"Blackthorn" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Donegal, there were not so many from the northern province. The majority were from Connaught. They generally landed at the Clarence Dock, Liverpool, a wiry, hardy-looking lot, with frieze coats, corduroy breeches, clean white shirts with high collars, and blackthorn sticks. I have seen them filling the breadth of Prescot Street, as they left the town, marching up like an army on foot to the various parts of England they were bound for. This was before special cheap trains were ...
— The Life Story of an Old Rebel • John Denvir
... quantities of leaves, are in many cases preserved. Among the shrubs are many evergreens, as Andromeda, and two extinct genera, Daphnogene and M'Clintockia, with fine leathery leaves, together with hazel, blackthorn, holly, logwood, and hawthorn. A species of Zamia (Zimites) grew in the swamps, with Potamogeton, Sparganium, and Menyanthes; while ivy and villes twined around the forest-trees, and broad-leaved ferns grew beneath their shade. Even in Spitzbergen, as far north ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... P.M., after witnessing some sport, S——r gave the word to mount, and off we set for Mr. Oliver's. An hour's ride brought us within his domain, where lofty deer-fences, blackthorn hedge-rows, well-made drives, and carefully cultivated land, formed a striking change from the wild but beautiful forest-country ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... turned back into my room. Hereupon, having locked the door, I got into my boots, slipped on my coat and knapsack, and, last of all, threw my blackthorn staff out of the window (where I was sure of finding it) and climbed out ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... embroidered on the covering of the settle by the hearth, and sparkled against a silver and crystal lantern hanging in the chimney. And between the cracks on the walls Young Gerard had stuck wands of gold and silver palm and branches of snowy blackthorn, and on the floor was a dish full of celandine and daisies, and a broken jar of small wild daffodils. And the child knew that all these things were the treasures of queens ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon
... out of the maiden's a red rose, which entwine together. Amongst further instances quoted by Grimm, we are told how, "a child carries home a bud which the angel had given him in the wood, when the rose blooms the child is dead. The Lay of Eunzifal makes a blackthorn shoot out of the bodies of slain heathens, a white flower by the heads of ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... of glory comes the gorse, lighting up the country round about, and blazing round about the beacon hill. The beacon hill stands behind Farringford. If you follow the little wood of nightingales and thrushes, and follow the lane where the blackthorn hedges shine in spring-time (lovely dials that illuminate to show the hour), you come to the downs, and climbing their smooth steps you reach 'Mr. Tennyson's Down,' where the beacon-staff stands ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... writing, and has at her fingers'-ends more than two thousand characters of learned writing. In a poetical competition she gained the first prize with a sonnet composed in praise of 'the blossoms of the blackthorn hedges seen in the dew of early morning.' Only, she is not very pretty: one of her eyes is smaller than the other, and she has a hole in her cheek, resulting from an illness of ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... spinosa).—It is believed that no hurt is so hard of healing as from a blackthorn. Also blackthorn winter is supposed to bring fresh cold in spring, when the bushes almost look as if clothed ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... litterateurs of England, do Wales and Cornwall, the Lakes and the Trossachs, to say nothing of Europe, dressed just as we are." "All right, old man, but I'm thinking I'll add a bandanna handkerchief and a blackthorn. They'll come in handy to carry the fossils over your shoulder. There now, I've forgot the printers' paper and the strap flower press for my specimens. True, there's Monday for that; but I'm afraid I'll have to shave the boards of the flower press down, or it'll be a sorry burden for a poor, ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... little bird told her all his story—how he had tried to fly to the warm countries, and how he had torn his wing on a blackthorn bush and fallen to the ground. But he could not tell her how he had come ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf; a Practical Plan of Character Building, Volume I (of 17) - Fun and Thought for Little Folk • Various
... Pomona, so berries were devoted to fairies. They would not let any one cut a blackthorn shoot on Hallowe'en. In Cornwall sloes and blackberries were considered unfit to eat after the fairies had passed by, because all the goodness was extracted. So they were eaten to heart's content on October 31st, and avoided thereafter. ...
— The Book of Hallowe'en • Ruth Edna Kelley
... day among the flowers, Taking no thought of any other thing But their own hearts, for out of them they sing: Their songs are kindred to the blossom heads, Faint as the petals which the blackthorn sheds, And like the earth—not alien songs as ours. To them this greenness and this island peace Are life and death and happiness in one; Nor are they separate from the white sun, Or those warm winds which nightly wash the deep Or starlight in the valleys, or new sleep; And ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various
... wand has had several names given to it. A common one was that of 'divining rod.' By the Germans it was called the 'wishing rod,' or 'wishing thorn,' which points to the fact that it was often cut from the blackthorn or sloe. It was supposed that the person who could use the magic rod most successfully was the seventh son of a seventh son, if such a person could be found. The wand, too, should not be cut from very old wood, but it must be more ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... a young Napoleon there, the grandson of Napoleon the First, that was a great man indeed. I was in the island where he was interred; it is a grand place, and what is not natural in those parts, there are two blackthorn bushes growing in it where you go into the place he was buried. And as to that great Napoleon, the fear of him itself was enough to kill people. If he was living till now it is hard to say what way would the world be. It is likely there'd be ...
— The Kiltartan History Book • Lady I. A. Gregory
... to his father, sitting with her short black dudeen by the delicate pink and white embers, for the evening was warm and the fire low. Ody himself was leaning against the wall, critically examining Brian Kilfoyle's blackthorn, and forming a poor opinion of it with considerable satisfaction. Not that he bore Brian any ill-will, but because this is his method of attaining to contentment with ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... tied two small green branches together in the form of a cross, which he held high aloft; and thus they rode through the forest, which became thicker and thicker, and the path, if path it could be called, taking them farther into it. The blackthorn stood as if to bar their way, and they had to ride round outside of it; the trickling streams swelled no longer into mere rivulets, but into stagnant pools, and they had to ride round them; but as the soft wind that played among the foliage of the trees was ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... have widened into black-spotted leaves; some are notched like the many-barbed bone harpoons of savage races. The hardy docks are showing, and the young nettles have risen up. Slowly the dark and grey hues of winter are yielding to the lively tints of spring. The blackthorn has white buds on its lesser branches, and the warm rays of the sun have drawn forth the buds on one favoured hawthorn in a sheltered nook, so that the green of the coming leaf is visible. Bramble bushes still retain their forlorn, shrivelled foliage; the hardy all but evergreen leaves ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... they were accustomed, and preserved, even long after the War of Independence, the habits of their rural ancestry. The massive stone farm-houses, the walled gardens, the bountiful orchards, and, more than all, the well-trimmed hedges of hawthorn and blackthorn dividing their fields, or bordering their roads with the living wall, over which the clematis and wild-ivy love to clamber, made the region beautiful to their eyes. Although the large original grants, mostly given by the hand ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor
... got a cap and a stick out of the rack; there was no element of selection in the cap, but there was a decided subconscious direction about the selection of the stick. It was a heavy blackthorn, with an iron ferrule and a silver weight set in the head; picked up—by my father at some Irish fair—a weapon ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... blackthorn bloomed anew, and the long grass Was starred with flowers that once Griselda prized, But plucked not. She, poor wench, from moon to moon Waxed pale and paler: of no known disease, The village-leech averred, with lips pursed out And cane at chin; some inward fire, he thought, ...
— Wyndham Towers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... Dolly had been a fortnight at Upcombe, the Compsons gave a picnic in the wild Combe undercliff. 'Tis a broken wall of chalk, tumbled picturesquely about in huge shattered masses, and deliciously overgrown with ferns and blackthorn and golden clusters of close-creeping rock-rose. Mazy paths thread tangled labyrinths of fallen rock, or wind round tall clumps of holly-bush and bramble. They lighted their fire under the lee of one such buttress of broken ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... down a Blackthorn Lane, when a blue-eyed, fresh-coloured young Lady, in a sad-coloured Skirt, and large-flapped Beaver, without either Feather or Buckle, swept by me on a small white Palfrey. She held a Bunch of Tiger Lilies in her Hand, the gayety of which contrasted strangelie ...
— Mary Powell & Deborah's Diary • Anne Manning
... and neighbours gathering round gazed with puzzled looks at the old man as he sat enthroned on his heap of stones, his knotted trembling hands leaning on a blackthorn stick, his face flushed, and his eyes blazing under their shaggy white brows. They could scarcely understand his stoicism; Mrs. Clancy's lamentations were far more ...
— North, South and Over the Sea • M.E. Francis (Mrs. Francis Blundell)
... he saw a stout blackthorn stick which was standing in a corner of the room, jump up into the air and leap towards him. He put his head down on to the carpet, covered his eyes with his hands, and began to moan with terror. The stick came down with what seemed to him superhuman force again and again on his back ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... Scutchemsee Nob, and when they reached the top, they saw Neville and his second, Mr. Hammersley, riding towards them. The pair had halters as well as bridles, and, dismounting, made their nags fast to a large blackthorn that grew there. The seconds then stepped forward, and saluted each ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... may, for, indeed, I would have you know that the words I spoke yonder were true when I said that you should be glad that you freed me, and that I have tried to serve you. That may be known by the token of the blackthorn spine and ...
— A Prince of Cornwall - A Story of Glastonbury and the West in the Days of Ina of Wessex • Charles W. Whistler |
