"Birch" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... so swiftly for Phil Kendrick as it did during the next two days. In the big roomy birch-bark canoe that Svenson had built he went fishing and exploring to his heart's content—with Miss Cristy Lawson. He initiated her into the mysteries of speckled trout and helped her to land triumphantly a three-pounder. ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... cells and the pollen. There are two types of pollenization, one where the pistil is fertilized by insects carrying sticky pollen; the other by movement of the wind carrying the pollen. If I should believe my records, in attempts to cross trees, I might have a cross between a birch and an alder, in which the pollen is carried by the wind. I tried once to hybridize pines. I put some pitch pine pollen on the female flower of another species and seed resulted. I did this the second year and again I got seed. The third year I put bags on the female flowers ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fifteenth Annual Meeting • Various
... Casa Cattolica is a broad foundation: I find Francis of Umbria at the same board with Sicilian Thomas. If I cleave to the one must I despise the other? Lady Fede has my heart and Lady Dottrina must put aside the birch if she would share that little kingdom. Religio habet, said Pico; theologia autem invenit. Let her find. But she must be speedy, for I promise her the mood grows on me as I become italianato; and I cannot predict when the other term of the proposition ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... abrupt promontory, to the woods of the plain. Its face was scored by the weather, and the dry drainage channels were headlong cascades of grey pebbles. Clumps of heather, sparse oak scrub with young leaves of bronze, contorted birch, and this year's croziers of the bracken (heaven knows their secret for getting lush aromatic sap out of such stony poverty), all made a tough life which held up the hill, steep as it was; though the hill was going, for the roots ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... but a waistcoat of water-tabby? Proceed to the particular works of creation, you will find how curious journeyman Nature has been to trim up the vegetable beaux; observe how sparkish a periwig adorns the head of a beech, and what a fine doublet of white satin is worn by the birch." The fault is not in any inaptness of the images, nor in the mere vulgarity of the things themselves, but in that of the associations they awaken. The "prithee, undo this button" of Lear, coming where it does and expressing what it does, ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... careful dentist to the stumps of his farm. It is beautifully stumpless, and slopes verdantly, or varied with yellow harvest, down to the lake and up to the forest primeval. He has preserved a pretty grove of birch and maple as shelter, ornament, partridge-cover, and perpendicular wood-pile. Below his house and barns is the lovely oval of the lake, seen across the fair fields, bright with wheat, or green with pasture. A road, hedged with briskly-aspiring young ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... these characteristics of race or species are those which are concerned with the relation of each to light, heat, and moisture. Thus, a river birch will die if it has only as much water as will suffice to keep a post oak in the best condition, and the warm climate in which the balsam fir would perish is just suited to the requirements of a long leaf ...
— The Training of a Forester • Gifford Pinchot
... evening; but to his astonishment a mountain stream was now foaming down it, leaping from rock to rock, and filling the glen with babbling murmurs. He, however, made shift to scramble up its sides, working his toilsome way through thickets of birch, sassafras, and witch-hazel, and sometimes tripped up or entangled by the wild grapevines that twisted their coils or tendrils from tree to tree, and spread a kind of ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... Paul, "but I learned to paddle a canoe pretty well. I'd rather have a good row-boat, though, than any birch I ever saw. If you run one of them on a sharp stone, it may be cut open, ...
— Harper's Young People, October 26, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... autumn he had a misfortune, for, with two other members of the 'Red Hand,' he was caught stealing apples at the time of cider-making. Three strokes of a birch rod fell on each revolutionary, and not Ernest Churchouse nor his mother could console Abel for this reverse. He gleaned his sole comfort at a dangerous source, and while the kindly ignored the event and the unkindly dwelt upon it, only Levi Baggs applauded Abel and preached privi-conspiracy ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... seed afore"; and Caleb, fired with curiosity, followed him away to a distance from home, out from the downs, into the woods and to a place where he had never been, where there were bracken and heath with birch and thorn-trees scattered about. On cautiously approaching a clump of birches they saw a big, thrush-like bird fly out of a large nest about ten feet from the ground, and settle on a tree close by, where it was joined by its mate. The old man pointed out that it was ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... not more than twenty-five thousand regularly marching. Already on the previous day the guard had shown signs of demoralization. The Emperor alone seemed impassive. For days he had shared the common hardships; clad in a long Polish coat of marten fur, a stout birch staff in his hand, without a sign of either physical or nervous exhaustion he had marched silently for long distances among his suffering men. If we picture him standing at Krasnoi, weighing how long he dared to brave an enemy which if consolidated ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... stared on Petrea with astonishment. She quickly made herself acquainted with them, and they promised to conduct her to the cottage, which lay at a little distance. On their way they gave Petrea bilberries out of their full birch-wood measure, and related to her that the reason of their being out so late was, that they had been looking for the cow which was lost in the wood; that they should have driven her home, but had ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... seen widow Platts (formerly Sarah Birch), a poor, fat, decent woman, who keeps a small greengrocer's shop, in West Bar, Sheffield. She says she was born in Spring Street in the same town, on the 29th Sept. 1781; well remembers wondering why she was so much looked at when a girl: and her surprise, when ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 65, January 25, 1851 • Various
... grows and flies, where the rabbits, the lizards, and the birds live their life as they please, either ignorant of intruding man or strangely little incommoded by his neighbourhood. And yet there is nothing forbidding or austere in these wide solitudes. The patches of graceful birch-wood; the miniature lakes nestling among them; the brakes of ling—pink, faintly scented, a feast for every sense; the stretches of purple heather, glowing into scarlet under the touch of the sun; the scattered farm-houses, so mellow ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... was a silence the while the flaxen-haired woman eyed her interrogator less disdainfully. "Yes, by poling- boat and birch-bark. I'm not fleeing the law; I'm not ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... trust-worthy of your attendants to guard, by multiplying them against the accidental losses to which they will be exposed. A further guard would be, that one of these copies be on the cuticular membranes of the paper-birch, as less liable to injury ...
— History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, Vol. I. • Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
... of the leaves on a branch of birch shows that something living is there, and presently the little head and neck of a whitethroat peers over them, and then under, looking above and beneath each leaf, and then with a noiseless motion passing on to the next. Another ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies
... description of his own schoolmaster, evidently a type of his kind, who "knew of the human soul thus much, that it had a faculty called memory, and could be acted on through the muscular integument by appliance of birch rods." After four years of most unsatisfactory school life, Tennyson returned home, and was fitted for the university by his scholarly father. With his brothers he wrote many verses, and his first efforts appeared in a little volume called Poems by Two Brothers, ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... comparatively few mountains, but many ranges of hills. Norway monopolizes almost entirely the mountain system of the great northern peninsula, but the large forests of pine, fir, and birch, which cover so much of the country, are common to both. Though iron is found in large deposits in Norway, it is still more abundant in Sweden, where it is chiefly of the magnetic kind, yielding when properly smelted the best ore for the manufacture of ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... 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
... roof; the goose plucked moss and stuffed it into the seams; the cock crew, and looked out that they did not oversleep themselves in the morning; and when the house was ready, and the roof lined with birch bark and thatched with turf, there they lived by themselves and were ...
— East O' the Sun and West O' the Moon • Gudrun Thorne-Thomsen
... improvise one to carry the smoke away, for the eddies around the tent will make the stove smoke occasionally beyond all endurance. Since you will need but little fire to keep you warm, you can use a funnel made of boards, barrel-staves, old spout, and the like. Old tin cans, boot-legs, birch-bark, and stout paper can be made to do service as elbows, with the assistance of turf, grass-ropes, and large leaves. But I forewarn you there is not much fun, either in rigging your stove and funnel, or in sitting by it and waiting for the storm ...
— How to Camp Out • John M. Gould
... with the utmost care, and loved by many people. They have been domesticated for thousands of years in several quarters of the world; the earliest known record of pigeons is in the fifth Aegyptian dynasty, about 3000 B.C., as was pointed out to me by Professor Lepsius; but Mr. Birch informs me that pigeons are given in a bill of fare in the previous dynasty. In the time of the Romans, as we hear from Pliny, immense prices were given for pigeons; "nay, they are come to this pass, that they can reckon up their pedigree and race." Pigeons ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... approached Seville, some low hills appeared on the left, near the river. Dazzling white villages were planted at their foot, and all the slopes were covered with olive orchards, while the banks of the stream were bordered with silvery birch trees. This gave the landscape, in spite of the African warmth and brightness of the day, a gray and almost wintry aspect. Soon the graceful Giralda, or famous Tower of Seville, arose in the distance; but, from the windings of the river, we were half an hour ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... head with a stick, seizing him by the ears, and filipping him under the chin, saying he held down his head like a thief. This producing no signs of recantation, he took him into his orchard, and in a small arbour there he flogged him first with a willow rod, and then with birch, till he was exhausted. This cruel ferocity arose from the answer of the poor sufferer, who, upon being asked how long it was since he had crept to the cross, replied, "Not since he had come to years of discretion, ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... her temple grew a tree with branches and twigs of gold, and leaves as yellow as the little leaves of the silver birch when the autumn sun kisses them as it sets. On this tree grew golden apples, and Aphrodite plucked three of them and gave them to the youth who had not feared to ask her to aid him to win the maid he loved. How he was to use the apples she then told him, ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... comforted her, and ran about so merrily, bringing fresh, fragrant birch-twigs for their beds, shaking out their blankets of reindeer-skins, and helping her so kindly, that the good dame quite forgot to be cross, and before she knew it, was telling them her very, very best story, that she always ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 5, March, 1878 • Various
... often from this windy upland perch, Mine eyes have seen the forest break in bloom, The rose-red maple and the golden birch, The dusty yellow of the elms, the gloom Of the tall poplar hung with tasseled black; Ah, I have watched, till eye and ear and brain Grew full of dreams as they, the moted plain, The sun-steeped wood, the marsh-land at ...
— Lyrics of Earth • Archibald Lampman
... had good reason, for as the horses climbed the crest of the long hill the lady in green was by his side on the box. He looked anxiously ahead, and there, in a hedge of young alder bushes, he saw something stirring, and, unless he was greatly mistaken, a birch broom lay on the ground ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin
... birch logs ready to be kindled. At her suggestion he put a match to them for the cheeriness they gave while she lighted a green shaded lamp which radiated a soft glow over the heavy mahogany library table upon which it stood. The room slowly warmed out of the gloom ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... being prepared in the manner I have previously described, the animals make ready to establish their dyke. They intermix their materials—driftwood, green willows, birch, poplars, etc.—in the bed of the river, with mud and stones, so making a solid bank, capable of resisting a great force of water; sometimes the trees will shoot up forming a hedge. The dam has a thickness of from three ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... approaching carriage, the long ditches, overgrown with mugwort, wormwood, and mountain ash; and as he watched the fresh fertile wilderness and solitude of this steppe country, the greenness, the long slopes, and valleys with stunted oak bushes, the grey villages, and scant birch trees,—the whole Russian landscape, so long unseen by him, stirred emotion at once pleasant, sweet and almost painful in his heart, and he felt weighed down by a kind of pleasant oppression. Slowly his thoughts ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... a country of swamps, low forests of birch, alder, and willow, fertile meadows, and snow-capped mountains. Its estuaries penetrated further inland than they now do, and the sea stood at the level of the Fifty-Foot Beach. On its plains and in its forests roamed many creatures ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... five miles on the left of the town the course of the river was interrupted by a small and thickly wooded island, along whose sandy beach occasionally rose the low cabin or wigwam which the birch canoe, carefully upturned and left to dry upon the sands, attested to be the temporary habitation of the wandering Indian. That branch of the river which swept by the shores of Canada was (as at this day) ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... beard drifting down to his very girdle? What boy would dare to play; or whisper, or even glance aside from his book; while Master Cheever is on the lookout behind his spectacles? For such offenders, if any such there be, a rod of birch is hanging over the fireplace, and a heavy ferule lies ...
— Grandfather's Chair • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... and raised her to my arms: spiling thereby a new weskit and a pair of crimson smalcloes. I rushed forrard. I say, very nearly knocking down the old sweeper who was hobbling away as fast as posibil. We took her to Birch's; we provided her with a hackney-coach and every lucksury, and carried her home ...
— Memoirs of Mr. Charles J. Yellowplush - The Yellowplush Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... him. A good spanking mark at the farmer would have relieved Master Ripton; it would have done nothing to console Richard Feverel for the ignominy he had been compelled to submit to. Ripton was familiar with the rod, a monster much despoiled of his terrors by intimacy. Birch-fever was past with this boy. The horrible sense of shame, self-loathing, universal hatred, impotent vengeance, as if the spirit were steeped in abysmal blackness, which comes upon a courageous and sensitive youth condemned ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... with Sarah Hutchinson, to Lodore. I never beheld anything more impressive than the wild outline of the black masses of mountain over Lodore, and so on to the gorge of Borrowdale. Even through the bare twigs of a grove of birch trees, through which the road passes; and on emerging from the grove a red planet, so very red that I never saw a star so red, being clear and bright at the same time. It seemed to have sky behind it. ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... now more anxious than ever to take prompt and decided action in our favour." Slidell asked if it was impossible to stir Parliament but acknowledged that everything depended on Palmerston: "that august body seems to be as afraid of him as the urchins of a village school of the birch of ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... in a motherly fashion at Eric, as he hung his hat on the white-washed wall and took his place at the table. Outside of the window behind him was a birch grove which, in the westering sun, was a tremulous splendour, with a sea of undergrowth wavered into golden ...
— Kilmeny of the Orchard • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... has to be done daily, hourly, momently, in order that the draught of life may steadily increase. And to do this unflinchingly, a man must be his own schoolmaster, must recognise that he is always in need of wisdom, must be ready to practise any austerities, to use the birch-rod unhesitatingly against himself, in order to gain his end. It becomes evident to any one who regards the subject seriously, that only a man who has the potentialities in him both of the voluptuary ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins
... clean-swept fireplace, Fresh boughs from the wood in bloom, And the birch-tree's fragrant branches ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... descending from the Cralich and the lofty mountains of Kintail, issue eastwards through a narrow gorge into Loch Affric. It was a place remarkably well adapted for the purpose of a resisting party. A rocky boss, called Torr-a-Bheathaich, then densely covered with birch, closes up the glen as with a gate. The black mountain stream, "spear-deep," sweeps round it. A narrow path wound up the rock, admitting of passengers in single file. Here lay Murchison with the best of his people, while inferior adherents were ready to make demonstrations at a ...
— History Of The Mackenzies • Alexander Mackenzie
... of this kind of one bough of every common tree,—oak, ash, elm, birch, beech, etc.; in fact, if you are good, and industrious, you will make one such study carefully at least three times a week, until you have examples of every sort of tree and shrub you can get branches of. You ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... the wigwam, a description of the manner and stages of its 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
... spacious room, comfortably furnished in old-fashioned style. In the foreground, against the right-hand wall, is a stove decorated with sprigs of fresh birch and wild flowers. Farther back, a door. In the back wall folding doors leading into the entrance hall. In the left-hand wall a window, in front of which is a stand filled with flowers and plants. Near ...
— Rosmerholm • Henrik Ibsen
... tenacious, semi-transparent substance, having a balsamic odour; which the bees gather from the buds of certain trees in the spring, such as the horse-chestnut, the willow, the poplar, and the birch. ...
— A Description of the Bar-and-Frame-Hive • W. Augustus Munn
... pupil, but there were several others made of old shawls and table-covers, who sat bolt upright, and bore their frequent whippings very meekly. Katie and Charlie each held a birch switch, and took the government of the school, while Dotty ...
— Dotty Dimple at Her Grandmother's • Sophie May
... elderberry. From my own woods have already come several four-foot maple-leaved vibernums, which, though moved in June, throve and have made a fine new growth. There will be, also, a shadbush or two and certainly some hobble bushes, with here and there a young pine and small, slender canoe birch. Here and there will be a clump of flowering raspberry. I shall not scorn spireas, and I must have at least one big white syringa to scent the twilight; but the great mass of my screen will be exactly what nature would plant there if she were left alone—minus the choke cherries. You always ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... been struck dead. Mercedes dried her eyes and looked at John Thornton. Charles sat down on a log to rest. He sat down very slowly and painstakingly what of his great stiffness. Hal did the talking. John Thornton was whittling the last touches on an axe-handle he had made from a stick of birch. He whittled and listened, gave monosyllabic replies, and, when it was asked, terse advice. He knew the breed, and he gave his advice in the certainty that it would ...
— The Call of the Wild • Jack London
... must go home with these lads, and tell their mother all about the race and the milk. Mammy must always know the truth,' now speaking to the children. 'And tell her, too, from me that I have got the best birch rod in the parish; and that if she ever thinks her children want a flogging she must bring them to me, and, if I think they deserve it, I'll give it them better than she can.' So Phillis led the children ...
— Cousin Phillis • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... not disturb the women cooking their rice at Rangoon; and now that they had not only been disturbed, but driven from their homes, he resolved to be revenged on them. The first conflict took place on the 16th of May, when Captain Birch dislodged the enemy from the village of Kemmendine, a war-boat station three miles above Rangoon. Nothing daunted, however, the enemy, as their numbers increased, gradually approached the British position, and threw up stockades in ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... in the river or creek have but little motion, the dam is almost straight; but when the current is more rapid, it is always made with a considerable curve, convex towards the stream. The materials made use of are drift-wood, green willows, birch, and poplars if they can be got; also mud and stones, intermixed in such a manner as must evidently contribute to the strength of the dam; but there is no other order or method observed in the dams, except that of the work being carried on with a regular sweep, and all the parts being made ...
— Quadrupeds, What They Are and Where Found - A Book of Zoology for Boys • Mayne Reid
... soda pop, ginger ales, and other soft drinks were triumphs of insipidity, and their birch beer sickened the thirstiest child. But the making and the marketing and even the drinking of them were matters of high emprise compared to the ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... portrays the cold and solemn beauty of Norwegian scenery as no painter's brush has contrived to do it. For the woodland background of the Saeter Girls there is no parallel in plastic art but the most classic of Norwegian paintings, Dahl's "Birch in a Snow Storm." Pages might be filled with praise of the picturesqueness of tableau after tableau in each act of ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... weight aloof, To hide it where one ghastly birch Held up the rafters of the roof, And grim ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... been at a neighbouring farm-house, where there lived one of Mr. Walsingham's tenants; a man of the name of Birch, a respectable farmer, who was originally from Ireland, and whose son was at sea with Captain Walsingham. The captain had taken young Birch under his particular care, ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... the winding ways of the river there were birch and beechen thickets in glory of leaf; big water-lilies spread their white beauty against the old black timbers of the water-mills; and in the quaint, ancient places of the old streets, under the gables and beams, pots of ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... they came to a small, clear, swift brook, crossed by a big white-birch log. Elizabeth Ann was horribly afraid to set foot on it, but with little Molly's hand holding tightly to hers she was ashamed to say she was afraid. Ralph skipped across, swinging the pail to show how easy it was for him. Ellen followed more slowly, and then—oh, don't ...
— Understood Betsy • Dorothy Canfield
... unmindful of his father's dreaming, played with the little Prince, kicking the ragga ball, or sailing miniature praus out into the river, and off toward the shimmering straits. But often they sat cross-legged and dropped bits of chicken and fruit between the palm sleepers of the wharf to the birch-colored crocodiles below, who snapped them up, one after another, never taking their small, cruel eyes off the brown faces that peered down ...
— Tales of the Malayan Coast - From Penang to the Philippines • Rounsevelle Wildman
... home. Here was a land where the grizzly had not yet learned of a might greater than his, where he had not yet surrendered his sovereignty to man. Here the moose—mightiest of the antlered herd—reached full maturity and old age without ever mistaking the call of a birch-bark horn for that of his rutting cow. Young bulls with only a fifty-inch spread of horns and ten points on each did not lead the herds, as in the more accessible provinces of the North. All things were in their proper balance, since ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall
... science, then, possesses not only the authoritative testimonies of Lepsius and Birch in proof of the existence of Negro races during the twenty-fourth century, B.C., but, the same fact being conceded by all living Egyptologists, we may hence infer that these Nigritian types were contemporary with the ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... did it remember everything, and thought, "Those were quite merry days! But they may come again. Klumpey-Dumpey fell downstairs and yet he married the Princess. Perhaps I may marry a Princess too?" And then the Fir Tree thought of a pretty little Birch Tree that grew out in the forest: for the Fir Tree, that Birch ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... beyond. A little shop, quite crammed and choked with the abundance 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, and all articles were in its net. How many other kinds of petty ...
— The Chimes • Charles Dickens
... half a bow-shot from the house on that side (i.e. due north thereof) was a little hazel-brake, and round about it the trees were smaller of kind than the oaks and chestnuts he had passed through before, being mostly of birch and quicken-beam and young ash, with small wood betwixt them; so now he passed through the thicket, and, coming to the edge thereof, beheld the Lady and the King's Son walking together hand in ...
— The Wood Beyond the World • William Morris
... pulled a long bulrush from a clump that grew at the side of the bog. Then she walked along the edge, skirting with care the deceitful green that looked so fair and lovely, till she came to where a slender birch hung its long drooping branches out over the bog. Clinging to one of these branches, Peggy leaned forward as far as she dared, and began to angle for her hat. "He rises well," she muttered, "but he doesn't ...
— Three Margarets • Laura E. Richards
... often such style, is to be found in all these books when they are good books. Compare a paragraph or two of the early Burroughs on his birch-clad lake country, or Thoreau upon Concord pines, with the "natural history paragraph" that English magazines used to publish, and you ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... trees, between which the fiord is visible. In front is seen the corner of a boat-shed with a boat drawn up. Under the old trees on the left stands a table with a bench and one or two chairs, all made of thin birch-staves. It is a heavy, damp day, with ...
— Little Eyolf • Henrik Ibsen
... of a dusty hill we were just climbing; but there was nothing else anywhere, except a clear brown creek, and some sweet-smelling meadows with a white horse gazing in a bored way over rather a queer fence, and some cows asleep under a clump of maple trees on our side of a young birch grove. ...
— Lady Betty Across the Water • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... Soap, containing 5 or 10 per cent. birch tar, which has a characteristic pungent odour and is recommended as a remedy for eczema ...
— The Handbook of Soap Manufacture • W. H. Simmons
... grave of Sir Arthur O'Kellyn? Where may the grave of that good man be?— By the side of a spring, on the breast of Helvellyn, Under the twigs of a young birch-tree! The oak that in summer was sweet to hear, And rustled its leaves in the fall of the year, And whistled and roared in the winter alone, Is gone,—and the birch in its stead is grown.— The knight's bones are dust, And his good ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... Newfoundland, are attended with a cloudy sky, and thick atmosphere. These may tend to mitigate the heats of summer, but are very disagreeable in the other seasons. The coldness of the climate is plainly to be perceived in the birch tree, which is here common in the woods; and the want of the mocking bird, the red bird, and a great variety of others, that visit you in the glimmer from South America. The fox squirrel too is scarce, and the gray squirrel almost white. We cannot cultivate the sweet, ...
— Travels in the United States of America • William Priest
... if they're bad, they get a good big birch stick. But I ain't been bad. I've been awfully good, ...
— The White Christmas and other Merry Christmas Plays • Walter Ben Hare
... picturesque sheet of water, almost entirely surrounded by trees, with now and then an opening bordered by a plot of grass, or a bend of the grand walk which ran round it. Here and there was an island with a few birch-trees or willows growing on it, and over the trees could be seen, rising in the distance, a downy hill, now sprinkled with some snow which had fallen the night before the frost regularly set in, and which had thus not affected the surface of the lake. At the lower end the ground ...
— Ernest Bracebridge - School Days • William H. G. Kingston
... from the 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 ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... Subularia aquatica. For forty years it had hidden itself away, growing and blossoming and casting abroad its tiny seeds in its watery home, unseen, or at least unnoticed, by living soul, save by the keen, soft, limpid eyes of Fishin' Jimmy. And he knew the trees and shrubs so well: the alder and birch from which as a boy he cut his simple, pliant pole; the shad-blow and iron-wood (he called them, respectively, sugarplum and hard-hack) which he used for the more ambitious rods of maturer years; the mooseberry, wayfaring-tree, hobble-bush, or triptoe,—it has all these names, with stout, trailing ...
— Fishin' Jimmy • Annie Trumbull Slosson
... austere beauty. His heart drank in the sense of freedom and great spaces just as his lungs drank in the cool and perfumed wind. Behind him in the stern seat, singing fragments of his native chanties, Defago steered the craft of birch bark like a thing of life, answering cheerfully all his companion's questions. Both were gay and light-hearted. On such occasions men lose the superficial, worldly distinctions; they become human beings working together for a common end. Simpson, the employer, and Defago the employed, ...
— The Wendigo • Algernon Blackwood
... event in their uneventful days; the farm with its red gables and its crowd of gobbling turkeys; the sweet-smelling fir groves with their sandy paths; and their own particular wood where beeches, oaks, and silvery birch trees were intermingled, with here and there a tall pine sometimes stately and erect, sometimes blown ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... only a slight specimen of the sad state of art and literature in England, neglected equally by Conservatives, Liberals and Radicals. What has been done for the endowment of research? What is our equivalent for the Prix de Rome? Since the death of Dr. Birch, who can fairly deal with a Demotic papyrus? Contrast the Societe Anthropologique and its palace and professors in Paris with our "Institute" au second in a corner of Hanover Square and its ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... nobles and the military storehouses, we hailed the silver hemispheres which canopy the tomb and shrine of St. Alexander of the Neva. On the left, huge brick factories pushed back the gleaming groves of birch, which flowed around and between them, to dip their hanging boughs in the river; but here and there peeped out the bright green cupolas of some little church, none of which, I was glad to see, slipped out of the panorama ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... back before they had committed the robbery. I, however, only fell in with Blount, who had been separated from the rest; and, with some difficulty, I induced him to return. We had got back to our rooms, when one of the ushers discovered the whole party. The master was called up, and, with birch in hand, went round the room, and inflicted summary punishment on all offenders. The next morning they were called up by name, their crime announced, and severe tasks being inflicted, they were all sent to Coventry for ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston
... attend at the public office, in Moor-street, every Monday and Thursday, are the Rev. Dr. Spencer, of Aston; William Villers, Esq. of Moseley; George Simcox and Theodore Price, Esqrs. of Harborne; Wm. Withering, Esq. of the Larches; William Bedford, Esq. of Birch's Green; William Hamper, Esq. Deritend House; Edmund Outram, D.D. St. Philip's Parsonage; and Isaac ...
— A Description of Modern Birmingham • Charles Pye
... had taken all I could carry, she showed me where the horses were, and urged me to take the one belonging to the chief, since it was clever and gentle. At first I had compunctions of conscience, but no choice was left me, and I had to do it. I made a rude bridle of birch bark, and jumping on the horse, came here just a little ...
— Three Young Pioneers - A Story of the Early Settlement of Our Country • John Theodore Mueller
... every one ought to," exclaimed Mellowkent, fishing the book down from a shelf; "published at six shillings, you can have it at four-and-six. There is a bit in chapter five that I feel sure you would like, where Emma is alone in the birch copse waiting for Harold Huntingdon—that is the man her family want her to marry. She really wants to marry him, too, but she does not discover that till chapter fifteen. Listen: 'Far as the eye could stretch rolled the mauve and purple billows of heather, lit up here and there ...
— The Toys of Peace • Saki
... gazed at the Pearl, who sat almost the length of the room away from him. The cabin was lighted only by the great log fire, and the leaping, ardent flames of the pine, mingled with the soft, glowing radiance of burning birch, invested the room and its occupants with that atmosphere of mystery and glamour, essential in flame-illumined shadow. And Hugh was playing the music the masters dreamed in the twilight hours when silence and shadow permitted them, even wooed ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... as if by enchantment, are carpeted with verdure; the pine, the oak, and the birch, from the neighbouring forest, contribute their young shoots and leaves; the prickly broom its yellow flowers. The facades of the houses are hidden under their various hangings, the rich suspend from their windows their splendid carpets; the poor, sheets as white ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... edge of the forest, hopping and fluttering with his broken wing. The first tree he came to was a slim silver birch. ...
— How to Tell Stories to Children - And Some Stories to Tell • Sara Cone Bryant
... fishes in the salt sea does it almost invariably with a pole, whether from cliff or dock or from a boat. Experience brings the desire for the hand line. The farmer's boy who comes down for the salt hay tucks his long birch pole into the bottom of the wagon and the trolley tripper comes to the beach with his split bamboo. Down in Maine years ago the pinkies used to sail equipped with numerous short poles whereby to trail for mackerel. In the day of your grandfather and mine it must have been a sight to see the ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... very striking reversions by buds, as we have seen on a previous occasion. They are ordinarily called pyramidal or fastigiate forms, and as far as their history goes, they arise suddenly in large sowings of the normal species. The fastigiate birch was produced in this way by Baumann, the Abies concolor fastigiata by Thibault and Keteleer at Paris, the pyramidal cedar by Paillat, the analogous form of Wellingtonia by Otin. Other instances could easily be added, though of course some of the most ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries
... coming from the westward and the other from the northward, having the Indian name of Cheputnatecook, or Chebuitcook, as the same may be variously spelt; then up the said stream so coming from the northward to its source, which is at a stake near a yellow-birch tree hooped with iron and marked S.T. and J.H., 1797, by Samuel Titcomb and John Harris, the surveyors employed to survey the above-mentioned stream ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Tyler - Section 2 (of 3) of Volume 4: John Tyler • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... his reel, the rush of a brown mountain stream with its fringe of silver birch and stunted alder, the white side of a leaping salmon, and the gasp of that noble fish towed deftly into the shallows at last, afforded him a natural and unmixed pleasure. He loved the heather dearly, the wild hillside, the keen pure air, the ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... best example for Assyria is furnished by the magnificent bronze gates of Balawat, now in The British Museum. See Birch and Pinches, The Bronze Ornaments of the Palace Gates of ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... that you can ford all the year round, if it does not utterly dry up in the summer heats, when you want it most; or, at best, it is a fussy little tormenting river, that won't and can't sail a sloop. What are you going to do about it? You are going to wind up your lead and line, shoulder your birch canoe, as the old sea-kings used, and thrid the deep forests, and scale the purple hills, till you come to water again, when you will unroll your lead and line for another essay. Is that fickleness? What else can you do? ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... little Water of Tyne, which flowed clear and swift beneath from the blind "hopes" and bare valleys of the Moorfoot Hills. But the site was well chosen both for pleasure and defence. The ground fell away on three sides. Birch, alder, ash, girt it round and made pleasant ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... her life. To her there were names (and names of dread) not to be known of any map. Deerleap, One Ash, the Wolves' Valley, the Place of the Withered Elm, the Charcoal-Burners', the Mossy Christ, the Birch- grove, the Brook under the Brow—and a hundred more. She steered by these, with all foresters. What she did not remember, or did not know, was that Maulfry had also lived in Morgraunt and knew the ways by heart. Still, she had a better mount than the ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... belt a broad-bladed knife, and for the moment disappeared in the deep fringe of evergreens which lined the shore. Fairly in the twinkling of an eye a rude frame of bent poles was made, above which were spread strips of unrolled birch bark from the cargo of the canoe. Over the spaces left uncovered by the supply of bark sheets there were laid down long mats made by Indian hands from dried reeds and bulrushes, affording no inconsiderable protection against the weather. ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... get a whole lot of birch bark," Dolly said, as they walked along; "let's look for particularly nice pieces and get a whole lot to take with ...
— Two Little Women • Carolyn Wells
... dismissed from his office if chaplain in both houses of the Legislature. There is a tradition that the Doctor was somewhat strict and severe in his requirements of the young catechists, and on occasions he resorted to the birch to enforce his teachings. "After punishing several of them one winter day, his feet slipped as he stepped from the icy threshold of the school, and he fell at full length, his hat and wig rolling off his head. There-upon the boys shouted in high glee, and gave three cheers." The ...
— Annals and Reminiscences of Jamaica Plain • Harriet Manning Whitcomb
... bells are ringing, under the impression that the more noise they make the more fruit will they get. Traces, too, of tree-worship, adds Mr. Ralston,[28] may be found in the song which the Russian girls sing as they go out into the woods to fetch the birch tree at Whitsuntide, and to gather flowers for wreaths ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... growing in my garden I noticed, yesterday evening, a very wet place on the gravel path, the water of which was obviously being fed by the cut extremity of a branch of the birch about an inch in diameter and some ten feet from the ground. I afterward found that exactly fifteen days ago circumstances rendered necessary the removal of the portion of the branch which hung over the path, 4 or 5 feet being still left on the tree. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 385, May 19, 1883 • Various |
