"Birch" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... twin birthplaces. He also knew where the great peel rested, on their annual migration from sea to moor; where the kingfisher's nest of fish-bones lay hidden; where the otter had her home beneath the bank, and its inland vent-hole behind a silver birch. ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... went outside, and the bocan led him on through rivers and a birch-wood for about three miles, till they came to the river Fert. There the bocan pointed out to Donald a hole in which he had hidden some plough-irons while he was alive. Donald proceeded to take them out, and while doing so ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... life-blood,—the beech, its smooth gray bark mottled so as to look like the body of one of those great snakes of old that used to frighten armies, always the mark of lovers' knives, as in the days of Musidora and her swain,—the yellow birch, rough as the breast of Silenus in old marbles,—the wild cherry, its little bitter fruit lying unheeded at its foot,—and, soaring over all, the huge, coarse-barked, splintery-limbed, dark-mantled hemlock, ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Prince, kicking the ragga ball, or sailing miniature praus out into the river, and off toward the shimmering straits. But often they sat cross-legged and dropped bits of chicken and fruit between the palm sleepers of the wharf to the birch-colored crocodiles below, who snapped them up, one after another, never taking their small, cruel eyes off the brown faces that peered down ...
— Tales of the Malayan Coast - From Penang to the Philippines • Rounsevelle Wildman
... "mount" and the soldiers crossed themselves and mounted. Rostov riding in front gave the order "Forward!" and the hussars, with clanking sabers and subdued talk, their horses' hoofs splashing in the mud, defiled in fours and moved along the broad road planted with birch trees on each side, following the infantry and a battery that ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... a long, old-fashioned rough-cast house facing the east, with great wide windows on each side of the door and a veranda all the way across the front. The big lawn was quite uneven, and broken here and there by birch trees, spruces, and crazy clumps of rose-bushes, all in bloom. Altogether it was a sweet, home-like old place. The view to the south showed, over the village roofs on the hill-side, the blue of Lake Erie outlined against the sky, while ...
— Beth Woodburn • Maud Petitt
... large sheets of birch-bark, kept in shape by delicate ribs of lance-wood or willow, it was nearly forty feet in length, and sharp at both ends; and the seams where the bark was sewn together were covered by a thick resinous gum, which became hard in the water. Like the small canoes, ...
— Afar in the Forest • W.H.G. Kingston
... away childish things." The experience and observation of years often make salutary corrections, which you would in vain attempt to effect in early childhood, by all the laws of a ponderous octavo, or by all the birch saplings to be found ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... any sort. She had such clear, intelligent, honest eyes; an open, sensible face with a faint, typically Russian look of mockery in her eyes and on her lips. There was nothing of the fine lady or of the female about her, except—if you like— her beauty! She was graceful, elegant as that birch tree; she had wonderful hair. That she may be intelligible to you, I will add, too, that she was a person of the most infectious gaiety and carelessness and that intelligent, good sort of frivolity which is only found in good-natured, light-hearted people with brains. Can one ...
— The Schoolmaster and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... first along the edge of the forest, then along a broad forest clearing; they caught glimpses of old pines and a young birch copse, and tall, gnarled young oak trees standing singly in the clearings where the wood had lately been cut; but soon it was all merged in the clouds of snow. The coachman said he could see the forest; the examining ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... north and followed me along my way. I was soon out of the cultivated basin of the Allier, and away from the ploughing oxen and such-like sights of the country. Moor, heathery marsh, tracts of rock and pines, woods of birch all jewelled with the autumn yellow, here and there a few naked cottages and bleak fields,—these were the characters of the country. Hill and valley followed valley and hill; the little green and stony ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... together, both men, women, and children, olde and young, all indifferently, and goe into the woodes and groves, hilles and mountaines, where they spend the night in pastyme, and in the morning they returne, bringing with them birch bowes and braunches of trees to deck their assembly withal. . . . They have twentie or fourtie yoke of oxen, every oxe having a sweete nosegay of flowers tyed on the tippe of his hornes, and these draw home this Maypole (this stincking idol rather) ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... Alban Butler was the second son of Simon Butler, Esq., of Appletree, in the county of Northampton, by Miss Ann Birch, daughter of Thomas Birch, Esq., of Gorscot, in the county of Stafford. His family, for amplitude of possessions, and splendor of descent and alliances, had vied with the noblest and wealthiest of this kingdom, but was reduced to slender circumstances at the time of his birth. A tradition ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... and the fishes took care of him and were never afraid of their master, used to visit certain trees on certain days in the year. The pine has a birthday worth celebrating in December, the maple in October, and the birch in May. You think this is all fancy, and believe persons must be very imaginative to find such friends in Nature? Oh, no; along with fancy Nature tucks very real things into our thoughts about her. You ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... walked Andy. There were parts of those hills where he walked that probably nobody, not even the Indian, ever traversed. Anything could happen there—where the woods are dark with pine or sunny with birch, and where echoes are the only memory (and they never last long). It was so far away, up in through there; as I've said, anything could happen there and we would never hear of it. All day long the cold brooks ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... saw a huge birch branch tossed about in the surf. It was quite green and fresh and had a white stem; possibly it had fallen off a pleasure-boat. He dragged it ashore, shook the water off and carried it to a gully ...
— In Midsummer Days and Other Tales • August Strindberg
... I give pre-eminence to the cut-leaf weeping birch. Possessing all the good qualities of the white birch, it combines with them a beauty and delicate grace yielded by no other tree. It is an upright grower, with slender, drooping branches, adorned with leaves of deep rich green, each leaf being delicately cut, as with ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... and fastening the cap together, he dropped it down, and, leaning forward, tried to catch the top of a young birch rustling close by the wall. Twice he missed it; the first time he frowned, but the second he uttered ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott
... place, Deerslayer," March at length observed; "here is a beech by the side of a hemlock, with three pines at hand, and yonder is a white birch with a broken top; and yet I see no rock, nor any of the branches bent down, as I told ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... pleased to notice what honor was put upon one of our humble and despised trees in Burghley House park, as in the grounds of other noblemen. There was not one that spread such delicate and graceful tresses on the breeze as our White Birch; not one that fanned it with such a gentle, musical flutter of silver-lined leaves; not one that wore a bodice of such virgin white from head to foot, or that showed such long, tapering fingers against the sky. I was glad to see such justice done to a tree in the noblest parks in England, which ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... for thee, When, years ago, beside the summer sea, White in the moon, we saw the long waves fall Baffled and broken from the rocky wall, That, to the menace of the brawling flood, Opposed alone its massive quietude, Calm as a fate; with not a leaf nor vine Nor birch-spray trembling in the still moonshine, Crowning it like God's peace. I sometimes think That night-scene by the sea prophetical, (For Nature speaks in symbols and in signs, And through her pictures human fate divines), That rock, wherefrom ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... the great booby held Jan to receive his thwacks from the strap which the Dame had of late years substituted for the birch rod. And as Jan writhed, he chuckled as heartily as before, it being an amiable feature in the character of such clowns that, so long as they can enjoy a guffaw at somebody's expense, the subject of their ridicule is not a matter of ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... distant ancestry. I love a spray of white cedar, especially the spicy, sweet inside bark, or a pine needle, or the tender, sweet, juicy end of a spike of timothy grass drawn slowly from its close-fitting sheath, or a twig of the birch that tastes ...
— Great Possessions • David Grayson
... maples in flame. Song birds, the glory of the St. Lawrence valley, were no longer to be heard, but the waters literally swarmed with duck and the forests were alive with partridge. Where to-day nestle church spires and whitewashed hamlets were the birch wigwams and night camp fires of Indian hunters. Wherever Cartier went ashore, Indians rushed knee-deep to carry him from the river; and one old chief at Richelieu signified his pleasure by presenting the whites with two Indian children. Zigzagging leisurely, now along the ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... determination—come to the conclusion that there are secret springs which can only be detected by the twigs of the divining-rod; and having discovered with what comparative ease the whole mechanism of his little government could be carried on by the admission of the birch-regulator, so, as he grew richer and lazier and fatter, the Philhellenic Institute spun along as glibly as a top kept in vivacious movement by the perpetual application ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... but, not having the impulse of the powerful feelings that had animated MacDonnell, he did not reach the top of the opposite bank, succeeding only in grasping the branch of a birch tree, where he hung suspended over the abyss. Macdonnell, finding he was not being followed, returned to the edge of the chasm, and, seeing Mackenzie's situation, took out his dirk, and as he cut off the branch from the tree he said, "I have left ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... he could see a man fishing and a companion watching him. By the Lochaber axe which the latter carried Edward recognised the fisher as Evan Dhu. On a stretch of sand under a birch tree, a girl was laying out a breakfast of milk, eggs, barley bread, fresh butter, and honeycomb. She was singing blithely, yet she must have had to travel far that morning to collect such dainties in ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... the more it said, the more clearly did it remember everything, and thought, "Those were quite merry days. But they may come again. Klumpey-Dumpey fell downstairs, and yet he married the princess. Perhaps I may marry a princess, too!" And then the Fir Tree thought of a pretty little Birch Tree that grew out in the forest; for the Fir Tree, that ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... from Amherst to Parrsboro' is tedious and uninteresting. In places it is made so straight that you can see several miles of it before you, which produces an appearance of interminable length, while the stunted growth of the spruce and birch trees bespeaks a cold, thin soil, and invests the scene with a melancholy and sterile aspect. Here and there occurs a little valley, with its meandering stream, and verdant and fertile interval, which, though possessing nothing peculiar to distinguish ...
— The Clockmaker • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... simmering on the stove; a Black-forest clock ticked in the corner; on some hanging shelves stood two painted China figures, a few cups, and about a dozen books; and behind the little looking-glass on the wall there was a fly-flap, and a birch rod carefully bound round with red ribbon. It was the first comfortable room that they had seen ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... time would receive fifty blows with a cane and afterwards be driven out. But if penance may be commuted with priests so it may with gendarmes. Delinquents contrived to purchase their escape from the bastinado by a sum of money, and French gallantry substituted with respect to females the birch for the cane. I saw an order directing all female servants to be examined as to their health unless they could produce certificates from their masters. On the 25th of December the Government granted twenty-four hours longer to persons who were ordered to quit the town; ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... could I? The remembrance of a trout-brook, with birch-trees hanging over it, and great red-seeded brake-leaves growing thick on the bank, made me shudder. Hadn't I held ever so many kittens under water in that very spot, and shouted and laughed to the other girls—some of you, my sisters, among them—while the ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... creek, with deep and sandy beds, and occasionally over small stony plains. At noon we were at some distance from the creek, but then went towards it. The gum-trees were no longer visible, but melaleucas, from fifteen to twenty feet high, lined its banks like a copse of young birch. We now observed a long but somewhat narrow sheet of water, to which we rode; our suspicions as to its quality being roused by its colour, and the appearance of the melaleuca. It proved, as we feared, to be slightly brackish, but not undrinkable. Near the edge of the water, or rather about four ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... September I came vnto Vologhda, which is a great citie, and the riuer passeth through the midst of the same. The houses are builded with wood of Firre trees, ioyned one with another, and round without: the houses are foure square without any iron or stone worke, couered with birch barkes, and wood ouer the same: Their Churches are all of wood, two for euery parish, one to be heated for Winter, and the ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, • Richard Hakluyt
... had just been at a neighbouring farm-house, where there lived one of Mr. Walsingham's tenants; a man of the name of Birch, a respectable farmer, who was originally from Ireland, and whose son was at sea with Captain Walsingham. The captain had taken young Birch under his particular care, at Mr. ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... alighting, had returned to the parent hive,—some hitch in the plan, perhaps, or may be the queen had found her wings too weak. The next day they came out again and were hived. But something offended them, or else the tree in the woods—perhaps some royal old maple or birch, holding its head high above all others, with snug, spacious, irregular chambers and galleries—had too many attractions; for they were presently discovered filling the air over the garden, and whirling excitedly around. Gradually they ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... that he liked her better than any woman he had seen for a long time. He had not known her a week, and she already absorbed his thoughts. And, during the drive home, he hardly saw the forest. Once a birch, whose faint leaves and branches dissolved in a glittering light, drew his thoughts away from Mildred. She lay upon his shoulder, his arm was affectionately around her, and, looking at him out of eyes whose brown seemed to ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... were soon dressed. The fire had burned low, indicating that Indian Jake had been gone for a considerable time. A fat goose was hanging from the limb of a tree. Fastened to it was a piece of birch bark, and scribbled upon the birch bark with a piece of charcoal from the fire, ...
— Troop One of the Labrador • Dillon Wallace
... the windings of the Monongahela river from its rise among the mountains of Western Virginia till, far away in the north, it met the flood of the Alleghany, at the present site of the city of Pittsburg. The voyage, in a birch canoe, required, in the figurative language of the Indians, "two paddles, two warriors ...
— Daniel Boone - The Pioneer of Kentucky • John S. C. Abbott
... was the red flag! "Wasn't that a signal for war? The flag was a red handkerchief, and it swayed from a stick cut from a variegated birch. ...
— The Girl Scout Pioneers - or Winning the First B. C. • Lillian C Garis
... Scotland. The males are hardly distinguishable from the females until they are about half-grown, when the black feathers begin to appear, first about the sides and breast. Their food consists of the tops of birch and heath, except when the mountain berries are ripe, at which period they eagerly and even voraciously pick the bilberries and cranberries from the bushes. Large numbers of these birds are found in Norway, almost rivalling the turkey in point of size. Some of them have begun to be imported ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... birch twigs caught in the straps of the digger's "swag," and he had a bit of rata flower stuck in the band of his hat. "That's where he's come from!" Tresco pointed in the direction of the great range of mountains which could be seen distinctly through ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... 1664. Sir William Petty intimated that it seemed by the scarcity and greater rate of knee timber that nature did not furnish crooked wood enough for building: wherefore he thought it would be fit to raise by art, so much of it in proportion, as to reduce it to an equal rate with strait timber" (Birch's ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... luxuriance of its wild woodland, from the contiguity of overhanging mountains, and from the beauty of Lovel Tarn, a small lake belonging to the property, studded with little islands, each of which is covered with its own thicket of hollies, birch, and dwarfed oaks. The house itself is poor, ill built, with straggling passages and low rooms, and is a sombre, ill-omened looking place. When Josephine Murray was brought there as a bride she thought it to be very sombre and ill-omened; but she loved the lakes ...
— Lady Anna • Anthony Trollope
... little space between them and its banks. The Morumbidgee itself, with an increased breadth, averaging from seventy to eighty yards, presents a still, deep sheet of water to the view, over which the casuarina bends with all the grace of the willow, or the birch, but with more sombre foliage. To the west, a high line of flooded-gum trees extending from the river to the base of the hills which form the west side of the valley before noticed, hides the near elevations, and thus shuts in the whole space. The soil of the plain is of the richest description, ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... Dr. Johnson, myself, and Joseph, my servant, and one which carried our portmanteaus, and two Highlanders walked along with us. Dr. Johnson rode very well. It was a delightful day. Loch Ness and the road upon the side of it, shaded with birch-trees, pleased us much. The night was spent at Fort Augustus, and the next two days we travelled through a wild country, with prodigious mountains ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... me those leaves grow greener while you wait," Kitty Clark said, reining her horse beside a chuckling brook and pointing to a near-by birch grove. "I feel just like this water. I want to run as fast as I can, calling, 'Spring is here! Spring is here!' Don't you perfectly love this odor of growing things? Listen to that phoebe! Doesn't it sound as if he were saying, ...
— Blue Bonnet in Boston - or, Boarding-School Days at Miss North's • Caroline E. Jacobs
... wood you shall not find! Beech and birch and oak agree Here to dwell in company. Hazel, elder, few men could Name the kinds of underwood. Summer and winter haunt together, And golden light with misty weather. 'Tis summer where this beech is seen Defenceless in its virgin green; All its leaves are smooth and thin, And the sunlight ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... Lenore took off her straw hat, and let the mild breeze play about her temples, while she drew in long draughts of forest fragrance. She often stopped and listened to the sounds around her—contemplated the tender leaves of the trees, stroked the white bark of the birch, stood by the rippling fountain before the forester's house, and caressed the little firs in the hedge, which stood as close and regular as the bristles in a brush. She thought she had never seen the ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... cross over to the Androscoggin and often stopped at this lake, midway, to fish in the spring, and again in winter to hunt for moose, then snowbound in their "yards." On snowshoes, or paddling their birch canoes along the pine-shadowed streams, these tawny, pre-Columbian warriors came and camped on the Pennesseewassee; we still pick up their flint arrow-heads along the shore; and it may even be that the short, brown Skraellings were here before them, ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... vig, why it's water!" exclaimed he—"water, I do declare, with worms[21] in it—I can't eat such stuff as that—it's not man's meat—oh dear, oh dear, I fear I've made a terrible mistake in coming to France! Never saw such stuff as this at Bleaden's or Birch's, or anywhere in the city." "I've travelled three hundred thousand miles," said the fat man, sending his plate from him in disgust, "and never tasted such a mess as this before." "I'll show them up in The Times," cried Mr. Jorrocks; "and, look, what stuff is here—beef boiled ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees
... that they went on to Doire-da-Bhoth, the Wood of the Two Huts. And Diarmuid cut down the wood round about them, and he made a fence having seven doors of woven twigs, and he set out a bed of soft rushes and of the tops of the birch-tree for Grania in the very ...
— Gods and Fighting Men • Lady I. A. Gregory
... violently forced and beaten in, and where what ought to be put clearly is presented in a confused and intricate way as if it were a collection of puzzles." The poor boys, he declared, were almost frightened to death. They needed skins of tin; they were beaten with fists, with canes and with birch-rods till the blood streamed forth; they were covered with scars, stripes, spots and weals; and thus they had learned to hate the schools and all ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... trees and chestnut trees and birch trees of three kinds; and there were white pine trees and pitch pine trees, and the pitch pine trees were ...
— The Doers • William John Hopkins
... be given to Nannie Cameron, and you shall wear your old one to the kirk. How will that suit your vanity? And you may be off to bed now directly, without any supper. There are twigs enough for a birch rod, my lady, if bed does not bring you to a better frame of mind. Run in now, and don't let me see your face before ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... a yard, where chickens, turkeys, and guinea- fowls, were kept; and in the front, looking towards the west, was laid out a fine garden, well provided with evergreens, such as holly, yew, and pine-trees, and amongst these, also, many birch and ash- ...
— Fanny, the Flower-Girl • Selina Bunbury
... changed the course of his vessel by reason of the mysterious conduct of that man-of-war hawk, not a soul would probably have survived the night. It was stated by the rescued passengers, among whom was Billy Birch, that the Central America had sailed from Aspinwall with the passengers and freight which left San Francisco on the 1st of September, and encountered the gale in the Gulf Stream somewhere off Savannah, in which she sprung ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... but a single bridge left across the Harlem. To boat it means to be beaten in detail. I tell you, gentlemen, that the only chance I might have in an attempt upon any part of Washington's army must be if he advances. In formal council, Generals Kniphausen, Birch, and Robertson sustain me; and, believing I am right, I am prepared to suffer injustice and calumny in silence from my detractors here in New ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... property of the wife, and the husband would not touch them without her permission. In many cases such property was very extensive. Among the Menomini Indians, for instance, a woman of good circumstances would own as many as from 1200 to 1500 birch-bark vessels.[140] In the New Mexican pueblo what comes from outside the house, as soon as it is inside is put under the immediate control of the women. Bandelier, in his report of his tour in Mexico, tells us that "his host at Cochiti, New Mexico, could not sell an ear of corn or a string of ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... personally, and their husbands will not touch them without having previously obtained their permission."[179] Among the Menomini a woman in good circumstances would possess as many as from 1,200 to 1,500 birch-bark vessels, and all of these would be in use during the season of sugar-making.[180] ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... In the solitary forest, Pondering, musing in the forest, On the welfare of his people. From his pouch he took his colors, Took his paints of different colors. On the smooth bark of a birch tree Painted many shapes and figures, Wonderful and mystic figures, And each figure had a meaning, Each ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... the grey mohair. We had a beautiful walk out from under the shade of the o'erarching chestnut trees before our door, along the grassy highway leading to the upper meadow, over the smooth newly-cut field on to the edge of the birch woods beyond. There we rested quiet, coming back when the moon rose over the hills and the stars hung out like ...
— The Harvest of Years • Martha Lewis Beckwith Ewell
... tolerably inured to the vicissitudes of traveling. We had experienced them under various forms, and a birch canoe was as familiar to us as a steamboat. The restlessness, the love of wilds and hatred of cities, natural perhaps in early years to every unperverted son of Adam, was not our only motive for undertaking the present journey. My companion hoped to shake off the effects of a disorder ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... spring and a part of the summer. At last, having completed our arrangements for the journey, we received orders to proceed, and on the 26th of July, accompanied by my father and brothers and a few friends, I repaired to the place of embarkation, where was prepared a birch bark canoe, manned by nine Canadians, having Mr. A. M'Kay as commander, and a Mr. A. Fisher as passenger. The sentiments which I experienced at that moment would be as difficult for me to describe as they were ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to the Northwest Coast of America in the years 1811, 1812, 1813, and 1814 or the First American Settlement on the Pacific • Gabriel Franchere
... own inward man there is no live coal, but all is burnt out to a dead grammatical cinder? The Hinterschlag Professors knew syntax enough; and of the human soul thus much: that it had a faculty called Memory, and could be acted on through the muscular integument by appliance of birch-rods. ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... she is," sang out Jeff Lynn, as he fastened the rope to a tree at the head of a small island. "All off now, and' we'll hev' supper. Thar's a fine spring under yon curly birch, an' I fetched along a leg of deer-meat. Hungry, ...
— The Spirit of the Border - A Romance of the Early Settlers in the Ohio Valley • Zane Grey
... young to be trusted with a birch. I'm glad they look at things that way. If you're satisfied with yourself, I suppose I ought to be, though I did look forward once to seeing a nephew of mine famous. You've 'ad all your fame at Cambridge, with your papers, and your poems, and your College skits—a nice ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... must go home with these lads, and tell their mother all about the race and the milk. Mammy must always know the truth,' now speaking to the children. 'And tell her, too, from me that I have got the best birch rod in the parish; and that if she ever thinks her children want a flogging she must bring them to me, and, if I think they deserve it, I'll give it them better than she can.' So Phillis led the children towards the dairy, somewhere in the back yard, and ...
— Cousin Phillis • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... a hollow birch-stub, in which a family of raccoons dwelt, and together they set to work to destroy the household of their own smaller brother. They dug and tore at the base of the stub until they had undermined it, and then together ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes
... gurgling, kiss'd his pebbled shore, O'erhung with wild-woods, thickening green; The fragrant birch and hawthorn hoar, 'Twin'd amorous round the raptur'd scene: The flowers sprang wanton to be prest, The birds sang love on every spray; Till too, too soon, the glowing west, Proclaim'd the speed of ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... of her meal, wrapped them in a bit of silver birch-bark, unrolled her bundle, and placed them there. Then she drained the tin cup of its chilly water, and, still sitting there cross-legged on the rock, tied the little cup to her girdle. It seemed to me, there in the dusk, ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... [Footnote 502: Birch's Life of Tillotson; Life of Prideaux. From Clarendon's Diary, it appears that he and Rochester were at Oxford ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... know when the first violets are blowing in the woods, and we paint for ourselves the tasselling of the alder and the red of maple-buds. We taste still the sting of checkerberry and woodsy flavor of the fragrant birch. When fields of corn are shimmering in the sun, we know exactly how it would seem to run through those dusty aisles, swept by that silken drapery, and counselled in whispers from the plumy tops so far ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... broad piazza under the lindens, Cooper, with others, listened to the Judge's recital of the story of a spy's great struggles and unselfish loyalty while serving his country in the American Revolution, and the story gave Cooper an idea for his "Harvey Birch." The fact that strolling peddlers, staff in hand and pack on back, were common visitors then at country houses, became another aid. "It was after such a visit of a Yankee peddler of the old sort, to the cottage at Angevine, that Harvey's lot in life was ...
— James Fenimore Cooper • Mary E. Phillips
... wigwams here and there on the bank, paddling their birch canoes over the river's smooth surface, or threading the foamy torrents ...
— Ladies-In-Waiting • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... storm has blown over. So we galloped thither in hot haste, and when we got there not a trace of the forest was to be seen. At last I asked a maize-reaper I fell in with, where on earth the Talpadi forest was? Over there, said he, pointing to a spot where some fifty birch-trees were withering in the sand like so many broomsticks, all set nicely in a row. And that, if you please, was the Talpadi forest which I had planted at a very great cost! You had better tell the man to plant out a few ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... were full of birch, exclaimed against this weak, and, as he said he would venture to call it, wicked lenity. To remit the punishment of such crimes was, he said, to encourage them. He enlarged much on the correction of children, and quoted many texts from ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... myself of the help of Prof. Lushington's translation in "Records of the past," edited by Dr. S. Birch. Translator.] ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... and very old-fashioned house, built in strict conformity with the Elizabethan style of architecture, over the portals of which, upon a deep blue board, in very, very bright gold letters, flashed forth that word so awful to little boys, so big with associations of long tasks and wide-spreading birch, the Greek-derived polysyllable, ACADEMY! Ignorant as I was, I understood it all in a moment. I was struck cold as the dew-damp grave-stone. I almost grew sick with terror. I was kidnapped, entrapped, betrayed. I had before hated school, my horror now was intense of "Academy." I ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... stupid suspicion at the approaching carriage, the long ditches, overgrown with mugwort, wormwood, and mountain ash; and as he watched the fresh fertile wilderness and solitude of this steppe country, the greenness, the long slopes, and valleys with stunted oak bushes, the grey villages, and scant birch trees,—the whole Russian landscape, so long unseen by him, stirred emotion at once pleasant, sweet and almost painful in his heart, and he felt weighed down by a kind of pleasant oppression. Slowly his thoughts wandered; their outlines were as vague and indistinct ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... most curious features of the establishment at St.-Gobain is a subterranean lake. The fine forests around St.-Gobain and La Fere—forests of oak, beech, elm, ash, birch, maple, yoke-elm, aspen, wild cherry, linden, elder, and willow—flourish upon a tertiary formation. The surface of clay keeps the soil marshy and damp, but this checks the infiltration of the rainwater and therefore favours the growth of the trees. In the calcareous ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... suffered considerable injury during the siege. The defenders used the lead from the chapter-house roof to cover the keep of the castle, and possibly also to make bullets. Finally, on December 18th, through the treachery of Colonel Birch, the governor of the city, Hereford was once more taken, and this time the whole place was overrun by ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Hereford, A Description - Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • A. Hugh Fisher
... is only a slight specimen of the sad state of art and literature in England, neglected equally by Conservatives, Liberals and Radicals. What has been done for the endowment of research? What is our equivalent for the Prix de Rome? Since the death of Dr. Birch, who can fairly deal with a Demotic papyrus? Contrast the Societe Anthropologique and its palace and professors in Paris with our "Institute" au second in a corner of Hanover Square and its skulls in ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... bad gone to seek work, for the sake of which he had suffered such agonies that night. A flood of memories came back to him of his village, running down the steep slope to the river and losing itself in a whole forest of birch trees, willows, and mountain-ashes. These memories breathed something warm into him and cheered him up. "Ah, it would be ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky
... the plate and apple to her father, and went with them into the forest. They walked about and gathered blackberries. All at once they saw a spade lying upon the ground. The wicked sisters killed Little Simpleton with it, and buried her under a birch tree. ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten
... eddies and floating foam-streaks, and deadened all other sounds with its solemn and soothing rumble. In midmost of the stream, embraced in the weir's shimmering arm-spread, a small island lay anchored, fringed close with willow and silver birch and alder. Reserved, shy, but full of significance, it hid whatever it might hold behind a veil, keeping it till the hour should come, and, with the hour, those who were ...
— The Wind in the Willows • Kenneth Grahame
... and drink, and sing, And we'd be as happy as birds in the spring; And modest Dame Lurch, who is always at church, Would not have bandy children, nor fasting, nor birch. ...
— Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience • William Blake
... got an idea, and soon I had half the tribe at work building me great meat caches. And of all they hunted I got the lion's share and stored it away. Nor was Moosu idle. He made himself a pack of cards from birch bark, and taught Neewak the way to play seven-up. He also inveigled the father of Tukeliketa into the game. And one day he married the maiden, and the next day he moved into the shaman's house, which was the finest in the village. The fall of Neewak was complete, for he lost all his possessions, ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... holding a little cloven-footed child by the hand. This, the old gardener assured us was Pandora, wife of the above-mentioned Pan, with her son. Not far from this spot, we came to the tree on which Byron carved his own name and that of his sister Augusta. It is a tree of twin stems,—a birch-tree, I think—growing up side by side. One of the stems still lives and flourished, but that on which he carved the two names is quite dead, as if there had been something fatal in the inscription that has made it for ever famous. The names are still very legible, altho the letters had ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various
... to bring shame to the beholder from more easy-going conditions. Everything is kept up with a strenuous virtue that imparts an air of self-respect to the landscape, which the bleaching and blackening stone walls, wandering over the hill-slopes, divide into wood lots of white birch and pine, stony pastures, and little patches of potatoes and corn. The mowing-lands alone are rich; and if the New England year is in the glory of the latest June, the breath of the clover blows honey—sweet into the car windows, and the fragrance of the new-cut hay rises ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... now more anxious than ever to take prompt and decided action in our favour." Slidell asked if it was impossible to stir Parliament but acknowledged that everything depended on Palmerston: "that august body seems to be as afraid of him as the urchins of a village school of the birch of their pedagogue[698]." ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... products consisted of sections of the great fir trees, pines, cedars, oaks, hemlocks, birch, ash, walnut, cherry, etc., and specimens of rough and polished lumber from every variety of wood grown in the Dominion, together with a large pyramid of pulp wood, of which Canada possesses millions of acres, railway ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... morning, and had not yet returned. These were the two men who had been so inhumanly murdered. Immediate search was made for the canoe, and it was found a little above the spot where the men were hiding. It was a very large buoyant birch canoe, constructed for the transportation of a numerous household, with all their goods, and such ...
— David Crockett: His Life and Adventures • John S. C. Abbott
... look of mansions wear, And others are as gardens fair, While others seem a massive block Of solid undivided rock. Behold those pleasant beds o'erlaid With lotus leaves, for lovers made, Where mountain birch and costus throw Cool shadows on the pair below. See where the lovers in their play Have cast their flowery wreaths away, And fruit and lotus buds that crowned Their brows lie trodden on the ground. North Kuru's realm is fair to see, Vasvaukasara,(371) ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... out, then birch comes in, And many flowers beside, Both of a fresh and fragrant kin, ...
— In The Yule-Log Glow—Book 3 - Christmas Poems from 'round the World • Various
... of the Most Reverend Dr. John Tillotson, Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, compiled chiefly from his Original Papers and Letters. By THOMAS BIRCH, D.D. The second Edition, enlarged. ...
— The Life of the Truly Eminent and Learned Hugo Grotius • Jean Levesque de Burigny
... a copy of Bishop Percy's "Reliques of Ancient English Poetry" that he prizes highly. It is the first edition of this noble work, and was originally presented by Percy to Dr. Birch of the British Museum. The Judge found these three volumes exposed for sale in a London book stall, and he comprehended them without delay—a great bargain, you will admit, when I tell you that they cost the Judge but three shillings! How came these precious ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... portage, not a short cut unfamiliar to him; not a narrow winding brook wide enough for a canoe to float in that he did not know. He had spent all his days and many of his nights in these solitary wanderings. Visitors to the region grew wonted to the sight of the comely figure in the slight birch canoe, shooting suddenly athwart their track, or found lying idly in some dark and shaded stream-bed. On the approach of strangers he would instantly away, lifting his hat courteously if there were ladies ...
— Between Whiles • Helen Hunt Jackson
... such style, is to be found in all these books when they are good books. Compare a paragraph or two of the early Burroughs on his birch-clad lake country, or Thoreau upon Concord pines, with the "natural history paragraph" that English magazines used to publish, ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... The Birch, the Mirtle, and the Bay, Like Friends did all embrace; 110 And their large branches did display, ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton
... Japan Permanent, work on "Constitutional Compact" of Yuan Shih-kai text of monarchy planned Continental quadrilateral, the, of Japan Coup d'etat, the, of Sept., 1898 Coup d'etat, the parliamentary of 1913 Crisp, Birch, attempts to ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... her hat. She sat leaning against the crisp trunk of a silver birch. Her hands were in her lap. Her dress was crumpled up, displaying her crossed feet and the tantalizing line of her slim ankles. Against the copper green of the tree trunk the mass of her hair was pressed, gold upon the shadow of gold. Her moist lips were ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... of the Esk, winding between rocks of lofty height, whose sides were fringed with a tangled mass of shrubs, ferns, and thistles, and whose summits were crowned with thickets of hazel, pine, and birch. On still higher ground, behind the house, and sheltering it from the northern blast, stood a thick wood of cedar, beech, and fir trees. Many winding footpaths led through this wood, and down the rocks ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... advent of the jaguar to introduce the element of sheer tragedy into luxurious life. In his Conspiracy of Pontiac, Parkman tells with rare eloquence the character of the Ojibwa Indians: "In the calm days of summer, the Ojibwa fisherman pushes out his birch canoe upon the great inland ocean of the North; ... or he lifts his canoe from the sandy beach, and, while his camp-fire crackles on the grass-plot, reclines beneath the trees, and smokes and laughs ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... door and stepped within. On either side of the entrance were the two sailboats that he and Dan used in summer and to the rear was the old-fashioned whaleboat with which they did their deep fishing. Over it, in a rudely constructed rack, was the Indian birch-bark canoe which Dan had purchased in the mountains a few years before. As the sea had fallen to a dead calm, he decided to use this canoe, which he could paddle quite noiselessly, and pulling down the little craft from ...
— The Inn at the Red Oak • Latta Griswold
... at a farm house, some miles north of the town, got a job on the woodpile, and astonished the farmer by the amount of birch he could saw in an hour. He took his pay in the shape of a bountiful dinner, and—after half an hour's smoke and talk with the farmer, to whom he gave a few pamphlets from the store in his knapsack—said good-bye to all hands and once more set his face northward for the long ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... wheat, it retains even in July, on an afternoon of glare and brazen locusts, the freshness of a spring morning. A thousand slews, a hundred lakes bordered with rippling barley or tinkling bells of the flax, Claire passed. She had left the occasional groves of oak and poplar and silver birch, and come out on ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... "go with him, and, do you hear, aim low, at the third man's horse. From the sound there are not more than five or six of them. We can but fail, at worst, and the wood is thick behind us, where none may pursue. You, Norman de Pitcullo, have your whinger ready, and fasten this rope tightly to yonder birch-tree stem, and then cross and give it a turn or two about that oak sapling on the other side of the way. That trap will bring down a horse or twain. Be quick, you ...
— A Monk of Fife • Andrew Lang
... young Roscius) Beyle, M., his 'Histoire de la Peinture en Italie' His account of an interview with Lord Byron at Milan Bible, the, read through by Lord Byron before he was eight years old Biography 'Bioscope, or Dial of Life,' Mr. Grenville Penn's Birch, Alderman Blackett, Joseph, the poetical cobbler His posthumous writings Blackstone, Judge, composed his Commentaries with a bottle of port before him Blackwood's Magazine Blake, the fashionable ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... forests of this region are full of dank heavy windfall that obstructs the streams and causes an endless succession of swamps. In these the paddlers had to wade to mid-waist, 'tracking' their canoes through perilous passage-way, where the rip of an upturned branch might tear the birch from the bottom of the canoe. When the swamps finally narrowed to swift rivers, blankets were hoisted as sails, and the brigade of canoes swept out to the sandy sea of Hudson Bay. 'We were in danger to perish a thousand times from the ice,' Radisson writes, ...
— The "Adventurers of England" on Hudson Bay - A Chronicle of the Fur Trade in the North (Volume 18 of the Chronicles of Canada) • Agnes C. (Agnes Christina) Laut
... was flooded in moonlight and the birch trees wavered their stark shadows across it like supplicating arms. Suddenly I heard the soft padded sound of snow falling upon snow, to slowly perceive a figure, the slender figure of a young child attempting to arouse itself almost ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al |
