"Overgrown" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... eighty-four English miles long and forty-one broad. As the lake of Chinchaycocha loses by various outlets much more water than it receives from its tributary sources, it is evident that it must be fed by subterraneous springs. Its marshy banks are overgrown by totora (Malacochaete Totora), and are inhabited by numerous water fowl. The Indians entertain a superstitious belief that this lake is haunted by huge, fish-like animals, who at certain hours of the night leave their watery abode to prowl ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... natural, partly artificial, in a bank of rock overgrown by brambles. There was a rough stone door on hinges, and a little window high up, and two apertures, through one of which the people announced their gifts to the hermit, and put questions of all sorts to him; and when he chose to answer, his voice came dissonant and ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... because a large part of the state has not been interested in Chicago's special needs and demands for betterment it also saddled upon the city an organization which in 1901 remained practically the same as in 1870, when Chicago was an overgrown town of 300,000 inhabitants. Chicago was the only large city of the state, and a charter generalized from village experience was unsuitable for it. The parts of Cook county outside the city have also been very jealous ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... of curses is far from being a likely mode of leading men to Christ. The chaplain's position in the pulpit used to strike me as being something like that of a farmer sowing good seed broad-cast over a field so overgrown with tares, that the seed could never reach the soil. If he attempts to clear the soil of the weeds, to win the hearts of the prisoners, he finds the whole system of prison discipline arrayed against him. That discipline breeds and encourages the growth of every evil passion in ...
— Six Years in the Prisons of England • A Merchant - Anonymous
... hand, one of the maddening pests of bird study at the East is here almost unknown,—the mosquito. Until the third week in June I saw but one. That one was in the habit of lying in wait for me when I went to a piece of low, swampy ground overgrown with bushes. Think of the opportunity this combination offers to the Eastern mosquito, and consider my emotions when I found but a solitary individual, and even that one ...
— A Bird-Lover in the West • Olive Thorne Miller
... that condition. Incredible as the statements may appear, they are amply borne out by everyday experience. In effect, all the farmers whom I have consulted, affirm, that they invariably lose by grain cultivation, and that they never resort to it, but to prevent the land from being overgrown by brushwood or forests, and rendered unfit for ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... the examining chaplain did not recognize the lean, pale, anxious man, for the round-faced, rosy, overgrown boy of a year ago. His scholarship and critical knowledge were fairly above the mark, in spite of a racking headache; and his written sermon, together with all that was elicited from him, revealed, all unconsciously ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... pipe. Leaving the camp at about ten in the forenoon, I noticed, lying among the tussocks where the spring-cart had stood, something which, at the first glance, I took for the sumptuous holster of an overgrown navy revolver. I need say no more. It may have been the landgraves' pipe-case, or, on the other hand, it may not. At all events, regarding the article as treasure-trove, within the meaning of the Act, I formally took possession under 6 Hen. III., ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... these dwellings will both show the fears that agitated these tyrants, and prove entertaining to the reader. They selected a spot overgrown with wood, near a river, and raised a rampart or ditch round it, so straight and steep that it was impossible to climb it, more particularly by those who had no scaling ladders. Over that ditch there was ...
— The Pirates Own Book • Charles Ellms
... hills, constantly growing more steep and precipitous, and occasionally winding between large rocks, which were often overgrown with honeysuckle in full luxuriance. The Arabs scrambled like wild animals over the rocks, and brought down very long streamers of honeysuckle, Luwayeh, as they call it, which they wound round and round the necks of our horses, and generally got piastres for ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... a nice soft spot upon the mossy bank and made himself comfortable as though he meant to stay; the Tramp did likewise, gathering the children close about his tangled figure. For one thing a big ditch faced them, its opposite bank overgrown with bramble bushes, and for another the sloping moss offered itself invitingly, like a cushioned sofa. So they lay side by side, watching the empty ditch, listening to the faint trickle of water tinkling down it. Slender reeds and tall straight ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... remains of a chain of earthworks that completely enveloped the capital. They are all overgrown by verdure, and are fast disappearing; but whenever the site of one is relieved against the clear sky a grassy embrasure or a bit of rampart may yet be seen ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... in ancient times. But does not the real evil exist, despite this liberation from the actual tumult, in the representative government of a great empire, as much as in the stormy comitia of an overgrown republic? It is not the mere strife in the streets, and shedding of blood in civil warfare, bad as it is, and truly as the "bellum plusquam civile" exceeds all others in horror, which is the only evil. The separation of interests, the disregard ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... them, not able to control herself. "Where's your dignity?" she demanded of Sue. "Acting like a romantic schoolgirl—a great, overgrown woman." ...
— Apron-Strings • Eleanor Gates
... of a wide, level stretch of ground on the right of the little stream Sniezhinka, nearly a mile from the Perekatovs' property. The left bank, completely covered by thick young oak bushes, rose steeply up over the stream, which was almost overgrown with willow bushes, except for some small 'breeding-places,' the haunts of wild ducks. Half a mile from the stream, on the right side of Long Meadow, began the sloping, undulating uplands, studded here and there with old birch-trees, nut bushes, ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... from the depths of the crib which he carried upside down upon his head, like some curious kind of overgrown helmet. ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... a certain overgrown pomp in the question's form, but that is how she very modestly asked it, and I will take no liberty with its construction. I thought his reply a ...
— The Amateur Garden • George W. Cable
... canter brought the committee to the big bend. The sand-bar was overgrown with weeds high as a man's shoulder on horseback, but the leader, followed by the boys, forced his mount through the tangle until the bend was circled. "It's an ideal winter shelter," said Priest, dismounting ...
— Wells Brothers • Andy Adams
... proof that they existed there down to our own time, my search was vain. Many stones measuring several feet in length were set in a perpendicular position to give extra stability to the wall. The ancient rampart is in places completely overgrown with juniper. Within the wall is nothing but level field. No trace remains of any buildings that stood there in the far-off days when the spot was the scene of all passions and vanities, the tragedy and ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... enviously at her valiant sister. Isobel was everything that poor, overgrown, dark-skinned Gyp longed to be—her face had the pink and white of an apple blossom, her fair hair curled around her temples and in her neck, her deep-blue eyes were fringed by long black lashes; she had, after much practice, acquired a willowy slouch that ...
— Highacres • Jane Abbott
... brass balls on the iron fence shone brighter than ever because he had come. There were steps in the garden that went down and then up again, and the porch, even, was overgrown with green stuff as if it were part of the garden. The walls of the hall were hung with musty leather, printed with gold flowers, and there were chairs with high backs that creaked as if ...
— Tell Me Another Story - The Book of Story Programs • Carolyn Sherwin Bailey
... of the road, passing the base of a huge hill of granite all overgrown with ivy and scrub oak, the deacon's house comes full in sight. It is a quaint old edifice of wood, whose architecture proclaims it as belonging to the ante-revolutionary period. Innocent of paint, its dingy shingles and moss-grown roof assimilated ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... commit almost any crime, with no inherent flair for criminality, but because of a lack of independent judgment and inability to resist suggestion, and a desire to please friends. He is simply an overgrown child who still loves to play with toys, laughs and cries, becomes angry or afraid, unreasonably and ridiculously, and yells for mamma when ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... Scrub, n. country overgrown with thick bushes. Henry Kingsley's explanation (1859), that the word means shrubbery, is singularly misleading, the English word conveying an idea of smallness and order compared with the size and confusion of the Australian use. Yet he is etymologically ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... seat. "What is this all round?" "Thick drugget, sir; they nail it round in winter to keep the cold out."—Thank Heaven, it is only nailed at the bottom. Suffocation began; down goes my window. Presently a sixteen-stone kind of overgrown Pickwickian "Fat Boy," sitting opposite me, exclaims aloud, with a polar shudder, "Ugh! it's very cold!" and finding I was inattentive, he added, "Don't you find it very cold?" "Me, sir? I'm nearly fainting from heat," I replied; and then, in charity, I lent him a heavy full-sized ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... gardens plant flowers on their house-tops, or at any rate grow vines round their windows which in time run up the whole house, and from out of the midst of this perennial verdure arise the shining cupolas of eighty mosques. At the end of every thoroughfare, overgrown with luxuriant grass and thick-foliaged cypresses, only the turbaned tombstones show that here is the place of sad repose. And the effect of the picture is heightened by the mighty cupola of the all-dominating Aja Sofia mosque, which looks right over all these palaces into the golden mirror of ...
— Halil the Pedlar - A Tale of Old Stambul • Mr Jkai
... after. There she is, supported by her old father, decked out in his old-fashioned brown coat, with a wig of the same colour, beautifully relieving the burning redness of his huge projecting ears; and the mother, puffed up like an overgrown bolster, encouraging the trembling girl, and joining her maiden aunts of full fifty years, in telling her to take courage, for it is what they must all come to. Bride's-maids and mutual friends make up the company; and there, standing out before ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 326, August 9, 1828 • Various
... paid him by Larsen, Comet would have quickly overcome his feeling of strangeness. He was no milksop. He was like an overgrown boy, off at college or in some foreign city. He was sensitive, and not sure of himself. Had Larsen gained his confidence, it would all have been different. And as for Larsen—he ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... that land is going out of cultivation, that the British home market has been spoiled, and that towns are overgrown and overcrowded are unfortunately only too well justified, but these phenomena are not due to private property in land. Private property in land is universal, but the desertion of the country and overcrowding in towns are not universal. These evils are to be found chiefly ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... the northeast; the river had widened almost to a sea, growing more and more desolate, with a few lonely islands breaking its expanse, and the shores sinking lower and lower till, near Tadoussac, they rose a little in flat-topped bluffs thickly overgrown with stunted evergreens. Here, into the vast low-walled breadth of the St. Lawrence, a dark stream, narrowly bordered by rounded heights of rock, steals down from the north out of regions of gloomy and ever-during solitude. This is the Saguenay; ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... freedom as to see in it the elements of a rich and rounded picture. The frame was still there but a short time since, cracked and empty, broken and gaping, like those few others, of the general overgrown scene, that my late quest had puzzled out; and this has somehow helped me to read back into it the old figures and the old long story, told as with excellent art. We knew the figures well while they lasted and had with them the happiest relation, but without ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... better, for in reality he was a good, worthy fellow—more so than any of the people with whom we otherwise came in contact. My mother in particular had a great respect for him, and, after herself, he was my best friend. But at first I was just an overgrown hoyden, and joined Sasha in playing the fool. For hours we would devise tricks to anger and distract him, for he looked extremely ridiculous when he was angry, and so diverted us the more (ashamed though I am now to ...
— Poor Folk • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... forward for half an hour, though in that time he did not cover much ground, and he was just beginning to think that the house must be near at hand when through a fringe of bushes he saw the old mansion. It stood in the midst of what had once been a fine park, but which was now overgrown with weeds and tangled briars. The paths that led to the house were almost out of sight, and the once beautiful home was partly ...
— Tom Swift and his Motor-cycle • Victor Appleton
... effect on the vital powers that makes us insensible to all the virtues and graces of the proprietor of one of these life-absorbing organs. When they touch us, virtue passes out of us, and we feel as if our electricity had been drained by a powerful negative battery, carried about by an overgrown human torpedo. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... The deserted site, overgrown with rank weeds and grass, stands but little above the marshy bed of the river, which here preserves the name of Shang- tu, and about a mile from its north or left bank. The walls, of earth faced with brick and unhewn stone, still stand, forming, as in the Tartar city of Peking, a double enceinte, ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... hung in long garlands from tree to tree, where the nightingale sang and the sunbeams were playing: it was very beautiful, but it was no place for girls to go; their clothes would get so torn. Large blocks of stone lay there, overgrown with moss of every color; the fresh spring bubbled forth, and made ...
— Andersen's Fairy Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... west from these islands, we came to an island two leagues long and as much in breadth, where we staid all night to take in wood and water, which we named Brions Island. It was full of goodly trees, verdant fields, and fields overgrown with wild-corn and pease in bloom, as thick and luxuriant as any we had seen in Brittany, so that it seemed to have been ploughed and sown; having likewise great quantities of gooseberries, strawberries, roses, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VI - Early English Voyages Of Discovery To America • Robert Kerr
... resort to the States and endeavor to obtain there the same organization which they failed to perpetuate in the Union; and with specious and deceitful plans of public advantages and State interests and State pride they will endeavor to establish in the different States one moneyed institution with overgrown capital and exclusive privileges sufficient to enable it to control the operations of the other banks. Such an institution will be pregnant with the same evils produced by the Bank of the United States, although ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 2) of Volume 3: Andrew Jackson (Second Term) • James D. Richardson
... beheld a large, overgrown, rough-looking man, about five and thirty, with black hair and eyes, and a coarse, florid complexion, who looked up and nodded carelessly on ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... or any one else's case," said the dwarf, hopping over the table like an overgrown toad, "I will first see that this guest of ours is properly taken care, of, and does not leave us without the ceremony of ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... seeds of knowledge, which, in fulness of time, were to spring up into new and more glorious forms of civilization. The organization of society became more favorable to geographical science. Instead of one overgrown, lethargic empire, oppressing every thing by its colossal weight, Europe was broken up into various independent communities, many of which, adopting liberal forms of government, felt all the impulses natural to freemen; and the ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... again on the opposite side. After a few missteps and much laughter we were landed at last, but several of the party had wet feet to remember the experience by. We found ourselves in a space that had once been a clearing. A tumbledown chimney overgrown with brambles and vines told of an abandoned hearthstone. The blackened remnants of many a picnic camp fire strewed the ground. A slight turn brought us to the spot where the Indian Spring welled out of the hillside. The ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... across, a range of islands shut out the main waters of the bay. For miles on the outer side of the curving prongs of land stretched a rugged, desolate coast, indented with coves and creeks, lined with bowlders of granite half sunken in the sea, and edged by beaches overgrown with pale sedge, or covered with beds of seaweed. Nothing alive, except the gulls, abode on these solitary shores. No lighthouse stood on any point, to shake its long, warning light across the mariners' wake. Now and then a drowned man floated in among the sedge, or a small craft went to pieces ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... conviction that, however it might once have been, the state would immediately abandon its industries now that she had come away from it. I beheld its considerable area desolated, the forges cold, the hammers stilled, the fields overgrown, the ships rotting at their docks, the stalwart mechanics drooping idly above their unfinished tasks. It was not possible to suppose that any one could feel, in a state which she had left, that interest which ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... rages."—Nearly the half of one of the sides, which is seventy feet long, is occupied by three flat Norman buttresses, of very small projection. No arched door-way, no window remains; nor any thing, except these buttresses, to give a distinct character to the architecture: the hill is so overgrown with brush-wood, that though traces of foundation are discernible in almost every part of it, no clear idea can be formed of the dimensions or plan of the building. Its importance is sufficiently ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. II. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... dimly outlined in the gathering shadows; yet one could imagine its stately, formal aspect, its precise garden with beds of old-fashioned flowers and straight paths bordered with box, and a little arbour overgrown with honeysuckle. I know not by what subtlety of delicate and indescribable touches—a slight inclination in one of the pillars, a broken line which might indicate an unhinged gate, a drooping resignation in ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke
... to which we had clambered was thickly overgrown with brambles, through which we soon discovered that it would have been impossible to force our way but for the scythe; and Jupiter, by direction of his master, proceeded to clear for us a path to the foot of an enormously tall tulip-tree, ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... the ship approached the harbour. The sea was blue with a blue she had never seen, and the sky was like an inverted bowl of copper. The low shore, covered with bush, stretched away in the distance; a line of waves was breaking on the reef. They came in sight of the island of Mombassa, with the overgrown ruins of a battery that had once commanded the entrance; and there were white-roofed houses, with deep verandas, which stood in little clearings with coral cliffs below them. On the opposite shore thick groves of ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham
... carved out of white stone, and gaudily painted; a yellow robe, like the Lamas', dangled across his shoulders. The air seemed close with incense and also with bad ventilation. The centre of the nave, if I may so call it, was occupied by a huge wooden cylinder, a sort of overgrown drum, painted in bright colours, with ornamental designs and Tibetan letters. It was much taller than a man, some nine feet high, I should say, and it revolved above and below on an iron spindle. Looking closer, I saw it had a crank attached to it, with a string ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... time took the human form; and at last, that he was THE ONLY GOD, the Creator and Providence of all the universe; but was man also, the GOD-MAN. Thus, gradually, the actual facts of his history were lost out of sight, overgrown with a great mass of fictions, poetic and other stories, which make him a mythological character; the Jesus of fact was well-nigh forgot,—the Christ of fiction took ...
— Two Christmas Celebrations • Theodore Parker
... nor stump must be removed, these woods were very lonely. Occasionally a trapper or a sportsman wandered through them, but just here where Ingolby was none ever loitered. It was too thick for game, there was no roadway leading anywhere, but only an overgrown path, used in the old days by Indians. It was this path which ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... mighty clever guesser, outpointing with ease his transatlantic cousin. Over there the sovereign guesses officially that devotion to the Mother of God is a superstitious practice. This reminds one of the overgrown farmer boy, who, when invited by his teacher to locate the center of a circle drawn on the blackboard, stood off and eyed the figure critically for a moment with a wise squint; and then said, pointing his finger to the middle or thereabouts: ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... of Orange. Difficulties were gradually smoothed away, and the Peace of Nimeguen between the United Provinces and France was signed August 11, 1678. The other powers shortly afterward acceded to it. The principal sufferer, as was natural, was the overgrown but feeble monarchy whose centre was Spain, which gave up to France Franche Comte and a number of fortified towns in the Spanish Netherlands, thus extending the boundaries of France to the east and northeast. Holland, for whose destruction Louis began the war, lost not a foot ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan
... Christian Science pretty well, although the name seemed to me somewhat of a misnomer. The main part of it consisted in trying to make me believe that nothing is or ever was. Just a great big, overgrown imagination. However, I cannot refrain from perpetrating that old gag about their taking real money for what they ...
— Confessions of a Neurasthenic • William Taylor Marrs
... would stir up trouble for the very joy of combat. Clemens never cared for that sort of thing and discouraged it, but Ward and Gillis were for war. "They never assisted each other. If one had offered to assist the other against some overgrown person, it would have been an affront, and a battle would have followed between that pair of little friends."—[S. L. C., 1906.]—Steve Gillis in particular, was fond of incidental encounters, a characteristic which would prove an important factor somewhat later in shaping Mark ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... the house, and the size of the orange-trees that shut in the little yard with walls of green, marked the place as having been established before the wealth of the far-away East discovered the peculiar charm of the Fairlands hills. The lawn, the walks, and the drive were unkempt and overgrown with weeds. The house itself,—a small cottage with a wide porch across the front and on the side to the west,—unpainted for many seasons, was tinted by the brush of the elements, a soft ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... which place he accordingly marched. Aldana got notice of his coming from some Spanish inhabitants of that place, and laid an ambuscade for him, consisting of an hundred and fifty musqueteers, in a place overgrown with tall reeds on the side of the road by which Acosta had to march in his way to Santa. Acosta had certainly fallen into the snare, if he had not fortunately made prisoners of some spies who had been sent on shore from the squadron, whom he was ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... Shore Railroad shot its way across the broad reaches of the northern peninsula. On either side of the right-of-way lay mystery in the shape of thickets so dense and overgrown that the eye could penetrate them but a few feet at most. Beyond them stood the forests. Thus Nature screened her intimacies from the impertinent eye of ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... now rose, almost perpendicularly, the everlasting rocks, to a height of a thousand feet, covered with the richest foliage that imagination can picture, while here and there a sharp steeple—like pinnacle of grey—stone, overgrown with lichens, shot up, and out from the face of them, into the blue sky, mixing with the tall forest trees that overhung the road, festooned with ivy and withes of different kinds, like the rigging of a ship, round which the tendrils ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... fellow sufferer at the Friday Afternoon Dancing Class, but otherwise not often a companion: a home-sheltered lad, tutored privately and preserved against the coarsening influences of rude comradeship and miscellaneous information. Heavily overgrown in all physical dimensions, virtuous, and placid, this cloistered mutton was wholly uninteresting to Penrod Schofield. Nevertheless, Roderick Magsworth Bitts, Junior, was a personage on account of ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... holding its cones and hoarding seeds often results in the cones being overgrown and embedded in the trunk or the limbs of the trees. As the cones hug closely the trunk or the limbs, it is not uncommon for the saw, when laying open a log at the mill, to reveal a number of cones ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... of the farms that ran out to the upper Carmody road. Just before them, hemmed in by beeches and firs but open to the south, was a little corner and in it a garden . . . or what had once been a garden. A tumbledown stone dyke, overgrown with mosses and grass, surrounded it. Along the eastern side ran a row of garden cherry trees, white as a snowdrift. There were traces of old paths still and a double line of rosebushes through the ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... hunting-frock and cap with a green plume shading his forehead, a double-barreled carbine in his hand, with a tomahawk and hunting-knife sheathed in his belt, which was the favorite dress of a hunter when rambling through the green, overgrown forests of the Valley of the Mohawk, to prevent being noticed ...
— The Forest King - Wild Hunter of the Adaca • Hervey Keyes
... peace at home and abroad: at home by restraining the excesses of forestars and tyrants; abroad by opposing the constant war policy against France. (3) Constitutional. He first encountered and checked the overgrown power of the Crown, and laid down limits and principles which resulted in the Church policy of John's reign and the triumph of Magna Carta. (4) Architectural. He fully developed—even if he did not, as some assert, invent—the Early English ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson
... before her eyes, till at last she saw the real land to which they were bound. There arose the most glorious blue mountains, with cedar forests, cities, and palaces. Long before the sun went down she sat on the rock, in front of a great cave overgrown with delicate green trailing plants looking like ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... trail, would run it up like a bloodhound. So he changed his path, descending the cliff, and making his way cautiously along the sea-beach where the snow did not lie. He passed the great boulder which had fallen with Frank Kennedy. It was now all overgrown with mussels and seaweed. The mouth of the cave opened black and dismal before him. Glossin drew breath before entering such a haunt of iniquity, and recharged his pistols. He was, however, somewhat heartened by ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... were fast asleep in their high nests, and the ears of the other animals were not delicate enough, or were too much overgrown with hair, to hear them. The Fire-flies alone heard the joyous peal, for they were akin to the flowers, through their common ancestor, Light. They inquired of their nearest relation, the Lily of the Valley, and from her they heard that a large flower ...
— Peter Schlemihl etc. • Chamisso et. al.
... of reducing and renovating an overgrown hedge by which all old and exhausted wood is cut out, leaving live vertical stakes at intervals, and winding the young stuff in and out of them in basket-making fashion, after notching it at the base ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... noon, while the men's squadron was paddling slowly along a flat bank overgrown with grass and bushes, Dick and Sam perceived a sudden excitement in the leading canoes. Haukemah stopped, then cautiously backed until well behind the screen of the point. The other canoes followed his example. In a moment they were all headed down stream, creeping ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White
... of October, Mrs. Chigwin was at work in her garden, with her dress tucked up, a basket in her left hand, and a large pair of scissors in her right. Every flower that had begun to fade, every withered leaf and overgrown shoot fell before those fatal shears, and was caught in the all-devouring basket; and from time to time she bore a fresh load of snippets to their last resting-place. Her heart was in her work, and ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... every one he met the explanation of this, that, and the other; and his own wits were so lively that he was ever ready with an answer himself for any question put to him, so that talkativeness had become, as it were, his second nature. But, just as in the body when a boy is overgrown, some touch of youthfulness is sure to show itself and tell the secret of his age, so for all the lad's loquacity, the impression left on the listener was not of arrogance, but of simplicity and warm-heartedness, and one would gladly have heard his chatter to the end ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon
... sordidly commercial. Even the body of it has undergone little or no alteration; it was as shapeless, as incongruous; as ugly when the author of 'New York in Slices' wrote as it is at this writing; it has simply grown, or overgrown, on the moral and material lines which seem to have been structural in it from the beginning. He felt in his time the same vulgarity, the same violence, in its architectural anarchy that I have ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... the trees as they penetrated deeper into the forest; more obstructed and difficult became the road. Suddenly, without an instant's warning, they came upon the house, a huge, square building of gray stone, so overgrown with moss, ivy, and creeping vines that scarcely a glimpse of the wall could be seen. Its colors, therefore, blended so well with the forest trees that grew thickly and closely around it, that one could scarcely suspect the existence of ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... spot, covered with great boulders that had rolled down the hill-sides, and with gaps and chasms here and there of considerable depth, that suggested the idea of volcanic action having visited the place at some remote period. These chasms or rents in the earth were overgrown with trees or bushes in many places, and obliged the travellers to make wide detours in some places ...
— The Coxswain's Bride - also, Jack Frost and Sons; and, A Double Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... was thus reasserting the imperial power, England had a strong king in Henry II. By wedding the most important feudal heiress in France, Henry added so many provinces to his ancestral French domain of Normandy that more than half France lay in his possession, and the French kings found that in this overgrown duke, who was also an independent monarch, they possessed a vassal far wealthier and more powerful than themselves. Henry took more than one step toward the humiliation, or even subjugation, of France, but seems to have been hampered by a real feudal respect for his overlord. Moreover, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume VI. • Various
... described as being four feet deep. In Young's Tours through England (1768) the Essex roads are spoken of as having ruts of inconceivable depth, and the roads so overgrown with trees as to be impervious to the sun. Some of the turnpikes were spoken of as being rocky lanes, with stones "as big as a horse, and abominable holes!" He adds that "it is a prostitution of language to call them turnpikes—ponds of liquid dirt and a scattering ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... profoundly disturbed. This was no ordinary predicament. He knew that unless the priest relented they stood small chance of seeing sun and stars again. Would he relent? Roldan's own indomitable will and growing ambitions responded to the awful forces in the man, overgrown and abnormal as they had become. That the priest had some great end in view to which this gold was the means, and that the gold itself had roused in him a controlling passion, he could not doubt. The priest himself had told him something, ...
— The Valiant Runaways • Gertrude Atherton
... living in deep retirement all summer, teaching their ungainly calves the sounds and smells and lessons of the woods, travel much less; their hoofs, in consequence, are generally long and pointed and overgrown. ...
— Wood Folk at School • William J. Long
... portion of the southern province is covered with palm-trees; the centre is a mountainous region, with magnificent scenery, crowned by the lofty summit of Adam's Peak; while the low lands, where cultivation does not extend, are overgrown with dense masses of forest and impenetrable jungle. This is the condition of the northern and a large portion of the eastern province. Kandy, the capital, is situated in the central province, and in the high lands. In the northern part of it are to be found ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... hard. Even a skilled man would have been kept busy by the multitude of details that poured in on the little office. Poor Bob was far from skilled. He felt as awkward amid all these swift and accurate activities as he had when at sixteen it became necessary to force his overgrown frame into a crowded drawing room. He tried very hard, as he always did with everything. When Collins succinctly called his attention to a discrepancy in his figurings, he smiled his slow, winning, troubled smile, thrust ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... southern edge of the woods were overgrown with raspberry-bushes. When Filippo's daily stint about the camp was finished, he visited these spots with his pail; and while the season lasted, heaping bowls of red, dead-ripe fruit or saucers of sweet preserve varied their customary ...
— Jim Spurling, Fisherman - or Making Good • Albert Walter Tolman
... Rohault's version of the Cartesian physics was translated into English; and Malebranche found an ardent follower in John Norris (1667-1711). Of Cartesianism towards the close of the 17th century the only remnants were an overgrown theory of vortices, which received its death-blow from Newton, and a dubious phraseology anent innate ideas, which found a witty ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... Sheffield whittle. The man had no covering upon his head, which was only defended by his own thick hair, matted and twisted together, and scorched by the influence of the sun into a rusty dark-red colour, forming a contrast with the overgrown beard upon his cheeks, which was rather of a yellow or amber hue. One part of his dress only remains, but it is too remarkable to be suppressed; it was a brass ring, resembling a dog's collar, but without any opening, and ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... absolute monarchies which flourished on the breaking up of feudalism, when it became a tyranny and a mockery, but which absolute monarchies flourished only one or two hundred years,—a sort of necessity in the development of nations to check the insolence and overgrown power of nobles, but after all essentially different from the imperialism of Caesar or Napoleon, since they relied on the support of nobles and municipalities more than on a standing army; yea, on votes and grants from parliaments to raise money to support the army,—certainly in England, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume V • John Lord
... two with loaded pistols, and started afresh through the wood in the direction of Warroch Point. She led them by a long and winding passage almost overgrown with brushwood, until they suddenly found themselves by the seashore. They were soon outside ...
— The Junior Classics, V5 • Edited by William Patten
... has an eye which lies very deep in the body and is almost overgrown by the skin. But this eye is by no means as developed as the organ of vision, for instance, of the water salamander (the triton) or of the so-called axolotl, for it exists only in a kind of embryonic development, and contains neither ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 664, September 22,1888 • Various
... to approach is the row of unswathed mummies that follow. Here, in each coffin over which we bend, there is a face which stares at us—or else closes its eyes in order that it may not see us; and meagre shoulders and lean arms, and hands with overgrown nails that protrude from miserable rags. And each royal mummy that our lantern lights reserves for us a fresh surprise and the shudder of a different fear—they resemble one another so little. Some ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... streets were empty, the air stifling. Close to the wall and fence lay the short shadows, vanquished by the triumphant sun. Through mere force of habit, Lida opened her parasol. She never noticed if it was cold or hot, light or dark. She walked swiftly past the fences all dusty and overgrown with weeds, her head bowed, her eyes downcast. Now and again she met a few gasping pedestrians half- suffocated by the heat. Over the town lay silence, the oppressive ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... threshold for a moment, and looked into the room. It was lighted—except for the feeble ray from the lamp—only by the faint moonlight which found its way in through the hall and narrow windows, partly overgrown with ...
— The Crime of the French Cafe and Other Stories • Nicholas Carter
... vicinity knew but little of romance. If they saved time from hard labor to read their Bible, it was certainly a subject for thankfulness. Most of them thought that Snag-Orchard was a gloomy place, and that it was a pity for so much good ground to be taken up with overgrown trees. It suited Mr. Croswell, however, who was the former proprietor. He had but little interest in the land belonging to this world, for all his relatives, nearly every one, had gone to the land that is "very far off." He loved the trees, and seemed to us like an ...
— Be Courteous • Mrs. M. H. Maxwell
... man: his hoary head Conspicuous many a league, the mariner, Bound homeward, and in hope already there, Greets with three cheers exulting. At his waist A girdle of half-withered shrubs he shows, And at his feet the baffled billows die. The common overgrown with fern, and rough With prickly gorse, that, shapeless and deformed And dangerous to the touch, has yet its bloom, And decks itself with ornaments of gold, Yields no unpleasing ramble; there the turf Smells fresh, and, rich in odoriferous herbs And fungous ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... morning found the three youths in a summer-house attached to the Wadsworth estate. This was located down near a tiny brook and was overgrown with vines and bushes. It was a cozy retreat, especially on such a hot day in July, and the boys proceeded to make themselves at home by throwing off their coats ...
— Dave Porter in the Gold Fields - The Search for the Landslide Mine • Edward Stratemeyer
... again with a hint of exasperation. "You're just like a child," she said severely. "A great, overgrown ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... and before my mental vision there arose an overgrown old orchard, skirting one of the great stock-routes from Riverina to Monaro. A glorious day was languidly smiling good night on abundance of ripe and ripening fruit and flowers. The scent of stock and the merry ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... those who ostensibly made themselves so busy in exploring woods and fields and lanes were quite so thorough when it came to the private examination of their own lofts and outhouses. Stories were afloat of a mysterious figure being occasionally seen in some old overgrown trackway or other, remote from turnpike roads; but when a search was instituted in any of these suspected quarters nobody was found. Thus the days and ...
— Stories by English Authors: England • Various
... immersed in his own thoughts and soothed by the knowledge that their friendship had reached a height where silence is permitted—becomes even the purest form of expression. At the bottom of the compound they reached a large, low-built building, evidently once a dwelling-place, overgrown with wild plants and half in ruins, whose dim outlines stood out against the darkening background of trees and sky. The door stood open, and must indeed have stood open for many years, for the broken hinges were rusty and seemed to be ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... hollows, streams tumbled in tiny waterfalls between gigantic trees hung with strange flowering vines and orchids. Or we would push into great lakes of swirling brown water, dotted with flat islands overgrown with reed grass higher than the head of a man. Again the water turned blue and the trees on the banks grew into forests with the look of cultivated, well-cared-for parks, but with no sign of man, not even a mud hut or ...
— The Congo and Coasts of Africa • Richard Harding Davis
... and so uneven and unsightly were the patches of growth, that the blossoming shrubs with which it had been sprinkled for ornament, now looked forlorn and out of place, flowering amidst the desolation. The slave-quarter was scarcely distinguishable from the wood behind it, so nearly was it overgrown with weeds. A young foal was browsing on the thatch, and a crowd of glittering lizards darted out and away on the approach of ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... pushing and dragging our ponies for twenty miles along a narrow path through thick jungle, which half-a-dozen natives in advance were opening before us with bill-hooks. This had at one time been a good path, but was then overgrown. It is ...
— The Rifle and The Hound in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... that wits jump?—that's jist what I was sayin' to meself," remarked O'Riley, grinning from ear to ear as he pulled the fur hood farther over his head, crossed his arms more firmly on his breast, and tried to double himself up as he sat there like an overgrown rat. "I wouldn't exchange it with the Lord Mayor o' London and his coach an' six—so I wouldn't. Arrah! have a care, Meetuck, ye baste, or ye'll have ...
— The World of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... small village. A little to the right was to be seen an old manor house of modest dimensions, its shutters closed, its portico awry. On one side stood a barn built of oak, small, but well preserved. The wide court-yard was entirely overgrown by nettles, as green and thick as ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... sort of twinkling light through the thick bushes, which seemed to lie in the way he was going, and on he went, slowly enough, poor man! But still the light was before him, till suddenly he came to a great rock, overgrown in many places with briers and brambles. In the midst of it, however, was the mouth of a large cave, with great masses of stone hanging over, as if ready to fall on a traveler's head. It was a very stern and gloomy looking place indeed, with clefts and crevices and ragged crags all around. ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 3 (of 12) - Classic Tales And Old-Fashioned Stories • Various
... I will conclude my overgrown letter with the assurance that you never were in greater favour, and that I love you dearly. Believe me, therefore, ever, my best beloved Victoria, your ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume 1 (of 3), 1837-1843) • Queen Victoria
... a story that summer in Elmira, in the little octagonal study, shut in now by trees and overgrown with vines. "A Dog's Tale," a pathetic plea against vivisection, was the last story written in the little retreat that had seen the beginning of ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... continue their uninterrupted slope from the forehead. Perched on this nose of land was an inconspicuous little house. As the surrounding land was too steep for habitation, this house stood by itself, the slope for many yards on either side being overgrown with bushes and undergrowths, while a considerable stand of pines grew at one side. The fenced-in yard of this house was large, and by an ingenious system of curves a roadway had been built from ...
— The Secret Wireless - or, The Spy Hunt of the Camp Brady Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss
... that, wherein, with meditative step, With uncompanion'd step, measured and slow, And wistful gaze, that to the left, the right, Was often turn'd, as if in secret dread Of something horrible that must be met— Of unseen evil not to be eschew'd— Up a long vista'd avenue I wound, Untrodden long, and overgrown with moss. It seem'd an entrance to the hall of gloom; Grey twilight, in the melancholy shade Of the hoar branches, show'd the tufted grass With globules spangled of the fine night-dew— So fine—that even a midge's tiny tread Had caused them ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... old ramparts that had defended the crest of the hill. A double bank of earth, now all overgrown with trees and shrubs, not unlike the outlines of ancient British and Roman encampments. On every point around us similar traces could be found, showing that the district had been thickly inhabited. As the Maoris had no grazing stock ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... the left from the old road, I wander over soft logs and gray yielding debris, across the little trout brook, until I emerge in the overgrown Barkpeeling,—pausing now and then on the way to admire a small, solitary white flower which rises above the moss, with radical, heart-shaped leaves, and a blossom precisely like the liverwort except in color, but which is not put ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... castle, for, in its immediate vicinity, and within his own enclosed domain, were the manifest traces, on the brow of the hill, of a Roman station, or castellum, which was still called the "Castle" by the country people. The primitive mounds and trenches, merely overgrown with greensward, with a few patches of juniper and box on the vallum, and a solitary ancient beech surmounting the place of the praetorium, presented nearly the same depths, heights, slopes, and forms, which the Roman soldiers had originally given them. From this cartel Mr. Crotchet ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... and the best and richest spots marked by hamlets and farmhouses, and this great and immeasurable plain, prepared for man, like a new paradise, bounded far and near by mountains partly cultivated, partly overgrown with woods, he will then conceive the rapture with which I blessed my fate, that it had destined me, for some time, so beautiful a ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... sure singing bird," said another sub, a stout, overgrown boy by the name of Booth. "The nerve of ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... pig—for its enormous size. Never were there such labyrinths of uncarpeted passages, such clusters of mouldy, badly-lighted rooms, such huge numbers of small dens for eating or sleeping in, beneath any other roof, as are collected between the four walls of this overgrown Tavern." ...
— Pickwickian Studies • Percy Fitzgerald
... into thick mud to his belly, and Ajor and I were thrown far over his head. He had run into one of those numerous springs which cover Caspak. Sometimes they are little lakes, again but tiny pools, and often mere quagmires of mud, as was this one overgrown with lush grasses which effectually hid its treacherous identity. It is a wonder that Ace did not break a leg, so fast he was going when he fell; but he didn't, though with four good legs he was unable to wallow from the mire. Ajor and I had sprawled face down in the ...
— The People that Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... calling forth qualities that till then had lain dormant. At the time the events I have to relate take us to Poland, the nation is just at this last turning-point, but it has not yet rounded it. To what an extent the bad qualities had overgrown the good ones, corrupting and deadening them, may be gathered from contemporary witnesses. George Forster, who was appointed professor of natural history at Wilna in 1784, and remained in that position for several years, says that he found in Poland "a medley of fanatical and almost New Zealand ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... of the sea went into a cave that was overgrown with vines and roses. Peleus looked into the cave and he saw her sleeping upon skins of the beasts of the sea. His heart was enchanted by the sight, and he knew that his life would be broken if he did not see this goddess day after ...
— The Golden Fleece and the Heroes who Lived Before Achilles • Padraic Colum
... towards the south, and then turned into a small river, where the scenery on both sides resembled that given in the picture. Cypress-swamps and high trees overgrown with moss everywhere met our view. On the banks, and generally on fallen logs, might be seen alligators basking ...
— The Nursery, October 1877, Vol. XXII. No. 4 - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest Readers • Various
... her lunch basket when they went to school together, he had patiently worked the sums on her slate with his big clumsy fingers when she cried over the mysteries of subtraction. Later, when shy and overgrown, and too bashful to speak his admiration, he had followed her around at picnics and parties with a dog-like devotion that touched her. He had sent her valentines and Christmas cards, and at the last High School commencement when the graduating exercises ...
— The Little Colonel's Chum: Mary Ware • Annie Fellows Johnston
... few miles away, was a line of mountains, divided into numerous spurs and peaks by deep valleys richly clothed in tropical verdure. The country about us was uncultivated and generally open, but here and there were straggling lines of low stone walls overgrown with a wild vine resembling our morning-glory, the masses of green leaves starred with large pink flowers. The algaroba, a graceful tree resembling the elm, grew along the roadside, generally about fifteen feet high. In Honolulu, where they are watered and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... this enormous bulk there must be hidden the modest, slender, violet-nature of a girl, whom an alien mass of earthliness has unkindly overgrown; for an English maiden in her teens, though very seldom so pretty as our own damsels, possesses, to say the truth, a certain charm of half-blossom, and delicately folded leaves, and tender womanhood shielded by maidenly reserves, with which, somehow or other, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... Mrs. Burton frantic. And she grew the longest, thinnest pair of legs and arms in Europe; and her hair seemed to lose its wonderful lustre; and her skin, upon which Mrs. Burton had banked so much, became colorless and opaque and a little blotched around the chin. And she was so nervous and overgrown that she would throw you a whole fit of hysterics during piano lessons; and she prayed so long night and morning that her bony knees developed callouses; and when she didn't have a cold in her head she was getting over one ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... guide, from his robust and athletic make, and the lowering expression of his countenance, might be easily recognized as Bermudo, the renegade; the others were strangers, and apparently disguised. They proceeded onwards, slowly, and with care, until at length they stopped at a sequestered spot, overgrown with brambles, and surrounded with high and widely spreading trees, whose sombre foliage offered an impenetrable barrier to the light of day. They plunged into the midst of this wilderness, and presently the renegade blew ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... pointing out the errors into which they have fallen. A respect for truth, however, obliges us to remark, that they seem never for a moment to have turned their eyes from the danger to liberty from the overgrown and all-grasping prerogative of an hereditary magistrate, supported and fortified by an hereditary branch of the legislative authority. They seem never to have recollected the danger from legislative usurpations, ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... to the turning-lathe,—times when there were heroes in abundance, but no scribes. And the cairn, about a hundred feet in length and breadth, by about twenty in height, with its long hoary hair of overgrown lichen waving in the breeze, and the trailing club-moss shooting upwards from its base along its sides, bears in its every lineament full mark of its great age. It is a mound striding across the stream of centuries, to connect the past with the present. And yet, ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... him to an elder-shoot and follow her. They went through a gap in a ruinous hedge, and traversed a furzy field, at the farther side of which stood the wizard's hut, a wretched place of a single story, with a shuttered window and a thatched roof full of holes and overgrown with weeds. As they approached the door a mighty clatter was audible within, and Mrs. Jenny held the boy's hand in a tightened grasp, fearful of devilry. As they stood irresolute to advance or retreat, a big cat dashed out at the doorway with a feline imprecation, and ...
— Julia And Her Romeo: A Chronicle Of Castle Barfield - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... fixed, that without instruments they may not be removed. One stone in the south wall is so large that we deemed it fully the task of from four to six men to move it when loose. The north side wall is beginning to give way, where the room is covered in. On the outside it is overgrown with black scurf and grey moss. The head end we deemed was the one which is turned to the rock and is not covered in, and evidently has been open from the beginning. Here the floor is overgrown with moss, grass, thyme, ferns, crow-foot, ...
— The Story of Grettir The Strong • Translated by Eirikr Magnusson and William Morris
... up-stairs to the Queen, who laid them under her own pillow. But the Castle had a governor, and the governor being Lord Montacute's friend, confided to him how he knew of a secret passage underground, hidden from observation by the weeds and brambles with which it was overgrown; and how, through that passage, the conspirators might enter in the dead of the night, and go straight to Mortimer's room. Accordingly, upon a certain dark night, at midnight, they made their way through this dismal place: startling the rats, ...
— A Child's History of England • Charles Dickens
... only question is, what is the most convenient time for their duration? On which there are three opinions. We are agreed, too, that the term ought not to be chosen most likely in its operation to spread corruption, and to augment the already overgrown influence of the crown. On these principles I mean to debate the question. It is easy to pretend a zeal for liberty. Those who think themselves not likely to be encumbered with the performance of their promises, either from their known inability, or total indifference about the performance, ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke
... discharged itself into the Mississippi; and further, that their course must be west southwest; but so many marshes and small lakes intervened, that the route was intricate; the more so, as the river was overgrown with wild rice, which obstructed the channel to such a degree, that it was difficult to follow it. On this account their guides were necessary, who conducted them safely to a portage, which was about two thousand seven hundred paces across.[126-10] The guides aided them ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... twenty-four in breadth; the steeple, which stands between the nave and the chancel, rests on four high and slender pointed arches. The principal entrance is by a handsome pointed doorway, luxuriantly overgrown with ivy, through which is seen the great eastern window. The intermediate space, as indeed every part of the ruined edifice, is filled with tombs, the greater number distinguished only by a slight elevation from the mold around them; but some containing ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... webs, whose central shafts lead to their nests. The highest levels, only a few feet above water, are grown with a dense bush that wants the matchet. Here are remains of plantations, a little knot of bananas, a single tall cocoanut, many young palms, and a few felled trunks overgrown with oysters. Europeans have proposed to build bungalows on Bobowusua, where they find fresh sea-air, and a little shooting among the red-breasted ring-doves, rails, and green pigeons affecting the vegetation. It appears to us a good place for mooring hulks. The steamers could then ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... surrounded by eight hundred kinds of roses and myrtles. Each one has a canopy according to his merits,[78] and under it flow four rivers, one of milk, the other of balsam, the third of wine, and the fourth of honey. Every canopy is overgrown by a vine of gold, and thirty pearls hang from it, each of them shining like Venus. Under each canopy there is a table of precious stones and pearls, and sixty angels stand at the head of every just man, saying unto him: "Go and eat with joy of the honey, for thou hast busied thyself with the Torah, ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... "Beside the woodland path there are two small farm-houses. The doors are low, and some of the windows are placed quite high, and others close to the ground; and whitethorn and barberry bushes grow around them. The roof of each house is overgrown with moss and with yellow flowers and houseleek. Cabbage and potatoes are the only plants cultivated in the gardens, but out of the hedge there grows a willow tree, and under this willow tree sat a little girl, ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... There is an opening among the pine-trees at that spot, as if there were a road between them. In fact, a path is sometimes made in that direction which then serves to bring down timber from the higher regions, but which is afterward overgrown again with grass. Proceeding along this way, which gently ascends, one arrives at last at a bare, treeless region. It is barren heath where grows nothing but heather, mosses, and lichens. It grows ever steeper, the further one ascends; but one always follows a gully resembling ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... overgrown path, in through the woods, my heart quivers with an unearthly joy. I call to mind a spot on the eastern shores of the Caspian, where I once stood. All just as it is here, with the water still and heavy and iron-grey as now. I walked through the woods, touched to ...
— Wanderers • Knut Hamsun
... wide, with spreading verandas all overgrown by roses and woodbine, and commanding on all sides a wide view of the rolling alfalfa-fields, was a most bewitching place for a young couple to spend the first few months of their married life. So Jack and I were naturally much delighted when ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... The castle of New Edinburgh was in ruins. The huts had been burned. The site marked out for the proud capital which was to have been the Tyre, the Venice, the Amsterdam of the eighteenth century was overgrown with jungle, and inhabited only by the sloth and the baboon. The hearts of the adventurers sank within them. For their fleet had been fitted out, not to plant a colony, but to recruit a colony already planted and supposed to be prospering. They were therefore worse provided with every ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... accurate. There is no accepted basis of fact for anything: nobody believes anybody else, and truth here lies in a very deep well. But one thing else is clear. Cuba, so gifted by Nature, is being despoiled by man; and what ought to be a garden will become overgrown with weeds if there is not a change of fortune. There is taxation without representation under an iron despotism: there is an army without war, and the people look on. It is not necessary to find any new means of going to the bad at a gallop. The rich give practical support to the Spanish, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... work of a moment. I then proceeded to look around, in order to gain a more clear idea of the situation in which I was placed, in the hope of discovering the easiest method of extricating myself from it. Close behind me lay the chalk-pit, and, as I gazed down its rugged sides, overgrown with brambles and rank weeds, I shuddered to think of the probable fate from which I had been so almost miraculously preserved, and turned away with a heartfelt expression of thanksgiving to Him who had mercifully decreed that the thread ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... and to the metropolis of Egypt. It is hard to realize that this wild moorland path by which we are travelling was once a busy road, filled with camels, horses, chariots, foot-passengers, clanking companies of soldiers; that these crumbling, cavernous walls, overgrown with thorny capers and wild marjoram and mandragora, were once crowded every night with a motley mob of travellers and merchants; that this pool of muddy water, gloomily reflecting the ruins, was once surrounded by flocks and herds and beasts of burden; that ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... the inn, and set out to walk from the entrance to the house. There is no porter's lodge; and the grounds, in this outlying region, had not the appearance of being very primly kept, but were well wooded with evergreens, and much overgrown with ferns, serving for cover for hares, which scampered in and out of their hiding-places. The road went winding gently along, and, at the distance of nearly a mile, brought us to a second gate, through which we likewise passed, and walked ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the doctor's telephone message, stood over the iron bed in the spick-and-span men's ward of St. Mary's, a wave of that intense feeling he had experienced at the accident swept over him. The farmer's beard was overgrown, and the eyes looked up at him as from caverns of suffering below the bandage. They were shrewd eyes, however, and proved that Mr. Meader had possession of the five senses—nay, of the six. Austen ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... there was a thatch-palm, stunted, and looking like the head-dress of some savage African warrior. Inland, the creek, all white sand and golden sunny water at its opening, spread out far and near into noisome swamps overgrown with mangroves. Those strangest of all trees, that had something tender and idyllic as they stepped out into the ripple with their fresh child-like laurel-line leaves and dangling rods of emerald, that were really the suckers of their ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... were not given. The circus maximus, where the last and dearest of Roman pleasures—the chariot races—were no longer celebrated, stretched its long lines beneath the imperial palace covered with dust and overgrown with grass. The colossal amphitheatre of Titus still reared its circle perfect, but stripped of its decorations. The gigantic baths, fed by no aqueduct since the ruin wrought by Vitiges the Goth, rose like fallen cities in a wilderness. Ivy ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... employed, are titles upon which we indulge our own, and the vanity of other nations, as we do that of private men on the score of their fortunes and honours. We even sometimes contend, whose capital is the most overgrown; whose king has the most absolute power; and at whose court the bread of the subject is consumed in the most senseless riot. These indeed are the notions of vulgar minds; but it is impossible to determine, how far the notions of vulgar minds ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... only to bring back the material-minded—to take them out of their cramped valley and put them on the ridge, whence they can breathe purer air and see other valleys and other ridges beyond. Religions are mostly petrified and decayed, overgrown with forms and choked with mysteries. We can prove that there is no need for this. All that is essential is both very simple and ...
— The New Revelation • Arthur Conan Doyle
... in time ruin the state. But it should be remembered, that the colonies never occasioned its increase, nor ever reaped any of the sweet fruits of involving the finest kingdom in the world in the sad calamity of an enormous, overgrown ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath
... wept bitterly when her husband ceased speaking. Every word went to her heart. She saw her folly, nay, her crime, in having acted as she had done. She was a weak, vain woman, but not all perverted. Notwithstanding rank weeds had long overgrown the garden of her mind, some plants of ...
— Finger Posts on the Way of Life • T. S. Arthur
... pictures, "A Quiet Corner," represents a retired nook in a garden, overgrown with foliage and flowers, so well painted that one feels that they must ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... and forest, in search of childish adventure. Yonder was the old academy, where he had attended school. The yellow brick of its walls had scaled away in places, leaving the surface mottled with pale splotches; the shingled roof was badly dilapidated, and overgrown here and there with dark green moss. The cedar trees in the yard were in need of pruning, and seemed, from their rusty trunks and scant leafage, to have shared in the general decay. As they drove ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt
... deserted garden, thickly surrounded and overgrown by shrubs. Through the immense spreading Portuguese laurels which sheltered it from the east, little or no sunshine found its way to the grey, moss-grown basin and the stone figures supporting it; over which a thin stream ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture
... besides giving notice of his retirement, Washington argued at length against sectional jealousy and party spirit, and urged the promotion of institutions "for the general diffusion of knowledge." He disapproved of large standing armies ("overgrown military establishments"), and earnestly declared that our true policy is "to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world," especially European nations. Washington died at Mount Vernon, ...
— A Brief History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... It had evidently been constructed when the building was used as a fortification, and was probably intended to enable the garrison to make a sudden sortie on the enemy at an unexpected point. The outside entrance was blocked up by rubbish overgrown with vegetation; and my father had caused a strong door to be placed to the vault, to prevent any intruder, who might by chance have found his way through it, from entering the house. He always kept the keys himself; and as no one ever thought ...
— Manco, the Peruvian Chief - An Englishman's Adventures in the Country of the Incas • W.H.G. Kingston
... his feet and moved forward, bent over the tell-tale moss and half overgrown sand. He was making straight for ...
— The Return of Blue Pete • Luke Allan
... asked me to make a sketch of her. With what joy did I paint the poetic vision before me! I think she was pleased with the drawing, but on our way back to the castle a foolish word of mine brought our friendship to an end. We came to a picturesque little lake, at the end of which was a waterfall, overgrown with brambles. In order to show what a good swimmer her dog was, Marguerite threw something in the current and told him to fetch it, but he got carried over the waterfall and caught in ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... scene of great activity and bustle, for we had quite two hundred natives to help. Alas, there is scarcely a trace of it left now! The great iron try-pots, built up in furnaces of coral lime, were overgrown by the green jungle thirty years ago, and it would be difficult even to ...
— "Old Mary" - 1901 • Louis Becke
... night upon the bank of the river. Among the emigrants there was an overgrown boy, some eighteen years old, with a head as round and about as large as a pumpkin, and fever-and-ague fits had dyed his face of a corresponding color. He wore an old white hat, tied under his chin with a handkerchief; his body was short and stout, but ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... crown the ridge; on clear sunny days I can see the sun shining on the lead roofs, and the great octagon rises with all its fretted pinnacles. Indeed, so kind is Providence, that the huge brick mass of the Ely water-tower, like an overgrown Temple of Vesta, blends itself pleasantly with the cathedral, projecting from the western front like ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... during this same golden age that an overgrown and diffident young man came from an obscure town in Illinois and was given a tryout on the Tribune. He was steady and industrious and ever willing, and they set him to do hotel reporting. He was a failure as a hotel reporter, because the young men employed by the Herald ...
— News Writing - The Gathering , Handling and Writing of News Stories • M. Lyle Spencer
... rest,' Jerrie answered laughingly. 'It is you who are to lie and rest, and not a great overgrown girl like me. I have given Harold his breakfast and seen him off. I cooked him half the steak,' she added as she took out the remaining half and put it on the gridiron. 'I don't care for steak,' she ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... great way back; he will then find in himself a perfect comprehension of its nature and extent; he will have made his hands meet on the other side, and can henceforth defy it and pass on superior. The world is his who can see through its pretension. What deafness, what stone-blind custom, what overgrown error you behold is there only by sufferance,—by your sufferance. See it to be a lie, and you have already ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... know how to do nothing in the modern way—by discussing the rights of women and the novel of lust, and the divorces past and prospective, by playing at bridge and benevolence. How absurd it all is! I'm not going to be an overgrown child ...
— Keeping up with Lizzie • Irving Bacheller
... Grecian temples, studded with "Academics," "Seminaries," and "Institutes," which glisten along our bays and rivers; these are the strong-holds of Yankee usurpation; but if haply you light upon some rough, rambling road, winding between stone fences, gray with moss, and overgrown with elder, poke-berry, mullein, and sweet-briar, with here and there a low, red-roofed, whitewashed farm-house, cowering among apple and cherry trees; an old stone church, with elms, willows, and button-woods, as old-looking ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... sunset when I walked up alone for a casual look at our new possession. It was still and deserted up there, and as the light faded into dusk, the ancient overgrown place certainly had an air about it that was not quite canny. I decided that I would not remain any longer, and was about to go when I noticed an old, white-haired man standing a few feet away. I had heard no step, ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... of France could not. They alleged that, if she would risk a war with Great Britain by openly espousing their cause, she would not be induced to that measure by the prospect of direct advantages, so much as by a desire to lessen the overgrown power of a dangerous rival.[54] It was therefore urged that the most certain means of influencing France to interfere, was an assurance that the United States were determined to persevere in refusing to resume their former allegiance. Under the influence of this better opinion, resolutions ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 2 (of 5) • John Marshall
... would be unjust to demand a mature mind in the overgrown boy, it is useless to hope for delicate tact and social feeling from the parvenu. To be gracious and at ease with all classes and professions, one must be perfectly sure of one's own position, and with us few feel this security, ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... of black mud, and his wheelbarrow, spade, and pickaxe were visible, but there was no sign of the man himself along the various pebbly watercourses, for the wayward mountain streams had hollowed out channels that were almost overgrown with low bushes. ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac |
