"Birch" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... violets. On one side was a perfect grove of the broad-leaved, waxen- belled Solomon's seal, sloping down to moister ground where was a golden river of king-cups, and above was a long glade between young birch-trees, their trunks gleaming silvery white, the boughs over head breaking out into foliage that looked yellow rather than green against the blue sky, and the ground below one sheet of that unspeakably intense purple blue which is only produced by masses ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and untried muscles of the younger Scouts. Soon after leaving the sandy banks and tundra of the lower stream, the creek began to wind its way through dense forests of spruce, poplar and oak with the ghostly bark of the birch lighting up the dim that marks the tangled wildwood of more southern climates, showing how little the sunlight of these northern ...
— The Boy Scouts on the Yukon • Ralph Victor
... logging up new fallows. Yet notwithstanding their usefulness, I do not know a worse treated set of animals than Canadian oxen. Their weight, when fat, varies from seven to eight hundred weight. A yoke and bows, made of birch or soft maple, is the only harness needed; and, in my opinion, for double draught, better, and certainly less troublesome than the collar and traces ...
— Twenty-Seven Years in Canada West - The Experience of an Early Settler (Volume I) • Samuel Strickland
... have been made about "cart whips," etc., when I say flogging is not the most degrading punishment in the world. It may be so to a white man in most countries, but how is it to the white boy? That necessary coadjutor of the schoolmaster, the "birch," is never thought to have rendered infamous the unfortunate victim of pedagogue ire; nor did Solomon in his wisdom dream that he was counseling parents to debase their offspring, when he exhorted them not to spoil the child by sparing the rod. Pardon me for recurring ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... light and thin almost like the birch bark Indian canoe of the north, and he was a good marksman. It was a last chance, but raising his rifle he fired the heavy bullet directly at the bottom of the canoe. As the echo of the first shot was dying he slipped in a cartridge and ...
— The Rock of Chickamauga • Joseph A. Altsheler
... for it; all I know is—that smothering there under all that horrible wreckage and everything—the instant my hand went home to his, the most absolute sense of serenity and contentment went over me. Did you ever see young white horses straying through a white-birch wood in the springtime? Well, it felt the way that looks!—Did you ever hear an alto voice singing in the candle-light? Well, it felt the way that sounds! The last vision you would like to glut your eyes on before blindness ...
— The Indiscreet Letter • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... and they advanced all the next day over a burned area. They traveled northward ten days, always ascending, and they were coming now to a wooded country. They crossed several creeks, flowing down from the higher mountains, and along the beds of these they found cottonwood, ash, box elder, elm, and birch. On the steeper slops were numerous cedar brakes and also groves of yellow pine. There was very little undergrowth, but the grass grew in abundance. Although it was now somewhat dry, the horses and mules ate it eagerly. The buffaloes did not appear here, but they saw many signs ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... ashamed of his weakness, and resolutely refrained from giving any evidence of his suffering, but when he detected the pale green foliage of the fragrant birch, he ventured to step out of the trail, break off a branch and chew the bark, thus securing temporary relief from the ...
— Camp-fire and Wigwam • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... was complex and even contradictory. What it lost in logical sequence it gained in variety. Wilkinson enumerates seventy-three principal divinities, and Birch sixty-three; but there were some hundreds of lesser gods, discharging peculiar functions and presiding over different localities. Every town had its guardian deity, to whom prayers or sacrifices were offered by the priests. The more complicated the religious ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... green birch trees—amid whose boughs hung gay lamps—and the rose bushes which surrounded a fountain of perfumed water, and Eva had already followed the Swiss knight across the threshold when she saw among the branches at the end of the room the Countess Cordula, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... are pleased, thought I, why should not others be amused also? In a few days Dr. Birch's young friends will be expected to reassemble at Rodwell Regis, where they will learn everything that is useful, and under the eyes of careful ushers continue the business of ...
— The Rose and the Ring • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Michael to endure hardship. Peter Strogoff was a huntsman by profession. Summer and winter—in the burning heat, as well as when the cold was sometimes fifty degrees below zero—he scoured the frozen plains, the thickets of birch and larch, the pine forests; setting traps; watching for small game with his gun, and for large game with the spear or knife. The large game was nothing less than the Siberian bear, a formidable and ferocious animal, in size equaling its fellow of the frozen seas. Peter ...
— Michael Strogoff - or, The Courier of the Czar • Jules Verne
... service by Perron, who had probably very good reason to believe that they would not join in fighting against the army of their own sovereign. Carnegie, Stewart, Ferguson, Lucan, two Skinners, Scott, Birch, and Woodville, are the only names recorded, but there may have been others also who were dismissed from the army at Perron's disposal. The prospects of those who were absent on duty in the Deccan, and elsewhere, soon ...
— The Fall of the Moghul Empire of Hindustan • H. G. Keene
... a thoroughly respectful character. By this time, the dullest began to perceive that the child was not likely to perish of any congenital weakness or infantile disorder, but was growing into a stalwart personage, upon whom mere goody scoldings and threatenings with the birch-rod were quite ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... the greatest antiquity in Wales; many figures of the saints are represented in colored glass, the lead betwixt the panes is the breadth of two fingers. The yard has several old trees—two very fine yews, and certainly the largest birch for ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... until the stars shone in the tips of the birch trees. Ridgeley did not come, and when they went back to the house, they found that he had been called to New York on an urgent case. He would not return until the ...
— The Gay Cockade • Temple Bailey
... of water, beckoning the phantom forth, and—as it declined to venture—seeking a passage for herself into its sphere of impalpable earth and unattainable sky. Soon finding, however, that either she or the image was unreal, she turned elsewhere for better pastime. She made little boats out of birch-bark, and freighted them with snail-shells, and sent out more ventures on the mighty deep than any merchant in New England; but the larger part of them foundered near the shore. She seized a live horseshoe by the tail, and made prize of several five-fingers, and laid out ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... growing up to the border of the amphitheatre on all sides; blackberry vines and sumach bushes overran the gradines almost to the margin of the pool which filled the centre; at the edge of the water some clumps of willow and white birch leaned outward as if to mirror their tracery in its steely surface. But of the life that the thing inarticulately recorded, there was not ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... less useful to have: a couple of lawn-mowers, an old sleigh hoisted up on the rafters of the carriage house, a weird old buggy, a plow, a grindstone, a collection of old chairs and sofas that had seen better days, a birch-bark ...
— The House of Torchy • Sewell Ford
... the struggle between trees in the forests of Denmark, from the researches of M. Hansten-Blangsted, strikingly illustrates our subject.[8] The chief combatants are the beech and the birch, the former being everywhere successful in its invasions. Forests composed wholly of birch are now only found in sterile, sandy tracts; everywhere else the trees are mixed, and wherever the soil is favourable ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... may be none the happier for it. There are times when I would give it all to be dancing down the Lachine Rapids in a birch canoe, or to see the red and the yellow on those hill-sides once more at the fall of ...
— The Refugees • Arthur Conan Doyle
... has been preserved till this time by constant submergence in the water and in the unusually moist soil above it to betray without any serious question the nature of the materials used and the mode of their employment. One of the corner-posts was a black birch and the bark on it is in a good state of preservation at and below the ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 5 • Various
... In-Place make friends with strange objects; everything in nature talks to us, if we will but listen. You have taught me to listen, too. Back a piece in the woods are a strong young hemlock and a little white birch. For years I have watched and tended them. When I was a small girl I likened the hemlock to you, sir, and there was I, leaning and huddling close to you, like the ghostly stripling of the woods. Well, I noticed ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... this injunction, went out to her oven and put the coals in at the mouth of it. Then she began to gather sticks, and little branches, and strips of birch bark, and other silvan combustibles, which she found scattered about the ground, and put them upon the coals to make the fire. She stopped now and then a minute or two to rest and to listen to the sound of Mary Erskine's spinning. At last some sudden thought seemed to ...
— Mary Erskine • Jacob Abbott
... arises the harmony that strikes us in the wildest natural landscapes,—in the relative shapes of rocks, the harmony of colours in the heaths, ferns, and lichens, the leaves of the beech and the oak, the stems and rich brown branches of the birch and other mountain trees, varying from verging autumn to returning spring,—compared with the visual effect from the greater number of artificial plantations?—From this, that the natural landscape is effected, as it were, by a single energy modified ab intra in each component ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... there was no sign that Macpherson's brigade had accomplished its task and carried the hill, or that Tytler had worked round to the village in the rear. Some attacks, however, were made upon the Afghan intrenchments. These, however, were unsuccessful, and some valuable lives were lost. Major Birch and Lieutenant Fitzgerald, both of the 27th Native Infantry, were killed; Captain Maclean, of the 14th Sikhs, was wounded; and between thirty and forty rank and file ...
— Our Soldiers - Gallant Deeds of the British Army during Victoria's Reign • W.H.G. Kingston
... residence of the governor, whom it was necessary for him to see, in order to make the commercial arrangements he desired. He ascended the Avatcha river, the banks of which are for the most part composed of fine meadow land, or hills thickly covered with birch. Early on the following day, the party left their boats, and proceeded on horseback over two or three very steep mountains, and amid clouds of mosquitoes, which tormented them exceedingly. The houses at which they stopped, from time to time, ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... his mind. He lived for some time in a confused glamour and glitter; surrounded by the fascinating specious life of the store, but drifting merely superficially upon it. The great place, with its columns of artificial marble and white censers of upward-shining electricity, glimmered like a birch forest by moonlight. Silver and jewels and silks and slippers flashed all about him. It was a marvellous education, for he soon learned to estimate these things at their proper value; which is low, for they have little to do with life itself. His work was tiring in the extreme—merely ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... flying squirrel, to study its mode of flight, but quickly carried it back to the wood. He possessed true instincts of topography, and could conceal choice things in the bush and find them again.... If Thoreau needed a box in his walk, he would strip a piece of birch bark off the tree, fold it, when cut straightly, together, and put his tender ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... quite abnormal mortality. All that natural selection can do in times of calamities is to spare the individuals endowed with the greatest endurance for privations of all kinds. So it does among the Siberian horses and cattle. They are enduring; they can feed upon the Polar birch in case of need; they resist cold and hunger. But no Siberian horse is capable of carrying half the weight which a European horse carries with ease; no Siberian cow gives half the amount of milk given by a Jersey cow, and no natives of uncivilized countries can ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... an illustration in Arundale- Bonomi-Birch's Gallery of Antiquities from the British Museum, pl. 31. The king thus represented is Thutmosis II. of the XVIIIth dynasty; the spear, surmounted by a man's head, which the double holds in his hand, probably recalls the human victims formerly sacrificed at the ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... red men, and swept their whole race away from the cold fountains. Endicott, and his followers, came next, and often knelt down to drink, dipping their long beards in the spring. The richest goblet, then, was of birch-bark. Governor Winthrop, after a journey afoot from Boston, drank here, out of the hollow of his hand. The elder Higginson here wet his palm, and laid it on the brow of the first town-born child. For many ...
— A Rill From the Town Pump (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... more by applying punishment to the most degraded part, adding contumely to tyranny. Of course, it is intended that a boy who is sent to school should gain by precept and example; but is he to learn benevolence by the angry look and the flourish of the vindictive birch,—or forbearance, by the cruelty of the ushers,—or patience, when the masters over him are out of all patience, or modesty, when his nether parts are exposed to general examination? Is he not daily reading a lesson at variance with that equality which we all possess, but of which we ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Frederick Marryat
... 'Where is the king's highway? I will walk nowhere but on the king's highway.' In a wilderness a man should take the track which will carry him home. In a revolution we must have recourse to the highest law, the safety of the state." Another veteran Roundhead, Colonel Birch, took the same side, and argued with great force and keenness from the precedent of 1660. Seymour and his supporters were beaten in the Committee, and did not venture to divide the House on the Report. The Bill passed rapidly, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Foxy, with official port, and leaned something like a cloth rolled round a stick against the desk. No one in authority was yet present, so the school applauded, crying: "What's that, Foxy? What are you stealin' the gentleman's brolly for?—We don't birch here. We cane! Take away that bauble!—Number off from the right"—and so forth, till the entry of the Head and the ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... our merchant when he returned from dinner, laid in a good stock of birch rods, which he carried secretly into his house, and hid near his bed, saying to himself that if his wife worried him she should be ...
— One Hundred Merrie And Delightsome Stories - Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles • Various
... all pretty young women had interested him in equal measure, yet among the rest he now singled out one in whom the charms of all the others were united, standing apart in her loveliness as a young birch tree stands in springtime on the border of ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... wife and Miss Beggs recurred, intensified—one an absolute wreck and the other as solidly slender as a birch tree. Fate had played a disgusting trick on him. In the prime of his life he was tied to a hopeless invalid. It put an unfair tension on him. Women were charming, gracious—or else they were nothing. If Emmy's money ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... Indians with all their rich pine land could be so poor. She resolved to ask her father and Levine about it and turned a somersault into the water. She swam about until tired, then turned over on her back to rest. Lying so a shadow drifted across her face and she raised her head. A gray birch bark canoe floated silently beside her. In it, in a gray bathing suit, ...
— Lydia of the Pines • Honore Willsie Morrow
... Harvey Birch, the hero of The Spy, is a portrait from the life of a revolutionary patriot who appears in the book as a peddler with a keen eye to trade as well as to the movements of the enemy. One of the best known incidents in the book is that in which Harvey, ...
— The Greatest Highway in the World • Anonymous
... bowed heads through the crumbling earth. He knelt above them breathless, he looked up to the maple-twigs, over which a faint reddish bloom had been cast in the night, beyond to the lower slopes of the mountain, delicately patterned with innumerable white stems of young birch-trees, and clasped his hands to see that a shimmer of green hung in their tops like a mist. His lips quivered, he laid his hand upon a tuft of grass with glossy, lance-like blades, and ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... quite covered with the citron-yellow leaves from the elms and maples; here and there were spots of a darker foliage. It was very pleasant, very clean to walk on this tigerskin-carpet, and to watch the leaves fall down like snow; the birch looked even lighter and more graceful with its branches almost bare and the roan-tree was wonderful with its heavy scarlet cluster of berries. And the sky was so blue, so blue, and the wood seemed so much bigger, one could look so far ...
— Mogens and Other Stories - Mogens; The Plague At Bergamo; There Should Have Been Roses; Mrs. Fonss • Jens Peter Jacobsen
... taken Master B.'s bell away and balked the ringing, and if they could suppose that that confounded boy had lived and died, to clothe himself with no better behaviour than would most unquestionably have brought him and the sharpest particles of a birch-broom into close acquaintance in the present imperfect state of existence, could they also suppose a mere poor human being, such as I was, capable by those contemptible means of counteracting and ...
— The Signal-Man #33 • Charles Dickens
... lovingly with their errors, mediated in their quarrels, and was idolized by them as was no other of his race. Pokanoket, Massasoit and Canonicus were his hosts and guardians during the winter and spring; and in summer he descended the river in a birch-bark canoe to the site of the present city of Providence, so named by him in recognition of the Divine mercies; and there he pitched his tent beside the spring, hoping to make the place "a shelter for persons ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... vagrant hunter. He led back into the forest. A score of yards from the margin, in an overgrown clearing, was an abandoned saeter hut. It was in none of the best of repair, was seven feet square inside, and held five feet of head-room under the roof-tree. It was about half filled with dried birch-bark, piled up against the farther end. It also contained a rude wooden trough and ball for pounding up coffee, three sections of pine-stem for seats, and a rusted old stove which had ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... of its stock; a perfectly voracious little shop, with a maw as accommodating and full as any shark's. Cheese, butter, firewood, soap, pickles, matches, bacon, table-beer, peg-tops, sweetmeats, boys' kites, bird-seed, cold ham, birch brooms, hearth- stones, salt, vinegar, blacking, red-herrings, stationery, lard, mushroom-ketchup, staylaces, loaves of bread, shuttlecocks, eggs, and slate pencil; everything was fish that came to the net of this greedy little shop, ...
— The Chimes • Charles Dickens
... lay the paradise, a meadow-like sweep of plain that reached down to the edge of Clearwater Lake, with clumps of poplars and white birch and darker tapestries of spruce and balsams dotting it like islets in a sea of verdant green. The flowers were two weeks ahead of their time and the sweet perfumes of late June, instead of May, rose up out of the plain, and ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... now curtained with brambles and wall-flowers, and festooned with Virginia creepers; the galleries are no longer crowded with archers and cross-bowmen; the moat itself has blossomed into a garden, luxuriant with limes and acacias, elders, planes, chestnuts, poplars, walnut, willow and birch trees, or divided into carefully tilled little garden plots. True it is that outside the moat, beneath the smug grin of substantial modern houses, runs that mark of modernity, ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various
... seized their supplies by theft or open violence. They appealed to Pontiac, and about the only creditable act recorded of that perfidious chief was his agreement to make restitution to the robbed settlers. Pontiac gave them in payment for their purloined property promissory notes drawn on birch-bark and signed with the figure of an otter—the totem to which he belonged—all of which promises to pay, it is ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... width. Forty miles beyond are Pokegama Falls. Here the river flows from Pokegama Lake, falling about fourteen feet before quiet water is reached. All the country about the headwaters is densely wooded with Norway pine on the higher ground, and with birch, maple, poplar and tamarack on the lower ground. Between Pokegama Falls and the Falls of St. Anthony, the river receives the waters of a number of other similar streams, all flowing from the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 810, July 11, 1891 • Various
... fair young birch trees he sacrificed to build a summer-house for himself and his staff to drink beer in, and gaze over the country, at St. Quentin, at Soissons and a hundred conquered towns and villages! Now he's obliged to look from St. Quentin at the ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... fast she is," sang out Jeff Lynn, as he fastened the rope to a tree at the head of a small island. "All off now, and' we'll hev' supper. Thar's a fine spring under yon curly birch, an' I fetched along a leg ...
— The Spirit of the Border - A Romance of the Early Settlers in the Ohio Valley • Zane Grey
... a little ridge, with great, gray rocks here and there, spots of cool, restful color amid the lavish green and gold and purple of nature's carpeting. To the north swept hills clothed with the deep, rich green of hemlock, the faint green flutter of birch, the dense foliage of sugar maples. To the east, in the valley, a singing silver brook flashed in and out among somber boulders, the land ascending to sunny hilltop pastures beyond. But toward the south from the ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr
... three years later. A view of tranquil sunlit sea, dotted with boats, in the background. On the left a portion of the house is seen, with an open window within which VALBORG is seen writing at a desk. The garden is shaded with birch trees; flower-beds run round the house, and the whole atmosphere one of modest comfort. Two small garden tables and several chairs are in the foreground on the right. A chair standing by itself, further back, has evidently had a recent occupant. When the curtain rises the stage is empty, ...
— Three Dramas - The Editor—The Bankrupt—The King • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... am sitting in our acacia grove, on the hill, with a few pines near enough for me to hear their oceanic murmur. It is only necessary for me to shut my eyes, to hear every variety of water sounds. The pine gives me the long, majestic swell and retreat of the sea waves; the birch, the silvery tinkle of a pebbly brook; the acacia, the soft fall of a cascade; and all mingled together, a sound of many waters most refreshing to the sense. I thank heaven that we possess a hilltop. No ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... observation reduced to a saying or a story. It is true that the oak-tree is a black witch so far as lightning is concerned and that the beech and alder are white witches. The proportion of trees struck by lightning has often been counted and for every fifty-four oaks struck, only one beech, or birch, or maple or alder is struck. Elms are fairly dangerous, being forty to the beech's one, and pines are less so, their ratio being fifteen. Not only this, boys, but a good deal depends on the way in ...
— The Boy with the U. S. Weather Men • Francis William Rolt-Wheeler
... [Footnote 2: Dr. Thomas Birch, in a letter dated June 15, 1764, says that this letter was by Mr. Philip Yorke, afterwards Earl of Hardwicke, who was author also of another piece in the Spectator, but his son could not remember ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... birch, above him, hung Her tassels in the sky; And many a vernal blossom sprung, And nodded ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant
... stopped for a half hour at sunset, when the sky, for a few moments, showed streaks of red, then closed in for a night's drizzle. I had built what shelter I could for the woman out of boughs covered with sheets of paper birch and elm. I had made a similar shelter for myself that I might not seem to discriminate too much in favor of the Englishman, and had told the men to do the same. But they were indolent, and stopped ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... Bible:—"Anne, my daughter, was born July the 29th, the day of the monthly Fast, between six and seven, or about half an hour after six in the morning, 1646." This, with subsequent entries on the same leaf, was copied by Birch, Jan. 6, 1749-50, when the Bible was shown him by Mrs. Foster, granddaughter to Milton (daughter to his youngest daughter Deborah), then keeping a chandler's shop in Cock Lane, near Shoreditch Church. It was the Bible in which Milton ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... Appendix to the life of Prince Henry, Doctor Birch has given us an account of the prices of butcher's meat as commonly paid by that prince. It is there said, that the four quarters of an ox, weighing six hundred pounds, usually cost him nine pounds ten shillings, or ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... you stay, nor vanish quite From this bleak spot of thorn, And birch, and fir, and frozen ...
— Poems of the Past and the Present • Thomas Hardy
... Jezebel, the mastiff-birch, was expected to assist in guarding our castle, — an honourable duty which her courage and fidelity amply warranted us in confiding to her. Of the former quality, I shall mention an instance that occurred during the voyage. We had one day caught a shark, ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... no such book as this Justinian of the play-ground, if we except a thin volume of games published by Tabart. Boys then quarrelled upon nice points of play, parties ran high, and civil war, birch, and the 119th psalm were the consequences. A disputed marble, or a questioned run at cricket, has thus broken up the harmony of many a holiday; but we hope that such feuds will now cease; for the "Boy's Own ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 338, Saturday, November 1, 1828. • Various
... strange people, all of whom were laughing and applauding his words, from the German Princess in the Royal box to the straight-backed Tommy in the pit. Instead of the painted scene before her, she saw the birch-trees by the river at home, where he had first read her the speech to which they were now listening so intensely—the speech in which the hero tells the girl he loves her. She remembered that at the time she had thought how wonderful it would be if some day ...
— The Lion and the Unicorn and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... the others had gone home, the master took down his long birch rod and said: "Elihu, I suppose I must be as good as my word. But tell me why you so deliberately ...
— Fifty Famous People • James Baldwin
... birch borer is destroying many fine white birch trees in some parts of the country. Its presence is known by the dying of the top of the tree. There yet is no known way of preventing this borer from attacking white birches, and the only practicable and effective ...
— Manual of Gardening (Second Edition) • L. H. Bailey
... out of the tent. In the open ground, on the way to a solitary birch-tree, we could see a group of soldiers.... Sara ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... church, and thither they all thronged: they said there were above five thousand persons assembled there. The church-service began at five o'clock. The pulpit and organ were ornamented with flowering lilacs; children sat with lilac-flowers and branches of birch; the little ones had each a piece of oat-cake, which they enjoyed. There was the sacrament for the young persons who had been confirmed; there was organ-playing and psalm-singing; but there was a terrible screaming of children, and the sound of heavy footsteps; the clumsy, iron-shod Dal shoes ...
— Pictures of Sweden • Hans Christian Andersen
... till Learning fly the shore, Till Birch shall blush with noble blood no more, Till Thames see Eton's sons for ever play, Till Westminster's whole year be holiday, Till Isis' elders reel, their pupils sport, And Alma Mater lie ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... legs, and their fine grey fur is interspersed with numerous black and white long hairs. {109} They breed perfectly true, and have long been kept in warrens. When they escape and cross with common rabbits, the product, as I hear from Mr. Wyrley Birch, of Wretham Hall, is not a mixture of the two colours, but about half take after the one parent, and the other half after the other parent. Secondly, chinchillas or tame silver-greys (I will use the former name) have short, paler, mouse or slate-coloured fur, interspersed with long, blackish, ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... made the broad stone slabs, placed as seats, and the other erections of this singular people. We repeatedly remarked cones of earth, clay, and pebbles, about twelve feet high, upon the hills, which appeared to be artificial, but of which the natives could give no explanation. Wild apple and birch are common trees, but there is little jungle, except in the hollows, and on the north slopes of the higher hills. Coarse long grass, with bushes of Labiate and Composite plants, ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... be the place, Deerslayer," March at length observed; "here is a beech by the side of a hemlock, with three pines at hand, and yonder is a white birch with a broken top; and yet I see no rock, nor any of the branches bent down, as I told you would ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... and considerable lakes. From these glaciers have been dropped patches of clay which hold the waters in wide extents of marsh and bog. The country presents a monotonous picture of low, rounded swells and flats, interspersed with stunted pine and birch woods. The marshes and the lakes form a labyrinth, difficult to pass even to those familiar with the country. The Masurian region is a great trap for any commander who has not had unlimited acquaintance with the place. Causeways, filled with ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... The birch, most shy and ladylike of trees, 50 Her poverty, as best she may, retrieves, And hints at her foregone gentilities With some saved relics of her wealth of leaves; The swamp-oak, with his royal purple on, Glares red as blood across the sinking sun, 55 As one who proudlier ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... Elder," in the prime of summer, had no wonders such as revealed themselves day by day to their unaccustomed eyes. The catkins on the willows, the gradual swelling of the hawthorn-buds, the graceful tassels of the silver birch, were to them a beauty and a mystery. The gradual change of brown fields to a living green, as the tender blades of the new-sown grain sprang up, was wondrous too. The tiny mosses on the rocks, the ...
— The Orphans of Glen Elder • Margaret Murray Robertson
... principle that dictates the rotation of ordinary crops, just as the leguminous plants alternate satisfactorily with the graminaceous, or, as I have read that in Norway, where a fir forest has been cut, birch will spring up automatically and take ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... rich stuffs resplendent with Tyrian dyes, and princely mantles of feather-work, were bought with pretty shells, and such money as the sea produces. It was a Venice with its street of waters and its central basin, where jostled the gondolas of the Aztec nobles and the light canoes of birch bark among the vessels of commerce which came laden with slaves and other merchandise from the surrounding villages—a basin that disappeared the same day ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... downwards and hidden by her hair, her hands convulsively clutching his left thigh, her legs sometimes hanging down, sometimes straight out. He walked composedly out with her, holding in his right hand a bunch of long fresh birch twigs. A little way from the gallery he paused, and laying her across his left knee, he tore off some of her clothes, and beat her until the blood flowed. She never uttered a sound. When he put her from him, she tremblingly rearranged—first her hair, ...
— Absalom's Hair • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... shadows from the tall brass andirons or claw-footed chair and table. Sometimes he glanced shyly at the mother, but getting no answering smile kept silence. Once or twice the girl whispered a word to him, as the logs fell and a sheet of flame from the hickory and the quick-burning birch set free the stored-up sunshine of many a summer day. A moment later, the girl caught ...
— Mr. Kris Kringle - A Christmas Tale • S. Weir Mitchell
... apparently capable of holding extended conversations in an unknown dialect with birds and red squirrels. Once I fell asleep in my cradle, suspended five or six feet from the ground, while Uncheedah was some distance away, gathering birch bark for a canoe. A squirrel had found it convenient to come upon the bow of my cradle and nibble his hickory nut, until he awoke me by dropping the crumbs of his meal. It was a common thing for birds to alight on my ...
— Indian Child Life • Charles A. Eastman
... was well pleased with what he saw, but not with the ways and means of Canadian travel; for he thought it strangely unbecoming that a lieutenant-general of the king should be forced to crouch on a sheet of bark, at the bottom of a birch canoe, scarcely daring to move his head to the right or left lest he should disturb the ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman
... PADDYWHACK AND DR. BIRCH.—Everyone knows what "the Assisted Education (Ireland) Bill" is. Why should not an Assisted Education (England) Bill be brought in to enable public school-boys to secure, without payment of any additional fee beyond that included for "swishing" in the Bill sent ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 102, February 27, 1892 • Various
... find out some new trade with the Indians of the country, for they have great store of red ochre, which they use to colour their bodies, bows, arrows, and canoes. The canoes are built in shape like wherries on the river Thames, but that they are much longer, made with the rinds of birch trees, which they sew very artificially and close together, and overlay every seam with turpentine. In like manner they sew the rinds of birch trees round and deep in proportion like a brass kettle, to boil ...
— Lecture On The Aborigines Of Newfoundland • Joseph Noad
... evil spirit, who punished with death any one who might dare to look upon them. The height of land or plateau which constitutes the interior of the Labrador peninsula is from 2,000 to 2,500 feet above the sea level, fairly heavily wooded with spruce, fir, hackmatack, and birch, and not at all the desolate waste it has been pictured by many writers. The barrenness of Labrador is confined to the coast, and one cannot enter the interior in any direction without being struck by the latent possibilities of the peninsula were it not for the abundance of flies and mosquitoes. ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 822 - Volume XXXII, Number 822. Issue Date October 3, 1891 • Various
... interpreters—bareheaded, except for the colored handkerchief binding back the lank hair, dressed in fringed buckskin, and chattering with the exuberant nonchalance of boys out of school, had finished gumming the splits of their ninety-foot birch canoes, and now stood in line awaiting the coming of their captain, Sieur Pierre Gaultier de Varennes de la Verendrye. The French soldier with his three sons, aged respectively eighteen, seventeen, and sixteen, now essayed to discover the fabled Western ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... construction may be interesting. Poles, twelve or fourteen feet long, are placed in the ground, these meeting at the top, and leaving an opening through which the smoke may escape. Over the poles are placed nets, made of flags, or birch bark, and, sometimes, the skins ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie
... both feet on the ground, he hitched the horse to the trunk of a little birch and waved his ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... in a flat uninteresting part of the country among fields and forests of fir and birch, which were partly cut down. The house lay behind a newly dug pond filled with water to the brink and with banks still bare of grass. It was at the end of a village that stretched along the highroad in the midst of a young copse in which ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... were having a play party in the woods. They had their lunch in little birch-bark baskets, and they used a nice, big, flat stump for a table. They took an old napkin for a tablecloth, and they had pieces of carrots boiled in molasses and chocolate, and cabbage with pink frosting on, and nuts all covered ...
— Bully and Bawly No-Tail • Howard R. Garis
... France. A voyageur flying from a band of Iroquois had found a hiding-place on a rocky islet in the middle of the Sept Chutes. He concealed himself from his foes, but could not escape, and in the end died of starvation and sleeplessness. The dying man peeled off the white bark of the birch, and with the juice of berries wrote upon it his death song, which was found long after by the side of his remains. His grave is now a marked spot on the Ottawa. La Complainte de Cadieux had seized the imagination of Amelie. She sang it exquisitely, and to-night needed no pressing ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... bad," she cried, hastening toward him sympathetically, "but see, there is a redbird on the top of that old birch tree. Try again! You will have better success this time, I am ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... retorted, "he may possibly deprive you of your nursing-bottle, or he may even birch you, but he will most assuredly not fight you, so long as I have any say in the affair. I' cod, we are all friends here, I hope. D'ye think Mr. Vanringham has so often enacted Richard III. that to strangle infants is ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... hazel bushes she hastened, nor noticed that the evening shadows fell; on past the birch groves she ran, nor noticed that the dew ...
— Stories from the Ballads - Told to the Children • Mary MacGregor
... certain tree into a kind of cloth; some are used in medicines, as the Peruvian bark for Quinine; others in dyeing, as that of the alder; others in spicery, as cinnamon, &c.; the bark of oak, in tanning; that of a kind of birch is used by the Indians ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... showed obscurely the expanse of water which spread before them, and the shapeless and indistinct forms of mountains with which it seemed to be surrounded. The cool and yet mild air of the summer night refreshed Waverley after his rapid and toilsome walk; and the perfume which it wafted from the birch-trees, bathed in the evening dew, was exquisitely fragrant. [It is not the weeping birch, the most common species in the Highlands, but the woolly-leaved Lowland birch, that is distinguished by ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... inn at the bridge is really charming. The little river which runs down the valley, and becomes lost in the distance, is finally fringed with trees—alder, birch, and chestnut. Ridge upon ridge of mountain rises up behind on the right hand and the left, the lower clothed with patches of green larch, and the upper with dark pine. Above all are ranges of jagged and grey rocks, shooting up in many places ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... stood Hiawatha, Turned and waved his hand at parting; On the clear and luminous water Launched his birch canoe for sailing, From the pebbles of the margin Shoved it forth into the water; Whispered to it, "Westward! westward!" And with speed it darted forward. And the evening sun descending Set the clouds on fire with ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... quick, for he was the first in the school to detect the footsteps of his pedagogue; and he could smell anything savoury nearly a mile off, if the wind lay the right way. Moreover, he knew that if he put his fingers in the fire that he would burn himself; that knives cut severely; that birch tickled, and several other little axioms of this sort which are generally ascertained by children at an early age, but which Jack's capacity had not received until at a much later date. Such as he was, our hero went to sea; his stock in his sea-chest being very abundant, while his stock ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat
... the brook which flows partly over and partly under the road at the horse watering-place, he looked down into the dell among the tangles of birch and the thick viscous foliage of the green-berried elder. There he caught the flash of a light dress, and as he climbed the opposite grassy bank on his way to the village, he saw immediately beneath him the maiden of his dreams ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... promoting the welfare of its possessor can be detected in the simplest commodities that are anywhere used. All kinds of industrial products have a common origin. Labor and capital act together in making a birch canoe as truly as they do in producing a transatlantic liner; and the productive power of each of these two agents is everywhere governed by certain general laws. Before ascertaining what is true of wealth when capital has become ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark
... on a dark night, I don't think!—and that pore Mr. Carfax—well, all I say is, I 'opes they catch 'im, that's all I say . . ." with further reminiscence concerning Mrs. Birch who had worked on Carfax's staircase the last ten years and never "'ad no kind of luck. There ...
— The Prelude to Adventure • Hugh Walpole
... Nicholas V. laid the foundations of the Vatican; the affection of Cardinal Bessarion for his country first gave Venice the rudiments of a public library; and to Sir T. Bodley we owe the invaluable one of Oxford. Sir Robert Cotton, Sir Hans Sloane, Dr. Birch, Mr. Cracherode, Mr. Douce, and others of this race of lovers of books, have all contributed to form these literary treasures, which our nation owe to the enthusiasm of individuals, who have consecrated their fortunes and their days to this great ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... no trouble about my disappearance. I sat on my hemlock floor until the gray of twilight and studied Latin, keeping my mind on the text; save when a squirrel ventured out and glided bushy trained and sinuous before me, or the marble birches with ebony limbs, drew me to gloat on them. The white birch is a woman and a goddess. I have associated her forever with that afternoon. Her poor cousin the poplar, often so like her as to deceive you until ashen bough and rounded leaf instruct the eye, always grows near her like a protecting servant. The poor cousin rustles and fusses. ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... render candles or torches unnecessary. Around it were seated six or seven hardy and athletic young men, some drawing coarse tools carefully through the curvatures of ox-bows, others scraping down the helves of axes, or perhaps fashioning sticks of birch into homely but convenient brooms. A demure, side-looking young woman kept her great wheel in motion; while one or two others were passing from room to room, with the notable and stirring industry of handmaidens, busied in the more familiar cares of the household. ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... and, leading me to the Middle Wood, showed me where my garden would be. That was quite enough to distract my thoughts, for we found Pere Larcher there marking out my piece of ground in a corner of the wood. There was a young birch tree against the wall. The corner was formed by the joining of two walls, one of which bounded the railway line on the left bank of the river which cuts the Satory woods in two. The other wall was that of the cemetery. All ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt |
