"Fern" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... given them, speaking as an old campaigner, some very useful if simple hints, such as always pitching the tent with its back to the wind; and keeping inside a supply of dry wood to light the fires with; and tying fern on Moses's head, against the flies; and carrying cabbage leaves in their own hats, against the heat; and walking with long staves instead of short walking sticks—after this he made them all sit round their fire, and sketched them, and the picture hangs at this very moment in ...
— The Slowcoach • E. V. Lucas
... the use of the gathering hook so that the branches can be brought within easy reach of the picker on his ladder, the wearing of a gathering apron, and the emptying of it gently into the baskets. Green fern has the same effect on pears packed for carriage as nettles on stone fruit; while apples should be packed in wheat, or better still in rye straw. For long journeys the American system of packing in barrels is anticipated, the apples being carefully put in by hand, and the ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... her dark eyes fixed on the setting sun. There was no sound save the breathing of her horse, the far sweet trailing song of a spotted sparrow, the undertones of some hidden rill welling up through matted tangles of vine and fern and long wild grasses. ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... These gardens are on the south side of the river Yarra. On a hill in the centre of them is built the Government House. There are seen many varieties of trees and plants all carefully labelled. The fern tree bower is very ingenious. You see here the elk or staghorn fern, which grows as a parasite on the palm or the petosperum of New Zealand. The grass is kept beautifully fresh and green, and is a favourite resort. I have no further room to continue this letter, but, in my next, ...
— Six Letters From the Colonies • Robert Seaton
... in fern, Old oak, I love thee well; A thousand thanks for what I learn And what remains to tell." —The ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... revealed itself as a monstrous sham, more dangerously indecent because of its pretense at decency. It is something like those poisoned tropical forests, fever-infested, which were in the land of my birth, beautiful outwardly, with great vivid flowers, high palms, towering trees of fern, all garlanded with creepers and lovely wild growth,—glades of fair shadow inviting to rest, yet poisonous so that ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... death-like hush upon everything. Indeed, the place seemed shunned in spite of the sodden loveliness of that scent which monopolised and mounted to my brain until I was beginning to be drunk with the sheer pleasure of it. And there in the centre of the space stood a plant not unlike a tree fern, about six feet high, and crowned by one huge and lovely blossom. It resembled a vast passion-flower of incredible splendour. There were four petals, with points resting on the ground, each six feet long, ivory-white ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... whins. The whins had been in bloom since Easter, for Larry and Eileen had gathered the yellow flowers to dye their Easter eggs. On the other side of the road the land rose a little, and was so covered with stones that it seemed as if there were no earth left for things to grow in. Yet the mountain fern took root there and made the rocks gay with ...
— The Irish Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... 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 looks like ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... slipped out my hand from the handcuff, cried to Harry Gauntlet, 'Follow me!'—whisked under the belly of the dragoon horse—flung my plaid round me with the speed of lightning—threw myself on my side, for there was no keeping my feet, and down the brae hurled I, over heather and fern, and blackberries, like a barrel down Chalmer's Close, in Auld Reekie. G—, sir, I never could help laughing when I think how the scoundrel redcoats must have been bumbazed; for the mist being, as I said, thick, they had little notion, ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... Having gone about five miles, we sat us down on a bridge to rest a while, and there the Don left us to go a little way up the course of the stream that flowed beneath, and he came back with a posey of sweet jonquils set off with a delicate kind of fern very pretty, and this he presents to Moll with a gracious little speech, which act, it seemed to me, was to let her know that he respected her still as a young gentlewoman in spite of her short petticoat, and Moll was not dull to the compliment neither; for, after the first ...
— A Set of Rogues • Frank Barrett
... 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, the sounds ...
— A Great Success • Mrs Humphry Ward
... wrested from it by the first Pilgrims, and has begun to efface the evidences of the inroad made in recent years by the bold speculator for whom Jocelyn's is named. The young birches and spruces are breast high in the drives and avenues at Jocelyn's; the low blackberry vines and the sweet fern cover the carefully-graded sidewalks, and obscure the divisions of the lots; the children of the boarders have found squawberries in the public square on the spot where the band-stand was to have been. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... grey on the hills. The north wind resounds through the woods. White clouds rise on the sky: the trembling snow descends. The river howls afar, along its winding course. Sad, by a hollow rock, the grey-hair'd Carryl sat. Dry fern waves over his head; his seat is in an aged birch. Clear to the roaring winds he lifts his ...
— Fragments Of Ancient Poetry • James MacPherson
... not many mushrooms any more, but we gathered gay red berries for decoration, bunches of late fern, sprays of bittersweet; we raked over the leaves for nuts, and sometimes found bits of spicy wintergreen or checkerberry, the kind that always flavored old-fashioned lozenges which our grandmothers bought in little rolls for a penny, on the way to school. You may guess that this was ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... said the fern, "but you do not know the world yet as well as I do, for my sticks are knotty;" and then ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... this dell as it should be described; and I will therefore only beg of thee, gentle reader, who peradventure mayst not have lingered in this classical neighbourhood, to fancy a deep, deep dell, its steep sides fringed down with hazel and beech, and fern and thick undergrowth, and clothed at the bottom with the richest and greenest sward in the world. You descend, clinging to the trees, and scrambling as best you may,—and now you stand on haunted ground! Tread softly, for this is the Boggart's clough; and see in yonder dark corner, and ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... and fern, Gum and mulga and sand, Reef and palm — but my fancies turn Ever away from land; Strange wild cities in ancient state, Range and river and tree, Snow and ice. But my star of fate Is ever across ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson
... to say. If any of the class to whom I appeal incline to let "I dare not wait upon I would," hear the experience of a bold enthusiast, as recounted by Mr. Castle in his small brochure, "Orchids." This gentleman had a fern-case outside his sitting-room window, six feet long by three wide. He ran pipes through it, warmed presumably by gas. More ambitious than I venture to recommend, "in this miniature structure," says Mr. Castle, "with liberal supplies of ...
— About Orchids - A Chat • Frederick Boyle
... 251. Successful Fern Growing.—A woman who has had her refrigerator placed on the porch has a long drain pipe to carry off the melted ice, and this is made to flow right into a large bed of ferns. The cold water in no way destroys the plants, in fact, ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... reminds me of an absurd bit of information I picked up from Kippy that made me feel as flat as a pressed fern. We were wandering along the shore one morning and she suddenly pointed to the ...
— The Cruise of the Kawa • Walter E. Traprock
... frantic gallopade along the line, we plunge into a plantation. Long vistas of straggling trees—and leaf-strewn pathways winding in among them—give way to scattered clumps of firs and tangled masses of fern and brushwood, while broken fences come dancing up between, and then shrink down again behind rising knolls covered with a sudden growth of gorse and heather. A pit yawns into a pond; the pond squeezes itself longways into a thin ditch, which turns off sharply at a corner, and leaves a dreamy-looking ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... enough at their termination to form a vista, through which its white walls glistened with beautiful effect in the calm splendor of a summer evening. Above the mound on which it stood, rose two steep hills, overgrown with furze and fern, except on their tops, which were clothed with purple heath; they were also covered with patches of broom, and studded with gray rocks, which sometimes rose singly or in larger masses, pointed or rounded into curious and fantastic shapes. Exactly between these ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... ways. Wild woodland voices ripple thro' thy lays; Sweet silvern murmurs from some deep-delled spring, Brook, tree and flower and each insensate thing, The throstle's call, the calm of sun-steeped days, A glint of sunshine on the swallow's wing, Fern-filagrees, the drowsy drone of bee Made drunk with draughts of purple wild-grape wine; All these Orphean music holds for thee, And all thy days and dreams companioning Walks Nature with her ...
— The Path of Dreams - Poems • Leigh Gordon Giltner
... your horse treads down alone The sere damp fern, night after night you sit Holding the bridle like a man of stone, Dismal, unfriended: ...
— The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems • William Morris
... 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 then we espied a little cornfield, which served ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... piercing shriek of delight. At first I looked hurriedly toward the brook as each yell clove the air; but, as I became accustomed to it, my attention was diverted by some exquisite ferns. Suddenly, however, a succession of shrieks announced that something was wrong, and across a large fern I saw a small face in a great deal of agony. Budge was hurrying to the relief of his brother, and was soon as deeply imbedded as Toddie was in the rich black mud, at the bottom of the brook. I dashed to the rescue, stood astride the brook, and offered a hand ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IX (of X) • Various
... away, stooping to pluck the withered frond of a fern that grew in the path. When she looked up at him again all the bloom and radiance ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... about that fag 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 ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... 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 that ...
— Riley Farm-Rhymes • James Whitcomb Riley
... 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 Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... stared. It was a charming but very simple pattern the lines of sand had assumed, not unlike the fronds of a delicate fern growing out of several small circles ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood
... fastnesses of fragrance and hidden castles of the dew. In such hours the Well at the World's End seems no mere poet's dream. It awaits us yonder in the forest glade, amid the brooding solitudes of silent fern, and the gate of the Earthly Paradise is surely there in yonder vale hidden among the ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... it was decided that the happy spot should be on 'Huckleberry Hill,' a picturesque elevation about a mile from the postoffice in Peonytown, covered with a luxurious growth of pines and hemlocks, interspersed with huckleberry bushes, sweet fern, and mullenstalks. A small, open place was selected, where the long moss made a beautiful carpet, and the tall trees on every side entwined their arms as lovingly together as if they, too, were about to take each other 'for better for worse,' while the ripple of a brook hidden in the woods lent ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... world. A severe critic of this world he indeed was; but, finding himself in it, and not precisely knowing what is beyond it, like a brave and true-hearted man, he set himself to make the best of it. Its sights and sounds were dear to him. The 'uncrumpling fern, the eternal moonlit snow,' the red grouse springing at our sound, the tinkling bells of the 'high-pasturing kine,' the vagaries of men, of women, and dogs, their odd ways and tricks, whether of mind or manner, all ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... course there were—three at least; but they lay so far on the one side or the other that no stranger could have found them from the track. A large part of the Ross is covered with big granite rocks, some of them larger than a two-roomed house, one beside another, with fern and deep heather in between them where the vipers breed. Anyway the wind was, it was always sea air, as salt as on a ship; the gulls were as free as moorfowl over all the Ross; and whenever the way rose a little, your eye would kindle with the ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... occupations they often considered it expedient to escape detection by assuming invisibility, and for this object sought the assistance of certain plants, such as the fern-seed[17]. In Sweden, hazel-nuts were supposed to have the power of making invisible, and it may be remembered how in one of Andersen's stories the elfin princess has the faculty of vanishing at will, by putting a wand in ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... Colocasia, Colocasia esculenta and macrorhizon), is an important esculent root in the Polynesian islands. In the dry method of culture practised on the mountains of Hawaii, the roots are protected by a covering of fern leaves. The cultivation of taro is hardly a process of multiplication, for the crown of the root is perpetually replanted. As the plant endures for a series of years, the tuberous roots serve at some of the rocky groups as a security against ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... to me as if they was sort of company to one, like, and when you water 'em and tend 'em always, I feel as if they was alive, and got to know one again, I do, and that makes one love 'em, now don't it, mum? To see 'em brighten up after you've watered 'em, like that there maiden-'air fern there, why it's enough to make one love 'em the same as if they was Christians, mum.' There was a melting tenderness in her voice when she talked about the flowers that half won over Edie's heart, even in spite of her ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... partly artificial and partly formed by the strata of the limestone bank, led from the roadside up to the opening of the foot- way. For thirty or forty yards the fern-fringed path was too narrow to admit of two persons walking abreast. Miss Denham, with her skirts gathered in one hand, went first, picking her way over the small loose stones rendered slippery by the moss, and Lynde followed on in silence, hardly able to realize the success ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... R.—In preparing ferns for skeleton-leaf bouquets it is not necessary to place them in the macerating bowl before bleaching, as the texture of the fern is so delicate as to be ruined by maceration. Before bleaching, the fern should be pressed, and as it becomes dry and brittle, more care is required in the bleaching process than for skeleton leaves. Hang your sprays in the jar, and fill gently with warm water. Then pour in the ...
— Harper's Young People, July 13, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... usually wimples and dimples its laughing surface, but in calmer moods it reflects, as in a polished mirror, the lofty, overhanging mountains, with every stately pine, bounding rivulet; blossoming shrub, waving fern, and—high above all, on the right—the clinging, thread-like line of the snow-sheds of the Central Pacific. When the railroad was being constructed, three thousand people dwelt on its shores; the surrounding forests resounded with the music of axes and saws, and the terrific blasts exploded in the ...
— History of the Donner Party • C.F. McGlashan
... 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 part ...
— Betty Leicester - A Story For Girls • Sarah Orne Jewett
... the stranger's admiration of the views, the exquisite framings of the summer sea and sky made by tree, rock, and rising ground, and the walks so well laid out on the little headland, now on smooth turf, now bordering slopes wild with fern and mountain ash, now amid luxuriant exotic shrubs that attested the mildness ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... as the water ran. Gently he leaned back till his back rested on the sloping ground—he raised one knee, and left the other foot over the verge where the tip of the tallest rushes touched it. Before he had been there a minute he remembered the secret which a fern had taught him. ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... world. And what are 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 ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... strike along the gorge, the voices of the singing birds died away, and the air grew cold and dark about him. But the distant valley with its houses was all the brighter for that. He came presently to talus, and among the rocks he noted—for he was an observant man—an unfamiliar fern that seemed to clutch out of the crevices with intense green hands. He picked a frond or so and gnawed its stalk, and ...
— The Door in the Wall And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... Several distinct levels in the present crater prove that it has eaten its way to its present depth. On the most elevated of these large trees now grow, evidences of many years' tranquillity; lower down we come to shrubs, and lastly to the fern, apparently the most venturesome of the vegetable kingdom; it seems to require nothing but rest and water, for we found it shooting out of crevices where the lava appeared to have undergone no decomposition. Nowhere, I conceive, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... ourselves at the entrance of an immense cavern formed in the lava. It was some hundred feet square, and from fifteen to twenty high. When lighted up by the torches, it had a very wild and picturesque appearance. The horses were tethered in one part, while we all went out and collected grass and fern leaves for our beds, and a good supply of fuel for our fire. Having cooked our supper, we sat round the fire, while one of the natives, who spoke English very well, told us some of the wonderful tales about Pele, the goddess of the burning mountain, and her numerous diabolical followers. ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... could not bear to hear him speak with trembling voice and gleaming eyes of the grand mountains and the silent corries around Ben-Nevis, the red deer trooping over the misty steeps, and the brown hinds lying among the green plumes of fern, and the wren and the thrush lilting ...
— Scottish sketches • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... pine forest and fern, The stalwart New Zealanders turn To the land of their sires, For with ancestral fires Their bosoms ...
— War Rhymes • Abner Cosens
... it wouldn't stay on the very tip of your ear, it's so small. As for nice, that depends. Sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn't. No, the only way for mortal people to be invisible is to gather the fern-seed and ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... 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 ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... and contrived her a small easel with her round lightstand and a book-rest; for Sulie was advancing in the fine arts, from painting dollies' paper faces in cheap water colors, to copying bits of flowers and fern and moss, with oils, on gray board; and she was doing it very well, and ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... 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 builder's most rare ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... the stream, she came at last to another wood—not a wild wood like the first, but a tame, domesticated wood. The dead limbs were cut away, and the ground was neatly brushed up under the trees. The brook flowed sedately between fern-bordered banks, under rustic bridges, and widened occasionally into pools carpeted with lily pads. Mossy paths set with stepping-stones led off into mysterious depths that the eye could not penetrate: the leaves were just out enough to half hide and to tantalize. ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster
... avenue, and at the top of a steep eminence commanding a wide view over four counties—a landscape of snow. A deep lane leads abruptly down the hill; a mere narrow cart-track, sinking between high banks clothed with fern and furze and low broom, crowned with luxuriant hedgerows, and famous for their summer smell of thyme. How lovely these banks are now—the tall weeds and the gorse fixed and stiffened in the hoar-frost, which fringes round the bright prickly holly, the pendent ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... impression,—a sturdy figure with long body and short legs, clad in a woolen shirt and butternut-colored trousers repaired to the point of picturesqueness, his head surmounted by a limp, light-brown felt hat, frayed away at the top, so that his yellowish hair grew out of it like some nameless fern out of a pot. His tawny hair was long and tangled, matted now many years past the possibility of being entered ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... hoods pricked with fern leaves whirled about these edifices in the airiest fashion. It was common to see them leap up to the height of two or three storeys from the lava pavement and rebound like balls, their faces meanwhile preserving that impressive dignity ...
— Honey-Bee - 1911 • Anatole France
... where the hoarse wind is raving, Rocks where the weary floods murmur and wail, Wilds where the fern by the furrow is waving, Reeled with the echoes that rode on the gale; Far as the tempest thrills Over the darkened hills Far as the sunshine streams over the plain, Roused by the tyrant band, Woke all the mighty land, Girded for ...
— How the Flag Became Old Glory • Emma Look Scott
... see now once again The glen And fern, the highland, and the thistle? And do you still remember when We heard the bright-eyed woodcock whistle Down ...
— The Dog's Book of Verse • Various
... 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 ...
— Captain Cook - His Life, Voyages, and Discoveries • W.H.G. Kingston
... a name is a pretty idea," said Kittie, recalling all the Roman titles she had ever heard of. "Call it—let's see, call it Fern-nook." ...
— Six Girls - A Home Story • Fannie Belle Irving
... his position, carelessly, noiselessly, yet quickly, until he leaned on the rail close to the ferns and could overhear every word the bushies said. He had dropped his cigar overboard, and his scented handkerchief behind a fern-pot en route. ...
— Over the Sliprails • Henry Lawson
... Benton nursed her round chin in the palm of one hand, leaning her elbow on the window sill. It was a relief to look over a widening valley instead of a bare-walled gorge all scarred with slides, to see wooded heights lift green in place of barren cliffs, to watch banks of fern massed against the right of way where for a day and a night parched sagebrush, brown tumble-weed, and such scant growth as flourished in the arid uplands of interior British Columbia had streamed in barren monotony, hot and ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... my mother gone from her home away?— But I know that my brothers are there at play, I know they are gathering the fox-glove's bell, Or the long fern leaves by the sparkling well; Or they launch their boats where the bright streams flow, Lady, kind lady! oh, let ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... Over bank and over brae, Where the copsewood is the greenest, Where the fountains glisten sheenest, Where the lady-fern grows strongest, Where the morning dew lies longest, Where the black-cock sweetest sips it, Where the fairy latest trips it. Hie to haunts right seldom seen, Lovely, lonesome, cool, and green, Over bank and over brae, Hie ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... very much interested, but Mrs. John Coulson drew her away towards the palm and fern-embowered door of the drawing-room. She was somewhat disappointed at the news of Mrs. Oliver's non-appearance, for that meant that neither was Mrs. Jarvis present. The fates did seem to be ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... this was the name of the palfrey, had his stall crammed full of dried fern for litter, and was otherwise as well provided for as ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... evidence of the sudden disappearance of several green-backed frogs, sunning themselves on a large, moss-grown rock, projecting above the water's edge; from shady nooks and crevices peeped clusters of early white violets; graceful maidenhair ferns, and hardier members of the fern family, called "Brake," uncurled their graceful, sturdy fronds from the carpet of green moss and lichen at the base of tree trunks, growing along the water's edge. Partly hidden by rocks along the bank of the stream, nestled ...
— Mary at the Farm and Book of Recipes Compiled during Her Visit - among the "Pennsylvania Germans" • Edith M. Thomas
... in which the Magnolia was resting, her bow against a fern bank, and presently the party was in a solitude that was almost oppressive. There was neither sign nor sound of human being, and the steamer was lost to sight around ...
— The Moving Picture Girls Under the Palms - Or Lost in the Wilds of Florida • Laura Lee Hope
... Sat to sew, Just where a patch of fern did grow; There, as she yawned, And yawn wide did she, Floated some seed Down her gull-e-t; And look you once, And look you twice, Poor old Tillie Was gone in a trice. But oh, when the wind Do a-moaning come, 'Tis poor old Tillie Sick for home; And oh, when a voice ...
— Peacock Pie, A Book of Rhymes • Walter de la Mare
... But on the fern-wove mattress lay No weary guest. St. Colum kneeled, And found no trace; but, ashen-grey, Far off he ...
— Christmas in Legend and Story - A Book for Boys and Girls • Elva S. Smith
... time approached we gathered up stray hats, aprons and handkerchiefs and prepared to go home. We painted each others' cheeks with the red blood of huckleberries and crowned our heads with leaves of the birch and oak, stalks of indigo weed or broad fern fronds that hung down over the face like green veils. Thus freaked and marked, walking in single file, our mothers and elder sisters behind us, shouting, leaping and laughing, we presented something as near a Bacchic procession as could be ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... appearing to be twice as many. Scape: 4 to 10 in. high. Leaves: Growing in an open rosette on the ground; round or broader, clothed with reddish bristly hairs tipped with purple glands, and narrowed into long, flat, hairy petioles; young leaves curled like fern fronds. ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... the equivocal bull, the cat's claws, and the unequivocal married person. And then you would turn over all the little things of old, and wrangle a bit over details here and there; and all the while you would be the very selfsame two that were young and were lost in the wood and trampled down the fern and saw the squirrels overhead ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... All of shade and sheen is theirs, All the strange fashions and the fair wise ways Of lives beneath man's own. He breathes delight Whose soul is fresh, whose feet are wet with dew And the melted mist of morning, when at watch Sunk deep in fern he marks the stealthy roe, Silent as sleep or shadow, cross the glade, Or dart athwart his view as August stars Shoot and are out—while gracefully pace on The wild-eyed harts to their traditional tree To clear the velvet from their budded horns. There is ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Jean Ingelow
... down the path little animals came out of the fern to meet them; the very first that they met were ...
— The Great Big Treasury of Beatrix Potter • Beatrix Potter
... 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 ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... suggests thoughts of the beauty of holiness; and the calm rest of creation speaks to us of the deeper rest of the soul in God. On the shadowed path that leads up to the house of prayer, with mind and senses quickened to perceive the loveliness and significance of the smallest object, the fern on the bank and the lichen on the wall, we feel indeed that heaven is not so much a yonder, towards which we are to move, as a here and a now, which ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... his bosom was reflected in the breast of Nature. Through deep green vistas where the boughs arched overhead, and showed the sunlight flashing in the beautiful perspective; through dewy fern from which the startled hares leaped up, and fled at his approach; by mantled pools, and fallen trees, and down in hollow places, rustling among last year's leaves whose scent woke memory of the past; the placid Pecksniff strolled. By meadow gates and hedges fragrant ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... English Herbs and Plants, Colworts, Carrots, Radishes, Fennel, Balsam, Spearmint, Mustard. These, excepting the two last, are not the natural product of the Land, but they are transplanted hither: By which I perceive all other European Plants would grow there: They have also Fern, Indian Corn. Several sorts of Beans as good as these in England: right Cucumhers, Calabasses, and several sorts of Pumkins, &c. The Dutch on that Island in their Gardens have Lettice, Rosemary, Sage, and all other Herbs and Sallettings that ...
— An Historical Relation Of The Island Ceylon In The East Indies • Robert Knox
... turned round and strolled about, loitering among the flowers. They halted with some curiosity before several women who were selling bunches of fern and bundles of vine-leaves, neatly tied up in packets of five and twenty. Then they turned down another covered alley, which was almost deserted, and where their footsteps echoed as though they had been walking through a church. Here ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... barely sufficient to produce them. The trees that came within our knowledge were the manchineal and a species of purow: also some palm-trees, the tops of which we cut down, and the soft interior part or heart of them was so palatable that it made a good addition to our mess. Mr. Nelson discovered some fern-roots, which I thought might be good roasted, as a substitute for bread, but it proved a very poor one: it however was very good in its natural state to allay thirst, and on that account I directed a quantity to be collected to take into the boat. Many pieces ...
— A Narrative Of The Mutiny, On Board His Majesty's Ship Bounty; And The Subsequent Voyage Of Part Of The Crew, In The Ship's Boat • William Bligh
... correspondent of the Hartford Courant, also newspapers in Boston, Albany and Worcester. About 1851 he bought out the Merchants Ledger, a paper devoted to the commercial interests of the country. This he transformed into a family story paper, and christened it the New York Ledger. Fanny Fern was just appearing in the columns of literature. Bonner offered her $1,000 to write a story for the Ledger, enclosing his check for the amount. As this was a very high price in those days, of course she accepted. Then ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... the season at any watering-place depresses me. If I could wear fern seed in my shoes to make me invisible, and sit on the piazza railing in a shirt-waist and a short skirt, I would love it. But both Bee and Mrs. Jimmie, with the light of heaven in their eyes, pulled out and put on their ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell
... Parrish by the arm, Jim started to drag him into the recesses of the fern forest. Suddenly the bestial face ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... to Fairyland across the thyme and heather, Round a little bank of fern that rustled on the sky, Me and stick and bundle, sir, we jogged along together,— (Changeable the weather? Well—it ain't all pie!) Just about the sunset—Won't you listen to my story?— Look at me! I'm only rags and tatters to your eye! Sir, that blooming sunset crowned this battered hat ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... wood, in search of the dragon that well might dwell there. Descending the hill-side with a suddenness which is almost startling, you may find yourself in a bamboo forest, which is a veritable fairyland for beauty. From a carpet of sand, on which lilies grow, these giant bamboos spring, fern-like, in enormous clumps, spreading their arms and feathery crests in all directions, and, meeting overhead, form avenues and lanes, which remind one of ...
— Burma - Peeps at Many Lands • R.Talbot Kelly
... oaks and ashes, and in between the trees and under them tangled bushes and creeping ivy. There were beech-trees too, but there was nothing under them but their own dead red drifted leaves, and here and there a delicate green fern-frond. ...
— The Story of the Amulet • E. Nesbit
... little stream had lost its way Amid the grass and fern; A passing stranger scooped a well, Where weary men might turn; He walled it in and hung with care A ladle at the brink; He thought not of the deed he did, But judged that all might drink. He passed again, and lo! the well, By ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... apparently more grown than other cereals. The chief meat of the lower classes then, as to-day, was bacon from the innumerable herds of swine who roamed in the woods and wastes, but in bad years, when food was scarce, the poor ate nuts, acorns, fern roots, bark, and vetches.[100] ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... high in air near the rocks. The Cove lay in sunshine, its rough stone chimneys and rude slate roofs overgrown with moss and fern, rising rapidly, one above the other, in the fast descending hollow, through which a little stream rushed to the sea,—more quietly than its brother, which, at some space distant, fell sheer down over the crag ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... potatoes are buried in a jungle of autumn burdocks. Our radishes stand seven feet high, uneatable. Our tomatoes, when last seen, were greener than they were at the beginning of August, and getting greener every week. Our celery looked as delicate as a maidenhair fern. Our Indian corn was nine feet high with a tall feathery spike on top of that, but no sign of anything eatable about ...
— Frenzied Fiction • Stephen Leacock
... standstill in corrasion, or even filling up, and its floor is a regular descent, except for the last three or four miles where the canyon is clogged by huge rocks that seem to have fallen from above. The maximum height of its present flood-waters is about six feet, proved by a fern-covered calcareous deposit, projecting some fifteen feet, caused by a spring (Shower-Bath Spring) on the side of the wall, seven or eight miles above the mouth, which is never permitted by the ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... 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, ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... did as bid. For a moment the fern smouldered and smoked, then the flame ran crackling along and shot up in the darkness, weirdly lighting the scene: to the right the low wood, a block of solid blackness against the sky; in front the wall of sheep, staring out of the gloom with bright eyes; and as centre-piece that ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... book on the Origin of Life Dr. Charlton Bastian tells of using two solutions. One consisted of two or three drops of dilute sodium silicate with eight drops of liquor fern pernitratis to one ounce of distilled water. The other was composed of the same amount of the silicate with six drops of dilute phosphoric acid and six grains of ammonium phosphate. He filled sterilised tubes, sealed them hermetically, and heated them to 125 or 145 degrees, Centigrade, although 60 ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... raw day, with a nipping wind and blinks of sunshine that swept across grass and ploughland and faded again. There were glistening pools in the narrow road and drops of moisture hung on the briars and withered fern along the hedgerows. Both Challoner and Blake were dressed in sober tweed, for the Colonel said he only wore the pink when he felt fit to follow the hounds and now he must be content to see them find. Glancing at his watch, he pulled up his horse ...
— Blake's Burden • Harold Bindloss
... Fern and Samuel Bligh, of Oneonta, N. Y., have patented an improved power for churning and other purposes where little power is required. It consists in the combination of a drum and weight, a train of gearing, and a pallet wheel arranged to oscillate ...
— Scientific American, Volume 40, No. 13, March 29, 1879 • Various
... sometimes used as an anthelmintic, so is wormwood, and the liquid extract of male fern, and in America spigelia root ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... vengeance against their enemies. The New Hollanders, near the sea, subsist on fish eaten raw, or nearly so; should a whale be cast ashore, it is never abandoned until its bones are picked; their substitute for bread, and that which forms their chief subsistence, is a species of fern roasted, pounded between stones, and mixed with fish. The general beverage of the negro tribes is palm-wine. No disgust is evinced by the Bosjesman Hottentots at the most nauseous food, and having shot an animal with a poisoned arrow, their only precaution, previous to tearing ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 381 Saturday, July 18, 1829 • Various
... ran on, pushing their way through the great tall fern, or scampering over the short green grass where the little mountain sheep were nibbling, and where a beautiful creeping moss grew all over the ground, which, mother told Milly, was called "Stags' horn moss," because its little green branches were so ...
— Milly and Olly • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... considerable way to go. The glen path, narrow and rough, went up and down, still following the water. Hazel and birch, oak and pine, overhung and darkened it. Bosses of rock thrust themselves forward, patched with lichen and moss, seamed and fringed with fern and heath. Roots of trees, huge and twisted, spread and clutched like guardian serpents. In places where rock had fallen the earth seemed to gape. In the shadow it looked a gnome world—a gnome or a dragon world. Then upon ledge or bank showed bells or disks or petaled ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... As fern grows in untilled grounds, and all manner of weeds, so do gross humours in an idle body, Ignavum corrumpunt otia corpus. A horse in a stable that never travels, a hawk in a mew that seldom flies, are both subject to diseases; which left unto themselves, are most free from any such ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... gay greenwood, When the little birds are singing, When the buck is belling in the fern, And the hare from ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... Bill), and several other respectable land-owners and farmers of the county of Wilts, to take into consideration the propriety of presenting Petitions to both Houses of Parliament, on behalf of the proprietors and occupiers of land. Thomas Grove, Esq. of Fern, one of the gentlemen who called the meeting, having taken the chair, Mr. Benett addressed them at a very considerable length in favour of a petition that he submitted for their adoption, expressive of the serious injury already sustained ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 3 • Henry Hunt
... holding mystery and fascination in green depths and purple distances, streams rushing with noisy joy over stony beds, sweet violet gloom of night with brilliant stars moving silently across infinite space; tender moss, delicate fern, creeping vine, covering the brown earth with living beauty—a fascinating world of loveliness for boyish eyes to ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr
... and hiding it in a fern-pot). That moonlight evening on the Backs, George, when I had failed in ...
— Happy Days • Alan Alexander Milne
... was 20 degrees below zero. I think I never saw such a brilliant atmosphere. That curious phenomenon called frost-fall was occurring, in which, whatever moisture may exist in the air, somehow aggregates into feathers and fern leaves, the loveliest of creations, only seen in rarefied air and intense cold. One breath and they vanish. The air was filled with diamond sparks quite intangible. They seemed just glitter and no more. It was still and cloudless, and the shapes of violet mountains were softened ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... day, two friends went out to a moor to gather fern, attended by a boy with a bottle of wine and a box of provisions. As they were straying about, they saw at the foot of a hill a fox that had brought out its cub to play; and whilst they looked on, struck by the strangeness of the sight, three children came ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... "El Liceo," 1838. The Duque de Rivas may have been influenced by our text, but such introductions were a Romantic commonplace. See M. Fernndez y Gonzlez, "Crnicas romanescas de Espaa. Don Miguel de Maara, memorias del tiempo de Carlos V," Paris, 1868. The story begins "Era la media noche"; and, later, "Haca mucho tiempo que Sevilla estaba entregada al sueo y ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... somehow by a partial, artificial light, and making a fond mistake. No! he found the impression true—rather, indeed, he gained than lost by this return: he took away with him a parting look —shy, but very soft—as beautiful, as innocent, as any little fawn could lift out of its cover of fern, or any lamb from ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... holy will, let Bresal my brother have near him these things of which he is dreaming, as a remembrance of what his soul loveth." Then, turning to the tree and the plant and the pool, he blessed them and said: "O little tree and starry plant and cool well and transparent fern, and whatsoever else Bresal now sees, arise in the name of the Lord of the four winds and of earth and water and fire, arise and go and make real the dream that ...
— A Child's Book of Saints • William Canton
... decorated with wild and sublime magnificence. She often went thither to wash the linen of the family beneath the shade of the two cocoa-trees, and thither too she sometimes led her goats to graze. While she was making cheeses of their milk, she loved to see them browse on the maiden-hair fern which clothes the steep sides of the rock, and hung suspended by one of its cornices, as on a pedestal. Paul, observing that Virginia was fond of this spot, brought thither, from the neighbouring forest, a great ...
— Paul and Virginia • Bernardin de Saint Pierre
... a place below the spring where the maidenhair fern grew thick and spread out wide, perfect fronds on slender brown stems, shading fairy bowers; and where taller ferns grew high and leaned over like a delicate fairy forest; and where the wild violets grew so thick you could not see the ground beneath them, and the grass was lush and long ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... stones lovingly, as if to conceal their irregular lines and other ravages which time and the elements had made upon them; while here and there, growing out from its crevices, were clusters of delicate maiden-hair fern, the bright green of which contrasted beautifully with the weather-beaten wall and the darker, richer ...
— The Masked Bridal • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... or in addition to farmyard manure, various other substances may be added, as bones, flesh, fish-scrap, and the offal of slaughter-houses. Sometimes leaves and the dried bracken-fern are used for the manufacture of composts. Some of these substances contain much nitrogen or phosphoric acid, but in their natural condition ferment when applied to the soil at a slow rate. If mixed ...
— Manures and the principles of manuring • Charles Morton Aikman
... of the sentry was heard, and at that moment, the glare of a lantern fell upon the trees, bordering a field opposite the window. Beyond that field the ground was broken and uneven, covered with tall bushes, fern, and masses of rock, and sloping upwards towards the neighbouring hills. The light drew nearer; the sentry challenged. It was the relief. Their heads in the embrasure of the window, Herrera and the gipsy ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... we would see the Ox-eye Daisy, Black-eyed Susan, Wild Carrot, and the most beautiful fall flower of the northeastern United States, the Fringed Gentian; in the woods, Mountain Laurel, Pink Azalea, a number of wild Orchids, Maidenhair Fern, and Jack-in-the Pulpit; in the marshes, Pink Rose-mallow, which reminds us of the Hollyhocks of our Grandmother's garden, Pickerel-weed, Water-lily, ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts
... forest of his demesne, and in the midst of which, covered with ivy and tufted plants, now ruddy with autumnal tints, stood the ruined walls of a little chapel. In the dilapidated vault close by lay buried many of his ancestors, and under the little wavy hillocks of fern and nettles, slept many an humble villager. He sat down upon a worn tombstone in this lowly ruin, and with his eyes fixed upon the ground, he surrendered his spirit to the stormy and evil thoughts ...
— The Evil Guest • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... a shy little Fern, From her home in the shade, "About pulling up roots, What a protest ...
— Pinafore Palace • Various |
