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More "Mistletoe" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... this mistletoe up over the folding doors," commanded the corporal, handing him a bamboo shoot, and pointing to the tent door. "Now when she comes asailin' in to dinner, all unaware of your presence, smack her a good one, right ...
— The Adventures of Piang the Moro Jungle Boy - A Book for Young and Old • Florence Partello Stuart
... of the world "out-along" made the lights and warmth of the room the more comforting and exciting, and Sam Figgis had hung holly about the walls and dangled a huge bunch of mistletoe from the middle beam and poor Jane Clewer was always walking under it accidentally and waiting a little, but nobody kissed her. These things Peter noticed; he also noticed that Dicky the Idiot was allowed to be ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... at all complacent when he walked home afterwards, and thought how extremely good-natured he had been, for he could not but feel that this marvellous forbearance was a sort of mistletoe growth on him, quite foreign really to his nature. Never before had Lucia showed so shrewish and venomous a temper; he had not thought her capable of it. For the gracious queen, there was substituted a snarling fish-wife, but then as Georgie calmly pursued the pacific mission ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... hereafter see, this may be true; but it is preposterous to attribute to mere external conditions the structure, for instance, of the woodpecker, with its feet, tail, beak, and tongue, so admirably adapted to catch insects under the bark of trees. In the case of the mistletoe, which draws its nourishment from certain trees, which has seeds that must be transported by certain birds, and which has flowers with separate sexes absolutely requiring the agency of certain insects to bring pollen from one flower ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... put up holly and mistletoe, and produced from my trunks a real Christmas pudding that my mother had made. We had it for supper, and it was ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... the literary pawnbroker comes to me from the (unpublished) letters of John Mistletoe, author of the "Dictionary of Deplorable Facts," that wayward and perverse genius who wandered the Third Avenue saloons when he might have been feted by the Authors' League had he lived a few years longer. Some day, I hope, the full story of that tragic life may be told, ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... remember that she had left the door ajar, taking away the key; then she would rush back like a stout round whirlwind, and in a minute more Barrie would be a prisoner, almost like the fair bride in "The Mistletoe Bough," only there was more air in the garret than in the oak chest that shut with a spring. But Barrie was used to taking risks—risks insignificant compared with this, yet big enough to supply salt and sugar for the dry ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... ready access to small articles. The chest was not infrequently unpanelled and unornamented, and in the latter period of its history this became the ruling type. It will not have been forgotten that it was in an old oak chest that the real or mythical heroine of the pathetic ballad of "The Mistletoe Bough" concealed herself, to ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... protectors small food bodies containing oil, but instead of secreting nectar in its leaves it harbors a small insect (coccus), whose sweet secretion is much relished by the ants. Dr. Beccari mentions an epiphytal plant growing on trees in Borneo, the seeds of which germinate, like those of the mistletoe, on the branches of the tree; and the seedling stem, crowned by the cotyledons, grows to about an inch in length, remaining in that condition until a certain species of ant bites a hole in the stem, which ...
— Scientific American, Volume 40, No. 13, March 29, 1879 • Various
... mystery, but some time afterwards the fatal chest was sold, which, on being opened, was found to contain the skeleton of the long-lost bride. This popular story was made the subject of a song, entitled "The Mistletoe Bough," by Thomas Haynes Bayley, who died in 1839; and Marwell Old Hall, near Winchester, once the residence of the Seymours, and afterwards of the Dacre family, has a similar tradition attached to it. Indeed, the very chest has been ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer
... still made the standard works and authorities in learning, beyond which there was no going,—not to the time when the national morality was still mystically produced at Stonehenge, in those national colleges, from whose mysterious rites the awful sanctities of the oak and the mistletoe drove back in confusion the sacrilegious inquirer,—not to that ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... leaves and scarlet berries, and the white-berried, pale green mistletoe may be closely copied. All these and many more are made on the same principle, and in so simple a manner that even quite a little child may succeed in producing ...
— Little Folks' Handy Book • Lina Beard
... fine in its new dress of holly berries, mistletoe and cedar. Across the front was hung in big red and white letters, "Unto us a Child is Born." Over the organ was suspended ...
— The Transformation of Job - A Tale of the High Sierras • Frederick Vining Fisher
... mistletoe, which Seraphine Dasher had mischievously suspended over the doorway, looked like a chaplet of pearls; the pointed stems of yew became frosted in silver; the variegated holly was transformed into branches of malachite, ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... Deity incarnated by avatars in human forms, I see the spots of the successions of priests on the earth, oracles, sacrificers, brahmins, sabians, llamas, monks, muftis, exhorters, I see where druids walk'd the groves of Mona, I see the mistletoe and vervain, I see the temples of the deaths of the bodies of Gods, I see ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... is that his dramas are the book of human life. He was an accurate observer of Nature: he notes the markings of the violet and the daisy; the haunts of the honeysuckle, the mistletoe, and the woodbine. He marks the fealty of the marigold to its god the sun, and even touches the freaks of fashion, condemning in some woman of his time an usage, long obsolete, in accordance with which she adorned her head with "the golden tresses of the ...
— Shakespeare's Insomnia, And the Causes Thereof • Franklin H. Head
... festoon'd; With bitter ivy bound; Terraced with funguses unsound; Deform'd with many a boss And closed scar, o'ercushion'd deep with moss; Bunch'd all about with pagan mistletoe; And thick with nests of the hoarse bird That talks, but understands not his own word; Stands, and so stood a thousand years ago, A single tree. Thunder has done its worst among its twigs, Where the great crest yet blackens, ...
— The Unknown Eros • Coventry Patmore
... wouldn't come to the mountain," Mary remarked to her lodger as Susan deposited her burden, "the mountain had to come to Mahomet. And here's a bit of mistletoe for your door, and ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... I not reason, think you, to look pale? These two have 'ticed me hither to this place:— A barren detested vale you see it is: The trees, though summer, yet forlorn and lean, O'ercome with moss and baleful mistletoe: Here never shines the sun; here nothing breeds, Unless the nightly owl or fatal raven:— And when they show'd me this abhorred pit, They told me, here, at dead time of the night, A thousand fiends, a thousand hissing snakes, Ten thousand swelling toads, as many urchins, ...
— The Tragedy of Titus Andronicus • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... in the hall at Chelsea one winters evening soon after Christmas. The high panelling was relieved by lines of greenery, with red berries here and there; a bunch of mistletoe leaned forward over the sloping mantelpiece, and there was an acrid smell of holly and laurel in the air. It was a little piteous, Ralph thought, under ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... bridal finery to and from the Philadelphia Centennial. In the quiet, uneventful years that followed it had reposed in a big, roomy old garret, undisturbed save at the annual spring house-cleaning, or when we children played "The Mistletoe Bough" and hid in it the skeleton which had descended to us as a relic ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... tall stems in the air. The live-oak, the sycamore, the Spanish mulberry, the holly, and the persimmon—gaily festooned with wreaths of the white and yellow jessamine, the woodbine and the cypress-moss, and bearing here and there a bouquet of the mistletoe, with its deep green and glossy leaves upturned to the sun—flung their broad arms over the road, forming an archway grander and more beautiful than any the hand of man ever wove for the greatest hero the ...
— Among the Pines - or, South in Secession Time • James R. Gilmore
... the house, this evening, and as this gives me room at the table, I am going to begin to answer your letter. George is out of town, and all the rest, including the servants, have gone to see the Mistletoe Bough. It is astonishing how slowly you get well; and yet with such heat and such smells as you have in Chicago, it is yet more astonishing that you live at all. I thought it dreadful to have the thermometer stand ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... of Life, in the paradise of Osiris. The "Hom," the sacred tree of the Persians, is spoken of in the Zendavesta as the "Word of Life," and, when consecrated, was partaken of as a sacrament. An oak was the sacred tree of the ancient Druids of Britain. We inherit their custom of gathering the sacred mistletoe at Yule-tide, while in our Christmas Tree we have a remnant of the old Norse tree-worship. During the Middle Ages the worship of trees was forbidden in France by the ecclesiastical councils, and in England by the laws of Canute. A learned antiquary remarks that "the ...
— Bible Romances - First Series • George W. Foote
... dust. The oak sideboard was filled with all sorts of utensils, plates, pitchers, tin bowls, wolf-traps. The children laughed when they saw a huge syringe. There was not a tree in the yard that did not have mushrooms growing around its foot, or a bunch of mistletoe hanging in its branches. Several of the trees had been blown down, but they had started to grow in the middle and all were laden with quantities of apples. The thatched roofs, which were of unequal thickness, looked like brown velvet ...
— Three short works - The Dance of Death, The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaller, A Simple Soul. • Gustave Flaubert
... in winter's cold, is seen, Sown on an alien tree, the mistletoe To bloom afresh with foliage newly green, And round the tapering boles its arms to throw, Laden with yellow fruitage, even so The oak's dark boughs the golden leaves display, So the foil rustles in the breezes low. Quickly AEneas plucks the lingering spray, And to the Sibyl bears ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... preseraro. Misrepresent falsreprezenti. Miss manki. Miss Frauxlino. Missile jxetarmilo. Missing manka. Mission misio. Missionary misiisto. Mist nebuleto. Mistake eraro. Mistaken, to be trompigxi. Mistletoe visko. Mistress (house) mastrino. Mistress (lover) amantino. Mistress (school) instruistino. Mistrust malfido. Mistrust suspekti. Misty nebuleta. Misunderstand malkompreni. Misuse maluzi, malbonuzi. Mite akaro. Mite (coin) monereto. Mitre mitro. Mitigate moderigi. Mix ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... centerpiece, and four red candles in silver holders. The table was of richly carved mahogany, and the Admiral, following an old custom, served the soup from a silver tureen, upheld by four fat cupids. From the wide arch which led into the great hall was hung a bunch of mistletoe; beyond the arch, the roaring fire made a background ...
— The Gay Cockade • Temple Bailey
... am like to mistletoe, Which has no root, and cannot grow Or prosper, but by that same tree It clings about: so I by thee. What need I then to fear at all So long as I about thee crawl? But if that tree should fall and die, Tumble shall heaven, and down ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... blackbird, sitting on the topmost spray; this tree is thine enemy; hasten where the vine rises in clustering shade of silvered leaves; on her bough rest the sole of thy foot, around her sing and pour the shrill music of thy mouth; for the oak carries mistletoe baleful to birds, and she the grape-cluster; and ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... of any that grow wild, and is the strongest of all that are under cultivation; its acorns were the principal diet of the first mortals, and the honey found in it gave them drink. I may say, too, it furnished fowl and other creatures as dainties, in producing mistletoe for birdlime to ensnare them. In this battle, meantime, it is stated that Castor and Pollux appeared, and, immediately after the battle, were seen at Rome just by the fountain where their temple now stands, with their horses foaming with ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... Christmas tree, and had brought it triumphantly home, while the girls had piled the sleds with evergreens and ground pine. On the return a stop had been made at the market, and great quantities of holly had been bought. Even the sprig of mistletoe for the chandelier in the hall had ...
— Grace Harlowe's Senior Year at High School - or The Parting of the Ways • Jessie Graham Flower
... passed through to-day is well studded with fine trees, among which the mhowa abounds more than usual. The parasite plant, called the bandha, or Indian mistletoe, ornaments the finest mhowa and mango trees. It is said to be a disease, which appears as the tree grows old, and destroys it if not cut away. The people, who feel much regard for their trees, cut these parasite plants away; and there is no prejudice against removing them ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... seldom was a hint dropped from any source that Richard Perry Stanlock was entitled to the slightest credit for these magnificent doings. He spent Christmas at home in a quiet unassuming way amid the family decorations of holly and mistletoe, and a vast litter of presents, oranges, apples, nuts, ...
— Campfire Girls in the Allegheny Mountains - or, A Christmas Success against Odds • Stella M. Francis
... he was busy all morning under Jane's garrulous command, getting in bunches of holly and other evergreens from the hedgerows. His last journey had been to one of the farms on the Upper Hanyards in quest of mistletoe, which grew abundantly there in an ancient orchard. On getting back he had held a sprig over Jane's head for a certain familiar and laudable purpose, and had been rewarded with a smack that sounded like the dropping of an empty milk-pail. A little later I found ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... it would be a marriage into the family of Negrepelisse, and for him this meant a family connection with the Marquise d'Espard, and a political career in Paris. Here was a fair tree to cultivate in spite of the ill-omened, unsightly mistletoe that grew thick upon it; he would hang his fortunes upon it, and prune it, and wait till he ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... Mistletoe.—Raise the bark of an apple, pear, or oak tree on the underneath part of a branch and insert some well-ripened berries, then tie the bark down neatly with raffia or woollen yarn. If the berries were inserted on the top of the branch the operation would result in failure, ...
— Gardening for the Million • Alfred Pink
... and was proud of her in any costume. Welshmen North and South, united for the nonce, now propose her gallantry as a theme to the rival Bards at the next Eisteddfod. She is to sit throned in full assembly, oak leaves and mistletoe interwoven on her head, a white robe and green sash to clothe her, and the vanquished beast's horns on a gilded pole behind the dais; hearing the eulogies respectively interpreted to her by Colonel Fluellen ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... One for the way it all begun, Two for the way it all has run, What three'll be for I do forget, But what's to be has not been yet.... So holly and mistletoe, So holly and mistletoe, So holly and mistletoe, Over and ...
— Christmas - A Story • Zona Gale
... the ceiling of this kitchen, old Wardle had just suspended, with his own hands, a huge branch of mistletoe, and this same branch of mistletoe instantaneously gave rise to a scene of general and most delightful struggling and confusion; in the midst of which, Mr. Pickwick, with a gallantry that would have done ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... inculcates a serious consideration of the value and blessings of a temperate; and well-spent life; it induces a thoughtful reflection that a life of goodness alone insures an end of peace. The holly, the mistletoe, the ivy, the acorn shell, the leafless branch, and the fruitless vine encircle the brow-fit emblems of the period which marks an exchange of time for eternity. All the figures are rendered complete by a carved lion's foot, at the bottom of each, and above the feet is a connecting frame, ...
— Young Americans Abroad - Vacation in Europe: Travels in England, France, Holland, - Belgium, Prussia and Switzerland • Various
... rich soil it became too dainty for dirt, and chose the life of a parasite. So the little seed struck its outer roots into the bark of the oak, and lazily sucked away the tree's rich sap. Soon luxury and living upon another's life ruined the mistletoe, just as the generation of young Romans was ruined by the father's wealth; just as an active and healthy boy is wrecked when he begins to be a sluggard and goes to the aunt—some rich aunt—and waits for her to die. And since all the lower creatures bear ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... most of the robins cowering on the lee side of the larger branches where the snow could not fall upon them, while two or three of the more enterprising were making desperate efforts to reach the mistletoe berries by clinging nervously to the under side of the snow-crowned masses, back downward, like woodpeckers. Every now and then they would dislodge some of the loose fringes of the snow-crown, which ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... wouldst thou gaze at tokens Of ages long ago— Our old oaks stream with mosses, And sprout with mistletoe; And mighty vines, like serpents, climb The giant sycamore; And trunks, o'erthrown for centuries, Cumber the forest floor; And in the great savanna, The solitary mound, Built by the elder ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... from the temple, robed majestically, and wearing a wreath of mistletoe in his flowing white wig. His false beard reaches almost to his waist. He carries a staff with a ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... taken in their welfare, are incidentally revealed in these letters. For instance, "The men had a wonderful Christmas Day (1916). They were like a happy lot of children. We decorated the ward with flags, holly and mistletoe, and paper flowers that the men made, and a ...
— 'My Beloved Poilus' • Anonymous
... Druidism, he observed—I am sure I cannot think why, but it was his hobby—you had a remarkable foreshadowing of Christianity; the idea of the human sacrifice, the Atonement, the Communion of Saints, the mystic Vine, which he clumsily identified with the mistletoe, and what not else. He read portions of his privately-published Tales of Taliessin. In short such happiness radiated from his pink-cheeked face and recovered eyes that David regretted in no wise his own lapses into conventional, stereotyped religion. The Church of Britain might be stiff and stomachered, ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... wild pines with long air-roots or gray beards; and last, but not least, that strange and lovely parasite, the Rhipsalis cassytha, which you mistake first for a plume of green sea-weed, or a tress of Mermaid's hair which has got up there by mischance, and then for some delicate kind of pendent mistletoe; till you are told, to your astonishment, that it is an abnormal form of Cactus—a family which it resembles, save in its tiny flowers and fruit, no more than it resembles the Ceiba-tree on which it grows; and told, too, that, strangely enough, it has been discovered in Angola—the ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... led to some rice plantations ten miles out of the city. Our path was ornamented by the live-oaks, cedar trees, the dogwood, and occasionally the mistletoe, and enlivened sometimes by the whistle of the mocking-bird. Down low by the wheels grew the wild azalea and the jessamine. Above our heads the Spanish moss hung from the trees ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell
... A tree of Western Australia, with brilliant orange-coloured flowers, Nuytsia floribunda, N.O. Loranthaceae; which is also called Tree Mistletoe, ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... out toward the higher back woods, I chanced to spy a bunch of snow in one of the great sour gums, that I thought was an old nest. A second look showed me tiny green leaves, then white berries, then mistletoe. ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... and justice, as well as the teachers of youth to the whole community, and exercised an absolute control over the unlearned people whom they governed; they worshipped in oak groves, and the oak tree and the mistletoe were sacred to them; the heavenly bodies appear to have been also objects of their worship, and they appear to have believed in the immortality and transmigration of the soul; but they committed nothing to writing, and for our knowledge of them we have to depend ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... even that he hath shall be taken away." Among plants as among souls, there are all degrees of backsliders. The foxglove, which is guilty of only sly, petty larceny, wears not the equivalent of the striped suit and the shaved head; nor does the mistletoe, which steals crude food from the tree, but still digests it itself, and is therefore only a dingy yellowish green. Such plants, however, as the broomrape, pinesap, beechdrops, the Indian pipe, and the dodder - which marks the lowest stage of degradation of them ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... now, but we had never heard those singular growths called "witches' brooms" before. Unlike mistletoe, the broom is not a plant parasite, but a growth from the fir itself, like an oak gall, or a gnarl on a maple or a yellow birch; but instead of being a solid growth on the tree trunk, it is a dense, abnormal growth of little twigs on a small bough of the fir, generally high ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... with merry laugh, With a merry laugh and a joyful shout, And the tidings are flung with an iron tongue From a thousand steeples pealing out; Hang up the holly—the mistletoe hang; Bedeck every nook round the old fireside; Make bright every hearth—let the joy-bells clang With ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... which our researchers in the ancient religions of Cornwall have honestly contrived to plunge themselves and us. It was better in the happy old days when we all believed in the Druids; when the Druids explained everything, and my excellent father grafted mistletoe upon his apple-trees—in vain, because nothing will persuade the mistletoe to grow down here. But nobody believes in the Druids just now: and the old question of the Cassiterides has never been solved to general satisfaction: and the Indian cowrie found in a barrow at Land's ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... a silver buckle, I sewed it on my shoe, And 'neath a sprig of mistletoe I danced ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume II. • Walter de la Mare
... fully proved. There is a third class of plants which feed, as is now generally admitted, on the products of the decay of vegetable matter, such as the bird's-nest orchis (Neottia), &c. Lastly, there is the well-known fourth class of parasites (such as the mistletoe), which are nourished by the juices of living plants. Most, however, of the plants belonging to these four classes obtain part of their carbon, like ordinary species, from the atmosphere. Such are the diversified ...
— Insectivorous Plants • Charles Darwin
... Channing, the well-known anti-slavery orator. Here Higginson, as a youth, used to listen with keenest pleasure, to the singing of his cousin, Lucy Channing, especially when the song she chose was, "The Mistletoe Hung on the Castle Wall," the story of a bride shut up in a chest. "I used firmly to believe," the genial colonel confessed to the Radcliffe girls, in reviving for them his memories of the house, "that there was a bride shut ...
— The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees • Mary Caroline Crawford
... pagan grief, desolate over lost beauty. "Balder the beautiful is dead, is dead!" it cried: and I thought of you suddenly; you, who are not Balder at all. Too many thorns have been in your life, but not the mistletoe stroke dealt by a blind god ignorantly. Yet in all great joy there is the Balder element: and I feared lest something might slay it for me, and my life become a cry like Chopin's march over mown-down unripened grass, and youth ...
— An Englishwoman's Love-Letters • Anonymous
... in another of her letters, (which neither is inserted,) is thus described:—'A piece of ruins upon it, the remains of an old chapel, now standing in the midst of the coppice; here and there an over-grown oak, surrounded with ivy and mistletoe, starting up, to sanctify, as it were, the awful solemnness of the place: a spot, too, where a man having been found hanging some years ago, it was used to be thought of by us when children, and by the maid- servants, with a degree of terror, ...
— Clarissa, Volume 2 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... Scotland, without having contemplated at your ease, beneath the brilliant sun of the tropics, one of those Edens overshadowed by the luxuriant verdure of palm-trees, bananas, mimosas and gigantic ferns? In your country, the bark of the trees is clad with lichens and mosses, and the parasite mistletoe suspends itself to the branches, more as a burden than as an ornament; here, numerous families of the orchis, with their singular forms, showy and variegated blossoms, climb along the knotty stems of the tall monarchs of the ...
— The Solitary of Juan Fernandez, or The Real Robinson Crusoe • Joseph Xavier Saintine
... forgot the mistletoe. So Loki, who always tried to do mischief, made an arrow of mistletoe, and gave it to the prince who shot and killed Baldur ...
— Famous Men of the Middle Ages • John H. Haaren
... of knives in association with religious rites are interesting, as, for instance, the golden knife with which the old Druids cut the mistletoe with pomp and much mystic ceremony. The early Christians made use of the knife and symbolized the cross when feasting; indeed, the old country habit—which is now deemed a sign of vulgarity—of crossing the knife and fork after dining, took its origin in that act of devotion, for together they ...
— Chats on Household Curios • Fred W. Burgess
... who, seeing the boy's strength and courage, took him as an assistant when he went on excursions among the hills. Here Harry learned to dig pits for the capture of tigers; to smear leaves with a sticky substance, obtained from a plant resembling mistletoe, so that when a tiger or bear trod upon them and, finding them sticking to his feet, paused and rubbed these on his head, until he became blinded and bewildered with a mass of sticky foliage, a well-placed shot ...
— At the Point of the Bayonet - A Tale of the Mahratta War • G. A. Henty
... was enlivened by many curious disquisitions of the nature {p.171} of undulating exhalations. I should have bowed before the venerable grove of oaks at Hamilton with as much respect as if I had been a Druid about to gather the sacred mistletoe. I should hardly have suspected your host Sir William[97] of having been the occasion of the scandal brought upon the library and Mr. Gibb[98] by the introduction of the Cabinet des Fees, of which I have a volume or ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... stole along, she nothing spoke, The sighs she heaved were soft and low, And naught was green upon the oak But moss and rarest mistletoe: She kneels beneath the huge oak tree, And in silence ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... polished floor with a step light and quick, And her high slipper heels went clickety-click. She looked cautiously round,—she was all by herself; Like a mischievous elf, She took from a shelf A mistletoe spray with its berries like pearls; Then tossing her head and shaking her curls, In a manner half daring and yet half afraid, The madcap maid, with a smile that betrayed Expectant thoughts of her lover dear, Fastened the spray to ...
— The Jingle Book • Carolyn Wells
... we began to notice queer-looking green bunches of something on the trees. As the forest had not yet put forth its foliage, we knew that growth could not be leaves, and were puzzled to imagine what it could be. But we finally learned from some of the boat's crew that it was mistletoe. So far as I knew none of the private soldiers had ever before seen that curious evergreen, and it was to us a strange curiosity. But we got well acquainted ...
— The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865 • Leander Stillwell
... near the Christmas season, the decorations included evergreens, holly and mistletoe, but besides these, quantities of roses and rare flowers of all sorts were used. The florists came early and worked all day, and they transformed the house ...
— Patty Fairfield • Carolyn Wells
... Turdus viscivorus, Linnaeus. French, "Merle Draine," "Grive Draine."—I quite agree with the remarks made by Professor Newton, in his edition of 'Yarrell,' as to the proper English name of the present species, and that it ought to be called the Mistletoe Thrush. I am afraid, however, that the shorter appellation of Missel Thrush will stick to this bird in spite of all attempts to the contrary. In Guernsey the local name of the Mistletoe Thrush is "Geai," by which name Mr. Metivier mentions it in his 'Dictionary ...
— Birds of Guernsey (1879) • Cecil Smith
... Minnie Marsh lays it in the drawer. She shuts the drawer with decision. I catch sight of her face in the glass. Lips are pursed. Chin held high. Next she laces her shoes. Then she touches her throat. What's your brooch? Mistletoe or merry-thought? And what is happening? Unless I'm much mistaken, the pulse's quickened, the moment's coming, the threads are racing, Niagara's ahead. Here's the crisis! Heaven be with you! Down she ...
— Monday or Tuesday • Virginia Woolf
... the days of their ascendency, had cruelly proscribed the most favorite pleasures and time-honored festivals of old England. But the love of them returned with redoubled vigor. May-poles, wrestling-matches, bear-baitings, puppet-shows, bowls, horse-racing, betting, rope-dancing, romping under the mistletoe on Christmas, eating boars' heads, attending the theatres, health-drinking,—all these old-fashioned ways, in which the English sought merriment, were restored. The evil was chiefly in the excess to which these pleasures ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... But with what a difference! It will not be, as with us, a mere opportunity for relatives to make up the quarrels they have picked with each other during the past year, and to eat and drink things that will make them ill well into next year. Holly and mistletoe there will be in the Municipal Eating Rooms, but the men and women who sit down there to General Cessation High-Tea will be glowing not with a facile affection for their kith and kin, but with communal anxiety for the welfare of the great-great-grand-children ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... flowers,—no garlands green, Conceal the goblet's shade or sheen, Nor maddening draughts of Hippocrene, Like gleams of sunshine, flash between Thick leaves of mistletoe. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... their apoplectic opulence. There were ruddy, brown-faced, broad-girthed Spanish onions, shining in the fatness of their growth like Spanish friars; and winking from their shelves in wanton slyness at the girls as they went by, and glanced demurely at the hung-up mistletoe. There were pears and apples, clustered high in blooming pyramids; there were bunches of grapes, made, in the shopkeepers' benevolence, to dangle from conspicuous hooks, that people's mouths might water gratis as they passed; there were piles ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... Sir Jasper's. Narrow windows pierced in the thick walls let in gleams of wintry moonlight; ivy, holly, and evergreen glistened in the ruddy glow of mingled firelight and candle shine. From the arched stone roof hung tattered banners, and in the midst depended a great bunch of mistletoe. Red-cushioned seats stood in recessed window nooks, and from behind a high-covered screen of oak sounded the blithe air of Sir ...
— The Abbot's Ghost, Or Maurice Treherne's Temptation • A. M. Barnard
... the mistletoe As though she did not know it. She looks quite unconcerned, you know, And ...
— When hearts are trumps • Thomas Winthrop Hall
... leg it to the sky-line, an' pipe the cruiser. Olsen, you go, too, an' see that Mr. Watts doesn't find a brewery. Hozier, p'raps you'd like to rig the mistletoe. Miss Yorke 'll 'elp, I'm sure. It's up to you, mister, an' his nibs with the sword, to parly-voo to the other convicts about the grub. Is there a nigger's wood-pile handy? If not, we must collar the hut. I'll take care of ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... you see?" said East, pointing to a lump of mistletoe in the next tree, which was a beech. He saw that Martin and Tom were busy with the climbing-irons, and couldn't resist the temptation of hoaxing. Arthur stared and ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... skill and foresight on his part not to be shot into the lane they made in the dark forest of an evening. And the forest,—it seemed an impenetrable mystery, a strange tangle of fantastic growths: the live-oak (chene vert), its wide-spreading limbs hung funereally with Spanish moss and twined in the mistletoe's death embrace; the dark cypress swamp with the conelike knees above the yellow back-waters; and here and there grew the bridelike magnolia which we had known in Kentucky, wafting its perfume over the waters, and wondrous flowers and vines and trees with French names that bring ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... so strung with garlands of Christmas green that it looked like a bower. Bunches of mistletoe and holly added their colors to the holiday cheer. Red ...
— Maida's Little Shop • Inez Haynes Irwin
... paused in a spot where a forest of trees with whorled tops were slowly being strangled to death by immense orchids of every conceivable shape and color, and by a kind of creeping mistletoe which grew almost as they watched. Here also, the ground was covered with fluffy, grey-green moss which seethed constantly as if it were a carpet of maggots. Both Ivana and Nini warned Kirby on his life not to touch or go near the moss, and a ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... that a glance at the contents of a magazine will often tell you within a month of its date of issue. There are the blizzard stories, which are due about January; and the vacation stories, which begin to appear in July, and the stories of holly and mistletoe and stockings, which come with the Christmas season. Likewise, we have special stories for New Years', St. Valentine's Day, Washington's Birthday, Easter, May Day, Memorial Day, Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, and a ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... orchard the neglected fruit-trees were running to wood, the rambling branches bore no fruit save the glistening mistletoe berries, and tall plants were growing in the garden walks. All this forlornness shed a charm across the picture that wrought on the spectator's mind with an influence like that of some enchanting poem, filling his soul with dreamy fancies. A poet must have lingered there in deep and ...
— Farewell • Honore de Balzac
... in his Natural History, tells us, "The Druids held nothing so sacred as the mistletoe of the oak, as this is very scarce and rarely to be found, when any of it is discovered, they go with great pomp and ceremony on a certain day to gather it. When they have got everything in readiness under the oak, both for the sacrifice and the banquet, which they make on this great ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19. Issue 548 - 26 May 1832 • Various
... go into a forest, and find there and gather a golden bough, which he was to bear in his hand to keep him safe. Long he sought it, until two doves, his mother's birds, came flying before him to show him the tree where gold gleamed through the boughs, and he found the branch growing on the tree as mistletoe grows ...
— Young Folks' History of Rome • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... fern-seed[10] doth bestow, The kernel of the mistletoe; And here and there as Puck should go, With terror to affright him, She nightshade straws to work him ill, Therewith her vervain and her dill, That hindreth witches of their will, Of ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick
... forsaken, and forsaking all; Live in a shady forest's sylvan scene, Stretched at my length beneath some blasted oak, I lean my head upon the mossy bark, And look just of a piece as I grew from it; My uncombed locks, matted like mistletoe, Hang o'er my hoary face; a murm'ring brook Runs ...
— All for Love • John Dryden
... small fire in the midst of a mats of black iron, roasts, and bakes, and boils, and steams, and broils, and fries, by a complicated apparatus which, whatever may be its other virtues, leaves no space for a Christmas fire. I like the festoons of holly on the walls and windows; the dance under the mistletoe; the gigantic sausage; the baron of beef; the vast globe of plum-pudding, the true image of the earth, flattened at the poles; the tapping of the old October; the inexhaustible bowl of punch; the life and joy of the old hall, when the squire and his ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... distinguished companion. I have often seen this in life, (I am now an old and experienced rat,) I have seen a mean race following and flattering their superiors, ready to lick the dust from their feet, not from real admiration or attachment, but, like a mistletoe upon a forest tree, because they had no proper footing of their own, and liked to be raised on the credit of another. It is easier to them to fawn than to work, to flatter the great ...
— The Rambles of a Rat • A. L. O. E.
... little gentleman, jumping up and offering his hand to Mrs Wag. "Hurt! Why, I feel myself twenty years younger than I did five minutes ago. Never mind, ma'am. Like Christmas gambols. Always did. Happen to have such a thing as a bunch of mistletoe, eh?" ...
— Tales from Blackwood, Volume 7 • Various
... sight. In many cases green matter is wanting in their tissues or is hidden by a livid tint that strikes the observer. Such are the Orobanchaccae, or "broomropes," and the tropical Balanophoraceae. Nevertheless, other parasites, such as the mistletoe, have perfectly green leaves. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 430, March 29, 1884 • Various
... shoes they clicked, her heels a-twinkling high; With mistletoe her steeple-hat bobbed as she capered by; But never a dint, or mark, or print, in the whiteness for to see, Though danced she high, though danced she fast, ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume II. • Walter de la Mare
... profusely in charming old-fashioned country gardens was there, depicted among its graceful foliage, but not in the wild disorder in which I have enumerated them. At the bottom of the panel lay a holly-branch, whose stiff straightness was ornamented by a twining drapery of English ivy and mistletoe and winter aconite; while down either side hung pendant garlands of spring and autumn flowers; and, crowning all, came gorgeous summer with the sweet musk-roses, and the rich-coloured flowers ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... flower; and monkeys, with curiously human faces, stare at the stranger from the tree-tops. White cotton trees, tamarinds, and strangely shaped fruits grow everywhere, and round about all are entwined festoons of trailing creepers, or the loveliest of scarlet mistletoe, in which humming-birds build their nests. Blue macaws, parrots, and a thousand other birds fly to and fro, and the black fire-bird darts across the sky, making lightning with every flutter of his wings, which, underneath, are painted a bright, vivid red. Serpents of all colors and sizes ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... had taken Alice for a downright girl, about whom there was and could be no mistake; and the first hot blast of prosperity had swept her away like a hectic leaf. What were all the shops dressed out in holly and mistletoe, what were all the rushing flaming gas-jets, what the fattest of prize-pigs to John, who could never more imagine a spare-rib on the table between Alice and him of a Sunday? His imagination ran on seeing her pass in her carriage, and ...
— Stephen Archer and Other Tales • George MacDonald
... old and queer, with narrow streets and curious houses, famed for the ancient legend of Godiva, one of those beautiful myths that grow, like the mistletoe, on the bare branches of history, and which, if they never were true in the letter, have been a thousand ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... her wisdom, counseled the Birds that when the acorn first began to sprout, to pull it all up out of the ground and not allow it to grow. She said acorns would produce mistletoe, from which an irremediable poison, the bird-lime, would be extracted and by which they would be captured. The Owl next advised them to pluck up the seed of the flax, which men had sown, as it was a plant which boded ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... wheat-field to the waist, and above was wrapped in the leaves and bunches of the wine-tree. And the fourth was clad in a scarlet gown flecked with white wool to set forth the winter's snow, and broidered over with the burning brands of the Holy Hearth; and she bore on her head a garland of mistletoe. And these four damsels were clearly seen to image the four seasons of the year- -Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter. But amidst them stood a fountain or conduit of gilded work cunningly wrought, and full of the best wine of the Dale, ...
— The Roots of the Mountains • William Morris
... saw proved to be a bunch of mistletoe, and when Winn began his climb the 'coon's place of concealment was still unknown. Up went the boy higher and higher, carefully examining each limb as he passed it, until he was among the very topmost branches of the tree. The others stood on opposite ...
— Raftmates - A Story of the Great River • Kirk Munroe
... forward—Christmas-games and incantations, the dexterous introduction, by a jocose old gentleman, of a mistletoe-bough into the festoons draping the chandelier, and divers other tricks, all of which were taken in excellent part by the victims thereof, and vociferously applauded by the spectators. The great hall-clock had rung out twelve strokes, and two or three methodical ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... the Christmas Ending.—And so, linked hand in hand, father and mother, son and daughter, husband and wife, nephew and niece, bowed their heads beneath the holly and mistletoe, and wished one another, with a heartiness that told volumes, "A Merry Christmas and a Happy ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, December 19, 1891 • Various
... recollected that, during the Christmas festivities at Manor Farm, after a certain amount of kissing had taken place under the mistletoe, Mr. Pickwick was "standing under the mistletoe, looking with a very pleased countenance on all that was passing round him, when the young lady with the black eyes, after a little whispering with the other young ladies, ...
— Pickwickian Manners and Customs • Percy Fitzgerald
... were to live, to pass long dolorous hours Before his father's effigy in church; Of one who then used often come to hall, Ever at Yule-tide, when the great log flamed In chimney-place, and laugh and jest went round, And maidens strayed beneath the mistletoe, Making believe not see it, so got kissed— Of one that joined not in the morrice-dance, But in her sea-green kirtle stood at gaze, A timid little creature that was scared By dead men's armor. Nought there suffered change, Those empty shells ...
— Wyndham Towers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... inn, told us a harrowing tale, and then to Barcy, where the maire, though busy with a pitch-fork upon a manure heap, received us with municipal gravity. We were now nearing the battlefield of the Marne, and here and there along the roadside the trunks of the poplars, green with mistletoe, were shivered as though by lightning. Yet nothing could have been more peaceful than the pastoral beauty of the countryside. We passed waggons full of roots, drawn by a team of white oxen under the yoke, and by the ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... soul abide equally in every part of this aforesaid tree; but in a certain bough of it, resembling a mistletoe, which hath yellow leaves, and, being broken off, groweth ever green and yellow afresh; which is the central mystery of all their Sathanic religion. For in this very bough—easy to be discerned by the eye among the green ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen
... where I sat, or go mad. That I did neither, was due to a divine inspiration which made me suddenly think of a device that I had once seen on a Druidical stone in Brittany—the sun, a hand with the index and little fingers pointing downwards, and a sprig of mistletoe. The instant I saw them in my mind's eye, the cords that held ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... moon" that then and thereafter remains fixed in the heavens as though it were a part of the solar system inaugurated by Joshua. Again the white-robed Druids filed past me, again I saw that improbable mistletoe cut from that impossible oak, and again cold chills ran down my back with the first strain of the recitative. The thumping springs essayed to beat time, and the private-box-like obscurity of the vehicle lent a cheap enchantment to the ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... Sleep, I wot, will grudge us not his best: In winter earlier sink the suns to rest, And eke the sooner shall our toils be sped; When in the embers glowing There'll be love-charms worth the knowing, Or, at Yule-tide, mazes threaded, with the mistletoe o'erhead. ...
— Primavera - Poems by Four Authors • Stephen Phillips, Laurence Binyon, Manmohan Ghose and Arthur Shearly Cripps
... a child of nature may remember that he is also a child of the spirit; and, even in the Vale Perilous, the spirit may be an instinctive and faithful guide. Because we love the woods we need not worship the sacred mistletoe. Because we listen to the sea we need not reject greater and more intelligible voices of the Word of Life. And the mention of the sea, and the memory of all that it has meant in Fiona Macleod's ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... in most households there are many little mysteries afoot, when parcels come and go, and are smothered away so as to be ready when Santa Claus comes his rounds; when some are busy decking the rooms with holly and mistletoe; when the cook is busiest of all, and savoury smells rise from the kitchen, telling of good things to be eaten ...
— Brave and True - Short stories for children by G. M. Fenn and Others • George Manville Fenn
... orders to suspend a superb Mistletoe bough in the publishing-office. PUNCH will be in attendance from daylight till dusk. To prevent confusion, the salutes will he distributed according to the order ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... poetical correspondence which followed was published in 'The British Album' (1789, 2 vols.) by John Bell. Other writers connected with the Della Cruscan school were "Perdita" Robinson, 'nee' Darby (1758-1800), who published 'The Mistletoe' (1800) under the pseudonym "Laura Maria," and to whom Merry addressed a poem quoted by Gifford in 'The Baviad' ('note' to line 284); Charlotte Dacre, who married Byrne, Robinson's successor as editor of the 'Morning Post,' wrote under ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... success of the ceremony. The significance of the flower rites. Ancient origin of rites. Explaining customs which followed the practice of scalping. Head hunters. The hair token. The flower before the fruit. The Druids. The ceremonia of the mistletoe. The antidote. The oak as a sacred tree. The great feast after the ceremony. Table implements. The Korinos. Where they were imprisoned. Prepared for the sacrifice. Their attempted escape. Gluttony. Habits of savages in this respect. The siesta. The boys discover ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Treasures of the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay
... weight. It was Christmas-time, but the squire felt none of the elation of the season. He was conscious that the old festal preparations were going on, but there was no response to them in his heart. Julius had arrived, and was helping Sophia to hang the holly and mistletoe. But Sandal knew that his soul shrank from the nephew he had called into his life; knew that the sound of his voice irritated him, that his laugh filled him with resentment, that his very presence in ...
— The Squire of Sandal-Side - A Pastoral Romance • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... you whatever other rash acts you see fit to commit during your meteoric flight across my plane of existence, don't ever give me away. Firstly, because if I ever get a chance to do so, I'm positive that I should want to cling to you as the mistletoe does to the oak, and could not bear to be given away; and secondly, because I'm so attached to my own skin that I should really suffer pain if it was taken from me by force. Bob wants you to think it over, and let him know as to the whats and whens ...
— The Rejuvenation of Aunt Mary • Anne Warner
... his whole live stock in an interminable forest, did not complain of the confinement of hedges and banks. Nay, the 'hedgerow elms and hillocks green' were to him as classical as Whitehall; he treated Maria's tame robins with as much respect as if they had been Howards or Percies; holly and mistletoe were handled by him with reverential curiosity; and the church and home of his ancestors filled him with a sweet loyal enthusiasm, more eager than in those to ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... if there were too many plants for the ground to support, and so they grew on the big limbs of the trees all around, the same as the mistletoe on the oak, only there were ever so ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... Jack keeping boon company with the lead soldiers, his spouse reposing, her lead-balanced eyes closed, in the broken clockwork motor-car. With the air of performing some vaguely momentous ritual, the children were kissing one another beneath the bunch of mistletoe that hung from the centre beam. In the intervals of kissing they told one another in whispers that Aunt Rachel was not very well, and Angela woke Flora to tell her that Aunt Rachel ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... Michigan, apple blossom; Minnesota, moccasin; Mississippi, magnolia; Montana, bitter root; Missouri, goldenrod; Nebraska, goldenrod; New Jersey, sugar maple (tree); New York, rose; North Dakota, goldenrod; Oklahoma, mistletoe; Oregon, Oregon grape; Rhode Island, violet; Texas, blue bonnet; Utah, Sego lily; ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... at Mrs. Blodgett's, after the fashion of a second-rate English house of entertainment. The servants hung mistletoe about in various places, and woe to the unlucky wight that was caught under it. Hawthorne presents an amusing picture of his boy Julian, nine years old, struggling against the endearments of a chamber-maid, and ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... the mouth-organ. This she gave to the hands that fluttered about the face on the pillow. He began to play "The Mocking Bird," opening and shutting his bony hands to let the music rise and fall. When he closed that tune he played "O the Mistletoe Bough," and after that over and over again he played "Tenting on the Old Camp Ground." When he dropped the mouth-harp, he lay very still for a time, though his lips moved incessantly. The morning was coming, and he was growing weak. But when his voice came back they knew that he was ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White
... giving—except Livingstone. Want was stretching out its withered hand even to Poverty and found it filled. But Livingstone took no part in it. The chilly and threadbare street-venders of shoe-strings, pencils and cheap flowers, who to-night were offering in their place tin toys, mistletoe and holly-boughs, he pushed roughly out of his way; he snapped angrily at beggars who had the temerity to ...
— Santa Claus's Partner • Thomas Nelson Page
... Should and Ought? Seen in thousand ways your nature, in all act and look and speech? By that large induction only I your law of being reach. Now I hear of this wrong action—what is that to you and me? Sin within you may have done it—fruit not nature to the tree. Foreign graft has come to bearing—mistletoe grown on your bough— If I ever really knew you, then, my friend, I know you now. So I say, "He never did it," or, "He did not so intend"; Or, "Some foreign power o'ercame him"—so I judge the action, friend. Let the mere outside observer note appearance as he can; We, more righteous ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... Henry Clay. And so today at Ashland, as at Hawarden, no tree is felled until it has been duly tried by the entire family and all has been said for and against the sentence of death. I heard Miss McDowell make an eloquent plea for an old oak that had been rather recklessly harboring mistletoe and many squirrels, until it was thought probable that, like our first parents, it might have a fall. It was a plea more eloquent than "O Woodman, spare that tree." A reprieve for a year was granted; and I thought, as I cast my vote on the side of mercy, that the jury that could not be ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... beautiful white strings of pop-corn to hang over it like wreaths of snow," he said, "so I am going down the lane for some mistletoe that grows in one of the highest trees. The berries are like ...
— The Gate of the Giant Scissors • Annie Fellows Johnston
... There's a storm brewing even now; I feel it in my bones." So saying, he tramped noisily out of the apartment, nearly knocking over a fleshy dame in ruffled cap and whitest apron, whose rosy cheeks were like winter apples, and who bore in her hands a huge mince-pie in which was stuck a sprig of mistletoe. ...
— Prince Lazybones and Other Stories • Mrs. W. J. Hays
... rock upon the supporting shafts—relics of an age when they were the only architecture, the only national monuments; when savage ancestors in lion skins, with stone weapons, led by white-robed Druid priests, came solemnly here and left the mistletoe wreath upon these Houses of Death for ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... gloom the shabbiness of the furniture could not be seen, and the fire-light danced playfully over the worn, comfortable-looking chairs drawn up to the hearth, on the holly and mistletoe which decorated the walls, and the great cluster of geranium and Christmas roses which the Adairs had sent to Janetta the day before. Everything looked homelike and comfortable, and perhaps it was no wonder that Wyvis—accustomed to the gloom of his own home, or the garish splendor ...
— A True Friend - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... "Besides," said he, "if we decide on hard wood, who shall choose the kinds? There's beech, birch and maple; cherry, whitewood and ebony; ash and brown ash and white ash and black ash; ditto oak, drawn and quartered; there's rosewood, redwood, gopherwood and wormwood; mahogany, laurel, holly and mistletoe; cedar of Lebanon and pine of Georgia, not to mention chestnut, walnut, butternut, cocoanut and peanut, all of which are popular and available woods for finishing modern dwellings. If we choose from this list, which may be indefinitely extended, the few ...
— The House that Jill Built - after Jack's had proved a failure • E. C. Gardner
... 'stick' the pews and pulpit with sprays of holly. In the time of the 'Spectator'[1020] and of Gay,[1021] and later still,[1022] rosemary was also used, doubtless by old tradition, as referring in its name to the Mother of the Lord. Nor was mistletoe excluded.[1023] In connection with this plant, Stanley says a curious custom was kept up at York, which in 1754 had not long been discontinued. 'On the eve of Christmas Day they carried mistletoe to the ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... child ever lived who did not believe grandpa's pocket a cornucopia for all juvenile desires? The day passes on. The turkey never looked browner or juicier, and the blaze on the pudding-sauce never burned bluer; the kissing under the mistletoe was never more delightful, nor the blindman's-buff ever played with a greater zest: but the merriest Christmas must end. Your little girl, tired and sleepy, kneels at your feet, and you pass your fingers through her soft curls, while she repeats her simple prayer: "God bless pa, ...
— Trifles for the Christmas Holidays • H. S. Armstrong
... table stands well down the stage with a chair at each end and on either side. Two chairs are set against the back wall to the right of the door. The walls and windows are decorated with holly and mistletoe and Christmas wreaths tied with bows of scarlet ribbon. When the window is opened there is a view of falling snow. At first the room is in ...
— Miss Civilization - A Comedy in One Act • Richard Harding Davis
... dusk as he drove through the park. Snow was on the ground, and still falling slowly, the two roaring fires in the hall, as the doors were thrown open, flung a red light on the holly berries and gigantic bunch of mistletoe suspended from the chandelier, and flickered on dark oil paintings let into the panels. The footmen were unfamiliar, but the old butler beamed on the young heir he ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... not yet arrived, but he was momentarily expected. Dan was already there in his new "Eton's," with a sprig of mistletoe in his button-hole. Tony was in his best white sailor suit, and Fanny and Grace had holly in their caps, and wore their Jubilee medals. The table was loaded with cakes and pasties, and "splits" with cream and jam on them; and then, just as they were getting tired of waiting, ...
— Kitty Trenire • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... tedious, this meant more than it does to-day. The visitors received a joyous welcome, not a sort of empty every-day one. Plum pudding, roast beef, and mince pies and nuts were the order of the day, for beverage various kinds of drinks. Holly and mistletoe and evergreens obtained in nearly every house; in fact it was a joyous day from morn till night. Games of various kinds were played. Toys for children, rudimentary toys and picture books, cheap, and such as the too knowing children of to-day would turn up ...
— Some Reminiscences of old Victoria • Edgar Fawcett
... conclusion of the service. On leaving the church of Saint Fiacre in Horto after the papal blessing the happy pair were subjected to a playful crossfire of hazelnuts, beechmast, bayleaves, catkins of willow, ivytod, hollyberries, mistletoe sprigs and quicken shoots. Mr and Mrs Wyse Conifer Neaulan will spend a quiet honeymoon in the ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... the road, past a wretched custom-house, where two painted sentry-boxes leaned, past a squalid barnyard full of amber-coloured, unsavoury puddles and gaunt poultry, up to the thatched stone house where Grahame stood waiting. Over the door hung a withered branch of mistletoe, above this swung ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... miles. And yet the place was crowded, as I remember well, 'Twas got for the occasion at "The Morning Star Hotel." The music was a fiddle and a lively tambourine, And a "viol come imported," by stage from Abilene. The room was togged out gorgeous—with mistletoe and shawls, And candles flickered frescoes around the airy walls. The "wimmin folks" looked lovely—the boys looked kinder treed, Till their leader commenced yellin': "Whoa, fellers, let's stampede." The music started sighin' and a-wailin' through the hall, ...
— Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp • Various
... a sudden glow of enthusiasm, "you shall have your jolly Christmas—I will provide it. You shall have your turkey, plum-pudding, mince-pies, crackers, mistletoe and all the rest of it." Cheeryble in his most beneficent mood could not have felt more expansive than I did just then. "You can invite your friends; we shall not be at home, so you will ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 29, 1920 • Various
... of dried fruits was all the grocer could send her—to make the frumenty and spiced cakes that from time immemorial had been eaten in that northern district to celebrate the feast of the Nativity. A Yule-log was sawn and placed upon the dining-room fire, and a huge bough of mistletoe hung up ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... with its finger ever on the thick wrist of its public, substituted for the little gray lady of tradition the glittering novelty of full-lipped bacchantes whose wreaths were grape, and mistletoe ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... always a thing forgotten When all the world goes well; A thing forgotten, as long ago, When the gods forgot the mistletoe, And soundless as an arrow of snow The arrow of ...
— The Ballad of the White Horse • G.K. Chesterton
... The mistletoe hung in the castle hall, The holly branch shone on the old back wall And the baron's retainers are blithe and gay, And keeping ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... the stars, but the moon has had a potent influence on medicine. For instance, mistletoe was to be cut with a golden knife, and when the moon was only six days old. Brand[82] quotes from The Husbandman's Practice, or Prognostication Forever, published in 1664, the following curious passage, "Good to purge with electuaries, the moon ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... cried, "I know foreign custom. I know everything. Mistletoe! Mistletoe! A kiss for ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... the next morning soon after sunrise to look round the camp, when I saw several birds of a greyish colour, about the size of a common thrush. Their notes, too, reminded me, as they sang their morning song, of the mistletoe thrush. Presently they flew off together, some way up the stream. Turning round, I saw Chickango, Igubo, and several of Mr Fraser's blacks following, with guns in their hands, accompanied by a pack ...
— In the Wilds of Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... I do not wish to show myself beaten before all Egdon, and the sport of a man like Wildeve. We have enough berries now, I think, and we had better take them home. By the time we have decked the house with this and hung up the mistletoe, we must think of starting ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... child of earth and sky. Thus the journey begins; and with ever-increasing strength the stream carves a way through the dear brown peat, wears a fresh wrinkle on the patient stones, and patters merrily under a clapper bridge which spanned its breadth when the mistletoe reigned and Bottor, the grim rock idol, exacted the toll of human life that made him great. On and on goes the stream, for it may not stay; leaving of its freshness with the great osmunda that stretches eager roots towards the running water; flowing awhile with ...
— The Roadmender • Michael Fairless
... yesterday, there were little branches of mistletoe hanging in several parts of the house, in the kitchen, the entries, the parlor, and the smoking-room,—suspended from the gas-fittings. The maids of the house did their utmost to entrap the gentlemen boarders, old and young; under the privileged places, and ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... possibilities of a race. No seer who knew the ancestors of the Anglo-Saxons as Caesar knew them, would have foretold such a future as they now enjoy. This Anglo-Saxon race, whose ancestors worshipped the mistletoe, offered human sacrifices, and drank wine out of human skulls, have now become the conquerors and the dominant race on the earth. Their literature is the cream of the human intellect, and their tongue promises to become the official lingua of the earth. God and Time have wrought these things ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... says the record; "and, to be sure, he was an exceedingly melancholy man, for he did sit away from the company during the most part of the evening. We afterwards heard that he had been keeping a secret account of all the kisses that were given and received under the mistletoe bough. Truly, I would not have suffered any one to kiss me in that manner had I known that so unfair a watch was being kept. Other maids beside were in a like way shocked, as Betty Marchant has since told me." But it seems that the melancholy ...
— The Canterbury Puzzles - And Other Curious Problems • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... possible, the hospital rested on that Christmas Day. The internes went about in fresh white ducks with sprays of mistletoe in their buttonholes, doing few dressings. Over the upper floors, where the kitchens were located, spread toward noon the insidious odor of roasting turkeys. Every ward had its vase of holly. In the afternoon, services were held in ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... in the dear old country 'tis Christ- mas, and to-night I'm thinking of the mistletoe and holly berries bright. The smoke above our chimbley pots I'd dearly love to see, And those dear folks down in Devon, how they'll talk and ...
— The Verse-Book Of A Homely Woman • Elizabeth Rebecca Ward, AKA Fay Inchfawn
... Region of Kentucky Flute and Violin, and Other Kentucky Tales The Bride of the Mistletoe A Kentucky Cardinal. Aftermath. A Sequel to "A ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... examination proved to be a dry bone. Whether it was human, or had come from the castle larder in bygone times, he could not tell. One bone was not a whole skeleton, but it made him think of Ginevra of Modena, the heroine of the Mistletoe Bough, and other cribbed and confined wretches, who had fallen into such traps and been discovered after a ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... holly on the streets, and silver mistletoe; The surging, jeweled, ragged crowds forever come and go. And here a silken woman laughs, and there a beggar asks— And, oh, the faces, tense of lip, like mad and mocking masks. Who thinks of Bethlehem today, and one lone winter night? Who knows that in a manger-bed ...
— The White Christmas and other Merry Christmas Plays • Walter Ben Hare
... holy night: On Christmas Eve the bells were rung; On Christmas Eve the Mass was sung; That only night in all the year Saw the staled priest the chalice rear. The damsel donn'd her kirtle sheen; The hall was dressed with holly green; Forth to the wood did merry men go, To gather in the mistletoe. Then open wide the baron's hall, To vassal, tenant, serf, and all; Power laid his rod of rule aside, And Ceremony doft'd his pride. The heir with roses in his shoes, That night might village partner choose; The lord, underogating, share The vulgar game of 'post and pair.' All hailed ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... given is, I am confident, absolutely free from every source of error. I do not remember that Mr. Rathbone had communicated with me since he sent me a plentiful supply of mistletoe a year ago last Christmas. The account I received from him was cut out of "The Sporting Times" of March 5, 1887. My own knowledge of the case came from "Kirby's Wonderful Museum," a work presented to me at least thirty years ago. I had not looked at the account, spoken of it, nor thought of it for ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... celebrated at Mrs. Blodgett's, after the fashion of a second-rate English house of entertainment. The servants hung mistletoe about in various places, and woe to the unlucky wight that was caught under it. Hawthorne presents an amusing picture of his boy Julian, nine years old, struggling against the endearments of a chamber-maid, and believes that he himself was the only male person in the house that escaped. [Footnote: ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... from the middle bark of most parasitic plants, that is to say, those that grow like mistletoe, out of the boughs of other trees. Holly and young elder shoots also afford it. The bark is boiled for seven or eight hours, till quite soft, and is then drained of its water and laid in heaps, in pits dug in the ground, where it is covered with stones and left for two or three weeks ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... Christmas Days of her life. Easy to-day to sit for a laughing hour with poor Mary Lord, to go to late service, and dream through a long sermon, with the odor of incense and spicy evergreen sweet all about her, to set tables, to dust the parlor, to be kissed by Loretta's little doctor under the mistletoe, to sweep up tissue- paper and red ribbon and nutshells and tinsel, to hook Mary Lou's best gown, and accompany Virginia to evening service, and to lend Georgie her best gloves. Susan had not had many Christmas presents: cologne and handkerchiefs and calendars ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... it was also looked upon with some suspicion, perhaps also arising from its use by our heathen ancestors, so that, though admitted into houses, it was not (or very seldom) admitted into churches. And this character so far still attaches to the Mistletoe, that it is never allowed with the Holly and Ivy and Box to decorate the churches, and Gay's lines ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... ever was such a ham? or ever such a wonderful man as Mine Host? or ever such a fortunate woman as the missus? Had any other woman such a ham or such a friend in need? And bubbling over with affection for the whole world, he sent Jackeroo off for mistletoe, and presently the ham, all brave in Christmas finery, was hanging like a gay wedding-bell in the kitchen doorway. Then the kitchen had to be decorated, also in mistletoe, to make a fitting setting for the ham, and after that the fiat went ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... the dear old country 'tis Christ- mas, and to-night I'm thinking of the mistletoe and holly berries bright. The smoke above our chimbley pots I'd dearly love to see, And those dear folks down in Devon, how they'll ...
— The Verse-Book Of A Homely Woman • Elizabeth Rebecca Ward, AKA Fay Inchfawn
... to mistletoe, Which has no root, and cannot grow Or prosper, but by that same tree It clings about: so I by thee. What need I then to fear at all So long as I about thee crawl? But if that tree should fall and die, Tumble shall heaven, and ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... parcels have arrived at Casa Grande. Bud Teetzel very gallantly sent me over a huge turkey, an eighteen-pounder, and to-morrow I have to go into Buckhorn for my mail-order shipments. We have decorated the house with a whole box of holly from Victoria and I've hung a sprig of mistletoe in the living-room doorway. The children, of course, are on tiptoe with expectation. But I can't escape the impression that I'm merely acting a part, that I'm a Pagliacci in petticoats. Heaven knows I clown enough; no one can accuse me of not going through ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... If the ice on the creek had been free from snow, they would have skated for hours, and she thought as long as that sport had been spoiled, they ought to do something to make up for it. Gay had never gathered any mistletoe. She thought it would be fun for them all to go around by Stone Hollow, and get some off the big trees that grew ...
— The Little Colonel's Christmas Vacation • Annie Fellows Johnston
... should," said Ambrose. "I remember best how he used to carry me on his shoulder to cull mistletoe for Christmas." ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... these celestial branches. Out of this as the race grew came also many another romantic symbolism of cherished belief. Among the glowing sunset clouds was hung the golden fleece of the Cholchis. The golden apples of the Hesperides grew there. The very lightning flash was but a celestial mistletoe growing mysteriously upon the limbs of this flame tree as it grows on the oaks in the forests beneath which they hunted. Secure in our better beliefs, we call their worship superstition, but it is well that they had it. ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... In common with the mistletoe and vervain the Druids held the Selago and Samolus as sacred plants, and never approached them but in the most devout and reverential manner. When they were gathered for religious purposes the greatest care was taken lest they ...
— Notes & Queries 1850.02.09 • Various
... till I'm ninety,—an' that's drawin' it mild, for my father lived till a 'underd, an' then on'y went through slippin' on a wet stone an' breakin' a bone in 'is back; an' my grandfather saw 'is larst Christmas at a 'underd an' ten, an' was up to kissin' a wench under the mistletoe, 'e was sich a chirpin' old gamecock. 'E didn't look no older'n you do now, an' you're a chicken compared to 'im. You've wore badly like, not knowin' the use ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... great; and, descending with a rapidity to which we had long been strangers, to our great pleasure oak trees appeared on the ridge, and soon became very frequent; on these I remarked unusually great quantities of mistletoe. ...
— The Life of Kit Carson • Edward S. Ellis
... white petals to the heart; straight the mind's glance goes back to how many other pageants of summer in old times When perchance the sunny days were even more sunny; when the stilly oaks were full of mystery, lurking like the Druid's mistletoe in the midst of their mighty branches. A glamour in the heart came back to it again from every flower; as the sunshine was reflected. from them so the feeling in the heart returned tenfold. To the dreamy summer haze love gave a deep enchantment, the colours were fairer, ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... road, by the garden walls over which, at this season, no scent of flowers came, or blossomed branches hung forth. There were red holly-berries visible, and upon one mossy old tree a gray bunch of mistletoe could be seen on the other side of the street. But how quiet it was! They scarcely met a dozen people between the station ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... dinner. They always dined out. They strayed from the chop-house to chop-sueydom, from terrace to table d'hote, from rathskeller to roadhouse, from cafe to casino, from Maria's to the Martha Washington. Such is domestic life in the great city. Your vine is the mistletoe; your fig tree bears dates. Your household gods are Mercury and John Howard Payne. For the wedding march you now hear only "Come with the Gypsy Bride." You rarely dine at the same place twice in succession. You tire of the food; and, besides, you want to give them time ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... a primitive ladder. This was the favourite sitting-room of the girls by day, and served for Pancho's bedroom at night. It was beautiful enough to be fit shelter for all the woodland nymphs, with its festoons of mistletoe and wild grape-vines; but Pancho was rather an unappreciative tenant, even going so far as to snore in ...
— A Summer in a Canyon: A California Story • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... ten years ago—and your grandfather had a party for you. There was mistletoe in the hall, and we danced and stopped ...
— The Trumpeter Swan • Temple Bailey
... once was a Willow, and he was very old, And all his leaves fell off from him, and left him in the cold; But ere the rude winter could buffet him with snow, There grew upon his hoary head a crop of Mistletoe. ...
— Verses for Children - and Songs for Music • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... is always a thing forgotten When all the world goes well; A thing forgotten, as long ago, When the gods forgot the mistletoe, And soundless as an arrow of snow The arrow ...
— The Ballad of the White Horse • G.K. Chesterton
... that we took led to some rice plantations ten miles out of the city. Our path was ornamented by the live-oaks, cedar trees, the dogwood, and occasionally the mistletoe, and enlivened sometimes by the whistle of the mocking-bird. Down low by the wheels grew the wild azalea and the jessamine. Above our heads the Spanish moss hung from the trees ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell
... the mountain," Mary remarked to her lodger as Susan deposited her burden, "the mountain had to come to Mahomet. And here's a bit of mistletoe for your door, and of ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... of the literary pawnbroker comes to me from the (unpublished) letters of John Mistletoe, author of the "Dictionary of Deplorable Facts," that wayward and perverse genius who wandered the Third Avenue saloons when he might have been feted by the Authors' League had he lived a few years longer. Some day, I hope, the ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... in their apoplectic opulence. There were ruddy, brown-faced, broad-girthed Spanish onions, shining in the fatness of their growth like Spanish friars; and winking from their shelves in wanton slyness at the girls as they went by, and glanced demurely at the hung-up mistletoe. There were pears and apples, clustered high in blooming pyramids; there were bunches of grapes, made, in the shopkeepers' benevolence, to dangle from conspicuous hooks, that people's mouths might water gratis as they passed; there ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... wisdom, counseled the Birds that when the acorn first began to sprout, to pull it all up out of the ground and not allow it to grow. She said acorns would produce mistletoe, from which an irremediable poison, the bird-lime, would be extracted and by which they would be captured. The Owl next advised them to pluck up the seed of the flax, which men had sown, as it was a plant which boded no good to them. And, lastly, the Owl, seeing an ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... bells were rung; On Christmas Eve the Mass was sung; That only night in all the year Saw the staled priest the chalice rear. The damsel donn'd her kirtle sheen; The hall was dressed with holly green; Forth to the wood did merry men go, To gather in the mistletoe. Then open wide the baron's hall, To vassal, tenant, serf, and all; Power laid his rod of rule aside, And Ceremony doft'd his pride. The heir with roses in his shoes, That night might village partner choose; The lord, ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... remind the reader, that the chorus of "derry down" is supposed to be as ancient, not only as the times of the Heptarchy, but as those of the Druids, and to have furnished the chorus to the hymns of those venerable persons when they went to the wood to gather mistletoe.] ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... the flowers regularly: having effected this, he might wish, if it profited the plant, to render abortive the stamens and pistils in different flowers, which he could do by continued selection. By such steps he might aim at making a plant as wonderfully related to other organic beings as is the mistletoe, whose existence absolutely depends on certain insects for impregnation, certain birds for transportal, and certain trees for growth. Furthermore, if the insect which had been induced regularly to visit this hypothetical plant profited much by it, our same Being might wish ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... "I know foreign custom. I know everything. Mistletoe! Mistletoe! A kiss for the mistletoe, ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... respect, and some approaches to good-will; and Sir Duncan Yordas, being skillfully removed, spent his Christmas (without knowing much about it) in the best and warmest bedroom in the rectory. But Mordacks returned, as an honest man should do, to put the laurel and the mistletoe on his proper household gods. And where can this be better done than in that grand old city, York? But before leaving Flamborough, he settled the claims of business and charity, so far as he could see them, and so far as the state ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... My father was in the highest of spirits, and would have the house decorated with holly and mistletoe. He went out to a few parties, but he was always unwilling to leave my mother, though she wished him to go; then, when we were quite alone, the wind wailing, the snow falling and beating up against the windows, she would ask me to read ...
— My Mother's Rival - Everyday Life Library No. 4 • Charlotte M. Braeme
... river-bottoms and low grounds the sycamore is found as clean-limbed, tall and stately as elsewhere. The cottonwood, too, is common, though generally dwarfed, scraggy and full of dead limbs. A willow still more scraggy, and having many limbs destroyed with mistletoe, is often found in the same places. The elder rises above the dignity of a shrub, or under-shrub, but can hardly be found a respectable tree. Two varieties of oak are common, and the alder forms here a fine tree along ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... she nothing spoke, The sighs she heaved were soft and low, And naught was green upon the oak But moss and rarest mistletoe: She kneels beneath the huge oak tree, 35 And in ...
— Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... this in life, (I am now an old and experienced rat,) I have seen a mean race following and flattering their superiors, ready to lick the dust from their feet, not from real admiration or attachment, but, like a mistletoe upon a forest tree, because they had no proper footing of their own, and liked to be raised on the credit of another. It is easier to them to fawn than to work, to flatter the great than ...
— The Rambles of a Rat • A. L. O. E.
... white lilies bore the inscription, "For the Mother Superior." Last week a barrel of apples and another of oranges appeared mysteriously, and to-day comes a note, written in a hand we do not recognise, saying we are not to buy holly, mistletoe, evergreens, Christmas tree, or baubles of any kind, as they will be sent to us on December 22. We have inquired of our friends, but have no clue as yet, further than it must be somebody who knows our needs and desires very thoroughly. We have certainly entertained an angel unawares, but which ...
— Marm Lisa • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... could possibly be thought of the architectural line, to make a convent picturesque. It is built of graystone; but it is only once in a while that you can see the graystone, for the walls are almost completely covered with mistletoe and ivy and evergreen. There are the most delicious little arched windows with diamond panes peeping out from the mistletoe and evergreen, and always at all times of the year, a little Christmas wreath of ivy ...
— Our Boys - Entertaining Stories by Popular Authors • Various
... a rich widow to wed, to say nothing of expectations; it would be a marriage into the family of Negrepelisse, and for him this meant a family connection with the Marquise d'Espard, and a political career in Paris. Here was a fair tree to cultivate in spite of the ill-omened, unsightly mistletoe that grew thick upon it; he would hang his fortunes upon it, and prune it, and wait till he could gather its ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... left, was decked with bunches of holly and other evergreens, and from the middle of the beam bisecting the ceiling hung the mistletoe, of a size out of all proportion to the room, and extending so low that it became necessary for a full-grown person to walk round it in passing, or run the risk of entangling his hair. This apartment contained Mrs. Dewy the tranter's wife, and the four remaining children, ...
— Under the Greenwood Tree • Thomas Hardy
... "everything has sworn except one little shrub which is called Mistletoe, and grows on the eastern side of Valhal. I did not take an oath from that because I thought ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... of folly; What might be!—speech for a fool; With mistletoe round me, and holly, Scarlet and green, at Yule. With the elm in the place of the wattle, And in lieu of the gum, the oak, Years back I believed a little, And ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... of mistletoe, tender and fair, grew high above the field," and such a little thing it was, with its dainty green leaves and waxen white berries, nestling for protection under the strong arm of a great oak, that the goddess passed ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... the snow just as I did," said Amy, fastening a spray of mistletoe that a friend had sent her from England to the chandelier; "and the same old warm welcome ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... an ancient account of Balder, the sun-god, who was slain because of the jealousy of Loki (fire). Loki knew that everything in nature except the mistletoe had promised not to injure the great god Balder. So he searched for the mistletoe until he found it growing on an oak-tree "on the eastern slope of Valhalla." He cut it off and returned to the place where the gods were amusing themselves by using Balder as a target, hurling stones ...
— Yule-Tide in Many Lands • Mary P. Pringle and Clara A. Urann
... sideboard was filled with all sorts of utensils, plates, pitchers, tin bowls, wolf-traps. The children laughed when they saw a huge syringe. There was not a tree in the yard that did not have mushrooms growing around its foot, or a bunch of mistletoe hanging in its branches. Several of the trees had been blown down, but they had started to grow in the middle and all were laden with quantities of apples. The thatched roofs, which were of unequal thickness, looked ...
— Three short works - The Dance of Death, The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaller, A Simple Soul. • Gustave Flaubert
... no one else seemed capable of attendance, and Mellicent laid her head on her mother's lap, and never ceased crying, except for one brief interval, when she darted upstairs to peep inside the old oak chest, prompted thereto by a sudden reminiscence of the bride of the "Mistletoe Bough." There was no Peggy inside the chest, however; only a few blankets, and a very strong smell of camphor; so Mellicent crept back to her footstool, and cried with redoubled energy. In the kitchen the fat old cook sat with a hand planted on either knee, and thrilled ...
— About Peggy Saville • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... that his dramas are the book of human life. He was an accurate observer of Nature: he notes the markings of the violet and the daisy; the haunts of the honeysuckle, the mistletoe, and the woodbine. He marks the fealty of the marigold to its god the sun, and even touches the freaks of fashion, condemning in some woman of his time an usage, long obsolete, in accordance with which she adorned her head ...
— Shakespeare's Insomnia, And the Causes Thereof • Franklin H. Head
... all his tenants and domestics, and Captain Fitzchrome. The hall was spacious and lofty; and with its tall fluted pillars and pointed arches, its windows of stained glass, its display of arms and banners intermingled with holly and mistletoe, its blazing cressets and torches, and a stupendous fire in the centre, on which blocks of pine were flaming and crackling, had a striking effect on eyes unaccustomed to such a dining-room. The fire was open on all sides, and the smoke was caught ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... of holly. In the time of the 'Spectator'[1020] and of Gay,[1021] and later still,[1022] rosemary was also used, doubtless by old tradition, as referring in its name to the Mother of the Lord. Nor was mistletoe excluded.[1023] In connection with this plant, Stanley says a curious custom was kept up at York, which in 1754 had not long been discontinued. 'On the eve of Christmas Day they carried mistletoe to the high altar ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... with the unfading evergreen, their tall stems in the air. The live-oak, the sycamore, the Spanish mulberry, the holly, and the persimmon—gaily festooned with wreaths of the white and yellow jessamine, the woodbine and the cypress-moss, and bearing here and there a bouquet of the mistletoe, with its deep green and glossy leaves upturned to the sun—flung their broad arms over the road, forming an archway grander and more beautiful than any the hand of man ever wove for the greatest ...
— Among the Pines - or, South in Secession Time • James R. Gilmore
... crossbones, sometimes skeletons or skeleton-like figures, are not uncommon among the sepulchral embellishments of an earlier period. Where one of these figures is found, the forty-day-fast story is likely to grow out of it, as the mistletoe springs from the oak or ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... Before his father's effigy in church; Of one who then used often come to hall, Ever at Yule-tide, when the great log flamed In chimney-place, and laugh and jest went round, And maidens strayed beneath the mistletoe, Making believe not see it, so got kissed— Of one that joined not in the morrice-dance, But in her sea-green kirtle stood at gaze, A timid little creature that was scared By dead men's armor. Nought there suffered change, ...
— Wyndham Towers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... hang this mistletoe up over the folding doors," commanded the corporal, handing him a bamboo shoot, and pointing to the tent door. "Now when she comes asailin' in to dinner, all unaware of your presence, smack her a good one, right ...
— The Adventures of Piang the Moro Jungle Boy - A Book for Young and Old • Florence Partello Stuart
... custom-house, where two painted sentry-boxes leaned, past a squalid barnyard full of amber-coloured, unsavoury puddles and gaunt poultry, up to the thatched stone house where Grahame stood waiting. Over the door hung a withered branch of mistletoe, ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... Brittany, the Guaisnics are neither Frenchmen nor Gauls,—they are Bretons; or, to be more exact, they are Celts. Formerly, they must have been Druids, gathering mistletoe in the sacred forests and sacrificing men upon their dolmens. Useless to say what they were! To-day this race, equal to the Rohans without having deigned to make themselves princes, a race which was powerful before the ancestors of Hugues Capet were ever ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... "Never mind that, it's mistletoe, and anyone who stands under it will get kissed whether they like it or not. Now's your time, ladies," answered the saucy Prince, keeping his place and looking sentimentally at the girls, who retired precipitately from ...
— Eight Cousins • Louisa M. Alcott
... of Balder, personified pure and tender love. Balder was the fair god who loved light and lived a life of purity and innocence. The evil Loke induced Balder's blind brother, der, to throw an arrow of mistletoe at him and he fell dead. When Nanna saw the body of her dead husband carried out to the funeral pyre, her heart burst ...
— Fritiofs Saga • Esaias Tegner
... expensive and tedious, this meant more than it does to-day. The visitors received a joyous welcome, not a sort of empty every-day one. Plum pudding, roast beef, and mince pies and nuts were the order of the day, for beverage various kinds of drinks. Holly and mistletoe and evergreens obtained in nearly every house; in fact it was a joyous day from morn till night. Games of various kinds were played. Toys for children, rudimentary toys and picture books, cheap, and such as ...
— Some Reminiscences of old Victoria • Edgar Fawcett
... Mexican vaquero. Her white garments fluttered famously against the other's costume of yellow and black. She had let down her abundant dark hair and then carelessly caught it up again and woven into it a garland of mistletoe. She smiled on Abner with a plaintive, weary lifting of her eyebrows; she appeared to be "creating atmosphere" again, just as on the afternoon when he had first seen her pouring tea. She seemed a long way off. The occasion itself removed her one stage from him, and her costume another, ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... gifts out of paper and cardboard and paste; no one was forgotten. Mrs. Lynch declared herself "as rich as rich" with bracelets and a necklace made of red berries. Mrs. Budge, forgetting, when Robin held a sprig of mistletoe over her head and daringly kissed her wrinkled cheek, that "things was going to sixes and sevens," laughed until her sides ached at Harkness in his silly clown's cap. Robin and Beryl, with much solemnity, exchanged purchases each had secretly made at the village store and Robin could not resist ...
— Red-Robin • Jane Abbott
... Doctor's going to help run the thing, and Rena Jackson and Lea Adams are in it—and Annie Pilgreen. Her and Happy are down on the program for 'Under the Mistletoe', a tableau—the ...
— The Lonesome Trail and Other Stories • B. M. Bower
... place it never comes, and that is here. Here, in these pages no good wishes spring, No well-worn greetings tediously ring— For Christmas greetings are like pots of ore: The hollower they are they ring the more. Here shall no holly cast a spiny shade, Nor mistletoe my solitude invade, No trinket-laden vegetable come, No jorum steam with Sheolate of rum. No shrilling children shall their voices rear. Hurrah for ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... (eucalypti), with their evergreen, mistletoe-looking leaves, standing apart from each other, impressed us most. It seemed to us as if we were walking through a large park, with wide open spaces and clumps of trees here and there; only the leaves of the trees hung down long and thin, with their edges upwards, and the ...
— Peter Biddulph - The Story of an Australian Settler • W.H.G. Kingston
... Mrs. Channing, who lived here with her son, William Henry Channing, the well-known anti-slavery orator. Here Higginson, as a youth, used to listen with keenest pleasure, to the singing of his cousin, Lucy Channing, especially when the song she chose was, "The Mistletoe Hung on the Castle Wall," the story of a bride shut up in a chest. "I used firmly to believe," the genial colonel confessed to the Radcliffe girls, in reviving for them his memories of the house, "that there was a bride shut up in the walls of this ...
— The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees • Mary Caroline Crawford
... The bronze mistletoe branches with their orange-red flowers are said to be the disappointed babies whose wailing in vain for mothers has wearied the spirits who transform them into these bunches, the red flowers being formed from their baby blood. The spirits ...
— The Euahlayi Tribe - A Study of Aboriginal Life in Australia • K. Langloh Parker
... from his childhood up. I took nonce that whenever he got into a fight with the other lads he always beat them; so, every time that he came to the castle, I kept stirring him up to difficult feats. He succeeded in everything, whether he set out to dislodge the doves from the tower, or to pluck the mistletoe from the oak, or to tear down a crow's nest from the highest pine: he was equal to anything. I thought to myself—that boy was born under a happy star; too bad that he is a Soplica! Who would have guessed that in him I was to greet ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... is frequently mentioned in the religions of antiquity. We are told that the mystic powers of the mistletoe comes from the fact that it grows on the oak, a once sacred tree. The pine of the North, the palm and the fig tree of the South, were sacred trees at one time. John Newton made a study of tree worship, especially ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... the river bank, of which the Blue Cock was directly under the widow's great dwelling. From the town came sounds of revelry and wassail, of singing and quarrel, and from the church on Sand Hook softer chanting, where the women were twining holly and laurel and mistletoe. Nanking lay flat on the roof, with his face turned toward the sky. The moon went down ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... oil, but instead of secreting nectar in its leaves it harbors a small insect (coccus), whose sweet secretion is much relished by the ants. Dr. Beccari mentions an epiphytal plant growing on trees in Borneo, the seeds of which germinate, like those of the mistletoe, on the branches of the tree; and the seedling stem, crowned by the cotyledons, grows to about an inch in length, remaining in that condition until a certain species of ant bites a hole in the stem, which then produces a gall-like growth ...
— Scientific American, Volume 40, No. 13, March 29, 1879 • Various
... thus related in the Edda, or sacred books. The god Balder, the son of Odin, having dreamed that he was in some great danger of life, his mother, Friga, exacted an oath from all the creatures of the animal, the vegetable, and the mineral kingdoms, that they would do no harm to her son. The mistletoe, contemptible from its size and weakness, was alone neglected, and of it no oath of immunity was demanded. Lok, the evil genius, or god of Darkness, becoming acquainted with this fact, placed an arrow made of ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... The semi-transparent sprig of mistletoe, which Seraphine Dasher had mischievously suspended over the doorway, looked like a chaplet of pearls; the pointed stems of yew became frosted in silver; the variegated holly was transformed into branches of malachite, ornamented ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... custom, if connected popularly with Christian worship, has at its roots an older, sterner, and perhaps bloody origin. For, searching back into the mists of antiquity, we find that those early and mysterious peoples whose priests we call the "Druids," to whom the mistletoe was sacred (and with which we decorate our houses at Christmas, the festival of "peace and good-will"), offered human sacrifices to their dark gods on high mountains and at the hour ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... and Cape Hatteras, we find a low level region known as the Atlantic plain, running parallel to the coast, on which the long-leaved or peach-pines flourish. This region is generally called the Pine Barrens. Wild vines encircle the trees, and among them are seen the white berries of the mistletoe. In winter these Pine Barrens retain much of their verdure, and constitute one of the marked features of the country. Amid them are numerous swamps or morasses. One of great size, extending to not less than forty miles from north to south, and twenty-five in its greatest width, is called ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... Youth. " Blue First emotions of love. Lily, Water Eloquence. May Flower Welcome. Marigold Sacred affection. Marigold and Cypress Despair. Mandrake Rarity. Mignonette Your qualities surpass your charms. Morning Glory Coquetry, Affectation. Mock Orange Counterfeit. Myrtle Love in absence. Mistletoe Insurmountable. Narcissus Egotism. Nasturtium Patriotism. Oxalis Reverie. Orange Blossom Purity. Olive Peace. Oleander Beware. Primrose Modest worth. Pink, White Pure love. " Red Devoted love. Phlox Our hearts are united. Periwinkle Sweet ...
— Your Plants - Plain and Practical Directions for the Treatment of Tender - and Hardy Plants in the House and in the Garden • James Sheehan
... 'tis Yule! all eyes are bright, And joyous songs abound; Our log burns high, but it glows less bright Than the eyes which sparkle round. The merry laugh, and the jocund tale, And the kiss 'neath the mistletoe, Make care fly as fast as the blustering gale That wreaths the new fallen snow. 'Tis Yule! 'tis Yule! all eyes are bright, And joyous thoughts abound; The log burns high, but it glows less bright Than ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... doth bestow, The kernel of the mistletoe; And here and there as Puck should go, With terror to affright him, She nightshade straws to work him ill, Therewith her vervain and her dill, That hindreth witches of their will, Of ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick
... looked like cranes standing on one leg with their heads slanted in pensive contemplation. There were no vineyards, but orchards aplenty near the farmhouses, and all about there were other trees pollarded to the quick and tufted with mistletoe, not only the stout oaks, but the slim poplars trimmed up into tall plumes like the poplars in southern France. The houses, when they did not stand apart like our own farmhouses, gathered into gray-brown villages around some high-shouldered church with a bell-tower in front or at one ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... unornamented, and in the latter period of its history this became the ruling type. It will not have been forgotten that it was in an old oak chest that the real or mythical heroine of the pathetic ballad of "The Mistletoe Bough" concealed herself, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... during the Christmas festivities at Manor Farm, after a certain amount of kissing had taken place under the mistletoe, Mr. Pickwick was "standing under the mistletoe, looking with a very pleased countenance on all that was passing round him, when the young lady with the black eyes, after a little whispering with the other young ladies, made a sudden dart forward, and putting her arm round Mr. Pickwick's ...
— Pickwickian Manners and Customs • Percy Fitzgerald
... everything was done conformably to ancient usage. Here were kept up the old games of hoodman blind, shoe the wild mare, hot cockles, steal the white loaf, bob apple, and snap dragon; the Yule-clog and Christmas candle were regularly burnt, and the mistletoe with its white berries hung up, to the imminent peril of ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... jingled toy harnesses, shouted the prices of bright truck for tree ornaments, and pushed through the crowd, offering holly and mistletoe. Circles formed around men exhibiting mechanical turtles or boxing monkeys. From a furry sledge above a shop door, Santa Claus bowed and gesticulated, shaking the lines above his prancing reindeer. I had ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... did neither, was due to a divine inspiration which made me suddenly think of a device that I had once seen on a Druidical stone in Brittany—the sun, a hand with the index and little fingers pointing downwards, and a sprig of mistletoe. The instant I saw them in my mind's eye, the cords that held me ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... glad we worked out that mistletoe design for the pottery and the holly for the little white rugs," she said; "it makes the ...
— Glory of Youth • Temple Bailey
... form of a female, resplendent in that delicate species of beauty which attends the fairest complexion. It was, she thought, the Britoness Vanda; but her countenance was no longer resentful—her long yellow hair flew not loose on her shoulders, but was mysteriously braided with oak and mistletoe; above all, her right hand was gracefully disposed of under her mantle; and it was an unmutilated, unspotted, and beautifully formed hand which crossed the brow of Eveline. Yet, under these assurances of favour, a ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... Norwood, belonging to the archbishops, wherein was anciently a tree called the vicar's oak, where four parishes met, as it were in a point. It is said to have consisted wholly of oaks, and among them was one that bore mistletoe, which some persons were so hardy as to cut for the gain of selling it to the apothecaries of London, leaving a branch of it to sprout out; but they proved unfortunate after it, for one of them fell lame, and others lost an eye. At length in ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 403, December 5, 1829 • Various
... not make me give in," he said, "but I've had to make a complete surrender to the Little Colonel." That Christmas there was such a celebration at Locust that May Lilly and Henry Clay nearly went wild in the general excitement of the preparation. Walker hung up cedar and holly and mistletoe till the big house looked like a bower. Maria bustled about, airing rooms and bringing out stores ...
— The Little Colonel • Annie Fellows Johnston
... gay donkey-drives to visit a solemn dolmen in a gloomy pine-wood, with mistletoe hanging from the trees, and the ghosts of ancient Druids haunting the spot. The cavalcade on such occasions was an imposing spectacle. Matilda being fond of horses likewise affected donkeys (or thought she did, till she tried to drive one), and usually ...
— Shawl-Straps - A Second Series of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... It brings the schoolboy home from school. [N.B.—Vulgarly pronounced 'schule' in the West of England.] Puddings and mistletoe and holly, With other contrivances for banishing melancholy: Boar's head, for instance—of which I have never partaken, But the name has associations denied to ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... Christmas Ending.—And so, linked hand in hand, father and mother, son and daughter, husband and wife, nephew and niece, bowed their heads beneath the holly and mistletoe, and wished one another, with a heartiness that told volumes, "A Merry Christmas ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, December 19, 1891 • Various
... effect that seldom was a hint dropped from any source that Richard Perry Stanlock was entitled to the slightest credit for these magnificent doings. He spent Christmas at home in a quiet unassuming way amid the family decorations of holly and mistletoe, and a vast litter of presents, ...
— Campfire Girls in the Allegheny Mountains - or, A Christmas Success against Odds • Stella M. Francis
... Christmas eve and yesterday, there were little branches of mistletoe hanging in several parts of the house, in the kitchen, the entries, the parlor, and the smoking-room,—suspended from the gas-fittings. The maids of the house did their utmost to entrap the gentlemen boarders, old and young; under the privileged places, ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... These, with the mistletoe, the favourite Druidical plant, the sorcerer is entreated, in an old balled, to lay aside, to seek no more for vain enchantments, but to remember ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... the maire, though busy with a pitch-fork upon a manure heap, received us with municipal gravity. We were now nearing the battlefield of the Marne, and here and there along the roadside the trunks of the poplars, green with mistletoe, were shivered as though by lightning. Yet nothing could have been more peaceful than the pastoral beauty of the countryside. We passed waggons full of roots, drawn by a team of white oxen under the yoke, ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... the work of preparation in which all were glad to take part, the gathering of the evergreens—red-berried holly, mistletoe with its glistening pearls, ground-pine, moss, and other wood treasures—for the decoration of parlor, hall, and dining-room, and, above all, of the old village church, a gleeful labor in which the whole neighborhood took part, and helpers came from miles ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... buckled scarlet that capered to and fro, And all her rusty locks were wreathed with twisted mistletoe; But never a dint, or mark, or print, in the whiteness for to see, Though danced she high, though danced she fast, though ...
— Songs of Childhood • Walter de la Mare
... So Loki, who always tried to do mischief, made an arrow of mistletoe, and gave it to the prince who shot and ...
— Famous Men of the Middle Ages • John H. Haaren
... and submissive tact made the best of things; and that evening she began to decorate the hall, dining-room, and drawing-room with holly and mistletoe. Before the pair retired to rest, the true Christmas feeling, slightly tinged with a tender melancholy, permeated the house, and the servants were growing excited in advance. The servants weren't going ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... other lands. The Druidic priests were well versed in astronomy and astrology, and the planets had an important part in the teachings. A portion of their ritual is said to have correspondences with the early Jewish rites and worship. Their favorite symbol—the mistletoe—was used as indicating re-birth, the mistletoe being the new life springing forth from the old one, typified by the oak. The Druids traveled into Ancient Britain and Ireland, and many traces of their religious rites may still be found there, not only ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson
... the success of his mission Uncle Noah trudged sturdily down the two miles to Cotesville, past Major Verney's old plantation, the cheery lights of the great house twinkling brightly through a curtain of snow, and into the snow-laden air of the village streets alive with Christmas shoppers. Holly and mistletoe, Christmas trees filling the air with the odor of pine, dancing snowflakes and bright lights, wonderful windows wreathed and dotted in Christmas glitter, and cheery voices—who could resist them? Uncle Noah felt his ...
— Uncle Noah's Christmas Inspiration • Leona Dalrymple
... neither coyotes nor horses could scent him. The nearer he approached the head of the arroyo, where the well was located, the thicker grew the desert vegetation. At length a dead palo verde, with huge black clumps of its parasite mistletoe thick in the branches, marked a distance from the well that Gale considered close enough. Noiselessly he crawled here and there until he secured a favorable position, and then rose to ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
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