"Fern" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... oriental: he is quiet, patient, sober, long suffering, pleasant in speech, indolent but handy, far from speculative, and yet good at succedaneum: when his anger is kindled, it descends like lightning: unlike his dog, his wrath gives no notice by grumbling: he blazes up like one of his own fires of dried fern. Quarrels do not often take place among them, but when they do, they are dreadful. The laws of the country in which they sojourn have so far banished the use of knives from among them that they only grind ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 572, October 20, 1832 • Various
... well ask, for none but an artist's hand could have grouped together so harmoniously the daffodils and primroses, with trails of ivy and fern in their beds ...
— The Carved Cupboard • Amy Le Feuvre
... not. He is over at the horse show at Fern Dyke, and won't be back till late. And if he has been forgathering with his boon companions he won't be ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... walls had been and the painted mummy-case, were tall dark green trees, oaks and ashes, and in between the trees and under them tangled bushes and creeping ivy. There were beech-trees too, but there was nothing under them but their own dead red drifted leaves, and here and there a delicate green fern-frond. ...
— The Story of the Amulet • E. Nesbit
... noisy haunts of men, Whose ruts the solitary lime cart tracks, Whose hedge-sides, propp'd by many a mossy stone, Are checker'd o'er with foxglove's purple bloom, Or graceful fern, or snakehood's curling sheath, Or the wild strawberry's crimson peeping through. There, where it joins the far-outstretching heath, A lengthen'd nook presents its glassy slope, A couch with nature's velvet verdure ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... sunset-glow like flecks of gold in amber wine,—while here and there the distant glimmer of tossing fountains, or the soft emerald sheen of a prattling brook that wound in and out the grounds, amongst banks of moss and drooping fern, gave a pleasant touch of coolness and refreshment to the brilliant verdure ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... The demesne around the castle contained some well-grown and handsome timber, and as the soil was undulating and fertile, presented many features of beauty; beyond it, all was sterile, bleak, and barren. Long tracts of brown heath-clad mountain or not less unprofitable valleys of tall and waving fern were all that the eye could discern, except where the broad Shannon, expanding into a tranquil and glassy lake, lay still and motionless beneath the dark mountains, a few islands, with some ruined churches and a round tower, alone breaking the ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... considerable extent, of wild, heathy moorland; short turfy strips of common; dingles full of foxglove, harebell, and gnarled old stunted hawthorn bushes; and knolls, covered with waving crests of powerful feathery fern. It was intersected with gravelly paths and roads, whose warm color contrasted and harmonized with the woodland hues of everything about them; and roofed in by dark green vaults of the most magnificent beech foliage I have ever seen anywhere. The trees ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... to-day on our door-steps. He had a haunch of elk-meat on his back, one end resting on his head, with a cushion of green fern-leaves. He called me "Closhe tum-tum" (Good Heart), and gave me ...
— Life at Puget Sound: With Sketches of Travel in Washington Territory, British Columbia, Oregon and California • Caroline C. Leighton
... forest for a crop or two of rice, the soil, except in the flooded plains, being not rich enough to carry more than one or two such harvests under such primitive methods of agriculture as only are known to the natives. The lands so cleared were deserted and were soon covered with a strong growth of fern and coarse useless lalang grass, difficult to eradicate, and it is well known that, when a tropical forest is once destroyed and the land left to itself, the new jungle which may in time spring up rarely contains any of the valuable timber trees ...
— British Borneo - Sketches of Brunai, Sarawak, Labuan, and North Borneo • W. H. Treacher
... slices of bread on top of the stove," she explained. "She said she always makes toast that way, and no one could tell the difference! I never heard of such a thing—did you, Manley? But I've been attending a cooking school ever since you left Fern Hill. I didn't tell you—I wanted it for a surprise. I could have done better with the toast before a wood fire—I think poor Arline was nearly distracted at the way I poked coals down from the grate; but she didn't say anything. Isn't it funny, to have cream in cans! I don't ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower
... of the tropics. Now, look, even with all these conditions fulfilled, how diverse is life on this earth itself, the one place we really know—varying as much as from the oak to the cuttle-fish, from the palm to the tiger, from man to the fern, the sea-weed, or the jelly-speck. Every one of these creatures is a complex result of very complex conditions, among which you must never forget to reckon the previous existence and interaction of all the antecedent ones. Is it probable, then, even a priori, that ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen
... a crack-cracking as of men coming closer among the scrub of heather and fern which surrounded the Dower House, only it was quite momentary. The stick which she had half-lifted, an unconscious act of readiness for defence, tapped back on to the floor, and my sword-point made a sharper rattle, though I was unaware ...
— The Black Colonel • James Milne
... nearest coast line. Several distinct levels in the present crater prove that it has eaten its way to its present depth. On the most elevated of these large trees now grow, evidences of many years' tranquillity; lower down we come to shrubs, and lastly to the fern, apparently the most venturesome of the vegetable kingdom; it seems to require nothing but rest and water, for we found it shooting out of crevices where the lava appeared to have undergone no decomposition. Nowhere, I conceive, (not even in Iceland,) can be ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... 'the distinguished honor'—he is very good—of meeting me at the house of our mutual friend Deedles, the banker, and he does me the favor to inquire whether it will be agreeable to me to have Will Fern put down. He came up to London, it seems, to look for employment (trying to better himself—that's his story), and being found at night asleep in a shed, was taken into custody, and carried next morning before the Alderman. The Alderman observes (very properly) that he is determined ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various
... foot of the hill. I was particularly struck, during the walk, with the richness of the undergrowth in most places, and recognised many berries and plants that resembled those of my native land, especially a tall, elegantly formed fern, which emitted an agreeable perfume. There were several kinds of flowers, too; but I did not see so many of these as I should have expected in such a climate. We also saw a great variety of small birds of bright plumage, and many paroquets similar to the ...
— The Coral Island • R.M. Ballantyne
... the lych-gate—where the graves lie level with the coping, and the horseman can decipher their inscriptions in passing, at the risk of a twisted neck—the base of the churchyard wall is pierced with a low archway, festooned with toad-flax and fringed with the hart's-tongue fern. Within the archway bubbles a well, the water of which was once used for all baptisms in the parish, for no child sprinkled with it could ever be hanged with hemp. But this belief is discredited now, and the well neglected: and the events which led to ...
— I Saw Three Ships and Other Winter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... new. We went upon a surface so hard and level, that we had little care to hold the bridle, and were therefore at full leisure for contemplation. On the left were high and steep rocks shaded with birch, the hardy native of the North, and covered with fern or heath. On the right the limpid waters of Lough Ness were beating their bank, and waving their surface by a gentle agitation. Beyond them were rocks sometimes covered with verdure, and sometimes towering in horrid nakedness. Now and ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... go through with the business, I.E. to take part in the attack, he slashes a chip from the beam with his PARANG and passes under it. On the far side of the beam stands a chief holding a large frond of fern, and, as each man passes under, he gives him a bit of the leaf, while an assistant cuts a notch on a tally-stick for each volunteer. If for any reason any man is reluctant to go farther, he states his excuse, perhaps a bad dream or illness, or sore feet, and returns to the boats, ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... yellow flowers to dye their Easter eggs. On the other side of the road the land rose a little, and was so covered with stones that it seemed as if there were no earth left for things to grow in. Yet the mountain fern took root there and made the rocks gay with its ...
— The Irish Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... most common, often growing ten feet tall. We counted five varieties of ferns growing in profusion, among them brake ferns, sword-ferns, and maidenhair, most beautiful and luxuriant. The maidenhair fern grew in masses, covering dead trunks of trees and making solid walls of delicate ...
— Tenting To-night - A Chronicle of Sport and Adventure in Glacier Park and the - Cascade Mountains • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... daintiest and prettiest for the bride-elect. Have the table decorations in white. For the center have a large round basket of bride roses, and at each plate tiny French baskets filled with maidenhair fern and white pansies, or apple blossoms, for individual favors. Tie the handle of each basket with white gauze ribbon, looping the baskets together with the ribbon forming a garland for the table. Serve strawberries in large white tulips or bride roses, and have the ...
— Breakfasts and Teas - Novel Suggestions for Social Occasions • Paul Pierce
... crept and sewed Her violets in dead men's faces, And in a soft and snowy shroud Drew the scarred fields with gentle stitch; Though in the valley where the ditch Was hoarse with nettles, blind with mud, She stroked the golden-headed bud, And loosed the fern, she dared not here To touch nor tend this murdered thing; The wind went wide of it, the year Upon this breast stopped short of Spring: Beauty ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... with fern leaves whirled about these edifices in the airiest fashion. It was common to see them leap up to the height of two or three storeys from the lava pavement and rebound like balls, their faces meanwhile preserving that impressive dignity ...
— Honey-Bee - 1911 • Anatole France
... guavas, bananas, mangoes, breadfruit palms, and two or three fern-trees. The leaves of the latter are in shape like those of the English fern, but of gigantic proportions, and grow on the top of a stem thirty feet in height. The sugar-cane is the chief cultivated production of the island on all the more level parts. The fields are surrounded with ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... hills. The north wind resounds through the woods. White clouds rise on the sky: the trembling snow descends. The river howls afar, along its winding course. Sad, by a hollow rock, the grey-hair'd Carryl sat. Dry fern waves over his head; his seat is in an aged birch. Clear to the roaring winds he lifts his ...
— Fragments Of Ancient Poetry • James MacPherson
... Westminster, my Lord being gone before my coming to chapel. I and Mr. Sheply told out my money, and made even for my Privy Seal fees and gratuity money, &c., to this day between my Lord and me. After that to chappell, where Dr. Fern, a good honest sermon upon "The Lord is my shield." After sermon a dull anthem, and so to my Lord's (he dining abroad) and dined with Mr. Sheply. So, to St. Margarett's, and heard a good sermon upon the text "Teach us the old way," or something like it, wherein he ran over ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... he came to a point where the narrow bridlepath branched off the road and wound upward into the silent woods. Following this path until it became indistinguishable on a thick carpet of moss and leaves and coarse fern, he reached the big boulder at last; there he left Keno safely tied and hidden in a clump of alders. Then he went on, several rods down the trail, and took up his position directly across the stream ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Geological Survey • Robert Shaler
... obtain 'a peep at nature, if they can no more.' Far removed from green fields and leafy woods, they may, for instance, enjoy their leisure mornings in watching one of the most beautiful phenomena of vegetable development—the evolution of the circinate fronds of the fern; a plant in every respect associated with elegance and beauty. This kind of gardening has, therefore, become of late years one of the most fashionable, while at the same time one of the most ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 445 - Volume 18, New Series, July 10, 1852 • Various
... path where the undergrowth was in any way trodden was the one by which he and Robin alike approached the well, the old, half-obliterated track that once had been so freely used. All around the sides of the dell, fern and bramble, hazel and undergrowth of all kinds, grew in wild confusion. Search as he would, Cuthbert could find nothing like a path of any kind. Did Robin indeed trust to that tangled undergrowth to keep his secret hid? And if so, what chance was there of its being found unless the whole ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... great care, and fills us with apprehension. The necessity of providing change for her will probably take us across the water very early in the autumn; and this again unsettles home schemes here, and withers many kinds of fern. If they knew (by "they" I mean my daughter and Miss Hogarth) that I was writing to you, they would charge me with many messages of regard. But as I am shut up in my room in a ferocious and unapproachable condition, owing to the great accumulation of letters ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens
... base of the leaf, it is bipartite; if to the base, it is bisect. Thus, too, a pod of a cruciferous plant is a siliqua, if it is four times as long as it is broad, but if it be shorter than this it is a silicula. Such terms being established, the form of the very complex leaf or frond of a fern (Hymenophyllum Wilsoni) is exactly conveyed by the following phrase: 'fronds rigid pinnate, pinnae recurved subunilateral, pinnatifid, the segments linear undivided ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... see now once again The glen And fern, the highland, and the thistle? And do you still remember when We heard the bright-eyed woodcock whistle Down by the rippling, ...
— The Dog's Book of Verse • Various
... "Under that bunch of fern," he whispered; "just the colour of the dead leaves. Do you see? ... Don't you see that big woodcock squatted flat, bill pointed straight out and resting on ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... snap of extreme cold had passed and every green thing was hurrying to be ahead of its neighbour. Bija made endless cowslip balls out of the beautiful rose-pink primulas, while Roy and Mirak, following the shepherds' boys, came back with their hands full of young rhubarb shoots and green fern croziers, which they ate like asparagus. But this sort of thing could not last long, since they were close to the caravan route from Kandahar to Kabul; and sure enough, no sooner had the snow on the uplands melted than travellers began ...
— The Adventures of Akbar • Flora Annie Steel
... which are very steep and rugged, leaving, in the interspaces, very large valleys, and gently-rising grounds about their sides. These hills, though of a rocky disposition, are, in general, covered, almost to their tops, with trees; but the lower parts, on the sides, frequently only with fern. At the bottom of the harbour, where we lay, the ground rises gently to the foot of the hills, which run across nearly in the middle of the island; but its flat border, on each side, at a very small distance from the sea, becomes quite steep. ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... thick that we could guide ourselves neither by the sun nor by the stars. We were again struck during this day by the want of arborescent ferns in that country; they diminish visibly from the sixth degree of north latitude, while the palm-trees augment prodigiously towards the equator. Fern-trees belong to a climate less hot, and a soil but little mountainous. It is only where there are mountains that these majestic plants descend towards the plains; they seem to avoid perfectly flat grounds, as those through which run the Cassiquiare, the Temi, Inirida, ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... commissariat. This was packed up in sacks, which were again enclosed in long pockets, made of hides, and called "parfleshes," the use of which is to defend the canvas of the sacking from being torn by branches of fern and underwood. The sacks we secured on strong pack-saddles, between which and the back of the horse were some thick soft cloths. All our baggage-horses were furnished with trail ropes, which were allowed to ...
— California • J. Tyrwhitt Brooks
... irritating to him. He could not bear to hear him speak with trembling voice and gleaming eyes of the grand mountains and the silent corries around Ben-Nevis, the red deer trooping over the misty steeps, and the brown hinds lying among the green plumes of fern, and the wren and the ...
— Scottish sketches • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... hearing the frogs croak from the Lagherello and the crickets sing in the hot darkness. The hut was empty: shepherd and sheep and dogs were all gone up to the higher grounds amongst the hills. There were some dry fern-plants in a corner of it. I lay on these and stared at the planets above me throbbing in the intense blue of the skies: they seemed to throb, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... undid the wattled cotes, And from the stack a thin blue wreath of smoke Curled through the air across the ripening oats, And on the hill the yellow house-dog bayed As through the crisp and rustling fern the heavy ...
— Poems • Oscar Wilde
... it, though I am not sure whether two of them may not be the same, varied somewhat by soil and position. The third grows only in high situations, and is unknown upon the plains; it has leaves very minutely subdivided, and looks like a fern, but the blossom and seed are nearly identical with the other varieties. The peculiar property of the plant is, that, though highly nutritious both for sheep and cattle when eaten upon a tolerably full stomach, it is very fatal upon an empty one. Sheep and ...
— A First Year in Canterbury Settlement • Samuel Butler
... — After some trouble in procuring coolies, we started at eleven in a shower of rain, and found ourselves gradually passing into the valley, and exchanging rocks and firs for groves of walnut; and moss and fern for the more civilized strawberry and the wild carnation. The strawberries, though small, had a delicious flavour, and we whiled away the time by gathering them as we passed. About two o'clock we reached the village of Shupayon, and here began to ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight
... bush, glistening with its luscious black berries, and began nibbling at them. A gopher, coming to his supper bush, gave a little squeak of annoyance, and Peter saw the bright eyes of the midget glaring at him from under a big fern leaf. Peter wagged his tail, for the savagery of his existence was qualified by that mellowing sense of humor which had always been a part of his master. He yipped softly, in a ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... superintending gardener—the same that cheered the last hours of Mrs. Warren. He recognizes Vivien and salutes her gravely. Seeing that she is accompanied by a gentleman in khaki he discreetly withdraws out of hearing and tidies up a tree fern. Vivien and Michael seat themselves on two green iron chairs under the fronds and in front ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... witnessed, seemed fresh and beautiful as at first. As I wished to get another shot or two, we crept slowly on, concealing ourselves as much as possible, lest any birds perched on the boughs might see us and fly away. There was little difficulty in doing so amongst the huge fern and palm-like foliage which surrounded us. In a short time we heard ahead of us a strange chattering and rustling in the trees, and moving cautiously on, we caught sight of a number of dark objects moving about ...
— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston
... have been infants characterized by their enormous size at birth. Among the older writers, Cranz describes an infant which at birth weighed 23 pounds; Fern mentions a fetus of 18 pounds; and Mittehauser speaks of a new-born child weighing 24 pounds. Von Siebold in his "Lucina" has recorded a fetus which weighed 22 1/2 pounds. It is worthy of comment that so great is the ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... thing finished in this hasty world. But ah! this other, this that never ends, Still climbing, luring fancy still to climb, As full of morals, half divined, as life, Graceful, grotesque, with ever new surprise Of hazardous caprices, sure to please, Heavy as nightmare, airy light as fern, Imagination's ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... situations the following are suitable: tradescantia, parlour ivy, moneywort, vinca smilax, climbing fern, asparagus fern, dracaena, coleus, centaurea, sword fern, and Boston fern. For indoor boxes in winter, the following may be used: abutilon, calceolaria, cyclamen, violets, primroses, petunias, geraniums, freesia, and such foliage plants as dracaena, cannas, dusty ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education
... give my namesake's philosophy the lie. However that may be, intense and new was the animal delight, to plant my hinder claws at some tree-foot deep into the black rotting vegetable-mould which steamed rich gases up wherever it was pierced, and clasp my huge arms round the stem of some palm or tree-fern; and then slowly bring my enormous weight and muscle to bear upon it, till the stem bent like a withe, and the laced bark cracked, and the fibres groaned and shrieked, and the roots sprung up out of the soil; and then, with a slow circular wrench, the whole tree was twisted bodily out of the ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... by the skill of man. These gardens are on the south side of the river Yarra. On a hill in the centre of them is built the Government House. There are seen many varieties of trees and plants all carefully labelled. The fern tree bower is very ingenious. You see here the elk or staghorn fern, which grows as a parasite on the palm or the petosperum of New Zealand. The grass is kept beautifully fresh and green, and is a favourite resort. I have no further room to continue this letter, but, in my next, hope to say something ...
— Six Letters From the Colonies • Robert Seaton
... ascent till she had on her right the moorland running south to the Lochan valley and on her left Garple chafing in its deep forested gorges. Her eyes were quick and she noted with interest a weasel creeping from a fern-clad cairn. A little way on she passed an old ewe in difficulties and assisted it to rise. "But for me, my wumman, ye'd hae been braxy ere nicht," she told it as it departed bleating. Then she realized that she had come a certain distance. ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... enemies. The New Hollanders, near the sea, subsist on fish eaten raw, or nearly so; should a whale be cast ashore, it is never abandoned until its bones are picked; their substitute for bread, and that which forms their chief subsistence, is a species of fern roasted, pounded between stones, and mixed with fish. The general beverage of the negro tribes is palm-wine. No disgust is evinced by the Bosjesman Hottentots at the most nauseous food, and having shot an animal with a poisoned arrow, their ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 381 Saturday, July 18, 1829 • Various
... It was a charming but very simple pattern the lines of sand had assumed, not unlike the fronds of a delicate fern growing out of several small ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood
... cow. She had not pastured in the meadows about Chartres with blind eyes. She knew the paths north and south and east and west through the forest and the fern; and even in the dark of the tangled underbrush she could feel out the way quite plainly. But she said to herself, "I must not make the way too easy for these wicked men. I must punish them all I can now that it is ...
— The Book of Saints and Friendly Beasts • Abbie Farwell Brown
... Gently he leaned back till his back rested on the sloping ground—he raised one knee, and left the other foot over the verge where the tip of the tallest rushes touched it. Before he had been there a minute he remembered the secret which a fern had ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... indeed, which fell in harmoniously with its peculiar charm, and indeed added to it. A lawn, not immaculate of the sweet fault of daisies, sank slowly to a babbling little tributary of the Lythe, and beyond were fern-covered slopes, and heather, and furze, and pine-woods. The rector was a sensible Englishman, who objected to have things done after the taste of his gardener instead of his own. He loved grass like a village poet, and would have no flower-beds cut in his lawn. Neither ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... at his command, and here he pleasantly passed the time ere he retired to rest. In the morning when he awoke, instead of finding himself on a couch in Fairy Hall, be found himself lying on a heap of fern on the wild ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... sweetest lesson wouldst thou learn, Come thou with me to Love's enchanted bower: High overhead the trellised roses burn; Beneath thy feet behold the feathery fern, A leaf ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... a wind from out the darkness, With scent of flower and fern and herb and tree, And in its breath there came a sound of thunder, Storm-laden ...
— Eyes of Youth - A Book of Verse by Padraic Colum, Shane Leslie, A.O. • Various
... faces, and their mimic shores steal down in quiet evenings to bathe themselves in the transparent waters—far into the depths of the great forest speeds the glad message of returning glory, and graceful fern, and soft velvet moss, and white wax-like lily peep forth to cover rock and fallen tree and wreck of last year's autumn in one great sea of foliage. There are many landscapes which can never be painted, photographed, or described, but which ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... are stated to live on grubs, insects, ants and their eggs, kangaroos, when they can catch them, fern roots, various kinds of berries, and honey; caterpillars and worms also form part ...
— Peter Parley's Tales About America and Australia • Samuel Griswold Goodrich
... the castle court, His charger trampling many a prickly star Of sprouted thistle on the broken stones. He look'd and saw that all was ruinous. Here stood a shatter'd archway plumed with fern; And here had fall'n a great part of a tower, Whole, like a crag that tumbles from the cliff, And like a crag was gay with wilding flowers: And high above a piece of turret stair, Worn by the feet that now were silent, wound Bare to the sun, and monstrous ivy-stems Claspt the gray walls with ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester
... just before you saw me, when you were wading through the wet fern? I think I was only thinking how wet the ferns must have been. How little I thought then who the man was, with the dog! You were only 'the ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... with its rolling drifts is safer hunting than this forest world. What glory, doomed prisoners between the woods and the sea within the shadow of the great forests and a great fear? The smell of wildwood things, of flower banks, of fern mold, came dank and unwholesome to these men. Their {3} nostrils were for the whiff of the sea; and every sunset tipped the waves with fire where they longed to sail. And the shadow of the fear fell on Gudrid. ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... come from haunts of coot and hern, I make a sudden sally, And sparkle out among the fern, To bicker down ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... creation speaks to us of the deeper rest of the soul in God. On the shadowed path that leads up to the house of prayer, with mind and senses quickened to perceive the loveliness and significance of the smallest object, the fern on the bank and the lichen on the wall, we feel indeed that heaven is not so much a yonder, towards which we are to move, as a here and a now, which we ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... of slaves had followed this road. For a mile Dick Sand and his companions struck against these scattered bones at each step, putting to flight enormous fern-owls. Those owls rose at their approach, with a heavy flight, and ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... must have showered their fervid sunshine on him, as he journeyed through plains of rice, where all the broad reaches whitening to harvest filled him with intense and bitterest loneliness. What region of spice did not recall the noons when they two had trampled the sweet-fern on wide, high New England pastures, and breathed its intoxicating fragrance? and what forest of the tropics, what palms, what blooms, what gorgeous affluence of color and of growth, equalled the wood on the lake-shores, with its stately hemlocks, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... he jumped into the ditch regardless of the stinging-nettles, pushed his way up through the briars, tearing his sleeve, forced his way across the mound, and went on his hands and knees through the young green fern on the other side (just as Pan would have done) under the thick thorn bushes, and so out into the next field. It was the very field where he and Pan had wandered before, only another part of it. There was his arrow ever so far off, ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies
... of the village, and paused among the trees and fern on the summit of the hill above, to take breath, and to look down at the beautiful sea. Suddenly the captain gave his leg a resounding slap, and cried, "Never knew such a right thing in all my ...
— A Message from the Sea • Charles Dickens
... leaving White Horse the track skirts the eastern shores of Lakes Bennett and Lindemann, through wild but picturesque moorland, carpeted with wild flowers,[87] and strewn with grey rocks and boulders. A species of pink heather grows freely here, the scent of which and the presence of bubbling fern-fringed brooks, and crisp bracing air, recalled many a pleasant morning after grouse in Bonnie Scotland. A raw-boned Aberdonian on the train remarks on the resemblance of the landscape to that of his own country and ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... painting never. Colour is life.—We are now at the end of this magnificent avenue, and at the top of a steep eminence commanding a wide view over four counties—a landscape of snow. A deep lane leads abruptly down the hill; a mere narrow cart-track, sinking between high banks clothed with fern and furze and low broom, crowned with luxuriant hedgerows, and famous for their summer smell of thyme. How lovely these banks are now—the tall weeds and the gorse fixed and stiffened in the hoar-frost, which fringes round the bright prickly holly, ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... prone upon a cloak of woven camel-hair amid luxuriating fern and samphire, on the very edge of the shelf of cliff to which he had climbed. On either side of him squatted a negro from the Sus both naked of all save white loin-cloths, their muscular bodies glistening like ebony in the dazzling sunshine of ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... side the bracken and the lady-fern grew thick and high, almost overlapping the broad moss-grown path, across which the young rabbits popped away in their new brown coats, showing their little white linings in their lazy haste. A dog-rose had hung out a whole constellation of ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... must be the internal force and the external stimulus. Neither is enough by itself. A rose will not flower in the dark, and a fern ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... overlooking a hill stream which was pouring noisily down in a flood made turgid by the rain, and the "rough bit of bog and boulder" was a sort of natural bridge across the torrent, formed by heaps of earth and rock, out of which masses of wet fern and plumy meadow-sweet sprang in tall tufts and garlands, which though beautiful to the eyes in day-time, were apt to entangle the feet in walking, especially when there was only the uncertain glimmer of ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... with dew Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through, Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern, And the beadbonny ash that sits over ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins
... a patch of fern, I saw what I had never dreamed of, what sent the blood from my heart in a cold shudder of fear: a girl, pale and dishevelled, was trying to part some vines. A twig crackled and she looked round, showing a face drawn with weariness and ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... look at that which had taken the doctor's attention, for he was gazing into a side nook that suggested, from a dry heap of fern-like growth and grass, that ...
— Dead Man's Land - Being the Voyage to Zimbambangwe of certain and uncertain • George Manville Fenn
... thicker, the light pierced down in golden arrows only, the silence was almost oppressive. Caroline stepped suddenly out of the tiny path, pushed aside a clump of fern, buried her arm up to the elbow in a hollow stump and produced a large crumbling ...
— While Caroline Was Growing • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... the brooks, following the course of the stream, two stone walls a foot or two high are built. These walls converge at the lower end and form a channel, in which is placed horizontally a mat of stalks of the eagle fern (Pteris aquilina). When the fish attempt to cross this mat, through which the water passes freely, they are intercepted. Often the fish caught in this way are only an inch long, but none is too small ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... rippling breeze usually wimples and dimples its laughing surface, but in calmer moods it reflects, as in a polished mirror, the lofty, overhanging mountains, with every stately pine, bounding rivulet; blossoming shrub, waving fern, and—high above all, on the right—the clinging, thread-like line of the snow-sheds of the Central Pacific. When the railroad was being constructed, three thousand people dwelt on its shores; the surrounding forests resounded with the music of axes and saws, and the terrific blasts ...
— History of the Donner Party • C.F. McGlashan
... known to the two cousins by name, and owned as familiar friends. On the other side, between two hills, each surmounted by its own rocky crest, lay nestled in woods the grey Church tower and cottages of the village of Fern Torr; and far away stretched the rich landscape of field, wood, and pasture, ending at length in the blue line of horizon, where sky and ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... shoes with fern-seed, This foolish little Nell, And in the summer sunshine Went dancing down the dell. For whoso treads on fern-seed,— So fairy stories tell,— Becomes invisible at once, So potent is its spell. A frog mused by the brook-side: "Can you see me!" she cried; ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, September 1878, No. 11 • Various
... Talks, by C. W. Naylor, has been out of print many years. The cloth-bound book, from which this reprint edition was produced, is the property of Sister Fern Stubblefield of Earlsboro, Okla. Originally owned by the late Nellie Poulos, the book was given in 1978 to Sister Stubblefield by T. Gus Poulos, the ...
— Heart Talks • Charles Wesley Naylor
... odor,—an odor made up of smells of strange saps, queer spicy scents of mould, exhalations of aromatic decay. Moreover, the views were glimpses of Paradise; and it was a joy to watch the torrents roaring down their gorges under shadows of tree-fern and bamboo. ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... who will see strange things," she said; and the prophecy was amply fulfilled. For as they went along the broad path, and came better into view of the splendid undulation of woodland and pasture and fern, when on the one hand they saw the Thames far below them flowing through the green and spacious valley, and on the other hand caught some dusky glimpse of the far white houses of London, it seemed to her that she had got into ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... Act II of the play. It is a night scene in a wood near Athens; mossy banks and green trees; clouds and twinkling stars in the heavens; forms of fairies sitting about like humming birds, or resting in nodding fern leaves. They sing in quick, short rhymes, suiting the ...
— Shakespeare's Christmas Gift to Queen Bess • Anna Benneson McMahan
... and faces all over with ashes, and wear cords round their necks for a hundred days in token that they are not eating good food.[581] They imagine that as soon as the soul quits the body at death, it mounts into a tree where there is a bird's nest fern, and sitting there among the fronds it laughs and mocks at the people who are crying and making great lamentations over his deserted tabernacle. "There he sits, wondering at them and ridiculing them. 'What are they crying for?' ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... and farmers of the county of Wilts, to take into consideration the propriety of presenting Petitions to both Houses of Parliament, on behalf of the proprietors and occupiers of land. Thomas Grove, Esq. of Fern, one of the gentlemen who called the meeting, having taken the chair, Mr. Benett addressed them at a very considerable length in favour of a petition that he submitted for their adoption, expressive of the serious injury already sustained by the farmer, and the probable ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 3 • Henry Hunt
... of the eastern sky sprang out ahead, where stunted spruces stood out against the sunshine and the intense heat of midday fell upon a bare table-land of rock and moss and fern. ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert W. Chambers
... and green as they slept. The silence was absolute, the forest's unconscious tribute to the Wonder Worker. Even the trout brook, running black as night among its white-capped boulders and delicate arches of frost and fern work, between massive banks of feathery white and green, had stopped its idle chatter and tinkled a low bell under the ice, as if only the Angelus could express the wonder of ...
— Secret of the Woods • William J. Long
... whole surface, and when that is dry, three coats of copal varnish, allowing each to dry before the next is put on. The effect is very handsome. And, even without painting the objects black, this same style of leaf and fern-work can be applied to earthen vases, wooden boxes, trays and saucers, for card-receivers. For these, you may get some good hints from the illustrations on subsequent pages. The same illustrations will apply to the "novelties in ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - No 1, Nov 1877 • Various
... haughty heads above an impenetrable growth which, the guides tell us, is the home of tigers, rhinoceroses, panthers, bears, wild hogs, buffaloes, deer and all sorts of beasts, and snakes as big around as a barrel. Fern trees are lovely, and are found here in their greatest glory, but nevertheless we have foliage at home, and they are no more beautiful than our elms, oaks, and other trees that ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... would have rejoiced over the trip, for it was carrying them back to the gleam of leaf-dappled streams and waving trees and deep, cool forests. It made their nostrils dilate with pleasure as they whirled past fern-filled ravines, out of which the rivulets stole with stealthy circuits under mossy rocks. They were both forest-born, and it was like getting back home out of a strange desert country to ...
— A Little Norsk; Or, Ol' Pap's Flaxen • Hamlin Garland
... as he saw the blue haze across the doorway, hiding the moss and a tiny fern that grew on the shaft ...
— Wulfric the Weapon Thane • Charles W. Whistler
... sweeping vista, and in the midst of an open space covered with the greenest sward, stood a mighty broad-armed oak, beneath whose ample boughs, though as yet almost destitute of foliage, while the sod beneath them could scarcely boast a head of fern, couched a herd of deer. There lay a thicket of thorns skirting a sand-bank, burrowed by rabbits, on this hand grew a dense and Druid-like grove, into whose intricacies the slanting sunbeams pierced; on that extended a long glade, formed by a natural avenue of oaks, ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... of life. I was barely three. I can remember the majestic gum-trees surrounding us, the sun glinting on their straight white trunks, and falling on the gurgling fern-banked stream, which disappeared beneath a steep scrubby hill on our left. It was an hour past noon on a long clear summer day. We were on a distant part of the run, where my father had come to deposit salt. He had left home ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... North Hill there stood a ruined lime-kiln whose walls were full of fern and coated with mother o' thyme. A bank of brier and nettles lay before the mouth. They hid the foot of the kiln and made a snug and secluded spot. Bridetown clustered in its elms far below; then the land rose again to protect the hamlet from the ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... and the wild peony with its variegated leaves. Many other delicate blossoms which we cannot stop to describe are there too. And the ferns! All kinds may be found by the initiated, and many are close at hand. The fern lined with gold or with silver, the running ferns, the ferns of lace-like fineness, the ferns as soft as velvet, all growing in the greatest profusion. And each day of the week a ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn
... a large park, studded with stately trees; here and there an avenue of Spanish chestnuts or a grove of oaks; sometimes a gorsy dell, and sometimes a so great spread of antlered fern, taller than the ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... home. William just hates me in green, but I would have them. They make one think of fern-leaves and the deep woods, don't they?" said she, standing before the mirror with childish admiration of her ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... incessantly. In another part was a little patch of mossy meadow, and again there were decaying logs out of which sprang various ferns in wild luxuriance, as one has seen them in deeply-shaded, low-lying woods. The maiden-hair fern was here seen ranging from leaves as large as one's thumb-nail to a species with leaves the size of pin-heads. There was a charming harmony in the whole arrangement; nothing seemed abrupt, each effect blended gracefully with those surrounding ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... a violent onslaught upon the tobacconists who sold cigarettes to minors, and this again was applauded by those who in their youth had avoided tobacco—because it was too expensive—and smoked sweet-fern and cornsilk behind the barn. He nagged the School Board until there went forth an edict prohibiting certain styles of dress; and the mothers of several unattractive maidens wrote letters to him, and called him a Christian. ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... evening here not long ago, and made me laugh well. She took me on Friday to see Fanny Fern, who hugged and kissed me, and whom it was rather pleasant to see after nearly, if not quite, thirty years' separation. She says nobody but a Payson could have written Stepping Heavenward, which is absurd. March 17th.—I ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... ones. Not that there is want of quantity even in the lower ranges, but it is a quantity of inferior things, and therefore more easily represented or suggested. On a Highland hill side are multitudinous clusters of fern and heather; on an Alpine one, multitudinous groves of chestnut and pine. The number of the things may be the same, but the sense of infinity is in the latter case far greater, because the number is of nobler things. ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... to three principal groups, based upon the form of the foliage: (1) Plain varieties, in which the leaves are nearly as they are in nature; (2) moss-curled varieties in which they are curiously and pleasingly contorted; and (3) fern leaved, in which the foliage is not curled, but ...
— Culinary Herbs: Their Cultivation Harvesting Curing and Uses • M. G. Kains
... many centuries ago, when the earth was even more beautiful than it is now, there grew in one of the many valleys a dainty little fern leaf. All around the tiny plant were many others, but none of them so graceful and delicate as this one I tell you of. Every day the cheery breezes sought out their playmate, and the merry sunbeams darted in and out, playing hide-and-seek among reeds and rushes; ...
— De La Salle Fifth Reader • Brothers of the Christian Schools
... white wrapper and blue net, sitting in a large chair, looking about her with the languid interest of an invalid in a new place. Her eyes brightened as they fell upon a glass of rosy laurel and delicate maidenhair fern that stood among the toast and eggs, strawberries and cream, ...
— A Garland for Girls • Louisa May Alcott
... are capable of any thing, they are in vines, which are in rows, four, five, or six feet apart, and sometimes more. Near Langon is Sauterne, where the best white wines of Bordeaux are made. The waste lands are in fern, furze, shrubbery, and dwarf trees. The farmers live on their farms. At Agen, Castres, Bordeaux, strawberries and pease are now brought to table; so that the country on the canal of Languedoc seems to have later seasons than that east and west of it. What can be the cause? To the ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... about him as he strolled through the darkening column, set thick with great bushes of sombre juniper among the yellowing fern, which stretched away on the left-hand side of the road leading to the Hall. He stood and watched the masses of restless discordant cloud which the sunset had left behind it, thinking the while of Mr. Grey, of his assertions and ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... dreamt of: clear sharp purple hills rose up against it. There was a clear rippling little fountain, bursting out of a rock, carved with old, old carvings, broken now and defaced, but shadowed over by lovely maidenhair fern and trailing bindweed; and in a niche above a little roof, sheltering a figure of the Blessed Virgin. Some way off stood a long low house propped up against the rich yellow stone walls and pillars of another old, old building, and with ...
— Little Lucy's Wonderful Globe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... feet from the level of the sea. Time and springs and summers have silenced and soothed away the startling crags and chasms, the threatening gestures of the earth at infinity, and clothed them over with a mantle of quietness and green fern and heather and dreams. When the Fifth Race was younger, its language was Alpine: in Gothic, in Sanskrit, in Latin, you can see the crags and chasms. French, Spanish and Italian are Pyrenean, much worn down. English is the Vosges. Chinese is hardly even the Welsh mountains. ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... the quiet, pretty, green meadow lane. She often walked there, and on this eventful morning Hugh saw her sitting in the midst of the fern leaves. He was by her side in a minute, and his dark, handsome face lighted up ...
— Dora Thorne • Charlotte M. Braeme
... by her house. Yes, there she was at the window, attending to her flowers and carefully shielding a much-prized little maidenhair fern with a bell glass from the rays of the sun, which beamed as though Phoebus had mistaken the season and thought it ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... sweet with birch and fern A sweeter memory blow; And there in spring the veeries sing The song ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... the locust, but stared hard at the spot where the fish had been laid down upon some fern leaves; but though the latter were still glistening with slime, ...
— First in the Field - A Story of New South Wales • George Manville Fenn
... species of heath-berries, cranberries, bilberries, &c., furnishing the poor with a source of profit, and the rich of luxury. What a pleasure it is to throw ourselves down beneath the verdant screen of the beautiful fern, or the shade of a venerable oak, in such a scene, and listen to the summer sounds of bees, grasshoppers, and ten thousand other insects, mingled with the more remote and solitary cries of the pewit and the curlew! Then, to think of the coach-horse, urged on his sultry ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 262, July 7, 1827 • Various
... pines that had been dropping their polished spills for centuries, perhaps silently adding, year by year, another layer of aromatic springiness to poor Tom's bed. Flinging his tired body on this grateful couch, burying his head in the crushed sweet fern of his pillow with one deep-drawn sigh of pleasure,—there, haunted by no past and harassed by no future, slept God's fool as sweetly as ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin
... the faithful years return And hearts unwounded sing again, Comes Taffy dancing through the fern To lead the ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... and watched the precision and power of the Jacks as they clove, swung, and lopped. From the cliff he looked down at the long bunk-house, saw the blue smoke rising straight, curled at the top like the uncoiling frond of a new fern-leaf. Saw the Chinese cook, in his wadded coat of blue, disappear into the snow-covered mound that hid the provision shack, and watched the bounding pups refusing to be broken into harness by Siwash George. ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... and are collecting and buying ferns, with Ward's cases wherein to keep them (for which you have to pay), and wrangling over unpronounceable names of species (which seem to he different in each new Fern-book that they buy), till the Pteridomania seems to you somewhat of a bore: and yet you cannot deny that they find an enjoyment in it, and are more active, more cheerful, more self-forgetful over it, than ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... indigenous flora.... Among the minor valleys Birmal perhaps takes precedence by right of its natural beauty. Here are stretches of park-like scenery where grass-covered slopes are dotted with clumps of deodar and pine and intersected with rivulets hidden in banks of fern; soft green glades open out to view from every turn in the folds of the hills, and above them the silent watch towers of Pirghal and Shuidar ... look down from their snow-clad heights across the Afghan uplands to the hills beyond Ghazni." ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... lightest graces; she whose eye could embrace such vast proportions, had stooped to study the glowing illuminations painted upon the wings of the fragile butterfly. She had traced the symmetrical and marvellous network which the fern extends as a canopy over the wood strawberry; she had listened to the murmuring of streams through the long reeds and stems of the water-grass, where the hissing of the "amorous viper" may be heard; she had followed the wild leaps of the Will-with-a-wisp as it bounds over ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... from the wallowing hippopotami by the crest of the knoll. The human squatting-place was a trampled area among the dead brown fronds of Royal Fern, through which the crosiers of this year's growth were unrolling to the light and warmth. The fire was a smouldering heap of char, light grey and black, replenished by the old women from time to time with brown leaves. Most of the men were asleep—they slept ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... stranger's admiration of the views, the exquisite framings of the summer sea and sky made by tree, rock, and rising ground, and the walks so well laid out on the little headland, now on smooth turf, now bordering slopes wild with fern and mountain ash, now amid luxuriant exotic shrubs that attested the ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... alone for the night in a little garret—a mere fowl-house—upstairs, formed by the roof and gable walls, and hung with strings of apples and chestnuts. It was a poor sleeping-place—rough, chilly, and unclean. I ascended to it by a ladder; my cloak and a little fern formed my only bed. But I was glad to accept it, for it enabled me to be alone and to think ...
— Under the Red Robe • Stanley Weyman
... knoll o'erlooks a dale Where Earn meanders down the vale; A knoll enwreathed in oak and fern, The sweetest nook in all Strathearn. The morn there breaks with earliest ray, Here latest shines the lingering day, There summer reigns supremely fair, And winter ev'n is lovely there. Its eastern prospect looks entire Along the glades of Ochtertyre; Its south, a mountain forest shade ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... der Kaftern, Wo die Hottentotten trachten Holie Hottentottentitel Zu erwerben in den Schlachten, Wo die Hottentottentaktik Lasst ertonen fern und nah Auf dem Hottentottentamtam Hottentottentattratah; Wo die Hottentottentrotteln, Eh' sie stampfen stark und kuhn. Hottentottentatowirung An sioh selber erst vollzieh'n, Wo die Hottentotten tuten Auf dem ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... crutch! is it not autumn, when the fern is red, the water-flag yellow? Have I not hated that which ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... gentleman, now no more. He was actively employed at that place, and wrote to me frequently, describing the family, to which he was much attached, the whimsicalities of his landlord—a thorough old Scotian, who amused himself by waking the echoes of the wilderness with the bagpipes,—the noble fern trees and the fine black cockatoos. He also continued his practice in surgery, but I believe he made no charge, as, not being duly licensed, he considered he had no right to do so. He returned to Ballaarat in ...
— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills
... evidently saw nothing and whipped up unmercifully, also unsuccessfully, for the spirit stood directly in the path, and the amiable beast would not budge a foot. A lively skirmish followed, which ended in the Eastern gentleman being upset into a sweet-fern bush, while the better bred animal abased itself ...
— Eight Cousins • Louisa M. Alcott
... has nothing in it of energy nor vitality, neither its repose of stability. But having once seen a great rock come down a mountain side, we have a noble sensation of its rest, now bedded immovably among the under fern, because the power and fearfulness of its motion were great, and its stability and negation of motion are now great in proportion. Hence the imagination, which delights in nothing more than the enhancing ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... indiscriminate onslaught upon customs of dress. Why did God put spots on the pansy, or etch the fern leaf? And what are china-asters good for if style and color are of ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... in search of them; but, in Gowbarrow Park, the lover of Nature might linger for hours. Here is a powerful Brook, which dashes among rocks through a deep glen, hung on every side with a rich and happy intermixture of native wood; here are beds of luxuriant fern, aged hawthorns, and hollies decked with honeysuckles; and fallow-deer glancing and bounding over the lawns and through the thickets. These are the attractions of the retired views, or constitute a foreground for ever-varying pictures of the majestic Lake, forced to take a winding course ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... "bee-bonneted," but bird-bonneted, I go. Yes, this day shall be given to the king, as our country-folk say, when they go a-pleasuring. I am off with the little wool-gatherers, to see what thorn and brier and fern-stalk and willow-catkin ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... verbenas, mesembryanthemums. For erect-growing plants: geraniums, heliotropes, phlox. If the position is a shaded one, the drooping plants might be of the following: tradescantia, Kenilworth ivy, senecio(A) or parlor ivy, sedums, moneywort,(A) vinca, smilax,(A) lygodium(A) or climbing fern. Erect-growing plants would be dracenas, palms, ferns, coleus, ...
— Manual of Gardening (Second Edition) • L. H. Bailey
... lichens take possession of the trees and cover them with a unique decoration. The licorice fern often gains a foothold on the trees thus decorated, and grows luxuriantly, embedded in the deep growth ...
— The Mountain that was 'God' • John H. Williams
... all along the line. Our potatoes are buried in a jungle of autumn burdocks. Our radishes stand seven feet high, uneatable. Our tomatoes, when last seen, were greener than they were at the beginning of August, and getting greener every week. Our celery looked as delicate as a maidenhair fern. Our Indian corn was nine feet high with a tall feathery spike on top of that, but no sign of anything eatable about it ...
— Frenzied Fiction • Stephen Leacock
... some moments. The deer, in lofty pity for Vick, have stopped to allow her to get nearer to them. With their fine noses in the air, and their proud necks compassionately turned toward her, they are waiting, while she pushes, panting and shrieking, through the stout fern-stems; then, leap cruelly away ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... Somerset, and Wilts.] Stretch'd the BLACK MOUNTAIN'S dreary chain! When eastward turn'd the straining eye, Great MALVERN met the cloudless sky: Southward arose th'embattled shores, Where Ocean in his fury roars, And rolls abrupt his fearful tides, Far still from MENDIP'S fern-clad sides; From whose vast range of mingling blue, The weary, wand'ring sight withdrew, O'er fair GLAMORGAN'S woods and downs, O'er glitt'ring streams, and farms, and towns, Back to the TABLE ROCK, that lours O'er old ...
— The Banks of Wye • Robert Bloomfield
... of Gondo, I find "Viola (saxatilis?) name yet wanted;—in the most delicate studding of its round leaves, like a small fern more than violet, and bright sparkle of small flowers in the dark dripping hollows. Assuredly delights in shade ...
— Proserpina, Volume 2 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... ravine, well shaded by mahogany-trees, the ground covered with the luxuriant vegetation of that tropical region, a little stream bubbling and leaping and dashing down one of the high rocks that flanked the hollow, and rippling away through the tall fern towards the rear of the spot where we had halted, at the distance of a hundred yards from which the ground was ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... preparing ferns for skeleton-leaf bouquets it is not necessary to place them in the macerating bowl before bleaching, as the texture of the fern is so delicate as to be ruined by maceration. Before bleaching, the fern should be pressed, and as it becomes dry and brittle, more care is required in the bleaching process than for skeleton leaves. Hang ...
— Harper's Young People, July 13, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... Spearmint, Mustard. These, excepting the two last, are not the natural product of the Land, but they are transplanted hither: By which I perceive all other European Plants would grow there: They have also Fern, Indian Corn. Several sorts of Beans as good as these in England: right Cucumhers, Calabasses, and several sorts of Pumkins, &c. The Dutch on that Island in their Gardens have Lettice, Rosemary, Sage, and all other Herbs and Sallettings that we ...
— An Historical Relation Of The Island Ceylon In The East Indies • Robert Knox
... oaks, intersected with those smooth and sunny glades, that seem as if they must be cut for dames and knights to saunter on. Then again the undulating ground spread on all sides, far as the eye could range, covered with copse and fern of immense growth. Anon you found yourself in a turfy wilderness, girt in apparently by dark woods. And when you had wound your way a little through this gloomy belt, the landscape still strictly sylvan, would beautifully expand with every combination ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... to look into the depth while lying upon a slab of stone that stretches some distance beyond the side of the pit! Bushes with twisted and fantastic arms, growing, they or their ancestors, from time immemorial in the clefts of the rock, reach towards the light, and the elfish hart's-tongue fern, itself half in darkness, points down with frond that never moves in that eternal stillness which all the winds of heaven pass over, to a thicker darkness whence comes the everlasting wail and groan ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... the billowy prairies of America, from the level of the sea-shore to the lofty valleys and table-lands of the Andes and the Himalayas, it is successfully cultivated. The emigrant clears the primaeval forest of Canada, or the fern-brakes of New Zealand, and there the corn seed sown will spring up as luxuriantly as on the old loved fields of home." [1] All this should teach us to see in the harvest the result, not of our skill and cleverness, but of the good God's lovingkindness. Ask yourselves now, my brothers, whether ...
— The Life of Duty, v. 2 - A year's plain sermons on the Gospels or Epistles • H. J. Wilmot-Buxton
... and "Fanny Fern" both delighted the public with individual styles of writing, vastly successful when ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... and gaining sweet woodland scenes of light and shade at every step, as the eye dived into the deep green stillness between the large old trunks, carefully freed from underwood, and with their feet carpeted with moss, and flowers, and fern. It was called the deer's track, from the fact that along it, morning and evening, all the bucks and does which had herded on that side of the park might be seen walking stately down to or from a bright, clear-running trout-stream, that wandered along about a quarter of a mile farther ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... of fancy turn Where the tumbled pippins burn Like embers in the orchard's lap of tangled grass and fern,— There let the old path wind In and out and on behind The cider-press that chuckles as ...
— Riley Farm-Rhymes • James Whitcomb Riley
... that had dined in the valley making their way up the dry bed of a stream, through a gorge which cleft a line of precipitous hills. On either hand the bank rose steeply, giving no footing for man or beast. The road was a difficult one; for here a tall, fern-crowned rock left but a narrow passage between itself and the shaggy hillside, and there smooth and slippery ledges, mounting one above the other, spanned the way. In places, too, the drought had left pools of dark, still water, difficult to avoid, and not infrequently the entire party must ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... the crest of the nearest hill between her and the City. The wind being from her, she did not even hear the hoof-beats until the horse had turned from the glare of the sun into the shadow of the fern-bordered lane. The first she knew of it, she glanced over her shoulder and saw the red-cloaked figure riding toward her along the ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... regretfully among the fern-decked rocks before quite finishing the ascent to the actual outside world, the mercury lost little ...
— Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills • Luella Agnes Owen
... foot of this path, concealed amongst the bushes, crouched two sentries. At another point also, where, from the loftiest part of the platform, a view was obtained over the tree-tops up the defile between the mountains, other two watchers were stationed, stretched at full length amongst the fern, and peering out through laurel bushes, with whose dark foliage their bronzed physiognomies were confounded beyond ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... to listen To the harp of Wainamoinen. Came the trout with graceful motions, Water-dogs with awkward movements, From the water-cliffs the salmon, From the sea-caves came the whiting, From the deeper caves the bill-fish; Came the pike from beds of sea-fern, Little fish with eyes of scarlet, Leaning on the reeds and rushes, With their heads above the surface; Came to hear the harp of joyance, Hear the songs of ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... of secondary capsules being added to the normal central capsule. A field of such poppies was grown, and M. Goeppert, with seed from this field, obtained still this monstrous form in great quantity. Deformities of ferns are sometimes sought after by fern-growers. They are now always obtained by taking spores from the abnormal parts of the monstrous fern; from which spores ferns presenting the same peculiarities invariably grow.... The most remarkable case is that observed by Dr. Godron, of ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... the sentry was heard, and at that moment, the glare of a lantern fell upon the trees, bordering a field opposite the window. Beyond that field the ground was broken and uneven, covered with tall bushes, fern, and masses of rock, and sloping upwards towards the neighbouring hills. The light drew nearer; the sentry challenged. It was the relief. Their heads in the embrasure of the window, Herrera and the gipsy could hear every word that passed. The man going off sentry gave over his instructions ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... the primeval trees. And surely would have had I not seen close to me a vast and smoothly slanting ledge of rock which the stars shining on made silvery, and on which no tree could grow, scarce even a tuft of fern, so like a floor it lay in a wide oval amid ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... the 'Denes,' which is no more, they tell me, than a hollow place, even as the word 'den' is," says John Ridd. "It is a pretty place," he adds, "though nothing to frighten any body, unless he hath lived in a gallipot." The valley is well protected from the wind, and "there is shelter and dry fern-bedding and folk to be seen in the distance from a bank whereon the sun shines." Here John Ridd came to consult the wise woman toward the end of March, while the weather was still cold and piercing. In ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... not through dry-shod? For wilding brooch shall wet your breast The rain-fresh goldenrod. Oh, never this whelming east wind swells But it seems like the sea's return To the ancient lands where it left the shells Before the age of the fern; And it seems like the time when after doubt Our love came back amain. Oh, come forth into the storm and rout And be my ...
— A Boy's Will • Robert Frost
... ourselves at the entrance of an immense cavern formed in the lava. It was some hundred feet square, and from fifteen to twenty high. When lighted up by the torches, it had a very wild and picturesque appearance. The horses were tethered in one part, while we all went out and collected grass and fern leaves for our beds, and a good supply of fuel for our fire. Having cooked our supper, we sat round the fire, while one of the natives, who spoke English very well, told us some of the wonderful tales about Pele, the goddess of ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... in all the constraint of a standing posture, he was held in the flexure of the rock like some of its fossils,—as unsuspected as a ganoid of the days of eld that had once been imprisoned thus in the sediment of seas that had long ebbed hence,—or the fern vestiges in a later formation finding a witness in the imprint in the stone of the symmetry of its fronds. He listened to the hue and cry for him; then to the sudden tramp of hoofs as a pursuing party ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... delightful talk, We rested from our walk. Beyond the shadow, large and staid, Cows chewed with drowsy eye Their cud complacently: Elegant deer walked o'er the glade, Or stood with wide bright eyes Gazing a short surprise; And up the fern slope nimble ...
— My Beautiful Lady. Nelly Dale • Thomas Woolner
... except that I was quite alone, and had come from a long way over the mountains. In the course of time they grew tired, and I very sleepy. I made signs as though I would sleep on the floor in my blankets, but they gave me one of their bunks with plenty of dried fern and grass, on to which I had no sooner laid myself than I fell fast asleep; nor did I awake till well into the following day, when I found myself in the hut with two men keeping guard over me and an old woman cooking. ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... Christmas," cried everyone in Spanish or Visayan, and "Merry Christmas" we responded, though June skies bending down toward tropical palms and soft winds just rustling the tops of tall bamboos, so that they cast flickering fern-like shadows over thatched nipa roofs, but ill suggested Christmas to an ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel |
