"Prairie" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... boards. Nor was this all. Mingled with stolen garments, cans and boxes of provisions, purses and bags of gold, were the Indian disguises in which the highwaymen from No-Man's Land had descended on the prairie-schooners on their tedious journey from Abilene, Kansas, ...
— Lahoma • John Breckenridge Ellis
... higher classes enjoyed any degree of comfort. Accustomed to inconveniences, few even among them knew such luxuries as are common to middle-class Americans. The castle and manor-house of the mediaeval lord were still more comfortless. In America the colonial log cabin and the sod house of the prairie pioneer were primitively incomplete. The struggle for existence and the difficulty of manufacture and transportation allowed few comforts. American homes, even a hundred years ago, knew nothing of furnaces and safety-matches, refrigerators and electric fans, bathtubs and sanitary ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... silvery sheen, the headlands, capes, and tongues stretching in long perspective below, while the Sugarloaf, father of mountains, rose in solitary grandeur high above his subject hills. On the nearer slope of Signal Hill we saw the first of the destructive bush-burnings. They are like prairie-fires in these lands, and sometimes they gird Freetown with a wall of flame. Complexion is all in all to Sa Leone, and she showed for a few ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... to learn how the French people in the Illinois country lived in friendship with the savage tribes around them. The settlements were usually small villages on the edge of a prairie or in the heart of the woods. They were always near the bank of a river; for the watercourses 5 were the only roads and the light canoes of the voyageurs were the only means of travel. There the French settlers lived like one great ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... regular pony—not one of those cotton-batting things with fat legs that an impressionist slaps on to a canvas and labels a horse. You could smell the lathered sweat on the pony's hide and feel the dust of the dry prairie tickling your nostrils. You could see the slide of the horse's withers and watch the play of the naked Indian's arm muscles. I should like to enroll as a charter member of a league of Americans who believe ...
— Cobb's Bill-of-Fare • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... England I should drop England quietly over the rapids some day when I could no longer stand her infernal patronizing, impertinent airs, and rid the world of a nuisance," said Mr. Ketchum, with energy. "Excuse my warmth, but that woman would poison a prairie for me. Fortunately, I happen to know that she only represents a class which neither Church nor State there has the authority to shoot, yet, and I am not going to cry down white wool because there are black sheep. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various
... is the great gift that has been bestowed upon her. She did not hide it in a napkin, but with heart and soul she did her best to make it a good and acceptable gift to art and humanity. Whether giving concerts among our prairie cities, resting by the sea-shore at Boulogne, traveling among the mountains of California, studying the great masters of the violin in London or Paris, or among friends in Boston, she is always practicing upon her beloved instrument. It is never out of her hands a day, unless ill ...
— Camilla: A Tale of a Violin - Being the Artist Life of Camilla Urso • Charles Barnard
... over-wearied Adjutant Lee, and it was suggested that she might conduct a party of emigrants to Canada, she hailed the opportunity with the joy of a child. To cross the ocean; to see something of the great Dominion; passing over thousands of miles of prairie, mountain, and river, and coming in touch with the throbbing cities of that great country, and all the while to be about her Master's business, was pure delight ...
— The Angel Adjutant of "Twice Born Men" • Minnie L. Carpenter
... intuitive sympathy which bewildered him; whether she talked to some Yankee farmer from the Dakotas, long-limbed, lantern-jawed, all the moisture dried out of him by hot summers, hard winters, and long toil, who had come over the border with a pocket full of money, the proceeds of prairie-farming in a republic, to sink it all joyfully in a new venture under another flag; or to some broad-shouldered English youth from her own north country; or to some hunted Russian from the Steppes, in whose eyes had begun to dawn the first lights of liberty; ...
— Lady Merton, Colonist • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... over which we travelled was seldom traversed by white men. The grass-covered prairie extended often as far as the eye could reach, here and there hills rising in the distance, or long lines of trees marking the course of some stream falling ...
— Snow Shoes and Canoes - The Early Days of a Fur-Trader in the Hudson Bay Territory • William H. G. Kingston
... the Interior Teller, showed in detail the vast extent of the unlawful fencing of public lands. In the Arkansas Valley in Colorado at least 1,000,000 acres of public domain were illegally seized. The Prairie Cattle Company, composed of Scotch capitalists, had fenced in more than a million acres in Colorado, and a large number of other cattle companies in Colorado had seized areas ranging from 20,000 to 200,000 acres. "In Kansas," Harrison went on, "entire counties are reported ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... giant herd is moving at the rising of the sun, And the prairie is lit with rose and gold, And the camp is all abustle, and the busy day's begun, He leaps into the saddle sure and bold. Through the round of heat and hurry, through the racket and the rout, He rattles ...
— The Spell of the Yukon • Robert Service
... that is their intense love of Home. Give the Englishman a home, and he is comparatively indifferent to society. For the sake of a holding which he can call his own, he will cross the seas, plant himself on the prairie or amidst the primeval forest, and make for himself a home. The solitude of the wilderness has no fears for him; the society of his wife and family is sufficient, and he cares for no other. Hence it is that the people of Germanic origin, from whom the English and Americans ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... The grass of the slopes was exceedingly fine, and would not exceed a height of about two feet, while that of the table lands would exceed nine feet, and become impassable, until sufficiently dry to be cleared by fire. In November, the entire country would become a vast prairie of dried straw, the burning of which would then render travelling ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... branch of the Canadian export trade. These interminable forests are principally composed of pines of large size, but which towards the northern boundary are of a very stinted growth. Another portion is the prairie country, reaching from Canada westward to the Rocky Mountains, and intersected by the boundary line of the United States. In general, the soil is rich alluvial, which being covered with luxuriant herbage, affords pasturage for the vast herds of wild buffaloes ...
— Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory • John M'lean
... in the midst of this dry powder lay withered tangles that had once been grass. Every one had the forsaken, desperate look worn by the pioneer who has reached the limit of his endurance, and the great stretches of prairie roads showed innumerable canvas-covered wagons, drawn by starved horses, and followed by starved cows, on their way "Back East." Our talks with the despairing drivers of these wagons are among my most tragic memories. They had lost everything except what ...
— The Story of a Pioneer - With The Collaboration Of Elizabeth Jordan • Anna Howard Shaw
... at first, and then through rocky, tangled woods of birch and poplar, rich with milk-weed and blue cornflowers, and the aromatic thimbleberry blossom, and that romantic, light, purple-red flower which is called fireweed, because it is the first vegetation to spring up in the prairie after a fire has passed over, and so might be adopted as the emblematic flower of a sense of humour. They told me, casually, that there was nothing but a few villages between me and the North Pole. It is probably true of several commonly frequented places in this country. But it gives ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... the city for a morning walk,—not through the hills, as Margaret went, going home, but on the other side, to the river, over which you could see the Prairie. We are in Indiana, remember. The sunlight was pure that morning, powerful, tintless, the true wine of life for body or spirit. Stephen Holmes knew that, being a man of delicate animal instincts, and so used it, just as he had used ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... country, covered with saw palmetto, dotted with pretty little lakes, what looks like a couple of acres of prairie ahead, and, oh yes, a lot of gopher holes all around us like the ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... largest one of its character extant. The acoustic properties of this immense structure are also remarkably perfect, which was proven to us by some curious experiments. As to general effect, however, there is no more architectural character to the Mormon Tabernacle than to a prairie dog's hole. Its roof resembles nothing so much as a huge metallic dish cover, forming an awkward and prominent ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... stand before me like dry grass and prairie, and verily, weary of themselves—and panting for ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... by a second kind of wolf, the prairie-wolf (Canis latrans), which is now looked at by all naturalists as specifically distinct from the common wolf; and is, according to Mr. J.K. Lord, in some respects intermediate in habits between a wolf and a fox. Sir J. ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... slept nor eaten. Jasper had joined him at the theater exit, had walked home with him, and, while he was with the manager, Pierre's pride and reserve had held him up. Afterwards he had ranged the city like a prairie wolf, ranged it as though it had been an unpeopled desert, free to his stride. He had fixed his eyes above and beyond and walked alone ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... an old settled and Eastern State, within easy reach of these large markets, of land which is easily tilled and generous and quick in its response to feeding, and at low prices, make them equal to, if not better than, the rich prairie soils of a new West, or the low prices and cheap lands of the abandoned ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall
... prudent to give him such a commission, though use of these warriors was made during the struggle. Every day the number of the insurgents increased. Between the 3rd and 6th of November, four thousand were concentrated at Napierville, in La Prairie, under the command of Dr. Robert Nelson, Dr. Cote, and one Gagnor. Upon this point Major-general Sir James Macdonnell was directed to march; but before he could arrive the rebels had dispersed, and were beyond pursuit. In their route they were twice attacked and defeated by ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... Far West rose early. Danvers stood watching the slow sun uplift from the gently undulating prairie. He threw back his head, his lungs expanded as though he could not get enough of the air. He did not know why, but he suddenly felt himself a part of the country—felt that this great, open country was his. The banks of the Missouri were not high and ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... factors to one another is necessarily very different in different branches of production. For instance, in the case of cattle-raising on a prairie, labor does very little, land almost everything. Hence an extensive, thinly populated country is best adapted to this species of production. But where land is scarce, as in wealthy and populous cities, human activity should be directed into those branches of industry which ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... ghostly grasses, over tangled underbrush, past water-dark jungles of dead trees where the savage cascade of brush and vine and fallen branches had woven a weird, wild lacery among the trees, through mud and saw grass, past fertile islands and lagoons of rush and flag—a trackless water-prairie of uninhabitable wilds which to Keela's keen and beautiful eyes held the mysteriously blazed home-trail of ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... water-carriage than at any previous period. That may, perhaps, in time shift the centre of the world from an island like England to the middle of a great land area, like Chicago or Moscow. And, no doubt, if ever the centre shifts at all, it will shift towards Western America, or rather the prairie region. But, just at present, what are the greatest commercial towns of the world? All ports to a man. And the day when it will be otherwise, if ever, seems still far distant. Look at the newest countries. What are their great focal ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... are met with in every climate, and the first of December brought zero weather. Indeed, it had been unusually cold for several weeks. Then, to make matters worse, a genuine western blizzard came howling across the prairie, and whistled and screamed about the streets, from which it had driven everything that could find a place of shelter. The stores on Broadway were vacant, save a few shivering clerks. In the offices, men sat with their feet on the stove and called to mind the biggest storms they had ever known; ...
— That Printer of Udell's • Harold Bell Wright
... of the Tunika tribe still living in their old homes on the Marksville Prairie, Avoyelles Parish, Louisiana. An excellent vocabulary was obtained of their language at Lecompte, Louisiana, and a careful comparison of this with other Indian languages shows that the Tunika is related to none, but represents a distinct linguistic family. He was unable ...
— Eighth Annual Report • Various
... happened when they had scrimmage close—it mighter been the one on Long Prairie—they brought a young boy shot through his lung to Mr. Phillip McNeill's house. He was a stranger. He died. I felt so sorry for him. He was right young. He belong to the Southern army. The Southern army nearly made his ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... country, out here! Beats all natur! But I don't feel to hum, fer I was raised right in ther middle of the woods, an' there's too much open land out this way. I don't mean right round here, you understand; but I've seen more'n forty thousan' miles of prairie sence comin' out this way, an' it makes ...
— Frank Merriwell's Bravery • Burt L. Standish
... leading the Chorus of Athenian youths, and singing to Athene, the tutelary goddess, a hymn of triumph for a glorious victory,—the very symbol of Greece and Athens, springing up into a joyous second youth after invasion and desolation, as the grass springs up after the prairie fire has passed. But the fire had been terrible. It had burnt Athens at least, down to the very roots. True, while Sophocles was dancing, Xerxes, the great king of the East, foiled at Salamis, as his father Darius had been foiled at ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... the wish of a friend I was visiting I went to carry some comforts to a neglected almshouse on a Western prairie. In the insane ward I found a poor young fellow suffering from epilepsy. There had been some brutal treatment in the almshouse and he had tried to escape. Being overtaken he had fought for his liberty, and in consequence ...
— Girls and Women • Harriet E. Paine (AKA E. Chester}
... crate, hurdle, stretcher, ambulance; black Maria; conestoga wagon, conestoga wain; jinrikisha, ricksha, brett^, dearborn [U.S.], dump cart, hack, hackery^, jigger, kittereen^, mailstate^, manomotor^, rig, rockaway^, prairie schooner [U.S.], shay, sloven, team, tonga^, wheel; hobbyhorse, go-cart; cycle; bicycle, bike, two-wheeler; tricycle, velocipede, quadricycle^. equipage, turn-out; coach, chariot, phaeton, break, mail phaeton, wagonette, drag, curricle^, tilbury^, whisky, landau, barouche, victoria, brougham, clarence^, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... keeping with the gloom which hung over the great city than her gala robes would have been, with a long array of carriages and merry wedding chimes. Westward they went, instead of South, and when our late lamented President was borne back to the prairie of Illinois, they were there to greet the noble dead, and mingle their tears with those who knew and loved him long before the world appreciated ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... license to preach; and he endeavored to magnify his office, as an evangelist, by going to the "regions beyond," as fast as the door of opportunity opened for him. During the early sixties he gathered new congregations for worship at his home on the Folsom farm and in the Horse Prairie neighborhood. The Oak Hill appointment was established soon after he ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger
... ranch for Portland, where conventional city life palls on him. A little branch of sage brush, pungent with the atmosphere of the prairie, and the recollection of a pair of large brown eyes soon compel his ...
— Odd Numbers - Being Further Chronicles of Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford
... difficult and interesting to work out. First, they had to balance each other. What figure in the Pioneer group could balance the elephant that typified the Orient? Calder had the idea of using the prairie schooner, associated with the coming of the pioneers to California, ...
— The City of Domes • John D. Barry
... queer sensation. I seemed to go into a trance, Away from the music's pulsation, Away from the lights and the dance. And the wind o'er the wild prairie Seemed blowing strong and free, And it seemed not Joe, but Harry Who was standing there close ...
— The Kingdom of Love - and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... trs content de voyager, reut la bndiction de son pre, quelques gteaux de sa mre, et partit gaiement. Il marcha longtemps, il traversa une montagne sombre, et il arriva enfin dans une prairie. ...
— Contes et lgendes - 1re Partie • H. A. Guerber
... man in a dream as to where it should live, it was told to choose a place for itself, and, "at first, it dwelt in the white rose of the mountains; but there it was so buried that it could not be seen. It went to the prairie; but it feared the hoof of the buffalo. It next sought the rocky cliff; but there it was so high that the children whom it loved most could not see it." It decided at last to dwell where it could always be seen, and so one morning the Indians awoke to find the surface of river, ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... triumphal arches. Both groups are so skillfully composed as to have a similar silhouette against the blue sky, but individually considered they are full, of a great variety of detail. It was an accomplishment to balance the huge bulk of an elephant by a prairie schooner on the opposite side of the court. Considering the almost painful simplicity of the costumes and general detail of the western nations as contrasted with the elaborately decorative accessories, trappings, and tinsel of the Orient, it was no small task to produce a feeling ...
— The Art of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... regulation. For instance, in a timbered town, where fences can be cheaply built, it may be desirable, especially if there is much wild land, to let cattle run at large, each person fencing out the cattle from his crops. On the other hand, in a prairie town, where fencing is expensive, or where there is little wild land, it may seem best to arrange that each person shall fence in his own cattle. No persons can judge which is the better plan for a given neighborhood so well as the people who live there. And to them it ...
— Studies in Civics • James T. McCleary
... their silent invocation was ended, the Osage braves stalked gravely towards their richly-caparisoned steeds, and mounting them, rode slowly from the camp. For some miles, their course was along a wide-spread rolling prairie; but soon the presence of trees gave sign of their approaching a river. It was not, however, until nightfall that they gained the banks of the Arkansas. Hitherto, their progress had been open and bold, being within the hunting-grounds ...
— Tales for Young and Old • Various
... of Vermont, of Connecticut, who read this book by the blaze of your winter-evening fire,—strong-hearted, generous sailors and ship-owners of Maine,—is this a thing for you to countenance and encourage? Brave and generous men of New York, farmers of rich and joyous Ohio, and ye of the wide prairie states,—answer, is this a thing for you to protect and countenance? And you, mothers of America,—you who have learned, by the cradles of your own children, to love and feel for all mankind,—by ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... the beginning, Manabozho, while yet a youngster, was living with his grandmother near the edge of a great prairie. It was on this prairie that he first saw animals and birds of every kind; he also there made first acquaintance with thunder and lightning. He would sit by the hour watching the clouds as they rolled by, musing ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten
... them at the camp. The man came up with that curiously silent, almost furtive gait, which no prairie Indian, however civilized, ever quite loses. It comes from long years of moccasin use, and an habitual bent knee walk. Peigan Charley considered himself unusually civilized. But it was for his native abilities that Kars ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... Western ways. We were not long in finding a suitable camping spot a mile from the town and the same distance from the many corrals of the great Western freighters and pilgrims, as the immigrants were called. For miles we could see those immense, white covered prairie schooners in corral formation. Hundreds of oxen and mules were quietly grazing under the watchful eyes of their herders in saddle. It was certainly a ...
— Dangers of the Trail in 1865 - A Narrative of Actual Events • Charles E Young
... plaster. A bed and chair of cheap pine and a very ancient chest of drawers constituted the furniture. Saxon had known this chest of drawers all her life. The vision of it was woven into her earliest recollections. She knew it had crossed the plains with her people in a prairie schooner. It was of solid mahogany. One end was cracked and dented from the capsize of the wagon in Rock Canyon. A bullet-hole, plugged, in the face of the top drawer, told of the fight with the Indians at Little Meadow. Of ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... an incident occurred which was likely to cause a change in the situation of affairs. In the midst of an interval of silence—in which the very stillness itself increased the apprehension of the travellers—was heard the long lugubrious whine of a prairie wolf. Melancholy as was this sound, it was sweet in comparison with the cries of the more formidable ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... reported in our front, and were soon discovered occupying the road in force. I ordered a halt upon reaching the water, with a view to rest and refresh the men, and to form deliberately our line of battle. The Mexican line was now plainly visible across the prairie, and about three-quarters of a mile distant. Their left, which was composed of a heavy force of cavalry, occupied the road, resting upon a thicket of chapparal, while masses of infantry were discovered in succession on the right, greatly outnumbering ...
— The Medallic History of the United States of America 1776-1876 • J. F. Loubat
... right now, under compulsion. But the tenantry demanded that they should be released entirely from the landlords' yoke. He said that the agriculturists were not in touch with the whole question of Home Rule, nor would they consider any subject but that of the land. The Nationalists had preached prairie value, and the people were tickled by the idea of driving out landowners and Protestants. All the evicted tenants, all the men who have no land, all the ne'er-do-weels would expect to be satisfied. Ulster is tillage—the South is ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... obtained a view of intermingled forest, prairie, lake, and river, so resplendent that even his mind was for a moment diverted from its gloomy introspections, and a glance of admiration shot from his eyes and chased the wrinkles from his brow; but the frown quickly returned, ...
— Twice Bought • R.M. Ballantyne
... eagles watch out from the eyrie On the mountains, their young heirs to screen; The old lions on the hot sand-prairie,— If some peril track their cub,—unseen, Stealthier than ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... sunlight, the silence and the magic of night, the mysteries of dawn, the smoke wreaths from each chimney; every chance event, in fact, in my curious world became familiar to me. I came to love this prison of my own choosing. This level Parisian prairie of roofs, beneath which lay populous abysses, suited my humor, and harmonized with ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... treasures, while he strode forward, abstracted, with his gaze fixed towards the long ridge of the horizon. The sands at Rhyl, near which Milton's friend was said to have been lost, were like a rolling prairie; at low tide the white fringe of the surf could scarcely be descried at their outermost verge, yet within a few hours it would come tumbling back, flowing in between the higher levels, flooding and brimming and overcoming, till it broke at our feet once more. ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... be discontinued, it seemed the best arrangement that she should accede to Mrs. Steele's request, and go to the West under the escort which had been proposed for her,—that of a friend of Alick who had come eastward for his wife, and was soon to return to his prairie home. ...
— Lucy Raymond - Or, The Children's Watchword • Agnes Maule Machar
... dey wuz a momsus mean man, en he live 'way out in de prairie all 'lone by hisself, 'cep'n he had a wife. En bimeby she died, en he tuck en toted her way out dah in de prairie en buried her. Well, she had a golden arm—all solid gold, fum de shoulder down. He wuz pow'ful mean—pow'ful; ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... considerable assembly of troops in our neighbourhood as yet; the flank companies, embodied under Colonel Young, are on their march, and the 2,000 militia will form a chain of posts from St. John's to La Prairie. The town militia of this and Quebec, to the amount of 3,000 in each city, have volunteered being embodied and drilled, and will take their proportion of garrison duty to relieve the troops. The proclamation for declaring martial law is prepared, and will be speedily issued. All ...
— The Life and Correspondence of Sir Isaac Brock • Ferdinand Brock Tupper
... discovered, he had gained money by his unworthy appeal to the meanly prosaic superstition of modern times. A long interval had then elapsed, and nothing had been heard of him, when a starving man was discovered by a traveller, lost on a Western prairie. The ill-fated Irish lord had associated himself with an Indian tribe—had committed some offence against their laws—and had been deliberately deserted and left to die. On his recovery, he wrote to his elder brother (who had inherited the title and ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins
... leaves the prairie States and nears the great Southwest, he finds Nature in a new mood—she is dreaming of canyons; both cliffs and soil have canyon stamped upon them, so that your eye, if alert, is slowly prepared ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... and who paid me the compliment to say, that he had read my book, and that he would walk six miles to see me any day. Such a flattering evidence of discriminating taste, of course, disposed my heart towards him; but when I went up and put my hand into his great prairie of a palm, I was as a grasshopper in my own eyes. I inquired who he was, and was told he was one of the Duke of Argyle's farmers. I thought to myself, if all the duke's farmers were of this pattern, that he might be able to speak to the enemy in ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... up his cap and ran out of doors, down the hillside toward the barn. The sun popped up over the edge of the prairie like a broad, smiling face; the light poured across the close-cropped August pastures and the hilly, timbered windings of Lovely Creek, a clear little stream with a sand bottom, that curled and ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... open space with an area of perhaps three or four acres; it was as clear of trees as a stretch of western prairie. It was triangular in shape, the boundary being so regular that there could be no doubt ...
— The Land of Mystery • Edward S. Ellis
... search was in vain, while the sharp squeaking seemed to multiply and to come from a dozen different quarters. By this time I had crawled down the rough face of the cliff, and had reached the heaps of fallen rock. There I caught a glimpse of a little head with two black eyes, like a prairie-dog's, peering out of a crevice, and I was just in time to see him open his small jaws and say "shink" —about as a rusty hinge would pronounce it. I whipped my revolver out of my belt and fired, but the little ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... new and modern square dances and tabulated forms for the guidance of the leader or others in calling them. Full and complete directions for performing every known square dance, such as Plain Quadrilles, Polka Quadrilles, Prairie Queen, Varieties Quadrille, Francaise, Dixie Figure, Girl I Left Behind Me, Old Dan Tucker, Money Musk, Waltz Lanciers, Military Lanciers, Columbian Lanciers, Oakland Minuet, Waltz Quadrilles, etc. The "German" introduces over One Hundred of the newest and most popular ...
— Down the Slope • James Otis
... difference in altitude between the two points being less than 2,200 feet. The average grade is therefore about 68 feet to the mile, and nowhere are the grades heavier than 80 feet to the mile. There are heavier grades than these in the prairie State of Iowa, and the mountain grades of a number of Eastern roads exceed those of the Union Pacific by from 30 to 40 feet to the mile. The rise is, if not uniform, at least gradual, and the construction of even ...
— The Railroad Question - A historical and practical treatise on railroads, and - remedies for their abuses • William Larrabee
... rested that strange peace of God which is found in the forest or on the prairie, where God is near and wicked men ...
— Three Young Pioneers - A Story of the Early Settlement of Our Country • John Theodore Mueller
... old-fashioned Tony, who believe that to act uprightly is as easy a thing as to eat a slice of bread and butter; for, as soon as I have done all I can, buried some, fed others, and offended my colleagues as much as possible, I shall go for a few months to the far southwest, to some noble prairie, where one may find alligators, and horned owls, and something more aristocratic than there is here. If the prairie afford pen and ink, I shall write to you again. If this letter be the last you ever get from me, devote a tear ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... Windsor. Water-fowl of gorgeous plumage sport in the stream, unintimidated by the approach of man. The plaintive songs of forest-birds float in the evening air. On the opposite side of the stream, herds of deer and buffalo crop the rich herbage of the prairie, which extends far away, till it is lost in the horizon of the south. Daniel retires from the converse of the cabin to an adjoining eminence, where silently and rapturously he gazes upon the scene of loveliness spread out ...
— Daniel Boone - The Pioneer of Kentucky • John S. C. Abbott
... very numerous in every part of the state. There are two kinds: the common or black wolf, and the prairie wolf. The former is a large, fierce animal, and very destructive to sheep, pigs, calves, poultry, and even young colts. They hunt in large packs, and after using every stratagem to circumvent their prey, attack it with remarkable ferocity. Like the Indian, they always endeavour to surprise their ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. 577 - Volume 20, Number 577, Saturday, November 24, 1832 • Various
... a bright sunny morning when they started off across the prairie. They saw a great many prairie-chickens, and two big gray wolves, as they went along. Albert was in great glee; but it was a long ride, and the little boy was very glad when they came in sight of the sparkling waters of the Neosho, just as the sun ...
— The Nursery, November 1873, Vol. XIV. No. 5 • Various
... wrought in them their stature and their strength. Only here and there you catch the loitering footfall of some other benighted dreamer, strolling around the vast quadrangle of level green, which lies, like a prairie-child, under the edging shadows of the town. The lights glimmer one by one; and one by one, like breaking hopes, they fade away from the houses. The full-risen moon, that dapples the ground beneath the trees, touches the tall church-spires ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... in reality an abandoned country without discipline, without law, without masters. It was a desert; on about 13,000 square miles 500,000 people lived, less than forty to a square mile. And the Prussian King treated his acquisition like an uninhabited prairie. He located boundary stones almost at his pleasure, then moved them some miles farther again. Up to the present time the tradition remains in Ermeland, the district around Heilberg and Braunsberg, with twelve ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... can better believe I do—and that's where my flyin' comes in, only I drift like one of these here prairie chickens about to light—I seem to be goin' down. And it was just last night I dreamed of the Judgment Day. First everything was mixed: here was Injun Joe and Doc Lyon, Joe Pink and Muff Potter, Aunt Polly and your grandma—everybody in these two towns all together. And Tom Sawyer, ...
— Mitch Miller • Edgar Lee Masters
... occasioned serious debts. Ferdinand's own plan was to clear these off with the price of his commission, and take Alda out with him to rule in American luxury over the unbounded resources of the magnificent land, the very name and scent of which had awakened in him his old prairie-land instincts, and her absolute refusal and even alarm at his enjoyment had greatly mortified him. 'She should not even have to rough it,' he said. 'I could make her like a queen out there, if she would only ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the air; they broke asunder in panic; there was never an end to it all. And far out in the distance the sun went down in a flame-red mist. A streak of cloud lay across it, stretching far out into infinity. A conflagration like a glowing prairie fire surrounded the horizon, and drove the hordes before it in panic-stricken flight, and on the beach shouted the naked swarm of boys. Now and again they sprang up with outspread arms, and, shouting, chased the wild ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... murderer. This terrible broadsheet I read, was certain that he had read it also, and fancy ran riot over the ghastly fact. For him no hope, no rest, no peace, no touch of hands gentler than the hangman's; all the world is after him like a roaring prairie of flame! I thought of Doolan, weary, foot-sore, heart-sore, entering some quiet village of an evening; and to quench his thirst, going up to the public well, around which the gossips are talking, and hearing that they were talking of him; and ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... is allowed to operate without human intervention, each place develops a stable level of biomass that is inevitably the highest amount of organic life that site could support. Whether deciduous forest, coniferous forest, prairie, even desert, nature makes the most of the available resources and raises the living drama to its most intense and complex peak possible. There will be as many mammals as there can be, as many insects, as many worms, as many plants growing as large as they can ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... interior of Lofoden, so that we had caught no glimpse of the sea until it had burst upon us from the summit. As the old man spoke, I became aware of a loud and gradually increasing sound, like the moaning of a vast herd of buffaloes upon an American prairie; and at the same moment I perceived that what seamen term the chopping character of the ocean beneath us, was rapidly changing into a current which set to the eastward. Even while I gazed, this current acquired a monstrous velocity. Each moment added to its speed—to ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... as happy as the Twins were miserable, and he yelled and shouted in ecstatic glee. Now he was a gang of cow-boys at a round-up; now he was a band of Apache Indians circling fiendishly around a crew of those inland sailors who used to steer their prairie-schooners across ...
— The Dozen from Lakerim • Rupert Hughes
... of the massacre to the breaking of a stray nest of hen's eggs on the prairie, and what came of the transaction; but the date lies farther back than that, so far as the resolution to seize the first favorable opportunity for slaughtering the whites is concerned—and belongs to ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... of the old-fashioned "prairie schooner" type, were made ready. In these the ladies would live when they were not in the saddle. There was also a "grub" wagon, in which food would be carried. It contained a small stove so that better meals could be prepared than would be possible ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Rocky Ranch - Or, Great Days Among the Cowboys • Laura Lee Hope
... big coulee among the hills, an', one summer, when there'd been a prairie fire that wiped out a lot o' feed, a bunch o' cattle was headed into this coulee. Three cowpunchers and a cook with the chuck wagon made up the gang. But this yar cook was one o' them fellers what's not only been roped by bad luck, but hog-tied ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Foresters • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... the prairie in the direction of the Indian camp. That the Apaches were still there Thursday thought altogether likely, for he knew that it takes a week to make mescal. No doubt the raiders had stopped to hold a jamboree over the success of ...
— A Man Four-Square • William MacLeod Raine
... classic scenery and classic diction: but I myself never for a moment believed that Ariadne was a particle more unhappy or pitiable than Nancy Bunker, our seamstress, was, when Hiram Fenn went West to peddle essences, and married a female Hoosier whose father owned half a prairie. They would by no means make as lovely a picture; for Nancy's upper jaw projects, and she has a wart on her nose, very stiff black hair, and a shingle figure, none of which adds grace to a scene; and Hiram went off in the Slabtown stage, with a tin-box ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... for the head- quarters of the little party so long as it might be necessary for them to remain in their island prison. There were trees in abundance on the islet, and of many varieties, but they did not grow so thickly together as they did on what we may call the mainland, large spaces of open prairie being discernable here and there, which Gaunt already mentally devoted to the process of cultivation. Swimming quietly he reached the islet with very little fatigue, and, dressing himself, at once set about looking for the wherewithal for a dinner. He had not ...
— The Missing Merchantman • Harry Collingwood
... a fast-rising town, beautifully situated upon the verge of a small prairie; it is between Sandusky and Huron that the prairie lands commence. The bay of Sandusky is very picturesque, being studded with small verdant islands. On one of these are buried in the same grave all those who fell in the hard-fought battle ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... difficulties to overcome, though we might have to swim a stream or two. "But that," as he observed, "is nothing when one is accustomed to it; and you, Barry, will have many a river to cross and many a marsh to wade through, as well as mountains to climb, and hundreds of miles to gallop over the prairie, when you take service with ...
— The Young Llanero - A Story of War and Wild Life in Venezuela • W.H.G. Kingston
... Ferry, 228 U.S. 346 (1913). Also, when a mother petitions for her appointment as guardian, and no one but the mother and her infant son of tender years, are concerned, failure to serve notice of the petition upon the infant does not invalidate the proceedings resulting in her appointment.—Jones v. Prairie Oil & Gas Co., 273 U.S. 195 (1927). Also a Pennsylvania statute which establishes a special procedure for appointment of one to administer the estate of absentees, which procedure is distinct from that contained in the general ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... hares in the corn, in shy gazelles Running the sand where no man dwells; In horses scared at the prairie spring; In the dun deer noiseless, hurrying; In fish in the dimness scarcely seen, Save as shadows shooting in a shaking green; In birds in the air, neck-straining, swift, Wing touching wing while no wings shift, Seen by none, ...
— Right Royal • John Masefield
... fear-inspiring flights above the neighboring states, the later starters from the Japanese squadron had continued to arrive in the oil regions. Like migrating birds, they settled down over the rich fields and grazing lands of that wonderful strip of flat, black-soiled prairie that stretches westward from the south center of Louisiana until it emerges into the great semi-arid cattle plains ...
— In the Clutch of the War-God • Milo Hastings
... waves with a movement like carpets on a line in a gale. The birds sat comfortably in groups, and they were envied by some in the dingey, for the wrath of the sea was no more to them than it was to a covey of prairie chickens a thousand miles inland. Often they came very close and stared at the men with black bead-like eyes. At these times they were uncanny and sinister in their unblinking scrutiny, and the men ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... The coyote, or prairie-wolf, is about the size of a large dog and resembles one. Its color is gray, made by a mixture of black and white hairs. It is a cowardly animal and not dangerous, but its contemptible character could not prevent a wave of compassion ...
— On the Trail - An Outdoor Book for Girls • Lina Beard and Adelia Belle Beard
... frost-bite, with recovery. The patient, aged twenty-six, while traveling to his home in Northern Minnesota, was overtaken by a severe snow storm, which continued for three days; on December 13th he was obliged to leave the stage in a snow-drift on the prairie, about 110 miles distant from his destination. He wandered over the prairie that day and night, and the following four days, through the storm, freezing his limbs, nose, ears, and cheeks, taking no food or water until, on December 16th, he was found ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... ran into Horleydene shortly after two, and Mrs. Holymead was the only passenger who alighted at the lonely little wayside station which stood in a small wood in a solitude as profound as though it had been in the American prairie, instead of the heart of an English county. The only sign of life was a dilapidated vehicle with an elderly man in charge, which stood outside the station yard all day waiting for ...
— The Hampstead Mystery • John R. Watson
... time in his life, suddenly alive to the beauty of this woodland scenery. By degrees, toward the left, the brushwood became less dense, and several gray buildings appeared scattered over the glistening prairie. Soon after appeared a park, surrounded by low, crumbling walls, then a group of smoky roofs, and finally, surmounting a massive clump of ash-trees, two round towers with tops shaped like extinguishers. The coachman pointed them out ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... were for private consumption, of course. Dick had no wish to invite the attention of the predatory; and, in any case, buyers and sellers of dogs do not talk in thousands of dollars on the prairie. ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... glanced observantly from side to side as they swept along—sometimes through glades of forest trees, sometimes through belts of more open ground and shrubbery; anon by the margin of a stream or along the shores of a little lake, and often over short stretches of flowering prairie-land—while the firm, elastic turf sent up a muffled sound from the tramp of their mettlesome chargers. It was a scene of wild, luxuriant beauty, that might almost (one could fancy) have drawn involuntary ...
— The Dog Crusoe and His Master - A Story of Adventure in the Western Prairies • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... was the Montreal Transcript, which declared that the fertile spots in the territory were small and separated by immense distances, and described the Red River region as an oasis in the midst of a desert, "a vast treeless prairie on which scarcely a shrub is to be seen." The climate was unfavourable to the growth of grain. The summer, though warm enough, was too short in duration, so that even the few fertile spots could "with difficulty mature a ...
— George Brown • John Lewis
... tells of a poor woman who had been washing for us, who said: 'Seems as if the Lord took very direct ways to reach people's feelings sometimes. Now, I was astonished once in my life. I lived away out West, on the prairie, I and my four children, and I couldn't get much work to do, and our little stock of provisions kept getting lower and lower. One night, we sat hovering over our fire, and I was gloomy enough. There was about ...
— The Wonders of Prayer - A Record of Well Authenticated and Wonderful Answers to Prayer • Various
... Emerson says, and I think that result is not uncommon. The little Indian boy in the pleasant fable, who ran on eagerly in advance of his migrating tribe, to plant his single, three-cornered beech-nut in the center of a great prairie, scarcely foresaw the many acres of heavy timber which was to confront the white pioneer hundreds of years afterward, as the outgrowth of his childish deed. Many soldiers are fighting our battles upon a basis broader than they know. There are men who believe that they are solely engaged ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... enough to allow the few passengers who wished a nearer view to cross the river to the terminal moraine. The sunbeams streaming through the ice pinnacles along its terminal wall produced a wonderful glory of color, and the broad, sparkling crystal prairie and the distant snowy fountains were wonderfully attractive and made me pray for opportunity ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... curtain, and the place is already jam full. If there's one kid out there, there's a thousand, and every tiny tot has got a sack of peanuts clutched in his or her chubby fist, as the case may be. And say, listen: there's a smell in the air like a prairie fire running through a Georgia ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... has sent forth messages from hilltops or across inaccessible places. In this country, when the Indian was monarch of the vast areas of forest and prairie, he spread news broadcast to roving tribesmen by means of the signal-fire, and he flashed his code by covering and uncovering it. Castaways, whether in fiction or in reality, instinctively turn to the beacon-fire as a mode of attracting a passing ship. On every hand throughout the ages this ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... suffering a loss of one hundred million dollars a year by reason of the ravages of the boll weevil. Why? Because the quails, the prairie chickens, the meadow larks and other birds which were formerly there in millions have been swept away by gunners. The grain growers are losing over one hundred million dollars a year on account of the work of ...
— News Writing - The Gathering , Handling and Writing of News Stories • M. Lyle Spencer
... the refugees. It was inconceivably horrible. The winter weather of late December and early January had been most inclement and the Indians had trudged through it, over snow-covered, rocky, trailless places and desolate prairie, nigh three hundred miles. When they started out, they were not any too well provided with clothing; for they had departed in a hurry, and, before they got to Fall River, not a few of them were absolutely naked. They ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... possession. It is an old superstition that if a warrior loses his scalp he forfeits his hope of ever reaching the "happy hunting ground." Col. Willis and Kit Carson camped there until two o'clock in the morning when they went down off of the stone ridge out onto the open prairie twenty miles distant, where they again camped. After dark they again started out on the trail. Indians hardly ever attack at night. Nevertheless, the Indians began to congregate until they numbered several thousand and chased Col. Willis and Kit Carson 300 miles. Under the clever ...
— The Second William Penn - A true account of incidents that happened along the - old Santa Fe Trail • William H. Ryus
... Song had suddenly taken America by storm. Sung first in the Empire Theatre on the Broadway by Abe Gideon, the bark-blocks comedian, ten days after the mare's victory and defeat, it had raged through the land like a prairie fire. Cattle-men on the Mexican Border sung it in the chaparral, and the lumber-camps by the Great Lakes echoed it at night. Gramophones carried it up and down the Continent from Oyster Bay to Vancouver, ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant
... River in a boat, and on the other side took the carriage that had to be sent around by Pierre, an extra distance of thirty-two miles, in order to cross on the bridge. Doctor and Mr. Frederick Riggs, from Santee, now joined us, and the day being pleasant, the prairie covered with the wild flowers so abundant here, we had a ...
— The American Missionary — Vol. 48, No. 10, October, 1894 • Various
... is the right name for these verdant deserts. On all the shores, interminable silent forest. If you land, there is prairie behind prairie, forest behind forest, sites of nations, no nations. The raw bullion of nature; what we call "moral" value not yet stamped on it. But in a thousand miles the immense material values will ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... into the woods and see what we can find!" Bob Arnold suggested to his chum, after they had watched the canoe disappear round a bend of the river. "There's only the carcase of a prairie chicken left in the larder. That won't be much to satisfy our ...
— The Fiery Totem - A Tale of Adventure in the Canadian North-West • Argyll Saxby
... recipients of the sendings. Bulwer Lytton was familiar with the belief, and uses the 'shining shadow' in A Strange Story. Now here is uniform recurrent evidence from widely severed ages, from distant countries, from the Polar North, the American prairie, Neoplatonic Egypt and Greece, England and New England of the seventeenth century, and England and Germany of today. The 'creeds and characters of the observers' are as 'different' as Neoplatonism, Shamanism, Christianity of divers sects, and probably Agnosticism or indifference. All these ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... than at other times. It wobbles slightly on its axis. It is inclined to the plane of the ecliptic, causing the seasons, and that brings a new set of factors into the problem. A mountain range or a desert will modify the atmosphere, even the difference between a forest and a prairie is noticeable." ...
— The Boy with the U. S. Weather Men • Francis William Rolt-Wheeler |
