"Tropical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was over, and they were in a dim, half-lighted conservatory. Tropical flowers bloomed around them, scenting the warm air; delicious music floated entrancingly in. The cold white wintry moon flooded the outer world with its frosty glory, and Rose felt as if fairyland were no myth, and fairy tales no delusion. They were alone in the conservatory; how they ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... civil tone; and he proceeded to escort Brackenbury along the path and up the steps. In the hall several other attendants relieved him of his hat, cane, and paletot, gave him a ticket with a number in return, and politely hurried him up a stair adorned with tropical flowers, to the door of an apartment on the first storey. Here a grave butler inquired his name, and announcing "Lieutenant Brackenbury Rich," ushered him into the drawing-room of ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and shrivels her as it does a tropical flower," said Thurston, desisting from his efforts after he had tucked a woolen shawl ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... buildings, Mohammedan mosques, Buddhist temples, an English cathedral, and a Methodist church. Our road thither led us through seemingly endless forests of rubber trees and of coconut palms. The profusion of tropical vegetation was both novel and impressive. These Federated Malay States furnish the world with more than half its supply of rubber, and many English and American investors are growing rich from the soaring of prices induced by ...
— A Tour of the Missions - Observations and Conclusions • Augustus Hopkins Strong
... reasons—much less beet-sugar is actually being grown, and some of the cane-sugar is too far away to be available. The sugar-beet, grown in temperate climates, and the sugar-cane, native in tropical and semitropical regions, are the only two sources of sugar large enough to be of more ...
— Food Guide for War Service at Home • Katharine Blunt, Frances L. Swain, and Florence Powdermaker
... a July day, with not a cloud in the sky, and an almost tropical sun blazed down upon the works. The sheds and railroad tracks shimmered in the heat, and it seemed as if the cinders upon which one trod had been newly poured from a fire. In the rooms where the furnaces blazed, Montague could not penetrate at all; he could ...
— The Moneychangers • Upton Sinclair
... this secret trial the accused was found guilty and condemned to be degraded from his military rank, and by a special act of the Chamber of Deputies was ordered to be imprisoned for life in a penal settlement on Devil's Island, off the coast of French Guiana, a tropical region, desolate and malarious in character. The sentence was executed with the most cruel harshness. During part of his detention Dreyfus was locked in a hut, surrounded by an iron cage, on the island. This was done on the plea of possible attempts ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... favorite lounge at all hours of the day, but especially toward evening. A handsome striped awning, and the natural shade of the splendid tropical plants that twined round the slender pillars, gave a pleasant shade even at noonday. Broad low steps led to the gardens, and deck-chairs and cushioned rocking-chairs were placed ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... time Smith steered down the coast, intending to cross the Owen Stanley range as soon as he saw a convenient gap. After about twenty miles, however, he ran with startling suddenness into a tropical storm. It was as though he had passed from sunlight into a dark and gloomy cavern. Rain fell in torrents, and he knew by the extraordinary and alarming movements of the aeroplane that the wind was blowing fiercely, and not steadily in one direction, but gustily, ...
— Round the World in Seven Days • Herbert Strang
... Tropical Committee for War Films exhibited a further series of pictures of the British Army in France at the West-end ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, February 23, 1916 • Various
... indigenous perfumes,—magnolia, lemon, orange, and myrtle, mingled with French exotics of the boudoir,—interpretive in these qualities, through a fine perception, of a social condition resulting from the transplanting to a semi-tropical soil of a conservative, wealthy, and aristocratic French community. Herein lay much of their most inviting charm; but more than this, they were racy with twinkling humor, tender with a ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... does not allow the facilities of tropical waters (where alligators and sharks, however, are not facilities!); but the sea is fit for bathing with us as many months as the Danube, though I suppose never so warm as the Danube at its warmest.... If I could be with you at ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... the early part of the Marne battle had been excellent for flying. The air had been still and the heat tropical. On the 9th of September, the critical day of the battle, the weather broke, and for the next few days there were violent storms and heavy rains which greatly impeded air work of any sort. The worst of these storms occurred on the night of the 12th of September, when ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... and that of San Juan, are the most fruitful parts of California, particularly the latter, which is capable of producing wheat, Indian corn, rye, oats, &c., with all the fruits of the temperate, and many of the tropical climates. It likewise offers pasture grounds for cattle. This region comprises a level plain, from fifteen to twenty miles in width, extending from the Bay of San Francisco, beyond the mission of that name, north and south. This may be termed the garden of California; but although ...
— The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and California • Brevet Col. J.C. Fremont
... a tropical holiday—that sail down to Cuba—a strange, huge pleasure-trip of steamships, sailing in a lordly column of three; at night, sailing always, it seemed, in a harbour of brilliant lights under multitudinous stars and over thickly sown beds ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.
... house. Lord James faced about to the eastern sky, where the gray dawn was beginning to lessen the star-gemmed blackness above the watery horizon. Swiftly the faint glow brightened and became tinged with pink. The day was approaching with the suddenness of the tropical sunrise. In quick succession, the pink shaded to rose, the rose to crimson and scarlet splendor; and then the sun came leaping above the horizon, to flood sea and sky with ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... broad windows, always open to the veranda, gave an al fresco effect to every meal, was a pathetic endeavor of the Southern-bred Peyton to emulate the soft, luxurious, and open-air indolence of his native South, in a climate that was not only not tropical, but even austere in its most fervid moments. Yet, although cold draughts invaded it from the rear that morning, Judge Peyton sat alone, between the open doors and windows, awaiting the slow coming of his wife and the young ladies. He was not in an entirely ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... seen at the Moravian chapel. Their dresses were of every color and style; their hats were of all shapes and sizes, and fillagreed with the most tawdry superfluity of ribbons. Beneath these gaudy bonnets were glossy ringlets, false and real, clustering in tropical luxuriance. This fantastic display was evidently a rude attempt to follow the example set them by ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... fields, were not to be seen till the ship got close to the entrance of the harbour. Before them appeared a line of breakers dashing in snow-white foam on the encircling reef of coral, with a lagoon of calm blue water within, out of which rose the shore, covered with the richest tropical vegetation; numberless vines and creeping plants making their way up the hillsides, amid which sparkling cascades came falling down ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... still was the day, and an indefinable, milky haze stretched between us and the cloudless sky above. The sun's rays pierced it and gathered fire; the mighty river beside us rolled listless and sullen, flinging back the heat defiantly. And on our left was a tropical forest in all its bewildering luxuriance, the live-oak, the hackberry, the myrtle, the Spanish bayonet in bristling groups, and the shaded places gave out a scented moisture like an orangery; anon we passed fields of corn and cotton, swamps of rice, stretches of poverty-stricken ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... indolence, both physically and morally. One cannot pore over a book when the blue sky is constantly smiling in at the open windows; then, out of doors after ten o'clock, the sun gives us due warning of our tropical latitude, and even though the breeze is so fresh and pleasant, one has no inclination to walk or ride far. Whatever be the cause, I am convinced that it is impossible to take the same exercise with the mind or with the body in this country, as in Europe or in the northern ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... lives—the second mate and cabin boy—on the Isthmus of Yucatan, close to the estuary of a river.[1] Here we were forced to spend nearly a year, during which time I made several journeys of exploration into the interior of the continent. In the course of one of my rambles amid a dense mass of tropical foliage, I suddenly found myself face to face with a gigantic stone Sphinx, which I at once recognized and identified. It was Tat-Nuada, an Atlantean deity, elaborately described in one of the burned books. Much excited, ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell
... very remote period. Thus the three closely allied genera, Menyanthes, Limnanthemum, and Villarsia, inhabit respectively Europe, India, and South America. Heterostyled species of Hedyotis are found in the temperate regions of North and the tropical regions of South America. Trimorphic species of Oxalis live on both sides of the Cordillera in South America and at the Cape of Good Hope. In these and some other cases it is not probable that each species acquired its heterostyled structure independently of its close allies. If they did ...
— The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species • Charles Darwin
... the steps to the level of the wharf, revealed itself as that of a man somewhat over middle height, broadly built, with hair, beard, and moustache of raven black, and a skin tanned almost to the colour of that of a mulatto by long exposure to sea-breezes and a tropical sun. His age I roughly ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... at the brig swinging in midstream by her chain, with her square sails hanging motionless in the hot air; and then as the men dipped their oars gently, the boat glided close in towards the overhanging boughs, which displayed every tint of rich tropical green. ...
— Old Gold - The Cruise of the "Jason" Brig • George Manville Fenn
... five-rail fence, walk ten miles at a stretch, and ride with the boldest dragoon. Robed in scarlet broadcloth, with a white beaver hat, on a spirited horse, she might be seen dashing through the dark woods, reminding one of the flight and gay plumage of a tropical bird." ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... "that I'll just take the boat across the bay, and bring back the captain from Harbour Island; but as his honour might prefer the cart, I'll send the cart round by the dune. There's no saying but, having been in tropical parts, he may be a bit scared of the ice. Howsomever, knowing that he's in that haste to meet his bride, and would, no doubt, grudge so much as a day spent between here and there on the sand, I'll jist give ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... on the "George Law," arriving at Aspinwall, the eastern terminal of the Panama Railroad, in ten days. Crossing the isthmus, with its wonders of tropical foliage and varied monkeys, gave a glimpse of a new world. We left Panama June 16th and arrived at San Francisco on the morning of ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... isthmus, and a day of sunshine was followed by a night without twilight, the new keeper was in his place evidently, for the light-house was casting its bright rays on the water as usual. The night was perfectly calm, silent, genuinely tropical, filled with a transparent haze, forming around the moon a great colored rainbow with soft, unbroken edges; the sea was moving only because the tide raised it. Skavinski on the balcony seemed from below like a small black point. He tried to ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Polish • Various
... entrance that Belle had indicated no one else was in sight when the four young friends reached the spot. There was a clump of potted tropical ...
— Dave Darrin's Fourth Year at Annapolis • H. Irving Hancock
... the Refuge had free access. It was sumptuously furnished, and the floor was covered with a gorgeous Turkey carpet, so thick and soft that footsteps made no sound upon it, while the brilliant figures of tropical flowers profusely studding it gave the impression of eternal summer. Desks abundantly supplied with writing materials, tables loaded with the latest newspapers and periodicals in all the languages of Europe, luxurious sofas and inviting fauteuils allured ...
— Monte-Cristo's Daughter • Edmund Flagg
... advanced wonderfully, owing mainly to the removal of commercial restrictions in the years immediately following the death of Louis XIV. The West India islands in particular throve greatly, and their welfare was naturally shared by the home ports that traded with them. The tropical climate of Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Louisiana, and cultivation by slaves, lent themselves readily to the paternal, semi-military government which marks all French colonies, but which produced less happy results in the bitter weather of Canada. ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan
... Channing gazed at their verdant heights and palm-fringed beaches of yellow sand with a feeling but little short of rapture to a man with a mind so beauty-loving and poetic as was his. Familiar to the wild bloom and brilliance of the West Indian islands, the soft tropical beauty of the scene now before him surpassed all he had ever seen, and, oblivious of the presence and voices of his brother officers as they conversed near him, he became lost in reflective and pleased contemplation of the radiant panorama of land, sea, ...
— Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories - 1898 • Louis Becke
... the most variable plants, such as Kidney-beans, Capsicum, Millets, Sorghum, &c., have been passed over; for botanists are not agreed which kinds ought to rank as species and which as varieties; and the wild parent-species are unknown.[812] Many plants long cultivated in tropical {372} countries, such as the Banana, have produced numerous varieties; but as these have never been described with even moderate care, they also are here passed over. Nevertheless a sufficient, and perhaps more than sufficient, number ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... has, or ought to have, the most transcendent interest for geologists and geographers. You know that geologists find traces of extraordinary variations of temperature on the surface of the earth. England was at one time tropical, at another time glacial. Far away north, in Spitzbergen, evidence of the luxuriant vegetation of past ages has been found; and the explanation of these great climatic changes has long been a puzzle. Does not the secular variation ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... life; and in the fifth chapter, that, "as the Father had life in Himself He gave to the Son to have life also in Himself." The Father is the fountain of life. Eternal life is ever rising up in His infinite Being with perennial vigor; and all things living, from the tiny humming-birds in the tropical forest to the strongest archangel beside the sapphire throne, derive their being from Him. Thus we have seen ferns around a fountain, nourishing their fronds on its spray. All things owe their existence and continued being to the unmeasured life, which has been from all eternity ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer
... vessel; but though they threw the guns overboard, plugged the shot holes, tried the pumps, and even attempted bailing, the water gained so rapidly that the Hornet's officers devoted themselves to removing the wounded and other prisoners; and while thus occupied the short tropical twilight left them. Immediately afterward the prize settled, suddenly and easily, in 51/2 fathoms water, carrying with her three of the Hornet's people and nine of her own, who were rummaging below; meanwhile four others of her crew had lowered ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt
... childhood of humanity, we have what has been called the parler enfantin of religion:—it is that rude and unformed speech, as of spiritual babes and sucklings, which principally makes them to differ from the anthropoid apes of their tropical forests: "un peuple est compte pour quelque chose le jour ou il s'eleve a la pensee de Dieu."[27] But the spirit of the age is unquestionably hostile to all these creeds from the highest to the lowest. In Europe there is a movement—of its breadth and strength I shall ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... curls over a forehead large and of noble outline. Broad shoulders and well-developed limbs denoted a man of European vigour, whose personal strength would be equal, if occasion required it, to the execution of those passionate designs nourished under the tropical skies ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... to a two-story white-stuccoed house with wide galleries rising amid the deep green tropical foliage on a wooded hill that sloped gently from ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume X (of X) • Various
... very soul; he might as well have fought against the beating of his heart. And if it was torture to remember those old days in India, he delighted in it; it was a pain more exquisite than the suffocating odours of tropical flowers, a voluptuous agony such as might feel the fakir lacerating his flesh in a divine possession.... Every little occurrence was clear, as if it had taken place but ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... spur of the mountain. To the north rises the old crater, black at night against the unfathomable blue of the sky. From the little circular building, with its mushroom dome, the slopes plunge steeply downward into the black mysteries of the tropical forest beneath. The little house in which the observer and his assistant live is about fifty yards from the observatory, and beyond this are the huts of their ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... give place to evergreens, as they themselves replaced the conifers further north, that the minutely subdivided horticulture and arboriculture begins, which characterize the Mediterranean region. To call it agriculture would be to exaggerate its scale. It is more like a northerly extension of tropical Hackbau, as the Germans call those forms of plant-raising which dispense with plough and spade, and employ only mattocks or hoes, which are little more than earth-chopping celts. You have only to watch the unhandy way in which ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... of human cruelty being enacted here on this little spot of earth, were veiling her face to shut out the shameful sight. By the time that the proceedings of the day were over and the enormous crowd began to disperse, it became evident that a more than usually violent tropical thunderstorm was brewing, although it might be some hours yet before it would burst over the blood-stained town. Naturally, I was very thankful that the awful day had passed over, and that its end ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... bench. Then the solicitors' seats filled up, and the magistrates' clerk bustled in to his table. And before these alarming arrivals had well brought the perspiration to our heroes' brows, the appearance of two magistrates on the bench sent up the temperature to tropical. ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... nineteen men, well armed and prepared, as I imagined, for every emergency. The night we left our ship we anchored late under the shelter of a small island, and all hands being tired from a long row in a hot sun, I let my men go to sleep during the short tropical darkness. As soon as the day was breaking all hands were alert, and we saw with delight a beautiful rakish-looking brig, crammed with slaves, close to the island behind which we had taken shelter, steering for a creek on the mainland a short distance from us. I ...
— Sketches From My Life - By The Late Admiral Hobart Pasha • Hobart Pasha
... as to the chance of rain. I am told that in these tropical places, rain comes on ...
— Facing the World • Horatio Alger
... the autumn gathered hickories and walnuts. The house was a rambling, wooden mansion painted grey, with red scroll-work on its porches and horsehair furniture inside. Oh, the smell of its darkened interior on a midsummer day! Like the flavour of that choicest of tropical fruits, the mangosteen, it baffles analysis, and the nearest I can come to it is a mixture of matting and corn-bread, with another element ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the middle size, rather slender than otherwise; many are little, but few tall or stout; the most of them have good features, and agreeable countenances; are, like all the tropical race, active and nimble; and seem to excel in the use of arms, but not to be fond of labour. They never would put a hand to assist in any work we were carrying on, which the people of the other islands used to delight in. ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World Volume 2 • James Cook
... areas and industrial centers in Rhone, Garonne, Seine, or Loire River basins; occasional warm tropical wind known as mistral ...
— The 1991 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... little island of Ternate, south of the Celebes, the ship was again docked and scraped. The crew were allowed another month's rest, when they feasted their eyes on the marvels of tropical life, then first revealed to them in their luxuriance—vampires "as large as hens," crayfish a foot round, and fireflies lighting the midnight forest. Starting once more, they had now to feel their ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... so highly plausible and ingenious that it was readily received. On the 14th of September they believed that they were near land, from seeing a heron and a tropical bird, neither of which were supposed to venture ...
— Notable Voyagers - From Columbus to Nordenskiold • W.H.G. Kingston and Henry Frith
... would people the dark with faces; or the lily-houses and the superb Victoria regia that would cradle a water-baby; or the great palm houses, where you may walk in a gallery among enormous leaves and tropical creepers as if you were back again with your grandfathers in the tree tops? That is an attraction, but it is not all of it. Nor is it the achievement of the gardens in the separate spheres of gardening. The sheets of crocuses in the low March sunlight, ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... with bone, and the weapons of the Inca lords were frequently mounted with gold or silver. Their heads were protected by casques made either of wood or of the skins of wild animals, and sometimes richly decorated with metal and with precious stones, surmounted by the brilliant plumage of the tropical birds. These, of course, were the ornaments only of the higher orders. The great mass of the soldiery were dressed in the peculiar costume of their provinces, and their heads were wreathed with a sort of turban or roll of different- colored cloths, that produced a gay and animating effect. ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... gradually pictured before me, by undeniable probation, in the light of so gross, so cold-blooded, and so black-hearted a villain, that I had a mind to have cast my brief upon the table. I was then boiling against the man with even a more tropical temperature than I had been boiling for him. But I said to myself: 'No, you have taken up his case; and because you have changed your mind it must not be suffered to let drop. All that rich tide of eloquence ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... any one start for a tropical climate with a greater antipathy towards these "wild men" than I did; I lived years in their vicinity and yet contrived to avoid all contact with them, and it was not till I was homeward-bound that my conversion was effected. The ship in which Mr. ...
— Anecdotes of the Habits and Instinct of Animals • R. Lee
... he discovered a big enthusiasm for Berande. All the bubble- illusions concerning the life of the tropical planter had been pricked by the stern facts of the Solomons. Following the death of Hughie, he had resolved to muddle along somehow with the plantation; but this resolve had not been based upon desire. Instead, it was based upon the inherent stubbornness ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... is tied closely to the French economy through subsidies and imports. Besides the French space center at Kourou, fishing and forestry are the most important economic activities. Forest and woodland cover 90% of the country. The large reserves of tropical hardwoods, not fully exploited, support an expanding sawmill industry that provides sawn logs for export. Cultivation of crops is limited to the coastal area, where the population is largely concentrated; rice and manioc are the major crops. French Guiana is heavily dependent ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government
... watered. Actual forests of lofty trees, forests of a West African type, are few in number, and are chiefly limited to portions of the Nyika, Angoniland and Shire Highlands plateaus, and to a few nooks in valleys near the south end of Tanganyika. Patches of forest of tropical luxuriance may still be seen on the slopes of Mounts Mlanje and Chiradzulu. On the upper plateaus of Mount Mlanje there are forests of a remarkable conifer (Widdringtonia whytei), a relation of the cypress, which in appearance resembles much more the cedar, and is therefore wrongly ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... in a heavy voice, "was a—a very unusual tiger. I met it, that is to say, most unexpectedly. It was in a tropical jungle, where the foliage was so thick that the sunlight hardly penetrated at all. It was dark as night even in the daytime. There were monkeys overhead and snakes beneath, and bananas were so plentiful that every time my elephant knocked against a tree a shower of fruit fell down like ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... almost audible the father turned away. At the door he glanced back, having noted the intense warmth of the room. The nurse, as many of her tropical race are apt to do, had forgotten to ventilate the chamber. The two windows were closed. Angrily he crept across the carpeted floor and noiselessly raised the sashes as high as they would go, feeling the fresh air stream in. With a parting glance at ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... keen also for rest after those dispiriting days, I stopped, before reaching Medesano, at an inn where three ways met; and there I purposed to eat and spend the night, for the next day, it was easy to see, would be tropical, and I should rise before dawn if I was to ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... very singular indeed in appearance, and interesting as well in its habits. Tropical and sub-tropical America, north to the Carolinas and Southern Illinois, where it is a regular summer resident, are its known haunts. Here it is recognized by different names, as Water Turkey, Darter, and Snake Bird. The last mentioned seems to be the most appropriate ...
— Birds, Illustrated by Color Photography [July 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... that of a Spanish olive, was not easily to be distinguished under the surface of crimson. However, as this mode of painting themselves was practised by both sexes, perhaps it was at first introduced as a defence against the venomous insects, so common in tropical climates, or possibly they considered the brilliancy of the colour as highly ornamental." These Charaibes had other ways of deforming themselves, some of which resembled what we shall find described ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... concert is given by a large, well-trained orchestra in the music-hall, or, when the weather is propitious, in a pavilion in the garden. The concert-hall looks through a glass partition directly into the great conservatory, which, thus viewed, presents a scene of tropical enchantment. The palm-trees occupy conspicuous positions amidst skilfully-grouped dracaenas, ferns, azaleas, rhododendrons, passifloras, and a myriad of other curious vegetable productions of the equatorial world. The ground is carpeted with light-green moss, smooth and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... Gaines the drudgery of camp life was experienced in mounting guns, blistering hands with shovels and crowbars and noses and ears by the direct rays of a semi-tropical sun. ...
— A History of Lumsden's Battery, C.S.A. • George Little
... the majority of them, have one character in common which distinguishes them at first sight. In many cases green matter is wanting in their tissues or is hidden by a livid tint that strikes the observer. Such are the Orobanchaccae, or "broomropes," and the tropical Balanophoraceae. Nevertheless, other parasites, such as the mistletoe, have ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 430, March 29, 1884 • Various
... our civilization has revealed itself as a monstrous sham, more dangerously indecent because of its pretense at decency. It is something like those poisoned tropical forests, fever-infested, which were in the land of my birth, beautiful outwardly, with great vivid flowers, high palms, towering trees of fern, all garlanded with creepers and lovely wild growth,—glades of fair shadow inviting to rest, yet ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... old, looked with much interest at the faces, soft, piquant, tropical, which made the effect of pansies looking inquisitively over a snowdrift. The girls returned their glances with approval, for they were as fine and manly a set of men as ever had faced death or woman. Ten minutes later ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... her cap, and satin ribbon. She was wrapped in a kind of dressing-gown of French grey merino: the furniture of the room was deep rose-colour, and white and gold,—the paper which covered the walls was Indian, beginning low down with a profusion of tropical leaves and birds and insects, and gradually diminishing in richness of detail till at the top it ended in the most delicate tendrils and most ...
— Round the Sofa • Elizabeth Gaskell
... beautiful land-locked gulf, and were immediately surrounded by shore boats full of Negroes and Mexican Indians and half-bloods selling fruits and vegetables and offering to dive for bits of money. The sight of so many good-humoured faces (especially the blacks), the taste of the tropical fruits, and above all the lights that began to shine in the town made a most charming contrast to our dark and bloody sojourn on the island; and the doctor and the squire, taking me along with them, went ashore to pass the early part of the night. Here they met the captain ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sources of the Nile, with the hope of meeting the East African Expedition of Captains Speke and Grant that had been sent by the English Government from the south, via Zanzibar, for that object. From my youth I had been inured to hardships and endurance in wild sports in tropical climates; and when I gazed upon the map of Africa I had the hope that I might, by perseverance, reach the heart of Africa. Had I been alone it would have been no hard lot to die upon the untrodden ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... conveys the rich sense of satisfaction that one feels all over the body in the delightful sensation experienced. No time is so agreeable for a long stay in the depths of the Canyon as in the heart of winter. A semi-tropical climate below, while above, within three hours easy ride, a snowy winter may be ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James
... conversation with him during this evening produced a strong impression on my mind. Whilst examining an old gravel-pit near Shrewsbury, a labourer told me that he had found in it a large worn tropical Volute shell, such as may be seen on the chimney-pieces of cottages; and as he would not sell the shell, I was convinced that he had really found it in the pit. I told Sedgwick of the fact, and he ...
— The Autobiography of Charles Darwin - From The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin • Charles Darwin
... palm-clad hills, our party were caressed by warm, odorous breezes. The softest of blue skies looked down upon us, and we gazed on the smoothest and clearest of seas. No wonder that the brave and holy Columbus, with his crew, should feel transported with joy at the sight of the tropical isles on which they first set foot. The poetic effect of the scenes then viewed must have been greatly increased by the appearance of the native Indians, whose costumes and wild graces were so strange ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 2, February 1886 • Various
... to sweep from end to end of a liquefying universe, by a downpour which threatened to beat their sodden bodies to pulp, by all the connotation of terror that lay in the darkness and in their unguarded condition on a barbarous, semi-tropical coast. ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... long story short, Mrs. Oke of Okehurst was, in my opinion, to the highest degree exquisite and strange,—an exotic creature, whose charm you can no more describe than you could bring home the perfume of some newly discovered tropical flower by comparing it with the scent of ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... spots, but the wily man-eaters would not touch them, and much preferred live men to dead donkeys.) Poison may have been used early in the history of man, for its powers are employed with strange skill by the men in the tropical forest, both in American and West Central Africa. But there is no evidence that the old inhabitants of Europe, or of Assyria or Asia Minor, ever killed lions or wolves by this means. They looked to the King or chief, or some champion, to kill these monsters for them. It was not the sport ...
— The Man-eaters of Tsavo and Other East African Adventures • J. H. Patterson
... age of the world which preceded the secondary period, the earth was clothed with immense vegetable forms, the product of the double influence of tropical heat and constant moisture; a vapoury atmosphere surrounded the earth, still veiling the direct rays of ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... bordering on Mingrelia, is smothered beneath an exuberance of vegetation almost tropical, blue and golden with enormous flowers, tangled with wild vines, rich with towering soft beech woods, and finally, in the upper sections, ablaze with leagues of huge rhododendron trees in blossom that ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... which a string of mules or a wheeled carriage might in the course of a single day pass from sea to sea. The soil was, to the depth of several feet, a rich black mould, on which a profusion of valuable herbs and fruits grew spontaneously, and on which all the choicest productions of tropical regions might easily be raised by human industry and art; and yet the exuberant fertility of the earth had not tainted the purity of the air. Considered merely as a place of residence, the isthmus was a paradise. ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... anthers yellow. A native of various parts of South America and the West Indies, but always close to the sea. It flowers in July; the flowers, which open generally in the evening, remain expanded all night, and close before noon the day following. This species requires tropical or warm house treatment. There are some old plants of it in the Kew collection, where it flowers annually. Except for large houses, this species is not recommended for general cultivation, as it blossoms only after attaining a good ...
— Cactus Culture For Amateurs • W. Watson
... forms and utterly crush and bury them; my glaciers will overspread vast areas and banish or destroy whole tribes and races of your handiwork; the shrinking and wrinkling crust of my earth will fold in its insensate bosom vast forests of your tropical growths, and convert them into black rock, and I will make rock of the myriad forms of minute life with which you plant the seas; through immense geologic ages my relentless, unseeing, unfeeling forces will drive on like the ploughshare ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... canvas-back duck is certainly well worthy of its reputation. Fish is well supplied. They have the sheep's head, shad, and one or two others, which we have not. Their salmon is not equal to ours, and they have no turbot. Pine-apples, and almost all the tropical fruits, are hawked about in carts in the Eastern cities; but I consider the fruit of the temperate zone, such as grapes, peaches, etcetera, inferior to the English. Oysters are very plentiful, very large, and, to an ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... are the roots or tubes of a vine-like plant; it is a native of tropical climate, but it is grown in states as far north as New York. The delicious yams of the southern states and the West Indies are made into many attractive foods. The food value of the sweet potato is closely allied to that of the white potato, but it ...
— Mrs. Wilson's Cook Book - Numerous New Recipes Based on Present Economic Conditions • Mary A. Wilson
... obtained by the natives by taking the tropical toad, Buffo Nigra, enclosing it in a segment of bamboo, heating this over a slow fire and gathering the exuded juice of the dessicated batrachian. It is a very powerful substance, having an action similar to that of adrenalin ...
— Hunting with the Bow and Arrow • Saxton Pope
... the genera, common to Fuegia on the one hand and on the other to Campbell, etc., and to the mountains of Van Diemen's Land or New Zealand (but not found in the lowland temperate, and southern tropical parts of South America and Australia, or New Zealand), would prominently bring out, at the same time, the relation between these Antarctic points one with another, and with ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... universal, and belongs as well to the poor as to the rich. It may not be well known that De Candolle, the celebrated and untiring Genevese botanist, made use, in a course of lectures, of a valuable collection of tropical American plants, intrusted to his care by a Spanish botanist. Unfortunately, the herbarium was needed by its owner sooner than expected, and Professor De Candolle was requested to send it back. This he stated to his audience, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... "It's a tropical storm," Jan explained. "The morning weather report from Washington said it would strike northern ...
— The Blue Ghost Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... They had, however, the disappointment of finding that the guns had been blown up by the enemy, and later on in the same night a most formidable concentration of artillery fire, sweeping the wood as a tropical storm sweeps the leaves from a forest, made it impossible for them to hold the position for which ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... be one if you are not the other,' said Mary, gathering her work up, with the dread of one used to tropical dews. ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of Tictocq, the great French detective, who springs from behind a mass of tropical ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... attractiveness to many generations which have since arisen there, and passed away. In the same report, we have the first notice of the celebrated Scuppernong grape, yielding its most abundant crops under the saline atmospheric influence, and semi-tropical climate of eastern Carolina. ...
— Sketches of Western North Carolina, Historical and Biographical • C. L. Hunter
... huge tropical hothouse, wherein are fountains, swimming turtles, large aquatic plants in flower, the Sphinx and Egyptian statues sixty feet high, specimens of colossal or rare trees, among others the bark of a Sequoia California 450 feet in height and measuring 116 feet in ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various
... plenty of jolly, old-fashioned flowers in the garden at home," said I. It was a polite way of expressing my inward regret that we had no tropical orchids or strange stove-plants. And Eleanor danced round me, and improvised ...
— Six to Sixteen - A Story for Girls • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... matters worse, the major began in a loud voice to talk about the heroic deeds of boys as found in history, and though the saloon cabin was hot enough before, it seemed now to Mark that it was tropical, and he was only too glad to go out on deck and wipe his streaming face in the company of Bruff and Jack the monkey, who, from becoming the companion of the dog, was willing enough to transfer some of his friendliness ...
— Mother Carey's Chicken - Her Voyage to the Unknown Isle • George Manville Fenn
... precarious, but if haply she withers as she grows old she lives forever. Such promised to be the case with William the Testy, who grew tough in proportion as he dried. He had withered, in fact, not through the process of years, but through the tropical fervor of his soul, which burnt like a vehement rushlight in his bosom, inciting him to ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... of his chair if he is prepared to handle metaphysical statements at all, though it be only for the purpose of getting rid of them, by showing them up as confused forms of something else. A chair in metaphysical philosophy becomes analogous to a chair in tropical diseases: what is taught from it is not the ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... as he had heard of our arrival, saw us far at sea, and hastened to our rescue. All the boats now, with their willing Native crews, got fastened to our schooner, and to our great joy she began to move ahead. After pulling for hours and hours, under the scorching rays of a tropical sun, we were all safely landed on shore at Aneityum, about six o'clock in the evening of 30th August, just four months and fourteen days since we sailed from Greenock. We got a hearty welcome from the ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton
... further slope, where a clear rivulet crossed the path, Jack was fain to rest beneath the shade of a giant tree-fern, and eat and drink. There was not a creature to harm him; no venomous reptile, no ravenous beast dwelt in those vast sub-tropical forests; no poisonous miasma reeked from the moist valleys below; in the evergreen trees countless pigeons cooed, kaka parrots and green paroquets screamed, and black parson-birds sang. It was a picture of Nature in one of her most peaceful and happy moods. Forgetful of the ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... with his face turned to the sea, was making a weary attempt at digging upon a small potato patch. The blaze of the tropical sun had become lost an hour or so before in a strange, grey mist, rising not from the sea, but from the swamps which lay here and there—brilliant, verdant patches of poison and pestilence. With the mist ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... even the resources of a cultivated mind that could exist upon its own stores through this sudden famine which had impoverished her world, nor could she think of a single innocent, attractive, pursuit by which she could fill the weary days. She was like a child that had dwelt in a tropical oasis, the flowers and fruits of which had seemed as limitless as its extent. She had supposed that the whole world would be like this oasis, and the only necessity ever imposed on her would be that of choice from its rich profusion. But ere she was aware she had lost herself in a ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... Bertrand, of Canrobert, of Espinasse, of Martimprey; the ship-loads of women sent off by General Guyon; Representative Miot dragged from casemate to casemate; hovels in which there are a hundred and fifty prisoners, beneath a tropical sun, with promiscuity of sex, filth, vermin, and where all these innocent patriots, all these honest people are perishing, far from their dear ones, in fever, in misery, in horror, in despair, wringing ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... me—they haven't got any use for me. Mrs. Frobisher is married already, and Miss Wrayne took the trouble last night to let me feel that, so far as she was concerned, I hadn't made it all right, and couldn't. I thought I had rather a cold parting with you, Alice, but it was quite tropical to what you left me to." A faint smile, mingled with a blush of relenting, stole into her face, and he hurried on. "I don't suppose I tried very hard to thaw her out. I wasn't much interested. If you must give me ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... intensified thought by the rapidity and terseness of electric messages. He has celebrated treaties. Go to the uttermost parts of the earth; go beneath the deep sea; to the land where snows are eternal, or to the tropical realms where the orange blooms in the air of mid-winter, and you will find this clicking, persistent, sleepless instrument ready to give its tireless wing ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... history of the earth's crust. Some of the convulsions caused by the fiery mass within threw up rock above the surface of the waters, and thus the dry land began to appear. Islands were formed, and immediately land-plants made their appearance, of excessive luxuriance, under the tropical temperature that still prevailed all over the globe, and began their office of absorbing carbon, and storing it up for future use. Land-animals as yet were not, for the excess of carbonic acid in the atmosphere ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen
... has stood at a high mark. The heat has been fierce. As far as possible people have kept within doors or walked on the shady side of the street. But we can have but a faint idea of what the people suffer crossing a desert or in a tropical clime. The head faints, the tongue swells and deathly sickness comes upon the whole body when long exposed to the summer sun. I see a whole caravan pressing on through the hot sands. "Oh," say the camel-drivers, ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... spread of branches. Its leaves are often a yard across, of a dark coppery bronze, with a purplish metallic lustre that makes the plant very striking. The best effect is secured by growing four or five plants in a group. None of the tropical plants that have come into prominence in gardening, during the past ten or twelve years, are nearly as effective as this easily-grown annual, whose seeds sell at five cents a package. For a very prominent location on the lawn or anywhere about the home-grounds no better ...
— Amateur Gardencraft - A Book for the Home-Maker and Garden Lover • Eben E. Rexford |
