"Pruning" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... home a nest of young birds without lying awake in misery half the night after, and often reinstating them and the nest in their original place the next morning. He could scarcely bear to see trees cut down or lopped, from a fancy that it hurt them; and late pruning, when the sap was up and the tree bled profusely, had been a positive grief to him in his infancy. This weakness of character, as it may be called, suggested that he was the sort of man who was born to ache a good deal before the fall ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... wyth Ewes Milke, and Lambes wyth Goates, the woll of thone will grow more rough and hard, and the heare of the other more tender and soft. In trees also and fruites, there is for the most part, a greater force and power in the nature of the soile and water where they grow, eyther for the pruning and planting, then there is if straunge impes and seedes be grifted and sowen there. And many times you see, that a fruitfull tree, caried and set in an other place, decayeth, throughe the nature of the ground more barren. What reason is ...
— The Palace of Pleasure, Volume 1 • William Painter
... we hold a Peace Sunday and on that day we pray mightily that God will give us peace in our time and that war shall be no more, and the spear shall be beaten into the pruning hook. But the next day we show God that he need not take us too literally, for we go on with the military training, and the building of the battleships, and our orators say that in time of peace we ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... fortune has sent him favoring gales. He obtained another employment in the custom-house; then he trafficked in negroes; then he failed—an occurrence which for certain business men is like a good pruning for trees, making them sprout again with fresh vigor—and now he is so prosperous that he has formed the resolution of entering the highest circles of the aristocracy, under the title of marquis or duke. Pepita is frightened and troubled at this unexpected ...
— Pepita Ximenez • Juan Valera
... that in his prime, Ere the pruning-knife of Time Cut him down, Not a better man was found By the crier on ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... seems to have been grown as a standard; I gather this from the description in Nos. 2 (see the entire passage s.v. "Pruning" in Part II.) and 3, and from the following in ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... perturbed," said Mattie Tiffany. Running rose-bushes, just leafing out into their fall greenery, overgrew the pillars beside her. These she fell to pruning with her hands, so that she turned away ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... hand. With this idea apparently in our minds, we inscribed on the walls of the Great Exhibition of 1851, the Scriptural text which tells us that "swords shall be beaten into ploughshares and spears into pruning hooks, neither shall they learn war any more." A significant commentary on the text was found in the fact that many of the exhibits at the "World's Fair" consisted of cannon, rifles, and other lethal instruments of improved method and construction, intended for the wholesale destruction ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... traded my right in this patent for six counties in Michigan and Indiana in a patent pruning shears, an old buck sheep, a knitting machine, an old dulcimer, a shot-gun and ...
— Twenty Years of Hus'ling • J. P. Johnston
... hunters, one of these dry stalks is a valuable discovery when its diameter matches the size of its would-be inhabitants; and it is also an interesting subject of study to the entomologist who, in the winter, pruning-shears in hand, can gather in the hedgerows a faggot rich in small industrial wonders. Visiting the bramble-bushes has long been one of my favourite pastimes during the enforced leisure of the wintertime; and it is ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... sloth; to use them too much for ornament, is affectation; to make judgment wholly by their rules, is the humor of a scholar: they perfect nature, and are perfected by experience; for natural abilities are like natural plants, that need pruning by study; and studies themselves do give forth directions too much at large except they be bounded in ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... same for holidays, and a suit of the best homespun, in which he adorned himself on week-days. His family consisted of a housekeeper above forty, a niece not quite twenty, and a lad who served him both in the field and at home, who could saddle the horse or handle the pruning-hook. The age of our gentleman bordered upon fifty years: he was of a strong constitution, spare-bodied, of a meagre visage, a very early riser, and a lover of the chase. Some pretend to say that his surname was Quixada or Quesada, ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... building, of greater strength than magnitude, one of the minor strongholds on the Border, and which might have been termed towers for the protection of stolen cattle. But, when the two nations came beneath the sovereignty of one monarch, and the spear of war was transformed into a pruning-hook, there went forth a decree that the strongholds, great and small, along the Borders should be destroyed; and amongst those that were rendered defenceless and uninhabitable was the turret which, for many generations, ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... in an old black letter in 12o. which was Queen Elizabeth's own book, and her own hand writing appears at the beginning, viz.: "August. I walke many times into the pleasant fieldes of the Holy Scriptures, where I plucke up the goodliesome herbes of sentences by pruning: eate them by reading: chawe them by musing: and laie them up at length in the hie seate of memorie by gathering them together: that so having tasted their sweetenes I may the lesse perceave the bitterness of this miserable life." The covering ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... universal practice in the South, but in many sections growers have abandoned it, claiming that they get as good or better results without it. In the North it is rarely used in field culture, though often used in private gardens and by some market gardeners, and both staking or tying up and pruning are essential to the profitable growing of tomatoes under glass. In the South, stout stakes from 1 to 2 inches in diameter and 4 to 5 feet long are driven into the ground so that they can be depended upon to hold ...
— Tomato Culture: A Practical Treatise on the Tomato • William Warner Tracy
... a vinedresser needs is a knife. The chief secret of culture is merciless pruning. And so says my text, 'The Father is the Husbandman.' Our Lord assumes that office in other of His parables. But here the exigencies of the parabolic form require that the office of Cultivator should be assigned only to the Father; although we are not to forget that the Father, in that office, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... the humble symphony of the hundreds of bees drawing their treasure from the golden hearts of the roses; and did not see, across the path a score of yards away, the tall figure of Joe Ellison among the rosebushes, pruning-shears in hand, with which he had been cutting out dead blossoms, gazing at her with that hungry, admiring, speculative look with which he had regarded the young women upon ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... requirements of his law, expect that the blessing of obedient and sanctified children will crown their days. Let not those who suffer their children to grow up around them like weeds, without religious culture or pruning, who demand no obedience, who command no reverence, who offer no earnest, ceaseless prayer, let them not suppose that the blessing of the God who spoke from Horeb will come upon their families. "He is in one mind and who can turn him." Not an iota has he abated from his law since ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... Boots happen to know all this? Why, through being under-gardener. Of course he couldn't be under-gardener, and he always about, in the summer-time, near the windows on the lawn, a-mowing, and sweeping, and weeding, and pruning, and this and that, without getting acquainted with the ways of the family. Even supposing Master Harry hadn't come to him one morning early, and said, "Cobbs, how should you spell Norah, if you was asked?" and then began cutting it in ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... some hemp-seed and corn and watched it pruning its feathers as it glanced warily at its new home and its new mistress. On the following morning, just as day was breaking, the Patin woman distinctly heard a loud, deep, roaring voice calling: "Are you going to get ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... drawers, pulled open with brass rings ornamented with dogs' heads. In these drawers are kept cow-drenches—bottles of oils for the wounds which cattle sometimes get from nails or kicks; dog-whips and pruning-knives; a shot-belt and powder-flask; an old horse-pistol; a dozen odd stones or fossils picked up upon the farm and kept as curiosities; twenty or thirty old almanacs, and a file of the county paper for forty years; and a hundred ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies
... he had brought. It was the big pruning-knife out of the drawer in the hall. He pulled it out. He would cut away some of the furze branches. Perhaps Dickie was lying bound, hidden in the middle ...
— Harding's luck • E. [Edith] Nesbit
... divested of certain exuberances—for Chatterton was precocious in every thing, and many of his fancies want the Bowdler pruning-knife—might be seasonably transferred to some of the penny publications for the benefit of Mr Frost's disciples. A poor man and woman, on their way to the parson's hayfield, complain to each other of their hard lot in being obliged to earn their bread by the sweat of their brows. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... require the pruning knife so much, and would so amply repay the trouble, as some of those of Otway. In the Orphan there are some passages as gross and offensive as are to be found, probably in any tragedy whatever. There is moreover too much of ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 6, June 1810 • Various
... Jerusalem and become a renewed power, but that the Messiah should ultimately reign over all the nations of the earth, should establish a reign of peace, so that warriors "should beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks." Heretofore the history of kings had been a history of wars,—of oppression, of injustice, of cruelty. Miseries overspread the earth from this scourge more than from all other causes combined. The world was decimated by ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume II • John Lord
... God: (1) As a nourisher, strength-giver, satisfier and a strong one who gives; (2) As the giver of fruitfulness which comes through nourishment. He was to make Abraham fruitful, Gen. 17:1-8; (3) As Giver of chastening. This he does in the way of pruning that ...
— The Bible Book by Book - A Manual for the Outline Study of the Bible by Books • Josiah Blake Tidwell
... extensive cotton-field, still white with the flossy cellulose. Here I landed under the shady trees, and gathered cotton, the result of peaceful labor. Truly had the sword been beaten into the ploughshare, and the spear into a pruning-hook, for above me frowned down Fort Pillow, the scene of the terrible negro massacre in our late war. Now the same sun shone so brightly upon the graves scattered here and there, and warmed into life the harvest ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop
... rend the bread. I'll light the fire for company for you; You'll not have any other company Till Ed begins to get out on a Sunday To look us over and give us his idea Of what wants pruning, shingling, breaking up. He'll know what he would do if he were we, And all at once. He'll plan for us and plan To help us, but he'll take it out in planning. Well, you can set the table with the loaf. Let's see you find ...
— Mountain Interval • Robert Frost
... old age; a garden which had been tended for over half a century by a withered old man and his wife, whose golden wedding was spent in the house they had built, and in the garden they had planted when they were bride and groom. His back was permanently bowed with constant weeding and pruning and planting and hoeing, and his hands and face were brown as the soil he cultivated. The "hot-glowing" crimson peonies, seedlings which the wife had sown in her youth, had become great shrubs, fifteen or ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... same, for holidays; and a suit of the very best homespun cloth, which he bestowed on himself for working days. His whole family was a housekeeper something turned of forty, a niece not twenty, and a man that served him in the house and in the field, and could saddle a horse, and handle the pruning hook. The master himself was nigh fifty years of age, of a hale and strong complexion, lean-bodied and thin-faced, an early riser, and a lover of hunting. Some say his surname was Quixada, or Quesada (for authors differ in this particular); however, we may reasonably conjecture ...
— The Children's Hour, v 5. Stories From Seven Old Favorites • Eva March Tappan
... grown into such a defiant attitude, that you could not get within several feet of it. Its stalks were enormous in size, and cast out long, prickly arms in all directions; but the bushes were pretty much all dead. I have walked into them a good deal with a pruning-knife; but it is very much like fighting original sin. The variety is one that I can recommend. I think it is called Brinckley's Orange. It is exceedingly prolific, and has enormous stalks. The fruit is also said to be good; but that does ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... cliffs yonder, the rock-doves were preparing to nest by hundreds, and waking the silence with their cooing and the flutter of their wings. Even the grim old eagle perched on the pinnacle of the peak was pruning himself, contentedly happy in the knowledge that his mate had laid an egg in that dark corner of the cliff. All things rejoiced and cried aloud that summer was at hand and that it was time to bloom and love and nest. Soon it would be winter again, when things died, and next ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... not, however, forget the good done by insects. They undoubtedly tend by their attacks to prevent an undue growth of vegetation. The pruning done to a tree or herb by certain insects undoubtedly causes a more healthy growth of the branches and leaves, and ultimately a greater production fruit. Again, as pollen-bearers, insects are a most powerful ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... For the meaning compare Cant. lix. 3: The voice of the turtle "is a sign that winter is past, proclaiming nevertheless that the time of pruning has come.... The voice, more like one who groans than one who sings, admonishes us of our pilgrimage." After Eugenius III. had visited Clairvaux St. Bernard wrote, "The voice of the turtle has been heard in our chapter. We had great joy ...
— St. Bernard of Clairvaux's Life of St. Malachy of Armagh • H. J. Lawlor
... love, that is not only seen in its wish and struggle to quicken all with the warm throb of happy life, but is also clearly manifested in the lingering over its creations with clinging fondness, 'hating nothing that it maketh,' pruning, elaborating, and laboring to gift with beauty the works of its patient hands, finishing every line in love, that it too may feel its creations to be 'good.' For Love not only gives wings, but also vital heat ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... which made love talk possible. So I told her how the ash would grow anywhere—even at the seaside, where all trees lean from the sea—except the ash. Sea or no sea, it stands straight up. Even the oak will shave up on the side of the wind, but not the ash. And best of all, the ash bears pruning better than any other tree. Pruning! That is the great trial both for men and trees, mother. None of us like it, but the ash-tree ...
— The Measure of a Man • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... shareholder, the parasitic speculator and the wretched multitudes of the Abyss. The New Republicans will constitute an informal and open freemasonry. In all sorts of ways they will be influencing and controlling the apparatus of the ostensible governments, they will be pruning irresponsible property, checking speculators and controlling the abyssward drift, but at that, at an indirect control, at any sort of fiction, the New Republic, from the very nature of its cardinal ideas, ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... by unequal fate. Then lowly cabins small Possessed the seat of Capitolian Jove; And, over Palatine, the rustics drove Their herds afield, where Pan's similitude Dripped down with milk beneath an ilex tall, And Pales' image rude Hewn out by pruning-hook, for worship stood. The shepherd hung upon the bough His babbling pipes in payment of a vow,— The pipe of reeds in lessening order placed, Knit well with wax from longest unto last. Where proud Velabrum lies, A little skiff across the shallows plies; And oft, to meet ...
— The Elegies of Tibullus • Tibullus
... bind up the jessamines in yonder arbour, and handle your pruning-knife with dexterity: tightly I say, go tightly to your business; you have cost me much, and must earn it in your work. Here's plentiful provision for you, rascal; salading in the garden, and water in the ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... and sown, pleasant wooden houses to be built, bees to be sheltered and encouraged, and schools to be erected where song and music were taught. O a truly great man was Hu Gadarn! though a warrior, he preferred the sickle and pruning hook to the sword, and the sound of the song and lute to the hoarse blast ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... the First Consul in the saddle. It was agreed, then, that the expenditures for the military and naval establishments should be kept at about $2,500,000—somewhat below the normal appropriation before the recent war-flurry; and that wherever possible expenses should be reduced by careful pruning of the list of employees at the navy yards. Such was the programme of humdrum economy which President Jefferson laid before Congress. After the exciting campaign of 1800, when the public was assured that the forces of Darkness and Light were locked in deadly combat for the soul of the ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... disposed irregularly, not even in rows—the better to escape the denudation of their roots by rain. Each vine is supported by an oak stick, which, removed in autumn, is replaced in spring after the process of pruning. When the young shoots are long enough they are bound to these sticks, and are not allowed to grow ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... important part of the happiness of a country life." In London, this insincere cockney adopts Savage's view. Thales, who is generally supposed to represent Savage (and this coincidence seems to confirm the opinion), is to retire "from the dungeons of the Strand," and to end a healthy life in pruning walks and twining bowers ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... pruning his feathers. "I hadn't thought of that. It is strange, very. Hu-lin, you're a wise child. Where did you ...
— A Chinese Wonder Book • Norman Hinsdale Pitman
... Mr. Pulham this morning, and that gave a fillip to my Laziness, which has been intolerable. But I am so taken up with pruning and gardening, quite a new sort of occupation to me. I have gather'd my Jargonels, but my Windsor Pears are backward. The former were of exquisite raciness. I do now sit under my own vine, and contemplate ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... some men, even among those who have chosen the task of pruning their fellow-creatures, grow more and more thoughtful and truly compassionate in the midst of their cruel experience. They become less nervous, but more sympathetic. They have a truer sensibility for others' pain, the more they study pain and ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... the oriental archipelagoes spread before him; and another separate one representing the long eastern coasts of the Japanese islands—Niphon, Matsmai, and Sikoke. With his snow-white new ivory leg braced against the screwed leg of his table, and with a long pruning-hook of a jack-knife in his hand, the wondrous old man, with his back to the gangway door, was wrinkling his brow, and ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... was ready to crop out on the slightest encouragement afforded to it. During his best period he had a mentor at his elbow in Charles Lemesle, who always read what he wrote before it went to the printer; and Balzac, though vain, was too intelligent not to avail himself of this friend's pruning. Under the new regime the revising was impossible, and, as a result, that difficult perfection which he had so perseveringly sought was destined to be attained but rarely in the rest of ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... Mr. Pomeroy said that the pruning might be done at any time of the year. I pruned a walnut tree one spring and it very nearly bled ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Fourth Annual Meeting - Washington D.C. November 18 and 19, 1913 • Various
... put upon me was the diary of a Virginian who had travelled in New England during the early thirties, and had set down his impressions of men and manners there. It began charmingly, and went on very well under Lowell's discreet pruning, but after a while he seemed to fall in love with the character of the diarist so much that he could not ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... in Chief, on horseback, and Bourgeois guards before and behind. About sixty thousand citizens of all forms and colors, armed with the muskets of the Bastile and Invalids, as far as they would go, the rest with pistols, swords, pikes, pruning-hooks, scythes, &c. lined all the streets through which the procession passed, and, with the crowds of people in the streets, doors, and windows, saluted them every where with cries of 'Vive la Nation;' but not a single 'Vive le Roy' was ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... artificial mound, and near the pathway, a small spud, such as is used for pruning, was stuck into some earth, newly drawn round a splendid tiger lily, and on the handle of the spud, were loosely thrown a white silk jacket, a blue velvet cap, and a light pink scarf—evidencing that no ordinary gardener had been that day employed in bringing into ...
— Hardscrabble - The Fall of Chicago: A Tale of Indian Warfare • John Richardson
... That is, the Sabbatical year or the year of release (ha-shemittah). See Ex. XXIII, 10 et seq., and Lev. XXV, 1-7. It is commanded that the land be allowed to lie fallow during that year, that there be no sowing, nor reaping, nor pruning of the vineyards, and that the servants, strangers, and animals, as well as the owner, shall share in the spontaneous growth of the fields and the vineyards. See also Deut. XV, 1-11, and Tractate Shebiit of ...
— Pirke Avot - Sayings of the Jewish Fathers • Traditional Text
... preponderance in the Diet; and as the States were impoverished by the late war, and the people generally detested war, a long peace of forty years (with a short interval of a year) was secured to Germany, during which prosperity returned and the population nearly doubled. The Germans turned their swords into pruning-hooks, and all kinds of industry were developed, especially manufactures. The cities were adorned with magnificent works of art, and libraries, schools, and universities covered the land. No nation ever made a more signal progress in material prosperity than did the German States during ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume X • John Lord
... Will Green had a bowl of wine in his hand. He stood up and said: "Here, now, I call a health to the wrights of Kent who be turning our plough-shares into swords and our pruning-hooks into ...
— A Dream of John Ball, A King's Lesson • William Morris
... phenomenon in the history of the world. That Peace was not indeed in our island so long continued or so unbroken as in the Mediterranean lands, where, for centuries on end, no weapon was used in anger. But even here swords were beaten into ploughshares and spears into pruning-hooks to an extent never known before or since in our annals. So profound was the quiet that for a whole generation Britain vanishes from history altogether. All through the Golden Age of Rome, the reigns of Nerva and Trajan, no writer even names her; and not till A.D. 120 do we find ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... little sap-flow, so little fruit. If you follow along the narrow road your progress is sure to be barred by a knife thrust out across the path. And the whole instinct of our nature is to shrink from the knife. The sacrificial knife becomes the pruning, the grafting knife. There can be no life without that knife. Failure to obey cuts off the ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon
... most part, they owned their own homes and the plots of ground they gardened, and I do contend that the watering-can and the spade and the pruning knife are a means of grace. Very many of them made twelve shillings a day, which is three dollars in our good Canadian money, and some of the highest paid made twice as much. And there was work for them every working day and every working ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... it will help to arouse interest in the study of fruits. The trees, as well as the fruit, frequently show distinguishing marks whereby they may be identified. Have the pupils notice the following points: general shape of tree, colour of bark, shape of leaf, method of cultivation, fertilizing, pruning and grafting, spraying and its need, orchard pests, method of picking and packing apples in ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education
... avert the heat. A thin dress of embroidered muslin with short sleeves displayed her arms, and a blue sash surrounded her thin and delicate form. She gathered a few flowers, and cut away a few bad branches of the rose-trees with an elegant English pruning-knife. Then after having passed two or three times up and down the alley in front of the portal, she put her hand to her brow as if to make a visor to shield her eyes from the burning rays of the sun. Just in front of her was the window—the curtain of which Doctor Matheus had drawn aside, and ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... future roues of the Regency, whom the Duc d'Orlans and the Duc de Vendme had gathered round them, at the Palais Royal and at Anet. It was at one of the famous soupers d'Anet that the Marquis de Sillery—who had turned his sword into a pruning-knife, and applied himself to the cultivation of his paternal vineyards on the principles inculcated by the celerer of St. Peter's—first introduced the sparkling wine bearing his name. The flower-wreathed bottles, which, at a given signal, a dozen ...
— Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines • Henry Vizetelly
... first and chief element of its glory, the most barbarous of all the rituals of barbarism—the immolation of hecatombs which wail a muling human wail? Is it indeed part of man's strange destiny through the deeps of Time that he one day bow his back to the duty of pruning himself as a garden, so that he run not to a waste wilderness? Shall the physician, the accoucheur, of the time to come be expected, and commanded, to do on the ephod and breast-plate, anoint his head with the oil of gladness, and add to the ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... had learned to eat the fruit for love of their friend, and since he has gone they have not eaten the chicken roast nor the fruit, and it seems to them that they should have eaten of these things in memory of him. In the Spring they come upon his pruning-knife, and discourse sadly on the changes he would have advised. Spring opens into summer, and when summer drops into the autumn Kilcarney's black passes into grey; he appears one morning in a violet tie, and the tie, picked out ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... monsters. The quaint phrase in the "Odyssey" about the Queen of the Laestrygones—'She was tall as a mountain, and they hated her'—would have seemed to them most reasonable.... To read Greek is to have a perpetual witness to the virtue of pruning—of condensing—a perpetual protest against all that crowds, and swells, and weakens the writer's purpose. To forget this is but to 'confound our skill in covetousness.' We cannot all be writers ... but we all wish to have good taste, and good taste is born of a generous ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... over which he was now passing, he observed, had been planted in winter wheat, and that just beyond, at the edge of the meadow, was the young orchard well grown and badly in need of pruning. The route he had taken soon brought him out into the lane at the foot of the hill, near the cider mill, where he stopped to drink of the cool sap that flowed into a large tin pail, from one of the sugar-maple trees ...
— Hidden Treasure • John Thomas Simpson
... uprising of the North,"—Joel iii., v. 9: "Proclaim ye this among the Gentiles: Prepare war, wake up the mighty men, let all men of war draw near; let them come up. Beat your ploughshares into swords, and your pruning-hooks into spears; let the weak say, I am strong." I was not in the country myself at that time, and my attention was first drawn to this in 1865 by a clergyman, who told me of his startled astonishment upon opening the ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... had been pruning with his utmost skill and strength. However, he has consulted your "Millar" thereupon, and finds out she is very ignorant, which he has gently intimated ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... time. There is hardly a target now to be found in the Highlands. After the disarming act[591], they made them serve as covers to their butter-milk barrels; a kind of change, like beating spears into pruning-hooks[592]. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... coffee culture in Abyssinia and Arabia—Coffee cultivation in general—Soil, climate, rainfall, altitude, propagation, preparing the plantation, shade, wind breaks, fertilizing, pruning, catch crops, pests, and diseases—How coffee is grown around the world—Cultivation in all the ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... tops with the perfection of detail common to the Dutch, as the first horticulturists of the world, we realise the far-reaching wisdom, which in a few decades transformed the face of the island, clearing vast tracks of jungle, and pruning that riot of tropical nature which destroys as rapidly as it creates. A lengthened survey of Java's political economy and past history would be out of place in a slight volume, written as a "compagnon ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... Arrowhead; and then of Squat, our youngest cowboy, from whose fair brow the intrepid veterinary, on his last previous visit, had removed a sizable and embarrassing wen with what looked to me like a pair of pruning shears. ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... of this rural repertory may be guessed from the numerous titles of that nature, such as "the Cow," "the Ass," "the Kid," "the Sow," "the Swine," "the Sick Boar," "the Farmer," "the Countryman," "Harlequin Countryman," "the Cattle-herd," "the Vinedresser," "the Fig- gatherer," "Woodcutting," "Pruning," "the Poultry-yard." In these pieces it was always the standing figures of the stupid and the artful servant, the good old man, the wise man, that delighted the public; the first in particular might never be wanting— the -Pulcinello- of this farce—the gluttonous ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... dressed in bright dresses, and attended by a governess in sober black, had just begun to play croquet. An elderly lady with a small white dog was walking along one of the graveled paths. An old man was pruning some bushes. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... passed a garden. The gardener had just finished his pruning, and the wounds of the knife and saw were just beginning to heal, while the warm April sun was gently nourishing the stricken plant into fresh life and energy. We thought as we looked at that plant how cruel ...
— Days of Heaven Upon Earth • Rev. A. B. Simpson
... crop in underhand fashion. Such of the tobacco farmers as wish to produce a great deal of tobacco, without regard to the excellence of the article, leave the plant to its natural growth, which is both scientifically and otherwise objectionable, for it is on a process of thinning and pruning a due diffusion of sap in the leaves depends, and consequently ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... moreover, a wholly redeeming feature, and turned his garb from that of a thousand corporals into the homely attire of a gentleman farmer. So soon as you saw them, you forgot the War. The style of them was most effective. It beat the spear into a pruning hook. With this to leaven them, the rough habiliments were most becoming. In a word, they supplied the very setting which manhood should have; and since Anthony, sitting there at his meat, was the personification of virility, they served, as all true settings should, by self-effacement to magnify ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... Barker in London, 1578, and measuring 4-1/2 by 3-1/2 inches, and it belonged to Queen Elizabeth. Inside she has written a note in which she says: 'I walke manie times into the pleasant fieldes of the Holy Scriptures, where I plucke up the goodlie greene herbes of sentences by pruning, eate them by reading, chawe them by musing, and laie them up at length in the hie seat of memorie by gathering them together, so that having tasted thy swetenes I may the less perceive the bitterness of this ...
— English Embroidered Bookbindings • Cyril James Humphries Davenport
... a carved chair, warming his bare feet at a blazing fire. Generally, when he is thus represented, there is a pot hung over the fire, from the top of the chimney. Sometimes he is pruning ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... him in a state of intoxication. It would often have been better had he kept out of the garden than gone into it; for his head was generally so muddled with beer, when he went to work on his trees, that his pruning-knife committed the greatest depredations, cutting away those branches which ought to have been left, and ...
— The Looking-Glass for the Mind - or Intellectual Mirror • M. Berquin
... ardent look, And at a lady's feet, like lion tame, Lay stretched, full loath the weight of arms to brook; And softened BIGOTRY, upon his book, Pattered a task of little good or ill: But the blithe peasant plied his pruning-hook, Whistled the muleteer o'er vale and hill, And rung from village-green ...
— Some Poems by Sir Walter Scott • Sir Walter Scott
... with the command, we have a worthy incentive in the doctrine of Restoration. If we can only realize that by faithful missionary effort the heathen will require a pruning and development when they pass out of this life, will not that be an effective and worthy incentive to the best efforts of which ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... there is of it." And then she laughed a little. "That miserable O'mie came up here the day after we went to Red Range and persuaded mother to cut it all down except one straight stick of a bush. He told her it was dying, and that it needed pruning, and I don't know what. And you know mother. I was over at the Anderson's, and when I came home the whole clump was gone. I dreamed the other night that somebody was hiding in there. It was all dead in the middle. Do you remember when ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... If he takes advantage of his position to exercise his censoriousness upon us we speedily vote him a bore, and take measures to get rid of him. But when done with gentleness and good nature, and with an eye single to our real good, this pruning of the tendrils of our inner life is one of the most precious ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... intention of letting the book speak for itself. To conclude therefore: there is much to wade through, though it is all more or less relevant to the progress of the story: some readers may like one part and some may prefer another; and if the pruning-hook had once been introduced it would have been difficult to decide what to leave and what to take, or whether it would not be better to publish another volume of the things pruned, since it had been determined to publish ...
— The Autobiography of Sergeant William Lawrence - A Hero of the Peninsular and Waterloo Campaigns • William Lawrence
... little pruning. However, to do well they must have plenty of light and air, and there must be room under the trees to cultivate. To this end, keep all lateral growths removed the first two years, pushing the strong terminal growth. Young trees so treated often make five or six feet in that time. They ...
— Walnut Growing in Oregon • Various
... is meaningless repetition which must be passed over, and expressions demanding modification. The symbolism is extravagant, and sometimes a single hymn is crowded with figures the most grotesque. The Mariolatry is excessive, and the hagiolatry offensive. Sifting and pruning are needed before a cento can be formed which would commend ...
— Hymns of the Greek Church - Translated with Introduction and Notes • John Brownlie
... flung away the pruning-knife and branch that he was cutting, and gazed at Claudet with a stupefied air. At the same time, his jovial face became shadowed, and his mouth ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... vaudeville. These girls are such a contrast to the usual groups of sophisticated, bored, blase girls who at eighteen have tired of the ordinary means of recreation and amusement. Our social life suffers from too rapid growth. It does not offer the tonic for healthy social nature. It needs pruning. Some of it needs to be ...
— The Girl and Her Religion • Margaret Slattery
... been niggard in its praise. The work is read, and always will be read, with high interest. This, perhaps, is capable of augmentation; and the Editor much deceives himself if he has not accomplished this effect by his labours, as well in pruning off the redundant moralizings and cumbrous ratiocinations of Dr Hawkesworth, as in contributing new but relevant matter to the mass of amusing and instructive information which that gentleman has recorded. He confesses that he has far less delicacy in doing either of these ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... are less than in 1913—for they have increased as governmental activities have enlarged—but in the sense that expenditures each year have been vastly less than they would have been without the budget plan of pruning and scaling down demands of existing State departments with a view both to general economy and ...
— The Progressive Democracy of James M. Cox • Charles E. Morris
... the flowers, and they too are in profusion. Every house stands in its own grounds, and I think I may say that every house has a beautiful shrubbery and garden attached to it. Of course, with all this warm rain constantly falling, the pruning-knife is as much needed as the spade, but the natives make excellent and clever gardeners, and every place is well and neatly kept. Mine is the only overgrown and yet empty garden I have seen, but, all the same, I have more flowers in my drawing-room than any one else, for all my neighbors ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... into a pruning hook is a matter for a skilled smith, but to change a bayonet into a poker is within the capacity of the least mechanical. All that is needed is to cause the bayonet to forsake the murderous rifle barrel and cleave to a short wooden handle. Henceforth its function is not to thrust ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... obsequious General was a topic fertile in irony. But she did condescend. Lady Camper came to his gate unexpectedly, rang the bell, and was let in like an ordinary visitor. It happened that the General was gardening—not the pretty occupation of pruning—he was digging—and of necessity his coat was off, and he was hot, dusty, unpresentable. From adoring earth as the mother of roses, you may pass into a lady's presence without purification; you cannot (or so the General thought) when you are caught in the act of adoring ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... friend. On his return, Gray went to Cambridge, where he led the life of a retired student, devoting himself to the ancient authors, to poetry, botany, architecture, and heraldry. He was fastidious as to his own productions, which were very few, and which he kept by him, pruning, altering, and polishing, for a long time before he would let them see the light. His lines entitled A Distant Prospect of Eton College appeared in 1742, and were received ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... faithfully to give up tree climbing, fishing in the pond, and many other favourite sports, and commenced to dig in the piece of kitchen garden under their grandmother's direction. In fact so zealous did Tuttu become that he borrowed a knife from one of the farm labourers who was vine pruning, and cut the whole of the branches off a vine near the house, ending with a terrible gash in his own thumb, which necessitated his being carried in an ox-cart to the hospital in Siena, supported in his grandmother's arms; while Tutti walked behind weeping bitterly, under the impression ...
— Soap-Bubble Stories - For Children • Fanny Barry
... noxious plants grow side by side. "You must either," he declares, "admit—which you do not—that both good and evil were chance sown, or refer their joint presence to some necessary or pre-ordained connection between them. In the latter case you may use your judgment in pruning away the too great exuberance of the noxious plant, but if you destroy it once for all, you have frustrated the intentions of him who placed ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... more independent of our modification than the remote sun,—yet they must feel responsible, after all, for the perfection of the development, in so far as removing every impediment, preserving every condition, and pruning every redundance. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... considering how I may shorten what I am going to say to the Athenians." Even Demosthenes himself, who used to despise the rest of the haranguers, when Phocion stood up, was wont to say quietly to those about him, "Here is the pruning-knife of my periods." This however, might refer, perhaps, not so much to his eloquence, as to the influence of his character, since not only a word, but even a nod from a person who is esteemed, is of more force than a thousand arguments or ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... there appeared to be very little system in the culture of the coffee-tree. Little care was taken in the selection of shading-trees, and pruning was much neglected. Nevertheless, very fine coffee was brought from the neighbourhood of Indan, Silan, Alfonso, and Amadeo. The Batangas bean had the best reputation in Manila; hence the Indan product was sometimes brought to that market and sold ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... without hinderance from the ignorant and the unsympathetic; where they can reach out for the sun on all sides and stretch their long arms skyward; where each vine can grow as it would in all the luxuriance of its nature, free from the pruning-knife of criticism and the straitlaced trellis of conventionality—a planet on which the Puritan with his creeds, customs, fads, issues, and dogmas, and the Cavalier with his traditions and time-honored notions ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... oasis to be given over to Sicilian cultivators. Apart from the fact that the wealthy Kaid of Gafsa, who is the chief owner of it, would have something to say on the subject, these advantages would be limited to pruning the trees and grafting some of them; introducing, possibly, a few more vegetables, and having the ground more parsimoniously tended than at present. The magnesia in the water is hostile to the majority of delicate European growths. ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... Abstracts from papers of considerable value and extent—on Pasturages, Chlorides applied to diseased Animals, Quality of Waste Land from the plants growing in it, Malt Duties, Beet Root Sugar, Aliment from Straw, Planting and Pruning, Indian Corn, Mangold Wurzol, &c. In Gardening are upwards of 40 similar Abstracts. In Domestic Economy are some practical papers on Milk, Bread, Sugar, Storing Fruit, Beer from Sugar, &c. In Useful Arts are about half-a-dozen, pages. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 488, May 7, 1831 • Various |
