"Tuft" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Fiend, Meer Serpent in appearance, forth was come, And on his Quest, where likeliest he might finde The onely two of Mankinde, but in them The whole included Race, his purposd prey. In Bowre and Field he sought, where any tuft Of Grove or Garden-Plot more pleasant lay, Thir tendance or Plantation for delight, By Fountain or by shadie Rivulet 420 He sought them both, but wish'd his hap might find Eve separate, he wish'd, but not with hope Of what so seldom chanc'd, when to his wish, Beyond his hope, Eve separate ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... Halley, as observed by Dr. Bessel in 1835, showed that a more or less well-defined tuft of rays emanated from that part of the nucleus which was turned towards the sun; and the rays being bent backward formed a part of the tail. The nucleus, with its emanations, presented the appearance of a burning rocket, the end of which was turned ...
— Outlines of a Mechanical Theory of Storms - Containing the True Law of Lunar Influence • T. Bassnett
... that speech revealed everything. Gainor stiffened a little and the tuft of beard which ran down to a point on his chin quivered and jutted out. The sheriff seemed to feel nothing more than a mild surprise and curiosity. And the three went silently, side by side, under the spruce. They were glorious ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand
... rose-water, and as much verjuyce, and stir and mingle all well together, and fill the pies, and close them, and bake them, they will not be above two hours a baking, and serve them all seventeen upon one dish, or plate, and ice them, or scrape sugar on them; every one of these Pies should have a tuft of paste jagged on ...
— The accomplisht cook - or, The art & mystery of cookery • Robert May
... Mehetabel ran among sheets of gold, leaped ribbons of shining metal, danced among golden filagree—the reflection of the orb in the patches, channels, frets of water. She sprang from one dark tuft of rushes to another; she ran along the ridges of the sand. She skipped where the surface was treacherous. What mattered it to her if she missed her footing, sank, and the ooze closed over her? As well end so a life that could never be other than ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... said the man, drawing himself up, and brushing the tuft of hair over the top of his forehead, so that it stood up fiercely, and gave his whole head some resemblance to the conventional naming shell of military ornamentation. "Of course, I couldn't think of a military eddication ...
— The Queen's Scarlet - The Adventures and Misadventures of Sir Richard Frayne • George Manville Fenn
... mounds side by side, elevated a little above the surface of the ground, ten or twelve feet in diameter, with a shallow depression in their summits. When one of them was opened, not long since, no bones, nor armor, nor weapons were discovered, nothing but some small jewels, and a tuft of hair,—perhaps from the head of a valiant general, who, dying on the field of his victory, bequeathed this lock, together with his indestructible fame, to after-ages. The hair and jewels are probably in the British Museum, where the potsherds and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... pictures have been drawn of the slights and indignities to which boys, whose means are inferior to those of their schoolfellows, are subject. I am happy to believe that this is a libel. There are, it is true, toadies and tuft hunters among boys as among men. That odious creature, the parasite of the Greek and Latin plays, exists still, but I do not believe that a boy is one whit the less liked, or is ever taunted with his poverty, provided he is a good fellow. Most of the miseries endured by boys whose pocket money ...
— By Sheer Pluck - A Tale of the Ashanti War • G. A. Henty
... formally adopted as a son in one of the Indian families. "The forms of the ceremony of adoption," says Mr. Peck,[36] "were often severe and ludicrous. The hair of the head is plucked out by a painful and tedious operation, leaving a tuft, some three or four inches in diameter, on the crown, for the scalp-lock, which is cut and dressed up with ribbons and feathers. The candidate is then taken into the river in a state of nudity, and there thoroughly washed and rubbed, 'to take all his white blood out.' This ablution is usually ...
— Life & Times of Col. Daniel Boone • Cecil B. Harley
... wife had it made and kept pansies growing there. We poured the water of my little lost boy's last bath onto the memory-bed. I keep pansies growing in one side of the bed in memory of her who loved them. In the other end I plant sweet alyssum in memory of my baby. A few pansies and a tuft of sweet alyssum smiled a welcome, though all the rest of my flowers were dead. We have a hop-vine at the window and it has protected the flowers in the memory-bed. How happy I have been, looking over the place! Some young calves have come while we were gone; ...
— Letters on an Elk Hunt • Elinore Pruitt Stewart
... unfortunately for some of his readers he leaves his index an index of names only, neglecting things. And thus I have had to extemporise an index for myself under such sad heads as those of Brodie's 'passionateness,' his 'covetousness,' his 'time-serving' and 'tuft-hunting,' and suchlike. And I am compelled in truth to say that the entries in my index under 'covetousness' and under 'time-serving' and 'tergiversation' is a long and yet far from exhaustive list. And now, acting, I hope, on the ...
— Samuel Rutherford - and some of his correspondents • Alexander Whyte
... looking man beyond middle age with large eyes that showed signs of dissipation. He had a small dark tuft beneath his lower lip and thin, black, ...
— The Light in the Clearing • Irving Bacheller
... come so natural to you as it would do. Howandiver, you know that there's but the one cure for it—a hair of the same dog that bit you; and if you're afeared to take the same hair by yourself, why I'll take a tuft of it wid you, an' we'll dhrink the wife's health—my ould sweetheart—and ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... fields. The manner in which they eat their roots of the plantain in my grass-walks is very curious: with their upper mandible, which is much longer than their lower, they bore under the plant, and so eat the root off upwards, leaving the tuft of leaves untouched. In this respect they are serviceable, as they destroy a very troublesome weed; but they deface the waffles in some measure by digging little round holes. It appears, by the dung that they drop upon the turf, that beetles are no inconsiderable ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... when it is desirable to move a tuft of it, it should be done during the growing season, so that it may begin to root at once and get established, otherwise the wind and frosts will ...
— Hardy Perennials and Old Fashioned Flowers - Describing the Most Desirable Plants, for Borders, - Rockeries, and Shrubberies. • John Wood
... daintily, the "bell," or tuft of coarse hair beneath his chin, swinging to his pace. Occasionally a cottontail leaped from his path and paused to stare, big ears alert and nose twitching sensitively; or a red squirrel, that saucy mischief-maker of the woods, chattered derisively at him from the safe ...
— Followers of the Trail • Zoe Meyer
... centre of a square plot of ground enclosed with lattice work, is erected a wooden cross, painted black. Neither marble, nor stone, nor letters, indicate his name. Two pots of roses, and a tuft of violets, alone marked the spot, which is carefully weeded. There is something more affecting in all this simplicity, something, in my mind, that goes more directly home to the heart, than in the most splendid ...
— A Visit to the Monastery of La Trappe in 1817 • W.D. Fellowes
... uplifted on swanlike necks. Great turtles crawl slowly forward, hares and water-rats flee before preying beasts, and a fox bounds after a bat, which is chasing mosquitos by the river. It seems as if every tuft has come to life. But through it all the little birds sleep on the waving rushes, secure from all harm in that resting-place which no enemy can approach, without the water splashing or the reeds shaking ...
— Invisible Links • Selma Lagerlof
... into the field. The infantry consisted of a limited number of archers or slingers. They had usually neither shield nor cuirass, but merely, in the way of protective armour, a padded head-dress, ornamented with a tuft. The bulk of the army carried short lances and broad-bladed choppers, or more generally, short thin-handled swords with flat two-edged blades, very broad at the base and terminating in ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 5 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... doubtful breed, called "houn's" by courtesy; long legged, sleepy watch-dogs from the "quarters," brindled or "yaller" mongrels, which even courtesy could not term other than "kyur dogs"; sharp-voiced "fises," busier than bees, hunting like fury, as if they expected to find rats in every tuft of grass; and, when the hares got up, bouncing and bobbing along, not much bigger than the "molly cottontails" they were after, getting in everyone's way and receiving sticks and stones in profusion, but with their spirits unbroken. And all these were in one incongruous ...
— The Long Hillside - A Christmas Hare-Hunt In Old Virginia - 1908 • Thomas Nelson Page
... become of him. He was now a tall young fellow, red-checked, broad-shouldered, and strong, and rather nice-looking. A slow, good-natured smile spread over his face when anyone spoke to him, and he had a way of flinging his head back, when the tuft of yellow hair which usually hung down over his forehead obscured his sight. Most people liked him, even though they laughed at him behind his back; but to his face nobody laughed, because his strength inspired respect. Nor did he know what fear was when he was roused; but that was probably, ...
— Boyhood in Norway • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... find, these past days; but what there were she gathered almost automatically, herself lost in a deep preoccupation. And all at once her hand reached toward a little vine of black berries, each with a green tuft at the end, not unlike gooseberries in ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall
... Presidential campaign to find a weak spot in the guard, and to send a spark straight into the thickest bunch of wiry sand grass, where the wind could fan it to a blaze and then seize it and bend the tall flame tongues until they licked around the next tuft of grass, and the next, and the next—until the spark was grown to a long, leaping line of fire, sweeping eastward with the relentless rush of a tidal ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower
... a tuft-hunter," said Rowdy, who had been at college with the barrister, and who, for his own part, has no more objection to a lord than you or I have; and adding, "Hang him, what business has HE to be giving ...
— A Little Dinner at Timmins's • William Makepeace Thackeray
... first pillowing the mangled head on a soft tuft of moss, tenderly as if it were conscious still. His nature was such that no shock, or pain, or sorrow to which humanity is liable, could bend or quell it, so as to deprive him, beyond a brief instant, of self-possession and calmness. It was not insensibility now, and hardly ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... 10th.—Two P.M.—This morning we started at about five, and reached this encampment soon after seven. A very nice ride, cool, and through a succession of crops of millet; a stiff, reedy stem, some twelve or fourteen feet high, with a tuft on the top, is the physiognomy of the millet stalk. It would puzzle the Tartar cavalry to charge us through this crop. As it is, we have seen no enemy; and Mr. Parkes has induced the inhabitants to sell us a good many sheep and oxen. Our tents were not pitched till ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... which the clang of the band, letting loose, rang out like a brass kettle rolling downstairs, all the guns were lowered. Then was seen stepping down from the carriage a gentleman in a short coat with silver braiding, with bald brow, and wearing a tuft of hair at the back of his head, of a sallow complexion and the most benign appearance. His eyes, very large and covered by heavy lids, were half-closed to look at the crowd, while at the same time he raised his sharp nose, and forced a smile upon ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... Sapphire, or Laugh of the Hills, as she was called. A long staff of iron-wood was in her hands, with which she jumped the dykes and streams and rocky fissures; in her breast were yellow roses, and there was a tuft of pretty feathers in her hair. She reached up and touched him on the breast with her staff, then she laughed again, and sang a snatch ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... remoteness from the world. Unless renewed by a yet further withdrawal towards the inner circle of self-communion, I lost the better part of my individuality. My thoughts became of little worth, and my sensibilities grew as arid as a tuft of moss ... crumbling in the sunshine, after long expectance of a shower." A fellow-toiler came upon him suddenly, one day, lying in a green hollow some distance from the farm, with his hands under his head and his face shaded by ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... medicine. This great Pearl-Feather slew the father of Niko'mis (the grandmother of Hiawatha). Hiawatha all day long fought with the magician without effect; at nightfall the woodpecker told him to strike at the tuft of hair on the magician's head, the only vulnerable place; accordingly, Hiawatha discharged his three remaining arrows at the hair tuft, and ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... himself down among the rank gray grass and heather, while the moor cock called to his mate in an agony of pleading passion, the lapwing crooned upon a tuft of grass as she prepared a place for her eggs, the whaup wheepled and twirled and cried in eerie alarm, the plover sighed to a low white cloud wandering past; while the snipe and the lark, the "mossie," the heather lintie, and the wandering, sighing winds among the reeds and rushes ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... gloom of one such chamber or space is traversed now by a golden shaft of light falling through some break in the upper foliage, giving a strange glory to everything it touches—projecting leaves, and beard-like tuft of moss, and snaky bush-rope. And in the most open part of that most open space, suspended on nothing to the eye, the shaft reveals a tangle of shining silver threads—the web of some large tree-spider. These seemingly distant yet distinctly visible ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... in awe of him. He looked what he was—a very king of lions, when, after a long sleep, he rose up in all his majesty of strength, shook his magnificent mane and lashed his tail, with its curious little black tuft, to and fro as though eager for ...
— Rataplan • Ellen Velvin
... the meantime closed his eyes and lost Canton and all else in delicate thoughts of Mian, to look up. That which met his attention on doing so filled him with an intelligent wonder, for the person before him held in his hand what had the appearance of a tuft of bright yellow hair, which shone in the light of the sun with a most engaging splendour, but which he nevertheless regarded with a most undignified expression of ...
— The Wallet of Kai Lung • Ernest Bramah
... 'kill-dog' bestowed upon it in some localities. Pursued to extremity, it casts itself into the water, swims with ease, and dives at the moment its enemy is about to seize it; or it conceals itself in a tuft of reeds or a bush, and by this means often escapes with impunity. It loves to breed among the reeds, and in long and thick grass, frequently in small companies of its own species, or of the Stellaris. The female lays her ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... seat the White Linen Nurse could have sworn that she heard a sharply ejaculated, maliciously joyful "Ha!" piped out. But when both she and the Senior Surgeon turned sharply round to make sure, the Little Crippled Girl, in apparently complete absorption, sat amiably extracting tuft after tuft of fur from the thumb of one big sable glove, to the rumbling, sing-song monotone of "He loves me—Loves me ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... they both started together. But the Hare, by reason of her exceeding swiftness, outran the Tortoise to such a degree, that she made a jest of the matter; and thinking herself sure of the race, squatted in a tuft of fern that grew by the way, and took a nap, thinking that, if the Tortoise went by, she could at any time overtake him with all the ease imaginable. In the meanwhile the Tortoise came jogging on with slow but continued motion; ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... giving an appearance of great roundness to the countenance. His features were regular, the mouth small and compressed, and on the upper lip he wore a moustache, parted in the centre, and brushed out horizontally, balanced by a tuft on the chin, four or five inches long. An adventurous spirit gazed out of his clear steady eyes, and altogether he looked like a man of determined temper, and one who, having once formed a resolution, would find it difficult to relinquish it. Around his neck ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... eyes, and brows that looked strangely thick, dark, and straight, in contrast with the pencilled arches belonging to all the rest, she was less weird and elfin-like than when she had been three inches shorter, and dressed more childishly. As Edgar said, she was less Riquet with a tuft than the good fairy godmother, and her twin sisters might have been her princess-wards, so far did they tower above her—straight as fir-trees, oval faced, regular featured, fair skinned, blue eyed, and bright haired. During ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the turf, at close quarters, with your eyes on the blades of grass? Whilst I was waiting for Babet, I pried indiscreetly into a tuft which was really a whole world. In my bunch of grass there were streets, cross roads, public squares, entire cities. At the bottom of it, I distinguished a great dark patch where the shoots of the previous spring were decaying sadly, then slender stalks were growing up, stretching ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... if he had been there. It was dreadful. The nightcap came over his forehead, down to his eyebrows, and he said to me, pressing my hand; "At last, Valentine; you are mine; do you love me? oh! tell me, do you love me?" And as his head moved as he uttered these words, the horrible tuft at the end of his ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... Skroelings. They were quite unlike the natives of Greenland, though of copper-colored complexion.[5] These men—there were no women among them,—were tall and sinewy, and wore their coarse black hair knotted up on the head with a tuft of feathers. They were naked to the waist, and wore fringed breeches of deerskin, and soft shoes embroidered in bright colors. Some had necklaces of bears' claws, beads or shells, but the only weapons seemed to be the bow and arrow ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey
... flowery hints foresay the berry, On spray of haw and tuft of brier, Then, wandering incendiary, You set the ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... from the canyon, now swollen to nearly fifty men, were slowly approaching from the direction of the chimney, and making use of every tuft, and bush, and rock, affording Bart a fine view from the gallery of the clever and cunning means an Indian will adopt to get within ...
— The Silver Canyon - A Tale of the Western Plains • George Manville Fenn
... scene, but, assisting her where it was requisite, began the steep and difficult ascent of the lower part of the cliff. The maiden's ingenuity in vain endeavored to assign reasons for this movement; but when they reached the tuft of trees, which, as has been noticed, grew at the ultimate point where mortal footstep might safely tread, she perceived through their thick branches the recess in the rock. Here they entered; and her guide pointed to a mossy seat, in the formation of which, to judge from its ...
— Fanshawe • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... River Corgo Fundo (elev. 1,250 ft.), along the banks of which the laminae of red-baked rock could be observed with thin white layers between. Above was a lovely green pasture with a tuft of deep green trees, which looked exactly like a bit of a well-kept English park. We mounted up again to 1,430 ft., then went down another descent into a large plain with campos, upon which grew merely ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... this: if a lad does not learn in the streets, it is because he has no faculty of learning. Nor is the truant always in the streets, for if he prefers, he may go out by the gardened suburbs into the country. He may pitch on some tuft of lilacs over a burn, and smoke innumerable pipes to the tune of the water on the stones. A bird will sing in the thicket. And there he may fall into a vein of kindly thought, and see things in a new perspective. Why, if this ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the colors are ripe, the whole circular grove, at a little distance, looks like a big handful of flowers set in a cup to be kept fresh—a tuft of goldenrods. Its feeding-streams are exceedingly beautiful, notwithstanding their inconstancy and extreme shallowness. They have no channel whatever, and consequently are left free to spread in ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... so. The little tuft of down was wafted up into the air, quite high above the lamp, and then it sailed slowly away, and fell ...
— Rollo's Philosophy. [Air] • Jacob Abbott
... and mean tuft-hunting so common, are due to the same desire to make use of people in some way or other. It is an abuse of the word friendship to apply it to such social scrambling. Of course, even tuft-hunting may be only a perverted desire after what we think the best, a longing to get near ...
— Friendship • Hugh Black
... roof and went hissing along the soaked ground; it sprayed out as the grass bent and parted under it; every hollow tuft was a water spout. The fields were dim behind the shining, glassy ...
— Anne Severn and the Fieldings • May Sinclair
... day, when she was walking through a great, great wood, she felt tired, and sat down on a mossy tuft and fell asleep. Then she dreamt that she went deeper and deeper into the wood, till she came to a little wooden hut, and there she found her brothers. Just then she awoke, and straight before ...
— East O' the Sun and West O' the Moon • Gudrun Thorne-Thomsen
... interlaced in their living cordage, that neither sun nor storm could penetrate them; or if a wandering beam found entrance through the thick natural trellice-work, it was only enough to cover some little tuft of violets or strawberries, its own offspring, growing up in its genial warmth with a strength and vigour pre-eminent amidst the pale and sickly brood of the neglected children of the shade. Nothing I had ever imagined ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 538 - 17 Mar 1832 • Various
... pistols. I presently reached a glade in a thicket, about eight yards across, that had a scent of lime and orange, where the just-sufficient twilight enabled me to see some old bones, three skulls, and the edge of a tam-tam peeping from a tuft of wild corn with corn-flowers, and here and there some golden champac, and all about a profusion of musk-roses. I had stopped—why I do not recollect—perhaps thinking that if I was not getting to the Sweet Waters, I should seriously ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... elephant, with a sociable shot through his off ear to make sure he should not tarry, was thundering down Mancos's main street, trumpeting at every jump, followed by the lion, the great tuft of hair at the end of his tail converted, by a happy thought of Lee Skeats, into a brightly blazing torch that, so long as the fuel lasted, lighted the shortest cut to freedom for his escaping mates—for the lion hit as close a bee-line as possible trying to outrun his own ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... those parts of marshes preferably where fresh water springs rise through the morass. Here it generally constructs its nest, "one of which," says an observer, "we had the good fortune to discover. It was built in the bottom of a tuft of grass in the midst of an almost impenetrable quagmire, and was composed altogether of old wet grass and rushes. The eggs had been flooded out of the nest by the extraordinary rise of the tide in a violent northwest storm, and lay scattered about the drift weed. The usual number of eggs is ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [August, 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... the plain. The trunk was, indeed, exceedingly slender, and, as the guide informed them, the wood was of so very brittle a nature that if the tree had not been protected from the winds by the high hills which encircled it, it would have been snapped off ages ago. Under the broad tuft of leaves that formed its top, the boys saw hanging large clusters of the precious fruit; great nuts as big ...
— The Bee-Man of Orn and Other Fanciful Tales • Frank R. Stockton
... driving very slowly onwards, when you suddenly hear a sweet female voice carrolling away in all the wildness of nature, and this without knowing whence it comes. On a sudden, coming nearer the bottom of the hill, you see on one side of the road a cottage chimney, peeping as it were from a tuft of trees in a dell, and immediately afterwards, coming in front, behold a girl picking grapes for the press, and chearfully singing over her toil. There are few of these cottages but what have a garden fronting the road, and some of these gardens, in the season of fruit ...
— Travels through the South of France and the Interior of Provinces of Provence and Languedoc in the Years 1807 and 1808 • Lt-Col. Pinkney
... started early for Marburg. The meadows were of the purest emerald, through which the stream wound its way, with even borders, covered to the water's edge with grass so smooth and velvety, that a fairy might have danced along on it for miles without stumbling over an uneven tuft. This valley is one of the finest districts in Germany. I thought, as I saw the peaceful inhabitants at work in their fields, I had most probably, on the battle-field of Brandywine, walked over the bones of some of their ancestors, whom a despotic ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... ambush.—The most rudimentary method of hunting in ambush is simply to take advantage of some favourable external circumstance to obtain concealment, and then to await the approach of the prey. Some animals place themselves behind a tuft of grass, others thrust themselves into a thicket, or hang on to the branch of a tree in order to fall suddenly on the victim who innocently approaches the perfidious ambush. The Crocodile, as described by Sir Samuel Baker, conceals himself by his ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... yellow breast and a black crescent on his throat. The meadow-lark is about the size of a quail. He stands erect when he sings, and he has a rather long beak. The nest can be found, if you look for it, but is generally out of sight under a loosened clod of earth or tuft of grass. ...
— On the Trail - An Outdoor Book for Girls • Lina Beard and Adelia Belle Beard
... favours and rejections, some rapturous, some doleful. While Don Quixote examined the book, Sancho examined the valise, not leaving a corner in the whole of it or in the pad that he did not search, peer into, and explore, or seam that he did not rip, or tuft of wool that he did not pick to pieces, lest anything should escape for want of care and pains; so keen was the covetousness excited in him by the discovery of the crowns, which amounted to near a hundred; and though he found no more booty, he held the blanket flights, balsam vomits, stake benedictions, ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... orchards bending under the weight of the rich nutritious fruit, tall cocoanut-trees with half a ton of ripening nuts in every tuft top, ant-hills nearly as high as native houses, rippling cascades, small rivers winding through the green valleys, tall flamingoes presiding over tiny lakes, and flowers of every hue and shape, together with birds such as one gazes at with curiosity in northern museums, ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... drew near to the break in that interminable gangway. A spur of coral sand stood forth on the one hand; on the other a high and thick tuft of trees cut off the view; between was the mouth of the huge laver. Twice a day the ocean crowded in that narrow entrance and was heaped between these frail walls; twice a day, with the return of the ebb, the mighty ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... perhaps two miles from the rising ground on this side of the river to that on the opposite side. The stream winds through the midst of the flat space, without any banks at all; for it fills its bed almost to the brim, and bathes the meadow grass on either side. A tuft of shrubbery, at broken intervals, is scattered along its border; and thus it meanders sluggishly along, without other life than what it gains from gleaming in the sun. Now, into the broad, smooth meadow, as into a lake, capes and headlands put themselves ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 2. • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... against the post to which the butcher Klein was accustomed to fasten his cattle. The dragoon fell heavily, his helmet rolled in the gutter, and immediately a head leaned out of the carriage to see what had happened—a large head, pale and fat, with a tuft of hair on the forehead: it was Napoleon; he held his hand up as if about taking a pinch of snuff, and said a few words roughly. The officer galloping by the side of the coach bent down to reply; and his master took his snuff and ...
— The Conscript - A Story of the French war of 1813 • Emile Erckmann
... gentlemanlike, all the summer they come abroad to their country-houses, to recreate themselves. Our gentry in England live most part in the country (except it be some few castles) building still in bottoms (saith [3154]Jovius) or near woods, corona arborum virentium; you shall know a village by a tuft of trees at or about it, to avoid those strong winds wherewith the island is infested, and cold winter blasts. Some discommend moated houses, as unwholesome; so Camden saith of [3155]Ew-elme, that it was therefore unfrequented, ob stagni vicini halitus, and all such places ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... quietness fell on Sheila's heart. She stared fixedly at the tuft of dark hair, the only visible sign of her husband, on the pillow. Then, taking up the basin of cold cornflour, she left the room. In a quarter of an hour she reappeared carrying a tray, with ham and eggs and coffee and honey invitingly ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... was hastily unloosed, and the young page of Mad. la Tour sprang lightly from its folds. A tartan kirtle, reaching below the knees, with trews of the same material, and a Highland bonnet, adorned with a tuft of eagle feathers, gave him the appearance of a Scottish youth;—but the sparkling black eyes, the clear brunette complexion, and the jetty locks which clustered around its brow and neck, proclaimed him the native of a warmer and brighter climate. Half laughing, yet blushing with shame, ...
— The Rivals of Acadia - An Old Story of the New World • Harriet Vaughan Cheney
... the air. His ascent being unluckily a little out of the perpendicular, he descended with a proportionate curve from the apex of his projection, and alighted not on the wall of the tower, but in an ivy-bush by its side, which, giving way beneath him, transferred him to a tuft of hazel at its base, which, after upholding him an instant, consigned him to the boughs of an ash that had rooted itself in a fissure about half way down the rock, which finally transmitted him to the ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock
... that moon-shiny doe, The gold star on its brow, her sire's ancestral crest! For ere the lark had left his nest, 20 She in the garden bower below Sate loosely wrapt in maiden white, Her face half drooping from the sight, A snow-drop on a tuft of snow! ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... rascals, to whom yet Nature intended horns to defend themselves: under Aquarius, cooks and paunch-bellies: under Pisces, caterers and orators: And so the world goes round like a mill, and is never without its mischief; that men be either born or perish. But for that tuft of herbs in the middle, and the honey-comb upon it, I do nothing without just reason for it: Our mother the earth is in the middle, made round like an egg, and has all good things in her ...
— The Satyricon • Petronius Arbiter
... foot of the ground around him, as far as he could trust his eyes to see clearly, separating the space into imaginary segments of a circle, and scrutinizing each of them until he had set apart every tuft of grass from every other tuft, and every stone from its neighbors. Minute after minute, with dogged perseverance, he kept himself at this exhausting task until the sweat was rolling down, his face, and his eyes burned deep in his head. Then suddenly something leaped inside of him,—some ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... I stared at him in wonder. It amazed us that in such a moment a man should think of this trifle. And now he was turning his soiled pouch inside out and wiping it with a tuft of grass, grumbling the while. It was plain that the danger had made ...
— A Prince of Cornwall - A Story of Glastonbury and the West in the Days of Ina of Wessex • Charles W. Whistler
... further; but she saw a pond in the distance, a large pond whose stagnant water looked like blood under the reflection of this new day, and she limped on with short steps and with her hand on her heart, in order to dip both her legs in it. She sat down on a tuft of grass, took off her heavy shoes, which were full of dust, pulled off her stockings and plunged her legs into the still water, from which bubbles were rising ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... Curly locks of dark hair, with now a sprinkle of silver in them, fell upon his brows. He had large brown eyes, a mouth firm and well modelled, a nose slightly aquiline, and wore a small, dark imperial—a mere tuft ...
— Darrel of the Blessed Isles • Irving Bacheller
... after a scanty breakfast of bananas and rice, and a pineapple which Marie salted heavily before she ate it, she went to a native barber and had her long hair cut close to the scalp, except for a little tuft on top which she had him brush ...
— The Woman with a Stone Heart - A Romance of the Philippine War • Oscar William Coursey
... with his loss, and he as readily went back with him to the brook, where they searched every tuft of grass in the meadow, as well where Jones had not been as where he had been; but all to no purpose, for they found nothing; for, indeed, though the things were then in the meadow, they omitted to search the only place where they were deposited; to wit, in the pockets of the ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... one at the first sight. But it was his dress rather than his person which attracted attention. He wore the ordinary Andalucian cap—of which such hideous parodies are now making themselves common in England—but was not contented with the usual ornament of the double tuft. The cap was small, and jaunty; trimmed with silk velvet—as is common here with men careful to adorn their persons; but this man's cap was finished off with a jewelled button and golden filigree work. He was dressed in a short jacket with a stand up collar; and that also was covered with golden ...
— John Bull on the Guadalquivir from Tales from all Countries • Anthony Trollope
... hall detained him several minutes before he returned with a large man who smoked a crooked-stemmed pipe during the conference. The man held the bowl of the pipe in his hand which was fat and red. So was his face. He had a mighty tuft of hair on his upper lip. His shirt sleeves shone like new snow through ...
— Old Caravan Days • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... taken certain liberties with the traditional costume of Scaramouche; he had caused the black doublet and breeches to be slashed with red, and the doublet to be cut more to a peak, a la Henri III. The conventional black velvet cap he had replaced by a conical hat with a turned-up brim, and a tuft of feathers on the left, and ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... wherever he goes. He is the oddest little figure, clothed in a most inadequate shirt, and a string round his neck with a shell attached to keep away evil spirits. His hair is closely shaved except for one upstanding tuft which is left to pull him up to heaven with; and his face looks nothing but two great twinkling eyes. He squats beside me nearly all day, and eagerly eats anything I give him, like a little puppy dog. Toffee and fancy biscuits, both of which I possess in abundance, are his favourites. ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... the day. It is about Mulhausen that he begins to feel a change in the landscape. The fields broaden into rolling downs, watered by clear and running streams; the green Swiss thistle grows by riverside and cowshed; pines begin to tuft the slopes of gently rising hills; and now the sun has set, the stars come out, first Hesper, then the troop of lesser lights; and he feels—yes, indeed, there is now no mistake—the well-known, well-loved magical fresh air, that never fails to blow from snowy mountains and meadows watered ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... as much as an ox could, in fairness, be made to do. A ride-ox can be tied up by his nose-bridle; but, if wild or frightened, he will assuredly struggle till the nose-stick be torn out of his nose, and he becomes free. It is, therefore, better to tie the bridle to a tuft of grass, or a slender twig, rather than to a tree or to the saddle-bags. Mounting an ox is usually a troublesome business, on account of his horns. To make ride-oxen quiet and tame, scratch their ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... the only sound they heard; for the man himself lay still on the chasm's brink, propped from the depths by a tuft of alpine roses in full bloom, his blue eyes wide open, a blue hole just between them, and his bandaged hand freed from its camouflage, lying palm upward and ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... of olive, ornamented on the two seams with an indefinite, but always uneven, number of lines, varying from one to eleven—a limit which was never exceeded. Add to this, high shoes with little irons on the heels, a tall hat with a narrow brim, hair worn in a tuft, an enormous cane, and conversation set off by puns of Potier. Over all, spurs and a mustache. At that epoch mustaches indicated the bourgeois, and ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... the strangest figure! His queer long coat from heel to head Was half of yellow and half of red, And he himself was tall and thin, With sharp blue eyes, each like a pin, And light loose hair, yet swarthy skin, No tuft on cheek nor beard on chin, But lips where smiles went out and in; There was no guessing his kith and kin: And nobody could enough admire The tall man and his quaint attire. Quoth one: "It's as my great-grandsire, Starting up at ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... Paris kissed her breast And slept; but her heart's riot gave no rest As quaking there she lay, awaiting doom. Then afar off rose clamour, and the room Was fanned with sudden light and sudden dark, As on a summer night in a great park Blazed forth you see each tuft of grass or mound, Anon the drowning blackness, while the sound Of Zeus's thunder hardens every close: So here the chamber glared, then dipt, and rose That far confused tumult, and now and then The scurrying feet of passion-driven men. ...
— Helen Redeemed and Other Poems • Maurice Hewlett
... fringe surrounding the face, are both, in perhaps equal degrees, worthy of the attention of the tasteful. The shaggy beard and mustachios, especially, if aided by the effect of a ferocious scowl, will admirably suit those who would wish to have an imposing appearance; the chin, with its pointed tuft a la capricorne, will, at all events, ensure distinction from the human herd; and the decorated upper lip, with its downy growth dyed black, and gummed (the cheek at the same time having been faintly tinged with rouge, the locks parted, perfumed, and curled, the waist ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 7, 1841 • Various
... or ti palm is not a true palm, though it looks like one. It has not the least resemblance to a cabbage. It has a tuft of green leaves, which are rather palmy-looking at a distance, and which springs from the top of a pithy, worthless stem, varying from one to twenty or thirty feet in height. Sometimes the stem is branched at the top, and each branch ends in a tuft. The flax and the cabbage-tree ...
— A First Year in Canterbury Settlement • Samuel Butler
... seen, was given to tuft-hunting to the backbone. His great ambition was to have a lion and unicorn, and to call himself haberdasher to a royal prince. He had never realized the fact that profit, like power, comes from the people, and not from the court. "I ...
— The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson - By One of the Firm • Anthony Trollope
... inscription and position, that the cave now shown may be one of the "artificial caverns," of which, indeed, there is another a little way higher up the valley, under a tuft of alder bushes; but a single grotto of Egeria is a mere modern invention, grafted upon the application of the epithet Egerian to these nymphea in general, and which might send us to look for the haunts of Numa upon ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... by inch out of the grass rose up the head and spread hood of Nag, the big black cobra, and he was five feet long from tongue to tail. When he had lifted one-third of himself clear of the ground, he stayed balancing to and fro exactly as a dandelion-tuft balances in the wind, and he looked at Rikki-tikki with the wicked snake's eyes that never change their expression, whatever the snake may ...
— The Kipling Reader - Selections from the Books of Rudyard Kipling • Rudyard Kipling
... from the rampart walls a glance Of the air his steed assumes; His proud neck swells, his glad hoofs prance, And on his head unceasing dance, In a gorgeous tuft, red plumes! ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... Chesterfield, Lord Bath, Mr. W. Whithed, Sir Charles Williams, Mr. Soame Jenyns, Mr. Cambridge, Mr. Coventry. Of these seven personages, Whithed was the lowest in station, but was the most accomplished tuft-hunter of his time. Coventry was of a noble family. The other five had among them two seats in the House of Lords, two seats in the House of Commons, three seats in the Privy Council, a baronetcy, a blue riband, a red riband, about a hundred thousand pounds a year, and not ten pages that are ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... him how to trim the shafts as smooth and true as possible with a cleft or notch at one end into which I set one of my rusty nails, binding it there with strips from my tattered shirt; in place of feathers I used a tuft of grass and behold! my arrow was complete, and though a poor thing to look at yet it would answer well enough, as I knew by experience. So we fell to our arrow-making, wherein I found Sir Richard very quick and skilful, ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... Prince Baldwin. First, she dazzles him in blue and silver, with a rich turban; then appears in purple satin, fringed and looped with gold, with white feathers in her hair; next, in green silk and emeralds; anon, in pale straw-color, with a tuft of flowers; next, in pink and silver, with varied plumes, white, carnation, and blue; then, in brown, with a splendid crescent. As the fortunate Prince beholds each transformation, he is bewildered (as well he may be) to choose which array ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... day the semi-detached is besieged by a lady and gentleman in search of a home. The gentleman, dressed in a very tight frock-coat, dusty and worn; a highly-glazed cap, the strap of which dangled above a tuft of hair, that graced his chin, its peak resting upon the tip of his nose, affording him little more than a view of his boots, with a portion of the hose protruding therefrom; his tightly-strapped trowsers carrying a broad ...
— Christmas Comes but Once A Year - Showing What Mr. Brown Did, Thought, and Intended to Do, - during that Festive Season. • Luke Limner
... stiff—rumped, wall—eyed, old first lieutenantish—looking veteran, with his coat of a regular Rodney cut, broad skirts, long waist, and standup collar, over which dangled either a queue, or a marlinspike with a tuft of oakum at the end of it,—it would have puzzled Old Nick to say which. His lower spars were cased in tight unmentionables of what had once been white kerseymere, and long boots, the coal—skuttle tops of which ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... was tall, clad in complete evening black, without so much relief as a watch-chain or a ring. His hair was white and well brushed back like a German's; his face was red, fierce and cherubic, with one dark tuft under the lower lip that threw up that otherwise infantile visage with an effect theatrical and even Mephistophelean. Not long, however, did that salon merely stare at the celebrated American; his lateness had already become a domestic problem, and he ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... this spot had a gravelly bottom; all of them except Elsa, who remained on the boat to keep watch. Following otter-paths through the thick rushes they came to the centre of the islet, some thirty yards away. Here, at a spot which Martha ascertained by a few hurried pacings, grew a dense tuft of reeds. In the midst of these reeds was a duck's nest with the young just hatching out, off which the old bird flew ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... their shallow orbits like an adder's, looked about and all around the place, as he stroked the dense brake of black-brown beard that cleverly filled in the interval between Mr. Van Busch's luxuriant whiskers. Presently he stooped and picked up a little tan-leather glove, lying in a tuft of pink flowers. The daintiness of the little glove brought home to Bough more forcibly than anything else, that the Kid ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... hid him from her and made him strange to her and utterly pathetic. And then, there was the back of his head, sunk like lead into his pillow. The cropped hair had begun to grow. You could see a little greyish tuft. You wouldn't have known that it was ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair
... of a garden door under a tuft of chestnuts, it was suddenly drawn back, and he could see inside, upon a garden path, the figure of a butcher's boy with his tray upon his arm. He had hardly recognized the fact before he was some steps beyond upon the other side. But the fellow had had time to observe him; he was evidently ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... shaved off his mustaches and the tuft on his chin, and the whole look of him was changed. A year had gone for every stroke of the razor; he seemed such a boy, so particularly guileless! He had stained his face so well that it looked for all the world as though the Southern sun had done it for him; his eyebrows and, lashes were ...
— Helmet of Navarre • Bertha Runkle
... the royal box, where sat a stout, middle-aged man, with a dull, good-humored face, a star and ribbon on his breast, and by his side a woman, ample and motherly, with an ugly tuft of feathers on her head, and a diamond tiara, which lit up her heavy Dutch features like a torch. The King, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various |
