"Sprig" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Gently, imperceptibly, it stole into the field of vision and stood there, delicately alluring. It could afford to wait. It had not even any pattern to speak of, only an indefinable white something, a dice, a diaper, a sprig. It was the sprig that ...
— Superseded • May Sinclair
... sought eagerly, and long Sought vainly; for the lady Elfinhart, Debating with herself, stood yet apart; But as Sir Gawayne gathered up his reins And bade the draw-bridge warden loose the chains, Suddenly Elfinhart stood by his side, Her fair face flushed with love, and joy, and pride. She plucked a sprig of holly from her gown And looked up, questioning; and he leaned down, And so she placed it in his helm. No word Might Gawayne's lips then utter, but he heard The voice that was his music, and could feel The touch of gentle fingers through the steel. "Wear this, Sir ...
— Gawayne And The Green Knight - A Fairy Tale • Charlton Miner Lewis
... that sprig of red geranium from Glanyravon was placed in his coat by his little niece, and in spite of his better resolutions, when he went home, it was transferred to a glass, and treasured as long as imagination could fancy ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... pebbles and loose blocks. Some of the rocks are perfectly black, and would be considered by an European geologist, on a distant view, as basalt. Until half-past four in the afternoon we did not see a blade of grass, a sprig of vegetation, or living thing of any description; but at the camping-ground was a thin scattering of herbage, near the foot of the black mountain ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 1 • James Richardson
... the fire in Mrs. Ginniss's attic-room sat a little figure, propped in the wooden rocking-chair with pillows and comfortables; while upon a small stand close beside her were arranged a few cheap toys, a plate with some pieces of orange upon it, a sprig of geranium in a broken-nosed pitcher of water, and a cup ...
— Outpost • J.G. Austin
... just quitting the lists, which they also were in the habit of visiting nearly every day. As the two parties passed one another, the Earl spoke to a gentleman walking beside him and in a voice loud enough to be clearly overheard by the others: "Yonder is the young sprig of Falworth," said he. "His father, my Lords, is not content with forfeiting his own life for his treason, but must, forsooth, throw away his son's also. I have faced and overthrown many a better knight than ...
— Men of Iron • Ernie Howard Pyle
... avowals and a betrothal. Hilton returned to nurse his adoptive father, and was to seek England as soon as he could obtain his release. Meanwhile, Kate pledged herself to wait for him. She kept the new locket, empty except for a sprig of edelweiss he had placed in it, and agreed that if she needed her lover's presence, she should despatch it as ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... of a sprig of parsley, thyme, and sweet marjoram, a bay leaf, and perhaps a stalk of celery, tied firmly together and used as flavoring in a soup or stew. Arranged in this way, the herbs are ...
— Woman's Institute Library of Cookery, Vol. 1 - Volume 1: Essentials of Cookery; Cereals; Bread; Hot Breads • Woman's Institute of Domestic Arts and Sciences
... cried Cuchulain. "Should a flock of birds graze upon the plain of Murthemne, thou shalt have a wild goose with half the other. Should fish come to the falls or to the bays, thou shalt have a salmon with as much again. Thou shalt have the three sprigs, even a sprig of cresses, a sprig of laver, and a sprig of sea-grass; there will be a man to take thy place at the ford." "This welcome is truly meant," replied Lugaid; "the choice of people for the youth whom ...
— The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Tain Bo Cualnge • Unknown
... ships in the world: where he shewed that matchless intrepidity, and able conduct, as a seaman and officer, which I have often had the happiness to experience, in many trying situations. I thank God, I was not present; for it would finish me, could I have taken a sprig of these brave men's laurels. They are, and I glory in them, my darling children; served in my school; and all of us caught our professional zeal and fire, from the great and ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. II (of 2) • James Harrison
... his scarred brigandine of chain-mail and his dinted steel cap showed that he was no holiday soldier, but one who was even now fresh from the wars. A white surcoat with the lion of St. George in red upon the centre covered his broad breast, while a sprig of new-plucked broom at the side of his head-gear gave a touch of gayety and grace to ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... his writing to a Spearman who is dressed in actor's boots (see Stothard's painting of Falstaff in the "Merry Wives of Windsor" wearing similar actor's boots, Plate 32, Page 127). Note that the Spearman has a sprig of bay in the hat which he holds in his hand. This man is a Shake-Spear, nay he really is a correct portrait of the Stratford householder, which you will readily perceive if you turn to Dugdale's engraving of the Shakespeare bust, Plate 5, Page 14. In the middle ...
— Bacon is Shake-Speare • Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence
... certainly in no passive mood when last it flung its constituents together; for, with the exception of a few circling acres forming a rim around the harbor, high, broken, and frowning battlements of rock, ungainly and sterile, look down upon you as far as the eye can reach. No sprig, or tree, or blade of grass takes root in its parched soil or stony bed, or survives the blasting heat. Scattered and dotted on crag, hilltop or slope, in glaring white, are the many offices and residence buildings of the camp. While in hidden crevices and forbidden ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... swore foe to a quarrel, Protects from the thunder and lightning of rows; Their sprig of shillelagh is nothing but laurel, Which flourishes ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... homes the brown oak-bough Vies with the red-gemmed holly now; And here and there, like pearls, there show The berries of the mistletoe. A sprig upon the chandelier Says to the maidens, "Come not here!" Even the pauper of the earth Some kindly ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... was dried pennyroy'l in every pocket of his coat, and he used to put a big bunch of it on his piller at night. Sundays it looked like Uncle Harvey couldn't enjoy the preachin' and the singin' unless he had a sprig of it in his hand, and I ricollect once seein' him git up durin' the first prayer and tiptoe out o' church and come back with a handful o' pennyroy'l that he'd gethered across the road, and he'd set and smell it and look as pleased as a child with ...
— Aunt Jane of Kentucky • Eliza Calvert Hall
... were quite sentimental over them. Cissie Gardiner had a pansy picked from Wordsworth's garden at Grasmere, and a sprig of rosemary that she said came from the grave of Keats. Her aunt brought it to her from Rome, where he's buried. She pasted it on to a piece of paper, and wrote underneath: 'Here's rosemary, that's for remembrance. I pray you, ...
— The Nicest Girl in the School - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... thought we loved each other too well for that defect in my character to make any difference. The wedding-day was at last fixed. I had presented her with funds to buy her trousseau, as they were not at all well off, when a young sprig of English nobility visited the Colonies, and became acquainted with them. The mother played her cards well, for that cursed snob married my girl under my very nose, and used the trousseau I had provided. She sent me a letter, in which she ...
— Australia Revenged • Boomerang
... "Thou'rt a fair sprig of de old tree, Muster Dickie, so 'e be," in the thick speech of the peasant people round about Talbot house where Dickie had once been a ...
— Harding's luck • E. [Edith] Nesbit
... in the sentimental affairs of the whole neighbourhood as well as in her own. Perhaps few young ladies now-a-days would write to their confidantes with the announcement that for some time past a young sprig had been teasing them to have him. This, however, is among Miss Nancy's confidences. She also writes poems and jeux d'esprit, and receives poetry in return from Betsy, who calls herself Camilla, and pays her friend many compliments, ...
— A Book of Sibyls - Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen • Anne Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie)
... Clarenham, or from Ashton himself; and, dolt as he is, I trow he has sense enough to keep his own counsel. He has not forgotten the day when he saw this dainty young sprig rise up in his golden spurs before his eyes. I know how it is! It is with him as it was with the Lord ...
— The Lances of Lynwood • Charlotte M. Yonge
... occurred of late Boreas had seen the destruction of numerous forests, and had even assisted in laying waste the country. But one night an avalanche had buried a hamlet from which only one living soul had escaped, and that was a young child—a mere sprig of a girl, with hair like the flax and eyes like its flowers, a little, timid, crying child—whom B.B. had actually taken in his arms and carried all the way out of the woods, over the mountains, and finally into Frozen Nose's own palace ...
— Prince Lazybones and Other Stories • Mrs. W. J. Hays
... the tactics by which it finally defeats its bovine foes. Now, if you have watched the progress of a particular shrub, you will see that it is no longer a simple pyramid or cone, but that out of its apex there rises a sprig or two, growing more lustily perchance than an orchard-tree, since the plant now devotes the whole of its repressed energy to these upright parts. In a short time these become a small tree, an inverted pyramid resting ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... eyes; for, indeed, she did be alway to wash herself and to make tidiness; and she to have a way now that she did set the armour-suit upon her, that had it to seem different, and she to have set a little sprig from the trees upon her breast, and in her girdle, and so to seem the more of a maid; and surely a man doth know and love these things; but not alway to have full knowing how that they be done. And, indeed, you to be likewise with me in this thing. ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... applied. One of them she gently bound upon the forehead of her husband, and the other upon his left arm. She threw perfumes into the brazier, and as the form of her husband was becoming indistinct from the smoke which filled the room, she muttered a few sentences, waved over him a small sprig of some shrub which she held in her white hand, and then closing the curtains, and removing the brazier she sat down by the side ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... sanctuary, here were his precious relics, and here he offered up his devotions, half Christian, half pagan, with never-failing ardor. From the long narrow box which the fort soldiers had noticed came an old sabre, a worn and faded uniform of the French grenadiers, a little dried sprig, its two withered leaves tied in their places with thread, and a coarse woodcut of the great Napoleon; for Jacques was a soldier of the Empire. The uniform hung on the wall, carefully arranged on pegs as a man would wear it, and the sabre was brandished from the empty sleeve as though a ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... perfection," he quoted once, in a letter to Emily Maxwell,—"I'll not call her perfection, for that's a post, afraid to move. But she's a dancing sprig of ...
— New Chronicles of Rebecca • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... the first blossoms. But New England does nothing in gay companies. It has been taught to distrust ceremonies and expression of any sort. It rejoices with reticence, it appreciates with a reservation. And yet I have seen a sprig of arbutus in rough and clumsy buttonholes on weather-faded lapels which, the rest of the twelve-month through, know no other flower. And when, in unfamiliar country, I have interrupted the ploughing to ask for guidance, I usually get it:—"Arbutus? Yaas. The's a lot of it up along that ...
— More Jonathan Papers • Elisabeth Woodbridge
... the smallest detail. He wore Brother Robert's boots when available; from appearances Brother Robert is now wearing the identical pair which made those footprints we saw, but I shall know in the morning, for that fiery young sprig obligingly left another well-marked set of prints in the same place twenty minutes ago. When circumstances compelled Hilton to walk that way in his own boots, he slipped on two roughly made moccasins, which he burned last night, having no further use for them. Therefore, he knew the murder would ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... a little way in advance of the group on the hearthrug, fanning herself, with her eye on the door, while she listened languidly to the remarks of a youthful diplomatist, a sprig of a lordly tree, upon the last debut at ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... riding to the hounds was one for gunning. A few entries in his diary tell the nature of his sport. "Went a ducking between breakfast and dinner and kill'd 2 Mallards & 5 bald faces." "I went to the Creek but not across it. Kill'd 2 ducks, viz. a sprig tail and a Teal." "Rid out with my gun but kill'd nothing." In 1787 a man asked for permission to shoot over Mount Vernon, ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... both the children, "how can that be possible, Mr. Moonman? we could not forget all these wonderful things, even if we tried, and we do not want to try." "That is all very well," I replied, "but it will make no difference whether you try or not, for all will be as I say. If you had carried a sprig of the sea-flower in your hands it might have been otherwise; but I take care never to give that to children, remembering what trouble my cousin Patty once had ...
— Five Mice in a Mouse-trap - by the Man in the Moon. • Laura E. Richards
... the identical scenery. Identical for more than two hundred miles. For twice that distance, they had seen no other life. No animal, no bird, not a sprig of cactus. ...
— Border, Breed Nor Birth • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... not venture to say yes, but her blush and sparkling eyes answered him. The old gardener understood her, and was as good as his word. He began with cutting a beautiful sprig of a large purple geranium, then a slip of lemon myrtle. Ellen watched him as the bunch grew in his hand, and could hardly believe her eyes as one beauty after another was added to what became a most ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Susan Warner
... Black Bull was his old friend Victor Nevill, little altered in five years, except for a heavier mustache that improved his dark and handsome face. To judge from appearances, he had not run through with all his money. He was daintily booted and gloved, and wore morning tweeds of perfect cut; a sprig of violets was thrust in his button-hole. The two had not met since they parted in Paris on that memorable night, nor had they known ...
— In Friendship's Guise • Wm. Murray Graydon
... far before she came upon the withered flowers he had thrown away at her command. "It must be about here," she murmured. Suddenly she uttered a cry of delight, and picked up the business card that Boyle had shown her. Then she looked furtively around her, and, selecting a sprig of myrtle among the cast-off flowers, concealed it in her mantle and ran back, glowing, to the coach. "Thank you! All right, I've found it," she called to Ashford, with a dazzling smile, ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... juniper close by, and she felt under its sharp branches. "Do you like honeysuckle?" She held up a fresh sprig fragrant with its pale horns, which she had tracked to covert by its scent. Lawrence was not given to wearing buttonholes, but he understood the friendly and apologetic intention and inclined his broad shoulder for Miss ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... bottom of your wardrobe, behind your jewels, beside packets of yellow letters, the handwriting of which we will not guess at, there is a little museum of sacred relics—the last shoes in which he played about on the gravel the day he complained of being cold, the remains of some broken toys, a dried sprig of box, a little cap, his last, in a triple wrapper, and a thousand trifles that are a world to you, poor woman, that are the fragments ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... sprig of honeysuckle as I spoke and gave it to her, which she received kindly. This emboldened me. Perhaps after all I was ...
— Roger Trewinion • Joseph Hocking
... companion had appropriated the flower, which he kept at his nose as he plodded along; after useless remonstrance, the other drew near to me again, shamefaced; would I make him another present; not a rose this time, he would not venture to ask it, but "questo piccolo"; and he pointed to a sprig of geranium. There was a grace about the lad which led me to talk to him, though I found his dialect very difficult. Seeing us on good terms, the elder boy drew near, and at once asked a puzzling question: ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing
... discover something I did not doubt. What was Margarita's mother? Some fisher girl, whose father had won an English lady's-maid with his flashing smile? Some little shopkeeper's daughter? Child, perhaps, of some sprig of nobility, caught by a pair of cool, grey English eyes? I did not know, but I felt certain that the ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... sequel to the adventure, though. I got through the post a charming little diamond brooch, with the name Esme set in a sprig of rosemary. Incidentally, too, I lost the friendship of Constance Broddle. You see, when I sold the brooch I quite properly refused to give her any share of the proceeds. I pointed out that the Esme part of the affair was my own invention, and the hyaena part of it belonged to Lord Pabham, if ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... day. There were portraits in miniature of the courtiers and the ladies of the Great Reign on the very ewers and basins. On the flounced dressing-table, with its antique glass and a diminutive patch-box, now the receptacle of Lubin's powder, a sprig of the lovely Rose The was exhaling a faint, far-away century perfume. It was surely a stage set for a real comedy; some of these high-coiffed ladies, who knows? perhaps Madame de Sevigne herself would come to life, and give to the room the only thing it lacked—the living ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... of the gaiety and splendour of his dress. It is a white satin pinked vest, close sleeved to the wrist; over the body a brown doublet, finely flowered and embroidered with pearl. In the feather of his hat a large ruby and pearl drop at the bottom of the sprig, in place of a button; his trunk or breeches, with his stockings and riband garters, fringed at the end, all white, and buff shoes with white riband. Oldys, who saw this picture, has thus described the dress of Rawleigh. But I have some important additions; for I find that Rawleigh's shoes ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... the gravy. Cook has put the dish for the meat and the plates where they will get hot, for little girls cannot see after everything. In this small saucepan is a little stock made by stewing two or three bones and scraps (with no fat whatever), a sprig of parsley, a few rings of onion, which have been fried till brown, an inch of celery, and five or six peppercorns in water. I do not know whether you noticed that this stock has been stewing by the side of the fire ever since we came into the kitchen; I have skimmed it every ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... the long, sunny hours Ardita's idea of the episode as incidental, madcap, a sprig of romance in a desert of reality, gradually left her. She dreaded the time when he would strike off southward; she dreaded all the eventualities that presented themselves to her; thoughts were suddenly troublesome and decisions odious. Had prayers found place in the pagan rituals of ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... either cycling or on foot, to go in any direction they like, to get a specimen of any ordered plant, say a sprig of yew, a shoot of ilex, a horseshoe mark from a chestnut tree, a briar rose, or something of that kind, whichever you may order, such as will tax their knowledge of plants and will test their memory as to where they noticed one of the kind required ...
— Boy Scouts Handbook - The First Edition, 1911 • Boy Scouts of America
... having got no portion small of buffeting and tussling, At last he reached the banquet-hall, where sat the mayor a-guzzling, And by his side his lady tall dressed out in white sprig muslin. ...
— Ballads • William Makepeace Thackeray
... doin'," replied the trapper, glancing at Herbert; "he has a likin' for their color and smell, and I never knowed him to eat without a green sprig or a bunch of bright moss or some sech ...
— How Deacon Tubman and Parson Whitney Kept New Year's - And Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... envious or ill-disposed, can enter into the house if there is a sprig of dill over the door. Then I know another charm which makes it stronger. If one just writes ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... among the currant bushes, Watched the moon slowly dip from twig to twig. If Theodore should chance to come, and blushes Streamed over her. He would not care a fig, He'd only laugh. She pushed aside a sprig Of sharp-edged leaves and peered, then she uprose Amid her bushes. "Sir," said ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell
... and a little sprig weskut and little knee cords and little top-boots and a little green coat with little bright buttons and a little welwet collar,' replied Tony, with great readiness and ...
— Master Humphrey's Clock • Charles Dickens
... the style of the "unstained;" because, amid the various chances of the long and bloody wars of the Roses, they had, with undeviating faith, followed the House of Lancaster, to which they had originally attached themselves. The meanest sprig of such a tree attached importance to the root from which it derived itself; and Tunstall was supposed to nourish in secret a proportion of that family pride, which had exhorted tears from his widowed and almost indigent mother, when she saw ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... sprig and leaf was glistening in the brilliant sunshine with its frosty dew, Preuss led Van away up the ravine to picket him on a little patch of grass he had discovered the day before and as he passed the ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... is simmering, Belfast is boiling. The breed is different. The Northerner is not demonstrative, is slow to anger, but being moved is not easily appeased. The typical Irishman, with his cutaway coat, his pipe stuck in his conical caubeen, his "sprig of shillelagh," or bludgeon the Donnybrook Fair hero who "shpinds half a-crown, Mates wid a frind An' (for love) knocks him down" is totally unknown in these regions. The men who by their ability and industry have lifted Ireland out of the slough, given her prosperity and ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... a sprig of mint in a quantity of air in which a candle had ceased to burn, and I found that, ten days later, another candle was able to burn therein perfectly well." It is to him, therefore, that is due the honor of having ascertained that plants exert an action ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 822 - Volume XXXII, Number 822. Issue Date October 3, 1891 • Various
... Christmas, undeniably glad to be back and very gentle with them all. She set to work almost immediately on the gifts, wrapping them and tying them with methodical exactness, sticking a tiny sprig of holly through the ribbon bow, and writing cards with neatness and care. She hung up wreaths and decorated the house, and when she was through with her work she went to her room and sat with her hands folded, not thinking. She did ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... gentleman, of whom I have spoken as sitting opposite to me, is no exception to the rule. She brought down some mignonette one morning, which she had grown in her chamber. She gave a sprig to her little neighbor, and one to the landlady, and sent another by the hand of Bridget to this ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... along the wayside here, but they were the same that I had been seeing for many a league, and they reminded me too forcibly of the rapid flight of the summer days by their haste—their unnecessary haste, as I thought—in passing from the flower to the seed. A sprig of lithosperm stood like a little tree laden with Dead Sea fruit, for the naked seeds clung hard and flinty where the flowers had been. The glaucium, although still blooming, had put forth horns nine inches long, ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... King across the Water. He knew that a fallen cause has ever two sets of devotees—those who talk and those who act: the many, in other words, who sing the songs and drink the toasts, and delight in the badges of treason—in the sucked orange, the sprig of oak, the knot of white ribbon, the fir-planting; and the few who mean more than they say, who mean, and sternly, to be presently the ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... success. Particularly was this the case with those who had an eye to the fortune rather than the heiress, taking the latter as the only means of obtaining the former; and first among this number was Louis Durant, a man of corrupt principles, and deeply depraved feelings. A sprig of a noble family of small pretensions, whose pride far exceeded their means, he was desirous of obtaining wealth; and being too indolent to enter a profession, too poor to become a merchant, and too proud to work, as a last resort, he wished to marry a fortune. Like most of his class, ...
— Ellen Walton - The Villain and His Victims • Alvin Addison
... sprig of sweet-scented balm at his mother's place, two or three rosy daisies at Kitty's, and a bunch of Christie's favorite violets at hers. She smiled as her eye went from the scentless daisies, so pertly pretty, to her own posy full ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott
... button. "What ails the bunch o' them in the kitchen, I should like to know. It'd be a pity to disturb Eliza. She might be busy, gettin' herself an extry cup o' coffee, an' couple o' fried hams-an'-eggs, to break her fast before breakfast. But that gay young sprig of a kitchen-maid, she might answer the bell an' open the door ...
— Martha By-the-Day • Julie M. Lippmann
... with attention, until this unnecessary commendation was mentioned; then, with a merry twinkle in his eye, he tapped the aristocratic sprig of hereditary nobility on the shoulder in the most fatherly way, as if the gentleman had made a confession of some unfortunate circumstance connected with his lineage, for which he was in no ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... relating to philosophy, the independence of mankind, and civil and political rights. With regard to men of science it was wholly different; those he held in real estimation; but men of letters, properly so called, were considered by him merely as a sprig in his ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... on a hot hearth. Cover the dish with the liver, then the artichoke, then the brains, and, lastly, the cauliflower, each distributed so as to decrease towards the top, which is covered with a larger sprig of cauliflower. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 449 - Volume 18, New Series, August 7, 1852 • Various
... also a pendent hoop. The tray that was its floor had just been cleaned and sanded. In the embrasure to the right was a fresh supply of hemp-seed; in the embrasure to the left the bath-tub had just been refilled with clear water. Stuck between the bars was a large sprig of groundsel. Yet, though all was thus in order, the bird did not eat nor drink, nor did he bathe. With his back to Battersea, and his head sunk deep between his little sloping shoulders, he watched the ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... of an imperfect art anxiously following foreign models as Goethe's first Christian poem—though truly with the tremendous difference that they represented the utmost that Frenchified courtly art could ever attain to; while Goethe's poem, on the contrary, was the immature sprig cut away before its time from the stem of a tree soon to stand in the full glory ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... a magnificent New Zealand tree, Metrosideros tomentosa, A. Cunn., N.O. Myrtaceae, called Christmas-tree and Fire-tree by the settlers. There is a Maori verb, pohutu, to splash. Kawa (n.) is a sprig of any kind used in religious ceremonies; the name would thus mean Splashed sprig. The wood of the tree is very durable, and a concoction of the inner bark is ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... journey's end, and by so doing relieve you of all suspicion of being anything but the honest plucky lad you have proved yourself. At the same time I looked forward to taking some of the conceit out of that young sprig of a secretary. That all my calculations were not upset by last night's accident was largely owing to you, for I must confess that, but for the shame of being outdone in bravery by a mere slip of a boy, I should have given up the fight ...
— Cab and Caboose - The Story of a Railroad Boy • Kirk Munroe
... pointed blossom rising delicate, with the perfume strong I love, With every leaf a miracle;—and from this bush in the door-yard, With delicate-colored blossoms and heart-shaped leaves of rich green, A sprig with ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... prayer!" And with this ejaculation of good-natured indignation, evidently at the memory of sundry and various poultry prods, Mrs. Silas betook herself to the house with a beautiful and serene dignity. As she went she stopped to break a sprig from a huge old lilac that was beginning to burst its brown buds and to put up half a yard of rambler that trailed across the path with its ...
— The Golden Bird • Maria Thompson Daviess
... two slices of onion, a slice of carrot, a bay-leaf, and a sprig of parsley. Add a heaping teaspoonful of flour and, when brown, a cupful of stock. Cook until thick, stirring constantly. Take from the fire, strain, add the juice of half a lemon, and ...
— How to Cook Fish • Olive Green
... I met there a young sprig of nobility who was coming up here the next term. He had been brought up abroad, and, I suppose, knew very few men of his own age in England. He was not a bad style of boy, but rather too demonstrative, and not strong-headed. He took to me wonderfully, was ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... difficult to abash, and by the coming of spring knew all of the best-looking girl students in the place—knew them well enough, it appeared, to speak of them not merely by their first names but by abbreviations of these. He had become fashion's sprig, a "fusser" and butterfly, and he reproached his roommate ...
— Ramsey Milholland • Booth Tarkington
... and isolated, so to speak, among the works of God. Such a whole, shaped as it were by the hand of God, is a plant, an animal, a man. We cannot wonder enough at the beauty and the contrivance of its structure. But when we see some broken bone, some piece of animal's flesh, some sprig of a plant, there appears to be nothing but confusion, unless an excellent anatomist observe it: and even he would recognize nothing therein if he had not before seen like pieces attached to their whole. ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... children, however, he proposed to the Barons to swear that they would recognise as his successor, his daughter Matilda, whom, as she was now a widow, he married to the eldest son of the Count of Anjou, GEOFFREY, surnamed PLANTAGENET, from a custom he had of wearing a sprig of flowering broom (called Genet in French) in his cap for a feather. As one false man usually makes many, and as a false King, in particular, is pretty certain to make a false Court, the Barons took the oath about the succession of Matilda (and her children after her), twice over, without in the ...
— A Child's History of England • Charles Dickens
... live on another hundred years. I saw some in England seven hundred years old, and they had grown queerer every century. It is a species of evergreen, and its leaf resembles our hemlock, only it is longer. This sprig gives you some idea of its general form. It is always planted about churches and graveyards; a kind of dismal emblem of immortality. This sepulchral old tree and the bass and treble dogs were the only occupants of the court. One of these, a great surly mastiff, barked out of his kennel on one side, ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... to the garden, and the pot was put in its place, again. And a week or two after, as grandmother was just going to make room in the earth for a new plant, she saw growing there a little green sprig, which was not a weed. She listened a moment, and heard the child's ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... Don Quixote, "was a giddy damsel, flighty and somewhat wanton, and she left the world as full of her vagaries as of the fame of her beauty. She treated with scorn a thousand gentlemen, men of valour and wisdom, and took up with a smooth-faced sprig of a page, without fortune or fame, except such reputation for gratitude as the affection he bore his friend got for him. The great poet who sang her beauty, the famous Ariosto, not caring to sing her adventures after her contemptible surrender (which probably ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... case dat's all I wuz big enough ter do, an' lemmie tell yo' dat when de war wuz ober I ain't had nary a sprig of hair on my haid, case de wooden buckets what I toted on it ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States • Various
... to such imagination as the majority of the spectators possessed. They had regarded the other marvels they had seen merely as bewilderingly clever examples of legerdemain: but for a man to make a single sprig of rose grow into a tree bearing both red and white roses without even touching it meant something quite unbelievable—until they had seen it. Instinctively the circle narrowed, and ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... from her, as though she were pushing it away. She had odd little ways of indicating different persons, by something in them which struck her. Master Russell, the Queen's clerk, and keeper of the royal children, used often to have a sprig of mint or thyme in his lips as he went about; her sign for him was a bit of stick or thread between her lips. For the priest, she tolled a bell. For the Lady Beatrice, her sister, who had a little airy way of putting her head on one side when ...
— Our Little Lady - Six Hundred Years Ago • Emily Sarah Holt
... and he had a little gun, And his bullets were made of lead, lead, lead; He shot Johnny Sprig through the middle of his wig, And knocked it right ...
— Young Canada's Nursery Rhymes • Various
... from the party, had changed her pretty new gown for her every-day one of mottled brown calico set with a little green sprig, and had helped her mother ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... wound the spirit, For such a pensive hour of soothing silence. Kind Nature, shuffling in her loose undress, Lays bare her shady bosom; I can feel With all around me;—I can hail the flowers That sprig earth's mantle,—and yon quiet bird, That rides the stream, is to me as a brother. The vulgar know not all the hidden pockets, Where Nature stows away her loveliness. But this unnatural posture of my ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... Perched on a view-commanding eminence; —Inn which may be a veritable house Where somebody once lived and pleased good taste Till tourists found his coign of vantage out, And fingered blunt the individual mark And vulgarized things comfortably smooth. On a sprig-pattern-papered wall there brays Complaint to sky Sir Edwin's dripping stag; His couchant coast-guard creature corresponds; They face the Huguenot and Light o' the World. Grim o'er the mirror on the mantlepiece, Varnished and coffined, Salmo ferox glares —Possibly at the List of Wines ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... before exhibited. Those which appeared to me the most remarkable, though not in the highest department of art, were still-life pieces by Hunt. It seems to me impossible to carry pictorial illusion to a higher pitch than he has attained. A sprig of hawthorn flowers, freshly plucked, lies before you, and you are half-tempted to take it up and inhale its fragrance; those speckled eggs in the bird's nest, you are sure you might, if you pleased, take into ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... curls hung from a puff of grey hair rolled back above her ears. Her eyes pointed at you—pointed. They had more than ever their look of wisdom and excitement. She was twisting and untwisting a string of white tulle round a sprig of privet flower. ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... lovely Sprig! Oh, hast thou cub to stay? Add wilt the little birdies sig Throughout the livelog day? What bessage dost thou brig to be, Fair Lady of by dreabs— Dost whisper of the babblig brook Ad fishig ...
— Poems for Pale People - A Volume of Verse • Edwin C. Ranck
... is that heather?" they say; and the most indifferent ends by picking a sprig of it in a hushed, wondering way. One must suppose that the root of their respective races issued from the glacial borders at about the same epoch, and ...
— The Land Of Little Rain • Mary Hunter Austin
... holdin' up her mournin' an' showin' blue beneath—kind o' secular, like her thinkin' about the all-silk ribbin at such a time. Sure enough, she knew her way to the lot all right. An' there was the new grave, all sodered green, an' not a sprig nor a stitch to ...
— Friendship Village • Zona Gale
... George, "every thing that is a plant. Every different kind of sprig, or little weed, that you ...
— Rollo in Rome • Jacob Abbott
... listened, always diffident, but eating heartily to the end; and soon after they rode away in a thoughtful clump. The wives of Bear Creek were few as yet, and the homes scattered; the schoolhouse was only a sprig on the vast face of a world of elk and bear and uncertain Indians; but that night, when the earth near the fire was littered with the cow-punchers' beds, the Virginian was heard drawling to himself: "Alfred and Christopher. ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... the most eloquent of its nobles? It could not be. His voice had, indeed, been touchingly soft whenever he addressed her. There had been a fascinating tenderness even in the vivacity of his look and conversation. But such were always the manners of Caesar towards women. He had wreathed a sprig of myrtle in her hair as she was singing. She took it from her dark ringlets, and kissed it, and wept over it, and thought of the sweet legends of her own dear Greece,—of youths and girls, who, pining away in hopeless love, had been transformed into flowers ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... warm, as usual at the last of August; and as the expected guests were late in making their appearance, Mr. Wyllys had undertaken in the mean time to beat his daughter at a game of chess. Elinor, mounted on a footstool, was intent on arranging a sprig of clematis to the best advantage, in the beautiful dark hair of her cousin Jane Graham, who was standing for that purpose before a mirror. A good-looking youth, whom we introduce without farther ceremony as Harry Hazlehurst, was watching the chess-players with some interest. ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... place is filled by William Three 1689-1702 His son-in-law from Dutch countree. This Orange sprig most brave of men With Mary reigns and all things then Went well with us. Macaulay's page Hails him as Hero of the age. In this reign of William Three, Laws were harsh 'gainst burglary; For they'd a very drastic way And hanged the 'Bill Sykes' of that day. National Debt In sixteen-nine-four ...
— A Humorous History of England • C. Harrison
... a harness of diamonds, according to the elegant taste of the times, appeared in a negligee of plain blue satin, without any other jewels than her eyes, which far outshone all that ever was produced by the mines of Golconda. Her hair had no other extraneous ornament than a small sprig of artificial roses; but the dignity of her air, the elegance of her shape, the sweetness and sensibility of her countenance, added to such warmth of colouring, and such exquisite symmetry of features, as could not be excelled by human nature, attracted the eyes and ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... beginning gently, till all the scum be risen, and scummed away. It must boil in all about two hours. Half an hour, before you end your boiling, put into it some Rosemary-tops, Thyme, Sweet-marjorame, one Sprig of Minth, in all about half a handful, and as much Sweet-bryar-leaves as all these; in all, about a handful of herbs, and two Ounces of sliced Ginger, and one Ounce of bruised Cinamon. He did use to put in a few Cloves ...
— The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Knight Opened • Kenelm Digby
... over the outside of the tomatoes with half-set aspic; when the aspic is set, repeat twice, then set aside on ice for some time before serving. Serve on a bed of lettuce seasoned with French dressing. Garnish each tomato with a sprig of parsley and the salad-dish with blocks of aspic. Anchovies or any cooked fish may be substituted for the lobster. ...
— Salads, Sandwiches and Chafing-Dish Dainties - With Fifty Illustrations of Original Dishes • Janet McKenzie Hill
... button; whereupon he strung it on a strip of his great-coat which he had used to bind the cross; and tying in a little sprig of birch and another of fir, he looked ...
— Kidnapped • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the conversation in a most delightfully neighborly way. Once a glistening little sprite, quite undaunted by the size of an audience that sat almost breathless enjoying his beauty, thrust his bill into one calyx after another on a long sprig of ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... Pinwheel Rolling Star Rolling Stone Roman Cross Roman Stripe Rose Rose Album Rose and Feather Rosebud and Leaves Rose of Dixie Rose of LeMoine Rose of St. Louis Rose of the Carolinas Rose of Sharon Rose Sprig Royal, The ...
— Quilts - Their Story and How to Make Them • Marie D. Webster
... slumber broken by the convulsive sensation which roused me up as I endeavored in imagination to swallow at one draught the contents of a metal tankard of half-and-half—half laurel-water, and half decoction of henbane—handed to me on a leaden salver by a demon-waiter, with a sprig of hemlock in the third buttonhole of his coat. This Lethean influence could hardly be that of the ailantus-tree alone. What of the plants on the balcony beneath,—the strange, rooty coilers which the mysterious planter sedulously fosters at the glooming of dusk, with a weird ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... very characteristic of its mistress. At Tallyn Henry Marsham had worked his will; here, in this house taken since his death, it was the will and taste of his widow which had prevailed. A gray paper with a small gold sprig upon it, sofas and chairs not too luxurious, a Brussels carpet, dark and unobtrusive, and chintz curtains; on the walls, drawings by David Cox, Copley Fielding, and De Wint; a few books with Mudie labels; costly photographs of friends and relations, especially of the relations' ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... compassion—to see the rate at which the string reels off, while he lies there bobbing up and down, poor fellow! and we are dashing along with the white foam and bright sparkle at our bows;—the ruffled bosom of prosperity and progress, with a sprig of diamonds stuck in it! But this is only the sentimental side of the matter; for grow we must, if we ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... or flower, is commonly used as a term of endearment: it is usually applied by parents to a favourite daughter, or by a lover to his mistress; it is also used to distinguish the bride and the bridegroom, as 'hanna-yomie,' 'hanna-moko.' Floral love-tokens (although they only consist of a single sprig) are as much prized among the Japanese as among ourselves; and are, ...
— Sketches of Japanese Manners and Customs • J. M. W. Silver
... the son of Geoffrey Plan-tag'e-net, Count of Anjou in France, and Matilda, daughter of King Henry I and granddaughter of William the Conqueror. Count Geoffrey used to wear in his hat a sprig of the broom plant, which is called in Latin planta genista. From this he adopted the name Plantagenet, and the kings who descended from him and ruled England for more than three hundred years are ...
— Famous Men of the Middle Ages • John H. Haaren
... tied to one person for almost nineteen years, day and night, never lettin' 'em out of your sight, and layin' the foundation of their manners and morals and education, and see how you'll feel when a blackmailing sprig of a play-doctor threatens to collect a hundred dollars from you if you dast to nurse ...
— A Spinner in the Sun • Myrtle Reed
... hostilities on my birthday with a purple satin letter-case embroidered with a sprig of rosemary and the word "Remembrance." That fresh offensive occurred on January 27th, which, I repeat, is my birthday. Readers ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 23, 1919 • Various
... red ovary flowers, that produce the nuts? Have you ever noticed them?' he asked her. And he came close and pointed them out to her, on the sprig ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... water when there is a catch of fish aboard. We ran in high upon a sea. Willing hands hauled the Cock Robin up the beach: we had fish to give away for help. The mackerel made elevenpence a dozen to Jemima Caley, the old squat fishwoman who wears a decayed sailor hat with a sprig of heather in it. "Yu don' mean to say yu've a-catched all they lovely fish!" she said with a rheumy twinkle, in the hope of getting them ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... kind of dissipation or expansion, especially a quick one, particularly if there be an r, as if it were from spargo or separo: for example, spread, spring, sprig, sprout, sprinkle, split, ...
— A Grammar of the English Tongue • Samuel Johnson
... craft, and make off with her. She is short-handed. We have four stout fellows, and the woman I make sure would help us. I'd undertake, while he is caterwauling away with the young gal, to knock that young sprig of an officer overboard. Then we'd cast off the hawser, and let the 'Crab' go adrift. They needn't know it was done on purpose; and while the other king's ship was looking after her to pick her up, we'd have a ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... proof to the dart — That nothing but whisky and gaming had ever a place in his heart; He carried a packet about him, well hid, but I saw it at last, And — well, 'tis a very old story — the story of Cameron's past: A ring and a sprig o' white heather, a letter or two and a curl, A bit of a worn silver chain, and the portrait ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson
... if the sunset of that vanished day were reddening the sky of memory, she drew a small packet from her bosom, and in it I found a withered rose-bud tied up with a shrivelled sprig of mignonette. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... which fills my cell. Sweet plant, you cheer by your perfume the one who plucked you from your home in the earth. I will try to imitate you and to do good even to those who without cause have torn me from my garden and thrown me into this prison. Here is a little sprig of peppermint, the emblem of hope. I also will preserve hope now that the time of suffering is come. Here again are two leaves of laurel. They remind me of that crown incorruptible, which is reserved in heaven for all who love the Lord and have submitted ...
— The Basket of Flowers • Christoph von Schmid
... Eugene, "perhaps you will not be sorry to hear that she is pretty sure to break with de Marsay before long. That sprig of fashion has left her for the Princesse Galathionne. For my part, I fell in love with Mme. Delphine ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... was observed to direct its flight towards the senate-house, consecrated by Pompey, whilst a crowd of other birds were seen to hang upon its flight in close pursuit. What might be the object of the chase, whether the little king himself, or a sprig of laurel which he bore in his mouth, could not be determined. The whole train, pursuers and pursued, continued their flight towards Pompey's hall. Flight and pursuit were there alike arrested; the little king was overtaken by his enemies, who ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 570, October 13, 1832 • Various
... punctuality. They had just arrived—to make the tour of Turkey. How I hated them!—As I rushed by the parlor, a single glance disclosed to me a blazing fire, with Lucy and several lovely creatures in a semi-circle. Fancy, too, gave me a glimpse of a sprig of mistletoe—I vanished from the house, like ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various
... combined were altogether too much for him. One sprig of seedling manhood remained to him, and only one—the will to smother emotion that he could not control a second longer. He buried his head in my lap, stuffing his mouth with the end of the abiyi to choke the sobs back. I covered his head ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... sprig from an ash-leaved sugar maple close by, according to a habit he had of twisting something in his lips during intervals of talk, Mr. Davidson walked down the slope with Robert. While they are discussing crops, with the keen interest which belongs not to amateurs, we may enlighten the reader somewhat ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... near-sighted, part his hair in the middle and have amber lights in his beard. To her companions her flights of fancy seemed short, rather, and poor and untutored; and even the fact that she was a sprig of the transatlantic democracy never sufficiently explained her apathy on social questions. She had a mental image of that son of the Crusaders who was to suffer her to adore him, but like many an artist who has produced ...
— Madame de Mauves • Henry James
... M.E. BRADDON, is not only very strong to send forth so many sprigs, but it is a curious branch, as from each sprig hangs a tale. The first, by the Editor and Authoress, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., Nov. 22, 1890 • Various
... leaves attached, of what seem to be from six to seven different species; and it is worthy of notice, that they resemble in the group rather the coniferae of the southern than those of the northern hemisphere. One sprig in my collection seems scarcely distinguishable from that of the recent Altingia excelsa; another, from that of the recent Altingia cunninghami. Lindley and Hutton figure in their fossil flora a minute branch of Dacrydium cupressinum, in order to show how nearly the twigs of a large tree, ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller |
