"Cactus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... growing hedge of cactus plants around the goat-pasture. This kind of cactus grows straight up in tall, round spikes about as large around as a boy's leg, and higher than a man's head. The spikes are covered with long, stiff spines that stick straight out and prick like everything if you run into them. The ...
— The Mexican Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... as it plashed in the shade of the majestic plum tree, I studied the grasses and the wood mosses that grew at the edge of my little lake; and upon the warm side of the garden where the sun shone all through the day, the cactus ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... retorted spiritedly. "It looks so much different in the summer time, but still seems queer to me with its heaps of rocks and no trees except the stiff old Joshuas. I wonder why they are called that. Even they don't seem like trees to me. They look like giant cactus plants, and just ...
— Tabitha's Vacation • Ruth Alberta Brown
... pull straws with him to see who took my canteen down to the creek and got some fresh water. He was agreeable and we hunched up to each other. It ain't to my credit to say it, but I was worse hurt than that Injun, so I worked him. He got the short straw, and had to crawl a mile through cactus, while I sat comfortable on the cause of the disagreement and yelled to him that he looked like a badger, and other things that an Injun wouldn't feel was a compliment." Red leaned back and roared. "I can see him now putting ...
— Red Saunders • Henry Wallace Phillips
... and continued forward alone about another mile toward a fairly large village visible between great blue boulders with cactus dotted all about. There was the usual herd of cattle grazing near at hand, but the place had an unaccountable forlorn look, and the small boy standing on an ant-hill to watch the cattle seemed too listless to be curious, and ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... almost like a meadow at home. On a nearer approach the vegetation was found to be very thin, and the soil still sandy, but it was spotted with delightful little flowers, and in the village of Sheikh Zowaid near by, were fruit trees and cactus hedged enclosures well covered with fresh grass; while to the south of us were some big areas of young crops. The effect of this change was immediate, and the least poetical and imaginative among us felt a thrill of joy in the relief from the desolation of eternal ...
— The Fifth Battalion Highland Light Infantry in the War 1914-1918 • F.L. Morrison
... which we were passing, and, after pipes and coffee, and the usual ceremonies, I mounted my horse, and, at the head of my escort, rode out of the mudir's courtyard, when my eye was caught by the flutter of the robes of a woman in a garden across the road. Around the garden ran a high hedge of cactus, and as I leaned forward in my saddle to look through one of the openings, a girl's face presented itself to me at the other side of it, and we stared each other in the eyes for several seconds before she—a Mussulman ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... gorgeous unnatural beauty of cactus and azalea and found Leonard Quinton, poet and romancer, with his head hanging downward off his ottoman and his red curls sweeping the ground. Into his left side was thrust the queer dagger that they had picked up in the garden, and his limp hand ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... you may have noticed that sometimes a fellow ought to cover up his tracks. What's to hinder you and me just takin' a little pasear down in toward the Sacramentos, on the southeast side, after a load of melons? They're better than cactus for the boys here. That's straight merchandisin', and, besides, it's Art. And—well, I think that's ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... irrigated, too much water will kill them. And this is true also of walnut and butternut seedlings. I have no acreage of nut trees. I grow seedlings and plant them wherever I find a place protected from the stock and within reach of moisture from the irrigation ditch, as this is a desert, cactus country. ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Thirty-Fourth Annual Report 1943 • Various
... be quite put out if the machinist had put too strong a light into one side of the moon, or if the sky-pieces hung down over the scenes when they ought to have hung behind them, or when a palm tree was introduced into a scene representing the Berlin Zoological Gardens, or a cactus in a view of the Tyrol, or a beech tree in the far north of Norway. As if that was of any consequence. Is it not quite immaterial? Who would fidget about such a trifle? It's only make-believe, after all, and every one is expected to ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... will spring up around the furnace, the Bessemer steel-works and the rail-mills that are now projected; and a few years will suffice to transform the level mesa, upon which for untold centuries the cactus and the yucca-lily have bloomed undisturbed, into a thriving manufacturing city whose pulse shall be the throb of steam through iron arms. The onlooking mountains, that have seen strange sights about this old outpost, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... flowed down on one side from the hill above, bordered by the graceful and variously shaped trees of the tropics—the tall maple arrow, surrounded by its flowering crown of yellow; the Spanish needle, with its dagger-like leaves; the quilled pimploe, a species of cactus; and numberless others, from the branches of which hung lilac and purple wreaths in rich festoons—while the sweet notes of the feathered songsters ever and anon burst forth, and here and there could be seen tiny humming-birds flitting from flower to ...
— The Missing Ship - The Log of the "Ouzel" Galley • W. H. G. Kingston
... to Hong Kong what Mount Auburn is to Boston,—not quite so extensive, but superior in its collection of flowers and trees, which must have been gathered and naturalized here at a great cost. The varieties of the cactus family are remarkable in numbers and mode of training. The same may be said of the camphor-tree, the aloes, tall and graceful cypresses, mingling with which are Cape jasmines, hydrangeas, magnolias, and the scarlet geranium, tall and hedge-like, barked by white, variegated, and scarlet ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... rougher, and her feet grew wearier, and her stomach emptier. Then, as if her troubles were all to come in a lump—as they have a way of doing—she stepped squarely into a bunch of "pincushion" cactus. ...
— Chip, of the Flying U • B. M. Bower
... was strangely un-English. Diana Mayo leaned forward, her head raised, listening intently, with shining eyes. The voice seemed to come from the dark shadows at the end of the garden, or it might have been further away out in the road beyond the cactus hedge. The singer sang slowly, his voice lingering caressingly on the words; the last verse dying away softly and clearly, almost imperceptibly ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... with eyes inflamed and strength all but gone, he finally laid Gloria in the shadow of a giant prickly pear bush, and fell beside her. He fumbled for his knife and clumsily scraped the needles from a leaf of the cactus and sliced it in two. The heavy sticky liquid ran over his hand as he placed the cut side of the leaf to Gloria's lips. The juice of the plant together with the shade, partially revived her. Philip, too, sucked the leaf until ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House
... now, but they may take it into their heads to come back and search. We had better make for the trees; by keeping close to that cactus hedge we shall be in ...
— In Times of Peril • G. A. Henty
... Henry W. Longfellow, without knocking, entered the sitting-room, his hair white as if he had walked through the snow with his hat off; and William H. Prescott, with his eyesight restored, happened in from Mexico, a cactus in his buttonhole; and Audubon set a cage of birds on the table—Baltimore oriole, chaffinch, starling and bobolink doing their prettiest; and Christopher North thumped his gun down on the hall floor, and hung his 'sporting jacket' on the hat-rack, and ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... background. There are excellent roads for riding and driving a few miles out of the city. The climate is very healthy for Europeans; the low ranges of mountains running north to south of the Island are sparsely wooded, some being quite bare of trees, and the atmosphere is comparatively dry. The cactus is very common all over the Island, and miles of it are seen growing in the hedges. About an hour and a half's drive from Cebu City there is the little town of Naga, the environs of which are extremely pretty. From the top of Makdoc Mountain, at the back of the town, there is ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... produced like the scenery of a piece, and when you arrive the curtain goes slowly up, and it is your first night. The beauty which you see is strangely artificial, and all partakes of the grotesque. Here flourishes that monstrous cactus-like growth called prickly-pear, with flat flap-like leaves resembling fingerless green hands; warped and brutal-looking stems looking like palsied arms. The cactus is abloom in red-hot poker ends. Orange trees and lemon trees and olive trees abound. Burlesquely-shaped palms, swathed in ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... 'bus, Ash," smilingly replied the leader of the drummers, a man named Pritchard. "If you'll send the 'bus over to the Cactus House with our trunks we'll be ...
— The Young Engineers in Arizona - Laying Tracks on the Man-killer Quicksand • H. Irving Hancock
... as it dipped earthward. Miles upon miles to the east and southeast the desert unrolled itself, white, naked, inhospitable, palpitating and shimmering under the sun, unbroken by so much as a rock or cactus stump. In the distance it assumed all manner of faint colors, pink, purple, and pale orange. To the west rose the Panamint Range, sparsely sprinkled with gray sagebrush; here the earths and sands were yellow, ochre, and rich, deep red, the hollows ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... a strong man. At the end of it he lay gasping and sick, aching in every limb, almost blind with glare and over-exertion, weary to death—and entirely happy. Thank God he would be able to stand up in a moment and rest behind a big cactus. Then he would have a spell of foot-work for a change, and, though crouching double, would not be doing any crawling until he had crossed the ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... the world beside, from the mystery of one beautiful and strange green thing to another she went wondering and admiring, and now and then timidly advancing her nose to see if something glorious was something sweet too. She could hardly leave a superb cactus, in the petals of which there was such a singular blending of scarlet and crimson as almost to dazzle her sight; and if the pleasure of smell could intoxicate, she would have reeled away from a luxuriant daphne odorata ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell
... and not more than knee-deep in mud. He traveled carefully, freezing on occasion when huge shadows moved above him. He was in fifty feet of water and he liked that better because it was easier to go unnoticed. He avoided a patch of electric cactus, for the spines would have electrocuted him even through the suit, and he went far around an area of white bull-root, shaped like women's legs, because he knew the bull-root was always infested with swamp-razors that would cut through ...
— The Wealth of Echindul • Noel Miller Loomis
... toward the dwelling, with its group of outhouses. By chance he found a path leading to the rear of these which he had not traversed before, and followed it until he came to a hedge of thickly set trees of some variety of cactus, which seemed to have been planted to form an enclosure. Cautiously pushing aside the branches bordering a small gap in this hedge, Uncle John discovered a charming garden lying beyond, so he quickly squeezed himself through the ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Abroad • Edith Van Dyne
... adroitly followed the sinuosities of a pretty sharply-inclined plane, and swept very close to the villages of Thembo and Tura-Wels. The latter forms part of the Unyamwezy, a magnificent country, where the trees attain enormous dimensions; among them the cactus, ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... isn't the company and there isn't the means. I can't even make you an apple-pie bed, when you sleep in a single blanket; and a booby-trap needs a door. And when there are only two people, and no one else to laugh, it's no fun to stick a cactus in a fellow's chair. Tuck, too! What do you know about tuck? What can you know about tuck when there's no shop for chocolate and Turkish Delight and things like that? Tinned stuff is all very well, but it gets jolly tedious. And birds'-nesting, and ratting, and setting ...
— The Flamp, The Ameliorator, and The Schoolboy's Apprentice • E. V. Lucas
... known species. I saw long ribbons of fucus drifting above me, some globular, others tubular: Laurencia, Cladostephus with the slenderest foliage, Rhodymenia palmata resembling the fan shapes of cactus. I observed that green-colored plants kept closer to the surface of the sea, while reds occupied a medium depth, which left blacks and browns in charge of designing gardens and flowerbeds in ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... (Calamus), the first I had seen. Though no hills are nearer than the Himalaya, from the constant alteration of the river-beds, the road undulates remarkably for this part of India, and a jungly vegetation ensues, consisting of the above plants, with the yellow-flowered Cactus replacing the Euphorbias, which were previously much more common. Though still 100 miles distant from the hills, mosses appeared on the banks, and more ferns were just ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... alone, I stood up and took in the scenery like a tourist ... there danced away, and gathered in, the shimmering, sun-flooded desert ... an endless flat expanse of silver sage and sentinel cactus. I saw bleached bones and a side-cast skull with whitened horns, poking up into the sky ... I saw a sick steer straggling alone, exactly like some melodramatic painting of Western life ... the kind we see hanging for ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... just in from Cactus Center and never did see one of those moving-picture outfits before. Thirty-eleven things were in sight as I happened round that bend, but the only one I glimmed was you being mistreated. Corking chance for a grandstand ...
— Steve Yeager • William MacLeod Raine
... hartebeeste. African game, as a general rule, avoids a country where the grass grows very high. We enjoyed, however, some bold and wonderful mountain scenery, and obtained glimpses through the flying murk of the vast plains and the base of Suswa. On a precipitous canon cliff we found a hanging garden of cactus and of looped cactus-like vines that was a marvel to behold. We ran across the hartebeeste on our way home. Our men were already out of meat; the hartebeeste of yesterday had disappeared. These porters are a good deal like the old-fashioned ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... back the way we had come to a triangular sandy space enclosed by a cactus hedge at the junction of three roads. There were several small grass-roofed shelters with open sides in there, and two tents already pitched, but we were not sufficiently interested just then to see who owned the other ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... of ten square miles above Nicolosi, created by the eruption of 1669, which was entirely barren in 1835, is now planted with vines almost to the summits of Monte Rosso, at a height of three thousand feet" Ueber den Sicilianischen Ackerbau, p. 19.] But the cactus is making inroads even here, while the volcanic sand and molten rock thrown out by Vesuvius soon become productive. Before the great eruption of 1631 even the interior of the crater was covered with vegetation. George ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... with their beer drinking and smoking, and their slow, stolid ways, you would think them perfectly earthly; but an ethereal fire is all the while working in them, and bursting out in most unexpected little jets of poetry and sentiment, like blossoms on a cactus. ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... and an extra yoke of oxen out of this cactus patch," Bob Birnie grinned good humoredly. "Not even to tickle Buddy. I'll see what I can do when we reach Olathe. But you won't have to take a man's place and drive, Lassie." He took the cup of water she drew from a keg and proffered-water was precious ...
— Cow-Country • B. M. Bower
... lifted my eyes; high in the heavens floated a flock of birds flying back to us.... 'Spring! welcome spring!' I shouted aloud: 'welcome, life and love and happiness!' And at that instance, with sweetly troubling shock, suddenly like a cactus flower thy image blossomed aflame within me, blossomed and grew, bewilderingly fair and radiant, and I knew that I love thee, thee only—that I am all filled full ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... regions east of it receive it to the full. Hence the almost tropical fertility of Natal and eastern Cape Colony, with their high rainfall, their luxuriance of vegetation, indigo, figs, and coffee, and the jungles of cactus and mimosa which choke their torrid kloofs. Hence, equally, the more austere veld of the central tableland, the great grass wildernesses, which are as characteristic of South Africa as the prairies and the pampas ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice
... "Hyeh's some of them cactus blossoms yu' wanted," said the Virginian. His voice recalled the girl with almost a start. "I've brought a good hawss I've gentled for yu', and Taylor'll keep him ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... speaker might possibly have the power to enforce his sentence diverted my attention from the slate, and I looked round. In front of the Jack-in-a-box stood a tiny red flower-pot and saucer, in which was a miniature cactus. My thoughts flew back to a bazaar in London where, years ago, a stand of these fairy plants had excited my warmest longings, and where a benevolent old gentleman whom I had not seen before, and never ...
— The Brownies and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... of elegant forms. Wherever these flowers flourished very luxuriantly there were single trees of stunted growth and thick bark, which seldom rose above fifteen or twenty feet. Besides these there were rich flowering myrtles, and here and there a grotesque cactus or two. ...
— Martin Rattler • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... down to the brook as if they were cattle going to drink; the dark caverns under the shelving cliffs, where the water murmured with such hollow mockery; the low spear-pointed gray plants, resembling century plants, and which Glenn called mescal cactus, each with its single straight dead stalk standing on high with fluted head; the narrow gorges, perpendicularly walled in red, where the constricted brook plunged in amber and white cascades over fall after fall, tumbling, rushing, singing its water melody—these all held ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... Mexico where there is plenty of soil and moisture, plenty of chance for yuccas to thrive, and you will find it turned into a tree and the thorn merely a dull blade-ending. Follow the sahuaro and the pitahaya into the tropics again, and with their cousin, the organ cactus, you will find them growing a soft thorn that would hardly ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... COMMUNIS.—Commonly called the Turk's Cap cactus, from the flowering portion on the top of the plant being of a cylindrical form and red color, like a fez cap. Notwithstanding that they grow in the most dry sterile places, they contain a considerable ...
— Catalogue of Economic Plants in the Collection of the U. S. Department of Agriculture • William Saunders
... carpet, the walls generally hung with colored prints and lithographs, illustrating religion or royalty, and as many greenhouse plants as the owner can afford to decorate the windows. I have seen, even beyond Umea, some fine specimens of cactus, pelargonium, calla, and other exotics. It is singular that, with the universal passion of the Swedes for flowers and for music, they have produced no distinguished painters ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... was wont to allow herself to be assisted, she was gratified with the obliging offer, and Henrietta had carried the myrtle, the old-fashioned oak-leaved geranium, with its fragrant deeply-indented leaves, a grim-looking cactus, and two or three more, and was deep in the story of the orange-tree, the pip of which had been planted by Uncle Geoffrey at five years old, but which never seemed likely to grow beyond the size of a tolerable currant-bush, when Beatrice came down and ...
— Henrietta's Wish • Charlotte M. Yonge
... treat as a demi-god a species of cactus which throws the eater into a state of ecstasy. The plant does not grow in their country, and has to be fetched every year by men who make a journey of forty-three days for the purpose. Meanwhile the wives at home contribute to ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... as even as a brick wall at the top and sides. There are also alleys forming long vistas between the trunks and beneath the boughs of oaks, ilexes, and olives; and there are shrubberies and tangled wildernesses of palm, cactus, rhododendron, and I know not what; and a profusion of roses that bloom and wither with nobody to pluck and few to look at them. They climb about the sculpture of fountains, rear themselves against pillars and porticos, ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... his trip across the alkali had been a nightmare. First his pony had died, and then his two remaining pack burros. He had obtained a scanty supply of thirst quenching stuff from the pulpy insides of cactus and maguey leaves, but when the aviators had discovered him he had been in the last stages of death from thirst and exhaustion—the death that so many men on the alkali ...
— The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings • Margaret Burnham
... tongue is a composite, mainly a Shoshonean dialect, probably accumulated as the various clans of the present tribe gathered in northeastern Arizona, from the cactus country to the south, the San Juan country to the northward and the Rio Grande valley to the eastward. But the Welsh legend ...
— Mormon Settlement in Arizona • James H. McClintock
... Rawalpindi. Interesting species are Tulipa stellata and Tulipa chrysantha. The latter is a Salt Range plant, as is the crocus-like Merendera Persica, and the yellow Iris Aitchisoni. A curious plant found in the same hills is the cactus-like Boucerosia (N.O. Asclepiadaceae), recalling to botanists the more familiar Stapelias of the same order. Another leafless Asclepiad, Periploca aphylla, which extends westwards to Arabia and Nubia and southwards to Sindh, is, like Boucerosia, a typical xerophyte adapted to a very dry soil ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... to right and left, to the mysterious, forbidden Lololand to the east, and to the unsurveyed country beyond the Yalung, west of us, or again it dropped to the banks of the streams, leading us through attractive hamlets buried in palms and bamboo, pines and cactus, while the surrounding hillsides were white or red with masses of rhododendron just coming into flower. Entering one village I heard a sound as of swarming bees raised to the one hundredth power. On inquiry it turned out to be a school kept in a small temple. While the ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... the long hours of gasping, breathless heat. 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 horses ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly
... by preference, grow upon a cactus plant. Little though she recked of botany, Miss Brewster was aware of this fundamental truth. Neither do they, without extraneous impulsion, go hurtling through the air along deserted mountain-sides, to find a resting-place far below; ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... our attention to a view panoramic and matchless beneath the glamour of sunset. Below us lay the mission town, its crude buildings aglow with rosy light; to the left was the canon, a frowning wilderness of manzanita, cactus and chaparral; to the right towered the triune peak of the Bishop, purple against an amber sky; in the distance were the shimmering waters of the Pacific. Upon the face of the landscape brooded infinite peace, and ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... would think the horticulturist insane, who took a delicate fern and planted it in arid soil, on a hilltop, far from shade, and expected it to thrive and bear blossoms like the cactus. ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... should cease. Adventures with noble savages in palm-fringed coral-islands, with greedy robbers amid the fragrant hills of Greece, with fierce Indians beneath the snow-peaks of the Far West, with coward Mexicans among tunals of cactus and agave, beneath the burning tropic sun—What a man he was! Where had he not been? and what had he not seen? And how he had been preserved—for her? And his image seemed to her utterly beautiful and glorious, clothed as ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... marched out from town it was still shining brightly through the mists, although it was past five o'clock. It lighted a plain two miles in extent broken by ridges and gullies and covered with thick, high grass and with bunches of cactus and palmetto. In the hollow of the ridges the mist lay like broad lakes of water, and on one side of the plain stood the walls of the old town. On the other rose hills covered with royal palms that showed white in the moonlight, ...
— Cuba in War Time • Richard Harding Davis
... of Margaret's manuscripts is found this beautiful symbol:—'There is a species of Cactus, from whose outer bark, if torn by an ignorant person, there exudes a poisonous liquid; but the natives, who know the plant, strike to the core, and there find a sweet, refreshing juice, that renews their strength.' ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... happened to be lying round, handy! So, then, we pass on to Bethlehem, looking like a fortress more than a town, all stone and very little window,—to Nazareth, with its brick oven-like houses, its tall minaret, its cypresses, and the black-mouthed, open tombs, with masses of cactus growing at their edge,—to Jerusalem,—to the Jordan, every drop of whose waters seems to carry a baptismal blessing,—to the Dead Sea,—and to the Cedars of Lebanon. Almost everything may have changed in these hallowed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... and stood in front of the fire between his father and grandfather. He was tremendously conscious of the grim and dusty cactus plant that stood on a little table by ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... clip in the magazine. Other clips were in his pocket. The clips were loaded with high velocity shells that exploded on contact. One slug could stop a Venusian krel, a mammoth beast that had been described as a cross between a sea lion and a cactus plant. ...
— Rip Foster Rides the Gray Planet • Blake Savage
... suggestion without enthusiasm and with very little show of pleasure. They found a table on the terrace in a retired corner, surrounded with flowering cactus plants and drooping mimosa, and overhung by a giant oleander tree. He talked to her easily but in gossiping fashion only, and always with the greatest respect. It was not until the arrival of their coffee that he ventured to ...
— Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the beginning of this mighty structure! What plans for the future greatness and prosperity of the Nation have been made. But, alas! here, too, come seasons of drought when seeds of humility, virtue and love fail to sprout and those of discord, strife and malice, like thorny cactus, ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... spinneys; while standing apart may be observed the arborescent jucca—the "dragon-tree" of the Western world, towering above an underwood unlike any other, composed of cactaceae in all the varieties of cereus, cactus, and echinocactus. Altogether unlike is the bottom-land bordering upon the river. There the vegetation is lush and luxuriant, showing a growth of large forest timber—the trees set thickly, and matted with many parasites, that look like cables coiling around and keeping ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... enable the museum to exhibit the leaves, fibres, and other vegetable productions from which the cloth, baskets, and so forth were constructed by the people who placed their dead in the caves. Dr. Palmer also sent a full set of the rude apparatus by which the present Indians of Mexico make their cactus-cakes and syrup, from the thorn-tipped pole with which the prickly fruit is gathered to the great earthen colanders through which it is strained; also all the implements and utensils, the native still, etc., used in making pulque and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... grew hot, and the way was long. As the ground rose again, it was stony and overgrown with cactus. A great desolation took possession of the girl. She felt as if she were in an endless flight from an unseen pursuer, who would never give up until he ...
— The Girl from Montana • Grace Livingston Hill
... but as he watched her he seemed to be gazing at some gorgeous cactus blossom opening its scentless petals to the burning sun. Beneath and beyond her stretched the gray wastes of the desert turning to gold under her feet, but still untrammeled and merciless, holding strange secrets close to its savage heart; now, exerting all its magic of illusion in ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... know that we've bin hitting the right trail," declared Pete. "Last time I come this way was with an old prospector who knew this part of the country well enough to 'pick up' a clump of cactus. If that compass ...
— The Border Boys Across the Frontier • Fremont B. Deering
... fast enough to suit the Blackfeet. An old fellow commenced to shout at him, and motion for him to go faster. But he didn't wish to go faster; the ground was thickly grown to prickly-pear cactus, and he had to pick his ...
— Boys' Book of Frontier Fighters • Edwin L. Sabin
... 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
... reed sheath, Remigia pulled a long and curved knife which served to cut cactus fruit. She took the pigeon in one hand, turned it over, its breast upward, and with the skill of a surgeon, ripped it in ...
— The Underdogs • Mariano Azuela
... of grades takes us past the base of Elk Mountain to a broad and sandy cactus-plain, whence we descend among curious trap and sandstone formations, simulating human architecture, to the crossing of the North Platte. A little farther on, so close to the snow-line that we shiver under the white ridges with a reflected chill, we cross the axial ridge of the continent, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... and out among the mesquite and the cactus to the house. Beside this trail, behind a clump of prickly pear, the Ranger sat down and waited. The hour-hand of his watch crept to ten, to eleven, to twelve. Roberts rose occasionally, stretched himself to avoid any chance of cramped muscles, and counted stars by way of entertainment. ...
— Oh, You Tex! • William Macleod Raine
... pieces of furniture, dumb, yet full of speech; they had seen and heard so much that was dear to her, that it seemed cruel to leave them to strangers. Above all she looked wistfully at a small twisted cactus in a pot standing on the window ledge. Mrs White had been fond of it, and had given it much care and attention. Might she venture to take it with her? How pleased Mother had been, she remembered, when the cactus had once rewarded her by producing ...
— White Lilac; or the Queen of the May • Amy Walton
... longer confine ourselves to one type of it. The single varieties, which were despised of old, are now prime favorites—preferred by many to any other kind. The old very double "show" and "fancy" varieties are largely grown, but they share public favor with the "decoratives," the pompones, and the cactus, and, as I have said, the single forms. Which of these forms is most popular it would be hard to say. All of them have enthusiastic champions, and the best thing to do is to try ...
— Amateur Gardencraft - A Book for the Home-Maker and Garden Lover • Eben E. Rexford
... terraces of the opposite mountains, the evergreen pine, the cedar, with its stiff, angular branches, and the cottonwood, with its varied curves and bright colours, were crowded into bunches or strung into zigzag lines, interspersed with shrubs and mountain plants, among which the flaming cactus was conspicuous. To the right and left, the bare cones of the barren peaks rose in multitude, with their calm, awful forms shrouded in snow, and their dark shadows reflected far into the valleys, like spectres from ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... soft, pleasant vegetation presented to the eye the whole range of shades in green, from the bluish, sickly green of the idrys to the dark, metallic green of the stenia. Farther inland, tall grapes, lianes, aloes, and cactus formed impenetrable thickets, out of which rose, like fluted columns, gigantic cocoa-palms, and the most graceful trees on earth, areca-palms. Through clearings here and there, one could follow, as far ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... of rock, grey, rugged, and precipitous, trending right and left through the chapparal far as they could see. A cliff, in short, though of no great elevation; on its crest, growing yuccas, cactus, and stunted mezquite trees. ...
— The Free Lances - A Romance of the Mexican Valley • Mayne Reid
... North Eagle seemed to know just what would interest the white boy—all the romance of the trail, the animals, the game, the cactus beds, the vast areas of mushrooms growing wild, edible and luscious, the badger and gopher holes, and the long, winding, half obliterated buffalo trails that yet scarred the distant reaches. It was only when he pointed to these latter, that he really spoke his mind, breaking into ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson
... chastely white above the violet; they saw the golden sands rimmed with foam; they saw the ships. Going down a lane, luxuriant with flowers and scented shrubs, where steep cactus hedges shut out the furrowed fields and olive gardens, and the cicalas made hissing music, Giafar ibn Mulk broke the ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett
... land of my birth," sang the Canary bird; "I will sing of thy dark-green bowers, of the calm bays where the pendent boughs kiss the surface of the water; I will sing of the rejoicing of all my brothers and sisters where the cactus ...
— Andersen's Fairy Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... a miserable existence, feeding on sand and gravel and dressing myself in cactus plants. Years passed. Eating sand and mud slowly undermined my robust constitution. I fell ill. I died. ...
— Nonsense Novels • Stephen Leacock
... into remote places in his cart. When Thea dragged him over the hill and made a camp under the shade of a bush or a bank, he would waddle about and play with his blocks, or bury his monkey in the sand and dig him up again. Sometimes he got into the cactus and set up a howl, but usually he let his sister read peacefully, while he coated his hands and face, first with an all-day sucker ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... valleys with verdure, and making them the winter home of the buffalo,—the favorite hunting-grounds of the Indians,—while the streams which flow from the southern slope of the mountains are alkaline, and, instead of luxuriant vegetation, there are vast regions covered with wild sage and cactus. They run into the Great Salt Lake, and have no outlet to the ocean. A late writer, describing the geological features of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... plant. With this goes a vegetable cheese curded by its own vegetable rennet. It's called tuna cheese, made from the milky juice of the prickly pear that grows on yet another cactuslike plant of the dry lands. This tuna cheese sometimes teams up in arid lands with the juicy thick cactus leaf sliced into a tortilla sandwich. The milky pulque of Xochomilco goes as well with it as beer ...
— The Complete Book of Cheese • Robert Carlton Brown
... what had been the debatable ground, as much the enemy's as ours, and had not gone far before we were suddenly aware of a group of Spanish horsemen over the hedge of cactus to the left of the road, brightly dressed young fellows wearing the blue linen and red facings of the guarda civile, who at the sight of us turned and dashed back through the fields as though to give news of our approach. Then there was a freshly ...
— The Surrender of Santiago - An Account of the Historic Surrender of Santiago to General - Shafter, July 17, 1898 • Frank Norris
... and the prairie land which the sunlight floods and fills, To the north the open country, southward the Cyprus Hills; Never a bit of woodland, never a rill that flows, Only a stretch of cactus beds, and the wild, sweet prairie rose; Never a habitation, save where in the far south-west A solitary tepee lifts its solitary crest, Where Neykia in the doorway, crouched in the red sunshine, Broiders her buckskin mantle with the quills ...
— Flint and Feather • E. Pauline Johnson
... by a garden in the ornate and artificial style of the country. A marble terrace overlooked the lake, crowned with many a statue and vase that held the aloe. The laurel and the cactus, the cypress and the pine, filled the air with their fragrance, or charmed the eye with their rarity and beauty: the walks were festooned with the vine, and they could raise their hands and pluck the glowing fruit which screened them, from the beam by which, it was ripened. ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... of Angels was all but empty. Upon it the lassitude of early afternoon lay heavily. The spider-legged music-racks of the Mexican string orchestra, the empty platform chairs, the deserted side-tables along the pictured wall, the huge cactus scrawled over with pin-etched initials,—all the impedimenta of ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... calling-hours. Every one can drop in upon every one else at pleasure. Mrs. Boulte put on a big terai hat, and walked across to the Vansuythens's house to borrow last week's Queen. The two compounds touched, and instead of going up the drive, she crossed through the gap in the cactus-hedge, entering the house from the back. As she passed through the dining-room, she heard, behind the purdah that cloaked the drawing-room door, her husband's voice, saying—"But on my Honor! On my Soul and Honor, I tell you she doesn't care for me. She told me so last night. I would have told ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... churches are second only to those of Rome in their magnificence. One might almost fancy one's self in the far East, there are so many surroundings of a Moorish and Saracenic character, and many of the names are quite oriental. The cactus, palm, and citron trees, tropical flowers and sunny skies, carry out the impression. There is no matter for wonder in this, however, as the Saracens made Palermo the capital of their Sicilian territories for more than two centuries, when the Normans in their turn took possession. From 1806 ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... [FN68] A kind of cactus, of which they make needles, grows abundantly on the mountains round Ollantay-tampu. It is called ahuarancu. They set fire to the cacti as a war signal. Zegarra calls it a thistle. The word in the Justiniani text ...
— Apu Ollantay - A Drama of the Time of the Incas • Sir Clements R. Markham
... witness the motly products of evolution: Man, ape, elephant, skunk, scorpion, lizard, lark, toad, lobster, louse, flea, amoeba, hookworm, and countless microscopic animals; also, the palm, lily, melon, maize, mushroom, thistle, cactus, microscopic bacilli, etc. All developed from one germ, all in some way related. Mark well the difference in size between the elephant, louse, and microscopic hookworm, and the difference in intellect between ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... splendid summer for flowers, and they seemed to enjoy the damp, cool season, especially the dahlia. If you have not tried the Countess of Lonsdale you should; it is a cactus dahlia and a very free bloomer. Everblooming roses did well—we had them ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... a miracle out of the Arabian Nights. Your backyard becomes voluptuous with pomegranate and almond trees, lemon groves, and hedges of flowering cactus, dazzling banks of azaleas, marble- basined fountains, in which chestnut-and-white pond-herons step daintily amid exotic water-lilies, while golden pheasants strut about on alabaster terraces. The whole effect rather suggests the idea that Providence ...
— The Toys of Peace • Saki
... the town, turning toward the south and west. Before him there stretched days of lonely traveling through the sand and cactus of the desert, of blistering sun and cold nights, of anxious searches for water-holes. It was because of the water-holes that he headed southwest, for such as they were they lay in tiny hidden oases in the canyons. Almost as soon as he left the town he was in the ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... shadows. The house, of red brick, one story, ran low and long beneath the trees. Through its middle, dividing its six rooms in half, extended a broad, arched passageway, picturesque with flowering cactus and hanging red earthern jars. A "gallery," low and broad, encircled the building. Vines climbed about it, and the adjacent ground was, for a space, covered with transplanted grass and shrubs. A little lake, long and narrow, glimmered ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... kept dry; all the old leaves should be taken off, as, in their decay, they cause dampness, and the roots wrapped in dry moss or cloth. The same means may be used for the pulpy plants, such as the cactus: any dry flexible substance, not subject to dampnes, as hairwool etc. may be used to pack them. These pulpy plants, if large, should be separated from the others, so that they may not be tainted by ...
— Movement of the International Literary Exchanges, between France and North America from January 1845 to May, 1846 • Various
... "For your wife, I will give you one of our riding whips." He leaned to the side, slashing at a cactus with his quirt. "We in Careba have no trouble with our wives, about ...
— Time Crime • H. Beam Piper |
