"Leafless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sense of relief that he entered Hyde Park, for here there were fewer people. And as he walked on, the day brightened. A warmer light began to suffuse the pale mist lying over the black-green masses of rhododendrons, the leafless trees, the damp grassplots, the empty chairs; and as he was regarding a group of people on horseback who, almost at the summit of the red hill, seemed about to disappear into the mist, behold! a sudden break in the sky; a silvery gleam shot athwart from the south, so that these distant figures ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... hill behind it are rough with ragged pine-woods, and, below, the banks shelve to the river with a broken scattering of deciduous trees, that leave on the eye the chill impression of leafless branches tangled against a background ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... sky had darkened strangely, but pale streaks of light, coming from one knew not where, filtered through the trees. No breath was stirring; the wheels and horses' hoofs made no sound on the deep fern mould. All around, the burnt tree-trunks, leafless and jagged, rose like withered giants, the passages between them were black, the sky black, and black the silence. No one spoke, and literally the only sound was Pippin's breathing. What was it that was so ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... receptacle has a shallow depression at the summit. The green berry-like fruit is formed of from fifteen to twenty tolerably long stalked separate carpels which inclose three to eight seeds arranged in two rows. The umbel-like peduncles are situated in the axils of the leaves or spring from the nodes of leafless branches. The flesh of the fruit is sweetish and aromatic. The flowers possess a most exquisite perfume, frequently compared with hyacinth, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 288 - July 9, 1881 • Various
... with its large, new-made graves; the sparse, leafless trees that swayed in the wind, ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... old and weary, Trembling in the wintry air; And my life be dark and dreary— Still I feel that thou art near; Stripped of all my blossoms golden, 'Reft of stalwart forest pride— Sere and sallow, leafless, olden; Yet remain'st thou by my side. Time wings on: my strength is fleeing, And my leafy beauties too; Life-long cling'st thou round ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... the bare and leafless oak The ring-doves' wooings will provoke A colder blood than you possess To play with ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... out-buildings in quest of food. I remember, one morning in early spring, hearing old Cuff, the farm-dog, barking vociferously before it was yet light. When we got up we discovered him at the foot of an ash-tree, which stood about thirty rods from the house, looking up at some gray object in the leafless branches, and by his manners and his voice evincing great impatience that we were so tardy in coming to his assistance. Arrived on the spot, we saw in the tree a coon of unusual size. One bold climber proposed to go up and shake it down. This was what old Cuff wanted, and he ...
— Squirrels and Other Fur-Bearers • John Burroughs
... blinding snowstorm which had followed him for the past six hours had at last hopelessly blocked the line. There was no prospect beyond the interminable snowy level, the whirling flakes, and the monotonous palisades of leafless trees seen through it to the distant banks of the Missouri. It was a prospect that the mountain-bred Falloner was beginning to loathe, and although it was scarcely six weeks since he left California, he was already looking back regretfully to the deep slopes and ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... that R. R. M., if nobody else, should likewise leave a record on the leads. There was an R. M. of 1820, that made it impossible to gainsay him. The view was not grand in itself, but there was a considerable charm in looking down on the rooks in their leafless trees, cawing over their old nests, and in seeing the roofs of the town; far away, too, the gray Welsh hills, and between, the country lying like a map, with rivers traced in light instead of black. Leonard stood still, his face turned towards the greenest of the meadows, and the river where ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Even the garden looked melancholy in this wan light, Clarissa thought. She made the circuit of the small domain, walked up and down the path by the mill-stream two or three times, and then went into the leafless orchard, where the gnarled old trees cast their misshapen shadows on the close-cropped grass. A week-old moon had just risen, pale in the lessening twilight. The landscape had a cold shadowy beauty of its own; but to-night everything seemed ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... intoxicating, makes me despair, for I cannot make you see what I am seeing! Amidst all this wealth of nature and in this perennial summer heat I quite fail to realize that it is January, and that with you the withered plants are shriveling in the frost-bound earth, and that leafless twigs and the needles of half-starved pines are shivering under the stars in the aurora-lighted ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... which divided it from the straggling street; beyond that, a mass of slate roofs. But a certain glory was on the slate roofs and all the garden that was not in shadow. For away over Wytham, where the blue vapor floated in the folds of the hills, blending imperceptibly with the deep brown of the leafless woods, sunset had lifted a wide curtain of cloud and showed between the gloom of heaven and earth, a long ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... it only showed the heap of wood ash and twisted sheets of galvanized iron—which was all that remained of Marmot's store—and streaks of black running out into the paddock beyond and along the fences, with now and again a tree either leafless and charred, or with the leaves brown and scorched, showing where the fire had for a moment obtained a footing and striven to gain a hold, from whence it could spread in every direction, to reap, with its sickles of flame, the rich harvest in a wild, unrestrained orgy and blast, not ...
— Colonial Born - A tale of the Queensland bush • G. Firth Scott
... melancholy phenomenon arrested our attention. Thousands and thousands of trees covered the valley, each of them about thirty feet high; but every tree was dead, and extended its leafless boughs to another—a forest of desolation, as if nature had at some particular moment ceased to vegetate! There was no underwood or grass. On the lowest of the dead boughs, the gannets, and other sea birds, ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... Redhead!" you exclaim exultantly, when a loud tattoo beats on your city roof in spring. And "There's the Redhead!" you cry with delight, as a soft kikarik comes from a leafless oak you are passing in winter; and the city street, so dull and uninteresting before, is ...
— Ohio Arbor Day 1913: Arbor and Bird Day Manual - Issued for the Benefit of the Schools of our State • Various
... reaches even to the end of the tomb." And to love in that way, and then go down the hill of life together, and as you go down hear, perhaps, the laughter of grandchildren—the birds of joy and love sing once more in the leafless branches of age. I believe in the fireside. I believe in the democracy of home. I believe in the republicanism of the family. I believe in liberty and ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... van of our Birds of Prey—and there she sits in her usual carriage when in a state of rest. Her hunger and her thirst have been appeased—her wings are folded up in a dignified tranquillity—her talons, grasping a leafless branch, are almost hidden by the feathers of her breast—her sleepless eye has lost something of its ferocity—and the Royal Bird is almost serene in her solitary state in the cliff. The gorcock unalarmed crows among the moors and ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... trunk of a tree with perhaps a leafless branch extended, who can say? Or is nature playing a prank with your vision? But, surely, in the eerie moonlight there seems to appear the figure of a man with arm extended, book in hand, waiting to receive the seven phantom penitents moving ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... Along the dripping leafless woods, The stirrup touching either shoe, She rode astride as troopers do; With kirtle kilted to her knee, To which the mud splash'd wretchedly; And the wet dripp'd from every tree Upon her head and heavy hair, And on her eyelids broad and fair; The tears and rain ran down her face. By fits and ...
— The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems • William Morris
... a grove of leafless trees that grew on a slope where the tombs were many; and behind her rose a multitude of the barbaric and classic shapes we so strangely strew about our graveyards: urn-crowned columns and stone-draped obelisks, shop-carved angels and shop-carved children poising ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington
... of enthusiasm at the beginning of the drive, her enjoyment appeared to have more staying powers. He liked her none the less that her eyes were often turned toward the stars or the dark silhouettes of the leafless trees against the snow. She did not keep saying, "Ah, how lovely! What a fine bit that is!" but he had only to follow her eyes to ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... This was one of the oldest; standing naked and alone, in the midst of a desert of gravel walks and cold stone terraces; with a cold-looking formal garden, cut into angles and rhomboids; and a cold leafless park, divided geometrically by straight alleys; and two or three noseless, cold-looking statues without any clothing; and fountains spouting cold water enough to make one's teeth chatter. At least, ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... illuminated snow castle through the branches of the leafless trees. The fiery star above it and the lights below shining through the ice-windows, made it very ...
— The Corner House Girls at School • Grace Brooks Hill
... sea-winds pierced our solitudes, I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods, Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook, To please the desert and the sluggish brook. The purple petals, fallen in the pool, Made the black water with their beauty gay; Here might the red-bird come his plumes to cool, And court the flower that cheapens ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... Noel, named the neat By those who love him, I bequeath A helmless ship, a houseless street, A wordless book, a swordless sheath, An hourless clock, a leafless wreath, A bed sans sheet, a board sans meat, A bell sans tongue, a saw sans teeth, ...
— If I Were King • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... but without rain. A white fog hung closely and thickly over the country, and lay like a clogging, woollen substance among the scattered gold and russets of the now almost leafless trees. ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... a Christmas spent in this wild waste of leafless woods and snowy hills was any thing but a merry one to these poor fellows, so far away from their homes, which, at that moment, they knew to be so bright and cheerful with the mirth and laughter of "old men and babes, and loving friends, ...
— The Farmer Boy, and How He Became Commander-In-Chief • Morrison Heady
... sullen brow, Sitt'st behind those virgins gay; Like a scorched, and mildew'd bough, Leafless ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... into the transparent depths can see submerged forest trees beneath him, still standing upright as they stood before the bridge fell in and the river was raised above them. It is a strange, weird sight, this forest beneath the river; the waters wash over the broken tree-tops, fish swim among the leafless branches: it is desolate, spectre-like, beyond all words. Scientific men who have examined the field with a view to determining the credibility of the legend about the bridge are convinced that it is essentially true. Believed in by many tribes, attested by the appearance of the ...
— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch
... the hollow. Then Lady Atherley returned and gave me tea; and afterwards, in the library, I worked at accounts till it was nearly too dark to write. No doubt on the high ground the sky was aflame with brilliant colour, of which only a dim reflection tinged the dreary view of sward and leafless trees, to which, for some mysterious reason, a gig crawling down the carriage-drive gave ...
— Cecilia de Noel • Lanoe Falconer
... his neck, saw her head fall confidingly on his breast, then silence settled upon them, and upon all nature, the gathering twilight deepening, till the last glow disappeared from the heavens above and from the circle of leafless trees which enclosed this tragedy from ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... sky o'ercast," The joyless winter day Let others fear, to me more dear Than all the pride of May: The tempest's howl, it soothes my soul, My griefs it seems to join; The leafless trees my fancy please, Their fate ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... decision which marked his life, he started for New York. It was immediately after the New Year and the ground was covered with snow. He looked out of the window of the train, and there was only the long line of white country broken by the leafless trees and rail-fences and the mansard-roofs and low cottages with their stoops, built up with earth to keep them warm; and the sheds full of cattle; and here and there a sawmill going hard, and factories pounding away and men in fur coats driving the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... was destined to remain for a long time an inscrutable mystery, but after leaving that little inn no man among the curious villagers ever looked upon that old man's face in life again. The two forms faded away in the distance, and the weary wind sighed through the leafless trees; the bright glare of the lights of the station gleamed behind them, but the shadows of the melancholy hills seemed to envelop them in their dark embrace—and to one of them, at least, it was ...
— Bucholz and the Detectives • Allan Pinkerton
... into the ravines, leaving the declivities almost entirely uncovered, and at others, overspreading the soil with an unruffled sheet of stainless white. The winds had awakened from their August slumbers, and blustered and shrieked dismally through the leafless forests, then sweeping out among the houses, sought entrance, but finding none, flung themselves despairingly against the doors, and mocked at the clattering windows, which every now and then threatened to burst ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... flushed, her eyes sparkling, she stopped opposite a point of the island which, forming a curve at this place, was nearest to the mainland. Through the leafless branches of the willows and poplars, La Louve could see the roof of the house, where, perhaps, Martial was dying. At this sight, uttering a fearful groan, she tore off her shawl and cap, and slipping down ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... country round it is so rocky, that our companions dreaded the fatigue, and were not much to blame, if, as is probably the case, the way be worse than that over which we travelled. As we trudged along over the black slag- like rocks, the almost leafless trees affording no shade, the heat was quite as great as Europeans could bear. It was 102 degrees in the shade, and a thermometer placed under the tongue or armpit showed that our blood was 99.5 degrees, or 1.5 degrees ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... rugged habit. The leaves are generally lance-shaped with a sharp apex and a spiny margin; but vary in colour from grey to bright green, and are sometimes striped or mottled. The rather small tubular yellow or red flowers are borne on simple or branched leafless stems and are generally densely clustered. The juice of the leaves of certain species yields aloes (see below). In some cases, as in Aloe venenosa, the juice is poisonous. The plant called American aloe, Agave americana (c.v.), belongs ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... never known before. And many of the attendants who were in Arthur's train were killed by the shower. After the shower had ceased, the sky became clear. And on looking at the tree, they beheld it completely leafless. Then the birds descended upon the tree. And the song of the birds was far sweeter than any strain they had ever heard before. Then they beheld a Knight, on a coal-black horse, clothed in black satin, ...
— The Mabinogion Vol. 1 (of 3) • Owen M. Edwards
... An ancient leafless stump of a horse-chesnut stood in the middle of a dusty field, bordered on the south side by a row of houses of some pretension. Against this stump, a pretty delicate fair girl of seventeen, whose short lilac sleeves revealed slender ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of mellow light Reflected from the skies The hill and vale is flooding; Still in their leafless guise The Jacqueminots are budding, Creating new delight By ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... which we rested—a space of two or three acres— was still free from the snow-drift, on account of its exposure to the wind. Straggling pines, stunted and leafless, grew over its surface, in all about fifty or sixty trees. From these we obtained our fires; but what were fires when we had no ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... the orchard, the stock of an old and leafless vine, showing here and there over the purple flush of flowering marjoram and the more scattered gold of St. John's-wort, told the story of the perished vineyard. For centuries a rich wine had flowed from these slopes, but at length the ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... bread, pleased him; they recalled evenings passed with Helen; she had often spoken of her love for these birds. He went to the window with bread for the peacocks, and the landscape came into his eyes: the clump of leafless trees on the left, rugged and untidy with rooks' nests; the hollow, dipping plain, melancholy of aspect now, misty, gray and brown beneath a lowering sky, dipping and then rising in a long, wide shape, and ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... ice, in games Confederate, imitative of the chase 35 And woodland pleasures,—the resounding horn, The pack loud-chiming, and the hunted hare. So through the darkness and the cold we flew, And not a voice was idle; with the din Smitten, the precipices rang aloud; 40 The leafless trees and every icy crag Tinkled like iron; while far-distant hills Into the tumult sent an alien sound Of melancholy, not unnoticed, while the stars, Eastward, were sparkling clear, and in the west 45 The orange ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... low list and the leafless trees Stand gaunt and gray 'gainst the sullen sky, The naked boughs whisper melodies Of Summer spent and of Spring gone by— Of days once glad that are gone forever, Of lips once true that will answer never, Of life and love that are but as these Dead leaves of Autumn ...
— The Rose-Jar • Thomas S. (Thomas Samuel) Jones
... rays had by this time penetrated the misty atmosphere, and the white frost had changed to diamond drops, which hung tremblingly on the leafless branches. A gleam of sunshine showed the red tints of the beech-trees, and the bright golden hue of the poplars, and the forest burst upon Julien in all the splendor of its autumnal trappings. The pleasant remembrance of ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... beds of rivers fill again; Trees leafless now renew their vernal bloom; Returning moons their lustrous phase resume; But man a second ...
— Book of Wise Sayings - Selected Largely from Eastern Sources • W. A. Clouston
... I miss. My servants have never called the name of Georgiana. The omission is unnatural, and must be intentional. Of course I have not asked whether she showed any care; but that little spot of silence affects me as the sight of a tree remaining leafless in the woods where everything else is ...
— A Kentucky Cardinal • James Lane Allen
... the leafless tree; He whispers to the tiny flower. His touch awakes the slumbering bee, And each obeys ...
— Our Profession and Other Poems • Jared Barhite
... cold the March winds be; High up in a leafless tree The little bird sits and wearily twits, The woods with perjury: But the cuckoo-knave sings hold his stave, (Ever the spring comes merrily) And "O poor fool!" sings he— For this is the way in the world to live, To mock when a friend hath no more to give, Whether ...
— Cromwell • Alfred B. Richards
... passed along the deserted streets. In an open carriage we were driven to Pont St. Esprit, and noticed the long lines of mulberry trees on each side of the roads; the driver explained that they are planted to feed the silkworms, and that in two months they would be leafless. We took the steamer again at Pont St. Esprit, late in the following day, for Avignon. In the morning of Sunday we all went to hear High Mass in the Cathedral, then to the Palace of the Popes, and round the walls. In the afternoon we visited ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... came to himself he felt chilled, and was leaning against a huge leafless tree. The night was moonless, and when he looked up he thought he had never seen stars so large and bright, or sky so black. The stars, too, seemed to blink down with longer intervals of darkness, and fiercer and more dazzling emergence, and ...
— J.S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 5 • J.S. Le Fanu
... crowd thrills as it passes, and only some few voices cry Vive l'Empereur! Shining golden in the frosty sun—with hundreds of thousands of eyes upon it, from houses and housetops, from balconies, black, purple, and tricolor, from tops of leafless trees, from behind long lines of glittering bayonets under schakos and bear-skin caps, from behind the Line and the National Guard again, pushing, struggling, heaving, panting, eager, the heads of an enormous multitude stretching out to meet ...
— The Second Funeral of Napoleon • William Makepeace Thackeray (AKA "Michael Angelo Titmarch")
... all leafless, and snow-clad the ground, Sweet pleasures at home in our cottage we found; 'Round our bright blazing fire, we'd work, read, or play, And find sweet employment to fill ...
— The Snow-Drop • Sarah S. Mower
... into a lane, its lights picking out the skeleton outlines of trees: peculiar trees—tall, gaunt, leafless. They added to Ted Graham's ...
— Old Rambling House • Frank Patrick Herbert
... beneath her feet; of the marble limbs and faces pressed into the earth, and all the other ruined things, small and great, mean or lovely, that lay deep in a common grave below the rustling olives, and the still leafless vineyards; and sometimes the mere passive companion of the breeze and the sun, conscious only of the chirping of the crickets, or the loudness of the nightingales, or the flight of a hoopoe, like some strange bright ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... out and shone down on the leafless trees that cast hardly any shadows on the pathway ...
— Very Short Stories and Verses For Children • Mrs. W. K. Clifford
... unfettered brooks glittering with motion, but without light, from the dusky depths; now and then a ghastly lustre shot from the ice still hanging like a glacier upon some upper steep, or a strange gleam from the sodden snow on their floors lightened the roofs of the leafless forests that overlapped the chasms, and trailed their twisted roots like shapes of living horror. What was there, I wondered, so darkly familiar in it all? in what nightmare had I dreamed it all before? Long ere the journey's end our spirits ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... burning lamps in order long And mournful pomp the corpse was brought to ground Her arms upon a leafless pine were hung, The hearse, with cypress; arms, with laurel crowned: Next day the prince, whose love and courage strong Drew forth his limbs, weak, feeble, and unsound, To visit went, with care and reverence meet, The buried ashes of his ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... regiments, fixed fast amongst the rocks, still waved defiant. The long grey line, "a ragged spray of humanity," plied the ramrod with still fiercer energy, and pale women on the hills round Winchester listened in terror to the crashing echoes of the leafless woods. But the end could not be long delayed. Ammunition was giving out. Every company which had reached the ridge had joined the fighting line. The ranks were thinning. Many of the bravest officers were down, and the Northern regiments, ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... Elizabeth, from her window overlooking the garden, had seen a picture that she never forgot. It was about noon, all the warmth that was in the December sun filled the garden (which the leafless trees no longer shaded). There was no snow on the ground, for the few stray flakes premonitory of winter which had fallen from time to time in the month had melted almost as soon as they had touched the ground. The air was like an Indian summer's day; it seemed ...
— The Bay State Monthly - Volume 2, Issue 3, December, 1884 • Various
... church and campanile, and its life that seems to pass entirely in the street: men in their shirt sleeves, lounging, smoking, spitting (else the land were not Italy!), or perhaps playing cards at a table under the leafless bush of the wine-shop; women gossiping over their needlework, or, gathered in sociable knots, combing and binding up their sleek black hair; children sprawling in the kindly dirt; the priest, biretta on head, nose in breviary, drifting slowly upon some priestly ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland
... punish the shepherds, for, alas, what had these innocent shepherds done? but in the mysterious wisdom of its ways, had denied the refreshing shower, and the soft-descending dew. From the top of Penmaenmawr, as far as the eye could reach, all was uniform and waste. The trees were leafless, not one flower adorned the ground, not one tuft of verdure appeared to relieve the weary eye. The brooks were dried up; their beds only remained to tell the melancholy tale, Here once was water; the tender lambs hastened to the accustomed brink, and lifted up their ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... specialized shoots for their better protection or distribution. Thus in Georgia the stalked, multicellular gemmae are borne at the ends of shoots surrounded by a rosette of larger leaves, and in Aulacomnium androgynum they are raised on an elongated leafless region of the shoot. In other cases detached leaves or shoots may give rise to new plants, and when a moss is artificially divided almost any ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... through the woods in the morning, but was sure to find standing in the tall dry grass along the border of the sandy road, here one and there one, on my return at noon. In similar places grew a "yellow daisy" (Leptopoda), a single big head, of a deep color, at the top of a leafless stem. It seemed to be one of the most abundant of Florida spring flowers, but I could not learn that it went by any distinctive vernacular name. Beside the railway track were blue-eyed grass and pipewort, ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... lightly here, for here, 'tis said, When piping winds are hush'd around, A small note wakes from underground, Where now his tiny bones are laid. No more in lone or leafless groves, With ruffled wing and faded breast, His friendless, homeless spirit roves; Gone to the world where birds are blest! Where never cat glides o'er the green, Or school-boy's giant form is seen; But love, and joy, and smiling Spring Inspire ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various
... heaven were beginning to grow gray, the sun was sinking in a bed of red and gold behind a clump of oaks on the edge of the horizon—the dark and delicate outline of leafless branches distinctly marked against that yellow light. Wimperfield Park was almost at its best upon such an afternoon as this, the turf soft and springy after autumnal rains, the atmosphere tranquil and balmy, and all animal creation—deer, oxen, rabbits, feathered game, and an innumerable ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... noise. Two boys at the thills and two more pushing behind, they softly trundled it down the yard, stopping at every unusually loud squeak. It was almost as light as day; only in the yard the trees cast a slight shadow of tangled branches, leafless as ...
— The Little Gold Miners of the Sierras and Other Stories • Various
... dead stump bobbed his little red-barred head and fluttered his yellow wings. Beneath the bridge the swift current sparkled in the sun. Over the river, on each side, rose the hills. The gray stone of the government works was visible to the right through the leafless trees: nearer, square, yellow and ugly, stood the old arsenal. A soldier, musket on shoulder, marched along the river-edge: the cape of his coat fluttered in the breeze and his slanting bayonet shone like silver. Before them lay D——, the smoke from its mills ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... watch the gunners among the trees and presently pass an encampment of their huts. Beyond, a high and grassy plateau—fringes of wood on either hand. But we must not go to the edge on our right so as to look down into the valley below. Through the thin leafless trees, however, we see plainly the ridges that stretch eastward, one behind the other, "suffused in sunny air." There are the towers of Mont St. Eloy—ours; the Bertonval Wood—ours; and the famous Vimy Ridge, blue in the middle distance, of ...
— Towards The Goal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... what had frightened her, Lysbeth saw standing on the bank of the mere, so close that she must have overheard every word, but behind the screen of a leafless bush, a tall, forbidding-looking woman, who held in her hand some broidered caps which apparently she was offering for sale. These caps she began to slowly fold up and place one by one in a hide satchel that was hung about ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... waited long at the bottom of the valley, where now the stream was brown and angry with the rains of autumn, and the weeping trees hung leafless. But though I waited at every hour of day, and far into the night, no light footstep came to meet me, no sweet voice was in the air; all was lonely, drear, and drenched with sodden desolation. It seemed as if my love was dead, and the winds ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... call it as folks love to do, In bustling centres of incessant trade, And leafless acres, though perhaps a few Pet dandelions blossom in the shade Where other vegetation will all fade, And parch to yellow in the smoky court, Where a solitary sunbeam might have strayed, And all the gloomy atmosphere is fraught ...
— The Minstrel - A Collection of Poems • Lennox Amott
... the house, the river on sunshiny days gleamed and glistened in the rays of the sun, and the white sails passing and repassing formed quite a picturesque scene. At night, however, especially in the winter time, the scene was different. Then the wind would howl and moan through the leafless trees and the river would beat against the rocks in a most mournful cadence. To this day I can remember the effect it had on my youthful mind, and whenever I hear the wind whistling at night, it always recalls, to my ...
— The Life and Amours of the Beautiful, Gay and Dashing Kate Percival - The Belle of the Delaware • Kate Percival
... upon the floor to make Mitchelbourne afraid. He had been upon the brink of fear ever since he had seen that lonely and disquieting house; he was now caught in the full stream. He turned back. Through the open doorway, he saw the avenue of leafless trees tossing against a leaden sky. He took a step or two and then came suddenly to a halt. For all around him in the darkness he seemed to hear voices breathing and soft footsteps. He realised that his fear had overstepped his reason; he forced himself ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... awa, wi' her verdure sae fair; The ance bonny woodlands are leafless an' bare; To the cot wee robin returns for a screen Frae the cauld stormy blast o' the lang ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... rather was both by fits and starts. Light fleecy clouds were constantly passing over the heavens, now gathering densely together and completely hiding the stars, and now breaking up and revealing between the rifts then shining points. A low wind softly moaned through the leafless trees on the banks of the Severn, sadly chiming in with the murmur of the tide, which rose quite up to the Falls of the Yaupaae. In the indistinct light, just enough to stimulate and keep in active play the imagination, softening ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... ground the trunk he plac'd, Which with the spoils of his dead foe he grac'd. The coat of arms by proud Mezentius worn, Now on a naked snag in triumph borne, Was hung on high, and glitter'd from afar, A trophy sacred to the God of War. Above his arms, fix'd on the leafless wood, Appear'd his plumy crest, besmear'd with blood: His brazen buckler on the left was seen; Truncheons of shiver'd lances hung between; And on the right was placed his corslet, bor'd; And to the neck was ...
— The Aeneid • Virgil
... whether they would take each other for wife and husband, and listened to their replies. Androvsky's voice sounded to him hard and cold as ice when it replied, and suddenly he thought of the storm as raging in some northern land over snowbound wastes whose scanty trees were leafless. But Domini's voice was clear, and warm as the sun that would shine again over the desert when the storm was past. The mayor, constraining himself to keep awake a little longer, gave Domini away, while Suzanne dropped tears into a pocket-handkerchief ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... change, nor pass away! Your gentle voices will flow on forever, When life grows bare and tarnished with decay, As through a leafless landscape flows ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... side upon the moist, soft ground of the large garden, under the leafless trees, where hung a slight penetrating mist which made ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... days. But we are not to talk sentiment now;—even May would not understand that maudlin language. We must get on. What a wintry hedgerow this is for the eighteenth of April! Primrosy to be sure, abundantly spangled with those stars of the earth,—but so bare, so leafless, so cold! The wind whistles through the brown boughs as in winter. Even the early elder shoots, which do make an approach to springiness, look brown, and the small leaves of the woodbine, which have also ventured to peep forth, are of a sad purple, frost-bitten, like a dairymaid's elbows ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... is like the autumn leaf That trembles in the moon's pale ray; Its hold is frail, its state is brief, Restless, and soon to pass away; But when that leaf shall fall and fade, The parent tree will mourn its shade, The winds bewail the leafless tree; But none shall breathe a sigh, ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... constant autumnal downpours, were covered with a thick carpet of fallen leaves which extended beneath the shivering bareness of the almost leafless poplars. She went as far as the shrubbery. It was as sad as the chamber of a dying person. A green hedge which separated the little winding walks was bare of leaves. Little birds flew from place to place with a little chilly cry, ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... protection against the deep snow and the forest wolves. There is something new in this: most of the houses are shut up; the shop-windows are all bare; the snow is two feet deep in the streets; the mountains on every side are white; the icicles hang upon the leafless boughs, and the rivulets are enchained. All is one drear blank; and except the two-horse diligence which heaves slowly in sight three or four hours past its time, and the post, (which is now delivered ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... gains. It may be added, that he loved to walk in solitary spots; that his chief musing-ground was the banks of the Ayr; the season most congenial to his fancy that of winter, when the winds were heard in the leafless woods, and the voice of the swollen streams came from vale and hill; and that he seldom composed a whole poem at once, but satisfied with a few fervent verses, laid the subject aside, till the muse summoned him to another exertion of fancy. In a little back closet, still existing in ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... swept out of the distance, brushed past the leafless woods, set the curtain of silence ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... closely related to the primrose, though its colour is certainly violet, and not pale yellow. By this time all the bladderworts have disappeared under water. In June in a pool near the inflow of the Thames at Day's Lock, opposite Dorchester, the fine leafless yellow spikes of flower were standing out of the water like orchids, while the bladders with their trapdoors were employed in catching and devouring small tadpoles. There is something quietly horrible about ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... continue to flourish and spread, drawing their nourishment not from the soil itself, but by strangling and sucking the life juices of the hosts on which it feeds. I have seen whole byways covered thus with yellow dodder—rootless, leafless, parasitic—reaching up to the sunlight, quite cutting off and smothering the plants which gave it life. A week or two it flourishes and then most of it perishes miserably. So many of us come to be like that: so much ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... farm-buildings, with its yard of yellow stacks. Beneath our feet the earth was iron, and the sky iron above our heads. Dark curdled clouds, "which had built up everywhere an under-roof of doleful grey," swept on before the bitter northern wind, which whistled through the low leafless hedges and rotting wattles, and crisped the dark sodden leaves of the scattered hollies, almost ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... directs. The rider moves without motion, and the horse judges without guidance. It would seem that the man had borrowed the beast's body, and the beast the man's mind. His regiment has formed upon the field, their stout lances erected like a young and leafless grove; but although now in line, it is with difficulty that they can subject the spirit of their warlike steeds. The trumpet has caught the ear of the horses; they stand with open nostrils, already breathing war ere they can see an enemy; and now dashing ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... the left-hand side. So much he could make out dimly through the November darkness; and as he stood there hesitating, he thought he could see somewhere below him a few other lights burning through the masses of leafless trees through which the ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... through the leafless jasmine branches. Behind them they heard the river flowing, and now and again on the bank the rustling of the dry reeds. Masses of shadow here and there loomed out in the darkness, and sometimes, vibrating ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... that region. For months together—that is to say, from the middle of October till late in May—during the whole period, the ground is covered with snow; the rivers are frozen over; the trees are leafless; every drop of water exposed to the air congeals. The atmosphere is very clear, the air pure and exhilarating, the sun shines brightly from the unclouded sky, and when no wind is blowing existence out of ...
— Snow Shoes and Canoes - The Early Days of a Fur-Trader in the Hudson Bay Territory • William H. G. Kingston
... nut-like flavor. The leaves are rush-like, about eighteen inches high, a little rough, and sharply pointed. The flower-stalks are nearly of the same height as the leaves, three-cornered, hard, and leafless, with the exception of five or six leaflike bracts at the top, from the midst of which are produced the spikelets of flowers, which are ...
— The Field and Garden Vegetables of America • Fearing Burr
... Hill slowly I went. How bare it looked then! Only leafless trees and dried seed pods rattling on the bushes, the sand frozen, and not a rush to be seen for the thick blanket of snow. A few rods above the bridge was a footpath, smooth and well worn, that led down to the creek, ...
— Laddie • Gene Stratton Porter
... was putting on his wig, and I saw him as through a cloud of powder. I rushed joyfully to embrace him; but, as I approached him, everything seemed changing in the mist. I wished to kiss his hands, but I recoiled with mortal cold. The fingers were withered branches, my father himself a leafless tree, which the winter had covered with hoar-frost. Ah, Lucy, Lucy, my brain is full of madness and my heart of sorrow. Sing me the ballad of the lady who took only one spoonful of gruel, 'with ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... Glimmers gay the leafless thicket Close beside my garden gate, Where, so light, from post to wicket, Hops the Sparrow, blithe, sedate; Who, with meekly folded wing, Comes to ...
— Birds, Illustrated by Color Photography, Vol. II, No 3, September 1897 • Various
... storms were howling o'er the ocean, Leafless trees and sombre landscape cold and drear, Bitter winds, and driving rains, or white commotion Of the whirling snow that drifted far and near; Then my heart, which had been strong, was bowed and broken, I was crushed with sudden sense of loss and fear, Dull as silence ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... and pointed with her little hand to the village church, which rose in quiet beauty from among the leafless trees. ...
— Ellen Middleton—A Tale • Georgiana Fullerton
... aware of an inward fluttering of pride, for it is no small matter to win the confidence of small children. I went with them towards the hill they spoke of. It lay at the end of an avenue of superb trees whose black, leafless twigs bore their frosting of snow like strings of jewels in the glittering air. The wind blew up the avenue keenly in our faces as we trudged. And then, where the trees ended, the hill fell away at our feet, the valley lay far and wide, the steel-blue river winding ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... what was then called the King's Square to see a newly arrived plant from India, whose name escapes our memory at this moment, and which, at that epoch, was attracting all Paris to Saint-Cloud. It was an odd and charming shrub with a long stem, whose numerous branches, bristling and leafless and as fine as threads, were covered with a million tiny white rosettes; this gave the shrub the air of a head of hair studded with flowers. There was always an ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... on the Potomac, of which he would have spoken so enthusiastically, though even that were a thing not to be disdained by such a lover of the beautiful as Seymour had shown himself to be,—the dry brown hills rising in swelling slopes from the edge of the wide quiet river; the bare and leafless trees upon their crests, now scarce veiling the comfortable old white house, which in the summer they quite concealed beneath their masses of foliage; and all the world lying dreamy and calm and still, in the motionless haze of one of those rare seasons ...
— For Love of Country - A Story of Land and Sea in the Days of the Revolution • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... up outside Leicester Lodge, and lights were shining above the shutters of the dining and drawing-room windows. The dim light enabled Arthur to see that it was a large house with a small piece of garden-ground in front, and one or two leafless trees, which gave it rather ...
— Left at Home - or, The Heart's Resting Place • Mary L. Code
... melted and frozen again, and the long road was like a gray river winding between leafless trees. The gaunt crows were still flying back and forth over the meadows, but she did not have corn for them to-day. Had she been happy, she would not have forgotten them; but the pain in her breast made her ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... corner of the earth and still be a respectable Pharisee. One may never move a dozen miles from the village of his birth and yet be of the happy company of romantics. Jeff could find in a sunset, in a stretch of windswept plain, in the sight of water through leafless trees, something that filled his heart ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... thought at the leafless forest, where every tree showed the graceful form and bend of its twigs; and during the winter sleep the icy mists of the clouds came down, and the ruler dreamed of his youthful days, and of the time of his manhood; and towards ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... them better Christians than he, set out on a war-party, and, after dragging their canoes over the frozen St. Lawrence, launched them on the open stream of the Richelieu. They ascended to Lake Champlain, and hid themselves in the leafless forests of a large island, watching patiently for their human prey. One day they heard a distant shot. "Come, friends," said Piskaret, "let us get our dinner: perhaps it will be the last, for we must dine before we ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... the band in swift canoes. On the queen of fairy islands, on the Wita-Wst's [b] shore, Camped Wanta, on the highlands, just above the cataract's roar. Many braves were with Wanta; Ap-dta, too, was there, And the sad Anptu-spa spread the lodge with wonted care. Then above the leafless prairie leaped the fat faced, laughing moon, And the stars—the spirits fairy—walked the welkin one by one. Swift and silent in the gloaming on the waste of waters blue, Speeding downward to the foaming, shot Wanta's ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... A leafless peach-tree bold Thought for him she smiled, I'm told; And, stirred by love, His sleeping sap did move, Decking each naked branch with green To show her that her look ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... stem; the wood winds round itself in a spiral. The bole of a beech in the sunshine h spotted like a trout by the separate shadows of its first young leaves. Tall bushes—almost trees—of blackthorn are in full white flower; the dark, leafless boughs make it appear the whiter. Among the blackthorn several tits are busy, searching about on the twigs, and pecking into the petals; calling loudly as they do so. A willow-wren is peering into the bloom too, but silent for the moment. The blackthorn is much ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... the peduncle and each other as high as the surface of the earth or about 2 inches; they are more succulent than the grasses and less so than most of the fillies hyesinths &c.- the peduncle is soletary, proceeds from the root, is columner, smooth leafless and rises to the hight of 2 or 21/2 feet. it supports from 10 to forty flowers which are each supported by seperate footstalk of 1/2 an inch in length scattered without order on the upper portion of the ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... The sky was low and heavy, in scarcely distinguishable shades of purplish grey, and Bycars Pool, of which she had a glimpse, appeared in its smooth blackness to be not more wet than the rest of the scene. Nothing stirred. Not the tiniest branch stirred on the leafless trees, nor a leaf on a grey rhododendron-bush in a front garden below. Every window within sight had its blind drawn. No smoke rose from any house-chimney, and the distant industrial smoke on the horizon hung in the lower air, just under ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... distinctly marked, being of a duller redder tinge. He prefers remote bushy heathery fields, where his song is one of the sweetest to be heard. It is sometimes very noticeable, especially early in spring. I remember sitting one bright day in the still leafless April woods, when one of these birds struck up a few rods from me, repeating its lay at short intervals for nearly an hour. It was a perfect piece of wood-music, and was of course all the more noticeable for being projected upon such a broad unoccupied page of silence. Its ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... soft warm heart, once free to hold A thousand tender pleasures, thine and mine, Be left more desolate, more dreary cold Than a forsaken bird's-nest fill'd with snow 'Mid its own bush of leafless eglantine— Speak, that my torturing doubts ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... howsoever true, If thought displeasing, should not be dispos'd In terms direct, but obviously dispos'd, To catch the mind, Joconde at ease detail'd, From days of yore to those he now bewail'd, The names of emp'rors and of kings, whose brows, By wily wives, were crown'd with leafless boughs! And who, without repining, view'd their lot, Nor bad made worse, but thought things best forgot. E'en I, who now your majesty address, Continued he, am sorry to confess, The very day I left ...
— The Tales and Novels, Complete • Jean de La Fontaine
... raiment, or the long hair of the women. But a very midmost of this dreary theatre rose up a huge and monstrous tree, whose topmost branches were even the horns which they had seen from below the hill's brow. Leafless was that tree and lacking of twigs, and its bole upheld but some fifty of great limbs, and as they looked on it, they doubted whether it were not made by men's hands rather than grown up out of the earth. All round about ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris
... air of the Bay of Salerno the grape-vine wisely refuses to burst into leaf at Yuletide, no matter how enticing the warmth. But the thick white pillars and their wooden cross-beams, around which are entwined the leafless coiling limbs of the sleeping vine, throw dark blue patterns of chequered shadow upon the sunlit ground. Above the terraced garden rises the orangery, well watered by many artificial rillets, and from the midst of the orange and lemon trees there emerges a path leading to ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... khair (Acacia Senegal). The dwarf tamarisk, pilchi or jhao (Tamarix dioica), grows freely in moist sandy soils near rivers. The scrub jungle consists mostly of jand (Prosopis spicigera), a near relation of the Acacias, jal or van (Salvadora oleoides), and the coral-flowered karil or leafless caper (Capparis aphylla). All these show their desert affinities, the jand by its long root and its thorns, the jal by its small leathery leaves, and the karil by the fact that it has managed to dispense ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... o'er the Haytian seas. Bozzaris! with the storied brave Greece nurtured in her glory's time, Rest thee; there is no prouder grave, Even in her own proud clime. She wore no funeral weeds for thee, Nor bade the dark hearse wave its plume, Like torn branch from death's leafless tree, In sorrow's pomp and pageantry, The ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... Water murmuring in his Ear: On rifted Rocks, the Dragon's late Abodes, The green Reed trembles, and the Bulrush nods. Waste sandy Vallies, once perplexd with Thorn, [8] The spiry Fir and shapely Box adorn: To leafless Shrubs the flow'ring Palms succeed, And od'rous Myrtle to the noisome Weed. The Lambs with Wolves shall graze the verdant Mead [9] And Boys in flow'ry Bands the Tyger lead; The Steer and Lion at one Crib shall meet, And harmless ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... but, as a rule, the above-mentioned hours are those alone when good "flying" may be reckoned on. When it is good, the sport must be superb: it is the very sublimation of "rocketing." You must hold straight and forward to stop a cock-pheasant whizzing over the leafless tree-tops—well up in the keen January wind; but a swifter traveler yet is the canvas-back drake, as he swings over the bar, at the fullest speed of his whistling pinions, disdaining to turn a foot from his appointed course, albeit vaguely suspecting the ambush below. ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... lower and lower; the sheep died in the fields; the cattle, scarcely able to crawl, tottered as they moved from spot to spot in search of food. Week after week, month after month, the sun looked down from the cloudless sky, till the karoo-bushes were leafless sticks, broken into the earth, and the earth itself was naked and bare; and only the milk-bushes, like old hags, pointed their shrivelled fingers heavenward, praying for the rain that ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... the grove was leafless; the boats taken out of the little lake and stored carefully away, to await the return of birds and leaves; the days grown short, dark, and cold; the "constitutionals" matters of dire necessity, but not in the least of pleasure; study assumed new interest, and the worried ...
— Miss Ashton's New Pupil - A School Girl's Story • Mrs. S. S. Robbins
... when the days were short, and the mist sprinkled cold drops on the berries and the leafless branches, I came back in fresh spirits, rushed through the air, swept the sky clear, and snapped off the dry twigs, which is certainly no great labor to do, yet it must be done. There was another kind of sweeping taking place at Waldemar Daa's, in the castle of Borreby. ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... strolling along the gravelled walks beneath the bare, leafless trees that were so black with London's grime. The day was cold, but bright, hence quite a number of persons were walking there, together with the usual crowd of nursemaids with the children of the well-to-do from the ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux
... a sore and dreary time for Hester, alone in the room where she had spent so many happy hours. She sat in a window, looking out upon the leafless trees and the cold gloomy old statue in the midst of them. Frost was upon every twig. A thin sad fog filled the comfortless air. There might be warm happy homes many, but such no more belonged to her world! The fire was burning cheerfully behind her, but her ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... like pictures on the undulating fields of banners; the stark rigging of a ship showed black against the sky, the Lido sank from sight upon the east, as if the shore had composed itself to sleep by the side of its beloved sea to the music of the surge that gently beat its sands; the yet leafless boughs of the trees above me stirred themselves together, and out of one of those trembling towers in the lagoons, one rich, full sob burst from the heart of a bell, too deeply stricken with the glory of the scene, and suffused the languid ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... bows the storm. The leafless trees Lash their lithe limbs, and, with majestic voice, Call to each other through the deepening gloom; And slender trunks that lean on burly boughs Shriek with the sharp abrasion; and the oak, Mellowed in fiber by unnumbered frosts, Yields to the shoulder of the Titan Blast, Forsakes ...
— Bitter-Sweet • J. G. Holland
... seconds! for thus long did my reasonings with regard to Clemenza and the Villars require to pass through my understanding, and escape, in half-muttered soliloquy, from my lips. My muscles trembled with eagerness, and I bounded forward with impetuosity. I saw nothing but a vista of catalpas, leafless, loaded with icicles, and terminating in four chimneys and a painted roof. My fancy outstripped my footsteps, and was busy in picturing faces and rehearsing dialogues. Presently I reached this new object of my pursuit, darted through the avenue, noticed ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... defender and tender lover. To his spouse his manners were charming. When he came to relieve her of her care, to give her exercise or a chance for luncheon, he greeted her with a few low notes, and alighted on a small leafless twig that curved up about a foot above the nest, and made a perfect watch-tower. She slipped off her seat and disappeared for about six minutes. During her absence he stayed at his post, sometimes changing his perch to one or other of half a dozen leafless branchlets in that ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... shingles indicated the place on the mossy roof where it had burned its way into the home that even then enshrined my dearest treasures. I saw the window at which Emily Warren had directed the glance that had sustained my hope for months. I looked wistfully at the leafless, flowerless garden, where I had first recognized my Eve. "Will her manner be like the present aspect of that garden?" I groaned. I saw the arbor in which I had made my wretched blunder. I had about broken myself of profanity, ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... intense stillness followed. I listened attentively, surveying the surrounding landscape on all sides with the close scrutiny of an experienced hunter, who had enjoyed many a lesson from the Indians. The piled-up rocks, scanty herbage, leafless and motionless trees gave no sign of life. No sound broke the intense solitude. Then, with startling suddenness, another cry, louder and more agonising than the former, echoed across the waste, and this was followed by ...
— Brave and True - Short stories for children by G. M. Fenn and Others • George Manville Fenn
... wintry sun was streaming on the leafless trees and snowy lawns; some thrushes and sparrows were bathing in the pan of water that Katie had placed ...
— Our Bessie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... it is then most divided, but because it is divided in a different way. Even in the unwooded parts, where the horizon is large, here and there against the background of a dark and distant mass of trees, now leafless or still keeping their summer foliage unchanged, a double row of orange-red chestnuts seemed, as in a picture just begun, to be the only thing painted, so far, by an artist who had not yet laid any colour on the rest, and to be offering ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... evening, as he sat in his house, enjoying a ray of pallid sunshine sent through the branches of a leafless fig-tree which stretched its gnarled, grey twisted arms before his door, Yuhanna Mahbub came to him with ...
— The Valley of the Kings • Marmaduke Pickthall
... clear moonless night the stars appear uncountable. You see them twinkling through the leafless trees, and covering all the sky from the zenith, the highest point above your head, down to the horizon. It seems as if someone had taken a gigantic pepper-pot and scattered them far and wide so that some had ...
— The Children's Book of Stars • G.E. Mitton
... spade! But no, I found nothing, though I had made a hole twice as large as the first. I thought I had been deceived—had mistaken the spot. I turned around, I looked at the trees, I tried to recall the details which had struck me at the time. A cold, sharp wind whistled through the leafless branches, and yet the drops fell from my forehead. I recollected that I was stabbed just as I was trampling the ground to fill up the hole; while doing so I had leaned against a laburnum; behind me was an artificial rockery, ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... flowers; R. Arcticus, an excellent rockwork plant from Northern Europe, with very pleasant fruit, but difficult to establish; R. Australis (from New Zealand), a most quaint plant, with leaves so depauperated that it is apparently leafless, and hardy in the South of England; and R. deliciosus, a very handsome plant from the Rocky Mountains. There are several others well worth growing, but I mention these few to show that the Bramble is not altogether ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... letting not one heart-beat go astray From Beauty's law of plainness and content; A simple, fireside thing, whose quiet smile Can warm earth's poorest hovel to a home; Which, when our autumn cometh, as it must, And life in the chill wind shivers bare and leafless, Shall still be blest with Indian-summer youth In bleak November, and, with thankful heart, Smile on its ample stores of garnered fruit, As full of sunshine to our aged eyes As when it nursed the blossoms of our ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... oak barrens, or boundless marshes overgrown with reeds. At night, they built their fire on ground made firm by frost, and bivouacked among the rushes. A few days brought them to a more favored region. On the right hand and on the left stretched the boundless prairie, dotted with leafless groves and bordered by gray wintry forests; scorched by the fires kindled in the dried grass by Indian hunters, and strewn with the carcasses and the bleached skulls of innumerable buffalo. The plains were scored with their pathways, and the muddy edges of the river were full of their ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... they trod the deserted paths of the Bois de Boulogne. The buds, which were beginning to swell on the tips of the slender black branches, dyed the tree-tops violet under the rosy sky. To their left stretched the fields, dotted with clumps of leafless trees, and the houses of Auteuil were visible. Slowly driven coupes, with their elderly passengers, crawled along the road, and the wet-nurses pushed their perambulators. A motor-car broke the silence of the Bois ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France
... long, sunk in thought, looking out of window, across the bare tree-tops in the garden, at the grey mist which seems as though it ended only at the edge of the world. It drips from the leafless boughs, and mine eyes—I need not hide it—will not be kept dry. It is as though the leaves from the tree of my life had all dropped on the ground—nay, as though my own guilty hand had torn them ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... found in bloom over large areas. Thus on the west coast of India the simultaneous blooming of Bambusa arundinacea (fig. 1), one of the largest species, has been observed at intervals of thirty-two years. After ripening of the seed, the leafless flowering culms ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... allowed something of a view beyond. Through it he could see that the ground sloped away almost at once to a bottom, along which a stream must run, and rose steeply from it on the other side, up to a field that was park-like in character, and thickly studded with oaks, now, of course, leafless. They did not stand so thick together but that some glimpse of sky and horizon could be seen between their stems. The sky was now golden and the horizon, a horizon of distant woods, ...
— A Thin Ghost and Others • M. R. (Montague Rhodes) James
... porch stood figures distinguishable as Janet and Alicia, all enwrapped for a journey, and Martha holding more wraps. The long facade of the house was black, save for one window on the first floor, which threw a faint radiance on the leafless branches of elms, and thus intensified the upper mysteries of the nocturnal garden. The arrival of the second cab caused excitement in the porch; and Hilda, leaning out of the window into the November ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... favoured apartments, where a peculiar air of home seems to reside, whether seen in the middle of summer, all its large windows open to the garden, or, as when our story commences, its bright fire and stands of fragrant green-house plants contrasted with the wintry fog and leafless trees of November. There were two persons in the room—a young lady, who sat drawing at the round table, and a youth, lying on a couch near the fire, surrounded with books and newspapers, and a pair of crutches near him. Both looked up with a smile ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... in the centre of which stood an ugly brick house, built apparently for some public purpose. This was the immediate outlook. Around, the land was undulating; trees were abundant, and were more apparent in the moonlight than the flat field spaces between them. The graceful lines of leafless elms at the side of the main road were clearly seen. About half a mile away the lights of a large village were visible, but bits of walls and gable ends of white houses stood out brighter in the moonlight than, the yellow lights within the windows. Where the houses stretched themselves ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... steam-engine, and holding the whip quietly arched over the neck of the other. The mechanical monotony of the movement seemed less in contrast than in harmony with the profound stillness of the wintry forest: the leafless branches heavy with rime frost and glittering in the sun: the deep repose of nature, broken now and then by the traversing of deer, or the flight of wild birds: highest and loudest among them the long lines of rooks: but for the greater part of the way ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... with the great stretches of woodland and farmsteads, the stubble of which is soon confused by the eye in the distance with the barren heaths around. In winter, the undulating mass of deep and even snow is marked everywhere by the small, brown, leafless trees in their great groupings, and by the pines, as small, and weighted with the burden of the weather; but much the most striking of the things seen in such a landscape are the stretches of black water, or, if ...
— A General Sketch of the European War - The First Phase • Hilaire Belloc |
