena, till, on high, they creep as if in awe about the great redwoods and pines of ...
— Other Things Being Equal • Emma Wolf
... few stiller things than the stillness of a summer's noon such as this, a summer's noon in a broken woodland, with the deer asleep in the bracken, and the twitter of birds silent in the coppice, and hardly a leaf astir in the huge beeches that fling their cool shade over the grass. Afar off a gilded vane flares out above the grey Jacobean gables ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... "Well, father, the bracken will be fit to cut in a month. I have ordered loads to be prepared for me in all parts of the forest. The soil of the woodlands is everywhere green with the curling fronds; and where I do not cut, the foresters and miners will ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... the Monkey being up a tree, and the Colonel having surreptitiously got rid of his Rabbit among the bracken, and the Tortoise having retired within his shell and firmly declined to come out again, sport is abandoned for the afternoon, to the scarcely disguised relief of the Curate, who is prevented from remaining to tea by the ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 10, 1892 • Various
... near the township gave place to scattered farms. These in their turn became further and further apart, and then they entered a wide belt of timber, ragged and wind-swept gums, with dense undergrowth of dogwood and bracken fern. The metalled road gave place to a hard, earthern track, on which the spinning tyres made no sound; it curved in and out among the trees, which met overhead and cast upon it a waving pattern of shadows. Grim things had once happened to Norah in this belt ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... THOU the vanguard of the three, And bury me at yon bracken bush, That stands upon ...
— Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy • Andrew Lang
... little isle of sheep, where the surf burst all about it in the midst of the sea, and it was all green with bracken, and all wet with dew, and the moon enlightened it. They ran the boat into a cove, and set foot to land; and the man came heavily behind among the rocks in the deepness of the bracken, but the Poor Thing went before him like a smoke in the light of the moon. So they came to the dead-cairn, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... is stiller than it was outside; the murmur descends from aloft. There was a frost last night and the leaves will soon fall. A beech leaf detaches itself now and then and flutters peacefully and waywardly to the ground, careless whether it finds its grave in the bracken or on the road where it will be trodden underfoot. The bramble is beginning to turn to blood. It is strange that leaves should show such character. Here is a corner on which there are not two of the same tint, ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... your finger—but how grey it looks beside the green of those brackens, that pasture, that wood! Purple, yellow, and green, you have now seen, sir, for the first time in your life. Widening and widening over your head, all the while you have been gazing on the heather, the broom, the bracken, the pastures, and the woods, have the eternal heavens been preparing for you a vision of the sacred Blue. Is not that an Indigo Divine? Or, if you scorn that mercantile and manufacturing image, steal that blue ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... dark and solid grandeur protects and fosters the tenderest of green carpets. See the moss of palest green, its long fronds appearing like ferns, or note those real ferns and coarser bracken fighting the brambles for supremacy or trying to flout that little wild rose ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... found; and he drank gratefully, but without a word. The torchlight showed bare walls and a shattered roof. Having searched all round and discovered neither reptile nor beast, the men made a bed of leaves and bracken, with a folded cloak for a pillow, and invited their master to lie upon it. Basil did so, turned his face away, and bade ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing
... statue were executed by Miss Enid Yandell, by birth a Kentuckian, but now of New York. The statues of James Monroe, James Madison, George Rogers Clark, on Art Hill, were, respectively, done by Julia M. Bracken, Chicago; Janet Scudder, Terre Haute, and Elsie Ward, Denver. The reclining figures over the central door of the Liberal Arts Building were by Edith B. Stephens, of New York, and the east and north spandrels of the Machinery Building were done by ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... wooded, at the bottom of which wound the silver river that ran through Grovebury. Civilization, in the shape of fields and hedges, stretched out fingers as far as Wynchcote, and there stopped abruptly. Past the bungalow lay the open wold with miles of heather, gorse, and bracken, and a road edged with low, grassy fern-covered banks instead of walls. The air blew freshly up here, and was far more bracing and healthy than down in the hollow of Grovebury. The residents of the new suburb affected ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... her child on the shawl she spread over the bracken, and proceeded to kindle a fire with a tinder-box lent her by Mrs. Chivers. It amused the babe to watch the sparks as they flew about, and when the pile of turves and sticks and heather was in combustion, to listen to the crackle, and watch the play ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... and beautiful bit of forest. The ground under the trees was thickly covered with enormous ferns or bracken, with here and there patches of light where the sun came through the foliage. The low spots were filled with the coarse green verdure of skunk cabbage. I was so sceptical about finding the cow in a wood where concealment was so easy ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... across the combe Shrill and shrill it rang — rang through The clear green gloom. Fairies there were a-spinning, And a white tree-maid Lifted her eyes, and listened In her rain-sweet glade. Bunnie to bunnie stamped; old Wat Chin-deep in bracken sate; A throstle piped, 'I'm by, I'm by!' Clear to his timid mate. And there was Longlegs, straddling, And hearkening was he, To distant Echo ...
— Peacock Pie, A Book of Rhymes • Walter de la Mare
... smugglers! The Downs swarmed with them, for since there might be no lawful trade betwixt France and England, it had all to run in that channel. I have been up on St. John's Common upon a dark night, and, lying among the bracken, I have seen as many as seventy mules and a man at the head of each go flitting past me as silently as trout in a stream. Not one of them but bore its two ankers of the right French cognac, or its bale of silk of Lyons and lace of Valenciennes. I knew Dan Scales, the head of them, and I knew Tom ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... fallen; the water was again shallow at this spot, but nearly all the stepping-stones had been swept away. For help at such times, a crazy little wooden bridge spanned the current a few yards above. Irene brushed through the long grass and the bracken, mounted on to the bridge, and, leaning over the old bough which formed a rail, let the voice of the beck soothe ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... woodcutter, wading in the bracken and looking about him in rather a lost fashion. The man seemed to be ...
— The Trees of Pride • G.K. Chesterton
... of their customary walks. The crystalline October sunshine, in which every distant tree and, seaward, each slowly travelling steamer, seemed to gain a new clearness of outline, lay upon the deep-ploughed fields, the yellowing bracken, and the red-gold of the bending trees, while the west wind, which had strewn the sea with white-flecked waves, brought down the leaves to form a carpet for their feet, and played strange music along the wood-crested slope. In the ...
— The Zeppelin's Passenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Found occasionally in shaded situations on piles of rotting straw or in the woods, especially on detritus of the bracken. The spores are many of them ellipsoidal; some are spherical; all are decidedly spinulose, perhaps might appear plicate-rugulose when dry or shrunken. Calcareous nodules very ...
— The North American Slime-Moulds • Thomas H. (Thomas Huston) MacBride
... on a stone on the hillside with a whole congregation of cobs about her. When they saw my wife they all scampered off as fast as they could run, and where the witch was sitting there was nothing to be seen but a withered bracken bush. I made no doubt myself she was putting ...
— The Princess and the Curdie • George MacDonald
... changing life of nature both by land and sea, and had made as little impression on the island as the ceaseless dashing of the waves against its coast. The cliffs, the caves and the sea-beaten boulders were the same; the colours of the bracken on the September hills, and of the sea anemones in their green, pellucid pools, were the same, and the fishermen's path down to the cove was the same. No iron chain had been put there, but the rope ...
— A Loose End and Other Stories • S. Elizabeth Hall
... not so ominous and strangely silent; these will not say even the one word, "Nevermore." They look like relics of a Saturnian reign before beauty and music and joy were known upon the earth. If there were charred stumps of trees in the Bracken which was shown to Faust, we should expect to see nighthawks squatted on them, wholly indifferent to the lamentations of lost souls. We go directly under the branch where one of them is sitting ten feet above and still he makes ...
— Some Spring Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... in?' she said, pushing the door of the cottage wider open. 'I've just tidied up, and I was fetching in a handful of bracken. It flames ...
— Miss Mouse and Her Boys • Mrs. Molesworth
... that, Catharine," said the glover: "I am as familiar with brogues and bracken as if I had worn them myself. I have only to fear that the decisive battle may be fought before I can leave this country; and if the clan Quhele lose the combat, I may suffer by the ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... discuss class matters, but chiefly to enjoy the crisp autumn weather. The woods were still gorgeous in russets and reds, in spite of the recent heavy frosts, and there was a smell of burning leaves and dry bracken in the air. The girls ...
— Grace Harlowe's Plebe Year at High School - The Merry Doings of the Oakdale Freshmen Girls • Jessie Graham Flower
... apparent how well the original wild cattle agreed with the original scenery of the island. One almost regrets the marten and polecat, though both small creatures, and wishes that the fox would come forth more by day. These acres of bracken and impenetrable thickets need more inhabitants; how well they are fitted for the wild boar! Such thoughts are, of course, only thoughts, and we must be thankful that we have as many wild creatures left ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... was clear: Rosinante could trust to her five wits better than I to mine. So leaving her to take what way she pleased, I rode on, till at length we approached the woods I had descried. Presently we were jogging gently down into a deep and misty valley flanked by bracken and pines, from which issued into the crisp air of morning a most delicious aromatic smell, that seemed at least to prove this valley not ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... was really the source of the spring that afterwards reappeared fifty yards nearer the road, and trickled into an unfailing pool known as the Burnt Spring, from the brown color of the surrounding bracken. It was the water supply of the ranch, and the reason for Mr. Medliker's original selection of that site. Johnny lingered for an instant, looked carefully around, and then lowered himself into the fissure. A moment later he reached up his arms to Florry, lowered her also, ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... under a big rock. The grass was short and green, and there were clothes-props cut from bracken stems, with lines of plaited rushes, and a heap of ...
— The Great Big Treasury of Beatrix Potter • Beatrix Potter
... valleys there was, hill above hill, forest above forest, and beyond it a great noble range, unwooded and high against heaven, guarding it, which I for my part knew when first I knew anything of this world. There is a high place under fir trees, a place of sand and bracken, in South England whence such a view was always present to eye in childhood and "There," said I to myself (even in childhood) "a man should make his habitation." In those valleys is the ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... in tawny stubble. The path ran by this and by a lichened stone wall. Overhead, swallows were skimming. Heath and bracken, rolled the colored hills. The air swam cool and golden, with a smell of the ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... going to make myself red-hot running after them if we're going out in the boat. Besides, we haven't got any of your father's pill boxes to put 'em in. I say, how the things do grow down here! Look at that fern and the bracken." ...
— Cormorant Crag - A Tale of the Smuggling Days • George Manville Fenn
... morning, the air fresh and sweet, the sun comfortably warm, a little too warm, perhaps, presently, when they had trodden the narrow path by the Tongue Ghyll, and were beginning to wind slowly upwards over rough boulders and last year's bracken, tough and brown and tangled, towards that rugged wall of earth and stone tufted with rank grasses, which calls itself Dolly Waggon Pike. Here they all came to a stand-still, and wiped the dews of honest labour ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... the hill here holds the last snows, but for all that the spring smell is steaming among the trees and up and down the bracken slopes in the ...
— A Diary Without Dates • Enid Bagnold
... woods were threaded with little paths, and Joseph cast curious eyes upon them all. The first led him into bracken so deep that he did not venture farther, and the second took him to the verge of a dark hollow so dismal that he came running back to ask if there were crocodiles in the waters he had discovered. He did not give his ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... a great boar lying in a tangled thicket of boughs and bracken, a dark place where the sun never shone, nor could the rain pierce through. Then the noise of the men's shouts and the barking of the dogs awakened the boar, and up he sprang, bristling all over his back, and with fire shining from his eyes. In ...
— Tales of Troy: Ulysses the Sacker of Cities • Andrew Lang
... and in the long June evenings the Boy liked to go there after tea to play. He took the Velveteen Rabbit with him, and before he wandered off to pick flowers, or play at brigands among the trees, he always made the Rabbit a little nest somewhere among the bracken, where he would be quite cosy, for he was a kind-hearted little boy and he liked Bunny to be comfortable. One evening, while the Rabbit was lying there alone, watching the ants that ran to and fro between his velvet paws in the grass, he saw two strange beings ...
— The Velveteen Rabbit • Margery Williams
... before the morning. The news is bad, I tell you frankly. The empire is tottering to its fall, and the news that I have in secret will be known all over Corsica to-morrow. Who knows? the island may flare up like a heap of bracken, and no one bearing a French name, or known to have French sympathies, will be safe. You know how you yourself are regarded in Olmeta. It is foolhardy to ...
— The Isle of Unrest • Henry Seton Merriman
... to seek Winifred, which had sustained her so long, Sophia chose now to skirt the edge of the wood rather than cross the open. As they went through long grass and bracken, here and there a fallen log impeded their steps. A frog, disturbed, leaped before them in the grass; they knew what it was by the sound of its falls. Soon, in spite of the rustle of their walking, they began to ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... fell at once contrasted pleasantly with the anxious bustle of the entry in April. A glorious autumn was settling on the hills, draping them from head to foot with a red mantle of the withering bracken, which slowly burnt itself out along their slopes. There was sun and daylight enough for many rambles along old paths or new ones before ...
— Uppingham by the Sea - a Narrative of the Year at Borth • John Henry Skrine
... the top of them. Furze brakes also are still numerous, the whole of the flat land on the top of the cliffs and the steep valleys and slopes down to the sea on the south and east side of the Island, from Fermain Bay to Pleimont, being almost uninterrupted wild land covered with heather, furze, and bracken; besides this wild furze land, there are several thick furze brakes inland in different parts of the Island. All these places seem to me to have remained almost without change for years. The furze, however, never grows very high, as it is ...
— Birds of Guernsey (1879) • Cecil Smith
... easy for the brittle bedding of dried bracken and grass the beast had left burned quickly, cleansing with both fire and smoke. When they raked the ashes out with branches, Asaki and Nymani brought in handfuls of leaves which they crumpled and threw ...
— Voodoo Planet • Andrew North
... and careless driving: "You shouldn't be on the box at all; I never saw such a wild driver." "Drive!" said Jehu, in a voice of thunder. "Why, man, once every year, I drive the mail-coach down that steep hill-side among the bracken. And this is the day for it!" So saying, the humorous fellow made as if to whip the horses down the cliff, and the terrified tourist shrieked aloud. "Seeing I've such a nervous passenger," said the driver, with a guffaw, "I had better break my ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... eighteenth-century house. It stood in the middle of a large park, and the park was surrounded by old grey walls and Ned liked to lean on these walls, for in places they had crumbled, and admire the bracken in the hollows and the wind-blown hawthorn-trees growing on the other side of the long, winding drive. He had long wished to walk in the park and now he was there. The hawthorns were in bloom and the cuckoo was ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... traversing the undulations on the side of the hill. The noise of the wind over the heath was shrill, and as if it whistled for joy at finding a night so congenial as this. Sometimes the path led her to hollows between thickets of tall and dripping bracken, dead, though not yet prostrate, which enclosed her like a pool. When they were more than usually tall she lifted the baby to the top of her head, that it might be out of the reach of their drenching fronds. On higher ground, where the wind was brisk and sustained, the rain flew ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... mass of millinery and chiffonery in that chamber. The spaces that were not piled high with vesture gave resting spots for cardboard boxes and packing-paper. Antoinette stood in a corner gazing at the spoil with a smile of beatific idiocy. I strode through the cardboard boxes which crackled like bracken, and remained dumb as a fish before these mysteries. Carlotta tried on hats. She shewed me patent leather shoes. She exhibited blouses and petticoats until my eyes ached. She brandished something in ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... led me into a steep forest, where I lost sight of the Tarn. The soil was too rocky for the trees—oaks and chestnuts chiefly—to grow very tall; consequently the underwood, although dense, was chequered all through with sunshine. Heather and bracken, holly and box, made a wilderness that spread over all the visible world, for the opposite side of the gorge was exactly similar. Shining in the sun amidst the flowering heather or glowing in majestic purple grandeur in the shade of shrubs stood many a foxglove, and almost ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... on the 30th last, and two or three days after were followed by Miss Blagden, Miss Bracken, and Lytton—all for our sake: they not otherwise wanting to come this way. Lytton arrived unwell, got worse soon, and last Friday week was laid up with a sort of nervous fever, caused by exposure to ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... on their snow-clad summits, slanted obliquely into the rich plain before them, bathing with rosy splendour the leafless, snow-sprinkled trees, and fading gradually into shadow in the distance. To the south, too, they beheld a deep-shaded amphitheatre of heather and bracken; the course of the Esk, near Penicuik, winding about at the foot of its gorge; the broad, brown expanse of Maw Moss; and, fading into blue indistinctness in the south, the wild heath-clad Peeblesshire hills. In sooth, that scene ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... under an obligation never to be expressed in words. Newlands, with its keen, almost mountain, air, its views, its woodlands, its yews, its groves of ash, and oak, and thorn, its green paths winding through the greyer and deeper-toned gorse, heather, and bracken, is a thing to live for. If one can be grateful, as certainly one can, to things inanimate, I am grateful for the health and strength which Newlands has given me. But this must be told, if I ever write it, in the history of the house. ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... balmy as June. Great flocks of sea-gulls wheeled screaming round the cliffs, their wings flashing in the sunshine; red admiral and tortoise-shell butterflies still fluttered over late specimens of flowers, and the bracken was brown and golden underfoot. The girls were wild with the delight of a few hours' emancipation from school rules, and flew about gathering belated harebells, and running to the top of any little eminence to get the view. After about a mile on the hills, they dipped down a steep sandy path that ...
— A Patriotic Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... of rain there had been a sudden clearing in the skies. The day had been fine, and now, towards sunset, there was a grand massing of rosy cloud along the edge of the down, and windy lights over the valley. Rachel, busy with the covering of the potato "clamps," laid down the bundle of bracken she had been handing to Peter Betts, and came quickly to meet her visitor. Her working dress was splashed with mire from neck to foot, and coils of brown hair had escaped from her waterproof cap, ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... coppice, bocage^, tope, clump of trees, thicket, spinet, spinney; underwood, brushwood; scrub; boscage, bosk^, ceja [Sp.], chaparal, motte [U.S.]; arboretum &c 371. bush, jungle, prairie; heath, heather; fern, bracken; furze, gorse, whin; grass, turf; pasture, pasturage; turbary^; sedge, rush, weed; fungus, mushroom, toadstool; lichen, moss, conferva^, mold; growth; alfalfa, alfilaria^, banyan; blow, blowth^; floret^, petiole; pin grass, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... sight in England to see land in a natural uncultivated state devoid of vegetation. The hills are covered with grasses and bushes, the moors with ling and heather, commons with grass, bracken and gorse, a garden tends to become smothered in weeds, and even a gravel path will not long remain free from grass. It is clear that soil is well suited for the growth of plants. We will make a few experiments to see what we can find out about ...
— Lessons on Soil • E. J. Russell
... or less protected in one way or another from the attacks of animals. These neglected spots are overgrown with gorse, brambles, nettles, blackthorn, and mullein, as well as with the bitter spurges, and the stringy inedible bracken. So, too, while in our meadows we purposely propagate tender fodder plants, like grasses and clovers, we find on the margins of our pastures and by our roadsides only protected species; such as thistles, houndstongue, cuckoo-pint, charlock, nettles (once more), and thorn bushes. The cattle ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... of a river, she scanned the scene beneath, made small her eyes to focus the distance, and so pursued a survey of meadow and woodland, yet without seeing what she sought. Beneath and beyond, separated from her standpoint by grasslands and a hedge of hazel, tangled thickets of blackthorn, of bracken, and of briar sank to the valley bottom. Therein wound tinkling Teign through the gorges of Fingle to the sea; and above it, where the land climbed upward on the other side, spread the Park of Whiddou, with expanses of sweet, stone-scattered herbage, with tracts of deep fern, coverts of ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... cut of the glen there was very little snow, only a few veins and patches here and there, threading and seaming the steep, as if a white-footed hare had been coursing about. Little stubby brier shoots, and clumps of russet bracken, and dead heather, ruffling like a brown dog's back, broke the dull surface of withered herbage, thistle stumps, teasels, rugged banks, and naked brush. Down in the bottom the noisy brook was scurrying over its pebbles ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... sea level among the heather and bracken of Craddock Moor, four or five miles north of Liskeard, you may find to-day the remains of three ancient stone circles known as "The Hurlers." Antiquaries will tell you that the Druids first erected them, but the people of the countryside ...
— Legend Land, Vol. 1 • Various
... visible, as distinctly outlined as any artist could have drawn them. Some of the most striking pictures are on the windows of the Milford Baptist Church, which are protected with shutters that are kept tightly closed. The people of Bracken county have not in years been more worked up over anything than they now ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... had been in at the death and who, during the settlement of my affair, had been busy in the stables, now joined us at dinner. He was but lately come from Cambridge, at which seat of learning the chief books appeared to be Bracken's Farriery and Gibson on the Diseases of Horses, with Hoyle's Whist as lighter reading for leisured hours. He was a hard rider, a hard swearer, and a hard drinker, and, after being double japanned, as he called it, by a friendly bishop, had been pitchforked ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... in clusters among the glossy dark leaves, sending its perfume out with the warm wind far and near. Before her, divided from the grove by a narrow, roughly fenced road, Mollie saw a wide, undulating plain, its surface covered somewhat scantily with coarse grass and occasional clumps of bracken. There were gum trees, large and small, their thin blue-green leaves hanging limply from the grey boughs, and throwing but little shade on the ground beneath. Some distance away a creek wound between wide banks of shingly sand and low boulders. At the ...
— The Happy Adventurers • Lydia Miller Middleton
... as though bewildered by the space, the sunshine, and the breeze, the great rabbit sat and stared about him; then suddenly old instincts came crowding back upon his rabbit brain, He saw furze and bracken, and rabbits' burrows all about him, he felt the turf under his feet, and life calling to him—and he followed ...
— Anxious Audrey • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... is a great sight better than the last one I had," said the conductor, in a tone of exultation, to Bracken, his new engineer. ...
— Chasing an Iron Horse - Or, A Boy's Adventures in the Civil War • Edward Robins
... ken the birdeen's blithie song, Ye'll hark till flo'ers lauchen; An' see the faeries trippit long By brook an' brae an' bracken. Sae doon your heid—an' shut your een; Gien ye'd be away, my dearie— An' the bonny sauncy faery queen Wull ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer
... the sickly feeling still troubled him, but he could not understand why. It was like awakening from some troubled dream, and full consciousness came back slowly. Then, by degrees, he grasped the fact that his head was resting on a tuft of heath, and bracken fronds shaded him from the sun. His wrists throbbed with sharp-shooting pains, which ran right up beyond his elbows. There were pains, too, about his knees and ankles, and there was something else which he could not make out, ...
— The Black Tor - A Tale of the Reign of James the First • George Manville Fenn
... spot which, whatever be the explanation, is distinguished by weird sounds and (some say) sights. I on one occasion was walking with a friend to catch the train at Bray about eleven o'clock one evening some twenty-five years ago, when we both heard heavy steps and rustling of bracken in the Deerpark; apparently some one got over the gate, crossed the road with heavy steps and fell from the wall next Bray Head, rustling and slightly groaning. The night was lightsome, though without ...
— True Irish Ghost Stories • St John D Seymour
... tree. He crept stealthily on his hands and knees through the bracken, and as stealthily climbed the wedge of outcrop, and then leaped like a wild cat on the tree. With incredible activity he lifted the balancing stone, and as the tree began to move, in a flash of perception ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... course, could not behold the gruesome deed, but over the autumn sun was drawn a grey purple mist, and gloom settled upon the Maremma. And as the elements paled and were silent, a hush overspread wild nature, not a beast in the thicket, not a bird on the bough, stirred. Sighs siffled through the bracken and the heather, and the roar of the distant sea died away ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... there the eagle soars; and there beyond the wild deer dash through the arbutus coverts, through which they have come to the margin of the lake to drink, and, scared by your footstep or your oar, are away back to crosiered bracken or heather covered moorland. But the first, the final, the deepest and most enduring impression of Killarney is that of beauty unspeakably tender, which puts on at times a garb of grandeur and a look of awe, only in order to heighten by passing ...
— The Sunny Side of Ireland - How to see it by the Great Southern and Western Railway • John O'Mahony and R. Lloyd Praeger
... wholesome. Through the open casement, the scent of the pines blows in with the breeze from the neighbouring firwood. Keen airs sigh through the pine-needles. Grasshoppers chirp from deep tangles of bracken. The song of a skylark drops from the sky like soft rain in summer; in the evening, a nightjar croons to us his monotonously passionate love-wail from his perch on the gnarled boughs of the wind-swept larch that crowns the upland. But away below in the valley, as night draws on, a lurid ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen
... the clean, cold hell Of glazed and aching silence he was trapped; And, closing in, the blank walls of his cell Crushed stifling on him ... when the bracken snapped, Caught in his clutching fingers; and he lay Awake upon his back among the fern, With free eyes travelling the wide blue day, Unhindered, unremembering; while a burn Tinkled and gurgled ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)
... medium height, slender and graceful as a lily, and looked about three-and-twenty. She was a study in brown. On her head was a brown tam, a rich, warm brown, like the brown of autumn bracken on the moor. She wore a brown jumper, brown skirt, brown stockings and little brown brogued shoes. As she came closer, Merriman saw that her eyes, friendly, honest eyes, were a shade of golden brown, and that a hint of gold also gleamed in the brown of her hair. She was pretty, not classically ...
— The Pit Prop Syndicate • Freeman Wills Crofts
... been enlarged, and is supplied by New River water. From this site a view of surprising beauty is seen—broken ground covered by bracken and gorse, bushes and trees, with the blue outlines of the ...
— Hampstead and Marylebone - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... within its slopes and glades, now tracts of primitive woodland whence the charcoal burners seemed to have but just departed; now purple wastes of heather, wild as the Chase itself; or again, dense thickets of bracken and fir, hiding primeval and impenetrable glooms. Maudeley House, behind them, a seemly Georgian pile, with a columnar front, had the good fortune to belong to a man not rich enough to live in or rebuild ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... along, picking their way among boulders and bracken and heather, he was asking her whether the heart-breaking accidents and bitter disappointments of salmon-fishing were not greater than its rewards; as to which she lightly ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... bracken from my bed I kindled a fire and, damping this a little, made a smoke the which, rising to a certain height, blew back upon us but always from the one direction; and peering up thither I judged ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... life and consciousness, subject to no will of his, but living in themselves. Just as he was, so it seemed the vigorous, wintry stars were strong also with life. He and they struck with the same pulse of fire, and the same joy of strength which held the bracken-frond stiff near his eyes held his own body firm. It was as if he, and the stars, and the dark herbage, and Clara were licked up in an immense tongue of flame, which tore onwards and upwards. Everything rushed along in living beside him; everything was still, ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... if I should like to go on for ever through that balmy freshness. My companion seemed to share in my feelings, and let the horse go slower and slower as he sat inhaling the green forest scents, chief amongst which was the smell of the trodden bracken ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... it as he passed might call it dreary; but in the hollows, miniature lakes glistened, into which the tiny spurs of granite ran out flush with the water like miniature piers. The wind of the morning waking, rippled on the lakelets, and blew the bracken softly northward. The heather was dark rose purple, the "ling" dominating the miles of moor; for the lavender-grey flush of the true heather had not yet broken over the great ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... have been on the floor of a throne; And, alas for auld Scotland, her sons and her daughters! Thy wish was their welfare, thy cause was their own. But 'lorn may we sigh where the hill-winds awaken, And weep in the glen where the cataracts foam, And sleep where the dew-drops are deep on the bracken; Thy foot has the land of thy fathers forsaken, And more—never more will ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... sack she seized eagerly. Bart might be dying, or he might be recovering from some injury; in either case she had only one desire, and that was to procure for him the necessary comforts. Having no access to hay or straw, she began rapidly to gather the bracken which was standing two and three feet high in great quantities wherever the ground was dry under the trees. She worked with a nervous strength that was extraordinary, even to herself, after the toilsome night. When she had filled the sack, she put it upon the floor of the lower room ...
— The Zeit-Geist • Lily Dougall
... unknown curved its ghastly figure over me and touched my throat and forehead with its fulsome tentacles, I was overcome with nervous tremors; a deadly pain griped my entrails, and, convulsed with agony, I rolled over on my face, furiously clawing the bracken. In this condition I continued for probably one or even two minutes, though to me it seemed very much longer. My sufferings terminated with the loud report of firearms, and slowly picking myself up, I found that the apparition had vanished, and that standing some twenty or so ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... of my way, or I shall fire." They made way for me. I charged down hill by the way I had come. Some one cried "Stop en." Another shouted "Shoot en, maister." There came a great bang of a gun over my head. But I was going down hill like a rabbit, into the gorse, into the bracken, into the close cover of the heath. Glancing back, I saw a dozen excited people rushing down the rampart after me. Some flung stones; some ran to catch horses to chase me. But I had the start of them. I was down the ...
— Martin Hyde, The Duke's Messenger • John Masefield
... repaired. Opposite the gates rose the steep slope of a heathery hill, along the flank of which the girls were now walking. On their right lay a piece of rough moorland, covered with heather, patches of bracken, and coarse grass. A few yards to the right, it sank in a steep descent. Such was the disposition of the ground for some distance along the road—on one side the hill, on the other a narrow level, ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... thought and speech; all the country round London has for me bright memories of our wanderings—Richmond, where we tramped across the park, and sat under its mighty trees; Windsor, with its groves of bracken; Kew, where we had tea in a funny little room, with watercress ad libitum; Hampton Court, with its dishevelled beauties; Maidenhead and Taplow, where the river was the attraction; and, above all, Broxbourne, where he delighted to spend the day with his fishing-rod, ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... would have grasped it only that the weight of her heavy cloth cloak dragged her down. So that instead of returning to dry land for many a long day's tramp, she went out to sea in company with sundry wrenched-off boughs, and mats of heather, and bundles of withered bracken, and other such waifs and strays, none of which were ever again heard tidings of any more than they were inquired after in the lonely places they had left. Only for some stormy days the wrecked and sodden banks of the ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... early summer, intermingled with stately pines. All space between these trees was filled with a rich growth of all the flowering shrubs known to our California mountains. In the damper places a wild tangle of ferns and vines and bracken entirely hid the earth from view. Lilacs, white and purple, in full bloom emitted a fragrance which rendered the air intoxicating and nearly overpowered one's senses. Mingled with these bushes were the Cascara Segrada, bright-leafed ...
— Out of Doors—California and Oregon • J. A. Graves
... man's looks, and his short-sighted eyes, and his odd way of speaking, that was abrupt yet soft, just as his hands were sun-burnt and sinewy, yet with smooth nails like a woman's. His hair was sunburnt-looking too, or rather the colour of bracken after frost; his eyes grey, with the appealing look of the shortsighted, his smile shy yet confident, as if he knew lots of things she had never dreamed of, and yet wouldn't for the world have had her feel ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... Lord, For all Thy Golden Silences,— For every Sabbath from the world's turmoil; For every respite from the stress of life;— Silence of moorlands rolling to the skies, Heath-purpled, bracken-clad, aflame with gorse; Silence of grey tors crouching in the mist; Silence of deep woods' mystic cloistered calm; Silence of wide seas basking in the sun; Silence of white peaks soaring to the blue; Silence of dawnings, ...
— 'All's Well!' • John Oxenham
... waltz. An ordinary waltz; Yet distance gives it dignity. Who knows? Journeying through the woods the master haunted. Under the cyclamen, among the bracken, It may ...
— L'Aiglon • Edmond Rostand
... tables of roughest plank round the auction-rooms there, are neatly ranged the various lots; bulbs and sticks of every shape, big and little, withered or green, dull or shining, with a brown leaf here and there, or a mass of roots dry as last year's bracken. No promise do they suggest of the brilliant colours and strange forms buried in embryo within their uncouth bulk. On a cross table stand some dozens of "established" plants in pots and baskets, which the owners ...
— About Orchids - A Chat • Frederick Boyle
... little awning above it, is enshrined in a spacious half hemisphere of glass which forms a pavilion commanding the garden, and, beyond it, a barren but lovely landscape of hill profile with fir trees, commons of bracken and gorse, and wonderful ...
— Misalliance • George Bernard Shaw
... gates there is a wilderness of fern, or bracken, as high as your waist. Hidden in the midst of this unlikely place Jones has found the dagger. It is as if the party, going down the avenue, ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... like Pan, or a faun, or any other woodland thing, with no sound of his approach, not even that of oaten pipes. When she raised her eyes he was standing in a patch of bracken. She had been stooping to gather the fruit that clustered on a long, low, spiny stem. The words on ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... in the wood, still as the dreaming bracken, secretive, moving softly among the pines as a young witch gathering simples. She wore a hood of finely woven shadows, yet, though she drew it close, sunbeams trooping westward flashed strange ...
— The Worshipper of the Image • Richard Le Gallienne
... its own sake. In winter he becomes an inmate of the workhouse, where he almost always proves himself turbulent and disorderly. As soon as it becomes warm enough to sleep in a haystack, or under a hedge, or in a thick clump of furze and bracken, he discharges himself from 'the Union' and takes to 'the roads.' From town to town he begs or steals his way, safe in the assurance that should things go amiss the nearest workhouse must always provide him with gratuitous ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... meandered through it. Far down below there was a waterfall, where gorgeous tree-ferns rose in natural bowers, while others further still leant over the lotus-covered stream, their giant leaves trailing in the slow-moving current. Tangled masses of bracken rioted in wild abundance over a velvety green sod, overshadowed by waving magnolias. Through the trees bright-plumaged birds were flitting from branch to branch in songless flight, flashing their brilliant colours through the sunny leaves. In places the water splashed ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... slim does and a ten-tined buck in the bracken lay; [1] And all of a sudden the sinister smell of a man, Awaft on a wind-shift, wavered and ran Down the hill-side and sifted along through the ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... visited it late at night, when the young moon was beginning to struggle through the cloudy sky, and looked down into the ravine which Cobbett declared was the most horrid place God ever made; but no sign of ghostly visitant could be caught among the bracken, no sound of the dead voices was audible in the air. It is the way with ghosts—they seldom appear where they might be looked for. It is the unexpected in the world of shadows, as in the workaday ...
— Real Ghost Stories • William T. Stead
... swung round into a side road, and we curved upward through deep lanes worn by centuries of wheels, high banks on either side, heavy with dripping moss and fleshy hart's-tongue ferns. Bronzing bracken and mottled bramble gleamed in the light of the sinking sun. Still steadily rising, we passed over a narrow granite bridge, and skirted a noisy stream which gushed swiftly down, foaming and roaring amid the gray boulders. Both road and stream wound up through a valley dense with scrub oak and ...
— Hound of the Baskervilles • Authur Conan Doyle
... the Government a large area of land, north of Tauranga, on the road towards Grahamstown and the Thames Goldfield. It was reported at the time that the price he had paid the Government was ten shillings per acre, right out. This tract of country was completely covered with bracken, and bracken is a difficult growth to get rid of. Proceeding to England, he induced a good many of his friends to try their fortune on the other side of the world, offering them land at an upset price of two pounds per acre—good land, beautiful ...
— The Chronicles of a Gay Gordon • Jose Maria Gordon
... on the top of the down, The wild heather round me and over me June's high blue, When I look'd at the bracken so bright and the heather so brown, I thought to myself I would offer this book to you, This, and my love together, To you that are seventy-seven, With a faith as clear as the heights of the June-blue heaven, ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... up the slope you came to a beautiful bit of old forest country, the trees of all ages, some of them very ancient; there were open glades running into the heart of the woodland, with thorn thickets and stretches of bracken. Hidden away in the depth of the woods, and approached only by green rides, were the ruins of what must have been a big old Jacobean mansion; but nothing remained of it except some grassy terraces, a bit of a fine ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Lochlee and elsewhere. {28a} It would be still more necessary in a substratum of timbers that was intended (as will be afterwards explained) to bear the weight of a superincumbent cairn. Underneath the layers of horizontal woodwork some portions of heather, bracken, and brushwood were detected, and below this came a succession of thin beds of mud, loam, sand, gravel, and finally the blue clay which forms the solum of the river valley. {28b} The piles penetrated this latter, ...
— The Clyde Mystery - a Study in Forgeries and Folklore • Andrew Lang
... proximity, and presently, he caught sight of a portion of the fringe of a bathing-towel. He took it from the thorn on which it hung, and fingered it absently; and while doing so, he noted the mark of footsteps which had trodden down the bracken in front of a certain bush. Almost at the same moment, he saw a little heap of dried leaves beneath the bush, and, mechanically, he stirred them with his foot. To his amazement, the displaced leaves revealed a box covered with morocco leather. He stood and ...
— The Woman's Way • Charles Garvice
... is a beautiful pleasaunce for the inhabitants of Midhurst; thickly carpeted with bracken and heather and broken by many picturesque knolls and hollows. The famous burned and ruined mansion lies on the west, close to the town and river. This beautiful old house was destroyed in 1793 through the carelessness of some workmen employed in repairing the woodwork of some of the ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... us land," said Miss Delamere, "I do so want some common bracken"—or whatever it was, for she cared no more than you or I about the ferns—"I want some for my book, and mamma says we really must collect some rare specimens before we go home." Mrs. Bagshaw guessed what sort of flower they would be ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith
... Thro' moss, and bracken, and purple bloom, With a glitter of gorses here and there, Shoulder deep in the dewy bloom, My love, I follow you everywhere! By faint sweet signs my soul divines, Dear heart, at dawning you came this way, By the jangled bells ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... out, shook his head, and cantered gaily homewards. Glyde, having Ingram on the ground, took him by the collar of his jacket and belaboured him with his open hand. He cuffed him like a schoolboy, boxed him about the ears and face, shook him well, and then cast him into the young bracken of his own avenue. "There's for you, seducer," he said; and that done, he walked steadily up the road ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... only saved from sharing the like fate by being sent out of the kingdom. His earnest words on his return to take the rule of this unhappy realm were these: "Let God but grant me life, and there shall not be a spot in my realm where the key shall not keep the castle, and the bracken bush the cow, though I should lead the life of a ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... could still show a few golden leaves, though each moment another went whirling away as the crests bowed and tossed before the wind. In the brown bracken beneath Harry Boyce stood waiting. His graces were set off with his customary rusty black. His hat was well down upon his bobwig, and he hunched his shoulders against the wind, making a picture of melancholy discomfort. He rocked to and fro a little, according to a habit ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... Melton turnpike, followed by three Irish miles of unaided forest track. Half of it lies under water for six months of the year; but in the summer a rutted ride projects from stony sand-pockets framed in velvet moss, with tidal-waves of bracken surging up from the dells at the road-side and low branches meeting ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... those of the watch, and the light of the moon high aloft was mingled with the light of the earliest dawn; and as it happed he looked down, and lo! close to his feet the face of the Bride as she lay beside her grand-sire, her head pillowed on a bundle of bracken. She was sleeping soundly like a child who has been playing all day, and whose sleep has come to him unsought and happily. Her hands were laid together by her side; her cheek was as fair and clear as it was wont to be at her best; her face looked calm and happy, and a lock of her dark-red hair ...
— The Roots of the Mountains • William Morris
... her, stooped to snatch her weapon, a rook-rifle, from her, and swinging it high in the air, flung it back among the bushes and bracken he had just crossed. ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... he had not lost the knack, and after the first cast or two, in the pleasure of recovered skill, his senses abandoned themselves entirely to the sport. Sir John had lit a cigar and seated himself amid the bracken a short distance back from the brink, to watch: but whether he conversed or not Mr. Molesworth could not tell. He remembered afterwards that at the end of twenty minutes or so—probably when his cigar was ...
— Merry-Garden and Other Stories • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... freely to the artificial fly when the natural fly is destroyed, and the angler is almost blinded with dusty snowflakes. All through midsummer the Scotch rivers lose their chief attractions. The bracken has not yet changed its green for the fairy gold, the hue of its decay; the woods wear a uniform and sombre green; the waters are low and shrunken, and angling is almost impossible. But with September the pleasant season returns for people who love "to be quiet, and go a-fishing," or a-sketching. ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... schoolhouse in time but without a second to spare. The boys, who had to wriggle hastily down from the trees, were later; and Anne, who had not been picking gum at all but was wandering happily in the far end of the grove, waist deep among the bracken, singing softly to herself, with a wreath of rice lilies on her hair as if she were some wild divinity of the shadowy places, was latest of all. Anne could run like a deer, however; run she did with the impish result that she overtook the boys at the door ...
— Anne Of Green Gables • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... evoke before their minds, and strengthened by the vital force of the listeners' hot-eared excitement, pictures of a strong man and a fine girl living like beasts in the fields. Not only did they tell lies of how they had watched her and Harry among the bracken, they said she had been seduced by the young doctor who had been locum tenens here in February, and that they had seen her in the lanes with the two lads that were being tutored at the Vicarage. These things had been repeated to her by her grandmother in order ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... the Wizard went over Three-Tree Common, his shoe became unstringed, and he bent down to refasten it. Then he saw Wry-Face, the gnome, hiding among the bracken and looking as mischievous as anything. In one hand he held a white fluff-feather. Now these feathers are as light as anything, and will blow in the wind; and whatever they are placed under, whether light or heavy, they are bound ...
— The Book of Stories for the Storyteller • Fanny E. Coe
... his knees and sat staring at the pond. Overhead the trees were whispering; behind him, in and out of their holes the rabbits whisked; far off he could hear the twitter of a swallow; the foxglove was dead, the bracken was turning brown, the cones from the fir trees were lying on the ground. As he watched, a strange thing happened. Slowly and slowly the pond lengthened out and out, stretching away and away until it became a river—a long ...
— Very Short Stories and Verses For Children • Mrs. W. K. Clifford
... tract called Mallory Heath, where the short greensward encroaches on the road, and where the eye roaming east or west or north can discern nothing except a limitless expanse of heather, broken here and there by patches of gorse and bracken, or by clumps of touselled and wind-thinned pines and Scotch firs. The tawny-coloured, sandy, track is difficult to follow in the dark, and there are posts set up at intervals on the skirts of the way for travellers' guidance. These posts show out white ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... unexpected little paths running out to promontories of the cliff and, at a sudden turn, she would find herself in what looked almost like danger. Below her the rock was at an angle to harbour hawthorn trees all in bud, blazing gorse bushes, bracken stiffly uncurling itself and many kinds of grasses, but there were nearly two hundred feet between her and the river, now at flood, and she felt that this was something of an adventure. She followed each little path in turn, half ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... was a smell of birch and beech buds sealed up in gum, of berries clotted on the rowan-trees, and of balsam and spice from plantations of Highland firs and larches. The babbling water of the burn was scented with the dead bracken of glens down which it foamed. Even the leafless hedges had their woody odors, and stone dykes their musty smell of decaying ...
— Greyfriars Bobby • Eleanor Atkinson
... of the man, she turned her back upon, him, and patting Cleopatra's neck, cantered quickly ahead to join the rest of the field which was now moving towards another cover, while the hounds ran through some low thickets of brushwood and tangled bracken. ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... wild. A grouse ran with a flutter and took wing with a cry, half in protest at being wakened from its sleep, half in alarm at my presence. A rabbit rushed from a sheltering hole in such a hurry that, as I could tell by its clatter among the bracken, it nearly fell over itself, as rabbits clumsily do, making fluffy, ...
— The Black Colonel • James Milne
... bell of some wanderer from the herd tinkled drowsily, arousing him from his reverie. The horses were ascending; the road emerged into a plain, set with bracken and gorse, with here and there a single tree, whose inclining trunk told of storms braved for many seasons. Near the highway, in the shadow of a poplar, stood a shepherd's hut, apparently deserted and isolated from human kind. The fool reined the horse, which for some time had been ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... verge of a black forest; the tree-trunks stood like those great columns in an Egyptian hall whence God in an older mood received the praise of men; the top of it sloped the way of an ancient wind. Here they all halted and lighted a fire of branches, striking sparks from flint into a heap of bracken. They eased them of their armour, and sat round the fire, and Camorak stood up there and addressed them, and Camorak said: "We go to war with Fate, who has doomed that I shall not come to Carcassonne. And if we turn aside but one of the dooms of Fate, then the whole future of the world ...
— A Dreamer's Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... blossom in the summer-time; and in the deeper, lonelier places the blackthorn and hoe ran wild, and the dog-rose in wild confusion; the alder and the gorse too, the honeysuckle and ivy, climbed up over rocks and stems; you might see a laurel now and then, and bilberry bushes by thousands, and bracken everywhere in an endless profusion ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... Introduction Key to Genera Classification of Ferns The Polypodies The Bracken Group: Bracken Cliff Brakes Rock Brake The Lip Ferns (Cheilanthes) The Cloak Fern (Notholaena) The Chain Ferns The Spleenworts: The Rock Spleenworts. Asplenium The Large Spleenworts. Athyrium Hart's Tongue and Walking Leaf The Shield Ferns: Christmas and ...
— The Fern Lover's Companion - A Guide for the Northeastern States and Canada • George Henry Tilton
... deeply that it was pure dog-in-the-mangerism of the cottagers, and this he could not stand. Not one beast in two years had fattened on its barrenness. Three old donkeys alone eked out the remnants of their days. A bundle of firewood or old bracken, a few peat sods from one especial corner, were all the selfish peasants gathered. But the cottagers were no great matter—he could soon have settled them; it was that fellow Peacock whom he could not settle, just because he happened to abut on the Common, and his fathers had ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the courier is forward to Elbingerode, ordering forty horses to be out. Roughish uphill road; winter in the sky and earth, winter vapors and tumbling wind-gusts: westward, in torn storm-cloak, the Bracken, with its witch-dances; highland Goslar, and ghost of Henry the Fowler, on the other side of it. A multifarious wizard Country, much overhung by goblin reminiscences, witch-dances, sorcerers'-sabbaths ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... reloaded and piled in different parts of the enclosure, ready to hand, and cutlasses resharpened on the grindstone belonging to the tool-chest and placed close to their owners' hands, the remainder of the little company stretched themselves out on beds of bracken, which had been cut during the day, and in a few minutes were fast asleep, completely worn out by the fatigue and excitement of a very long ...
— A Chinese Command - A Story of Adventure in Eastern Seas • Harry Collingwood
... with bracken-fronds, And golden elf-locks fly above; Her eyes are bright as diamonds And bluer than ...
— Songs from Books • Rudyard Kipling
... in which we lay there stretched out an avenue of timber trees, whereunder the bracken, breast high, had been cut to make a ride. Upon this bracken, and upon this smooth channel in the midst the late sun streamed toward us, a soft wash of gold. Behind all this the sky, pale to whiteness immediately overhead, ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... quickly that his mother was a most wonderful creature. She was by all odds the biggest thing alive—that is, the biggest that stood on legs, and moved. He was confident of this for a space of perhaps two minutes, when they came to the end of the fen. And here was a sudden snort, a crashing of bracken, the floundering of a huge body through knee-deep mud, and a monstrous bull moose, four times as big as Noozak, set off in lively flight. Neewa's eyes all but popped from his head. And STILL Noozak PAID ...
— Nomads of the North - A Story of Romance and Adventure under the Open Stars • James Oliver Curwood
... (Bishop's Lydeard, Crowcombe, Stogumber, Williton). On the E. side, they are cut by numerous long and leafy combes (notably Cockercombe and Seven Wells' Combe), which afford easy ascents; but on the W. the slopes are much steeper and barer. Their tops are covered with bracken, heather, scrub oak, and quantities of whortle berries, the ripening of the last marking the beginning of the summer holidays for the village children, who then go "whorting." The most conspicuous summits in order ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade
... was the command of General Reynolds, with headquarters at Cheat Mountain Pass,( 3) three miles from Huttonville on the Staunton pike. Here Colonel Sullivan's 13th Indiana, part of Loomis' battery, and Bracken's Indiana Cavalry were camped. On Cheat Mountain, at the middle mountain-top, about nine miles to the southeast of Huttonville on the Staunton pike, were the 14th Indiana, 24th and 25th Ohio, and parts of the same battery and cavalry, ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... mixed with the heavy perfume of the elder, whose mingled odour is like the odour of the room of the dead, a vapour of incense and corruption. I stood at the edges of the wood, gazing at all the pomp and procession of the foxgloves towering amidst the bracken and shining red in the broad sunshine, and beyond them into deep thickets of close undergrowth where springs boil up from the rock and nourish the water-weeds, dank and evil. But in all my wanderings I avoided ...
— The Great God Pan • Arthur Machen
... before us—some hundreds of yards across—all green turf and low bracken growing to the very edge of the cliff. Round this clearing there was a semi-circle of trees with curious huts built of foliage piled one above the other among the branches. A rookery, with every nest a little house, would best convey the idea. The openings of these huts and ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... two normal children, and nursed each for one month. "The bearded woman" of every circus side-show is an evidence of the curious interest in which these women are held. The accompanying illustration is a representation of a "bearded woman" born in Bracken County, Ky. Her beard measured ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... straggling back by twos and threes as they had gone away. Each brought some treasure found in their wanderings, and Marjorie would have been buried beneath the offerings of flowers, and tender green bracken, and "bonny stanies" that were brought to her, if Annie Cairns had not taken possession of them all, promising to carry them safe ...
— Allison Bain - By a Way she knew not • Margaret Murray Robertson
... Pauline in the country, against a background of golden beech trees and brown bracken, look even beautiful; but in London she lacks something, possibly the right background. She has glorious hair, but her maid can't do it. Pauline admits it, but she says she can't send a nice woman ...
— The Professional Aunt • Mary C.E. Wemyss
... they have to break through the ground, but when they arise from the summit of the bulb above ground, they are from the first quite straight; and this is a fact which deserves notice. The rachis of the bracken fern (Pteris aquilina), and of some, probably many, other ferns, likewise rises above ground under the form of an arch. No doubt other analogous instances could be found by careful search. In all ordinary cases of bulbs, rhizomes, [page 87] root-stocks, ...
— The Power of Movement in Plants • Charles Darwin
... Conservative Party. I was trying—chaotic task—to gauge the possibilities inherent in the quality of the British aristocracy. There comes a broad spectacular effect of wide parks, diversified by woods and bracken valleys, and dappled with deer; of great smooth lawns shaded by ancient trees; of big facades of sunlit buildings dominating the country side; of large fine rooms full of handsome, easy-mannered people. As ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... Carlsruhe ("Charles's Rest") to the eastward, but the bracken and underbrush have given way to beaten roads, which prolong with perfect regularity the fan of streets. An avenue of the finest Lombardy poplars in Germany, the trees being from ninety to a hundred and twenty feet high, extends for two miles to Durlach. Around ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... so desolate as to offer no food at all for one who knows what to look for. There is usually some sort of berry available. One kind of acorn is not bad to eat. Shoots of bracken are not unlike asparagus. There are some spiny wild plants whose leaves, if plucked young enough, will yield some nourishment and of course there are mushrooms. Even on stone one can find liverish rock-tripe which is edible if one dries ...
— Operation Terror • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... small treasures in places unknown to others; and most of all the rich sense of observation of a hundred curious and delicate things; the nests of birds in the shrubbery, the glossy cones of the young pines, the green, uncurling fingers of the bracken, the fresh green sword-grass that grew beneath the firs; he did not care to know the nature or the reasons of these things; it was enough simply to see them, to explore them with restless fingers, to recognise their scents, hues, and savours, with the sharp ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the land where bracken grows And heath-clad mountains rise; Where peaks still fringed with winter snows Tower in the summer skies. Oh! I have seen the red and green Of fir and rowan tree, And heard the din of flooded linn, With ...
— Deep Down, a Tale of the Cornish Mines • R.M. Ballantyne
... the storm rushes upon the deep woods, It lets down curtains of mist And sheets of rain, that drip Crystal beads among the trees. Way above, the branches lash and moan And weave. Below, it is still, Still as the undersea. Soft fern and feathery bracken Loom through the mist Like branching coral, And drifting leaves float down Like snowy fishes, ...
— A Little Window • Jean M. Snyder
... they walked back to Braeside. It was a pretty walk across a bit of moorland, through the heather and bracken, here and there a moss-grown rock, here and there across the path a ...
— Hunter's Marjory - A Story for Girls • Margaret Bruce Clarke
... rock. Descending further, the bleak aspect of Nature is transformed. The heather gives place to dwarf shrubs; the bare, weather-beaten rocks are clothed with blackberry bushes, or hidden amid luxurious bracken. Dark hollies clinging to detached rocks present varied and life-like forms. The air has suddenly become still. The butterflies hover over the foxgloves. The wild strawberry is at your feet. The ...
— A Child of the Glens - or, Elsie's Fortune • Edward Newenham Hoare
... tawny and amber tints, so various and so harmonious in their delicate gradations that the eye of the artist was gladdened by their decay. The hawthorns in Wimperfield Park glowed in the distance like patches of crimson flame, and the undulating sweeps of bracken showed golden-brown against the green-sward; while the oaks-symbolic of all that is solid, ponderous, and constant in woodland nature, slow to bloom and slow to die—had hardly a faded leaf to ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... which I took on the homeward way, and which follows the old water conduit built by the monks into a forest of enormous chestnuts, oaks, hollies and Calabrian pines, emerging out of an ocean of glittering bracken. ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... the house. It led along the breast of the hill, with a fine view under the spreading arms of the great beeches, across the water to the Welsh mountains. On the left the woods were thick. Huge old hollies showed the ravages of age and storm. A riotous undergrowth of bushes and bracken filled the spaces between the taller trees. Doves were murmuring in the shade. Rabbits scampered across the road. In an open park at the edge of the wood, a herd of twenty or thirty fallow deer with pale spotted sides and twinkling tails trotted ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
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