"Feathery" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... rheumatic apple tree is that dimpled path that runs across fields, the short cut down to the harbour. The stiff frozen plumes of ghostly goldenrod stand up pale and powdery along the way. How many tints of brown and fawn and buff in the withered grasses—some as feathery and translucent as a gauze scarf, as nebulous as those veilings Robin Herrick was so fond of—his mention of them gives an odd connotation to a ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... were several white villas, before which pink and scarlet geraniums ran riot, with spreading mimosas golden with their feathery blossom, for Ospedaletti makes a frantic, if vain, bid for popularity as a winter-resort. Its deadly dullness, however, is too well known to the habitue of the Riviera; and its casino, which never obtained a licence, imparts to it the air ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... of blue.... Mean while the island coast has clearly brought out all its beauties: first you note the long white winding thread-line of beach-coral and bright sand;—then the deep green fringe of vegetation through which roofs and spires project here and there, and quivering feathery heads of palms with white trunks. The general tone of this verdure is sombre green, though it is full of lustre: there is a glimmer in it as of metal. Beyond all this coast-front long undulations of ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... cauldron of green fires through which the conical rays angled and interwove, crossed and mingled. And where they mingled, where they crossed, flamed out suddenly immense rayless orbs; palpitant for an instant, then dissolving in spiralling, feathery spray of ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... springs by the human herds that drink of them. Just where the welling of stainless water, trembling and pure, like a body of light, enters the pool of Carshalton, cutting itself a radiant channel down to the gravel, through warp of feathery weeds, all waving, which it traverses with its deep threads of clearness, like the chalcedony in moss-agate, starred here and there with the white grenouillette; just in the very rush and murmur of the first spreading currents, ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... directions; dividing it into two different families, and making on its model, by adding new organs, and taking away old ones, in one direction the whole family of Actiniae (sea- anemones), and in a quite opposite one the Holothuriae, those strange sea-cucumbers, with their mouth-fringe of feathery gills, of which you shall see some anon. Thus there has been, in the Creative Mind, as it gave life to new species, a development of the idea on which older species were created, in order - we may fancy - that every mesh of the great net might gradually be supplied, and there should be no gaps ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... starlit night, nestled in feathery warmth, to sail over the dark tree-tops, high and higher and on and on—that is a wonderful thing. And when the Tree Mother stands above you, wrapped in her dark cloak with her face shining under her cloudy white hair, now and ...
— The Little House in the Fairy Wood • Ethel Cook Eliot
... round their trunks, as if to support them; while many bent gracefully beneath the load of their clustering fruit and heavy foliage. Orange-trees with their ripe fruit shone in the sunbeams like gold. Stately palms rose above the surrounding trees and waved their feathery plumes in the air, and bananas with broad enormous leaves rustled in the breeze and cast a cool shadow on ...
— Martin Rattler • R.M. Ballantyne
... the feathery race indulge the song, Inhale the liberal beam, and melt in love: Free let the fleet hind bound her hills along, And in pure streams the ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... the name there's nothing To one that knows not Lad's-love, or Old Man, The hoar-green feathery herb, almost a tree, Growing with rosemary and lavender. Even to one that knows it well, the names Half decorate, half perplex, the thing it is: At least, what that is clings not to the names In spite of time. And yet ...
— Last Poems • Edward Thomas
... this natural phenomenon. My delight and surprise were as boundless as if the heavy gray sky had let down a shower of pond lilies and white roses, instead of snow-flakes. It happened to be a half-holiday, so I had nothing to do but watch the feathery crystals whirling hither and thither through the air. I stood by the sitting-room window gazing at the wonder until twilight shut out ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... Bhima) to the regions of death. Successive showers of Arjuna's shafts were seen overspread on the sky, while others were seen to slay thy army. Filling the welkin with his shafts that resembled dense flights of feathery creatures, Dhananjaya, O monarch, at that time, became the very Destroyer unto the Kurus. With his broad-headed arrows, and those equipped with heads flat and sharp as razors, and cloth-yard shafts of bright polish, Partha mangled the bodies of his foes and cut off their ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... delicate and exquisite shades of pink known to nature. Komatsu guided them about the city with a kind of pleased and gratified delight as if he were showing his own property. Sometimes he stood up and pointed to the feathery tops of carefully nurtured cherry trees, glimpses of which could be seen over the ...
— The Motor Maids in Fair Japan • Katherine Stokes
... The feathery white moon never let the sky grow dark; all night the chestnut blossoms were white in the green; dim was the cow-parsley ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... stood upon the pebbles of the shore, and began gently to draw the tip of her long feather over the surface of the water, and I saw, to my amazement, that wherever the feather passed it changed the surface of the water into ice. Long feathery crystals began to shoot in every direction over the basin wherever Agnes moved ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... from east to west, as far as the eye could reach, were the brownish-green savanna-like lowlands, against which beat, in soft murmurs, the waves of that sea I had so longed to reach. From out the broad marshes arose low hammocks, green with pines and feathery with palmetto-trees. Clouds of mist were rising, and while I watched them melt away in the warm beams of the morning sun, I thought they were like the dark doubts which curled themselves about me so long ago in the cold ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop
... rays; the guava, growing at its feet, like an infant of the same family; the mammee—or abricot de St. Domingue—with its rich green fruit hanging in clusters, and a foliage rivalling the mango; the dark and feathery tamarind; the light and graceful indigo; the slow-growing arrowroot, with its palmy and feathery leaves spreading like a tender rampart round its precious fruit; boundless fields of the rich sugar-cane; acres of the luscious pine ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... glume in texture. This is called the palea. The fourth glume and its palea adhere together by their margins. Inside the fourth glume and between it and the palea there are three stamens and an ovary with two styles ending in feathery stigmas. Just in front of the ovary and outside the stamens two very small scale-like bodies are found. These are the lodicules. They are fleshy and well developed in flowers that are about to open. In the ...
— A Handbook of Some South Indian Grasses • Rai Bahadur K. Ranga Achariyar
... gray, Sure all the Muses this their bird inspire, And he alone is equal to a choir. Oh, sweet musician! thou dost far excel The soothing song of pleasing Philomel: Sweet is her song, but in few notes confined, But thine, thou mimic of the feathery kind! Runs thro' all notes: thou only know'st them all, At once ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... Pico de Sao Joao, built by the Spaniards, an upper work which a single ironclad would blow to powder with a broadside; the mariner's landmark, 2,000 feet high, Nossa Senhora do Monte, white-framed in brown-black and backed by its feathery pines, distance-dwarfed to mere shrubs, where the snow-winds sport; the cloud-cap, a wool-pack, iris-tinted by the many-hued western sky, and the soft sweet breath of the serre-chaude below, profusely ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... its passage. A similar contrast was seen between the level green meadow, in which the ruins were situated, and the large timber-trees which were scattered over it, compared with the precipitous banks which arose at a short distance around, partly fringed with light and feathery underwood, partly rising in steeps clothed with purple heath, and partly more abruptly elevated into fronts of grey rock, chequered with lichen, and with those hardy plants which find root even in the most arid crevices ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... degrees above the horizon, shining with a liquid radiance, as if he had already drawn up and was shining through the dew of the morning, though it lay yet on all the grasses by the roadside, turning them into gem-plants. Every sort of gem sparkled on their feathery or beady tops, and their long slender blades. At the first cottages they passed, the women were beginning their day's work, sweeping clean their floors and door-steps. Clare noted that where were most flowers in the garden, ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... the side of the house, where the trees had turned early under the chill of an unseasonable night, yellow leaves were sifting down without a sound. Goldenrod was growing dull, clematis had ripened into feathery spray, and she knew how the closed gentians were painting great purple dashes by the side of the road. "Oh!" she cried aloud, in rapture. It was her wedding day; a year ago the sun had shone as warmly and benignantly as he ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... a knight with his flaming targe See the DENT-DE-LION so bold With his feathery crest at large, On a field of ...
— A Floral Fantasy in an Old English Garden • Walter Crane
... simplest stretches of sward and clumps of trees, and long clear vistas across still ponds, with distances whose accents are pricked out with white houses and yellow cows and placid fishers and ferrymen in red caps, seen in glimpses through curtains of sparse, feathery leafage—or peoples woodland openings with nymphs and fawns, silhouetted against the sunset glow, or dancing in the cool gray of dusk. A man of no reading, having only the elements of an education in the general sense ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... in the distance, the night was made momentarily ugly by the sound of a gramophone on a passing launch, yet this discordant note seemed only to bring the perfection of present things closer. Back across the velvety lawn, through the feathery strips of foliage, the lights of The Sanctuary, shaded and subdued, were dimly visible. The dining-table under the cedar-tree had already been cleared. Hedges, newly arrived from town to play the major domo, was putting the finishing ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... [Footnote: Called on Marquette's map, Ouabouskiaou. On some of the earliest maps, it is called Ouabache (Wabash).] Soon they began to see the marshy shores buried in a dense growth of the cane, with its tall straight stems and feathery light-green foliage. The sun glowed through the hazy air with a languid stifling heat, and, by day and night, mosquitoes in myriads left them no peace. They floated slowly down the current, crouched in the shade of the sails ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... around. His own clothes were damp. Little beads of moisture were upon his face. But below, where the Atlantic billows came thundering in upon a rock-strewn coast, the sun, slowly gathering strength, seemed to be rolling aside the feathery grey clouds. Downwards, split with great ravines, the road now sloped abruptly to a little plateau of farmland, on the seaward edge of which stood the ruins of a grey castle. Dotted here and there about ...
— The Box with Broken Seals • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... for some one. A pleasant place this to wait in. So dark, so hemmed in with trees, and the road so little used; spring was early here, and the boughs were getting quite dense already. How pleasant to see the broad red moon go up behind the feathery branches, and listen to the evensong of the thrush, just departing to roost, and leaving the field clear for the woodlark all night. There were a few sounds from the village, a lowing of cows, and the noise of the boys at play; but they were so tempered down by the distance, ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... The big mahogany doors swung open before us, and as I passed with George, into the brilliantly lighted hall, where the perfume of roses filled the air, I managed to move, if not with grace, at least with the necessary dignity of an invited guest. The lamps, placed here and there amid feathery palm branches, glowed under pink shades like enormous roses in full bloom, and up and down the wide staircase, carpeted in white, a number of pretty girls tripped under trailing garlands of Southern smilax. As we entered the door on the right, I saw Miss Mitty and Miss Matoaca, standing very ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... came to the castle for a night's shelter, and the maids flocked to her, Anne held back. The winter was long and black and rainy. One day, in Yves de Cornault's absence, some gypsies came to Kerfol with a troop of performing dogs. Anne bought the smallest and cleverest, a white dog with a feathery coat and one blue and one brown eye. It seemed to have been ill-treated by the gypsies, and clung to her plaintively when she took it from them. That evening her husband came back, and when she went to bed she found the dog ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... crisp-etched shadows; and in the afternoon there was always the wondrous opalescent haze of August, filling every distance. There was always his garden—there were the great trees, with the light sifting through high spaces of feathery green; there were the flowers, the birds, the bees, the butterflies, with their colour, and their fragrance, and their music; there was his tinkling fountain, in its nimbus of prismatic spray; there was the swift, symbolic Aco. And then, at a ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... design, the central portion being a framework of interlacing cream bands, forming diamond shaped panels alternating with circles, the centres of these panels being varied reds and greens; the framework surrounds four large panels of Pavonazzo d'Italie, each in six slabs. This is a beautiful marble of feathery purple grey veinings on a creamy white ground. This central part is flanked on each side by a broad band of the same Pavonazzo, which separates it from the large side panels of a bold design of squares of red, green and cream placed diagonally, interlaced by white bands; upon these panels ...
— The Cathedral Church of Peterborough - A Description Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • W.D. Sweeting
... soul; for, as I said, The sense of all his beauty, sweetness, comes When blossoms are the sweetest; when the sea, Sparkling and blue, cries to the sun in joy, Or, silent, pale, and misty waits the night, Till the moon, pushing through the veiling cloud, Hangs naked in its heaving solitude: When feathery pines wave up and down the shore, And the vast deep above holds gentle stars, And the vast world beneath ...
— Poems • Elizabeth Stoddard
... up and warm, and now the snowy world seemed to leap up at him and drag him down as though into an icy well. Mysterious shadows hovered over the garden; the fountain pointed darkly against the sky, and he could feel from the feathery touches upon his face that the snow had begun ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole
... Feathery smoke was rising from the funnels of the ship when Whistler and his chums had come aboard. Now great gray masses of oily smoke ballooned upward, drifting away to leeward before the gale. As soon as the anchors ...
— Navy Boys Behind the Big Guns - Sinking the German U-Boats • Halsey Davidson
... coming without noise, each flake so light and tiny none can mark the spot whereon it settles, yet the mass of it able to smother whole villages, wove through the very texture of his mind—cold, bewildering, deadening effort with its clinging network of ten million feathery touches. ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... Conspicuous on every hillside are the groves 'where the mango apples grow,' their mass of dense rounded foliage looking not unlike our maples, and giving a pleasant sense of home to the northern sojourner. The feathery bamboo, most gigantic of grasses, runs in plumy lines across the country. Around the negro cottages, here and there, rise groups of the cocoanut palms, giving, more than anything else, a tropical character to the landscape. On a distant eminence may perhaps be seen a lofty ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... thing, smaller than a grain of sand. When I plant them, I always wonder how those great, feathery petunias are coming out of those little, baby seeds, but they come. Over there are things that won't blossom till late—asters, tiger-lilies and prince's feather. It's going to be a beautiful garden, deary. Down by the gate are my sweet herbs and simples—marjoram, sweet thyme, ...
— Lavender and Old Lace • Myrtle Reed
... sparks from a glowing brand, 'Mid the tender green of the feathery fern And nodding sedge, by the light gale fanned, The Indian pinks in the sunlight burn; And the wide, cool cups of the corn flower brim With the sapphire's splendor of heaven's own blue, In sylvan hollows and dingles dim, Still sweet with a hint of ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... small, heavily-grated, unglazed window high in the wall, with a stone screen before it, so that the sky could be only seen by stooping low and looking up. There was a small chimney, heavily barred across, a few feet within. There was a heap of old feathery wood-ashes on the hearth. There was a stool, and table, and a straw bed. There were the four blackened walls, and a rusted iron ring ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... had been trained by a couple of maiden aunts who only thought to give you the manners of a gentleman, and leave you their money to get through the world with? I guess, under such circumstances, you, too, might have settled into the feathery nest prepared for you, and thought you were doing your duty to the world if you were only ornamental," and the dubious smile on his really handsome face robbed the speech ...
— That Girl Montana • Marah Ellis Ryan
... time we reached San Sebastian our rain had thickened to a heavy downpour, and by the time we mounted to our rooms, three pair up in the hotel, it was storming in a fine fury over the bay under them, and sweeping the curving quays and tossing the feathery foliage of the tamarisk-shaded promenade. The distinct advantage of our lofty perch was the splendid sight of the tempest, held from doing its worst by the mighty headlands standing out to sea on the right and left. But our rooms were cold with the stony cold of the south when it is cooling ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... while brilliant patches of clover or the quieter-coloured onion crops vary the green of the landscape. The scent of flowering bean-fields fills the air, and the hum of wild bees is heard above the other sounds of the fields. Palm groves lift their feathery plumes towards the sky, and mulberry-trees and dark-toned tamarisks shade the water-wheels, which, with incessant groanings, are continually turned by blindfolded bullocks. Villages and little farmsteads ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Egypt • R. Talbot Kelly
... river, perceptible only at intervals, owing to the thick clusters of gently nodding pines; the white-washed walls of cottages, glistening amid the dark green denseness of the thickly leaved box trees, and the light, feathery foliage of the golden laburnum; the undulating meadows, besprinkled with gorse and grotesquely moulded crags of granite; the white, the dazzling white roads, saturated with moonbeams; all—all were overwhelmed with stillness—the ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... surroundings, . . his unguided steps wandered as it seemed, of their own accord, into wide streets, paved entirely with mosaics, and lined on both sides with lofty, picturesque, and palace-like buildings,—he crossed and recrossed broad avenues, shaded by tall feathery palms, and masses of graceful flowering foliage,—he passed rows upon rows of brilliant shops, whose frontages glittered with the most costly and beautiful wares of every description,—and as he strolled ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... neighbourhood, find the church, and, in a word, do something to shake myself into my new garments. The day was glorious. I wandered along a green path, in the opposite direction from our walk the evening before, with a fir-wood on my right hand, and a belt of feathery tamarisks on my left, behind which lay gardens sloping steeply to a lower road, where stood a few pretty cottages. Turning a corner, I came suddenly in sight of the church, on the green down above me—a sheltered yet commanding situation; for, while the ...
— The Seaboard Parish Volume 1 • George MacDonald
... visiting places caused it to be very late when we sat down amongst stones and triodia to devour our frugal supper. A solitary eagle was the monarch of this scene; it was perched upon the highest peak of a bare ridge, and formed a feathery sky-line when looking up the gorge—always there sat the solemn, solitary, and silent bird, like the Lorelei on her rock— above—beautifully, there, as though he had a mission to watch the course of passing events, and to record them in the books of time and fate. There was a larger and semicircular ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... high in the feathery top of a giant sal tree was crying "miaow, miaow!" to the dipping sun when, in the centre of the Bagree camp the blacksmith, sitting on his haunches in front of a charcoal fire in which nested the iron cannon ball, fanned the flames with ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser
... it where the feathery palm-trees rise, And the date grows ripe under sunny skies? Or midst the green islands of glittering seas, Where fragrant forests perfume the breeze, And strange, bright birds, on starry wings, Bear the rich hues of all glorious things?" —"Not ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... scenting the old trail, lad, the trail that leads straight out of the Gate to swoop down to the South Seas. Do you think a man who has felt his ship's bows heave and plunge under him in the long Pacific swell—just ahead of him a reef breaking white into the lagoon, and beyond a fence of feathery palms—cares to follow hounds over gray hedges under a gray November sky? And the society? A man who's got a speaking acquaintance in every port from Acapulco to Melbourne, who knows every den and every longshoreman in it from a South American ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... and Hiel rebuilt. The spring, which is probably the same that Elisha cleansed with salt (II Kings ii: 19-22), sends forth a merry stream to turn a mill and irrigate a group of gardens full of oranges, figs, bananas, grapes, feathery bamboos and rosy oleanders. But the ancient city is buried under a great mound of earth, which the German ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... green glen, with a brawling stream running in white cataracts and rapids down its midst. We were able to breathe freely now; we could enjoy the great tapering deodars that rose in ranks on the hillsides, the snow-clad needles of ramping rock that bounded the view to north and south, the feathery bamboo-jungle that fringed and half-obscured the mountain torrent, whose cool music—alas, fallaciously cool—was borne to us through the dense screen of waving foliage. Lady Meadowcroft was so delighted at having got clear away from those murderous and ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... excitement, lifting their high shoulders and half unfolding the stiff drapery of their wings. As they saw their fellow overwhelmed they launched themselves from their perch and came hooting hoarsely over the rank, green tops of the palms and feathery calamaries. Swooping and circling they gathered over the hideous final struggle, and from time to time one or another would drop perpendicularly downward to stab the crown or the face of one of the preoccupied fish-beasts with his ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... the truth. The enormous mass of snow, weighing thousands of tons, had toppled over and slid down the mountain-side with a roar like Niagara, but stopped short, just before reaching the tent. Some of the feathery particles sailed forward and struck the canvas, the greatest effect being produced by the wind, but the monster was palsied before he could reach forward ...
— Klondike Nuggets - and How Two Boys Secured Them • E. S. Ellis
... is considered a sign of summer when the housewives fill the fireplaces with branches of mountain laurel, and, later, with the feathery stalks of the asparagus. This is often, too, the timid expression of a tender feeling, under Puritanic repression, which has not sufficient vent in the sweet-william and hollyhock at the front door. This is a yearning after beauty and ornamentation which ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... shrill voice sing out, "Take good aim, men—Fire"; but now each cannon in thunder shot forth its glance of flame, without a word being uttered, as she kept away to bring them to bear in succession, while the long feathery cloud of whirling white smoke that shrouded her sides from stem to stem, was sparkling brilliantly throughout with crackling musketry, for all the world like fire—flies in a bank of night fog from the hills, until the breeze blew it back again through the rigging, and once more ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... guards who were stationed at certain distances along the canal. These men, in winter, attend to keeping the surface free from obstruction and garbage. After a snowstorm they are expected to sweep the feathery covering away before it hardens into a marble pretty to look at but very unwelcome to skaters. Now and then the boys so far forgot their dignity as to clamber among the icebound canal boats crowded together in a widened harbor off the canal, but the watchful guards would soon ...
— Hans Brinker - or The Silver Skates • Mary Mapes Dodge
... bed of the daintiest of guest-chambers, for my apartment, though small, was comfortable, and with the hatch securely closed, I was safe from invasion by man or beast, and enjoyed the well-earned repose with a full feeling of security. The owl softly winnowed the air with his feathery pinions as he searched for his prey along the beach, sending forth an occasional to-hoot! as he rested for a moment on the leafless branches of an old tree, reminding me to take a peep at the night, and to inquire "what its signs ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop
... Soon the east end of the priory chapel was visible, basking in the broad light of the harvest moon, then riding up full and unclouded towards her zenith. Buttress and oriel were weltering in her beam, and the feathery pinnacles sprang out sharp and clear into the blue sky. The shadows were thrown back in masses deep and unbroken, more huge in proportion to the unknown depths through which the ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... who slowly paddles his canoe upon the waters of this western sound, each tree of different kind by shade of green and shape of crown is known; the Toh-a-mupt or Sitca spruce with scaley bark and prickly spine; the feathery foliage of the Quilth-kla-mupt, the western hemlock, relieved in spring by the light green of tender shoots. The frond-like branches and aromatic scent betray to him the much-prized Hohm-ess, the giant cedar tree, from which he carves his staunch canoe. These form the ...
— Indian Legends of Vancouver Island • Alfred Carmichael
... valleys where the pure bright waters of these hill-fed streams flow through a green tunnel of overarching trees, making a fertile paradise of flower and fern in their course. And the magnificent bold rocks and forelands of the coast, the streams broken into feathery spray falling down the precipitous face of the cliffs, creek and gully and cave, the wave-washed golden sands of the bays, or the line of foam fretting ever at the foot of these granite crags. And beyond is the sea; from every hilltop the eye turns to it, in the sheltered orchards ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... quiet—very silent—whether shines the mocking sun Through the wintry blue, or lowering drift the feathery snow-clouds dun: Always quiet, always silent, be it night or be it day, With that pale shroud coldly lying where the ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 422, New Series, January 31, 1852 • Various
... much to expect that the children could think or talk anything but sleds and snow that evening, and many were the anxious peeps taken through the living-room windows after supper to see how deep the feathery ...
— Four Little Blossoms and Their Winter Fun • Mabel C. Hawley
... verse the mocking bird descended to a lower branch. The feathery songster drew his head to one side and appeared to be completely enraptured at the wonderful voice of the young singer. When the last note died away upon the air, her fond brother sang ...
— De La Salle Fifth Reader • Brothers of the Christian Schools
... and moss-grown, over a dry water-course, where straggling willows stretched out from the bank and trailed their long, feathery ends a yard or so above the level of the weeds and grasses that carpeted the sandy bed of it, and along its edge—once built as a protection for the heedless or unwary, but now a ruin and a wreck—a moss-grown wall with a narrow, gateless archway made ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... rugged hills cut against the pale-saffron sky. The valley between was filled with blue shadow, but in the foreground a river twinkled in the fading light. Feathery larches grew close up to the house, and a beck splashed in the gloom among their trunks. Farther off, a dog barked, and there was a confused bleating of sheep, but this seemed to emphasize the ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss
... wet October afternoon of Rorie's home-coming; but no rakish horse came swinging round the curve of the carriage-drive. The flying snow drifted past the window; the winter sky looked blue and clear between the brief showers, the tall feathery fir-trees and straight slim cypresses stood up against the afternoon light, and Vixen gazed at them with angry eyes, full ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... suffered much from forest fires. What we see is largely second growth,—Banksian pine, fir, spruce, birch, and aspen. The aspen is the first deciduous tree to leaf. Tall, slender, delicate, its bole is clean as an organ-pipe and its terraced feathery branches ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... his bold form, And bares a brave breast to the lightning and storm, While palm, bay, and laurel, in classical glee, Chase tulip, magnolia, and fragrant fringe-tree; And sturdy horse-chestnut for centuries hath given Its feathery blossom and branches ...
— Poems • Mary Baker Eddy
... moon flooded the valley one midnight. Dorthe lay on the bank of the creek in the fern forest. She and the frogs had held long converse, and she was staring up through the feathery branches, waving in the night wind, at the calm silver face which had ignored her overtures. Upon this scene entered a man. He was attenuated and ragged. Hair and beard fell nearly to his waist. He leaned on a staff, and tottered like ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... anxiously around. He was in the midst of an almost bare sun-baked plain, the new-sown fields awaiting the rains to spring into verdure. Here and there were clumps of trees—the towering palmyra with its fan-shaped foliage, the bamboo with its feathery branches, the plantain, throwing its immense leaves of vivid green into every fantastic form. There was no safety ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... here the inhabitants of this favored estate would resort for recreation in the afternoon and evening. Near this strip of land, beneath the shade of an immense live-oak, luxuriates a clump of West India bamboo, said to have originated from a single stalk brought here by General Lee. The feathery lances clash and rattle with all the wild abandon characteristic of them in their native isles. I have not seen a more perfect group outside the islands ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... troopers on horseback. It was the last day of the year, and although a winter morning, the rare mountain air was as soft as spring. We struck the banks of the Tuckasegee directly opposite to a feathery waterfall, which, leaping over a crag of the opposite cliff, was dissipated in a glittering sheet of spray before reaching the tops of the trees below. As the morning advanced we fell into a more negligent order of marching. The beautiful river, a wide, swift ...
— Famous Adventures And Prison Escapes of the Civil War • Various
... more than one passer-by gave her smiles in return. They had not long been out when the snow came indeed, as if just to oblige the little maiden; first in a sulky, slow way, then taking a start as if it were in earnest, down came the feathery flakes. ...
— Harper's Young People, December 16, 1879 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... not cold; they have a bed like that" (a high gesture toward the quilt of many colours on which we were sitting, such a quilt as I have not seen since; a feathery deepness soft to the touch as air in Spring), "which is worth three times this of mine—but tu comprends, it's not hot these mornings"—then he dropped his head, and lifted ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... amongst the stalks of the banana plantation, darted over the moonlit space, and fell in the darkness at the foot of the verandah. It might have been the shadow of a driving cloud, so noiseless and rapid was its passage, but for the trail of disturbed grass, whose feathery heads trembled and swayed for a long time in the moonlight before they rested motionless and gleaming, like a design of silver sprays embroidered on a ...
— Almayer's Folly - A Story of an Eastern River • Joseph Conrad
... wigglers. If you find pupae, put some in a tumbler of water, cover it with cloth or a lid and watch for the mosquitoes to appear. After collecting several mosquitoes examine them for number of wings, legs and markings and see if all have the slender sucking tube. The males have large feathery feelers, ...
— An Elementary Study of Insects • Leonard Haseman
... quantity of her ware; and I notice that, after giving lumping weight, she throws in a few extra, presumably to counterbalance what, upon sober second thought, she perceives to have been an unjust suspicion. While I am extracting what satisfaction my feathery purchase contains, it begins to rain and hail furiously, and so continues with little interruption all the forenoon, compelling me, much against my inclination, to search out in Tronville, if possible, some accommodation till ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... some day, when the beds have ceased To cater for your daily feast, You'll see—the after growth is fair— A green and feathery forest there, And "here," you'll say, "is what shall cheer My ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 29, 1914 • Various
... and exhilarating. The fir trees and shrubs gave out a delicious perfume, and their waving tops seemed to beckon us on. The sky was deep blue, with here and there a feathery cloud gliding lazily over its surface. The bright sunlight made our hearts bound and filled our bodies with vigour, and as we stood there on the edge of the unknown and silent world we had come so far to see, our hopes ...
— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace
... del Ponte is a long grey rectangular building, as severe in outward aspect as a barrack or a prison, in a garden that stretches right away to the sea-wall, a garden full of palms, oranges, tall, feathery eucalyptus-trees, and lizards, perfectly Italian. But no sooner do you pass the portal of the house, than you leave Italy, as on a magic-carpet, and find yourself in the seventh circle of England, amid English furniture, ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... separated them, by giving one of the females a sharp tweak and blow. Then the males were at it again, their blue plumage mixing with the green grass and ruffled by the ruddy soil. What a soft, feathery, ineffectual battle it seemed in both cases!—no sound, no blood, no flying feathers, just a sudden mixing up and general disarray of blue wings and tails and ruddy breasts, there on the ground; assault but no visible wounds; thrust of beak and grip of ...
— Bird Stories from Burroughs - Sketches of Bird Life Taken from the Works of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... Chinon. The country is rich and noble, deep in grass and maize and corn, with meadows set in low broad hedgerows, and bare scratchy vineyards along the slopes. The road is lined with acacias, Tennyson's "milk-white bloom" hanging from their tender feathery boughs, and here beneath the hot sun of the South the acacia is no mere garden shrub but one of the finest and most graceful of trees. Everywhere along the broad sunlit river of Vienne nature is rich and lavish, and nowhere richer or more lavish than where, towering high on the ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... first three hours he went forward to peer through the wind and the glaring sunshine for the first glimpse of the Isle of Man. When at length he saw it, like a gray bird lying on the waters far away, with the sun's light tipping the hill-tops like a feathery crest, he felt so thick about the throat that he took six steerage passengers to the bar below to help him to get rid of his hoarseness. There was a brass band aboard, and during the trip they played all the outlandish airs ...
— Capt'n Davy's Honeymoon - 1893 • Hall Caine
... children awoke, and saw a white world around them. Alec jumped out of bed in delight. It was a sunny, frosty morning. The snow had fallen all night, with its own silence, and no wind had interfered with the gracious alighting of the feathery water. Every branch, every twig, was laden with its sparkling burden of down-flickered flakes, and threw long lovely shadows on the smooth featureless dazzle below. Away, away, stretched the outspread glory, the only darkness in it being the line of the winding river. ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... skin of a curious pale silvery gray, and pale, pure-white hair rising in what looked like a feathery crest. The eyes were long and slanting, the forehead high and narrow, the nose delicately thin and chiseled with long vertically slit nostrils, the ears long, pointed and lobeless. The mouth looked almost human, though the chin was abnormally pointed. The hands would ...
— The Colors of Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... chuckles a little to itself as the greedy creatures pass it by untouched. School-girls and botanists break down the golden-rods and asters, and pull up the gerardias and ladies'-tresses; but neither school-girl nor collector often troubles the thistle. It opens its gorgeous blossoms and ripens its feathery fruit unmolested. Truly it is a great thing to wear ...
— The Foot-path Way • Bradford Torrey
... had been of little profit, and they range their luxuriant expanse of pasture with as little heed. To the left soar up, in long range, the many-coloured hills; to the right meanders a creek, belted by feathery trees; and on its opposite bank a forest opens, through frequent breaks, into park-like glades and alleys. The territory, of which I so suddenly find myself the lord, is vast, even ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... them to sway and caper in a sabbath of misrule. The forms of the community emerged from the gust-blown vestments, the dean of studies, the portly florid bursar with his cap of grey hair, the president, the little priest with feathery hair who wrote devout verses, the squat peasant form of the professor of economics, the tall form of the young professor of mental science discussing on the landing a case of conscience with his class like a giraffe cropping high leafage among a herd of antelopes, the ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... the fording point, there was a little island which lay like a feathery tree-top upon the tinted water; and as Dan went by, he felt the brush of willows on his face and heard the soft lapping of the small waves upon the shore. The keen smell of the sycamores drifted to him ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... Wings! I should think not!" Melissa had all a sound bee's hereditary hatred against the big, squeaking, feathery Thief of the Hives. "Tumble out!" she called across the youngsters' quarters. "All you who aren't feeding babies, show a leg. Scrap-wax pillars for the Ga-ate!" She chanted the order ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... the steaming rain-washed slopes, Now satisfied with sunshine, and behold Those lustrous clouds, as glorious as our hopes, Softened with feathery fleece of downy gold, In all fantastic, huddled shapes uprolled, Floating like dreams, and melting silently, In the blue ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... chastising all persons that fall away from their duties); He that assumed the form of a Swan for communicating the Vedas to the Grandsire Brahman; (or, He that enters into the bodies of all persons); He that has Garuda, the prince of the feathery denizens of the welkin, for His vehicle; He that is the foremost of snakes in consequence of His identity with Sesha or Ananta who upholds on his head the vast Earth, (or, He that has the hood of the prince of snakes for His bed while He lies down to sleep ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... stories Indian girls are called squaws," remarked practical Dan, tying his mayflowers together in one huge, solid, cabbage-like bunch. Not for Dan the bother of filling his basket with the loose sprays, mingled with feathery elephant's-ears and trails of creeping spruce, as the rest of us, following the Story Girl's example, did. Nor would he admit that ours looked any better ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... all round the low garden-wall of the Mission, staring through the feathery cloud of the tamarisks at the upper windows of the house, till he saw a light in one of them, when he sat down on his heels and watched it doggedly. He feared the blame which would attach to himself were the Emir to die; still more the reproaches of his own mind; but ...
— The Valley of the Kings • Marmaduke Pickthall
... terrible attacks, Wield the huge mace and ponderous battle-axe; And as they wave aloft in morning's beam The milk-white plumage of their helms, they seem Like a chenar-tree grove[32] when winter throws O'er all its tufted heads his feathery snows. ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... was a cold one, but clear. More snow had fallen, and the deep, feathery whiteness stretched away until lost in the dark background of the pines and spruces. A wavering line of smoke rose over the roof of the little old shack ...
— Good Cheer Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... did everything they could think of to cheer up the doctor and made a great feast in his honor. Sahwah baked her feathery biscuits; Migwan stirred up a pan of delicious fudge; Hinpoha made her famous slumgullion; Nyoda broiled fish, while the rest of the girls gathered blueberries in the woods. The cooking must have tasted good to the doctor, for he passed his plate three times for slumgullion and ate so many ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Maine Woods - Or, The Winnebagos Go Camping • Hildegard G. Frey
... swayed on its delicate dark brown stems, and the ostrich fern stood in vase-like clusters along the mountain side or spread their lovely fronds along some river bank, while the dainty bladder bulblet draped ravines, gorges and steep banks of streams with long feathery fronds whose points overlapped the delicate light green of which formed a vast composite picture in sunlight and shadow. Here we first discovered the lizard's-tail, a tall plant crowned with a terminal spike whose point bent gracefully ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... air are good," she thought, watching the sun-rays pierce the purple hearts of a passion-flower, the shadows move across the deep brown water, the radiant butterfly alight upon a lily, the scarlet-throated birds dart in and out through the yellow feathery blossoms of ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... didn't. He threw me over," said Nancy, plaintively, looking afar over the low-lying fields and a feathery young spruce valley to the white buildings of the Wright farm, glowing rosily in the sunset light when all the rest of Avonlea was scarfing itself in shadows. There was laughter in her eyes. Louisa could not pierce beneath that laughter to find if ...
— Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... and shrub, in place of leaves, had assumed a dress of milk white feathers. How dazzling it was. The eye could hardly bear the strong reflected light. A forest of feathers! We had never seen this effect in such perfection before. And now the sun, kissing these feathery sprays with warmth and burning ardor, made them blush rosy red, like the cheeks of a young maiden pressed by amorous lips. The feathery robe of the branches was as frail as false modesty, and melted away like good resolutions under strong ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... all silver. She shone and glistened. Like a great bird, she flung out tilting wings. The sun kissed them and turned them into flashing mirrors. Behind her the German shells burst in white puffs of smoke, feathery, delicate, as innocent-looking as the tips of ostrich-plumes. The biplane ran before them and seemed to play with them as children race up the beach laughing at the pursuing waves. The biplane darted left, darted right, climbed unseen aerial trails, tobogganed down ...
— With the French in France and Salonika • Richard Harding Davis
... Chance, listen hour after hour as the day wears itself out from early morning to late evening in that beautiful, cruel, enchanting earthly paradise, whose shores are washed by the bluest sea in the world, whose gardens are dotted with globes of golden fruit, and plumed with feathery palms, and where, as you wander in and out among the delicious shadowy foliage, you hear, incessantly, the sound of guns, and may, now and then, catch sight of some doomed creature with delicate white breast and broken wing, ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... terribly still. The stillness beat as before, like a thing with feathery wings. The distant clock tick came and went between these flurries of silence. I looked at my watch. An hour had gone. It was growing dark. My patient chauffeur had lit his lights. Passers-by came and went, in and out of their white ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... thick, with low stratus clouds in the morning, and snow was falling in large crystals. Our socks and finnesko, hung out to dry, were covered with most beautiful feathery crystals. In the warm weather one gets fairly saturated with perspiration on the march, and foot-gear is always wet, except the outside covering which is as a rule more or less frozen according to existing temperature. On camping at night I shift to night foot-gear ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... cascades came leaping and plunging from everywhere into the canyon. Two of these opposite our camp were exceedingly beautiful. One was about two feet wide and the other five. For one thousand feet they made a clear plunge, then vanished in spray, feathery and beautiful. These rain cascades are a delightful feature of the country and some day will be famous. Soon Millecrag Bend, marking the end of Cataract Canyon, came in sight. The walls were only broken by a deep canyon valley coming in on the left, and the next canyon. Narrow, then began, ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... April, 1869, is a huge globular mass of moss and fine moss-roots some 7 inches in diameter, with, on the upper side, an entrance to a small egg-cavity some 31/2 inches in diameter, and 2 inches in depth. It is a most singular nest, a great compact ball of soft feathery moss and very fine moss-roots, which latter predominate in the interior of the cavity, and so form a sort of lining to it. The great body of the nest is below the cavity, the overhanging dome-like covering of the cavity being ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume
... and the shadows of the beech-aisles of Dollan, she appears to be a large bird, with a philosophic contentment of mind—an ancient creature that, shunning the fellow-ships of the garish modern day and loving the leisure and the solitude of night, dreams of the past. But, beneath its loose feathery garments, her body, hardly larger than that of a ringdove, is altogether out of proportion to her long, narrow head and wide-spreading talons. Visions of the past may come to her, as, blinking at the light of day, she sits in the hollow of the ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees
... upper picture shows a rice field in the foreground, tea alongside the buildings, and the graceful feathery bamboo in the background; also, an unusual sight on a Japanese farm, a group of cattle. The lower picture shows ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... the soft haziness of a June morning, and the dew sucked a fresh fragrance from the blossoms and the grass. I looked out of our window at the orchard, all pink and white in the early sun, and across a patch of clover to the stone kitchen. A pearly, feathery smoke was wafted from the chimney, a delicious aroma of Creole coffee pervaded the odor of the blossoms, and a cotton-clad negro a pieds nus came down the path with two steaming cups and knocked at our door. He who has tasted ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... limestone trunks or stems which encased them. Blue, red, pink, orange, purple, and green, were among the colours, and the variety of patterns seemed absolutely endless: they mimicked, in their manner of growth, the foliage of trees, the spreading antlers of the stag, globes, columns, stars, feathery plumes, trailing vines, and all the wildest and most graceful forms of terrestrial vegetation. Nothing was wanting to complete this submarine shrubbery, even to the minutest details; there were mosses, and ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... tame and tractable energy, Electricity is new. It has no past and no pedigree. It is younger than many people who are now alive. Among the wise men of Greece and Rome, few knew its existence, and none put it to any practical use. The wisest knew that a piece of amber, when rubbed, will attract feathery substances. But they regarded this as poetry rather than science. There was a pretty legend among the Phoenicians that the pieces of amber were the petrified tears of maidens who had thrown themselves ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... human habitation became increasingly apparent: little clusters of nipa-thatched huts built on stilts over the water; others hidden away in the jungle and betraying themselves only by spirals of smoke rising lazily above the feathery tops of the palms. Sandakan itself straggles up a steep wooded hill, the Chinese and native quarters at its base wallowing amid a network of foul-smelling and incredibly filthy sewers and canals or built on rickety wooden platforms which extend for half a mile ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... that early summer night, weathermen across the world were marking their weather maps with thousands of observations—feathery wind arrows, temperatures, barometric ...
— Warning from the Stars • Ron Cocking
... and Datu. The bay, as far as we have seen, is free from danger; the beach is lined by a feathery row of beautiful casuarinas, and behind is a tangled jungle, without fine timber; game is plentiful, from the traces we saw on the sand; hogs in great numbers; troops of monkeys, and the print of an animal with cleft hoofs, either a large deer, tapir, ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... on this south side, so sunny, with feathery trees and deep black shadows. It reminded me of Goethe, of the ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... now studded with knobs of golden blossoms. The milk-weed, (I see a great gorgeous creature of gamboge and black lighting on one as I write,) is in flower, with its delicate red fringe; and there are profuse clusters of a feathery blossom waving in the wind on taper stems. I see lots of these and much else in every direction, as I saunter or sit. For the last half hour a bird has persistently kept up a simple, sweet, melodious song, from the bushes. (I ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... boat. They came out to the left of us and sailed ahead together. Then they must have been turned by the wind, for they made a beautiful, graceful curve until they came around so that I was sure they would fly into the boat. Their motion was indescribably airy and feathery, buoyant and swift, with not the slightest quiver of fins or wings as they passed within five feet of me. I could see through the crystal wings. Their bodies were white and silvery, and they had staring black eyes. ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey |
