"Cactus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... walnut, which, with smaller growths, are interwoven with vines of grape, hop, and columbine, in places forming a veritable jungle. On every hand, whether on mountain or in valley, many varieties of cactus grow in profusion; and in springtime canon and vale, mountain-side and mesa, are all aglow ...
— The North American Indian • Edward S. Curtis
... African game, as a general rule, avoids a country where the grass grows very high. We enjoyed, however, some bold and wonderful mountain scenery, and obtained glimpses through the flying murk of the vast plains and the base of Suswa. On a precipitous canon cliff we found a hanging garden of cactus and of looped cactus-like vines that was a marvel to behold. We ran across the hartebeeste on our way home. Our men were already out of meat; the hartebeeste of yesterday had disappeared. These porters are a good deal like the old-fashioned Michigan lumberjacks—they take a good ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... the plain from east to west. A thicket of cactus covered part of its summit. Toward ...
— Thrilling Adventures by Land and Sea • James O. Brayman
... noted that we had not seen cactus nor sandy wastes, nor were the trees thorny, while many of the wild trees yielded good fruit. It is also to be noted that we did not see snow on the mountains, nor were there any mosquitos or ants in the land, which are very harmful, both ...
— The First Discovery of Australia and New Guinea • George Collingridge
... all the time that whatever they decided to do out there in the wilderness meant thousands of dollars to the stockholders somewhere up in God's country, who would some day hold them to account for them. They dragged their chains through miles and miles of jungle, and over flat alkali beds and cactus, and they reared bridges across roaring canons. We know nothing about them and we care less. When their work is done we ride over the road in an observation-car and look down thousands and thousands ...
— Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... of sand, isn't it?" she whispered. "Sand and cactus,—no roses blooming here upon ...
— Sunny Slopes • Ethel Hueston
... turned out to be roosters [laughter]; but I resolved—I presume as William Nye says about the farm—to carry it on; I would carry on that farm as long as my wife's money lasted. [Laughter.] A great mishap was when my Alderney bull got into the greenhouse. There was nothing to stop him but the cactus. He tossed the flower-pots right and left. Talk about the flowers that bloom in the spring,—why, I never saw such a wreck, and I am fully convinced that there is nothing that will stop a thoroughly well-bred bull but a full-bred South American cactus. [Laughter.] I went down ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... the last, with the standard in his hand. The castle itself not high, but strong, brown and battered. Beyond it, the gallows, and the place of death. Below it, a desolation of tumbling rock and ruin, where wild flowers struggled for a holding in spring, and the sharp cactus sent out ever-green points between the stones. Far down, a confusion of low, brown houses, with many dark towers standing straight up from them like charred trees above underbrush in a fire-blasted forest. Beyond ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... the Algerian antithesis runs. Finally she paused before the open French window of a snow-white villa, half-buried in tamarisk and orange and pomegranate, with the deep-hued flowers glaring in the sun, and a hedge of wild cactus fencing it in; through the cactus she made her way as easily as a rabbit burrows; it would have been an impossibility to Cigarette to enter by any ordinary means; and balancing herself lightly on the sill for a second, stood ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... association. At any rate, it is certain that when we contemplate almost any forms of plant-structure which, for special reasons of utility, differ widely from these (to us) more habitual forms, the result is not suggestive of beauty. Many of the tropical and un-tree-like plants—such as the cactus tribe—strike us as odd and quaint, not as beautiful. Be this however as it may, I trust I have said enough to prove that in the vegetable world, at all events, the attainment of beauty cannot be held to have been an object aimed at, ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... the flower of a prickly-pear cactus, full of sunlight from behind, which a fairy took the fancy to swell ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... the animal Bela Moshi rode it barebacked, urging it at a gallop and finishing by taking a formidable obstacle in the shape of a cactus-bush. ...
— Wilmshurst of the Frontier Force • Percy F. Westerman
... up on a small sandy beach, and then started off into the country, and by noon we had caught three large tortoises which we found feeding on cactus plants. Then, as we were resting and eating, we suddenly heard the report of a heavy gun, and then another and another. We clambered up the side of a rugged hill, from the summit of which we could see the ...
— "Old Mary" - 1901 • Louis Becke
... resemble those at Naples, and the churches are second only to those of Rome in their magnificence. One might almost fancy one's self in the far East, there are so many surroundings of a Moorish and Saracenic character, and many of the names are quite oriental. The cactus, palm, and citron trees, tropical flowers and sunny skies, carry out the impression. There is no matter for wonder in this, however, as the Saracens made Palermo the capital of their Sicilian territories for more than two centuries, when ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... as Ted Strong sat on Sultan and gazed across the wide valley, over which the sun's warm rays shimmered above the sand and cactus, greasewood and sage toward a low-lying ranch house in the far distance, it did not seem ...
— Ted Strong in Montana - With Lariat and Spur • Edward C. Taylor
... cactus growing at their feet, and they ate of its red fruit greedily, but all around them was naught but water. When night came on they retired to the ark and slept—a night, a month, a year, perhaps a century, for when they ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... with the flag of the UK in the upper hoist-side quadrant and the colonial shield centered on the outer half of the flag; the shield is yellow and contains a conch shell, lobster, and cactus ...
— The 1999 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... along the western horizon rose a range of mountains whose bare peaks cut a jagged line along the sky. The country between us and these far-away mountains was made up of many parallel ranges of rocky hills; which ranges were separated by broad, shallow valleys, where cactus and sage-brush covered the dry ground thickly; and the only trees that broke this dreary monotony were pita-palms, the most dismal thing in all created nature to which the name of a tree ever has been given ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... before the rising of the hot October sun, I was soon ready for breakfast, which Miss Macgregor and I had in the garden among the parrots and the pigeons, and the dear little squirrels. We were ready for the road before seven, and were soon trotting along between dusty hedges of gaunt-fingered cactus, shaded here and there ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... Joel Creech!'... His clothes were in a pile on the bank. At first I thought I'd throw them in the water, but when I got to them I thought of something better. I took up all but his shoes, for I remembered the ten miles of rock and cactus between him and home, and I climbed up on Buckles. Joel screamed and swore something fearful. But I didn't look back. And Peg, you know—maybe you don't know—but Peg is fond of me, and he followed me, straddling his bridle all the way in. I dropped Joel's clothes down the ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... an enthusiastic horticulturist, and the walls of the kitchen garden were covered with luxuriant fruit-trees, while the greenhouses were well stocked with rare and beautiful exotics. Among these was a specimen of that fantastic cactus, the night-blowing Cereus, whose flowers, after an existence of but a few hours, fade with the waning sun. On the day when this occurred large numbers of people used to obtain Mr. Dodgson's leave ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... sunshine of that May morning, after they had unsaddled at Moreno's, after the sergeant, wearied with the vigils of two successive nights, had gone to sleep in the coolest shade he could find, there came riding across the sun-baked, cactus-dotted plain at the west a young man who had the features of the American and the grave, courteous bearing of ...
— Foes in Ambush • Charles King
... exquisitely beautiful flowerets and plants of elegant forms. Wherever these flowers flourished very luxuriantly there were single trees of stunted growth and thick bark, which seldom rose above fifteen or twenty feet. Besides these there were rich flowering myrtles, and here and there a grotesque cactus or two. ...
— Martin Rattler • R.M. Ballantyne
... of cactus, prickly pears, plums and plants with the most gorgeous flowers lined their path, and gave constant delight to young Smith and some of the others, but Jack and Percival were more intent on seeing where they would come out than ...
— The Hilltop Boys on Lost Island • Cyril Burleigh
... takes us past the base of Elk Mountain to a broad and sandy cactus-plain, whence we descend among curious trap and sandstone formations, simulating human architecture, to the crossing of the North Platte. A little farther on, so close to the snow-line that we shiver under the white ridges ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... doctor get matters arranged it will really make no difference whether a farmer is located in the black-waxy district, or on the arid cactus-cursed lands of the trans-Pecos country, as he will have to surrender to the public all he produces in excess of what the poorest land in use will yield. He will have no incentive to study the capabilities ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... in and out among the mesquite and the cactus to the house. Beside this trail, behind a clump of prickly pear, the Ranger sat down and waited. The hour-hand of his watch crept to ten, to eleven, to twelve. Roberts rose occasionally, stretched himself to avoid any chance of cramped muscles, and counted stars ...
— Oh, You Tex! • William Macleod Raine
... with him to see who took my canteen down to the creek and got some fresh water. He was agreeable and we hunched up to each other. It ain't to my credit to say it, but I was worse hurt than that Injun, so I worked him. He got the short straw, and had to crawl a mile through cactus, while I sat comfortable on the cause of the disagreement and yelled to him that he looked like a badger, and other things that an Injun wouldn't feel was a compliment." Red leaned back and roared. "I can ...
— Red Saunders • Henry Wallace Phillips
... will probably succeed. Persons that are fond of flowers, and have collected a number, are generally willing to give their young friends a few plants; and where we succeed in raising a fine plant from a slip, or cutting, we value it more than one that has been purchased at a green-house. Geraniums, cactus', wax plants, cape and catalonian jessamines, and some others, are easily cultivated in a parlor. Roses, camelias, and azaleas bloom best in a moderate temperature, as the heat of a parlor (unless very large) dries the buds, and prevents their coming to ...
— Domestic Cookery, Useful Receipts, and Hints to Young Housekeepers • Elizabeth E. Lea
... twice to examine the wide circle of the horizon with eyes that were trained to note every aspect of the wilderness. On his right the plains melted away in gentle swell after swell, until they met the horizon. Their brown surface was broken only by the spiked and thorny cactus and stray ...
— The Texan Scouts - A Story of the Alamo and Goliad • Joseph A. Altsheler
... as she fumbled with the string. It was a curious-shaped parcel, and Penelope kept enjoining her to be very careful, and not to turn it over. When at last she did undo the wrappings, and the box inside, and found a tiny red flower-pot with a baby cactus in it, her joy knew ...
— The Carroll Girls • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... perhaps, grant it to some one of his officers, or pawn it to foreign sympathizers for military stores. The neighborhood of Rivas was dotted with ranch-houses, distenanted by these means,—rank grass growing in the court-yards, the cactus-hedges gapped, and the crops swept away by the foragers. Perhaps, had these men been let alone, jealousy toward foreigners would not, of itself, have made them enemies; but General Walker was obliged to provide arms and provisions for his soldiers, and, having no other ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... resumed a study of the immediate landscape. It had not changed as we progressed: ocean, sand, low dunes crowned with impenetrable tangles of wild bay, sparkleberry, and live-oak, with here and there a weather-twisted palmetto sprawling, and here and there the battered blades of cactus and Spanish-bayonet thrust menacingly forward; and over all the vultures, sailing, sailing—some mere circling motes lost in the blue above, some sheering the earth so close that their swiftly sweeping shadows slanted ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... she had confessed in her eyes her love for him. What was he going to do about it? That was the question he had to face and to settle; and he went out alone and tramped over the brown hills and across arroyos and through clumps of sage brush and juniper and cactus, and argued it ...
— Emerson's Wife and Other Western Stories • Florence Finch Kelly
... an innocent child through a hotbed of sensuality and a hailstorm of seduction, on a single twilight eve in London had four or five encounters the particulars of which remained in my memory as barbed arrows remain imbedded in the flesh, smarting and itching and burning like the thorny fibres of cactus or sweetbriar seed with which one has come into too ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... itself felt even in this pastoral retreat, for the two gentlemen appeared to shrink slightly within themselves, and a chill seemed to have passed over the group. The Mayor coughed. The avuncular Woods gazed abstractedly at a large cactus. Even Paul, prepared by previous experience, ...
— A Ward of the Golden Gate • Bret Harte
... trampled out by a blind and deaf world. But we of America are loath to admit this. And if we do not think of genius as an unquenchable flame, we are apt to think of it as an amazingly hardy plant, more tough than horse-brier or cactus. Only a few of us have yet begun to realize that the flower of genius is not the flower of an indestructible weed, but of a fastidious exotic, which usually demands good conditions for bare existence, and needs a really excellent environment and constant tending if it ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... honeysuckle. An aloe, ten feet high, blossomed in a corner, unheeded among loftier beauties. And at the very mouth of the fissure a huge banana leaned across, and flung out its vast leaves, that seemed translucent gold against the sun; under it shone a monstrous cactus in all her pink and crimson glory, and through the maze of color streamed the deep blue of the peaceful ocean, ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... miserable existence, feeding on sand and gravel and dressing myself in cactus plants. Years passed. Eating sand and mud slowly undermined my robust constitution. I fell ill. ...
— Nonsense Novels • Stephen Leacock
... business is a creation, and a beneficent one. It has opened up vast territories to the farmer, gardener and stock-raiser, where before cactus and sagebrush were supreme; and the prairie-dog and his chum, the rattlesnake, held ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... In the very center of the desert is a little settlement called Eden Valley. Imagination must have had a heap to do with its name, but one thing is certain: the serpent will find the crawling rather bad if he attempts to enter this Eden, for the sand is hot; the alkali and the cactus are there, so it must be a serpentless Eden. The settlers have made a long canal and bring their water many miles. They say the soil is splendid, and they don't have much stone; but it is such a flat ...
— Letters on an Elk Hunt • Elinore Pruitt Stewart
... the sandy plain over which we rode. On this grew the short, stubby buffalo-grass, the dust-colored sage-brush, and cactus in rank profusion. Over to the right, perhaps a mile away, a long range of foothills ran down to the horizon, with here and there the great canons, through which entrance was effected to the upland country, each canon bearing ...
— Last of the Great Scouts - The Life Story of William F. Cody ["Buffalo Bill"] • Helen Cody Wetmore
... together with some wiry desert grass and fastened to her belt. It was not long before Donald spied an amole, and having found one, discovered many others growing near. Then Linda led the way past thorns and brush, past impenetrable beds of cholla, until they reached a huge barrel cactus that she had located with the glasses. Beside this bristling monstrous growth Linda paused, and reached for the axe, which Donald handed to her. She drew it lightly across ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... is found this beautiful symbol:—'There is a species of Cactus, from whose outer bark, if torn by an ignorant person, there exudes a poisonous liquid; but the natives, who know the plant, strike to the core, and there find a sweet, refreshing juice, that renews their strength.' ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... Naab laughed, and while Hare ate breakfast he talked of the sheep. The flock he had numbered three thousand. They were a goodly part of them Navajo stock: small, hardy sheep that could live on anything but cactus, and needed little water. This flock had grown from a small number to its present size in a few years. Being remarkably free from the diseases and pests which retard increase in low countries, the sheep had multiplied almost one for one for every year. But for the ravages of wild beasts ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey
... great height and density, and as even as a brick wall at the top and sides. There are also alleys forming long vistas between the trunks and beneath the boughs of oaks, ilexes, and olives; and there are shrubberies and tangled wildernesses of palm, cactus, rhododendron, and I know not what; and a profusion of roses that bloom and wither with nobody to pluck and few to look at them. They climb about the sculpture of fountains, rear themselves against pillars and porticos, ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the same latitude, just over the equator, are the Galapagos. They are pretty islands: the cactus and aloe cover the sides of the rocks, flamingoes and turtle-doves fill the air, and the beach is covered with enormous turtle. But no trace whatever indicates the residence of man, and I believe no man has ever landed on these ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... the tawny eyes glittering with excitement. "The tail of a scorpion! I thought so! And Sowerby would have it that it represented the stem of a Cactus or Prickly Pear!" ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer
... calling-hours. Every one can drop in upon every one else at pleasure. Mrs. Boulte put on a big terai hat, and walked across to the Vansuythens's house to borrow last week's Queen. The two compounds touched, and instead of going up the drive, she crossed through the gap in the cactus-hedge, entering the house from the back. As she passed through the dining-room, she heard, behind the purdah that cloaked the drawing-room door, her husband's voice, saying—"But on my Honor! On my Soul and Honor, I tell you she doesn't care for me. She told me so last night. I would ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... bust, while her mouth would have been pretty but for a trace of moustache. Upon the whole, aided by the resources of the toilet, her appearance at distance was such, that some might have thought her, if anything, rather beautiful, though of a style of beauty rather peculiar and cactus-like. ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... giant cactus stretched mutilated hands across the desert sand, and she believed that Nogales was near, Jean carried her suit-case to the cramped dressing-room and took out her six-shooter and buckled it around her. Then she pulled her coat down over it with a good deal of twisting and ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... the stiff envelopes of the plant-cells, the substance of the wood. The tunicates are the only class of animals that have a real cellulose or woody coat. Sometimes the cellulose mantle is brightly coloured, at other times colourless. Not infrequently it is set with needles or hairs, like a cactus. Often we find a mass of foreign bodies—stone, sand, fragments of mussel-shells, etc.—worked into the mantle. This has earned for the Ascidia the name ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.2 • Ernst Haeckel
... mystery—these are the attributes of the desert. True, it has its softer phases—veiled dawns and dusks, rainbow hues, moon and stars. But these are but tender blossoms from a spiked, poisonous stalk, like the flowers of the cactus. They are brief and evanescent; the iron ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... long in seeing that their victims were escaping, and hurried after them in a much lighter boat, so that they gained on the fugitives with every stroke. The Spaniards were obliged to drive their boat to land and hide in a thicket of cactus. Only those in fear of death could have forced their way into such a thicket. The Indians, with their naked bodies, could not push through the thorns, and the fleeing men therefore escaped and made their way to their countrymen's ships, thus getting in safety to San Domingo. De Soto, however, ...
— Las Casas - 'The Apostle of the Indies' • Alice J. Knight
... excessive rapidity. The patient was suffering great pain. His mind was clear, but he was oppressed with a dreadful anxiety. Up to the time I saw him he had received absolutely no treatment, excepting the application of a cactus poultice to the leg, since there was no whisky at the ranch where he was wounded. I at once made free incisions, five or six in number, from one to two inches in depth, and about three inches in length. These cuts ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 841, February 13, 1892 • Various
... to a place where Wildfire had doubled on his trail and had turned up a side canyon. The climb out was hard on Slone, if not on Nagger. Once up, Slone found himself upon a wide, barren plateau of glaring red rock and clumps of greasewood and cactus. The plateau was miles wide, shut in by great walls and mesas of colored rock. The afternoon sun beat down fiercely. A blast of wind, as if from a furnace, swept across the plateau, and it was laden with red dust. Slone walked here, where he could have ridden. And he made several miles of up-and-down ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... tell me how it is a man can get fond of so Godforsaken a country? Cactus and greasewood and mesquite, and for a change mesquite and greasewood and cactus! Nothing but sand washes and sand hills, except the naked mountains 'way off with their bones sticking through. But in the mo'ning like this, when the world's kind o' smiley with the sunshine, or after dark when things ...
— Crooked Trails and Straight • William MacLeod Raine
... they do up here now, and particularly because he'd had a government contract for a long while, ran a big gang of men and critters, and had made a lot of money. Likewise he had a girl, who lived at the fort, and was mighty nice to look at, and restful to the eye after a year or so of cactus-trees and mesquite and buffalo-grass. She was twice as nice and twice as pretty as the women at the post, and as for money—well, her dad could have bought and sold all the officers in a lump; but they and their wives looked down on her, and she didn't mix with them none whatever. ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... tell you? Why, they went away to Bennett's ranch. Couldn't find a vestige of vegetables nearer. Mrs. Bennett has a little patch where she raises lettuce and radishes. The orderly carried a basket full of truck, and leaves and flowers, poppies and cactus, you know, and you've no idea how pretty they've ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King
... soft, pleasant vegetation presented to the eye the whole range of shades in green, from the bluish, sickly green of the idrys to the dark, metallic green of the stenia. Farther inland, tall grapes, lianes, aloes, and cactus formed impenetrable thickets, out of which rose, like fluted columns, gigantic cocoa-palms, and the most graceful trees on earth, areca-palms. Through clearings here and there, one could follow, ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... that this was Richard Saltire's business on the farm—to rid the land of that bane and pest of the Karoo, the prickly-pear cactus. The new governmental experiment was the only one, so far, that had shown any good results in getting rid of the pest. It consisted in inoculating each bush with certain poisons, which, when they entered ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... thin try to burn him." Then he went up to the girl, cut her loose from the stake, and she raised up in a sitting posture, "Would ye's moind lettin' me help ye to yer fate, Miss?" said Mike. "O, I'm so tired and weak I can't stand," said the girl. "They have almost killed me dragging me over the cactus." ...
— Thirty-One Years on the Plains and In the Mountains • William F. Drannan
... little heed to him. Lying there he looked down the slope, clad with stunted cork-trees and evergreen oaks; here and there was the golden gleam of broom; yonder over a spur of whitish rock sprawled the green and living scarlet of a cactus. Below him about the caves of Hercules was a space of sea whose clear depths shifted with its slow movement from the deep green of emerald to all the colours of the opal. A little farther off behind a projecting screen of rock that formed a little haven two ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... drugs that affect sensation, thinking, self-awareness, and emotion. Hallucinogens include LSD (acid, microdot), mescaline and peyote (mexc, buttons, cactus), amphetamine variants (PMA, STP, DOB), phencyclidine (PCP, angel dust, hog), phencyclidine analogues (PCE, PCPy, TCP), and ...
— The 1997 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... gigantic size; lycopodiums, a hundred feet high; the huge sigillaria, found in our coal mines; tree ferns, as tall as our fir-trees in northern latitudes; lepidodendra, with cylindrical forked stems, terminated by long leaves, and bristling with rough hairs like those of the cactus. ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... Room a narrow fissure forms a passage to the Cactus Chamber, where there is a marvelous floor on which the crystals are in bunches like cacti, and the beautiful ceiling is the finest and most irregular unbroken mass ...
— Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills • Luella Agnes Owen
... but remarkable, considering that she could not see her target, planted it in the pit of Wallie's stomach with such force that the muffled thud of it sounded like someone beating a carpet. The kick knocked the breath out of him, and as he lay on his back on a clump of cactus he was sure that he was bleeding internally ...
— The Dude Wrangler • Caroline Lockhart
... was the lucky one for the Gold and Green. Monty Merriweather opened with a clean two-base hit to left, and advanced to third on Biff Pemberton's sacrifice to short. Butch, trying to knock a home-run, struck out-a la "Cactus" Cravath in the World's Series; but the lanky Ichabod, endeavoring to bunt, dropped a Texas-Leaguer over second, and the score was tied, though the sky-scraper twirler was caught off base a moment later. And, though Ballard fought hard in the last of the eighth, Ichabod displayed ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... the almost indefinite slurring from note to note was strangely un-English. Diana Mayo leaned forward, her head raised, listening intently, with shining eyes. The voice seemed to come from the dark shadows at the end of the garden, or it might have been further away out in the road beyond the cactus hedge. The singer sang slowly, his voice lingering caressingly on the words; the last verse dying away softly and clearly, almost ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... rose and fell in long billowing waves; as if some wizard, in the morning of the world, had smitten a living ocean to lifeless sand, where nothing flourished but the camel thorn and the ak plant and gaunt cactus bushes—their limbs ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... Mexico where there is plenty of soil and moisture, plenty of chance for yuccas to thrive, and you will find it turned into a tree and the thorn merely a dull blade-ending. Follow the sahuaro and the pitahaya into the tropics again, and with their cousin, the organ cactus, you will find them growing a soft thorn that would hardly ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... asceticism with the mellower and richer fancy of the luxurious Mohammedan has resulted in a perfect work of that art which makes death lovely by recalling its spiritual significance. Besides, a holy silence broods about the cactus and the euphorbian foliage, so that a word will send the paroquets, accustomed to such unbroken stillness, into hasty flights. The tomb proper is in the chamber at the centre, enclosed by delicately-trellised ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... pools. The way the great gray bowlders trooped down to the brook as if they were cattle going to drink; the dark caverns under the shelving cliffs, where the water murmured with such hollow mockery; the low spear-pointed gray plants, resembling century plants, and which Glenn called mescal cactus, each with its single straight dead stalk standing on high with fluted head; the narrow gorges, perpendicularly walled in red, where the constricted brook plunged in amber and white cascades over ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... the surface of the water, which, however, is often strongly disturbed as some ungainly monster rolls or turns below them. On the outskirts of the towns are the gardens, enclosed by hedges of castor-oil or cactus, where many kinds of fruits and spices are grown: bananas, pineapple, guava, bael, citrons, etc., are some of the ordinary kinds, while the coco-nut, tamarind, jack, and papaya grow everywhere about the streets and houses. Many ...
— Burma - Peeps at Many Lands • R.Talbot Kelly
... periods, but only upon a certain day in each year. Then, stripped to the waist, these poor zealots go chanting a dolorous strain, and beating themselves unsparingly upon the back with the sharp-spined cactus, or soap-weed, until they are a revolting sight to look upon. Often they sink from the exhaustion of long-sustained suffering and loss of blood. One of the ceremonies among these peculiar people is the bearing of a ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... your skill. And when did you arrive, my dearest friend? and where have you been? Our old haunts? Many sketches? What abbey have you explored, what antique treasures have you discovered? I have such a fine addition for your herbal! The Barbary cactus, just what you wanted; I found it in my volume of Shelley; and beautifully dried, beautifully; it will quite charm you. What do you think of this drawing? Is it not beautiful? quite the character, is it not?' Ferdinand paused ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... and follow in my wake." Jones, as he spoke, seized a torch, extinguished it, and handed it to Dick. Equipped as he had directed, they set out, half crawling, half swimming, to avoid the volumes of smoke hovering in the thick, cactus-like leaves of the wild laurel. Presently they emerged, after toil and misery, that excitement alone enabled the boy to support, into what seemed a cleared space. But as soon as their eyes could distinguish clearly, they found themselves on the edge ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... other vegetable productions from which the cloth, baskets, and so forth were constructed by the people who placed their dead in the caves. Dr. Palmer also sent a full set of the rude apparatus by which the present Indians of Mexico make their cactus-cakes and syrup, from the thorn-tipped pole with which the prickly fruit is gathered to the great earthen colanders through which it is strained; also all the implements and utensils, the native still, etc., used ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... have been, or are, in cultivation in the gardens of the few specialists who take an interest in Cactuses; but these are practically unknown in English horticulture. It is not, however, very many years ago that there was something like a Cactus mania, when rich amateurs vied with each other in procuring and growing large collections of ...
— Cactus Culture For Amateurs • W. Watson
... the grass changed yet again. They had rolled under wheel by now more than one hundred different varieties of wild grasses. The vegetation began to show the growing altitude. The cactus was seen now and then. On the far horizon the wavering mysteries of the mirage appeared, marvelous in deceptiveness, mystical, alluring, the very spirits of the Far West, appearing to move before their eyes in giant ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... smoking, and their slow, stolid ways, you would think them perfectly earthly; but an ethereal fire is all the while working in them, and bursting out in most unexpected little jets of poetry and sentiment, like blossoms on a cactus. ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Chug Springs, the head of a branch stream, and from thence we went over what we were told was the toughest divide in the whole country. The heat was scorching over the dreary, dusty wastes of sand and alkali, where hardly the cactus could find sustenance. This was our first glimpse of the Mauvaises Terres, the alkali-lands, which turn up their white linings here and there, but do not quite prevail on this side the Platte. The Black Hills of Wyoming, with their dark jagged outlines, gave life to the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... state of delight; and now, lost to all the world beside, from the mystery of one beautiful and strange green thing to another, she went wandering and admiring, and now and then timidly advancing her nose to see if something glorious was something sweet too. She could hardly leave a superb cactus, in the petals of which there was such a singular blending of scarlet and crimson as almost to dazzle her sight; and if the pleasure of smell could intoxicate she would have reeled away from a luxuriant daphne odorata in full ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Susan Warner
... forest trees of temperate Europe and America—the ash, elm, beech, oak, fir and walnut. The orchards, above those of oranges and lemons, are of figs and olives. The cork-oak covers considerable tracts, but is less attended to than in Spain. A non-European aspect is imparted by the tufts of cactus and aloes which abound in ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... neatly divided into patches—each hedged off in squares in which flourished all sorts of vegetables, including sweet corn and potatoes and several other less familiar varieties. In pastures, fenced in with mathematical regularity by hedges of the African cactus thorn, herds of humped cattle were feeding contentedly in the mellow glow of the setting sun, occasionally lowing softly, which latter made Billy, as he expressed it, ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... ejaculated in shrill surprise and reined in his horse to gaze. The young hobo was running and, not far ahead, the Ground Hog was fleeing before him. They ran through bushy gulches and over cactus-crowned ridges where the sahuaros rose up like giant sentinels; until at last, as he came to the sandy creek-bed, the black hobo ...
— Silver and Gold - A Story of Luck and Love in a Western Mining Camp • Dane Coolidge
... intuition North Eagle seemed to know just what would interest the white boy—all the romance of the trail, the animals, the game, the cactus beds, the vast areas of mushrooms growing wild, edible and luscious, the badger and gopher holes, and the long, winding, half obliterated buffalo trails that yet scarred the distant reaches. It was only when he pointed to these latter, that he really spoke his mind, breaking into ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson
... wonderful Burbank with his thornless cactus, his stoneless plum, and his white blackberry, is simply a searcher after mutations. His success is not because he uses any secret methods, but because of the size of his operations. He produces his specimens by the millions, and in these millions looks, and often looks in vain for the lonely ...
— The Dollar Hen • Milo M. Hastings
... hundreds of miles in every direction the plains stretched away to the dim horizon. There was room everywhere, nothing much, in fact, but room, with a little coarse grass and plenty of clear air. But the population went in for crowding by preference, and didn't care a cactus whether it ...
— Children of the Wild • Charles G. D. Roberts
... heavenly voice told the father to fly with the child across the Jumna, and the tyrant, like Herod, killed the infants in the village. In this month also is a feast upon which no fire must be kindled or food cooked, and on which the cactus-tree and serpents ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... party on that bright desert morning, though the way led through a dismal country of giant cactus, cholla and mesquite. Pete noted with amusement that Stanley and Frank-Francis showed some awkwardness and restraint with each other. Their clipped g's were carefully restored and their conversation was otherwise conducted on the highest plane. The dropping of this superfluous final letter ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... supply of coal, which would carry her, if properly husbanded, across the Pacific. Steaming northward, she entered the bay of Valparaiso, which Tom, as he looked at the barren, red, and bare hills surrounding it, with scarce a bush except the cactus to be seen, pronounced a very odd sort of Paradise. The town stands partly on the shores of the bay, and chiefly on a number of hills separated by valleys, with the mighty Cordilleras rising beyond, giving the scenery, in spite of the barren aspect of the foreground, a grand and picturesque ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... of cactus, of which they make needles, grows abundantly on the mountains round Ollantay-tampu. It is called ahuarancu. They set fire to the cacti as a war signal. Zegarra calls it a thistle. The word in ...
— Apu Ollantay - A Drama of the Time of the Incas • Sir Clements R. Markham
... better she liked it. There was a cheery bit of color in its blazing letters, and she was partial to bits of color. That's why she kept plants all winter in the little sitting-room at home, and nursed one cactus that gave out a scarlet bloom ...
— Abijah's Bubble - 1909 • F. Hopkinson Smith
... pine, the cedar, with its stiff, angular branches, and the cottonwood, with its varied curves and bright colours, were crowded into bunches or strung into zigzag lines, interspersed with shrubs and mountain plants, among which the flaming cactus was conspicuous. To the right and left, the bare cones of the barren peaks rose in multitude, with their calm, awful forms shrouded in snow, and their dark shadows reflected far into the valleys, like ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... what had been the debatable ground, as much the enemy's as ours, and had not gone far before we were suddenly aware of a group of Spanish horsemen over the hedge of cactus to the left of the road, brightly dressed young fellows wearing the blue linen and red facings of the guarda civile, who at the sight of us turned and dashed back through the fields as though to ...
— The Surrender of Santiago - An Account of the Historic Surrender of Santiago to General - Shafter, July 17, 1898 • Frank Norris
... marsh-forests. They were characterized, then, as now, by the small size of the leaves growing close against the stem, so that the stem itself, though covered with leaves, looks almost naked, like the stem of the Cactus. Beside these, there are the tree-like Equiseta, in which we find the articulations on the trunk corresponding exactly to those now so characteristic of those marsh-grasses which are the modern representatives of this family of plants, with cone-like ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... very good one anyhow," I said encouragingly. "It wasn't typical. Dahlia should have had an orange in her hand, and Myra might have been resting her cheek against a cactus. Try it again, Simpson, and get a ...
— The Sunny Side • A. A. Milne
... Judy had forgone three meals! He shut his lips tightly, and a light of almost heroic resolve came into his eyes. Round at the side of the house was the window to the pantry; he had often gazed longingly up at it, but had never ventured to attempt the ascent, for there was a horrible cactus creeper up the wall. ...
— Seven Little Australians • Ethel Sybil Turner
... toward the dwelling, with its group of outhouses. By chance he found a path leading to the rear of these which he had not traversed before, and followed it until he came to a hedge of thickly set trees of some variety of cactus, which seemed to have been planted to form an enclosure. Cautiously pushing aside the branches bordering a small gap in this hedge, Uncle John discovered a charming garden lying beyond, so he quickly squeezed himself through the opening ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Abroad • Edith Van Dyne
... to parade of the sufferings, mental and bodily, which her devotees were instructed to inflict upon themselves! I am reminded of the thirsting mule, which has, in some countries, to strike with his hoof among the spines of the cactus, and drink, with lamed foot and bleeding lips, the few drops of milk which ooze from the broken thorns. Affectionate, suffering natures came to Rome for comfort; but her scanty kindness is only to be drawn with anguish from the cruel sharpness of asceticism. The worldly, the audacious, ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... meant. He knew by the look of joy on the freshly smeared faces at his waking, by the pitch-pine wood that had been brought up, and by the fagots at his feet. The big chief who had felt his fist came up, grinning, and jabbed a buckhorn cactus against the engineer's thigh, and when the latter tried to move out of reach they all grunted and danced with delight. They had been uneasy lest the white ...
— The Last Spike - And Other Railroad Stories • Cy Warman |
