"Palmetto" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of the natives, constructed of the yellow bamboo, tastefully twisted together in a kind of wicker-work, and thatched with the long tapering leaves of the palmetto, are scattered irregularly along these valleys beneath the shady branches of the ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... found abundantly in the tropics; one, the Palmetto, grows from South Carolina to Florida. While in our region there are no trees of this character, there are plants having this kind of stem, the best illustration being the corn-stalk. In this case there is no separable bark, and the ...
— Trees of the Northern United States - Their Study, Description and Determination • Austin C. Apgar
... of that time they are singularly, to my mind, like fairy palm trees, planted in the gardens where the little folk stroll on midsummer nights. Their single stem and the spreading whorl of leaves at the summit of it are in about the same proportion as those of a palmetto whose great leaves have been tossed and shredded by the trade winds. That so tiny a twig could become, in the passage of centuries even, a 200-foot tree seems difficult to believe. It looks no more likely than that the "ground-pine" which is taller than the seedling and ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... the crime for which he suffered such a horrible death? Can men capable of committing such deeds as the burning and mutilating the body of this wretch be relied upon for truth? If Cranford was one of that mob of cowards who shot to death those manacled men at Palmetto, the knocking out of his brains would have made a man of another ...
— Hanover; Or The Persecution of the Lowly - A Story of the Wilmington Massacre. • David Bryant Fulton
... fall of Atlanta Mr. Davis visited Palmetto and Macon and made speeches at each place. He spoke at Palmetto on the 20th of September, and at Macon on the 22d. Inasmuch as he had relieved Johnston and appointed Hood, and Hood had immediately taken the initiative, it is natural to suppose that Mr. Davis was disappointed with General ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... towards nightfall of the day on which Dickory had escaped from the pirates at the spring that he found himself on a piece of high ground in an open place in the forest, and here he determined to spend the night. With his dirk he cut a quantity of palmetto leaves and made himself a very comfortable bed, on which he was soon asleep, ...
— Kate Bonnet - The Romance of a Pirate's Daughter • Frank R. Stockton
... Charleston, in September of that year,—an attack made memorable by the determined courage of the Americans, the daring exploit of Sergt. Jasper, and the discovery of the remarkable qualities of palmetto logs as a ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... on the deserted battlements, a stork eyed me with solemn curiosity from the minaret of a near mosque, and only the earliest wayfarers were astir. How slowly the men seemed to do their work, and how rapidly the morning wore on. Ropes and palmetto baskets refused to fit at the last moment, two mules were restive until their "father," the Maalem, very wide awake and energetic, cursed their religion, and reminded them that they were the children of asses renowned throughout the Moghreb for baseness and immorality. ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan
... said, taking in Stephen's rank, "so we won't qua'l as to who's host heah. One thing's suah," he added, with a twinkle, "I've been heah longest. Seems like ten yeahs since I saw the wife and children down in the Palmetto State. I can't offer you a dinner, seh. We've eaten all the mules and rats and sugar cane in town." (His eye seemed to interpolate that Stephen wouldn't be there otherwise.) "But I can offer you something choicer than ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... she has been promoted because Mas'r told somebody he would not take a dollar less for her. She can superintend the domestic affairs of the mansion just as well as anybody. In one hand she bears a cup of orange-grove coffee, in the other a fan, made of palmetto-leaves. ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... bloodshed is inevitable, unless as a section we are allowed our constitutional rights; and I, for one, say, if it must, let it come, even with the fury of a storm. I am for State rights, and the Palmetto ...
— Leah Mordecai • Mrs. Belle Kendrick Abbott
... ships didn't win," said the carpenter, persisting in the argument, and pointing aft to the low mounds of sand backed by the rudely interlaced palmetto logs, behind which the gallant Moultrie had fought Barker's fleet six months before, until the ships had been ...
— For Love of Country - A Story of Land and Sea in the Days of the Revolution • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... the hall a small woman, as dry as the peppers that hung in strings on the wall behind her, sat in a rush-bottomed rocking-chair plaiting a palmetto hat, and with her elbow swinging a tattered manilla hammock, in whose bulging middle lay Alice, taking her compulsory noonday nap. Mary came, expressed her thanks in sprightly whispers, lifted the child out, and carried her to a room. How had Mary ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... to the sea, there lies, between the rivers Sabine and Natchez, a narrow tongue of land, which, widening in proportion as the rivers recede, forms a gently swelling eminence, enclosed by the clear and beautiful waters of the two streams. The latter flow through dark thickets of cypress and palmetto, to the lake above named, which, in its turn, is united with the Gulf of Mexico, and it would almost appear as if nature, in a capricious moment, had chosen thus distinctly to mark the boundary of the two vast countries which the Sabine severs. On the right bank of that river rises ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... was assembled in the open space before the chief building, which was of considerable size, built round after the manner of a dove-house, and completely thatched with palmetto leaves. Many smaller buildings surrounded it: one, in especial, I would have done well to take note of; for it was doubtless a kind of sentinel or watch-tower, being set on tall, upright timbers which gave it an elevation much greater than any part ...
— Margaret Tudor - A Romance of Old St. Augustine • Annie T. Colcock
... bearing the seeds of rice-field fevers still in them, and weakly wondering at the novel sights so far from home, the South Carolina conscripts were not a hopeful set of soldiers. As soon as the tread of hostile battalions had echoed on her soil, the sons of the Palmetto State flew to their posts. State regulars went to the coast, picked volunteer corps came to Virginia. None stayed behind but those really needed there by the Government, or that refuse class which had determined to dodge duty, but now failed to dodge "the conscript man." The former ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... were gin'rally allowed that I haddent a red cent, I want to explain to you Mister Ford for the first time a secret. This here is how it was done. When I first came to Injian Spring, I settled down into the old Palmetto claim, near a heap of old taillings. Knowin' it were against rools, and reg'lar Chinyman's bizness to work them I diddn't let on to enyboddy what I did—witch wos to turn over some of the quarts what I thought was likely and Orrifferus. ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... not. All his loyalty was to his State. He scarcely pretended to anything like national feeling. The Union was at best a useful treaty of alliance with foreigners to be preserved only so far as the interests of the Palmetto State were advantaged thereby. His representatives in House and Senate, the men he sent to take part as electors in the choosing of a President, had rather the air of ambassadors than of legislators. They were in Congress to fight the battles of their State, ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... the western extremity, where Fort Moultrie stands, and where are some miserable frame buildings, tenanted during summer by the fugitives from Charleston dust and fever, may be found, indeed, the bristly palmetto; but the whole island, with the exception of this western point, and a line of hard white beach on the seacoast, is covered with a dense undergrowth of the sweet myrtle, so much prized by the horticulturists ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... Lee and Robert Howe, of the Continental army, hastened immediately to the defense of that city, and among the soldiers who followed them was John Koen. Here again the British were defeated, Colonel Moultrie's Palmetto fortifications proving an effective defense to the city by the sea, and Thompson's South Carolinians and North Carolinians bravely repelling the British land troops. Here Koen fought by the side of the soldiers of North Carolina, and here, possibly, he was an eye witness of ...
— In Ancient Albemarle • Catherine Albertson
... election, the palmetto and lone star flag was thrown out to the breeze from the office of the Charleston Mercury and hailed with cheers by the populace. "The tea has been thrown overboard—the revolution of 1860 has been initiated," said that ebullient ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... The dwarf-palmetto on his knees adores This Princess of the air; The lone pine-barren broods afar and sighs, "Ah! come, lest I despair;" The myrtle-thickets and ill-tempered thorns Quiver and thrill within, As through their leaves they feel the dainty touch Of ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... summer reigns. The banks of the mighty Mississippi, which has for ages rolled on in increasing grandeur, present to the eye a wilderness of sombre scenery, indescribably wild and romantic. The bays, formed by the current, are choked with palmetto and other trees, and teem with alligators, water-snakes, and freshwater turtle, the former basking in the sun in conscious security. Overhead, pelicans, paroquets, ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... covered with a dense growth of oak, pine, cypress, and palmetto trees, together with a jungle of luxuriant tropical vines and shrubs. They range in size from one to one hundred acres and are but slightly elevated above the ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... sometimes best to make a shelter for the open face of such a cave, even if we only need it for a temporary camp (Fig. 10); this may be done by resting poles slanting against the face of the cliff and over these making a covering of balsam, pine, hemlock, palmetto, palm branches, or any available material for thatch to shed the rain and prevent it driving under the cliff to wet ...
— Shelters, Shacks and Shanties • D.C. Beard
... window of Pauline. Oh for the image of the maiden, were it but for one moment, leaning out of the casement to hang her mocking-bird and looking down into the garden,—where, above the barrier of old boards, I see the top of the fig-tree, the pale green clump of bananas, the tall palmetto with its jagged crown, Pauline's own two orange-trees holding up their bands toward the window, heavy with the promises of autumn; the broad, crimson mass of the many-stemmed oleander, and the crisp boughs ...
— Old Creole Days • George Washington Cable
... color, of velvet, and silk, and gold embroidery, the man who would have certainly first attracted a stranger's eye wore the plain and ugly costume common at that day to all American gentlemen. Only black cloth and white linen and a row palmetto hat with a black ribbon around it; but he wore his simple garments with the air of a man having authority, and he returned the continual salutations of rich and poor, like one who had been long familiar with ...
— Remember the Alamo • Amelia E. Barr
... say that a dread Nemesis has not overtaken the metropolis of the Palmetto State? Streets, once the busy scene of commerce and industry, now covered with grass, in this city of secession—formerly the head and front of treason and rebellion and the defiant advocate ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... Massachusetts and South Carolina may draw tears from the eyes of our tender-hearted President by walking arm in arm into his Philadelphia Convention, but a citizen of Massachusetts is still an alien in the Palmetto State. There is that, all over the South, which frightens Yankee industry, capital, and skill from its borders. We have crushed the Rebellion, but not its hopes or its malign purposes. The South fought for perfect and permanent control over the Southern laborer. It was a war of the rich against ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... thousand, spread over a large territory; they did not want to desert their palmetto thatched cabins and strenuously-cleared acres; they disliked crowding into towns; they saw no justice in paying to intangible and alien proprietors a penny tax on their tobacco exports to New England—though they paid it nevertheless. They particularly objected to the interference of Governor ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... Armed heel upon it! Rive the palmetto tree— Cursed fruit grows on it! Up with the Flag of Light! Let the old glory Flash down the newer stars Rising ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... could be pounded into rude tools. The officers took heart. Cross-bows, stirrups, spurs, horse-furniture, reduced to scrap-iron, furnished axes, hammers, saws and nails. There was plenty of timber in the forests. Those not able to do hard work stripped palmetto leaves to use in the place of tow for calking and rigging. Every third day one of the horses was killed, the meat served out to the sick and the working party, the manes and tails saved to twist into rope with palmetto fiber, and the skin of the legs ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey
... years must have elapsed, before it attained its full size. Excepting the dragon trees at Madeira, the only many-headed palm I had seen before was that at Mazagong in Bombay. It is crowned, however, with a leaf like that of the palmetto; but the tufts of the dragon tree resemble the yucca in growth. The palm tree at Mazagong, like the adansonia in Salsette, is reported to have been carried thither by a pilgrim from Africa, probably from Upper Egypt, where ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... main land, and lived alone and unattended, save for the weekly visits of an old fisherman and his son, who brought supplies of provisions from the town miles away. His dwelling-place, surrounded with palmetto trees, was little more than a rough shelter. Diotti arose at daylight, and after a simple repast, betook himself to practise. Hour after hour he would let his muse run riot with his fingers. Lovingly he wooed the strings with ...
— The Fifth String, The Conspirators • John Philip Sousa
... Ted on the boat, when he came with some lemonade he had ordered, how far it was from the Brock House to the palmetto clearing, and if there was any conveyance to take him there. Ted had stared at him with wonder—first, as to what such as he could want at the clearing, and second, if he was crazy enough to think there was a conveyance. ...
— The Cromptons • Mary J. Holmes
... decent crate that was we saw pass over early this morning I'd say, old hoss," continued Perk, nodding his head as if to punctuate his remarks and also to cause his thoughts to flow more smoothly. "I had a good peep at it as we lay behind that bunch o' saw palmetto out front, an' unless I'm away off in my guess, she was a Curtiss-Robin ship—a ...
— Eagles of the Sky - With Jack Ralston Along the Air Lanes • Ambrose Newcomb
... thinks he's protected by that flag of their'n. If he don't take care, we'll tar-and-feather him; and if his government says much about it, she'll larn what and who South Carolina is. We can turn out a dozen Palmetto regiments that'd lick any thing John Bull could send here, and a troop o' them d—d Yankee abolitionists besides. South Carolina's got to show her hand yet against these fellers, afore they'll respect the honor and standing of her institutions. ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams
... I paced on with neither word nor look until, finding me thus blind and deaf to her, she cursed me bitterly and so left me alone and I, following a haphazard course, presently found myself in a grove of palmetto trees and sat me down in this pleasant shade where I might behold the sea, that boundless, that impassable barrier. But in a while, espying the woman coming thitherwards, I rose and tramped on again with no thought but to ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... ship in a heavy storm. A fire was kindled in the bight of a sand-hill and protected as well as might be with sails and palmetto branches; and to this, Dickenson, with "Great trembling and Pain of Hartt," carried his baby in his own arms and laid it in its mother's breast. Its little body was pitiful to see from leanness, and a great fever was upon it. Robert Barrow, the crippled captain, and ...
— Stories of Childhood • Various
... have been done, with any degree of safety to the command, by the concurrence of the South Carolina authorities. But, before any steps could possibly have been taken in this direction, we received information, dated on the 28th instant, that "the Palmetto flag floated out to the breeze at Castle Pinckney, and a large military force went over last night (the 27th) to Fort Moultrie." Thus the authorities of South Carolina, without waiting or asking for any explanation, and doubtless believing, as you have expressed it, that the officer had acted not ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... wave-washed halls of Tiberius' palazzo a mare, our boat swiftly glides over the pellucid expanse until it reaches those vast towering cliffs of limestone that spring almost perpendicular from the waters' edge to the plateau of Ana-Capri, fully a thousand feet above our heads. Clumps of palmetto, of cytizus, and of various hardy shrubs manage to sprout and to exist in the crannies of this sheer wall of rock; and on some of the larger ledges, far out of reach of a despoiling human hand, we see masses of the odorous narcissus, though whence they draw their sustenance ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... Resaca de la Palma. The Americans took up their march to Fort Brown. When within three miles of the fort they encountered the Mexicans, strongly posted in Resaca de la Palma, a ravine three hundred feet wide bordered with palmetto trees. Taylor deployed a portion of his force as skirmishers, and a company of dragoons overrode the first Mexican battery. The Americans then advanced their battery to the crest. A regiment charged in column, and, joined by the skirmishers, ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... a little French asked if we would not like to visit the queen. We assented, and in a few moments she led us into a hut thatched with palmetto leaves and in all respects like the others. Its interior was disgustingly unclean. The queen was a woman quite or nearly a hundred years old. She sat on a mat upon the earth, her arms crossed on her breast, her eyes half closed, muttering between her teeth something resembling a prayer. She ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... an arched, arbored entrance, at one of its palmetto- thatched ends. But not through this exclusive portal entered the Islanders. Humbly stooping, they found ingress under the drooping eaves. A custom immemorial, and well calculated to remind all contumacious subjects of the dignity ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... characters who live on those west coast keys. They're bad, some of them—kill you for a few dollars. Others are real friendly, like the old fellow who told me about the buried treasure. He was almost dead of fever when I found him in his little palmetto shack. I got medicine for him, stayed until he was well. That's why he told me about ...
— Wilt Thou Torchy • Sewell Ford
... under his chin when he so inclined. His long beard, now silvered with age, descended over his breast. One of two youthful acolytes who attended him created an artificial shade, peculiar then to the East, by bearing over his head an umbrella of palmetto leaves, while the other refreshed his reverend master by agitating a fan ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott |
