"Buttercup" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Captain Corcoran Commanding H.M.S. Pinafore. Ralph Rackstraw Able seaman. Dick Deadeye Able seaman. Bill Bobstay Boatswain's mate. Bob Becket Carpenter's mate. Tom Tucker Midshipmate. Sergeant of marines Josephine The Captain's daughter. Hebe Sir Joseph's first cousin. Little Buttercup A Portsmouth bumboat woman. First Lord's sisters, his cousins, ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon
... prop, the stem of a buttercup. The flower tipped a little to one side so that Maya could see him perfectly as he raised himself on his hind legs and looked up at her. She thought he had a nice, dear, friendly face—but not so very young any ...
— The Adventures of Maya the Bee • Waldemar Bonsels
... wish I was a buttercup, Upon the mountain top, That you might sweetly pick me up, And sweetly let me drop. I wish I was a little worm, All rigling in the sun, That I myself towards thee might turn When thou along didst come. Oh, I wish I was a doormat, sweet, All prostrate on the floor, ...
— The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's - A School Story • Talbot Baines Reed
... the boat must turn turtle, unless, by the blessing of the gods, the mast parts asunder—you look out through half-closed eyelids at a very beautiful coast. The waves dance, and glimmer, and shine in the sunlight, the long stretch of sand is yellow as a buttercup, and the fringes of graceful casuarina trees quiver like aspens in the breeze, and shimmer in the heat haze. The wash of the waves against the boat's side, and the ripple of the bow make music in ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... was showing the Ashland dairyman the bull calf, child of Red Rover VII and Buttercup IV, Mrs. Egg saw her oldest daughter's motor sliding across the lane from the turnpike. It held all three of her female offspring. Mrs. Egg groaned, drawling commonplaces to her visitor, but he stayed a full ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... discontented eye Looked sorrowfully up, And chanced across the path to spy A golden Buttercup. Its petals flinched before the wind, The stalk was roughly bent, And yet the Daisy could not hear ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... reached the road, the traction engine was not in sight, so they sat in the bank and waited, Mrs. Marston regal in the chair; and Hazel held a buttercup under Edward's chin to see ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... just lifts the head Of many a columbine; And, taken from their rocky bed, They in our wreaths shall twine. Saxifrage, so small and sweet, Grows in plenty at our feet; From the grass we gather up, Golden bright, the buttercup. ...
— Cousin Hatty's Hymns and Twilight Stories • Wm. Crosby And H.P. Nichols
... of plants belonging to the natural order Ranunculaceae, the buttercup family, commonly known as aconite, monkshood or wolfsbane, and embracing about 60 species, chiefly natives of the mountainous parts of the northern hemisphere. They are distinguished by having one of the five blue or yellow coloured ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... on the dusty street, And daisies spring about her feet; Or, touched to life beneath her tread, An English cowslip lifts its head; And, as to do her grace, rise up The primrose and the buttercup! I roam with her through fields of cane, And seem to stroll an English lane, Which, white with blossoms of the May, Spreads its green carpet in her way! As fancy wills, the path beneath Is golden ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... Reilly?" asked the girl somewhat stiffly, for she had a suspicion of what was coming. A little negro girl in the back kitchen named Buttercup also had a suspicion of what was coming, and stationed herself with intense delight behind the door, through a crack in which she ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... still, you will observe that the posies of the capitals are much the same everywhere. In all the churches of the thirteenth century you will find the leaves of the vine, the oak, the rose-tree, the ivy, the willow, the laurel, and the bracken, with strawberry and buttercup leaves. Indeed, as a rule, the image-makers selected native plants characteristic of the ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... him think of their own cows. He could shut his eyes and see how each one looked. Clover was red, Teenie black, and Buttercup had white spots ...
— Mother Stories • Maud Lindsay
... beliefs seem to be peculiarly indubitable. One might instance the belief that two and two are four, that two things cannot be in the same place at the same time, nor one thing in two places, or that a particular buttercup that we are seeing is yellow. The suggestion we are to examine is that such: beliefs have some recognizable quality which secures their truth, and the truth of whatever is deduced from them according ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
... pick them up, But stumbling forward, sunk, O'er the wild pea and buttercup, Across the ...
— Our Boys - Entertaining Stories by Popular Authors • Various
... some appropriate gift, such as, for example, a nice potted geranium. Great care should be taken, however, that it is a plant of the correct species, for in the etiquette of courtship all flowers have different meanings and many a promising affair has been ruined because a suitor sent his lady a buttercup, meaning "That's the last dance I'll ever take you to, you big cow," instead of a plant with a more tender significance. Some of the commoner flowers and their meaning in courtship are ...
— Perfect Behavior - A Guide for Ladies and Gentlemen in all Social Crises • Donald Ogden Stewart
... to pitch my tents in Ashdod; and I doubt the use of the sling as a weapon in modern war. I decline to go into hyperbolic eccentricities over unknown geniuses, and a single quality or power is not enough to arouse my enthusiasm. It is possible that no master ever painted a buttercup like this one, or the fringe of a robe like that one; that this poet has a unique subtlety, and that an undefinable music. I am still unconvinced, tho the man who can not see it, we are told, should at once retire to the place where there is wailing ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... in it, restrained by it, till the time of birth. The shell is hardly more subordinate to the germ in the egg, than the calyx to the blossom. It bursts at last; but it never lives as the corolla does. It may fall at the moment its task is fulfilled, as in the poppy; or wither gradually, as in the buttercup; or persist in a ligneous apathy, after the flower is dead, as in the rose; or harmonise itself so as to share in the aspect of the real flower, as in the lily; but it never shares in the corolla's bright passion of life. And the gradations which thus exist ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... most admired fairy opera airs. But before the banquet was through, I am sadly afraid some of the gay young fellows forgot they were in the presence of ladies, they laughed so loud, and talked so much nonsense, and one of them came very near upsetting the table at which he sat, spilling his buttercup of dew all over the new gossamer dress of Lilliebelle, ...
— The Fairy Nightcaps • Frances Elizabeth Barrow
... of real persons to the characters in their books. For this reason, I mean to call them Primrose, Periwinkle, Sweet Fern, Dandelion, Blue Eye, Clover, Huckleberry, Cowslip, Squash-blossom, Milkweed, Plantain, and Buttercup; although, to be sure, such titles might better suit a group of fairies than a ...
— The Gorgon's Head - (From: "A Wonder-Book For Girls and Boys") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... stuff?" Peterson was asked, referring to the brownish "milk" subsequently identified as coming from a dainty young cow known as Melody Buttercup Greenbrier IV. ...
— Make Mine Homogenized • Rick Raphael
... BUTTERCUP or CROWFOOT - (R. sceleratus) Highly-polished petals, which spangle (R. acris) the fields and hedges with gold. (R. repens) All much alike; all haunting (R. bulbosus) kitchen-gardens and pastures, where the cattle, disliking ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... the formula K H2O KHO H. But it is better still to have a mental picture of the tiny atoms clasping each other, and mingling so as to make a new substance, and to feel how wonderful are the many changing forms of nature. It is useful to be able to classify a flower and to know that the buttercup belongs to the Family Ranunculaceae, with petals free and definite, stamens hypogynous and indefinite, pistil apocarpous. But it is far sweeter to learn about the life of the little plant, to understand why its peculiar flower is useful to it, and how it feeds itself, ...
— The Fairy-Land of Science • Arabella B. Buckley
... by asking, she had learnt the way to go; She had found the famous meadow—it was wrapped in cruel snow; Not a buttercup or daisy, not a single verdant blade Showed its head above its prison. Then she ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... yellow flower! Tell me its name."—"A columbine. It grows In clefts of rocks. That's an anemone: We call it so because the leaves are torn So easily by the wind; for anemos Is Greek for wind."—"Oh! here's a buttercup! I know that well. Red clover, too, I know. Isn't the dandelion beautiful? And O, Miss Percival, what flower is this?" "That's a wild rose."—"What, does the rose grow wild? But is not that delightful? A wild rose! And ...
— The Woman Who Dared • Epes Sargent
... wished she were not in the carriage; that it would stop; that I could get out, and run, dancing and shouting, through the fields. I broke the silence. I implored the lady to stop the carriage; to let me go and find my home; to let me gather one buttercup, one blade of grass. She drew her glimmering veil more closely around her; I believe she thought the wind blew a little. On, on, we went! At length we stopped, and I thought it was my mother's house. I looked out for the little ...
— The Magician's Show Box and Other Stories • Lydia Maria Child
... Hamilton, as having reached her drawing-room, she proceeded to adjust some dainty gilt cups that stood on a small table. "That is, if you are allowed to have coffee at night. From your roseleaf cheeks, I fancy you drink only honeydew or buttercup tea." ...
— Patty's Friends • Carolyn Wells
... books, is Les Beaux Messieurs de Bois-Dore. It is all the more agreeable that we may even "begin with a little aversion." It suggests itself as a sort of interloper in the great business of Dumas and Co.: it opens, indeed, only a few years before D'Artagnan rode up to the inn on the buttercup-coloured pony. And, in manner, it may look at first as if the writer were following another but much inferior example—our own G. P. R. James; for there are "two cavaliers," and one tells the other a tale fit to make him fall asleep and off his saddle. But it improves ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... about them. If you did, you would find they had none of the gilt and gloss you imagine. But the great things they have got in common with all humanity you ignore. It's like—it's like sentimentalising about a pancake because it looked like a buttercup, and all the while not knowing that it was ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... the subject,—why, look there for something! just as, when going through deep meadow-grass, a bird flies ostentatiously up before you, you may know her nest is not there, but far off, under distant tufts of fern and buttercup, through which she has crept with a silent flutter in her spotted breast, to act her pretty little ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... and kissed the child, and the little one half opened his eyes. They plucked some of the rich flowers, but also took with them the despised buttercup and ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... Tobels, opening downward to the Lake of Constance, which now shimmered afar through the gaps, were left behind us, and we passed westward along a broken, irregular valley. The vivid turf was sown with all the flowers of spring,—primrose, violet, buttercup, anemone, and veronica,—faint, but sweetest-odored, and the heralds of spring in all lands. So I gave little heed to the weird lines of cloud, twisting through and between the severed pyramids of the Sentis, as if weaving the woof of storms. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... its ridge southward from London through a mile of chestnut, lilac, and apple trees, hanging over the wooden palings on each side—suddenly the trees stopped on the left, and out one came on the top of the field sloping down to the south into Dulwich valley—open field animate with cow and buttercup, and below, the beautiful meadows and high avenues of Dulwich; and beyond, all that crescent of the Norwood hills; a footpath, entered by a turnstile, going down to the left, always so warm that invalids could be sheltered there in March, when to walk elsewhere ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... a crowing baby, in her lap. Gilbert was tickling Peter's chin with a buttercup, Nancy was putting a wreath of leaves on her mother's hair, and Kathleen was swinging from an apple-tree bough, her yellow ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... of this country of uncertainties, it came to pass one day, that in the midst of a shower of rain that might well be called golden, seeing the sun, shining as it fell, turned all its drops into molten topazes, and every drop was good for a grain of golden corn, or a yellow cowslip, or a buttercup, or a dandelion at least;—while this splendid rain was falling, I say, with a musical patter upon the great leaves of the horse-chestnuts, which hung like Vandyke collars about the necks of the creamy, red-spotted blossoms, and on the leaves of the sycamores, looking as ...
— A Double Story • George MacDonald
... the supper set before him softened Gallito's harsh face. Brook trout, freshly caught that afternoon from the rushing mountain stream not far away from the cabin, and smoking hot from the frying pan; an omelette, golden brown and buttercup yellow, of a fluff, a fragrance, with savories hidden beneath its surface, a conserve of fruits, luscious, amber and subtly biting, the coffee of dreams and a bottle of red wine, ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... thorny cactus, all covered with warts and knobs and sharp spines. Dear mother was very proud of him, and she was always hoping he would blossom, but he never did. He lived in the house in winter, but in spring Mother set him out in the flower-bed, just beside the double buttercup. So when the buttercup blossomed, with its lovely yellow balls, I played that Old Moneybags, who was an odious old miser, was counting his gold. Then, when the petals dropped, he piled his money in little heaps, ...
— Hildegarde's Holiday - a story for girls • Laura E. Richards
... nicer in your own bright gown; The little children love you: Be the best buttercup you can, And think ...
— The Posy Ring - A Book of Verse for Children • Various
... dream there was a time Long past and irrecoverable, a clime Where any brook so radiant racing clear Through buttercup and kingcup bright as brass But gentle, nourishing the meadow grass That leans and scurries in the wind, would bear Another beauty, divine and feminine, Child to the sun, a nymph whose soul unstained Could love all day, and never hate or tire, A lover ...
— Last Poems • Edward Thomas
... wallflower's fragrance dwell; And hover round the slight bluebell, My childhood's darling flower. Smile on the little daisy still, The buttercup's bright goblet fill With all thy ...
— Poems • (AKA Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte) Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell
... house and throw away her doll in a month or two more. Sweet Fern has learned to read and write, and has put on a jacket and pair of pantaloons—all of which improvements I am sorry for. Squash Blossom, Blue Eye, Plantain, and Buttercup have had the scarlet fever, but came easily through it. Huckleberry, Milkweed, and Dandelion were attacked with the whooping cough, but bore it bravely, and kept out of doors whenever the sun shone. Cowslip, during the autumn, had either the measles, ...
— Tanglewood Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... from her native bole Coming at dusk, when the dim stars emerge, To a slow river at whose silent verge Tall poplars tremble and deep grasses roll, Come thou no less and, kneeling in a shoal Of the freaked flag and meadow buttercup, Bend till thine image from the pool beam up Arched with blue heaven like an aureole. See how adorable in fancy then Lives the fair face it mirrors even so, O thou whose beauty moving among men Is like the wind's way on the woods below, Filling ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... accounted for by the escape of imprisoned air unequally expanded, but "a veil of mystery hangs over the whole."[EN18] The valley-sides of dark trap were striped with white veins of heat-altered argil; the sole with black magnetic sand; and patches of the bed were buttercup-yellow with the Handn (dandelion), the Cytisus, and the Zaram (Panicum turgidum) loved by camels. Their jaundiced hue contrasted vividly with the red and mauve blossoms of the boragine El-Kahl, the blue flowerets of the Lavandula (El-Zayti), and the delicate green of the useless[EN19] ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 2 • Richard Burton
... And at eve she's asleep when the valleys are dark, And she chatters and dances the blessed day long, Now laughing in gladness, now singing a song. She never is silent; the whole summer day She is off on the green with the blossoms at play; Now seeking a buttercup, plucking a rose, Or laughing aloud at ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... see what a flower really is. Take, for example, a buttercup, cotton, tobacco, or plum blossom (see Figs. 31 and 32). You will find on the outside a row of green leaves inclosing the flower when it is still a bud. These leaves are the sepals. Next on the inside is a row of colored leaves, or petals. Arranged inside of the ...
— Agriculture for Beginners - Revised Edition • Charles William Burkett
... instinct within it that reaches and towers, 40 And, grasping blindly above it for light, Climbs to a soul for grass and flowers; The flush of life may well be seen Thrilling back over hills and valleys; The cowslip startles in meadows green, 45 The buttercup catches the sun in its chalice, And there's never a leaf or a blade too mean To be some happy creature's palace, The little bird sits at his door in the sun, Atilt like a blossom among the leaves, 50 And lets his illumined being o'errun With the deluge of summer ...
— Narrative and Lyric Poems (first series) for use in the Lower School • O. J. Stevenson
... how you know whether you like it or not," Betsy observed, "unless you've looked into a buttercup to find out." ...
— The Tale of Betsy Butterfly - Tuck-Me-In Tales • Arthur Scott Bailey
... lessening temptation, is based on what life has taught me, that the fundamental character of people is not greatly alterable, but that the alteration of their circumstances will certainly influence the effect and working of their capacities and instincts. The buttercup which is tall with a flower at the end of a high firm stalk and leaves with slender spike fingers, if it grows in an open meadow, becomes a stunted flower on a short stem, and its leaves form squat webs, in order to force ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... a box may be arithmetic, the painting of a buttercup may be nature study, the construction of a model, or of dramatic properties may be geography or history, not by any means the only way of learning, but one of the earlier ways and a very sound way; there is a purpose to serve behind it all, that will lead to very careful discrimination ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... music and the rolling of carriages made night, if not hideous, at least discordant to the unconsidered minority who went to bed as usual. Outside in the country, even in the suburbs, June came in glory, with woods in freshest livery of green, with fragrance of hawthorn and broom and gorse, buttercup meadows and gardens brimmed with roses. It seemed to George Goring and Mildred as though somehow this warmth, this gayety and richness of life in the earth had never been there before, but that Fate ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... Veget.,' t. iv, p. 426. The same author also cites Romer as having found two plants of Ranunculus, from the stem of which emerged a daisy. As it is not an uncommon practice to stick a daisy on a buttercup, it is to be hoped no hoax was played off on ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters
... style. Venus, Aphrodite^, Hebe, the Graces, Peri, Houri, Cupid, Apollo^, Hyperion, Adonis^, Antionous^, Narcissus. peacock, butterfly; garden; flower of, pink of; bijou; jewel &c (ornament) 847; work of art. flower, flow'ret gay^; [flowers: list] wildflower; rose, lily, anemone, asphodel, buttercup, crane's bill, daffodil, tulip, tiger lily, day lily, begonia, marigold, geranium, lily of the valley, ranunculus, rhododendron, windflower. pleasurableness &c 829. beautifying; landscaping, landscape gardening; decoration &c 847; calisthenics^. [person who is beautiful] beauty; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... therefore stray far above the level at which bee-blossoms altogether cease to grow. Now, the butterfly differs greatly from the bee in his mode of honey-hunting: he does not bustle about in a business-like manner from one buttercup or dead-nettle to its nearest fellow; but he flits joyously, like a sauntering straggler that he is, from a great patch of color here to another great patch at a distance, whose gleam happens to ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... can go, just as soon as you get the butter made. Now, hurry up, and let us get into the buttercup field, which is a whole lot nicer than the butter churn and— Oh! it smells much nicer, too. Why, Ruth, that cream actually ...
— Ruth Fielding of the Red Mill • Alice B. Emerson
... since I've grown up" (Miss Dinsmore's gold was fast becoming silver); "Sary Ann's is changin', too, I see. Miss Bray says she isn't over-fond of stirrin' round; and I shouldn't wonder if 't was so. Sary Ann don't look no more like workin' than a buttercup; but then, as I tell Miss Bray, corn is made for usin' and flowers for starin' at, and I don't know as any special sign is set on either of 'em to show which is the best. Don't mind them youngsters, Sandy; they're always pretty ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... by a book I have. The only good veterinary doctor about here lives way over by Spring Hill, and it would take him a day to drive over and back, besides costing me about ten dollars. Still, I ought to get him. Buttercup is pretty sick," answered Sam, and I could see that his broad shoulders under his well-cut blue serge coat of last season seemed to sag with the ...
— Over Paradise Ridge - A Romance • Maria Thompson Daviess
... for her. Her muzzle is too blunt; then she does not bite as do the sheep; she has not upper teeth; she crops. But on the lower slopes, and margins, and rich bottoms, she is at home. Where the daisy and the buttercup and clover bloom, and where corn will grow, is her proper domain. The agriculture of no country can long thrive without her. Not only a large part of the real, but much of the potential wealth of the land is wrapped up ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... grass is short, and the fresh turf sets off its "ring of gold" with admirable effect; hence we know the poet is a month or more out of the season when, in "Al Fresco," he makes it bloom with the buttercup ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... pass more or less into other flowers, whose forms are properly pure vases; but it affects some of them slightly, others not at all. It never strongly affects the heaths; never once the roses; but it enters like an evil spirit into the buttercup, and turns it into a larkspur, with a black, spotted, grotesque centre, and a strange, broken blue, gorgeous and intense, yet impure, glittering on the surface as if it were strewn with broken glass, and stained or darkening irregularly into red. ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... Abbey before the tale was resumed. A flat "throuch" stone sustained the narrator, while the four disposed themselves on the sunny grass, in the various attitudes of severe inattention which youth assumes when listening to a story. Sweetheart pored into the depths of a buttercup. Hugh John scratched the freestone of a half-buried tomb with a nail till told to stop. Sir Toady Lion, having a "pinch-bug" coralled in his palms, sat regarding it cautiously between his thumbs. Only Maid Margaret, her dimpled ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... every fresh-water tank. It must be grown as a bottom-plant, and flourishes only when rooted. The Nitella is another pleasing variety. The Ranunculus aquatilis, or Water-Crowfoot, is to be found in almost every pond in bloom by the middle of May, and continues so into the autumn. It is of the buttercup family, and may be known as a white buttercup with a yellow centre. The floating leaves are fleshy; the lower ones finely cut. It must be very carefully washed, and planted from a good joint, allowing length enough of stem to reach the surface. Some of the blossom-heads may also be sprinkled ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... flown too high, And felt a little lazy, Was resting near a buttercup Who wished she ...
— The Posy Ring - A Book of Verse for Children • Various
... This thought redoubled my sobs, and then I saw that Mamma, who had never allowed herself to go to any length of tenderness with me, was suddenly overcome by my tears and had to struggle to keep back her own. Then, as she saw that I had noticed this, she said to me, with a smile: "Why, my little buttercup, my little canary-boy, he's going to make Mamma as silly as himself if this goes on. Look, since you can't sleep, and Mamma can't either, we mustn't go on in this stupid way; we must do something; I'll get one of your books." But I had none there. "Would you like me to get out the books now ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... rather unsafe is a paper boat, Better it is to be candid! And after a voyage across the seas They came to an island of flowers and trees. And, wishing to feel rather more at ease, They anchored their craft and landed! A bright little Fairy cried out from the strand, "You're welcome my darlings, to Buttercup Land!" ...
— Golden Moments - Bright Stories for Young Folks • Anonymous
... Hops climb the ash and hang their clusters, which impart an aromatic scent to the hand that plucks them; broad burdock leaves, which the mouchers put on the top of their baskets to shield their freshly gathered watercresses from the sunshine; creeping avens, with buttercup-like flowers and long stems that straggle across the ditch, and in autumn are tipped with a small ball of soft spines; mints, strong-scented and unmistakable; yarrow, white and sometimes a little lilac, ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies
... and Saartje; which is Dutch for Kate, Annie and Sallie. These, their fond mother, who loved them dearly, called her "orange blossoms"; but when at dinner, Klaas would keep on, dipping his potatoes into the hot butter, while others were all through, his mother would laugh and call him her Buttercup. But always Klaas wanted more cheese. When unusually greedy, she twitted him as a boy "worse than Butter-and-Eggs"; that is, as troublesome as the yellow and white plant, called toad-flax, is to the farmer—very pretty, ...
— Dutch Fairy Tales for Young Folks • William Elliot Griffis
... then drew toward each other with no break in their symmetry; they did not close. Above was, roughly, a ten-foot rift, ragged edged, through which poured light like that in the heart of pale amber, a buttercup light shot through ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... lines are barely fifty yards apart, and at the present time the grass is hiding the enemy's trenches; to peep over the parapet gives one the impression of looking on a beautiful meadow splashed with daisy, buttercup, and poppy flower; the whole is a riot of colour—crimson, heliotrope, mauve, and green. What a change from some weeks ago! Then the place was littered with dead bodies, and limp, (p. 080) lifeless figures ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill
... creeping buttercup, marsh buttercup, small-flowered crowfoot, dandelion, yellow woodsorrel, bell-wort, star-grass, downy yellow violet, pappoose root, lousewort, prickly ash, hop hornbeam, white oak, mossy-cup oak, ...
— Some Spring Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... set a dainty little round table (not at all like a multiplication table) with pink shell dishes, and put on a jar of honeysuckle honey and a pat of buttercup butter. Then Avrillia baked the waffles and they sat down ...
— The Garden of the Plynck • Karle Wilson Baker
... only kick them all about in the air when you tumble? Legs are meant to walk with, you know. Now, don't be cross about it, and don't begin putting out your wings yet; I've some more to say. Go down to the frog that lives behind that buttercup—give him my compliments—Sylvie's compliments—can you ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 2, December, 1877 • Various
... old Squire had been breeding a herd of Jerseys. There were sixteen of them: Jersey First, Canary, Jersey Second, Little Queen, Beauty, Buttercup, and all the rest. Each one had her own little book that hung from its nail on a beam of the tie-up behind her stall. In it were recorded her pedigree, dates, and the number of pounds of milk she gave at each milking. The scales for weighing the milk hung from the same beam. We weighed each ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... want to have all the gibberish to yourself. That you should have it all to yourself in your own pulpit we accede to you; but out here, on the heath, surely I may have my turn. You do not believe in Rumtunshid? Then why should farmer Buttercup be called on to believe in the communion of the saints? What does he believe about it? Or why should you make little Flora Buttercup tell such a huge fib as to say, that she believes in the resurrection ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... dear little puppy it was!" said Alice, as she leant against a buttercup to rest herself, and fanned herself with one of the leaves. "I should have liked teaching it tricks very much, if—if I'd only been the right size to do it! Oh, dear! I'd nearly forgotten that I've ...
— Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Illustrated by Arthur Rackham. With a Proem by Austin Dobson • Lewis Carroll
... grateful song resounding over every land; in homage to the blessing-laden blossoms? Lips long used to wailing swell that chorus loudest, for it was the sunshine caught in buttercup or dandelion that turned so many darkened faces in sudden smiles to heaven. Ah! they are the forms wasted and bowed down by anguish, that stoop most meekly, thankfully, only to lie where the daisies can ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... the grass and the flowers," said the fairy queen. "In every blade and in every bud lie hidden notes of fairy music. Each violet and daisy and buttercup,—every modest wild-flower (no matter how hidden) gives glad response to the tinkle of fairy feet. Dancing daintily over this quiet sward where flowers dot the green, my little people strike here and there and everywhere the keys which give ...
— A Little Book of Profitable Tales • Eugene Field
... forget books, it is as easy to forget the months and what they showed us, when once they are gone. Just for the moment I tell myself that I know May like the multiplication table and could pass an examination on its flowers, their appearance and their order. To-day I can affirm confidently that the buttercup has five petals. (Or is it six? I knew for certain last week.) But next year I shall probably have forgotten my arithmetic, and may have to learn once more not to confuse the buttercup with the celandine. ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd
... type may become a vegetative variety, and be multiplied by bulbs, buds or cuttings, etc. Some cultivated anemones and crowfoots (Ranunculus) are of this character, and even the marsh-marigold (Caltha palustris) has a petalomanous variety. I once found in a meadow such a form of the meadow-buttercup (Ranunculus acris), and succeeded in keeping it in my garden for several years, but it did not make seeds and finally died. Camellias are known to have both types of double flowers. The petalomanous type is highly regular in structure, ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries
... which is not there. A beauty or a suggestion is a truth, and the poet sees a beauty or a suggestion. He would indeed be false and an enemy to science if he said that a primrose by the river's brim was a buttercup, or that it was red when it is yellow, but it is no fiction when he declares that the primrose tells him this or that of nature or of God. It may not tell the scientist anything of the kind, but that is because the scientist ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... the ferns, lycopods and horsetail plants. The first two of the above-named classes have been well called Seed plants. These are again broken up into divisions, to which the name Natural Orders has been given. Most of us know, as the following are examined, Anemone, Buttercup, Marsh Marigold, Globe Flower, and Larkspur, that they have the same general structural arrangement, but in many particulars they differ. Thus these natural orders are again subdivided into genera, and a still further subdivision into species ...
— The Story of the Cotton Plant • Frederick Wilkinson
... under Margate Pier. Excursionists discovered embarking in two rival sailing-boats, the "Daisy" and the "Buttercup," whose ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, August 13, 1892 • Various
... for me a kiss." His face grew thoughtful, then the rogue Lisped out: "Well, this is most in vogue: An acorn-cup of sugar first, Sprinkle quite well with bubbles burst, Then add a pinch of down that lies All over June's brown butterflies. Mix well, and take, to stir it up, The stem of one long buttercup. But, sir, you ne'er can taste a mite Until I add the appetite." Whereat, ere I could turn to start, I saw—I felt ...
— Cap and Gown - A Treasury of College Verse • Selected by Frederic Knowles
... them off on her fingers, "you've got a father—and a mother—and new tires to your bike. Good boots" (she had stuck buttercups in their laces) "and a most beautiful purple tie." (She held another buttercup ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... a tea rose, stood doubtfully in the cedar-wood door, poised for flight either way, sucking in the dimple at the left of her mouth. Running at his call she flew into his arms and dropped her buttercup head on his shoulder. For the first time he smiled, and the wise wife slipped quietly away and watched them from the door, guessing at their murmurs, counting their kisses. Later she ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... A poppy piped, a bramble played the concertina, and a lilac grew desperately jealous of me and tried to claw my hair. Then the dancing ceased, and I found myself in the midst of bluebells that shook their bells at me with loud trills of laughter. And out from among them, came a buttercup, pointing its yellow head at me. 'See! see,' it cried, 'what Gladys is carrying behind her. Naughty Gladys!' And trees and flowers—everything around me—shook with laughter. Then I grew hot and cold all over, and did not know ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell
... the buttercup blooms by the way, A song of the joyous ground; While the melody rained from yonder spray Is a blossom in fields ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... simile in spite of Alphonse Karr!) the close fine grass! The pale-yellow rock cistus in clumps, the blue "shepherd's thyme" in tracts of colour, sweet little purple-capped orchids, spireas and burnets, and everywhere "the golden buttercup" in sheets of gleaming yellow, and the soft wind blows and blows, and the black-nosed sheep come up the leas, and I drink in the breeze! Oh, those flocks of black-faced lambs and sheep are TOO-TOO! and I must tell you that the old Wiltshire "ship-dog" is nearly extinct. I regret to say ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... forgot the puffs and the linen gown, and thought only of the exquisitely beautiful face and rippling golden hair, for Bessie's head was uncovered, and Neil saw that she received quite as much admiration from the fashionable crowd as did Little Buttercup or the Captain's daughter, and that Jack looked supremely happy and nodded to his friends here and there as if to call their attention to ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... of Spring cheered her eyes and calmed the unrest of her heart, as she rode. Among the dead leaves of the woods, the snowy blossoms of the blood-root had already burst forth in starry clusters; the anemones trembled between the sheltering knees of the old oaks, and here and there a single buttercup dropped its gold on the meadows. These things were so many presentiments of brighter days in Nature, and they awoke a corresponding faith in her ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor
... you are right." Hadria was picking the petals off a buttercup one by one, and when she had destroyed one golden corolla, ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... underground retreats from the region poisoned by sunshine. Next year you will find the grass growing fresh and green where the stone lay—the ground-bird builds her nest where the beetle had his hole—the dandelion and the buttercup are growing there, and the broad fans of insect-angels open and shut over their golden disks as the rhythmic waves of blissful consciousness pulsate ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... hummed and buzzed in the hedge as I got ready for work, importuning the flowers for that which he could not carry, and finally giving up the attempt in despair fell asleep on a buttercup, the best place for his weary little velvet body. In five minutes—they may have been five hours to him—he awoke a new bee, sensible and clear-sighted, and flew blithely away to the hive with his sufficiency—an example this weary world ...
— The Roadmender • Michael Fairless
... the seed would have to be in the ground two years in order to germinate. I didn't know that and left them in only a few months. I think the only way is to buy the plants. It is a very beautiful plant, yellow and shaped like golden glow, belongs to the same family as the buttercup. ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... existence and interaction of all the antecedent ones. Is it probable, then, even a priori, that if life or anything like it exists on any other planet, it would exist in forms at all as near our own as a buttercup is to a human being, or a sea-anemone is to a cat or ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen
... to tell you that Buttercup (the spotted cow with one horn, Mother of Lesbia) has done a disgraceful thing. She got into the orchard Friday evening and ate apples under the trees, and ate and ate until they went to her head. For two days she has been perfectly ...
— Daddy-Long-Legs • Jean Webster
... buttercup green of the meadows, The snow of the blossoming may, Lovelier are not than the legions of children Magic hath ...
— Peacock Pie, A Book of Rhymes • Walter de la Mare
... brother, and that Little Billie thought so too. Ma said she just couldn't live with Little Billie gone—Myrtle and me didn't answer, somehow. And one day I heard her singin' at the piano—she and pa had joined the town troupe to sing Pinafore. She was Little Buttercup, and pa was Dick Deadeye, and so they practiced together. And I always, to this day, think of Little Billie whenever I hear any one sing "The Nightingale Sighs for the Moon's Bright Rays." These things always get mixed together and stay mixed, so my ...
— Mitch Miller • Edgar Lee Masters
... that some of the travellers hesitated, slowed up, and finally stood quite still. He saw that the tall beech tree stopped, and that the roebuck and the wheat blade tarried by the wayside, likewise the blackberry bush, the little yellow buttercup, the chestnut tree, ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... my heart bleed, verily. 'Twas for the young Lord of Mallow—but a lad with buttercup curls and speedwell eyes, and a smile to win the love o' any maid in her reason (though, to be sure, my lady was in her reason). He comes to me and gets between my knees, like any little eanling that might 'a' been ...
— A Brother To Dragons and Other Old-time Tales • Amelie Rives
... earth to sky, and was about to give it up, when a buttercup fell at his feet, and he caught sight of Miss Celia smiling at him from behind her brother, who did not ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, May, 1878, No. 7. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... And, groping blindly above it for light, Climbs to a soul in grass and flowers; The flush of life may well be seen Thrilling back over hills and valleys; The cowslip startles in meadows green, The buttercup catches the sun in its chalice, And there's never a leaf nor a blade too mean To be some happy creature's palace; The little bird sits at his door in the sun, Atilt like a blossom among the leaves, And lets ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For • Various
... the unhappy mate made David cook an omelet and bake a seed-cake, the latter so richly compounded that it opened to the knife like a freckled buttercup. With the same object he stuck night-lines into the banks of the mill-pond, and drew up next morning a family of fat eels, some of which were skinned and prepared for his breakfast. They were his favourite fish, ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy |
