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More "Thistle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... cushions, and quilts—be it enacted, that no person or persons whatsoever shall make (to the intent to sell, or offer to be sold) any feather-bed, bolster, or pillow, except the same be stuffed with dry-pulled feathers, or clean down only, without mixing of scalded feathers, fen-down, thistle-down; sand, lime, gravel, unlawful or corrupt stuff, hair, or any other, upon pain of forfeiture,' &c. One would like to know what 'unlawful or corrupt stuff' is, and whether the corruptness be physical ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 443 - Volume 17, New Series, June 26, 1852 • Various
... say what there was about my partner—a whimsical humor, a slight mocking sound in his voice, which pleased me; he took nothing seriously; everything he said was as light as a thistle-down; he reminded me of the wit of grandmamma and the Marquis; we ...
— The Reflections of Ambrosine - A Novel • Elinor Glyn
... a flowering peach, A youth with a little blue wren held speech. With his back to a tree and his feet in the grass, He watched the thistle-down drift and pass, And the cloud-puffs, borne on a lazy breeze, Move by on their errand, above the trees, Into the vault ...
— The Glugs of Gosh • C. J. Dennis
... thistle-down were his feet, but no sooner had the Giant felt their tread than he gave a great start, and lifting his hand struck himself a tremendous blow upon his forehead. Pease-Blossom would have been crushed to death had he not managed ...
— The Story-teller • Maud Lindsay
... smiled above his harp, And turned his face to the naked sky, Where, blown before the wastrel wind, The thistle-down she ...
— The Seven Seas • Rudyard Kipling
... a thistle," returned that disgusted youth. "He means you're an ass, and you are. ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... on a purple sea-thistle close to his head. It poised there with fanning wings, so languid, ...
— The Gentleman - A Romance of the Sea • Alfred Ollivant
... family had arranged that Mr. Alexander should attend, instead of his brother; and as the said Mr. Alexander was deservedly celebrated for possessing all the pertinacity of a bankruptcy-court attorney, combined with the obstinacy of that useful animal which browses on the thistle, he required but little tuition. He was especially enjoined to make himself as disagreeable as possible; and, above all, to black-ball the Tauntons ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... Of what avail is all this seed if it falls as it ripens upon soil already overcrowded with its kind? Hence the vigorous emigration policy to be observed in plants of every name. Hence the fluffy sails set to catch the passing breeze by the dandelion, the thistle and by many more, including the southern plant of snowy wealth whose wings are cotton. With the same intent of seeking new fields are the hooks of the burdock, the unicorn plant, and the bur-parsley which impress as carriers ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various
... Sleepy?" said Jesse, going up to the sleek big white mule that stood with drooping head, the stalk of a thistle hanging out of a corner of his mouth. "He's fat and strong, isn't he? What makes him look so sad? And aren't you afraid he'll run away? He hasn't ...
— The Young Alaskans on the Missouri • Emerson Hough
... trees, Pretty little lettuce-leaves, Pretty pebbles, Red and brown, Pretty floating thistle-down. Pretty baby, Curly head, Standing in a pansy-bed, Pretty clouds All white and curled— O ...
— The Peter Patter Book of Nursery Rhymes • Leroy F. Jackson
... wheels composed of crickets' bones, And daintily made for the nonce; For fear of rattling on the stones With thistle-down they shod it; For all her maidens much did fear If Oberon had chanced to hear That Mab his Queen should have been there, He would not have ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick
... exceedingly prevalent throughout the universe, and the structure of the Milky Way is everywhere suggestive of them. But this is hazardous sport even for the imagination — to play with suns as if they were but thistle-down in the wind or corks ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... Thistle Grove Lane is one of those quaint survivals which enable us to reconstruct the past topographically, in the same way as the silent letters in a word, apparently meaningless, enable us to reconstruct the philological past. It is no longer a lane, but a narrow passage, and about midway down is crossed ...
— The Kensington District - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... shower of white over the green leaves of the sumach or sage. Snap-dragons of blue and white, dandelions that you must look at three or four times to be certain what they are, thistles that are soft and tender with flowers too pretty for the thistle family, orchids that you may try in vain to classify, and sages and mints of which you can barely recognize the genera, with cruciferae, compositae, and what-not, add ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... dragged out Arthur Onslow by the head and heels—the good boy of the piece; and we found he was never missed, but the whole much lightened by throwing this heavy character overboard. Next night "The Rose, Thistle, and Shamrock": Mr. Knox laughed, and seemed ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... steps at a time whenever the lightning showed me the way. It was necessary to be careful, as the road was raised, with a deep ditch on either side; several trees had already been blown down, and lay across it, and huge branches were being driven through the air like thistle-down. I found extreme difficulty in keeping my feet, especially at the cross-roads, where I was more than once all but blown over. At last I reached my house, but even then my struggles were not quite at an end. ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... wooly brown caterpillars wend their way in the short grass by the wayside, where the wild carrot and the purple bull-thistle are coming ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin
... is thought that they date from the same period as the screen itself. It is difficult, however, to believe that they can be so old, or that such good and bad work could belong to the same period. James I. introduced into the foliage of the spandrils the rose and thistle; but this uncalled-for emendation was summarily removed in the year 1875. The side arches of the screen were at one period filled up with thick walls, and two strong doors barred the arch of entrance, but this was altered by ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Exeter - A Description of Its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • Percy Addleshaw
... government in America the angel of freedom and the demon of slavery wrestled for the mastery. Tallyrand has beautifully and forcibly said: "The Lily and Thistle may grow together in harmonious proximity, but liberty and slavery delight in the separation." The pronounced policy of the best minds at the adoption of the Federal Constitution was to repress it as an institution inhuman in its ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... in such a brassy age I could not move a thistle; The very sparrows in the hedge Scarce answer to my whistle; Or at the most, when three-parts-sick With strumming and with scraping, A jackass heehaws from the ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... had for his crown; His jacket was woven of thistle-down. His shirt was a web by spiders spun; His breeches of softest feathers were done. His stockings of red-apple rind were tyne With an eyelash plucked from his mother's eyne. His shoes were made of a mouse's skin, Tanned with ...
— English Fairy Tales • Flora Annie Steel
... of earth united in the grumbling thunder of his wrath? See, there he stands, yonder in heaven—his form dark as midnight. I hear it—he calls—Overshadow the heavens, O Jupiter, With thy vaporous clouds! Cut off the oak and mountain-tops As a boy plucks the thistle. Leave me earth and my cabin Which thou hast not built, And my hearth-side, The glow of which thou enviest me! I know naught so miserable ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... field that no one knows about. We creep in and out through a little place where the barbed wire is down. We lie in the long grass and crush dandelions between our two cheeks till the milk comes out on our faces. We hold each other tight and the wind tip-toes all over us and pelts us with thistle-down. ...
— Sun-Up and Other Poems • Lola Ridge
... free men instead of a negro livery-stable. [Great applause and laughter.] Once let slavery get planted in a locality, by ever so weak or doubtful a title, and in ever so small numbers, and it is like the Canada thistle or Bermuda grass—you can't root it out. You yourself may detest slavery; but your neighbor has five or six slaves, and he is an excellent neighbor, or your son has married his daughter, and they beg you to help save their property, and you vote against your interests and ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... see the flower seeds wafted, From the nurturing mother tree, Tell we can, wherever planted, What the harvesting will be; Never from the blasting thistle, Was there gathered golden grain, Thus the seal the child receiveth, From its mother ...
— Elsie's children • Martha Finley
... told Owen the name in Arabic. These mountains were reached the following day, and, after passing through numberless defiles, the caravan debouched on a plain covered with stones, bright as if they had been polished by hand—a naked country torn by the sun, in which nothing grew, not even a thistle. In the distance were hills whose outline zigzagged, now into points like a saw, and now into long sweeping curves like a scythe; and these hills were full of narrow valleys, bare as threshing-floors. The heat hung ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... Town Hall clock was just chiming half-past three as Tom Pollard left his home in Dixon Street and made his way towards the Thorn and Thistle public-house. It was not Tom's intention to stay long at the Thorn and Thistle, as he had other plans in view, nevertheless something drew him there. He crossed the tram lines in St. George's Street, and, having stopped to exchange some rustic ...
— Tommy • Joseph Hocking
... went back to the Little Country to be counsellor at law to its people in time of need, and a father to Solon Denney and his two children. Solon could direct large affairs acceptably, but he and his babes were as thistle-down ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... face resembles a bare belly?" resumed Gervaise. "And the little one, with small eyes framed in red eyelids, pared down and slashed up like a thistle head?" ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... show up again, Zenie?" Miss Susie clipped her words off short to everyone. She was a wisp of a woman with little hands as dry and yellow as parchment. Her voice had a quavering falsetto break in it and her laugh, when there was occasion, was dry and withery and short-lived like a piece of thistle-down. ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... an Oaken Leaf, His Shirt a Spider's Web, Both light and soft for these his Limbs That were so smally bred. His Hose and Doublet Thistle Down, Together weav'd full fine; His Stockings of an Apple green, Made of the outward Rind; His Garters were two little Hairs Pluck'd from his Mothers Eye; His Shooes made of a Mouse's ...
— Parodies of Ballad Criticism (1711-1787) • William Wagstaffe
... expectant Eleanor; dressed, in these wilds, with a dainty care which would have done honour to London or Paris, with a bright colour in her cheeks, and the quiver of a smile on her lips. Ill! He thought he had seldom seen her look so well. Had she not always been of a thistle-down lightness? 'Exaggeration!—absurdity!' he said to himself fiercely, carrying his mind back to certain sayings in a girl's voice that were still ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... vain colossal England mows, With ponderous strength, the yielding foes; In vain fair Scotia, by her side, With courage flushed and Highland pride, Whirls her keen blade with horrid whistle And lops off heads like tops of thistle; In vain brave Erin, famed afar, The flaming thunderbolt of war, Profuse of life, through blood does wade, To lend her sister kingdom aid: Our conquering thunders vainly roar Terrific round the Gallic shore; Profoundest statesmen vainly scheme— 'Tis all a vain, ...
— Cottage Poems • Patrick Bronte
... of Glandine, Thistle-eaters the stoutest gave way, Outdone in their own special line By the forty-ass power ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... himself with a charitable effort; for he transplanted all the thistles he could find, and tended them carefully for Toby, who was fond of the prickly delicacy, and had eaten all he could find on the place. The boys had great fun over Tom's thistle bed; but he insisted that it was better to care for poor Toby than for himself, and declared that he would devote his entire farm next year to thistles, worms, and snails, that Demi's turtles and Nat's pet owl might have the food they loved, as well as the ...
— Little Men - Life at Plumfield With Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... experiment of leaving Paul with his grand-parents and calling for him in the late afternoon; but one day, on re-entering the Malibran, he was met by a small abashed figure clad in a kaleidoscopic tartan and a green velvet cap with a silver thistle. After this experience of the "surprises" of which Gran'ma was capable when she had a chance to take Paul shopping Ralph did not again venture to leave his son, and their subsequent Saturdays were passed together in the sultry gloom of the Malibran. Conversation with the ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... foolish clown, 'kill me the red humble bee on the top of that thistle yonder; and, good Mr. Cobweb, bring me the honey-bag. Do not fret yourself too much in the action, Mr. Cobweb, and take care the honey-bag break not; I should be sorry to have you overflown with a honey-bag. ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... carefully, and found it so closely branched that it was impossible to see into it more than a few inches. The branched were tough and elastic, and when it struck the ground after being tossed up it would rebound several inches. But it was almost as light asa thistle-ball, and when we turned it loose it rolled away across the prairie again as ...
— The Voyage of the Rattletrap • Hayden Carruth
... it to be said of me by those who know me best that I have always plucked a thistle and planted a flower in its place wherever ...
— De La Salle Fifth Reader • Brothers of the Christian Schools
... Nelly, his eyes on hers, treading lightly, his tall body apparently weighing no more than thistle-down. It was as though ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... associated with the late Lord Beaconsfield. The story of the Wars of the Roses is, of course, known to everybody, and how, in consequence of these feuds, the rose became the emblem of England, as the thistle is of Scotland, and the ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... door, where I had first to teach the bloodhounds a lesson. I never entered the filthy place but once. There were two sons and a daughter. Oh, how immortally beautiful that girl was! Such velvet darkness in the eye, such statuesque lines, such rose-leaf color, such hair—'hair like the thistle-down tinted with gold,' as John Mills, the Scotch poet-player, sang. The old man Raynier worshipped her, perhaps as a wild beast loves its whelp. But he had all sorts of fanciful names for her, Heart's-ease and Heart's Delight, and Violet and Rose and Lily. He grew almost gentle when he spoke ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... Romantic glen. Glen Ross. Camels on the down grade. Larger creek. The Ashburton. No natives. Excellent bushes for camels. A strange spot. Junction of several creeks. Large snake. Grand Junction Depot. A northerly journey. Milk thistle. Confined glen. Pool of water. Blind with ophthalmia. Leading the blind. Dome-like masses. Mount Robinson and The Governor. Ophthalmia range. Rocky spring. Native fig-trees. A glen full of water. Camels nearly drowned. Scarcity of living ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... thought that the male bird only was addicted to this practice, and that this might be his method of amusement while unprovided with a partner. The nest of the Hemp-bird is made of cotton, the down of the fern, and other soft materials, woven together with threads and the fibres of bark, and lined with thistle-down, if it be late enough to obtain it, and sometimes with cow's hair. It is commonly placed in the fork of the slender branches of a maple, linden, or poplar, and is fastened to them with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... with civil war and confusion. The queen conferred titles upon those who appeared to have influence in the nation [118] [See note Y, at the end of this Vol.] and attachment to her government, and revived the order of the thistle, which ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... by whose command Was form'd this Machiavelian plot, Not leave a thistle on thy land; Then who will own thee ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... though encumbered by his burden, again inanimate, her arms clasped around his neck, as they had been round that of her kinsman, made the most desperate exertions to bear her off, seeming to regard her weight no more than if the burden had been a cushion of thistle-down. He ran for a moment with astonishing activity, leaping over bush and gully, where such crossed his path, with such prodigious strength and suppleness of frame, as to the savages appeared little short of miraculous; and, it is more than probable he might have effected his ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... was suddenly afraid and thought only of himself. Jimmy Skunk knocked Jerry Muskrat flat in his hurry to get away. Billy Mink trod on Great-Grandfather Frog's big feet and didn't even say "Excuse me." Striped Chipmunk ran head first into a big thistle and squealed as much ...
— Mother West Wind's Children • Thornton W. Burgess
... dimm'd with weeping, In the silent dust are sleeping; When above my lowly bed The breeze shall wave the thistle's head, Thou ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... medicine." Belladonna, writes Mr. Conway, is esteemed in Bohemia a favourite plant of the devil, who watches it, but may be drawn from it on Walpurgis Night by letting loose a black hen, after which he will run. Then there is the sow-thistle, which in Russia is said to belong to the devil; and Loki, the evil spirit in northern mythology, is occasionally spoken of as sowing weeds among the good seed; from whence, it has been suggested, originated the popular phrase of "sowing ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... had a little brother, With eyes that were dark and deep; In the lap of that dim old forest, He lieth in peace asleep: Light as the down of the thistle, Free as the winds that blow, We roved there the beautiful summers, The summers of long ago; But his feet on the hills grew weary, And, one of the autumn eves, I made for my little brother, A ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... kindness was his chief delight, and his examples of kindness have been of untold benefit to millions of people. You remember he said, "When they lay me away let it be said of me that as I traveled along life's road I have always endeavored to pull up a thistle and plant a rose in ...
— Dollars and Sense • Col. Wm. C. Hunter
... past by his garden, and saw the wild bryar The thorn and the thistle grow broader and higher: The clothes that hang on him are turning to rags; And his money still wasts, still he ...
— Divine Songs • Isaac Watts
... brought in on her bier, and dances (she would!) her own funeral service. Maestro's heart is touched; he lies down in her stead, and she, dancing on a carpet of thistle-down shot with stars (I think), and her lord (I am sure), perpetually exclaiming, "How perfectly topping!"—both ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 24, 1920. • Various
... him," said Ralph. So he walked slowly up to the thistle and put out his hand to catch the butterfly. But the butterfly spread his wings and flew up in the air. In a moment he came back and lighted on the ...
— Our Young Folks at Home and Abroad • Various
... turned with a jerk, And laying his finger aside of his nose, And giving a nod, up the chimney he rose, He sprang to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle, And away they all flew like the down of a thistle; But I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight, "Happy Christmas to all, and ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... as Christ was—kindly, too, It seems so strange the thistle, hatred, grew To whip your tender backs, with great ado, Because you builded better ...
— Hydesville - The Story of the Rochester Knockings, Which Proclaimed the Advent of Modern Spiritualism • Thomas Olman Todd
... who was sunning himself on the top of a thistle, Frank prepared to strike, when it suddenly mounted and flitted over a hedge. In a moment the boys had scrambled through the gap and were in full pursuit. The butterfly flitted here and there, sometimes allowing the boys to approach within a few feet and then flitting ...
— By Sheer Pluck - A Tale of the Ashanti War • G. A. Henty
... and thus be made to blossom as the rose. Others are dry land of a general character; but there is water enough to make all fruitful: so that instead of the thorn, the myrtle; and instead of the thistle, the fig; and instead of the deadly upas, the ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... neither the rose nor the thistle, nor does he forget the solitary blade of grass in the distant waste. He destroys thoroughly and unceasingly. Everywhere we may see how he crushes to dust plants and beasts, men and their works. Even the Egyptian pyramids, that would seem to defy him, are trophies of his power,—monuments of ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... breeds of camels any more than the different breeds of other domesticated animals. During the summer, when the camels are required to find their own sustenance along the road, a large caravan travels but a wretched eight miles a day, the remainder of the time being occupied in filling his capacious thistle and camel-thorn receptacle; this comes of the scarcity of good grazing along the route, compared with the number of camels, and the consequent necessity of wandering far and wide in search of pasturage, rather ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... a wish, (I mind its pow'r), A wish that to my latest hour Shall strongly heave my breast, That I for poor auld Scotland's sake Some usefu' plan or book could make, Or sing a sang at least. The rough burr-thistle, spreading wide Amang the bearded bear, I turn'd the weeder-clips aside, An' spar'd the symbol dear: No nation, no station, My envy e'er could raise; A Scot still, but blot still, I ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... helmet on; It was plumed of the silk of the thistle down: The corslet plate that guarded his breast Was once the wild bee's golden vest; His cloak, of a thousand mingled dyes, Was formed of the wings of butterflies; His shield was the shell of a lady-bug queen, Studs of gold on a ground ...
— The Culprit Fay - and Other Poems • Joseph Rodman Drake
... filled all the stockings; then turned with a jerk, And laying his finger aside of his nose, And giving a nod, up the chimney he rose. He sprang to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle, And away they all flew like the down of a thistle. But I heard him exclaim, ere they drove out of sight, "Happy Christmas to all, and to all a ...
— The Elson Readers, Book 5 • William H. Elson and Christine M. Keck
... if any of your contibutors could inform me in an early number, when and on what occasion the Thistle was adopted as the emblem of the Scottish nation? I have looked into many historians, but as ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 2, November 10 1849 • Various
... procession the Highlanders, who were real Scotchmen, in plaids, and bonnets with eagle feathers. Every one had a claymore by his side, and a thistle on his breast; and there were pipers playing ...
— Life at Puget Sound: With Sketches of Travel in Washington Territory, British Columbia, Oregon and California • Caroline C. Leighton
... the yard were two American goldfinches, or thistle-birds, in bright yellow and black plumage, both males. They also went to the new homestead in the oak, inspected it, chatted over it in their sweet tones, and then passed on. It began to look as though the nest were in the market for ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... common in their summer range in the United States, nesting at a low elevation in bushes and low trees. The two eggs are white, .50 x .35. Data.—Brownsville, Texas, May 5, 1892. Nest of fine bark-like fibre on the outside, lined with lint from thistle plant; located on limb of small hackberry. ...
— The Bird Book • Chester A. Reed
... testify : atesti. text : teksto textile : teksa. thaw : degeli. theatre : teatro. then : tiam, poste, do. thick : dika; densa. thigh : femuro. thing : afero, ajxo, objekto. think : pensi, opinii. thirst : soif'i, -o. thistle : kardo. thorn : dorno. thrash : drasxi; skurgxi, bategi. threaten : minaci. threshold : sojlo. thrill : eksciti. throat : gorgxo, fauxko. throne : trono. throw : jxeti. thrush : turdo. thunder : tondr'i, -o. thus : tiel, tiamaniere; jene thyme : timiano. ticket : bileto. tickle : tikli, ...
— The Esperanto Teacher - A Simple Course for Non-Grammarians • Helen Fryer
... walking with papa in the fields, when he saw a red and black butterfly. It was on a thistle. ...
— Our Young Folks at Home and Abroad • Various
... for all his wretched plight, but made a spring after it in the waves, and clutched it to him, and sat in the midst thereof, avoiding the issues of death; and the great wave swept it hither and thither along the stream. And as the North Wind in the harvest tide sweeps the thistle-down along the plain, and close the tufts cling each to other, even so the winds bare the raft hither and thither along the main. Now the South would toss it to the North to carry, and now again the East would yield it to the West ...
— DONE INTO ENGLISH PROSE • S. H. BUTCHER, M.A.
... his soul In solitude.—Stranger! these gloomy boughs Had charms for him; and here he loved to sit, His only visitants a straggling sheep, The stone-chat, or the glancing sand-piper; And on these barren rocks, with juniper, And heath, and thistle, thinly sprinkled o'er, Fixing his downcast eye, he many an hour A morbid pleasure nourished, tracing here An emblem of his own unfruitful life: And lifting up his head, he then would gaze On the more distant scene; how lovely ...
— Lyrical Ballads, With Other Poems, 1800, Vol. I. • William Wordsworth
... several quarters, will not be found in any volume of Browning's works, and was omitted from "Men and Women" by accident, and from further collections by forgetfulness, it may be fitly quoted here. Karshook, it may be added, is the Hebraic word for a thistle. ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... a plant closely resembling the thistle, and it is extensively cultivated for its flowering head. The head is gathered just before the flower expands. The eatable portion is the fleshy part of the calyx, the bottom or basin of the blossom and the true base of the leaves of ...
— Mrs. Wilson's Cook Book - Numerous New Recipes Based on Present Economic Conditions • Mary A. Wilson
... otherwise. It takes the bloom off the freshness of young writers if they are determined to exhibit the last new words that are in, or out of season. New words have a doubtful position at first. They float here and there like thistle-down, and their future depends upon where they settle. But until they are established and accepted they are out of place for children's use. They are contrary to the perfect manner for children. We ask that their English should be simple and unaffected, not that it should ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... about London in those days,—or, rather, one who was an old Liberal but a young lord,—one Lord Mount Thistle, who had sat in the Cabinet, and had lately been made a peer when his place in the Cabinet was wanted. He was a pompous, would-be important, silly old man, well acquainted with all the traditions of his party, and perhaps, on that account, useful,—but a bore, ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... clumps of crested dog's-tail and stray blades of succulent darnel; I force my attention on a toadstool, whose soft and lowly head gleams sickly white in the moonbeams. I glance from it to a sleeping close-capped dandelion, from it to a thistle, from it again to a late bush vetch, and then, willy-nilly, to the accursed elm. My God! What a change. It wasn't like that when I passed it at noon. It was just an ordinary tree then, but now, now—and what is that—that sinister ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... There was also Fox's "Political Pause" with its wonderful requirements of inflection to express irony; Sprague's "American Indians," "Not many generations ago, where you now sit, encircled with all that exalts and embellishes civilized life, the rank thistle nodded in the wind, and the wild fox dug his hole unscared." Did you not commit it to memory and speak it? Then there was Webster's Speech in which he supplied John Adams from his own fervid imagination that favorite of all patriotic boys, "Sink or swim, live ...
— A History of the McGuffey Readers • Henry H. Vail
... the power of increase is even greater and its effects more distinctly visible. Hundreds of square miles of the plains of La Plata are now covered with two or three species of European thistle, often to the exclusion of almost every other plant; but in the native countries of these thistles they occupy, except in cultivated or waste ground, a very subordinate part in the vegetation. Some American plants, like the cotton-weed (Asclepias cuiussayica), have now become common ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... the nest and pick up a precarious subsistence on asters and thistles till the frosts of October cut them off. You may often see, in late September or early October, these tramp bees passing the night or a cold rain-storm on the lee side of a thistle-head. The queen bee alone survives. You never see her playing the vagabond in the fall. At least I never have. She hunts out a retreat in the ground and passes the winter there, doubtless in a torpid state, as she stores no food against the inclement season. Emerson has put this fact ...
— The Wit of a Duck and Other Papers • John Burroughs
... sifted a sieve of unsifted thistles. If Theophilus Thistle, the thistle-sifter, sifted a sieve of unsifted thistles, where is the sieve of unsifted thistles that Theophilus ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... took up the pail. The cows meandered along. She was rather glad Jim did not see the thistle. She would not ...
— A Little Girl in Old New York • Amanda Millie Douglas
... thee; Yes, with this magic Blade I shall touch thee; Such is its power That, like a thistle, Withered 'twill leave thee, Like a thistle the ...
— The Children of Odin - The Book of Northern Myths • Padraic Colum
... problem in Euclid. To do so would be to treat the creatures by a law not germane to their nature. It is, indeed, a radical vice in Calvinistic reasoning that, because God is omnipotent, He can as easily therefore create virtue in a free being as He can waft the down of the thistle on the breeze. It is quite true that "whatsoever the Lord pleased that did He in heaven and in earth" (Ps. cxxxv. 6). But the question is—What is His pleasure in regard to the production of virtue? Is it a forced ...
— The Doctrines of Predestination, Reprobation, and Election • Robert Wallace
... the verification of it are of so recent a date, that we cannot resist giving it a place in our pages. In the account of the late Captain Flinder's voyage of discovery, is the melancholy relation of the loss of the master, Mr. Thistle, with seven others, in a boat, on the inhospitable shores of Terra Australia. To this narrative, the following note is subjoined, which we shall here quote in Captain Flinder's own words: "This evening, Mr. Fowler, the lieutenant, told me a circumstance which I thought very extraordinary, and it ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... more forsaken looking place it would be hard to imagine. Not that the surrounding country wasn't ruggedly beautiful and grand; the hills were covered with live-oak, yucca grass, chulla, manzanita, and starred with the white blossoms of wild thistle. But this locality was remote ...
— The Seed of the Toc-Toc Birds • Francis Flagg
... surveyed and explored the mountain. There are a lot of strawberries planted there, which do very well, but there were not many ripe. The common weeds and plants of the top were very like English ones, such as buttercups, sow-thistle, plantain, wormwood, chickweed, charlock, St. John's wort, violets and many others, all closely allied to our common plants of those names, but of distinct species. There was also a honey-suckle, and a tall and very pretty kind of cowslip. None of ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... the thistle; but the thistle maintained his abominable heresy so stoutly that the little vine and the daisy and the violet were quite at a loss to know which of the two to believe,—the old oak-tree ...
— A Little Book of Profitable Tales • Eugene Field
... evening coolness and the gradual approach to the great Alps, which await him at the close of the day. It is about Mulhausen that he begins to feel a change in the landscape. The fields broaden into rolling downs, watered by clear and running streams; the green Swiss thistle grows by riverside and cowshed; pines begin to tuft the slopes of gently rising hills; and now the sun has set, the stars come out, first Hesper, then the troop of lesser lights; and he feels—yes, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... oak-leaf hat he had for his crown; His shirt of web by spiders spun; With jacket wove of thistle's down; His trowsers were of feathers done. His stockings, of apple-rind, they tie With eyelash from his mother's eye His shoes were made of mouse's skin, Tann'd with ...
— English Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... I can figure to myself your whole surprised attitude as you exclaim, "What, in the name of all that is restless, has sent 'Dame Shirley' to Rich Bar? How did such a shivering, frail, home-loving little thistle ever float safely to that far-away spot, and take root so kindly, as it evidently has, in that barbarous soil? Where, in this living, breathing world of ours, lieth that same Rich Bar, which, sooth to say, hath a most taking name? And, for pity's sake, ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... that was so brave and so comely, and that could overtake a deer at its greatest speed, and see a thistle thorn on the darkest night, the wife he took was Eibhir of the plaited yellow hair, that was the foreign sweetheart of ...
— Gods and Fighting Men • Lady I. A. Gregory
... (Cuscutaceae); the beautiful group of convolvuluses (Convolvulaceae); the gentians (Gentianaceae); the primrose group (Primulaceae); the heaths (Ericaceae); the graceful hair-bell and its allies (Campanulaceae); the very large group to which belong the daisy, dandelion, and thistle (Compositae); the honeysuckle order (Caprifoliaceae); the ivy (Araliaceae); the large order containing the fennel, hemlock, and a multitude of other forms which, though mostly ranking as herbs, attain gigantic dimensions in some species ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... hope it will grow out," she bantered, in an effort to put him at his ease. "What a pity if his illness should leave poor Don with a head like a thistle—with all the fuzzy-wuzzy inside." ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... clown, "the red bumble-bee on the top of the thistle yonder, and bring me the honey-bag. ...
— Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare • E. Nesbit
... you let us?" asked Betty eagerly, jumping up and dropping a kiss, light as thistle-down, upon the old face. "And we'll bring you flowers, whole bunches of them. Will you promise to ...
— The Outdoor Girls at the Hostess House • Laura Lee Hope
... action, you will see many. A faint pur comes out of the heavens and two planes are seen circling as they exchange bullets from their machine guns. Another plane is turning to the right and left and ducking to avoid the thistle blows of smoke which burst from the shrapnel shells ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... paled. The indecisiveness which never dared to grasp the thistle firmly was troubling him with a new dilemma. Yet something in Marcia Terroll made a call upon him which no other woman had yet made—the call to be honest at ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... The sweet-smelling clover, He, humming, hangs over; The scent of the roses Makes fragrant his wings: He never gets lazy; From thistle and daisy, And weeds of the meadow, Some ...
— McGuffey's Second Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... because he had had so little sleep of late; and then he would be fresh for her, fresh for youth and beauty, coming towards him across the sunlit lawn—lady in grey! And settling back in his chair he closed his eyes. Some thistle-down came on what little air there was, and pitched on his moustache more white than itself. He did not know; but his breathing stirred it, caught there. A ray of sunlight struck through and lodged on his boot. A ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... be sorry to think," I broke in, "that that sweet little floating thistle-down of a child I once knew was to be done to ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... up the fulsome thistle in the prime: Young trees bend lightly, but grow strong in time. Were I the worthiest to advise your honour, You should pursue him with your spredding bandes Swifter in march then is the lightning flame, And take him tardy ...
— A Collection Of Old English Plays, Vol. IV. • Editor: A.H. Bullen
... Crickets bones, And daintily made for the nonce, For feare of ratling on the stones, With Thistle-downe they shod it; For all her Maydens much did feare, If Oberon had chanc'd to heare, 150 That Mab his Queene should haue bin there, He would ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton
... that there followed for M. de Cussy an extremely bad quarter of an hour. M. de Cussy, in fact, deserves your sympathy. His self-sufficiency was blown from him by the haughty M. de Rivarol, as down from a thistle by the winds of autumn. The General of the King's Armies abused him—this man who was Governor of Hispaniola—as if he were a lackey. M. de Cussy defended himself by urging the thing that Captain Blood had so admirably urged already on his behalf—that if the terms he had made ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... hills o' the cromlech and cairn, Where blossoms the thistle by hillocks o' fern; There Freedom in triumph an altar has made For holiest rites in the land ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... great, flower-grown railway banks, garden-set stations, and all the little things of the vanished nineteenth century still holding out against Immensity. Here and there would be a patch of wind-sown, wind-tattered giant thistle defying the axe; here and there a ten-foot puff-ball or the ashen stems of some burnt-out patch of monster grass; but that was all there was to hint at the coming ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... chasm of the bluffs, having better soil and underwood, which, thin at first, increases gradually in density. Low bushes, hardly a foot high, are formed by the American Thistle, (Ceanothus Americanus,) a plant whose leaves were used instead of tea, in Boston, during the Revolution. Next follow the Hazel-bush, (Corylus Americana,) the fiery-red Castilleja coccinea, and the yellow Canadian Louse-wort; the Dipteracanthus strepens, with great blue funnel-shaped blossoms, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... than ever—a wood-nymph, half divine. Yet, obscurely, he felt a change in her, from the beginning of their talk. Why had she sent for him? The wildest notions had possessed him, ever since her letter reached him. Yet, now that he saw her, they seemed to float away from him, like thistle-down on the wind. ...
— Helena • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... boughs. We can't have all these bundles coming down on his reverence's head—— Come on, Babet, it's your turn. What's the good of staring at me like that with your big eyes? Fine rosemary yours is, my word! as yellow as a thistle. You next, La Rousse. Ah, well, that is splendid laurel! You got that out of your ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... laughing, "they say and say it very distinctly, too, 'Charlotte, Charlotte, don't you hear me whistle?' Charlotte is his mate, you know; and the reply to that is 'Philip, Philip's sitting on the thistle.'" ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... branches, which in a warm climate each stem throws out close above the surface of the ground, breaks the length of fibre and renders it unfit for those purposes for which, in the northern regions of Europe, its tall branchless stem is so well adapted. The sow thistle, a plant that occurs in almost every part of the world, was nothing different here from its usual habit in Europe. We observed also a species of Chenopodium and of Artemisia or wormwood; abundance of the Pe-tsai, and other common culinary vegetables. ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... India in 1862 he was given a silver pitcher and a silver tray.[19] The pitcher (13 inches high and 7-1/2 inches in diameter) has a tall, slender neck with a decided downturn to the pouring lip and a hinged lid with a thistle flower as a knob. The neck is engraved on each side with a design of grape leaves and grapes. The bowl of the pitcher has eight panels embossed with scrolls of vines and flowers. Both the tray and the pitcher are marked "Allen and ...
— Presentation Pieces in the Museum of History and Technology • Margaret Brown Klapthor
... there. I quite go with that line of reasoning. By their fruits shall ye know them. A man don't usually go to a thistle to find grapes. But let me ask you, Ned, do you usually find that murderers, drunkards, burglars, thieves, and blackguards in general are students of the Bible and given to ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... swept and thrashed to and fro in the thundering wind like a thistle, and flamed in the full sunshine like a bonfire. The green, fantastic human figure, vivid against its autumn red and gold, was already among its highest and craziest branches, which by bare luck did not break with the weight of his big body. He ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... There have been many other examples of the almost incredible power of multiplication of an animal or plant when taken into a new environment, removed from conditions which held it in check, as the introduction of the mongoose into Jamaica, the rabbit into Australia, the thistle into New South Wales and ...
— Disease and Its Causes • William Thomas Councilman
... somewhat impressive. His complexion was that of the copper-beech tree. His frame was stalwart, though slightly stooping. His mouth was large, and he carried an unpolished sapling as his walking-stick, except when he carried a spud for cutting up any thistle he encountered on his walks. His castle stood in the midst of a park, surrounded by dusky elms, except to the southward; and when the moon shone out, the gleaming stone facade, backed by heavy boughs, was visible from the distant high road as a white ...
— A Group of Noble Dames • Thomas Hardy
... the prime adventurer of the party, now got ready to settle at Portland Bay. He chartered a small schooner, "The Thistle", loading her with stores and live stock, and with selections of seed, fruit trees, vegetables, etc., part of them bought from Fawkner, who had then a market garden on Windmill Hill, near Launceston, besides keeping ...
— Personal Recollections of Early Melbourne & Victoria • William Westgarth
... with the Duke of Cumberland whom he succeeded. A cheerful, singularly polite, modest, well-conditioned man withal. To be slightly better known to us, if we live. He at present is a Boy of ten, chasing the thistle's beard. ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... was unceremoniously put aside, it was then. Sam had come rather leisurely at first—then with a sort of flying bound which cleared the fence like a thistle down, he bore down upon the doctor, and taking up Faith as easily as if she had been a kitten, absolutely ran with her to a spring which welled up through the long meadow grass a few yards off. There the doctor found him applying the cold water with both gentleness and skill, for Sam ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... with the country, young De Clameran was confident of eluding his pursuers. He knew that the next field was a thistle-field, and was separated from the chestnut by a ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau
... and squeal and whistle, Rollin' in the sand; Let him have the freedom of the whole back lot. Things that hurt like thorn o' thistle Workin' in your hand You'll be wishin' some time that those things were not! When I think of babies—old From the things that can't be told— And then look at him a-dancin', Singin', shoutin', in his joy: Don't put out a hand to stop ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... again rebound; But not a dog doth bark to welcome thee, Nor churlish porter canst thou chafing see; All dumb and silent like the dead of night, Or dwelling of some sleepy Sybarite! The marble pavement hid with desert weed, With houseleek, thistle, dock, and hemlock-seed.— Look to the towered chimneys, which should be The windpipes of good hospitality:— Lo there the unthankful swallow takes her rest, And fills the tunnel ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... the dull-green, serried hop-rows, talking at rare intervals about the value of the crops, the drainage of the estate, the village schools, the Primrose League, and the iniquities of Mr. Gladstone, while Oke of Okehurst carefully cut down every tall thistle that caught his eye—I sometimes felt, I say, an intense and impotent desire to enlighten this man about his wife's character. I seemed to understand it so well, and to understand it well seemed to imply such ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... passes, Saucy grasshoppers Leapt about the grasses And the thistle-burs; And the whispered chuckle Of the katydid Shook the honeysuckle ...
— Riley Child-Rhymes • James Whitcomb Riley
... deep shade of the cool glossy leaves, through the long warm summer day; to gather the fresh nuts and berries; to drink the pure dews of heaven, all bright and sparkling from the opening flowers; to sleep on soft beds of moss and thistle-down in some hollow branch rocked by the wind as in a cradle. Yet, though this was the happy life led by a family of pretty grey squirrels that had their dwelling in the hoary branch of an old oak-tree that ...
— Lady Mary and her Nurse • Catharine Parr Traill
... boughs Had charms for him: and here he loved to sit, His only visitants a straggling sheep, The stone-chat, or the glancing sand-piper; And on these barren rocks, with fern and heath And juniper and thistle sprinkled o'er, Fixing his downcast eye, he many an hour A morbid pleasure nourished, tracing here An emblem of his own unfruitful life: And, lifting up his head, he then would gaze On the more distant scene,—how lovely ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... a species of tall thistle of rank and unpleasant scent, is the first plant that appears when the ground has been freed from timbers by fire: if a piece of land lies untilled the first summer after its being chopped, the following spring shows you a smothering crop of this vile weed. The next plant ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... place but once. There were two sons and a daughter. Oh, how immortally beautiful that girl was! Such velvet darkness in the eye, such statuesque lines, such rose-leaf color, such hair—'hair like the thistle-down tinted with gold,' as John Mills, the Scotch poet-player, sang. The old man Raynier worshipped her, perhaps as a wild beast loves its whelp. But he had all sorts of fanciful names for her, Heart's-ease and Heart's Delight, and Violet and Rose and Lily. He grew almost gentle when he spoke to ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... breath of the nettle stung her, And the thistle's rude embrace Burned her sensitive nature, And scarred ...
— Debris - Selections from Poems • Madge Morris
... specious weight like tissue freight The snowflakes are—in sparkle pure As the rich parure A lovely queen were proud to wear; As volatile, as fine and rare As thistle-down dispersed in air, Or bits of filmy lace; Like nature's tear-drops strewn around That beautify and warm the ground, But melt ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... mulberry, together with a sweet wilderness of unfamiliar plants, are not to be perfectly enjoyed on a fourfooted animal that stumbles, or on a road full of pitfalls. We shall only say that the Cynara cardunculus, (a singularly fine thistle or wild artichoke;) the prickly uncultivated love-apple, (a beautiful variety of the Solanum,) of which the decoction is not infrequently employed in nephritic complaints; the Ferula, sighing for occupation all along the sea-shore, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... said Ralph. So he walked slowly up to the thistle and put out his hand to catch the butterfly. But the butterfly spread his wings and flew up in the air. In a moment he came back and ...
— Our Young Folks at Home and Abroad • Various
... Valley at the Riverside Mountains, Riverside County (Stager, Jour. Mamm., 20:226, May 14, 1939). West of the Rocky Mountains the species is known to occur also in at least the southern two-thirds of Arizona, southwestern New Mexico, and is recorded from Thistle Valley, Utah, on the basis of two young specimens in alcohol (Miller and Allen, Bull. U. S. Nat. Mus., 144:87, May 25, 1928). Through comparisons made possible by the acquisition, in the last few years, of mammals ...
— A New Subspecies of Bat (Myotis velifer) from Southeastern California and Arizona • Terry A. Vaughan
... shepherd's purse, mallows, wild marjoram, crane's bill, marsh-mallows, false eglantine, laurel, violet, blue flag, wild indigo, solomon's seal, dragon's blood, comfrey, milfoil, many sorts of fern, wild lilies of different kinds, agrimony, wild leek, blessed thistle, snakeroot, Spanish figs which grow out of the leaves, tarragon and numerous other plants and flowers; but as we are not skilled in those things, we cannot say much of them; yet it is not to be doubted that experts would be able to find many simples of great and different virtues, in which we have ...
— Narrative of New Netherland • J. F. Jameson, Editor
... all comers, but as we heard that the duke was entertaining a distinguished company, including Lord Delamere of Vale Royal from our own county of Cheshire, we did not apply for permission to enter the grounds, and thus missed seeing the great Scotch thistle, the finest in all Scotland. This thistle was of the ordinary variety, but of colossal proportions, full seven feet high, or, as we afterwards saw it described, "a beautiful emblem of a war-like nation with ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... onlookers and swelled into a mighty shout as the Scotchmen vaulted over the barrier into the arena. It was a nice question for connoisseurs in physical beauty as to which team had the best of it in physique. The Northerners in their blue jerseys, with a thistle upon their breasts, were a sturdy, hard-bitten lot, averaging a couple of pounds more in weight than their opponents. The latter were, perhaps, more regularly and symmetrically built, and were pronounced by experts to be the faster team, but there was a massive, gaunt look about the Scotch ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Goblins when the thorns of the Ryls reached their savage hearts and let their life-blood sprinkle all the plain. And afterward from every drop a thistle grew. ...
— The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus • L. Frank Baum
... we could afford barilla as an export." The Erythraea Australis is, we are informed, a good substitute, and is used as such, for hops; and one species of tobacco is indigenous to the colony. The sow-thistle of Swan River was, in the early days of the settlement, used as a vegetable, but is now eaten only by the domestic animals, by whom it is much relished. As a salad, it is said to be scarcely inferior to endive. The Helicrysum, a biennial of the Vasse district, is a grateful fodder for horses, ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... comprehended it, the effect might have been beneficial. For, whatever knowledge the donkey might have possessed about the flood, he did not realise the fact that since he last tickled his palate with the spinous thistle—an herb which probably assumed to his throat the flavour that pepper does to ours—there had been a considerable depth of water over the fen, and that it was very soft. The result was, that while the lads stopped short, and then ...
— Dick o' the Fens - A Tale of the Great East Swamp • George Manville Fenn
... worth living! All the dainties an aspirant to gout could wish for were, according to our "Official Gazette," to be had for the asking. At the hotels, "Highland Cream Whiskey" was for ever arriving; and "O.K." (another thistle!) kept "licking 'em all" with monotonous invincibility. Iced beer was on tap; the champagne was sparkling; the wine needed no bush. The cheese was still alive (on paper). Cakes, hams, jams, biscuits, potted fish, flesh, and good red herring were, so to speak, all over the shops. This was the sort ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... recovered from his degradation on that day: and in June 1562, the Magistrates directed the portraiture of the Saint, which had served as their emblem, to be cut out of the city standard, as an idol, and a Thistle to be inserted, "emblematical (as a recent writer remarks) of rude reform, but leaving the Hind which accompanied St. Giles, as one of the heraldic supporters of the city arms."—(Caledonia, vol. ii. ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox
... been reprinted in several quarters, will not be found in any volume of Browning's works, and was omitted from "Men and Women" by accident, and from further collections by forgetfulness, it may be fitly quoted here. Karshook, it may be added, is the Hebraic word for a thistle. ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... bath, bathe, sith, sithe, both, both, loath, loath, oath, oathes, smith, smithy, breath, of, off, then, yet, liveth or liveth, joth or joth, mouth, mouth, path or path, wrath, wreath, faith or faith, thy, thigh, this, thistle, thou, thousand, thank, they, them, theame, thus, thunder, thine, thin, goal or goal, as afore, motion, crimson, action, Acteon, singed, hanged, changed, shepherd, Shaphat, dishonour, asham'd, bishop, mishap, character, charity, duckherd, blockhead, ...
— Magazine, or Animadversions on the English Spelling (1703) • G. W.
... him in the House. Then, when the first meeting of the Cabinet was summoned after his return, it became known that he also had resigned his office. There was nothing said about his resignation in the House. He had resigned on the score of ill-health, and that very worthy peer, Lord Mount Thistle, formerly Sir Marmaduke Morecombe, came back to the Duchy of Lancaster in his place. A Prime Minister sometimes finds great relief in the possession of a serviceable stick who can be made to go in and out as occasion may require; ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... naturalists who surveyed and explored the mountain. There are a lot of strawberries planted there, which do very well, but there were not many ripe. The common weeds and plants of the top were very like English ones, such as buttercups, sow-thistle, plantain, wormwood, chickweed, charlock, St. John's wort, violets and many others, all closely allied to our common plants of those names, but of distinct species. There was also a honey-suckle, and a tall and very pretty kind of ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... mother, I could not endure it—except it were required of me. I can live on as little as any, but it must be with some liberty. I have surely inherited the spirit of some old sea-rover, it is so difficult for me to rest! I am a very thistle-down for wandering! I must know how my fellow-creatures live! I should like to BE one man after another—each for an hour ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... when the valleys are dark, And she chatters and dances the blessed day long, Now laughing in gladness, now singing a song. She never is silent; the whole summer day She is off on the green with the blossoms at play; Now seeking a buttercup, plucking a rose, Or laughing aloud at the thistle she blows. ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... first is that of Jotham: "The trees went forth on a time to anoint a king over them; and they said unto the olive-tree, Reign thou over us," etc. Judg. 9:8-15. The second is that of Jehoash: "The thistle that was in Lebanon sent to the cedar that was in Lebanon, saying, Give thy daughter to my son to wife: and there passed by a wild beast that was in Lebanon, and trode down ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... That these same fault-finding beings Can produce such horrid sounds as Those which I have just now heard. Are such tones not like a nosegay Made of straw, and thorns, and nettles, In the midst a prickly thistle? And in presence of this maiden Who the trumpet there is blowing, Can a man then without blushing E'er sneer at our caterwauling? But, thou valiant heart, be patient! Suffer now, the time will yet come When this self-sufficient monster, Man, will steal from us the true art Of expressing ...
— The Trumpeter of Saekkingen - A Song from the Upper Rhine. • Joseph Victor von Scheffel
... these eyes, long dimm'd with weeping, In the silent dust are sleeping; When above my lowly bed The breeze shall wave the thistle's head, Thou wilt think of ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... of mutton, Capon pies. Doe-coneys. with capers. Bacon pies. Hedgehogs. Sirloins of beef. Soused hog's feet. Snites. Breasts of veal. Fried pasty-crust. Then large puffs. Pheasants and phea- Forced capons. Thistle-finches. sant poots. Parmesan cheese. Whore's farts. Peacocks. Red and pale hip- Fritters. Storks. pocras. Cakes, sixteen sorts. Woodcocks. Gold-peaches. Crisp wafers. Snipes. Artichokes. Quince tarts. Ortolans. ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... Thistle and darnell and dock grew there, And a bush, in the corner, of may, On the orchard wall I used to sprawl In the blazing heat of the day; Half asleep and half awake, While the birds went twittering by, And nobody there my lone ...
— Peacock Pie, A Book of Rhymes • Walter de la Mare
... leaning a little forward, he might have touched it with his lips. The thought brought him no horror. For even as he looked, one of her hands crept up to her cheek—the small, soft hand that had touched his face and hair as lightly as a bit of thistle-down—and he knew that two hands like that could not have killed a man who was fighting for life ...
— The Valley of Silent Men • James Oliver Curwood
... composed of crickets' bones, And daintily made for the nonce; For fear of rattling on the stones With thistle-down they shod it; For all her maidens much did fear If Oberon had chanced to hear That Mab his Queen should have been there, He would ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick
... enviable being! No storms, no clouds, in thy blue sky foreseeing, Play on, play on, My elfin John! Toss the light ball, bestride the stick,— (I knew so many cakes would make him sick!) With fancies buoyant as the thistle-down, Prompting the face grotesque, and antic brisk, With many a lamb-like frisk! (He's got the scissors snipping at your gown!) Thou pretty opening rose! (Go to your mother, child, and wipe your nose!) Balmy and breathing music like the south (He really brings my heart into ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... if one will, the other horn of the dilemma. That, too, one will find as ill a resting place as an upright thistle. Let the wages,—as with Mr. Bellamy,—all be equal. The managers then cannot vote themselves large emoluments if they try. But what about the purple citizens? Will they work, or will they lie round in their purple garments and loaf? Work? Why should they work, their pay is there "fresh and ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... builds a plain nest in the open field, without so much as a bush or thistle or tuft of grass to protect it or mark its site; you may step upon it, or the cattle may tread it into the ground. But the danger from this source, I presume, the bird considers less than that from another. Skunks and foxes have a very impertinent curiosity, as Finchie well knows; and ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... weight dully falls. But I have said 'Tis not for me, but France—Good-bye an hour. [Kissing her.] I must dictate some letters. This new move Of England on Madrid may mean some trouble. Come, dwell not gloomily on this cold need Of waiving private joy for policy. We are but thistle-globes on Heaven's high gales, And whither blown, or when, or how, or why, Can choose us not at all!... I'll come to you anon, dear: staunch Roustan Will light ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... patches here and there, threading and seaming the steep, as if a white-footed hare had been coursing about. Little stubby brier shoots, and clumps of russet bracken, and dead heather, ruffling like a brown dog's back, broke the dull surface of withered herbage, thistle stumps, teasels, rugged banks, and naked brush. Down in the bottom the noisy brook was scurrying over its pebbles brightly, or plunging into gloom of its own production; and away at the bend of the valley was seen the ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... and poor as Christ was—kindly, too, It seems so strange the thistle, hatred, grew To whip your tender backs, with great ado, Because you builded better ...
— Hydesville - The Story of the Rochester Knockings, Which Proclaimed the Advent of Modern Spiritualism • Thomas Olman Todd
... lizards, and mud-hens, she would be as ruthlessly exterminated as they. Every passing sportsman would fill her with duck-shot, and every strolling gentleman would step out of his way to smite off her head with his cane, as one decapitates a thistle. But in the drawing-room one lays off his destructiveness with his hat and gloves, and the Young Person enjoys the same immunity that a sleepy mastiff grants to the worthless kitten campaigning against ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... She held up her face to let the cold, star-shaped crystals settle on it. She caught them on her sleeve to marvel over their airy beauty. "It's like frozen thistle-down!" she cried. "I hope it will snow all day and all night until everything is covered. I never saw a ...
— The Little Colonel's Christmas Vacation • Annie Fellows Johnston
... said the foolish clown, 'kill me the red humble bee on the top of that thistle yonder; and, good Mr. Cobweb, bring me the honey-bag. Do not fret yourself too much in the action, Mr. Cobweb, and take care the honey-bag break not; I should be sorry to have you overflown with a honey-bag. Where ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... that are cultivated in our gardens, with bells large and clear; crimson pinks; the Michaelmas daisy; a plant with a thin, radiated yellow flower, of the character of an aster; a centaurea of a light purple, handsomer than any English one; a thistle in the dryest places, resembling an eryngo, with a thick, bushy top; mulleins, yellow and white; the wild mignonnette, and the white convolvulus; and clematis festooning the bushes, recalled the flowery fields and lanes of England, and yet told us that we were not there. The meadows had also ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... a right to wag his tongue, much less to wag his pen, without saying something; he knows not what mischief he does, past computation, scattering words without meaning, to afflict the whole world yet before they cease. For thistle-down flies abroad on all winds and airs of wind.... Ship-loads of fashionable novels, sentimental rhymes, tragedies, farces ... tales by flood and field are swallowed monthly into the bottomless pool; ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... or less perfection, belonging to that mystery, a Man. Capabilities there were in me to give battle, in some small degree, against the great Empire of Darkness: does not the very Ditcher and Delver, with his spade, extinguish many a thistle and puddle; and so leave a little Order, where he found the opposite? Nay your very Day-moth has capabilities in this kind; and ever organizes something (into its own Body, if no otherwise), which was before Inorganic; ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... had been in that car, so he could have seen Miss Flyaway trying to prop her mother's head against her own morsel of a shoulder—about as secure a resting-place as a piece of thistle-down. ...
— Dotty Dimple at Play • Sophie May
... the uneuphonius chorus. The marvellous Plays of Hyspiros! ... the grandest tragedies, the airiest comedies, the tenderest fantasies, ever created by human brain, have been called in question by these thistle-eating animals!—and one most untractable mule-head hath made pretence to discover therein a passage of secret writing which shall, so the fool thinks, prove that Hyspiros was not the author of his own works, but only a literary cheat, and forger of another and lesser man's inspiration! ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... was loaded with good provisions of several sorts, which, in time of harvest, he was carrying into the field for his master and the reapers to dine upon. On the way he met with a fine large thistle, and being very hungry, began to mumble it; which while he was doing, he entered into this reflection:—"How many greedy epicures would think themselves happy, amidst such a variety of delicate viands as I now carry! But to me this bitter, prickly thistle is more savory and relishing ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... may be found. As we shall see when we come to the spiral nebul, gyratory movements are exceedingly prevalent throughout the universe, and the structure of the Milky Way is everywhere suggestive of them. But this is hazardous sport even for the imagination — to play with suns as if they were but thistle-down in the wind or corks ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... the madhouse," he suggested. We walked on. "Please," said a little rosy-faced boy, "if you want to find out any thing about old houses, Hill, the rat-catcher, knows them all, as he hunts up the rats and sparrows about; and you have only to go down Thistle Grove, into the Fulham road—straight on. His is a low house, ma'am—his name in the window—you can't pass it, for the ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... there pushed any ragged thistle-stalk Above its mates, the head was chopped; the bents Were jealous else. What made those holes and rents In the dock's harsh swarth leaves, bruised as to baulk 70 All hope of greenness? 'tis a brute must walk Pashing their life out, ...
— Dramatic Romances • Robert Browning
... Hamilton, too, but didn't have the time. He seemed to be hurtling to one side of the ring and then the other, yet effortlessly, as lightly as thistle-down. Couldn't stop for anything—Holliday insisted on fighting right along. He couldn't remember it was so long since he had laid a ...
— Winner Take All • Larry Evans
... and ruins on which the wild pinks nodded, and its stone-covered roofs overgrown with white sedum. I was struck by the number of prickly plants on the sandy banks of the Tarn. Those which now made the best show of bloom were the star-thistle centaurea and ononis repens. The appearance of this last was very curious, for in addition to its pink pea-blossoms it seemed to be sprinkled over with little flowers the colour of forget-me-nots. These, however, ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... unmanly lover, when, all at once, he found himself riveted to the ground. His feet refused to move, his hands hung powerless at his side, his tongue refused to utter a word. The bow and arrow fell from his hand, and his spear lay powerless. A little child, not so high as the fourth leaf of the thistle, came and spat on him, and a company of the spirits danced around him singing a taunting song. When they had thus finished their task of preparatory torture, a thousand little spirits drew their bows, and a thousand arrows pierced his heart. ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends: North American Indian • Anonymous
... it may be the flower is on the top of the pericarp as in pomegranate, apple, pear, plum, and myrtle ... for these have their seeds below the flower.... In some cases again the flower is on top of the seeds themselves as in ... all thistle-like plants'.[36] Thus Theophrastus has succeeded in distinguishing between the hypogynous, perigynous, and epigynous types of flower, and has almost come to regard its relation to the fruit as the essential ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... doubt from consideration, they seemed to be much forgotten. The family was like an old thistle-head, withering on its wintry stalk, alone in a wind-swept field. All the summer through not a single visitor, friend or stranger, had slept in the house. A fresh face was more of a wonder to Cosmo than to ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... to wait long for company. For one by one, the Lovely Ladies, wild with the joy of the mazy dance, the soft rush of the wind and the laughing and clapping of the little leaves, loose their hold, and drift to earth light as thistle-down, and that is the end of their dancing for that year. Where do they go to while the year goes by? I have never found out, but I think it most likely that they go to the ...
— Piccaninnies • Isabel Maud Peacocke
... bordering the fields on each side. The worm-fence was of a polished, satiny, silvery gray, with trimmings of green vines clinging to it, wild-flowers peeping out of its crotches, and tall purple thistles swaying their heads toward it. On one especially tall thistle the Red ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... which I would draw attention, is a saccharine substance resembling dark honey. Mr. Loftus, who obtained it near Kirrind, 13th July, 1851, and whose specimen is in the British Museum, states that it is exuded from a species of thistle when pierced by a Rhynchophorous insect; but he fails to inform us for what purposes it is used ...
— Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society - Vol. 3 - Zoology • Various
... wisest. If this were not true, the present chronicler would never be guilty of the folly of expending his time and ink upon such details as go to make up this true history; it would be lost labor, were not the flower and the blade of grass, the very thistle down upon the breeze, each and all, as wonderful as the grand forests of the splendid tropics. What character or human deed is too small or trivial for study? Never did a great writer utter truer ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke
... once, for heaven's sake. The general has come with all his officers. Ah! goodness, you have got a thistle in your moustache." ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... to the trouble of translating it for the benefit of others. I am for this synthetical method on a journey in preference to the analytical. I am content to lay in a stock of ideas then, and to examine and anatomise them afterwards. I want to see my vague notions float like the down of the thistle before the breeze, and not to have them entangled in the briars and thorns of controversy. For once, I like to have it all my own way; and this is impossible unless you are alone, or in such company as I do not covet. I have no objection to argue a point ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... by his garden, and saw the wild bryar The thorn and the thistle grow broader and higher: The clothes that hang on him are turning to rags; And his money still wasts, still he ...
— Divine Songs • Isaac Watts
... Geraint into the castle court, His charger trampling many a prickly star Of sprouted thistle on the broken stones. He look'd and saw that all was ruinous. Here stood a shatter'd archway plumed with fern; And here had fall'n a great part of a tower, Whole, like a crag that tumbles from the cliff, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester
... of white cotton cloth, some of wool in bands of bright colour having a very pretty effect. But, unlike their red brethren of the North, they know nought of either leggings or moccasin. Their mild climate calls not for such covering; and for foot protection against stone, thorn, or thistle, the Chaco Indian rarely ever sets sole to the ground—his horse's back being ...
— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid
... proceedings, and of the solemnity of religious rites, a people whose national pride and mutual attachment have passed into a proverb, a people whose high and fierce spirit, so forcibly described in the haughty motto which encircles their thistle, preserved their independence, during a struggle of centuries, from the encroachments of wealthier and more powerful neighbours, such a people cannot be long oppressed. Any government, however constituted, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the early train, Whirl down with shriek and whistle, 50 And feel the bluff North blow again, And mark the sprouting thistle Set up on waste patch of the lane Its ...
— Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems • Christina Rossetti
... can do nothing with any French part in Covent Garden. If they can find a theater of half that size to get it up in, well and good; but seen from a distance, which defies discrimination of objects, a thistle is as good as a rose, and in that enormous frame refinement is mere platitude, and finish of detail ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... hogfish and lamprey in American waters—that's a near-fish that sucks the blood of other fish, you know—should be exterminated just in the same way that the farmers of the country are making away with the Canada thistle. Against the sharks—the tigers of the sea, the killers—the wolves of the sea, and all the other predatory forms, relentless war should be waged until the wild fishes of the sea are destroyed, as the wild beasts of the forest ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... chain the plighted pair, And join paternal with maternal care; The married birds with nice selection cull Soft thistle-down, gray moss, and scattered wool, Line the secluded nest with feathery rings, Meet with fond bills, and woo with fluttering wings. Week after week, regardless of her food, The incumbent Linnet warms ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... with gold and precious jewels, he set off, attended only by his faithful De Fistycuff. From place to place he wandered, year after year, till his locks were turned to silvery grey, and his beard became like the down of a thistle. One evening his heart fainting, and his once firm knees trembling, he reached the gate of a monastery in Bohemia. Then he sunk down before even his Squire could ring the bell to summon the monks to his assistance. When the porter opened ...
— The Seven Champions of Christendom • W. H. G. Kingston
... heard Robert Collyer speak in a sermon of James Oliver as "a transplanted thistle evolved into a beautiful flower," and "the man ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... opportunity of writing a few lines to you, my dear uncle, as I have a chance of sending it ashore by the revenue cutter Thistle, which is lying alongside of us. Between us, we have just captured a rascally smuggling lugger, with a cargo of lace, silk, and spirits. You will, I am sure, be surprised and grieved to hear that among the crew of the lugger was James Walsham. I ...
— With Wolfe in Canada - The Winning of a Continent • G. A. Henty
... and a profusion of buds standing out at all angles, is, in July, almost the only growing thing to be seen on the barren-looking mesa around Colorado Springs. Anything more unpromising can hardly be imagined; the coarsest thistle is a beauty beside it; the common burdock has a grace of growth far beyond it; the meanest weed shows a color which puts it to shame. Yet if the curious traveler pass that way again, late in the afternoon, he shall find that "Solomon in all his glory ...
— A Bird-Lover in the West • Olive Thorne Miller
... advantages, without labour,—without fulfilling his destiny? No. Ferocious and noxious animals disappear only before cultivation. It is part of the labour to which he has been sentenced, that he should rend them out as the 'thistle and the thorn;' or drive them to those regions, which are not yet required by him, and of which they may continue ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... in the early stage, when the sensation is that of sharp, sticking pain, feeling as though a brier or thistle was in the finger, immerse the part in water as hot as possible, into which put common salt as long as it will dissolve; hold it in this hot salt bath for an hour or more at a time, and when removed, apply finely pulverized salt, wet in Spirits of Turpentine; bind on the salt with several ...
— An Epitome of Homeopathic Healing Art - Containing the New Discoveries and Improvements to the Present Time • B. L. Hill
... took in Lady Derl, and then her long lashes drooped before Lady Derl had time to take in Folly. Folly's whole self drooped. She was still a bit of thistle-down, but its pal, the breeze, was gone. She crossed the room, barely touched Helene's hand, and then fluttered down to stillness on the ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... was found at Hawking Craig in Ayrshire, is a well-known example of this style. Silver brooches of immense size, some having pins 15 in. in length, and the penannular ring of the brooch terminating in large knobs resembling thistle heads, are occasionally found in Viking hoards of this period, consisting of bullion, brooches and Cufic and Anglo-Saxon coins buried on Scottish soil. In medieval times the form of the brooch was usually a simple, flat circular disk, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... a little brother, With eyes that were dark and deep; In the lap of that dim old forest, He lieth in peace asleep: Light as the down of the thistle, Free as the winds that blow, We roved there the beautiful summers, The summers of long ago; But his feet on the hills grew weary, And, one of the autumn eves, I made for my little brother, A bed ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... Glenalmond students have adopted of wearing the hood, which our Bishops (not without diversity of opinion) had granted for those who had been educated at our College. It is a hood lined with green (Scottish thistle colour), and they have a way of wearing it in a manner which brings the coloured part in front. Pray, pray, don't think of answering this; it is merely to correct an unfavourable impression in one whose favourable opinion I much desiderate. I cannot tell you the pleasure ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... Britannia," and the "Boyne Water." The word "Union," followed by the names of Balfour, Abercorn, Iveagh, Hartington, Chamberlain, and Goschen, was conspicuous on the side galleries, and over Mr. Balfour's head was a great banner bearing the rose, thistle, and shamrock, with the Union Jack and the English crown over all. Boldly-printed mottoes in scarlet and white, such as "Quis Separabit?" "Union is strength," "We Won't submit to Home Rule," and "God Bless Balfour," ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... should attend, instead of his brother; and as the said Mr. Alexander was deservedly celebrated for possessing all the pertinacity of a bankruptcy-court attorney, combined with the obstinacy of that useful animal which browses on the thistle, he required but little tuition. He was especially enjoined to make himself as disagreeable as possible; and, above all, to black-ball the Tauntons at ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... racemes of the choke-cherries, or the shining scarlet globes of the cultivated fruit, fairly shout aloud to the birds—"Come and eat us, we're as good as we look!" But Mother Nature looks on and laughs to herself. Thistle seeds are blown to the land's end by the wind; the heavier ticks and burrs are carried far and wide upon the furry coats of passing creatures; but the cherry could not spread its progeny beyond a branch's length, were it not for the ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... and his face paled. The indecisiveness which never dared to grasp the thistle firmly was troubling him with a new dilemma. Yet something in Marcia Terroll made a call upon him which no other woman had yet made—the call to be honest ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... settlers will be few and far between for many generations. What the Plains universally need is a plant that defies intense protracted drouth, and will propagate itself rapidly and widely by the aid of winds and streams alone. I do not know that the Canada thistle could be made to serve a good purpose here, but I suspect it might. Let the plains be well covered by some such deep-rooting, drouth-defying plant, and the most of their soil would be gradually arrested, the quality of that which remains, meliorated, and other plants encouraged and enabled ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... would be here. He would have just one tiny nap, because he had had so little sleep of late; and then he would be fresh for her, fresh for youth and beauty, coming towards him across the sunlit lawn—lady in grey! And settling back in his chair he closed his eyes. Some thistle-down came on what little air there was, and pitched on his moustache more white than itself. He did not know; but his breathing stirred it, caught there. A ray of sunlight struck through and lodged on his boot. A bumble-bee alighted and strolled on the crown ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... same in sexual reproduction: it is a matter of perfectly common experience, that the tendency on the part of the offspring always is, speaking broadly, to reproduce the form of the parents. The proverb has it that the thistle does not bring forth grapes; so, among ourselves, there is always a likeness, more or less marked and distinct, between children and their parents. That is a matter of familiar and ordinary observation. We notice the same thing ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... (Leptospermum scoparium) the latter a low shrub with handsome white or pinkish flowers. In some of the ravines two species of tree-ferns of the genus Cyathea grow luxuriantly in the moist clayey soil. Everywhere one sees common English weeds scattered about, especially the sow-thistle and common dock, and a British landshell (Helix cellaria) has even found its way to New Zealand and is to be met with ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray
... engineer's boots with rippled soles. The tops of the boots were tight-fitting and the peg-bottomed trousers were drawn snugly over them. Odin learned later that what had appeared to be green moss out there on the weathered plain was a kind of thistle ...
— Hunters Out of Space • Joseph Everidge Kelleam
... upland spirits too Who love the shadeless downs to climb; There, in the far-off fabled time, Men called them when the moon was new, And built them little huts of stone With briar and thistle over-grown. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 5, 1920 • Various
... Chapters: and although this soile naturally of it selfe (if it haue receiued his whole Ardor in due seasons, and haue beene Ploughed cleane, according to the office of a good Husband) doth neither put forth Thistle or other weede, yet if it want either the one or the other, it is certaine that it puts them forth in great abundance, for by Thistles and weedes, vpon this soile, is euer knowne the goodnesse and dilligence of ...
— The English Husbandman • Gervase Markham
... "Political Pause" with its wonderful requirements of inflection to express irony; Sprague's "American Indians," "Not many generations ago, where you now sit, encircled with all that exalts and embellishes civilized life, the rank thistle nodded in the wind, and the wild fox dug his hole unscared." Did you not commit it to memory and speak it? Then there was Webster's Speech in which he supplied John Adams from his own fervid imagination that favorite of all patriotic boys, "Sink or swim, live or die, ...
— A History of the McGuffey Readers • Henry H. Vail
... NICHOLAS: I make so many of the "Thistle-Puffs" spoken of in the September number that I thought I would let you know how I fix mine. After I get the thistles I cut off all the green excepting a little at the bottom; then I pull out all the purple, and leave them out in the sun till they ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - No 1, Nov 1877 • Various
... hard to realize that three years before the valley before us had been one of the great fertile valleys of France, dotted with little grey towns with glowing red roofs. For as we looked it seemed to be "that ominous tract, which all agree hides the Dark Tower!" There it all lay; the "ragged thistle stalk," with its head chopped off; "the dock's harsh swart leaves bruised as to balk all hope of greenness." "As for the grass, it grew scantier than hair in leprosy; thin dry leaves pricked the mud, which underneath looked kneaded up with blood!" It was the self-same field ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... blows me fairly away!' she said, jumping up and floating off to the mill door like any thistle down, on the ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... with ivy, were half demolished and become the residence of birds of prey. Huge fragments of the eastern tower, which was almost demolished, lay scattered amid the high grass, that waved slowly in the breeze. 'The thistle shook its lonely head: the moss whistled to the wind.'[24] A Gothic gate, richly ornamented with fretwork, which opened into the main body of the edifice, but which was now obstructed with brushwood, remained entire. Above the vast and magnificent portal of this gate arose a ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... of errors by scriptural investigation was putting on armour of proof. Self-confidence was gradually swallowed up by dependence upon the word—the result of the severest spiritual training. Those painful exercises produced a life of holiness and usefulness. Can the thistle produce grapes, or the noxious weeds corn? Never! His experience came from heaven, in mercy to his soul, and to make him a blessing to millions of his race. By this he was made truly wise, civilized, enlightened, and elevated. Every painful ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... must be beaten and stoned and punched with sticks, if you want to get them into the least bit of a trot, and which always want to stop by the roadside, if they see so much as a cabbage-leaf or a tempting thistle. ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... America Afloat. Shamrock and Thistle; or, Young America in Ireland and Scotland. Red Cross; or, Young America in England and Wales. Dikes and Ditches, or, Young America in Holland and Belgium. Palace and Cottage; or, Young America in France and Switzerland. Down the ...
— The Yacht Club - or The Young Boat-Builder • Oliver Optic
... you'd come to the end of your patience," said Stephen, smiling, but gravely; "and truly, I don't wonder. But what's this about holy-thistle? Are you sick, ...
— One Snowy Night - Long ago at Oxford • Emily Sarah Holt
... Jareb: Ephraim shall receive shame, and Israel shall be ashamed of his own counsel. 7. As for Samaria, her king is cut off as the foam upon the water. 8. The high places also of Aven, the sin of Israel, shall be destroyed: the thorn and the thistle shall come up on their altars; and they shall say to the mountains, Cover us; and to the hills, Fall on us. 9. O Israel, thou hast sinned from the days of Gibeah: there they stood: the battle in Gibeah against the children of iniquity did not overtake them. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... cicadas crouched in ranks: Slack the thistle-head piled its down-silk grey: Scarce the stony lizard sucked hollows in his flanks: Thick on spots of umbrage our drowsed flocks lay. Sudden bowed the chestnuts beneath a wind unheard, Lengthened ran the grasses, the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... brought to mind that beautiful passage of Ossian, [330] relating to the daughter of Reuthamir, the "white-bosomed" Moina:—"I have seen the walls of Balclutha, but they were desolate. The fire had resounded in the halls, and the voice of the people is heard no more. The thistle shook there its lonely head; the moss whistled to the wind. The fox looked out of the windows, the rank grass of the wall waved round its head. Desolate is the dwelling of Moina, silence is in the house.... Raise the, song of mourning, O bards! over the land of strangers. They have but fallen ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... conversation and capricious laughter, Vanya's vague music drifted like wind-blown thistle-down, and his absent regard never left Marya, where she rested among the cushions in low-voiced ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... the high hillside, I started a stone rolling, which as it went plunging into a hazel thicket, thrust out a deer, whose flight seemed fairly miraculous to me. He appeared to drift along the hillside like a bunch of thistle-down, and I took a singular delight ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... of Scotland; created for his grandfather Sir James Stuart in 1703) on his father's death in 1723. He was elected a representative peer for Scotland in 1737 but not in the following parliaments, and appears not to have spoken in debate. In 1738 he was made a knight of the Thistle, and for several years lived in retirement in Bute, engaged in agricultural and botanical pursuits. From the quiet obscurity for which his talents and character entirely fitted him Bute was forced by a mere accident. He had resided in England since the rebellion ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... attenuated frame will be mingled with the dust from which it sprung, and scattered by the winds of heaven, or by the labour of future generations, as chance may dictate, will yield sustenance to the thistle which wars against the fertility of nature, or the grain which is the support of our existence,—to the nightshade with its deadly fruit, or the creeping violet with its sweet perfume. The heart which has throbbed so tumultuously with the extreme ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... and the waves swept him away like thistle-down, and beat back at him as he fought through them and stood choked and panting on the other shore. He did not dare stop to rest. The Marcums, too, had crossed the river up at the ford by this time, and were galloping towards him; and Isom started on and up. When ...
— The Last Stetson • John Fox Jr.
... there. And what are those things? Jerusalem artichokes? And look at that magnificent thistle; I never saw a finer thistle in my life! And poppies—and marigolds—and ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... alehoof, which was ground-ivy, or gill-go-by-ground, or haymaids, or twinhoof, or gill-creep-by-ground, and was an herb of Venus, and thus in special use for "passions of the heart," for "amorous cups," which few Puritans dared to meddle with. The blessed thistle, of which one scandalized old writer says, "I suppose the name was put upon it by them that had little holiness themselves." Clary, or clear-eye, or Christ's-eye, which latter name makes the same writer indignantly say, "I could wish from my soul that blasphemy and ignorance ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... she picked up a little bit of stick, and held it out to the puppy; whereupon the puppy jumped into the air off all its feet at once, with a yelp of delight, and rushed at the stick, and made believe to worry it; then Alice dodged behind a great thistle, to keep herself from being run over; and the moment she appeared on the other side, the puppy made another rush at the stick, and tumbled head over heels in its hurry to get hold of it; then Alice, thinking it was very like having a game of play with ...
— Alice's Adventures in Wonderland • Lewis Carroll
... Simon went to look If plums grew on a thistle, He pricked his fingers very much, Which ...
— A History of Nursery Rhymes • Percy B. Green
... lie-in there, to make our princes Welshmen born, and that way ingratiate the inhabitants to their subjection to a prince born in their own country. And for that reason our kings to this day wear a leek (the badge of Wales) on St. David's Day, the patron of this country; as they do the Order of the Thistle on St. Andrew's Day, ...
— From London to Land's End - and Two Letters from the "Journey through England by a Gentleman" • Daniel Defoe
... of the hard work attending that preparation. Again, conditions under which an experiment is successfully performed are often not appreciated when merely stated in words. "To prepare hydrogen gas, pass a thistle tube and a delivery tube through a cork which fit tightly in the neck of a bottle," etc., is simple enough. Let a pupil try with a cork which does not fit tightly and he will never ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 286 - June 25, 1881 • Various
... (Avena sterilis of the Old World) has taken full possession of California; how that cattle and horses, introduced by the Spaniard, have spread as widely and made themselves as much at home on the plains of La Plata as on those of Tartary; and that the cardoon-thistle-seeds, and others they brought with them, have multiplied there into numbers probably much exceeding those extant in their native lands; indeed, when we contemplate our own race, and our particular stock, taking such recent but dominating possession of this New World; when ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... greengage. I returned home loaded with this undescribed genus: I found likewise a fine Buddleia, and Menispermum, with some rare Compositae, among which was an arborescent Eupatorium and a gigantic thistle, a Prunus in flower and fruit, and a neat Liparis, Calamus, Tree- fern, Tupistra, Pandanus, were likewise observed, and a beautiful Viburnum, Corol sterilibus, 4 phyllis, foliis niveis carneo venosis: petal fertil calyptratis, deciduis, ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... Earl Berkeley, Knight of the Thistle. He married Elizabeth, daughter of Henry Drax, Esq, of Charborough, in Dorsetshire; and ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... allowed only on some few particular days in the year. They lodged together in little bands upon beds made of the rushes which grew by the banks of the river Eurotas, which they were to break off with their hands without a knife; if it were winter, they mingled some thistle-down with their rushes, which it was thought had the property of giving warmth. By the time they were come to this age, there was not any of the more hopeful boys who had not a lover to bear him company. The old ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... Sun had on a crown Wrought of gilded thistle-down, And a scarf of velvet vapor, And a ravelled-rainbow gown; And his tinsel-tangled hair, Tossed and lost upon the air, Was glossier and ...
— Afterwhiles • James Whitcomb Riley
... his head defiantly. "They dared not come to blows—they knew my kind! Yet John Shakspere is no bad sort—he knoweth what is what. But Master Bailiff Stubbes, I ween, is a long-eared thing that brays for thistles. I'll thistle him! He called Will Shakspere rogue. Hast ever looked ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... followed for M. de Cussy an extremely bad quarter of an hour. M. de Cussy, in fact, deserves your sympathy. His self-sufficiency was blown from him by the haughty M. de Rivarol, as down from a thistle by the winds of autumn. The General of the King's Armies abused him—this man who was Governor of Hispaniola—as if he were a lackey. M. de Cussy defended himself by urging the thing that Captain ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... Saucy grasshoppers Leapt about the grasses And the thistle-burs; And the whispered chuckle Of the katydid Shook the ...
— Riley Child-Rhymes • James Whitcomb Riley
... and the very strangeness of the experience was not without attraction for his eager and dominant temperament. What a queer little oddity she was, he thought as he glanced up at the grave old house before turning rapidly away—as light and sensitive as thistle-down, as vivid as flame. He tried to recall her delicately distinguished figure and profound dark eyes, but her charming smile seemed to come between him and her features, and her face was obscured for him in a mysterious radiance. Her ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... fly-away seeds that Rap spoke of a moment ago. The fluff is not the seed, but a sort of sail to which the seed is fastened, that the wind may blow it away to another place to grow. If you look carefully you will see that the birds do not eat thistle-down, but only the seed; they will soon use the down to line their pretty round cup-shaped nests." "Oh, yes," said Dodo, "there are lots of fluffy seeds, and they mostly belong to very bad weeds. Olive has been telling us about them, Uncle Roy, and so of course ...
— Citizen Bird • Mabel Osgood Wright and Elliott Coues
... amusement while unprovided with a partner. The nest of the Hemp-bird is made of cotton, the down of the fern, and other soft materials, woven together with threads and the fibres of bark, and lined with thistle-down, if it be late enough to obtain it, and sometimes with cow's hair. It is commonly placed in the fork of the slender branches of a maple, linden, or poplar, and is fastened ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... every mound, Then lingeringly and slowly move As if they knew the precious ground Were opening for their fertile love: They almost try to dig, they need So much to plant their thistle-seed. ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... to some rich person so as to live luxuriously on the wages of his own dishonour. The foul stain which they had brought on the honour of the Banda Oriental could only be washed away with their blood. Pointing to the advancing troops, he said that when those miserable hirelings were scattered like thistle-down before the wind, the entire country would be with him, and the Banda Oriental, after half a century of degradation, free at last and for ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson
... of Australia. Method of research. Aboriginals at King George's Sound. Discovery of Spencer's Gulf. Loss of Thistle and a boat's crew. Memory Cove. Port Lincoln. Kangaroo Island. St. Vincent's Gulf. Pelicans. Speculations on the fate ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... not germane to their nature. It is, indeed, a radical vice in Calvinistic reasoning that, because God is omnipotent, He can as easily therefore create virtue in a free being as He can waft the down of the thistle on the breeze. It is quite true that "whatsoever the Lord pleased that did He in heaven and in earth" (Ps. cxxxv. 6). But the question is—What is His pleasure in regard to the production of virtue? Is it a forced or free thing? Every good man will cheerfully ascribe to God the praise of his (the ...
— The Doctrines of Predestination, Reprobation, and Election • Robert Wallace
... cherrystones, Bundle'em jig. Cried Debby, I'll kiss this sweet Donkey of mine, For sure the dear creature is almost divine; Look at his eyes, how they sparkle and shine! He's an ambling, scambling, Braying-sweet, turn-up feet, Mane-cropt, tail-lopt, High-bred, thistle-fed, Merry old ...
— Deborah Dent and Her Donkey and Madam Fig's Gala - Two Humorous Tales • Unknown
... drew me homeward. At my departure their tomb had been hidden in the morning mist. Beholding it in the sunshine now, I felt a sensation through my frame as if a breeze had thrown the coolness of September over me, though not a leaf was stirred, nor did the thistle- down take flight. Was I to roam no more through this beautiful world, but only to the other end of the village? Then let me lie down near my parents, but not with them, because I love a green grave ...
— Fragments From The Journal of a Solitary Man - (From: "The Doliver Romance and Other Pieces: Tales and Sketches") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... smile lighted her grave eyes suddenly. She extended her arms, her face still raised to the moon. Her whole figure, light as thistle-down, began to sway, to drift hither and thither over the silver-green lawn. Dancing, was she? It was no human dance, surely; the name was too common for this marvel of motion. A wave cresting ...
— Fernley House • Laura E. Richards
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