"Birch" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 their ...
— The Rose and the Ring • William Makepeace Thackeray
... I shall rave to see thee; restore me, oh restore me then to Bellfont, happy Bellfont, still blest with Sylvia's presence! permit me, oh permit me into those sacred shades, where I have been so often (too innocently) blest! Let me survey again the dear character of Sylvia on the smooth birch; oh when shall I sit beneath those boughs, gazing on the young goddess of the grove, hearing her sigh for love, touching her glowing small white hands, beholding her killing eyes languish, and her charming bosom rise and fall with short-breath'd uncertain breath; breath as soft ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... remembered ever the gentle airs and the high-bred, stately grace of Mary Robertson,—for though married to Captain Cameron of Erracht, Mary Robertson she continued to be to the Glen folk,—the lady of her ancestral manor, now for five years lain under the birch trees yonder by the church tower that looked out from its clustering firs and birches on the slope beyond the loch. Five years ago the gentle lady had passed from them, but like the liquid, golden sunlight, and like the perfume ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... sugar making from the sap of the hard or sugar maple was first taught by the aborigines to the white settlers. In my day the Sioux used also the box elder for sugar making, and from the birch and ash is made a dark-colored sugar that was used by them as a carrier in medicine. However, none of these yield as freely as the maple. The Ojibways of Minnesota still make and sell delicious maple sugar, put up in "mococks," or birch-bark packages. Their wild rice, ...
— The Indian Today - The Past and Future of the First American • Charles A. Eastman
... herself. "Good," he muttered, "this is my wife."' She refuses to eat the beavers he has shot, but at night he hears a noise, 'krch, krch, as if beavers were gnawing wood.' He sees, by the glimmer of the fire, his wife nibbling birch twigs. In fact, the good little wife is a beaver, as the pretty Indian girl was a frog. The pair lived happily till spring came and the snow melted and the streams ran full. Then his wife implored the ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... little children sit at the other end of the table, whispering and shivering, debarred the vent of all natural spirits, for fear of making a noise; and strangely uniting the idea of the domestic hearth with that of a hobgoblin, and the association of dear papa with that of a birch rod." ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... 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 thereabouts; that is thirty-one shillings and eight-pence per hundred ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... boy dearly, and she often gently chided him, but he would not listen to her, and when she urged him to be more diligent, he ran out of the room. The monks did not spare the birch rod, and soon it was a case of a whipping for ...
— Welsh Fairy Tales • William Elliot Griffis
... 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 had been an assistance at ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... night, for of course we could not assist him. He made a full suit of rabbit skins sewed with fibers, and a cap and shoes of coonskin to match. The shoes were cut from a bedroom-slipper pattern that Tish traced in the sand on the beach, and the cap had an eagle feather in it. He made a birch-bark knapsack to hold the fish he smoked and a bow and arrow that looked well but would not shoot. When he had the outfit completed, he put it on, with the stone hatchet stuck into a grapevine belt and the bow and arrow over his shoulder, and ...
— Tish, The Chronicle of Her Escapades and Excursions • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... 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
... Machinery—Gabriel Moulin Palace of Fine Arts Open Corridor, Palace of Fine Arts Detail of Rotunda, Palace of Fine Arts Colonnade, Fine Arts, and Half-Dome, Food Products Palace —J. L. Padilla "The Mother of the Dead" "High Tide; the Return of the Fishermen"—Gabriel Moulin "Among the White Birch Trunks"—Gabriel Moulin Tower of Jewels at Night—J. L. Padilla "The Outcast" "Muse Finding the Head of Orpheus" Palace of Fine Arts at Night—Paul Elder Co. Tympanum, Palace of Varied Industries Tympanum, Palace of Education "The Genius of Creation" Pavilions of Australia and Canada ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... led to the Wrangler, but stage-fright made her burst into tears at the critical moment. Somehow or other the truth leaked out; the Duffer and John were sent up to the Head Master and "swished." Each collected a few twigs of the birch, carefully preserved to ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... more upish. In fact, nobody could deny that in clothes the Squire was all consequence; and when he loomed into 'Court,' all over the steel chain, believe it, there were bows and servilities without stint. Taking his seat on a high birch block, the plank table being set before him, on which to spread his inseparable law-book, the plaintiffs and defendants assembled, and took seats on a wooded bench in front. 'All persons whatsoever havin' any business ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... often blocked by interminable trains of bullock carts laden with logs or dressed lumber, Urga's important exports. Toward the end of the day the way became steeper and wilder, ascending between slopes well wooded with spruce and pine and larch and birch. It was a joy to be in a real forest again. The flowers that grew in great profusion were more beautiful than any I had seen before in North Mongolia, especially the wonderful masses of wild larkspur of a blue so intense ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... ravine, when he fell violently into a clearer part of it. Then he gathered courage, for the bluff was large and would be difficult to miss; but it did not appear when he expected it. He was breathless, nearly blinded, and on the verge of exhaustion, when he crashed into a dwarf birch and, looking up half dazed, saw an indistinct mass of larger trees. He had now a guide, but it was hard to follow, with his strength fast falling and the savage wind buffeting him. He had stopped a moment, gasping, when something emerged from the driving ...
— Ranching for Sylvia • Harold Bindloss
... of style in the work of various countries are well indicated by Walter de Gray Birch, who says: "The English are famous for clearness and breadth; the French for delicate fineness and harmoniously assorted colours, the Flemish for minutely stippled details, and the Italian for the gorgeous yet calm dignity apparent in their best manuscripts." Individuality of facial expression, ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... we passed, keeping the trodden trail, now wading, now ankle-deep in cranberry, now up to our knees in moss, now lost in the high marsh-grass, on, on, through birch hummocks, willows, stunted hemlocks and tamaracks, then on firm ground once more, with the oak-mast under foot, and the white dawn silvering the east, and my horse breathing steam as he ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... cried the mother in a low, firm voice, and the little bits of things, scarcely bigger than acorns and but a day old, scattered far (a few inches) apart to hide. One dived under a leaf, another between two roots, a third crawled into a curl of birch-bark, a fourth into a hole, and so on, till all were hidden but one who could find no cover, so squatted on a broad yellow chip and lay very flat, and closed his eyes very tight, sure that now he was safe from being seen. They ceased their frightened peeping and all ...
— Lobo, Rag and Vixen - Being The Personal Histories Of Lobo, Redruff, Raggylug & Vixen • Ernest Seton-Thompson
... viceroy of the Portuguese possessions there, and founded its capital, Goa. From his letters and reports to King Manoel of Portugal a book was compiled by his son Afonso, entitled Commentarios do Grande Afonso Dalbuquerque (Lisboa, 1557); see also W.D. Birch's English translation, Commentaries of the Great Afonso Dalboquerque (Hakluyt Society, London, nos. 53, 55, 62, 69, of first series). Therein may be found a history of the events ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume VI, 1583-1588 • Emma Helen Blair
... an air of deep dejection; yet he bore his woes in silence, doubtless avoiding any concession that should suggest the need of another clarification of his system. Once, when nobody was looking, he cautiously withdrew a handful of scraped birch bark from his pocket and gave it to me, remarking that he thought it was "a little more bracin' than ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... father's. Westminster, he says, represented 'hell' for him when Browning Hill stood for paradise. The instruction 'was wretched,' The fagging system was a 'horrid despotism.' The games were too much for his strength. His industry, however, enabled him to escape the birch, no small achievement in those days,[206] and he became distinguished in the studies such as they were. He learned the catechism by heart, and was good at Greek and Latin verses, which he manufactured for his companions as well ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... church, garlands of birch leaves hung here and there on the white walls and festooned the carved pulpit. Green wreaths crowned the golden angels that supported, each with one lifted hand, the sculptured altar-piece; while in the other, outstretched, ...
— The Golden House • Mrs. Woods Baker
... the scanty earth. Among the heaped-up stones that lay, And soon a tiny birch had birth, And grew in stature ...
— Fleurs de lys and other poems • Arthur Weir
... and fought, But gay to-day is our communion. BRITANNIA'S helm is crowned with flowers, BRITANNIA'S trident's wreathed with posies, And Fancy sees in Flora's showers Thistles and Shamrocks blent with Roses. The Indian Lotus let us twine With gorgeous bloom from Afric's jungles Canadian Birch with Austral Pine. Tape-bound Officialdom oft bungles; Some blow too hot, some breathe too cold, O'er-chill are some, and some o'er-gushing; But the same blood-stream, warm and bold, Through all our veins is ever rushing; And so to all true ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, May 13, 1893 • Various
... the inhabitants of the place were greatly excited, and were running to and fro. The globe was lowered to within three hundred feet of the earth. As they neared the spot, two of the anchors were dropped, and soon caught in the birch tree tops. The ship strained tremendously at the cables for a moment or two, and then rode easily at anchorage, three ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... likely to denote the site of Dud Dudley's enterprising but unfortunate experiment of making pig-iron with pit-coal," no remains had been found. It was the same with the like operations of Cromwell, Major Wildman, Captain Birch, and other of his officers, doctors of physic and merchants, by whom works and furnaces had been set up in the Forest ...
— Iron Making in the Olden Times - as instanced in the Ancient Mines, Forges, and Furnaces of The Forest of Dean • H. G. Nicholls
... The birch-bark canoe, made by the Indians of the northern rivers and lakes, is really a work of art. It is a model of lightness, and when we consider its frailty, and then the way in which it can be managed in the most turbulent ...
— Healthful Sports for Boys • Alfred Rochefort
... they came into the shadow of the island, the keel grunted upon sand, and they got out. There was a little crescent of white beach, with an occasional exclamatory green reed sticking from it, and above was a fine arch of birch and pine. They hauled up the boat as far as they could, and sat down to wait for the tide to turn. Firm earth, in spite of her awful spiritual forebodings, put Margaret in a more cheerful mood. Furthermore, the ...
— Aladdin O'Brien • Gouverneur Morris
... proper pitch. The copper in this state is what is termed dry: it is brittle, of a deep-red colour, inclining to purple, an open grain, and crystalline structure. In the process of toughening, the surface of the metal in the furnace is first well covered with charcoal; a pole, commonly of birch, is then held into the liquid metal, which causes considerable ebullition, owing to the evolution of gaseous matter; and this operation of poling is continued, until, from the assays which the refiner from time to time ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 458 - Volume 18, New Series, October 9, 1852 • Various
... eglantine embalmed the air, Hawthorn and hazel mingled there. The primrose pale and violet flower, Found in each cliff's narrow bower; Foxglove and nightshade side by side, Emblems of punishment and pride; Gray birch and aspen wept beneath; Aloft the ash and warrior oak, Cast anchor in the rifted rock; And higher yet the pine-tree hung, His shattered trunk, and frequent flung Where seemed the cliff to meet on high, His boughs athwart the narrow ...
— Gathering Jewels - The Secret of a Beautiful Life: In Memoriam of Mr. & Mrs. James Knowles. Selected from Their Diaries. • James Knowles and Matilda Darroch Knowles
... woodshed to the barn. Above the house a pasture dotted with gray boulders extended up to a wood of firs, and out of this wood the small river which bore the name of the family came rushing down the field in a gully, went under the road, swept around to the right and along the edge of a birch copse just below the house. The little stream grew quieter there and widened into a mill pond. At the lower end was a broken dam and beside it a dismantled mill. Here was peace for Roger's soul. The next day at dawn he awakened, and through the window close by his bed he saw ...
— His Family • Ernest Poole
... biographies of the great governor must necessarily be. They were published by his son, Braz de Albuquerque, in 1557, reprinted by him in 1576, and republished in four volumes in 1774. They have been translated into English for the Hakluyt Society by Walter de Gray Birch in four volumes, 1875-1884, and from this translation the quotations in the present volume are taken. The nature and the authority of this most valuable and interesting work are best shown by quoting the first ...
— Rulers of India: Albuquerque • Henry Morse Stephens
... what it meant, when he luckily remembered his wife's words and lay still. But the time till morning seemed very long, and with the first ray of sun they both rose, and pushed aside the branches of the birch trees. There, in the very place they had chosen, stood a beautiful house—doors and windows, and everything ...
— The Brown Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... has happened during the night. They expect to find, if St. Nicholas is pleased with them, that the hay and carrots have disappeared, and that their shoes are full of presents; but that if they have not been good enough, the shoes will just be as they were the night before, and a birch-rod stuck into the hay. But, as you may suppose, it always turns out that St. Nicholas is pleased. The presents are there, and amongst them there is sure to be a gingerbread figure of the saint, which they may eat or not, as they please; ...
— Peeps At Many Lands: Belgium • George W. T. Omond
... Robert Charles. Amaritudo mea circa mediam noctem. Jan. 28th, the cloose was hyerd of Ed. Brydock for thre pownd payd beforehand by me John Dee to the said Ed. Brydock, being 4 from Candlemas next tyll Candlemas come a twelvemonth. Feb. 9th, George Birch sute was stayd at Chester uppon his promise to compownd with me for all tyth, haye, and other matter. Thomas Goodyer his sute and excommunication I stayed, salvo interim jure suo. Baxter's likewise I stayd at Chester court. Feb. ...
— The Private Diary of Dr. John Dee - And the Catalog of His Library of Manuscripts • John Dee
... 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
... ways, as the world had forgotten them; killed their meat as they found it; feasted in plenty and starved in famine, and searched unceasingly for the yellow lure. They crisscrossed the land in every direction, threaded countless unmapped rivers in precarious birch-bark canoes, and with snowshoes and dogs broke trail through thousands of miles of silent white, where man had never been. They struggled on, under the aurora borealis or the midnight sun, through temperatures that ranged from one hundred degrees above zero to eighty ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... from behind the piano and stood in front of him, as erect as a silver birch, and as slim and young. There was a great indignation all ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... a short lecture on the different kinds of water-wheels, he decided on an undershot, and with Sandy's help proceeded to construct it—with its nave of mahogany, its spokes of birch, its floats of deal, and its axle of stout iron-wire, which, as the friction would not be great, was to run in gudgeon-blocks of some hard wood, well oiled. These blocks were fixed in a frame so devised that, with the help of a few stones to support it, the wheel might ...
— Gutta-Percha Willie • George MacDonald
... headstrong steeds,— Which for this fourteen years we have let sleep, Even like an o'ergrown lion in a cave, That goes not out to prey. Now, as fond fathers, Having bound up the threat'ning twigs of birch, Only to stick it in their children's sight For terror, not to use, in time the rod Becomes more mock'd than fear'd; so our decrees, Dead to infliction, to themselves are dead; And liberty plucks justice by the nose; The baby beats the nurse, and ...
— Measure for Measure • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... 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 ...
— Memoirs of Mr. Charles J. Yellowplush - The Yellowplush Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... was a yard, where chickens, turkeys, and guinea- fowls, were kept; and in the front, looking towards the west, was laid out a fine garden, well provided with evergreens, such as holly, yew, and pine-trees, and amongst these, also, many birch and ash- ...
— Fanny, the Flower-Girl • Selina Bunbury
... Mr. Apollinax visited the United States His laughter tinkled among the teacups. I thought of Fragilion, that shy figure among the birch-trees, And of Priapus in the shrubbery Gaping at the lady in the swing. In the palace of Mrs. Phlaccus, at Professor Channing-Cheetah's He laughed like an irresponsible foetus. His laughter was submarine and profound Like the old man of the seats Hidden ...
— Prufrock and Other Observations • T. S. Eliot
... pews of curly birch, upholstered in old rose plush. The floor is in white Italian mosaic, with frieze of the old rose, and the wainscoting repeats the same tints. The base and cap are of pink Tennessee marble. On the walls are bracketed oxidized ...
— Pulpit and Press • Mary Baker Eddy
... out and were not renewed. He also raised grapes, quinces, and small fruit in abundance. The rosebush he prized as his mother's favorite is still flourishing, as are also the fine magnolia, laburnum, and cut-leaved birch of his planting. The ash tree in front of the house was planted ...
— Whittier-land - A Handbook of North Essex • Samuel T. Pickard
... was going to have 'la bonne chance' on this trip. He wanted to try his own mouth at 'calling.' He had never really done it before. But he had been practicing all winter in imitation of a tame cow moose that Johnny Moreau had, and he thought he could make the sound 'b'en bon.' So he got the birch-bark horn and gave us a sample of his skill. McDonald told me privately that it was 'nae sa bad; a deal better than Pete's feckless bellow.' We agreed to leave the Indian to keep the camp (after locking up the whisky flask in my bag), and take Billy with ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... words, 'I consider this music worldly and profane, and shall never give permission for it to be used in my church.' These words so enraged St. Nicholas that he came down from the heavens at night when the abbot was asleep, and, dragging him out of bed by the hair of his head, beat him with a birch rod he carried in his hand till he was more dead than alive. The lesson proved salutary, and from that day forth the responses of St. Nicholas formed a part ...
— Dutch Life in Town and Country • P. M. Hough
... steal upon the sight, * * * * * The brooklet branching from the silver Trent, The whispering birch by every zephyr bent, The woody island and the naked mead, The lowly hut half hid in groves of reed, The rural wicket and the rural stile, And frequent interspersed ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... time I was convinced of the wisdom of Mr. Fuller's appreciation of our native trees. In few instances should we have to go far from home to find nearly all that we wanted in beautiful variety—maples, dogwoods, scarlet and chestnut oaks, the liquid- amber, the whitewood or tulip-tree, white birch, and horn-beam, or the hop-tree; not to speak of the evergreens and shrubs indigenous to our forests. Perhaps it is not generally known that the persimmon, so well remembered by old campaigners ...
— The Home Acre • E. P. Roe
... was scarcely heart to trim and deck the Christmas-tree; to tell the children to prepare for the visit of the Christ Kindlein on Christmas Eve, who would bring good gifts to the good, but would leave the naughty to Pelsnichol to come and whip them with his great birch. In some villages like ours an old man disguised with a long beard and gown, and a great bag, would go about at Christmastide to the houses where the people had expected him, and would carry the gifts to the children, and would show others who were naughty the ...
— Miss Grantley's Girls - And the Stories She Told Them • Thomas Archer
... the two leading parts must reluctantly be admitted as more serious evidence. The abuse of innocent foreign words or syllables by comparison or confusion with indecent native ones is a simple and school-boy-like sort of jest for which Master Hey wood, if impeached as even more deserving of the birch than any boy on his stage, might have pleaded the example of the captain of the school, and protested that his humble audacities, if no less indecorous, were funnier and less forced than Master Shakespeare's. As for the other member ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... and Flemish painters (in spite of their exquisite pots and pans, and cabbages and carrots, their birch-brooms, in which you can count every twig, and their carpets, in which you can reckon every thread) do not interest me; their landscapes too, however natural, are mere Dutch nature (with some brilliant exceptions), fat cattle, clipped trees, boors, ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... following instance Seventeen of the boys were to be flogged for making a bonfire on the 5th of November, myself of course among the number; many of them were large boys, and we were left together while Griffith was busily employed making up a number of rods out of half a dozen new birch brooms, a great many dozens of which he bought every year at Weyhill fair, expressly for that purpose. While he was thus amiably occupied, although I was one of the smallest and youngest among them, I volunteered to recommend forcible resistance; and proposed, ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... division on the previous question whether they should go into Committee. On this previous question 136 had voted No, with Sir Charles Wolseley and Mr. Strickland (two of the Council of State) for their tellers, but 141 had voted Yea, with Bradshaw and Colonel Birch for their tellers. In other words, it had been carried by a majority of five that it fell within the province of the House to determine whether the Single-Person element in the Government of the Commonwealth, already ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... piped a few notes by way of remark; the blackbird was heard, flute-throated, down in the hollow recesses of the wood; and the thrush, in a holly tree by the wayside, sang out his sweet, clear song that seemed to rise in strength as the wind awoke a sudden rustling through the long woods of birch and oak.—WILLIAM BLACK, in Adventures of ...
— Bird Day; How to prepare for it • Charles Almanzo Babcock
... subsequently shows a 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 ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... the bleak October morning, when Ida found herself alone amidst its stoniness, the native population only just beginning to bestir itself in the street above the quay, and making believe, by an inordinate splashing and a frantic vehemence in the use of birch-brooms, to be the cleanest population under the sun; an assertion of superiority somewhat belied by an all-pervading odour of decomposed vegetable matter, a small heap of which refuse, including egg-shells and fishy offal—which the town in the matutinal cleansing ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... wild animals, certain individuals attach themselves strongly to man, drawn doubtless by some unknown but no less strongly felt attraction. It was so there in the wilderness. The first morning after our arrival at the birch grove I was down at the shore, preparing a trout for baking in the ashes, when Chigwooltz, of the ear drums, biggest of all the frogs, came from among the lily pads. He had lost all fear apparently; he swam directly up to me, touching my hands with his nose, and ...
— Wilderness Ways • William J Long
... set both feet on the ground, he hitched the horse to the trunk of a little birch and waved his hand ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... of keeping up a good fire they had long before this been compelled to build up the entrance with a wall of firewood, the interstices being stuffed with moss; the hut was lighted by lamps of bear and deer fat melted down and poured into tin drinking-cups, the wicks being composed of strips of birch bark. A watch was regularly kept all day, two always remaining in the hut, one keeping watch through a small slip cut in the curtain before the narrow orifice in the log wall, that served as a door, the other looking after the fire, keeping up a good supply of melted snow, and preparing dinner ...
— In The Heart Of The Rockies • G. A. Henty
... canoe, where the paddle at every stroke comes within eighteen inches of them. I know nothing which can be eaten that they will not take, and I had one steal all my candles, pulling them out endwise, one by one, from a piece of birch bark in which they were rolled, and another pecked a large hole in a keg of castile soap. A duck which I had picked and laid down for a few minutes had the entire breast eaten out by one or more of these birds. I have seen one alight in the ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photograph [April, 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... through birch and pine Of gable, roof, and porch, The tavern with its swinging sign, The sharp horn of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... object, but the idea of an "enemy." A "fight" could then be shown simply by drawing two arrows directed against each other. Many uncivilized tribes still employ picture writing of this sort. The American Indians developed it in most elaborate fashion. On rolls of birch bark or the skins of animals they wrote messages, hunting stories, and songs, and even preserved tribal ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... her first fierce charging of them, with a strong hand at the back of her waist. That was nothing to the joy of scorching on the level with linked hands. And it was best of all when they rested, sitting side by side under a birch tree on the Common, or lying in the long grass of ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... we had been taking short trial runs, to test our pace and powers of endurance; and Birch (my fellow-"hare") and I had more than once surveyed the course we proposed to take on the occasion of the "great hunt," making ourselves, as far as possible, acquainted with the bearings of several streams, ploughed fields, ...
— Parkhurst Boys - And Other Stories of School Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... they heard that sir Trevor Williams was at Usk with a strong body of men. They knew colonel Birch was besieging Gutbridge castle. Two days passed, and then colonel Kirk appeared to the north, and approached within two miles. The ladies began to look pale as often as they saw two persons talking together: there ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... covers the fingers as though they had been dipped in sulphur-flour; shake the branch and it flies off, a little cloud of powdery particles. The scaly bark takes a ruddy tinge, when the sunshine falls upon it, and would then, I think, be worthy the attention of an artist as much as the birch bark, whose peculiar mingling of silvery white, orange, and brown, painters so often endeavour to represent on canvas. There is something in the Scotch fir, crowned at the top like a palm with its dark foliage, ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies
... in two the feather of the hat belonging to him against whom it was directed, and broke a small birch at the other end of ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... and frequent intercourse with its inmates, have brought them much under the notice of the officers and ladies of the garrison. She has no occasion to present the Indian in a theatrical garb—a mere thing of paint and feathers, less like the original than his own rude delineation on birch-bark or deer-skin. The reader will find in the following pages living men and women, whose feelings are in many respects like his own, and whose motives of action are very similar to those of the rest of the world, though far less artfully covered up and disguised under ...
— Dahcotah - Life and Legends of the Sioux Around Fort Snelling • Mary Eastman
... are, and Ganymede I hope you will be! Win the county cup but once more, old fellow, and then it will be our own! This horse was bred on the farm here; he is the produce of a gray mare that you may recollect my father mounted on in our birch-rod days. He deserves the name of 'Thousands' undeniably; for Lord Oxfence, who was in the regiment with me, offered a ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... I'll give you a stick," he called to her; "it's a help when you're climbing." He pulled down a slender birch, and, setting his foot on it, broke it off at the root. She stopped, with an impatient gesture, and waited while he tore off handfuls of leaves ...
— The Way to Peace • Margaret Deland
... Maundy Thursday was a special day for cleansing the altars and font, which was done by a priest; but the clerk was required to provide a birch broom and also a barrel in order that water might be placed in it for this purpose. On Easter Eve and the eve of Whit-Sunday the ceremony of cleaning the altar and font was repeated. Flagellation was not obsolete as a penance, ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... river (that is, we approached Stockholm by lovely river), with banks and hills covered with pine and birch trees, and studded with villas, where the Stockholm people live away from the town. "Studded" is a good word, but phrase sounds too much like "studied with SASS," as so many of our best artists did. Lovely for boating. Why don't the Swedes row? They don't. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., September 20, 1890 • Various
... of Lough Ness, a water about eighteen miles long, but not, I think, half a mile broad. Our horses were not bad, and the way was very pleasant; the rock, out of which the road was cut, was covered with birch-trees, fern, and heath. The lake below was beating its bank by a gentle wind, and the rocks beyond the water, on the right, stood sometimes horrid, and wild, and sometimes opened into a kind of bay, in which there was ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... to Dr. Walker, [One of the Judges of the Admiralty.] to give him my Lord's papers to view over, concerning his being empowered to be Vice-Admiral under the Duke of York. Thence by water to White Hall, to the Parliament House, where I spoke with Colonel Birch, [Colonel John Birch represented Leominster at that time, and afterwards Penryn. He was an active Member of Parliament.] and so to the Admiralty chamber, where we and Mr. Coventry had a meeting about several ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... among the ferns, the copsewood, and the grand old clumps of timber, exploring the undulations, and the wild nooks and hollows which have each their circumscribed and sylvan charm; a wonderful interest those little park-like broken dells have always had for me; dotted with straggling birch and oak, and here and there a hoary ash tree, with a grand and melancholy grace, dreaming among the songs of wild birds, in their native solitudes, and the brown leaves tipped with golden light, all breathing something of old-world romance—the poetry of bygone love and adventure—and stirring ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... see the slender threads of smoke ascending from others, the houses themselves beyond the scope of his vision. The range was taking on fall shades, the gray of the sage relieved by brown patches of open grasslands and splotches of color where early frosts had touched the birch and willow thickets that marked each side-hill spring. Tiny dark specks moved through it all. Meat! It had been long since Breed had tasted beef, and his red tongue lolled out and dripped in anticipation of ...
— The Yellow Horde • Hal G. Evarts
... first act 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 ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... stuff it was. Green peas shelled in little measures, ready to cook. (I wish they'd have them that way in our own Lexington market at home!) Wild strawberries—I didn't see any other kind, no big ones like we have in Baltimore or at home. The berries were hulled and put into little home-made birch-bark baskets that the Indian women make themselves, just pinned together at the end with a thorn or stick. Auntie Lu bought some for us but Miss Greatorex wouldn't let me eat the berries, though I was just suffering to! She said after they'd been handled by those dirty ...
— Dorothy's Travels • Evelyn Raymond
... tree-ferns take their place. Losing these, we found the cinchona bedewed by the cool clouds of Guaranda; and last of all, among the trees, the polylepis. The twisted, gnarled trunk of this tree, as well as its size and silvery foliage, reminded us of the olive, but the bark resembles that of the birch. It reaches the greatest elevation of any tree on the globe. Then followed shrubby fuchsia, calceolaria, eupatoria, and red and purple gentians; around and on the Arenal, a uniform mantle of monocotyledonous plants, with scattered tufts of valeriana, ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... in question—for the sun was not yet much above the horizon—a little birch-bark canoe might have been seen to glide noiselessly from a bed of rushes, and proceed quietly, yet swiftly, along the outer ...
— The Buffalo Runners - A Tale of the Red River Plains • R.M. Ballantyne
... and fastening the cap together, he dropped it down, and, leaning forward, tried to catch the top of a young birch rustling close by the wall. Twice he missed it; the first time he frowned, but the second he uttered an ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott
... altogether—Mr. Stevens, Clark, the two Boston soldiers, and myself; and presently we came down the steep passage in the cliff to where our craft lay, secured by my dear wife—a birch canoe, well laden with necessaries. Our craft was none too large for our party, but she must do; and safely in, we pushed out upon the current, which was in our favour, for the tide was going out. My object was to ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the rocks and trees, and Balsamides stopped. We were quite out of earshot from the road, and it would be hard to imagine a more desolate place than it appeared, between two and three o'clock on that March night, the bare twigs of the birch-trees wriggling in the bleak wind, the faint light of the decrescent moon, that seemed to be upside down in the sky, falling on the white rocks, and on the whitened branches torn down by the winter's storms, lying like bleached bones upon the ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... whatever fragments remained of the Central America. Had he not changed the course of his vessel by reason of the mysterious conduct of that man-of-war hawk, not a soul would probably have survived the night. It was stated by the rescued passengers, among whom was Billy Birch, that the Central America had sailed from Aspinwall with the passengers and freight which left San Francisco on the 1st of September, and encountered the gale in the Gulf Stream somewhere off Savannah, in which ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman
... many who didn't. Henry James, for instance, wrote a review of "Drum Taps" in the Nation, November 16, 1865. In the lusty heyday and assurance of twenty-two years, he laid the birch on smartly. It is just a little saddening to find that even so clear-sighted an observer as Henry James could not see through the chaotic form of Whitman to the great vision and throbbing music that seem so plain to us to-day. ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... standing with his back against the door, to prevent egress, just to permit them to depart; which, after a slight contest, he does—they rushing, pell-mell, to the drawing-room, there to find an old birch-broom blazing in the grate, and the recess covered with two sheets suspended by forks. In front of the sheets is a table; whilst in front of that table, stand the wondering little crowd, speculating ...
— Christmas Comes but Once A Year - Showing What Mr. Brown Did, Thought, and Intended to Do, - during that Festive Season. • Luke Limner
... deep and sandy beds, and occasionally over small stony plains. At noon we were at some distance from the creek, but then went towards it. The gum-trees were no longer visible, but melaleucas, from fifteen to twenty feet high, lined its banks like a copse of young birch. We now observed a long but somewhat narrow sheet of water, to which we rode; our suspicions as to its quality being roused by its colour, and the appearance of the melaleuca. It proved, as we feared, to be slightly brackish, but not undrinkable. Near the edge of ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... his pebbled shore, O'erhung with wild woods, thickening green; The fragrant birch, and hawthorn hoar, Twined amorous round the raptured scene; The flowers sprang wanton to be prest, The birds sang love on every spray,— Till soon, too soon, the glowing west Proclaimed the speed ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... Monk. It was chiefly brewed from the rind and tops of firs, and was esteemed very powerful against the formation of stone, and to cure all scorbutick distempers. Various herbs, as best approved by the maker, were infused with the mum in concocting it, such as betony, birch, burnet, brooklime, elder-flowers, horse-radish, [582] marjoram, thyme, water-cress, pennyroyal, etc., together with several eggs, "the shells not cracked or broken"! The Germans, especially in Saxony, have so great a veneration for mum that they fancy ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... enjoyment. It was delightful to hear the gigantic plans of the little rogues, and the impracticable feats they were to perform during their six weeks' emancipation from the abhorred thraldom of book, birch, and pedagogue." ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... won as well by birchbarks as by battleships. But if both sides have the same sort of craft, or one side has none at all, then it does not matter what the sort is. When the Iroquois paddled their birch-bark canoes past Quebec in 1660, and defied the French Governor to stop them, they "commanded" the St. Lawrence just as well as the British Grand Fleet commanded the North Sea in the Great War; and for the same reason, because their enemy was not strong enough to stop them. Whichever army ...
— Flag and Fleet - How the British Navy Won the Freedom of the Seas • William Wood
... Nordwest; Parkman. Old Regime.] Aster's American Fur Company practically controlled the trade of Wisconsin and Michigan. It shipped its guns and ammunition, blankets, gewgaws, and whiskey from Mackinac to some one of the principal posts, where they were placed in the light birch canoes, manned by French boatmen, and sent throughout the forests to the minor trading-posts. Practically all of the Indian villages of the tributaries of the Great Lakes and of the upper Mississippi were regularly visited by the trader. The trading-posts became the nuclei of ...
— Rise of the New West, 1819-1829 - Volume 14 in the series American Nation: A History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... ran at first along the edge of the forest, then along a broad forest clearing; they caught glimpses of old pines and a young birch copse, and tall, gnarled young oak trees standing singly in the clearings where the wood had lately been cut; but soon it was all merged in the clouds of snow. The coachman said he could see the forest; the examining magistrate ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... or the rare and long-wished-for gift (it matters not whether the vessel be of gold, or silver, or iron, or wood, or clay, or just a small bit of birch bark folded into a cup), may carry a message ...
— The Spirit of Christmas • Henry Van Dyke
... you, it may mean the short birch for me, Steele," said the factor gloomily. "Lac Bain is just now the emptiest, most fallen-to-pieces, unbusiness-like post between the Athabasca and the Bay. We've had two bad seasons running, and everything has gone wrong. Colonel Becker ...
— Philip Steele of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • James Oliver Curwood
... walls, a bed or two, a table and a few chairs—in fact, no more than the necessities of life. But Colonel Zane's house proved an exception to this. Most interesting was the large room. The chinks between the logs had been plastered up with clay and then the walls covered with white birch bark; trophies of the chase, Indian bows and arrows, pipes and tomahawks hung upon them; the wide spreading antlers of a noble buck adorned the space above the mantel piece; buffalo robes covered the couches; ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... ears of lovers in the fern, while the deer stole by. The bracken grove of irretrievable delights, of golden minutes in the long marriage of heaven and earth! The bracken grove, sacred to stags, to strange tree-stump fauns leaping around the silver whiteness of a birch-tree nymph at ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... longer in the lurch, With Romans, Greeks, and Hindoos: But give us beef instead of birch, And ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... 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 ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... 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 little ...
— History Of The Mackenzies • Alexander Mackenzie
... 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 limiting the powers of the disembodied spirits of the dead, ...
— The Signal-Man #33 • Charles Dickens
... found that the more a log was hollowed out the better it would float; and so the dug-out was invented. Log, raft, and dug-out all belong to the first and simplest type, in which there are no artificial parts to fit together. The second type is exemplified by the birch-bark canoe, which has three parts in its frame—gunwale, cross-bars, and ribs—and a fourth part, the skin, to complete it. The third type is distinguished from the second by its keel, as clearly as vertebrate animals are distinguished from ...
— All Afloat - A Chronicle of Craft and Waterways • William Wood
... and yet low note that sounds something like 'skeek-skeek' comes from a birch, and another 'skeek-skeek' answers from an elm. It is like the friction of iron against iron without oil on the bearings. This is the tree-climber calling to his mate. He creeps over the boles of the ...
— The Amateur Poacher • Richard Jefferies
... piece of dry leather, and try to rub it over with oil or grease, you cannot make it enter the pores of the leather; the black colour is produced by rubbing it over with a solution of green vitriol, the sulphate of iron. Russian leather is tanned in an infusion of birch bark, and is said to be afterwards mixed with a quantity of birch tar, to give it that odour for which it is peculiar, which renders it valuable for book-binding, on account of preventing it from being attacked by insects. Tawed leather, used for gloves, is made ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 334 Saturday, October 4, 1828 • Various
... had enough of that work," said Vincent. "Tunstall would lend me the money, poor fellow, an he had it; but his gentle, beggarly kindred, plunder him of all, and keep him as bare as a birch at Christmas. No—my fortune may be spelt in four letters, ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... that there are secret springs which can only be detected by the twigs of the divining-rod; and having discovered with what comparative ease the whole mechanism of his little government could be carried on by the admission of the birch-regulator, so, as he grew richer and lazier and fatter, the Philhellenic Institute spun along as glibly as a top kept in vivacious movement by the ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Notes and Queries, 2d series, vii. 231, 299, 445, viii. 190. It contains the celebrated sympathetic powder. I am still in much doubt as to the connection of Digby with this tract.[191] Without entering on the subject here, I observe that in Birch's History of the Royal Society,[192] to which both Digby and White belonged, Digby, though he brought many things before the Society, never mentioned the powder, which is connected only with the names of Evelyn[193] ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... of passage have gone; a happy journey and welcome back again! Titmouse and blackcap and a hedge-sparrow or so live now alone in the bush and undergrowth: tuitui! All is so curiously changed—the dwarf birch bleeds redly against the grey stones, a harebell here and there shows among the heather, swaying and whispering a little song: sh! But high above all hovers an eagle with outstretched neck, on his ...
— Pan • Knut Hamsun
... anchorage, waited the night through, and then rowed off in their boat and ran her up on to the beach. It was a naked country of broken rock and shale. No grass was to be seen, and hardly any trees, except a few stunted silver birch. They walked inland for a mile or more to where the snow began, and then saw, as it were, one vast unwrinkled sheet of snow stretching upwards into a bank of cloud. The ground was all scree of slate and shaly rock. They saw no signs of habitancy, and few tracks of animals. Then presently they ...
— Gudrid the Fair - A Tale of the Discovery of America • Maurice Hewlett
... halfbreed and white, but luck was against them all. Without being a very expert caller I have done enough of it to know the game and to pass for a "caller." So one night I said in a spirit of half jest: "I'll have to go out and show you men how to call a Moose." I cut a good piece of birch-bark and fashioned carefully a horn. Disdaining all civilized materials as "bad medicine," I stitched the edge with a spruce root or wattap, and soldered it neatly with pine gum flowed and smoothed ...
— Wild Animals at Home • Ernest Thompson Seton
... fathers, Having bound up the threatening twigs of birch, Only to stick it in their children's sight For terror, not to use, in time the rod Becomes more mock'd than fear'd; so our decrees, Dead to infliction, to themselves are dead; And liberty plucks justice by the nose; The baby beats ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... Adams was her name. Vocation, school-teacher. Present avocation, getting lost in the snow. Age, yum-yum (the Persian for twenty). Take to the woods if you would describe Miss Adams. A willow for grace; a hickory for fibre; a birch for the clear whiteness of her skin; for eyes, the blue sky seen through treetops; the silk in cocoons for her hair; her voice, the murmur of the evening June wind in the leaves; her mouth, the berries ...
— Waifs and Strays - Part 1 • O. Henry
... snow was flooded in moonlight and the birch trees wavered their stark shadows across it like supplicating arms. Suddenly I heard the soft padded sound of snow falling upon snow, to slowly perceive a figure, the slender figure of a young child attempting to arouse itself almost at ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... above three feet, and at Bear Lake, in latitude 64 degrees, not more than twenty inches. The frozen substratum does not of itself destroy vegetation, for forests flourish on the surface, at a distance from the coast.") In a like manner, in Siberia, we have woods of birch, fir, aspen, and larch, growing in a latitude (64 degrees) where the mean temperature of the air falls below the freezing point, and where the earth is so completely frozen, that the carcass of an animal embedded ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... spirits rose a trifle; and when at length all lowland landscapes were left far behind them, and they had come into a province of peat streams and granite pinnacles, with the gloom of pines and the freshness of the birch blended like a May and December marriage, all appearance, at least, ...
— Count Bunker • J. Storer Clouston
... day of his visit he had been wont of an evening to take a walk along the shore of the lake. The road led along close under the garden. At the end of the latter, on a projecting mound, there was a bench under some tall birch trees. Elisabeth's mother had christened it the Evening Bench, because the spot faced westward, and was mostly used at that time of the day in order to enjoy a ...
— Immensee • Theodore W. Storm
... 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 climes penetrated ...
— The Boy Scouts on the Yukon • Ralph Victor
... associated with Westminster, and he ruled the school with his terrible birch rod for upward of fifty-seven years. "My rod is my sieve," he said, "and who can not pass through it is no boy for me." So many able boys, however, passed through it, that he could point to the Bench of Bishops, and boast that sixteen of the spiritual lords sitting there ...
— Harper's Young People, April 27, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... said, pointing with my whip, "look at that baby moon so innocently peeping at us over the edge of the mist just behind that silver birch; and don't talk so much about women and things you don't understand. What is the use of your bothering about fists and whips and muscles and all the dreadful things invented for the confusion of obstreperous wives? You know you are a civilised husband, and a civilised husband is a creature ...
— Elizabeth and her German Garden • "Elizabeth", AKA Marie Annette Beauchamp
... meantime proceeding along a dark path through oak and birch woods, constantly ascending, until the oak grew stunted and disappeared, and the opening glades showed steep, stony, torrent-furrowed ramparts of hillside above them, looking to Christina's eyes as if she were set ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Whitefoot, as she worked a strip of white birch bark into the roof of the new home she and Whitefoot had been building out of the old home of Melody the Wood Thrush, "this finishes the roof. I don't think any water will get through it even ...
— Whitefoot the Wood Mouse • Thornton W. Burgess
... working members,' etc. etc. None of this helps very much; too detailed. But he noticed how tall she was and how slim, save for a very beautiful bosom, too full for Dian's (he tells us), whom else she resembled; how she was straight as a birch-tree; how in walking it seemed as if her skirts clung about her knees. There was an air of mingled surprise and defiance about her; she was a silent girl. 'Fronted like Juno,' he appears to cry, 'shaped like Hebe, and like Demeter in stature; ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett
... south of Yefremov Kamen, forms actual thickets of flowering plants, while the tundra itself is overgrown with an exceedingly scanty carpet, consisting more of mosses than of grasses. Salices of little height go as far north as Port Dickson (73 deg. 30' N.L.), the dwarf birch (Betula nana, L.) is met with, though only as a bush creeping along the ground, at Cape Schaitanskoj (72 deg. 8' N.L.); and here in 1875, on the ice-mixed soil of the tundra, we gathered ripe cloudberries. Very luxuriant alders (Alnaster ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... stunted trees just before him and the wilderness of snow beyond, sloping up to the crest, outlined in white against the solid gray sky. The Spartans of the forest were around him—fir, pine, spruce, birch, and trembling little aspens up there among the stoutest. All were of one height, clean-shaven by the volleys of the wind-driven sand and pebbles that clipped off any treetop that aspired above the mass. In solid numbers was their salvation, ...
— Bull Hunter • Max Brand
... a low, home-made stool upon the hard and smoothly swept ground. Within, the neatly kept log cabin had a rough floor strewn with white sand. On one side of the single large room there was a settee stuffed with shavings of birch-bark; and a cat lay curled up and dozing in the sun, which streamed in through the open lattice that took the place of a window. Around the room were the rough tables and the benches which used to serve as furniture in such primitive dwellings. Shelves and cupboards were fastened upon the wall. ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 6, June, 1886, Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 6, June, 1886 • Various
... synopsis were followed, as seems likely, his condemnation of the Preface as "Theobald's heap of disjointed stuff" was disingenuous, to say the least. Far less defensible was his assertion in the same letter to Thomas Birch that, apart from the section on Greek texts, virtually the entire Preface was stitched together from notes which he had supplied (Nichols, Illustrations, ...
— Preface to the Works of Shakespeare (1734) • Lewis Theobald
... that he should find the Shcherbatskys there, Kitty among them. He had seen their carriage at the gate. It was a lovely day, and the gaily-clad fashionable people, the Russian izbas with their carved woodwork, the paths gleaming with snow, and the old birch-trees, brilliant with icicles, combined to render the whole ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... the land climbed into 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 ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr
... an autograph letter of her sister, Miss Pinkerton, was an object of as deep veneration as would have been a letter from a sovereign. Only when her pupils quitted the establishment, or when they were about to be married, and once when poor Miss Birch died of the scarlet fever, was Miss Pinkerton known to write personally to the parents of ...
— Eighth Reader • James Baldwin
... home; the hare was carpenter, and gnawed pegs and bolts and hammered them into the walls and 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 ...
— East O' the Sun and West O' the Moon • Gudrun Thorne-Thomsen
... that the climate is like that of Paris, subject to short spells of severe cold in winter and sudden changes, I doubt much in the experiment. But the health-giving, fever-destroying Eucalyptus is not needed in this well-wooded healthy country, and the splendid foliage of acacia, walnut, oaks, and birch leaves nothing to desire either in the matter of shade or ornament. A lover of trees, birds, and whispering breezes will say that here at least is a corner of the Happy Fields of Homer, or the Islands of the ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... she handed to Polly, telling her she might have it to read, and when she had finished it to please bring it back to her. Polly thanked her, and ran away to a quiet corner of the back room, where I saw her slowly reading the clipping as she rocked herself in her pretty birch chair. When she had read it through, she sat for some time looking very thoughtful. At last she rose and carried the paper back to Miss Katharine, halting a moment as she passed my ...
— Dickey Downy - The Autobiography of a Bird • Virginia Sharpe Patterson
... While he with two assistants was thus employed, two of our photographic corps were busily engaged in preserving as many of their odd faces and costumes as possible, making pictures of their picturesque camp on the side of a hill sloping toward an arm of the Gut, with its round tent covered with birch and fir bark, dogs and children, and stacks of logs or wood—from which they make the strips for their chief products, baskets—cows, baggage and all the other accompaniments of a comparatively permanent camp. They go into the woods and make log huts for winter, but ...
— Bowdoin Boys in Labrador • Jonathan Prince (Jr.) Cilley
... into an open space, and took my stand close to a birch that grew on the very edge of the bank. For thirty feet there was no good cover for the catamount; so, armed and determined, I ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... you crossed the lawn (If it was wrong to watch you, pardon), Behind this weeping birch withdrawn, I watched you saunter round the garden. I saw you bend beside the phlox, Pluck, as you passed, a sprig of myrtle, Review my well-ranged hollyhocks Smile at the fountain's ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... the second son of Simon Butler, Esq., of Appletree, in the county of Northampton, by Miss Ann Birch, daughter of Thomas Birch, Esq., of Gorscot, in the county of Stafford. His family, for amplitude of possessions, and splendor of descent and alliances, had vied with the noblest and wealthiest of this kingdom, ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... wale were found to be stove in, and the timbers within started. The farther they proceeded in removing the sheathing, the more they discovered the decayed state of the ship's hull. The chief damage was repaired with a birch tree, which had been cut down when they were there before, and was the only one in the neighbourhood large enough for the purpose; but Captain King gave orders that no more sheathing should be ripped ...
— Captain Cook - His Life, Voyages, and Discoveries • W.H.G. Kingston
... his face and tore deep through the skin before he could lift his wide-flung arms to protect it. And then, almost before he realized what had happened, she stood back, groping blindly away from him until her hands found a birch sapling. She clung to it with a desperately tight clasp as if to hold herself erect. A little spot of red flecked her own lip where her locked teeth had cut through. She swayed a moment, dizzily, the too-tight little waist gaping at her throat as she struggled ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... throwing up innumerable fountain streams. These are masterly executions after the ancient sculptors, and give the scene an air of Grecian classicality. Around these triumphs of art, rise lofty woods of graceful birch, varied by dark fir, and interspersed with erections of Roman and Gothic design. It is in the contemplation of these beauties that fancy recalls the mythology of rocky woods, peopled with Dryads and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 343, November 29, 1828 • Various
... mulcts modern authors in unpaid copies. But it is 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 skulls in ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... its body, with a more accurate and better Magnifying Microscope, I found that the tufts or haires of its Wings were nothing else but a congeries, or thick set cluster of small vimina or twiggs, resembling a small twigg of Birch, stript or whitned, with which Brushes are usually made, to beat out or brush off the dust from Cloth and Hangings. Every one of the twiggs or branches that composed the Brush of the Feathers, appeared in this bigger Magnifying Glass (of which EF which represents ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... "Birch and keyre 'tis wal veyre a spyunyng deye a towme. I am the geyest mayed of all that brought the somer houme. Justice Deyruse in my lopp, and senscal in ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 192, July 2, 1853 • Various |
