"Peat" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... knocked on the head. The woods are always on the sheltered slopes of the hills, the moors on the summits are bare of trees; yet it would seem that trees once grew there, trunks of oak being occasionally dug up from the peat. Both the peaty turf and the heather are used for fuel; the heather is pulled up, the turf cut with a particular kind of spade, heart-shaped and pointed, not unlike the traditional spade used by the gravedigger in "Hamlet," but with ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... now the red sand formed a distinct layer, 2 inches beneath the surface, or 11/2 inch beneath the turf; so that on an average .21 inches of mould had been annually brought to the surface. Immediately beneath the layer of red sand the original sub-stratum of black, sandy peat extended. ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... may contribute to answering B.'s Query, to know that smoke-pennies are also yearly levied from most of the inhabitants of the New Forest, and understood by them to be an indication for their right of cutting peat in ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 41, Saturday, August 10, 1850 • Various
... and the Irish girl with her baby escaped only by hiding in a cellar under a ruined house. When the boy was seven years old his mother died, and since then he had gone from one village to another as the fancy took him. For a week or more he might be herding goats or sheep, fishing, or cutting peat for fires; he stayed nowhere longer than he chose and owned nothing in the world except what he wore. Under the tunic there hung a small leather bag with the few relics his mother had left him. He could make a fish-hook of a bit of bone, a boat of reeds, or a snare of almost ...
— Masters of the Guild • L. Lamprey
... are herbaceous and mostly hardy, of a creeping nature, fast growers, and suitable for dry banks or rough stony places. They flourish best in sandy loam and peat, and may be increased by cuttings placed under glass. The flowers, which are green, are produced in May. The height of the various kinds varies from ...
— Gardening for the Million • Alfred Pink
... low valley and through a belt of fan-palms and jungle bordering an ever-flowering stream the banks of which are knee-deep in fat, rich loam. Huge tea-trees stand in the water, where the fibrous roots are matted like peat. ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... ancient inhabitants, and understand something of their manners of life and customs. Their rude abodes had probably cone-shaped roofs made of rafters lashed together at the centre, protected by an outside coat of peat, sods of turf, or rushes. The spindle-whorl is evidence that they could spin thread; the mealing stones show that they knew how to cultivate corn; and the bones of the animals found in their dwellings testify to the fact that they were not in ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... apart from the town, and holds two very different memorials. One is the Burne-Jones window to the memory of Tennyson, who lived at Aldworth on Black Down over the border; the other is a strange, rough heap of peat and heather, piled inside the gate of the churchyard. Under it lies John Tyndall. He was one of the discoverers of Hindhead as a place to live in instead of merely a hill to climb; the tragedy of his death is a recent memory. It was his wish that his grave should ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... at last, and having laid my flask, tobacco-pouch, and twelve loose cartridges where I could reach them most handily on projecting shelves of peat inside the butt—I love neatness and method: Kitty says that when (if ever) I get to heaven I will decline to enter until I have wiped my boots,—settled down to enjoy a superb view and take note of the not altogether uninteresting manner in which the other members of ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay
... chickens and ducks for sale. But the Twins had plenty of those at home. There were stalls and stalls of vegetables just like Father's, and there were booths where meat and fish and wood and peat were sold. But the Twins couldn't find anything they wanted that ...
— The Dutch Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... Gordian knot, which Alexander great Did whilom, cut with his all-conquering sword, Was nothing like thy busk-point, pretty peat,[221] Nor could ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... is a bridle-path all along a wonderful brown trout stream that goes racing down our hill. There's a moor on one side, and a wood on the other, and a peat ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... as chemist to the Conn. State Ag. Society, made accurate analyses of 33 samples of peat and muck sent him by gentlemen from different parts of the State. The amount of potential ammonia in the chemically dry peat was found to vary from 0.58 in the poorest, to 4.06 per cent in the richest samples. In other words, one deposit of muck ...
— Talks on Manures • Joseph Harris
... "hellish." Fas est ab hoste doceri—disrespect is made more pungent by quotation; and there is no doubt but he felt relieved, and went upstairs into his tutor's chamber with a quiet mind. M'Brair sat by the cheek of the peat-fire and shivered, for he had a quartan ague and this was his day. The great nightcap and plaid, the dark unshaven cheeks of the man, and the white, thin hands that held the plaid about his chittering body, made a sorrowful ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... not say you expressed them," went on the vigorous Elizabeth; "you look them—they ooze out of your words like water from a peat bog. Everybody knows you are a radical and a freethinker and everything else that is bad and mad, and contrary to that state of life in which it has pleased God to call you. The end of it will be that you will lose the mistresship ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... dark the air turned very chill, and snow began to fall thick and fast. Malcolm laid a few sticks on the smouldering peat-fire, but they were damp and did not catch. All at once the laird gave a shriek, and crying out, "Mither! mither!" fell into a fit so violent that the heavy bed shook with his convulsions. Malcolm held his wrists and called aloud. No one came, and, bethinking ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... blew the flame that consumed me, with his own willing breath. So that when at last—wandering one day over the wild moors—I said, knowing his hatred of law and lawyers: "Alas, uncle, that nothing should be left for me but the Bar!" Captain Roland struck his cane into the peat and exclaimed, "Zounds, sir! the Bar and lying, with truth and a world fresh from God ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the use of the whole family,—even to burn in the stables and stalls, as the supply of bears' fat was precarious, and the pine-tree was too precious, so far north, to be split up into torches, while it even fell so short occasionally as to compel the family to burn peat, which they did not like nearly so well as pine-logs. It was Madame Erlingsen's business to calculate how much of all these foreign articles would be required for the use of her household for a whole year; and, trusting to her calculations, ...
— Feats on the Fiord - The third book in "The Playfellow" • Harriet Martineau
... a studio, and brought up among the cloud-swept mountains of Westmorland, amid the purple heather and the sunset in the peat-moss puddles, barrack-life soon became like penal servitude. I was like a caged wild animal. I knew now why the tigers and leopards pace up and down, up and down, behind ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave
... power, and historical majesty. And this element among the wilds of our own country I found wholly wanting. The Highland cottage is literally a heap of gray stones, choked up, rather than roofed over, with black peat and withered heather; the only approach to an effort at decoration consists in the placing of the clods of protective peat obliquely on its roof, so as to give a diagonal arrangement of lines, looking somewhat as if the surface had been scored over ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... Ammoniacal Products; Human Urine as a Source of Ammonia — Extraction of Ammoniacal Products from Sewage — Extraction of Ammonia from Gas Liquor — Manufacture of Ammoniacal Compounds from Bones, Nitrogenous Waste, Beetroot Wash and Peat — Manufacture of Caustic Ammonia, and Ammonium Chloride, Phosphate and Carbonate — Recovery of Ammonia from the ...
— The Dyeing of Woollen Fabrics • Franklin Beech
... deeply that it was pure dog-in-the-mangerism of the cottagers, and this he could not stand. Not one beast in two years had fattened on its barrenness. Three old donkeys alone eked out the remnants of their days. A bundle of firewood or old bracken, a few peat sods from one especial corner, were all the selfish peasants gathered. But the cottagers were no great matter—he could soon have settled them; it was that fellow Peacock whom he could not settle, just because he happened to abut on the Common, and his fathers had been nasty before him. Mr. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... and for a window had only a small hole, which was stopped with a piece of turf, that was taken out occasionally to let in light. In the middle of the room or space which we entered, was a fire of peat, the smoke going out at a hole in the roof. She had a pot upon it, with goat's flesh, boiling. There was at one end under the same roof, but divided by a kind of partition made of wattles, a pen or fold in which we saw a good ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... all that—love flowers nevertheless. For such these plants are more than a relief. Observe my Oncidium. It stands in a pot, but this is only for convenience—a receptacle filled with moss. The long stem feathered with great blossoms springs from a bare slab of wood. No mould nor peat surrounds it; there is absolutely nothing save the roots that twine round their support, and the wire that sustains it in the air. It asks no attention beyond its daily bath. From the day I tied it on that block last year—reft from home and all its pleasures, bought with paltry ...
— About Orchids - A Chat • Frederick Boyle
... outset you will soon find yourself involved in chemical and meteorological questions: as, for instance, when you ask—How is it that I find one flora on the sea-shore, another on the sandstone, another on the chalk, and another on the peat-making gravelly strata? The usual answer would be, I presume—if we could work it out by twenty years' experiment, such as Mr. Lawes, of Rothampsted, has been making on the growth of grasses and ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... wrap themselves in cloaks and shake their heads disconsolately, saying, "Winter is at hand." Then the axe of the woodcutter echoes sharp and diligently in the forest; then the coal-merchants rejoice because each shriek of Nature in her agony adds something to the price of coal per ton; then the peat-smoke spreads its aromatic fragrance through the atmosphere. A few days more, and at eventide the children look out of the window and dimly perceive the flaunting of a snowy mantle in the air. It is stern Winter's vesture. They crowd around the hearth ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... burning in the caravan, probably from the economy of want. The hut was lighted only by a red tinge, arising from the opening at the top of the stove, in which sparkled a peat fire. On the stove were smoking a porringer and a saucepan, containing to all appearance something to eat. The savoury odour was perceptible. The hut was furnished with a chest, a stool, and an unlighted ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... and dressing-table, joined to the heat from the stove, produced a heavy atmosphere that made her gasp. Somebody must already have been in her room, for the stove had been lit again, and she could see the peat blazing inside its open door. But outside, what a divine coldness and purity! She leaned out, drinking it in in long breaths, the warm March sun shining on her head. The garden, a mere uncared-for piece of rough ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... Natural resources: forests, peat deposits, small quantities of oil and natural gas, granite, dolomitic limestone, marl, chalk, ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... the sign "Water en vuur te koop."[1] It was not necessary for the children to go inside. They could see the whole apartment through the wide-open door-way. An old woman stood by a stove, or great oven, with a pair of tongs, taking up pieces of burning peat and dropping them into the buckets of the children, and then filling their tea-kettles with boiling water from great copper tanks on the stove. For this each child paid her a Dutch cent, which is less than half ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... tumbled—a stone dislodged by her foot dropped to it almost plumb—the stream hurtled down the glen, following the curve of its sides until they overlapped; naked cliffs above, touched with sunlight, their feet set in peat, up which the forest trees clambered as if in a race for the top—pines leading, with heather and scrubby junipers, oaks and hemlocks some way behind; alders, mostly by the waterside, with maples in swampy patches, and here and there ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... only chimney was little more than a hole in the middle of the thatch. This rendered the absence of glass in the windows not so objectionable; for, left without ordered path to its outlet, the smoke preferred a circuitous route, and lingered by the way, filling the air. Peat-smoke, however, is both wholesome and pleasant, nor was there mingled with it any disagreeable smell of cooking. Outside were no lamps; the road was unlighted save by the few rays that here and there crept ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... rather hazily knocking at a door and presently finding myself in a low kitchen with a peat fire burning on an open hearth and what seemed to be dozens of people sitting round it. I probably counted each of them ...
— The Man From the Clouds • J. Storer Clouston
... our journey for three hours longer, through thin forests, over extensive beds of primitive rock, among fields of large boulders thickly strewn about, passing by numerous herds of buffalo, giraffe, and zebra, over a quaking quagmire which resembled peat, we arrived at the small stream of Sunuzzi, to a camping place only a mile removed from a large settlement of Wahha. But we were buried in the depths of a great forest—no road was in the vicinity, no noise was made, deep silence was preserved; nor ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... she's got. A kind and good woman she is—miles too good for you. She gave us nought but the best, while you're just longing to burn us. Ay, ay, 'twould be plenty warm enough then! For here 'tis cold, and there's no-one to bring a load of peat to ...
— Ditte: Girl Alive! • Martin Andersen Nexo
... it was supposed, might even be drained by making the railway across its quivering surface, but hopes of this sort were not to be realised, for it remains to-day a wild, but picturesque stretch of heather and silver birches, where the peat-digger plies his trade with, perhaps, as much profit as the farmer would in tilling it. But as to its power to bear the weight of passing trains the engineers had little doubt. The canal already crossed it, and though in making soundings the surveyors ...
— The Story of the Cambrian - A Biography of a Railway • C. P. Gasquoine
... that gun! Why the blazes couldn't you have come home and brought me a bit of peat from the pit? A fine hunter you are! I might as well have married the devil.—And his wife turned from him ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... on the fresh heather, as I have done many a night on less occasion," said Roland Graeme, "than in the smoky garret of your father, that smells of peat smoke and ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... by the side of muddy, stagnant self-complacence, and you discern no essential difference. "Water's water," you say, with your broad, stupid generalization, and go oozing along contentedly through peat-bogs and meadow-ditches, mounting, perhaps, in moments of inspiration, to the moderate sublimity of a cranberry-meadow, but subsiding with entire satisfaction into a muck-puddle: and all the while the little brook that you ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... his wife had seen: and one winter evening beside the peat-fire, as Annette was busy with her distaff, and he sat smoking and watching the glowing embers, he told her her mother's story. She and Paul's father, the elder Paul Gignol, had been betrothed in their youth; but his fishing-smack had struck on the rocks one foggy night, and gone ...
— A Loose End and Other Stories • S. Elizabeth Hall
... and other localities in Strathmore a number of small lakes, lying in hollows of the boulder clay. These were being drained and their deposits quarried for the purpose of 'marling' the land; the excavations thus made showed that, under peat containing a boat hollowed out of the trunk of a tree, there were calcareous deposits, sometimes 16 to 20 feet in thickness, which passed into a rock, solid and crystalline in character as the materials of the older geological formations and containing the ...
— The Coming of Evolution - The Story of a Great Revolution in Science • John W. (John Wesley) Judd
... a sudden puff of heat That sets my ears aglow, And smell the reek of burning peat Across ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... my own. I'm American and American born. I'd rather be bossed by a silk tile and kid gloves than by a Tipperary hat and a shillalah, with a damned three-cornered shamrock riding the necks of both. It's a pretty pass we've come to if we've got to go to Irish peat-bogs and Russian snow-banks to find them as will tell us our rights and how to get them, and then import dagoes with rings in their ears and Hungarians with spikes in their shoes to back us up. Let me talk a bit! I get my seventy-five dollars a month for knowing ...
— Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason
... time. As coal had not then been introduced into Salem, everybody burned wood, so that wood-sawing was an occupation of considerable importance. During the war of 1813 wood became rather scarce, and some people used dried turf, or peat, as it was called, ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 4: Quaint and Curious Advertisements • Henry M. Brooks
... atmosphere upon this turfy substance exposed to the air and moisture. This author has very well described the constant augmentation of this vegetable substance in the morasses of that country, as it also happens in those of our own; but there is a wide difference in those two cases of peat bog and healthy turf; the vegetable substance in the morass is under water, and therefore has its inflammable quality or combustible substance protected from the consuming operation of the vital or atmospheric air; the turfy soil, on the contrary, is exposed to this source ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 2 (of 4) • James Hutton
... into the next room, the housekeeper's room—very comfortable, yak (oak) all round—there was a fine fire blazin' away, wi' coal, and peat, and wood, all in a low together, and tea on the table, and hot cake, and smokin' meat; and there was Mrs. Wyvern, fat, jolly, and talkin' away, more in an hour than my aunt would in ...
— Madam Crowl's Ghost and The Dead Sexton • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... uranium, rare earth oxides, peat, cobalt, copper, platinum, vanadium, arable land, hydropower, niobium, tantalum, gold, ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... in the army have already accomplished their military task but they cannot be demobilized as yet. Now that they have been released from their military duties, they must fight against economic ruin and against hunger; they must work to obtain fuel, peat and other heat-producing products; they must take part in building, in clearing the lines of snow, in repairing roads, building ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... the cellars of the earth, it seems evident that we need not trouble our minds or be anxious as to the duration of our coal supply. Besides, the conversion of vegetable matter into coal seems to be going on even now. In the United States there are peat-bogs of considerable extent, in which a substance exactly resembling cannel coal has been found; and in some of the Irish peat-beds, as also in the North of Scotland, a similar substance has been discovered, of a very inflammable ...
— Lectures on Popular and Scientific Subjects • John Sutherland Sinclair, Earl of Caithness
... walls of the line into wide semicircles, and it seemed likely to be touch-and-go with the engine, truck, and your humble commissioner. I took a last look at the landscape, and made a final note, but, while inly wondering whether I should be ultimately consumed in the form of peat or dug up and exhibited to future ages as a bog-preserved brutal Saxon, with a concluding squash we passed the rotten spot, and it was permissible to breathe again. "We prefer it to sink at once," said Mr. Bennett. "Then we know the 'hard' is not far off, and we ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... Cross-bow ... bowman Mr. Archer Wavy hair dancing wave ... Morris dance Mr. Morrison Black eyes white ... snow ... pure as snow Mr. Virtue Retreating chin retiring ... home-bird Mr. Holmes High instep high boots ... mud ... peat Mr. Peat Crooked legs broken legs ... crushed Mr. Crushton Apprehension suspension ... gallows Mr. Galloway Sombre sad ... mourning ... hat-band Mr. Hatton Music stave ... bar Mr. Barcroft Violinist violin ... high note ... whistle Mr. ...
— Assimilative Memory - or, How to Attend and Never Forget • Marcus Dwight Larrowe (AKA Prof. A. Loisette)
... belongs not to me, but to the shepherd of the Redswirehead, and I heard it from him in his dwelling, as I stayed the night, belated on the darkening moors. He told me it after supper in a flood of misty Doric, and his voice grew rough at times, and he poked viciously at the dying peat. ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... a door. The food consisted of coarse vegetable products, such as peas, and even the bark of trees. In some places they were unacquainted with bread. Cabins of reeds plastered with mud, houses of wattled stakes, chimneyless peat fires, from which there was scarcely an escape for the smoke, dens of physical and moral pollution swarming with vermin, wisps of straw twisted round the limbs to keep off the cold, the ague-stricken peasant with no help except shrine-cure," i.e., cure by the touching bone of saint, or image ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... materials for supplying us with the means of domestic heat and comfort, has exercised the ingenuity of man. Those now known have been divided into five classes; the first comprehending the fluid inflammable bodies; the second, peat or turf; the third, charcoal of wood; the fourth, pit-coal charred; and the fifth, wood or pit-coal in a crude state, with the capacity of yielding a copious and bright flame. The first may be said seldom to be employed for the purposes of cookery; but peat, especially ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... was of wood and peat, though coal was also used. For artificial lighting oil-lamps (wicks in oil) and candles were used. A light was obtained from flint and tinder, the latter being ignited by a spark got from striking the flint with a ...
— Life in a Medival City - Illustrated by York in the XVth Century • Edwin Benson
... its sombre pall. Like gloomy sentinels, furry cattails nod in the bog where the blue gentian peeps timidly into murky pools; the only human habitation in sight some heath boer's ling-thatched hut, flanked by rows of peat stacks in vain endeavor to stay the sweep of the pitiless west wind. On the barrows where the vikings sleep their long sleep, the plover pipes its melancholy lay; between steep banks a furtive brook steals swiftly by as if anxious to escape from the universal ...
— Hero Tales of the Far North • Jacob A. Riis
... make one do things!" thought Al-ice. "I might just as well be at school at once." She stood up and tried to re-peat it, but her head was so full of the Lob-ster Dance, that she didn't know what she was say-ing, and the words ...
— Alice in Wonderland - Retold in Words of One Syllable • J.C. Gorham
... remains of men, with rude implements of rough or chipped flint, of polished stone, of bone, of bronze, are found in Europe in caves, in drifts, in peat-beds. They indicate a savage life, spent in hunting and fishing. Recent researches give reason to believe that, under low and base grades, the existence of man can be traced back into the tertiary times. He was contemporary ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... hour repeated in my brain. And as I grew aware of this, the dullness fell off me, and all became very distinct. And the muscles about my wound had stiffen'd—which was vilely painful: and the country, I saw, was a brown, barren moor, dotted with peat- ...
— The Splendid Spur • Arthur T. Quiller Couch
... their own roots, the Epiphyllums, as well as the pendent-growing kinds of Rhipsalis, and several species of Cereus, may be placed in baskets and suspended from the roof. The baskets should be lined with thin slices of fibrous peat, and the whole of the middle filled with the compost recommended for these plants under "Soil". When well managed, some very pretty objects are formed by the Epiphyllums grown as basket plants. The climbing Cactuses are usually planted in ...
— Cactus Culture For Amateurs • W. Watson
... "happinesses." N'en parlons plus. By the way, have you ever clearly remarked withal what a despicable function "view-hunting" is. Analogous to "philanthropy," "pleasures of virtue," &c., &c. I for my part, in these singular circumstances, often find an honestly ugly country the preferable one. Black eternal peat-bog, or these waste-howling sands with mews and seagulls: you meet at least no Cockney to exclaim, ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... wood carbonized to a certain degree, but retaining distinctly its woody texture. Dr. MacCulloch, On Rocks, p. 636., observes: "In its chemical properties, lignite holds a station intermediate between peat and coal; while among the varieties a gradation in this respect may be traced; the brown and more organised kinds approaching very near to peat, while the more compact kinds, such as jet, approximate ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 236, May 6, 1854 • Various
... 'needs no bush.' Here is a pretty love tale, and the landscape and rural descriptions carry the exile back into the Kingdom of Galloway. Here, indeed, is the scent of bog-myrtle and peat. After inquiries among the fair, I learn that of all romances, they best love, not 'sociology,' not 'theology,' still less, open manslaughter, for a motive, but, just love's young dream, chapter after chapter. From Mr. Crockett they ...
— Wild Nature Won By Kindness • Elizabeth Brightwen
... ran like lunatics, uttering cries of despair, while men abandoned their houses, carrying off whatever was most valuable, running against and knocking each other over in the darkness. On all sides was heard, "Mauve qui peat; we are going to be blown up, we are all lost;" and the maledictions, lamentations, blasphemies, were sufficient to make your ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... followed even in comparatively bad weather. Rain or shine, snow or blow, save only in real storms, every one spent a good many of the twenty-four hours under the broad skies. There was always some work to be done, cutting wood, digging peat—the main reliance for fuel—mending stone walls, and attending to the tree-nurseries. Then for fun, there was coasting, skating, sleigh-riding and taking long tramps over the place or to some distant point of interest. Exposure to the elements seemed ...
— My Friends at Brook Farm • John Van Der Zee Sears
... a peat or turf-cutter, who had newly joined the group, carried across his shoulder the singular heart-shaped spade of large dimensions used in that species of labour; and its well-whetted edge gleamed like a silver bow in the beams of ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... "Republic Afloat" formed a cordon across the mouth of the Thames, and intercepted all traffic. But he did not burn a long peat stack, to use a Scotticism; for the nation was enraged at him, and one by one his ships went back to their allegiance. He was seized, and after a three days' trial was condemned and executed, cool and intrepid ...
— As We Sweep Through The Deep • Gordon Stables
... reality—was the daughter, a skeleton herself, crouched and crying over the lifeless body of her mother, which was on the floor, cramped up as she had died, with her rags and her cloak about her, by the side of a few embers of peat." They came to the cabin of a poor old woman, the door of which was stopped up with dung. She roused up, evidently astonished. They had taken her by surprise. She burst into tears, and said she had not been able to sleep since the corpse of ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... A red peat fire was burning on the hearth, and a man sat by it. A woman was engaged at needlework by the light ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... on a Saturday evening soon after Bill Swinton had become convalescent. The parlor of the "Brown Cow" was filled with its usual gathering; a peat fire glowed upon the hearth, and two tallow candles burned somewhat faintly in the dense smoke. Mugs of beer stood on the tables, but they were seldom applied to the lips of the smokers, for they had to do service without being refilled through the long evening. The ...
— Through the Fray - A Tale of the Luddite Riots • G. A. Henty
... is not that of Howard, his cure for national distress is to bury our paupers in peat bogs, driving wooden boards on the top of them. His entire works may be described as reiterating the doctrine that "whatever is is wrong." He has thrown off every form of religious belief and settled down into the conviction that the Christian profession of Englishmen is a sham.... ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... "Yes" nor "No." Moved by the soft and insinuating talkativeness of Herzog, she felt herself treading on dangerous ground. It seemed to her that her foot was sinking, as in those dangerous peat-mosses of which the surface is covered with green grass, tempting one to run on it. Cayrol was under the charm. He drank in the German's words. This clever man, who had never till then been duped, had found his master ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... a reverie as he sat by the peat fire, whilst Roger and the ranger continued talking together eagerly of many matters, and he heard little of what passed until roused by the name of Basildene spoken more than once, and he commanded his drowsy and wearied faculties to listen to what ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... clearly. As far as I could judge, the figure was that of a tall, thin man. He stood with his legs a little separated, his arms folded, his head bowed, as if he were brooding over that enormous wilderness of peat and granite which lay before him. He might have been the very spirit of that terrible place. It was not the convict. This man was far from the place where the latter had disappeared. Besides, he was a much taller man. With a cry of surprise I ...
— Hound of the Baskervilles • Authur Conan Doyle
... luggage-carrier, and, after some back-firing, the three started forth. It was a glorious run over moorland country, with glimpses of the sea on the one hand, and craggy tors on the other, and round them billowy masses of heather, broken here and there by runnels of peat-stained water. If Egbert exceeded the speed-limit, he certainly had the excuse of a clear road before him; there were no hedges to hide advancing cars, neither was there any possibility of whisking round a corner to find a hay-cart blocking the way. In the course of an hour they had covered ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... wherever the tundra moss is destroyed to give them footing. Most distinctive is the ubiquitous carpeting of mosses, varying in colours from the pure white and cream of the reindeer moss to the deep green and brown of the peat moss, all conspicuously spangled in the briefsummer with bright flowers of the higher orders, heavy blossoms on stunted stalks. The thick peat moss or tundra of the undrained lowlands covers probably at least a quarter of Alaska; the reindeer moss grows both on the lowlands and the hills.7 Sedges ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... I'm so sorry," she said penitently. "I only knew by the smell of the peat stacks." I could not restrain a groan of disappointment, and Myra stroked my face, and murmured ...
— The Mystery of the Green Ray • William Le Queux
... two, a rude table, a cross-legged chair, a few stools, and some deer and seal skins spread on the floor completed the furniture of this ladies' bower. There was, unusual luxury, a chimney with a hearth and peat fire, and a cauldron on it, with a silver and a copper basin beside it for washing purposes, never discarded by poor Queen Joanna and her old English nurse Ankaret, who had remained beside her through all the troubles of the stormy and barbarous ...
— Two Penniless Princesses • Charlotte M. Yonge
... mineral wealth of Baden is not great; but iron, coal, zinc and lead of excellent quality are produced, and silver, copper, gold, cobalt, vitriol and sulphur are obtained in small quantities. Peat is found in abundance, as well as gypsum, china-clay, potters' earth and salt. The mineral springs of Baden are very numerous and have acquired great celebrity, those of Baden-Baden, Badenweiler, Antogast, Griesbach, Freiersbach and ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... meeting out of the reach of persecuting troopers. We know that battle may follow prayer; and as we believe that in the worst issue of battle heaven must be our reward, we are ready and willing to redden the peat-moss with our blood. That music stirs my soul; it wakens all my life; it makes my heart beat—not with its temperate daily pulse, but with a new, thrilling vigour. I almost long for danger—for a faith, a land, or at ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... night and morning were unusually stormy. The advance was placed under the command of Colonel Dennie of the 13th Light Infantry, and the main column under Brigadier Sale. The explosion party was directed by Captain Thomson, who had under him Lieutenants Durand and Macleod of the Bengal, and Captain Peat of the Bombay corps. Under cover of the darkness, the noise the men might make being overpowered by the roaring of the wind, the storming column advanced along the Cabul road, while the engineers carried up their powder-bags to the gate. Meantime ...
— Our Soldiers - Gallant Deeds of the British Army during Victoria's Reign • W.H.G. Kingston
... cover for fur and feathers; rivers and streams meant a vehicle for the display of a fly to trout, and only attracted him or the reverse, according to the fish they harboured. When the moorland waters spouted and churned, cherry red from their springs in the peat, he deemed them a noble spectacle; when, as at present, Teign herself had shrunk to a mere silver thread, and the fingerling trout splashed and wriggled half out of water in the shallows, he freely criticised its scanty volume ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... mounds and earthworks. Not long ago a man ploughing in the fen struck an old red vase up with the share, and searching the place found a number of the same urns within the space of a few yards, buried in the peat, as fresh as the day they were made. There was nothing else to be found, and the place was under water till fifty years ago; so that it must have been a boatload of pottery being taken in to market that was swamped there, how many centuries ago! But there have been stranger things than ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... had just been packed off to bed by marital authority; Bassett and Wheeler sat smoking pipes and sipping whisky-and-water. Bassett professed to like the smell of peat smoke in whisky; what he really liked ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... the gases, and converted vegetable matter into coal. All the coal dug from the earth represents vegetable life of a former period. Millions of years were required for the transformation; but the same change is in progress now, where peat beds are forming ...
— An Introduction to Chemical Science • R.P. Williams
... Kirkcudbright, "Janet Jo" used to be a dramatic entertainment amongst young rustics. Suppose a party have met on a winter evening round a good peat fire, writes Chambers, and is resolved to have "Janet Jo" performed. Two undertake to personate a goodman and a goodwife; the rest a family of marriageable daughters. One of the lads—the best singer of the party—retires, ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... of the strongest Castles, rather a big Country Mansion than a Castle, which it will be necessary first to take. They go accordingly to take it (May 28th, having well laid their heads together the day before); march through intricate wet forest country, peat above all abundant; see the Castle of Hilgartsberg towering aloft, picturesque object in the Donau Valley, left bank;—are met by cannon-shot, case-shot, shot of every kind; likewise by Croats apparently innumerable, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... rivers of ink; and when the bottom can be seen, which is usually a sandy one, the sand has the appearance of gold. Even when lifted in a vessel, the water retains its inky tinge, and resembles that which may be found in the pools of peat-bogs. It is a general supposition in South America that the black-water rivers get their colour from the extract of sarsaparilla roots growing on their banks. It is possible the sarsaparilla roots may have something to do with it, in common ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... between 12.5 and 2.5 P.M., and about 3 P.M. commenced firing at the defences over the gate: under cover of this fire the bags of powder, to the amount of 800 lbs. were placed against the gate by Captain Peat, the hose being fired by Lieut. Durand. In the mean time the road to the gate was occupied by the storming party, the advance of which was composed of the flank companies of all the European Regiments. The head of the ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... convinced that Mr. Plausaby did know how to manage sharks. He went out and examined the stakes, and found that block 26 did not contain the oak, but was much farther down in the slough, and that the corner lots that were to have been Katy's wedding portion stretched quite into the peat bog, and further that if the Baptist University should stand on block 27, it would have ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... mud of the sea. But there are certain parts of the world in which the coral polypes which live and grow are of a kind which remain, adhere together, and form great masses. They differ from the ordinary polypes just in the same way as those plants which form a peat-bog or meadow-turf differ from ordinary plants. They have a habit of growing together in masses in the same place; they are what we call "gregarious" things; and the consequence of this is, that as they die and leave their ...
— Coral and Coral Reefs • Thomas H. Huxley
... extending my slipper toe to the glowing peat, which by extraordinary effort had been brought up from the hotel kitchen, as a bit of local colour, "it is ridiculous that we three women should be in Ireland together; it's the sort of thing that ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... but Macdonald, who observed her searching gaze, pointed his glass and invited her to look through it. At first she saw nothing but a dim confusion of grey rocks and dull grass; but at length she made out a grey cottage, with a roof of turf, and a peat stack ...
— The Billow and the Rock • Harriet Martineau
... London. The city might now look for a plentiful supply of coal, a commodity which had become so scarce that in July the civic authorities had received permission from parliament to dig for turf and peat, by way of a substitute for coal, wherever they thought fit.(664) Seeing that it was by the aid of the city that a fleet had been maintained off the north coast, that Berwick had been secured for parliament, and that a free passage had thus been kept open ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume II • Reginald R. Sharpe
... above said), or about 150,000 pounds. And so it has stood for ten years past; Mecklenburg the most anarchic of countries, owing to the kind of Ritters and kind of Duke it has. Poor souls, it is evident they have all lost their beaten road, and got among the IGNES FATUI and peat-pools: none knows the necessities and sorrows of this poor idle Duke himself! In his young years, before accession, he once tried soldiering; served one campaign with Charles XII., but was glad to "return to Hamburg" again, to the peaceable scenes of ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... his reach. About mid-day the Islesmen were drawn up on the moor, about a quarter of a mile distant from the position occupied by the Mackenzies, the opposing forces being only separated from each other by a peat moss, full of deep pits and deceitful bogs. Kenneth, fearing a siege, had shortly before this prevailed upon his aged father to retire to the Raven's Rock, above Strathpeffer, to which place, strong and easily defended, he resolved to follow him in case he were ...
— History Of The Mackenzies • Alexander Mackenzie
... possession, and to set before his guests a muttonham and a bottle of that drink which they call Athole brose. The two enemies were still on the very breach of a quarrel; but down they sat, one upon each side of the peat fire, with a mighty show of politeness. Maclaren pressed them to taste his muttonham and "the wife's brose," reminding them the wife was out of Athole and had a name far and wide for her skill in that confection. ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... Bronte's studio was the kitchen; and there we may easily picture the Bronte children telling stories to Tabby or Martha, or to whatever servant reigned at the time, and learning, as all of them did, to become thoroughly domesticated—Emily most of all. Behind the dining-room was a peat-room, which, when Charlotte was married in 1854, was cleared out and converted into a little study for Mr. Nicholls. The staircase with its solid banister remains as it did half a century ago; ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... answered, "Oh la! what harm can it do? You are such a proud peat! Grand-dame and sister like to know all about His ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... up to the Raymond Tavern. Quite a crowd of men were in the bar-room. They were seated in front of a great fire of logs and peat. Captain Rogers was in ...
— Ben Comee - A Tale of Rogers's Rangers, 1758-59 • M. J. (Michael Joseph) Canavan
... and all that sort of thing. Then you've got a little stretch along through Belshazzar that don't produce anything now—at least nothing but rocks—but irrigation will fetch it. Then from Catfish to Babylon it's a little swampy, but there's dead loads of peat down under there somewhere. Next is the Bloody Run and Hail Columbia country—tobacco enough can be raised there to support two such railroads. Next is the sassparilla region. I reckon there's enough of that truck ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... of asparagus is from one to four tons of marketable shoots per acre, according to age and thrift of plants, etc., the largest yields being on the peat lands of the river islands. On suitable lands one ought to get at least two tons per acre. Roots may yield a few days' cuttings during their second year in permanent place; the third year they will stand much more cutting, and for ...
— One Thousand Questions in California Agriculture Answered • E.J. Wickson
... the Abbot of Whalley, hung by a chain from his neck. A hunting knife was in his girdle, and an eagle's plume in his cap, and he leaned upon the but-end of a crossbow, regarding three persons who stood together by a peat fire, on the sheltered side of the beacon. Two of these were elderly men, in the white gowns and scapularies of Cistertian monks, doubtless from Whalley, as the abbey belonged to that order. The third and last, and evidently ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... had been reading; at least beside the chair drawn up to a fire of peat that perfumed the apartment lay a book upon a table, and it was characteristic of the Count, who loved books as he loved sport, and Villon above all, that he should strain his eyes a little and tilt his head slightly to see what manner of literature ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... from the atmosphere, and replaced it with sixteen pounds of oxygen gas, occupying the same bulk. And when we consider the amount of carbon that is contained in the tissues of living, and of extinct vegetation also, in the form of peat and coal, we may have some idea of the vast body of oxygen which the vegetable kingdom has added ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... ran races, they fenced with their walking-sticks and umbrellas; and, in spite of this violent exercise, the fun grew only the more extravagant with the miles they traversed. Their drunkenness was deep-seated and permanent, like fire in a peat; or rather—to be quite just to them—it was not so much to be called drunkenness at all, as the effect of youth and high spirits—a fine night, and the night young, a good road under foot, and the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... presented no distinctive features; it was a region difficult to attack and easy to defend; it consisted first of a spongy plain, saturated with water, with scattered artificial mounds on which stood the clustered huts of the villages; between this plain and the shore stretched a labyrinth of fens and peat-bogs, irregularly divided by canals and channels freshly formed each year in flood-time, meres strewn with floating islets, immense reed-beds where the neighbouring peasants took refuge from attack, and ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 7 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... me where I was—in the hollow valley, within a couple of hundred yards from nurse's cottage. I made my way towards it. There was no light in it, except the feeblest glow from the embers of her peat fire. "She is in bed," I said to myself, "and I will not disturb her." Yet something drew me towards the little window. I looked in. At first I could see nothing. At length, as I kept gazing, I saw something, indistinct in the darkness, like ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... hottest and dampest laboratories. Nearly eighty inches of yearly rain and more than eighty degrees of perpetual heat make swift work with vegetable fibre, which, in our cold and sluggard clime, would curdle into leaf-mould, perhaps into peat. Far to the north, in poor old Ireland, and far to the south, in Patagonia, begin the zones of peat, where dead vegetable fibre, its treasures of light and heat locked up, lies all but useless age after age. But this is the zone of illimitable sun-force, which destroys as swiftly as it generates, ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... much buzz, and clatter, and outcry. Now, it was a thriving mechanic in quest of a tenement that should come within his moderate means of rent; now, a ruddy Irish girl from the banks of Killarney, wandering from kitchen to kitchen of our land, while her heart still hung in the peat-smoke of her native cottage; now, a single gentleman looking out for economical board; and now—for this establishment offered an epitome of worldly pursuits—it was a faded beauty inquiring for her lost bloom; or Peter Schlemihl, for his lost shadow; or an author of ten years' standing, ...
— The Intelligence Office (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... tiles like those which I had seen in northwestern England. We soon passed burial grounds in which the graves were headed with crosses, in place of marble slabs, for tombstones. Large quantities of peat and the white stone quarries in the chalk formations, next arrested our attention. Though it was the 22nd of July, haying was not yet finished. Some of the farmers were, however, engaged in reaping both their wheat and barley. At 8:34 ...
— The Youthful Wanderer - An Account of a Tour through England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany • George H. Heffner
... circle is, we gain our best clue to the age of all these monuments, everywhere so much like each other in their massive form and dimensions, everywhere so like in their utter mystery. Round the lakes of Erne there are wide expanses of peat, dug as fuel for centuries, and in many places as much as twelve feet deep, on a bed of clay, the waste of old glaciers. Though formed with incredible slowness, this whole mass of peat has grown since some of the great stone monuments ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... among the heather-clad hills which form the broad dividing barrier between England and Scotland, the little river Esk brawls and bickers over its stony bed through a wild land of barren braesides and brown peat mosses, forming altogether some of the gloomiest and most forbidding scenery in the whole expanse of northern Britain. Almost the entire bulk of the counties of Dumfries, Kirkcudbright, and Ayr is composed ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... Labrador exhibits a very barren appearance: the mountains rise abruptly from the sea, and are composed of rocks, that are thinly covered with peat earth. This produces only stunted spruce trees, and a few plants; but the adjacent sea, and the various rivers and lakes, abound with fish, fowl, and amphibious animals. Springs are rare, and fresh water is chiefly ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley
... the bannock was frightened when it heard about the ale, and turned and was off as hard as it could, and the smith after it, and cast the hammer. But it missed, and the bannock was out of sight in a crack, and ran till it came to a farmhouse with a good peat-stack at the end of it. Inside it runs to the fireside. The goodman was cloving lint, and the goodwife heckling. "O Janet," quoth he, "there's a wee bannock; I'll have the half ...
— More English Fairy Tales • Various
... having been told she was on no account to speak during the service, she was suddenly struck with the unfairness of the whole thing, and, pointing at St. Sennans' arch-priest, said very audibly that he was "peatin'," so why wasn't she to "peat"? However, it was a very good wedding, and there was no doubt the principals had really become the Julius Bradshaws. They started from Dover on a sea that looked like a mill-pond; but Tishy's husband afterwards reported ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... seen cottages on the verge of this wild district, whose timbers consisted of a black hard wood, looking like oak, which the owners assured me they procured from the bogs by probing the soil with spits, or some such instruments: but the peat is so much cut out, and the moors have been so wed examined, that none has been found of late.** Besides the oak, I have also been shown pieces of fossil-wood of a paler colour, and softer nature, which the inhabitants ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... inhabitants are salvages. A civilized man, using the word in the ordinary sense, with his ideas and associations, must at length pine there, like a cultivated plant, which clasps its fibres about a crude and undissolved mass of peat. At the extreme North, the voyagers are obliged to dance and act plays for employment. Perhaps our own woods and fields,—in the best wooded towns, where we need not quarrel about the huckleberries,—with the primitive swamps ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... stood about a village green, or lurked ancient and ivy-grown under the shade of great old park trees. But the turf-roofed hovels of Tully-Veolan, with their low doors supported on either side by all too intimate piles of peat and rubbish, appeared to the young Englishman hardly fit for human beings to live in. Indeed, from the hordes of wretched curs which barked after the heels of his horse, Edward might have supposed them meant to serve as kennels—save, that is, for the ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... appears as if it were gusts and great whirls of the same material as the "till," lifted up by the cyclones and mingled with blocks, rocks, bones, sands, fossils, earth, peat, and other matters, ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... was surprised to find a neatly, though plainly, furnished room, which was evidently the kitchen of the house—indeed, the sole room, with the exception of an off-shoot closet. The large open fireplace contained a peat fire on the hearth, over which hung a bubbling pot. There were two box-beds opposite the fire, and in the wall which faced the door there was a very small window, containing four panes of glass, each of which had a knot in the middle of it. ...
— The Eagle Cliff • R.M. Ballantyne
... slacks o' moorland peat, An' gethers sweetness out o' t' ling an' gorse; At first its voice sounds weantly(1) saft an' leet, But graws i' strength wi' lowpin ...
— Songs of the Ridings • F. W. Moorman
... gentle-spoken sort of woman, and would bear a good deal from a fellow; but she used to fire up sometimes, and that was more than she could stand. "You don't deserve to be cared about, for speaking like that!" says she, with her cheeks as red as peat-coals. ...
— Men, Women, and Ghosts • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... and precipitous peat track brought us down to our friend's house.—Another fine moonlight night; but a thick fog rising from the neighbouring river, enveloped the rocky and wood-crested knoll on which our fancy cottage had been erected; and, ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth |
