"Bracken" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... bed. Holding the image tight in her right arm, she drew the bolt cautiously. On the threshold at her feet, lay her own babe, nestling in a bed of bracken. ...
— News from the Duchy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... grey it looks beside the green of those brackens, that pasture, that wood! Purple, yellow, and green, you have now seen, sir, for the first time in your life. Widening and widening over your head, all the while you have been gazing on the heather, the broom, the bracken, the pastures, and the woods, have the eternal heavens been preparing for you a vision of the sacred Blue. Is not that an Indigo Divine? Or, if you scorn that mercantile and manufacturing image, steal that blue from the sky, and let the lady of your love tinge but her ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... not long before the water broke out in the mine, sitting on a stone on the hillside with a whole congregation of cobs about her. When they saw my wife they all scampered off as fast as they could run, and where the witch was sitting there was nothing to be seen but a withered bracken bush. I made no doubt myself she was putting them ...
— The Princess and the Curdie • George MacDonald
... into the bracken like a rabbit. I bade him cut across Sir Michael Gregory's park, and if he caught my friend, to tell him I should probably be ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... on his green native braes of the Nith, He pluck'd the wild bracken, a frolicsome boy; He sported his limbs in the waves of the Frith; He trod the green heather in gladness and joy;— On his gallant grey steed to the hunting he rode, In his bonnet a plume, on his bosom a star; He chased the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... dingles, and beyond, across the trees, to remoter country, wild bare hills and dark wooded lands meeting the grey still sky. Immediately beneath his feet the ground sloped steep down to the valley, a hillside of close grass patched with dead bracken, and dotted here and there with stunted thorns, and below there were deep oak woods, all still and silent, and lonely as if no one ever passed that way. The grass and bracken and thorns and woods, all were ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... the silvery sward beside the Stony Bottom there lay the ruffled body of a dead sheep. All about the victim the dewy ground was dark and patchy like dishevelled velvet; bracken trampled down; stones displaced as though by straggling feet; and the whole ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... reaped, lay in tawny stubble. The path ran by this and by a lichened stone wall. Overhead, swallows were skimming. Heath and bracken, rolled the colored hills. The air swam cool and golden, with a smell of ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... large, circular enclosure, crammed to the very top of its girdling bank with furze-bushes, bracken, low hazel, and stunted Scotch firs. Its primary idea was woodcock, its second rabbits; beaters were in the habit of getting through it somehow, but a ride feasible for fox hunters had never so much as occurred to it. Into this, with practical assistance from the country boys, the deeply reluctant ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... The waiting-maids, who have escorted me to the door, fall on all fours as a final salute, and remain prostrate on the threshold—as long as I am still in sight down the dark pathway, where the rain trickles off the great over-arching bracken ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... gut, is not a likely manoeuvre. The grayling behaved well for a couple of yards or so, and then bethought himself of plunging, the consequence being that I lost my hook, and he dropped into a tuft of bracken in a niche ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... only genuine ones), of whom I can affirm only one thing, that they haunted certain brains, and have haunted, among others, my own and my friends'—yours, dear Arthur Lemon, along the dim twilit tracks, among the high growing bracken and the spectral pines, of the south country; and yours, amidst the mist of moonbeams and olive-branches, dear Flora Priestley, while the moonlit sea moaned and rattled against the moldering walls of the house whence Shelley set ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... the tree. He crept stealthily on his hands and knees through the bracken, and as stealthily climbed the wedge of outcrop, and then leaped like a wild cat on the tree. With incredible activity he lifted the balancing stone, and as the tree began to move, in a flash of perception ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... away from our work to-day, For the breeze sweeps over the down; And it's hey for a game where the gorse blossoms flame, And the bracken is bronzing to brown. With the turf 'neath our tread and the blue overhead, And the song of the lark in the whin; There's the flag and the green, with the bunkers between - Now will you be over ...
— Songs of Action • Arthur Conan Doyle
... better than I to mine. So leaving her to take what way she pleased, I rode on, till at length we approached the woods I had descried. Presently we were jogging gently down into a deep and misty valley flanked by bracken and pines, from which issued into the crisp air of morning a most delicious aromatic smell, that seemed at least to prove this valley not ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... in our warrens and wild places, most of the plants are thus more or less protected in one way or another from the attacks of animals. These neglected spots are overgrown with gorse, brambles, nettles, blackthorn, and mullein, as well as with the bitter spurges, and the stringy inedible bracken. So, too, while in our meadows we purposely propagate tender fodder plants, like grasses and clovers, we find on the margins of our pastures and by our roadsides only protected species; such as thistles, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... amber tints, so various and so harmonious in their delicate gradations that the eye of the artist was gladdened by their decay. The hawthorns in Wimperfield Park glowed in the distance like patches of crimson flame, and the undulating sweeps of bracken showed golden-brown against the green-sward; while the oaks-symbolic of all that is solid, ponderous, and constant in woodland nature, slow to bloom and slow to die—had hardly a faded leaf to murk ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... them, met in conclave, partly to gather nuts in the woods near by, partly to discuss class matters, but chiefly to enjoy the crisp autumn weather. The woods were still gorgeous in russets and reds, in spite of the recent heavy frosts, and there was a smell of burning leaves and dry bracken in the air. The girls skipped about ...
— Grace Harlowe's Plebe Year at High School - The Merry Doings of the Oakdale Freshmen Girls • Jessie Graham Flower
... that he had certainly seen a man slinking off the path into the covert; and the Corporal at once hurried to the spot in the hope that it might be the idiot. Making his way through the thicket he presently came upon a man lying down in some bracken and evidently anxious to conceal himself. The fellow was ragged, unkempt and bearded, but he was not the idiot, and he seemed terrified at being discovered, stammering out something about meaning no harm, and ...
— The Drummer's Coat • J. W. Fortescue
... and secretly I too thought they were wicked. We had been taught to believe that we alone were responsible for our sins, and it did not occur to me that the causes of my wickedness might lie beyond my control. The beauty of the scented pines and the new green of the bracken took my breath and filled my heart with a joy that changed immediately to overwhelming grief; for I could not help contrasting this glorious kind of life with the squalid existence to which I must return so soon. I realised so fiercely the force ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... country road, a good deal rutted, and seldom repaired. Opposite the gates rose the steep slope of a heathery hill, along the flank of which the girls were now walking. On their right lay a piece of rough moorland, covered with heather, patches of bracken, and coarse grass. A few yards to the right, it sank in a steep descent. Such was the disposition of the ground for some distance along the road—on one side the hill, on the other a narrow level, ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... Walter looked, and deemed that he beheld something through the grass and bracken on the other side of those two, an ugly brown and yellow body, which, if it were not some beast of the foumart kind, must needs be the monstrous dwarf, or one of his kin; and the flesh crept upon ...
— The Wood Beyond the World • William Morris
... And, alas for auld Scotland, her sons and her daughters! Thy wish was their welfare, thy cause was their own. But 'lorn may we sigh where the hill-winds awaken, And weep in the glen where the cataracts foam, And sleep where the dew-drops are deep on the bracken; Thy foot has the land of thy fathers forsaken, And more—never more will ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... northern counties witches are said to dislike the bracken fern, "because it bears on its root the initial C, which may be seen on cutting the root horizontally."[26] and in most places equally distasteful to them is the yew, perhaps for no better reason than ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... a tone of deep satisfaction, and crawled out of a patch of tall dried bracken, and came forward to ...
— The Wolf Patrol - A Tale of Baden-Powell's Boy Scouts • John Finnemore
... shade in which we lay there stretched out an avenue of timber trees, whereunder the bracken, breast high, had been cut to make a ride. Upon this bracken, and upon this smooth channel in the midst the late sun streamed toward us, a soft wash of gold. Behind all this the sky, pale to whiteness immediately overhead, deepened to the ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... winter. They are free from the dangerous alternation of sunshine and frost. Put things of doubtful hardihood under a north wall, with plenty of sandy soil or ashes over their roots, some cinders on that, and perhaps a little light protection, like bracken, in front of them, and their chances will not be bad. Apropos to tender things, if your little garden is in a cold part of the British Isles, and has ungenial conditions of soil and aspect, don't try to keep tender things out of doors in winter; but, if it is in the ...
— Last Words - A Final Collection of Stories • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... top of the down, The wild heather round me and over me June's high blue, When I look'd at the bracken so bright and the heather so brown, I thought to myself I would offer this book to you, This, and my love together, To you that are seventy-seven, With a faith as clear as the heights of the June-blue heaven, And a fancy as summer-new ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... by are few," she answered. "We are too far off the beaten track. Only on Saturdays and holiday times there are trippers, fearful creatures who pick the bracken, walk arm in arm, and sing songs. Tell me why you look as though ...
— The Double Life Of Mr. Alfred Burton • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... drew back coldly and let her hand fall from his arm. She took a few steps forward, stopped, ran back to him again, crushed his face and head in a close embrace, and then seemed to dip like a bird into the tall bracken, and ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... "purple light," intense enough to perpetuate the brief flower-flush of August on the heather, or the rare sunset-smile of June; out of his heart must well the freshness, that in latter spring and early summer brightens the bracken, nurtures the moss, and cherishes the starry flowers that spangle for a few weeks the pasture of the moor-sheep. Unless that light and freshness are innate and self-sustained, the drear prospect of a Yorkshire moor will be found as barren of poetic as of agricultural interest: where the love ...
— Poems • (AKA Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte) Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell
... lichens; and many of the less important ones would produce valuable colours if experiments were made with the right mordants. Those which have been in use in the Highlands are most of them good dyes. Among these are Ladies Bedstraw, whortleberry, yellow iris, bracken, bramble, meadow sweet, alder, heather and many others. The yellow dyes are most plentiful and many of these are good fast colours. Practically no good red, in quantity, is obtainable. Madder is the only reliable red dye among plants, and that is no longer indigenous in England. Most of the ...
— Vegetable Dyes - Being a Book of Recipes and Other Information Useful to the Dyer • Ethel M. Mairet
... might be expected. A hardy race of trout will sometimes rise freely to the artificial fly when the natural fly is destroyed, and the angler is almost blinded with dusty snowflakes. All through midsummer the Scotch rivers lose their chief attractions. The bracken has not yet changed its green for the fairy gold, the hue of its decay; the woods wear a uniform and sombre green; the waters are low and shrunken, and angling is almost impossible. But with September the pleasant season returns for people who love "to be quiet, and ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... bitterness of the anti-septo pill on his tongue, Ross helped Ashe limp upstream to the cave. He left the older man outside while he cleaned up the floor of the cave and then made his companion as comfortable as he could on a bed of bracken. The fire Ross had longed for was built. They stripped off their sodden clothing and hung it to dry. Ross wrapped a bird he had shot in clay and tucked it under the hot ...
— The Time Traders • Andre Norton
... said, pushing the door of the cottage wider open. 'I've just tidied up, and I was fetching in a handful of bracken. ...
— Miss Mouse and Her Boys • Mrs. Molesworth
... regions with his field-glass. Even then I was not allowed to smoke, and while I was baked to a blister with the sun, I was wet through with black peat water. Never a deer could we see, or could HUGH see, rather, for I am short-sighted, and cannot tell a stag from a bracken bush. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, May 14, 1892 • Various
... a real floor made of puncheons, or hewn logs. A bunk, against the wall, was made of a second log set four feet from the log wall, with a hammock mattress of sacking stuffed with dried bracken stretched between them. There was the usual huge fireplace of granite rocks used for both warmth and cooking, and a box ...
— Down the Mother Lode • Vivia Hemphill
... old stone bridge that crosses the stream just below the mill-house; 'it's such a lovely day one feels loath to miss any of it, and the scenery here looks so bright and cheerful after the endless brown heather and russet bracken about Dunbude. Not that Exmoor isn't beautiful in its way, too—all Devonshire is beautiful alike for that matter; but then it's more sombre and woody in the north, and much less spring-like than this lovely quiet South ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... misfortunes reached a climax when he used his last bullet on a rabbit and missed it. He went on for twelve hours, and in the darkness under a mass of dripping bracken began to think of Farleys less as a place of peril than as a refuge, even though known for what he was. But he pushed that thought away as other men push temptation and tried to sleep under his saturated tent. In the morning he was on the trail with the ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... could see the lights of Inverness beginning to glimmer as we passed. A score of times we had to dismount on account of the roughness of the ground to lead our horses along the steep incline of the mountainsides, and each time Donald set his teeth and dragged his shattered ankle through bracken and over boulder by sheer dour pluck. Hunger gnawed at our vitals, for in forty-eight hours we had but tasted food. Deadly weariness hung on our stumbling footsteps, and in our gloomy hearts lurked the coldness ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... of this valley is the most beautiful I know of in the lower Himalaya, and the Cheer Pine (P. longifolia) is abundant, cresting the hills; which are loosely clothed with clumps of oaks and other trees, bamboos, and bracken (Pteris). The slopes are covered with red clay, and separate little ravines luxuriantly clothed with tropical vegetation, amongst which flow pebbly streams of transparent cool water. The villages, which are merely scattered ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... though here and there a silver birch drew a shaft of light upon their sombre background. Here were no English woodlands, no stretches of pale green turf, no vistas opening beneath flattened boughs, with blue distant hills and perhaps a group of antlers topping the bracken. The wild life of these forests crawled among thickets or lurked in sinister shadows. No bird poured out its heart in them; no lark soared out of them, breasting heaven. At rare intervals a note fell on the ear—the scream ...
— Fort Amity • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Mountains on the one side and the ranges around the Sugar Loaf on the other. In places the cliffs are precipitous, but, generally, the lower slopes furnish pasture-land and occasional woods, while the upper parts are covered with bracken fern, with a few trees and copses. The priory stands on a gentle slope at the base of the Black Mountains, elevated a short distance above the stream. Its original name was Llanhodeni, or "the Place by the Hodeni." It was founded by two hermits ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... June. Great flocks of sea-gulls wheeled screaming round the cliffs, their wings flashing in the sunshine; red admiral and tortoise-shell butterflies still fluttered over late specimens of flowers, and the bracken was brown and golden underfoot. The girls were wild with the delight of a few hours' emancipation from school rules, and flew about gathering belated harebells, and running to the top of any little eminence to get the view. After about a mile on the hills, they ...
— A Patriotic Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... the bracken and gorse which tangled their feet and scratched their bare shins at every step. That mile over the Heath was the most trying yet. The hares seemed to have picked out the very cruellest track they could find; and when, presently, the "Firm" ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... relation, the last time of the times, had passed into vagueness; there was perhaps even an impression that if they were inscrutable to their friends they were not wholly crystalline to each other and themselves. What had occurred for Granger at all events in connexion with the portrait was that Mrs. Bracken, his intending model, whose return to America was at hand, had suddenly been called to London by her husband, occupied there with pressing business, but had yet desired that her displacement should not interrupt her sittings. The young man, at her request, ...
— Some Short Stories • Henry James
... If there is help of any sort for such horrors of despair let them take it where they find it," he found himself saying aloud to the emptiness of the stretches of heath and bracken. "The old nurse ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... stiller than it was outside; the murmur descends from aloft. There was a frost last night and the leaves will soon fall. A beech leaf detaches itself now and then and flutters peacefully and waywardly to the ground, careless whether it finds its grave in the bracken or on the road where it will be trodden underfoot. The bramble is beginning to turn to blood. It is strange that leaves should show such character. Here is a corner on which there are not two of the same tint, but they spring from the same root, and the circumstances of light and shade under which ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... pine woods. "The country"—to quote an account written some years ago—"was drenched in sunset; white towering thunder-clouds descending upon and mingling with the crimson of the heath, the green stretches of bracken, the brown pools upon the common, everywhere a rosy suffusion, a majesty of light interweaving heaven and earth and transfiguring all dear familiar things—the old farm-house, the sand-pit where the children played and the sand-martins nested, the wood-pile by the farm ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... kingdom. His earnest words on his return to take the rule of this unhappy realm were these: 'Let God but grant me life, and there shall not be a spot in my realm where the key shall not keep the castle, and the bracken bush the cow, though I should lead the life of a ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge
... off again through the forest, at a more moderate pace now, for the way ran no longer clear. The word "forest" to a stay-at-home means a tract of soft, springy turf, with tall trees and pleasant glades and clumps of bracken that shelter rabbits and other small creatures of the woodland. But the forest of the West Indies bears to our English forest the relation of a giant to a dwarf. The fronds of the bracken grow to feet where we have inches; weeds that with us would shelter a mouse would there oonceal an elephant, ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... Yorkshire moors. One smells the smell of burning furze, one tastes the resinous breath of pine-trees, one feels beneath one's feet the tough fibrous stalks of the ling and the resistant stems and crumpled leaves of the bracken. ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... beneath the shadows of the tall elms, the stillness of the night was broken only by the quick scurry of a rabbit into the tall bracken or the harsh cry of some night-bird startled ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... under rustling poplars—rode many leagues, and forded many streams. The night was hot, it was the month of June; and it thundered continually, but with no rain. At this point and that bands of men joined us, mysteriously, and in silence; until from the hill with its bracken and walnut trees, we saw the lights of Cahors below us, and the glimmer of the winding Lot, and heard the bells of the ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman
... Hindhead; and Johnny, reclining, novel in hand, in a swinging chair with a little awning above it, is enshrined in a spacious half hemisphere of glass which forms a pavilion commanding the garden, and, beyond it, a barren but lovely landscape of hill profile with fir trees, commons of bracken and ...
— Misalliance • George Bernard Shaw
... topics, he thought—lay around them. He praised the pine-woods, the deep lasts of bracken, the crimson leaves that spotted the hurt-bushes, the serviceable beauty of the turnpike road. The outdoor world was not very familiar to him, and occasionally he went wrong in a question of fact. Mrs. Honeychurch's mouth twitched ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... During the full moon there is no night, only a change to silver light from golden; and the forest is full of delight. There are wood-cutters' huts in the ravines where the water falls, soft beds of torn bracken and fragrant grasses where great trees make a shelter from the heat; and for food, that is easily arranged. A basket of rice with a little salt-fish and spices is easily hidden in a favourable place. You only want a jar to cook it, and there is ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding
... on the edge of the common, beyond the small brook that ran in the dip at the bottom of the garden, carrying the garden path in continuation from the plank bridge on to the common. He had cut the rough turf and bracken, leaving the grey, dryish soil bare. But he was worried because he could not get the path straight, there was a pleat between his brows. He had set up his sticks, and taken the sights between the big pine trees, but for some reason everything seemed wrong. He looked ...
— England, My England • D.H. Lawrence
... ye'se get a bed o' green bracken; My plaidie will hap thee and me; Ye'se lie in my arms, bonnie Lizie, If ye'll gae to the ...
— Ballads of Scottish Tradition and Romance - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Third Series • Various
... hill, forest above forest, and beyond it a great noble range, unwooded and high against heaven, guarding it, which I for my part knew when first I knew anything of this world. There is a high place under fir trees, a place of sand and bracken, in South England whence such a view was always present to eye in childhood and "There," said I to myself (even in childhood) "a man should make his habitation." In those valleys is the ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... stately avenue of elms and beeches, with bracken and ferns covering mossy glades in the distance, and then Roy and Dudley flung themselves off their ponies before an old stone house with ivy-covered walls and turrets. Everything had been brightened up for their visit. The flowers on the terraces were one mass ...
— His Big Opportunity • Amy Le Feuvre
... and with much shouting woke up the inhabitants of the cottage whence it proceeded, promising to reward them liberally if they would only show us our way back. Three of them consented to do this, and provided themselves accordingly with pine-torches, wrapped round with bracken and leaves. One, a very fine man, dressed in white, with his arm extended above his head, bearing the light, led the way; another walked in front of my horse, while the third brought up the rear. They conducted us down the most frightfully steep paths until we had descended beneath the clouds, ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... sports were really a pretty sight. I see it all in my mind's eye now. I often wonder I have not made a picture of it. The high cliff stretching overhead, and covered with bushes and bracken, amongst which nestled the red-tiled cottages. Then below the cliff the level green, covered with strong, hardy fishermen and their sunburnt wives, and surrounding the green, on the sand-hills, the visitors old and young, dressed in bright colours and ...
— Christie, the King's Servant • Mrs. O. F. Walton
... those charming reminiscences of George Borrow which appeared in The Athenæum. {25} I have been reading them, I may add, under the happiest conditions for enjoying them—amid the self-same heather and bracken where I have so often listened to Lavengro’s quaint talk of all the wondrous things he saw and heard in his wondrous life. So graphically has Mr. Hake depicted him, that as I walked and read his paper I seemed to hear the fine East-Anglian ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... for ever staring out in front of her with her lips parted, as if she saw something wonderful; but when I came behind her and looked the same way, I could see nothing but the sheep's trough or the midden, or father's breeches hanging on a clothes-line. And then if she saw a lump of heather or bracken, or any common stuff of that sort, she would mope over it, as if it had struck her sick, and cry, "How sweet! how perfect!" just as though it had been a painted picture. She didn't like games, but I used to make her play ...
— The Great Shadow and Other Napoleonic Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... country-house was like. The Cronins lived in a dim, red brick, eighteenth-century house. It stood in the middle of a large park, and the park was surrounded by old grey walls and Ned liked to lean on these walls, for in places they had crumbled, and admire the bracken in the hollows and the wind-blown hawthorn-trees growing on the other side of the long, winding drive. He had long wished to walk in the park and now he was there. The hawthorns were in bloom and the cuckoo was calling. The sky was dark ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... and mysterious, with green shadows, and the swing of rope vines, and the sudden remoteness of glimpsed skies. The earth was soft and moist under foot; so the dampness of it rose to the nostrils. Vines and head-high bracken and feather growths covered the ground. In every shallow ravine were groves of tree ferns forty feet tall. A silence dwelt there, a different silence from that of the veldt at night; compounded of a few simple elements, ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al
... iron posts which supported a railing that ran round the crescent and used it as a lever. The rotten planks gave way. One of them uncovered the lock, which he attacked with a big knife, containing a number of blades and implements. A minute later, the gate opened on a waste of bracken which led up to a long, dilapidated building, with a turret at each corner and a sort of a belvedere, built on a taller tower, in ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... into two parts by a ravine passing immediately under the old Castle and traversing its entire length. The further side is called the Deer Park, inclosed and stocked by Sir John Glynne in 1739. Its banks and glades, richly timbered, and overgrown with bracken, afford from various points beautiful views over the plain of Chester, with the bold projections of the Frodsham and Peckforton hills. Along the bottom of the hollow flows Broughton brook. Two Waterfalls occur in its course through the Park: the lower is called the Ladies' Fall: near ...
— The Hawarden Visitors' Hand-Book - Revised Edition, 1890 • William Henry Gladstone
... wild tones of the storm. The air was mottled with pine-tassels and bright green plumes, that went flashing past in the sunlight like birds pursued. But there was not the slightest dustiness; nothing less pure than leaves, and ripe pollen, and flecks of withered bracken and moss. I heard trees falling for hours at the rate of one every two or three minutes: some uprooted, partly on account of the loose, water-soaked condition of the ground; others broken straight across, ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... a foot-road leading from his garden to Folly Clough, and thus secured the quiet ever found in those deeply-wooded seams that plough into the very heart of the moors. Following the water-worn path which wound in tortuous ascent under clustering trees and between slopes of bracken, the two soon gained the head of the Clough, and climbed towards the banks of the Green Fold Lodge, a stretch of water into which drained the moisture of vast tracts of uplands, its overflow rushing through flood-gates and pouring its volume through ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... to a wild-looking creature prowling among the trees. He was evidently looking for something. His search so earnest and troubled that the caution he had heretofore displayed had deserted him. Stooping, poking among the leaves and bracken, rising, moving toward another tree, stooping again—repeating endlessly this same proceeding, the watchers soon tired of simply ...
— The Brass Bound Box • Evelyn Raymond
... the command of General Reynolds, with headquarters at Cheat Mountain Pass,( 3) three miles from Huttonville on the Staunton pike. Here Colonel Sullivan's 13th Indiana, part of Loomis' battery, and Bracken's Indiana Cavalry were camped. On Cheat Mountain, at the middle mountain-top, about nine miles to the southeast of Huttonville on the Staunton pike, were the 14th Indiana, 24th and 25th Ohio, and parts of the same battery and cavalry, Colonel Nathan ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... the rain ceased, however, and quickening my steps, I began to think I should be driven to pay for a night's lodging after all. Presently I came to a kind of open moor, covered with bracken, bramble, and brilliant patches of heath. A rabbit scampered across the road, but there was no one to be seen, although a railway ran close at hand through a cutting on the right. I could see the tops of the signal-posts ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... heart in silence as if in a moment the trees should fly like woodpeckers, the sky flash and flutter its blue like a jay's wing, and the very earth leap like a squirrel for his amazement. Presently he came to an open space where the young bracken was springing round a pool. He flung himself down in the frondage, and the spice of it in his nostrils was as if he were feeding upon summer. He was happy until he caught sight of his own reflection in the pool, and then he could not bear to stay any longer in this ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... through the underwood up the side of the hill, when suddenly she disappeared from his sight, behind some bracken. When he got there he could see her nowhere, but looking about him found a fox's earth, but so well hidden that he might have passed it by a thousand times and would never have found it unless he had made particular search ...
— Lady Into Fox • David Garnett
... are my only brother's children." Here Katherine paused with a sense of relief; they had reached a stile where a footway led across some fields and a piece of common overgrown with bracken and gorse. It was the short-cut to Castleford, by which Cecil had led her to the ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... declined swiftly to the main road. Straight in front of him were the palings of Falmer Park, and the tenantless down with its long smooth curves, was broken up into sudden hillocks and depressions. Dells and dingles, some green with bracken, others half full of water lay to right and left of the path, which, as it approached the corner of the park, was more strongly marked than when it lay over the big open spaces. It was somewhat slippery, too, after the torrent of yesterday, and ...
— The Blotting Book • E. F. Benson
... and took wing with a cry, half in protest at being wakened from its sleep, half in alarm at my presence. A rabbit rushed from a sheltering hole in such a hurry that, as I could tell by its clatter among the bracken, it nearly fell over itself, as rabbits clumsily do, making fluffy, ...
— The Black Colonel • James Milne
... On either side the bracken and the lady-fern grew thick and high, almost overlapping the broad moss-grown path, across which the young rabbits popped away in their new brown coats, showing their little white linings in their lazy haste. A dog-rose had hung out a ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... first half of the way runs across a flat sandy tract called Mallory Heath, where the short greensward encroaches on the road, and where the eye roaming east or west or north can discern nothing except a limitless expanse of heather, broken here and there by patches of gorse and bracken, or by clumps of touselled and wind-thinned pines and Scotch firs. The tawny-coloured, sandy, track is difficult to follow in the dark, and there are posts set up at intervals on the skirts of the way for travellers' guidance. These posts show out white against a starless night, ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... without charge), improving their schools, and visited from time to time by patients from abroad, drawn here by his fame as an oculist. Among these last came a Mr. Taufer, a resident of Hong-Kong, and with him his foster-child, Josephine Bracken, the daughter of an Irish sergeant. The pretty and adventurous girl and the banished patriot fell in love ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... no sooner seen these people coming than I made up my mind (for no reason that I can tell) to go through with my adventure; and when the first came alongside of me, I rose up from the bracken and asked ...
— Kidnapped • Robert Louis Stevenson
... overgrown with bramble. In its depths they could hear the monotonous trickle of water. It was really the source of the spring that afterwards reappeared fifty yards nearer the road, and trickled into an unfailing pool known as the Burnt Spring, from the brown color of the surrounding bracken. It was the water supply of the ranch, and the reason for Mr. Medliker's original selection of that site. Johnny lingered for an instant, looked carefully around, and then lowered himself into the fissure. A moment ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... and bracken, and purple bloom, With a glitter of gorses here and there, Shoulder deep in the dewy bloom, My love, I follow you everywhere! By faint sweet signs my soul divines, Dear heart, at dawning you came this way, By the jangled bells of the columbines, ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... o'er a leafy carpet, by the silent woods they came, Where the golden bracken lingered and the maples were aflame. On the stream the starlight shimmered, o'er their wings the moonbeams shone, Music filtered through the forest—and the Little ...
— The Verse-Book Of A Homely Woman • Elizabeth Rebecca Ward, AKA Fay Inchfawn
... level among the heather and bracken of Craddock Moor, four or five miles north of Liskeard, you may find to-day the remains of three ancient stone circles known as "The Hurlers." Antiquaries will tell you that the Druids first erected them, but the people of the countryside ...
— Legend Land, Vol. 1 • Various
... the Squire's way of making a night of it. The parson who had been in at the death and who, during the settlement of my affair, had been busy in the stables, now joined us at dinner. He was but lately come from Cambridge, at which seat of learning the chief books appeared to be Bracken's Farriery and Gibson on the Diseases of Horses, with Hoyle's Whist as lighter reading for leisured hours. He was a hard rider, a hard swearer, and a hard drinker, and, after being double japanned, ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... had been able to walk home to Bracken-Braes, and Michael and Isabel sat by her bedside. All her strength was gone, and she lay at the mercy of the rustle of a leaf, or a shadow across the window. Thus hour after hour passed, till it was again twilight. "I hear ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... the bracken, it prattles and purls, And the lips of the rose are as red as a girl's; Sing "hey" and ...
— Sprays of Shamrock • Clinton Scollard
... flowers or trees with which we are familiar, except conifers, are found in any region. Ferns grow in great abundance, and have now reached many of the forms with which we are acquainted. Thickets of bracken spread over the plains; clumps of Royal ferns and Hartstongues spring up in moister parts. The trees are conifers, cycads, and trees akin to the ginkgo, or Maidenhair Tree, of modern Japan. Cypresses, yews, firs, and araucarias (the Monkey ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... with the daylight shining through the empty windows. Beyond the houses, again, lie successive lines of hills, at this moment lit up by shafts of sunlight that lend a glowing warmth and richness to the fine colors of a late autumn. The hills are red and brown with rusted bracken and heather, and here and there the smooth waters of the bay catch a tinge of other and varied hues. In one of the fishing-smacks that lie almost underneath the shadow of the tall crag on which the castle ruins stand, an artist has put a rough-and-ready easel, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... From the mute elm-trees, hanging on air Like tattered flags along the walls Of chapels deep in sunlit prayer. Once more ... Within its flawless glass To-day reflects that other day, When, under the bracken, on the grass, We who were lovers happily lay And hardly spoke, or framed a thought That was not one with the calm hills And crystal sky. Ourselves were nought, Our gusty passions, our burning wills Dissolved in boundlessness, and we Were almost ...
— The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems • Aldous Huxley
... longing to get further away from the town and enjoy what remained of the afternoon on higher ground and in purer air; he would go up to Hampstead, he thought, and see the lights sweeping over the rusty bracken on the heath, or walk down over Highgate Hill, and past the quaint old brick houses with their high-trim laurel hedges and their last century wrought-iron gateways and lamps in which the light of ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... craving to leave something permanent? The Islands, here, will outlast anything you can build. I come back after fifteen years, and they are unchanged; they would be unchanged were I to come back after a hundred. The same rocks, the same bracken, the same hum of the tides; the same flowers; the same blue here, below us, the same outline of a spear-head there, beyond St. Ann's, where the tide forces through the slack water; the same streak of yellow yonder on the ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... door opened and Dodge and a companion, who subsequently proved to be E. M. Bracken, alias "Bradley," an agent employed by Howe and Hummel, left the room, went to the elevator and descended to the dining-room upon the second floor. Jesse watched until they were safely ensconced at breakfast and then returned to the fourth floor where he tipped the chambermaid, told her that ...
— True Stories of Crime From the District Attorney's Office • Arthur Train
... walked along, picking their way among boulders and bracken and heather, he was asking her whether the heart-breaking accidents and bitter disappointments of salmon-fishing were not greater than its rewards; as to which she ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... immediately secured, Ruth pushed her way into enchantment. The river winds in and out through exquisite coves entangled in a wilderness of brambles and lace-like ferns that are almost transparent as they bend and dip toward the silvery waters; while, climbing over the rocky cliffs, run bracken and the fragrant yerba-buena, till, on high, they creep as if in awe about the great redwoods and pines of ...
— Other Things Being Equal • Emma Wolf
... few stiller things than the stillness of a summer's noon such as this, a summer's noon in a broken woodland, with the deer asleep in the bracken, and the twitter of birds silent in the coppice, and hardly a leaf astir in the huge beeches that fling their cool shade over the grass. Afar off a gilded vane flares out above the grey Jacobean gables ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... "Well, father, the bracken will be fit to cut in a month. I have ordered loads to be prepared for me in all parts of the forest. The soil of the woodlands is everywhere green with the curling fronds; and where I do not cut, the foresters and miners will ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... the Monkey being up a tree, and the Colonel having surreptitiously got rid of his Rabbit among the bracken, and the Tortoise having retired within his shell and firmly declined to come out again, sport is abandoned for the afternoon, to the scarcely disguised relief of the Curate, who is prevented from remaining to tea by the ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 10, 1892 • Various
... near the township gave place to scattered farms. These in their turn became further and further apart, and then they entered a wide belt of timber, ragged and wind-swept gums, with dense undergrowth of dogwood and bracken fern. The metalled road gave place to a hard, earthern track, on which the spinning tyres made no sound; it curved in and out among the trees, which met overhead and cast upon it a waving pattern of shadows. Grim things had once happened to Norah in this belt ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... THOU the vanguard of the three, And bury me at yon bracken bush, That stands upon ...
— Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy • Andrew Lang
... little isle of sheep, where the surf burst all about it in the midst of the sea, and it was all green with bracken, and all wet with dew, and the moon enlightened it. They ran the boat into a cove, and set foot to land; and the man came heavily behind among the rocks in the deepness of the bracken, but the Poor Thing went before him like a smoke in the light of the moon. So they came to the dead-cairn, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson |
