"Thatching" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... by the land forget the passage of the years. A year is but a harvest. After the ploughing and sowing and cleaning, the reaping and thatching and threshing, what is there left of the twelvemonth? It has gone like a day. Thus it is that a farmer talks of twenty years since as if it was only last week, and seems unable to grasp the flight of time till it is marked and ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies
... which can be gathered is not sufficient to form an important economical resource.—Andresen, Om Klitformationen, p. 160.] cordage and netting twine are manufactured from its fibres, it makes a good material for thatching, and its dried roots furnish excellent fuel. These useful qualities, unfortunately, are too often prejudicial to its growth. The peasants feed it down with their cattle, cut it for rope-making, or dig if up for fuel, and it has been found necessary to resort to severe legislation to prevent them ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... to the recumbent form of Matthew Moon, who usually undertook the rough thatching of the home-stead, and shook him. The shaking ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... who is on duty in the guard-room opens the gates and introduces you to the grounds in which the quarters are situated. There are groups of huts with mud walls and palm-leaf thatching, which have a thoroughly Indian and yet home like appearance. The first few of these are occupied as workshops or carpentry for the manufacture of tea boxes, and here from early to late the men may be seen busily employed, sawing, planing, measuring, bevelling, hammering ...
— Darkest India - A Supplement to General Booth's "In Darkest England, and the Way Out" • Commissioner Booth-Tucker
... of squatters, who possess habitations more fit for human beings. These were originally built by men who had saved a little money, had showed, perhaps, a certain talent for hedge carpentering or thatching, become tinkers, or even blacksmiths. In such capacities a man may save a little money—not much, perhaps L30 or L40 at furthest. With the aid of this he manages to build a very tidy cottage, in the face of the statement made by architects and builders that a good cottage cannot be erected ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies
... cold, dry or moist, and the musquash is scarce likely to be wiser. I have noted but two days' difference in the coming of the song-sparrow between a very early and a very backward spring. This very year I saw the linnets at work thatching, just before a snow-storm which covered the ground several inches deep for a number of days. They struck work and left us for a while, no doubt in search of food. Birds frequently perish from sudden changes in our whimsical spring weather of which they had no foreboding. More ...
— My Garden Acquaintance • James Russell Lowell
... chanced, here there was little difficulty about building operations, for stone and wood and tambuki grass for thatching were all at hand in plenty. Also the Basuto section of the Sisa, as is common among that race, were clever masons and carpenters, some of them having followed those trades in Natal and the more settled places in Zululand, where dwellings had to be erected. ...
— Smith and the Pharaohs, and Other Tales • Henry Rider Haggard
... green slope. Before us, lying partly in the valley, and straggling half-way up the ascent, was a pretty village. The neat and light-built native dwellings dotted the side of the slope, or peeped out from among embowering trees along the banks of the brook, in the most picturesque manner. The thatching of the cottages, bleached to an almost snowy-whiteness, offered a pleasing contrast to the surrounding verdure. Troops of children were pursuing their sports in every direction. Some were wading in the stream, sailing tiny boats, or ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... leaves, and where the wind got in and did mischief in the last January gale. When in the course of Nature the old hedge-trimmer dies, there is no one to take his place. The men do not learn these outside accomplishments as they once did, and the art is likely to be lost, just as ornamental thatching and the making of the more decorative kinds of oak paling are in ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... elsewhere, they took their old rafters with them or sold these. Their walls seem to have been of mud and wattle, or of some unsaleable stuff, and these, no doubt, served for a time for the lay brethren, after a little trimming and thatching. But their church had to be looked to before it could serve for the worship of the conversi. The old inhabitants (near two hundred, Mr. Buckle thinks, rather generously), were still there up to Hugh's time, and if their church was like their houses the wooden roof was much decayed ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson
... if they would be thatching the house that autumn; but she answered that the thatch would last out the old people, and she was going to join her ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... Chronicle, writing on women farmers, quotes the tribute of HUTTON, the historian, to a Derbyshire lady who died at Matlock in 1854: "She undertakes any kind of manual labour, as holding the plough, driving the team, thatching the barn, using the flail; but her chief avocation is breaking horses at a guinea per week. She is fond of Pope and Shakespeare, is a self-taught and capable instrumentalist, and supports the bass viol in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 16, 1917. • Various
... village lands.—These lands are set apart to provide a supply of firewood, thatching grass, &c., and are the property of the village. The inhabitants of other villages are not allowed to enjoy the produce of such lands. Such lands can be cultivated by ryots of the village, but the latter possess only occupancy ...
— The Khasis • P. R. T. Gurdon
... his being three-parts drunk most of the time. At last the rain was coming in through the roof. When Anthony saw that he came to himself a bit and sent for my grandfather and settled with him to put a few patches of new thatch on the worst places. My grandfather was the best man at thatching that there was in the island in them days, and he took the job though he misdoubted whether he'd ever be paid for it. Anthony never came next or nigh him when he was working, which shows that he hadn't ...
— Our Casualty And Other Stories - 1918 • James Owen Hannay, AKA George A. Birmingham
... thatching the ridge, Which is the way to Banbury-bridge? One foot up and t'other foot down, And that's the way ...
— Banbury Chap Books - And Nursery Toy Book Literature • Edwin Pearson
... grim to tears is the lot of the children in the hovel I saw yesterday; yet not the less they hung it round with frippery romance, like the children of the happiest fortune, and talked of "the dear cottage where so many joyful hours had flown." Well, this thatching of hovels is the custom of the country. Women, more than all, are the element and kingdom of illusion. Being fascinated, they fascinate others. They see through Claud-Lorraines. And how dare any one, if he could, pluck away the coulisses, stage effects, and ceremonies, by which they ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... "And I cannot be slain within a house, nor without. I cannot be slain on horseback nor on foot." "Verily," said she, "in what manner then canst thou be slain?" "I will tell thee," said he. "By making a bath for me by the side of a river, and by putting a roof over the cauldron, and thatching it well and tightly, and bringing a buck, and putting it beside the cauldron. Then if I place one foot on the buck's back, and the other on the edge of the cauldron, whosoever strikes me thus will cause ...
— The Mabinogion Vol. 3 (of 3) • Owen M. Edwards
... unheeded with Ship in the sweet grass, and clamoured from time to time for milk from a glass bottle; Will stood up aloft and received the hay from Chown's fork, while Mrs. Blanchard, busy with the "skeiner" stuck into the side of the rick, wound stout ropes of rushes for the thatching. ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... thatching his well-modelled head, his sanguine colouring, friendly blue eyes and mobile lips suggested Irish lineage; and his hands which, though thin and clouded with smears of ink, were strong and graceful (like the slender feet in his shabby shoes) bore ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... abruptly and snatched off his cap, revealing a crop of crinkly dark-brown hair thatching a lean sunburnt face, out of which gleamed a pair of eyes as ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... fen, because a new scheme had occurred to Marvel, relative to some reeds with which a part of this fen was covered; on these reeds myriads of starlings were accustomed to roost, who broke them down with their weight. Now Marvel knew that such reeds would be valuable for thatching, and with this view he determined to drive away the starlings; but the measures necessary for this purpose would frighten his friends, the geese, and therefore he was obliged to protect and feed them in his farm-yard, at a considerable expense, whilst he was carrying on the war with ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... ship from the sun's rays; but Lukabela assured George that there was no need to delay the departure of the expedition until the roof had been thatched, for he undertook that the women of his village, who were, according to him, experts in the art of thatching, should attend to that part of ...
— The Cruise of the Nonsuch Buccaneer • Harry Collingwood
... particular ill-housing on their estate. And if the inhabitants were not encouraged to improve themselves, they were at all events maintained at a certain level, by steady and not ungenerous supervision. When a roof required thatching it was thatched; when a man became too old to work, he was not suffered to lapse into the Workhouse. In bad years for wool, or beasts, or crops, the farmers received a graduated remission of rent. The pottery-works were run on a liberal if autocratic basis. It was true that though Lord Valleys ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... slope of the Rectory grounds the thatched roofs of the village bobbed into view, some gleaming golden in all the pride of recent thatching, others with their crown of straw mellowed by sun and rain to a deeper colour and patched with clumps of moss, ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... passed on her way under the place where Hugh was thatching, he dropped a small handful of rushes on her head to call her attention, and when she looked up she saw his red-brick-hued face in a wild tow-coloured halo peering down at her from over the eaves. "I am sorry I lost ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... and a murderous fire of grape-shot and musketry was opened upon the wretched passengers from both sides of the river. At the same time the thatching of many of the budgerows was found to be on fire, and the flames began to spread from boat to boat. Numbers were murdered in the river, but at last the firing ceased. A few escaped down the river, but only four men ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... friends reached the cable-house, native labourers, in picturesque Oriental costume, were busy thatching its roof or painting it blue, while some were screwing its parts together; for the house, with a view to future telegraphic requirements, was built so as to come to pieces for shipment to still more distant quarters ...
— The Battery and the Boiler - Adventures in Laying of Submarine Electric Cables • R.M. Ballantyne |
