"Fern" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Ingleborough proved to be quite correct, for they paused at a rugged archway between piled-up fern-hung blocks, out of which the water rushed in a fairly large volume, but not knee-deep; and, upon leaving his horse with his comrade and boldly wading in, West found that the cave expanded as soon as the entrance was passed, so that the spring ran outward ...
— A Dash from Diamond City • George Manville Fenn
... British Constitution, though I personally disagree with some points in his argument. One sentence from this passage might be addressed to our Allies very appropriately to-day—"Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle reposing beneath the shadow of the British oak chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... not only fern-like cryptogamic plants and phanerogamic monocotyledons (grasses, yucc-like Liliaceae and palms), but also gymnospermic dicotyledons (Coniferae and Cycadeae), amounting in all to nearly 400 species, as characteristic of the coal formations. Of these ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... shady nooks, where the grass and wild flowers weave their lovely patterns for the earth floor, and tall pines spread their soft carpets of brown, while giant oaks and sycamores lift their cathedral arches to support the ceilings of green, and dark rock fountains set in banks of moss and fern hold water clear and cold. It was to one of these that Stanford Manning brought his bride for their honeymoon. Stanford himself pitched their tent and made their simple camp, for it was not in his plan that the sweet intimacy of these, the first ...
— When A Man's A Man • Harold Bell Wright
... thousand strong — all mounted men — and guns: There met, beneath the world-wide flag, the world-wide Empire's sons; They came to prove to all the earth that kinship conquers space, And those who fight the British Isles must fight the British race! From far New Zealand's flax and fern, from cold Canadian snows, From Queensland plains, where hot as fire the summer sunshine glows; And in the front the Lancers rode that New South Wales had sent: With easy stride across the plain their long, lean Walers went. Unknown, untried, those squadrons were, but proudly out they drew Beside ...
— Rio Grande's Last Race and Other Verses • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... Softly, dear, Let me breathe it in your ear— They are you, and only you. And those other nameless two Walking in Arcadian air— She that was so very fair? She that had the twilight hair?— They were you, dear, only you. If I speak of night or day, Grace of fern or bloom of grape, Hanging cloud or fountain spray, Gem or star or glistening dew, Or of mythologic shape, Psyche, Pyrrha, Daphne, say— I mean you, dear, ...
— The Sisters' Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... growth. She saw two natives in the act of kicking out a dung fire. Rajah headed directly toward them, the fire evidently being in the line of path he had chosen. This rare and unexpected freedom, this opportunity to go whither he listed, was as the giant fern he used to eat in the days when he was ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... West extricated his lady from her gallants, and led her away to a pretty haven; not indeed, to a conservatory, since there was none, but to a bewitching nook under the wide stairway, all banked about with palm and fern and pretty flowering shrub. There they sat them down, unseeing and unseen, near yet utterly remote, while in the blood of West beat the intoxicating strains of Straus, not to mention the vintage champagne, to which he had ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... green bottles and a water spigot with a neck like a giraffe's that rose out of the bar beside a varnished wood pillar that made the decoration of the corner, with a terra cotta pot of ferns on top of it. From where Andrews sat on the padded bench at the back of the room the fern fronds made a black lacework against the left- hand side of the window, while against the other was the brown silhouette of the old man's head, and the slant of his cap. The stove hid the door and the white cat, round and symmetrical, formed the center of the visible universe. ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... love shot a mighty hart Among the standing rye, When on him leapt that keeper old From the fern ...
— Andromeda and Other Poems • Charles Kingsley
... out he bundled, and, crushing through the fern-grown woodbiney fence, darted into the wood in a way that astonished our hero. Presently the chop, chop, chop of the axe revealed ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... slipt Down through a frost-leaved forest-crypt, 190 Long, sparkling aisles of steel-stemmed trees Bending to counterfeit a breeze; Sometimes the roof no fretwork knew But silvery mosses that downward grew; Sometimes it was carved in sharp relief With quaint arabesques of ice-fern leaf; Sometimes it was simply smooth and clear For the gladness of heaven to shine through, and here He had caught the nodding bulrush-tops And hung them thickly with diamond drops, 200 That crystalled the beams of moon and sun, And made a star of every one: No mortal ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... Mrs. Trevor proposed a stroll through the conservatories, and while the elders stopped to admire a fern or a rare exotic, Will and Gwenda roamed on under the palms and greenery to where a sparkling fountain rose, and flung its ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine
... dustily, along, in a cloud of their own creation, they would stare fashionably at the antlered heads which the great slow deer raised out of a forest of bracken that promised to autumn lovers such cover as was never seen before. And now and again, as the amorous perfume of chestnut flowers and of fern was drifted too near, one would say to the other: "My ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Joseph. "My lady, the Alderman is so obliging as to remind me that he has had 'the distinguished honor'—he is very good—of meeting me at the house of our mutual friend Deedles, the banker, and he does me the favor to inquire whether it will be agreeable to me to have Will Fern put down. He came up to London, it seems, to look for employment (trying to better himself—that's his story), and being found at night asleep in a shed, was taken into custody, and carried next morning ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various
... into forest—early British woodland. It was the change of a nightmare, and that all should fit, fifty yards ahead of us a babbling brook barred our way. On the far side a velvet green ride, sprinkled with rabbits and fern, gently sloped upwards and away, but behind us was no hope. Forty horse-power would never have rolled wet pneumatic tyres up that verdurous ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... sunset-glow like flecks of gold in amber wine,—while here and there the distant glimmer of tossing fountains, or the soft emerald sheen of a prattling brook that wound in and out the grounds, amongst banks of moss and drooping fern, gave a pleasant touch of coolness and refreshment to the brilliant verdure of the ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... faithful years return And hearts unwounded sing again, Comes Taffy dancing through the fern To ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... directions, which are very steep and rugged, leaving, in the interspaces, very large valleys, and gently-rising grounds about their sides. These hills, though of a rocky disposition, are, in general, covered, almost to their tops, with trees; but the lower parts, on the sides, frequently only with fern. At the bottom of the harbour, where we lay, the ground rises gently to the foot of the hills, which run across nearly in the middle of the island; but its flat border, on each side, at a very small distance from the sea, becomes quite steep. ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... away below, into the cup of the camp or citadel. I did not dare to stand up, lest I should be seen. I burrowed my way among the ferns over the wall into the hollow, worming my way towards the edge of the fern clump so that I could see. In a minute, I was gazing through the fern-stems into the camp itself; ...
— Martin Hyde, The Duke's Messenger • John Masefield
... mines of carbon once abstracted from the atmosphere by plants. In these coal-beds are often found fern leaves, toads, whole trees, and in short all forms of organized matter. These all existed as living things before the great floods, and at the breaking away of the barriers of the immense lakes, of which our present ...
— The Elements of Agriculture - A Book for Young Farmers, with Questions Prepared for the Use of Schools • George E. Waring
... that for a time the two English lads forgot all about their guns, as they stopped hard by some watercourse to admire the graceful lace-fronded fern, or the wonderful displays of moss hanging from ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... "Merry Christmas," cried everyone in Spanish or Visayan, and "Merry Christmas" we responded, though June skies bending down toward tropical palms and soft winds just rustling the tops of tall bamboos, so that they cast flickering fern-like shadows over thatched nipa roofs, but ill suggested Christmas to ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel
... without Winthrop's strong arm; although in many a rough pitch and steep rise of the way, young hickories and oaks lent their aid to her hand that was free. Mosses and lichens, brown and black with the summer's heat, clothed the rocks and dressed out their barrenness; green tufts of fern nodded in many a nook, and kept their greenness still; and huckleberry bushes were on every hand, in every spare place, and standing full of the unreaped black and blue harvest. And in the very path, under their feet, sprang many an unassuming little ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... accessories to make a dinner party go off well. The large dining-room was a long, low, octagonal apartment, with a small conservatory opening out at the lower end. There were numerous small alcoves in the wall, and in the recesses of each of these were huge pots of maidenhair fern. ...
— Marie Gourdon - A Romance of the Lower St. Lawrence • Maud Ogilvy
... the fronds of a giant fern; a cautious step beyond his hands touched a slippery, pliant vine. And his whisper ended as he felt the thing turn and twist beneath his hand. It was alive!—writhing!—cold as the body of a monster snake, and just as vicious ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... eaten un-cooked. It has a mucilaginous, slightly sweet taste, with a faint smell like that of a mushroom. With the exception of a few berries, chiefly of a dwarf arbutus, the natives eat no vegetable food besides this fungus. In New Zealand, before the introduction of the potato, the roots of the fern were largely consumed; at the present time, I believe, Tierra del Fuego is the only country in the world where a cryptogamic plant affords a staple ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... scandens, also called Gnito and nitongputi, a climbing fern found throughout the Philippines. Blanco gives the name of the genus as Ugena. The glossy, wiry stems are used in the making of fine hats, mats, cigarette and cigar cases, etc. See Census of Philippines, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 40 of 55 • Francisco Colin
... White Horse the track skirts the eastern shores of Lakes Bennett and Lindemann, through wild but picturesque moorland, carpeted with wild flowers,[87] and strewn with grey rocks and boulders. A species of pink heather grows freely here, the scent of which and the presence of bubbling fern-fringed brooks, and crisp bracing air, recalled many a pleasant morning after grouse in Bonnie Scotland. A raw-boned Aberdonian on the train remarks on the resemblance of the landscape to that of his own country and is flatly contradicted ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... those at the top of the brow, rising out of the rich green scrub? Verily, again, we are in the Tropics. They are palms, doubtless, some thirty feet high each, with here and there a young one springing up like a gigantic crown of male-fern. The old ones have straight gray stems, often prickly enough, and thickened in the middle; gray last year's leaves hanging down; and feathering round the top, a circular plume of pale green leaves, like those of a coconut. But these are not ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... love to loiter by the old oak tree, Where waters ripple over clean white stones, And cresses, mint with feathered fern grown high. In such a place the peaceful thoughts will come; There is no hurry there where nature plays. Soft gentle breezes wave the grass and sedge; White fluffy clouds pass overhead and roll. Now dreaming, I hear the cricket's gay song. O river bank you ...
— Clear Crystals • Clara M. Beede
... gates there is a wilderness of fern, or bracken, as high as your waist. Hidden in the midst of this unlikely place Jones has found the dagger. It is as if the party, going down the avenue, had ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... freely after a clearing has been made. Nature lays down a green sward directly on the rich virgin mould, and sets to work besides to cover up the unsightly stems and holes of the fallen timber with luxuriant tufts of a species of hart's-tongue fern, which grows almost as freely as an orchid on decayed timber. I was so still and silent that innumerable forest birds came about me. A wood pigeon alighted on a branch close by, and sat preening her radiant plumage in a bath of golden sunlight. The profound stillness was stirred now ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... which the stranger displayed in tending his horse; for, muttering something about provender left for the keeper's palfrey, he dragged out of a recess a bundle of forage, which he spread before the knight's charger, and immediately afterwards shook down a quantity of dried fern in the corner which he had assigned for the rider's couch. The knight returned him thanks for his courtesy; and, this duty done, both resumed their seats by the table, whereon stood the trencher of pease placed between them. The hermit, after a long grace, ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... Undaunted April crept and sewed Her violets in dead men's faces, And in a soft and snowy shroud Drew the scarred fields with gentle stitch; Though in the valley where the ditch Was hoarse with nettles, blind with mud, She stroked the golden-headed bud, And loosed the fern, she dared not here To touch nor tend this murdered thing; The wind went wide of it, the year Upon this breast stopped short of Spring: Beauty ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... strata, presenting a much smaller number of monocotyledonous plants; (a) Co-ordinate and almost contemporary formations with red sandstone (rothe todtes liegende), quartz-porphyry and fern-coal. These strata are less connected by alternation than by opposition. The porphyries issue (like the trachytes of the Andes) in domes from the bosom of intermediary rocks. Porphyritic breccias which envelope the quartzose porphyries. (b) Zechstein or Alpine ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V3 • Alexander von Humboldt
... better than this!" he panted dismally, fanning himself with a large fern leaf. "History ...
— Soap-Bubble Stories - For Children • Fanny Barry
... opinion as he had never valued it before; and, as he thought of her in his restless tossings, she seemed to him something as pure, as wholesome, and strong as the air of his native New-England hills, as the sweet-brier and sweet-fern he used to love to gather when he was a boy. She seemed of a piece with all the good old ways of New England,—its household virtues, its conscientious sense of right, its exact moral boundaries; and he felt somehow as if she belonged, to that healthy portion of his life which he now looked ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... extreme cold had passed and every green thing was hurrying to be ahead of its neighbour. Bija made endless cowslip balls out of the beautiful rose-pink primulas, while Roy and Mirak, following the shepherds' boys, came back with their hands full of young rhubarb shoots and green fern croziers, which they ate like asparagus. But this sort of thing could not last long, since they were close to the caravan route from Kandahar to Kabul; and sure enough, no sooner had the snow on the uplands melted than travellers ...
— The Adventures of Akbar • Flora Annie Steel
... and illustrated by a large number of drawings. In order to render the issue of the present cheap edition possible, it has been found necessary to restrict its size a little by the omission of chapters dealing with Glaciers, Ferns and Fern-seed, and the history of the Sea-squirts or Ascidians, which are contained in the original larger book. My hope is that this collection of papers, "about a number of things," may meet with as kind a reception from my readers as that which they have ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... ease Along your city squares, Thank those who there have fought the trees, And howling wolves and bears. They met the proud woods in the face, Those gloomy shades and stern; Withstood and conquered, and your race Supplants the pine and fern. ...
— Thoughts, Moods and Ideals: Crimes of Leisure • W.D. Lighthall
... carefully, we find on the lower side numerous fine hairs like those on the lower surface of the liverworts, which fasten it firmly to the ground. By and by, if our culture has been successful, we may find attached to some of the larger of these, little fern plants growing from the under side of the prothallia, and attached to the ground by a delicate root. As the little plant becomes larger the prothallium dies, leaving it attached to the ground as an independent plant, which after ...
— Elements of Structural and Systematic Botany - For High Schools and Elementary College Courses • Douglas Houghton Campbell
... mission Beryl took the faded blossoms from her basket, added a cluster of chrysanthemums, a frond of fern from the "branch" border, and hurried on to the cemetery. When she reached the entrance, the gate was locked, but unwilling to return without having gratified her mother's wish, she climbed into a spreading cedar close by the low brick wall, and swung ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... article of their common diet; and our people also found it very palatable and wholesome. We could not learn to what species of plant it belonged, having never been able to procure the leaves; but it was supposed, by our botanists, to be the root of some kind of fern. ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr
... were hidden from the wallowing hippopotami by the crest of the knoll. The human squatting-place was a trampled area among the dead brown fronds of Royal Fern, through which the crosiers of this year's growth were unrolling to the light and warmth. The fire was a smouldering heap of char, light grey and black, replenished by the old women from time to time with brown leaves. Most ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... changed, and only the vegetable ivory tree remained, with a great profusion of wonderful orchids, among which I learned to recognize the rare Nuttonia Vexillaria and the glorious pink and scarlet blossoms of Cattleya and odontoglossum. Occasional brooks with pebbly bottoms and fern-draped banks gurgled down the shallow gorges in the hill, and offered good camping-grounds every evening on the banks of some rock-studded pool, where swarms of little blue-backed fish, about the size and shape of English trout, gave ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... comment as they went on. Presently they came to a deep rift in the moor through which a stream leaped sparkling. The girl scrambled down, waist-deep in yellow fern, but the other side was steep and stony and she was glad of help when he held out his hand. They made the ascent with some difficulty and on reaching the ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... extent of the island run many little streams, sometimes between high banks of rock, covered with moss and magnificent fern, with great pools of clear, deep water at the base of high waterfalls, and in those places where the stream cuts its way through the level plains double rows of the royal palm mark its course. The royal palm is the characteristic ...
— Cuba in War Time • Richard Harding Davis
... "I thought fern would suit your hair better than anything else," said Tom; "and so I got these leaves," and he picked out two ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... believe any of you happen to have just the same passion for the blue hyacinth which I have,—very certainly not for the crushed lilac-leaf-buds; many of you do not know how sweet they are. You love the smell of the sweet-fern and the bayberry-leaves, I don't doubt; but I hardly think that the last bewitches you with young memories as it does me. For the same reason I come back to damask roses, after having raised a good many of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... gardener—the same that cheered the last hours of Mrs. Warren. He recognizes Vivien and salutes her gravely. Seeing that she is accompanied by a gentleman in khaki he discreetly withdraws out of hearing and tidies up a tree fern. Vivien and Michael seat themselves on two green iron chairs under the fronds and in front ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... intimation he had of anything wrong was a cry from the girl, and he saw a strip of water widen between the canoe and the bank. He ran his hardest, but made little headway, for thorny bushes and fern formed thickets along the bank, while when he reached the boulders he felt that he had come too late, because no swimmer could then overtake the canoe, even if he escaped destruction in the first rapid immediately below. ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... shape of fields and hedges, stretched out fingers as far as Wynchcote, and there stopped abruptly. Past the bungalow lay the open wold with miles of heather, gorse, and bracken, and a road edged with low, grassy fern-covered banks instead of walls. The air blew freshly up here, and was far more bracing and healthy than down in the hollow of Grovebury. The residents of the new suburb affected seaside fashions, and went their moorland walks without hats ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... England boy had a wider range of emotions than boys of more equable climates. He felt his nature crudely, as it was meant. To the boy Henry Adams, summer was drunken. Among senses, smell was the strongest — smell of hot pine-woods and sweet-fern in the scorching summer noon; of new-mown hay; of ploughed earth; of box hedges; of peaches, lilacs, syringas; of stables, barns, cow-yards; of salt water and low tide on the marshes; nothing came amiss. Next to smell came taste, and the children knew the taste of everything ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... on together through the open pasture, where the sweet-fern and bayberry bushes grew tall and thick; there was another strip of woods between them and the river, and just this side was a deserted house, which had not been lived in for many years and was gray and crumbling. The fields that belonged to it had been made ...
— Betty Leicester - A Story For Girls • Sarah Orne Jewett
... enter it. Here dwelt at that time the merry little people of the Rootmen. They were pretty little creatures, in form and look like human beings,—the tallest about six inches high, and the smallest as long as your little finger. In summer they lived in mossy bowers and under the leaves of the tall fern; in winter they nestled among the roots of trees, in the holes of some gnarled old trunk, and crept into the clefts in the rocks. Their dress was fine and elegant: the little men wore coats and hose of moss, and the little women dresses of pretty variegated flowers, leaves, and ...
— The King of Root Valley - and his curious daughter • R. Reinick
... A moist, fern-bordered wood road attracted me; I reasoned that it must lead, by a short cut, across the hills to the military highway which passed between Trois-Feuilles and La Trappe. So I took it, and presently came into four ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... Joan everything was delightful. There had been the hay harvest, and the corn harvest, and the cutting of fern on the mountains for winter fodder, and the threshing of the corn on the barn-floor, and the piling up of great heaps of straw in the wide bays on each ...
— The Christmas Child • Hesba Stretton
... of the coconut tree, whose head is more than its body. Even while it lives its head is shorn once a year, for, as fresh fronds push out and upward from the centre, those of the outer circle get old and must be cut away. And when one of those feathery, fern-like fronds, toying with the breeze, comes crashing to the ground, it is ten or twelve feet long, and consists of a great backbone, as thick at the base as a man's leg, with a close-set row of swords on either side, about a yard in length. They are hard and tough, but supple yet and of a shiny green ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... is at its best. It is a riot of rugged boulder, fern, and heather, through which rushing streams, full of trout, flow swiftly southward to the Channel. The Tors here are not the highest of the moor, yet many of them rise well above the 1,500 ...
— Legend Land, Volume 2 • Various
... tinkle, Through fern and periwinkle The cows are coming home; A-loitering in the checkered stream Where the sun-rays glance and gleam, Clarine, Peachbloom and Phoebe Phillis Stand knee-deep in the creamy lilies In a drowsy dream; To-link, to-lank, to-linklelinkle, O'er banks with butter cups ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... 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 of diet. This thick growth rendered travelling almost impossible, and it was rendered still more fatiguing ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: Explorers • Various
... little ferns begin to grow and they live a very long time indeed. There is at Rothamsted a bottle of soil that was put up just like this as far back as 1874. For a number of years past a beautiful fern has been growing inside the bottle, and even now it is very healthy and vigorous. If, instead of being kept moist, the rich garden soil is left in a dry shed during the whole of the winter so that it gradually loses its moisture, it will generally show ...
— Lessons on Soil • E. J. Russell
... end of the universe in the pursuit of knowledge. We read of his walking thirty-two miles in a soaking rain to the top of a mountain, and bringing home only a plant of white heather. On another day he walked thirty-six miles to find a peculiar kind of fern. Again he walked for twenty-four hours in hail, rain, and wind, reaching home at three o'clock in the morning. But at seven he was up and ready for work as usual. He carried heavy loads, too, when he went searching for minerals and fossils. In one of ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... Fern hollow—begging the indulgence of those who have read the earlier volume of this series—is a deep, richly vegetated ravine or gully forming one of a series of scenic convolutions of the surface of the earth which gave the ...
— Campfire Girls at Twin Lakes - The Quest of a Summer Vacation • Stella M. Francis
... just over the scrubby hill to the north, young Gordon was walking, knee deep in the bronzed sweet fern, gun cocked, eyes alert. His two beautiful dogs were working close, quartering the birch-dotted hill-side in perfect form. But they made no points; no dropping woodcock whistled up from the shelter of birch or alder; no partridge blundered away from bramble covert or willow fringe. Only the ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... thought Binzer, walking over to the window and drumming his fingers on the glass fern-shade. "At breakfast, is he? That's the mistake I made: turning out ...
— In a German Pension • Katherine Mansfield
... eyes of fancy turn Where the tumbled pippins burn Like embers in the orchard's lap of tangled grass and fern,— There let the old path wind In and out and on behind The cider-press ...
— Riley Love-Lyrics • James Whitcomb Riley
... fern by the way side to the study of psychology—the most fascinating of all studies—there is something in which all can interest themselves, but more especially for women, for to me this seems woman's kingdom. With much quicker ...
— Bohemian Society • Lydia Leavitt
... together, she landed the major upon the rock. And then she laughed; and then, inconsistent as it may appear, she became grave, and at once proceeded to scrape him off, and rub him down with dried leaves, with fern-twigs, with her handkerchief, with the border of her mantle, as if he were a child, until he blushed with ...
— Thankful Blossom • Bret Harte
... about 150 feet below. By a succession of these falls, although of more limited height, it at length reaches the bottom of the valley. It is only on the precipices about the fall that the Chamaerops appears to grow; at the foot of a precipice a little to the right (going from Churra,) a tree fern grows, which I have Wallich's authority for stating to be Polypod giganteum, a fern which occurred at Mahadeb, and which I have seen in somewhat similar situations at Mergui. All my excursions have been confined to this valley and to the water-courses immediately around Churra; once only ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... Oriental fabric, together with the books and pictures, which had been left packed and ready to be sent to them whenever they should settle down, and last of all, in the sunniest corner was a beautiful sword fern, a rubber plant, ...
— The Spectacle Man - A Story of the Missing Bridge • Mary F. Leonard
... into a tunnel, fern walled, fern roofed, garlanded with tawny orchids, gay with carmine fungus and golden moss. We stepped out into a blaze ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... hole scooped out in the rock, where the water lay dark and silent, or a little precipice over which it dashed and foamed. This was a favourite wood with the children. In summer they often spent whole days there, gathering wild flowers or the beautiful fern leaves, which grew in every nook and corner. And now that the bright autumn leaves were scattered everywhere, and the tempting berries covered the ground, they found employment for many a spare hour. To-day the little girls had ...
— Nanny Merry - or, What Made the Difference • Anonymous
... their flight To neighb'ring woods, and trust themselves to night. The speedy horse all passages belay, And spur their smoking steeds to cross their way, And watch each entrance of the winding wood. Black was the forest: thick with beech it stood, Horrid with fern, and intricate with thorn; Few paths of human feet, or tracks of beasts, were worn. The darkness of the shades, his heavy prey, And fear, misled the younger from his way. But Nisus hit the turns with happier haste, And, thoughtless of his friend, the forest pass'd, ...
— The Aeneid • Virgil
... showing ourselves in town or village was too great. But there came a night, when, as we journeyed, we approached the town of Fierbois, a place very well known to me; and when we halted in a wood with the first light of day, and the wearied soldiers made themselves beds amid the dried fern and fallen leaves, I approached the Maid, who was gazing wistfully towards the tapering spire of a church, visible at some distance away, and ...
— A Heroine of France • Evelyn Everett-Green
... Peak, would have been wholly new. We went upon a surface so hard and level, that we had little care to hold the bridle, and were therefore at full leisure for contemplation. On the left were high and steep rocks shaded with birch, the hardy native of the North, and covered with fern or heath. On the right the limpid waters of Lough Ness were beating their bank, and waving their surface by a gentle agitation. Beyond them were rocks sometimes covered with verdure, and sometimes towering in horrid nakedness. Now and ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... controls. The ship steadied, the dive became a fast glide. He looked for an open space to land. Then he felt the landing gear scrape some surface. Directly ahead loomed one of the fern trees. The plane sped toward the long fronds. There came a ripping crash, the splintering of metal and wood. The scarlet cloud gathering before Garin's ...
— The People of the Crater • Andrew North
... the greater portion of the ground in the form of immense flat slabs or blocks of rock, often split in a vertical direction. I saw long fissures of eight or ten feet in breadth, and from ten to fifteen feet in depth. In these clefts the flowers blossom earlier, and the fern grows taller and more luxuriantly, than in ...
— Visit to Iceland - and the Scandinavian North • Ida Pfeiffer
... daintiest and prettiest for the bride-elect. Have the table decorations in white. For the center have a large round basket of bride roses, and at each plate tiny French baskets filled with maidenhair fern and white pansies, or apple blossoms, for individual favors. Tie the handle of each basket with white gauze ribbon, looping the baskets together with the ribbon forming a garland for the table. Serve strawberries ...
— Breakfasts and Teas - Novel Suggestions for Social Occasions • Paul Pierce
... bit of rough, open land there that gave from the covert edge, with scattered brake-fern and a stream in the midst and a lot of blackthorn scrub round about. A noted place for a woodcock, also a snipe, and a spot from which trespassers were warned very careful. So Samuel took a look over to see ...
— The Torch and Other Tales • Eden Phillpotts
... as to leave no broken twigs, and finding that the ground which he had now reached rapidly descended into a deep ravine or gully—one of the many that drain that part of the country—in a few minutes he was down between the fern-hung sandstone rocks. ...
— In the King's Name - The Cruise of the "Kestrel" • George Manville Fenn
... while everywhere the country was covered with beautiful trees, among them the pandanus palm, the tree-fern, the banyan, the bread-fruit tree, wild nutmeg, and superb bamboos. The natives also were very well-behaved and quiet, and were always inclined to treat us hospitably. Indeed, we might have travelled without the slightest risk from one ...
— Peter Trawl - The Adventures of a Whaler • W. H. G. Kingston
... pedagogy. She lived under the eyes of her pupils. Her life was one ceaseless effort to avoid doing anything which might influence her charges for evil or shock the natural sensitiveness of their parents. She had to wind her earthly way through a forest of the most delicate susceptibilities—fern-fronds that stretched across the path, and that she must not even accidentally disturb with her skirt as she passed. No wonder she walked mincingly! No wonder she had a habit of keeping her elbows close to her sides, ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... The trees were smaller and scantier here, owing to the rocky nature of the ground, which sloped rather rapidly down; but it was moist and overgrown with mosses, ferns, creepers, and low shrubs, all of the liveliest green. I could not see many yards ahead owing to the bushes and tall fern fronds; but presently I began to hear a low, continuous sound, which, when I had advanced twenty or thirty yards further, I made out to be the gurgling of running water; and at the same moment I made the ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... the flowers in her hands were hyacinths, hyacinths and damp fern and mignonette. It grew and grew and surrounded me with a penetrating cloud of rich perfume, perfume and old, sweet memories that cut and soothed at once. I thought of the lily-of-the-valley bed under my ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... pink flowers over there, and those green rushes, and those fern-like plants? Well, they are all living polyps, or colonies of polyps, some kinds of which leave coral when they die, like ...
— How Sammy Went to Coral-Land • Emily Paret Atwater
... still rested upon the light from the window. It silhouetted a rare fern from Assam, it ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... of labor not far off told that camp was being built. Presently the absent five returned, two of the Mayorunas carrying a crude but strong litter constructed from saplings and giant-fern leaves. McKay rose ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel
... as a man variously and mysteriously alive, very different from every other man and especially from certain kinds of man. When you look at a larch wood with a floor of fern in October at the end of twilight, you are not content to have that wood described as so many hundred poles growing on three acres of land, the property of a manufacturer of gin. Still less was Borrow content to sit down at Oulton, while the blast howled amid the pines which nearly surround ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... intense and new was the animal delight, to plant my hinder claws at some tree-foot deep into the black rotting vegetable-mould which steamed rich gases up wherever it was pierced, and clasp my huge arms round the stem of some palm or tree-fern; and then slowly bring my enormous weight and muscle to bear upon it, till the stem bent like a withe, and the laced bark cracked, and the fibres groaned and shrieked, and the roots sprung up out of the soil; and then, with a slow circular wrench, the whole ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... ran, stumbling, recovering themselves, stumbling again. To breathe became an agony. But not until many minutes later, when they plowed into the cover of a fern belt whose blackness not even the moonlight had pierced, did ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... two miles from the sea. Wherever we turn we have woods, smooth downs, and valleys, with small brooks running down them, through green meadows, hardly ever intersected with hedgerows, but scattered over with trees. The hills that cradle these valleys are either covered with fern and bilberries, or oak woods, which are cut for charcoal. Walks extend for miles over the hill-tops, the great beauty of which is their wild simplicity—they are perfectly smooth, without rocks.' It was in this neighbourhood, as the two poets loitered in the silvan combs or walked along ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... days he had gone occasionally to see a play, and in 1875 he went to see Irving in Hamlet and liked him better than Macready, whom he had seen in the part. Still later he went to see Lady Archibald Campbell act when ‘Becket’ was given “among the glades of oak and fern in the Canizzaro Wood at Wimbledon.” But handicapped as he was by ignorance of drama as a stage product how could he ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... caught sight of there was her eldest son. He was dancing a quadrille, and his partner was a short young lady in a strawberry-coloured tulle dress, covered with trails of spinach-green fern leaves. This young person had a round, chubby face, with bright apple-hued cheeks, a dark, bullet-shaped head, and round, bead-like eyes that glanced about her rapidly like those of a frightened dickey-bird. Her dress was cut very low, and the charms she exhibited were not captivating. Her arms ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... thoughtful, and a trifle astonished, but she made the best use of her memory, and Alton listened gravely. "Yes," he said. "I seem to see it. The rose garden on the south side, the big lawn, and the lake. There's a little stream on the opposite side of it that comes down through the fern from ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... painted the wide landscape in every direction. On mountain sides, and across the undulating lowland, wall or hedge mapped his conquests of nature, little plots won by the toil of successive generations for pasture or for tillage, won from the reluctant wilderness, which loves its fern and gorse, its mosses and heather. Near and far were scattered the little white cottages, each a gleaming speck, lonely, humble; set by the side of some long-winding, unfrequented road, or high on the green upland, ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... a light to England? And isn't it the duty of parishes and millionaires to supply light?" She was plucking a fern-leaf to pieces. ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... species of fern were growing abundantly around a pool of water, fed from a tiny rivulet that trickled down from the cliff above; and I had no sooner got under the shelter of the leafy branches than I was surrounded by a flock of the pretty grey doves whose ...
— The Island Treasure • John Conroy Hutcheson
... cow. She had not pastured in the meadows about Chartres with blind eyes. She knew the paths north and south and east and west through the forest and the fern; and even in the dark of the tangled underbrush she could feel out the way quite plainly. But she said to herself, "I must not make the way too easy for these wicked men. I must punish them all I can now that it is ...
— The Book of Saints and Friendly Beasts • Abbie Farwell Brown
... going forward, Mr Banks and Dr Solander walked along the shore of the bay by themselves without anxiety, and collected numerous plants. They visited several huts, and found the inhabitants at dinner, their food consisting, at this time of the year, of fish and the root of a large fern. The roots were prepared by scorching them over a fire, and then beating them till the charred bark fell off. The remainder was a clammy, soft substance, not unpleasant to the taste, but mixed with three times its bulk of fibres, which could not be swallowed. This ...
— Captain Cook - His Life, Voyages, and Discoveries • W.H.G. Kingston
... handy, far from speculative, and yet good at succedaneum: when his anger is kindled, it descends like lightning: unlike his dog, his wrath gives no notice by grumbling: he blazes up like one of his own fires of dried fern. Quarrels do not often take place among them, but when they do, they are dreadful. The laws of the country in which they sojourn have so far banished the use of knives from among them that they only grind them, otherwise these conflicts ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 572, October 20, 1832 • Various
... the shepherd's hut wide awake that night, hearing the frogs croak from the Lagherello and the crickets sing in the hot darkness. The hut was empty: shepherd and sheep and dogs were all gone up to the higher grounds amongst the hills. There were some dry fern-plants in a corner of it. I lay on these and stared at the planets above me throbbing in the intense blue of the skies: they seemed to throb, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... as she gazed from her loophole over the woods with a vague, never-quenchable hope of seeing something, she became aware of something very stealthy below—the rustling of a fox, or a hare in the fern mayhap, though she could not see to the bottom of the quarry, but she clung to the bar, craned forward, and beheld far down a shaking of the ivy and white-flowered rowan; then a hand, grasping the root of a little ...
— Two Penniless Princesses • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and interest of the observations made during his stay at Rio, when tropical nature was still a fresh and unexplored page to the young observer, are wonderful. Cabbage palms, liana creepers, luxuriant fern leaves—roads, bridges, and soil—planarian worms, frogs which climbed perpendicular sheets of glass, the light of fireflies, brilliant butterflies, fights between spiders and wasps, the victories of ants over difficulties, the habits of monkeys, ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... string looks jest like a fern with a lot of roots. My mother used to grow them in the corner of our garden. They ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: Volume IV, Georgia Narratives, Part 1 • Works Projects Administration
... knows what I'd have done if it hadn't been for her," he laughed. "I wanted to plant American Beauty roses and maiden-hair fern all over the place. I even think I had some notion of growing four-dollar orchids on the pear trees. The idea of putting in things that would really ...
— The Lilac Girl • Ralph Henry Barbour
... many ineffectual trials to deceive, or overcome him, it was at length determined to let him pursue his own course, and to watch if he should apply for relief to any of the productions of the country. He was in consequence observed to dig fern-root, and to chew it. Whether the disorder had passed its crisis, or whether the fern-root effected a cure, I know not; but it is certain that he ...
— A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson • Watkin Tench
... stumbled, stood still in the entrance to the back-trail. In that leafy tunnel, as far as the eye could see, was no one living or dead. The porters, the tent boys, all were gone in a stampede for safety. The baggage lay scattered among the fern beds. She saw bundles of green canvas, chop boxes, rags, bursting sacks of grain. Beside a mossy rock lay her dressing case smashed open, its mirror, brushes, and vials trampled into ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... in that meat. Jacob had gone out accordingly; he had gained his leeward position of a fine buck, and was gradually nearing him by stealth, now behind a huge oak-tree, and then crawling through the high fern, so as to get within shot unperceived, when on a sudden the animal, which had been quietly feeding, bounded away and disappeared in the thicket. At the same time Jacob perceived a small body of horse ...
— The Children of the New Forest • Captain Marryat
... while after this, Arthur thought that he had had about enough dancing for awhile, and went and sat by himself in a secluded spot under the shadow of a tree-fern in a temporary conservatory put up outside a bow-window. The Chinese lantern that hung upon the fern had gone out, leaving his chair in total darkness. Presently a couple, whom he did not recognize, for he only saw their backs, strayed in, and placed themselves ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... carefully studied on the large-scale map he and the Master had used in planning the attack; but the Master's intimate knowledge was not his. After two and one-half minutes, the leader stopped again, and gestured at heavy fern-brakes that could just be distinguished as black blotches in the dark of ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... spaces, caught the light as it struck through the gray trunks of the beeches. Newbury found a seat for Marcia on a fallen trunk, and threw himself beside her. The world seemed to have been all washed by the thunder-storm of the night before; the odors of grass, earth, and fern were steaming out into the summer air. The wood was alive with the hum of innumerable insects, which had become audible and dominant with the gradual silencing of the birds. In the half-cut hay-fields the machines stood ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... alone, do my thoughts no longer hover Over the mountains, on that northern shore, Resting their wings where heath and fern-leaves cover Thy noble heart for ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... thing to leave the carcasses of these brave creatures uncovered there. So I stripped off branches of the trees, and gathered bundles of fern and bracken, with which to conceal awhile their bones from wolf and fowl. And him whom I had begun to love I covered last, desiring he might but return, if only for a moment, to bid me his ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... situations the following are suitable: tradescantia, parlour ivy, moneywort, vinca smilax, climbing fern, asparagus fern, dracaena, coleus, centaurea, sword fern, and Boston fern. For indoor boxes in winter, the following may be used: abutilon, calceolaria, cyclamen, violets, primroses, petunias, geraniums, freesia, ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education
... children, through the wood-path and out upon the moor. Meadows had brought a shawl, and spread it on a rock, full under the moonlight. There they sat, close together, feeling all the goodness and glory of the night, drinking in the scents of heather and fern, the sounds of plashing water and gently moving winds. Above them, the vault of heaven and the friendly stars; below them, the great hollow of the valley, the scattered lights, ...
— A Great Success • Mrs Humphry Ward
... Louis went on, "I'd like to see this guy Elliott. Anybody who would draw a picture like that. Hold your horses, Mike, here's another. 'The Faun." What's a faun, Mike? I guess he means fern. It ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... romantic view and mark our progress towards the foot of the hill. I was particularly struck, during the walk, with the richness of the undergrowth in most places, and recognised many berries and plants that resembled those of my native land, especially a tall, elegantly formed fern, which emitted an agreeable perfume. There were several kinds of flowers, too; but I did not see so many of these as I should have expected in such a climate. We also saw a great variety of small birds of bright plumage, and many paroquets similar to the one, ...
— The Coral Island • R.M. Ballantyne
... white wrapper and blue net, sitting in a large chair, looking about her with the languid interest of an invalid in a new place. Her eyes brightened as they fell upon a glass of rosy laurel and delicate maidenhair fern that stood among the toast and eggs, strawberries and ...
— A Garland for Girls • Louisa May Alcott
... Milton so acute as these two. But of less ingenious readers I would ask, if any single word can be found equal to "monumental" in its power of suggesting to the imagination the historic oak of park or chase, up to the knees in fern, which has outlasted ten generations of men; has been the mute witness of the scenes of love, treachery, or violence enacted in the baronial hall which it shadows and protects; and has been so associated with man, that it is now rather a column and memorial obelisk than a tree ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison |
