"Lichen" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... dust lay thick, undisturbed for generations. Unclean things littered in musty corners. Through gaping skylights a sunny beam would penetrate; it played about the mildewy stucco partitions encrusted, in patches, with a poisonous lichen of bright green. Wandering about this dank and mournful pile of wreckage, he could understand why simple folks should dread to enter so ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... fare. In their desire to do him honour, and to give him pleasure, his hosts had provided the rarest delicacies, and of course he felt obliged to taste them all. Some of the dishes were excellent, but many of them were rather trying to a European digestion, especially the fungus and lichen. One sort had been grown on ice in the Antarctic Sea, the whale's sinews came from the Arctic Ocean, the shark's fins from the South Sea Islands, and the birds' nests were of a quality to be found only in ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... busy month, and full of new experiences, of intimate touch with realities of London life, sordid and otherwise. It was all very unlike Rugby and Cambridge; very unlike the life of the big luxurious Weybridge house, and even more unlike lichen-covered Tarn Regis. In those days I took little stock of such mundane details as bed and board. But these things count; I had been made to take note ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... the ridges, the smoke mounts straight from its chimneys and the trees drip as steadily as though they were clocks and marked the seconds perfunctorily, with no real interest in the lapse of time. For the house, with its round-shouldered Jacobean gables, its stone-cropped roof, lichen-spotted plaster, and ill-kept yew hedge, has an air of resignation to decay, well-bred but spiritless, and communicates it to the whole of its small landscape. Our old builders chose their sites for shelter rather than for view; and this—and perhaps a well of exquisite ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... porpoises rolling in the green sea. Here and there an ancient apple-tree, bent down and bowed to the ground with age, offers a mossy, shady seat upon one of its branches which has returned to the earth from which it sprung. Some wooden posts grown green and lichen-covered, standing at regular intervals, show where the housewife dries her linen. Right before the very door a great horse-chestnut tree rears itself in all the beauty of its thousands of blossoms, hiding half the house. A small patch of ground in front is railed in with wooden palings ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies
... meridian of life. The tree was in its youth. It no longer stood in an isolated garden; for pretentious brick and stucco houses had clustered about Antoine's cottage. They looked down scowling on the humble thatched roof. The city was edging up, trying to crowd him off his land. But he clung to it like lichen and ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... Mr. Mivart's other objections. Insects often resemble for the sake of protection various objects, such as green or decayed leaves, dead twigs, bits of lichen, flowers, spines, excrement of birds, and living insects; but to this latter point I shall hereafter recur. The resemblance is often wonderfully close, and is not confined to colour, but extends to form, and ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... great central arch was no new thing, for moss and lichen enamelled its jagged edges with green and gold. Some branches loosely strewn across the road were the only signposts indicating this tragedy, though perhaps it was a story as old as the great ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... in the tropics "the most wholesome diet, without doubt, is chiefly vegetable." Despite Jacquemont and all the rice-eaters, I cry beef and beer for ever and everywhere! Many can testify personally to the value of the unofficinal prescription which he offers in cases of severe lichen (prickly heat), leading to impetigo. It is as ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... of men, coming thousands of years later, rubbed away the lichen, read the lines, and applied them to a trouble other than the one Leo meant. Being a man, men believed that he had made the verses himself; but they belong to Leo, the Child of the Zodiac, and teach, as he taught, that what comes or does not come, ...
— Kipling Stories and Poems Every Child Should Know, Book II • Rudyard Kipling
... did not pass without notice and censure. We are not made of wood or stone, and the things which connect themselves with our hearts and habits cannot, like bark or lichen, be rent away without our missing them. The farmer's dame lacked her usual share of intelligence, perhaps also the self-applause which she had felt while distributing the awmous (alms), in shape of a gowpen (handful) of oatmeal, to the mendicant who brought ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... were dyed with bark of alder for black, bark of willow for flesh colour. A lichen growing on stones supplied their violets and crimson.[311] The lichen on the birch-tree gives a good brown; heather ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... development hypothesis, we ascertain, as we proceed outwards, that the course is not one of progression from the low to the high, but of descent from the high to the low. Passing northwards, we meet, where the lichen-covered land projects into the frozen ocean, with the diminutive Laps, squat, ungraceful, with their flat features surmounted by pyramidal skulls of small capacity, and, as a race, unfitted for the arts either of peace or war. We meet also with the timid Namollas, with noses ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... lie, Hush, ye will say, it is eternity! This is the glimmering verge of Heaven, and these The columns of the heavenly palaces! And, in the sweeping of the wind, your ear The passage of the Angels' wings will hear, And on the lichen-crusted leads above The rustle of ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... is a trifle fanciful. But romance gathers round an old story like lichen on an old branch. And the story of Martin Pippin in the Apple-Orchard is so old now—some say a year old, some say even two. How can the children ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon
... outline of Benbecula and North Uist, a feat that would be a great deal beyond the vast majority of grown-ups living on those islands themselves. As we turned to cross the head of Loch Hourn, Myra pointed out Glasnabinnie, nestling like a lump of grey lichen at the foot of the Croulin Burn. Anchored off the point was a small steam yacht, either a converted drifter ...
— The Mystery of the Green Ray • William Le Queux
... down stood a wayside inn; a desolate and villainous-looking lump of lichen-spotted granite, with windows paper-patched, and rotting thatch kept down by stones and straw-banks; and at the back a rambling court-ledge of barns and walls, around which pigs and barefoot children grunted in loving communion of dirt. At the door, rapt apparently in the contemplation of ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... world). limite m. limit, boundary. limosna alms, charity. limpiar to clean. limpieza cleanliness. limpio clean, limpid. linajudo having lineage, of old family. lindante bordering. lio bundle. liquen m. lichen. liquido liquid. liso smooth. lista list. listo ready, prompt, clever. literario literary. lo n. the, it; lo que that which. lobo wolf. loco mad. locura madness. lograr to obtain, succeed, bring about. lomo loin. longaniza sausage. lontananza distance. ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
... out on the lawn under the shade of a huge cedar-tree. The river ran at their feet and a Canadian canoe and a rowing-boat were tethered close by in a little dock. The house, a place of grey stone with grey weathered and lichen-coloured slates, raised its great oblong chimneys into a pellucid air. The sunlight flashed upon its rows of tall windows—they were all flat to the house, except the one great bay on the ground floor in the library—and birds called ...
— Witness For The Defense • A.E.W. Mason
... blunted but destroyed; and while he perceived in himself the terrible effects of his sinful indulgence, he saw them still more indisputably in the gradual coarseness which seemed to be spreading, like a grey lichen, over the countenance, the mind, and the manners of his younger companion. Sometimes the vision of a Nemesis breaking in fire out of his darkened future, terrified his guilty conscience in the watches of the night; and the conviction of some fearful Erinnys, some discovery dawning out of the ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... cove. It was a scrambling, precipitous way, over perpendicular walls of rock, whose crevices furnished anchoring-places for grand old hemlocks or silver-birches, and whose rough sides, leathery with black flaps of lichen, were all tangled and interlaced with thick netted bushes. The men plunged down laughing, shouting, and swearing at their occasional missteps, and silently as moonbeam or thistledown the light-footed shadow ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... be more obviously different from one another, in faculty, in form, and in substance, than the various kinds of living beings? What community of faculty can there be between the brightly-coloured lichen, which so nearly resembles a mere mineral incrustation of the bare rock on which it grows, and the painter, to whom it is instinct with beauty, or the botanist, whom it ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... above it, their sides covered with the leafage of tall beeches and dark fir trees to the height of a hundred feet. The trees, with their different kinds of foliage, rise up straight and tall, fantastically colored by patches of lichen, forming magnificent colonnades, with a line of straggling hedgerow of guelder rose, briar rose, box and arbutus above and below the roadway at their feet. The subtle perfume of this undergrowth was mingled just then with scents from the wild mountain region and with ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... extinguishers. About half way down the dress was full, and some cushion-moss appeared that could not be passed by. Amabel sat down and reviewed her treasures. She could part with nothing, and she had just caught sight of some cup- moss lichen for dolls' wine-glasses. But, by good luck, she was provided with a white sun-bonnet, as clean and whole as her dress; and this she took off and filled. It was less fortunate that the scale-mosses and liverworts, growing nearer to the stream, came ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... came out to a point above me, seeming unscalable, all grown over with brush and lichen, and stunted spruce. But by hauling myself up, and crawling here, and winding under bridges of rock there, and holding to the brush, at last, panting and ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... these are still in place and the outlines of streams and waves can be seen. So little time has elapsed since it ran down that the elements have not weathered a soil, and there is scarcely any vegetation on it, but here and there a lichen is found. And yet, so long ago was it poured from the depths, that where ashes and cinders have collected in a few places, some huge cedars have grown. Near the crater the frozen waves of black basalt are rent with deep fissures, ...
— Canyons of the Colorado • J. W. Powell
... semicircular, resembling a fish-scale. The same form with a small square shoulder is very generally used, but there is a great variety, and sometimes those with ornamental ends are blended with plain ones. Age imparts a very beautiful colour to old tiles, and when covered with lichen they assume a charming appearance which artists love ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... shell up the pendulous woodbine, the bee adding to his golden treasure as he swung in the bells of the campanula, the green fly darting hither and thither like an animated seedling, the spider weaving her gossamer from twig to twig, the woodpecker heedfully scrutinising the lichen on the gnarled oak-hole, the passage of the wind through leaves or across grass, the motions and shadows of the clouds, and so forth. These were his golden holidays. Much of the rest of his time, when not passed ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... walnut, and is saddled on a small horizontal limb of a tree, often many feet from the ground. It is composed almost entirely of soft plant fibres, fragments of spiders' webs sometimes being used to hold them in shape. The outer sides are thickly studded with bits of lichen, and practised, indeed, is the eye of the man or woman that can distinguish it from a knot on a limb. Although the Hummingbird's nest is exceedingly frail, there is nothing on record to show that {30} any great number of them come to grief during the summer rains. It is, however, ...
— The Bird Study Book • Thomas Gilbert Pearson
... presenting a fair smooth surface, now jagged, shattered, shelving, roughened with brushwood; sometimes bleached and hoary, as in the case of the pinnacled crag called the White Kirk; sometimes green with moss or grey with lichen; sometimes, though but rarely, shaded with timber, as in the approach to the cavern named the Earl's Bower; but generally bold and naked, and sombre in tint as the colours employed by the savage Rosa. Such were the distinguishing features of the gorge of Cliviger when Nicholas ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... of antiquity in the wrinkled, lichen- covered thorn of a wintry landscape, and thus it is a fitting object to stir and sustain the poet's tendency to note 'chance and change' and to lament the loss of the days that are no more. The exceeding appropriateness of this in a narrative poem dealing with departed habits and customs ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... specimens of moss and lichen to Captain Renner, who looked at them with interest, and then passed them on to Beeson for ...
— Shepherd of the Planets • Alan Mattox
... planks, and though now fitted to become permanently useful, its whole beauty is lost forever, or is to be regained only in part, when decay and ruin shall have withdrawn it again from use, and left it to receive from the hand of Nature the velvet moss and varied lichen, which may again suggest ideas of inherent happiness, and tint its mouldering sides with hues of life. For the Imagination, unperverted, is essentially loving, and abhors all utility based on the pain ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... Not only from the Lichen tribe, but also from the Algae, fungi, mosses and ferns man derives nutriment and valuable products. Some of the cryptogamic plants form considerable articles of commerce, particularly as food plants, ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... then retired to her room, but not to sleep. She seated herself before a table, drew out her portfolio, and began to write. Now and then she paused and looked up, when the sinister light that shone in her eyes streamed through the room like the phosphorescent glow of the lichen ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... doctors in Europe and Asia; and at first Old World immigrants thought they could not live here without the plant on their farms. Once given a chance to naturalize itself, no composite is slow in seizing it. The vigorous elecampane, rearing its fringy, yellow disks above lichen-covered stone walls in New England, the Virginia rail fence, and the rank weedy growth along barbed-wire barriers farther west, now bids fair to cross ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... slowly forward. He is fabulously old, crowned with mistletoe and clad in a long green gown edged with moss and lichen. He is blind; his white beard streams in the wind. He leans with one hand on a knotty stick and with the other on a young OAKLING, who serves as his guide. The Blue Bird is perched on his shoulder. At his approach, ...
— The Blue Bird: A Fairy Play in Six Acts • Maurice Maeterlinck
... modern ducks. Artists would find a paradise of queer, cozy gables, and corners of gardens crowded with old-fashioned flowers that matter more than all the ancient books in the museum library. They would remember Easthampton for the green velvet moss and golden lichen on its ancient roofs, the faint rainbow tints in the old, old glass of its tiny window-panes; for the pink hollyhocks painted against backgrounds of dove-gray shingles; for its sky of peculiar hyacinth blue like a vast cup inverted over wide-stretching ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... of purity. The violets whisper from the shade Which their own leaves have made: Men scent our fragrance on the air, Yet take no heed Of humble lessons we would read. But not alone the fairest flowers: The merest grass Along the roadside where we pass, 20 Lichen and moss and sturdy weed, Tell of His love who sends the dew, The rain and sunshine too, To ...
— Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems • Christina Rossetti
... There was no cottage where he might house his picture and materials within half a mile of Gorse Point, but a granite cow-byre rose considerably nearer, at a corner of an upland field. Wind-worn and lichen-stained it stood, situated not more than two hundred yards from the spot on which Barron's picture was to be painted. A pathway to outlying farms cut the fields hard by the byre, and about it lay implements of husbandry—a chain harrow and a rusty plow. Black, tar-pitched double ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... casing of the doorway remained, but the door had gone, and in its place hung a piece of tattered sacking. There was one small window, but this had been boarded over. The building was largely covered with lichen, and weeds had grown out of the mud-filling daubed in between the logs. There was something very desolate but wondrously peaceful about ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... been finished the babies were taken from their cradles, and their little beds were made afresh. The cradle bottoms were covered with fine, soft, well-dried lichen or reindeer moss, over which a little cotton sheet was spread. The babies were stark naked, and were wrapped in little sheepskins while their beds were being made. Then they were laid in, the sheet turned down, with a coarse piece of vadmal ...
— The Land of the Long Night • Paul du Chaillu
... form a well-defined family of lichens, the affinities of which seem plainly marked. In apothecial structure, and so far as known, in structure of the sexual reproductive areas, the family seems to be closely related to the mainly non-lichen Patellariaceae and to such lichens as the Gyalectaceae, the Lecanactidaceae, the Collemaceae, the Baeomycetaceae, and ...
— Ohio Biological Survey, Bull. 10, Vol. 11, No. 6 - The Ascomycetes of Ohio IV and V • Bruce Fink and Leafy J. Corrington
... for his meat; Give him cantharids to eat; From air and ocean bring him foods, From all zones and altitudes;— From all natures sharp and slimy, Salt and basalt, wild and tame; Tree and lichen, ape, sea-lion, Bird and reptile, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... fine old city, aforetime capital of Wessex, lay amidst its convex and concave downlands in all the brightness and warmth of a July morning. The gabled brick, tile, and freestone houses had almost dried off for the season their integument of lichen, the streams in the meadows were low, and in the sloping High Street, from the West Gateway to the mediaeval cross, and from the mediaeval cross to the bridge, that leisurely dusting and sweeping was in progress which usually ushers in ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... suspect that their camp-mate must be writing a story, founded on that strange cabin, with its lichen-covered walls, and the roof that seemed to be sprouting green grass ...
— The Strange Cabin on Catamount Island • Lawrence J. Leslie
... falling, and the leaves drifted downward in a continuous murmuring veil. Then, no rabbits played upon the grassy wayside or crossed the track, and the pheasants shivered in their hidden shelters. In early springtime one best realizes the antiquity; the first opening leaves call to mind pale lichen growing upon damp castle walls: in summer the air is languorous, bringing a desire for rest and contemplation. Storms are impious there: the ancient oaks and birches and chestnuts must wail and protest, like dotards wakened from ...
— The Dukeries • R. Murray Gilchrist
... obeyed his young master's behest as promptly as though he had fully understood the words. Meanwhile, Ralph found a mossy spot on the shady side of a big gray, lichen-covered boulder, and, seating himself thereon, with his back comfortably adjusted to a depression in the rock, he drew a worn account book from a pocket of his corduroy coat. Moistening his thumb he began to turn the pages rapidly, until he came ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Geological Survey • Robert Shaler
... herself on the lichen-covered log with her feet upon a stone, and sat enjoying the musical tinkle of the water, with her eyes on the delicate ferns stirring in the wind, and the lively jingle of the multiplication-table chanted by ...
— A Garland for Girls • Louisa May Alcott
... together with the yellow of the wings and tail, are tints that exactly harmonize with the colours of various species of lichens, while the brilliant red wax tips exactly represent the crimson fructification of the common lichen, Cladonia coccifera. When sitting on its nest, therefore, the female bird will exhibit no colours that are not common to the materials of which it is constructed; and the several tints are distributed in about the same proportions ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... strong delight of the novelty, the freedom, the delicious wild things around, the bracing air, the wonderful lofty beauty, made me as happy as I thought I could be. I feasted on the rocks and wild verdure, the mosses and ferns and lichen, the scrub forest and tangled undergrowth, among which we plunged and scrambled: above all, on those vast leafy walls which shut in the glen, and almost took away my breath with their towering lonely grandeur. All this time Dr. Sandford was as busy as a bee, in quest of something. He was a ...
— Daisy • Elizabeth Wetherell
... found rough and rugged, as every hill here is. It was scorched absolutely brown, thistles—especially yellow-flowered ones—alone showing signs of life, along with a pretty, dwarf Dianthus. The rocks are covered with an orange-coloured lichen which gives them a warm colour. When lying on the top I could almost imagine myself in Scotland, if I kept my eyes above the villages and valleys, and viewed the hill-tops only. Away to the north ...
— The Incomparable 29th and the "River Clyde" • George Davidson
... o'clock that hideous bell rang its swinging, melancholy note. Why it was nobody could possibly tell. Nobody in the village had ever been beyond the great rusty gates leading to a dark drive of Scotch firs, though one small boy bolder than the rest had once climbed the lichen-strewn stone wall and penetrated the thick undergrowth beyond. Hence he had returned, with white face and staring eyes, with the information that great wild dogs dwelt in the thickets. Subsequently the village poacher confirmed this information. He was not exactly loquacious on the subject, ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... here two brothers, one a king, had met And fought together; but their names were lost; And each had slain his brother at a blow; And down they fell and made the glen abhorr'd: And there they lay till all their bones were bleach'd, And lichen'd into colour with the crags: And he, that once was king, had on a crown Of diamonds, one in front, and four aside. And Arthur came, and labouring up the pass, All in a misty moonshine, unawares Had trodden that crown'd skeleton, and the skull Brake from the nape, and from the skull the crown ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... thermometer 39 degrees, the same trees, scarcely any thing but Abies, Arenoid, Dicranum macrocarpus, Orthotrichum, Lichen pendulum atratum. ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... their masque of Hercules; the claret colored walls adorned with gold cinquefoils of Demetrios' court; his pavilion with porticoes of Andalusian copper; Theodoret's capital, Megaris, ruddy with bonfires; the free port of Narenta with its sails spread for the land of pagans; the lichen-incrusted glade in the Forest of Columbiers; gardens with the walks sprinkled with crocus and vermilion and powdered mica ... all are at once real and bright with unreality, rayed with the splendor of an antiquity built from webs and films of imagined wonder. The past is, at its moment, the ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... bricks the green moss grew. Yellow lichen on the stone, Over which red apples shone; Little war that ...
— The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems • William Morris
... of this vast rock, which the Goddess with but a simple touch of one of her fingers moved into its place five hundred years ago, as though it had been the airiest down that ever floated in a summer's breeze, and you will see something yellow standing out in marked contrast to the black lichen-covered stone. That is the sign-manual of the Goddess. She printed it on the rock when she condemned me centuries ago to be enclosed within this narrow cell until you should come and release me. Your hand alone can remove ...
— Chinese Folk-Lore Tales • J. Macgowan
... land: 0% permanent crops: 0% meadows and pastures: 0% forest and woodland: 0% other: 100% (largely covered by permanent ice and snow with some sparse vegetation consisting of grass, moss, and lichen) ...
— The 1996 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... for her large style. We know nothing rightly, for want of perspective. Now we learn what patient periods must round themselves before the rock is formed, then before the rock is broken, and the first lichen race has disintegrated the thinnest external plate into soil, and opened the door for the remote Flora,[503] Fauna,[504] Ceres,[505] and Pomona,[506] to come in. How far off yet is the trilobite! how far the quadruped! how inconceivably remote is man! All duly arrive,[507] ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... short-lived stone, No lichen shall its lines efface, He needs these few and simple lines ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... Bevis, being tired of swinging, went to the summer-house to read what he had written with his stump of pencil till he was called to tea. In the evening, when the sun was sinking, he went out and lay down on the seat—it was a broad plank, grey with lichen—under the russet apple-tree, looking towards the west, over the brook below. He saw the bees coming home to the hives close by on the haha, and they seemed to come high in the air, flying straight as if from the distant hills where the sun was. He heard the bees say ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies
... of which about one-fourth exists from the summit downwards, is of nummulite limestone, compact, hard, and more homogeneous than that of the courses, with rusty patches here and there due to masses of a reddish lichen, but grey elsewhere, and with a low polish which, at a distance, reflects the sun's rays. Thick walls of unwrought stone enclose the monument on three sides, and there may be seen behind the west front, in an oblong enclosure, a row of stone sheds hastily constructed ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... bird on its ground nest, or ground contentedly taken for nest, among heath and scarlet-topped lichen, is among the most beautiful in his book; and there are four quite exquisite drawings by Mr. Ford, of African varieties, in Dr. Smith's zoology of South Africa. The one called by the doctor Europaeus seems ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... branches was never the song of a bird. The lower branches were dead. All the life of the place had fled upwards to meet the sun. Soon even the life overhead would be gone. Christophe passed into a part of the wood which was visited by some mysterious pestilence. A kind of long, delicate lichen, like spiders' webs, had fastened upon the branches of the red pines, and wrapped them about with its meshes, binding them from hand to foot, passing from tree to tree, choking the life out of the forest. It was like the deep-sea alga with its ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... autumn leaves are fading and falling 'inland,' there may come such a day of sunshine and glorious blue sky, with the larks singing on every side among the golden furze-blossoms, that one is able to forget the calendar. And then, amongst the great boulders covered with white lichen that lie along the sides of streams, the leaves of the whortleberries turn scarlet over the little round fruit, with its plum-like bloom. Sometimes in winter the snow lies in patches on the hills, among stretches of pale ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... are a few capitals lying about, as well as granite columns in the curious old crypt. A pillar stands all forlorn in a field; and quite close to the church are erected two others—the larger of cipollino, beautified by a patina of golden lichen; a marble well-head, worn half through with usage of ropes, may be found buried in the rank grass. The plain whereon stood the great city of Sipus is covered, now, with bristly herbage. The sea has retired from its old beach, and half-wild cattle browse on the site of ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... exhibits the same sacrificial principle. Our treasures of coal mean that vast forests have risen and fallen again for our factories and furnaces. Nobody is richer until somebody is poorer. Evermore the vicarious exchange is going on. The rock decays and feeds the moss and lichen. The moss decays to feed the shrub. The shrub perishes that the tree may have food and growth. The leaves of the tree fall that its boughs may blossom and bear fruit. The seeds ripen to serve the birds singing in all the boughs. The fruit falls to be food for man. ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... having settled into bearings far down below the stream, on the morrow of some vast convulsion and upheaving of nature—the forest era was at last established. How long a time elapsed before the action of the weather had produced, from the hard face of the stone itself, soil enough for the lichen and the moss, or for these, in their turns, to become the receptacle of the seeds of forest trees, blown from some distant region—is a problem. In threading these islands, sometimes our vessel passed through tortuous passages apparently blocked up at the end, and within a few yards of land, ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... letting the remaining handfuls of corn dribble down very slowly, while the sunshine grew warmer and the shadows of the guardian griffins more distinct upon the lichen-encrusted stones, Helen de Vallorbes sank back into meditation—Yes, unquestionably the drama was alive. But it seemed so difficult to bring it to the birth. And she wanted, very badly, to hear its first half-articulate cries and watch its first staggering footsteps. All that ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... once a Genoese fort, growing like a grey spiked aloes out of the marble rocks of our bay; rock and wall (the walls existed long before Genoa was ever heard of) grown almost into a homogeneous mass, delicate grey, stained with black and yellow lichen, and dotted here and there with myrtle-shoots and crimson snapdragon. In what was once the highest enclosure of the fort, where your friend Gertrude watches the maids hanging out the fine white sheets and ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... Lathrop he sat down on a rock overgrown with a kind of monstrous lichen and gave way to tears. But not for long. Lathrop was a plucky enough lad, and as ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... end of a crooked stone wall, half surrounded by water, was a great spreading oak, its branches reaching half way across the narrow marsh. Within touching distance of the yielding ground stood Chad pointing to a smooth blaze, stained and overgrown with lichen. ...
— Colonel Carter of Cartersville • F. Hopkinson Smith
... seated side by side upon a Yorkshire wall. A wall of sandstone of many colors, glowing redder and yellower as the sun goes down; well cushioned with moss and lichen, and deep set in rank grass on this side, where the path runs, and in blue hyacinths on that side, where the wood is, and where—on the gray and still naked branches of young oaks—sit divers crows, not less solemn than the ...
— Jackanapes, Daddy Darwin's Dovecot and Other Stories • Juliana Horatio Ewing
... thatched and suggested long disuse. Its air was less of dilapidation than desertion, and lichen and fungus played a large part in such an aspect. The walls were low, and the heavy roof was flat and sloping. As the man drew near a flight of birds streamed from its eaves, screaming their resentment ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... nature is knowledge! It clings to the mind when it has once seized on it like a lichen on the rock. I wished sometimes to shake off all thought and feeling, but I learned that there was but one means to overcome the sensation of pain, and that was death—a state which I feared yet did not understand. I admired virtue and good feelings and loved ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... I stayed on with uncle at the farm until he died of that bronchitis I told you of, and the little wing was built up again, and the lichen has grown on it, so that now you could hardly tell it is only forty years old; and he left me all his money, and when he died, and Whitecroft went to a distant relation, I came here to do what bits ...
— In Homespun • Edith Nesbit
... truth of it was this: as Keawe undressed for his bath, he spied upon his flesh a patch like a patch of lichen on a rock, and it was then that he stopped singing. For he knew the likeness of that patch, and knew that he was fallen in ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... its threshold was for the future considered to be "home" and out of the game. Corven Abbey, as a result, grew in power and popularity. Abbot succeeded abbot, the lake at the foot of the hill was restocked at intervals, the lichen grew on the walls; ...
— The Gem Collector • P. G. Wodehouse
... this reason that persons of taste have taken pains to face their houses with weather-stained and lichen-crusted stone, or invent proper names for them, in imitation of the English manor-houses. But Nature is jealous of this helping, and neither the lichens nor the names will stick, for the reason that they never grew there. They cannot be naturalized without naturalizing their conditions. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... mockery! Even the lichen, the insect, lives a complete life, while we, with all our reason, so often blunder, fail, and miss that which ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... seat beside her on a pile of boughs where the smoke was least troublesome; he had chosen a spot that was sheltered by a lichen-covered ledge, and this low wall behind, with the wickiup joining it, formed an enclosure that lent them a certain air of privacy. They ate ravenously, and drank deep cupfuls of the unflavored tea. By the time they were finished the night had fallen and the air ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... broad hedge which fenced in the farm, and which was overgrown with briers and lichen. There he sat down to think about how it would go with him, if he never became a human being again. When father and mother came home from church, there would be a surprise for them. Yes, a surprise—it would be ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... deep wooden boxes with shield-shaped fronts; these fronts were covered with gray lichens from the rocks; the rosy blossoms waved from out these boxes, looking as much at home as they did above the lichen-covered trunks of the ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Anonymous
... love, of justice and loyalty, our thoughts of bold ambition—what are all these but acorns that fall from the oak in the forest? and must not thousands and tens of thousands be lost and rot in the lichen ere a single tree spring to life? "She had a beautiful soul," said, speaking of another woman, the woman whose words I quoted above, "a wide intellect, and tender heart, but ere these qualities could issue forth into life they had perforce to traverse a straitened character. ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... endeavour—if such a word as endeavour maybe used where all is done without effort—to subdue the rawness of every colour, and even to stain the white-wash we put upon her works, and covers the lightest rocks with lichen. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... trees not so luxuriant. It was also to be seen on tall black poplars, and I have a piece—planted purposely—on a hawthorn in my garden here. It grows in parts of the Forest, especially on the white-beams in Sloden, in curiously small detached pieces like lichen. The white-beam was a favourite tree of the Romans for the wood-work of agricultural implements, being tough ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... came to a small island walled about with high cliffs, red and brown, and at the foot of the cliffs a narrow beach of ruddy sand; but on the rocks grew no green thing, lichen or moss or grass or shrub, and no sweet water came bickering ...
— A Child's Book of Saints • William Canton
... of tree vegetation (four thousand eight hundred feet) is passed, and the remaining rocky slope offers no growth except a few hardy plants, such as sandwort, grasses, and several varieties of moss and lichen. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... the knife, the tear- ing blinding shell, Where falls the spattered sunlight on a lichen- covered well. No voice is here, no fall of feet, no smoke lifts cool and grey, But on the granite stoop a cat blinks vaguely at the day. From hill to hill across the vale Storms man's terrific iron gale; The cot roof on a brooding ...
— 'Hello, Soldier!' - Khaki Verse • Edward Dyson
... or landmark, the initials on which were hidden under moss. Up in the tree, near the gun, there was a dead branch that had decayed in the curious manner that seems peculiar to oak. Where it joined the trunk the bark still remained, though covered with lichen, and for a foot or so out; then there was a long space where the bark and much of the wood had mouldered away; finally, near the end the bough retained its original size and the bark adhered. At the junction with the trunk ...
— The Amateur Poacher • Richard Jefferies
... green date groves flourish near its ruins. The jackal and the hyaena appear to shun the dull aspect of its tombs. The king of birds never hovers over the deserted waste. A blade of grass or an insect finds no existence there. The shrivelled lichen alone, clinging to the weathered surface of the broken brick, seems to glory in its universal dominion over those barren walls. Of all the desolate pictures I have ever seen that of Warka incomparably surpasses all." Surely ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... all things." Jesus is omniscient. He can see with microscopic eye the lichen on the grey stone, the enamel on the shell, the modest flower; and He can see the love that is in the disciple's heart, though it be but ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer
... bounding on the river, which the owner said protected it by its fogs from frosts in the spring, though that was nothing to me; the gray color and ruinous state of the house and barn, and the dilapidated fences, which put such an interval between me and the last occupant; the hollow and lichen-covered apple trees, nawed by rabbits, showing what kind of neighbors I should have; but above all, the recollection I had of it from my earliest voyages up the river, when the house was concealed behind a dense ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... ruin, solitary and uninhabited. The cold October wind whistled through its joints and crannies;—the walls were studded with bright patches of moss and lichen;—darkness and desolation brooded over it, unbroken by aught but the cry of the moor-fowl and the stealthy prowl of the weasel and ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... heaving flank and lolling tongue, into the green but stony glade which formed the ridge and crest of the Tinnaburra range. The last hundred yards of his progress had been a good deal of a scramble, through thick scrub and over lichen-covered boulders, on a very steep rise. And now that he had reached the cool glade of topmost Tinnaburra, he found that his arrival had caused considerable perturbation among a small mob of brumbies, or wild horses, ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... green of everything strikes me: green hedges in place of our rail-fences, always ugly, and our rude stone-walls, which are not wanting in a certain look of fitness approaching to comeliness, and are really picturesque when lichen-coated, but poor features of landscape as compared to these universal hedges. I am disappointed in the trees, so far; I have not seen one large tree as yet. Most of those I see are of very moderate dimensions, feathered all the way up their long slender trunks, with a lop-sided ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... there a gleaming scarlet berry among small, round, close-lying waxy leaves; breaths of silvery moss, like a frosty vapor; these flung a grace of lightness over the closer garlanding, and the whole lay upon a bed of exquisitely curled and laminated soft gray lichen. ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... they see these things on the rocks, will call them Wau-konug (lichen), and although they are poor food they will keep them from starving ...
— Algonquin Indian Tales • Egerton R. Young
... of ground enclosed by a stone wall caught his attention. With no very definite intent he rose and went to it. In the center was a square, solid monument of hewn stone. It was brown with age, weather-worn at the angles, spotted with moss and lichen. Between the massive blocks were strips of grass the leverage of whose roots had pushed them apart. In answer to the challenge of this ambitious structure Time had laid his destroying hand upon it, and it would soon ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... stately lilacs, and snowballs attested the careful training and attention which many years had bestowed. In the centre of this court, and surrounded by a wide border of luxuriant lilies, was a triangular pedestal of granite, now green with moss, and spotted with silver grey lichen groups, upon which stood a statue of St. Francis, bearing the stigmata, and wearing the hood drawn over his head, while the tunic was opened to display the wound in his side, and the skull and the crucifix lay at his feet. Close to the base of the pedestal crouched a marble lamb, ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... gray cemetery nestled in a curve of the road between wheat fields on every side. A gray, moss-covered, lichen-hung wall surrounded it. The five American graves were under the shadow of the Western wall, and the sun was slowly sinking in his glory as the company of soldiers escorted the women into the cemetery. They ...
— The War Romance of the Salvation Army • Evangeline Booth and Grace Livingston Hill
... on his lichen-decorated, snow-draped bowlder, hands in pockets, so to speak, abominably untidy, with a pessimistic hunch of the shoulders, but a light in his eyes, a strangely malignant, devilishly roguish leer, that belied his appearance. Perhaps he was waiting to see if Cob during his struggles ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... canvas bag full of sand back with them from the mountain-side. In the valley sloping towards the ice-sea they found what had once been watercourses opening out into rivers towards the sea; and in the lowest parts there was a kind of lichen-growth clinging to the rocks under the snow. On the surface of the snow they saw traces of what might have been the tracks of animals, but, as there was no breath of wind in the attenuated atmosphere, it was quite possible that these might have been frozen into permanent shape hundreds or ...
— A Honeymoon in Space • George Griffith
... mushroom peer would have given almost their weight in gold to place them at the beginning of his newly made park; but no one came to open them, they were closed by a heavily padlocked chain, and the lodge beside them was empty and dilapidated; and the girl rode beside the lichen-covered wall in which they stood until she came to an opening leading to an old arch which faced a broad and spacious court-yard. As she rode beneath the arch a number of dogs yelped a welcome from kennels or behind stable half-doors, and a bent old man, dressed ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... quaint village street with a row of pollarded elms on each side of it. Just beyond were two ancient stone pillars, weather-stained and lichen-blotched bearing upon their summits a shapeless something which had once been the rampant lion of Capus of Birlstone. A short walk along the winding drive with such sward and oaks around it as one only ...
— The Valley of Fear • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the Barfjell. By degrees all trees disappeared; the ground was naked, or only covered by low black bushes; between, lay patches of snow-lichen, which increased in extent the higher they ascended. The prospect around had in it something indescribably cold and terrific. But Susanna felt herself in a peculiar manner enlivened by this wild, and to her new spectacle. To this the old Halling peasant contributed, who, whilst they travelled ...
— Strife and Peace • Fredrika Bremer
... Professor Schwendener first propounded his views,[J] and then briefly and vaguely, that all and every individual lichen was but an algal, which had collected about it a parasitic fungal growth, and that those peculiar bodies which, under the name of gonidia, were considered as special organs of lichens, were only ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... stared, but there could be no comment. There was a vast, dark sea to the left of the landing-place. Inland there were mountains and valleys. But the mountains were not sloped. There were heaps of detritus at the bases of their cliffs, but it was simply detritus. No tiniest patch of lichen grew anywhere. No blade of grass. No moss. No ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... devotion to each other and to their home, characteristic of their family. Both lovers work on the construction of the flat nest that is saddled on some mossy or lichen-covered limb, and so cleverly do they cover the rounded edge with bits of bark and lichen that sharp eyes only can detect where the cradle lies. Creamy-white eggs, whose larger end is wreathed with brown and lilac spots, are guarded ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... this almost prodigal waste of life, we perceive that every being, from the puny insect which flutters in the evening ray; from the lichen which we can scarcely distinguish on the mouldering rock; from the fungus that springs up and re-animates the mass of dead and decomposing substances; that every living form possesses a structure as perfect in its sphere, an organization sometimes as complex, always as truly ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... only were always hungry, but were capable of digesting everything. They ate spiders and flies, green worms, ants, millers, dirty brown worms, insect-eggs by the dozen, devil's-darning-needles, woodlice, bits of lichen, grasshoppers, and I know not how many other things. I could not help thinking that when one family of birds destroyed such numbers of injurious insects, if all the birds were to stop eating, the insects would soon destroy every green ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... his companion make his way round to the place from which it was only too evident Oliver must have fallen. Gilling went slowly, carefully inspecting every yard of the moss and lichen-covered stones. Once he paused some time and seemed to be examining a part of the parapet with unusual attention. When he reached the precise spot at which he had aimed, he instantly called ...
— Scarhaven Keep • J. S. Fletcher
... at the virtues of the syrup of marshmallow and the infusion of lichen, prescriptions that he had not varied. Dona Victorina was so pleased with her husband that one day when he stepped on the train of her gown she did not apply her penal code to the extent of taking his set of false teeth away from ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... fastnesses of the hill a brook gushes down to the sea through the boulders that bestrew its banks. Obliged to wait until the preceding couple had holed out, our citizen and golfer amused himself by upturning one of the great lichen-stained boulders. He gazed into the dank pit thus disclosed to his eyes, and half drew back dismayed at the extraordinary activity of insect life that was revealed. It was so sudden, so unexpected. Beneath that grey and solemn boulder that Time and ...
— Rembrandt • Mortimer Menpes
... gather this piece of golden lichen," pleaded she. "It will look so pretty among the green moss, in the cross I am going to make ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child
... down with his companion, passing the other prisoners from time to time on the wide bench in the corner; while old Jenk sat on the mossy stone steps at the foot of the sun-dial in the middle of the court, one arm nursing his sword upon his knees, the other embracing the lichen-covered pedestal against which he rested his head— no bad representation of old Father ...
— The Young Castellan - A Tale of the English Civil War • George Manville Fenn
... the way to the beach, and then turning to the left walked along the hard, white sand till they came to a bar of low rocks covered with sea-moss and lichen. Lying against the seaward face of the rock was a pile of driftweed, kelp, crayfish shells, &c, and half buried in debris was the object that ...
— A Memory Of The Southern Seas - 1904 • Louis Becke
... plain of the Garonne as well. As the clouds were gradually obscuring the scene, we made our way at a smart pace through the pines back towards the inn at Payole. One weather- beaten old fir, hung with lichen, devoid of all its former garb of green, seemed to appeal to us for pity; we noticed it both when ascending and descending, and its misery at dying when all the trees around were growing anew, ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough
... questionable sentiments, of communal and egoistic aspirations of the highest order. It was a wonderful liturgy, as grotesque as it was beautiful—like an old cathedral in all styles of architecture, stored with shabby antiquities and side-shows and overgrown with moss and lichen—a heterogeneous blend of historical strata of all periods, in which gems of poetry and pathos and spiritual fervor glittered and pitiful records of ancient persecution lay petrified. And the method of praying these things was equally complex and uncouth, equally the bond-slave of ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... dead, blasted by lightning, or injured by the attacks of animals at its base, it does not therefore lose all its beauty; for it becomes immediately covered with a peculiar gray lichen of great length and luxuriance; occupying every branch and twig of the dead tree, and clothing it, as it were, with a second but a new kind of foliage. This lichen will sometimes hang down from the branches ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... so firm that it does not easily fall to pieces. Inside it is lined with hair and feathers, and downy things, which make it ever so soft. Just put your finger inside, Annie, and feel it. Outside it is made of moss, fine dry grass, and wool, all matted together, and covered all over with the lichen which grows on the trunks and branches of trees. It is often very difficult to find this bird's nest, it looks so exactly like the part of ...
— Woodside - or, Look, Listen, and Learn. • Caroline Hadley
... about here all bow to the north-east, bent to that posture by the prevailing south-west winds. A Sussex man, on the hills or south of them, lost at night, has but to ascertain the outline of a tree, and he may get his bearings. If he cannot see so much as that he has but to feel the bark for lichen, which grows on the north ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... could find neither a plant nor a lichen on the island, and only a few insects and spiders, besides the boobies and noddies. I ought to have mentioned that we did not fail to meet with the moist and oppressive weather found under the belt of calms under the equator. Frequently I felt as if I could scarcely breathe, ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... arrive here, early in May, we see the brilliant males darting about—sometimes, I am sorry to say, quarrelling with their rivals and giving shrill cries like the squeaking of young mice. The last of May the dainty nest is made of plant-down and lichen scales. Then the male goes off by himself and sulks. You may see him feeding, but he keeps away from the nest—selfish bird that he is—until the little ones are ready ...
— Citizen Bird • Mabel Osgood Wright and Elliott Coues
... saunter or sit down among these memorials without paying some attention to the lettering on them, and always with greatest interest in those which time and weather and the corrosive lichen have made illegible. The old stones that are no longer visited, on which no fresh-gathered flower is ever laid, which mark the last resting-places of the men and women who were once the leading members of the little rustic community, and are now forgotten ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... fluor-spar, oyster-shells, bricks, and slate; gums, acacia and tragacanth; starch; paper, white and brown, cardboard and millboard; cork sheets, cork raspings, and old bottle-corks; gutta percha; leather and leather chips; wood; paints, oil, water, and varnish; moss, lichen, ferns, and grass; talc, window and looking-glass; muslin and net; chenille; carded wool; tow; wire; hay and straw; various varnishes, glue, ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... gathered up the jewels from their beds of mossy green, With all the dewy diamonds that summer morns have seen; The silver from the lichen and the powdered gold dust, too, Where the buttercups have ...
— The Verse-Book Of A Homely Woman • Elizabeth Rebecca Ward, AKA Fay Inchfawn
... capital, and famous in the spring for its long lines of cherry trees in full blossom. In the autumn it impressed me, as did all the other Japanese parks, as rather damp and unwholesome. The ground was saturated from recent rain; all the stonework was covered with moss and lichen; the trees dripped moisture, and the little lakes scattered here and there were like those gloomy tarns that Poe loved to paint in his poems. Near the entrance to this park is a shallow lake covered with lotus plants, and a short ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch
... run we have noticed shrines with images of little foxes before them, some clean and new, but some weather-worn and grown over with lichen. As Yosoji unpacks the lunch he tells us these are Shinto shrines put up in honour of the god of rice. It seems very appropriate to hear this now, just as we are going to fare merrily on hard-boiled eggs, a tiny ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... reflected skies. They never heard of Spaulding, and do not know that he is their neighbor—notwithstanding I heard him whistle as he drove his team through the house. Nothing can equal the serenity of their lives. Their coat-of-arms is simply a lichen. I saw it painted on the pines and oaks. Their attics were in the tops of the trees. They are of no politics. There was no noise of labor. I did not perceive that they were weaving or spinning. Yet I did detect, when the wind lulled ...
— Walking • Henry David Thoreau
... certain air of fixed calm, the type of an eternal quiet. At the base of the hills lay the city, a dirty mass of bricks and smoke and dust, and at its far edge flowed the Wabash,—deep here, tinted with green, writhing and gurgling and curdling on the banks over shelving ledges of lichen and mud-covered rock. Beyond it yawned the opening to the great West,—the Prairies. Not the dreary deadness here, as farther west. A plain dark russet in hue,—for the grass was sun-scorched,—stretching away into the vague distance, intolerable, silent, broken by hillocks and puny streams ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... of herbs which have got their names from their virtues and operations, as Aristolochia, because it helpeth women in childbirth; Lichen, for that it cureth the disease of that name; Mallow, because it mollifieth; Callithricum, because it maketh the hair of a bright colour; Alyssum, Ephemerum, Bechium, Nasturtium, Aneban (Henbane), and so ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... the mountain side, pass through several solemn gateways, and up and up endless stairs, rising far above the town and the noises of humanity into a sacred region filled with innumerable tombs. On all the pavements, in all the walls, lichen and stonecrop; and over all the gray tint of extreme age spreads everywhere ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... Out of it would come one Sally, sister of its swarthy tenant, swarthy herself, shady-lipped, sad-voiced, and, bending over her flower-bed, would gather a "posy," as she called it, for the little boy. Sally lies in the churchyard with a slab of blue slate at her head, lichen- crusted, and leaning a little within the last few years. Cottage, garden-beds, posies, grenadier-like rows of seedling onions, —stateliest of vegetables,—all are gone, but the breath of a marigold brings them all back ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... their way close up to the huge, lichen-crusted walls, and in the shadow of the gigantic pile slowly explored round to the vast portals ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... emaciated with leaflessness, had each a shadow that twisted on the earth like ground-ivy or climbed the wall like a creeper. Through an orchard piebald with moonbeams and shadow, and a gate, glaring as with new white paint, set in a lichen-grey hedge, they passed out on the grizzled hillside. He did not take her down the path by which she and Marion had gone on to the marshes the previous afternoon, but plunged forward into the short grey fur of the moonlit field, where there was no path, and led ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... of a clear head and cooled blood. The camp had been pitched close under the red wall. A lichen-covered cliff, wet with dripping water, overhung a round pool. A ditch led the water down the ridge to a pond. Cattle stood up to their knees drinking; others lay on the yellow clay, which was packed as hard as stone; still ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey
... eternity! 40 This is the glimmering verge of Heaven, and these The columns of the heavenly palaces! And, in the sweeping of the wind, your ear The passage of the Angels' wings will hear, And on the lichen-crusted leads deg. above deg.45 The rustle of the eternal rain ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... partly by old red brick walls against which fruit trees were trained and partly by a laurel hedge with a wood behind it. It was my habit to sit and write there under an aged writhen tree, gray with lichen and festooned with roses. The soft silence of it— the remote aloofness—were the most perfect ever dreamed of. But let me not be led astray by the garden. I must be firm and confine myself to the Robin. The garden ...
— My Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... no less upon the ditcher in the meadow than the lady in the bower. When I walk in the woods, I am reminded that a wise purveyor has been there before me; my most delicate experience is typified there. I am struck with the pleasing friendships and unanimities of nature, as when the lichen on the trees takes the form of their leaves. In the most stupendous scenes you will see delicate and fragile features, as slight wreaths of vapor, dewlines, feathery sprays, which suggest a high refinement, a noble blood ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... that of a frog. What is true of the newt is true of every animal and of every plant; the acorn tends to build itself up again into a woodland giant such as that from whose twig it fell; the spore of the humblest lichen reproduces the green or brown incrustation which gave it birth; and at the other end of the scale of life, the child that resembled neither the paternal nor the maternal side of the house would be regarded as ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... lichen, as much as he could, and had a fine lot, all of the best. It was good fodder, and he treated it as he would hay, covering it over with bark in the woods. There was only a little still left out, and now, when Inger spoke of it, he answered despairingly, as if it were ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... of her thoughts and Tanqueray's. She talked incessantly. She looked around her and made him see how patches of furze seen under a haze showed flattened, with dark bitten edges, clinging close like lichen on a granite wall; and how, down the hillsides, in the beds of perished streams, the ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... have more love for nature than hard good sense, I am told. So I loathe paint just as I hate surface manners. I want the true grain all the way through, be it in boards or people. I love the weather stain on an old house. I love the mossy touches, the lichen grays and the russet browns that age imparts to the shingles, and I almost feel like murdering the paint fiend when he comes around every spring, and transforms some dear old landmark into a gorgeous "Mrs. Skewton," with hideous coats and splashy trimmings. But alas for sentiment ...
— A String of Amber Beads • Martha Everts Holden
... bluff, are two or three huge, dark caves into which the swell of the Caribbean Sea rolls with a dull, reverberating roar. The height of the castle above the water appears to be one hundred and fifty or two hundred feet. There are very few embrasures, or port-holes, in the gray, lichen-stained walls of the old fortification, and, so far as I could see, it had no armament whatever except two or three guns mounted en barbette on the parapet of ...
— Campaigning in Cuba • George Kennan
... nearly a hundred years since the young attorney went to the island and planted the first tree; to-day the churchyard where he lies is a bower of cool green, with the trees that he planted dropping their moisture on the lichen-covered stone ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok
... the Saskatchewan, and the next devouring hung white-fish and scarce venison, in the sterile regions of Mackenzie River, or varying the meal with a little of that delectable substance often spoken of by Franklin, Back, and Richardson as their only dish—namely, tripe-de-roche, a lichen or moss which grows on the most barren rocks, and is only used as food in the absence of ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... quantity of land. As Darby thought, it could have housed a regiment, and must have cost something to keep up. As wind and weather and time had mellowed its incongruous parts into one neutral tint, it looked odd and attractive. Moss and lichen, ivy and Virginia creeper—this last flaring in crimson glory—clothed the massive stone walls with a gracious mantle of natural beauty. Narrow stone steps, rather chipped, led down from the blue door to the broad, yellow path, which came round the rear of the house and swept down hill ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... plants and by trees that for fifty years have heard no sound of axe. One might think it a virgin forest, made primeval again through some phenomenon granted exclusively to forests. The trunks of the trees are swathed with lichen which hangs from one to another. Mistletoe, with its viscid leaves, droops from every fork of the branches where moisture settles. I have found gigantic ivies, wild arabesques which flourish only at fifty leagues from Paris, here where land ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... compliment of a description, and it is now high time that the omission were supplied, for the house is itself an actor in the story, and one whose part is nearly at an end. Two stories in height, walls of a warm yellow, tiles of an ancient ruddy brown diversified with moss and lichen, it stood with one wall to the street in the angle of the Doctor's property. It was roomy, draughty, and inconvenient. The large rafters were here and there engraven with rude marks and patterns; the handrail of the stair was carved in countrified ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the end of his journey by this time. The Grange stood in front of him—a great rambling building, with many gables, gray lichen-grown walls, and quaint old diamond-paned casements in the upper stories. Below, the windows were larger, and had an Elizabethan look, with patches of stained glass here and there. The house stood back from the road, with a spacious ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... a vast roof of foliage, whose green in the midst of summer is made brown by sacks and sacks of beech nuts. These are the trees to camp by, and that are chosen by painters. The bark of the beech is itself a panel to study, spotted with velvet moss brown-green, made grey with close-grown lichen, stained with its own hues of growth, and toned by time. To these add bright sunlight and leaf shadow, the sudden lowering of tint as a cloud passes, the different aspects of the day and the evening, ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... dark brown, almost black. It contained bits of meat, and mushrooms, and slices of hard-boiled egg, and yellow Martian rock lichen. It produced, on the light tunic, a ...
— Last Enemy • Henry Beam Piper
... sie klar und tief mit feuchten Augen an. Wohl und wehe zugleich, Frulein Milla!—denn keine andere sind Sie, wiewohl ich Sie nie gesehen, die treueste Freundin meiner unvergelichen Elsa.—Er reichte ihr die Hand ...
— Eingeschneit - Eine Studentengeschichte • Emil Frommel
... will deliver us from the rest." And Chesnel hung his head sadly, and did not dare to answer, "It cannot be God's will to sweep away France." Yet both of them were grand figures; the one, standing out against the torrent of facts like an ancient block of lichen-covered granite, still upright in the depths of an Alpine gorge; the other, watching the course of the flood to turn it to account. Then the good gray-headed notary would groan over the irreparable havoc which the superstitions ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac |
