"Prairie fire" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... grateful even for the firing of a national joke heard round the world. And when Mark Twain, robust, big-hearted, gifted with the divine power to use words, makes us all laugh together, builds true romances with prairie fire and Western clay, and shows us that we are at one on all the main points, we feel that he has been appointed by Providence to see to it that the precious ordinary self of the Republic shall suffer ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... do their hardest work for money, when they scramble and struggle and strike each other down in the effort to reach wealth. And it is not possible to blame them. They are trying to escape from poverty, from a disaster worse than any prairie fire or other ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... moustache were withdrawn, and with considerable clattering and shouting, the holy fright was led forth. She was a small and active chestnut mare, with a tawny fleece, a mane like a prairie fire, and a tail like a comet. Her impish eyes expressed an alarm that was more than half simulated, and the task of manoeuvring her into position beside the mounting block, was comparable only to an endeavour to extract a kitten from under a bed with the lure of a reel of cotton. An apple ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... of a prairie fire during a storm, Henry took out his hunting-knife and cut up a small portion of the buffalo. Then he dug out the dry grass from under the game, lit his tinder-box, and started up a fire, feeding it both with grass and with some buffalo ...
— On the Trail of Pontiac • Edward Stratemeyer
... known her since his father brought him home from Paris, a boy of eight, after his mother died there. The passion that awoke in him that day, when he saw her at the gate, swept along like an avalanche, or like a prairie fire, or like anything that drives headlong ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin
... took place six or seven years later is a suggestive question only, but when the wave of spiritual power from the great American revival of 1857-8 reached England, its first messenger to Wales, Rev. H.R. Jones, a Wesleyan, had only to drop the spark that "lit a prairie fire." The reformation, chiefly under the leadership of Mr. Jones and Rev. David Morgan, a Presbyterian, with their singing bands, was general and lasting, hundreds of still robust and active Christians today dating their new birth from the Pentecost of ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... the boy, and waved his sword with hoarse cries to his men. They caught sight of the lonely little figure in the background, and his cry went to their hearts, and a great wave of rage and shame swept the line like a prairie fire. Like a landslide the men of Connecticut swept forward to recapture the ground they had yielded. Back fell the British before a countercharge they could not withstand, back beyond the rail fence. Nor was there refuge ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... was itself an idolatry. The two things it persecuted were the idea of God being made flesh and of His being afterwards made wood or stone. A study of the questions smouldering in the track of the prairie fire of the Christian conversion favours the suggestion that this fanaticism against art or mythology was at once a development and a reaction from that conversion, a sort of minority report of the Hebraists. In this sense Islam was something like a Christian heresy. The ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... were all hospitality and flocked to our tents to greet us. It was very hot at Safed in the daytime; and when we left the next day we had a most trying ride across a country burnt black with the recent prairie fire. We encamped for the night in a lonely spot, which turned out to be a perfect paradise for mosquitoes, spiders, scorpions, and other pests, but a perfect hell for us. We could do nothing but wrap ourselves up completely in sheets, and walk up and down all night long by the camp-fires, while ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... was prepared. Early in the summer of 1877 train hands on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad struck because of a reduction in wages, the fourth cut that they had suffered in seven years. The strike spread with the speed of a prairie fire over most of the northern roads between New England and the Mississippi. At the height of the controversy at least 100,000 strikers and six or seven thousand miles of railway were involved, while at several ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... Civil War, the most momentous conflict of recent times, was marked by a wave of fervent enthusiasm in the States of the South which swept with the swiftness of a prairie fire over the land. Pouring in multitudes into the centres of enlistment, thousands and tens of thousands of stalwart men offered their services in defence of their cause, gathering into companies and regiments far more rapidly than they could be absorbed. This state of affairs, ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... I finds myse'f not five miles down the wind from a prairie fire; an' it crackin' an' roarin' in flame-sheets twenty foot high an' makin' for'ard jumps of fifty foot. What do I do? Go for'ard down the wind, set fire to the grass myse'f, an' let her burn ahead of me. In two minutes I'm over on a burned deestrict of my own, an' by the time the orig'nal ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... 15th, President Lincoln called for 75,000 troops. If he had asked for a million, the President would have had them. That shot had kindled a fire of patriotism that swept across the North like a prairie fire. In one day the college students deserted the lecture halls, the students of law and medicine and theology closed their books, the farmer left his plow in the furrow, the woodsman dropped his ax, ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis
... "that saved a settler's wife and child—a prairie fire. The house was lost, but the constable pulled them out and got rather badly burned ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... this season of the year. The Englishman set the pace with the stride of the long-legged. The sun rose high; the dry runs reminded us unpleasantly of our increasing thirst, and the puffing wind blew hot as from a distant prairie fire. ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... snorting and quivering, high in the air; they broke asunder in panic; there was never an end to it all. And far out in the distance the sun went down in a flame-red mist. A streak of cloud lay across it, stretching far out into infinity. A conflagration like a glowing prairie fire surrounded the horizon, and drove the hordes before it in panic-stricken flight, and on the beach shouted the naked swarm of boys. Now and again they sprang up with outspread arms, and, shouting, chased the wild horses back ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... may be surprised at these wild animals being in the state of utter exhaustion which I have described; but he must be reminded that, in all probability, this prairie fire had driven them before it for hundreds of miles, and that at a speed unusual to them, and which nothing but a panic could have produced. I think it very probable that the fire ran over an extent of five hundred miles; and my reason ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... any fire, only the smoke, and that didn't last long. I thought at first maybe it was a prairie fire, and started to see; but it was getting thinner before I'd gone a mile, so I turned round and by the time I got back to the corral there wasn't ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge |
