"Spruce" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sent the volumes tumbling to the floor. He picked them up and looked at his watch. It was noon. The freight would lie here for an hour or more, until the east-bound passenger went by. Claude left the car and walked slowly up the platform toward the station. A bundle of little spruce trees had been flung off near the freight office, and sent a smell of Christmas into the cold air. A few drays stood about, the horses blanketed. The steam from the locomotive made a spreading, deep-violet stain as it curled up against ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... country is one of exceeding beauty. The dark green forests of spruce, larch and pine, broken now and then by a grove of poplars or silver birches, the secluded valleys and the rounded hills are strangely restful and give one a sense of infinite peace. It is a place to go for tired nerves. ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... devious outlet of the basin of which the lake occupied the principal expanse, reached through three miles of no-man's route, framed in green hills forest-clad up to their summits. The camp was a shelter of spruce bark, open wide in front and closed at the ends, drawn on three faces of an octohedron facing the fireplace. The beds were made of layers of spruce and other fir branches spread on the ground and covered with the fragrant twigs of the arbor vitae. Two huge maples overhung ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... the thing you had under your coat was a saw. I saw you hide something under the woodpile here, but I'm so dumb that I didn't think much of it at the time. Now, the log over the gully was a spruce ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys as Sergeants - or, Handling Their First Real Commands • H. Irving Hancock
... course, a six-inch shell was dropped within about one hundred feet of his vessel. Then he stopped. A boat put off from the "San Jacinto," and made for the "Trent." Up the side of the merchant-vessel clambered a spruce lieutenant, and demanded the immediate surrender of the two commissioners. The captain protested, pointed to the flag with the cross of St. George waving above his head, and invoked the power of her Britannic ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... true word spoken from the chest," I sighed, just as Uncle Peter made his first cast and cleverly wound about eight feet of line around a spruce ...
— Back to the Woods • Hugh McHugh
... the light would be something; to go like this, to carry with her only the memory of a dark looming house without cheer was unthinkable. The gate was never locked. If she but went into the garden and round by the spruce tree to the back of the ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... after that he lay hidden under a fallen tree in the snow and bitter cold; but even there he was not safe, and the gamekeeper took him deeper into the forest, where a big spruce grew on a hill in the middle of a frozen swamp. There no one would seek him till he could make a shift to get him out of the country. The hill is still there; the people call it the King's Hill, and not after ...
— Hero Tales of the Far North • Jacob A. Riis
... opened its office first in humble quarters in Spruce street, and since then it has occupied rooms in Beekman, John and Reade streets. These down-town locations have served some valuable purposes. They were accessible to the teachers and workers in passing to and from the South, and in the shipment of goods ...
— The American Missionary - Vol. 44, No. 3, March, 1890 • Various
... the 16th June. They keep above 5000 feet. I never observed any in the lower ranges. The nest is not a difficult one to find, being large and of loose construction; from 15 to 30 feet up a medium-sized tree close to the trunk or sometimes in a large fork. They never seem to build in the spruce firs which abound about Murree. They are by no means shy birds, and hop about the trees close by while their nest is being examined. Five is the ordinary number of eggs, which differ very much in appearance and size: the longest I have measures 1.25 ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume
... and grades of dress, ranging from the spruce blue and buff of some of the officers, through the gray homespun and linsey-woolsey of the farmer privates, to the buckskin of the trappers and huntsmen, so there were all manner of weapons, all styles of head-gear and equipment, all fashions of faces. There were Germans ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... some point,—an arrangement doubtless prompted by the deep snows and severe cold of this latitude. The typical Canadian dwelling-house is also presently met with on entering the Dominion,—a low, modest structure of hewn spruce logs, with a steep roof (containing two or more dormer windows) that ends in a smart curve, a hint taken from the Chinese pagoda. Even in the more costly brick or stone houses in the towns and vicinity this style is adhered to. It is so universal that one wonders if the reason ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... Street, Second Street, and so on in order, in the plain Quaker fashion which had thus entitled the days of the week and the months of the year. Eight were to lie parallel with High, and to be called after the trees of the forest,—Spruce, Chestnut, Pine. In the midst of the city, at the crossing of High and Broad Streets, was to be a square of ten acres, to contain the public offices; and in each quarter of the city was to be a similar open space for walks. The founder intended to allow no house to be built ...
— William Penn • George Hodges
... much. Man changes with the fleeting years and a civilized world changes, but the untrod wilderness never changes. Before us lay the same rushing river I remembered so well, the same starved forest of spruce with its pungent odor, and there was the clump of spruce trees in which our last camp was pitched just as I had seen it last. Malone and Blake remained by the river bank while I approached alone what to me was sacred ground. Time fell away, and I believe that I expected, when I stepped beside ...
— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace
... across in your jacket," said the Elector, laughing. "Remember always that you are the servant of the master, and those spruce fellows but the lackeys of the servant, although I must say that the servant is a much richer, more magnificent man than his master. Run and bring ...
— The Youth of the Great Elector • L. Muhlbach
... or ornament, and if they are, what plants are most suitable?" The answer to this question was given from the experiments of the essayist during the last forty years. The deciduous plants tried were the buckthorn, Osage orange, honey-locust, privet and barberry. The evergreens were the Norway spruce, ...
— The Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56, No. 2, January 12, 1884 - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... 'tis well: If ever ye get a wife, i'faith I'll tell. Sirrah, at home we have a servingman; He is[240] not humour'd bluntly as Coomes is, Yet his condition[241] makes me often merry: I'll tell thee, sirrah, he's a fine neat fellow, A spruce slave; I warrant ye, he will[242] have His cruel garters[243] cross about the knee, His woollen hose as white as th'driven snow, His shoes dry-leather neat, and tied with red ribbons, A nosegay bound with laces in his hat— Bridelaces, ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VII (4th edition) • Various
... i. 251-270, the reader will find an interesting account of the Trained Bands and the Artillery Company. Old writers are fond of sneering at the City warriors. The following passage is from Shirley's "Witty Fair One," v. 1:—"There's a spruce captain newly crept out of a gentleman-usher and shuffled into a buff jerkin with gold lace, that never saw service beyond Finsbury or the Artillery-Garden, marches wearing a desperate feather in his lady's beaver, ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various
... soon followed by the ouzel, which is the first bird to visit a glacier lake, as the sedge is the first of plants. So the young lake grows in beauty, becoming more and more humanly lovable from century to century. Groves of aspen spring up, and hardy pines, and the hemlock spruce, until it is richly overshadowed and embowered. But while its shores are becoming enriched, the soil-beds creep out with incessant growth, contracting its area, while the lighter mud-particles deposited ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... garden of spruce and cedar had heretofore marked the bounds of his excursions. His father had often allowed him to go out alone in the boat or Peter's canoe, but only when he was watching from the fields or the shore, and then he ...
— The End of the Rainbow • Marian Keith
... he caved in at once and obeyed the policeman's orders, that worse might not overtake him. So he sat tight and waited, and then Teddy Pegram and his dog and his air-gun crept out of the woods with a load of ten birds. They roosted in the spruce firs, you understand, and 'twas as easy to slay them as blackbeetles, for Teddy's eyes, helped by the moon, marked 'em above ...
— The Torch and Other Tales • Eden Phillpotts
... remembers sitting in the best room of a well-to-do farmer, and watching, with great interest, the carpet rise and fall with the gusts of wind outside. To avoid such unhappy consequences, farmers have been accustomed to bank up the house outdoors in the fall with dry leaves, spruce-boughs, or manure, usually to a point on the woodwork. This, of course, closes the cellar windows for the winter for the sake of keeping out the wind. A concrete wall, at the present price of cement, ...
— Rural Hygiene • Henry N. Ogden
... his gold chain and seals conspicuously, and wears his spectacles easily, and drops them in a genteel manner on the silk ribbon that is suspended around his neck; and if he is altogether neat and spruce, as becomes an ecclesiastic of some standing in his diocese, is that a reason why he should be stared at, and why men should put their hands in their pockets and whistle, and why rather perky young fellows should cry "Hallo!" and whisper, ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... Hampshire, and Vermont,—abundant, filling swamps acres in extent, alone or associated with other trees, mostly black spruce; growing depressed and scattered on Katahdin at an altitude of 4000 feet; Massachusetts,—rather common, at least northward; Rhode Island,—not reported; Connecticut,—occasional in the northern half of the state; reported as far south ...
— Handbook of the Trees of New England • Lorin Low Dame
... despair, of spiritual or political tyranny or servitude, were never taught by such as shared the serenity of nature. Surely good courage will not flag here on the Atlantic border, as long as we are flanked by the Fur Countries. There is enough in that sound to cheer one under any circumstances. The spruce, the hemlock, and the pine will not countenance despair. Methinks some creeds in vestries and churches do forget the hunter wrapped in furs by the Great Slave Lake, and that the Esquimaux sledges are drawn by ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... foot or used canoes. In the northern parts where birch trees were plentiful, the canoe was of birch bark stretched over a light wooden frame, sewed with strips of deerskin, and smeared at the joints with spruce gum to make it watertight. In the South tree trunks hollowed out by fire and called dugouts were used. In the West there were "bull boats" made of skins stretched over wooden frames. For winter travel the Northern and Western Indians ...
— A Brief History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... too long the track To follow down or struggle back. The sun has set on fair Naushon Long ere my western blaze is gone; The ocean disk is rolling dark In shadows round your swinging bark, While yet the yellow sunset fills The stream that scarfs my spruce-clad hills; The day-star wakes your island deer Long ere my barnyard chanticleer; Your mists are soaring in the blue While mine are sparks ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... two," she said, "and rolls and butter and poached heggs; and see as the heggs is well done, and the toast buttered fine and thick. Now then, look spruce, ...
— Sue, A Little Heroine • L. T. Meade
... slayer of bears. It was notorious in the canyon that the only bear Old Bill ever saw was a fifty-pound cub that stole a string of trout from under Bill's nose, waded the creek and went away while Old Bill was throwing his gun into the brush and hitching frantically along a fallen spruce under the impression that he was climbing a tree. As for himself, he was getting too old and rheumatic to hunt, but he had had a little sport with bears in his time. He recalled with especial glee a little incident of ten or a dozen years ago. He had been over on the ...
— Bears I Have Met—and Others • Allen Kelly
... instalment of Loyalist emigrants arrived at Navy Island, and during the summer they continued to arrive, until about 5,000 had settled between Parrtown (St. John) and St. Anne's. The peninsula now occupied by the city of St. John was then almost a wilderness, covered with shrubs, scrubby spruce, and marsh. Large numbers of emigrants also arrived at Annapolis, Port Roseway, and other points; and Governor Parr, in a letter to Lord North in September, 1783, estimates the whole number that had arrived in Nova Scotia and the island of St. John ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... the dull period of the afternoon, the quiet, waiting period which comes between three or four o'clock and the sunset, and Bill and his wife sat in the shadow of the mighty silver spruce before their door. The great tree was really more of a home for them than the roof they ...
— Ronicky Doone • Max Brand
... following pertinent fact. Shortly after my arrival in America, in the winter of 1907, the most active disseminator of socialistic literature in New York sent me, by way of a challenge, a new and very spruce volume, which contained the most important of his previous leaflets and articles, collected and republished, and claiming renewed attention. The first of these—and it was signalised by an accompanying advertisement ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... the American Journal of Science for September, 1868, to which the reader is referred for other physical observations. The barometric anomaly, noticed particularly on the Lower Amazon, was also observed by Herndon, Castelnau, Chandlers, Spruce, and Wallace.] ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... that meandered among the spruce and pine, skirting the edges of the mountain meadows and keeping within the timber, Cheyenne finally reached the main ridge of the range. Occasionally he dismounted and ...
— Partners of Chance • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... Lake lay Happy Camp—so named because here was found the uppermost fringe of the timber line, where men might warm themselves by fire again. Scarcely could it be called timber, for it was a dwarf rock-spruce that never raised its loftiest branches higher than a foot above the moss, and that twisted and grovelled like a pig-vegetable under the moss. Here, on the trail leading into Happy Camp, in the first sunshine of half a dozen days, Old Tarwater ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... fruitless attempts to ring up his young friend since the fateful morning in St. James's Park, ran him to earth one afternoon at his club, smooth and spruce and unruffled ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... rein, and his next to lead her to meet her discomfited master, who was crippling towards him, his clothes much soiled with his fall, his eyes streaming with tears, from pain as well as mortification, and altogether exhibiting an aspect so unlike the spruce and dapper importance of his ordinary appearance, that the honest smith felt compassion for the little man, and some remorse at having left him exposed to such disgrace. All men, I believe, enjoy an ill natured joke. The difference is, that an ill natured person can drink out ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... abundance. Earlier in the summer the hills were literally carpeted with flowers. I could not learn that any skilled botanist had ever visited Kamchatka and classified its flora. Among the arboreal productions the alder and birch were the most numerous. Pine, larch, and spruce grow on the Kamchatka river, and the timber from them is brought to Avatcha from the ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... Wade far up the valley of White River under the shadow of the Flat Top Mountains. It was beautiful country. Grassy hills, with colored aspen groves, swelled up on his left, and across the brawling stream rose a league-long slope of black spruce, above which the bare red-and-gray walls of the range towered, glorious with the blaze of sinking sun. White patches of snow showed in the sheltered nooks. Wade's gaze rested longest on the ...
— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey
... and cozy. The air was perfumed with the spicy fragrance of spruce mingled with the pleasant odour of the woodfire, the incense of the wilderness. Outside he could hear the seas breaking upon the cliff off the Duck's Head and over the reef, and listening to the pounding seas outside, and the cheerful ...
— Left on the Labrador - A Tale of Adventure Down North • Dillon Wallace
... he was, and imperfectly educated, he aspired to be a lawyer; and at eighteen years of age he became a law-student in the office of Mr. Spruce McCay in Salisbury, North Carolina. Two years later, in 1787, he was admitted to the bar. Not making much headway in Salisbury, he wandered to that part of the State which is now Tennessee, then an almost unbroken wilderness, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XII • John Lord
... an angel-like divine countenance, a saint, an humble mind, a meet spirit clothed in rags, beg, and now ready to be starved? To see a silly contemptible sloven in apparel, ragged in his coat, polite in speech, of a divine spirit, wise? another neat in clothes, spruce, full of courtesy, empty of grace, wit, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... smart fellows, clean-shaven and even spruce in their new blue coats and scarlet trousers. Now the war had put its dirt upon them and seemed to have aged them by fifteen years, leaving its ineffaceable imprint upon their faces. They had stubble beards upon their chins, and their cheeks were sunken and hollow, ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... most careful observer, would have recognised in the two dusty figures, the once spruce forms of Captain Thomas Tomb ...
— The Pirate's Pocket Book • Dion Clayton Calthrop
... quieter than a cat, for they break bark and make an awful scratching with their claws sometimes; my bare feet were soundless. Up and up I went, slowly, for it was dreadfully rough. They were not on the sofa. I could see plainly through the needles. Then I saw the spruce would have been better, for they were standing in front of the parlour door and Peter had one hand on the knob. His other arm was around my sister Sally. Breathlessly I leaned as far as I could, ...
— Laddie • Gene Stratton Porter
... be called torrents, being precipitated as it were in one leap from the Lebanon to the Mediterranean. Olives, vines, and corn cover the maritime plain, while in ancient times the heights were clothed with impenetrable forests of oak, pine, larch, cypress, spruce, and cedar. The mountain range drops in altitude towards the centre of the country and becomes merely a line of low hills, connecting Gebel Ansarieh with the Lebanon proper; beyond the latter it continues without interruption, till at length, above the narrow Phoenician coast road, it rises ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... took charge of the younger group and led them through the garden to where some young spruce trees hid the wall. Here a surprise awaited them in the shape of two of the largest of the growing trees festooned with ribbons and laden with strange fruit in the shape of coloured toy balloons that bobbed about and tugged at their moorings ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... blanket and unfolded it until Lorraine saw that it was a full-size bed blanket of heavy gray wool. The man's ingenuity seemed endless. Without seeming to have any extra luggage, he had nevertheless carried a very efficient camp outfit with him. He took his hunting knife, went to the spruce grove and cut many small, green branches, returning with all he could hold in his arms. She watched him lay them tips up for a mattress, and was secretly glad that she knew this much at least of camp comfort. He spread the blanket ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... stepped into the cavern and looked around. A rude couch had been made of the boughs of spruce and white pine, and saplings had been roughly hewn into ...
— Boy Scouts on the Great Divide - or, The Ending of the Trail • Archibald Lee Fletcher
... of rather spruce looking young men alighted from an eastern train in Paris and, strolling forth in the crowd of passengers, looked about them ...
— Our Pilots in the Air • Captain William B. Perry
... stillness of the desolation. It was too late for the life of day, too early for the nocturnal roamings and voices of the creatures of the night. Like the basin of a great amphitheater the frozen lake lay revealed in the light of the moon and a billion stars. Beyond it rose the spruce forest, black and forbidding. Along its nearer edges stood hushed walls of tamarack, bowed in the smothering clutch of snow and ice, ...
— The Wolf Hunters - A Tale of Adventure in the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... the step was let down, and Mr. Elton, spruce, black, and smiling, was with them instantly. Emma thought with pleasure of some change of subject. Mr. Elton was all obligation and cheerfulness; he was so very cheerful in his civilities indeed, that she began to think he must have received ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... this level we encountered a steeper ascent than any I had yet climbed. Here the character of the forest began to change. There were other trees than pines, and particularly one kind, cone-shaped, symmetrical, and bright, which Dick called a silver spruce. I was glad it belonged to the conifers, or pine-tree family, because it was the most beautiful tree I had ever seen. We climbed ridges and threaded through aspen thickets in hollows till near sunset. Then Stockton ordered a halt ...
— The Young Forester • Zane Grey
... see you, smug and spruce, There at Chicago, burrowed in a Chair, Not made to measure and a deal too loose, And see you lift your little arm and swear Democracy shall be no more! If it's a fair And civil question, and not too abstruse, Were you elected as a "robber ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... shining water over the whole valley. The trees, or most of them, that stand about the banks have grown since the Duke saw the water. There are old oaks on the northern shore, but the southern and eastern sides were planted with spruce and other conifers at the end of the eighteenth century and beginning of the nineteenth, when all that remained of the victor of Culloden was his horrible nickname and his obelisk above the lake. The trees are glorious in December ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... bitter skirmish of winds, carrying powdered snow dust, nipped round the gateways of the dormitories and Tait McKenzie's fine statue of Whitefield stood sharply outlined against a cold blue sky. I lunched at a varsity hash counter on Spruce Street and bought tobacco in a varsity drug store, where a New York tailor, over for the day, was cajoling students into buying his "snappy styles" in time for Christmas. There is no more interesting game than watching a lot of college men, trying to pick out those who may ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... couple of streets, we came to a humble but neat-looking dwelling house, with an apology for a garden in front. Tables and seats were arranged beneath some trees; "spruce beer" was advertised for sale, but there were indications that other kinds of refreshments could be obtained. The place wore a comfortable aspect. We nodded smilingly to each other, as much as to say, "This will ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... so cool at this altitude that a fire will soon seem grateful," he remarked, lighting the fragrant boughs of spruce and hemlock which filled the fireplace and drawing chairs before ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... blue-grass knoll a quarter of a mile eastward. Deacon Gramps was, at the close of this peaceful summer day, indulging in a mental congratulation of himself on being so favorably situated in life. Everybody recognized Farmer Gramps as being the wealthiest man in all Spruce Township. He owned the finest and fattest horses that were driven to Mount Olivet Church. His cattle roamed the forests for miles around, and his hogs cracked acorns on ...
— The Deacon of Dobbinsville - A Story Based on Actual Happenings • John A. Morrison
... far-off days when it was the abode of fashion,—the far-off days when fashion itself had not become old-fashioned and got improved into Smart Society,—this haunted half-mile or more still retains many fine old residences of brown stone and of red brick, which are spruce and well-kept. One such, on the west side of the street, of red brick, with a high stoop of brown stone, is a boarding-house, and in it is an apartment to which, on a certain clear, cold afternoon in October, the reader's presence in the spirit is ...
— The Mystery of Murray Davenport - A Story of New York at the Present Day • Robert Neilson Stephens
... in the least; and, indeed, the old man seemed to indulge less frequently in his violent outbreaks of furious passion, and to have laid aside his rugged untamable fierceness, since his marriage. There he sat beside his beautiful Annunciata, spruce and prim, in the richest, gayest apparel, smirking and smiling, challenging in the sweet glances of his grey eyes,—from which a treacherous tear stole from time to time,—those who were present to say if any one of them could boast of such a wife as his. Instead ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... very neat and spruce; it had suffered a restoration lately. The walls were stripped of their old plaster and pointed, so that the inside is now rougher than the outside, a thing the ancient builders never intended. The altar is fairly ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... closing with the fellow, got him fairly by the throat and shook him to and fro. And now was I minded to choke him outright, but, even then, spied a cavalier who spurred his horse against me. Hereupon I dashed the breathless Gregory aside and turned to meet my new assailant, a spruce young gallant he, from curling lovelock to Spanish boots. I remember cursing savagely as his whip caught me, then, or ever he could reach me again, I sprang in beneath the head of his rearing horse and seizing the ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... is an old woman who wants the popular pastor to get her husband work in the Navy Yard. No sooner is she disposed of, with a word of comfort, than a spruce-looking young man steps forward. He is a book agent, and his glib tongue runs so fast that the preacher subscribes for his book without looking at it. As the agent retires a shy young girl comes forward and asks for the preacher's autograph. It is given cheerfully. Two old ladies ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... is a crime. Well, I only bought in on this timber because a friend of mine wanted me to come in with him; and, figuring I didn't know nothing about it, I allowed I certainly would lose for once—I couldn't tell a pine tree from a spruce to save ...
— The Man Next Door • Emerson Hough
... on the way to Golconda, if Golconda's yours when you get there?" said Markham. "Why, Watkins, the young spruce and poplar alone on that tract are worth twice the price I ask for the whole. A pulp-mill, which you could knock together for a few shillings, on one of those magnificent water-powers, would make you all ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... I was thru with my trubbel with wimmin's warin apparel for one day, so I started hum. I'd ony got to the corner of Spruce street, wen a grate strappin perliceman cum up to me, and clappin me on the shoulder, sed: "I've got you, sunny, this time; cum along, now, or I'll be after makin you." I seen discreshun was the better part of valler, so I let him leed me. Wen ...
— The Bad Boy At Home - And His Experiences In Trying To Become An Editor - 1885 • Walter T. Gray
... horse and gig With promises to pay; And he pawned his horns for a spruce new wig, To redeem as he came away: And he whistled some tune, a waltz or a jig, And drove off ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... send him shuttling from one planet to another. To achieve it they study, they sweat, they make all out efforts to meet and suck up to anybody they think might help. Finally, when and if they get an interview for one of the few openings, they spruce up in their best clothes, put on their best party manners, present themselves as the sincere, high I.Q., ambitious young men that they are—and then flunk their chance. I decided I might as well ...
— Ultima Thule • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... The spruce trees rustled amid their umbrageous boughs. The sob of the saxophone still came through the window. I saw Stella tremble through all her tall young body. A tear fell upon the floor and rebounded against one of ...
— Maw's Vacation - The Story of a Human Being in the Yellowstone • Emerson Hough
... highlands of the Rockies, a morning clear, cold, and tense, with a bell-like quality in the frosty air to make the cracking of a snow-laden spruce-bough resound like a pistol-shot. For Denver and the dwellers on the eastern plain the sun is an hour high; but the hamlet mining-camp of Argentine, with its dovecote railway station and two-pronged siding, still lies in the steel-blue depths ...
— A Fool For Love • Francis Lynde
... the charming power that lives Within it makes the music that it gives. It dims! it brightens! it will shape itself. And see! a graceful dazzling little elf. He lives! he moves! spruce mannikin of fire, What more can we? what more can ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... of the lungs. If Bergenheim were to see him sweating and panting like this in this bleak wind, he would give me a sound blowing-up. Upon my word, it is becoming comical! There are no more young girls! I shall see her appear presently as spruce and conceited as if she had been playing the finest trick in the world. It will do for once; but if we sojourn in these quarters some time yet, she must be educated and taught to say, 'If you please' and 'Thanks.' ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard
... kept its reputation good and yielded abundantly to the solicitation of Herbert's flies. The trout were large and in excellent condition and were quickly made ready for the trapper's treatment. A large piece of bark, peeled from a giant spruce standing near, and laid upon the ground, served for the table,—against the dark bark of which the tin dishes freshly scoured in the sand of the beach gleamed bright. The venison and trout were cooked as only one accustomed to the woods can do it, and the ...
— How Deacon Tubman and Parson Whitney Kept New Year's - And Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... saturated with tar, all kinds of threads, fish-line, threads rubbed with tarred lampblack, fine threads plaited together in strands, cotton soaked in boiling tar, lamp-wick, twine, tar and lampblack mixed with a proportion of lime, vulcanized fibre, celluloid, boxwood, cocoanut hair and shell, spruce, hickory, baywood, cedar and maple shavings, rosewood, punk, cork, bagging, flax, and a host of other things. He also extended his searches far into the realms of nature in the line of grasses, plants, canes, and similar products, ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... observatories were carried ashore, and placed upon an elevated rock on one side of the cove, close to the Resolution. A party of men, with an officer, was sent to cut wood, and to clear a place for the conveniency of watering. Others were employed to brew spruce-beer, as pine-trees abounded here. The forge was also set up, to make the iron-work wanting for the repairs of the fore-mast. For, besides one of the bibs being defective, the larboard trestle-tree and one ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... inches wide, and three inches in thickness. At the head, and at the foot, is to be screwed a notched two-inch board, three inches wide, as in Fig. 8. The mortises are to be one inch wide and deep, and one inch apart, to revive slats made of ash, oak, or spruce, one inch square, placed lengthwise of the couch. The slats being small, and so near together, and running lengthwise, make a better spring frame than wire coils. If they warp, they can be turned. They must not be fastened ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... there was plenty of grass for our steeds. We contented ourselves with forming a lean-to, but did not light a fire lest it should betray our whereabouts. Having eaten a little more pemmican, we formed our beds of spruce-fir tops, ...
— Afar in the Forest • W.H.G. Kingston
... the range, till he came out above a magnificent valley. Descending the slope, he entered a forest of towering spruce, while on all sides the snow was trampled with tracks as wide as a snow-shoe. There came to him a noise which, as he proceeded, increased till it filled the woods. It was a frightful din, as though a thousand wolves were howling with the madness of the kill. ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... comes from Bergin, Swinsound, Mott, Longland, Dranton, &c. (which experienc'd work-men call the dram) being long, strait and clear, and of a yellow more cedry colour, is esteemed much before the white for flooring and wainscot, for masts, &c. those of Prussia, which we call spruce, and Norway (especially from Gottenberg) and about Riga, are the best; unless we had more commerce of them from our Plantations in New England, which are preferable to any of them; there lying rotting at present at Pascataway, ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... the people slept he caused birch, spruce, and cottonwood trees to spring up in the low places, and when the people awoke in the morning they clapped their hands in delight, for the birds were singing in the tree-tops and the green leaves with the sunlight flickering through them made it seem like a fairy land. And they were ...
— A Treasury of Eskimo Tales • Clara Kern Bayliss
... could, in fact, scarcely be called flight. The steady vibration of the wings simply bore them upwards, ten, twenty or thirty feet, until they were caught by a breeze, or by the steadier wind that was moving at an elevation equal to the height of the surrounding pine and spruce trees. So far as we were able to discover, their wings were of the same use to them, in transporting them from their former home, that the 'wings' of many seeds are, in scattering them; both are wholly at ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... the lofty cabin, under the void where the roof shut off the stars, and talked of the pine-woods, of logging, measuring, and spring-drives, and of moose-hunting on snow-shoes, until our mouths had a wild flavor more spicy than if we had chewed spruce-gum by the hour. Spruce-gum is the aboriginal quid of these regions. Foresters chew this tenacious morsel as tars nibble at a bit of oakum, grooms at a straw, Southerns at tobacco, or ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... child. That's all. A Norway spruce cone. When it is dry its scales are open. I filled them with grass seed and put the cone in a small tumbler so that the lower end might be damp all the time. The dampness makes the scales close and starts the seed to sprouting. This has been ...
— Ethel Morton's Enterprise • Mabell S.C. Smith
... these woods, and overhung it—each bank a mute monotonous screen of foliage, unbroken by glade or clearing; pine and spruce and hemlock, maple and alder; piled plumes of green, motionless, brooding, through which no sunrays broke, though here and there a silver birch drew a shaft of light upon their sombre background. Here were no English woodlands, no stretches ...
— Fort Amity • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Skinner, the ideal wood for aeroplane construction is clear Pacific Coast spruce. I've been reading up on the subject. Inasmuch as this war must be won in the air, you can imagine the number of aeroplanes the country must turn out in the next eighteen months. Stu-pen-dous, Skinner, simply stu-pen-dous! Try to visualize the wastage alone in the aeroplanes on the battle fronts; ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... by enemies 'tis said, The laurel, which adorns thy head, Must one day come in competition, By virtue of some sly petition: Yet mum for that; hope still the best, Nor let such cares disturb thy rest. Methinks I hear thee loud as trumpet, As bagpipe shrill or oyster-strumpet; Methinks I see thee, spruce and fine, With coat embroider'd richly shine, And dazzle all the idol faces, As through the hall thy worship paces; (Though this I speak but at a venture, Supposing thou hast tick with Hunter,) Methinks I see a blackguard rout Attend thy coach, and hear them shout In approbation ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... Mountains common. Rare on Vancouver Island. Brooks says common resident in the spruce zone ...
— Catalogue of British Columbia Birds • Francis Kermode
... glance over the top of my head, past my side, over my shoulder, but never meet my eye. The gentle-modest would turn their faces south if I were coming east, flit down a passage if I were about to halve the pavement with them. There was the spruce young bookseller would play the same tricks; the butcher's daughters; the upholsterer's young men. Hand in glove when doing business out of sight with you; but caring nothing for a' old woman when playing the genteel away from ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... transparent threads spreading from one to the other. No birds were to be heard; everything seemed asleep, the espalier covered with straw, and the vine, like a great sick serpent under the coping of the wall, along which, on drawing hear, one saw the many-footed woodlice crawling. Under the spruce by the hedgerow, the curie in the three-cornered hat reading his breviary had lost his right foot, and the very plaster, scaling off with the frost, had left white scabs ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... Nova Scotia, a maritime province, there is a ridge called North Mountain, overlooking the Bay of Fundy on one side and the fertile Annapolis valley on the other. On the northern slope of the range grows the hardy spruce-tree, well adapted for ship-timbers, of which many vessels of all classes have been built. The people of this coast, hardy, robust, and strong, are disposed to compete in the world's commerce, and it is nothing against the master mariner if the birthplace mentioned on his certificate ...
— Sailing Alone Around The World • Joshua Slocum
... sun there,"—a very roundabout way to accomplish a very simple end. As years passed on, trees sprang up and grew apace, and too often the churches became overhung and heavily shadowed by dense, sombre spruce, cedar, and fir trees. A New England parson was preaching in a neighboring church which was thus gloomily surrounded. He gave out as his text, "Why do the wicked live?" and as he peered in the dim light at his manuscript, he exclaimed abruptly, "I hope they will live ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... morning when his colleague entered, spruce as ever in attire, but looking rather weary. The little man flung himself at full ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... stone pick or hatchet. It is said that the women of the North American tribes used a hoe made of an elk's shoulder-blade and a handle of wood. In Sweden the earliest records of tillage represent a huge hoe made from a stout limb of spruce with the sharpened root. This was finally made heavier, and men dragged it through the soil in the manner of ploughing. Subsequently the plough was made in two pieces, a handle having been added. Finally a pair of cows yoked together were compelled to drag the plough. Probably ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... which exudes from the spruce-fir, and is used by some polishers in the making of ...
— French Polishing and Enamelling - A Practical Work of Instruction • Richard Bitmead
... lamp hung from the ceiling and the little room exactly suited its mistress both were neat and clean, trim and spruce, simple and yet nice. Snowy transparent curtains enclosed the bed as a protection against the mosquitoes, a crucifix of delicate workmanship hung above the head of the couch, and the seats were covered with good cloth of various colors, fag-ends from the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... daylight, I went down to breakfast. I found the officers already assembled at one of the long tables in the mess-hall. Our party were calm, and even somewhat merry. We had retained one colored man to wait on us. He was a spruce-looking mulatto from Charleston, very active and efficient on ordinary occasions, but now completely demoralized by the thunder of the guns and crashing of the shot around us. He leaned back against the wall, almost white with ...
— Reminiscences of Forts Sumter and Moultrie in 1860-'61 • Abner Doubleday
... beech, birch, ash, hackmatack, hemlock, spruce, bass-wood, maple, interweave their foliage in the natural wood, so these mortals blended their varieties of visage and garb. A Tartar-like picturesqueness; a sort of pagan abandonment and assurance. ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... pleasure, relief, was found also in the restful deadness of the wooded sides of the hills when he came near them. Grey there was of deciduous trees in the basin of the river, and dull green of spruce firs that grew up elsewhere. Intense light has the effect of lack of light, taking colour from the landscape. Even the green of the fir trees, as they stood in full light on the hill summits, was faded in ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... overgrown with ivy. This ivy, Mr. Milestone observed, required trimming and clearing in various parts; a little pointing and polishing was necessary for the dilapidated walls; and the whole effect would be materially increased by a plantation of spruce fir, the present rugged and broken ascent being first converted into a beautiful slope, which might be easily effected by blowing up a part of the rock with gunpowder, laying on a quantity of fine mould, and covering the whole with ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VII • Various
... George was right. He said everybody was right. You would hardly have recognized in this shrunken figure and wattled face the spruce and dressy old man whom Ma Minick used to spoil so delightfully. "You know best, George. You know best." He who used to stand up to George until Ma Minick was moved to say, "Now, Pa, you don't ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... I cleaned up about one hundred and twenty dollars from the Fourth to Labor Day," says he. "But there was lots of good days when I didn't git any parties at all. You see, I look kind of old and shabby. So does the Curlew; and the spruce young fellers with the new boats gits the cream of the trade. But it don't take much to ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... included chiefly among the coniferous evergreens, embracing the Pine, the Fir, the Spruce, and the Cypress. Though many of the deciduous trees assume more or less of this outline, it is the normal and characteristic form of the Pines and their kindred species. It is a peculiarity of the pyramidal trees, with a few exceptions, to remain always disfigured, after the loss of an important ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... recommended to purify the blood." His office consisted of a room about ten feet square, located in what was then known as the Sun building, an edifice ten by forty feet, situated at the corner of Spruce and Nassau streets, where the Tribune is now published. His "factory" was at his residence in Hudson street. He put up a large gilt sign over the Sun office, five or six feet wide by the length of the building, which attracted much attention, as ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... row to form the two sides of the house, bent till they met, and lashed together at the top. To these other poles were bound transversely, and the whole was covered with large sheets of the bark of the oak, elm, spruce, or white cedar, overlapping like the shingles of a roof, upon which, for their better security, split poles were made fast with cords of linden bark. At the crown of the arch, along the entire length of ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... embellishment of the breakfast-table. There was fresh groundsel, too, for Miss Maylie's birds, with which Oliver, who had been studying the subject under the able tuition of the village clerk, would decorate the cages, in the most approved taste. When the birds were made all spruce and smart for the day, there was usually some little commission of charity to execute in the village; or, failing that, there was rare cricket-playing, sometimes, on the green; or, failing that, there was always something to do ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... whom he kills another hour discussing the merits of the different animals he meets with there. These important duties being done, he strolls to an exhibition, or to a print-shop, and looks over a portfolio of caricatures; thence he keeps on moving to a fashionable hotel, to take white spruce beer(!) and sandwiches; here, after arranging his parties for the evening, be returns home to dress. After looking over the cards which have been left for him, he proceeds to his toilette with his valet, and is dressed about seven, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... positions of great strength around the quaint little Polish town of Kozienice. From this town for perhaps ten miles west, and I know not how far north and south there is a belt of forest of fir and spruce. Near Kozienice the Russian infantry, attacking in flank and front, fairly wrested the enemy's position and drove him back into this jungle. The Russians simply sent ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... pink wild roses and columbine hung in profusion over the spring which gushed out of the bank. Away to the east were the sand-hills of the Assiniboine—the bad lands of the prairie, their surface peopled with stiff spruce trees that stand like sentries looking, always looking ...
— The Black Creek Stopping-House • Nellie McClung
... old barns. Sometimes they crawled into wagon sheds and slept upon loads of grain or produce that had been gotten ready for the morrow's marketing. More frequently they bivouacked in the open, under the blue canopy of heaven, merely sheltered a little by a friendly spruce or pine, with the silver moon for a lamp, and the bright stars for candles. The great shaggy beast and the little dark man slept in one bed, as it were. Pedro usually pillowed his head upon Black Bruin and so the bear had to lie very still and not disturb his master, ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes
... poles and bark had been built by the men during his absence. In it were all the stores, as well as a quantity of spruce boughs and hemlock tips for bedding. The chill evening air was filled with a delicious fragrance of burning cedar, mingled with the pleasant odor of boiling coffee. Several white-fish nailed to oak planks ...
— The Copper Princess - A Story of Lake Superior Mines • Kirk Munroe |
