"Spruce" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... North-Western Rhodesia Native Police, a smart body of 380 natives, officered by eleven or twelve Englishmen. To Colonel Colin Harding, C.M.G., was due the credit of recruiting and drilling this smart corps, and it was difficult to believe that these soldierly-looking men, very spruce in their dark blue tunics and caps, from which depend enormous red tassels, were only a short time ago idling away their days ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... no noise, though sometimes there was a gurgle, as though a fish had broken the water behind them; sometimes, in the shining pools ahead, she saw the trout leap out. At every startling flop Delphin would exclaim: "Un gros!" From an upper branch of a spruce a kingfisher darted like an arrow into the water, making a splash like a falling stone. Once, after they had passed through the breach of a beaver dam, Herve nodded his head toward a mound of twigs by the bank and muttered something. Augusta ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... weight. A restless tramp is Mooween, who scatters his records over forty miles of hillside on a summer day, when his lazy mood happens to leave him for a season. Here, on the other side, are the bronze-green petals of a spruce cone, chips from a squirrel's workshop, scattered as if Meeko had brushed them hastily from his yellow apron when he rushed out to see Mooween as he passed. There, beyond, is a mink sign, plain as daylight, where ...
— Wood Folk at School • William J. Long
... industrious citizen, basking in the sunshine of his shop-door, and gathering in the flock which is so bountifully reared on his withered tribe of children. There strutted the spruce cavalier, with his upper-man furnished at the expense of his lower, and looking ridiculously imposing: and there—but sacred be their daughters, for the sake of one, who shed a lustre over her squalid sisterhood, sufficiently ...
— Adventures in the Rifle Brigade, in the Peninsula, France, and the Netherlands - from 1809 to 1815 • Captain J. Kincaid
... every penny, so's at least one of the younger children can have more of an education than James an' Sally an' Austin an' Ruth. I don't look at it that way—seems to me it ain't fair to give one child more than another. I want to spruce up this place a little, an' lay by to raise the ...
— The Old Gray Homestead • Frances Parkinson Keyes
... crust had formed upon the snow—a crust that was just strong enough to support Dickie's weight. And he made swiftly for the spruce woods, to hunt for his supper, for he knew he could find nothing on the ground, covered as it ...
— The Tale of Dickie Deer Mouse • Arthur Scott Bailey
... rounded the Cape, that the extreme heat of an Indian climate is so favourable to the growth of hair as to put those wights who are afflicted with dark chevelures, which was my case, to the inconvenient necessity of chin-scraping twice on the game day, when they wish to appear particularly spruce of an evening. Now I intended to have shaved before the play began, but in the hurry of dressing had forgotten all about it; and upon inspecting my visage in a glass, after I had donned Lady Macbeth's night-gear, the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... followed Luna up the stairs to the outer door, and watched the big mill foreman as he walked down the trail to the mill. Then, as was his custom when perturbed in mind, Pierre crossed the dusty waggon trail and seated himself on a boulder, leaning his back against a scrubby spruce. He let his eyes rest contentedly on a big, square-faced building. Rough stone steps led up to a broad veranda, from which rose, in barbaric splendour, great sheets of shining plate-glass, that gave an unimpeded view of a long mahogany bar backed by tiers of glasses ...
— Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason
... replied that he was more ingenious than the other thought for, and had propped up the weapon in the ground and fallen on the point—"just like Nebuchadnezzar," he added, winking to the assistants. The doctor, who was a little, spruce, ruddy man of an impatient temper, pished and pshawed and swore over his patient. "Nothing could be made of him!" he cried. "A perfect heathen. If we could only find the weapon!" But the weapon had ceased to exist. A little resined twine was perhaps ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... unable to define the spirit. They talked naturally more with Verena than with her mother; and while they were so engaged Mrs. Tarrant explained to her who they were, and how one of them, the smaller, who was not quite so spruce, had brought the other, his particular friend, to introduce him. This friend, Mr. Burrage, was from New York; he was very fashionable, he went out a great deal in Boston ("I have no doubt you know some of the places," ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... Montmorenci, whose emigration caused the domain to be confiscated, and sold as national property; but the baronial castle is still standing, and displays, in two of its towers and in a chimney of unusual form, a portion of its ancient character: the rest of the building is modernized into a spruce, comfortable residence, and is at this time occupied by a countryman of ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. II. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... been quite as good as her word when she told Mrs Eames that her household was composed of herself, of a son who was in an attorney's office, of an ancient maiden cousin, named Miss Spruce, who lodged with her, and of Mr Cradell. The divine Amelia had not then been living with her, and the nature of the statement which she was making by no means compelled her to inform Mrs Eames that the young lady would probably ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... 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
... 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
... may be we are more addicted to Venus than our fathers were. They are two exercises that thwart and hinder one another in their vigour. Lechery weakens our stomach on the one side; and on the other sobriety renders us more spruce and amorous for the ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... fallen, I suppose, in the first crash, and which was nearest to the pond, taking a more easterly direction, sank among our screen of chestnuts and firs, knocking down one spruce-fir, breaking off the head of another, and stripping the two corner chestnuts of several branches in its fall. This is not all: the maple bearing the weathercock was broken in two, and what I regret more than all the rest is, that all the three elms that ...
— A Book of Sibyls - Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen • Anne Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie)
... mountains for forty miles, containing inexhaustible quantities of timber. We noticed tall cedar and oaks of every description; one kind more interesting than the others, being a white oak from twenty to forty feet in the body. Pine and spruce, with superior white ash and walnut, were found, and the most gigantic cotton-woods, particularly on the Sonoita. * * * * "The mountains in the neighborhood are filled with minerals, and the precious metals are said to abound. ...
— Memoir of the Proposed Territory of Arizona • Sylvester Mowry
... visitors, while at our Long Island hotel there was a losing bet on a scant generation of them. When it seemed likely that it might be a winning bet the sand was planked there in front of the hotel to the sea with spruce boards. It was very handsomely planked, but it was never afterwards touched, apparently, for any manner of repairs. Here, for half a mile the dune on which the hotel stands is shored up with massive masonry, and bricked for carriages, ...
— Widger's Quotations from the Works of William Dean Howells • David Widger
... 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 hand to follow us. Furs and greatcoats were abandoned. Each ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... words, and those who could not do so were not slow to learn the news by hearsay. There was to be a Christmas Tree! It would be like a birthday party, with this above ordinary birthdays, that there were to be presents for every one. One of the children invited lived in a little white house, with a spruce fir-tree before the door. The spruce fir did this good service to the little house, that it helped people to find their way to it; and it was by no means easy for a stranger to find his way to any given house in this little town, especially if the house were small and white, and stood in one ...
— The Brownies and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... is a sure solvent of distress. There whirls not for him in the night any so hideous a phantasmagoria as will not become, in the clarity of next morning, a spruce procession for him to lead. Brief the vague horror of his awakening; memory sweeps back to him, and he sees nothing dreadful after all. "Why not?" is the sun's bright message to him, and "Why not indeed?" his answer. After hours ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... which was shedding her silver light from a clear heaven. The air was not oppressive, and it was scented with the perfume of the lilacs and apple-blossoms, so that Gorham was fain every now and then to draw a deep breath in order to inhale their fragrance. There was no dust, and nature looked spruce and trig, without a taint of the frowziness which is observable in the foliage a ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... in the yard, leaning on his slim umbrella to admire the brilliant yellow of the renewed sheets, standing out in vivid blots against the tarnished verdigris of the old. To pass from Blackpool to the West, however, is a tardy process; and when Rainham reached the spruce, little house in one of the most select of the discreet and uniform streets which adjoin Portman Square, he found the clatter of teacups for the most part over. There were, in fact, only two persons in the long room, which, with its open Erard, and its innumerable bibelots, and its plenitude ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... toilet. But she protested with every move she made. Just before the fifteen minute time allowance had expired, the two girls stepped out into a glorious forest morning. Great trees towered above them, the forest birds were raising their voices in a melodious chorus, fresh, pungent odors from spruce and hemlock trees filled the air and somewhere near at hand, a stream splashed and ...
— The Meadow-Brook Girls Under Canvas • Janet Aldridge
... variety to our ornamental plantings, and aid in enriching the winter coloring. The Austrian pine and the Scotch pine are welcome additions to our own pine family. In these days of economic chemistry and a deficient rag supply, every reader of these words is probably in close proximity to an important spruce product—paper. The manufacturers say, with hand on heart, that they do not use much wood pulp, but when one has passed a great paper-mill flanked on all sides by piles of spruce logs, with no bales of rags in sight anywhere, he is tempted to think otherwise! ...
— Getting Acquainted with the Trees • J. Horace McFarland
... of the people.—To be spruce is not altogether foolish, for it proves that a great number of people work for one. It shows by one's hair, that one has a valet, a perfumer, etc., by one's band, thread, lace, ... etc. Now it is not merely superficial nor merely outward show to have many arms at command. The more arms one has, ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... flitted across Thorndyke's face as he laid the hat upon the remains of the newspaper. "We must not expect too much," he observed. "Hats, as you know, have a way of changing owners. Your own hat, for instance" (a very spruce, hard felt), "is a new ...
— John Thorndyke's Cases • R. Austin Freeman
... for directly in front of them was a wigwam, so cunningly built in behind a growth of small spruce trees that unless one knew of its whereabouts it might be easily passed by. The Indian girl laughed at Anne's exclamation, and nodded at her ...
— A Little Maid of Massachusetts Colony • Alice Turner Curtis
... this gallant and spruce company (for every man had donned his best, and dressed himself with the utmost care) came Caron La Boulaye. He walked alone, for although their comrade in death, he was their comrade in nothing else. Their heads might lie together ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... his arm to the south. "Road winds through a swamp, then climbs to high ground. Ends in a spruce forest." ...
— Collectivum • Mike Lewis
... interference of man has in many districts almost extirpated them, and, excepting the beech forests of the Austrian Alps, a considerable wood of deciduous trees is scarcely anywhere to be found. In many districts where such woods once existed, their place has been occupied by the Scottish pine and spruce, which suffer less from the ravages of goats, the worst enemies of tree vegetation. The mean annual temperature of this region differs little from that of the British Islands; but the climatal conditions are widely different. Here snow usually lies for several ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... mornings on Long Island, when through the singing of robin and song-sparrow comes the piercing cadence of the meadowlark; and of the far northland woods in June, fragrant with the breath of pine and balsam-fir, where sweetheart sparrows sing from wet spruce thickets and rapid brooks rush under the drenched ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... these faded into slate again, and the night had come. It was but twenty-four hours since they had sat in their canvas chairs discussing politics by starlight on the saloon deck of the Korosko; only twelve since they had breakfasted there and had started spruce and fresh upon their last pleasure trip. What a world of fresh impressions had come upon them since then! How rudely they had been jostled out of their take-it-for-granted complacency! The same shimmering silver stars, as they had looked upon last night, the ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... burned black And the sun shrunken yellow in smoke. We know who when they come to town Bring berries under the wagon seat, Or a basket of eggs between their feet; What this man brought in a cotton sack Was gum, the gum of the mountain spruce. He showed me lumps of the scented stuff Like uncut jewels, dull and rough. It comes to market golden brown; But turns ...
— Mountain Interval • Robert Frost
... acre lot that straggled unevenly from the wood road down to the river. To the casual onlooker, it seemed just a patch of underbrush. There were half-grown birches all over it, and now and then a little dwarf spruce tree or cluster of hazel bushes. But to the girls of Greenacres, that ten acre lot represented a treasure trove in the month of August when huckleberries and blueberries were ripe. Shad said knowing ...
— Kit of Greenacre Farm • Izola Forrester
... crack of a dry stick checked her. The next instant she picked up his rifle, seized his arm, and fairly dragged him into a spruce thicket. ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert W. Chambers
... music, the great old lumbering piece of ordnance came slowly, dragged by a magnificent team of horses, into the fortress. Nothing could be more striking than the contrast presented by this huge, clumsy, misshapen, obsolete engine of war, and the spruce, trim, shining, comparatively little cannon (mere pocket-pistols for Bellona) which furnished the battery just below our stand, and which, as soon as the unwieldy old warrioress had occupied the post of honor reserved ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... of her love, Robert had sunk steadily. Gambling, drink, morphia, billiards and cigars—he had taken to them all; until now in the wretched figure of the outcast on the Embankment you would never have recognized the once spruce figure of ...
— The Holiday Round • A. A. Milne
... trees, among them the Palo Colorado or Lambertine fir, some of them a dozen feet in diameter, although they did not attain any remarkable height. These were not the colossal pines so famous the world over. There were quite a number of beech, sycamore, oak, spruce, and maple, and other trees whose particular names they were ...
— Adrift in the Wilds - or, The Adventures of Two Shipwrecked Boys • Edward S. Ellis
... cleaned up about one hundred and twenty dollars from the Fourth to Labor Day," says he. "But there was lots of good days when I didn't git any parties at all. You see, I look kind of old and shabby. So does the Curlew; and the spruce young fellers with the new boats gits the cream of the trade. But it don't take much to ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... his coat-collar, and has put on a spotless suit of black cloth, and sports his gold chain and seals conspicuously, and wears his spectacles easily, and drops them in a genteel manner on the silk ribbon that is suspended around his neck; and if he is altogether neat and spruce, as becomes an ecclesiastic of some standing in his diocese, is that a reason why he should be stared at, and why men should put their hands in their pockets and whistle, and why rather perky young ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... competition, By virtue of some sly petition: Yet mum for that; hope still the best, Nor let such cares disturb thy rest. Methinks I hear thee loud as trumpet, As bagpipe shrill or oyster-strumpet; Methinks I see thee, spruce and fine, With coat embroider'd richly shine, And dazzle all the idol faces, As through the hall thy worship paces; (Though this I speak but at a venture, Supposing thou hast tick with Hunter,) Methinks I see a blackguard rout Attend thy coach, ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... Norway spruce and it was set up in front of the high school which had a lawn before it large enough to hold a goodly crowd of observers. The choirs of all the churches had volunteered their services for the occasion. They were placed on a stand elevated above the crowd so that they ...
— Ethel Morton's Holidays • Mabell S. C. Smith
... peninsula, runs northward almost to the Narrows, and spreads out westward until its farthest edge touches the shore of the arm. The "Point" has been wisely set aside for a public park, and except where a fort or two, built to command the entrance to the harbour, intrudes upon it, the forest of spruce and fir with its labyrinth of roads and paths and frequent glades of soft waving grass, extends from shore to shore, making a wilderness that a boy's imagination may easily people with Indians brandishing ...
— Bert Lloyd's Boyhood - A Story from Nova Scotia • J. McDonald Oxley
... winter— Laughed along the stormy waters, Danced upon the windy headlands, On the storm his white hair streaming, And his steaming breath, ascending, On the pine-tops and the cedars Fell in frosty mists of silver, Sprinkling spruce and fir with silver, Sprinkling ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... undulating country, the blue, winding river, the nooks and crags, dotted here and there by cottages that seem to hang on their sides, a slow team jogging round, or fields being ploughed. All the air is sweet with pine and spruce, and ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... was approaching, comprised of a spruce, dress-coated manager; a short thick-set, broad-faced man who was doubtless the long-overdue detective; a professional-appearing gentleman with a black bag, obviously the house-physician; and the policeman that I had summoned from his stroll below. ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... the first roadway to Rockwood Park. Could our pioneers in trade revisit the scene of their labors and note the changes time has wrought what would be their amazement? They would hardly recognize their surroundings. Instead of rocks and crags covered with spruce and cedar, with here and there an open glade, and the wide spreading mud flats at low tide they would behold the wharves that line our shores, the ocean steamships lying in the channel, grain elevators that receive the harvests of Canadian wheat-fields ...
— Glimpses of the Past - History of the River St. John, A.D. 1604-1784 • W. O. Raymond
... a good-looking man; spruce and dapper, and very tidy. He is somewhat below middle height, being about five feet four; but he makes up for the inches which he wants by the dignity with which he carries those which he has. It is no fault of his own if he has not a commanding eye, for he studies hard to assume it. His features ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... proud and vain, They seem to think they may well disdain With the peasant a glass of his wine to drain But, soft—to the left o' the fire I see Three riflemen, who from the Tyrol should be Emmerick, come, boy, to them will we. Birds of this feather 'tis luck to find, Whose trim's so spruce, and their ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... hair.] The great ones also generally, and spruce young men, do wear their hair long hanging down behind: but when they do any work or travail hard, it annoying them, they tie it up behind. Heretofore generally they bored holes in their ears and hung weights in them to make them grow long, ...
— An Historical Relation Of The Island Ceylon In The East Indies • Robert Knox
... books of mine, how they begin to rise around me! Faces of friends and counsellors that have flown for ever; the sibylline Marian Evans with her long, weird, dreamy face; Lewes, with his big brow and keen thoughtful eyes; Browning, pale and spruce, his eye like a skipper's cocked-up at the weather; Peacock, with his round, mellifluous speech of the old Greeks; David Gray, great-eyed and beautiful, like Shelley's ghost; Lord Houghton, with his warm worldly smile ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... was rather long—not of that pronounced length which inevitably challenges the decision of the bystander as to whether the wearer be fool or poet, but still long enough to fall a little carelessly round the head and so take off from the spruce conventional effect of the owner's irreproachable ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Canadians. When Montcalm was general, I commanded a certain detachment towards Lake Champlain. Through how many leagues of forest, over how many cedar swamps and rocky hills, across how many icy torrents did my bronzed woodmen not toil! We made beds from boughs of spruce, our walls were the forest, our roofs were the skies. Many a day we fasted the twenty-four hours. More than once we ate our mocassins. 'Twas all for France. Ah, if our young men at Versailles had that to do, they would have to ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... a stoutish man, of middle height and mild appearance, with little short legs and little fat hands; he wore a roomy and excessively spruce frock-coat, a high broad cravat, snow-white linen, a gold chain on his silk waistcoat, a gem-ring on his forefinger, and a white wig on his head; he spoke softly and persuasively, trod noiselessly, and had an amiable smile, an amiable look in his eyes, and an amiable way of settling ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... nipped at his blood, and lighted a fresh cigar, half-turning to shield himself from a wind that was growing out of the east. As the match flared in the cup of his hands for an instant there came from the black gloom of the balsam and spruce at his feet a wailing, hungerful cry that brought a startled breath from his lips. It was a cry such as Indian dogs make about the tepees of masters who are newly dead. He had never heard such a cry before, and yet he knew that it ...
— The Danger Trail • James Oliver Curwood
... and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows. We require an infusion of hemlock-spruce or arbor-vitae in our tea. There is a difference between eating and drinking for strength and from mere gluttony. The Hottentots eagerly devour the marrow of the koodoo and other antelopes raw, ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... stopped short, seeming to shrink smaller and smaller before my eyes. Then he edged sidewise to a great stump, hid himself among the roots, and stood stock-still,—a beautiful picture of innocence and curiosity, framed in the rough brown roots of the spruce stump. It was his first teaching to hide and be still. Just as he needed it most, he had forgotten absolutely the ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... awaiting them. But the birds had come, punctual as ever, and the bluejays were screaming in the orchard, robins were perking up their heads and tails as they went house-hunting, purple finches in their little red hoods were feasting on the spruce buds, and the faithful chip birds chirped gayly on the grapevine trellis where they had lived all winter, warming their little gray breasts against the southern side of the house when the sun shone, and hiding under the evergreen ...
— Jack and Jill • Louisa May Alcott
... corridor to the stairs, smiling to himself. Christmas at Spindrift was fun. The entire scientific staff and their families joined in, first in cutting their own trees from the stand of spruce at the back side of the island, then in decorating the big tree in the Brant library. On Christmas Eve there was a Yule log to be brought in and presents to be exchanged, although the Brants waited until morning to open their gifts ...
— The Egyptian Cat Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... full-size bed blanket of heavy gray wool. The man's ingenuity seemed endless. Without seeming to have any extra luggage, he had nevertheless carried a very efficient camp outfit with him. He took his hunting knife, went to the spruce grove and cut many small, green branches, returning with all he could hold in his arms. She watched him lay them tips up for a mattress, and was secretly glad that she knew this much at least of camp comfort. He spread the blanket over them ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... here!" said Dapplegrim; "make haste, now, and throw the ox-hides, with the spikes in them, over me, and throw down the tar-barrel on the plain; then climb up into that great spruce-fir yonder. When it comes, fire will flash out of both nostrils, and then the tar-barrel will catch fire. Now, mind what I say. If the flame rises, I win; if it falls, I lose; but if you see me winning, take and cast ...
— Tales of Wonder Every Child Should Know • Various
... higher hills. Towering, broken crags loomed ahead darkly in the gathering gloom. The vast riven facets cut the sky-line, and black patches of pine forests, and spruce, gave a ghostly, threatening outlook. They must have been riding over two hours when Scipio realized they were passing over a narrow cattle track on the summit of a wooded hill. Then presently their ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... the eyes, and was stammering something about the true priest cut off from earthly marriage, therefore free to commit himself completely to his work, when Mrs. Callender came back, spruce and smart, with many smiles and curtsies. The Prime Minister greeted her with the same old-fashioned courtesy, and they cooed away like two old doves, until a splendid equipage drove up to the door, and the plain old gentleman drove ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... ocean now I fly, And those happy climes that lie Where day never shuts his eye, Up in the broad fields of the sky. There I suck the liquid air, All amidst the gardens fair Of Hesperus, and his daughters three That sing about the golden tree. Along the crisped shades and bowers Revels the spruce and jocund Spring; The Graces and the rosy-bosomed Hours Thither all their bounties bring. There eternal Summer dwells; And west winds with musky wing About the cedarn alleys fling Nard and cassia's balmy smells. Iris there with humid bow Waters ...
— L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Comus, and Lycidas • John Milton
... curling up from the chimney straight as a column, for there was not a breath of air stirring. The sun was almost gone, and the strong bluish light was settling on everything, giving even the green spruce-trees a curious ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... limbs dangle the tempting wares, and a stump serves as a chopping-block. Under the shrubbery, where the sun cannot penetrate, are stored home-made firkins full of yellow butter, and great cheeses, and heaps of substantial home-baked bread. Kegs of hard cider and spruce beer and perhaps more potent brews are abroach, and behind the haggling and jesting and bustle you may catch the sound of muskets or the whoop of the Indians from afar. Meanwhile, in the settlements, all manner of industries were stimulated, and a great number of women throughout the ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... occasionally emitting short shrieks of protest. The mountains, which had gradually been assuming shape and color, were now looming up in grand proportions, their rugged outlines clearly defined against the sky. Already the mountain breezes, fragrant with the breath of tamarack, spruce and pine, stole in on adventurous wings through the car windows; lifted locks, both golden and silvered, from heated brows, kissed a fretful infant into peaceful slumber, turned the pages of novels and flapped newspapers so persistently ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... on the wild heights of the island of Mount Desert. They entered a bay that stretched inland between iron-bound shores, and gave it the name of St. Sauveur. It is now called Frenchman's Bay. They saw a coast-line of weather-beaten crags set thick with spruce and fir, the surf-washed cliffs of Great Head and Schooner Head, the rocky front of Newport Mountain, patched with ragged woods, the arid domes of Dry Mountain and Green Mountain, the round bristly backs of the Porcupine Islands, and the waving ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... forge for the iron work, and to erect tents for the sailmakers and coopers. They applied themselves, also, to the brewing of beer from the branches or leaves of a tree, which greatly resembled the American black spruce. Captain Cook was persuaded, from the knowledge which he had of this tree, and from the similarity it bore to the spruce, that, with the addition of inspissated juice of wort and molasses, it would make a very wholesome liquor, and supply the want of vegetables, of which the country was destitute. ...
— Narrative of the Voyages Round The World, • A. Kippis
... new expedient and forged a parole. The next day all three of us were quietly walking down the guard-line on the outside. At the creek, where all the camp came for water, we found Dorr and Byers and West, and calling to one of them in the presence of the guard, asked for blankets to bring in spruce boughs for beds. When the blankets came they contained certain haversacks, cups, and little indispensable articles for the road. Falling back into the woods, we secured a safe hiding-place until after dark. Just beyond ...
— Famous Adventures And Prison Escapes of the Civil War • Various
... common. Rare on Vancouver Island. Brooks says common resident in the spruce zone ...
— Catalogue of British Columbia Birds • Francis Kermode
... true word spoken from the chest," I sighed, just as Uncle Peter made his first cast and cleverly wound about eight feet of line around a spruce tree on ...
— Back to the Woods • Hugh McHugh
... cabin built of spruce logs with an immense stone fireplace at one end of a long living room,—a comfortable backwoods place where one felt very close to the out-of-doors. Here the new arrivals found awaiting them Phillips, another member of the Jefferson eleven, and an ...
— The Mark of the Knife • Clayton H. Ernst
... fort is one immense level swamp, thickly covered with willows, and dotted here and there with a few clumps of pine-trees. The only large timber in the vicinity grows on the banks of Hayes and Nelson Rivers, and consists chiefly of spruce fir. The swampy nature of the ground has rendered it necessary to raise the houses in the fort several feet in the air upon blocks of wood; and the squares are intersected by elevated wooden platforms, which form the only promenade the inhabitants have ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... settling himself comfortably in the corner by the door, while the elder of his companions—a tall, spare American—crossed his long legs and lighted a thin black cigar, and the younger—a spruce young Englishman wearing an eye-glass and a small mustache—wrapped himself in his rugs, took a clean pocket-handkerchief from his dressing-case, and opened a large bundle of ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... as shared the serenity of nature. Surely good courage will not flag here on the Atlantic border, as long as we are flanked by the Fur Countries. There is enough in that sound to cheer one under any circumstances. The spruce, the hemlock, and the pine will not countenance despair. Methinks some creeds in vestries and churches do forget the hunter wrapped in furs by the Great Slave Lake, and that the Esquimaux sledges are drawn by dogs, and in the twilight ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... the bell a second time, and the baby squirrels began playing among the mosses. There was the smell of newly plowed fields. The tinkle of sheep and cow bells could be heard, and the pine and spruce trees covered themselves with red cones, like kings in ...
— Tell Me Another Story - The Book of Story Programs • Carolyn Sherwin Bailey
... sprigs, crossed in certain ways and left upon the trail, compose the patteran. But they must always be of different trees or shrubs. Thus, on the ranch here, a patteran could be made of manzanita and madrono, of oak and spruce, of buckeye and alder, of redwood and laurel, of huckleberry and lilac. It is a sign of Gypsy comrade to Gypsy comrade, of Gypsy lover to Gypsy lover." And ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... of late years been introduced'. The teapot and the mug of ale jointly possessed the breakfast table, and meat and pudding smoked on the board every noon. Formerly one might see at church what was the cut of a coat half a century ago, now dress was spruce and modern.[481] As a proof of the spirit of improvement among farmers, Marshall instances the custom in the Midlands of placing their sons as pupils on other farms to widen their experience. 'Their entertainments are as expensive as ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... 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 ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... 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 ...
— In Friendship's Guise • Wm. Murray Graydon
... in the Albany, did Fledgeby, and maintained a spruce appearance. But his youthful fire was all composed of sparks from the grindstone; and as the sparks flew off, went out, and never warmed anything, be sure that Fledgeby had his tools at the grindstone, and turned it with ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... by the Old South Congregation in 1753 when it offered its sanctuary to the worshipers in King's Chapel, after that edifice was burned, for them to hold their Christmas services. It was with the implicit understanding that there was to be no spruce, holly, or other greens used on that occasion to ...
— Yule-Tide in Many Lands • Mary P. Pringle and Clara A. Urann
... I stood in the hall, a tall, clean-shaven, rather spruce young man entered and spoke to the concierge, who at once brought ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux
... it was raining, they sat beside their fire in a desolate gorge. A cold wind swept between the thin spruce trunks that loomed vaguely out of the surrounding gloom as the red glare leaped up, and wisps of acrid smoke drifted about the camp. There was a lake up the hollow, and now and then the wild and mournful cry ...
— The Intriguers • Harold Bindloss
... "I think I'm rather different from other wimmin, Elizabeth. Very few would admire a man like Mr. Roarings. But 'e's my style, so to speak, if I was pickin' an' choosin'. But to show you 'ow strange I am," she goes on, "if 'e made 'isself spruce I should get to dislike 'im all ...
— Our Elizabeth - A Humour Novel • Florence A. Kilpatrick
... with himself; and, since there was not a bit of chocolate on his trousers, he looked unusually spruce and handsome, too. Sara skipped along beside him delightedly; only, sometimes when she looked back, she wished she could stay with Avrillia while she was in such a lovely mood, and all those interesting ...
— The Garden of the Plynck • Karle Wilson Baker
... thought in his head not purely admiring; but still he looked up. The knot of office-boys, crowding and skylarking across a couple of seats, stopped their shuffle and noise for a second, and one said, "My! ain't she stunning?" A young fellow, rather spruce in his own way also, with precise necktie, deep paper cuffs and dollar-store studs and initial sleeve-buttons, touched his hat with an air of taking credit to himself, as she glanced at him; and another, in a sober old gray suit, with ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... Romish and Protestant steeples, and the dwellings of fishermen, with the universal appendages of fishing-houses, boats, and "flakes." One seldom looks upon a hamlet so picturesque and wild. The rocks slope steeply down to the wonderfully clear water. Thousands of poles support half-acres of the spruce-bough shelf, beneath which is a dark, cool region, crossed with foot-paths, and not unfrequently sprinkled and washed by the surf,—a most kindly office on the part of the sea, you will allow, when once you have scented the fish-offal perpetually ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... far from the lodge as I could, and remained there until my mother came and found me out. She knew what was the matter, and brought me nearer to the family lodge, and bade me help her in making a small lodge of branches of the spruce tree. She told me to remain there, and keep away from every one, and as a diversion, to keep myself employed in chopping wood, and that she would bring me plenty of prepared bass-wood bark to twist into twine. She told me she would come to see me, in two days, ...
— Old Mackinaw - The Fortress of the Lakes and its Surroundings • W. P. Strickland
... wore an old linen duster, a black slouch hat, and a pair of light blue pants thrust into the tops of heavy boots which were seldom blacked, but often splashed with Cairo mud. But everybody stepped respectfully aside to let him pass, and the spruce young staff officers never failed to salute. It was ...
— Rodney The Partisan • Harry Castlemon
... bough delighted fly, 20 Some rise, and circling light to perch again; A pleasing murmur hums along the plain. So, when a stage invites to pageant shows, (If great and small are like) appear the beaux; In boxes some with spruce pretension sit, Some change from seat to seat within the pit, Some roam the scenes, or turning cease to roam; Preluding music fills the lofty dome. When thus a fly (if what a fly can say Deserves attention) raised ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... within a short period of time?" asked, somewhat abruptly, a little thick-set man, who was enjoying his pipe and negus in a sociable way at the window-seat. The characteristics of this personage were, a spruce wig, a bottle nose, an elevated eyebrow, a snuff-coloured skin and coat, and an air of that consequential self-respect which distinguishes the philosopher who agrees with the French sage, and sees "no reason in the world why a man ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... goodness you'd keep your goods in better order. In front of your store, on sidewalk and gutter, are old fruits, potatoes, and sundry other things too old to be quite nice. So spruce things up, and you will ...
— Marjorie's Busy Days • Carolyn Wells
... vale where, among groves of poplar and abele, winds silver Whit. Come and breakfast at the neat white inn, of yore a posting-house of fame. The stables are now turned into cottages; and instead of a dozen spruce ostlers and helpers, the last of the postboys totters sadly about the yard and looks up eagerly at the rare sight of a horse to feed. But the house keeps up enough of its ancient virtue to give us a breakfast worthy of Pantagruel's self; and after it, while we are looking out our ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... open island channel, with a strip of dark rocks fringing the land within, and another dark strip fringing the barren Eilean Chaisteil outside,—lay the Betsey, looking wonderfully diminutive, but evidently a little thing of high spirit, taut-masted, with a smart rake aft, and a spruce outrigger astern, and flaunting her triangular flag of blue in the sun. I pointed first to the manse, and then to the yacht. The minister shook ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... That's all. A Norway spruce cone. When it is dry its scales are open. I filled them with grass seed and put the cone in a small tumbler so that the lower end might be damp all the time. The dampness makes the scales close and starts the seed to sprouting. ...
— Ethel Morton's Enterprise • Mabell S.C. Smith
... I'd seen everything," he remarked. "But yellow pine, spruce, tamarack, apples, oaks, palms, oranges, cedars, joshua trees and cactus—just to name a few—all growing on the ...
— Masters of Space • Edward Elmer Smith
... the Squire, calling up a spruce embodiment of blue cloth, brass buttons, and pink cravat,—"I say! here's Cilly off the hooks to get hold of the new teacher. Whereabouts do you ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... 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 ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... ragtag hipplety-clinch: but I've been travelling Mischancy roads; and I'm fair muggert-up. Yet, why should that stagnate you? Where's the sense Of expecting a mislucket man like me To be as snod and spruce as a young shaver? But I'm all right: there's naught amiss with Jim, Except too much of nothing in his belly. A good square meal, and a pipe, and a decent night's rest, And I'll be fit as a fiddle. I've hardly slept ... Well, now I'm home, I'll ...
— Krindlesyke • Wilfrid Wilson Gibson
... not much left of the steamer, and I am not justified in throwing away the lives of my men," replied a very spruce-looking officer. ...
— On The Blockade - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray Afloat • Oliver Optic
... to his liking. He nicknamed it "strike-me-blind," being firmly convinced that its continued use would rob him of his eyesight. Tea was not added to his dietary till 1824, but as early as 1795 he could regale himself on cocoa. For the rest, sugar, essence of malt, essence of spruce, mustard, cloves, opium and "Jesuits'" or Peruvian bark were considered essential to his well-being on shipboard. He was further allowed a barber-one to every hundred men-without whose attentions it was found impossible to keep him "clean ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... or five inches diameter at the butt, leaving an open passage between. Then lay in brush of any size, the coarsest at the bottom, filling the drain to within a foot of the surface, and covering with pine, or hemlock, or spruce boughs. Upon these lay turf, carefully cut, as close as possible. The brush should be laid but-end up stream, as it obstructs the water less in this way. Fill up with soil a foot above the surface, and tread it in as hard as ...
— Farm drainage • Henry Flagg French
... variety of tree, particularly of the evergreen class. Their branches brushed into the carriage as we passed along, and left us with that pleasant woody smell belonging to leaves. One of the ladies, catching a bit of green from one of these intruding branches, said it was cedar, and another thought it spruce. ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... I'll run, and spruce myself up a bit. Aye, aye, I hav'n't prophesied a customer to-day for ...
— John Bull - The Englishman's Fireside: A Comedy, in Five Acts • George Colman
... went forward rapidly. The pool kept its reputation good and yielded abundantly to the solicitation of Herbert's flies. The trout were large and in excellent condition and were quickly made ready for the trapper's treatment. A large piece of bark, peeled from a giant spruce standing near, and laid upon the ground, served for the table,—against the dark bark of which the tin dishes freshly scoured in the sand of the beach gleamed bright. The venison and trout were cooked as only one accustomed ...
— How Deacon Tubman and Parson Whitney Kept New Year's - And Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... Berta's eyes as the last lingering strains died away. Oh, dear! why did they sing that good-bye serenade again? Berta was going to cry. Hark! A robin's twilight call rose melodiously from the heart of a shadowy spruce. In the thrill of it Robbie felt the sting of sudden tears. She turned ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz
... and our coming was celebrated by a dinner of wild goose, plum pudding, and coffee. After the voyage from Halifax it seemed good to rest a little with the firm earth under foot, and where the walls of one's habitation were still. Through the open windows came the fragrance of the spruce woods, and from the little piazza in front of the house you could look down and across Lake Melville, and away to the blue mountains beyond, where the snow was ...
— A Woman's Way Through Unknown Labrador • Mina Benson Hubbard (Mrs. Leonidas Hubbard, Junior)
... all directions in search of more effective cover. Our shrapnel barrage had been considerably improved also, and the moment the enemy left their positions it promptly came down and drove them to earth again. The 7th were worn out, and the men were losing their spruce appearance, but rifles and L.G's. were kept clean, and amidst the terrific shelling of that day they asked for nothing better than that Jerry would try to come across to give them an opportunity for revenge. ...
— The Seventh Manchesters - July 1916 to March 1919 • S. J. Wilson
... It was Steel, spruce and serene as ever, a pink glow upon his mobile face, a pink flower in his reefer jacket, a jaunty Panama straw covering his white hairs, and buckskin shoes of kindred purity upon his small and well-shaped feet. Langholm greeted him in turn, only trusting that the tremors which had been instantly ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... may be) Thus low I take off mine to thee, The homage of a layman's castor, To the spruce delta of his pastor. Oh mayst thou be, as thou proceedest, Still smarter cockt, still brusht the brighter, Till, bowing all the way, thou leadest Thy ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... if it had been a pilgrimage or religious duty, while meantime there was always a kind of Russian carnival on the ice, oxen being sometimes roasted whole, and all kinds of "fakirs," as they are now termed, selling doughnuts, spruce-beer, and gingerbread, or tempting the adventurous with thimblerig; many pedestrians stopping at the old-fashioned inn on Smith's Island for hot punch. Juleps and cobblers, and the "one thousand and one American fancy drinks," were not as yet invented, ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... this wilderness, a hillock of grass, descending into which you find a small chamber painted all round with a deep hedge of orchard and woodland plants, pomegranates, apples, arbutus, small pines and spruce firs, all most lovingly and knowingly given, with birds nesting and pecking, in brilliant enamel like encaustic on an enamel ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee
... 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 highest ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... hard during the night and continued well on into the next morning, so we made a late start, breaking camp at eight o'clock. Spruce, alders, willows, and birch were the trees growing along the banks, and we now passed through the country where the moose range during the summer months. Already the days had become perceptibly shorter, and there ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various
... Waller lived was one of a row of semi-detached villas on the north side of the Common. The door was opened to them by their host himself. So far from looking battered and emitting last breaths, he appeared particularly spruce. He had just returned from Church, and was still wearing his gloves and tall hat. He squeaked with surprise when he saw who were standing ...
— Psmith in the City • P. G. Wodehouse
... come down, they made themselves comfortable under some immense spruce trees whose branches almost touched the ground. Here supper was had, and then Henry and Barringford, accompanied by White Buffalo; moved up to the top of a small hill which was close at hand, hoping to discover something from ...
— On the Trail of Pontiac • Edward Stratemeyer
... new set of people fill the streets. The goods in the shop-windows are invitingly arranged; the shopmen in their white neckerchiefs and spruce coats, look as it they couldn't clean a window if their lives depended on it; the carts have disappeared from Covent-garden; the waggoners have returned, and the costermongers repaired to their ordinary 'beats' in the suburbs; clerks ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... ago, longer than you can imagine, Bertha, forests were growing along the shores of the Baltic Sea. There was a great deal of gum in the trees of these forests. It oozed out of the trees in the same manner as gum from the spruce-tree and ...
— Bertha • Mary Hazelton Wade
... 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 ...
— God's Country—And the Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... watched him as he leant over the piano, looking through the songs which she had dared once more to bring forth from her room. She might well have taken a romantic interest in the dark and dapper man, with the military eye-glass and mustache, the spruce duck jacket and the spurred top-boots. It was her first meeting with such a type in the back-blocks of New South Wales. The gallant ease, the natural gayety, the charming manners that charmed no less for a clear trace of mannerism, were a peculiar refreshment ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... course: it at one time conveyed no suggestion of mean finery or shabby splendour, as now it does. 'Voluble' was an epithet which had nothing of slight in it, but meant what 'fluent' means now; 'dapper' was what in German 'tapfer' is; not so much neat and spruce as brave and bold; 'plausible' was worthy of applause; 'pert' is now brisk and lively, but with a very distinct subaudition, which once it had not, of sauciness as well; 'lewd' meant no more than unlearned, as ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... and on the next night the west wind cautioned them. But this third warning was equally futile. On the fourth night came the south wind. It breathed into Suha's ear that he alone had been good and should be saved, and bade him make a hollow ball of spruce gum in which he might float while the deluge lasted. Suha and his wife immediately set out to gather the gum, that they melted and shaped until they had made a large, rounded ark, which they ballasted with jars of nuts, acorn-meal and ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... starlight they threaded the spruce forest down by the sea, and found the "camp," a wooden box, with a broad veranda ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... the thing you had under your coat was a saw. I saw you hide something under the woodpile here, but I'm so dumb that I didn't think much of it at the time. Now, the log over the gully was a spruce log, ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys as Sergeants - or, Handling Their First Real Commands • H. Irving Hancock
... Bender, my old-time evening-school instructor. I had not seen him for more than three years, during which time he had developed a pronounced tendency to baldness, though his apple face had lost none of its roseate freshness. He looked spruce as ever, his clothes spick and span, his "four-in-hand" tastefully tied, his collar and cuffs immaculate. His hazel eyes, however, had a worn ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... In the last years he would walk every evening to look at the great stag-headed ruins of the oaks, which thrust their gnarled and crooked limbs fantastically into the closing night, or stand watching the shadows fall on the spruce rides which stretch out near the old inn, till, in the fading light, it seemed as though figures were moving in and out on the greensward of the great vistas. In the bright sunshine, imposing silence on himself and his companions, he would watch for long ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... and measurements here given are the result of careful experiments and some failures. Fig. 1 is an elevation, Fig. 2 a ground-plan of the frame, and Fig. 3 a section of a runner. Get a spruce plank, A, 12 feet long, 6 inches wide, 2 inches thick. This is the backbone of the structure. Cut near one end of it a hole two inches square to receive ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, January 1878, No. 3 • Various
... boggy character, has been clothed by 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 in ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... two flys had driven off and the spectators had vanished, Barnet followed to the door, and went out into the sun. He took no more trouble to preserve a spruce exterior; his step was unequal, hesitating, almost convulsive; and the slight changes of colour which went on in his face seemed refracted from some inward flame. In the churchyard he became pale as a summer cloud, and ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... between this basin and the sea. The place, well chosen from the point of view of the soldier or the fisherman, was unfit for an agricultural colony, its surroundings being barren hills studded with spruce and fir, and broad marshes buried ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... stories high, and its spruce walls of Portland stone and ashlar work rise sheer out of the green sward; in front, Doric columns support a heavy entablature, and there are urns at the corners of the building. The six windows on the ground floor are topped with round arches, and coming up the drive the house seems ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... hate the Kaiser; a bunch of them were in France, and more would have come, if the government had not kept them cross by putting their leaders into jail. An army officer with some sense had gone into the spruce-country of the far North-west, and had appealed to the patriotism of the men, giving them decent hours and wages, and recognizing their unions; as a result, even the dreaded I.W.W. organization ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... Pete 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 he'd ...
— Amarilly of Clothes-line Alley • Belle K. Maniates
... than did the god of war. But worse than all, a jealous brain confines His fury to no law; what rage assigns Is present justice: thus the rash sword spills This lecher's blood; the scourge another kills. But thy spruce boy must touch no other face Than a patrician? is of any race So they be rich; Servilia is as good, With wealth, as she that boasts Iulus' blood. To please a servant all is cheap; what thing In all their stock to the last suit, and king, But lust exacts? the ...
— Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II • Henry Vaughan
... driving her right up on the beach for safety's sake, there being no anchor. Then—Neil carrying a small basket the while and Duncan a coil of rope—they passed through a wood of young larches and spruce, the air smelling strongly of bracken and meadow-sweet after the rain; and finally they reached the rocky eminence on which stood the ruins. There was no way up, for tourists did not come that way, and the owner of the island, who was a farmer ...
— The Beautiful Wretch; The Pupil of Aurelius; and The Four Macnicols • William Black
... stuck our axes in a log and went on the snow crust up to the foot of a mountain, about half a mile distant, where the hardwood growth gave place to spruce. We wanted to dig a pocketful of spruce gum. For several days Ellen and Theodora had been asking us to get them some ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... shadow from the spruce there, Ranald," she cried, pointing to a deep, black turn in the road. For answer there came from behind them the long, mournful hunting-cry of the wolf. He was on their track. Immediately it was answered by a chorus of howls from ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... "Charge" was given, and the entire force, perhaps a hundred and fifty strong, fell in one solid mass on the mob, knocking men over right and left, and laying heads open at every blow. The panic-stricken crowd fled up Chatham Street, across the Park, and down Spruce and Frankfort Streets, punished terribly at every step. The space around the building being cleared, a portion of the police rushed inside, where the work of destruction was going on. The sight of the blue-coats ...
— The Great Riots of New York 1712 to 1873 • J.T. Headley
... James's Parke, being unwilling to go to spend money at the ordinary, and there spent an hour or two, it being a pleasant day, seeing people play at Pell Mell; where it pleased me mightily to hear a gallant, lately come from France, swear at one of his companions for suffering his man (a spruce blade) to be so saucy as to strike a ball while his master was ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... plants come under this class, and are excellent climbers. One of the most remarkable is the Marcgravia umbellata, the stem of which in the tropical forests of South America, as I hear from Mr. Spruce, grows in a curiously flattened manner against the trunks of trees; here and there it puts forth claspers (roots), which adhere to the trunk, and, if the latter be slender, completely embrace it. When this plant has climbed to ...
— The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants • Charles Darwin
... umbrella on the veranda, and aunt Helen led me into the dining-room, where a spruce maid was making a pleasant clatter in laying the table. Caddagat was a very old style of house, and all the front rooms opened onto the veranda without any such preliminary as a hall, therefore it was necessary to pass through ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... time of our abode among these islands we found reasonable quantity of wood, both fir, spruce, and juniper; which, whether it came floating any great distance to these places where we found it, or whether it grew in some great islands near the same place by us not yet discovered, we know not. But we judge that it groweth there farther into the ...
— Voyages in Search of the North-West Passage • Richard Hakluyt
... much about girls and society and dances and theatres, and nothing about work. Remember, I am footing the bills. When I was your age I got up at 4 in the morning and toiled away in the fields till sundown, and then I was too tired to spruce up and play at being a gentleman. If you're going to be a doctor, you'd better take ...
— The Mermaid of Druid Lake and Other Stories • Charles Weathers Bump
... of the night the roar of the fall sounds loud and near; the north-west wind sways the tops of spruce and fir with a sweet cool sighing; again and again, farther away and yet farther, an owl is hooting; the chill that ushers in the dawn is still remote. And Maria, in perfect contentment, rests upon the step, watching the ruddy beam from her fire-flickering, disappearing, ...
— Maria Chapdelaine - A Tale of the Lake St. John Country • Louis Hemon
... the blood of my heart, The wind of the plain my breath. No woodsman am I. My eyes are set For the wide low lines. The level rim Of the prairie land is mine. The semi-gloom of the pointed firs, The sleeping darks of the mountain spruce, Are prison and poison to such as I. In the forest I long for the rose of the plain, In the dark of the firs ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... sister back quickly a dozen steps, and they hid behind a giant spruce to watch. The scene that followed was like the holiday spectacle in a London Terminus, except that the passengers had no luggage. The other difference was that they seemed intent upon some purpose not wholly for their own advantage. It seemed, too, they had expected somebody to meet them, ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... 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 ...
— The Iroquois Book of Rites • Horatio Hale
... spruce and scholarly, hugely pleased with himself, because he had an article in The National Review, on the strenght of the colonies in war time; and some lines entitled "Baby's Boredom" in Fireside Chat, concerning which he had already announced his intention of standing ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... The churchyard was as smooth and correct as a newly-barbered head, not a hair out of place. We looked and kept our thoughts to ourselves, but we wondered if the dead were really as grateful as they should be for this drastic house-cleaning? Did they appreciate this mathematical uniformity, this spruce and spotless residential air of their numbered rectangular rest; or was not the old way nearer to their desire, with soft mosses tucking them in from the garish sun, and Spring winds spreading coverlets of wild ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne
... him acrost the flat, with their tongues out; so he soopled himself up a bit with a few jumps and made for that there big down spruce. He lands on the trunk and runs along it to where the top begins. He has it all worked out. He's saying: "If this here is a joke, all right; but if it ain't a joke I better have some place back of me for ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... morning long Cuffy Bear and his sister Silkie played and played as hard as they could. They played that they were making maple-sugar. And they pretended to hang buckets on all the trees near Mr. Bear's house. There were no maple trees about Cuffy's home—only pine and hemlock and spruce—but if you are just pretending to make maple-sugar any ...
— The Tale of Cuffy Bear • Arthur Scott Bailey
... his surgery at the agency for his midday meal, and his abundant toned hail reached his wife in a remote bedroom in the almost luxurious home which he had had set up amidst the spruce woods ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... Yet he was modest and unassuming, and appeared really to enjoy his life of hard work; varying his struggles with a kernel of hard corn on the ground, where his color shone out like a flower against the green, with a rest on a spruce-tree, where ...
— A Bird-Lover in the West • Olive Thorne Miller
... beasts roared about her, but none did her any harm. In the evening she came to a little cottage, and went in there to rest herself, for her weary feet would carry her no further. Everything was spruce and neat in the cottage: on the table was spread a white cloth, and there were seven little plates with seven little loaves and seven little glasses with wine in them; and knives and forks laid in order, and by the wall stood seven little beds. Then, as she was very hungry, she picked ...
— My Book of Favorite Fairy Tales • Edric Vredenburg
... far-off days when fashion itself had not become old-fashioned and got improved into Smart Society,—this haunted half-mile or more still retains many fine old residences of brown stone and of red brick, which are spruce and well-kept. One such, on the west side of the street, of red brick, with a high stoop of brown stone, is a boarding-house, and in it is an apartment to which, on a certain clear, cold afternoon in October, the reader's presence in the spirit ...
— The Mystery of Murray Davenport - A Story of New York at the Present Day • Robert Neilson Stephens
... Spruce went up on spec? Very enterprising of you both, I am sure! And did you make anything ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... unexceptionable, and had completed the most arduous day's walk in his journal, nearly thirteen miles, in a state of dust and heat far from agreeable to a stoutish gentleman of forty, who usually looked as spruce as if he came out of a band-box. Hanmer and he seemed really glad to see each other. On those "oxless" shores, where, as Byron says, "beef ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... things which threaten to make the tapers turn bottom upward! Part and parcel of all this was I, Christopher, most reckless of rheumatism, most careless of dignity, the round, bald top of my head to be seen emerging everywhere from the thick boughs of the spruce, now devising an airy settlement for some gossamer-robed doll, now adjusting far back on a stiff branch Tom's new little skates, now balancing bags of sugar-plums and candy, and now combating desperately with some contumacious taper that would turn slantwise or crosswise, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... May 31st, 1884, at 8 P.M., the Commission met at the house of the Provost, 1811 Spruce Street, for the purpose of sealing a slate to be left with the Medium, Mrs. Patterson, who was to try to procure independent writing upon the inside surfaces. There were present Dr. Pepper, Mr. Furness, Professor Thompson and Mr. Fullerton. Mr. Furness ...
— Preliminary Report of the Commission Appointed by the University • The Seybert Commission
... wharves no more, nor at the weedy slips, She comes to port with cargo from many a storied clime. No more to the rough-throat chantey her windlass creaks in time. No more she loads for London with spices from Ceylon,— With white spruce deals and wheat and apples from St. John. No more from Pernambuco with cotton-bales,—no more With hides from Buenos Ayres ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... to the ultimate springs of slang? A verb which I never met before I enlisted was "to spruce." This is almost, if not quite, a blend of "swinging the lead" and "doing a mike." To spruce is to dodge duty or to deceive. A man who contrived to slip out of the ranks of a squad when they were performing some distasteful task would be said to "spruce off." Or he would be denounced ...
— Observations of an Orderly - Some Glimpses of Life and Work in an English War Hospital • Ward Muir
... 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
... hear the note of selfishness, but with harmonic overtones that change its quality, the result of a change in the way of regarding women. Where women are looked down on as inferiors, as among the ancients, amorous hyperbole cannot be sincere; it is either nothing but "spruce affectation" or else an illustration of the power of sensual love. No ancient author could have written what Emerson wrote in his essay on Love, of the visitations ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck |
