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More "Fern" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... stalactite formations like cauliflowers. Immediately above the village is a much larger cavern 72 feet high and 36 feet deep. It is vaulted like a dome, and tendrils of ivy and vine hang down draping the entrance. Violets grow in purple masses at the opening, and maiden-hair fern luxuriates within. At the extreme end, high up, to be reached only by a ladder of forty rungs, is another opening into a cave that runs far into the bowels of the Causse, to where the water falls in a cascade that now flows ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... was apparently more grown than other cereals. The chief meat of the lower classes then, as to-day, was bacon from the innumerable herds of swine who roamed in the woods and wastes, but in bad years, when food was scarce, the poor ate nuts, acorns, fern ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... out fantastically all over them. It shelved so deeply, that, while the hemlock-tassels were swinging on the trees around its border, all would be still at its springy bottom, save that perhaps a single fern would wave slowly backward and forward like a sabre with a twist as of a feathered oar,—and this when not a breath could be felt, and every other stem and blade were motionless. There was an old story of one having perished here in the winter of '86, and his body having been found in the ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... 2-cleft, thus appearing to be twice as many. Scape: 4 to 10 in. high. Leaves: Growing in an open rosette on the ground; round or broader, clothed with reddish bristly hairs tipped with purple glands, and narrowed into long, flat, hairy petioles; young leaves curled like fern fronds. ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... 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 ...
— A Little Window • Jean M. Snyder
... and dark, in sun and storm, for years, and the old instinctive sense of direction, of location, had not deserted him. In a little while he came out abreast of Cradle Bay. The Gower house, all brightly gleaming windows, loomed near. He struck down through the dead fern, over the ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... and colour. Every green was young, every pore was open, and every stalk was swollen with racing currents of juice. God was palpably present in the country, and the devil had gone with the world to town. Flossy catkins of the later kinds, fern-sprouts like bishops' croziers, the square-headed moschatel, the odd cuckoo-pint,—like an apoplectic saint in a niche of malachite,—snow-white ladies'-smocks, the toothwort, approximating to human flesh, the enchanter's night-shade, ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... with their perpetual summer,—or of the Hesperides (if they were flat, and not close to Atlas), golden apples and all,—I would give away in an instant, for one mossy granite stone a foot broad, and two leaves of lady-fern.[24] ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... not a single living thing left. I didn't know about this, when I spoke to your man Democritus. I have ordered the service of Rhosian ware. But, hallo! what are you thinking of? You generally serve us up a dinner of herbs on fern-pattern plates, and the most sparkling of baskets: what am I to expect you to give on porcelain? I have ordered a horn for Phemius: one will be sure to turn up; I only hope he may play something worthy ...
— Letters of Cicero • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... seen from the country to which I was going, where it might be useful to me in fixing other points; the other being to obtain a view of Port Phillip, and thus to connect my survey with that harbour. But the tree-fern, musk-plant, brush, and lofty timber together shut us up for a long time from any prospect of the low country to the southward, and it was not until I had nearly exhausted a fine sunny afternoon in wandering round the broad summit that I could ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... tutor, sympathising fully with the ardent pursuits of boyhood, had been over-indulgent in the matter of granting whole Wednesdays, instead of half-holidays. Any excuse sufficed. Skating on inland ponds in the winter; fishing in the bay, as the year wore on; and, latterly, digging for primrose or fern roots in Brattlesby Woods. But Philip Price was beginning to find out by results that too much play and not enough work was making dull scholars of his pupils, and he had determined to stand out firmly against any more indulgences in the future. It was high time that Alick ...
— The Captain's Bunk - A Story for Boys • M. B. Manwell
... ages ago a beautiful fern grew in a deep vale, nodding in the breeze. One day it fell, complaining as it sank away that no one would remember its grace and beauty. The other day a geologist went out with his hammer in the interest of his science. He struck a rock; and there in ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... in den garten, Da er dieselb zu sein gedacht, Und nehmend war[1] von fern der zarten, Die ihn in diese Welt gebracht, 10 "Wolan, sprach er, nu soll dein blut Recht bssen, ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... companion with them. The man found himself in a beautiful hall with everything he could desire at his command, and here he pleasantly passed the time ere he retired to rest. In the morning when he awoke, instead of finding himself on a couch in Fairy Hall, be found himself lying on a heap of fern on the wild ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... may be symbolized by a frond of fern, having ten or more leaves, and to this a common leaflet may be added to increase the number of thousands. In this way any given number may be represented in foliage, such as the date of a year in which ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... got in any quantity at Wankelo, so Mrs. Hading had cleverly decided to use only those of one colour, choosing sunflowers, marigolds, and all the little yellow children of the Zinnia family. These, mingled with the tender green of maidenhair fern, of which quantities had been obtained from Selukine, massed against walls draped with green, made an exquisite setting for her entertainment and her own beauty. She glided here and there among the amber lights, welcoming her guests and setting ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... ground will permit the use of a harrow good results are obtainable by scarifying the soil in strips about 10 feet apart and sowing the seed in these strips. On unburned areas covered with a dense growth of fern, salal, moss, grass, or other plants, this covering must be removed by the seed spot method. This consists in removing the ground cover with a grub hoe or mattock in spots of varying diameter (6 inches ...
— Practical Forestry in the Pacific Northwest • Edward Tyson Allen
... than the drive to Strathfield-saye, passing, as we do, through a great part of Heckfield Heath,* a tract of wild woodland, a forest, or rather a chase, full of fine sylvan beauty—thickets of fern and holly, and hawthorn and birch, surmounted by oaks and beeches, and interspersed with lawny glades and deep pools, letting light into the picture. Nothing can be prettier than the approach to the duke's lodge. And the entrance ...
— The Lost Dahlia • Mary Russell Mitford
... manor-house appeared before them, rising amidst the hereditary woods, which doubtless dated from a time beyond the days which Middleton fondly recalled, when his ancestors had walked beneath their shade. On each side of them were thickets and copses of fern, amidst which they saw the hares peeping out to gaze upon them, occasionally running across the path, and comporting themselves like creatures that felt themselves under some sort of protection from the outrages of man, though they knew too much of his destructive character to trust ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... seemed uninviting, these were occasionally broken into charmingly alluring coves floored with golden sand, clad with evergreen shrubbery, and adorned with every variety of indigenous wattle, she-oak, wild flower, and fern, from the delicately graceful 'maiden-hair' to the palm-like 'old man'; while the majestic gum-tree, clean and smooth as the mast of 'some tall admiral' pierces the clear air to the height of 230 ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... with unreasoning, nightmare terror. She was lying on a bed of fern in a narrow, dark ravine. The place was full of shadow, though far overhead she saw the light of day. At one end, only a few yards from her, a stream rushed and gurgled among great boulders, and its insistent murmur filled the air. Behind her rose a great wall of grey rock, clothed ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... lilac and with the blackbird's song; and when the curtain fell into its trench of flowers, and the play commenced, we saw before us a real forest, and we knew it to be Arden. For with whoop and shout, up through the rustling fern came the foresters trooping, the banished Duke took his seat beneath the tall elm, and as his lords lay around him on the grass, the rich melody of Shakespeare's blank verse began to reach our ears. And all through the performance this delightful sense of ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... Leamington. He was riding homewards, through a sequestered and wooded part of the park, when he was aware of the presence of two ladies, evidently a mother and daughter. They sate on one side of the rude path, on an old prostrate beech tree. The daughter, who was very beautiful, was sketching a piece of fern for a foreground: the mother was looking over the drawing. Neither ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... saw that all was ruinous, Here stood a shattered archway plumed with fern; And here had fall'n a great part of a tower, Whole, like a crag that tumbles from the cliff, And like a crag was gay with wilding flowers, And high above a piece of turret stair, Worn by the feet that now were ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume I • Susan Warner
... considerable way to go. The glen path, narrow and rough, went up and down, still following the water. Hazel and birch, oak and pine, overhung and darkened it. Bosses of rock thrust themselves forward, patched with lichen and moss, seamed and fringed with fern and heath. Roots of trees, huge and twisted, spread and clutched like guardian serpents. In places where rock had fallen the earth seemed to gape. In the shadow it looked a gnome world—a gnome or a dragon world. Then upon ledge or bank showed ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... and the men put down their tools, for a sharp, ringing noise rolled across the woods. When they reached camp Jim was surprised to note two hobbled horses among the springing fern. The big pack-saddles stood near the fire and a man was helping Carrie to fill the tin plates. He stopped when Jim advanced, and Carrie said, "This is Mr. Davies; he was at ...
— Partners of the Out-Trail • Harold Bindloss
... they may be seen bending over fields tapestried with Passion-Flowers and verdurous with Myrtles and Orange-trees, and presenting their long shafts to the tendrils of the Trumpet Honeysuckle and the palmate foliage of the Climbing Fern. But the slender Palms, when solitary, afford but little shade. It is when they are standing in groups, their lofty tops meeting and forming a uniform umbrage, that they afford any important protection from the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... slipt Down through a frost-leaved forest-crypt.[19] 190 Long, sparkling aisles of steel-stemmed trees Bending to counterfeit a breeze; Sometimes the roof no fretwork knew But silvery mosses that downward grew; Sometimes it was carved in sharp relief[20] 195 With quaint arabesques[21] of ice-fern leaf; Sometimes it was simply smooth and clear For the gladness of heaven to shine through, and here He had caught the nodding bulrush-tops And hung them thickly with diamond drops, 200 Which crystalled the beams of moon and sun, And made a star of every one: So mortal builder's most rare device ...
— Narrative and Lyric Poems (first series) for use in the Lower School • O. J. Stevenson
... and looked out, wishing the children a happy Christmas. Then we dressed, for there was a great deal to do. Papa had many services in church, Chinese, English, and Dyak. I had the wreaths to make. The church had been decked with moss fern the day before, but the flowers must be added in the morning, or they would be faded. So Julia and I made a crown of French marigolds to hang on the cross over the altar, two large wreaths for either side, and one at the west end made entirely of the golden allamanda, in the buds of which ...
— Sketches of Our Life at Sarawak • Harriette McDougall
... by which she had crept in, and a dove finding its way in every day with a loaf to feed her, while a spring within the cave supplied her with water. Legends have grown over every stone of this poetic land like moss and lichen and rock-fern; and at Beul, a small bathing-place with a real geyser and a very tolerable circle of society, we come across the universal story of a golden treasure sunk in a castle-well and guarded by a giant. The old, world-forgotten town has its hall of justice and all the shell of its antique civic paraphernalia, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... Kidney bean, which when roasted eats like a Chestnut, and is called Ahee; the fruit of a Tree which they call Wharra, something like a Pine Apple; the fruit of a Tree called by them Nano; the roots of a Fern and the roots of a plant called Thive. All these Articles the Earth almost Spontaniously produces, or, at least, they are raised with very little Labour. In the Article of food these people may almost be said to be exempt from the Curse of our Forefathers, ...
— Captain Cook's Journal During the First Voyage Round the World • James Cook
... mankind were gazing that night. She was in dashing spirits, a glorious color diffused her cheeks, her eyes fairly danced. Her dress was of feathery black tulle, and a broad silver ribbon, like an order, went over her shoulders. In the shining black braids glistened fern leaves of silver filigree. Fortunately, Fred and I discovered them—Leonora and her inseparable cavalier, Denis, I mean—in an alcove of roses and jessamines. She admiring the flowers, and he talking with a fervor very easy to read. She listening, as women always listen ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... respectable land-owners and farmers of the county of Wilts, to take into consideration the propriety of presenting Petitions to both Houses of Parliament, on behalf of the proprietors and occupiers of land. Thomas Grove, Esq. of Fern, one of the gentlemen who called the meeting, having taken the chair, Mr. Benett addressed them at a very considerable length in favour of a petition that he submitted for their adoption, expressive of the serious injury already ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 3 • Henry Hunt
... Ravenswood; 'the broad blaze which might have been seen ten miles off—what occasioned that?' 'Hout, awa! it's an auld saying and a true, "Little's the light will be seen far in a mirk night"—a wheen fern and horse litter that I fired in the courtyard, after sending back the loon of a ...
— The Proverbs of Scotland • Alexander Hislop
... 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 Holly Fern Marsh Fern Tribe The Beech Ferns The ...
— The Fern Lover's Companion - A Guide for the Northeastern States and Canada • George Henry Tilton
... glorious sight upon a glorious day. To the northward the glens rushed down toward the cliff, crowned with gray crags, and carpeted with purple heather and green fern; and from their feet stretched away to the westward the sapphire rollers of the vast Atlantic, crowned with a thousand crests of flying foam. On their left hand, some ten miles to the south, stood ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... into our fern-house, which is just beyond here," she said. "We have got such exquisite maidenhairs and such a splendid Killarney fern. ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... spring had lost its way Amid the grass and fern; A passing stranger scooped a well Where weary men might turn. He walled it in, and hung with care, A ladle on the brink; He thought not of the deed he did, But judged that Toil might drink. He passed again; and lo! the well, By summer never dried, ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Literature • Ontario Ministry of Education
... brought their pikes, and spears, and javelins, and such other projectiles as were employed in those days in hunting wild beasts. The troop was divided into companies of one hundred, and for banners they bore tufts of grass on wisps of straw, or fern, or other herbage, tied at the top of a pole. The armament was rude, but the men were resolute and determined, and they made their appearance at the gates of the city upon the outside, just in time to co-operate with Remus in the rebellion which ...
— Romulus, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... of the brow, rising out of the rich green scrub? Verily, again, we are in the Tropics. They are palms, doubtless, some thirty feet high each, with here and there a young one springing up like a gigantic crown of male-fern. The old ones have straight gray stems, often prickly enough, and thickened in the middle; gray last year's leaves hanging down; and feathering round the top, a circular plume of pale green leaves, like those of a coconut. But these are not cocos. The last year's leaves of the coco are rich yellow, ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... carry on their backs. Flour, of course, formed the principal article of our commissariat. This was packed up in sacks, which were again enclosed in long pockets, made of hides, and called "parfleshes," the use of which is to defend the canvas of the sacking from being torn by branches of fern and underwood. The sacks we secured on strong pack-saddles, between which and the back of the horse were some thick soft cloths. All our baggage-horses were furnished with trail ropes, which were allowed to drag on the ground ...
— California • J. Tyrwhitt Brooks
... pound pulverized and dried iron sulphate and 1/2 pound bicarbonate of soda, and give one teaspoonful each morning until the medicine is gone. After the last dose give the following: Turpentine, 2 ounces; fluid extract male fern, 1/2 ounce; Pearson's Creolins, 1 ounce; raw linseed oil, 1 pint. Mix and give all at one dose. To improve the general condition one may give artificial Carlsbad salts, 1 tablespoonful in each feed, and ...
— One Thousand Questions in California Agriculture Answered • E.J. Wickson
... to descend the narrow cork-screw stair, so dark and cool, I caught a glimpse, one turn down, by the feeble light that came through its chinks after it was shut behind us, of a tiny maiden-hair fern growing out of the wall. I stopped, and said ...
— The Seaboard Parish Volume 1 • George MacDonald
... such as intercommuning of foreigners, surcharges of commoners, trespasses in the fence month and winter haining, and in the enclosures; keeping hogs, sheep, goats, and geese, being uncommonable animals, in the Forest; cutting and burning the nether vert, furze, and fern; gathering and taking away the crabs, acorns, and mast; and other purprestures and offences; carrying away such timber trees as were covertly cut down in the night time; by which practices several hundred fine oaks were yearly ...
— The Forest of Dean - An Historical and Descriptive Account • H. G. Nicholls
... white goods on the morrow, or Mrs. Gashwiler's version of a regrettable incident occurring at that afternoon's meeting of the Entre Nous Five Hundred Club, in which the score had been juggled adversely to Mrs. Gashwiler, resulting in the loss of the first prize, a handsome fern dish, and concerning which Mrs. Gashwiler had thought it best to speak her mind? What importance could he attach to the disclosure of Metta Judson, the Gashwiler hired girl, who chatted freely during her appearances with food, that ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... that drifted One after one, like infant elves at play Amid the night-winds, in their lonely way— Some whistling and some moaning, some asleep, And dreaming dismal dreams, and sighing deep Over their couches of green moss and flowers, And solitary fern, and ...
— The Death-Wake - or Lunacy; a Necromaunt in Three Chimeras • Thomas T Stoddart
... sunshine glimmers with green light. Oh! 'tis a quiet spirit-healing nook! Which all, methinks, would love; but chiefly he, The humble man, who, in his youthful years, Knew just so much of folly, as had made His early manhood more securely wise! Here he might lie on fern or withered heath, While from the singing lark (that sings unseen The minstrelsy that solitude loves best), And from the sun, and from the breezy air, Sweet influences trembled o'er his frame; And he, with many feelings, many thoughts, Made up a meditative ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... stream, she came at last to another wood—not a wild wood like the first, but a tame, domesticated wood. The dead limbs were cut away, and the ground was neatly brushed up under the trees. The brook flowed sedately between fern-bordered banks, under rustic bridges, and widened occasionally into pools carpeted with lily pads. Mossy paths set with stepping-stones led off into mysterious depths that the eye could not penetrate: the leaves were just out enough to half hide and to tantalize. The grass was starred with ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster
... neither a painter nor a poet) to describe this dell as it should be described; and I will therefore only beg of thee, gentle reader, who peradventure mayst not have lingered in this classical neighbourhood, to fancy a deep, deep dell, its steep sides fringed down with hazel and beech, and fern and thick undergrowth, and clothed at the bottom with the richest and greenest sward in the world. You descend, clinging to the trees, and scrambling as best you may,—and now you stand on haunted ground! Tread ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... and yet it cannot be said to have been unproductive; for, probably, there never was a space of ground of equal size, unless it were Maidenhead Thicket, which could show so rich and luxuriant a crop of gorse, heath, and fern. For a shelter to the latter, appeared scattered at unequal distances over the ground a few stunted trees—hawthorns, beeches, and oaks. The beech, however, predominated, in honour of the county in which ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... yours," said the pertinacious Master Ganlesse, as he called himself; "and we will both travel the safer, that we journey in company. I have the receipt of fern-seed, man, and walk invisible. Besides, you would not have me quit you in this lane, where there is no turn to ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... grass and wild flowers weave their lovely patterns for the earth floor, and tall pines spread their soft carpets of brown, while giant oaks and sycamores lift their cathedral arches to support the ceilings of green, and dark rock fountains set in banks of moss and fern hold water clear and cold. It was to one of these that Stanford Manning brought his bride for their honeymoon. Stanford himself pitched their tent and made their simple camp, for it was not in his plan that the sweet intimacy of these, ...
— When A Man's A Man • Harold Bell Wright
... Westminster, my Lord being gone before my coming to chapel. I and Mr. Sheply told out my money, and made even for my Privy Seal fees and gratuity money, &c., to this day between my Lord and me. After that to chappell, where Dr. Fern, a good honest sermon upon "The Lord is my shield." After sermon a dull anthem, and so to my Lord's (he dining abroad) and dined with Mr. Sheply. So, to St. Margarett's, and heard a good sermon upon the text "Teach ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... light has turned a rich yellow;— long black shapes lie across the curving road, shadows of balisier and palm, shadows of tamarind and Indian-reed, shadows of ceiba and giant-fern. And the porteuses are coming down through the lights and darknesses of the way from far Grande Anse, to halt a moment in this little village. They are going to sit down on the road-side here, before ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... I'd better turn back?" he asked her, gently. "Your path is clear before you." He pointed to it winding through the fern. "And you know, I hope, that anything I could do for you and your mother during your stay here I should be only too enchanted to do. The one thing I shrink from doing is to interfere in any ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... into silence and changes the subject,—why, look there for something! just as, when going through deep meadow-grass, a bird flies ostentatiously up before you, you may know her nest is not there, but far off, under distant tufts of fern and buttercup, through which she has crept with a silent flutter in her spotted breast, to act her pretty little ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... nature affects us painfully, like the want of sympathy in a dear friend. Mara had been all her days a child of the woods; her delicate life had grown up in them like one of their own cool shaded flowers; and there was not a moss, not a fern, not an upspringing thing that waved a leaf or threw forth a flower-bell, that was not a well-known friend to her; she had watched for years its haunts, known the time of its coming and its going, studied ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... he, heedless of her; and pointed to the oak, where, half hidden by the tall fern, stood ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... warranted to evoke from almost any face. The sky had darkened strangely, but pale streaks of light, coming from one knew not where, filtered through the trees. No breath was stirring; the wheels and horses' hoofs made no sound on the deep fern mould. All around, the burnt tree-trunks, leafless and jagged, rose like withered giants, the passages between them were black, the sky black, and black the silence. No one spoke, and literally the only sound was Pippin's breathing. What was it that was so terrifying? Scorrier had ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Thornton and Florence made their appearance, looking very confused and awkward. Glenville preceded them, shouting and laughing. "Here they are, caught at last, and apparently quite pleased at keeping us all waiting, and quite unable to give any account of what they have been doing. One little fern has fallen before their united efforts in the space of half an hour or more. Hawkstone says he'll be shot if he lends you his boat to go a row in another time. ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith
... occupations they often considered it expedient to escape detection by assuming invisibility, and for this object sought the assistance of certain plants, such as the fern-seed[17]. In Sweden, hazel-nuts were supposed to have the power of making invisible, and it may be remembered how in one of Andersen's stories the elfin princess has the faculty of vanishing at will, by putting a wand in ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... the kitchen to find her father sitting placidly in the rocking-chair by the window. He had lighted his corn-cob pipe, in which he always smoked a mixture of dried sweet-fern as being cheaper than tobacco, and his face wore something resembling a smile—a foxy smile—as he watched his youngest-born ploughing down the hill through the deep snow, while the more obedient Waitstill moved about the room, setting supper on ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... weeks that she lay weak and speechless upon a pallet of dried fern, her only shelter the ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... had since her widowhood succeeded in freeing from the ugly stucco which had once disguised and defaced it. It could not claim the classical charm, the learned elegance of Threlfall Tower. Duddon was romantic—a medley of beautiful things, full of history, colour, and time, fused by the trees and fern, the luxuriant creepers and mosses, and of a mild and rainy climate into a lovely irregular whole; with no outline to speak of, yet with nothing that one could seriously wish away. The size was great, yet no one but an auctioneer could have called it "superb"; it seemed ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... about five miles, we sat us down on a bridge to rest a while, and there the Don left us to go a little way up the course of the stream that flowed beneath, and he came back with a posey of sweet jonquils set off with a delicate kind of fern very pretty, and this he presents to Moll with a gracious little speech, which act, it seemed to me, was to let her know that he respected her still as a young gentlewoman in spite of her short petticoat, and Moll was not dull to the compliment neither; for, after the ...
— A Set of Rogues • Frank Barrett
... the function of science, not as some think to divest this universe of its wonder and mystery, but, as in the case before us, to point out the wonder and the mystery of common things. Those fern-like forms, which on a frosty morning overspread your windowpanes, illustrate the action of the same force. Breathe upon such a pane before the fires are lighted, and reduce the solid crystalline film to the liquid condition; then watch its subsequent resolidification. You ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... one of these carefully, we find on the lower side numerous fine hairs like those on the lower surface of the liverworts, which fasten it firmly to the ground. By and by, if our culture has been successful, we may find attached to some of the larger of these, little fern plants growing from the under side of the prothallia, and attached to the ground by a delicate root. As the little plant becomes larger the prothallium dies, leaving it attached to the ground as an independent plant, which after ...
— Elements of Structural and Systematic Botany - For High Schools and Elementary College Courses • Douglas Houghton Campbell
... in full leaf stood, its fruit Hidden in a green expectancy; but all His days were rounded with ripe consciousness: While Jerry felt the winter's whitening blight, As when that frosty fern-work and those palms Of visionary leaf, and trailing vines, Quaint-chased by night-winds on the pane, melt off, And naked earth, stone-stiff, with bristling trees, Stares in the winter sunlight coldly through. But yet he rose, and clothed himself amain With misery, and once ...
— Rose and Roof-Tree - Poems • George Parsons Lathrop
... shade beneath was broken by the gilding of a ray of sunshine on a lower twig, or on a white trunk, but the floor of the vast arcades was almost entirely of the russet brown of the fallen leaves, save where a fern or holly bush made a spot of green. At the foot of the slope lay a stretch of pasture ground, some parts covered by "lady-smocks, all silver white," with the course of the little stream through the midst indicated by a perfect golden river of shining kingcups interspersed with ferns. Beyond lay ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... cleared away, and as, by the assistance of an old tree, I climbed over the paling of Barstone Park, the sun was shining brightly, wrapping dale and down in a mantle of golden light. Rabbits sprung up under my feet as I made my way through the fern and heather; and pheasants, their varied plumage glittering in the sunlight, ran along my path, seeking to hide their long necks under some sheltering furze brake, or rose heavily on the wing, scared at the unwonted intrusion. At any other time the fair scene 396 ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... to look at that which had taken the doctor's attention, for he was gazing into a side nook that suggested, from a dry heap of fern-like growth and grass, that ...
— Dead Man's Land - Being the Voyage to Zimbambangwe of certain and uncertain • George Manville Fenn
... my ancient kindred spoke— Grotesque and monstrous voices, heard afar Down ocean caves when behemoth awoke, Or through fern forests roared the plesiosaur Locked with the ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... the foot of this path, concealed amongst the bushes, crouched two sentries. At another point also, where, from the loftiest part of the platform, a view was obtained over the tree-tops up the defile between the mountains, other two watchers were stationed, stretched at full length amongst the fern, and peering out through laurel bushes, with whose dark foliage their bronzed physiognomies were confounded beyond ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... cold? Greenland with its rolling drifts is safer hunting than this forest world. What glory, doomed prisoners between the woods and the sea within the shadow of the great forests and a great fear? The smell of wildwood things, of flower banks, of fern mold, came dank and unwholesome to these men. Their {3} nostrils were for the whiff of the sea; and every sunset tipped the waves with fire where they longed to sail. And the shadow of the fear fell on Gudrid. Ordering the vessels loaded with timber ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... his pleasure almost too openly. They chatted lightly on many subjects as they walked together, knee-deep, at times, among scarlet wine-berries, and the delicate green and ebony of maidenhair fern. The scents and essence of summer hung heavy in the air. Shafts of golden sunlight, piercing the somber canopy of the forest isles, touched, and, it seemed to Geoffrey, etherealized, his companion. The completeness of his enjoyment troubled the man, and presently he lapsed into ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... garden, it was full of delightful old-world flowers that came up year after year: daffodils and violets and snow-flakes, and clumps of pinks, and orange lilies and Canterbury bells, and tall Michaelmas daisies, and ribbon grass and royal Osmunda fern, the sort of flowers that people used to pick in days gone by, put a paper frill round, and call a nosegay or a posy. There was a lawn for tennis and cricket, a pond planted with irises and bulrushes, and a wild corner ...
— The Luckiest Girl in the School • Angela Brazil
... of fern, I saw what I had never dreamed of, what sent the blood from my heart in a cold shudder of fear: a girl, pale and dishevelled, was trying to part some vines. A twig crackled and she looked round, showing a face drawn with weariness ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... Joan; "at any rate the name is quite new and Gorla is new as far as the public are concerned, and that is enough to establish the novelty of the thing. Among other things she does a dance suggesting the life of a fern; I saw one of the rehearsals, and to me it would have equally well suggested the life of John Wesley. However, that is probably the fault of my imagination—I've either got too much or too little. Anyhow it is an understood thing that she is ...
— When William Came • Saki
... the pitcher of water to Mrs. King without touching a drop of it and helped her to strain the fern bits out of it through a handkerchief before she began to give it to her husband in spoonfuls. With the first sip he ceased his uneasy murmuring and she smiled up at the boy. "Thank you, Carter. It's very splendid of you. Won't you take a ...
— Play the Game! • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... the peculiar sentiment of the card she tore off the enclosing tissue paper from the flowers. Orchids, wonderful, delicately tinted orchids, nestled in a sheaf of feathery green fern—five of them. ...
— The Apartment Next Door • William Andrew Johnston
... and inferior ones. Not that there is want of quantity even in the lower ranges, but it is a quantity of inferior things, and therefore more easily represented or suggested. On a Highland hill side are multitudinous clusters of fern and heather; on an Alpine one, multitudinous groves of chestnut and pine. The number of the things may be the same, but the sense of infinity is in the latter case far greater, because the number is of nobler things. Indeed, so far as mere magnitude of space occupied on the field of the horizon ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... give my namesake's philosophy the lie. However that may be, intense and new was the animal delight, to plant my hinder claws at some tree-foot deep into the black rotting vegetable-mould which steamed rich gases up wherever it was pierced, and clasp my huge arms round the stem of some palm or tree-fern; and then slowly bring my enormous weight and muscle to bear upon it, till the stem bent like a withe, and the laced bark cracked, and the fibres groaned and shrieked, and the roots sprung up out of the soil; and then, with a slow circular wrench, the whole ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... all very well, but it will be quite a job to make you all little again. It will take three magic fern seeds, and I don't think I have any ...
— The White Christmas and other Merry Christmas Plays • Walter Ben Hare
... shady and undulating walks, winding over sweeping lawns dotted with masses of flowers and copses of shrubbery, and overhung by wide-spreading trees, sometimes gradually rising over gentle acclivities or points of rock overhung with moss and fern. Rustic cottages, half hidden by the luxuriant foliage, crowned each prominent eminence, and little by-ways branched off into cool, umbrageous recesses, where caves, glittering with sea-shells ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... quarrel to notice anything—took the Lamb in his arms, and, still stooping, carried the sleeping baby a dozen yards along the road to where a stile led into a wood. The others followed, and there among the hazels and young oaks and sweet chestnuts, covered by high strong-scented brake-fern, they all lay hidden till the angry voices of the men were hushed at the angry voice of the red-and-white lady, and, after a long and anxious search, the carriage at ...
— Five Children and It • E. Nesbit
... beautiful and instructive example of this play of molecular force than that furnished by water. You have seen the exquisite fern-like forms produced by the crystallization of a film of water on a cold window-pane.[15] You have also probably noticed the beautiful rosettes tied together by the crystallizing force during the descent of a snow-shower ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... internal force and the external stimulus. Neither is enough by itself. A rose will not flower in the dark, and a fern will not flower anywhere. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... impression,—a sturdy figure with long body and short legs, clad in a woolen shirt and butternut-colored trousers repaired to the point of picturesqueness, his head surmounted by a limp, light-brown felt hat, frayed away at the top, so that his yellowish hair grew out of it like some nameless fern out of a pot. His tawny hair was long and tangled, matted now many years past the possibility of being ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... sometimes used as an anthelmintic, so is wormwood, and the liquid extract of male fern, and in America spigelia root ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... company that had dined in the valley making their way up the dry bed of a stream, through a gorge which cleft a line of precipitous hills. On either hand the bank rose steeply, giving no footing for man or beast. The road was a difficult one; for here a tall, fern-crowned rock left but a narrow passage between itself and the shaggy hillside, and there smooth and slippery ledges, mounting one above the other, spanned the way. In places, too, the drought had ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... the air grew cold and dark about him. But the distant valley with its houses was all the brighter for that. He came presently to talus, and among the rocks he noted—for he was an observant man—an unfamiliar fern that seemed to clutch out of the crevices with intense green hands. He picked a frond or so and gnawed its stalk, and found ...
— The Door in the Wall And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... first—but there was the codfish. If the poor dear had had nothing but codfish! . . . Helen opened a jar of the treasured peach preserves, too; indeed, the entire supper table from the courageous little fern in the middle to the "company china" cup at Mrs. Raymond's plate was a remorseful apology for that midday codfish. If Mrs. Raymond noticed this, she gave no sign. Without comment, she ate the corncake and the peach preserves, and drank her tea from the china cup; with Mrs. ...
— The Tangled Threads • Eleanor H. Porter
... when we had left the uplands of Boulogne behind us, lay along the skirts of that desolate marsh in which I had wandered, and so inland, through plains of fern and bramble, until the familiar black keep of the Castle of Grosbois rose upon the left. Then, under the guidance of Savary, we struck to the right down a sunken road, and so over the shoulder of a hill until, ...
— Uncle Bernac - A Memory of the Empire • Arthur Conan Doyle
... most part, and here and there, underneath their spreading branches, were open spaces carpeted with wind-flowers and bluebells, primroses and wild orchids, while ferns, large and small, grew in glorious profusion, some as tall as Tony, others as fragile and tiny as a fairy fern might be. In other spots large lichen-covered rocks raised their heads out of a tangle of bracken and bushes, while here and there, down by the river's brink, gleamed ...
— Kitty Trenire • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... Sat to sew, Just where a patch of fern did grow; There, as she yawned, And yawn wide did she, Floated some seed Down her gull-e-t; And look you once, And look you twice, Poor old Tillie Was gone in a trice. But oh, when the wind Do a-moaning come, 'Tis poor old Tillie Sick for home; And oh, when a voice In the mist do sigh, Old ...
— Peacock Pie, A Book of Rhymes • Walter de la Mare
... probable that the late Cromwellian proprietor had discovered the jewels during his occupancy, and that, like a prudent man, he kept his own counsel in the matter. But Sir Ralph still clung to the belief that somewhere in his grounds, "near the water and by the fern," the wealth he now so sorely needed lay concealed. That in this faith Sir Ralph lived and died was proved by his will, in which he bequeathed to the younger of his two sons, "and to his heirs," the jewels and other specified valuables which the testator firmly believed ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... handy, far from speculative, and yet good at succedaneum: when his anger is kindled, it descends like lightning: unlike his dog, his wrath gives no notice by grumbling: he blazes up like one of his own fires of dried fern. Quarrels do not often take place among them, but when they do, they are dreadful. The laws of the country in which they sojourn have so far banished the use of knives from among them that they only grind them, otherwise these conflicts would always be ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 572, October 20, 1832 • Various
... und folglich auch ihr Abklatsch, die romische Palliata, war nicht ein Lustspiel im hoechsten, im sittlichen Sinne des Wortes, sondern ein blosses Unterhaltungsdrama. Amuesieren wollten die Komoediendichter, nichts weiter. Jedes hoehere Streben lag ihnen fern. Wohl spickten sie ihre Lustspiele mit moralischen Sentenzen.... Aber die schoenen Sentenzen sind eben nur Zierat, sind nur Verbramung einer in ihrem Kerne und Wesen durch und durch unsittlichen Dichtung ... Mit der Wahrscheinlichkeit der Handlung wird es sehr leicht genommen: die ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke
... into the house, and laid me down on the lit de fouaille—a wooden frame forming a sort of couch, and filled with dried fern, which forms the principal piece of furniture in every farm-house kitchen in the Channel Islands. Then he cut away the boot from my swollen ankle, with a steady but careful touch, speaking now and then a word of encouragement, as if I were ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... deficient in that meat. Jacob had gone out accordingly; he had gained his leeward position of a fine buck, and was gradually nearing him by stealth—now behind a huge oak tree, and then crawling through the high fern, so as to get within shot unperceived, when on a sudden the animal, which had been quietly feeding, bounded away and disappeared in the thicket. At the same time Jacob perceived a small body of horse galloping through the glen in which the buck had been feeding. Jacob had never ...
— The Children of the New Forest • Captain Marryat
... an elegant little tree from Japan. Its foliage is almost fern-like in its delicacy. It is a free grower, and in ...
— Amateur Gardencraft - A Book for the Home-Maker and Garden Lover • Eben E. Rexford
... Hemlock spruce of America; which, while growing by itself in open ground, is the most wilful and fantastic, as well as the most graceful, of all the firs; imitating the shape, not of its kindred, but of an enormous tuft of fern. ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... Chinese embroidery in imperial yellow, and a neutral mauve carpet. The effect, with glittering iridescent pyramids of glass, massive frosted repousse silver, burnished gold-plate and a wide table decoration of orchids and fern, was tropical and intense. It was evident to Linda that the Feldts were very ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... part visited, will not fail to repay you for the certain disappointment to be experienced within the streets of the town. Portions of the scenery, from these heights, are not unlike those in Derbyshire, about Matlock. There is plenty of rock, of shrubs, and of fern; while another Derwent, less turbid and muddy, meanders below. Thus much for a general, but hasty sketch of the town of Vire. My next shall give you some detail of the interior of a few of the houses, of which I may be said to have hitherto only ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... exqusite black-and-gilt Etruscan patera filled with white anemones; on another table near by stood a silver one filled with the same flowers, pink and yellow. Each was circled round the edge with fringing masses of maiden-hair fern. Every lounge and chair had a low, broad foot-stool before it, ruffled with the chintz; and in one corner of the room were a square pink and white and green Moorish rug, with ten or a dozen chintz-covered pillows, piled up in a sort of chair-shaped ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson
... on for about an hour, till we were in a denser forest than I had yet seen. Creepers innumerable hung down from the boughs, twisting round them, and forming a complete network in all directions; while huge fern-leaved plants covered the ground, waving gracefully above our heads. We were in a complete labyrinth of shrubs, plants, and creepers, out of which alone I could certainly never have extricated myself. "No fear, me find a way," said Chickango, ...
— In the Wilds of Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... diameter and redwoods even larger. One such he passed, a twister that was at least ten or eleven feet through. The trail led straight to a small dam where was the intake for the pipe that watered the vegetable garden. Here, beside the stream, were alders and laurel trees, and he walked through fern-brakes higher than his head. Velvety moss was everywhere, out of which grew maiden-hair and ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... hill stream which was pouring noisily down in a flood made turgid by the rain, and the "rough bit of bog and boulder" was a sort of natural bridge across the torrent, formed by heaps of earth and rock, out of which masses of wet fern and plumy meadow-sweet sprang in tall tufts and garlands, which though beautiful to the eyes in day-time, were apt to entangle the feet in walking, especially when there was only the uncertain glimmer of the stars by ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... finished visiting each other, and Mr. MacAngus had given them, speaking as an old campaigner, some very useful if simple hints, such as always pitching the tent with its back to the wind; and keeping inside a supply of dry wood to light the fires with; and tying fern on Moses's head, against the flies; and carrying cabbage leaves in their own hats, against the heat; and walking with long staves instead of short walking sticks—after this he made them all sit round their fire, and sketched them, and the picture hangs at this very ...
— The Slowcoach • E. V. Lucas
... Richmond Hill or Windsor Terrace,—nay, the gardens of Alcinous, with their perpetual summer—or of the Hesperides, (if they were flat, and not close to Atlas,) golden apples and all, I would give away in an instant, for one mossy granite stone a foot broad, and two leaves of lady fern. ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin
... BED. The following characteristic lines are from the pen of Fanny Fern, and contain such good advice that we cannot refrain from quoting them: "Not with a reproof for any of the day's sins of omission or commission. Take any other time than bed-time for that. If you ever heard a little creature sighing ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... light. In the hollows we met with superb ferns growing on stems some twenty feet in height, and about the thickness of a boat-oar. It then throws out a number of leaves in every direction, four or five feet in length, very similar in appearance to the common fern. Another curious tree had a stem sixteen feet long; after which it branched out in long spiral leaves which hung down on all sides, resembling those of the larger kinds of grass. From the centre of the leaves sprang a foot-stalk twenty feet in length, exactly like the sugar-cane, and terminating ...
— Twice Lost • W.H.G. Kingston
... verse witch crease built calf search script eaves squint half fern guess heave live talk kern start leap stick walk sperm wrath knee cliff chalk serve floor spleen writ lawn were czar have bronze daub herb haunch frank buzz fault strength flaunt slake snatch spawn sneak haunt smack dredge drift purse sharp clamp church ...
— McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book • W. H. McGuffey
... still; They will search all about till the sunlight slips out And the trees stand frowning and chill. "The flowers," they will say, "have all vanished, And where can the fairies be fled That played in the fern?"—The flowers will return, But I fear that ...
— Punch, 1917.07.04, Vol. 153, Issue No. 1 • Various
... Verkimier with enthusiasm. "Look at zat tree-fern. You have not'ing like zat in England—eh! I have found nearly von hoondred specimens of ferns. Zen, look at zee fruit-trees. Ve have here, you see, zee Lansat, Mangosteen, Rambutan, Jack, Jambon, Blimbing ant many ozers—but zee queen of fruits is zee Durian. ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... ear— They are you, and only you. And those other nameless two Walking in Arcadian air— She that was so very fair? She that had the twilight hair?— They were you, dear, only you. If I speak of night or day, Grace of fern or bloom of grape, Hanging cloud or fountain spray, Gem or star or glistening dew, Or of mythologic shape, Psyche, Pyrrha, Daphne, say— I mean you, ...
— The Sisters' Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... there was a slip of soil, a helpless clutch at fern and heather, a cry of terror, and he was alone on the headland. The black swirl was closing over the ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... out of the village, and paused among the trees and fern on the summit of the hill above, to take breath, and to look down at the beautiful sea. Suddenly the captain gave his leg a resounding slap, and cried, "Never knew such a right thing in all ...
— A Message from the Sea • Charles Dickens
... no one understood the cool nature of that organ better than Melanie herself. The ladies in the apartment at the Archangel had lingered at their breakfast, the austerity of which had been mitigated by a center decoration of orchids and fern, fresh-touched with dew; or so Madame Reynier had described them to Melanie, as she brought them to her with the card of Mr. Lloyd-Jones. Miss Reynier smiled faintly, admired ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger
... 3 Carnations and 1 Maiden-Hair Fern gracing the center of the Board, the terrified Guests saw a Wagon-Load of tropical Bloom which pleased them very much as soon as each had secreted a new kind of Cocktail, served in a Goblet, with a Stick of Dynamite substituted ...
— Knocking the Neighbors • George Ade
... and set out again over the bracken-covered hill-side. Another half-mile and they had reached the bourne of their expedition. The narrow track through the gorse and fern widened suddenly into a lane, a lane with very high, unmortared walls, over which grew a variety of bramble with a particularly luscious fruit. Every connoisseur of blackberries knows what a difference there is between the little hard seedy ones that commonly ...
— For the Sake of the School • Angela Brazil
... and, perhaps, unreasonably irritating to him. He could not bear to hear him speak with trembling voice and gleaming eyes of the grand mountains and the silent corries around Ben-Nevis, the red deer trooping over the misty steeps, and the brown hinds lying among the green plumes of fern, and the wren and the thrush lilting in ...
— Scottish sketches • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... slices of bread on top of the stove," she explained. "She said she always makes toast that way, and no one could tell the difference! I never heard of such a thing—did you, Manley? But I've been attending a cooking school ever since you left Fern Hill. I didn't tell you—I wanted it for a surprise. I could have done better with the toast before a wood fire—I think poor Arline was nearly distracted at the way I poked coals down from the ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower
... telegraphed for a waggonette to meet them, and they started on their drive in high spirits. It was a lovely July evening, and the air was delicate with the scent of the pine-woods. Now and then they heard a wood pigeon brooding over its own sweet voice, or saw, deep in the rustling fern, the burnished breast of the pheasant. Little squirrels peered at them from the beech-trees as they went by, and the rabbits scudded away through the brushwood and over the mossy knolls, with their white tails in the air. As they entered the avenue of ...
— Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories • Oscar Wilde
... pass. In truth, she would have had little of her lover's company, if she had liked the chaunt of the choristers better than the cry of the hounds: yet I know not; for they were companions from the cradle, and reciprocally fashioned each other to the love of the fern and the foxglove. Had either been less sylvan, the other might have been more saintly; but they will now never hear matins but those of the lark, nor reverence vaulted aisle but that of the greenwood canopy. They are twin plants ...
— Maid Marian • Thomas Love Peacock
... or other material as therein described, covering with moss, chaff, leaves or some other light substance. The clog should be fully twice as heavy as that used for the fox. Some trappers rub the traps with "brake leaves," sweet fern, or even skunk's cabbage. Gloves should always be worn in handling the traps, and all tracks should be obliterated as much as if a fox were the object sought ...
— Camp Life in the Woods and the Tricks of Trapping and Trap Making • William Hamilton Gibson
... brilliant in color, and singular in abundance. The form of the larger cottages, being frequently that of a cross, would hurt the eye by the sharp angles of the roof, were it not for the cushion-like vegetation with which they are rounded and concealed. Varieties of the fern sometimes relieve the massy forms of the stonecrop, with their light and delicate leafage. Windows in the roof are seldom met with. Of the chimney I ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin
... "I thought fern would suit your hair better than anything else," said Tom; "and so I got these leaves," and he picked out two ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... for him his first jacket, and that, though he succeeded in sewing on one sleeve to the hole at the shoulder, where it ought to be, he committed the slight mistake of sewing on the other sleeve to one of the pocket-holes. Poor Andrew Fern had heard that his townsman's sloop had been captured by a privateer, and, fidgety with impatience till he had communicated the intelligence where he thought it would tell most effectively, he called on the master's wife, to ask whether she had not heard that all the wind-bound vessels had got ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... the Sheep Eaters had passed. The silent night became more silent, the owl ceased calling to his mate, the coyote skulked into his lair, the birds ceased their chirping, the great forest trees seemed in a trance, not a flower or fern moved, all ...
— The Sheep Eaters • William Alonzo Allen
... like gauzy butterflies. The hard, bitter feeling was getting pretty bad, when the maid brought in a box of flowers. Before she could speak, Annie had the cover off, and all were exclaiming at the lovely roses, heath, and fern within. ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... and a half kilometres. We passed signs of Indian habitation. There were abandoned palm-leaf shelters on both banks. On the left bank we came to two or three old Indian fields, grown up with coarse fern and studded with the burned skeletons of trees. At the mouth of a brook which entered from the right some sticks stood in the water, marking the site of an old fish-trap. At one point we found the tough vine hand-rail of an Indian bridge running right across the river, a couple ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... bloom of the grass; in time to come the furrow, as it were, shall open, and the great buttercup of the waters will show a broad palm of gold. You never know what will come to the net of the eye next—a bud, a flower, a nest, a curled fern, or whether it will be in the woodland or by the meadow path, at the water's side or on the dead dry heap of fagots. There is no settled succession, no fixed and formal order—always the unexpected; and you cannot say, 'I ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... magnificent, while everywhere the country was covered with beautiful trees, among them the pandanus palm, the tree-fern, the banyan, the bread-fruit tree, wild nutmeg, and superb bamboos. The natives also were very well-behaved and quiet, and were always inclined to treat us hospitably. Indeed, we might have travelled without the slightest risk from one end of the island to the other. ...
— Peter Trawl - The Adventures of a Whaler • W. H. G. Kingston
... embittered, disappointed, old maids of New England. The noble apology which Edmund Burke once offered for his countrymen always recurs to my mind when I hear these 'women's conventions' alluded to: 'Because half-a-dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, while thousands of great cattle repose beneath the shade of the British oak, chew the cud, and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... the silvery trunks and fragile twigs which looked like lacework against a background of blue shadow. Thick hollies and rhododendrons planted near the wayside kept off the light wind, and dead leaves and withered fern made patches of glowing colour. When they came to a gate leading to a drive through ...
— Blake's Burden • Harold Bindloss
... peacock and a bird of paradise, lift their proud and haughty heads above an impenetrable growth which, the guides tell us, is the home of tigers, rhinoceroses, panthers, bears, wild hogs, buffaloes, deer and all sorts of beasts, and snakes as big around as a barrel. Fern trees are lovely, and are found here in their greatest glory, but nevertheless we have foliage at home, and they are no more beautiful than our elms, oaks, and other trees that I ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... which they were assigned. In the poetry of our enlightened times, the characteristics of all seasons, soils, and climates may be blended together with much benefit to the author's fame as an original genius. The cowslip of a civic poet is always in blossom, his fern is always in full feather; he gathers the celandine, the primrose, the heath-flower, the jasmine, and the chrysanthemum all on the same day and from the same spot; his nightingale sings all the year round, his moon is always ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... of July when Margaret returned home. The forest trees were all one dark, full, dusky green; the fern below them caught all the slanting sunbeams; the weather was sultry and broodingly still. Margaret used to tramp along by her father's side, crushing down the fern with a cruel glee, as she felt it yield under her light foot, and send up the fragrance peculiar ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... ascension of the night We heard the mellow lapsing and return Of night-owls purring in their groundling flight Through lanes of darkling fern. ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)
... "El Liceo," 1838. The Duque de Rivas may have been influenced by our text, but such introductions were a Romantic commonplace. See M. Fernndez y Gonzlez, "Crnicas romanescas de Espaa. Don Miguel de Maara, memorias del tiempo de Carlos V," Paris, 1868. The story begins "Era la media noche"; and, later, "Haca mucho tiempo que ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... fearing to hesitate, the boy got over the low wall and stood on the narrow edge of the old, crumbling, fern-hung shaft, and the next moment he was being lowered down, Joe turning a little faint from excitement as the upturned face disappeared, and he watched the rope glide through the man's ...
— Sappers and Miners - The Flood beneath the Sea • George Manville Fenn
... committed. Damage was also received from the little stock which remained alive; the owners, not having wherewith to feed them, were obliged to turn them loose to browse among the grass and shrubs, or turn up the ground for the fern-root; and as they wandered without any one to prevent their doing mischief, they but too often found an easy passage over fences and through barriers which were now grown weak and perishing. It was however ordered, that the stock should be kept up during the night, and every damage ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins
... for there arose a crack-cracking as of men coming closer among the scrub of heather and fern which surrounded the Dower House, only it was quite momentary. The stick which she had half-lifted, an unconscious act of readiness for defence, tapped back on to the floor, and my sword-point made a sharper rattle, though I was unaware that my hand had even ...
— The Black Colonel • James Milne
... which she can lend to beauty. She was not ignorant of the lightest graces; she whose eye could embrace such vast proportions, had stooped to study the glowing illuminations painted upon the wings of the fragile butterfly. She had traced the symmetrical and marvellous network which the fern extends as a canopy over the wood strawberry; she had listened to the murmuring of streams through the long reeds and stems of the water-grass, where the hissing of the "amorous viper" may be heard; she had followed ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... the Burn, We play the sad 'two more'; How often at the turn, The heather must we spurn; How oft we've 'topped and swore,' In bent and whin and fern! ...
— Ban and Arriere Ban • Andrew Lang
... o' the cromlech and cairn, Where blossoms the thistle by hillocks o' fern; There Freedom in triumph an altar has made For holiest rites in the land o' ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... several minutes together. They moreover share the business of incubation, taking day and night duty on the eggs, which, two in number, are laid on the bare ground without any pretence of a nest, and generally on open commons in the neighbourhood of patches of fern-brake. Like the owls, these birds sleep during the day and are active only when the sun goes down. It is this habit of seeking their insect food only in the gloaming which makes nightjars among the most difficult of birds to study from life, and all accounts of their feeding habits ...
— Birds in the Calendar • Frederick G. Aflalo
... in striking here," and Friedel sprang to withhold Koppel, who had lighted a bundle of dried fern ready to thrust ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and daisy sweetly bloomed, Hemlock and fern, in rank luxuriance spread; Where rose and lily once the air perfumed, Wild dock and nettle sprout, no fragrance shed: And here no more the throstle's mellow lay Awakes with gladsome song ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... and shine of sea, Brown's bare hill with its lonely tree, (It wasn't then as we see it now, With one scant scalp-lock to shade its brow;) Dusky nooks in the Essex woods, Dark, dim, Dante-like solitudes, Where the tree-toad watches the sinuous snake Glide through his forests of fern and brake; ...
— The One Hoss Shay - With its Companion Poems How the Old Horse Won the Bet & - The Broomstick Train • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... Lomond now that I had so beloved a companion for my rambles. I visited with my father every delightful spot, either on the islands, or by the side of the tree-sheltered waterfalls; every shady path, or dingle entangled with underwood and fern. My ideas were enlarged by his conversation. I felt as if I were recreated and had about me all the freshness and life of a new being: I was, as it were, transported since his arrival from a narrow spot of earth into a universe ...
— Mathilda • Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
... strike, the young coco-nut sends up at first a fine rosette of big spreading leaves, not raised as afterwards on a tall stem, but springing direct from the ground in a wide circle, something like a very big and graceful fern. In this early stage nothing can be more beautiful or more essentially tropical in appearance than a plantation of young coco-nuts. Their long feathery leaves spreading out in great clumps from the buried stock, and waving with lithe motion before the strong sea-breeze of the Indies, ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... banks of Lough Ness, a water about eighteen miles long, but not, I think, half a mile broad. Our horses were not bad, and the way was very pleasant; the rock, out of which the road was cut, was covered with birch-trees, fern, and heath. The lake below was beating its bank by a gentle wind, and the rocks beyond the water, on the right, stood sometimes horrid, and wild, and sometimes opened into a kind of bay, in which there ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... in air near the rocks. The Cove lay in sunshine, its rough stone chimneys and rude slate roofs overgrown with moss and fern, rising rapidly, one above the other, in the fast descending hollow, through which a little stream rushed to the sea,—more quietly than its brother, which, at some space distant, fell sheer down over the crag in a white ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... inquisitive fellow, who gave me the Indian names of the birds and plants that we met. The water-ousel he knew well and he seemed to like the sweet singer, which he called "Sussinny." He showed me how strips of the stems of the beautiful maidenhair fern were used to adorn baskets with handsome brown bands, and pointed out several plants good to eat, particularly the large saxifrage growing abundantly along the river margin. Once I rushed suddenly upon him to see if he would be frightened; but he unflinchingly ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... passion for such pillaging expeditions, and Cicely, who had discovered that her step-father knew almost as much about birds and squirrels as Miss Brent did about flowers, was not to be appeased till Amherst had scrambled into the pony-cart, wedging his long legs between a fern-box and a lunch-basket, and balancing a Scotch terrier's telescopic body across ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... stooping to pluck the withered frond of a fern that grew in the path. When she looked up at him again all the ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... fern-bordered wood road attracted me; I reasoned that it must lead, by a short cut, across the hills to the military highway which passed between Trois-Feuilles and La Trappe. So I took it, and presently came into four cross-roads ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... 'tis merry in gay greenwood, When the little birds are singing, When the buck is belling in the fern, And the hare ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... species of heath-berries, cranberries, bilberries, &c., furnishing the poor with a source of profit, and the rich of luxury. What a pleasure it is to throw ourselves down beneath the verdant screen of the beautiful fern, or the shade of a venerable oak, in such a scene, and listen to the summer sounds of bees, grasshoppers, and ten thousand other insects, mingled with the more remote and solitary cries of the pewit and the curlew! Then, to think of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 262, July 7, 1827 • Various
... are told how the common break-fern flowers but once a year, at midnight, on Michaelmas Eve, when it displays a small blue flower, which vanishes at the approach of dawn. According to a piece of folk-lore current in Bohemia and the Tyrol, the fern-seed shines like glittering ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... scene was so great, however, that these occasional obstructions, so far from diminishing, actually heightened the charm of the whole. The forest was full of the most luxuriant underwood, creepers, palms, and fern plants; the latter, in many instances sixteen feet high, proved a no less effectual screen against the burning rays of the sun than did the palms ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... lane, retired from noisy haunts of men, Whose ruts the solitary lime cart tracks, Whose hedge-sides, propp'd by many a mossy stone, Are checker'd o'er with foxglove's purple bloom, Or graceful fern, or snakehood's curling sheath, Or the wild strawberry's crimson peeping through. There, where it joins the far-outstretching heath, A lengthen'd nook presents its glassy slope, A couch with nature's velvet verdure clad, Trimm'd by the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... chain! When eastward turn'd the straining eye, Great MALVERN met the cloudless sky: Southward arose th'embattled shores, Where Ocean in his fury roars, And rolls abrupt his fearful tides, Far still from MENDIP'S fern-clad sides; From whose vast range of mingling blue, The weary, wand'ring sight withdrew, O'er fair GLAMORGAN'S woods and downs, O'er glitt'ring streams, and farms, and towns, Back to the TABLE ROCK, that lours O'er ...
— The Banks of Wye • Robert Bloomfield
... shady knoll o'erlooks a dale Where Earn meanders down the vale; A knoll enwreathed in oak and fern, The sweetest nook in all Strathearn. The morn there breaks with earliest ray, Here latest shines the lingering day, There summer reigns supremely fair, And winter ev'n is lovely there. Its eastern prospect looks entire Along the glades of Ochtertyre; Its south, ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... had wandered away down the banks of the little stream where grew pale marsh violets, golden globeflowers, and the sweet-scented fern. Pushing through the undergrowth above the water, they found themselves in a tiny natural clearing such as poets of old would have described as a "a bower." Budding trees encircled it, a guelder rose bush overtopped it, ...
— The Princess of the School • Angela Brazil
... and the Vortices on windows: several Observations on the branched Figures of Urine: the Figures of Regulus Martis stellatus, and of Fern. Of the Figures ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... I who will see strange things," she said; and the prophecy was amply fulfilled. For as they went along the broad path, and came better into view of the splendid undulation of woodland and pasture and fern, when on the one hand they saw the Thames far below them flowing through the green and spacious valley, and on the other hand caught some dusky glimpse of the far white houses of London, it seemed to her that she had got into ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... ripple thro' thy lays; Sweet silvern murmurs from some deep-delled spring, Brook, tree and flower and each insensate thing, The throstle's call, the calm of sun-steeped days, A glint of sunshine on the swallow's wing, Fern-filagrees, the drowsy drone of bee Made drunk with draughts of purple wild-grape wine; All these Orphean music holds for thee, And all thy days and dreams companioning Walks Nature with her ...
— The Path of Dreams - Poems • Leigh Gordon Giltner
... Trade is dead, And swart Work sullen sits in the hillside fern And folds his arms that find no bread to earn, And bows ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... Ram{1} his half cours i-ronne,{2} And smal fowls maken melodie, That slepen al the night with open eye, So priketh hem nature in here corages:— Than longen folk to gon on pilgrimages, And palmers for to seeken{3} straung strondes, To fern halwes, kouthe in sondry londes; And specially, from every schirs ende Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende, The holy blisful martir{4} for to seeke, That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.{5} Byfel that, in that sesoun on a day, In Southwerk at the ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... stream had lost its way Amid the grass and fern; A passing stranger scooped a well, Where weary men might turn; He walled it in and hung with care A ladle at the brink; He thought not of the deed he did, But judged that all might drink. He passed again, and lo! the well, By summer never dried, Had cooled ten thousand ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... appearance, looking very confused and awkward. Glenville preceded them, shouting and laughing. "Here they are, caught at last, and apparently quite pleased at keeping us all waiting, and quite unable to give any account of what they have been doing. One little fern has fallen before their united efforts in the space of half an hour or more. Hawkstone says he'll be shot if he lends you his boat to go a row in another time. Don't ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith
... lingered on the white blossoms of the various shrubs. They found the pink hawthorn; in the boughs of one of those trees one night in England in mid-May he had heard the nightingale, master singer of the non-human world. Up to him rose the enchanting hillside picture of grass and moss and fern. It was all like a sheet of soft organ ...
— A Cathedral Singer • James Lane Allen
... along the bank of the Laughing Brook, only more of them. There were pretty birch-trees and wild cherry-trees. It was still and dark and oh, so peaceful! Peter liked that place and sat down under a big fern to rest. He didn't hear a sound excepting the beautiful silvery voice of Veery the Thrush. Listening to it, Peter fell asleep, for ...
— Mrs. Peter Rabbit • Thornton W. Burgess
... and chestnut trees, as quick as light, and rabbits, dodging in and out amongst the ferns, and just showing the snow-white patch under their little tails as they disappeared, and now and again the lordly deer stepping daintily and leisurely through the deep fern; all these lived in the wonderful depths of Craythew Park, and of birds there was no end. There were game birds and song birds, from the handsome pheasants to the modest little partridges, the royalists and the puritans ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... gentleman, whose name I have forgotten, sent me a collection of fossils—tiny mollusk shells beautifully marked, and bits of sandstone with the print of birds' claws, and a lovely fern in bas-relief. These were the keys which unlocked the treasures of the antediluvian world for me. With trembling fingers I listened to Miss Sullivan's descriptions of the terrible beasts, with uncouth, ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... All last week at Fern Hill for the Ascot races; the Chesterfields, Tavistocks, Belfasts, George Ansons, Montague, Stradbroke, and Brooke Greville were there. The Royal Family came to the course the first day with a great ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... magnificent savannahs glowing in verdure and sunlight—at the princely estates and palace mansions—at the luxuriant cultivation, and the sublime solitude of primeval forests, where trees of every name, the mahogany, the boxwood, the rosewood, the cedar, the palm, the fern, the bamboo, the cocoa, the breadfruit, the mango, the almond, all grow in wild confusion, interwoven ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... she had selected was a typical old-fashioned French cottage, venerable in scaling plaster and fern-tufted tile roof, but cool and roomy within as uninviting without. A small inland garden surprised the eye as one entered the battened gate at its side, and a dormer-window in the roof looked out upon the rigging of ships at ...
— Solomon Crow's Christmas Pockets and Other Tales • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... way—with dull-colored suits underneath, and tailored hats. There wasn't a single bright, frivolous thing about that tea. Even the house was dismal—rows of black walnut bookcases with busts of great men on top, steel engravings framed in oak on the walls, and a Boston fern or two in red pots sitting about on plates. When I looked up from my weak tea, served in a common stock-pattern willow cup, and saw Lucy sparkling with pleasure, talking away for dear life with a white-haired old man who wore a string tie and ...
— The Fifth Wheel - A Novel • Olive Higgins Prouty
... twenty-eight years old then, and he really had an awful time of it at first trying to work out by hand the wonderful stuffs and colors. There was the fern-design, spangled with Sweet William, for instance. It was only to be the edging on a shawl for her, but he spent three days and two nights on it; and then she asked him to make it over with jack-in-the-pulpit inset, because she was sure to ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... I'd have done if it hadn't been for her," he laughed. "I wanted to plant American Beauty roses and maiden-hair fern all over the place. I even think I had some notion of growing four-dollar orchids on the pear trees. The idea of putting in things that would really grow ...
— The Lilac Girl • Ralph Henry Barbour
... the moors. It takes good seamanship to bear the motion of a Quantuck box cart; it requires still better seamanship to navigate one of them along the rutted roads. For some time, it took all of Dr. McAlister's energy to keep from landing himself and Allyn head foremost in the thickets of sweet fern and beach plum. By degrees, however, he became more expert in avoiding pitfalls and in keeping both wheels in the ruts, and ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... St. Francis had last restored was very wee, but it had a very long name. It was called the Portiuncola, which meant "the little portion." It was built all among the trees and long grass, and mossy, fern-covered rocks; and the birds sang around it. St. Francis loved the spot very much—it was like home to him—and he spent a lot of time there. Besides, it was not far from the leper settlement, and he had now taken on himself the rather horrible job of serving ...
— Stories of the Saints by Candle-Light • Vera C. Barclay
... unwholesome blood, and with its exorbitant heat woundeth them with grievous, hurtful, smart, and noisome vapours. And, as in divers plants and trees there are two sexes, male and female, which is perceptible in laurels, palms, cypresses, oaks, holms, the daffodil, mandrake, fern, the agaric, mushroom, birthwort, turpentine, pennyroyal, peony, rose of the mount, and many other such like, even so in this herb there is a male which beareth no flower at all, yet it is very copious of and abundant in seed. ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... too rarely happens that we see this tiny mouse-like wren in summer, unless we come upon him suddenly and overtake him unawares as he creeps shyly over the mossy logs or runs literally "like a flash" under the fern and through the tangled underbrush of the deep, cool woods. His presence there is far more likely to be detected by the ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... mahogany-trees, the ground covered with the luxuriant vegetation of that tropical region, a little stream bubbling and leaping and dashing down one of the high rocks that flanked the hollow, and rippling away through the tall fern towards the rear of the spot where we had halted, at the distance of a hundred yards from which the ground was low ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... Nats, good and bad, great and little, male and female, now living round about us. Some of them live in the trees, especially in the huge figtree that shades half-an-acre without the village; or among the fern-like fronds of the ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... the same," one of them informed her; "so you are too! Everybody's looking." And they crowded round to examine the objects in her hand—a dirty earth-stained trowel and a fern. They knew she collected ferns on the sly, but never before had they seen her bring home such a prize. Usually she found only crumpled things like old bits of wrinkled brown paper which she called "specimens." This one was marvellously beautiful. It had a dainty, slender stalk of ebony black, ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... of mulga break the even line of the horizon, and, in the valleys, thickets or belts of bloodwood are seen. In these hollows one may hope to find feed for the camels, for here may grow a few quondongs, acacia, and fern-tree shrubs, and in rare cases some herbage. The beefwood tree, the leaves of which camels, when hard pressed, will eat, alone commands the summit of the undulations. As for animal life—well, one forgets that life exists, until occasionally reminded of the fact by a bounding spinifex ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... went on a fern hunt with Professor Keith. It was getting near the end of her vacation and she had only two weeks more. They were sitting down to rest on the side of the road when she mentioned this fact inconsequently. The professor prodded the harmless dust with his cane. Well, he supposed ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1907 to 1908 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... stated to live on grubs, insects, ants and their eggs, kangaroos, when they can catch them, fern roots, various kinds of berries, and honey; caterpillars and worms also ...
— Peter Parley's Tales About America and Australia • Samuel Griswold Goodrich
... a particle of vengefulness about Miss Hastings. She was not one to hold this against him; he could see that at once! She understood men. She knew that grave problems frequently confronted them, and that such minor things as fern gathering expeditions would necessarily have to step aside and be forgotten. She was one of the bright, cheerful, always smiling kind; one who would make a sunshiny helpmate for any man, and never object ...
— The Early Bird - A Business Man's Love Story • George Randolph Chester
... microscopes and dissecting instruments, and we work through the structure of a certain number of plants and animals. As, for example, among the plants we take the yeast-plant, a Protococcus, a common mould, a Chara, a fern, and some flowering plant; among animals we examine such things as an Amoeba, a Vorticella, and a fresh-water polyp. We dissect a starfish, an earthworm, a snail, a squid, and a fresh-water mussel. We examine a lobster and a crayfish, and ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... Here was held {95} the session of 1844-45. Such legislation as was passed had no direct bearing on the question of responsible government. Before the session ended news came that the home government intended to raise the governor to the peerage as Baron Metcalfe of Fern Hill. His brief two years in Canada formed only an episode in the long career of a distinguished public servant. He had made his name and spent his life in India. The contemplated honour was well deserved; and it was designed ...
— The Winning of Popular Government - A Chronicle of the Union of 1841 • Archibald Macmechan
... nest-building of the California miner, were all here with the dreariness of decay superadded. A few paces from the cabin there was a rough inclosure, which, in the brief days of Tennessee's Partner's matrimonial felicity, had been used as a garden, but was now overgrown with fern. As we approached it, we were surprised to find that what we had taken for a recent attempt at cultivation was the broken soil about an ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... midges whirled round and danced in the warm sunset-glow like flecks of gold in amber wine,—while here and there the distant glimmer of tossing fountains, or the soft emerald sheen of a prattling brook that wound in and out the grounds, amongst banks of moss and drooping fern, gave a pleasant touch of coolness and refreshment to the brilliant verdure of the ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... one ascends. All day long the villages of Dalpe and Cornone had been tempting me, so I resolved to take them next day. This I did, crossing the Ticino and following a broad well-beaten path which ascends the mountains in a southerly direction. I found the rare English fern Woodsia hyperborea growing in great luxuriance on the rocks between the path and the river. I saw some fronds fully six inches in length. I also found one specimen of Asplenium alternifolium, which, however, is abundant on the ...
— Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino • Samuel Butler
... of grey granite. Behind them stretched away the park, where forest trees, nearly shorn of their leaves at the edge of winter, still answered the setting sun with fires of thinning foliage. They sank away through stretches of brake fern, and already amid their trunks arose a thin, blue haze—breath of earth made visible by coming cold. There was frost in the air, and the sickle of a new moon hung where dusk of evening dimmed the ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... had a pleasant smell, not so fine an odor as the Bible, but so delectable that I loved to bury my nose in its opened pages. What caused this odor I cannot tell—perhaps it had been used to press flowers or sprigs of sweet fern. ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... was immediately hoisted on board; and the chief and his men were despatched a second time on the same errand. Meanwhile, the rest of the natives continued to take pigs to the ship in considerable numbers; and by the close of the day about two hundred had been purchased, together with a quantity of fern-root to feed ...
— John Rutherford, the White Chief • George Lillie Craik
... say that, toiling With wild white roses' bloom— No printers' vats a-boiling Nor labour of the loom— With fern and foxglove chalice On tiny feet or wings Titania's elves made sallies, And that's how Lady Alice Had on ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 25, 1919 • Various
... to be the same as those used for this belt, said that the split cane-like material is a strip from the periphery of the petiole or stem of a palm, and that the other material is sclerenchyma fibre from the petiole or rhizome of a fern, and not that of a creeping plant. I may say that I felt a doubt at the time as to the complete accuracy of the information given to me concerning the vegetable materials used for the manufacture of various articles, and there may well be errors as ...
— The Mafulu - Mountain People of British New Guinea • Robert W. Williamson
... I began to feel ashamed of young life's selfish outburst, and the vehement spring of mere bodily health. On this account I sat down sadly in a little cove of hill, whereto the soft breeze from the river came up, with a tone of wavelets, and a sprightly water-gleam. And here, in fern and yellow grass and tufted bights of bottom growth, the wind made entry for the sun, and they played with ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... luxuriant growth of the soil, without entering into the individualities of the vegetation. In the more highly situated Montanas, where the cinchona is found in the place of its nativity, the gigantic orchidae, the numerous fern plants, the tree-like nettles, the wonderful bignonias, and the numerous, impenetrable complications of climbing plants, powerfully rivet the attention of the observer. Lower down, in the lighter forest soil, amidst numerous shrubs and climbers, the eye delights to dwell ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... time put a teaspoon of cracked ice in the bottom of each shell; fill with the pulp, mixed thoroughly with powdered sugar and a little sherry, if desired; and place a maraschino cherry or bit of bright-colored jelly in the centre of each. Lay on paper doilies or surround with bits of asparagus fern. ...
— The International Jewish Cook Book • Florence Kreisler Greenbaum
... green, there are spots or islands of dusky red,—a deep, substantial hue, very well fit to be close to the ground,—while the yellow, and light, fantastic shades of green soar upward to the sky. These red spots are the blueberry and whortleberry bushes. The sweet-fern is changed mostly to russet, but still retains its wild and delightful fragrance when pressed in the hand. Wild China-asters are scattered about, but beginning to wither. A little while ago, mushrooms or toadstools were very numerous along the wood-paths and by the roadsides, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... All was still again. I breathed free: to my heart, back fled The warmth. "But, all the world!"—I said. I stooped and picked a leaf of fern, And recollected I might learn From books, how many myriad sorts Of fern exist, to trust reports, Each as distinct and beautiful As this, the very first I cull. Think, from the first leaf to the last! Conceive, then, earth's resources! ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... water 'em and tend 'em always, I feel as if they was alive, and got to know one again, I do, and that makes one love 'em, now don't it, mum? To see 'em brighten up after you've watered 'em, like that there maiden-'air fern there, why it's enough to make one love 'em the same as if they was Christians, mum.' There was a melting tenderness in her voice when she talked about the flowers that half won over Edie's heart, even in spite ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, while thousands of great cattle beneath the shadow of the British oak chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field, that of course they are many in ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... bunch of mignonette would be to her too gay a posy for the Lord's House and the Lord's Day. And balmier breath than was ever borne by blossom is the pure fragrance of green growing things,—southernwood, mint, sweet fern, bayberry, sweetbrier. No rose is half so ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... Pass it flowed, toward fertile San Fernando Valley. Steadily it climbed to the hilltops, masticating sage, greasewood, oak, sycamore and manzanita with the same ease it bolted houses and pavements. Into Griffith Park it swaggered, mumbling the planetarium, Mount Hollywood and Fern Dell in successive mouthfuls and swarmed down to the concretelined bed of the Los Angeles River. Here ineffectual shallow pools had preserved illusion and given tourists something at which to laugh in the dry season; the weed licked them up like ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... blood my ancient kindred spoke— Grotesque and monstrous voices, heard afar Down ocean caves when behemoth awoke, Or through fern forests roared the plesiosaur Locked with the giant-bat ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... A moist, fern-bordered wood road attracted me; I reasoned that it must lead, by a short cut, across the hills to the military highway which passed between Trois-Feuilles and La Trappe. So I took it, and presently came into four cross-roads unknown ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... on the tempestuous night, and Winter, who had surely whispered her coming under the darkness, vanished again at dawn. The Moor still provided forage, but all light was gone out of the heather, though the standing fern shone yellow under the sun, and the recumbent bracken shed a rich russet in broad patches over the dewy green where Will had chopped it down and left it to dry for winter fodder. He was very late this year in stacking the fern, and designed that ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... evening at Limoise, just before the inevitable hour for my departure, I went up alone to the large, old room on the second floor in which I slept. First I leaned out of the open window to watch the July sun sink behind the stony fields and fern heaths that lay towards the sea, which though very near us was invisible. These sunsets at the end of my Thursday holidays ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... butternut branches,—all these are very dear to them, for they are involved with their earliest memories, touched with the glamour which the imagination of youth flings over the humblest scenes of human life. To them the Fern Road, The Bubbling Spring, and the Apple Tree Glen, scenes of many camping places, are all a part of childhood's fairy kingdom. The thought of never again walking beneath those familiar trees or sitting in those familiar rooms, ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... to tell you. Zephyrus will only be represented by the effect of the wind seen on the bushes, on the trees, and every blade of grass or fern in the picture. These small tamarisk trees that fringe the glade will be bent nearly double. The spirit of the wind must be in the whole painting. That will be the ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... laughed rather ruefully, as he described how he had discovered a very rare species of fern in an inaccessible place, and in his efforts to obtain it had lost his footing, and slipped ...
— The Mysterious Affair at Styles • Agatha Christie
... R.—In preparing ferns for skeleton-leaf bouquets it is not necessary to place them in the macerating bowl before bleaching, as the texture of the fern is so delicate as to be ruined by maceration. Before bleaching, the fern should be pressed, and as it becomes dry and brittle, more care is required in the bleaching process than for skeleton leaves. ...
— Harper's Young People, July 13, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... Dandelion, Thistles, and Goldenrod; in the fields and meadows, we would see the Ox-eye Daisy, Black-eyed Susan, Wild Carrot, and the most beautiful fall flower of the northeastern United States, the Fringed Gentian; in the woods, Mountain Laurel, Pink Azalea, a number of wild Orchids, Maidenhair Fern, and Jack-in-the Pulpit; in the marshes, Pink Rose-mallow, which reminds us of the Hollyhocks of our Grandmother's garden, Pickerel-weed, Water-lily, and ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts
... compacted mass of stones, are often formed by two exterior surfaces of stone, filled up with earth in the middle, which makes them very warm. The roof is generally bad. They are thatched, sometimes with straw, sometimes with heath, sometimes with fern. The thatch is secured by ropes of straw, or of heath; and, to fix the ropes, there is a stone tied to the end of each. These stones hang round the bottom of the roof, and make it look like a lady's hair in papers; but I should think that, when there is ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... pasture, being all health and colour. Every green was young, every pore was open, and every stalk was swollen with racing currents of juice. God was palpably present in the country, and the devil had gone with the world to town. Flossy catkins of the later kinds, fern-sprouts like bishops' croziers, the square-headed moschatel, the odd cuckoo-pint,—like an apoplectic saint in a niche of malachite,—snow-white ladies'-smocks, the toothwort, approximating to human flesh, the enchanter's night-shade, and the black-petaled doleful-bells, ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... the uncomfortable sounding Akenside (oak), Fearenside (fern), but Heaviside appears to be a nickname. Handyside may mean "gracious manner," from Mid. Eng. side, cognate with Ger. Sitte, custom. See Hendy (Chapter XXII). The simple end survives as Ind or Nind (Chapter III) and in Overend (Chapter XII), Townsend. Edge appears ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... grace. For he was an outlaw, and any man might kill him and never pay penalty for it. But, outlaw or not, the poor people loved him and looked on him as their friend, and many a stout fellow came to join him, and led a merry life in the greenwood, with moss and fern for bed, and for meat the King's deer, which it was death to slay. Peasants of all sorts, tillers of the land, yeomen, and as some say Knights, went on their ways freely, for of them Robin took no toll; but lordly churchmen with ...
— The Book of Romance • Various
... the eye and the ear of the artist receive refreshment and stimulus here. The garden is a bath of verdancy and coolness even upon the most torrid day. The very light which filters through the dense foliage is tinged with green. The marbles are velvety and moist with moss, and the maidenhair fern drips lush and dank. Here Liszt drew inspiration from the harmonies of water notes blended with the chiming of distant bells, and Watteau showed in the many studies which he made in the garden how potent was its influence in investing ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... are close by across a valley: Kirk Yetton, with its long, upright scars visible as far as Fife, and Allermuir the tallest on this side: with wood and tilled field running high up on their borders, and haunches all moulded into innumerable glens and shelvings and variegated with heather and fern. The air comes briskly and sweetly off the hills, pure from the elevation, and rustically scented by the upland plants; and even at the toll, you may hear the curlew calling on its mate. At certain seasons, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a point likely to be seen from the country to which I was going, where it might be useful to me in fixing other points; the other being to obtain a view of Port Phillip, and thus to connect my survey with that harbour. But the tree-fern, musk-plant, brush, and lofty timber together shut us up for a long time from any prospect of the low country to the southward, and it was not until I had nearly exhausted a fine sunny afternoon in wandering ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... have I got here? Just azure hills and peace, Green moss and green fern on roads that never cease. And if my heart grows weary of such pleasurings as these, There's a baby who comes romping through ...
— England over Seas • Lloyd Roberts
... inhabitants Pea; the root also of a plant called Ether; and a fruit in a pod like a Kidney bean, which when roasted eats like a Chestnut, and is called Ahee; the fruit of a Tree which they call Wharra, something like a Pine Apple; the fruit of a Tree called by them Nano; the roots of a Fern and the roots of a plant called Thive. All these Articles the Earth almost Spontaniously produces, or, at least, they are raised with very little Labour. In the Article of food these people may almost be said to be exempt from the Curse of our Forefathers, scarcely ...
— Captain Cook's Journal During the First Voyage Round the World • James Cook
... is an elegant little tree from Japan. Its foliage is almost fern-like in its delicacy. It is a free grower, ...
— Amateur Gardencraft - A Book for the Home-Maker and Garden Lover • Eben E. Rexford
... among the fern-decked rocks before quite finishing the ascent to the actual outside world, the mercury lost little time ...
— Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills • Luella Agnes Owen
... jubilation, and there was a rush to the tall door, up the dilapidated steps, where curls of fern were peeping out; but the gentlemen called out that only the back-door could be opened, and the intention of a 'real grand exploration' was cut short by Miss Elbury's declaring that she was bound not to let Phyllis stay out till ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... else. There is a point where dinginess becomes picturesque; and the vines, undisturbed by repairs, were doing their best to hide all deficiencies. The grounds were ample for a city; and the tall Ginkgo tree which reached out its fern-like branches protectingly toward the timeworn mansion was only one of many other fine trees and shrubs. Inside, the lofty rooms and handsome furnishings of many years ago, some fine old portraits, and many ...
— The Pleasant Street Partnership - A Neighborhood Story • Mary F. Leonard
... Figgis had arrived from Brighton, to find that it was superfluous to look any further or inquire any more concerning the whereabouts of the missing man. All that was mortal of him was here, the head covered with a cloth, and bits of the fresh summer growth of fern and frond sticking ...
— The Blotting Book • E. F. Benson
... fastnesses of fragrance and hidden castles of the dew. In such hours the Well at the World's End seems no mere poet's dream. It awaits us yonder in the forest glade, amid the brooding solitudes of silent fern, and the gate of the Earthly Paradise is surely there in yonder vale hidden ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... carry a small grain, of the same colour, and almost the same shape, with mustard. The Arabians call it Avezoud: they gather it and make it up into a paste, on which they feast. We observed that the distant hills were covered with a species of wild fern, which bore the appearance of ...
— Perils and Captivity • Charlotte-Adelaide [nee Picard] Dard
... these gloomy boughs Had charms for him; and here he loved to sit, His only visitant a straggling sheep, The stone-chat, or the glancing sand-piper; And on these barren rocks, with fern and heath And juniper and thistle sprinkled o'er, Fixing his downcast eye, he many an hour A morbid pleasure nourished, tracing here An emblem of his own unfruitful life; And, lifting up his head, he then would gaze On the more distant ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... live? Oh, just anywhere—all about; among the fern, in the long grass, down on the sands, in all the places babies ...
— Piccaninnies • Isabel Maud Peacocke
... not well represented, both the soil and the air of the county being too dry for them. Another cause for the present scarcity of ferns is the proximity of Hertfordshire to London, for they have been uprooted and taken there for sale in cart-loads. We have twenty-four species of ferns and fern-allies, but not one really rare. The principal varieties are Scolopendrium vulgare, var. multifidum; Athyrium filixfaemina[c], var. convexum; and Polypodium vulgare, var. serratum. Equisetum silvaticum is our rarest horsetail; and our only ...
— Hertfordshire • Herbert W Tompkins
... forest, and in the moister valleys where they attain their full luxuriance they may be seen in extensive groves as well as in little groups. Four kinds of maidenhair, always light and graceful and attractive, are found; and of ferns common to Europe, Osmunda regalis, the Royal fern of Europe, and the European moonwort and alder's-tongue ferns. Then there is a fern which attains to gigantic proportions, especially in the cool forests, where its massive fronds grow to more than 5 yards in length and 3 in breadth, with ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... now once again The glen And fern, the highland, and the thistle? And do you still remember when We heard the bright-eyed woodcock whistle Down ...
— The Dog's Book of Verse • Various
... was not much there to tell of the springtime, for the pines are unsympathetic, but it seemed as if all the more wealth had been flung about on the carpeting beneath. Where the moss was not were flowing beds of fern, and the ground was dotted with slender harebells and the dusty, half-blossomed corydalis, while from all the rocks the bright red lanterns ...
— King Midas • Upton Sinclair
... hours go idly by. Your friend at the easel labours doggedly a little way off, in the wide shadow of the tree; and yet farther, across a strait of glaring sunshine, you see another painter, encamped in the shadow of another tree, and up to his waist in the fern. You cannot watch your own effigy growing out of the white trunk, and the trunk beginning to stand forth from the rest of the wood, and the whole picture getting dappled over with the flecks of sun that slip through ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... planet was quite satisfactory. It was the one you know as the earth. It was young. It was green. Huge fern-like plants grew abundantly on its surface. It was full of food. ...
— Lonesome Hearts • Russell Robert Winterbotham
... in the lives of the early New-Englanders had something shy, if not sombre, about it. If their natures flowered, it was out of sight, like the fern. It was in the practical that they showed their true quality, as Englishmen are wont. It has been the fashion lately with a few feeble-minded persons to undervalue the New England Puritans, as if they ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... stone, and the curving beach with the grass-grown highway skirting it, is the forest; and through this forest is the lovers' lane, made long ago by the early colonists and kept in perfect trim by the latest,—a lane that is green-arched overhead and fern-walled on either side, and soft with the dust of dead pine boughs underfoot. There also are streams and waterfalls and rustic bridges such as one might look for in some stately park in England, ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... deep green of fern and bush and understuff, told of the full tide of the year. Here and there a leaf trailed in the shallows, yellow as gold ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... nature is on a grander scale? Mr. Smithson might give her fine houses and costly upholstery; but only the Tropic of Cancer could give her larger and brighter stars, a world of richer colouring, a land of perpetual summer, nights luminous with fire-flies, gardens in which the fern and the cactus were as forest trees, and where humming-birds flashed among the foliage like living flowers; nay, where the flowers themselves took the forms of the animal world and seemed instinct ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... topped with red and yellow fern-like fronds grew rankly all about us to the height of several ...
— Warlord of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... rush on to the distant river, but that boys and girls at play can stop them for a little time with slight banks of mud and stones. In just such a smooth, sloping dell, down in a soft green basin, called Fern's Hollow, was the hiding-place where the convict's sad wife ...
— Fern's Hollow • Hesba Stretton
... table in front of the pulpit. It seemed to be resting on an altar of cedar and ferns. Mercy had brought from her old haunts in the woods masses of the glossy evergreen fern, and interwoven them with the boughs of cedar. At the end of the services, it was announced that all who wished could pass by the coffin and take one last ...
— Mercy Philbrick's Choice • Helen Hunt Jackson
... Therefore I am forced to leave their part of the telling to Fancy, and you may believe or discredit as much or as little as you choose; only I am hoping that by this time you have acquired at least a sprinkling of fern-seed in your eyes. You may have forgotten that fern-seed is the most subtle of eye-openers known to Fancy; and that it enables you to see the things that have existed only in your imagination. It is very scarce nowadays, and hard to find, for the bird-fanciers no longer keep it—and ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer
... circumstances they would have rejoiced over the trip, for it was carrying them back to the gleam of leaf-dappled streams and waving trees and deep, cool forests. It made their nostrils dilate with pleasure as they whirled past fern-filled ravines, out of which the rivulets stole with stealthy circuits under mossy rocks. They were both forest-born, and it was like getting back home out of a strange desert country to come back ...
— A Little Norsk; Or, Ol' Pap's Flaxen • Hamlin Garland
... cried Fred, "if we find a better way in, we can easily cover this place over with some old branches and fern roots, because it must be a secret way, or ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... their rector, having unearthed even the remotest and shyest member of his flock, advanced in florid hurry and taking his wife and Ringfield with him, passed under the hanging branches of maize, asparagus, fern and crabapples which decorated the great door. The floor of the barn, although partially cleared, was still half full of straw, and flecks of it flew through the air as the people trooped in, decently awed but amused too, for the ripple of lowered laughter and pleased hum of voices resounded ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... everything was delightful. There had been the hay harvest, and the corn harvest, and the cutting of fern on the mountains for winter fodder, and the threshing of the corn on the barn-floor, and the piling up of great heaps of straw in the wide bays on each ...
— The Christmas Child • Hesba Stretton
... sufficient to produce them. The trees that came within our knowledge were the manchineal and a species of purow: also some palm-trees, the tops of which we cut down, and the soft interior part or heart of them was so palatable that it made a good addition to our mess. Mr. Nelson discovered some fern-roots, which I thought might be good roasted, as a substitute for bread, but it proved a very poor one: it however was very good in its natural state to allay thirst, and on that account I directed a quantity to be collected to take into the boat. Many pieces of cocoa-nut shells and ...
— A Narrative Of The Mutiny, On Board His Majesty's Ship Bounty; And The Subsequent Voyage Of Part Of The Crew, In The Ship's Boat • William Bligh
... happens; little ferns begin to grow and they live a very long time indeed. There is at Rothamsted a bottle of soil that was put up just like this as far back as 1874. For a number of years past a beautiful fern has been growing inside the bottle, and even now it is very healthy and vigorous. If, instead of being kept moist, the rich garden soil is left in a dry shed during the whole of the winter so that it ...
— Lessons on Soil • E. J. Russell
... a—little! To brood a baby forest in one's arms—if only for a single day—? Think of the experience!" Even at the very thought of it she began to shine all over again! "Funny little fluff o' green," she laughed, "no fatter than a fern!" Her voice went suddenly all wabbly like a preacher's. "But, oh, the glory of it!" she said. "The potential majesty! Great sweeping branches—! Nests for birds, shade for lovers, masts for ships to plow the great world's waters—timbers ...
— Fairy Prince and Other Stories • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... Filix-Mas. Polypodium, Linn. MALE FERN. The Roots. L. E. D.—They are said to be aperient and anthelmintic. Simon Pauli tells us, that they have been the grand secret of some empirics against the broad kind of worms called taenia; and that the dose is one, two, or three drams of the powder. Two other kinds of Ferns used ...
— The Botanist's Companion, Vol. II • William Salisbury
... The light that fell through long brown aisles from out the kindling blue, The creak and yawn of stretching boughs, the jay-bird's early call, The rat-tat-tat of woodpecker that waked the woodland hall, The fainter stir of lower life in fern and brake and brier, Till flashing leaped the torch of Day from ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... the darkness, soft music plays, while Pierrot gathers together fern and foliage into a rough couch at the foot of the steps which lead to the Temple d'Amour. Then he lies down upon it, having made his ...
— The Poems And Prose Of Ernest Dowson • Ernest Dowson et al
... no indiscriminate onslaught upon customs of dress. Why did God put spots on the pansy, or etch the fern leaf? And what are china-asters good for if style and color ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... hanging to his neck?" cried Jasper, while the rest shouted as he picked at the fern-box ...
— Five Little Peppers Abroad • Margaret Sidney
... Ingleborough proved to be quite correct, for they paused at a rugged archway between piled-up fern-hung blocks, out of which the water rushed in a fairly large volume, but not knee-deep; and, upon leaving his horse with his comrade and boldly wading in, West found that the cave expanded as soon as the entrance was passed, so that the spring ran outward ...
— A Dash from Diamond City • George Manville Fenn
... British Constitution, though I personally disagree with some points in his argument. One sentence from this passage might be addressed to our Allies very appropriately to-day—"Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle reposing beneath the shadow of the British oak chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... not only fern-like cryptogamic plants and phanerogamic monocotyledons (grasses, yucc-like Liliaceae and palms), but also gymnospermic dicotyledons (Coniferae and Cycadeae), amounting in all to nearly 400 species, as characteristic of the coal formations. Of these ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... shady nooks, where the grass and wild flowers weave their lovely patterns for the earth floor, and tall pines spread their soft carpets of brown, while giant oaks and sycamores lift their cathedral arches to support the ceilings of green, and dark rock fountains set in banks of moss and fern hold water clear and cold. It was to one of these that Stanford Manning brought his bride for their honeymoon. Stanford himself pitched their tent and made their simple camp, for it was not in his plan that the sweet intimacy of these, the first ...
— When A Man's A Man • Harold Bell Wright
... thousand strong — all mounted men — and guns: There met, beneath the world-wide flag, the world-wide Empire's sons; They came to prove to all the earth that kinship conquers space, And those who fight the British Isles must fight the British race! From far New Zealand's flax and fern, from cold Canadian snows, From Queensland plains, where hot as fire the summer sunshine glows; And in the front the Lancers rode that New South Wales had sent: With easy stride across the plain their long, lean Walers went. Unknown, untried, those squadrons were, but proudly out they drew Beside ...
— Rio Grande's Last Race and Other Verses • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... Softly, dear, Let me breathe it in your ear— They are you, and only you. And those other nameless two Walking in Arcadian air— She that was so very fair? She that had the twilight hair?— They were you, dear, only you. If I speak of night or day, Grace of fern or bloom of grape, Hanging cloud or fountain spray, Gem or star or glistening dew, Or of mythologic shape, Psyche, Pyrrha, Daphne, say— I mean you, dear, ...
— The Sisters' Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... growth. She saw two natives in the act of kicking out a dung fire. Rajah headed directly toward them, the fire evidently being in the line of path he had chosen. This rare and unexpected freedom, this opportunity to go whither he listed, was as the giant fern he used to eat in the days when he was ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... West extricated his lady from her gallants, and led her away to a pretty haven; not indeed, to a conservatory, since there was none, but to a bewitching nook under the wide stairway, all banked about with palm and fern and pretty flowering shrub. There they sat them down, unseeing and unseen, near yet utterly remote, while in the blood of West beat the intoxicating strains of Straus, not to mention the vintage champagne, to which he had ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... green bottles and a water spigot with a neck like a giraffe's that rose out of the bar beside a varnished wood pillar that made the decoration of the corner, with a terra cotta pot of ferns on top of it. From where Andrews sat on the padded bench at the back of the room the fern fronds made a black lacework against the left- hand side of the window, while against the other was the brown silhouette of the old man's head, and the slant of his cap. The stove hid the door and the white cat, round and symmetrical, formed the center of the visible universe. ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... love shot a mighty hart Among the standing rye, When on him leapt that keeper old From the fern ...
— Andromeda and Other Poems • Charles Kingsley
... out he bundled, and, crushing through the fern-grown woodbiney fence, darted into the wood in a way that astonished our hero. Presently the chop, chop, chop of the axe revealed ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... slipt Down through a frost-leaved forest-crypt, 190 Long, sparkling aisles of steel-stemmed trees Bending to counterfeit a breeze; Sometimes the roof no fretwork knew But silvery mosses that downward grew; Sometimes it was carved in sharp relief With quaint arabesques of ice-fern leaf; Sometimes it was simply smooth and clear For the gladness of heaven to shine through, and here He had caught the nodding bulrush-tops And hung them thickly with diamond drops, 200 That crystalled the beams of moon and sun, And made a star of every one: No mortal ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... Mrs. Trevor proposed a stroll through the conservatories, and while the elders stopped to admire a fern or a rare exotic, Will and Gwenda roamed on under the palms and greenery to where a sparkling fountain rose, and flung its ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine
... dustily, along, in a cloud of their own creation, they would stare fashionably at the antlered heads which the great slow deer raised out of a forest of bracken that promised to autumn lovers such cover as was never seen before. And now and again, as the amorous perfume of chestnut flowers and of fern was drifted too near, one would say to the other: "My ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Joseph. "My lady, the Alderman is so obliging as to remind me that he has had 'the distinguished honor'—he is very good—of meeting me at the house of our mutual friend Deedles, the banker, and he does me the favor to inquire whether it will be agreeable to me to have Will Fern put down. He came up to London, it seems, to look for employment (trying to better himself—that's his story), and being found at night asleep in a shed, was taken into custody, and carried next morning ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various
... into forest—early British woodland. It was the change of a nightmare, and that all should fit, fifty yards ahead of us a babbling brook barred our way. On the far side a velvet green ride, sprinkled with rabbits and fern, gently sloped upwards and away, but behind us was no hope. Forty horse-power would never have rolled wet pneumatic tyres up that verdurous ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... sunset-glow like flecks of gold in amber wine,—while here and there the distant glimmer of tossing fountains, or the soft emerald sheen of a prattling brook that wound in and out the grounds, amongst banks of moss and drooping fern, gave a pleasant touch of coolness and refreshment to the brilliant verdure of the ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... faithful years return And hearts unwounded sing again, Comes Taffy dancing through the fern To ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... directions, which are very steep and rugged, leaving, in the interspaces, very large valleys, and gently-rising grounds about their sides. These hills, though of a rocky disposition, are, in general, covered, almost to their tops, with trees; but the lower parts, on the sides, frequently only with fern. At the bottom of the harbour, where we lay, the ground rises gently to the foot of the hills, which run across nearly in the middle of the island; but its flat border, on each side, at a very small distance from the sea, becomes quite steep. ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... away below, into the cup of the camp or citadel. I did not dare to stand up, lest I should be seen. I burrowed my way among the ferns over the wall into the hollow, worming my way towards the edge of the fern clump so that I could see. In a minute, I was gazing through the fern-stems into the camp itself; ...
— Martin Hyde, The Duke's Messenger • John Masefield
... mines of carbon once abstracted from the atmosphere by plants. In these coal-beds are often found fern leaves, toads, whole trees, and in short all forms of organized matter. These all existed as living things before the great floods, and at the breaking away of the barriers of the immense lakes, of which our present ...
— The Elements of Agriculture - A Book for Young Farmers, with Questions Prepared for the Use of Schools • George E. Waring
... that for a time the two English lads forgot all about their guns, as they stopped hard by some watercourse to admire the graceful lace-fronded fern, or the wonderful displays of moss hanging from ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... "Merry Christmas," cried everyone in Spanish or Visayan, and "Merry Christmas" we responded, though June skies bending down toward tropical palms and soft winds just rustling the tops of tall bamboos, so that they cast flickering fern-like shadows over thatched nipa roofs, but ill suggested Christmas to ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel
... without Winthrop's strong arm; although in many a rough pitch and steep rise of the way, young hickories and oaks lent their aid to her hand that was free. Mosses and lichens, brown and black with the summer's heat, clothed the rocks and dressed out their barrenness; green tufts of fern nodded in many a nook, and kept their greenness still; and huckleberry bushes were on every hand, in every spare place, and standing full of the unreaped black and blue harvest. And in the very path, under their feet, sprang many an unassuming little ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... accessories to make a dinner party go off well. The large dining-room was a long, low, octagonal apartment, with a small conservatory opening out at the lower end. There were numerous small alcoves in the wall, and in the recesses of each of these were huge pots of maidenhair fern. ...
— Marie Gourdon - A Romance of the Lower St. Lawrence • Maud Ogilvy
... the fronds of a giant fern; a cautious step beyond his hands touched a slippery, pliant vine. And his whisper ended as he felt the thing turn and twist beneath his hand. It was alive!—writhing!—cold as the body of a monster snake, and just as vicious ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... eaten un-cooked. It has a mucilaginous, slightly sweet taste, with a faint smell like that of a mushroom. With the exception of a few berries, chiefly of a dwarf arbutus, the natives eat no vegetable food besides this fungus. In New Zealand, before the introduction of the potato, the roots of the fern were largely consumed; at the present time, I believe, Tierra del Fuego is the only country in the world where a cryptogamic plant affords a staple ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... scandens, also called Gnito and nitongputi, a climbing fern found throughout the Philippines. Blanco gives the name of the genus as Ugena. The glossy, wiry stems are used in the making of fine hats, mats, cigarette and cigar cases, etc. See Census of Philippines, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 40 of 55 • Francisco Colin
... White Horse the track skirts the eastern shores of Lakes Bennett and Lindemann, through wild but picturesque moorland, carpeted with wild flowers,[87] and strewn with grey rocks and boulders. A species of pink heather grows freely here, the scent of which and the presence of bubbling fern-fringed brooks, and crisp bracing air, recalled many a pleasant morning after grouse in Bonnie Scotland. A raw-boned Aberdonian on the train remarks on the resemblance of the landscape to that of his own country and is flatly contradicted ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... those at the top of the brow, rising out of the rich green scrub? Verily, again, we are in the Tropics. They are palms, doubtless, some thirty feet high each, with here and there a young one springing up like a gigantic crown of male-fern. The old ones have straight gray stems, often prickly enough, and thickened in the middle; gray last year's leaves hanging down; and feathering round the top, a circular plume of pale green leaves, like those of a coconut. But these are not ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... love to loiter by the old oak tree, Where waters ripple over clean white stones, And cresses, mint with feathered fern grown high. In such a place the peaceful thoughts will come; There is no hurry there where nature plays. Soft gentle breezes wave the grass and sedge; White fluffy clouds pass overhead and roll. Now dreaming, I hear the cricket's gay song. O river bank you ...
— Clear Crystals • Clara M. Beede
... 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, had ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... freely after a clearing has been made. Nature lays down a green sward directly on the rich virgin mould, and sets to work besides to cover up the unsightly stems and holes of the fallen timber with luxuriant tufts of a species of hart's-tongue fern, which grows almost as freely as an orchid on decayed timber. I was so still and silent that innumerable forest birds came about me. A wood pigeon alighted on a branch close by, and sat preening her radiant plumage in a bath of golden sunlight. The profound stillness was stirred now ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... which the stranger displayed in tending his horse; for, muttering something about provender left for the keeper's palfrey, he dragged out of a recess a bundle of forage, which he spread before the knight's charger, and immediately afterwards shook down a quantity of dried fern in the corner which he had assigned for the rider's couch. The knight returned him thanks for his courtesy; and, this duty done, both resumed their seats by the table, whereon stood the trencher of pease placed between them. The hermit, after a long grace, ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... Undaunted April crept and sewed Her violets in dead men's faces, And in a soft and snowy shroud Drew the scarred fields with gentle stitch; Though in the valley where the ditch Was hoarse with nettles, blind with mud, She stroked the golden-headed bud, And loosed the fern, she dared not here To touch nor tend this murdered thing; The wind went wide of it, the year Upon this breast stopped short of Spring: Beauty ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... strata, presenting a much smaller number of monocotyledonous plants; (a) Co-ordinate and almost contemporary formations with red sandstone (rothe todtes liegende), quartz-porphyry and fern-coal. These strata are less connected by alternation than by opposition. The porphyries issue (like the trachytes of the Andes) in domes from the bosom of intermediary rocks. Porphyritic breccias which envelope the quartzose porphyries. (b) Zechstein or Alpine ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V3 • Alexander von Humboldt
... better than this!" he panted dismally, fanning himself with a large fern leaf. "History ...
— Soap-Bubble Stories - For Children • Fanny Barry
... opinion as he had never valued it before; and, as he thought of her in his restless tossings, she seemed to him something as pure, as wholesome, and strong as the air of his native New-England hills, as the sweet-brier and sweet-fern he used to love to gather when he was a boy. She seemed of a piece with all the good old ways of New England,—its household virtues, its conscientious sense of right, its exact moral boundaries; and he felt somehow as if she belonged, to that healthy portion of his life which he now looked ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... extreme cold had passed and every green thing was hurrying to be ahead of its neighbour. Bija made endless cowslip balls out of the beautiful rose-pink primulas, while Roy and Mirak, following the shepherds' boys, came back with their hands full of young rhubarb shoots and green fern croziers, which they ate like asparagus. But this sort of thing could not last long, since they were close to the caravan route from Kandahar to Kabul; and sure enough, no sooner had the snow on the uplands melted than travellers ...
— The Adventures of Akbar • Flora Annie Steel
... and illustrated by a large number of drawings. In order to render the issue of the present cheap edition possible, it has been found necessary to restrict its size a little by the omission of chapters dealing with Glaciers, Ferns and Fern-seed, and the history of the Sea-squirts or Ascidians, which are contained in the original larger book. My hope is that this collection of papers, "about a number of things," may meet with as kind a reception from my readers as that which they have ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... ease Along your city squares, Thank those who there have fought the trees, And howling wolves and bears. They met the proud woods in the face, Those gloomy shades and stern; Withstood and conquered, and your race Supplants the pine and fern. ...
— Thoughts, Moods and Ideals: Crimes of Leisure • W.D. Lighthall
... carefully, we find on the lower side numerous fine hairs like those on the lower surface of the liverworts, which fasten it firmly to the ground. By and by, if our culture has been successful, we may find attached to some of the larger of these, little fern plants growing from the under side of the prothallia, and attached to the ground by a delicate root. As the little plant becomes larger the prothallium dies, leaving it attached to the ground as an independent plant, which after ...
— Elements of Structural and Systematic Botany - For High Schools and Elementary College Courses • Douglas Houghton Campbell
... mission Beryl took the faded blossoms from her basket, added a cluster of chrysanthemums, a frond of fern from the "branch" border, and hurried on to the cemetery. When she reached the entrance, the gate was locked, but unwilling to return without having gratified her mother's wish, she climbed into a spreading cedar close by the low brick wall, and swung ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... article of their common diet; and our people also found it very palatable and wholesome. We could not learn to what species of plant it belonged, having never been able to procure the leaves; but it was supposed, by our botanists, to be the root of some kind of fern. ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr
... were hidden from the wallowing hippopotami by the crest of the knoll. The human squatting-place was a trampled area among the dead brown fronds of Royal Fern, through which the crosiers of this year's growth were unrolling to the light and warmth. The fire was a smouldering heap of char, light grey and black, replenished by the old women from time to time with brown leaves. Most ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... changed, and only the vegetable ivory tree remained, with a great profusion of wonderful orchids, among which I learned to recognize the rare Nuttonia Vexillaria and the glorious pink and scarlet blossoms of Cattleya and odontoglossum. Occasional brooks with pebbly bottoms and fern-draped banks gurgled down the shallow gorges in the hill, and offered good camping-grounds every evening on the banks of some rock-studded pool, where swarms of little blue-backed fish, about the size and shape of English trout, gave ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... comment as they went on. Presently they came to a deep rift in the moor through which a stream leaped sparkling. The girl scrambled down, waist-deep in yellow fern, but the other side was steep and stony and she was glad of help when he held out his hand. They made the ascent with some difficulty and on reaching the ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... extent of the island run many little streams, sometimes between high banks of rock, covered with moss and magnificent fern, with great pools of clear, deep water at the base of high waterfalls, and in those places where the stream cuts its way through the level plains double rows of the royal palm mark its course. The royal palm is the characteristic ...
— Cuba in War Time • Richard Harding Davis
... believe any of you happen to have just the same passion for the blue hyacinth which I have,—very certainly not for the crushed lilac-leaf-buds; many of you do not know how sweet they are. You love the smell of the sweet-fern and the bayberry-leaves, I don't doubt; but I hardly think that the last bewitches you with young memories as it does me. For the same reason I come back to damask roses, after having raised a good many of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... gardener—the same that cheered the last hours of Mrs. Warren. He recognizes Vivien and salutes her gravely. Seeing that she is accompanied by a gentleman in khaki he discreetly withdraws out of hearing and tidies up a tree fern. Vivien and Michael seat themselves on two green iron chairs under the fronds and in front ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... intimation he had of anything wrong was a cry from the girl, and he saw a strip of water widen between the canoe and the bank. He ran his hardest, but made little headway, for thorny bushes and fern formed thickets along the bank, while when he reached the boulders he felt that he had come too late, because no swimmer could then overtake the canoe, even if he escaped destruction in the first rapid immediately below. ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... 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 seaside fashions, and went their moorland walks without hats ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... England boy had a wider range of emotions than boys of more equable climates. He felt his nature crudely, as it was meant. To the boy Henry Adams, summer was drunken. Among senses, smell was the strongest — smell of hot pine-woods and sweet-fern in the scorching summer noon; of new-mown hay; of ploughed earth; of box hedges; of peaches, lilacs, syringas; of stables, barns, cow-yards; of salt water and low tide on the marshes; nothing came amiss. Next to smell came taste, and the children knew the taste of everything ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... on together through the open pasture, where the sweet-fern and bayberry bushes grew tall and thick; there was another strip of woods between them and the river, and just this side was a deserted house, which had not been lived in for many years and was gray and crumbling. The fields that belonged to it had been made ...
— Betty Leicester - A Story For Girls • Sarah Orne Jewett
... enter it. Here dwelt at that time the merry little people of the Rootmen. They were pretty little creatures, in form and look like human beings,—the tallest about six inches high, and the smallest as long as your little finger. In summer they lived in mossy bowers and under the leaves of the tall fern; in winter they nestled among the roots of trees, in the holes of some gnarled old trunk, and crept into the clefts in the rocks. Their dress was fine and elegant: the little men wore coats and hose of moss, and the little women dresses of pretty variegated flowers, leaves, and ...
— The King of Root Valley - and his curious daughter • R. Reinick
... Joan everything was delightful. There had been the hay harvest, and the corn harvest, and the cutting of fern on the mountains for winter fodder, and the threshing of the corn on the barn-floor, and the piling up of great heaps of straw in the wide bays on each ...
— The Christmas Child • Hesba Stretton
... of the coconut tree, whose head is more than its body. Even while it lives its head is shorn once a year, for, as fresh fronds push out and upward from the centre, those of the outer circle get old and must be cut away. And when one of those feathery, fern-like fronds, toying with the breeze, comes crashing to the ground, it is ten or twelve feet long, and consists of a great backbone, as thick at the base as a man's leg, with a close-set row of swords on either side, about a yard in length. They are hard and tough, but supple yet and of a shiny green ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... is at its best. It is a riot of rugged boulder, fern, and heather, through which rushing streams, full of trout, flow swiftly southward to the Channel. The Tors here are not the highest of the moor, yet many of them rise well above the 1,500 ...
— Legend Land, Volume 2 • Various
... tinkle, Through fern and periwinkle The cows are coming home; A-loitering in the checkered stream Where the sun-rays glance and gleam, Clarine, Peachbloom and Phoebe Phillis Stand knee-deep in the creamy lilies In a drowsy dream; To-link, to-lank, to-linklelinkle, O'er banks with butter cups ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... spur of the mountains. The whole lower country he found covered with almost impenetrable thickets of small pine, with which is mixed a species of plant resembling arrow-wood, twelve or fifteen feet high, with thorny stems, almost interwoven with each other, and scattered among the fern and fallen timber: there is also a red berry, somewhat like the Solomon's seal, which is called by the natives solme, and used as an article of diet. This thick growth rendered travelling almost impossible, and it was rendered still more fatiguing ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: Explorers • Various
... little ferns begin to grow and they live a very long time indeed. There is at Rothamsted a bottle of soil that was put up just like this as far back as 1874. For a number of years past a beautiful fern has been growing inside the bottle, and even now it is very healthy and vigorous. If, instead of being kept moist, the rich garden soil is left in a dry shed during the whole of the winter so that it gradually loses its moisture, it will generally show ...
— Lessons on Soil • E. J. Russell
... end of the universe in the pursuit of knowledge. We read of his walking thirty-two miles in a soaking rain to the top of a mountain, and bringing home only a plant of white heather. On another day he walked thirty-six miles to find a peculiar kind of fern. Again he walked for twenty-four hours in hail, rain, and wind, reaching home at three o'clock in the morning. But at seven he was up and ready for work as usual. He carried heavy loads, too, when he went searching for minerals and fossils. In one of ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... Fern hollow—begging the indulgence of those who have read the earlier volume of this series—is a deep, richly vegetated ravine or gully forming one of a series of scenic convolutions of the surface of the earth which gave the ...
— Campfire Girls at Twin Lakes - The Quest of a Summer Vacation • Stella M. Francis
... just over the scrubby hill to the north, young Gordon was walking, knee deep in the bronzed sweet fern, gun cocked, eyes alert. His two beautiful dogs were working close, quartering the birch-dotted hill-side in perfect form. But they made no points; no dropping woodcock whistled up from the shelter of birch or alder; no partridge blundered away from bramble covert or willow fringe. Only the ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... thought Binzer, walking over to the window and drumming his fingers on the glass fern-shade. "At breakfast, is he? That's the mistake I made: turning out ...
— In a German Pension • Katherine Mansfield
... eyes of fancy turn Where the tumbled pippins burn Like embers in the orchard's lap of tangled grass and fern,— There let the old path wind In and out and on behind The cider-press ...
— Riley Love-Lyrics • James Whitcomb Riley
... together, she landed the major upon the rock. And then she laughed; and then, inconsistent as it may appear, she became grave, and at once proceeded to scrape him off, and rub him down with dried leaves, with fern-twigs, with her handkerchief, with the border of her mantle, as if he were a child, until he blushed with ...
— Thankful Blossom • Bret Harte
... about 150 feet below. By a succession of these falls, although of more limited height, it at length reaches the bottom of the valley. It is only on the precipices about the fall that the Chamaerops appears to grow; at the foot of a precipice a little to the right (going from Churra,) a tree fern grows, which I have Wallich's authority for stating to be Polypod giganteum, a fern which occurred at Mahadeb, and which I have seen in somewhat similar situations at Mergui. All my excursions have been confined to this valley and to the water-courses immediately around Churra; once only ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... Oriental fabric, together with the books and pictures, which had been left packed and ready to be sent to them whenever they should settle down, and last of all, in the sunniest corner was a beautiful sword fern, a rubber plant, ...
— The Spectacle Man - A Story of the Missing Bridge • Mary F. Leonard
... into a tunnel, fern walled, fern roofed, garlanded with tawny orchids, gay with carmine fungus and golden moss. We stepped out into a blaze ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... hole scooped out in the rock, where the water lay dark and silent, or a little precipice over which it dashed and foamed. This was a favourite wood with the children. In summer they often spent whole days there, gathering wild flowers or the beautiful fern leaves, which grew in every nook and corner. And now that the bright autumn leaves were scattered everywhere, and the tempting berries covered the ground, they found employment for many a spare hour. To-day the little girls had ...
— Nanny Merry - or, What Made the Difference • Anonymous
... their flight To neighb'ring woods, and trust themselves to night. The speedy horse all passages belay, And spur their smoking steeds to cross their way, And watch each entrance of the winding wood. Black was the forest: thick with beech it stood, Horrid with fern, and intricate with thorn; Few paths of human feet, or tracks of beasts, were worn. The darkness of the shades, his heavy prey, And fear, misled the younger from his way. But Nisus hit the turns with happier haste, And, thoughtless of his friend, the forest pass'd, ...
— The Aeneid • Virgil
... showing ourselves in town or village was too great. But there came a night, when, as we journeyed, we approached the town of Fierbois, a place very well known to me; and when we halted in a wood with the first light of day, and the wearied soldiers made themselves beds amid the dried fern and fallen leaves, I approached the Maid, who was gazing wistfully towards the tapering spire of a church, visible at some distance away, and ...
— A Heroine of France • Evelyn Everett-Green
... Peak, would have been wholly new. We went upon a surface so hard and level, that we had little care to hold the bridle, and were therefore at full leisure for contemplation. On the left were high and steep rocks shaded with birch, the hardy native of the North, and covered with fern or heath. On the right the limpid waters of Lough Ness were beating their bank, and waving their surface by a gentle agitation. Beyond them were rocks sometimes covered with verdure, and sometimes towering in horrid nakedness. Now and ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... controls. The ship steadied, the dive became a fast glide. He looked for an open space to land. Then he felt the landing gear scrape some surface. Directly ahead loomed one of the fern trees. The plane sped toward the long fronds. There came a ripping crash, the splintering of metal and wood. The scarlet cloud gathering before Garin's ...
— The People of the Crater • Andrew North
... the greater portion of the ground in the form of immense flat slabs or blocks of rock, often split in a vertical direction. I saw long fissures of eight or ten feet in breadth, and from ten to fifteen feet in depth. In these clefts the flowers blossom earlier, and the fern grows taller and more luxuriantly, than in ...
— Visit to Iceland - and the Scandinavian North • Ida Pfeiffer
... daintiest and prettiest for the bride-elect. Have the table decorations in white. For the center have a large round basket of bride roses, and at each plate tiny French baskets filled with maidenhair fern and white pansies, or apple blossoms, for individual favors. Tie the handle of each basket with white gauze ribbon, looping the baskets together with the ribbon forming a garland for the table. Serve strawberries ...
— Breakfasts and Teas - Novel Suggestions for Social Occasions • Paul Pierce
... bit of rough, open land there that gave from the covert edge, with scattered brake-fern and a stream in the midst and a lot of blackthorn scrub round about. A noted place for a woodcock, also a snipe, and a spot from which trespassers were warned very careful. So Samuel took a look over to see ...
— The Torch and Other Tales • Eden Phillpotts
... as to leave no broken twigs, and finding that the ground which he had now reached rapidly descended into a deep ravine or gully—one of the many that drain that part of the country—in a few minutes he was down between the fern-hung sandstone rocks. ...
— In the King's Name - The Cruise of the "Kestrel" • George Manville Fenn
... while everywhere the country was covered with beautiful trees, among them the pandanus palm, the tree-fern, the banyan, the bread-fruit tree, wild nutmeg, and superb bamboos. The natives also were very well-behaved and quiet, and were always inclined to treat us hospitably. Indeed, we might have travelled without the slightest risk from one ...
— Peter Trawl - The Adventures of a Whaler • W. H. G. Kingston
... pedagogy. She lived under the eyes of her pupils. Her life was one ceaseless effort to avoid doing anything which might influence her charges for evil or shock the natural sensitiveness of their parents. She had to wind her earthly way through a forest of the most delicate susceptibilities—fern-fronds that stretched across the path, and that she must not even accidentally disturb with her skirt as she passed. No wonder she walked mincingly! No wonder she had a habit of keeping her elbows close to her sides, ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... The trees were smaller and scantier here, owing to the rocky nature of the ground, which sloped rather rapidly down; but it was moist and overgrown with mosses, ferns, creepers, and low shrubs, all of the liveliest green. I could not see many yards ahead owing to the bushes and tall fern fronds; but presently I began to hear a low, continuous sound, which, when I had advanced twenty or thirty yards further, I made out to be the gurgling of running water; and at the same moment I made the ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... the flowers in her hands were hyacinths, hyacinths and damp fern and mignonette. It grew and grew and surrounded me with a penetrating cloud of rich perfume, perfume and old, sweet memories that cut and soothed at once. I thought of the lily-of-the-valley bed under my ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... pink flowers over there, and those green rushes, and those fern-like plants? Well, they are all living polyps, or colonies of polyps, some kinds of which leave coral when they die, like ...
— How Sammy Went to Coral-Land • Emily Paret Atwater
... still rested upon the light from the window. It silhouetted a rare fern from Assam, it ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... of labor not far off told that camp was being built. Presently the absent five returned, two of the Mayorunas carrying a crude but strong litter constructed from saplings and giant-fern leaves. McKay rose ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel
... as a man variously and mysteriously alive, very different from every other man and especially from certain kinds of man. When you look at a larch wood with a floor of fern in October at the end of twilight, you are not content to have that wood described as so many hundred poles growing on three acres of land, the property of a manufacturer of gin. Still less was Borrow content to sit down at Oulton, while the blast howled amid the pines which nearly surround ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... intense and new was the animal delight, to plant my hinder claws at some tree-foot deep into the black rotting vegetable-mould which steamed rich gases up wherever it was pierced, and clasp my huge arms round the stem of some palm or tree-fern; and then slowly bring my enormous weight and muscle to bear upon it, till the stem bent like a withe, and the laced bark cracked, and the fibres groaned and shrieked, and the roots sprung up out of the soil; and then, with a slow circular wrench, the whole ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... ran, stumbling, recovering themselves, stumbling again. To breathe became an agony. But not until many minutes later, when they plowed into the cover of a fern belt whose blackness not even the moonlight had pierced, did ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... two miles from the sea. Wherever we turn we have woods, smooth downs, and valleys, with small brooks running down them, through green meadows, hardly ever intersected with hedgerows, but scattered over with trees. The hills that cradle these valleys are either covered with fern and bilberries, or oak woods, which are cut for charcoal. Walks extend for miles over the hill-tops, the great beauty of which is their wild simplicity—they are perfectly smooth, without rocks.' It was in this neighbourhood, as the two poets loitered in the silvan combs or walked along ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... days he had gone occasionally to see a play, and in 1875 he went to see Irving in Hamlet and liked him better than Macready, whom he had seen in the part. Still later he went to see Lady Archibald Campbell act when ‘Becket’ was given “among the glades of oak and fern in the Canizzaro Wood at Wimbledon.” But handicapped as he was by ignorance of drama as a stage product how could he ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... caught sight of there was her eldest son. He was dancing a quadrille, and his partner was a short young lady in a strawberry-coloured tulle dress, covered with trails of spinach-green fern leaves. This young person had a round, chubby face, with bright apple-hued cheeks, a dark, bullet-shaped head, and round, bead-like eyes that glanced about her rapidly like those of a frightened dickey-bird. Her dress was cut very low, and the charms she exhibited were not captivating. Her arms ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... thoughtful, and a trifle astonished, but she made the best use of her memory, and Alton listened gravely. "Yes," he said. "I seem to see it. The rose garden on the south side, the big lawn, and the lake. There's a little stream on the opposite side of it that comes down through the fern from ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... painted the wide landscape in every direction. On mountain sides, and across the undulating lowland, wall or hedge mapped his conquests of nature, little plots won by the toil of successive generations for pasture or for tillage, won from the reluctant wilderness, which loves its fern and gorse, its mosses and heather. Near and far were scattered the little white cottages, each a gleaming speck, lonely, humble; set by the side of some long-winding, unfrequented road, or high on the green upland, ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... a light to England? And isn't it the duty of parishes and millionaires to supply light?" She was plucking a fern-leaf to pieces. ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... species of fern were growing abundantly around a pool of water, fed from a tiny rivulet that trickled down from the cliff above; and I had no sooner got under the shelter of the leafy branches than I was surrounded by a flock of the pretty grey doves whose ...
— The Island Treasure • John Conroy Hutcheson
... cow. She had not pastured in the meadows about Chartres with blind eyes. She knew the paths north and south and east and west through the forest and the fern; and even in the dark of the tangled underbrush she could feel out the way quite plainly. But she said to herself, "I must not make the way too easy for these wicked men. I must punish them all I can now that it is ...
— The Book of Saints and Friendly Beasts • Abbie Farwell Brown
... going forward, Mr Banks and Dr Solander walked along the shore of the bay by themselves without anxiety, and collected numerous plants. They visited several huts, and found the inhabitants at dinner, their food consisting, at this time of the year, of fish and the root of a large fern. The roots were prepared by scorching them over a fire, and then beating them till the charred bark fell off. The remainder was a clammy, soft substance, not unpleasant to the taste, but mixed with three times its bulk of fibres, which could not be swallowed. This ...
— Captain Cook - His Life, Voyages, and Discoveries • W.H.G. Kingston
... the shepherd's hut wide awake that night, hearing the frogs croak from the Lagherello and the crickets sing in the hot darkness. The hut was empty: shepherd and sheep and dogs were all gone up to the higher grounds amongst the hills. There were some dry fern-plants in a corner of it. I lay on these and stared at the planets above me throbbing in the intense blue of the skies: they seemed to throb, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... as she gazed from her loophole over the woods with a vague, never-quenchable hope of seeing something, she became aware of something very stealthy below—the rustling of a fox, or a hare in the fern mayhap, though she could not see to the bottom of the quarry, but she clung to the bar, craned forward, and beheld far down a shaking of the ivy and white-flowered rowan; then a hand, grasping the root of a little ...
— Two Penniless Princesses • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and interest of the observations made during his stay at Rio, when tropical nature was still a fresh and unexplored page to the young observer, are wonderful. Cabbage palms, liana creepers, luxuriant fern leaves—roads, bridges, and soil—planarian worms, frogs which climbed perpendicular sheets of glass, the light of fireflies, brilliant butterflies, fights between spiders and wasps, the victories of ants over difficulties, the habits of monkeys, ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... string looks jest like a fern with a lot of roots. My mother used to grow them in the corner of our garden. They ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: Volume IV, Georgia Narratives, Part 1 • Works Projects Administration
... knows what I'd have done if it hadn't been for her," he laughed. "I wanted to plant American Beauty roses and maiden-hair fern all over the place. I even think I had some notion of growing four-dollar orchids on the pear trees. The idea of putting in things that would really ...
— The Lilac Girl • Ralph Henry Barbour
... many ineffectual trials to deceive, or overcome him, it was at length determined to let him pursue his own course, and to watch if he should apply for relief to any of the productions of the country. He was in consequence observed to dig fern-root, and to chew it. Whether the disorder had passed its crisis, or whether the fern-root effected a cure, I know not; but it is certain that he ...
— A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson • Watkin Tench
... stumbled, stood still in the entrance to the back-trail. In that leafy tunnel, as far as the eye could see, was no one living or dead. The porters, the tent boys, all were gone in a stampede for safety. The baggage lay scattered among the fern beds. She saw bundles of green canvas, chop boxes, rags, bursting sacks of grain. Beside a mossy rock lay her dressing case smashed open, its mirror, brushes, and vials trampled into ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... in that meat. Jacob had gone out accordingly; he had gained his leeward position of a fine buck, and was gradually nearing him by stealth, now behind a huge oak-tree, and then crawling through the high fern, so as to get within shot unperceived, when on a sudden the animal, which had been quietly feeding, bounded away and disappeared in the thicket. At the same time Jacob perceived a small body of horse ...
— The Children of the New Forest • Captain Marryat
... while after this, Arthur thought that he had had about enough dancing for awhile, and went and sat by himself in a secluded spot under the shadow of a tree-fern in a temporary conservatory put up outside a bow-window. The Chinese lantern that hung upon the fern had gone out, leaving his chair in total darkness. Presently a couple, whom he did not recognize, for he only saw their backs, strayed in, and placed themselves ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... carefully studied on the large-scale map he and the Master had used in planning the attack; but the Master's intimate knowledge was not his. After two and one-half minutes, the leader stopped again, and gestured at heavy fern-brakes that could just be distinguished as black blotches in the dark of ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... spaces, caught the light as it struck through the gray trunks of the beeches. Newbury found a seat for Marcia on a fallen trunk, and threw himself beside her. The world seemed to have been all washed by the thunder-storm of the night before; the odors of grass, earth, and fern were steaming out into the summer air. The wood was alive with the hum of innumerable insects, which had become audible and dominant with the gradual silencing of the birds. In the half-cut hay-fields the machines stood ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... alone, do my thoughts no longer hover Over the mountains, on that northern shore, Resting their wings where heath and fern-leaves cover Thy noble heart for ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... thing to leave the carcasses of these brave creatures uncovered there. So I stripped off branches of the trees, and gathered bundles of fern and bracken, with which to conceal awhile their bones from wolf and fowl. And him whom I had begun to love I covered last, desiring he might but return, if only for a moment, to bid me his ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... situations the following are suitable: tradescantia, parlour ivy, moneywort, vinca smilax, climbing fern, asparagus fern, dracaena, coleus, centaurea, sword fern, and Boston fern. For indoor boxes in winter, the following may be used: abutilon, calceolaria, cyclamen, violets, primroses, petunias, geraniums, freesia, ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education
... children, through the wood-path and out upon the moor. Meadows had brought a shawl, and spread it on a rock, full under the moonlight. There they sat, close together, feeling all the goodness and glory of the night, drinking in the scents of heather and fern, the sounds of plashing water and gently moving winds. Above them, the vault of heaven and the friendly stars; below them, the great hollow of the valley, the scattered lights, ...
— A Great Success • Mrs Humphry Ward
... Louis went on, "I'd like to see this guy Elliott. Anybody who would draw a picture like that. Hold your horses, Mike, here's another. 'The Faun." What's a faun, Mike? I guess he means fern. It ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... romantic view and mark our progress towards the foot of the hill. I was particularly struck, during the walk, with the richness of the undergrowth in most places, and recognised many berries and plants that resembled those of my native land, especially a tall, elegantly formed fern, which emitted an agreeable perfume. There were several kinds of flowers, too; but I did not see so many of these as I should have expected in such a climate. We also saw a great variety of small birds of bright plumage, and many paroquets similar to the one, ...
— The Coral Island • R.M. Ballantyne
... white wrapper and blue net, sitting in a large chair, looking about her with the languid interest of an invalid in a new place. Her eyes brightened as they fell upon a glass of rosy laurel and delicate maidenhair fern that stood among the toast and eggs, strawberries and ...
— A Garland for Girls • Louisa May Alcott
... Milton so acute as these two. But of less ingenious readers I would ask, if any single word can be found equal to "monumental" in its power of suggesting to the imagination the historic oak of park or chase, up to the knees in fern, which has outlasted ten generations of men; has been the mute witness of the scenes of love, treachery, or violence enacted in the baronial hall which it shadows and protects; and has been so associated with man, that it is now rather a column and memorial obelisk than a tree ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... given them, speaking as an old campaigner, some very useful if simple hints, such as always pitching the tent with its back to the wind; and keeping inside a supply of dry wood to light the fires with; and tying fern on Moses's head, against the flies; and carrying cabbage leaves in their own hats, against the heat; and walking with long staves instead of short walking sticks—after this he made them all sit round their fire, and sketched them, and the picture hangs at this very moment in ...
— The Slowcoach • E. V. Lucas
... the use of the gathering hook so that the branches can be brought within easy reach of the picker on his ladder, the wearing of a gathering apron, and the emptying of it gently into the baskets. Green fern has the same effect on pears packed for carriage as nettles on stone fruit; while apples should be packed in wheat, or better still in rye straw. For long journeys the American system of packing in barrels is anticipated, the apples being carefully put in by hand, and the ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... her dark eyes fixed on the setting sun. There was no sound save the breathing of her horse, the far sweet trailing song of a spotted sparrow, the undertones of some hidden rill welling up through matted tangles of vine and fern and long wild grasses. ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... These gardens are on the south side of the river Yarra. On a hill in the centre of them is built the Government House. There are seen many varieties of trees and plants all carefully labelled. The fern tree bower is very ingenious. You see here the elk or staghorn fern, which grows as a parasite on the palm or the petosperum of New Zealand. The grass is kept beautifully fresh and green, and is a favourite resort. I have no further room to continue this letter, but, in my next, ...
— Six Letters From the Colonies • Robert Seaton
... in fern, Old oak, I love thee well; A thousand thanks for what I learn And what remains to tell." —The ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... revealed itself as a monstrous sham, more dangerously indecent because of its pretense at decency. It is something like those poisoned tropical forests, fever-infested, which were in the land of my birth, beautiful outwardly, with great vivid flowers, high palms, towering trees of fern, all garlanded with creepers and lovely wild growth,—glades of fair shadow inviting to rest, yet poisonous so that ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... death-like hush upon everything. Indeed, the place seemed shunned in spite of the sodden loveliness of that scent which monopolised and mounted to my brain until I was beginning to be drunk with the sheer pleasure of it. And there in the centre of the space stood a plant not unlike a tree fern, about six feet high, and crowned by one huge and lovely blossom. It resembled a vast passion-flower of incredible splendour. There were four petals, with points resting on the ground, each six feet long, ivory-white ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... whins. The whins had been in bloom since Easter, for Larry and Eileen had gathered the yellow flowers to dye their Easter eggs. On the other side of the road the land rose a little, and was so covered with stones that it seemed as if there were no earth left for things to grow in. Yet the mountain fern took root there and made the rocks gay with ...
— The Irish Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... slipped out my hand from the handcuff, cried to Harry Gauntlet, 'Follow me!'—whisked under the belly of the dragoon horse—flung my plaid round me with the speed of lightning—threw myself on my side, for there was no keeping my feet, and down the brae hurled I, over heather and fern, and blackberries, like a barrel down Chalmer's Close, in Auld Reekie. G—, sir, I never could help laughing when I think how the scoundrel redcoats must have been bumbazed; for the mist being, as I said, thick, they had little notion, ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... Having gone about five miles, we sat us down on a bridge to rest a while, and there the Don left us to go a little way up the course of the stream that flowed beneath, and he came back with a posey of sweet jonquils set off with a delicate kind of fern very pretty, and this he presents to Moll with a gracious little speech, which act, it seemed to me, was to let her know that he respected her still as a young gentlewoman in spite of her short petticoat, and Moll was not dull to the compliment neither; for, after the first ...
— A Set of Rogues • Frank Barrett
... wood-path and out upon the moor. Meadows had brought a shawl, and spread it on a rock, full under the moonlight. There they sat, close together, feeling all the goodness and glory of the night, drinking in the scents of heather and fern, the sounds of plashing water and gently moving winds. Above them, the vault of heaven and the friendly stars; below them, the great hollow of the valley, the scattered lights, the sounds ...
— A Great Success • Mrs Humphry Ward
... wrested from it by the first Pilgrims, and has begun to efface the evidences of the inroad made in recent years by the bold speculator for whom Jocelyn's is named. The young birches and spruces are breast high in the drives and avenues at Jocelyn's; the low blackberry vines and the sweet fern cover the carefully-graded sidewalks, and obscure the divisions of the lots; the children of the boarders have found squawberries in the public square on the spot where the band-stand was to have been. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... grey on the hills. The north wind resounds through the woods. White clouds rise on the sky: the trembling snow descends. The river howls afar, along its winding course. Sad, by a hollow rock, the grey-hair'd Carryl sat. Dry fern waves over his head; his seat is in an aged birch. Clear to the roaring winds he lifts his ...
— Fragments Of Ancient Poetry • James MacPherson
... not many mushrooms any more, but we gathered gay red berries for decoration, bunches of late fern, sprays of bittersweet; we raked over the leaves for nuts, and sometimes found bits of spicy wintergreen or checkerberry, the kind that always flavored old-fashioned lozenges which our grandmothers bought in little rolls for a penny, on the way to school. You may guess that this was ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... said the fern, "but you do not know the world yet as well as I do, for my sticks are knotty;" and then ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... this dell as it should be described; and I will therefore only beg of thee, gentle reader, who peradventure mayst not have lingered in this classical neighbourhood, to fancy a deep, deep dell, its steep sides fringed down with hazel and beech, and fern and thick undergrowth, and clothed at the bottom with the richest and greenest sward in the world. You descend, clinging to the trees, and scrambling as best you may,—and now you stand on haunted ground! Tread softly, for this is the Boggart's clough; and see in yonder dark corner, and ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... and fern, Gum and mulga and sand, Reef and palm — but my fancies turn Ever away from land; Strange wild cities in ancient state, Range and river and tree, Snow and ice. But my star of fate Is ever across ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson
... to say. If any of the class to whom I appeal incline to let "I dare not wait upon I would," hear the experience of a bold enthusiast, as recounted by Mr. Castle in his small brochure, "Orchids." This gentleman had a fern-case outside his sitting-room window, six feet long by three wide. He ran pipes through it, warmed presumably by gas. More ambitious than I venture to recommend, "in this miniature structure," says Mr. Castle, "with liberal supplies of ...
— About Orchids - A Chat • Frederick Boyle
... 251. Successful Fern Growing.—A woman who has had her refrigerator placed on the porch has a long drain pipe to carry off the melted ice, and this is made to flow right into a large bed of ferns. The cold water in no way destroys the plants, in fact, ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... reminds me of an absurd bit of information I picked up from Kippy that made me feel as flat as a pressed fern. We were wandering along the shore one morning and she suddenly pointed to the ...
— The Cruise of the Kawa • Walter E. Traprock
... frantic gallopade along the line, we plunge into a plantation. Long vistas of straggling trees—and leaf-strewn pathways winding in among them—give way to scattered clumps of firs and tangled masses of fern and brushwood, while broken fences come dancing up between, and then shrink down again behind rising knolls covered with a sudden growth of gorse and heather. A pit yawns into a pond; the pond squeezes itself longways into a thin ditch, which turns off sharply at a corner, and leaves a dreamy-looking ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... enough at their termination to form a vista, through which its white walls glistened with beautiful effect in the calm splendor of a summer evening. Above the mound on which it stood, rose two steep hills, overgrown with furze and fern, except on their tops, which were clothed with purple heath; they were also covered with patches of broom, and studded with gray rocks, which sometimes rose singly or in larger masses, pointed or rounded into curious and fantastic shapes. Exactly between these ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... ways. Wild woodland voices ripple thro' thy lays; Sweet silvern murmurs from some deep-delled spring, Brook, tree and flower and each insensate thing, The throstle's call, the calm of sun-steeped days, A glint of sunshine on the swallow's wing, Fern-filagrees, the drowsy drone of bee Made drunk with draughts of purple wild-grape wine; All these Orphean music holds for thee, And all thy days and dreams companioning Walks Nature with her ...
— The Path of Dreams - Poems • Leigh Gordon Giltner
... your horse treads down alone The sere damp fern, night after night you sit Holding the bridle like a man of stone, Dismal, unfriended: ...
— The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems • William Morris
... upon a surface so hard and level, that we had little care to hold the bridle, and were therefore at full leisure for contemplation. On the left were high and steep rocks shaded with birch, the hardy native of the North, and covered with fern or heath. On the right the limpid waters of Lough Ness were beating their bank, and waving their surface by a gentle agitation. Beyond them were rocks sometimes covered with verdure, and sometimes towering in horrid nakedness. Now and then we espied a little cornfield, which served ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... piercing shriek of delight. At first I looked hurriedly toward the brook as each yell clove the air; but, as I became accustomed to it, my attention was diverted by some exquisite ferns. Suddenly, however, a succession of shrieks announced that something was wrong, and across a large fern I saw a small face in a great deal of agony. Budge was hurrying to the relief of his brother, and was soon as deeply imbedded as Toddie was in the rich black mud, at the bottom of the brook. I dashed to the rescue, stood astride the brook, and offered a hand ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IX (of X) • Various
... away, stooping to pluck the withered frond of a fern that grew in the path. When she looked up at him again all the bloom and radiance ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... about that fag end of the universe in the pursuit of knowledge. We read of his walking thirty-two miles in a soaking rain to the top of a mountain, and bringing home only a plant of white heather. On another day he walked thirty-six miles to find a peculiar kind of fern. Again he walked for twenty-four hours in hail, rain, and wind, reaching home at three o'clock in the morning. But at seven he was up and ready for work as usual. He carried heavy loads, too, when he went searching ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... fancy turn Where the tumbled pippins burn Like embers in the orchard's lap of tangled grass and fern,— There let the old path wind In and out and on behind The cider-press that ...
— Riley Farm-Rhymes • James Whitcomb Riley
... beeches. Newbury found a seat for Marcia on a fallen trunk, and threw himself beside her. The world seemed to have been all washed by the thunder-storm of the night before; the odors of grass, earth, and fern were steaming out into the summer air. The wood was alive with the hum of innumerable insects, which had become audible and dominant with the gradual silencing of the birds. In the half-cut hay-fields ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... stared. It was a charming but very simple pattern the lines of sand had assumed, not unlike the fronds of a delicate fern growing out of several small circles ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood
... it was decided that the happy spot should be on 'Huckleberry Hill,' a picturesque elevation about a mile from the postoffice in Peonytown, covered with a luxurious growth of pines and hemlocks, interspersed with huckleberry bushes, sweet fern, and mullenstalks. A small, open place was selected, where the long moss made a beautiful carpet, and the tall trees on every side entwined their arms as lovingly together as if they, too, were about to take each other 'for better for worse,' while the ripple of a brook hidden in the woods lent ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... world. A severe critic of this world he indeed was; but, finding himself in it, and not precisely knowing what is beyond it, like a brave and true-hearted man, he set himself to make the best of it. Its sights and sounds were dear to him. The 'uncrumpling fern, the eternal moonlit snow,' the red grouse springing at our sound, the tinkling bells of the 'high-pasturing kine,' the vagaries of men, of women, and dogs, their odd ways and tricks, whether of mind or manner, all ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... course there were—three at least; but they lay so far on the one side or the other that no stranger could have found them from the track. A large part of the Ross is covered with big granite rocks, some of them larger than a two-roomed house, one beside another, with fern and deep heather in between them where the vipers breed. Anyway the wind was, it was always sea air, as salt as on a ship; the gulls were as free as moorfowl over all the Ross; and whenever the way rose a little, your eye would kindle with the ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Colocasia, Colocasia esculenta and macrorhizon), is an important esculent root in the Polynesian islands. In the dry method of culture practised on the mountains of Hawaii, the roots are protected by a covering of fern leaves. The cultivation of taro is hardly a process of multiplication, for the crown of the root is perpetually replanted. As the plant endures for a series of years, the tuberous roots serve at some of the rocky groups as a security against ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... to me as if they was sort of company to one, like, and when you water 'em and tend 'em always, I feel as if they was alive, and got to know one again, I do, and that makes one love 'em, now don't it, mum? To see 'em brighten up after you've watered 'em, like that there maiden-'air fern there, why it's enough to make one love 'em the same as if they was Christians, mum.' There was a melting tenderness in her voice when she talked about the flowers that half won over Edie's heart, even in spite of her ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... partly artificial and partly formed by the strata of the limestone bank, led from the roadside up to the opening of the foot- way. For thirty or forty yards the fern-fringed path was too narrow to admit of two persons walking abreast. Miss Denham, with her skirts gathered in one hand, went first, picking her way over the small loose stones rendered slippery by the moss, and Lynde followed on in silence, hardly able to realize the success ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... usually wimples and dimples its laughing surface, but in calmer moods it reflects, as in a polished mirror, the lofty, overhanging mountains, with every stately pine, bounding rivulet; blossoming shrub, waving fern, and—high above all, on the right—the clinging, thread-like line of the snow-sheds of the Central Pacific. When the railroad was being constructed, three thousand people dwelt on its shores; the surrounding forests resounded with the music of axes and saws, and the terrific blasts exploded in the ...
— History of the Donner Party • C.F. McGlashan
... together through the open pasture, where the sweet-fern and bayberry bushes grew tall and thick; there was another strip of woods between them and the river, and just this side was a deserted house, which had not been lived in for many years and was gray and crumbling. The fields that belonged to it had been made part ...
— Betty Leicester - A Story For Girls • Sarah Orne Jewett
... the stranger's admiration of the views, the exquisite framings of the summer sea and sky made by tree, rock, and rising ground, and the walks so well laid out on the little headland, now on smooth turf, now bordering slopes wild with fern and mountain ash, now amid luxuriant exotic shrubs that attested the mildness ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... as the water ran. Gently he leaned back till his back rested on the sloping ground—he raised one knee, and left the other foot over the verge where the tip of the tallest rushes touched it. Before he had been there a minute he remembered the secret which a fern had taught him. ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... world. And what are those at the top of the brow, rising out of the rich green scrub? Verily, again, we are in the Tropics. They are palms, doubtless, some thirty feet high each, with here and there a young one springing up like a gigantic crown of male-fern. The old ones have straight gray stems, often prickly enough, and thickened in the middle; gray last year's leaves hanging down; and feathering round the top, a circular plume of pale green leaves, like those of a coconut. But these ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... strike along the gorge, the voices of the singing birds died away, and the air grew cold and dark about him. But the distant valley with its houses was all the brighter for that. He came presently to talus, and among the rocks he noted—for he was an observant man—an unfamiliar fern that seemed to clutch out of the crevices with intense green hands. He picked a frond or so and gnawed its stalk, and ...
— The Door in the Wall And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... Several distinct levels in the present crater prove that it has eaten its way to its present depth. On the most elevated of these large trees now grow, evidences of many years' tranquillity; lower down we come to shrubs, and lastly to the fern, apparently the most venturesome of the vegetable kingdom; it seems to require nothing but rest and water, for we found it shooting out of crevices where the lava appeared to have undergone no decomposition. Nowhere, I conceive, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... ourselves at the entrance of an immense cavern formed in the lava. It was some hundred feet square, and from fifteen to twenty high. When lighted up by the torches, it had a very wild and picturesque appearance. The horses were tethered in one part, while we all went out and collected grass and fern leaves for our beds, and a good supply of fuel for our fire. Having cooked our supper, we sat round the fire, while one of the natives, who spoke English very well, told us some of the wonderful tales about Pele, the goddess of the burning mountain, and her numerous diabolical followers. ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... could not bear to hear him speak with trembling voice and gleaming eyes of the grand mountains and the silent corries around Ben-Nevis, the red deer trooping over the misty steeps, and the brown hinds lying among the green plumes of fern, and the wren and the thrush lilting ...
— Scottish sketches • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... pine forest and fern, The stalwart New Zealanders turn To the land of their sires, For with ancestral fires Their bosoms ...
— War Rhymes • Abner Cosens
... it wouldn't stay on the very tip of your ear, it's so small. As for nice, that depends. Sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn't. No, the only way for mortal people to be invisible is to gather the fern-seed and ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... and contrived her a small easel with her round lightstand and a book-rest; for Sulie was advancing in the fine arts, from painting dollies' paper faces in cheap water colors, to copying bits of flowers and fern and moss, with oils, on gray board; and she was doing it very well, and ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... Down through a frost-leaved forest-crypt, 190 Long, sparkling aisles of steel-stemmed trees Bending to counterfeit a breeze; Sometimes the roof no fretwork knew But silvery mosses that downward grew; Sometimes it was carved in sharp relief With quaint arabesques of ice-fern leaf; Sometimes it was simply smooth and clear For the gladness of heaven to shine through, and here He had caught the nodding bulrush-tops And hung them thickly with diamond drops, 200 That crystalled the beams of moon and sun, And made a star of every one: No mortal builder's most rare ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... the stream, she came at last to another wood—not a wild wood like the first, but a tame, domesticated wood. The dead limbs were cut away, and the ground was neatly brushed up under the trees. The brook flowed sedately between fern-bordered banks, under rustic bridges, and widened occasionally into pools carpeted with lily pads. Mossy paths set with stepping-stones led off into mysterious depths that the eye could not penetrate: the leaves were just out enough to half hide and to tantalize. ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster
... avenue, and at the top of a steep eminence commanding a wide view over four counties—a landscape of snow. A deep lane leads abruptly down the hill; a mere narrow cart-track, sinking between high banks clothed with fern and furze and low broom, crowned with luxuriant hedgerows, and famous for their summer smell of thyme. How lovely these banks are now—the tall weeds and the gorse fixed and stiffened in the hoar-frost, which fringes round the bright prickly holly, the pendent ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... hoods pricked with fern leaves whirled about these edifices in the airiest fashion. It was common to see them leap up to the height of two or three storeys from the lava pavement and rebound like balls, their faces meanwhile preserving that impressive dignity ...
— Honey-Bee - 1911 • Anatole France
... where the hoarse wind is raving, Rocks where the weary floods murmur and wail, Wilds where the fern by the furrow is waving, Reeled with the echoes that rode on the gale; Far as the tempest thrills Over the darkened hills Far as the sunshine streams over the plain, Roused by the tyrant band, Woke all the mighty land, Girded for ...
— How the Flag Became Old Glory • Emma Look Scott
... see now once again The glen And fern, the highland, and the thistle? And do you still remember when We heard the bright-eyed woodcock whistle Down ...
— The Dog's Book of Verse • Various
... shore of the bay by themselves without anxiety, and collected numerous plants. They visited several huts, and found the inhabitants at dinner, their food consisting, at this time of the year, of fish and the root of a large fern. The roots were prepared by scorching them over a fire, and then beating them till the charred bark fell off. The remainder was a clammy, soft substance, not unpleasant to the taste, but mixed with three times its bulk of ...
— Captain Cook - His Life, Voyages, and Discoveries • W.H.G. Kingston
... a name is a pretty idea," said Kittie, recalling all the Roman titles she had ever heard of. "Call it—let's see, call it Fern-nook." ...
— Six Girls - A Home Story • Fannie Belle Irving
... his position, carelessly, noiselessly, yet quickly, until he leaned on the rail close to the ferns and could overhear every word the bushies said. He had dropped his cigar overboard, and his scented handkerchief behind a fern-pot en route. ...
— Over the Sliprails • Henry Lawson
... Benton nursed her round chin in the palm of one hand, leaning her elbow on the window sill. It was a relief to look over a widening valley instead of a bare-walled gorge all scarred with slides, to see wooded heights lift green in place of barren cliffs, to watch banks of fern massed against the right of way where for a day and a night parched sagebrush, brown tumble-weed, and such scant growth as flourished in the arid uplands of interior British Columbia had streamed in barren monotony, hot and ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... my mother gone from her home away?— But I know that my brothers are there at play, I know they are gathering the fox-glove's bell, Or the long fern leaves by the sparkling well; Or they launch their boats where the bright streams flow, Lady, kind lady! oh, let ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... Over bank and over brae, Where the copsewood is the greenest, Where the fountains glisten sheenest, Where the lady-fern grows strongest, Where the morning dew lies longest, Where the black-cock sweetest sips it, Where the fairy latest trips it. Hie to haunts right seldom seen, Lovely, lonesome, cool, and green, Over bank and over brae, Hie ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... very much interested, but Mrs. John Coulson drew her away towards the palm and fern-embowered door of the drawing-room. She was somewhat disappointed at the news of Mrs. Oliver's non-appearance, for that meant that neither was Mrs. Jarvis present. The fates did seem to be ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... this was the name of the palfrey, had his stall crammed full of dried fern for litter, and was otherwise as well provided for as ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... evidence of the sudden disappearance of several green-backed frogs, sunning themselves on a large, moss-grown rock, projecting above the water's edge; from shady nooks and crevices peeped clusters of early white violets; graceful maidenhair ferns, and hardier members of the fern family, called "Brake," uncurled their graceful, sturdy fronds from the carpet of green moss and lichen at the base of tree trunks, growing along the water's edge. Partly hidden by rocks along the bank of the stream, nestled ...
— Mary at the Farm and Book of Recipes Compiled during Her Visit - among the "Pennsylvania Germans" • Edith M. Thomas
... in which the Magnolia was resting, her bow against a fern bank, and presently the party was in a solitude that was almost oppressive. There was neither sign nor sound of human being, and the steamer was lost to sight around ...
— The Moving Picture Girls Under the Palms - Or Lost in the Wilds of Florida • Laura Lee Hope
... But on the fern-wove mattress lay No weary guest. St. Colum kneeled, And found no trace; but, ashen-grey, Far off he ...
— Christmas in Legend and Story - A Book for Boys and Girls • Elva S. Smith
... time approached we gathered up stray hats, aprons and handkerchiefs and prepared to go home. We painted each others' cheeks with the red blood of huckleberries and crowned our heads with leaves of the birch and oak, stalks of indigo weed or broad fern fronds that hung down over the face like green veils. Thus freaked and marked, walking in single file, our mothers and elder sisters behind us, shouting, leaping and laughing, we presented something as near a Bacchic procession as could be ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... appearing to be twice as many. Scape: 4 to 10 in. high. Leaves: Growing in an open rosette on the ground; round or broader, clothed with reddish bristly hairs tipped with purple glands, and narrowed into long, flat, hairy petioles; young leaves curled like fern fronds. ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... the equivocal bull, the cat's claws, and the unequivocal married person. And then you would turn over all the little things of old, and wrangle a bit over details here and there; and all the while you would be the very selfsame two that were young and were lost in the wood and trampled down the fern and saw the squirrels overhead ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... All of shade and sheen is theirs, All the strange fashions and the fair wise ways Of lives beneath man's own. He breathes delight Whose soul is fresh, whose feet are wet with dew And the melted mist of morning, when at watch Sunk deep in fern he marks the stealthy roe, Silent as sleep or shadow, cross the glade, Or dart athwart his view as August stars Shoot and are out—while gracefully pace on The wild-eyed harts to their traditional tree To clear the velvet from their budded horns. There is ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Jean Ingelow
... down the path little animals came out of the fern to meet them; the very first that they met were ...
— The Great Big Treasury of Beatrix Potter • Beatrix Potter
... something about provender left for the keeper's palfrey, he dragged out of a recess a bundle of forage, which he spread before the knight's charger, and immediately afterwards shook down a quantity of dried fern in the corner which he had assigned for the rider's couch. The knight returned him thanks for his courtesy; and, this duty done, both resumed their seats by the table, whereon stood the trencher of pease placed ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... suggests thoughts of the beauty of holiness; and the calm rest of creation speaks to us of the deeper rest of the soul in God. On the shadowed path that leads up to the house of prayer, with mind and senses quickened to perceive the loveliness and significance of the smallest object, the fern on the bank and the lichen on the wall, we feel indeed that heaven is not so much a yonder, towards which we are to move, as a here and a now, which ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... his bosom was reflected in the breast of Nature. Through deep green vistas where the boughs arched overhead, and showed the sunlight flashing in the beautiful perspective; through dewy fern from which the startled hares leaped up, and fled at his approach; by mantled pools, and fallen trees, and down in hollow places, rustling among last year's leaves whose scent woke memory of the past; the placid Pecksniff strolled. By meadow gates and hedges fragrant ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... English Herbs and Plants, Colworts, Carrots, Radishes, Fennel, Balsam, Spearmint, Mustard. These, excepting the two last, are not the natural product of the Land, but they are transplanted hither: By which I perceive all other European Plants would grow there: They have also Fern, Indian Corn. Several sorts of Beans as good as these in England: right Cucumhers, Calabasses, and several sorts of Pumkins, &c. The Dutch on that Island in their Gardens have Lettice, Rosemary, Sage, and all other Herbs and Sallettings that ...
— An Historical Relation Of The Island Ceylon In The East Indies • Robert Knox
... turned round and strolled about, loitering among the flowers. They halted with some curiosity before several women who were selling bunches of fern and bundles of vine-leaves, neatly tied up in packets of five and twenty. Then they turned down another covered alley, which was almost deserted, and where their footsteps echoed as though they had been walking through a church. Here ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... barely sufficient to produce them. The trees that came within our knowledge were the manchineal and a species of purow: also some palm-trees, the tops of which we cut down, and the soft interior part or heart of them was so palatable that it made a good addition to our mess. Mr. Nelson discovered some fern-roots, which I thought might be good roasted, as a substitute for bread, but it proved a very poor one: it however was very good in its natural state to allay thirst, and on that account I directed a quantity to be collected to take into the boat. Many pieces ...
— A Narrative Of The Mutiny, On Board His Majesty's Ship Bounty; And The Subsequent Voyage Of Part Of The Crew, In The Ship's Boat • William Bligh
... correspondent of the Hartford Courant, also newspapers in Boston, Albany and Worcester. About 1851 he bought out the Merchants Ledger, a paper devoted to the commercial interests of the country. This he transformed into a family story paper, and christened it the New York Ledger. Fanny Fern was just appearing in the columns of literature. Bonner offered her $1,000 to write a story for the Ledger, enclosing his check for the amount. As this was a very high price in those days, of course she accepted. Then ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... the season at any watering-place depresses me. If I could wear fern seed in my shoes to make me invisible, and sit on the piazza railing in a shirt-waist and a short skirt, I would love it. But both Bee and Mrs. Jimmie, with the light of heaven in their eyes, pulled out and put on their ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell
... Parrish by the arm, Jim started to drag him into the recesses of the fern forest. Suddenly the bestial face ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... to Fairyland across the thyme and heather, Round a little bank of fern that rustled on the sky, Me and stick and bundle, sir, we jogged along together,— (Changeable the weather? Well—it ain't all pie!) Just about the sunset—Won't you listen to my story?— Look at me! I'm only rags and tatters to your eye! Sir, that blooming sunset crowned this battered hat ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... wood, in search of the dragon that well might dwell there. Descending the hill-side with a suddenness which is almost startling, you may find yourself in a bamboo forest, which is a veritable fairyland for beauty. From a carpet of sand, on which lilies grow, these giant bamboos spring, fern-like, in enormous clumps, spreading their arms and feathery crests in all directions, and, meeting overhead, form avenues and lanes, which remind one of ...
— Burma - Peeps at Many Lands • R.Talbot Kelly
... oaks and ashes, and in between the trees and under them tangled bushes and creeping ivy. There were beech-trees too, but there was nothing under them but their own dead red drifted leaves, and here and there a delicate green fern-frond. ...
— The Story of the Amulet • E. Nesbit
... little stream had lost its way Amid the grass and fern; A passing stranger scooped a well, Where weary men might turn; He walled it in and hung with care A ladle at the brink; He thought not of the deed he did, But judged that all might drink. He passed again, and lo! the well, By ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... high in air near the rocks. The Cove lay in sunshine, its rough stone chimneys and rude slate roofs overgrown with moss and fern, rising rapidly, one above the other, in the fast descending hollow, through which a little stream rushed to the sea,—more quietly than its brother, which, at some space distant, fell sheer down over the crag ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... potatoes are buried in a jungle of autumn burdocks. Our radishes stand seven feet high, uneatable. Our tomatoes, when last seen, were greener than they were at the beginning of August, and getting greener every week. Our celery looked as delicate as a maidenhair fern. Our Indian corn was nine feet high with a tall feathery spike on top of that, but no sign of anything eatable about ...
— Frenzied Fiction • Stephen Leacock
... standstill in corrasion, or even filling up, and its floor is a regular descent, except for the last three or four miles where the canyon is clogged by huge rocks that seem to have fallen from above. The maximum height of its present flood-waters is about six feet, proved by a fern-covered calcareous deposit, projecting some fifteen feet, caused by a spring (Shower-Bath Spring) on the side of the wall, seven or eight miles above the mouth, which is never permitted by the ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... body. Even while it lives its head is shorn once a year, for, as fresh fronds push out and upward from the centre, those of the outer circle get old and must be cut away. And when one of those feathery, fern-like fronds, toying with the breeze, comes crashing to the ground, it is ten or twelve feet long, and consists of a great backbone, as thick at the base as a man's leg, with a close-set row of swords on either side, about a yard in length. They are hard and tough, ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... did as bid. For a moment the fern smouldered and smoked, then the flame ran crackling along and shot up in the darkness, weirdly lighting the scene: to the right the low wood, a block of solid blackness against the sky; in front the wall of sheep, staring out of the gloom with bright eyes; and as centre-piece that ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... book on the Origin of Life Dr. Charlton Bastian tells of using two solutions. One consisted of two or three drops of dilute sodium silicate with eight drops of liquor fern pernitratis to one ounce of distilled water. The other was composed of the same amount of the silicate with six drops of dilute phosphoric acid and six grains of ammonium phosphate. He filled sterilised tubes, sealed them hermetically, and heated them to 125 or 145 degrees, Centigrade, although 60 ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... raw day, with a nipping wind and blinks of sunshine that swept across grass and ploughland and faded again. There were glistening pools in the narrow road and drops of moisture hung on the briars and withered fern along the hedgerows. Both Challoner and Blake were dressed in sober tweed, for the Colonel said he only wore the pink when he felt fit to follow the hounds and now he must be content to see them find. Glancing at his watch, he pulled up his horse ...
— Blake's Burden • Harold Bindloss
... vengeance against their enemies. The New Hollanders, near the sea, subsist on fish eaten raw, or nearly so; should a whale be cast ashore, it is never abandoned until its bones are picked; their substitute for bread, and that which forms their chief subsistence, is a species of fern roasted, pounded between stones, and mixed with fish. The general beverage of the negro tribes is palm-wine. No disgust is evinced by the Bosjesman Hottentots at the most nauseous food, and having shot an animal with a poisoned arrow, their only precaution, previous to tearing ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 381 Saturday, July 18, 1829 • Various
... ran on, pushing their way through the great tall fern, or scampering over the short green grass where the little mountain sheep were nibbling, and where a beautiful creeping moss grew all over the ground, which, mother told Milly, was called "Stags' horn moss," because its little green branches were so ...
— Milly and Olly • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... As fern grows in untilled grounds, and all manner of weeds, so do gross humours in an idle body, Ignavum corrumpunt otia corpus. A horse in a stable that never travels, a hawk in a mew that seldom flies, are both subject to diseases; which left unto themselves, are most free from any such ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... gay greenwood, When the little birds are singing, When the buck is belling in the fern, And the hare from ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... Bill), and several other respectable land-owners and farmers of the county of Wilts, to take into consideration the propriety of presenting Petitions to both Houses of Parliament, on behalf of the proprietors and occupiers of land. Thomas Grove, Esq. of Fern, one of the gentlemen who called the meeting, having taken the chair, Mr. Benett addressed them at a very considerable length in favour of a petition that he submitted for their adoption, expressive of the serious injury already sustained ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 3 • Henry Hunt
... holding mystery and fascination in green depths and purple distances, streams rushing with noisy joy over stony beds, sweet violet gloom of night with brilliant stars moving silently across infinite space; tender moss, delicate fern, creeping vine, covering the brown earth with living beauty—a fascinating world of loveliness for boyish eyes to ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr
... and hiding it in a fern-pot). That moonlight evening on the Backs, George, when I had failed in ...
— Happy Days • Alan Alexander Milne
... was 20 degrees below zero. I think I never saw such a brilliant atmosphere. That curious phenomenon called frost-fall was occurring, in which, whatever moisture may exist in the air, somehow aggregates into feathers and fern leaves, the loveliest of creations, only seen in rarefied air and intense cold. One breath and they vanish. The air was filled with diamond sparks quite intangible. They seemed just glitter and no more. It was still and cloudless, and the shapes of violet mountains were softened ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... day, two friends went out to a moor to gather fern, attended by a boy with a bottle of wine and a box of provisions. As they were straying about, they saw at the foot of a hill a fox that had brought out its cub to play; and whilst they looked on, struck by the strangeness of the sight, three children came ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... somehow by a partial, artificial light, and making a fond mistake. No! he found the impression true—rather, indeed, he gained than lost by this return: he took away with him a parting look —shy, but very soft—as beautiful, as innocent, as any little fawn could lift out of its cover of fern, or any lamb from ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... holy will, let Bresal my brother have near him these things of which he is dreaming, as a remembrance of what his soul loveth." Then, turning to the tree and the plant and the pool, he blessed them and said: "O little tree and starry plant and cool well and transparent fern, and whatsoever else Bresal now sees, arise in the name of the Lord of the four winds and of earth and water and fire, arise and go and make real the dream that ...
— A Child's Book of Saints • William Canton
... decorated with wild and sublime magnificence. She often went thither to wash the linen of the family beneath the shade of the two cocoa-trees, and thither too she sometimes led her goats to graze. While she was making cheeses of their milk, she loved to see them browse on the maiden-hair fern which clothes the steep sides of the rock, and hung suspended by one of its cornices, as on a pedestal. Paul, observing that Virginia was fond of this spot, brought thither, from the neighbouring forest, a great ...
— Paul and Virginia • Bernardin de Saint Pierre
... a place below the spring where the maidenhair fern grew thick and spread out wide, perfect fronds on slender brown stems, shading fairy bowers; and where taller ferns grew high and leaned over like a delicate fairy forest; and where the wild violets grew so thick you could not see the ground beneath them, and the grass was lush and long ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... stones lovingly, as if to conceal their irregular lines and other ravages which time and the elements had made upon them; while here and there, growing out from its crevices, were clusters of delicate maiden-hair fern, the bright green of which contrasted beautifully with the weather-beaten wall and the darker, richer ...
— The Masked Bridal • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... or in addition to farmyard manure, various other substances may be added, as bones, flesh, fish-scrap, and the offal of slaughter-houses. Sometimes leaves and the dried bracken-fern are used for the manufacture of composts. Some of these substances contain much nitrogen or phosphoric acid, but in their natural condition ferment when applied to the soil at a slow rate. If mixed ...
— Manures and the principles of manuring • Charles Morton Aikman
... of the sentry was heard, and at that moment, the glare of a lantern fell upon the trees, bordering a field opposite the window. Beyond that field the ground was broken and uneven, covered with tall bushes, fern, and masses of rock, and sloping upwards towards the neighbouring hills. The light drew nearer; the sentry challenged. It was the relief. Their heads in the embrasure of the window, Herrera and the gipsy ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... we would see the Ox-eye Daisy, Black-eyed Susan, Wild Carrot, and the most beautiful fall flower of the northeastern United States, the Fringed Gentian; in the woods, Mountain Laurel, Pink Azalea, a number of wild Orchids, Maidenhair Fern, and Jack-in-the Pulpit; in the marshes, Pink Rose-mallow, which reminds us of the Hollyhocks of our Grandmother's garden, Pickerel-weed, Water-lily, ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts
... forest of his demesne, and in the midst of which, covered with ivy and tufted plants, now ruddy with autumnal tints, stood the ruined walls of a little chapel. In the dilapidated vault close by lay buried many of his ancestors, and under the little wavy hillocks of fern and nettles, slept many an humble villager. He sat down upon a worn tombstone in this lowly ruin, and with his eyes fixed upon the ground, he surrendered his spirit to the stormy and evil thoughts ...
— The Evil Guest • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... a shy little Fern, From her home in the shade, "About pulling up roots, What a protest ...
— Pinafore Palace • Various
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