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More "Thorny" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... amused." He presented a top-like triangular appearance for one staggering second. The Tinleys did not go 'so' at all, and consequently they lost the satirical man, and were called 'the ballet-dancers' by Adela which thorny scoff her sisters permitted to pass about for a single day, and no more. The Tinleys were their match at epithets, and any low contention of this kind obscured for them the social summit they hoped to attain; the dream whereof ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... gold, of the songs of bliss; and then her eyes glistened; she said, "Yes, I shall be there soon; I shall meet them by-and-by;" and then she seemed so glad! Ah! believer, you may always cheer yourself with that thought. Thy head may be crowned with thorny troubles now, but it shall wear a starry crown directly; thy hand may be filled with cares—it shall grasp a harp soon, a harp full of music. Thy garments may be soiled with dust now; they shall be white by-and-by. Wait a little ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 8 - Talmage to Knox Little • Grenville Kleiser
... see such a central sprig, whose progress I have watched, when I thought it had forgotten its destiny, as I had, bearing its first crop of small green or yellow or rosy fruit, which the cows cannot get at over the bushy and thorny hedge which surrounds it, and I make haste to taste the new and undescribed variety. We have all heard of the numerous varieties of fruit invented by Van Mons and Knight. This is the system of Van Cow, and ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... flush of dawn has left the sky, a man makes his way along the steep deserted bank like a tiny speck: the ancient, mast-like pines rise up in terraces on both sides of the torrent, gaze sternly at the free man and murmur menacingly; rocks, huge stones, and thorny bushes bar his way, but he is strong in body and bold in spirit, and has no fear of the pine-trees, nor stones, nor of his solitude, nor of the reverberating echo which repeats the sound of every footstep that ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... softly as a cat, and keeping with great care in the shadow, had followed him through the little door which he forgot to lock, and was now hidden among those very trees, he might have remembered a proverb to the effect that snakes hide in the greenest grass and the prettiest flowers have thorny stems. But he thought of no such thing, who was lost in happy anticipations of a moonlight interview with a lovely and cultured young lady, whose image, to speak truth, had taken so deep a hold upon his fancy, ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... pallid ghost of mortal love, That fills with banned and mournful loveliness, Unblest, the haunted chambers of my soul. My misery will atone,—my misery, - Dear God, will surely atone! for not the sting Of lacerating thongs, nor the slow horror Of crowns of thorny iron maddening the brows, Nor all that else pale hermits have devised To scourge the rebel senses in their shade Of caverned desolation, have the power To smart and goad and lash and mortify Like the great love that binds my ruined heart Relentless, as the insidious ivy binds The ...
— Pike County Ballads and Other Poems • John Hay
... it were, but poorer were the love. Lord, I would have me love thee from the deeps— Of troubled thought, of pain, of weariness. Through seething wastes below, billows above, My soul should rise in eager, hungering leaps; Through thorny thicks, through sands unstable press— Out of my dream to him who ...
— A Book of Strife in the Form of The Diary of an Old Soul • George MacDonald
... peeps into the dining-room, and see the curly brown head between the two gay ones, as the three sat round the table. He could not help hearing a word now and then, as the windows were open, and these bits of conversation filled him with curiosity for the names "Thorny," "Celia," and "George" were often repeated, and an occasional merry laugh from the young lady sounded like music in ...
— Under the Lilacs • Louisa May Alcott
... employment, and have supported thy wife and children; and thy family, which is now sunk into the refuse of humanity, would have been blooming and prosperous; lamented by them, thou wouldst have died calmly on thy bed, and thy example would have guided thy posterity along the thorny ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... formation had given place to basaltic rocks. They passed from groups of mhowa trees and left behind a wide shallow stream, its bed dotted with pools fringed by great kowa trees, and its banks lined by a thick green cover of jamun and karonda. Thorny babul thrust their spiked branches out over the roadway, white with tufts of cotton torn by its thorns from bales, loose pressed, on their way to market in buffalo carts; "Babul the thief," the natives called this ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser
... in the dreamy and forgotten little town, I hold acquittal for all who have strayed and gone to ruin in Cupid's flowery and thorny labyrinth. For assuredly it is ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... wilt answer? He will smile on thee, One smile of His shall be enough to heal The wound of man's neglect; and He will sigh, Pitying the trouble which that sigh shall cure; And He will speak—speak in the desolate nigh In the dark night: 'For me a thorny crown Men wove, and nails were driven in my hands And feet: there was an earthquake, and I died I died, and ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... place of call on the mainland called Pangu; they were steaming straight out of a bay. To the east a massive headland closed the view, with the tilted edges of the rocky strata showing through its ragged clothing of rank bushes and thorny creepers. The wind had begun to sing in the rigging; the sea along the coast, green and as if swollen a little above the line of the horizon, seemed to pour itself over, time after time, with a slow and thundering fall, into the shadow of the leeward cape; and across ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... of the river called Shigogo and Shipanga are bordered by a low level expanse of marshy country, with occasional clumps of palm-trees and a few thorny acacias. The river itself spreads out to a width of from three to four miles, with many islands, among which it is difficult to navigate, except when the river is in flood. In front, a range of high hills from ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... man's nose is a great organ, and we will not cast it in his teeth more than nature has done. I said so to my diplomatist, who was amused. If you are sparklingly vulgar with the English, you are aristocratic. Oh! what principle we women require in the thorny walk of life. I can show you a letter when we meet that will astonish humdrum. Not so diplomatic as the writer thought! Mrs. Melville (sweet woman!) must continue to practise civility; for a woman who is a wife, my dear, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... parable tells us nothing about the comparative acreage of the path and the rocky and thorny soils on the one hand, and of the fertile soil on the other. It is not meant to teach the proportion of success to failure, but to exhibit the fact that the reception of the word depends on men's dispositions. The good soil has none of the faults of the rest of the field. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... one vintem's worth of pins in his pocket threw the pins at her. Immediately a high, thorny hedge sprang out of the ground between the little old ...
— Fairy Tales from Brazil - How and Why Tales from Brazilian Folk-Lore • Elsie Spicer Eells
... Colonia Dublan, is made in the shape of a horned toad, the lizard so familiar to anyone who has visited the Southwest of the United States. The head with its spikes, and the tail as well, are well rendered; the thorny prominences of the body are represented by the indentations around ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... eminent for Wisdom and Vertue, and Men acted by a noble Principle of Conscience: Had not Conscience (of Duty to God) prevailed above other Considerations with them, they would not for all they are worth in the World have medled in this Thorny business. Have there been any disputed Methods used in discovering the Works of Darkness? It may be none but what have had great Presedents in other parts of the World; which may, though not altogether justifie, ...
— The Wonders of the Invisible World • Cotton Mather
... on the step he saw the ragged cluster of children troop down the road from twenty years agone, almost as if he actually beheld them, himself at the head. He could still feel their plump palms clinging to his hand at the first suggestion of danger. He had led them a right thorny path, each to a successful goal. And now could he turn against "Fambly"? Should he denounce the treachery of one of the little group that he could see huddling together for warmth on the meagre hearthstone, while outside the snows of a ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... cannot be put in motion in any other; and whose muscular power is so exclusively exercised that the nervous power which produces intelligence is thereby greatly reduced. People of this kind must absolutely have something that they can take hold of on the slippery and thorny path of their life, some sort of beautiful fable by means of which things can be presented to them which their crude intelligence could most certainly only understand in picture and parable. It is impossible to approach them with subtle ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... be," I objected, "when the pea is a weak, clinging, straggling herb, and the locust a big, thorny hardwood tree?" ...
— The Story of My Boyhood and Youth • John Muir
... berry to berry, gathering them with a deft skilfulness her companions could not emulate. Diana knew how they were getting on, without using her eyes to find out; for all their experience was proclaimed aloud. How the ground was rough and the bushes thorny, how the berries blacked their lips and the prickles lacerated their fingers, and the stains of blackberry juice were spoiling gloves and dresses and all ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... a flat wooden cover over it now, with an iron bar to keep it in place, lest some one be careless and fall in, though now the wild blackberry vines have nearly hidden it from sight. Even now when only young leaves are on the brambles, the thorny stems make a network over the cover. The old Paxton House was gone before my time," Mrs. Derby said, "but a part of its fine wall remains. It was upon that wall ...
— Dorothy Dainty at Glenmore • Amy Brooks
... were frequently relieved. It was rather serious work for the bearers—to say nothing of my feelings—for they had never carried a chair before, and the way lay through thick jungle, constantly interspersed by morasses and swamps, and obstructed by fallen trees, overhanging branches, thorny creepers, and marshy streams. At first I had many misgivings, but soon gained confidence when I saw how careful the men were, and how anxious to avoid an accident. Two coolies went on in front, and with their sharp parongs cut down or hacked away the more ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... of the differences of opinion between the two seniors of the house of Fujinami, which became more frequent as the clouds of disaster gathered over the home in Akasaka. A far more thorny problem was ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... rock-walled well, Where the silver-scaled sea-farers, and the crook-lipped bull-trout dwell. But most when their hearts were merry 'twas the joy of carle and quean To ride in the deeps of the oak-wood, and the thorny thicket green: Forth go their hearts before them to the blast of the strenuous horn, Where the level sun comes dancing down the oaks in the early morn: There they strain and strive for the quarry, when the wind hath fallen dead In the odorous dusk of the ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris
... Chris held his breath, the dampened leaves and petals of the bush he had planted sent their green fragrance lifting and turning on the night air. As if that had been the signal it had long waited for, a dust-colored bird flew down to perch on a thorny stem. ...
— Mr. Wicker's Window • Carley Dawson
... the town of Shumla, is nearly surrounded by a rampart of Mount Haemus, or the Balkan, which descends on both sides in the form of a horse-shoe. The steep slopes of this great fence are covered with detached rocks and close thorny bushes. The nature of the ground makes it a most advantageous position for the Turkish soldier, who when sheltered by these inequalities, rapid steeps and a few intrenchments, displays all the address ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 390, September 19, 1829 • Various
... heap Toil and unvanquishable penury On those who build their palaces, and bring Their daily bread? From vice, black, loathsome vice, From rapine, madness, treachery and wrong; From all that genders misery, and makes Of earth this thorny wilderness; from ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer • Charles Sotheran
... disbelieve it, you think yourself deceived; but no: Caroline lacks intellect, she is dull, she can neither joke nor reason, sometimes she has little tact. You are frightened. You find yourself forever obliged to lead this darling through the thorny paths, where you must perforce ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Part First • Honore de Balzac
... had been friends in youth; But whispering tongues can poison truth; And constancy lives in realms above; And life is thorny; and youth is vain; And to be wroth with one we love, Doth work like madness in the brain. And thus it chanced, as I divine, With Roland and Sir Leoline. Each spake words of high disdain And insult to his heart's best brother They parted—ne'er to meet again! But never either found another To free ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... fell fast and faster Yet you would not call me back Nay be glad her feet no longer Tread life's rough and thorny track ...
— Preliminary Report of the Commission Appointed by the University • The Seybert Commission
... volcanic convulsion far down in the depths of the ocean. Masses of coral worn by time lay scattered about, amid which grew shrubs and tangled creepers, with here and there a few taller trees; but as the shrubs were not of a thorny species we pushed through them or leaped over them, Dick and Nat coming down on their noses more than once in our progress. Seeing a knoll, or rather a mass of coral, thrown up higher than the rest ahead I made ...
— The Cruise of the Dainty - Rovings in the Pacific • William H. G. Kingston
... collurio, an allied bird, uses this method still more frequently. He even prepares a small larder before feasting. One may thus see on a thorny branch spitted side by side Coleoptera, crickets, grasshoppers, frogs, and even young birds, which he has seized when they ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... searching in the underbrush, for it was evident it could not be far off. The bloody track could be followed for some distance; in fact, in one place the thorny roots of the remarkable pachiuba palm-tree, the roots that the women here use for kitchen graters, had torn off a bunch of long, beautiful hair from the sides of the jaguar, which very likely was weak and was dragging itself to some cluster of trees where ...
— In The Amazon Jungle - Adventures In Remote Parts Of The Upper Amazon River, Including A - Sojourn Among Cannibal Indians • Algot Lange
... been a chance of returning to civilization through a safe road; as it was, Gabriel, Roche, and I resumed our journey alone. During two or three days we followed the edge of the wood, every attempt to penetrate into the interior proving quite useless, so thick were the bushes and thorny briers. Twice or thrice we perceived on some hills, at a great distance, smoke and fires, but we could not tell what ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... and spattering him with mud, Herrick's face was very tired and worn, but in his eyes there lurked a little faint light of happiness that he had helped another weary soul a few steps forward on its pilgrimage over a thorny road. ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... slender, bending pines to the bushes of dogwood and sassafras, and the rotting, ancient stumps and fallen logs, by the uncontrollable, all-spreading vine. It was such a fantastic thicket as one might look to find in fairyland, thorny and impenetrable: here as tall as a ten years' pine, there sunken away to the height of the wild honeysuckles; everywhere backed by blue sky, heavy with odors, filled, with the flash of wings and the songs of birds. To the east the thicket fell ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... the arts of peace and he cultivated none but those of war; he was by choice a warrior and a sailor, a wanderer to other lands, a plougher of the desolate places of the "vasty deep," yet withal a lover of home, who trod at times, with bitter longing for his native land, the thorny paths of exile. To him physical cowardice was the unforgivable sin, next to treachery to his lord; for the loyalty of thane to his chieftain was a very deep and abiding reality to the Anglo-Saxon warrior, and in the early poems of our English race, love for ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... with them, and the banks which were thus formed caused the waters to accumulate in lagoons extending behind the dunes. For miles the road led through thickets, interrupted here and there by marshy places and clumps of thorny shrubs. Bands of Shausu were accustomed to make this route dangerous, and even the bravest heroes shrank from venturing alone along this route. Towards Aluna the way began to ascend Mount Carmel by a narrow and giddy track cut in the ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... another prefatory remark which it seems desirable I should make. It is that I think it proper to confine myself to the work done, without saying anything about the doers of it. Meddling with questions of merit and priority is a thorny business at the best of times, and unless in case of necessity, altogether undesirable when one is dealing with contemporaries. No such necessity lies upon me, and I shall, therefore, mention no names of living men, lest, perchance, ...
— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century • T.H. (Thomas Henry) Huxley
... Goya, who from the first plucked success from its thorny setting, was soon forgotten, and until Gautier in 1840 recorded his impressions in his brilliant Voyage en Espagne, critical literature did not much concern itself with the versatile Spaniard. And Gautier's sketch of a few pages ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... Parana) has not been determined Climate: varies from temperate in east to semiarid in far west Terrain: grassy plains and wooded hills east of Rio Paraguay; Gran Chaco region west of Rio Paraguay mostly low, marshy plain near the river, and dry forest and thorny scrub elsewhere Natural resources: iron ore, manganese, limestone, hydropower, timber Land use: arable land 20%; permanent crops 1%; meadows and pastures 39%; forest and woodland 35%; other 5%; includes irrigated NEGL% Environment: local flooding in southeast (early September ...
— The 1992 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... the Black Watch in single file through the bush, and desired Lieutenant-Colonel Ewart to guide the remainder of the brigade round the obstruction. The three battalions in rear, easily avoiding the small patch of thorny shrubs, rejoined more quickly than had been expected, and soon fell into their proper places. When the brigade-major reported their arrival, Major-General Wauchope issued instructions for deployment on the Black Watch, but not in the same order ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice
... world, the longing for peace and shelter; the desire to smooth his sister's way, which had led him to devote himself in heart to the cloister, though never permitted openly to pledge himself. Then the discovery that the world was less thorny than he had expected; the allurement of royal favour and greatness; the charm of amusement, and activity in recovered health; the cowardly dread of scorn, leading him not merely into the secular life, ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... was toneless and gray as an autumn sky it seemed to her that all was wrong, that she had committed a fault that was almost a crime, that there was nothing now to be done but to confess, to go home and to expiate, as the Prodigal Son doubtless did among the thorny roses of forgiveness, those days in the far country. But always with the morning light came the remembrance that it was not her father's house to which she must go to make submission. It was her step-father's. And after all, it was her own life—she had ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... has any heart, would not grieve! The golden ore may still by stamping be broken up, how much more the feelings choked with sorrow! the prince has grown up in a palace, with every care bestowed upon his tender person, and now he gives his body to the rough and thorny forest; how will he be able to bear a life of privation? When first you ordered me to equip your steed, my mind was indeed sorely troubled, but the heavenly powers urged me on, causing me to hasten the preparation of the horse, but what is the intention that urges the prince, to resolve thus ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... holds the reason in perceptive thought. More pitiable, like rivers lacking rains, Kissing cold stones, the women shrink for drought. Those faceless discords, out of nature strayed, Rank of the putrefaction ere decayed, In impious singles bear the thorny wreaths: Their lives are where harmonious Pleasure breathes For couples crowned with flowers that burn in dew. Comes there a tremor of night's forest horn Across her garden from the insaner crew, She darkens ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... a gateway there once, but for some reason or other it had become blocked with a rank vegetation. The old gap was chocked full with a thorny, flower-bearing bush so thick that a cat could not have passed through. Somerfield switched on one of his theories as soon as he got over his first surprise. Worshipers, he held, had brought flowers there and the seeds that had dropped had sprouted. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... two about this friend. At Vernet he was usually called M. le Capitaine, though in fact he had never reached that rank. He had been in the army, and having been wounded in the leg while still a sous-lieutenant, had been pensioned, and had thus been interdicted from treading any further the thorny path that leads to glory. For the last fifteen years he had resided under the roof of Madame Bauche, at first as a casual visitor, going and coming, but now for many years as constant there as she ...
— La Mere Bauche from Tales of All Countries • Anthony Trollope
... Camoens were frequently in his mouth, and in bitterest moments, in the times of profoundest defection, he could always find relief in the pages of him whom he reverently calls "my master." Later in life he could see a parallel between the thorny and chequered career of Camoens and his own. Each spent his early manhood on the West Coast of India [74], each did his country an incalculable service: Camoens by enriching Portugal with The Lusiads, Burton by his travels and by presenting to England vast stores of ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... would be the best general direction. Toward the east, they knew, lay the railroad and the more cultivated part of the province. Westward were nothing but sterile, arid plains, without water or inhabitants, supporting no vegetation but thorny bushes and the ...
— The Border Boys Across the Frontier • Fremont B. Deering
... brook, and with much fatigue, and after walking three miles, ascended the first spur of the mountains. The whole lower country he found covered with almost impenetrable thickets of small pine, with which is mixed a species of plant resembling arrow-wood, twelve or fifteen feet high, with thorny stems, almost interwoven with each other, and scattered among the fern and fallen timber: there is also a red berry, somewhat like the Solomon's seal, which is called by the natives solme, and used as an article ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: Explorers • Various
... said Ezekiel. He walked towards the cactus; there was nothing to be seen but its thorny spikes. He was confronted, however, by the sudden apparition of Joan from behind the manzanita at its side. She looked up and glanced from Ezekiel to Dona Rosita ...
— The Argonauts of North Liberty • Bret Harte
... writers are God's elect. I will not contradict you. Shtcheglov calls me the Potyomkin of literature, and so it is not for me to speak of the thorny path, of disappointments, and so on. I do not know whether I have ever suffered more than shoemakers, mathematicians, or railway guards do; I do not know who speaks through my lips—God or someone worse. I will allow myself to mention only one little drawback which I ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... reverence, Above a fold where wrapped in swaddling clothes A new-born infant in a manger lay; In humble contrast to the throne of light, He left to tread the thorny paths of earth; In undefiled and stainless innocence, Which earth with all her foul iniquities Might never tarnish ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... free from under-wood. Along the left-hand fence ran a thick belt of underwood, sumac and birch, with a few young oak trees interspersed; but in the middle of the swampy level, covering at most some five or six acres, was a dense circular thicket composed of every sort of thorny bush and shrub, matted with cat-briers and wild vines, and overshadowed by a clump of tall and leafy ashes, which had not as yet lost one atom of their foliage, although the underwood beneath them was quite sere ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... Jose stripped, retaining only a pair of sandals. These were as noiseless as his bare feet, and would be needed, as in the dark he might tread upon a thorny creeper, or strike ...
— The Treasure of the Incas • G. A. Henty
... saints in a single night, in the way that Jack's beanstalk grew from earth to sky. Sainthood comes slowly, like the blossom on a century plant; there must be a hundred years of thorny stem-life first. ...
— Ole Mammy's Torment • Annie Fellows Johnston
... about 4 P.M., and they invariably, retire to the thickest and most thorny jungle in the neighbourhood of their feeding-place by 7 A.M. In these impenetrable haunts they ...
— The Rifle and The Hound in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... For a mile or so the route lay through fertile gardens and fields. Then suddenly the cultivation ended abruptly on the edge of a sandy desert that, seamed with nullahs, or deep, steep-sided ravines, and dotted with tall clumps of thorny cactus, stretched away to the horizon. The road became a barely discernible track; but the two sowars cantered on, confidently heading for the spot where the fresh ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly
... lion should be mine. The section we were in was the usual 'lion country' of East Africa, wide stretches of dry, level plain with occasional low rolling hills, thinly timbered everywhere with the thorny mimosa, most of it low bush, some grown to small trees twenty or ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... of feeling, mingled with the terrible sense, periodically alive in him, of physical doom, seems to have stripped from the thorny soul its outer defences of mental habit. He sees once more the hideous spectacle of his father's death, his own black half-remembered moments of warning, the teasing horror of his sister's increasing weakness of brain. Life has been on the ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... sonny," said the president promptly. "We'll hang on to this until we hear where that thorny old chump of yours has fetched up and is actin' her conundrums, and mebbe we ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... and one that I shall never forget—the white-faced, distracted woman, tramping in her flimsy house-shoes over the rough ground, bursting through the bushes, regardless of the thorny branches that dragged at skin and hair and dainty clothing, and sending forth from time to time a tremulous cry, so dreadfully pathetic in its mingling of terror and coaxing softness, that a lump rose in my throat, and I could barely keep ...
— John Thorndyke's Cases • R. Austin Freeman
... an eye on the technicians. They were working on a bush of some kind that had little thorny-looking nuts on it, clipping bits off here and there. He wasn't at all sure what they did with all those little pieces and bits, but that was none of his business, anyway. Let the brains take care of that stuff; his job ...
— Cum Grano Salis • Gordon Randall Garrett
... table-lands and across the tops of mountains, it was no longer necessary as it had been in the hot lands. Never did I see anything more dreary than these immense lengths of desolate plains covered with aloes and other thorny and succulent shrubs of fantastic aspect, which alone could live on the sandy and waterless soil. This is a strange land, that can boast three separate climates within its borders, and is able to ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard
... Many brave and gallant Princes tried to force their way through the magic hedge, in order to solve the mystery and to see for themselves the beautiful maiden who lay in an enchanted sleep behind that thorny barrier. But the thorns caught them, and held them from going forward or back, and the gallant youths perished miserably in ...
— Favorite Fairy Tales • Logan Marshall
... water, absence of trees, a failure of stones, an almost luxuriant abundance of thistles during the rainy season, thistles which became almost shrubby with the warm season, and then formed impenetrable thickets; then, also, dwarf trees, thorny shrubs, the whole giving to these plains a rather arid and ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... and looked across the sea, and he knew that she was thinking of those beloved coasts—of the Ionian waters, of the blossoming almond-trees among the olives and the rocks, of the scarlet geraniums glowing among the thorny cactus, of the giant watercourses leading up into the mountains. A hunger was awake in her, now that she had a home so near the ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... enveloped its base, on the outside of which the light and graceful Acacia pendula also grew on the grassy plain. I found the red rock to be the common one of the country, in a state of decomposition. It was hollowed out by some burrowing animal, whose tracks had opened ways through the thick thorny scrub, enabling us to lead our horses to near the top. From the apex, I obtained an extensive view of the country then before us, in many parts clear of wood to the verge of the horizon, and finely studded with isolated hills ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell
... through which we had to force our way, however, was wonderfully thorny. The creepers were thorny, even the bamboos were thorny, while shrubs grew in a zig-zag and jagged fashion, forming an inextricable tangle, through which it was difficult to cut our way. Beautiful birds flitted in and out ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... Boeotia they dress up the bride with a chaplet of asparagus, for as the asparagus gives most excellent fruit from a thorny stalk, so the bride, by not being too reluctant and coy in the first approaches, will make the married state more agreeable and pleasant. But those husbands who cannot put up with the early peevishness of their brides, are not a whit wiser than ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... her fond husband, was by his tender care kept from every inclemency of the air, and preserved from every inconvenience that it was possible for human nature to suffer. What then must be her condition now, when through bypaths and thorny ways, she was obliged to fly with all possible speed, to escape the fury of her cruel pursuers: for she too well knew the merciless temper of her enemies, to hope that they would not pursue her with the utmost diligence, especially as she ...
— The Governess - The Little Female Academy • Sarah Fielding
... most circumstances, even more readily deceived; but, in the matter of dress, they have walked the thorny paths of experience. They know the cruel cost of everything they wear,—a cost which in this country is artificially maintained by a high protective tariff,—and they are not to be cajoled by that delusive word "simplicity," being too well ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... You spotted Snakes with double tongue, Thorny Hedgehogges be not seene, Newts and blinde wormes do no wrong, Come not neere our Fairy Queene. Philomele with melodie, Sing in your sweet Lullaby. Lulla, lulla, lullaby, lulla, lulla, lullaby, Neuer harme, nor spell, nor charme, Come our louely Lady nye, ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... May Comes no more with golden weather; Fields, and woods, and sunshine gay, Purple skies, and purple heather. We have had our holyday, And I sit with folded hands, In the twilight looking back Over life's uneven track— Thorny wilds, ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean
... heart a strange wish for exploring The thorny and briery place, And, lo, a path through the deepest thicket Opened ...
— On the Tree Top • Clara Doty Bates
... to be tied to any thorny bush than to be with a cross man. He to know the seventy-two languages he couldn't be more crabbed ...
— Three Wonder Plays • Lady I. A. Gregory
... protect from the hot sun the globe-shaped nuts that hang in grape-like clusters beneath. I see the abanico, with its enormous fan-shaped leaves; the wax-palm distilling its resinous gum; and the acrocomia, with its thorny trunk and enormous racemes of golden fruits. By the side of the stream I guide my horse among the columnar stems of the noble coeva, which has been enthusiastically but appropriately termed the "bread of life" ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid
... buzzards, land of cloud-nourished trees and wild things that live without drink. Above all, it is the land of the creosote and the mesquite. The mesquite is God's best thought in all this desertness. It grows in the open, is thorny, stocky, close grown, and iron-rooted. Long winds move in the draughty valleys, blown sand fills and fills about the lower branches, piling pyramidal dunes, from the top of which the mesquite twigs flourish greenly. Fifteen or twenty feet under the ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... clothing upon himself from within but collects it from various distant and haphazard sources is not any reason to call this necessity an instinct for decency. These, you will admit, are weighty reflections and worthy of consideration before we proceed to the wide and thorny subject of moral and immoral action. Now, what is virtue?" Pan, who had listened with great courtesy to these remarks, here ...
— The Crock of Gold • James Stephens
... girl as Cuckoo could not be capable of the real love, the love ascetic, not the love Bacchanalian. Love among the roses is easy, but not many can welcome love among the nettles; and, moreover, Julian, despite his knowledge of the thorny paths along which Cuckoo walked habitually, along which all her poor sisterhood walked incessantly, had not entirely disabused himself of the fallacy that a life such as hers was, in some vague, undefined and indefinable way, a life of pleasure. Even when we know a thing to ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... the wall at the rear of the gardens; had clambered over it, dropping to his feet in the midst of a climbing rose which clutched at him with its thorny branches; had run across an acre of kitchen garden and leaped the low-growing hedge which divided it from the sunken flower garden he had made for Lydia. Here were more rosebushes and an interminable space broken ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley
... as if there was going to be trouble between the two boys, for Thorny was naturally masterful, and illness had left him weak and nervous, so he was often both domineering and petulant. Ben had been taught instant obedience to those older than himself, and if Thorny had been a man Ben would have made ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, May, 1878, No. 7. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... in the wisdom with which this delicate task would be executed, to find that it was entrusted to a family party, one of which was a mere boy; and the mistrust must have been increased when, somewhat later in the course of the year, the thorny questions which immediately encompassed the task of distribution led to the introduction by Tiberius of another law, which gave judicial power to the triumvirs, for the purpose of determining what was public ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... least; but toward which side are you? Have you fallen into the soft feather-bed of agnosticism, or the thorny ditch of belief?' ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... sometimes the drovers taking their lunch of tortillas and wine, while their animals munched their midday meal hard by. The scenery was often fine. On the third day the fertile soil, watered by many rivers, was exchanged for a sandy plain, broken by a thorny mimosa scattered over the surface. This plain lay between the Cordillera of the Andes and the Coast Range. As the road advanced farther inland, the panorama of the Cordilleras became more and more striking. In the glow of the sunset, the peaks of the ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... a sprawling, hateful thing, Thorny and twisted like a snake, Writhing to work a mischief, in the brake It stands at menace, in its cling Is danger and a venomed sting. It grows on green and slimy slopes, It is a thing of shades and slums, For passing feet it wildly gropes, And loops to catch all feet that run Seeking ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... of our elders went out for a stroll into the village. I could not restrain my eagerness any longer, and, slipping out unperceived, followed them for some distance. As I went along the deeply shaded lane, with its close thorny seora hedges, by the side of the tank covered with green water weeds, I rapturously took in picture after picture. I still remember the man with bare body, engaged in a belated toilet on the edge of the tank, cleaning his teeth with the chewed end of a twig. Suddenly ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... I was an hour descending that tree, but I could not have been more than three minutes if my skinned legs could be relied upon as evidence of speed. I found Holman in a thorny tangle, and as I dragged him into the open he groaned loudly and endeavoured ...
— The White Waterfall • James Francis Dwyer
... express. We could not satiate our eyes with gazing on the beauties of this place, verdure being so enchanting to the sight, especially after having travelled through the Desert. Before reaching the river we had to descend a little hill covered with thorny bushes. My ass stumbling threw me into the midst of one, and I tore myself in several places, but was easily consoled when I at length found myself on the banks of a river of fresh water. Every one having quenched ...
— Thrilling Narratives of Mutiny, Murder and Piracy • Anonymous
... suits The gouty limb, 'tis true; but gouty limb, Though on a Sofa, may I never feel: For I have loved the rural walk through lanes Of grassy swarth, close cropped by nibbling sheep, And skirted thick with intertexture firm Of thorny boughs: have loved the rural walk O'er hills, through valleys, and by river's brink, E'er since a truant boy I passed my bounds To enjoy a ramble on the banks of Thames. And still remember, nor without regret Of hours that sorrow since has much endeared, How ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... axe, the forest yields Its thorny maze to fertile fields; This goodly breadth of well-till'd land, Well-purchased by his own right hand, With conscience clear, he can bequeath His children, when he sleeps ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... thorny pink Close wall of blossom'd may, I gazed thro' one green chink And saw no more than thousands may,— Saw sweetness, tender and gay,— Saw full rose lips as rounded as the cherry, Saw braided locks more dark than bay, And flashing eyes ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... time Dinah had undressed and put on her night-gown, this feeling about Hetty had gathered a painful intensity; her imagination had created a thorny thicket of sin and sorrow, in which she saw the poor thing struggling torn and bleeding, looking with tears for rescue and finding none. It was in this way that Dinah's imagination and sympathy acted and reacted habitually, each heightening the other. She ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... fish have the air of bantam cocks, and, with their sharp, prickly fins and spines and scaly sides, must be ugly customers in a hand-to-hand encounter with other finny warriors. To a hungry man they look about as unpromising as hemlock slivers, so thorny and thin are they; yet there is sweet meat in them, as we found ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
... point on some high down, and sitting on her horse survey the prospect before her—the sea of rounded hills, hills beyond hills, stretching away to the dim horizon, and over it all the vast blue dome of heaven. Sky and earth, with thorny brakes and grass and flowers and wild creatures, with birds that flew low and others soaring up into heaven—what was the secret meaning it had for her? She was like one groping for a key in a dark place. Not a human figure visible, not a ...
— Dead Man's Plack and an Old Thorn • William Henry Hudson
... to my thoughts at that time was, to get up into a thick bushy tree like a fir, but thorny, which grew near me, and where I resolved to sit all night, and consider the next day what death I should die, for as yet I saw no prospect of life. I walked about a furlong from the shore, to see if I could find any fresh water ...
— The Children's Hour, v 5. Stories From Seven Old Favorites • Eva March Tappan
... a good bath and teaching him to smile. Finally, I assigned him Comedy as his yokefellow, thus gaining him the confidence of his hearers, who until then would as soon have thought of picking up a hedgehog as of venturing into the thorny presence ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... loved the shade. Prim, right-angled paths neatly bordered with clamshells, intersected it like moist red ribbons and in the beds between old-fashioned flowers ran riot. There were rosy bleeding-hearts and great splendid crimson peonies; white, fragrant narcissi and thorny, sweet Scotch roses; pink and blue and white columbines and lilac-tinted Bouncing Bets; clumps of southernwood and ribbon grass and mint; purple Adam-and-Eve, daffodils, and masses of sweet clover white with its delicate, fragrant, feathery sprays; scarlet ...
— Anne Of Green Gables • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... his father was by no means in the habit of telling him everything, making indeed a thin cloud of wilful mystery about some of his doings. It had always been so; and Angelot had grown up with a certain amount of blind trust in the hand which had guided his mother and himself through the thorny years ...
— Angelot - A Story of the First Empire • Eleanor Price
... Love! thou art a fallen child of light, A ruined seraph in a world of care— Tortured and wrung by sorrow and despair, And longings for the beautiful and bright: Thy brow is deeply scarred, and bleeds beneath A spiked coronet, a thorny wreath; Thy rainbow wings are rent and torn with chains, Sullied and drooping in extremest wo; Thy dower, to those who love thee best below, Is tears and torture, agony and pains, Coldness and scorn and doubt which often parts;— "The course of true love never does run smooth," ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... were both cautious in the extreme, going out on all fours, and then crawling in and out between the blocks of granite—a pleasant enough task so long as the growth between was whortleberry, heath or ferns, but as for the most part it was the long thorny strands of the blackberry, the travelling became more and more painful. At last, after progressing in this way some three hundred yards, a horribly thorny strand hooked Vince in the leg of his trousers and skin as well, with ...
— Cormorant Crag - A Tale of the Smuggling Days • George Manville Fenn
... again during our troubled journey through life we reach little oases of almost perfect happiness, set jewel-like here and there in the thorny wilderness of time. Sometimes these are hours of mere animal content. In others they are made beautiful by waters blowing from our spiritual springs of being, as in those rare instances when the material veil of life seems to be rent by a mighty hand, and we feel the presence ...
— Marie - An Episode in The Life of the late Allan Quatermain • H. Rider Haggard
... Father—you who alone of all the world can understand—forgive and pity your son who has found the cross too heavy—the crown too thorny—to bear! I go to join my unhappy mother across the river that men call death—and there together we shall await the coming of the husband and father we could neither of us claim in this miserable, ...
— One Day - A sequel to 'Three Weeks' • Anonymous
... some sacred caves in Burmah. Lighting our torches, and each man taking one, we mounted the steep, tortuous, and slippery foot-path of damp, green stones, through the thorny shrubs that beset it, to the low entrance to the outer cavern. Stooping uncomfortably, we passed into a small, vacant antechamber, having a low, dripping roof, perpendicular walls, clammy and green, and a rocky floor, sloping inward through a narrow arch to a long, double, transverse ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... 237: Lehua makanoe. The lehua trees that grow on the top of Wai-aleale, the mountain mass of Kauai, are of peculiar form, low, stunted, and so furzy as to be almost thorny, kuku, as mentioned ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... he revolved in his mind the question of attempting this or that career, he may have thought of entering the alluring but thorny path of office-seeking and "practical" politics. It cannot be said that his desire for public emolument lasted very long. He deliberately decided against a political career. Even if the exigencies of the moment had not tended to forbid the flight of his ...
— Charles Carleton Coffin - War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman • William Elliot Griffis
... of the acacia-trees stood up like the blackened pillars of a burning city, and behind them the glow of a conflagration blazed high up to the heavens. Beams of violet and gold slipped and sparkled between the boughs, and danced among the thorny twigs, the white racemes of flowers, and the tufts of leaves with their feathery leaflets; the clouds above were fired with tints more pure and tender than those of the roses with which Cleopatra had ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... personally supervised the examination of many thousands of graves and has forwarded the bulk of his collections to the United States. His explorations have occupied a number of years, during which time he has undergone much privation and displayed great enthusiasm in pursuing the rather thorny pathways of scientific research. In the preparation of this paper his notes have been used as freely as their rather disconnected character warranted, and since Mr. McNiel's return to the United States, in July, 1886, I have been favored with a series of interviews with him, and by this means ...
— Ancient art of the province of Chiriqui, Colombia • William Henry Holmes
... why you have not reached the soft exuberance of Livy, after you have thoroughly regretted imitating the calm solemnity of Sallust, and been satisfied with only the few flowers you have plucked with a discriminative hand out of the gardens of Quintus Curtius more frequently than the thorny thickets of Cornelius Tacitus": "Non reposcent a te rationem, cur lacteam Livii ubertatem non sis assecutus; postquam et te omnino piguerit Sallustii sobrietatem imitari, et satis tibi fuerit pauculos tantum flores ex Quinti Curtii pratis, soepius quam ex ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... unclasping from my brow The thorny crown of lost delight, The solemn grandeur of the night Flashed on me from ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... let me go out for walks in the afternoon. And this afternoon I walked a new way, and a little brook led me into a new country, but I tore my frock getting through some of the difficult places, as the way was through many bushes, and beneath the low branches of trees, and up thorny thickets on the hills, and by dark woods full of creeping thorns. And it was a long, long way. It seemed as if I was going on for ever and ever, and I had to creep by a place like a tunnel where a brook must have been, but all the water ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... woman should have any tincture of aught ignoble in it, and one is caused thereby to decry one's state of mortality, which seems as inseparable from selfish ends as the red wings of a rose from the thorny stem which binds it to earth. Truly the longer I live the more am I aware of the speck which mars the completeness of all in this world, and ever the desire for a better, and that longing which will not be appeased groweth in my soul, until ...
— The Heart's Highway - A Romance of Virginia in the Seventeeth Century • Mary E. Wilkins
... The thorny question of etiquette was the next matter to receive Washington's attention. Personally he favored the easy hospitality to which he was accustomed in Virginia, but he knew quite well that his own taste ought not to be decisive. The forms that he might adopt would ...
— Washington and His Colleagues • Henry Jones Ford
... not the case with all aristocratic ladies; she also took great interest in art and literature, and it was even said that she patronized one of our poets in a manner which was worthy of the Medicis, and that she strewed the beautiful roses of continual female sympathy on to his thorny path. All this was evident to everybody, and had nothing strange about it, but the world would have liked to know the history of that woman, and to look into the depths of her soul, and because people could not do this in Princess ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... William bristles up at sight of him, and crosses the street with a lowering front, unmindful of the hints of Dr. Mather, who is aware of an unsettled dispute between the captain and the governor, relative to the authority of the latter over a king's ship on the provincial station. Into this thorny subject, Sir William plunges headlong. The captain makes answer with less deference than the dignity of the potentate requires: the affair grows hot; and the clergymen endeavor to interfere in the blessed capacity of peacemakers. The governor lifts his cane; and ...
— Biographical Sketches - (From: "Fanshawe and Other Pieces") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... caught a thousand times in as many feet last night," Scotty commented. "It's easy by day, but don't try it by night." He led the way through clear spaces between the thorny patches, ...
— The Blue Ghost Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... novelty of the task so absorbed was she in her sudden Quixotic project. Yet, as she groped among the brown leaves at the foot of her tree, her fingers came in contact with something wholly different from chestnuts or their thorny burrs. It was hard as a stone, yet it wasn't a stone. It was half-buried in the leaf-mold and moss, though the rain of the previous night had washed it free in ...
— The Brass Bound Box • Evelyn Raymond
... now—that the common bed is strewn or sown with the cast shells of Radiolaria. However that may be, the Sponges soon begin to absorb the silica or lime of the sea-water, and deposit it in needles or fragments in their bed. The deposit goes on until at last an elaborate framework of thorny, or limy, or flinty material is constructed by the one-celled citizens. In the higher types a system of pores or canals lets the food-bearing water pass through, as the animals draw it in with their lashes; in the highest types the animals ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... it to be seen, not even the flag upon the roof. But the story of the beautiful sleeping "Briar-rose," for so the princess was named, went about the country, so that from time to time kings' sons came and tried to get through the thorny hedge ...
— Household Tales by Brothers Grimm • Grimm Brothers
... that the path of the virtuous woman without the independence that accompanies the possession of her own money, was in ancient days much more thorny than that of the concubine or the prostitute; and it is because of this fact that parental love, the most powerful of all levers employed by the Cosmic Law to lift love out of degradation, instituted the custom of the "dowry," and although this, too, has at various times become a source ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... plains and wooded hills east of Rio Paraguay; Gran Chaco region west of Rio Paraguay mostly low, marshy plain near the river, and dry forest and thorny scrub elsewhere ...
— The 1995 CIA World Factbook • United States Central Intelligence Agency
... respects, however, there was everything which could gratify the eye and the taste. The land was fertile, the soil cultivated, the scenery beautiful. Tall trees—the mulberry and the poplar—arose in long lines; here and there the cactus stretched forth its thorny arms, and at intervals there appeared the dark green of extensive olive-groves. Behind the traveller there extended a wall of purple hills, and before him arose the giant heights of the Pyrenees. Among these last the road at length entered, and, winding along at the base of sloping hills, ...
— A Castle in Spain - A Novel • James De Mille
... political career, must have been a sad alloy to its pleasure and its pride. The fable of the sheep that leaves its fleece on the bramble bush is but too apt an illustration of the fate of him, who thus sees himself stripped of the comforts of friendship by the tenacious and thorny hold of politics. On the present occasion, however, the desertion of his standard by a few who had followed him cordially in his ascent to power, but did not show the same alacrity in accompanying his voluntary fall, was amply made up to ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... endure not so much corporal pain for a small preferment, or some honour, as they call it, yet stick not to commit actions, by which they are more shamefully and more lastingly stigmatised? But you may say, "Though these be the most ordinary and open ways to greatness, yet there are narrow, thorny, and little-trodden paths, too, through which some men find a passage by virtuous industry." I grant, sometimes they may; but then that industry must be such as cannot consist with liberty, though it ...
— Cowley's Essays • Abraham Cowley
... Believe me: the dear God has brought you together to help each other gain Heaven, to be prop and staff to each other on the narrow, toilsome way that leads to eternal life, to level and lighten that way for each other through love, meekness, and long-suffering—for it is rough and thorny. Now when gloomy days come, when faults break out in one or the other, or both, then think not of bad luck, as if that made you unhappy, but of the dear God, who has long seen all these faults and ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... think this association of ideas very complimentary to myself, I thanked her for her good advice. I nevertheless took away as a souvenir a flower and one of the thorny apples, seeing which the peasant trudged on her way, saying no doubt that it was wasting time and words to give advice to lunatics. Again the cliffs drew very close together, and the valley was nothing more than a deep crack in the earth's crust. On one side was unbroken ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... low hedge, but though it was low it was very thorny, and while he was trying to find a place to get through, he looked over and spied a hare crouched in the rough grass, just under the hedge between it and the wheat. The hare was lying on the ground; she did not move, though she saw Bevis, and ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies
... obtaining refreshments. For this trick, Pepper and some of the others got after the Pornellites and made them prisoners in a cave, from which they could escape only by going out a back way, through some water and mud, and thorny bushes. ...
— The Mystery at Putnam Hall - The School Chums' Strange Discovery • Arthur M. Winfield
... summer during a spare hour I met him in an empty room in the museum, where there were usually very few visitors at that time of day, and where large show-cases gave concealment. He came up to me and told me he had been away in the country, and that, when making his way home through hedges and thorny bushes, some of the thorns got stuck amongst his clothes and were still giving him uneasiness. 'I would be very grateful,' he said, 'if you would put your hand down and try if you can feel any thorns sticking in my underflannels and pull them out.' He then unbuttoned ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... us the merry May Comes no more with golden weather; Fields, and woods, and sunshine gay, Purple skies, and purple heather. We have had our holyday, And I sit with folded hands, In the twilight looking back Over life's uneven track— Thorny wilds, and desert sands. ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean
... deviated from custom or tradition to make each new candidate for a living shrink from any publicity that could be avoided. Society frowned upon the woman who dared to strike out in new paths, and thus made them even more thorny than ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell
... accorded her by the bar of Chicago and by the general public; for her somewhat exceptional position as well as her ability had made her one of the marked characters of the city. Her short life, so successful and brilliant to the public eye, was not without its dark and thorny places. Unusual responsibilities of a domestic nature, opposition of various kinds and keen disappointments only nerved her to greater persistency, and her courage was upheld by the generous and abundant recognition which she ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... has accompanied you on the thorny and bloody path to victory, will forsake you, and you will not be aware of it, for conquerors and tyrants are always blind. You will conquer and dominate. And you will plunge into injustice, and you will not feel the quagmire under your feet.... Every ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 2, April 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... against the pride that, in spite of the prohibition of the Almighty, sought to know all things, 'to become as gods.' Meekness, humility, self-abnegation, affection, are the beautiful flowers that grow by the wayside; but the pathway is not the less thorny, and no good can be accomplished by denying or sugar-coating ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... life and its thorny ways, She sought the friend of her early days: "Mother, I bring thee a breaking heart, In sorrows deep it hath borne a part; Speak to me tenderly as of yore, Let thy kiss rest on my brow once more; To the ...
— The Poetical Works of Mrs. Leprohon (Mrs. R.E. Mullins) • Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon
... something of a mouse-trap now,' said he, 'or a lion's den, if you like a statelier image; the way in is easy enough, but the way out is more difficult than the steep and thorny path to heaven. Every town and village we should come to would rise against us with hue and cry, and drive us back to the city, to perish there; so cruel are men become through ...
— Andrew Golding - A Tale of the Great Plague • Anne E. Keeling
... words. A city shattered, burned, destroyed, desolate, a land wasted, humiliated, made a desert and a wilderness, or wearing the thorny crown of humiliation and subjugation, is invested with the sacred prerogatives and immunities of the dead. The base human revenge of exultation at its fall and ruin should shrink back abashed in the presence of the infinite Divine chastisement. ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... with a lowering front, unmindful of the hints of Dr. Mather, who is aware of an unsettled dispute between the captain and the governor, relative to the authority of the latter over a king's ship on the provincial station. Into this thorny subject, Sir William plunges headlong. The captain makes answer with less deference than the dignity of the potentate requires: the affair grows hot; and the clergymen endeavor to interfere in the blessed ...
— Biographical Sketches - (From: "Fanshawe and Other Pieces") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... worked he could steal peeps into the dining-room, and see the curly brown head between the two gay ones, as the three sat round the table. He could not help hearing a word now and then, as the windows were open, and these bits of conversation filled him with curiosity for the names "Thorny," "Celia," and "George" were often repeated, and an occasional merry laugh from the young lady sounded like music ...
— Under the Lilacs • Louisa May Alcott
... maintenance, and cannot be put in motion in any other; and whose muscular power is so exclusively exercised that the nervous power which produces intelligence is thereby greatly reduced. People of this kind must absolutely have something that they can take hold of on the slippery and thorny path of their life, some sort of beautiful fable by means of which things can be presented to them which their crude intelligence could most certainly only understand in picture and parable. It is impossible to approach them with subtle explanations and fine distinctions. ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... think every blessed place in the tropics is a flat shore and palm-trees and surf, bless 'em! This place, for instance, wasn't a bit that way. Not common rocks they were, undermined by waves; but great curved banks like ironwork cinder heaps, with green slime below, and thorny shrubs and things just waving upon them here and there, and the water glassy calm and clear, and showing you a kind of dirty gray-black shine, with huge flaring red-brown weeds spreading motionless, and crawling and darting things going through it. And far away beyond the ditches and ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... offered to my thoughts at that time was, to get up into a thick bushy tree like a fir, but thorny, which grew near me, and where I resolved to sit all night, and consider the next day what death I should die, for as yet I saw no prospect of life. I walked about a furlong from the shore, to see if I could find any fresh water ...
— The Children's Hour, v 5. Stories From Seven Old Favorites • Eva March Tappan
... roses and honeysuckles, jasmine and clematis. Pinks, lilies, columbines made the garden patches gay, and, as though so many flowers were not enough, the windows, too, shone with geraniums and the scarlet tassels of great cactus, that lifted their exotic, thorny bodies behind the window panes. Not a wall but flaunted red valerian and snapdragon. Indeed Bridetown was ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... understandest not how it is to be repaired. The essieu is left on the spot, as the load is too heavy for the horses. Thy courage has evaporated. Thou beginnest to run. The heaven is cloudless. Thou art thirsty; the enemy is behind thee; a trembling seizes thee; a twig of thorny acacia worries thee; thou thrustest it aside; the horse is scratched till at ...
— Patriarchal Palestine • Archibald Henry Sayce
... alone, The Redbreast, sacred to the household gods, Wisely regardful of the embroiling sky, In joyless fields and thorny thickets leaves His shivering mates, and pays to trusted ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... does not try to push sound carpentry or ready wit into genius. Fortune and his own impetuous onslaught upon life cast Kilmer into the role of hack journalist: he would have claimed no other title. Yet he adorned Grub Street (that most fascinating of all thorny ways) with gestures and music of his own. Out of his glowing and busy brain he drew matter that was never dull, never bitter or petty or slovenly. In the fervent attack and counter-attack, shock and counter-shock of his strenuous days ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... sad, it is the Holy tide: Be dusky mistletoes and hollies strown, Sharp as the spear that pierced His sacred side, Red as the drops upon His thorny crown; No haggard Passion and no lawless Mirth Fright off the solemn Muse,—tell sweet old tales, Sing songs as we sit brooding o'er the hearth, Till the lamp flickers, and the ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... offered to my thoughts; at that time, was, to get up into a thick bushy tree, like a fir, but thorny—which grew near me, and where I resolved to sit all night—and consider the next day what death I should die, for as yet I saw no prospect of life. I walked about a furlong from the shore, to see if I could find any fresh water to drink, which I did, to my ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe Of York, Mariner, Vol. 1 • Daniel Defoe
... or twice to examine the wide circle of the horizon with eyes that were trained to note every aspect of the wilderness. On his right the plains melted away in gentle swell after swell, until they met the horizon. Their brown surface was broken only by the spiked and thorny cactus and stray bits ...
— The Texan Scouts - A Story of the Alamo and Goliad • Joseph A. Altsheler
... from the superior, for sending a future saint; from the nuns, for sending such a love of a plaything; and, finally, from papa, for sending such substantial board and well-bolted lodgings, 'from which,' said the malicious old fellow, 'my pussy will never find her way out to a thorny and dangerous world.' Won't she? I suspect, son of somebody, that the next time you see 'pussy,' which may happen to be also the last, will not be in a convent of any kind. At present, whilst this general rendering of thanks was going on, one person only took no part ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... and fenced lands. The frontier still was offering opportunity for the bold man to reap where he had not sown. Lands leased to the Indians of the civilized tribes began to cut large figure in the cow trade—as well as some figure in politics—until at length the thorny situation was handled by a firm hand at Washington. The methods of the East were swiftly overrunning those of the West. Politics and graft and pull, things hitherto unknown, soon wrote their hurrying story also over all this newly won region from which the rifle-smoke ...
— The Passing of the Frontier - A Chronicle of the Old West, Volume 26 in The Chronicles - Of America Series • Emerson Hough
... and looked up in the air; then took a glance at Martha's broom, and as he looked down he thought he saw Toody winking at him. So he just smiled and said: "I declare, by the tom-tit's folly, and the mole's pin-hole eye, and the woodpecker's thorny tongue, that I ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... of costly splendour, fabrics by the artist wove, Dry wood from the thorny jungle, perfume from the ...
— Maha-bharata - The Epic of Ancient India Condensed into English Verse • Anonymous
... to take short pieces of stems or dry twigs from her slippers, and often the thorny branches of the low ...
— Princess Polly At Play • Amy Brooks
... Dryad: Sprinkle out of flower bells Mortal sense entrapping spells; Make no sound On the ground; Strew and lap and lay around. Gnat nor snail Here assail, Beetle, slug, nor spider here, Now descend, Nor depend, Off from any thorny spear. ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... wapiti, and the wolf, nesting place of buzzards, land of cloud-nourished trees and wild things that live without drink. Above all, it is the land of the creosote and the mesquite. The mesquite is God's best thought in all this desertness. It grows in the open, is thorny, stocky, close grown, and iron-rooted. Long winds move in the draughty valleys, blown sand fills and fills about the lower branches, piling pyramidal dunes, from the top of which the mesquite twigs flourish greenly. Fifteen or twenty feet under the drift, where it seems no rain ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... by a wide belt of thorny shrubs, interlaced and fastened together by cords, extended from the bank of the river, about a thousand yards above Seringapatam; and, making a wide sweep, came down to it again opposite the ...
— The Tiger of Mysore - A Story of the War with Tippoo Saib • G. A. Henty
... sisterhood of artists beckon me on; what Elizabeth Cheron, Sibylla Merian, Angelica Kauffman, Elizabeth Le Brun, Felicie Fauveau, and Rosa Bonheur have achieved, I also will accomplish, or die in the effort. These travelled no royal road to immortality, but rugged, thorny paths; and who shall stay my feet? Afar off gleams my resting-place, but ambition scourges me unflaggingly on. Do not worry about my future; I will take care of it, ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... Homiletics with Dr. Weissenborn; PASTORALE [not Pastoral Poetry, but the Art of Pastorship] and MORALE with Dr. Buddaeus.' [There, your Majesty!—what a glimpse, as into infinite extinct Continents, filled with ponderous thorny inanities, invincible nasal drawling of didactic Titans, and the awful attempt to spin, on all manner of wheels, road-harness out of split cobwebs: Hoom! Hoom-m-m! Harness not to be had on those terms. Let the dreary Limbus close again, till the general ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... wicked son of thine, O Dhritarashtra, hath his hour come. He chooseth evil, not good, though entreated by his well-wishers. Thou also followest in the wake of this wicked wretch of sinful surroundings, who treadeth a thorny path setting at naught the words of his well-wisher. This exceedingly wicked son of thine with all his counsellors coming in contact with Krishna of unstained acts, will be destroyed in a moment. I dare not listen to the words of this sinful and wicked ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... the left-hand fence ran a thick belt of underwood, sumac and birch, with a few young oak trees interspersed; but in the middle of the swampy level, covering at most some five or six acres, was a dense circular thicket composed of every sort of thorny bush and shrub, matted with cat-briers and wild vines, and overshadowed by a clump of tall and leafy ashes, which had not as yet lost one atom of their foliage, although the underwood beneath them ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... not any desponding thoughts; I rest alone upon the mercies and the merits of a suffering and a redeeming Saviour; he is my sole refuge. To our mother, my conscience acquits me either of intentional errors, or errors of omission. This is a source of the purest consolation; it clears the rough, the thorny path to the valley of death. Elizabeth, my dearest sister, listen to me before I go hence, and be no more seen. Every night recall to mind the actions of the day. Let this be the question you put to yourself: "Have I done my ...
— The Boarding School • Unknown
... Bushes, thorny twigs, and the roots of trees hindered their progress. The child followed the vision of his mother, made clear now and then by the moon's rays across the heavy foliage. They were in the mysterious wood of the family of Ibarra. Basilio often stumbled and fell, but he got up again, without feeling ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... also, is the thorny tamarisk, the same tree which grew up around the body of Osiris. It was a sacred tree among the Arabs, who made of it the idol Al-Uzza, which Mohammed destroyed. It is abundant as a bush in the Desert of ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... but we never came to that old road again. Once I thought I'd found it, but it was only some open, flat, thorny ground. It was very dark then, the dark comes on so fast here. Suddenly we both began to run as hard as we could, hand in hand; I don't know why, something set us off and I felt just as if I must, and I suppose Joyce did too, and then—crash!—before ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... moment the autumn Session was approaching, in which the thorny subject of reforming Parliamentary procedure must be disposed of, and the Cabinet were preoccupied with this till 6 p.m. ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... the valley through thick timber and withered underbrush which tore his clothes and delayed his march. There were fallen trunks with spreading branches to be scrambled over, and tangles of thorny canes, but he was cheered by signs that somebody had passed on ahead of him not long before. Later, the forest died out and the bottom of the hollow was strewn with sharp-edged stones, which threatened to tear his worn boots from his feet, ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... snakes with double tongue, Thorny hedge-hogs, be not seen, Newts and blind-worms, do no wrong, Come not near our fairy Queen. Philomel with melody, Sing in your sweet lullaby, Lulla, lulla, lullaby, lulla, lulla, lullaby: Never harm, nor spell, nor charm, Come ...
— A Fairy Tale in Two Acts Taken from Shakespeare (1763) • William Shakespeare
... with an impulse not the less savage because there is a dark shadow beside them for evermore. There is no short cut, no patent tram-road, to wisdom: after all the centuries of invention, the soul's path lies through the thorny wilderness which must be still trodden in solitude, with bleeding feet, with sobs for help, as it was trodden by them of ...
— The Lifted Veil • George Eliot
... each opening year, fresh with the dew of heaven and the blush of innocence, coming up in this wild garden of a world, what would the gardener do without you? Where would all beauty and sweetness be found among the thorny bushes and the withering old shrubs and the rotting weeds, were it not for you? Maidens with clean hands and pure hearts, in whose touch there is something that heals the ills and soothes the pains of mortality, ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... next most common tree, but I fancy it does not extend beyond 7,500 feet; this is in general use for firewood, many of the trees, especially below, are much damaged, and on these the leaves are generally very thorny. Next is the Zaitoon, but it is not common in this direction, although common a mile to the south on the ridge first ascended. The soil is now saturated with snow water, and appears good and plentiful. The want of soil is another reason why the lower ranges are ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... that too," says Mrs. Monkton, who has now grown rather pale. "But there is still one more thing to know—that in making such a marriage as we have described, a woman lays out a thorny path for her husband. She separates him from his family, and as all good men have strong home ties, she naturally compels him to ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... necessary that I should know. Now that she has chosen to take herself off I shall not choose to live under the same roof with her again. If Lord Kingsbury speaks to you on the subject you should make him understand that." Poor Mr. Greenwood felt that there were thorny paths before him, in which it might be very difficult to guard his feet from pricks. Then he had to consider if there were to be two sides in the house, strongly opposed to each other, with which would it be best for him to take a part? The houses of the Marquis, with all ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope
... marriage, Prince Alexander of Battenberg had been sounded by the Russian authorities, with a view to his acceptance of the Bulgarian crown. By the vote of the Bulgarian Chamber, it was offered to him on April 29, 1879. He accepted it, knowing full well that it would be a thorny honour for a youth of twenty-two years of age. His tall commanding frame, handsome features, ability and prowess as a soldier, and, above all, his winsome address, seemed to mark him out as a natural leader of men; ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... together on the very rock where Katy sat that day when Uncle Ephraim told her of the different paths there were through life, some pleasant and free from care, some thorny and full of grief. Katy had never forgotten the conversation, and, without knowing why, she had always avoided that rock beneath the butternut as a place where there had been revealed to her a glimpse of something sad; and so, when Wilford proposed resting there, she at first objected, but ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... finished, there is always for the author a most doleful hour, when, retracing his steps, he thinks of what he has attempted, the difficulties of the task, the unlikeliness that he has overcome them. Misprints taking wrong numbers by the hand, black and thorny creatures, dance their wild dance round him. He is awe-stricken, and shudders; he wonders at the boldness of his undertaking; "Qu'allait-il faire dans cette galere?" The immensity of the task, the insufficience of the means stand in striking contrast. He had ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... true, my poor poetical fury, he will pen all he knows. A sharp thorny-tooth, a satirical rascal, By him; he carries hay in his horn: he will sooner lose his best friend, than his least jest. What he once drops upon paper, against a man, lives eternally to upbraid him in the mouth of every slave, tankard-bearer, or waterman; ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson
... by whom conferred, M. Thiers went to Bordeaux in 1871, is a thorny question, into which I need not here enter. What he might have done for his country is, perhaps, uncertain. What he did we know. He founded a republic of which, in one of his characteristic phrases, he said that: 'it must be Conservative, or it could not be,' ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... solitudes lying to the north-west of King Hudibras' town, keeping carefully out of the way of open places, lest wandering hunters should find her, and sleeping in the forked branches of trees at night. Of course the necessity of thus keeping to the dense woods, and making her way through thorny thickets, rendered her journey very fatiguing; but Branwen was unusually strong and healthy, though the grace of her slender frame gave her a rather fragile appearance, and she did not find herself exhausted even at the end of a long day's march; while ...
— The Hot Swamp • R.M. Ballantyne
... searched the rattling shallows, and many a rock-walled well, Where the silver-scaled sea-farers, and the crook-lipped bull-trout dwell. But most when their hearts were merry 'twas the joy of carle and quean To ride in the deeps of the oak-wood, and the thorny thicket green: Forth go their hearts before them to the blast of the strenuous horn, Where the level sun comes dancing down the oaks in the early morn: There they strain and strive for the quarry, when the wind hath fallen dead In the ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris
... and implacable genius of superstition. Their mutual resolution was supported by the example of millions, of either sex, of every age, and of every rank; and each proselyte who entered the gates of a monastery, was persuaded that he trod the steep and thorny path of eternal happiness. [25] But the operation of these religious motives was variously determined by the temper and situation of mankind. Reason might subdue, or passion might suspend, their influence: but they acted ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... graphic illustration of gesture, that his audience laughed at the merry tale till the tears ran down their cheeks. Then with a few allusions to his strange childhood, he thanked the God who led him through thorny ways into the very arms of love and peace in the cottage of Robert and Janet Grant, whence, and not from the fortune he had since inherited, came all ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... finest in the herd, and kept my eye on her in particular. At length two of the troop had walked slowly past at about sixty yards, and the one which I had selected was feeding with two others, on a thorny tree before me. ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... to put forth a tender green tendril and clasp her kind friend's helping hand, which, if rough and thorny, ...
— Parables from Flowers • Gertrude P. Dyer
... shock of feeling, mingled with the terrible sense, periodically alive in him, of physical doom, seems to have stripped from the thorny soul its outer defences of mental habit. He sees once more the hideous spectacle of his father's death, his own black half-remembered moments of warning, the teasing horror of his sister's increasing weakness of brain. Life has been on the whole a burden, though ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... night, they grew bolder, and showed not the least fear of the camp fires, which were always kept alight. They paid no heed to the noise and tumult they caused, or even to gunshots fired at them in the darkness. A tall, thick fence of tough, thorny bushes was erected round each camp as a protection, but the lions always jumped over or broke through it when they wanted a man. In the daytime the Colonel followed their tracks, which were plainly visible ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... omitted to mention the provocation which gave rise to many of them. Eusden, Colley Cibber, Dennis, Theobald, Blackmore, Smyth, and Lord Hervey are among the prominent criminals placed in Pope's pillory, and the student of the age may find an idle entertainment in tracking the poet's thorny course, while he gives an unenviable notoriety to names of which the larger number were 'born to ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... the rear. For several miles we traversed the lower slopes of the range, winding hither and thither but steadily working our way eastward, now passing over sterile, rocky ground, sparsely dotted here and there with clumps of thorny scrub, and anon opening out a glorious prospect of gently undulating, fertile country, dotted with plantations,—the smoke-blackened roofless walls of some of the mansions built on them clearly suggesting ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... Revere his consort's faith, his father's fame, And spare the meek usurper's holy head. Above, below, the rose of snow, Twin'd with her blushing foe, we spread: The bristled boar in infant-gore Wallows beneath the thorny shade. Now, brothers, bending o'er the accursed loom, Stamp we our vengeance deep, ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... the way to His palace-gate:" - "That way is thorny, and steep, and straight; By none can His palace-gate be seen, Save those who have washed in ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere
... sudden case of want among the poor caused him to ask her aid, for he knew very well that her heart and hand went forth on every occasion of distress. Hers it was to soothe and cheer and comfort and help, and many a thorny path was made smooth and many a heavy burden lifted by her brave and generous spirit and the pleasant, cheerful way she had of doing such things. In the presence of others she made a duty of cultivating cheerfulness of manner. Not that she ever for ...
— Peak's Island - A Romance of Buccaneer Days • Ford Paul
... add the reckoning up I suppose, between now and then, Having walked himself in the thorny, difficult Ways of men. ...
— Look! We Have Come Through! • D. H. Lawrence
... a native of the South of France, Corsica, and some other localities, for the purpose of making tobacco-pipes was introduced into this country. The word "brier" or "briar" has no connexion whatever with the prickly, thorny briar which bears the lovely wild rose. It is derived from the French bruyere, heath—the root of the White Heath being the material known as "briar" or "brier," and at first as "bruyer." The Oxford Dictionary quotes an advertisement from the Tobacco Trade Review of so recent a date ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... knew not where; Up windy downs far-stretching, bleak and bare; Through swamps that soddened under stagnant air; In blackest woods and brambled mesh, Thorny bushes ...
— My Beautiful Lady. Nelly Dale • Thomas Woolner
... houses, I counted upwards of 180, and although extensive traces of fire, and of new houses existed, I should reckon it to have contained only about 300. At the Pagoda I gathered a curious Rutaceous-looking decandrous thorny tree, with foliis bijugis. ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... was sent to me from California, and lived for a few weeks, but as nothing would induce it to eat, to my great regret it pined and died. It was about as large as an ordinary full-grown toad, of a speckled grey colour, with rich brown markings, its head something like a lizard, with large thorny projections which extended all along the spine. The feet were very remarkable, each toe being furnished with a sucker which enabled the Gecko to walk with perfect ease in any position on a wall or pane of glass without losing its hold; and ...
— Wild Nature Won By Kindness • Elizabeth Brightwen
... the place to plunge into the thorny questions which surround the thought of the tempted Christ. However these may be solved, the great fact remains, that His temptations were most real and unceasing. It was no sham fight which He fought. The story of the wilderness is the story of a most real conflict; and that ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... is ended. If you have followed us thus far, neglect not to receive what we have faintly endeavored to inculcate; and ever remember, while treading life's thorny vale, that "a kind word is of more value than gold or ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... concerned with the practical task of reconciling actual difficulties, bringing nations together for various purposes—arbitration, international trade, boards of conciliation and the like. This is the slow and thorny path, and on account of its very difficulty is apt to engross the thoughts and energy of the best brains which devote themselves to the cause. But the first line, of self-cultivation and the promotion of a favourable spirit among others, though open to any one and easy of approach, ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... finding plenty who gave us glorious sport. The jungles consisted of great grass plains, with thickly wooded patches of dense tree jungle, intersected here and there by deep ravines, with stagnant pools of water at intervals; the steep sides all thickly clothed with thorny clusters of the wild dog-rose. It was a difficult country to beat, and we had always to supplement the usual gang of beaters with as many elephants as we could collect. In the centre of the jungle was an eminence of considerable height, ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... Italians rallied round the standard of the patriot, whose words lit in them the spark of sacrifice. They received his adjurations gladly, promising to obey them. He pointed out a thorny road, but the reward was at the end, the illumination of the soul which crowns each great endeavour. Self had to be forgotten and family ties broken if they held back from the claims of country. Mazzini thought the family sacred, but he bade parents give up their sons ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... had lost track of the man they were after when they heard a crack ahead of them, followed by a short yell of alarm. Merrick had stumbled over a fallen log and pitched headlong into some thorny bushes. It took him some time to extricate himself, and ...
— The Rover Boys on the Farm - or Last Days at Putnam Hall • Arthur M. Winfield (AKA Edward Stratemeyer)
... and Flounder the facts seem to suggest that differences of habitat may have something to do with the development of the scales. In the Baltic the Flounders are as large as those on our own coasts, but the thorny tubercles are much more developed, nearly the whole of the upper surface being covered with them. The Plaice, on the other hand, are smaller than those of the North Sea, and the males have the scales spinulate over a considerable ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... of my readers are disturbed by this thorny question, I beg leave to recommend, to them Letter 69 of Montesquieu's Lettres Persanes; and the late Mr. John Palmer of Islington's Answer to Dr. Priestley's mechanical arguments for what he absurdly calls 'Philosophical Necessity.' BOSWELL. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... the Pinta hoisted on board another reed, a small board, and a little stick, which appeared to have been cut with an instrument of iron; it was evident that human hands had been employed upon these things. Almost at the same moment, the men of the Nina perceived a branch of some thorny tree covered with blossoms. At all this every one rejoiced exceedingly; there could be no doubt now of the proximity of the coast. Night fell over the sea. The Pinta, the best sailor of the three vessels, ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... You try to disbelieve it, you think yourself deceived; but no: Caroline lacks intellect, she is dull, she can neither joke nor reason, sometimes she has little tact. You are frightened. You find yourself forever obliged to lead this darling through the thorny paths, where you must perforce leave ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... and strange as these? When health gushes through each vein, Who paint the fever of the brain? Who picture half the grief and pain That follows pale sickness in her train? With bitterest dregs she fills her cup, And makes her victims drink them up: Binds them to thorny pillows down, And frightens sleep with her stern frown; Or if perchance the eyelids close, She gives her victim no repose, But hurries round and madly screams, And conjures up her wildest dreams, Binds reason in her iron chains, To fancy gives her longest reins, And whips and spurs ...
— Withered Leaves from Memory's Garland • Abigail Stanley Hanna
... brier, woodbine, bramble, forming one impenetrable thicket, and almost uniting with the lower branches of the elms, and oaks, and beeches, which rise at regular distances overhead. No foot can penetrate that dense and thorny entanglement; but there is a walk all round by the side of the wide sloping bank, walk and bank and copse carpeted with primroses, whose fresh and balmy odour impregnates the very air. Oh how exquisitely beautiful! and it is not the primroses only, those ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... tyres splashing through puddles, and spattering him with mud, Herrick's face was very tired and worn, but in his eyes there lurked a little faint light of happiness that he had helped another weary soul a few steps forward on its pilgrimage over a thorny road. ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... every thought of the future was more entirely regulated with reference to her welfare. It is no sinecure to have the entire devotion of a strong, enterprising, self-willed friend, as Agnes had all her life found. One cannot gather grapes of thorns or figs of thistles, and the affection of thorny and thistly natures has often as sharp an acid and as long prickers as wild gooseberries,—yet it is their best, and must ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... slap at a mosquito Val headed inland, following with ease that trail of footprints. Ricky was suffering, too, for her rashness he noted with satisfaction when he discovered a long curly hair fast in the grip of a thorny ...
— Ralestone Luck • Andre Norton
... seclusion and independence, of stern self- reliance, and sincere upright searching into religious truth—were only traceable in the features which were the distinctive creations of the Gothic schools, in the varied foliage and thorny fretwork, and shadowy niche, and buttressed pier, and fearless height of subtle pinnacle and crested tower, sent "like an unperplexed ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... in advance of his comrade, he decided to await his coming. At the same time he sent one of his escort into Enramada to discover if Lieutenant Navarro had by any chance reached that place, and to arrange for fresh mounts. Then he threw himself down in the scant shadow of a thorny bush for ...
— "Forward, March" - A Tale of the Spanish-American War • Kirk Munroe
... way is cut off by huge thorny hedges and fences of barbed wire—man's devilish improvement on the bramble—brought down to the water's edge. The river-follower must force his way through these obstacles, in most cases greatly to the detriment ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... half-contemptuous, half-pitiful look at Amelia. "I have no wish to marry. Truly, I have not seen many happy examples of wedded life in our family. All my sisters are unhappy, and I see no reason why I should tread the same thorny path." ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... right and my duty to pursue; and yet I found that, whatever route I took, before long I came to a tall and formidable looking fence. Confident as I might be in the existence of an ancient and indefeasible right of way, before me stood the thorny barrier with its comminatory notice-board—'NO THOROUGHFARE. By order. MOSES.' There seemed no way over; nor did the prospect of creeping round, as I saw some do attract me.... The only alternatives were either to give up my journey—which I was not minded to do—or to ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... Rinaldo ceased in little time to spy Baiardo's traces, who strange course had run; And made for thorny thicket, wet or dry, Tree, rock, or river, with design to shun Those cruel claws, which, pouncing from the sky, To him such outrage and such scathe had done. Rinaldo, after labour vain and sore To await him at the fount returned ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... gravel walks were bordered with great lilac-bushes, mock-orange, and bridal-wreath. Back of the house was a neglected rose garden, surrounded by a low stone wall over which the long suckers trailed and matted. They had wound their pink, thorny tentacles, layer upon layer, about the lock and the hinges of the rusty iron gate. Even the porches of the house, and the very windows, were damp and heavy with growth: wistaria, clematis, honeysuckle, and trumpet ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... incipient teardrop; and, although Mr. Taylor told her that the individual was nothing and the Office everything, he had been rather gratified. Thinking that a turn in the open air might clear his brain and enable him better to grapple with this very thorny question, he changed his cassock for a long tailed coat, put on his wide awake, and, leaving the precincts of St. Edward Confessor, struck across Park Lane and along the Row. He passed several people he knew, both men and women: Mrs. Marland was there, attended by two young men, ...
— Comedies of Courtship • Anthony Hope
... times before doing so. I reckoned, when at last I emerged upon it, that it was a distance of some six or seven miles from the settlement, though, owing to my ignorance of the way, it had taken me a whole morning to cover it. Did she have to thread these thorny thickets every time she came to the little town? No; doubtless she was acquainted with ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... who breathed threatenings and slaughter against the Church—while Jeremiah himself, in his moods of despair, seems to have caught the temper of the tribe among whom his family dwelt. Whether in the land or in its sons it was hard, thorny soil that needed deep ploughing.(101) It was, too, as Isaiah had predicted, the main path of invasion from the North,(102) by Ai, Migron, Michmash, the Pass, Geba, Ramah, Gibeah of Saul, Laish, and poor Anathoth herself. It had been the scene of many massacres, and above all of the ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... a fortnight? Good heavens! it seemed months, years, a lifetime! These revolutions of mind are not to be measured by time. It had come to this that the late fellow of Oriel, so aristocratic in his tastes, so temperate in his likings, had entered certain devious paths, where hidden pitfalls and thorny enclosures warn the unwary traveller of unknown dangers, and in which he was walking, not blindfold, but by strongest will and intent, led by impulse like a mere boy, and not daring to raise his eyes to the future. "And what Grace would have said!" And for the first ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... trying to emulate fair Lady Rose, held their heads so very high that they, of course, did not hear the low, soft cry, "Oh, will no one give me shelter?" At last there came an answer, "I will, gladly," in a shy and trembling tone, as though fearing to be presumptuous, from a thick thorny bush which helped to protect the more dainty beauties from the rough blasts of a sometimes too boisterous wind; in consideration of which service the flowers considered the briar as a good, useful sort of thing, respectable ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... not assimilate the dirt? Should we be less careful about mental and moral food materials? The Junior Classics have been selected with this principle in mind, without losing sight of the fact that every developing human being needs to have a vision of the rough and thorny road over which the human race has been slowly ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten
... in the procession, and the teacher, riding on, found her lying face down among the briars of the desolate meeting-house yard, her small body convulsively heaving with her weeping, and her slim fingers grasping the thorny briar shoots as though she would still hold to the earth that lay in freshly broken clods ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... farewells already? Wasn't my whole life one thorny path of farewells? At post offices, steamer-quays, railway stations—with the waving of ...
— The Road to Damascus - A Trilogy • August Strindberg
... mainland called Pangu; they were steaming straight out of a bay. To the east a massive headland closed the view, with the tilted edges of the rocky strata showing through its ragged clothing of rank bushes and thorny creepers. The wind had begun to sing in the rigging; the sea along the coast, green and as if swollen a little above the line of the horizon, seemed to pour itself over, time after time, with a slow and thundering fall, into the shadow of the leeward cape; ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... to feel if the plaster Christ were above his head. His groping old fingers found it, and he stayed, half-reared up against his pillows for an instant, while he touched the drooping head with its thorny crown, and on that familiar touch he let his hand fall, and ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... the wretch that long has tost On the thorny bed of pain Again repair his vigour lost And walk ...
— Advice to a Mother on the Management of her Children • Pye Henry Chavasse
... intersected with backwaters,*1* in which lie alligators, electric eels, and stinging rays. Far as the eye can reach are swamps, swamps, and more swamps, a sea of waving pampa-grass. After the swamps thickets of tacuaras (canes), forests of thorny trees, chanares, nandubay, jacarandas, urundey, talas, and quebrachos, each one hard enough to split an axe, some, like the black canela, almost like iron; the inhabitants ferocious and intractable as when the Governor ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... under guard of negroes, twenty of the men pressed on afoot through tangled vines and thorny bushes, still led by the dogs, until they brought up at the bottom of a tall cliff, and here the hounds seemed to be at fault, for they ran around and around a tree, looking up into it and whining. The herder swung himself into the branches and scrambled almost to the top. "Nobody here," he ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... if she has as yet journeyed any particular distance at all—or any more than set out upon the road. For the look she shot at me convinces me that she has started—in fact, has reached that turn in the thorny path where she is less inclined to defend herself than her own possessions. You seem ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... rainbows had found board and lodging. We may call him toad-hopper or spittle-bug, or as Fabre says, "Contentons-nous de Cicadelle, qui respecte le tympan." Like all of its kindred, the Bubble Bug finds Nirvana in a sappy green stem. It has neither strong flight, nor sticky wax, thorny armature nor gas barrage, so it proceeds to fashion an armor of bubbles, a cuirass of liquid film. This, in brief, was the rainbow which caught my eye when I broke open the stump. Up to that moment no rainbow had existed, only a little light sifting through ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... wounded, helpless man across the saddle, this stretch of thorny and contorted desert was practically impassable. Yet Gale headed into it unflinchingly. He would carry the Yaqui as far as possible, or until death make the burden no longer a duty. Blanco Sol plodded on over the dragging sand, up and down the steep, loose banks of washes, ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... from Bourn. He and my other hunter continued to see it two or three times a week, and to hear its peculiar note much oftener, but could never get a specimen, owing to its always frequenting the most dense thorny thickets, where only hasty glimpses of it could be obtained, and at so short a distance that it would be difficult to avoid blowing the bird to pieces. Ali was very much annoyed that he could not get a specimen of this ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume II. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... return. June came in upon the Bay, bringing with it a more vivid life in the environs of Naples. As the heat of the sun increased the vitality of the human motes that danced in its beams seemed to increase also, to become more blatant, more persistent. The wild oleander was in flower. The thorny cactus put forth upon the rim of its grotesque leaves pale yellow blossoms to rival the red geraniums that throng about it insolently in Italy. In the streets of the city ragged boys ran by crying, "Fragole!" and holding aloft the shallow baskets in ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... a despot's fortunes be, After his days of strength had flown, Amidst this people, proud and free, Whose histories from such sources run? The thought is its own mockery. I pity the audacious one Who may ascend that thorny throne, And bide a single setting sun. Day dies; my shadow's length has grown; The sun is sliding down the west. That trumpet in my camp was blown. From yonder high and wooded crest I shall behold my squadron's camp, Prepared to sleep its guarded rest In the low, misty, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... stared at the profile of District Attorney Sanderson's private secretary. So she was a "society girl," a "Forsyte" girl! Was that the reason, perhaps, why she had been so thorny with him, a mere "dick"? Well, he wasn't just a dick any longer. He was a Special Investigator ... A society girl, ...
— Murder at Bridge • Anne Austin
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