"Sod" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... upon the porch and toward the chair Virginia had placed for her. The Vigilantes and Aunt Nan watched her, fascinated. Virginia had told them of her wedding journey across the plains in '64; of the hardships and dangers she had withstood; of lonely winter days in a sod hut, and of frightful perils from Indians. She seemed so little someway sitting there, so frail and wrinkled in the big chair. It was almost incredible that she had lived through such terrible things. They longed to hear the story of it all from ...
— Virginia of Elk Creek Valley • Mary Ellen Chase
... Louis; the town where you make your living. Are they Christianized? Cleaned up? Yet you are ready for Mexico. No; you're all wrong, J.W. I don't believe the world's going to be saved the way you break up prairie sod, a field at a time, and let the rest alone. We've got to do our missionary work the way they feed famine sufferers. They don't give any applicant all he can eat, but they try to make the supply go 'round, giving each one a little. Remember, J.W., the rest ...
— John Wesley, Jr. - The Story of an Experiment • Dan B. Brummitt
... call for little notice beyond the warning that they should never be neglected. The authors have seen many thousands of feet of cement walk laid in the middle West in which the sub-base was placed directly on the natural sod, often covered with grass and weeds a foot high. Such practice is wholly vicious. The sod should always be removed and the surface soil excavated to a depth depending upon the climate and nature of the ground and the ...
— Concrete Construction - Methods and Costs • Halbert P. Gillette
... that college rising as from the soil itself, as if it was what come at the last of that thinking that breathes from the earth. I see it—but I want to know it's real before I stop knowing. Then maybe I can lie under the same sod with the red boys and not be ashamed. We're not old! Let's fight! Wake in other men what ...
— Plays • Susan Glaspell
... and joyous cries, From sources full, draw need's supplies, Quench hearty thirst, obtain what must eftsoon Form blood and mind, in freest boon, Respire at length thy sacred flaming light, From all that greets our ears, touch, scent or sight— Brown leaves, blue mountains, yellow gleams, green sod— Thou undistracted still dost ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... with game. Myriads of prairie chickens were almost as tame as domestic fowls. Deer stared in wide-eyed amazement at the early settlers. Bands of buffalo snorted in surprise as the first dark lines of sod were broken up. Droves of wild turkey skirted the fringes of timber. Indians roamed freely; halting in wonder at the first log cabins of ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills
... shrine he heap'd a spire Of teeming sweets, enkindling sacred fire; Anon he stain'd the thick and spongy sod With wine, in honour of the shepherd-god. Now while the earth was drinking it, and while Bay leaves were crackling in the fragrant pile, And gummy frankincense was sparkling bright 'Neath smothering parsley, and a hazy light 230 Spread greyly ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... soil, and so, when Ab had outlined the pit and cut up its surface into sods, he carried them one by one to the bank and cast them down among the reeds where the water still made little puddles. In time of flood the river spread out into a lake, reaching even as far as here. The sod removed, there was exposed a rectangle of black soil, for the earth was of alluvial deposit and easy of digging. Shellful after shellful of the dirt did Ab carry from where the pit was to be, trotting patiently ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo
... signally cruel to her, and that she was drinking deeply of the cup of sorrow. She was convinced that Wilbur, had he lived, would have moved presently to Benham, in accordance with her desire, and that they would then have been completely happy again. Instead he was dead and under the sod, and she was left to face the world with no means save $5,000 from his life insurance and the natural gifts and soul which ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... original organic bunch of original sin within the man. The only other clergyman who came was from out of town—a half-Universalist, who said he wouldn't give twenty cents for my figure. He said that the snake-grass was not in my garden originally, that it sneaked in under the sod, and that it could be entirely rooted out with industry and patience. I asked the Universalist-inclined man to take my hoe and try it; but he said he hadn't time, ...
— Little Masterpieces of American Wit and Humor - Volume I • Various
... bulky now and heavy, by Conspirator No. Two, takes up the spade and begins to dig. And, in a while, having made an excavation not very deep to be sure, but sufficient to his purpose, he deposits the sack within, covers it with soil, treads it down, and replacing the torn sod, carefully pats it down with the flat of his spade. Which thing accomplished, Conspirator No. One wipes his brow, and stepping forth of the shadow, consults his watch with anxious eye, and, thereupon, smiles,—surely ...
— The Money Moon - A Romance • Jeffery Farnol
... like one million-petalled flower of upheaved whiteness—or of tender rosiness, as if the snow which had covered it in winter had sunk in and gathered warmth from the life of the tree, and now crept out again to adorn the summer. The long loops of the laburnum hung heavy with gold towards the sod below; and the air was full of the fragrance of the young leaves of the limes. Down in the valley below, the daisies shone in all the meadows, varied with the buttercup and the celandine; while in damp places grew large pimpernels, ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... them had had crop failures before. All of them had seen the labour of months go for naught in the blight of an evening's frost, or the sweep of a prairie fire. So here on this virgin isle, in soil whose sod had never been turned, they sowed from the bins of the slumbering ship. Wheat and oats and flax, brought from the Argentina plains; potatoes, squash and beet-root; even beans and peas were tried, but with small hope. ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... Michael answered. "There are jobs in plenty for the willing hands. Sure, no Irishman would give up at all when there's always something new to try. And there's always somebody from the old sod there to help you if the luck turns on you. Do you remember Patrick Doran, now? He lived forninst the blacksmith shop years ago. Well, Patrick is a great man. He's a man of fortune, and a good friend to myself. One year when ...
— The Irish Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... and faithful, the name of Wallace on each lip, the weal of Scotland in each heart, her mountains our shield, her freedom our sword, shall we, can we fail? No! no! Scotland shall be free, or her green sod and mountain flowers shall bloom upon our graves. I have no crown save that which Scotland gives, no kingdom save what your swords shall conquer, and your hearts bestow; with you I live ...
— The Days of Bruce Vol 1 - A Story from Scottish History • Grace Aguilar
... until he came to a place where those swaying curtains were stilled, where he no longer strode above the sky but on soft surface, a mat of gray living sod where his steps released a spicy fragrance. And there he really saw the Foanna for the ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton
... along the gay mead The daisy and cowslip appear! The flocks, as they carelessly feed, Rejoice in the spring of the year; The myrtles that shade the gay bowers, The herbage that springs from the sod, Trees, plants, cooling fruits, and sweet flowers, All rise to the ...
— Louis' School Days - A Story for Boys • E. J. May
... over a partly submerged rock and manoeuvred with difficulty among others, that raised their heads ominously above the water. As we approached, we made out through the fog the dim outlines, close to the shore, of a hut partially covered with sod. Our welcome was tumultuous—a combination of the barking of dogs and the shrill screams of women demanding to know who we were and what we wanted. There were two women, tall, scrawny, brown, with hair flying at random. The younger one had a baby in her arms. She was Steve's married sister. ...
— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace
... serving the Union in its legislative halls, and, at a maturer age, leading his fellow-citizens, his brethren, from the widest-sundered states, to redden the same battle-fields with their kindred blood, to unite their breath into one shout of victory, and perhaps to sleep, side by side, with the same sod over them. Such a man, with such hereditary recollections, and such a personal experience, must not narrow himself to adopt the cause of one section of his native country against another. He will stand up, as he has always ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... on June 13, 1854, that the first sod was turned for the construction of the Nova Scotia Railway, and a beginning made at last. The road was to run from Halifax to Truro, with a branch to Windsor. Progress was slow, but by 1858 the ninety-three miles planned had been completed. ...
— The Railway Builders - A Chronicle of Overland Highways • Oscar D. Skelton
... it was, under the existing circumstances political and social, suited to its purpose. The distribution of the domains, moreover, was in itself no political party-question; it might have been carried out to the last sod without changing the existing constitution or at all shaking the government of the aristocracy. As little could there be, in that case, any complaint of a violation of rights. The state was confessedly the owner of the occupied ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... zealous, he digged in the earth under the sod for the tree of glory until he uncovered and came upon three crosses together in a mournful home, hid twenty feet below, concealed 830 in their dark grave beneath the steep cliff, and covered over with sand, even as in days of yore the 835 host of the sinful, the race ...
— The Elene of Cynewulf • Cynewulf
... was Purcell, who could never conquer until all seemed over with him. There was—what! shall I name thee last? Ay, why not? I believe that thou art the last of all that strong family still above the sod, where mayst thou long continue—true piece of English stuff—Tom of Bedford. Hail to thee, Tom of Bedford, or by whatever name it may please thee to be called, Spring or Winter! Hail to thee, six-foot Englishman of the brown ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... disease seized me, and I determined to unburden my conscience, and dragged myself here, only to learn that the sweet lady of Aescendune had died within the year, with all the symptoms of rapid decline, and upon my sod I charge Hugo de ...
— The Rival Heirs being the Third and Last Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... her sad-beholding husband saw, Amazedly in her sad face he stares: Her eyes, though sod in tears, look'd red and raw, Her lively colour kill'd with deadly cares. He hath no power to ask her how she fares: Both stood, like old acquaintance in a trance, Met far from ...
— The Rape of Lucrece • William Shakespeare [Clark edition]
... waves his arms like a whirligig and 'That's all right,' says he. Then he and Carnehan takes the big boss of each village by the arm and walks them down into the valley, and shows them how to scratch a line with a spear right down the valley, and gives each a sod of turf from both sides of the line. Then all the people comes down and shouts like the devil and all, and Dravot says—'Go and dig the land, and be fruitful and multiply,' which they did, though they didn't understand. Then we asks the names of things in their lingo—bread ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... story: believe that you know better than any of us, and be sure that everybody likes it. That I know. There is not, and never was, anybody so competent to write a true New England poem as yourself, and have no doubt that you are doing it. The native sod sends up the best inspiration to the brain, and you are as sure of immortality as we all are of dying,—if you only go on with entire ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... lean cattle walking, walking, up-hill and down coulee, nose to the dry ground, snipping the stray tufts where should be a woolly carpet of sweet, ripened grasses, eating wildrose bushes level with the sod, and wishing there was only an abundance even of them; drifting uneasily from hilltop to farther hilltop, hunger-driven and gaunt, where should be sleek content. When they sought to continue their quest beyond the river, and the weaker bogged at its muddy edge, Rowdy and Pink and the Silent ...
— Rowdy of the Cross L • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B.M. Bower
... shade falls over the whole front of the place. In the back is an orchard of old apple trees, and trellises of big blue grapes. On one side is a broad lawn, at the back of which is one of the good old-fashioned flower gardens that does one good to look at. There are little pink primroses dotting the sod, sweet-william, lavender, nasturtiums, sweet peas, hollyhocks, bachelor's buttons, portulaca, and a row of tall sunflowers, the delight of a sleepy colony of hens. I learned all the flowers that summer." He clasped his hands comfortably back of his head and looked at her. ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... the intrusive Pile, ill-graced With baubles of theatric taste, O'erlooks the torrent breathing showers On motley bands of alien flowers In stiff confusion set or sown, Till Nature cannot find her own, Or keep a remnant of the sod Which Caledonian Heroes trod) I mused; and, thirsting for ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... I now, I too were By deep wells and water-floods, Streams of ancient hills; and where All the wan green places bear Blossoms cleaving to the sod, Fruitless fruit, and grasses fair, Or such darkest ivy-buds As divide thy yellow hair, Bacchus, and their leaves that nod Round thy fawnskin brush the bare Snow-soft shoulders of a god; There the year is sweet, and there Earth is full of secret springs, And the ...
— Atalanta in Calydon • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... anticipation of the opening of the railway. He must be prepared with waggons, trucks, and carriages, himself superintending their manufacture. The permanent road, turntables, switches, and crossings,—in short, the entire structure and machinery of the line, from the turning of the first sod to the running of the first train of carriages upon the railway,—were executed under his immediate supervision. And it was in the midst of this vast accumulation of work and responsibility that the battle of the locomotive engine had to be fought,—a battle, ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... followed the trail for some time, but when I reached a turn, I came into a sort of blind trail, where I lost the track. I think the horse had been led up on hard sod, to mislead any one on the track. I pushed on, crossed the creek, and soon found the tracks again in soft ground. This part of the mountain was perfectly unknown to me, and very wild. Finally I came to a ridge, from which I looked down on a little ranch. As I came ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... cried, nothing daunted, "we must work together again. Get a pole and stand it on the farther side of the plot four feet in from the edge of the sod. That's right. Now come here; take old Bay by the head, and, with your eyes fixed on the pole, lead him ...
— Driven Back to Eden • E. P. Roe
... its winding walks, rare old trees and rich sweep of sod filled with children, so full of enjoyment that one is half-minded to drop down and roll over the grass with them. On the central walk, midway between the Capitol and St. Paul's church, stands Crawford's equestrian Washington ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... he cried, taking me by the hand. "It's myself, I can assure you. Thanks to this torrid climate, sangaree, and Yellow Jack, you're right, my boy. All the fine fellows you knew at Savannah are invalided home, or are under the sod; but as I eschew strong drinks, and keep in the shade as much as I can, I have hitherto escaped the fell foe. I suppose you're going to call on my friends the Talboys? They will be very glad to see you. We often talk about you, for the gallant way in which you, Pim, and your other messmates ...
— Paddy Finn • W. H. G. Kingston
... sown these seeds of a free Christian faith; so that when Luther came, it was in England as in our country when the forest fires have ceased, and suddenly there spring up from the sod a new forest because the seeds lie in the prairie from age to age. So in our English soil there were those seeds of Christian freedom that sprung forth and gave us a free and Protestant England. And then, in the reaction, when Mary was on the throne, and the ...
— American Missionary, Volume 44, No. 1, January, 1890 • Various
... of Ladysmith the Irish Brigade was sent to Helpmakaar Pass, and remained there for six weeks, until Colonel Blake succeeded in inducing the War Department to send them to the Free State, where these "sons of the ould sod" might make a display of their valour to the world, and more especially to Michael Davitt, who was then visiting in the country. When the Brigade was formed it was not necessary to show an Irish birth certificate in order to become a member of the organisation, and consequently ...
— With the Boer Forces • Howard C. Hillegas
... of mine," said Mr. Emblem, "now, like nearly all my friends, beneath the sod, used to say that a good marriage was a happy blending of the finest Wallsend with the most delicate Silkstone. But he was in the coal trade. For my own part I have always thought that it is like the binding of two scarce ...
— In Luck at Last • Walter Besant
... lovely woman. It sort of chills me to the marrow at first thought. I've been in a delirium, quite irresponsible. These last few months I've been coming down to earth. Only instead of getting my feet planted firmly on the sod I think I've struck a quicksand bed. I say, lend ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley
... no one hill rises conspicuously over the rest. We found ourselves at one time on their summits beside huge masses of granite, at others crossing valleys of rich soil and green appearance. A country under cultivation is so widely different from one the sod of which has never been broken by the plough, that it is difficult and hazardous to form a decided opinion on the latter. If you ask a stockman what kind of a country lies, either to his right, or to his left, he is sure to condemn it, unless ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... plots Are now resorts of vicious ease, Were then laid out in little lots, With useful beans and early peas: Each merely ornamental sod They dug with spades and hoed with hoes: The wilderness in every quad Was made to blossom as ...
— Lyra Frivola • A. D. Godley
... advice from the same author: 'If you have a piece of wet ground there plant cuttings of poplars, and also reeds which are set out as follows: having turned the sod with a hoe plant the scions of reed three feet one from the other. Wild asparagus (from which you may cultivate garden asparagus) should also be set out in such a place because the same kind of cultivation is suitable for it as for reeds. ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato
... crept back at his impure kiss, a giant power came rending the twain apart. A man had sundered them, sprung from the ground or from heaven belike, or from behind a boulder? He tore Democrates's hands away as a lion tears a lamb. He dashed the mad orator prone upon the sod, and kicked him twice, as of mingled hatred and contempt. All this Hermione only knew in half, while her senses swam. Then she came to herself enough to see that the stranger was a young man in a sailor's loose dress, his features almost hidden under the dishevelled hair and ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... shadow forth the truth, That somehow here the very nerves of God Thrill the old fires, the rocks, the primal sod; We throw our speech upon the open air, And it is caught Far down the world, to sing and murmur there; Our common words are with ...
— Lundy's Lane and Other Poems • Duncan Campbell Scott
... up her dreams the glorious way Through flagrant ordeals august, and won To burning eyries, till beneath her wing Rankled the shaft. Her Archer was abroad; And hooded with strange darkness, shuddering Down pain's dull spiral, sank she on the sod. Close round, green dusk of dews! No more we dare The blue inviolate castles of ...
— The Hours of Fiammetta - A Sonnet Sequence • Rachel Annand Taylor
... arches crossed it and continued up the shoulder of the hills toward the east. All about it flourished the young growth of the rough sedge grass, green as emerald. The spot was treeless and marked with broad low hummocks of new sod. ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... thou strong of heart, Lord King, For this I tell thee sure, The sod that drank the Douglas' blood ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester
... twelve lepers to Findian for their healing. Findian sent them to Ciaran. Ciaran welcomed them, and went with them westward from the cell, and tears a sod from the ground, so that a stream of pure water breaks forth from thence. He poured three waves of the water over each of them, so that they ...
— The Latin & Irish Lives of Ciaran - Translations Of Christian Literature. Series V. Lives Of - The Celtic Saints • Anonymous
... action. The unfortunate Mr. Hammond, however, was pierced through the right breast, and another of the party was killed by being transfixed through the bowels. At this instant Huertis gave the word to fire; and, at the next, no small number of the enemy were rolling upon the sod, amid their plunging horses. A second rapid, but well delivered volley, brought down as many more, when the rest, in attitudes of frantic wonder and terror, unconsciously dropped their weapons and fled like affrighted fowls under the sudden swoop of the kite. Their dispersion was ...
— Memoir of an Eventful Expedition in Central America • Pedro Velasquez
... each rippling streamlet, mount and sod Obeys the mandate sent to it from God, To do the work to each by Heaven assigned, And in its due ...
— Home Lyrics • Hannah. S. Battersby
... mood to calculate odds. For all his blind rage, however, he was a crafty fighter, always. Seeing that the challenger made no move, he gave voice to a huge, squealing grunt, like the noise of a herd of raging pigs. Then he dug his armed snout into the turf and hurled a shower of sod into the air. ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... storm tossed sailors sent; With a film in my eyes, I would not see the ladder based on earth, Yet reaching to the cloud-crowned height, where the true Light has birth. The beautiful angels passing up, with all our prayers to God, Our tears and moans, our fading flowers, all stained with mire and sod— And coming down; ah, many a time I have blessed the Lord above, For His pure descending angels, bringing Faith, and Hope, and Love. There was a time when all this wealth of glory was lost on me, And I was like a rudderless ship, far ...
— Victor Roy, A Masonic Poem • Harriet Annie Wilkins
... the cold sod. He lay like the dead on the grave of the dead. Then he knew that it was ordered above that the cloud of his father's sin should darken his days; that through all the range and change of life he was to be the lonely slave ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... roof of the southern transept; and this drip had caused the mould at the foot of the stone, on the side next the wall, to sink, so that there was a considerable crack between the stone and the soil. The old man had cut some sod from another part of the churchyard, and was now standing, with the rain pouring on him from the roof, beating this sod down in the crack. He was sheltered from the wind by the church, but he was as wet as he could be. I ...
— The Seaboard Parish Vol. 3 • George MacDonald
... within The breast of childhood; instincts fresh from God Inspire it, ere the heart beneath the rod Of grief hath bled, or caught the plague of sin. How mighty was this fervor which could win Its way to infant souls!—and was the sod Of Palestine by infant Croises trod? Like Joseph went they forth, or Benjamin, In all their touching beauty to redeem? And did their soft lips kiss the Sepulchre? Alas! the lovely pageant, as a dream, Faded! They sank not through ignoble fear; They felt not Moslem steel. By mountain ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... Are ranged in one big horde, Our line, that for Gabriel's trumpet waits, Will stretch tree deep that day, From Jehoshaphat to the Golden Gates— Kelly and Burke and Shea." "Well, here's thank God for the race and the sod!" Said ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... murderer's grasp! How much more a murdered that could destroy radiant innocence! Poor little fellow! one only consolation have we; his friends mourn and weep, but he is at rest. The pang is over, his sufferings are at an end for ever. A sod covers his gentle form, and he knows no pain. He can no longer be a subject for pity; we must reserve that ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... remembered, is not a broad highway, but a narrow path, deeply indented by the hoofs of the horses on which the Indians travel in single file. So deeply is it sunk in the sod which covers the prairies, that it is difficult, sometimes, to distinguish it at a distance of a ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie
... muttered he, thoughtfully. "Grubbing out these young pines wouldn't take long. There's a heavy sod and it would have to be ploughed deeply. Then a crop of corn this year, perhaps—late corn for fear the river might overflow ...
— Hiram The Young Farmer • Burbank L. Todd
... body lay beneath the sod, His soul released the winds and loosed the flood: The Nation wrought his will as hest of God, And her bloodguiltiness ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... right," answered Pat Malloy. "He's better than thim foreigners, anyway." To him, the only foreigners were Italians and Germans. He did not think himself one, although he had come from the "ould sod" less than ...
— Randy of the River - The Adventures of a Young Deckhand • Horatio Alger Jr.
... sod, Weet the lang roads whaur gangrels plod - A maist unceevil thing o' God In mid July - If ye'll just curse the sneckdraw, dod! An' ...
— Underwoods • Robert Louis Stevenson
... kettle-drummer Pillsbury, and he fell with a grunt, doubling up across his nigh kettle-drum. A moment later Peters struck his cymbals wildly together and fell clean out of his saddle, crashing to the sod. Schwarz, his trombone pierced by a ball, swore aloud and dragged ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... air with fragrance breath'd; He moved; the earth confess'd the god; Her brightest chaplets nature wreath'd, Where'er his dimpled feet had press'd the sod. "Why weeps Love's young divinity alone, While men have hearts, and woman charms beneath Tell me, fair worshipp'd boy of ages flown, Is ev'ry ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... next morning feeling cramped and sore after his journey, and carefully looked about. The building had solid walls of sod; such rude stalls as it had been fitted with had been removed, perhaps for the sake of the lumber. He could not reach the door without alarming his jailer, who had taken up his quarters behind the board partition; and there was only one ...
— Ranching for Sylvia • Harold Bindloss
... office, went to his room in the hotel, and sat for hours crushed and discouraged. Presently he rose, kicked the kinks out of his trousers, and walked out into the clear sunlight. At the end of the street he stepped from the side-walk to the sod path and kept walking. He passed an orchard and plucked a ripe peach from an overhanging bough. A yellow-breasted lark stood in a stubble-field, chirped two or three times, and soared, singing, toward the far blue sky. A bare-armed ...
— The Last Spike - And Other Railroad Stories • Cy Warman
... numerously attended by the population of the district. Of his literary friends—owing to the remoteness of the locality—Professor Wilson alone attended. He stood uncovered at the grave after the rest of the company had retired, and consecrated, by his tears, the green sod of his friend's last resting-place. With the exception of Burns and Sir Walter Scott, never did Scottish bard receive more elegies or tributes to his memory. He had had some variance with Wordsworth; but this venerable poet, forgetting the past, became the first to lament his departure. ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... spirit," he cried, "crushed as it has been in the whirlwind of war. Behold her standing over the sod that covers the hero of his country, the husband of her virgin affections. In vain the orphan at her side turns its tearful eye upwards, and asks for the plumes that so lately pleased its infant fancy; in vain its gentle voice inquires when he is to return, ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... passer-by!—Stop, child of God, And read with gentle breast. Beneath this sod A poet lies, or that which once seem'd he.— O, lift one thought in prayer for S. T. C.; That he who many a year with toil of breath Found death in life, may here find life in death! Mercy for praise—to be forgiven for fame He ask'd, and hoped, through Christ. ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... loath to run, but we urged them to it. When we had covered half this open road, we took to the sod at the roadside to avoid raising a telltale cloud of dust. After a hard gallop we reached a forest where the road again left the river. Here we halted to breathe our horses and to watch the road on the right bank. After ten minutes we ...
— Yolanda: Maid of Burgundy • Charles Major
... land. He began to use his knees, and Pirate felt the pressure. He didn't like it at all. Oddly enough, Warburton's leg did not bother him as he expected it would, and this gave him confidence. On, on; the dull pounding of Pirate's feet, the flying sod, the wind in his face: and when he saw the barb-wire fence, fear entered into him. An inch too low, a stumble, and serious injuries might result. He must break ...
— The Man on the Box • Harold MacGrath
... States were the first to follow the example of England, after the practicability of steam locomotion had been proved on the Stockton and Darlington, and Liverpool and Manchester Railways. The first sod of the Baltimore and Ohio Railway was cut on the 4th of July, 1828, and the line was completed and opened for traffic in the following year, when it was worked partly by horse-power, and partly by a locomotive built at Baltimore, which is still preserved in the Company's ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... was much; and once, when just ahead of him he espied a young, sunbonneted woman crouching in the pouring sunshine beyond the sod of the bayou's bank, itself but a few inches above the level of the stream, on a little pier of one plank pushed out among the flags and reeds, pounding her washing with a wooden paddle, he stopped the dip of his canoe-paddle, ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... years, and are protected from robbery: our cache is built in this manner: In the high plain on the north side of the Missouri and forty yards from a steep bluff, we chose a dry situation, and then describing a small circle of about twenty inches diameter, removed the sod as gently and carefully as possible: the hole is then sunk perpendicularly for a foot deep, or more if the ground be not firm. It is now worked gradually wider as they descend, till at length it becomes six or seven feet deep, shaped nearly like a kettle or the lower part ...
— History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, Vol. I. • Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
... fascination for the Celtic mind. Sometimes the attraction becomes so strong as seemingly to overbalance the faculty of distinguishing fact from fancy. Of St. Bridget we are gravely told that to dry her wet cloak she hung in out on a sunbeam! Another Saint sailed away to a foreign land on a sod from his native hillside! More than once we find a flagstone turned into a raft to bear a missionary band beyond the seas! St. Fursey exchanged diseases with his friend Magnentius, and, stranger still, the exchange was arranged and effected ...
— The Life of St. Mochuda of Lismore • Saint Mochuda
... and the little mound over Matches's grave had been covered with sod, the children were loath to stop playing funeral. They had enjoyed it so much. Somebody said that we ought to march down the street so that people could see how funny I looked in my crape veil; but I could stand it no longer. When I ...
— The Story of Dago • Annie Fellows-Johnston
... beyond a doubt an Irishman, and a patriotic one at that, but for "somethin' warrum" he evidently preferred Scotch whiskey to that which is produced on the Emerald Sod. Beneath the benign influences of this draught he became more confidential, and I grew more serene. We sat. We quaffed the fragrant draught. We inhaled the cheerful nicotic fumes. ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... call to prayer, As slow the orb of daylight sets, Is rising sweetly on the air, From Syria's thousand minarets! 85 The boy has started from the bed Of flowers, where he had laid his head, And down upon the fragrant sod Kneels, with his forehead to the south, Lisping th' eternal name of God 90 ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... castle, or looking into the windows of the booksellers' shops, where he saw all books of the day, save the poems of the Ayrshire Ploughman." He found his way to the lowly grave of Fergusson, and, kneeling down, kissed the sod; he sought out the house of Allan Ramsay, and, on entering it, took off his hat. While Burns is thus employed, we may cast a glance at the capital to which he had come, and the society he was ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... when the conflagration began the little flames looked like crocuses breaking through the sod. If it ever happened I fancy it would be quite as simple as that. But perhaps ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... L. Kells states that in Ontario this Junco selects a variety of places for nesting sites, such as the upturned roots of trees, crevices in banks, under the sides of logs and stumps, a cavity under broken sod, or in the shelter of grass or other vegetation. The nest is made of dry grasses, warmly and smoothly lined with hair. The bird generally begins to nest the first week of May, and nests with eggs are found as late as August. ...
— Birds Illustrated by Colour Photography, Vol II. No. 4, October, 1897 • Various
... bullock becomes ill on the road, the driver will, with his knife, cut all around the sod where the animal has left its footprint. Lifting this out, he will cut a cross on it and replace it the other side uppermost. This cure is most ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... bigger is the overdue bill nature's got against you, and when she does hit you she'll hit to kill. Where'll your mind and your studies be when we've planted your body down under the sod?" ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... sod was torn by the hoofs of a hundred ponies. That was evident. All around a little sink in the surface at a distance of several hundred yards the warriors must have dashed and circled for full an hour. Here along ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... in vain, not all in vain, thank God; All that you were and all you might have been Was given to the cold effacing sod, Unstrewn with garlands green; The valour and the vision that were yours Lie not with broken spears and fallen towers, With glories perishable of ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... was clothed with natural fur. A rudely made cedar fiddle was tucked under his furred chin. Supporting it with his left hand, he sawed it vigorously with a bow that was not unlike an Indian boy's miniature weapon, while his moccasined left foot came down upon the sod floor in time with the music. When the shrill war-whoop came, and the door and window were cut in strips by the knives of the Indians, he did not even cease playing, but instinctively he closed his eyes, so as not to behold the horror of ...
— Old Indian Days • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... said no more until they reached the spot where the boys had found the edge of the bluff torn away. There, for a space of about two feet only, back from the brink, the sparse grass was trampled, and the earth showed marks of heels and in places the sod was freshly torn up. ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... upsprang, and he tore up a tree by its lusty roots, and down the declivity, dashing with rapid leaps, panting and wild, he struck the ravisher on the temple with the mighty pine. Alschiroch fell lifeless on the sod, and Miriam ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli
... has trod, And the pirate hordes that wander Shall never profane the sacred sod Of these beautiful isles ...
— John Smith, U.S.A. • Eugene Field
... hot blood streamed on the daisied sod, Poor soul, you were likened to Cain, and you fled from God; Men say you fought hard for your life, when the deed was done; But your body would rise no ...
— The Fairy Changeling and Other Poems • Dora Sigerson
... a fresh heaped mound, Raised o'er the clay of one he'd fondly loved; And cursed the world, and drenched the sod with tears And all the flimsy mockery of his ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... lands in our Northwest which need development, and who is better fitted for settlers than the resourceful Canadians themselves? We have sons and grandsons who have the will, the knowledge, the mettle and the courage to break the prairie sod and bring the virgin soil to successful fruition, and assist in developing our country's resources. They will lie glad to do this, and take particular pride in the patrimony of their military ancestors. ...
— Troublous Times in Canada - A History of the Fenian Raids of 1866 and 1870 • John A. Macdonald
... I've read and re-read my few books and papers until I can almost repeat the contents by heart. I've finished my desk, and the candlesticks, and the frame for Clare's picture. But now I'll be able to make my garden. And I can sod a little lawn in front ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner
... and quality 1 Subs. Such meats as are easy of digestion, well-dressed, hot, sod, &c., young, moist, of good nourishment, &c. Bread of pure wheat, well-baked. Water clear from the fountain. Wine and drink not too strong, &c. Flesh Mountain birds, partridge, pheasant, quails, &c. Hen, capon, mutton, veal, kid, rabbit, &c. ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... weapon that comes down as still As snowflakes fall upon the sod; But executes a freeman's will, As lightning does the will of God; And from its force nor doors nor locks Can shield you,—'t is ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... of shouting, shooting men, so still and solitary was everything left behind it. It seemed the very midland solitude of the world where Septimius was delving at the grave. He and his dead were alone together, and he was going to put the body under the sod, and be ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... dreadful secret must be buried underground! Not a ragged blade of verdure—not one root of moss is there; Who hath torn the grasses from it—wherefore is that barrow bare? Darkness shuts the forest round me. Here I stand and, O my God! This may be some injured spirit raving round and round the sod. Hush! the tempest, how it travels! Blood hath here been surely shed— Hush! the thunder, how it ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... Here we are running through a hill country where they are so complete and so neat in their landscape that they even sod the cuts. It is like going ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell
... wasteth away, And where is he?"—Hark! from the skies I hear a voice answer and say, "The spirit of man never dies: His body, which came from the earth, Must mingle again with the sod; But his soul, which in heaven had birth, Returns to the ...
— Poems • George P. Morris
... the sod; O deep amazement, strangely felt! As though, unseen, vast numbers knelt And ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... was, haunted me like a familiar melody. If the person was my mother, why should her very name be kept from me? If she was still living, why could I not go to her? If she was dead, why might I not water the green sod above her grave with my tears, and plant the sweetest flowers by her tombstone? I was dissatisfied with my lot, and I was determined, at no distant day, to wring from my silent uncle the particulars of my early history. I was so eager to get this ...
— Breaking Away - or The Fortunes of a Student • Oliver Optic
... mission charge sixteen miles distant from the town in which he resided, and he was therefore constantly traveling between these two places. About six miles distant was the country residence of Judge S., a well-known and venerable parishioner of the worthy doctor. The sod had been turned above this gentleman's grave only about six weeks, when Dr. B. chanced to be returning from his mission charge in company with a friend. It was broad daylight, just about sunset, and not far from Judge S.'s gate, when a carriage, ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... was over, and the last sod had—so to speak—been cast upon that living grave, Fay tried to take up her life again. But she could not. She had lost heart. She dared not be alone. She shunned society. At her earnest request her sister Magdalen came out ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... they had not come; a few days more and larger leaves would hide them perfectly. Just at this time, too, along the roadsides, big hawthorn shrubs and wild plum were in blossom, and in the sheltered fields the mossy sod was pied with white and purple violets, whose flowerets so outstripped their half-grown leaves that blue and milky ways were seen in ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... fair argument of the poet's bucolic life. I have a strong faith that his farming was of the higgledy-piggledy order; I do not believe that he could have set a plough into the sod, or have made a good "cast" of barley. It is certain, that, when the Tyrone rebels burned him out of Kilcolman Castle, he took no treasure with him but his Elizabeth and the two babes; and the only treasures he left were the ashes ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... the best part of the story. After the sergeant had well pummelled his enemy, he picked up his head again, and thrust into a neighbouring great gun: from the want of his peepers he made a random shot, and killed the horse on which Lord Lake was riding—his Lordship saluted the sod." ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 494. • Various
... than it was this April day; which, with its sunshine and showers in unregulated alternation, seemed symbolical of life,—that life of which every tender blade of grass, every venturesome flower thrusting its head above the sod, seemed to speak. There was health and strength in the gentle breeze which wantonly played with the budding leaves of the great trees, already putting forth little evangels of that splendid foliage with which they decked themselves in the full glory of summer. ...
— For Love of Country - A Story of Land and Sea in the Days of the Revolution • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... boy, with thee, Betsie Brown, By my grave once bend the knee, Betsie Brown, Teach him to bleed or die For his country or his God, Like him whose ashes lie Beneath the loving sod, Betsie Brown! ...
— Soldier Songs and Love Songs • A.H. Laidlaw
... or other opaque substances, till the fit obscurity is restored. Again, like all followers of Nature-Worship, they are liable to out-breakings of an enthusiasm rising to ferocity; and burn men, if not in wicker idols, yet in sod cottages. ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... it shall be shod All in silver, housed in azure, And the mane shall swim the wind! And the hoofs, along the sod, Shall flash onward in a pleasure, Till the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... thought he saw his chance and whirled his weapon, bringing it down in a terrible sweep. Craftily Almo caught it against his shield, just below the upper rim, horribly it grated against the bronze plating of the shield, with the full weight of the mighty swing it buried itself in the sod. ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... guilty knowledge of a great crime breeds loathing and contempt. History contains many such instances where the subject had knowledge of the sovereign's sins, and the sovereign found no rest until the man who knew was beneath the sod. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... proved that Man is nothing more Than educated sod, Forgetting that the schoolmen's lore Is foolishness ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... the way to Claggan Mountain, where they shot at Smith last year, and—if I don't disremember—is just where they shot Hunter last August eleven years. Ye'll mind the cross-roads before ye come to the chapel. It was there they shot him from behind a sod-bank." This was the reply I received in answer to my question as to the whereabouts of a public meeting to be held yesterday morning, with the patriotic object of striking terror into the hearts of landlords and agents. It was delivered without ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker
... from me to croak as the "laudator temporis acti." Past, present, and future—all are divine—all are parts of a celestial scheme—none to be scorned, all to be loved and improved. But the past is under the sod; the future is behind the clouds; the present alone has its foot upon the green sward. In a higher sense than the epicure's, it is "our own." Let us, then, appreciate, exalt, and enjoy it. There are good and glorious signs in ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... fell on me early, else I might have squandered my resources of endurance, and in place of this sturdy story-teller whose sixty years sit lightly on him, there would have been only a ripple in the sod of the curly mesquite on the Plains and a little heap of dead dust, turned to the inert earth again. The West grows large men, as it grows strong, beautiful women; and I know that the boys and girls then differed only in surroundings and opportunity from the ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... say that he reached his goal with a certain elation and stood there again with a certain assurance. The creature beneath the sod knew of his rare experience, so that, strangely now, the place had lost for him its mere blankness of expression. It met him in mildness—not, as before, in mockery; it wore for him the air of conscious greeting ...
— The Beast in the Jungle • Henry James
... the iniquity would be looked on as a "class anarchist." I will go further and state that if in New England a man of the type of Folk, of Missouri, can be found who, after giving over six months to turning up the legislative and Boston municipal sod of the past ten years, does not expose to the world a condition of rottenness more rotten than was ever before exhibited in any community in the civilized world, it will be because he has been suffocated by the ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... many ugly tools to dig up the stumps and burn off the forests and drain the swamps of a howling wilderness. He has used this old Egyptian plow of slavery to turn over the sod of these fifteen Southern States. Its sin consisted in not dying decently when its work was done. It strove to live and make all the new world like it. Its leaders avowed that their object was to put this belt of the continent under the control of an aristocracy which believes that one-fifth ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... in Spring, When earth is fair and glad, And sweet birds sing, And fewest hearts are sad — Shall I die then? Ah! me, no matter when; I know it will be sweet To leave the homes of men And rest beneath the sod, To kneel and kiss Thy feet In Thy home, O ...
— Poems: Patriotic, Religious, Miscellaneous • Abram J. Ryan, (Father Ryan)
... wonderful green of the larch woods, the bronze of the opening oaks, and the smooth velvet pastures between the little river and the gleaming limestone at the foot of the towering fell! All is trimmed and clipped and cared for, down to the level hedgerows and the sod on the roadside banks, and every here and there white hamlets, with little old-world churches, nestle among-the trees. You see, it has grown ripe and mellow, while your settlements are ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... never die. Not sweeter are the flowers that make your valley fair, not greener are the pines that give your valley its name, than the memory of the brave men who died for freedom. And yet no victim of those days, sleeping under the green sod, is more truly a martyr of Liberty than every murdered man whose bones lie bleaching in this summer sun upon the silent plains of Kansas. And so long as Liberty has one martyr, so long as one drop of blood is ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander |
