"Spruce" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... manner. The peculiar beckoning twist of this presumptuous individual's chin and henna-stained beard summoning me to come out and "perform" reminds me of nothing so much as some tamer of wild animals ordering a trained baboon to spruce himself up and dance for the edification of the circus-going public. Signifying my unwillingness to be thus made a circus of over and over again, the officer beckons even more peremptorily than before, and even makes a feint of coming and fetching ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... like a story for interest, and there was a bush that bore a secret worth the telling. Even Simeon Holly glowed into a semblance of life when David had unerringly picked out and called by name the spruce, and fir, and pine, and larch, and then, in answer to Mrs. Holly's murmured: "But, David, where's the difference? They look so ...
— Just David • Eleanor H. Porter
... and I believe it will be the coming wood for them," said John with enthusiasm. "We have used it plain on this machine. On a large airplane it ought to be reinforced with transverse sections of very thin spruce laid latticewise. That would add considerably to its natural strength, and increase the total weight ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... striding up and down the living-room, and, in spite of my preconceived dislike, I had to admit that the man was presentable. A big fellow he was, tall and dark, as Gertrude had said, smooth-shaven and erect, with prominent features and a square jaw. He was painfully spruce in his appearance, and his manner ...
— The Circular Staircase • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... think there is no luxury equal to that of lying before a good fire on a good spruce bed, after a good supper, and a hard moose chase in a fine clear frosty moonlit starry night. But to enter into the spirit of this, you must understand what a moose chase is: the man himself runs the moose down by pursuing the track. Your success in killing depends on the ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... while backing the hind wheels across the new hole in which the tree is to be planted. The machine (Figs. 149, 150) consists of a hind axle twelve feet long, and broad-tired wheels. The frame is made of spruce three-by-eight inches and twenty feet long. The braces are three-by-five inches and ten feet long, and upright three-by-nine inches and three feet high; these are bolted to the hind axle and main frame. The front axle has ...
— Manual of Gardening (Second Edition) • L. H. Bailey
... of swamp land, fringed by tamarack and slim-bodied spruce, promised fair for his scheme. Back and forth, back and forth over its cushion of deep moss he passed, seeking for a treacherous place—a place wherein Shag would sink to the belly; where the sand-mud would grasp his legs like soft chains and hold him ...
— The Outcasts • W. A. Fraser
... humoring them or courting their favor, that he always thwarted and opposed them. But so it was, as great men and princes are said to call in their flatterers when dinner has been served, so the Athenians, upon slight occasions, entertained and diverted themselves with their spruce speakers and trim orators, but when it came to action, they were sober and considerate enough to single out the austerest and wisest for public employment, however much he might be opposed to their wishes and sentiments. This, indeed, he made no scruple to admit, when ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... my friend, but this king, so spruce, so smiling, so adored, M. Monk fancies he has recalled him, you fancy you have supported him, I fancy I have brought him back, the people fancy they have reconquered him, he himself fancies he has negotiated his restoration; and yet nothing of all this is true, ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... dumb man. They left the wood and walked downhill beside a ploughed field, and in the shelter of a high wall. An open lane brought them to a gate, the gate opened on a rough road through yet another wood of larch and spruce and fir. The road was deeply rutted and they walked in single file until Charles turned, saying, 'This is what I've brought you to see. This ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... notice, would interfere with the main object of our visit. We have come for a special purpose, and we can only allude to a very few of the species to which our attention may be supposed to be directed. A white spruce, in rich luxuriance, measuring, as the branches trail upon the sward, upwards of sixty feet in circumference; the Himalayan white pine, with its deep fringe-like foliage, twenty-five feet in height; the Cephalonian fir, with leaves as pungent as an Auricaria, twenty feet ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... topped the rise and leveled to the tree-girdled mesa. Young Pete stared. This was the most beautiful spot he had ever seen. Ringed round by a great forest of spruce, the Blue Mesa lay shimmering in the sunset like an emerald lake, beneath a cloudless sky tinged with crimson, gold, and amethyst. Across the mesa stood a cabin, the only dwelling in that silent expanse. And this was to be his home, and the big man beside him, gently urging the horse, ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... discussing the merits of the different animals he meets with there. These important duties being done, he strolls to an exhibition, or to a print-shop, and looks over a portfolio of caricatures; thence he keeps on moving to a fashionable hotel, to take white spruce beer(!) and sandwiches; here, after arranging his parties for the evening, be returns home to dress. After looking over the cards which have been left for him, he proceeds to his toilette with his valet, and is dressed about ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... joy. It was not their fault that all that piece of the earth had grown so dusty and untidy; it was Mother Nature's own fault for being so long coming with those big buckets of hers. How could any land, however willing, look spruce and green and clean with no rain for four months? No wonder there was such a commotion, and it was such a noisy, vigorous business, when at last the rain did come! Every tree and every blade and every flower had a special little life-plan of its own to ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... the Yangtsze basin, there exist in districts remote from the traffic of the great rivers, extensive forests of conifers, like those of Central Europe in character, but with different species of silver fir, larch, spruce and Cembran pine. Below this altitude the woods are composed of deciduous and evergreen broad-leafed trees and shrubs, mingled together in a profusion of species. Pure broad-leafed forests of one or two species are rare, though small woods of oak, of alder and of birch are occasionally seen. There ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... to the front door, but returned almost immediately. Drawing the major aside, I whispered a request, which led to a certain small article being passed over to me, after which I sauntered out on the stoop just in time to encounter the spruce but irate figure of Mr. Moore, who had ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... the wise Queen Dolores, saying: "I have studied mathematics. I will question this young man, in my tent to-night, and in the morning I will report the truth as to his claims. Are you content to endure this interrogatory, my spruce young fellow who wear ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... me through, and I saw him. He stood, spruce, frock-coated, dapper, as he always was, with his face pressed against and into the grill, and either hand raised and clenched tightly round a bar of the trap. His posture was as of one caught and striving frantically to release himself; yet the narrowness of the ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... aerial onyx upon the dark, star-tremulous sky; sculptured buttresses of snow, enclosing hollows filled with diaphanous shadow, and sweeping aloft into the upland fields of pure clear drift. Then came the swift descent, the plunge into the pines, moon-silvered on their frosted tops. The battalions of spruce that climb those hills defined the dazzling snow from which they sprang, like the black tufts upon an ermine robe. At the proper moment we left our sledge, and the big Christian took his reins in ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... the delicate scent of the feathery ceanothus (New Jersey tea). The vivid greenness of the young leaves of the forest, the tender tint of the springing corn, was contrasted with the deep dark fringe of waving pines on the hills, and the yet darker shade of the spruce and balsams on the borders of the creeks, for so our Canadian forest rills are universally termed. The bright glancing wings of the summer red-bird, the crimson-headed woodpecker, the gay blue-bird, and noisy but splendid plumed jay might be seen among the ...
— Lost in the Backwoods • Catharine Parr Traill
... noticed with the greatest astonishment that the chairs were now not lettered, but numbered, and that the boy was sitting at his little desk with a series of white cards bearing the figures from one to twenty-five. It was very early—not ten o'clock—but the Child was as spruce and neat as he had been in the afternoon of the day before. He bore already that mark of energy combined with neatness which is the stamp ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... we were shocked by rumours of a canoe trip through Canadian waterways. Hereupon the usually benevolent Dennis protested as he glanced approvingly at the well-kept Tuscan landscape. "Crocker needn't rub it in," he opined. "Why, it's the same scrubby spruce tree from the Plains of Abraham to James's Bay-and Emma, who hated being bored! Why, it's marriage by capture; it's barbaric." "It's worse; it's rheumatic," shuddered Harwood as he declined Marsala ...
— The Collectors • Frank Jewett Mather
... Phil," said a miner, one of sixteen who sat about a tap-room fire, "Do thee go on, Phil Spruce; and, Mrs. Pittis, fetch us in ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... hall he had helped the others put up the fragrant spruce pine-tree which reached to the ceiling, helped to dress it midst jolly chatter and joyous confusion, helped to hide the innumerable presents for the morrow's findings; and on Christmas morning had as eagerly dumped the contents of his stocking ...
— The Man in Lonely Land • Kate Langley Bosher
... our rhododendron and its dark-green, wax-like leaf and purple flower; of Mingo's mighty oak that weathered six hundred winters; of our highest peak, Spruce Knob, bony above the lush forest; of Cranberry Glades and their strong plants native to Equator and Pole; bracing altitudes, averaging ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... rock is a rather hard thing to bunk on, I do think," Raed remarked, peeping under the walrus-skin. "If we were in Maine, now, we should qualify that with a 'shake-down' of spruce-boughs. Didn't see any thing of the evergreen sort among the rocks, did ...
— Left on Labrador - or, The cruise of the Schooner-yacht 'Curlew.' as Recorded by 'Wash.' • Charles Asbury Stephens
... watching the grotesque antics of a squirrel negotiating the fresh tips of a young spruce. The squirrel sat up on his hind legs and chittered, whether at the Senator's brands or their heresy it would be hard to ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... needles, and of rather frail and flat construction. Their eggs are laid during May or June and are greenish white, specked with reddish brown; size .68 x .48. Data.—Hamilton Inlet, Labrador, June 17, 1898. Nest on branch of a spruce, 10 feet from the ground; made of grass, lined with moss and feathers. ...
— The Bird Book • Chester A. Reed
... observatories were carried ashore, and placed upon an elevated rock on one side of the cove, close to the Resolution. A party of men, with an officer, was sent to cut wood, and to clear a place for the conveniency of watering. Others were employed to brew spruce-beer, as pine-trees abounded here. The forge was also set up, to make the iron-work wanting for the repairs of the fore-mast. For, besides one of the bibs being defective, the larboard trestle-tree and one ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... many miles over a barren, rocky, undulating country, covered with var and spruce trees, with an undergrowth of raspberry, wild rhododendron, and alder. We passed a chain of lakes extending for sixteen miles, their length varying from one to three miles, and their shores covered with forests of gloomy pine. People are very apt to say that Nova Scotia is ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... ornamental conifers mention may be made of the beautiful Japanese Spruce Ajanensis, which grows freely in most soils and has dual-coloured leaves—dark green on the upper surface and silvery white underneath; this makes a grand single specimen anywhere. The White Spruce (Abies Alba Glauca) is a rapid grower, but while ...
— Gardening for the Million • Alfred Pink
... engaged about a twelvemonth in my new place, a very pleasant little shop, though the pay was less and the work harder than I had had with Monsieur C——, when, one morning, standing at the shop-window, I saw that gentleman pass: very brisk, very spruce, very plump he looked. Glancing in, (I flatter myself that a show-window arranged as I could arrange it would attract any one's eye,) he espied me. A speedy recognition and a long conversation were the result. It was early morning, and we had the store to ourselves. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... and perceived, at length, higher up the bank of the stream, a fox, which, having evidently sent them adrift, was eagerly watching their progress and the effect they produced. Satisfied with the result, cunning Reynard at last selected a larger branch of spruce-fir than usual, and couching himself down on it, set it adrift as he had done the others. The birds, now well trained to indifference, scarcely moved till he was in the midst of them, when, making rapid snaps right and left, he secured two ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... but a comparatively exalted summer heat.' It is, however, only the barley which ventures so far north: the limit of rye is 67 degrees, of oats, 65 degrees, of wheat, 64 degrees, on the west side of the peninsula, and from 1 to 2 degrees less on the east. In Southern Norway, the spruce-fir ceases to grow beyond the line of 2900 feet above the sea-level; while in Switzerland, it is commonly met with at the height of 5500 feet, and in some situations, 7000; shewing that the influences which affect the growth of grain do not similarly ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 438 - Volume 17, New Series, May 22, 1852 • Various
... ambassador was, for the most part, held in respect. One morning, however, Scandawati had disappeared. They were full of excitement; for they thought that he had escaped to the enemy. They ranged the woods in search of him, and at length found him in a thicket near the town. He lay dead, on a bed of spruce boughs which he had made, his throat deeply gashed with a knife. He had died by his own hand, a victim of mortified pride. 'See,' writes Father Ragueneau, 'how much our Indians stand on the point ...
— The Iroquois Book of Rites • Horatio Hale
... welcome, we do never Our Candles, Pipes or Fier grutch To daily customers and such, They'r Company (without expence,) For that's sufficient recompence. Here at a table all alone, Sits (studying) a spruce youngster, (one Who doth conceipt himself fully witty, And's counted one o' th' wits o' th' City,) Till by him (with a stately grace,) A Spanish Don himself doth place. Then (cap in hand) a brisk Monsieur He takes his seat, ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... Andy, spruce and trim in a new suit, had sent on his trunk, and, with his valise in hand, bade ...
— Andy at Yale - The Great Quadrangle Mystery • Roy Eliot Stokes
... and foliage of coniferous trees like spruce, fir, and pine are so full of turpentine and resin that they burn like tinder. The heat is almost beyond the power of words to express. The fire does not seem to burn in a steady manner, the flames just breathe ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Foresters • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... had ever known Mrs. Bast, and prosecute her for libel. Perhaps he never had known her. Here was Margaret, who behaved as if he had not. There the house. Round them were half a dozen gardeners, clearing up after his daughter's wedding. All was so solid and spruce, that the past flew up out of sight like a spring-blind, leaving only the last ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... with the dirty outside woolen wrapper which generally hung loose from the man's neck. Heaven knows, I did not begrudge him his comforter in that cold weather, or even his long, uncombed shock of hair; but I think he might have been made more spruce, and I am sure that he could not have looked more uncomfortable. As I went, however, I felt for him a sort of affection, and wished in my heart of hearts that he might soon be enabled to return to some ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... in Haverhill, to "sett up a shed outside of the window to keep out the heat of the sun there,"—a very roundabout way to accomplish a very simple end. As years passed on, trees sprang up and grew apace, and too often the churches became overhung and heavily shadowed by dense, sombre spruce, cedar, and fir trees. A New England parson was preaching in a neighboring church which was thus gloomily surrounded. He gave out as his text, "Why do the wicked live?" and as he peered in the dim light at his ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... skins, he took his traps and camping outfit and set out for that region of country, although it was more than two hundred miles away. Here he found tracks in abundance, and so before he made his little hunting lodge in the midst of a spruce grove, he set his traps for the fierce wolves in a spot which seemed to be a rallying place of theirs. As they are very suspicious and clever, he carefully placed two traps close together and sprinkled them over with snow, leaving visible only the dead rabbits ...
— Oowikapun - How the Gospel Reached the Nelson River Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young
... spruce, birch and willow, compose the forests of Siberia. The larch manages to exist even round the pole of cold. The Polar bear, the Arctic fox, the glutton, the lemming, the snow-hare, and the reindeer are the animals in the cold north. In the central parts of the country are to be found red ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... they walked down to the club together. Dress makes so much difference to a man, and Arthur, spruce and debonair, with a gardenia in his button-hole, and every part of his attire almost "faultily faultless," according to the canons of London fashion, presented a very different appearance to the tragical-looking personage of half an hour ago. ...
— A Monk of Cruta • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... soldiers!" cried Peterkin as we came in sight of it; "how spruce their white trousers look, this morning! I wonder if they will receive us kindly. D'you think they are ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... and gig With promises to pay; And he pawned his horns for a spruce new wig, To redeem as he came away: And he whistled some tune, a waltz or a jig, And drove off ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... linger in such a place, amid the thousands of volumes grown dingy with the accumulated dust of years!—We care not for one of your modern libraries, with its spruce shelves, filled with the sickly effusions of romantic triflers—the solemn, philosophical nonsense of Arthur, the dandified affectation of Willis, and the clever but wearisome twittle-twattle of Dickens—once great in himself, now living on the fading reputation ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... grievous load, And Chelsea, flower'd and spruce, And antique thingummies in spode; The only thing that none bestowed ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 25, 1914 • Various
... side chamber, which produced an almost incredible effect. An ellipsoidal missile of ninety gauge and several diameters long, made of brass, was driven through thirty-six inches of oak and twenty-four inches of green spruce timber, or fifty inches of the most impenetrable of timbers. The same principle of acceleration has, it is said, been most successfully applied in Boston by the use of a hollow tige or tube fixed at the bottom ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... this conference Mr. Bassett, Mr. Wheeler, and two spruce gentlemen dressed in black, sat upon the ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... Foedora! How often I had given the price of a week's sustenance to see her for a moment! To leave my work and go without food was the least of it! I must traverse the streets of Paris without getting splashed, run to escape showers, and reach her rooms at last, as neat and spruce as any of the coxcombs about her. For a poet and a distracted wooer the difficulties of this task were endless. My happiness, the course of my love, might be affected by a speck of mud upon my only white waistcoat! Oh, to miss the sight of her because I was ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... made A grand parade, With marching train-band, guild, and trade: The burgomaster in robes arrayed, Gold chain, and mace, and gay cockade, Great keys carried, and flags displayed, Pompous marshal and spruce young aide, Carriage and foot and cavalcade; While big drums thundered and trumpets brayed, And all the bands of the canton played; The fountain spouted lemonade, Children drank of the bright cascade; Spectators of every rank ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. V, August, 1878, No 10. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... the son, father, and grandfather; while the undulations and hollows, which seventy or eighty years since must have looked only like wrinkles in the black morasses, being now drained and limed, are skirted with deep woods, particularly of spruce, which thrives wonderfully, and covered with excellent grass. We drove in the droskie and walked ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... drinking a mint julep and lighting a cigar, he joined the throng. He fumed and fretted for over an hour and a half, when he saw Mrs. Maroney coming down the street, looking very warm. He met her and she excused herself by saying that she had called on a lady friend who lived on Spruce street, just above Twentieth, and finding her sick had been unable to get away; that she had walked back very ...
— The Expressman and the Detective • Allan Pinkerton
... silently vanished. I found my luncheon ready on the table in the little entry, wrapped in its shining old homespun napkin, and as if by way of special consolation, there was a stone bottle of Mrs. Todd's best spruce beer, with a long piece of cod line wound round it by which it could be lowered for coolness into the deep ...
— The Queen's Twin and Other Stories • Sarah Orne Jewett
... the busy wives plying with skill their nets in the emerald waters. Two hundred white winters and more have fled from the face of the Summer Since DuLuth, on that wild, somber shore, in the unbroken forest primeval, From the midst of the spruce and the pines, saw the smoke of the wigwams up-curling, Like the fumes from the temples and shrines of the Druids of old in their forests. Ah, little he dreamed then, forsooth, that a city would stand on that hill-side, And bear the proud name of Duluth, the untiring and dauntless explorer. ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... more forsaken and hungry ones, more and more of the human "waste" that is cast into the streets and the darkness. And on the other hand, an army of street-sweepers was now appearing to remove all the filth of the past four and twenty hours, in order that Paris, spruce already at sunrise, might not blush for having thrown up such a mass of dirt and loathsomeness in the ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... at that time universally used by the fur traders for navigating the intricate and often-obstructed rivers. The canoe was between thirty and forty feet long, and several feet in width; constructed of birch bark, sewed with fibres of the roots of the spruce tree, and daubed with resin of the pine, instead of tar. The cargo was made up in packages, weighing from ninety to one hundred pounds each, for the facility of loading and unloading, and of transportation at portages. The canoe itself, ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... into the more crowded district again. She began to be a little perturbed, forgot her anger; at least it was dimmed. Coming to Spruce Street she saw the usual crowd of men hanging about the door of the Ardmore. They always stood there, clustered about on the steps, with their cigarettes and their half-burned cigars and their flashy clothes and their burnt-out ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... to be—stepped quickly across the floor, flushing angrily, as well she might; but, as she reached the door, it flew open and a small, spruce, middle-aged ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... subdued on the silver and fruit and flowers, on the girls' white necks, on George's well-coloured face and glossy shirt-front, gleamed in the jewels on his mother's long white fingers, showed off the Squire's erect and still spruce figure; the air was languorously sweet with the perfume of azaleas and narcissus bloom. Bee, with soft eyes, was thinking of young Tharp, who to-day had told her that he loved her, and wondering ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... give it to his wife's lady's-maid. His wife ain't a lady, but having a lady's-maid shows she intends to set up for one when she gets to home. To be a lady, she must lay in a lot of airs, and to brush her own hair and garter her own stockins is vulgar; if it was known in First Avenue, Spruce Street, in Bonnetville, it would ruin her as a woman of fashion ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... when the pollen of the staminate plant is all shed before the pistillate gets ready. Sometimes we have a plant that is self sterile. I have experimented with pollen from several different nut trees and also with the Norway spruce. Then again, there are abnormal cases; sometimes there is parthenogenesis. The jimson weed is the first plant which has ever been reproduced by parthenogenesis. Since that was discovered, an investigator in California has found a similar case ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fifteenth Annual Meeting • Various
... calculations. I have read over a Greek play, and made out a problem or two in mechanics, without being the worse for it; but, somehow, I can't for the life of me hark back to the opinions that had such power over me at Oxford. I can't even recollect the half of them. It is as if that hemlock spruce had battered them out of ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... hill, where the cabin trail met the river trail. When the Boss o' the camp looked up and saw the prodigal coming along, rather groggy on his legs, he just stood still a moment. Then he kicked off his web-feet, turned back a few paces uphill, and sat down on a spruce stump, folded his arms, and waited. Was it the knapsack on his back that ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... loved her, all the details of that night became vivid. She sat alone under the spruce-trees near the cabin. The shadows thickened, and then lightened under a rising moon. She heard the low hum of insects, a distant laugh of some woman of the village, and the murmur of the brook. Jim was later than usual. Very likely, as her uncle had hinted, Jim had ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... a strange unrest. The sight of Harriet Penny irritated her. She stepped from the tent and filled her lungs with great drafts of the spruce-laden night-breeze that wafted gently out of the mysterious dark, and rippled the surface of the river until little waves slapped softly against the shore in tiny whisperings of the unknown—whisperings that called, and were understood by the ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... bank presented to the mighty river a low chain of hills, fringed at the base with a scattered growth of scrubby spruce, birch, willow, and cotton-wood. Timber line was only two hundred feet above the river brink; beyond that height, rocks and moss covered with ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... glittering bayonets he caught the flourish of energetic drumsticks. The big drum gave forth its clamor with window-shaking insistence; it seemed to be the summons of power that all else should stand aside. On they came, these spruce Guards, each man a marching machine, trained to strut and pose exactly as his fellows. There was a sense of omnipotence in their rhythmic movement. And they all had the grand manner—from the elegant captain in command down to the smallest drummer-boy. Although the sun was shining ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... time-keeper, and to make other observations. The remainder of the empty water-casks were also sent on shore, with the cooper to trim, and a sufficient number of sailors to fill them. Two men were appointed to brew spruce beer; and the carpenter and his crew were ordered to cut wood. A boat, with a party of men, under the direction of one of the mates, was sent to collect grass for our cattle; and the people that ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... There was fresh groundsel, too, for Miss Maylie's birds, with which Oliver, who had been studying the subject under the able tuition of the village clerk, would decorate the cages, in the most approved taste. When the birds were made all spruce and smart for the day, there was usually some little commission of charity to execute in the village; or, failing that, there was rare cricket-playing, sometimes, on the green; or, failing that, there was always something to do in the garden, or ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... was the drive up to the house-door, and a sweep, or small oval plot, of turf, surrounded by gravel; and a gate at the corner of this sweep opened into a grove of the grandest old spruce-firs in the island. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... wind might be rollicking and boisterous. Here it always went gently. Little, winding, fairy paths ran here and there over spruce roots cushioned with moss. Wild cherry trees, that in blossom time would be misty white, were scattered all over the valley, mingling with the dark spruces. A little brook with amber waters ran through it from the Glen village. ...
— Rainbow Valley • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... mine, meaning, of course, to look at: it is a natural orchard and left to itself. The palings by the road are falling, and held up chiefly by the brambles and the ivy that has climbed up them. There are trees on the left and trees on the right; a fine spruce fir at the back. The apple-trees are not set in straight lines; they were at first, but some have died away and left an irregularity. The trees themselves lean this way and that; they are scarred and marked, as it were, with lichen ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies
... about in the hills, Getting your grub with a rifle, Taking your drink from rills. Getting your bed from the spruce tree, Taking your course by your dreams, Just camping alone in the ...
— Rhymes of a Roughneck • Pat O'Cotter
... on each side of the front step. A servant threw open the door of the breakfast room, and Delme mechanically entered it. It was filled with strangers; on some of these the spruce undertaker was fitting silk scarfs; while others were busy at ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... sticks Mr. Eddy has found clear spruce better than any other wood. Bamboo is bad, because it bends unevenly at the joints. White pine is not tough enough, and cypress is both too brittle and too flexible. The hard woods, like ash, hickory, and oak, are too heavy; in scientific kite-flying, ...
— McClure's Magazine, March, 1896, Vol. VI., No. 4. • Various
... Noyes. Gum.' He's the boy what sells gum to the theayter. He was agoin' to a party whar you hev to be the name of a book. He wore the surplus so his name was the Little Minister. We took it out in gum— spruce and pepsin. Iry swallered his'n every time, and Miss Hudgers was afeard ...
— Amarilly of Clothes-line Alley • Belle K. Maniates
... Enth. Any quantity of it. What shall it be? They've "Anti-Bass Beer," or "Spruce Stout;" or perhaps you'd like to try their "Pennyroyal Porter?" I'm rather partial to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 17, 1892 • Various
... have a nice warm home here in the spruce trees, with their thick, heavy boughs to shut out the snow and cold. There is plenty of room, so Thistle could sleep here all winter. We would let him perch on a branch, when we Chickadees would nestle around him until he was as warm as in the lovely summer time. These cones are so ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... here is my second: "Nor can any lover of nature enter the old piles of Oxford and English cathedrals without feeling that the forest overpowered the mind of the builder, and that his chisel, his saw and plane, still reproduced its ferns, its spikes of flowers, its locust, elm, pine, and spruce." ...
— A Cathedral Courtship • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... lies a land Where the trees together stand Closely as the blades of wheat When the summer is complete. Rolling like an ocean wide Over vale and mountainside, Balsam, hemlock, spruce and pine,— All those mighty trees are mine. There's a river flowing free,— All its waves belong to me. There's a lake so clear and bright Stars shine out of it all night; Rowan-berries round it spread Like a belt of coral red. Never royal garden planned Fair as my Canadian land! ...
— Songs Out of Doors • Henry Van Dyke
... said the Senior Tutor of St. Boniface: and two scholars came in. (He knew they were scholars, because this was his hour for seeing scholars.) One was a heavy-looking young man in a frock coat and tall hat. The other was a spruce youth, who looked as if nature had intended him for an attorney's ...
— The Casual Ward - academic and other oddments • A. D. Godley
... from the ceiling and the little room exactly suited its mistress both were neat and clean, trim and spruce, simple and yet nice. Snowy transparent curtains enclosed the bed as a protection against the mosquitoes, a crucifix of delicate workmanship hung above the head of the couch, and the seats were covered with good cloth of various colors, fag-ends from the looms. Pretty straw mats lay ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... to know that we had made the crossing in safety and that their wait under the upturned 'James Caird' was ended. Curiously enough, they did not recognize Worsley, who had left them a hairy, dirty ruffian and had returned his spruce and shaven self. They thought he was one of the whalers. When one of them asked why no member of the party had come round with the relief, Worsley said, "What do you mean?" "We thought the Boss or one of the others would come round," they explained. "What's the matter ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... that, at length, the ship got near enough to the Isle of Pines to enable the captain, with a party of officers, to land on one of the islets connected with it. The objects observed were found to be a species of spruce pine, admirably fitted for masts and spars. After dinner, therefore, two boats went on shore with the carpenter and his crew, and as many spars as were required were cut down. It was of this tree that the natives ...
— Captain Cook - His Life, Voyages, and Discoveries • W.H.G. Kingston
... while Jimmie and Sir Lucius were dining at Morley's, Victor Nevill emerged from his rooms in Jermyn street, and walked briskly to Piccadilly Circus. He looked quite unlike the spruce young man of fashion who was wont to disport himself in the West End at this hour, for he wore tweeds, a soft hat, and a rather shabby overcoat. He took a cab in Coventry street, and gave the driver a northern address. As he rode through the Soho district he occasionally pressed one hand to his breast, ...
— In Friendship's Guise • Wm. Murray Graydon
... the Nahr el-Kelb,* can scarcely even be called torrents, being precipitated as it were in one leap from the Lebanon to the Mediterranean. Olives, vines, and corn cover the maritime plain, while in ancient times the heights were clothed with impenetrable forests of oak, pine, larch, cypress, spruce, and cedar. The mountain range drops in altitude towards the centre of the country and becomes merely a line of low hills, connecting Gebel Ansarieh with the Lebanon proper; beyond the latter it continues without interruption, till at length, above the narrow Phoenician ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... neighbourhood began to be very assiduous in his courtship to her, hoping also that the persons she talked of, as her father and brothers in the country, would give him a sum of money to set up his trade. Miss Jenny was a forward lass, and the fellow being a spruce young spark, soon prevailed over her affections, and they were accordingly privately married, though it proved not much to her advantage. For her husband finding no money come, began to use her indifferently, upon which she fell into that sort of business ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... picture. The sun is just beginning to pour into the garden. He is looking through the apple trees and having hard work to make even a splash of golden green upon the lawn, but the silver spruce and the tiara of roses get the full measure of his morning smile and are doing their best to show that they understand, appreciate, and are glad. Oh, it is ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... schoolmaster; and doubtless some backwoods schools of that period had masters as ignorant as Andrew Jackson. Finally, he resolved to study law, and in the winter of 1784-5 started out to find an office in which he might prepare himself for his profession. He found a place in the office of Mr. Spruce McCay, of Salisbury, North Carolina, an old-fashioned Southern town, where he made his home until 1788, when he was ...
— Andrew Jackson • William Garrott Brown
... lay one after another along the canal, many of them looking mighty spruce and ship-shape in their jerkin of Archangel tar picked out with white and green. Some carried gay iron railings, and quite a parterre of flower-pots. Children played on the decks, as heedless of the rain as if they had been brought up on Loch Carron side; men fished over the gunwale, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... he had said to the factor: "It's glorious! It's God's Country!" And the factor had turned his tired, empty eyes upon him with the words: "It was—before SHE went. But no country is God's Country without a woman," and then he took Philip to the lonely grave under a huge lob-stick spruce, and told him in a few words how one woman had made life for him. Even then Philip could not fully understand. ...
— God's Country—And the Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... rout out, clear out, sweep out &c; make a clean sweep of. Adj. clean, cleanly; pure; immaculate; spotless, stainless, taintless; trig; without a stain, unstained, unspotted, unsoiled, unsullied, untainted, uninfected; sweet, sweet as a nut. neat, spruce, tidy, trim, gimp, clean as a new penny, like a cat in pattens; cleaned &c v.; kempt^. abstergent^, cathartic, cleansing, purifying. Adv. neatly &c ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... competent young botanist with good legs 100 pounds to go and study distribution in the Engadine—from the Maloja as centre—in a circle of a radius of eight or ten miles. The distribution of the four principal conifers, Arolla pine, larch, mountain pine and spruce, is most curious, the why and ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... certain pluck. He would try for something else for which his own tongue had not disqualified him. With Joe, to think was to do. He went on to the Continental Hotel, where there were almost always boys wanted to "run the bells." The clerk looked him over critically. He was a bright, spruce-looking young fellow, and the man ...
— The Sport of the Gods • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... poles and bark had been built by the men during his absence. In it were all the stores, as well as a quantity of spruce boughs and hemlock tips for bedding. The chill evening air was filled with a delicious fragrance of burning cedar, mingled with the pleasant odor of boiling coffee. Several white-fish nailed to oak planks were browning before a bed of ...
— The Copper Princess - A Story of Lake Superior Mines • Kirk Munroe
... his face outlined between the close-growing trunks of two spruce trees, were the startling ...
— The High School Boys' Fishing Trip • H. Irving Hancock
... went "aloft," and, as he expressed it, "rigged himself out," in a spruce blue coat with brass buttons; blue vest and trousers to match; a white dicky with a collar attached and imitation carbuncle studs down the front. To these he added a black silk neckerchief tied in a true sailor's knot but with the ends separated ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... Kitty Spruce went up on spec? Very enterprising of you both, I am sure! And did you make anything ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... season, and therefore an appropriate times for celebrating. He went down into the "wood-lot"—their own "wood-lot"—and cut a spruce tree, and set it up in the dining-room; they hung thereon all the contrivances which the associated grandparents had sent down to commemorate an occasion which was not only Christmas and house-warming, but the ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... road from Whisper Cove to Twist Tickle in a screaming gale of wind and rain. I was in Judith's service: I made haste. 'Twas a rough road, as I have said—a road scrambling among forsaken hills, a path made by chance, narrow and crooked, wind-swept or walled by reaching alders and spruce limbs, which were wet and cold and heavy with the drip of the gale. Ah, but was I not whipped on that night by the dark and the sweeping rain and the wind on the black hills and the approach of death? I was whipped on, indeed! The road was perverse to hurrying ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... was the manager of the City and Suburban Bank, and it puzzled her to think why a bank manager should live with such a seedy-looking person, who smoked clay pipes and sipped whiskey and water all the evening when he was at home. For Roxdal was as spruce and erect as his fellow-lodger was round-shouldered and shabby; he never smoked, and he confined himself to a small glass of claret ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various
... with the exception of the last two, seem to explain themselves. During the summer months in the North Woods you will not need a rifle. Partridges, spruce hens, ptarmigan, rabbits, ducks, and geese are usually abundant enough to fill the provision list. For them, of course, a shotgun is the thing; but since such a weapon weighs many pounds, and its ammunition ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... she! It was in a long lane bordered on both sides by dark spruce and beeches decked out in the golden brown tints of autumn. The sunbeams, distinctly bluish in the fine mist, slantingly penetrated the dark spruce, and fell in golden radiance upon the pale green moss, and the blue ether ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... secret, says a beau, And sneers at some ill-natured wit below; But faith, if we should tell but half we know, There's many a spruce young fellow in this place, Wou'd never presume to show his face; Women are not so weak, what e'er men prate; How many tip-top beaux have had the fate, T'enjoy from mama's secrets their estate! Who, if ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... crow (Picicorvus columbianus). True jays and orioles are also well represented. The gallinaceous birds include the large blue grouse of the coast, replaced in the Rocky Mountains by the dusky grouse. The western form of the "spruce partridge" of eastern Canada is also abundant, together with several forms referred to the genus Bonasa, generally known as "partridges" or ruffed grouse. Ptarmigans also abound in many of the higher mountain regions. Of the Anatidae only passing ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various |
