"Overgrown" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... uninteresting ground, we think it more convenient to sling our legs over a horse's back, for the journey to Civita Vecchia, better known to sailors as "Chivity-Vic." This was the former capital of the island, though now, as deserted almost as Babylon, its streets overgrown with grass, its buildings crumbling ruins, and echoing to the tread of our horses' hoofs. But it is not so much to view these ruins that I have brought you here, as to visit the Catacombs, or subterranean burying ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... iron-works of the Forest, dated in the year 1780, "deep in the earth vast caverns scooped out by men's hands, and large as the aisles of churches; and on its surface are extensive labyrinths, worked among the rocks, and now long since overgrown with woods; which whosoever traces them must see with astonishment, and incline to think them to have been the work of armies rather than of private labourers. They certainly were the toil of many ...
— The Forest of Dean - An Historical and Descriptive Account • H. G. Nicholls
... bulk there must be hidden the modest, slender, violet-nature of a girl, whom an alien mass of earthliness has unkindly overgrown; for an English maiden in her teens, though very seldom so pretty as our own damsels, possesses, to say the truth, a certain charm of half-blossom, and delicately folded leaves, and tender womanhood, shielded by maidenly reserves, with which, somehow or other, our American girls ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)
... heaped up against the face of the cliff; but the remaining surface of the stone was clean bare and weather-beaten. The talus against the cliff was composed of loose fragments of stone and other products of wash and erosion. This was overgrown with a thicket of stunted shrubs, wry-necked goblin thistles and murderous devil's clubs. These bludgeon-shaped plants, thickly covered with sharp thorns, reared aloft their weapons as if in menace to all living things; the unstable ...
— The Black Wolf Pack • Dan Beard
... contempt, and though he endeavoured to appease the people by the banishment of Emeri, yet the Parliament, perceiving what ascendancy they had over the Court, left no stone unturned to demolish the power of this overgrown favourite. ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... he cast the stunned reptile far out into the garden. Returning, he said—"The aodaisho[u] is the most harmless of snakes. The farmers keep it to destroy the rats which infest house and store rooms. How can Hana be afraid of snakes, living in this yashiki overgrown by weeds and grass, from roof to garden?" O'Hana did not reply in direct terms—"It is evil fortune to take a snake in the hand."—"Never mind such talk. It is the priest who speaks. This Iemon knows all about snakes. Go to sleep." She obeyed, knowing ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... cathedrals with their tomes, without ever dreaming of bringing their labors to the press. He evidently was deeply and accurately informed of the particulars of the wars between his countrymen and the Moors, a tract of history but too much overgrown with the weeds of fable. His glowing zeal, also, in the cause of the Catholic faith entitles him to be held up as a model of the good old orthodox chroniclers, who recorded with such pious exultation ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... because of Kells's interest and the silent attention of the men of his clan. It did not seem to mean anything to the white-faced, tragic-eyed Cleve. Joan gazed at him with utter amazement. She remembered a heavily built, florid Jim Cleve, an overgrown boy with a good-natured, lazy smile on his full face and sleepy eyes. She all but failed to recognize him in the man who stood there now, lithe and powerful, with muscles bulging in his coarse, white shirt. Joan's gaze swept over ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... of one of these dwellings will both show the fears that agitated these tyrants, and prove entertaining to the reader. They selected a spot overgrown with wood, near a river, and raised a rampart or ditch round it, so straight and steep that it was impossible to climb it, more particularly by those who had no scaling ladders. Over that ditch there was one passage into the wood; the dwelling, which was a ...
— The Pirates Own Book • Charles Ellms
... bony or gristly nodules are to be found at the bases of these two metacarpal splints, and it is probable that these represent rudiments of the first and fifth toes. Thus, the part of the horse's skeleton, which corresponds with that of the human hand, contains one overgrown middle digit, and at least two imperfect lateral digits; and these answer, respectively, to the third, the second, and the fourth fingers ...
— American Addresses, with a Lecture on the Study of Biology • Tomas Henry Huxley
... pale green foliage. The sound of the waters came up to her, and the wilderness of it all appealed, as, at that moment, nothing else could have appealed. She pressed her blowing horse forward, and rode down to the banks so densely overgrown. ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... sides of which we were travelling; where these streams crossed our trail there were great masses of caladiums with their leaves of green velvet. We passed two little coffee plantations, the first of which was sadly neglected and overgrown with weeds, the second neatly kept. From this we rose again, and having gained the summit, looked down upon the village of ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr
... rustic two-story frame cottage, with a long porch in front, all overgrown with honeysuckles, clematis, woodbine ...
— Victor's Triumph - Sequel to A Beautiful Fiend • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... which we had observed when coming in from work both days, and which seemed to promise shelter, although the trees were small. We passed through it quickly, and kept it between us and the village until we reached a ditch two and a half or three feet deep and overgrown with heather. By this time it was beginning to rain, for which we were glad, for it would discourage travelling and drive indoors those who had any place to go to. We crawled on our hands and knees along the ditch, whose bottom was fairly dry and grassy, until ...
— Three Times and Out • Nellie L. McClung
... depend on the season of the year. In summer, the heads will remain at the proper stage for cutting no more than a day or two, while late in autumn they may often be left a week before becoming overgrown. ...
— The Cauliflower • A. A. Crozier
... Paris consumes 8,000 quintals of meal daily, which expenditure alone amounts to 1,200 millions per annum." Seven months later, when a bag of flour brings 13,000 francs, the same expenditure reaches 546 millions per month.—Under the ancient regime, Paris, although overgrown, continued to be an useful organism; if it absorbed much, it elaborated more; its productiveness compensated for what it consumed, and, every year, instead of exhausting the public treasury it poured 77 millions into it. The new regime has converted it into a ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... Wedmore, in a very loud and determined voice, which was supposed to have the effect of frightening her into submission. "And it's all rubbish to think to get around me by calling yourself 'little Doreen,' when you're a great, big, overgrown lamp-post of a girl, who can take her own part against ...
— The Wharf by the Docks - A Novel • Florence Warden
... to a slow decay, That what we are, and have been, may be known; But at the coming of the milder day, 175 These monuments shall all be overgrown. ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... screeched, and across broad stretches of fenland and moor, where the silence was only broken by the booming cry of the bittern or the fluttering of wild duck far above our heads. The road was in parts overgrown with brambles, and was so deeply rutted and so studded with sharp and dangerous hollows, that our horses came more than once upon their knees. In one place the wooden bridge which led over a stream had broken down, and no attempt had been made to repair it, so that we were compelled to ride our horses ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the Atlantic, when the ship suddenly takes a sharp turn round an abrupt corner, and before you know it, you are advancing into the most perfect of landlocked harbours. A great cliff rises on the left,—Quirpon Point they call it,—and clinging to its base like an overgrown limpet is a tiny cottage, with its inevitable fish stage. Farther along are more houses; then a white church with a pointed spire, and a bright-green building near by, while across the path is a very pretty square green school. Next ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... found himself, one evening, on a wild and lonely mountain side. No village was in sight, no cottage, not even the hut of a charcoal burner, so often to be found on the outskirts of the forest. He had been following a faint and much overgrown path, but at length, even that was lost sight of. Twilight was coming on, and in vain he strove to recover the lost track. Each effort seemed only to entangle him more hopelessly in the briers and tall grasses which grew thickly on all sides. Faint and weary he stumbled on in the fast gathering darkness, ...
— Tales of Wonder Every Child Should Know • Various
... be taught every American schoolboy, for when that schoolboy becomes a voter he should have learned the lesson that the United States, while it ought not to become an overgrown military power, should always have a first-class navy, formidable from the number of its ships, and formidable still more from the excellence of the individual ships and the high character of the officers ...
— Hero Tales From American History • Henry Cabot Lodge, and Theodore Roosevelt
... generations is as convenient as the new personality side is for the remaining nine, and these tenth purposes—some of which are not unimportant—are obscured and fulfilled amiss owing to the completeness with which the more commonly needed conception has overgrown the other. ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... these we followed to its junction with a very wide channel, larger, in my opinion, than the Gregory at the point where we left that stream. From its appearance I imagine it has not been visited by a flood for a considerable period, as in many places it is overgrown with ...
— Journal of Landsborough's Expedition from Carpentaria - In search of Burke and Wills • William Landsborough
... rhododendrons, which grew in more perfection here than anywhere else in the county. To the right there were the kitchen gardens, the fish-pond, and an orchard bordered by a dry moat, and a broken ruin of a wall, in some places thicker than it was high, and everywhere overgrown with trailing ivy, yellow stonecrop, and dark moss. To the left there was a broad graveled walk, down which, years ago, when the place had been a convent, the quiet nuns had walked hand in hand; a wall bordered with espaliers, and shadowed on one ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... rooms and then back to the kitchen, where she talked with Roswitha about everything imaginable: about the ivy over on Christ's Church and the probability that next year the windows would be entirely overgrown; about the porter, who had again turned off the gas so poorly that they were likely to be blown up; and about buying their lamp oil again at the large lamp store on Unter den Linden instead of on Anhalt St. She talked about everything imaginable, except ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... higher than a two-years' child, It stands erect this aged thorn; No leaves it has, no thorny points; It is a mass of knotted joints, A wretched thing forlorn. It stands erect, and like a stone With lichens it is overgrown. ...
— Lyrical Ballads 1798 • Wordsworth and Coleridge
... field roads with no definite aim, and chanced upon an uninhabited, somewhat dilapidated house, which stood in the middle of the rising ground with a view over Copenhagen, and surrounded by a large, overgrown garden. On an old, rotten board stood the words "To let," but nothing was said as to where application ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... ground-colour was much the same, but it was spotted all over with snow-white spots that gave it a very beautiful appearance. It looked somewhat like the young of the fallow-deer, and might have been taken for an overgrown fawn. Karl, however, knew ...
— The Plant Hunters - Adventures Among the Himalaya Mountains • Mayne Reid
... once very pleasant, but they then had the appearance of a wilderness. The painful uncertainty of many years, had occasioned the neglect and ruin in which I saw them. Some of the nuns were reading upon shattered seats, under overgrown bowers, and others were walking in the melancholy shade of neglected avenues. The effect of the whole was gloomy and sorrowful, and fully confirmed the melancholy recital which I received from Mrs. S——. Bonaparte, it is said, intends to confirm to these nuns ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... on the opposite bank, and, having dismounted, Arthur sought for, and soon found, the entrance to the road they were in search of, now overhung with brambles and creeping plants. Pushing them carefully aside, they entered, and found themselves in a narrow track, overgrown with soft grass. Assisting Edith to remount, Carlton threw the bridle of his own horse over the stump of a tree, then said to her, in a voice hoarse with emotion, and pointing to a small opening between the bushes, "From this point you can watch the results ...
— Vellenaux - A Novel • Edmund William Forrest
... some friends and come back in the evening." Krishna replied, "I would like that very much. Let us go for a bathe." So Arjuna and Krishna set out with their friends. Reaching a fine spot fit for pleasure and overgrown with trees, where several tall houses had been built, the party went inside. Food and wine, wreaths of flowers and fragrant perfumes were laid out and at once they began to frolic at their will. The girls in the party with delightful rounded haunches, large breasts ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer
... who had not been informed of the danger, caught a glimpse of the picture of the Archangel Gabriel. All of the pictures and pieces of sculpture were then removed to a little hut in the orchard near the stables, built in the side of a hillock, half under ground, and quite overgrown by vines; and when both pictures and the precious books were safely out of the house Aunt Mary felt that she could breathe. By that time Clark had returned from Sing Sing, where he had purchased a large amount of gunpowder by Aunt Mary's ...
— The Story of a Summer - Or, Journal Leaves from Chappaqua • Cecilia Cleveland
... piled from morning until night. Strange solitary pumps were found near Todgers's hiding themselves for the most part in blind alleys, and keeping company with fire-ladders. There were churches also by dozens, with many a ghostly little churchyard, all overgrown with such straggling vegetation as springs up spontaneously from damp, and graves, and rubbish. In some of these dingy resting-places which bore much the same analogy to green churchyards, as the pots of earth for mignonette and wall-flower in the windows overlooking them did to ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... rural economy, I am equally certain that there is none in which a careless or inexperienced person would be more sure to find his outlay result in an almost entire loss. An Apiary neglected or mismanaged, is far worse than a farm overgrown with weeds, or exhausted by ignorant tillage: for the land is still there, and may, by prudent management, soon be made again to blossom like the rose; but the bees, when once destroyed, can never be brought back to life, unless the poetic fables of the Mantuan Bard, can be ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... the day that bends us, humbleth us, and that makes us bow before God, for our faults committed in our prosperity? and yet doth it yield no good unto us? we cold not live without such turnings of the hand of God upon us. We should be overgrown with flesh, if we had not our seasonable winters. It is said that in some countries trees will grow, but will bear no fruit, because there is no winter there. The Lord bless all seasons to his people, and help them rightly to behave themselves, under all the times that go ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... form, but must dwindle in number till our past seems as thinly peopled as our continent. It is in these rooms that the grandeur of England, historically, resides. You may, if you are so envious, consider it in that point and this, and at some point find her less great than the greatest of her overgrown or overgrowing daughters, but from the presence of that tremendous collectivity, that populous commonwealth of famous citizens whose census can hardly be taken, you must come away and own, in the welcome obscurity ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... wisdom than our own. We wish to subvert no religion. We wish only to bring back the material-minded—to take them out of their cramped valley and put them on the ridge, whence they can breathe purer air and see other valleys and other ridges beyond. Religions are mostly petrified and decayed, overgrown with forms and choked with mysteries. We can prove that there is no need for this. All that is essential is both very simple and ...
— The New Revelation • Arthur Conan Doyle
... different parts, in the hope of procuring lead and iron shot. At the south side only the ditches remain perfect: they are wide and deep, and are cut through immense rocks of limestone; and, from being overgrown, towards the top, with different kinds of shrubs, they have a ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley
... is as dark as a wolf's mouth," said he to Tressilian, as they walked together slowly along the solitary and broken approach, and had just come in sight of the monastic front of the old mansion, with its shafted windows, brick walls overgrown with ivy and creeping shrubs, and twisted stalks of chimneys of heavy stone-work. "And yet," continued Lambourne, "it is fairly done on the part of Foster too for since he chooses not visitors, it is right to keep his place in a fashion that will invite few to trespass upon ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... sloping up to the house was almost full of shrubbery in a state of overgrown prosperity. There were lilacs, dark with buds, and what Anne, who was devotedly curious in matters of growing life, thought althea, snowball and a small-leaved yellow rose. All this runaway shrubbery looked, in a way of speaking, inpenetrable. It would have taken ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... conflagration and murders and devastations. Churches were turned into stables, palaces were burned, works of priceless value were destroyed, the relics of martyrs were desecrated, the most fruitful provinces were overrun, the population was decimated, the land was overgrown with forests, cultivation was suspended, and despair and fear seized the minds of all classes. So great was the misfortune of the Illyrian provinces that they never afterward recovered, and for ten centuries only supplied materials for roving robbers. The ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... way. It turns into the forest at once on leaving Sarufuto, and goes through forest the entire distance, with an abundance of reedy grass higher than my hat on horseback along it, and, as it is only twelve inches broad and much overgrown, the horses were constantly pushing through leafage soaking from a night's rain, and I was soon wet up to my shoulders. The forest trees are almost solely the Ailanthus glandulosus and the Zelkowa keaki, often matted together with a white-flowered trailer of ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... Britain, stripped as they now are of the overgrown importance which they derived from the Feudal System, have made no acquisition of political influence to compensate for the loss of it, by an increasing extension of patronage, either collectively or individually, ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... stands in dumb testimony of that taste and feeling which prevailed among its British founders. The garden in which it stands, once rich with the choicest flowers of every clime, now presents an area overgrown with rank weeds, decaying hedges, dilapidated walks, and sickly shrubbery. The hand that once nurtured this pretty scene of buds and blossoms with so much care has passed away. Dull inertness now hangs its lifeless festoons over the whole, from the vaulted ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... of its high successes. Do you know Spezia?" "Not in the least; never was here before." "Well, sir, I have known it, I'll not stop to count how many years; but I knew it when that spot yonder, where you see that vile tall chimney, with its tail of murky smoke, was a beautiful little villa, all overgrown with fig and olive trees. Where you perceive that red glare—the flame of a smelting furnace—there was an orangery. I ought to know the spot well. There, where a summerhouse stood, on that rocky point, they have got a ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... down to work for dear life in this doleful spot, without a farthing of capital, no stock, no anything. I came upon the clearing one day in the course of my surveying, and never did I see Gone to the Dogs more clearly written on any spot; the half-burnt or overthrown trees lying about overgrown with wild vines and raspberries, the snake fence broken down, the log-house looking as if a touch would upset it, and nothing hopeful but a couple of patches of maize and potatoes, and a great pumpkin climbing up a stump. ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and a paddock, and a shrubbery, the last so much overgrown that it resembled a little forest, and often did duty for a miniature "merry Sherwood," when the present of some bows and arrows caused playing at Robin Hood and his men to become a popular pastime. Lastly, there was the stable, where Jessamine, the little fat pony, and the low basket-carriage ...
— Soldiers of the Queen • Harold Avery
... raising revenue, but to afford advantages to favored classes at the expense of a large majority of their fellow-citizens. Those employed in agriculture, mechanical pursuits, commerce, and navigation were compelled to contribute from their substance to swell the profits and overgrown wealth of the comparatively few who had invested their capital in manufactures. The taxes were not levied in proportion to the value of the articles upon which they were imposed, but, widely departing from ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Polk - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 4: James Knox Polk • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... of plucking the hairs out one by one when he was absorbed in thought, not to mention those plucked out by his wife without the excuse of thinking. His black cap shone like a buttered roll, his linen shirt was neither an Egyptian nor a Swiss fabric, and his chest, overgrown with long black hair, always showed bare through the slit of his unbuttoned shirt. His linen trousers had been white once upon a time, but now they were picturesquely variegated from the dust and soot clinging to them, and by the stains added by his young hopeful, ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... it may be questioned if all those who ostensibly made themselves so busy in exploring woods and fields and lanes were quite so thorough when it came to the private examination of their own lofts and outhouses. Stories were afloat of a mysterious figure being occasionally seen in some old overgrown trackway or other, remote from turnpike roads; but when a search was instituted in any of these suspected quarters nobody was found. Thus the days and weeks ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... which appeared each day, keeping up a brazier fire in my room when it was damp, but I was tired of being treated as either a suspect or a royal personage, and as we were now well beyond the limit of Lolo raids I demanded the freedom of being alone. I found quiet in an overgrown graveyard, with charming views down stream and up the near hillsides cultivated in tiny scallops to the very top, although the slopes were so steep that each plot was shored up with a strong stone wall to keep the crop of maize ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... dismounted at the Ghoda, and walked into the forest. I found the large umgwenya tree without any difficulty, and underneath it were the two piles of stones close together. They were much overgrown with ferns and creepers. A large bush-buck leaped up and crashed through the undergrowth. His doe followed immediately afterwards, passing so close that I could see the dew-drops glistening ...
— Kafir Stories - Seven Short Stories • William Charles Scully
... holding its cones and hoarding seeds often results in the cones being overgrown and embedded in the trunk or the limbs of the trees. As the cones hug closely the trunk or the limbs, it is not uncommon for the saw, when laying open a log at the mill, to reveal a number of cones embedded there. I have in my cabin a sixteen-foot plank that is two inches in diameter ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... quite fearsome at nightfall. Linen was hanging to dry on the broken marble statues of an unused fountain; here and there in the middle of the garden cabbages were planted beside some common flowers; everything was neglected, in disorder, and overgrown with tall weeds, among which glided varicolored lizards. On all sides through the gigantic old trees there was a distant, lonely prospect of range after range of mountains stretching as far ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... whole affair was so tame that it was impossible to get up any fighting enthusiasm over it; the poor, unwieldy creature died meekly and quietly as an overgrown seal. In less than an hour from the time of leaving the ship we were ready to bring our ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... to move at midnight," the troops stretched themselves upon the ground to get such comfort and rest as was possible. Promptly at midnight we began to move again, and such a march, and under such conditions, was never before experienced by the troops. Along blind roads, overgrown by underbrush, through fields that had lain fallow for years, now studded with bushes and briars, and the night being exceedingly dark, the men floundered and fell as they marched. But the needs were too urgent to be slack in the march now, so the men struggled with nature in their endeavor ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... piteously. "I would rather have talked to you," she said. "Peter Tappan is only an overgrown boy. If you had really cared to talk to me—" She checked ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... land which has never been ploughed, mown or cropped and also land once cultivated but now overgrown ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... noble structure exhibited such a melancholy proof. I walked round it several times, meditating on the fleeting and transitory nature of all terrestrial things; on the eastern end were the remains of a lofty tower, near forty feet high, overgrown with ivy, the top apparently flat; I surveyed it on every side very minutely, thinking that if I could gain its summit I should enjoy the most delightful prospect of the circumjacent country. Animated with ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... of birch and oak and pitch pine, planted, as were the blackberry vines, by birds that stopped to rest a moment on the old fence or to satisfy their curiosity. Stout young trees had crowded it aside and broken it. Here and there a leaning post was overgrown with woodbine. The rails were gray and moss-grown. Nature was trying hard to make it a bit of the landscape; it could not much longer retain its individuality. The wild things of the woods had long accepted it as theirs, though not quite as they ...
— Ways of Wood Folk • William J. Long
... darkness fell over the landscape, and the battery arrived at a beautiful camping-place about one mile east of Siboney, where a break in the water-pipe near the railroad track gave an ample supply of excellent water, and a ruined plantation, now overgrown with luxuriant sugar-cane, provided ample forage for the mules. The two troops of cavalry, which had been offered and refused as an escort, had reached this camping-place some time before, so that the wearied members of the detachment found pleasant camp-fires already ...
— The Gatlings at Santiago • John H. Parker
... which his unscientific education has stimulated into such monstrous 'o'ergrowth' (but not enlightened), so that the hero on the battle-field who is winning there the oaken crown, which he will transmit if he can to his posterity, is only, after all, a boy overgrown,—a boy with his boyishness unnaturally prolonged by his culture,—the impersonation of the childishness of a childish time,—the crowned impersonation of the instinct which is SOVEREIGN in an age of instinct. He shows us the drum ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... remain unaffected by the approach of the storm were the birds in the treetops; to them the thing it heralded meant a superabundance of food and a denser, more protective growth of vegetation. And the stupid Agoutis, overgrown guinea-pigs they were, who could never profit by past experiences anyway, either squatted comfortably in their burrows or stole out noiselessly to nibble the tender ...
— The Black Phantom • Leo Edward Miller
... church-door. Without saying much about it, the family had always tended it, and a new head-board had been put up when the old one had rotted away below. The upper part of it was in the shape of a wheel, as Ole himself had desired. The grave was in a sunny spot, and was thickly overgrown with wild flowers. Every churchgoer that had ever stood by it had heard from some one or other how a botanist in government pay, making a collection of the plants and flowers of the valley and the mountains round ...
— The Bridal March; One Day • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... colonists in a ready-made state on the island. As soon as they had settled themselves and built their barracks and Government House, they set to work and cleared away the bush for an area of from four to six miles round the town. The ground soon became overgrown again, but this clearing is still perceptible in the different type of forest on it, and has enabled the gardens and little plantations round Clarence to be made more easily. My Spanish friends assure me that the Portuguese, ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... I am going to examine the sheeps' hoofs. You know we've had warm, moist weather all through July, and I'm afraid of foot-rot. Then they're sometimes troubled with overgrown hoofs." ...
— Beautiful Joe • Marshall Saunders
... the day here. Fra Lorenzo joined them at dinner, and in the evening they walked with the padre beyond the tower to see the spires of the Siena cathedral through the lovely poisonous blue mist. On the way back they stopped in the tangled, overgrown garden at the foot of the tower, which had once been filled with rare medicinal plants, and peeped into the deserted pharmacy in the lower story, where the shelves were still filled with rare old pottery jars with the three mounts and cross and olive-branches upon them. "I am the only physician ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... would scarcely have dared oppose his overgrown servant had not Wallenstein failed in an attempt to capture Stralsund. This little Baltic seaport held out against the assaults of his entire army. Wallenstein vowed that he would capture it "though it were fastened by chains to heaven." But each ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... the king came upon another forest full of the retreats of ascetics, beautiful to look at, delightful to the heart and of cool agreeable breezes. And it was full of trees covered with blossoms, the soil overgrown with the softest and greenest grass, extending for many miles around, and echoing with the sweet notes of winged warblers. And it resounded with the notes of the male Kokila and of the shrill cicala. And it was full of magnificent trees with outstretched branches forming ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa - Translated into English Prose - Adi Parva (First Parva, or First Book) • Kisari Mohan Ganguli (Translator)
... sloping down from behind, with rocks on either side. The travellers are visible upon the heights, before they appear on the stage. Rocks all round the stage. Upon one of the foremost a projecting cliff overgrown with brushwood. ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... present you with an humble and obscure mathematician of the same city, called Archimedes, who lived many years after; whose tomb, overgrown with shrubs and briers, I in my quaestorship discovered, when the Syracusans knew nothing of it, and even denied that there was any such thing remaining; for I remembered some verses, which I had been informed were engraved on his monument, ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... to the roof of the house. It had evidently been constructed when the building was used as a fortification, and was probably intended to enable the garrison to make a sudden sortie on the enemy at an unexpected point. The outside entrance was blocked up by rubbish overgrown with vegetation; and my father had caused a strong door to be placed to the vault, to prevent any intruder, who might by chance have found his way through it, from entering the house. He always kept the keys himself; and as no one ever thought of wishing to enter ...
— Manco, the Peruvian Chief - An Englishman's Adventures in the Country of the Incas • W.H.G. Kingston
... binding upon all men. (2) Political. He made for peace at home and abroad: at home by restraining the excesses of forestars and tyrants; abroad by opposing the constant war policy against France. (3) Constitutional. He first encountered and checked the overgrown power of the Crown, and laid down limits and principles which resulted in the Church policy of John's reign and the triumph of Magna Carta. (4) Architectural. He fully developed—even if he did not, as some assert, invent—the Early English style. (5) Ecclesiastical. He counterbalanced ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson
... painfully, its propellers clogged by seaweed, its keels overgrown with barnacles, the grand armada crossed the Indian Ocean and headed northward for the China Sea. On May 27, steering for the Korean channel, it fell into a snare which a blind man ought to have been able to foresee. Togo's fleet had the freedom of the seas. ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... not opposing, yielding, as I was just now saying, to that motion which is in accordance with our will; but the necessary and resistant being contrary to our will, implies error and ignorance; the idea is taken from walking through a ravine which is impassable, and rugged, and overgrown, and impedes motion—and this is the derivation of the word anagkaion (necessary) an agke ion, going through a ravine. But while my strength lasts let us persevere, and I hope that you ...
— Cratylus • Plato
... grand, dignified, sublime, majestic &c. (repute) 873. vast, immense, enormous, extreme; inordinate, excessive, extravagant, exorbitant, outrageous, preposterous, unconscionable, swinging, monstrous, overgrown; towering, stupendous, prodigious, astonishing, incredible; marvelous &c. 870. unlimited &c. (infinite) 105; unapproachable, unutterable, indescribable, ineffable, unspeakable, inexpressible, beyond expression, fabulous. undiminished, unabated, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... wound near the beds of what had been formerly two fish-ponds, which were now nothing more than stagnant swamps, overgrown with rank weeds, and here and there encroached upon by the straggling underwood; the avenue itself was much broken; and in many places the stones were almost concealed by grass and nettles; the loose stone walls which had here and there intersected ...
— Two Ghostly Mysteries - A Chapter in the History of a Tyrone Family; and The Murdered Cousin • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... Ust-kutsk (the first town of any importance) on the sixth day. This place figures largely on most English maps, but it is little more than an overgrown village. A church with apple-green dome and gilt crosses, a score of neat houses clustered around the dwelling of an ispravnik,[9] perhaps a couple of stores for the sale of clothing and provisions, ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... us not to piles of mossy stone, Temples of yore, with age now hoar, and ivy overgrown, Through whose stained windows softly creeps a dim religious light, Seeming as it were sanctified unto the ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various
... stood against the hill, around the point from Corkscrew Bend, old and rambling and overgrown with vines; and along the road that led up to it there were rows of peaches and figs, fenced off by stone walls from the creek. Dusty rode past the trees slowly, feasting his eyes on their lush greenness and the rank growth of alfalfa beyond; ...
— Wunpost • Dane Coolidge
... of the Cross, to the extent we have shown, is referable to the philanthropic Howard, who, in a visit to Eyam, about the year 1788, or 44 years since, particularly noticed the finest part of the relic lying in a corner of the churchyard, and nearly overgrown with docks and thistles. "The value this hitherto unregarded relic had in the estimation of Howard," says Mr. Rhodes, "made it dearer to the people of Eyam: they brought the top part of the cross from its hiding-place, and set it on ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 563, August 25, 1832 • Various
... with some more such graces of Speech; as, [Sidenote: Preface, p. 21.] Lord, what a Filthy Croud is here; Bless me! what Devil has rak'd this Rabble together; Z—-nds, what squeezing is this! A Plague confound you for an overgrown Sloven? Who in the Devil's Name, I wonder, helps to make up the Crowd half so much as your self? Don't you consider with a Pox, that you take up more room with that Carcass than any Five here? Bring your own Guts to a reasonable Compass, and be d——d. ...
— Reflections on Dr. Swift's Letter to Harley (1712) and The British Academy (1712) • John Oldmixon
... You hit our old controversy. Ay, but we do not want this overgrown population! However, we will put politics and sociology and the pack of their modern barbarous words aside. You read me intuitively. I have been, I will not say annoyed, but ruffled. I have much to do, and going into Parliament would ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... banks of the Platte westward to the passes of the Sierra Nevada, and, I presume, to the banks of the Columbia, bearing mute but impressive testimony to the chronic inhospitality of the Great American Desert, which is almost everywhere thinly overgrown by worthless shrubs, known to travelers as grease-wood and sage brush;—the former prickly and repellant, but having a waxy or resinous property which renders it useful to emigrants as fuel; the latter affording shelter and subsistence to rabbits ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... but the others are fading away, or already buried in dead memories under the sod. It was a quaint, picturesque old place, stretching back from the white limestone road that bordered the little port, its overgrown garden surrounded by an ancient stockade ten feet in height, with a massive, slow-swinging gate in front, defended by loopholes. This stockade bulged out in some places and leaned in at others; but the veteran posts, each a tree ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... at what appeared to have been a sugar plantation, but evidently abandoned for the fences were thrown down, though the shrubs and bushes formed an almost impenetrable barrier. They discovered, however, at last, a path. Even that was much overgrown, though they managed to force their ...
— From Powder Monkey to Admiral - A Story of Naval Adventure • W.H.G. Kingston
... lop-sided man, with his head on one side and with the shrewdest and wickedest of faces and pale blue eyes, addressed an obscene remark to the mad Irishman, calling him O'Sullivan. But O'Sullivan took no notice and muttered on. On the heels of the little lop-sided man appeared an overgrown dolt of a fat youth, followed by another youth so tall and emaciated of body that it seemed a marvel his flesh could ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... again on the opposite side. After a few missteps and much laughter we were landed at last, but several of the party had wet feet to remember the experience by. We found ourselves in a space that had once been a clearing. A tumbledown chimney overgrown with brambles and vines told of an abandoned hearthstone. The blackened remnants of many a picnic camp fire strewed the ground. A slight turn brought us to the spot where the Indian Spring welled out of the hillside. The setting was all that we could have hoped for,—great moss-grown rocks ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... great way back; he will then find in himself a perfect comprehension of its nature and extent; he will have made his hands meet on the other side, and can henceforth defy it and pass on superior. The world is his who can see through its pretension. What deafness, what stone-blind custom, what overgrown error you behold is there only by sufferance,—by your sufferance. See it to be a lie, and you have already dealt it its ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... announced one day, just when they were sitting down to dinner, Clare quickly sprang to his feet to behold the extraordinary man; but was much astonished on seeing a little, dark, boyish figure, looking like an overgrown child, oddly dressed in a blue coat, with black necktie, and a small hat in his hand. Clare's astonishment became still greater when this singular-looking little man began to talk, not, as the listener innocently ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... humble cottage in the park of Charrebourg was deserted, and permitted to fall to decay, for the old visconte, and even Marguerite, had been removed to the establishment at Des Anges, and so, in process of time, the little walks were overgrown with grass, the fences spread and straggled, dark green plants clambered to the roof, and weeds showed themselves over the tiled vestibule and even ventured into the inner chambers. Thus time and nature, in mournful ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... curtains should not be used at all, and in winter we should do well without them. In summer every wise man, who can afford it, will sleep out of town—at any of the villages which are removed sufficiently from the smoke and impurities of this overgrown metropolis. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 392, Saturday, October 3, 1829. • Various
... man snorted. "These overgrown teddy-bears don't know what brotherhood means, nor humanity, either. Bread and water I've been getting, nothing more, and then only if they feel like bringing it down." He sank wearily down on the rock bench along the wall. "I thought you'd never get here! ...
— Letter of the Law • Alan Edward Nourse
... the cynosure of three pairs of eyes. These were all kindly and full of cheer. Two pairs were contributed respectively by the nurse and Lady Touchstone, while the third was set in the face of an overgrown cherub, who smelt agreeably of Harris tweed and was gently furbishing his ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... proved when some twenty minutes later. I clattered into the hamlet of Mirepoix, and drew up before an inn flaunting the sign of a peacock—as if in irony of its humbleness, for it was no better than a wayside tavern. Neither stable-boy nor ostler was here, and the unclean, overgrown urchin to whom I entrusted my horse could not say whether indeed Pere Abdon the landlord would be able to find me a room to sleep in. I thirsted, however; and so I determined to alight, if it were only to ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... a bronzed hairy man, with one sleeve empty, and a breast covered with stars; but in his face, brown with sun and wind, overgrown with hair and scarred with wounds, Melchior saw his second brother! There was no doubt of it. And the brother himself, though he bowed kindly in answer to the greetings showered on him, was gazing anxiously for the old coach, where ...
— Melchior's Dream and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... "The overgrown wood-choppers!" growled the captain as soon as he had come out on deck and taken in the situation. "Sheer off!" he yelled. ...
— The Rover Boys on the Plains - The Mystery of Red Rock Ranch • Arthur Winfield
... I reached the ground a startling thing happened. I missed my footing and found myself rolling down a steepish bank. At the bottom I fetched up against an odd-looking little hut almost overgrown with bushes. It was bright moonlight and the door ...
— The Girl Aviators' Motor Butterfly • Margaret Burnham
... strips of ploughed land, in fan-shape, which flew past, at the willow-trees slowly flitting by, at the stupid crows and daws gazing with dull suspicion askance at the passing equipage, at the long strips of turf between the cultivated sections, overgrown with artemisia, wormwood, and wild tansy; he gazed ... and that fresh, fertile nakedness and wildness of the steppe, that verdure, those long hillocks, the ravines with stubby oak bushes, the grey hamlets, the flexible birch-trees,—this whole ...
— A Nobleman's Nest • Ivan Turgenieff
... All overgrown with azure moss, and flowers So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou For whose path the ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... cutlass. Of a sudden things began to go strangely easier; I found stumps, bushing out again; my body began to wonder, then my mind; I raised my eyes and looked ahead; and, by George, I was no longer pioneering, I had struck an old track overgrown, and was restoring an old path. So I laboured till I was in such a state that Carolina Wilhelmina Skeggs could scarce have found a name for it. Thereon desisted; returned to the stream; made my way down that ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the London fogs, by the improved methods of consuming smoke, must be a very fine thing for the dwellers in that overgrown city. We hear, however, of one old lady, a duchess, who thinks the fog now to be very vulgarly pale; and regrets the good old days of what she thought a much ...
— 1931: A Glance at the Twentieth Century • Henry Hartshorne
... and maybe for half a mile farther; but, a few yards below their junction, are partly dammed by the masonry of a bridge over which a country lane crosses the railway; and this obstacle spreads them into a pool some fifteen or twenty feet wide, overgrown with the leaves of the arrow-head, and fringed with water-flags ...
— News from the Duchy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Deadham post office and Mrs. Doubleday's general shop.—A neglected somewhat desolate strip of road this, between broken earthbanks topped by ragged firs, yet very paintable and dear to the sketch-book of the amateur. In summer overgrown with grass and rushes, bordered by cow-parsley, meadowsweet, pink codlings-and-cream, and purple flowered peppermint, in winter a marsh of sodden brown and vivid green; but at all seasons a telling perspective, ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... exhibition she makes of herself when she takes to "orating"—as the Yankees say—and lecturing, and dressing herself up in her brother's clothes. Do you think, my dear Emmy, there are many women foolish enough to applaud Dr. Mary Walker because she dresses like an overgrown school-girl, and shows her trousers? What is she like in society? Neither man nor woman. But how many have imitated her? How many women in England, France, and America have taken to the platform? One would think that all womankind was in ...
— The Cockaynes in Paris - 'Gone abroad' • Blanchard Jerrold
... limits of nature and history, when he affirms, "that, in those desert countries, nothing was left except the sky and the earth; that, after the destruction of the cities, and the extirpation of the human race, the land was overgrown with thick forests and inextricable brambles; and that the universal desolation, announced by the prophet Zephaniah, was accomplished, in the scarcity of the beasts, the birds, and even of the fish." ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... lady," and he climbed on to the rock, drawing her after him. At the back of it was a hole, almost overgrown with moss. "Here is the ...
— Eric Brighteyes • H. Rider Haggard
... unused. The wall of rough, white stone was decayed, and in places had crumbled away, and the roof of the wing, the blind wall of which looked toward the railway, had perished, and was patched here and there with tin. Through the gates there was a large yard, overgrown with tall grass, and beyond that, an old house with Venetian blinds in the windows, and a high roof, brown with rot. On either side of the house, to right and left, were two symmetrical wings; the windows of one were boarded up, while by the other, the windows ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... place, outstripped by towns of ten years' existence, as it has neither a port nor a river. There was an agricultural show, and monster pumpkins and overgrown cabbages were displayed to admiring crowds, under the shadow of a ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... of things seems to me to have been gained on a memorable raw afternoon, one Christmas Eve. Ours was the marsh country, down the river, within twenty miles of the sea; and I had wandered into a bleak place overgrown with nettles ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... dawn we left this road and camped amid the overgrown ruins of a deserted town that had been built almost beneath the precipitous cliffs of Mur, fortunately without having met any one or being challenged. I took the first watch, while the others turned in to sleep after we had all breakfasted off cold ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... now that that patch of sunny beach was just a death-trap. But in the middle of the estuary, far out from either shore, far removed from the unseen, lurking horrors of the fern forests, spread acre upon acre of drowned marsh, overgrown with tall green reeds and feathery "mares' tails." Through these stretches of marsh he ploughed his way, half-swimming, half-wading, and felt that here he might find a safe refuge as well as an unfailing pasturage. But the anguish of his wounds ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... up like a bloodhound. So he changed his path, descending the cliff, and making his way cautiously along the sea-beach where the snow did not lie. He passed the great boulder which had fallen with Frank Kennedy. It was now all overgrown with mussels and seaweed. The mouth of the cave opened black and dismal before him. Glossin drew breath before entering such a haunt of iniquity, and recharged his pistols. He was, however, somewhat ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... in half an hour from the shore its foot may be reached, and in another half-hour one is at the top. It is about 260 m. high, a miniature volcano, with all its accessories complete, hot springs, lake, desert, etc., always active, rarely destructive, looking like an overgrown molehill. A wide plain stretches inland, utterly deserted owing to the poisonous vapours always carried across it by the south-east trade-wind, and in the centre of the plain is a ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... employment of skilled idlers only,' Mrs. Bill put in. 'They must all know how to do nothing in the modern way—by discussing the rights of women and the novel of lust, and the divorces past and prospective, by playing at bridge and benevolence. How absurd it all is! I'm not going to be an overgrown child ...
— Keeping up with Lizzie • Irving Bacheller
... certain camp called Barrow Hill, adding, "they say this was a Danish camp, and everything hereabout is attributed to the Danes, because of the neighbouring Daventry, which they suppose to be built by them. The road hereabouts too, being overgrown with Dane-weed, they fancy it sprung from the blood of Danes slain in battle, and that if cut upon a certain day in the ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... their minds to give the usher possession, to enter. But having entered, the confusion and bedevilment was ten times worse than even in the churchyard itself. The benches were lined with a pack of overgrown rascals in corduroy vestments, and with leather at the knees, from all the neighbouring villages; in a gallery at one end sat a Scotch bagpiper, flanked by a blind fiddler, and an itinerant performer on the hurdygurdy, accompanied by his monkey—who in the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... that the river had fallen off in appearance. I examined it with feelings of intense anxiety, certain, as I was, that the flooded spaces, over which we had been travelling would, sooner or later, be succeeded by a country overgrown with reeds. The river evidently overflowed its banks, on both sides, for many miles, nor had I a doubt that, at some periods, the space northward, between it and the Lachlan, presented the appearance of one vast sea. The flats of polygonum stretched away to the N.W. to ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... Connor, in spite of his forty years, was no more than an overgrown boy, in whose simple character the love of justice and the love of fun jostled each other for first place. He believed he had discovered an opportunity to "take a rise" out of Yetmore and at the same time to compel the misappropriator of other people's goods ...
— The Boys of Crawford's Basin - The Story of a Mountain Ranch in the Early Days of Colorado • Sidford F. Hamp
... ruts were described as being four feet deep. In Young's Tours through England (1768) the Essex roads are spoken of as having ruts of inconceivable depth, and the roads so overgrown with trees as to be impervious to the sun. Some of the turnpikes were spoken of as being rocky lanes, with stones "as big as a horse, and abominable holes!" He adds that "it is a prostitution of language to call them turnpikes—ponds of liquid ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... the day was (many degrees below freezing), I heard and saw bluebirds, and as we passed along, every sheltered tangle and overgrown field or lane swarmed with snowbirds and sparrows,—the latter mainly Canada or tree sparrows, with a sprinkling of the song, and, maybe, one or two other varieties. The birds are all social and gregarious in winter, and seem drawn together by common instinct. Where you find ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... paid him by Larsen, Comet would have gotten over his homesickness. He was no milksop. He was like an overgrown boy off at college, or in some foreign city, sensitive, not sure of himself or his place in the order of things. Had Larsen gained his confidence, it would all have been different. And as for Larsen, ...
— Frank of Freedom Hill • Samuel A. Derieux
... the slippery grass, he sidled out alongside the jutting slab, and suddenly ducked under it. The Lord Proprietor, following, crawled under the stone, and found himself staring into the mouth of the adit—a dark hole less than four feet in height, and overgrown with ivy. Sam had spoken the truth. The passage, whithersoever it led, had been disused ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... had wished to lie—near the little mausoleum which still covers Mamma's tomb. The little mound beneath which she sleeps is overgrown with nettles and burdock, and surrounded by a black railing, but I never forget, when leaving the mausoleum, to approach that railing, and to salute the plot of earth within by bowing reverently ...
— Childhood • Leo Tolstoy
... overgrown with rank weeds and grass, stands but little above the marshy bed of the river, which here preserves the name of Shang- tu, and about a mile from its north or left bank. The walls, of earth faced with brick and unhewn stone, still ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... weary, I gained not then my journey's end, but came ere long to a craggy pass, dipping towards growing regions still beyond. A zigzag road, half overgrown with blueberry bushes, here turned among the cliffs. A rent was in their ragged sides; through it a little track branched off, which, upwards threading that short defile, came breezily out above, ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... day the plains died off, and we re-entered a new bed of scrubs—again consisting of mallee, casuarinas, desert sandal-wood, and quandong-trees of the same family; the ground was overgrown with spinifex. By the night of the twelfth day from the dam, having daily increased our rate of progress, we had traversed scrubs more undulating than previously, consisting of the usual kinds of trees. At sundown we descended into a hollow; I thought this would prove the bed of another ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... tall, overgrown fellow of nineteen, with a vacant face and an ever-running tongue. He now stood stock still upon the approach of Walter Skinner and gazed at him. He would have done the same if any creature possessed of the power of ...
— A Boy's Ride • Gulielma Zollinger
... went through a gap in a ruinous hedge, and traversed a furzy field, at the farther side of which stood the wizard's hut, a wretched place of a single story, with a shuttered window and a thatched roof full of holes and overgrown with weeds. As they approached the door a mighty clatter was audible within, and Mrs. Jenny held the boy's hand in a tightened grasp, fearful of devilry. As they stood irresolute to advance or retreat, a big cat dashed ...
— Julia And Her Romeo: A Chronicle Of Castle Barfield - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... she served the dwarf and the overgrown lump?" whispered the student to the duke's fool. "Are you ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... to local circumstances it involves. There are three materials for it, we said;—stone, wood, and metal. Stone engraving is the art of countries possessing marble and gems; wood engraving, of countries overgrown with forest; metal engraving, of countries possessing treasures of silver and gold. And the style of a stone engraver is formed on pillars and pyramids; the style of a wood engraver under the eaves of larch cottages; the style ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... born, but for the then first time took the human form; and at last, that he was THE ONLY GOD, the Creator and Providence of all the universe; but was man also, the GOD-MAN. Thus, gradually, the actual facts of his history were lost out of sight, overgrown with a great mass of fictions, poetic and other stories, which make him a mythological character; the Jesus of fact was well-nigh forgot,—the Christ ...
— Two Christmas Celebrations • Theodore Parker
... old fortress, like Ticonderoga, from a view of its gray and broken ruins. Here and there, perchance, the walls may remain almost complete, but elsewhere may be only a shapeless mound, cumbrous with its very strength, and overgrown, through long years of peace and neglect, with grass and ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... that it was the storeroom key. But I could not take it by force. And so defiantly she faced me, so valiant was every line of her slight figure, that I was ashamed of my impulse to push her aside and take it. I loved her with every inch of my overgrown body, and I did the thing she knew I would do. I bowed and left the cabin. But I had no intention of losing the key. I could not take it by force, but she knew as well as I did what finding it there in Turner's room meant. Turner had locked me in. But I must be able to prove ...
— The After House • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... nothing for him but to lie down and die in despair, when suddenly he caught a sort of twinkling light through the thick bushes, which seemed to lie in the way he was going, and on he went, slowly enough, poor man! But still the light was before him, till suddenly he came to a great rock, overgrown in many places with briers and brambles. In the midst of it, however, was the mouth of a large cave, with great masses of stone hanging over, as if ready to fall on a traveler's head. It was a very stern and gloomy looking place indeed, with clefts and crevices ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 3 (of 12) - Classic Tales And Old-Fashioned Stories • Various
... hotel in Lagrange, a rival establishment, that bore the reputation of being much the worse in point of comfort. It was owned by a widow, and this widow had a son—a lank, overgrown youth of eighteen. His poverty, on one point, was the greatest I ever knew. He could have been appropriately selected as the hero of a certain popular novel by Wilkie Collins. No name had ever been given him by his parents. In his infancy ...
— Camp-Fire and Cotton-Field • Thomas W. Knox
... canst love the Earth while it injures thee, and even because it injures thee; for this a Greater than Zeno was needed, and he too was sent. Knowest thou that 'Worship of Sorrow'? The Temple thereof, founded some eighteen centuries ago, now lies in ruins, overgrown with jungle, the habitation of doleful creatures: nevertheless, venture forward; in a low crypt, arched out of falling fragments, thou findest the Altar still there, and its sacred Lamp ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... exceedingly rough and here and there almost overgrown with coarse weeds. Near the temple, the ground ascended fairly steeply, and the path narrowed so that it was ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell |
