"Peat" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... order that it may support its present occupants, that even beds of coal have been stored up for mans benefit Yet what is more accidental, and more simply the consequence of physical agencies than the accumulation of vegetable matter in a peat bog and its transformation into coal? No scientific person at this day doubts that our solar system is a progressive development, whether in his conception he begins with molten masses, or aeriform or nebulous masses, or with a fluid revolving mass of vast extent, ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... percherons seemed to feel the unrest of their driver, for they fretted and actually executed a clumsy prance as Jim Irwin pulled them up at the end of the turnpike across Bronson's Slew—the said slew being a peat-marsh which annually offered the men of the Woodruff District the opportunity to hold the male equivalent of a sewing circle while working out their road taxes, with much conversational gain, and no great ...
— The Brown Mouse • Herbert Quick
... with her baby escaped only by hiding in a cellar under a ruined house. When the boy was seven years old his mother died, and since then he had gone from one village to another as the fancy took him. For a week or more he might be herding goats or sheep, fishing, or cutting peat for fires; he stayed nowhere longer than he chose and owned nothing in the world except what he wore. Under the tunic there hung a small leather bag with the few relics his mother had left him. He could ...
— Masters of the Guild • L. Lamprey
... green that all hope of maturity was out of the question. Low meadows were in a state of inundation, and on alluvial soils the ravages of the floods Were visible in layers of mud and gravel that were deposited over many of the prostrate corn fields. The peat turf lay in oozy and neglected heaps, for there had not been sun enough to dry it sufficiently for use, so that the poor had want of fuel, and cold to feel, as well as want of food itself. Indeed, the appearance of the country, in consequence of this wetness in the firing, was singularly dreary ...
— The Black Prophet: A Tale Of Irish Famine • William Carleton
... that wakening up to very ecstasy among the islands of Loch Lomond,—that new world, magical, enchanting. And then that plunge into the heart of the Highlands, when they find themselves by the shores of Loch Katrine, alone with the native people there,—the smell of the peat-reek within, and the scent of the bog-myrtle without; those 'gentle ardours' that awake, as they move along Lochawe-side and look into the cove of Cruachan, or catch that Appin glen by Loch Linnhe, at the bright sunset hour, enlivened by the haymaking people; or that new rapture ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... her dark groves, her little cities perched like eyries on the crags, her rivers gliding under ancient walls; beautiful is Italy, her seas, and her suns: but dearer to me the long grey wave that bites the rock below the minster in the north; dearer are the barren moor and black peat-water swirling in tauny foam, and the scent of bog myrtle and the bloom of heather, and, watching over the lochs, ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... found on his father's estate and other localities in Strathmore a number of small lakes, lying in hollows of the boulder clay. These were being drained and their deposits quarried for the purpose of 'marling' the land; the excavations thus made showed that, under peat containing a boat hollowed out of the trunk of a tree, there were calcareous deposits, sometimes 16 to 20 feet in thickness, which passed into a rock, solid and crystalline in character as the materials of the older geological ...
— The Coming of Evolution - The Story of a Great Revolution in Science • John W. (John Wesley) Judd
... ensign of the Abbot of Whalley, hung by a chain from his neck. A hunting knife was in his girdle, and an eagle's plume in his cap, and he leaned upon the but-end of a crossbow, regarding three persons who stood together by a peat fire, on the sheltered side of the beacon. Two of these were elderly men, in the white gowns and scapularies of Cistertian monks, doubtless from Whalley, as the abbey belonged to that order. The third and last, and evidently ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... wilds, which occupy all the northwest of the county, one may travel all day and meet with no living thing save the birds of the air, and a few shy, wild creatures of the moorlands; curve after curve, the rounded hills stretch away into the distance, grass-grown or heatherclad, with occasional peat-mosses; above is the "grey gleaming sky," and, all around, a stillness as of vast untrodden wastes, and a sense of solitude out of all proportion to the actual extent of this lonely region. The fascination of it, ...
— Northumberland Yesterday and To-day • Jean F. Terry
... a saddle is a proper place for jewels, then let the seat be paved with diamonds and emeralds, and Runjeet Singh's harness-maker be considered as a lofty artist, for whose barbaric splendour Mr. Peat and his Melton customers are to forswear pigskin and severe simplicity—not to say utility and comfort. If poetic diction be different in species from plain English, then let us have it as poetical as possible, and as unlike English; as ungrammatical, abrupt, involved, transposed, as the clumsiness, ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... doubtfully over the immense peat bog through which the train had been travelling, and thought of the swamps and the forests of pine and birch which lay between them and Lulea, many miles away on the coast. Then she looked forward toward more peat bogs, swamps and forests that lay ...
— Gerda in Sweden • Etta Blaisdell McDonald
... also became a permanent part of the School life. The Cricket-field had been purchased in 1869, and had been used for both Cricket and Football. Unfortunately it was a fair-weather ground. Its foundations rested on peat, and continuous play all the year round did not improve it. The first matches that were played took place in the early seventies, when the Hostel had as yet only fourteen boys, but in spite of their small ...
— A History of Giggleswick School - From its Foundation 1499 to 1912 • Edward Allen Bell
... army have already accomplished their military task but they cannot be demobilized as yet. Now that they have been released from their military duties, they must fight against economic ruin and against hunger; they must work to obtain fuel, peat and other heat-producing products; they must take part in building, in clearing the lines of snow, in repairing roads, ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... from the turn of the hill-side the Blair of Drummond waving with corn and shadowed with rich woods, where eighty years ago there was a black peat-moss; and far off, on the horizon, Damyat and the Touch Fells; and at his side the little loch of Ruskie, in which he may see five Highland cattle, three tawny brown and two brindled, standing in the still water—themselves as still, all except their switching tails and winking ears—the ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... Rein; and gives name to the little place. We heard of the Rein at Ruppin: it is there counted as a kind of river; still more, twenty miles farther down, where it falls into the Havel, on its way to the Elbe. The waters, I think, are drab-colored, not peat-brown: and here, at the source, or outfall from that mesh of lakes, where Reinsberg is, the country seems to be about the best;—sufficient, in picturesqueness and otherwise, to satisfy a ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle
... cloud stretched across from north to south, and thickening as they got near the horizon. Down at their feet, near the shore, a dusky line of huts and houses was scarcely visible; and over these lay a pale blue film of peat smoke that did not ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... things are like guid—they baith come bit by bit, a pickle at a time; an' there were folk even then that said the Lord had left the college professors to their ain devices, an' the lads that went to study wi' them wad hae done mair an' better sittin' in a peat-bog, like their forbears o' the persecution, wi' a Bible under their oxter an' a speerit o' prayer in their heart. There was nae doubt, onyway, but that Mr. Soulis had been ower lang at the college. He was careful an' troubled for mony things besides the ae thing needful. He had a ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... thence to the sea-port town of Greenock from which the packet ships went weekly out into the mists, heading for the land of promise somewhere beyond the sky-line. He slept with his companions on heather beds in front of peat fires in the homes of the Highlanders through whose villages they passed, and the Gaelic tongue of one of their number was always a charm sufficient to secure them food. He reached Greenock on the 20th of March, but because of unforeseen delay it was not until April 11th that he embarked ...
— McGill and its Story, 1821-1921 • Cyrus Macmillan
... shepherding his father's flock on the hills, and whilst thus engaged, he, one misty morning, came suddenly upon a lovely girl, seated on the sheltered side of a peat-stack. The maiden appeared to be in great distress, and she was crying bitterly. The young man went up to her, and spoke kindly to her, and his attention and sympathy were not without effect on the comely stranger. So beautiful was the young woman, that from expressions of sympathy the ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... substance and makes the greater value of coal as fuel. There is little doubt now as to the method by which this woody material of the past has been converted into coal. The same process appears to be going on in a similar manner to-day in the peat beds of various northern countries. The fallen vegetation, trees, trunks, branches, and leaves, accumulate in masses, and, when the conditions of moisture and temperature are right, begin to undergo a fermentation. Ordinarily this action of bacteria, as already ...
— The Story Of Germ Life • H. W. Conn
... wind blowing Over hill-flower and peat, Where the bell heather's growing, And the brown burn flowing, And the ghost-shadows going Down the glen on stealthy feet. There's a clean wind blowing, And the breath of it ...
— A Cluster of Grapes - A Book of Twentieth Century Poetry • Various
... the Spaniard lay at Smerwick; and, mean and crumbling, still gave rise to emotions which the stern battlements of Stralsund or of Rostock had failed to evoke. Soil and sky, the lark which sang overhead, the dark peat-water which rose under foot, the scent of the moist air, the cry of the curlew, all spoke of home—the home which he had left in the gaiety of youth, to return to it a grave man, older than his years, and with grey hairs flecking the black. No wonder that he stood more ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... the Ingvorstrup horses were intended for. They were to blind the judge and to lead him aside from the narrow path of righteousness. The rich Morten Bruus covets poor Ole Andersen's peat moor and pasture land. It would have been a good bargain for Morten even at seventy thalers. But no indeed, my good fellow, ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... intensely interesting episodes related by a Young American who served as a volunteer with the French Army—Red Cross Division. His book is to the field of mercy what those of Empey, Holmes and Peat have been in describing the vicissitudes of army life. The author spent ten months in ambulance work on the Verdun firing line. What he saw and did is recounted with most graphic clearness. This book contains many illustrations ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... made a bright peat fire, which all the children gathered round, expecting every minute to hear their parents' voices at the door. But it began to get dark and late, and still they did not come. Agnes had often heard of the dangers ...
— The Old Castle and Other Stories • Anonymous
... in a considerable peninsula: very bare and grassy; haunted by sheep, and, at night and morning, by the piercing cries of the shepherds; wandered over by a few wild goats; and on its sea-front indented with long, clamorous caves, and faced with cliffs of the colour and ruinous outline of an old peat-stack. In one of these echoing and sunless gullies we saw, clustered like sea-birds on a splashing ledge, shrill as sea-birds in their salutation to the passing boat, a group of fisherwomen, stripped to their gaudy underclothes. (The clash ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... cottagers, and this he could not stand. Not one beast in two years had fattened on its barrenness. Three old donkeys alone eked out the remnants of their days. A bundle of firewood or old bracken, a few peat sods from one especial corner, were all the selfish peasants gathered. But the cottagers were no great matter—he could soon have settled them; it was that fellow Peacock whom he could not settle, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... and Clifton (southeastern part of Penobscot county) northward just east of the Penobscot river the predominant tree, generally on dry ridges and eskers, but in Greenbush and Passadumkeag growing abundantly on peat bogs with black spruce; hillsides and lower mountains about Moosehead, scattered; New Hampshire,—ranges with the pitch pine as far north as the White mountains, but is less common, usually in groves of a few to several hundred acres in extent; Vermont,—less common than P. Strobus ...
— Handbook of the Trees of New England • Lorin Low Dame
... traces of Roman occupation hereabouts in mounds and earthworks. Not long ago a man ploughing in the fen struck an old red vase up with the share, and searching the place found a number of the same urns within the space of a few yards, buried in the peat, as fresh as the day they were made. There was nothing else to be found, and the place was under water till fifty years ago; so that it must have been a boatload of pottery being taken in to market that ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... over his big book, he told his distracted client to find a black hen without a single feather of any other colour. This she was to bake (not living, but dead, as appears by the sequel) before a fire of wood (not, as usual, of peat), with feathers and all intact. Every window and opening was to be closed, except one—presumably the chimney; and she was not to watch the crimbil, or changeling, until the hen had been done enough, which she would know by the falling off of all her feathers. The more knowing woman, in an Irish ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... had long since been cleared off by the travellers who had preceded them. The chips afforded excellent fuel, burning with a fierce, steady glow, and making a fire something like that afforded by well-dried peat. Another source of fuel were the bones which lay in many places, scattered pretty thickly. Sometimes these marked the spot where long before a party of Indians had come upon a herd of buffalo, sometimes they were remains of the cattle of caravans ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty
... at least amongst their own class. But behind them, and I should say in unpleasant proximity (for the peasantry do not carry handkerchiefs scented with White Rose or Jockey Club,—only the odor of the peat and the bogwood), surged a vast crowd of men and women, on whose lips and in whose hearts was a prayer for her who was entering on the momentous change in her sweet and tranquil life. And young Patsies and Willies and Jameses were locked by their legs around their brothers' ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... a peat or turf-cutter, who had newly joined the group, carried across his shoulder the singular heart-shaped spade of large dimensions used in that species of labour; and its well-whetted edge gleamed like a silver bow in the ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... about six ounces of thick, black matter were found in it. The middle lobe was crepitant, though soaked with black fluid; several impacted lobules were scattered throughout its substance. The inferior lobe was indurated, resembling a piece of moist peat. The left lung was cavernous in both lobes, and the cysts were empty, the contents having been expectorated. A small portion of the upper lobe was pervious to air. There were several enlarged bronchial glands at the root of both lungs; and ...
— An Investigation into the Nature of Black Phthisis • Archibald Makellar
... Plausaby did know how to manage sharks. He went out and examined the stakes, and found that block 26 did not contain the oak, but was much farther down in the slough, and that the corner lots that were to have been Katy's wedding portion stretched quite into the peat bog, and further that if the Baptist University should stand on block 27, it would have a baptistery all ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... on high, white, green-turreted cliffs by the sea. I have tramped the tough heather, the purple, the brown, By pools of peat water; from the night to the day, Till the moon has dropped down: the ghost of a minim, low down, In a high-piping treble ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... or should they come to a thicket or shaw, they would lodge them there softly. Victual and drink failed them not, for they bore what they needed on sumpter-horses, and shot some venison on the way withal. They saw but few folk; for the most part naught save a fowler of the waste, or a peat-cutter, who stood to look on the men-at-arms going by, and made obeisance to the token ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris
... those who have eaten oatmeal porridge in the wayside cottages of bonny Scotland, or who love to linger over "The Cotter's Saturday Night," there is a touch of tender pathos in the picture. The stone floor, the bare, whitewashed walls, the peat smoldering on the hearth, sending out long, fitful streaks that dance among the rafters overhead, and the mother and son sitting there watching the coal—silent. The woman takes a small twig from a bundle of sticks, reaches over, lights it, applies ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... very dismal place. Fish, and water-birds, and rats inhabited it: and here and there stood the hut of a fowler; or a peat-stack raised by the people who lived on the hills round, and who obtained their fuel from the peat-lands in the swamp. There were also, sprinkled over the district, a few very small houses—cells belonging to the Abbey of Saint Mary, at York. To these cells some of the monks from ...
— The Settlers at Home • Harriet Martineau
... your company and assistance. Wait a bit! There is a fellow cutting peat up yonder. Bring him over here, and he will ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... of an old Irish peasant in Kerry, Robert Blatchford asked him what he wanted. "The old man leaned upon his spade and looked out across the black peat fields at the lowering skies. 'What is it that I'm wantun?' he said; then in a deep plaintive tone he continued, more to himself than to me, 'All our brave bhoys and dear gurrls is away an' over the says, an' the agent has taken the pig off me, an' the wet has spiled the praties, an' I'm an owld ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... strong pile-drivings, he finds half a furlong of his latest heavy piling clean gone. What in the world has become of it? Pooh, the swollen lake has burst it topsy-turvy; and it floats yonder, bottom uppermost, a half-furlong of distracted liquid-peat. Whereat his Majesty gave a loud laugh, says Bielfeld, [Baron de Bielfeld, Lettres Familieres (second edition, a Leide, 1767), i. 31.] and commenced anew. The piles now stand firm enough, like the rest of the Earth's crust, and carry strong ashlar houses and umbrageous ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... the cottage, though rugged, was not cheerless. In the long winter evenings they would gather around a smoking fire of peat, while Tennyson read aloud the Idylls of the King to the rude old cottager. Not to show his rudeness, the old man kept awake by sitting on a tin-tack. This also kept his mind on the right tack. The two found that they had much in common, especially the old cottager. They called each other "Alfred" ...
— Literary Lapses • Stephen Leacock
... knife, F, for cutting the material into suitable lengths in a peat machine having a continuous discharge from the expelling ...
— Scientific American, Vol. 17, No. 26 December 28, 1867 • Various
... sea. At the mouth of the Igarape Grande, both at Soure and at Salvaterra, on the southern side of the Igarape, is a submerged forest. Evidently this forest grew in one of those marshy lands constantly inundated, for between the stumps is accumulated the loose, felt-like peat characteristic of such grounds, and containing about as much mud as vegetable matter. Such a marshy forest, with the stumps of the trees still standing erect in the peat, has been laid bare on both sides of the Igarape Grande by the encroachments of the ocean. That this ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... the virgin mould itself, with a peculiar jerk, clean down to the sand, or rather the water—for it was a very springy soil—indeed all the terra firma there was—and haul it away on sleds, and then I guessed that they must be cutting peat in a bog. So they came and went every day, with a peculiar shriek from the locomotive, from and to some point of the polar regions, as it seemed to me, like a flock of arctic snow-birds. But sometimes Squaw Walden had her ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... days—spoken as he spoke it. Perhaps it was because I was tired: the office faded away, desk, Headquarters across the street, boy, officer, business, and all. In their place were the brown heath I loved, the distant hills, the winding wagon track, the peat stacks, and the solitary sheep browsing on the barrows. Forgotten the thirty years, the seas that rolled between, the teeming city! I was at home again, a child. And there he stood, the boy, with ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... that his lantern would be useful to show her the way. They went into a long, smoky room. The women had collected into one corner, and the priest was walking up and down, his hands thrust into the pockets of his overcoat. Now he stopped in his walk to scold two children who were trying to light a peat fire in ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... muffin is quite hot," said Fanny, stooping down to a tray which stood before the peat fire, holding the muffin dish. "But perhaps you'd like a morsel of buttered toast; say the word, uncle, and I'll make it in a ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... rain to the roots of flowers. Donald had one of the rare voices that carry the heart to laughter and to sobs. The singer's song, all pathos and tenderness, played on the chords of our emotion like a harp. My eyes began to smart. Creagh muttered something about the peat-smoke affecting his, and I'm fain to admit that I rolled over with my face from the fire to hide the tell-tale tears. The haunting pathetic wistfulness of the third stanza shook me ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... Canadians. We were housed in one large hut built on a swamp and were continually wet. There were only two small stoves for the seven hundred men and we had only a few two pound syrup tins in which to cook. A poor quality of peat was our only fuel. As only five men could crowd round a stove at a time, one's chances were rather slim in the dense mob, every man-jack of whom was waiting to slip into the first vacant place ...
— The Escape of a Princess Pat • George Pearson
... last, and having laid my flask, tobacco-pouch, and twelve loose cartridges where I could reach them most handily on projecting shelves of peat inside the butt—I love neatness and method: Kitty says that when (if ever) I get to heaven I will decline to enter until I have wiped my boots,—settled down to enjoy a superb view and take note of the not altogether uninteresting ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay
... see are so few ... Aye! There was a power of trouble. There were two men killed themselves and families broken up all by reason of me. I meant no harm, wee Shane, but it happened, and it does be troubling me in my old days. And I sit there afeared by the peat fire, and when I've thought too much on it, I get up and go to the half-door. And I look out on the Moyle, wee Shane, and I think: that's been roaring since the first tick of time, and I see the stars so many of them, and the moon that never ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... Also, he was in debt three hundred dollars to the Six Companies—you know, they're Chinese affairs. And, remember, this was only seven years ago—health breaking down, three hundred in debt, and no trade. Chow Lam blew into Stockton and got a job on the peat lands at day's wages. It was a Chinese company, down on Middle River, that farmed celery and asparagus. This was when he got onto himself and took stock of himself. A quarter of a century in the United States, back not so strong as it used to was, and not a penny ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... to have ripened off its bulbs it should be placed in the warmest part of the house, and the ripening process encouraged. The Brassias, Cyanoches, Coelogynes, Miltonias, and other such plants, when they are beginning to grow, to be repotted. The compost to consist of turfy peat mixed with a portion of charcoal or broken potsherds, and the pots to be at least half full of ...
— In-Door Gardening for Every Week in the Year • William Keane
... are more than a relief. Observe my Oncidium. It stands in a pot, but this is only for convenience—a receptacle filled with moss. The long stem feathered with great blossoms springs from a bare slab of wood. No mould nor peat surrounds it; there is absolutely nothing save the roots that twine round their support, and the wire that sustains it in the air. It asks no attention beyond its daily bath. From the day I tied ...
— About Orchids - A Chat • Frederick Boyle
... Woods with Jerry Blunt, the bird-trainer, and Ned Dempster, strange things were happening in the quiet little bay at home—things that will be talked of for years to come in the long winter nights, when the fisher-wives sit mending their husband's nets round the peat-fires, and the children crowd close to listen with all their ...
— The Captain's Bunk - A Story for Boys • M. B. Manwell
... It was supposed that she had come from Iceland, but nobody remembered to have brought her, nor knew of her origin. In these days she lived by herself in a hut of the Settlement at the Ness, and crouched over a peat fire all the winter, singing songs to herself which nobody could understand. In the summer she was often seen about among the pastures below the hills, but always by herself. When she was asked she might go out and show herself at men's ...
— Gudrid the Fair - A Tale of the Discovery of America • Maurice Hewlett
... sprinkling the ground in every direction, and giving it the aspect of the burial-place of a race of giants. Now and then we passed a hut or two, with neither window nor chimney, and the smoke of the peat fire rolling out at the door. But there were not six of these dwellings in a dozen miles; and anything so bleak and wild, and mighty in its loneliness, as the whole country, it is impossible to conceive. Glencoe itself is perfectly terrible. The pass ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... said of her that she was too good for such a quiet place, and, though she never listened to her discontent and told her at the end of it (looking up, sucking her thread, or taking off her spectacles) that a little peat wrapped round the iris roots keeps them from the frost, and Parrot's great white sale is Tuesday next, "do remember,"—Mrs. Flanders knew precisely how Mrs. Jarvis felt; and how interesting her letters were, about Mrs. ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... the fir forest—over the open moors, whose surface is scored for miles by the turf-slane of the cottager and squatter—over the clear brown streams that trickle out of the pink and emerald mosses of the peat-bogs, and gain volume and vigour as they sparkle away by woodside, and green-lane, and village street—and over those secret, bosky places, in the heart of the great common-lands, where the smooth, white stems and ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... the noticeable dark blue eyes that twinkled merrily, yet with something gloomy in their darkness, as of hyacinths in a woodland glade, drifting and smoky, like the kind of smoke that comes from weed-burning or a peat-fire lit ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... colour, compared with a river of more clear water. This colour proceeds from the moss water, as it is called, which runs into the rivers, or the infusion of that vegetable substance which forms combustible turf, called peat. Now, this moss water leaves, upon evaporation, a bituminous substance, which very much resembles fossil coal. Therefore, in order to employ this vegetable infusion, delivered into the ocean for the purpose of forming bituminous strata at its bottom, it is only required to make this bituminous ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 1 (of 4) • James Hutton
... being placed in a moist heat of 65deg. Large plants of inferior kinds, if healthy, may be grafted all over with the choicer sorts, so as to obtain a large specimen in a short time. They require a rich and fibrous peat soil, with a mixture of sand to prevent its getting water-logged. The best time to pot azaleas is three or four weeks after the blooming is over. The soil should be made quite solid to prevent its retaining too much water. To produce handsome plants, they must while young be stopped ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... letter, considered in language, crafty in purpose, really, an overture for the hand of Marget Forbes, and I sat far into the night, while my peat fire died out in Corgarff Castle, wondering how I was to answer it, and, even more, how I myself stood towards the acute personal situation which it created. For I saw that the Black Colonel meant to make love and do business at the same stroke, ...
— The Black Colonel • James Milne
... during the Heptarchy were often very beautiful, and of imposing form. One of the finest we have seen belonged to the Rev. H. B. Hutchings, of Appleshaw, Hants,[100-*] and was found in a meadow at Bosington, near Stockbridge, in the same county, by a labourer who saw it among a heap of peat. We give a side and front view of this interesting relic; the whole is of gold, and is of considerable weight and thickness; the gold threads are all beautifully reeded, and the lettering and head executed with great care. The inscription reads—NOMEN EHLLA FID IN XPO, equivalent ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt
... England could take to benefit Ireland would be to drain the large bogs and so improve fuel. In some places the bogs are likely to be exhausted, but in others there is plenty of turf (turf, O Saxon, is not the grass on which you play cricket or croquet, but is the Hibernian for peat). Indeed, there is ample for all the needs of Ireland for a hundred years to come, but it should not be used in the shamefully wasteful way so often noticeable. It is no excuse that the heat it contains is not so great ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... he found the father seated at his humble hearth, unshaven, and altogether a man careless and negligent of his appearance. He sat with his hands clasped before him, and his heavy eyes fixed on the embers of the peat fire which smouldered on the hearth. The mother was at her distaff, and so were the other two females—to wit, her grandmother and Grace's sister. But the mother! gracious heaven, what a spirit of distress and misery breathed from ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... it is filled, have formed in the several valleys a great variety of swamps, where the Indian grass and the blue bent, peculiar to such soils, grow with tolerable luxuriancy. Some of the swamps abound with peat, which serves the poor instead of firewood. There are fourteen ponds on this island, all extremely useful, some lying transversely, almost across it, which greatly helps to divide it into partitions for the use of their cattle; others abound with peculiar fish and sea fowls. Their ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... slightly out of her element in a southern setting. Her appropriate background was moorland and heather and gray loch, and driving clouds and a breeze with fine mist in it, that would make you want to wrap a plaid round your shoulders and turn to the luxury of a peat fire. Quite unconsciously she suggested all these things. Peachy once described her as a living incarnation of one of Scott's novels, for she was steeped in old traditions and legends and superstitions, and could tell ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... cackling in distant barns, I judge that dame Nature is interested still to know how many eggs her hens lay. The Universal Soul, as it is called, has an interest in the stacking of hay, the foddering of cattle, and the draining of peat-meadows. Away in Scythia, away in India, it makes butter and cheese. Suppose that all farms are run out, and we youths must buy old land and bring it to, still everywhere the relentless opponents of reform bear a strange ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... Imagining at length that she had discovered the very spot where she left him, and not finding him, she came to the conclusion that some wild beast had come upon the helpless thing and carried him off. Then a gleam of water coming to her eye, she rushed to the peat-hag whence it was reflected, and would there have drowned herself. But she was intercepted and turned aside by a man who threw down his flauchter-spade, and ran between her and the frightful hole. He thought she was out of her mind, and tried to console her with ...
— Salted With Fire • George MacDonald
... and in what a form! Love, at least in his first access, must be as blind a horseman as he is an archer. The heath was rough with peat-cutting and turf-cutting and many a deep-rutted farm road, and tufts of heather and furze. Over them and through them went horse and man—horse rising seven and man twenty off, a well-matched pair in age for a wild ride—headlong towards the north, till a ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... the whaup on windy days Cry up amang the peat Whaur, on the road that speels the braes, I've heard my ain sheep's feet, An' the bonnie lambs wi' their canny ways An' the silly ...
— Songs of Angus and More Songs of Angus • Violet Jacob
... room in two, making each occupant as private as if in a separate room, with a dressing-table and ample washing conveniences on each side. A large grate filled with turf, and all ready for lighting, with a peat basket lined with tin, and also filled with the same fuel, reminded us strongly that we were in Ireland. Large wax candles were on the mantelpiece, and every ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... lying farther inland. Taking so little room and supplying the poor with a handy and cheap fuel, I doubt that these little bogs are any detriment to the country. Some of them have been made to take on a soil (by draining, cutting, drying and burning the upper strata of peat, and spreading the ashes over the entire surface), and are now quite productive.—Drainage and ridging are almost universally resorted to, showing the extraordinary humidity of the atmosphere. The Potato is ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... Choczim, a Monastery of Czenstochow, a Bay of Tschesme, and lets off extensive fire-works that contain little or no shot; leads you on trackless marches, inroads or outroads, through the Lithuanian Peat-bogs, on daring adventures and hair-breadth escapes of mere Pulawski, Potocki and the like;—had not got to understand the matter himself, you perceive: how hopeless to make you ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... stream at our feet. It was like a bit of Scotland or North Wales. The tower was in a state of decay and roofless, but a wandering tribe of ragged Eeliauts had taken up their quarters inside, and watched us suspiciously through the grey smoke of a damp, spluttering peat fire. They are a queer race, these Eeliauts, [B] and have little or nothing in common with the other natives. The sight of a well-filled lunch-basket and flasks of wine (which our kind hosts had insisted on our taking) would have brought ordinary ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt
... pedlar, "must be the out-scourers of Murray's party; let us lie down in the peat-hag, and keep ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... try to make one do things!" thought Al-ice. "I might just as well be at school at once." She stood up and tried to re-peat it, but her head was so full of the Lob-ster Dance, that she didn't know what she was say-ing, and the words all came ...
— Alice in Wonderland - Retold in Words of One Syllable • J.C. Gorham
... found—as you will actually find along some English shores—under the sand hills, perhaps a bed of earth with shells and bones; under that a bed of peat; under that one of blue silt; under that a buried forest, with the trees upright and rooted; under that another layer of blue silt full of roots and vegetable fibre; perhaps under that again another old land surface with trees again ...
— Town Geology • Charles Kingsley
... I, who hitherto had so intensely relished such a scene, should be so absent now that it was spread round me in its perfection. The peat and bog-fir fire before me, and the merry faces glistening through the white smoke beyond; the chimney overhead, like some great minster bell (the huge hanging pot for the clapper); the antlers, broadsword, and ...
— Tales from Blackwood, Volume 7 • Various
... dressing-table, joined to the heat from the stove, produced a heavy atmosphere that made her gasp. Somebody must already have been in her room, for the stove had been lit again, and she could see the peat blazing inside its open door. But outside, what a divine coldness and purity! She leaned out, drinking it in in long breaths, the warm March sun shining on her head. The garden, a mere uncared-for piece of rough grass with big trees, was radiant with rain-drops; the strip ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... supplying us with the means of domestic heat and comfort, has exercised the ingenuity of man. Those now known have been divided into five classes; the first comprehending the fluid inflammable bodies; the second, peat or turf; the third, charcoal of wood; the fourth, pit-coal charred; and the fifth, wood or pit-coal in a crude state, with the capacity of yielding a copious and bright flame. The first may be said seldom to be employed for the purposes of cookery; but peat, especially amongst rural populations, ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... to hold a meeting out of the reach of persecuting troopers. We know that battle may follow prayer; and as we believe that in the worst issue of battle heaven must be our reward, we are ready and willing to redden the peat-moss with our blood. That music stirs my soul; it wakens all my life; it makes my heart beat—not with its temperate daily pulse, but with a new, thrilling vigour. I almost long for danger—for a faith, a land, or at least a ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... Dickie's heart it grew sae grit, That the ne'er a bit o't he dought to eat— Then was he aware of an auld peat-house, Where a' the night ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... I was much struck with Axel Blytt's Essay showing from observation, on the peat beds in Scandinavia, that there had apparently been long periods with more rain and other with less rain (perhaps connected with Croll's recurrent astronomical periods), and that these periods had largely determined the present distribution ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... and stalls, as the supply of bears' fat was precarious, and the pine-tree was too precious, so far north, to be split up into torches, while it even fell so short occasionally as to compel the family to burn peat, which they did not like nearly so well as pine-logs. It was Madame Erlingsen's business to calculate how much of all these foreign articles would be required for the use of her household for a whole year; and, trusting to her calculations, ...
— Feats on the Fiord - The third book in "The Playfellow" • Harriet Martineau
... having then a thick and strong texture, like bread, and being of a blueish black colour, is taken out and made into small cakes of about 3/4 lb. in weight, which are wrapped in dock leaves and hung up to dry in peat smoke. When dry it may be preserved fit for use for many years; when wanted for dyeing it is partially dissolved in warm water; 5 lbs. of Korkalett is considered sufficient for about 4 Scotch ells of cloth. The colour produced is a light red. It is used in the dyeing ...
— Vegetable Dyes - Being a Book of Recipes and Other Information Useful to the Dyer • Ethel M. Mairet
... empty now in the hut; a heavy silence clung about the peat walls and the earthen floor; a deep and solemn loneliness. Spinning-wheel and carding-combs were in their place; the beads, too, were safe as they had been, stowed away in a bag under the roof. Inger had taken nothing of her belongings. ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... seemed woven into the fabric of Peregrine's life, and he belonged to them as exclusively as the grouse or mountain linnet. He knew every rock upon their crests and every runnel of water that fretted its channel through the peat; he could mark down the merlin's nest among the heather and the falcon's eyrie in the cleft of the scar. If he started a brooding grouse and the young birds scattered themselves in all directions, he could gather them ...
— Tales of the Ridings • F. W. Moorman
... to him, or farther still to the remote unknown places, foreign lands, cities, towns, where giants and fairies roamed and outrage happened and kings were, in the tales the shepherds told about the peat fires on ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... where they had to climb, and then to a long peat level beside a rivulet. There a quantity of delicate little pink flowers caught Bert's eye. "Gaw!" he said, and stooped to pick one. "In a ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... burn, known as the Dryhope Burn. It is deeply buried in the hills. Spurs of the Cheviots as these are, they rise to a considerable elevation, but are pasturable nearly to the top. There, however, where the heather begins, peat-hags and morasses make dangerous provision, from which the flocks are carefully guarded. It is the practice of the country for the shepherds to be within touch of them all night, lest some, feeding upward (as sheep always do) should reach the summits and be lost or mired inextricably. ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... such as to deserve punishment. She ate only enough of the lettuces to make a slight difference in the number of seeding plants ultimately devoured by the cottager's pig, or thrown to the refuse-heap; and from the great pile of carrots, to be gathered and stored in the peat-mound by the farmstead, the few she destroyed could never by any chance be missed. On all the countryside she was the most inoffensive creature—the harmless gipsy of the animal world, having no fixed abode, her tent-roof being the ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees
... up on a bare moor, which showed a white lodge among pines, a white cottage in a green nook by a burnside, and no other marks of human dwelling. To his left, which was the east, the heather rose to a low ridge of hill, much scarred with peat-bogs, behind which appeared the blue shoulder of a considerable mountain. Before him the road was lost momentarily in the woods of a shooting-box, but reappeared at a great distance climbing a swell of upland which seemed to be the glacis of a jumble of bold summits. ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... garden produce; the house is gaunt and hungry-looking. It stands, with the scanty fields attached, as an island in a sea of morass. The landscape is unredeemed by grace or grandeur—mere undulating hills of grass and heather, with peat bogs in the ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... between 12.5 and 2.5 P.M., and about 3 P.M. commenced firing at the defences over the gate: under cover of this fire the bags of powder, to the amount of 800 lbs. were placed against the gate by Captain Peat, the hose being fired by Lieut. Durand. In the mean time the road to the gate was occupied by the storming party, the advance of which was composed of the flank companies of all the European Regiments. The head of the advance ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... gun! Why the blazes couldn't you have come home and brought me a bit of peat from the pit? A fine hunter you are! I might as well have married the devil.—And his wife turned from him with ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... remember rather hazily knocking at a door and presently finding myself in a low kitchen with a peat fire burning on an open hearth and what seemed to be dozens of people sitting round it. I probably counted each of them ...
— The Man From the Clouds • J. Storer Clouston
... Natural resources: forests, peat deposits, small quantities of oil and natural gas, granite, dolomitic limestone, marl, chalk, sand, ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... at him. "What?" said he, "insult old Semmes' liquid music with a hot breath of peat smoke! Never, sir. And consequently I'll take another ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... peat-fire scattered capering shadows across the smooth, stone floor, flickered among the dim rows of hams suspended from the ceiling and on the panelled cupboards of dark, glistening oak. A servant-girl, spreading ...
— Victorian Short Stories • Various
... some newsboy told him that the war was over, and he was glad, because it meant that Peat Brothers, publishers, would get out their new edition of "Spinoza's Improvement of the Understanding." Wars were all very well in their way, made young men self-reliant or something but Horace felt that he could never forgive the President ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... Coventry asking leave of the Duke, he bid us go to Woolwich. So he and I to the waterside, and our horses coming by the ferry, we by oars over to Lambeth, and from thence, with brave discourse by the way, rode to Woolwich, where we eat and drank at Mr. Peat's, and discoursed of many businesses, and put in practice my new way of the Call-book, which will be of great use. Here, having staid a good while, we got up again and brought night home with us and foul weather. So over to Whitehall to his chamber, whither my boy ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... into wide semicircles, and it seemed likely to be touch-and-go with the engine, truck, and your humble commissioner. I took a last look at the landscape, and made a final note, but, while inly wondering whether I should be ultimately consumed in the form of peat or dug up and exhibited to future ages as a bog-preserved brutal Saxon, with a concluding squash we passed the rotten spot, and it was permissible to breathe again. "We prefer it to sink at once," said Mr. Bennett. "Then we know the 'hard' ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... acquired the greater part of its riches through commerce, but the earth had to yield its fruits before commerce could exist; and there was no earth—it had to be created. There were banks of sand, broken here and there by layers of peat, and downs which the wind blew about and scattered over the country; large expanses of muddy land, destined, as it seemed, to eternal barrenness. Iron and coal, the first elements of industry, were lacking; there was no wood, for the forests had already been destroyed by storms before ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... surprised to find a neatly, though plainly, furnished room, which was evidently the kitchen of the house—indeed, the sole room, with the exception of an off-shoot closet. The large open fireplace contained a peat fire on the hearth, over which hung a bubbling pot. There were two box-beds opposite the fire, and in the wall which faced the door there was a very small window, containing four panes of glass, each of which had a knot in the middle of it. One ...
— The Eagle Cliff • R.M. Ballantyne
... of the early English were row-boats of very simple construction. We actually possess one undoubted specimen at the present day, whose very date is fixed for us by the circumstances of its discovery. It was dug up, some years since, from a peat-bog in Sleswick, the old England of our forefathers, along with iron arms and implements, and in association with Roman coins ranging in date from A.D. 67 to A.D. 217. It may therefore be pretty confidently assigned to the first half of the third ...
— Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain • Grant Allen
... "American Note Books," in particular, seem to Mr. James a chronicle of small beer, and he marvels at the triviality of an existence which could reduce the diarist to recording an impression that "the aromatic odor of peat smoke in the sunny autumnal air is very pleasant." This peat-smoke entry has become proverbial, and is mentioned by nearly everyone who writes about Hawthorne. Yet on a recent rereading of James's biography, it seemed to me not so unsympathetic as I had remembered ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... to the old James the First graveyard near Peat's Hill may spell out this bit of doggerel, undoubtedly one of the worst recorded of an Elizabethan, on the tomb of ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... School-children's use of paper instead of slates, the fashion of wrapping Christmas gifts in white tissue, and the invention of the low-priced cameras have increased enormously the amount of paper called for. In the attempt to supply the demand all sorts of materials have been used, such as hemp, old rope, peat, the stems of flax, straw, the Spanish and African esparto grass, and especially wood; but much more paper is made of wood than of all the rest together. Poplar, gum, and chestnut trees, and especially those trees which bear cones, such as the spruce, fir, balsam, and pine are used. ...
— Makers of Many Things • Eva March Tappan
... second son; and now he clutches at the old man himself; then across the street to Gentleman Jan, his eldest: but he is driven out from both houses by chloride of lime and peat dust, and the colony of ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... Besides making experiments on production and utilization of coal-gas for lighting, he devoted his knowledge of chemistry to the analysis of the gas. He also made analytical studies of the relative value of wood, peat, oil, wax, and different kinds of coal for the distillation of gas. His chemical analyses showed to a considerable extent the properties of carbureted hydrogen upon which illuminating value depended. The results ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... shades of night. It is an eery business to be out on the hills at such a season, for they are deathly quiet except for the lashing of the storm. You will never hear a bird cry or a sheep bleat or a weasel scream. The only sound is the drum of the rain on the peat or its plash on a boulder, and the low surge of the swelling streams. It is the place and time for dark deeds, for the heart grows savage; and if two enemies met in the hollow of the mist only one would ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... rough way, certainly: but roughness is not discomfort, where the taste has not been educated. A Red Indian sleeps as well in a wigwam as we in a spring bed; and the Irish babies thrive as well among the peat ashes as on a Brussels carpet. Man is a very well constructed being, and can live and multiply anywhere, provided he can keep warm, and get pure water and enough to eat. Indeed, our Teutonic fathers must have been comfortably ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... searchings, chasings, catchings, imprisonments, torturings, banishments, headings, hangings, dismemberings, and quarterings quick, forby the hundreds forced from their ain habitations to the deserts, mountains, muirs, mosses, moss-flows, and peat-hags, there to hear the word like bread ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... Cedars sat in his antique room alone, by a peat-wood fire. He appeared wrapt in moody thought and contemplation, though ever and anon, as the wintry blast gave a wilder sweep over the swaying roof above him, he turned and glanced uneasily toward the door, ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... conducted. Raynham was out of sight. They were a long way down the valley, miles from Lobourne, in a country of sour pools, yellow brooks, rank pasturage, desolate heath. Solitary cows were seen; the smoke of a mud cottage; a cart piled with peat; a donkey grazing at leisure, oblivious of an unkind world; geese by a horse-pond, gabbling as in the first loneliness of creation; uncooked things that a famishing boy cannot possibly care for, and must ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... with floors of kneaded clay, and ceilings of moorland turf: a few books on a shelf, thumbed by many a thumb; a few hams drying above head in the smoke, which was in no haste to get out at the roof—a wooden settle, some oak chairs, chaff beds well covered with blankets, with a fire of peat and wood burning at a distance from the gable wall, on the middle of the floor. His food was as homely as his habitation, and consisted chiefly of oatmeal-porridge, barley-broth, and potatoes, and milk. How the muse happened to visit him in this clay biggin, ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... of Shan-tung are composed of mountains and swamps. Here, lakes of various magnitudes occur and large tracts of country similar to those which are known to us by the name of peat-moss. In such places the population could not be expected to be excessive; and, accordingly, we met with few inhabitants, except those who subsisted their families by fishing. So great were the numbers engaged in this ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... pine woods contain 8-10 p.ct. of these constituents in their anhydride form ('pentosanes'). They yield readily to acid hydrolysis, and certainly constitute a considerable percentage of the dissolved products. A similar complex was obtained by the author in his investigation of peat (Berl. Ber. 30, 2571), and was found to be similarly incompletely attacked by yeast. The yields of alcohol corresponded with the proportion of the total carbohydrates disappearing. These were the hexose constituents of the hydrolysed ...
— Researches on Cellulose - 1895-1900 • C. F. Cross
... on the subject, and the use of albumen for soap-making in this country appears to be very slight, however popular it may be on the Continent. Numerous other substances have been proposed for addition to soaps, including yeast, tar from peat (sphagnol), Swedish wood tar, permanganate of potash, perborates and percarbonates of soda and ammonia, chlorine compounds, but none of these has at present come much into favour, and some had only ephemeral existence. Of the ...
— The Handbook of Soap Manufacture • W. H. Simmons
... the Fern Owl, by Rusticus.—Beyond Godalming, on the Liphook road, is a great tract of barren heathy land: it stretches wide in every direction, and includes immense peat-bogs, and several large ponds. One particular district, called the Pudmores, is the favourite resort of the fern owl. In the daytime, while walking across the moor, you will every now and then put up one of these singular birds; their flight is perfectly without noise, and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 566, September 15, 1832 • Various
... observation made on the Mahakam was the effect of dry weather on the jungle. At one place, where it covered hills rising from the river, the jungle, including many big trees, looked dead. From what I later learned about the burning of the peat in Sarawak, where unusually dry weather may start fires which burn for months, this was undoubtedly also the case here, but it seems strange that in a country so humid as Borneo the weather, although admittedly of little stability, may become dry enough to destroy ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... not look back; I had no time. I ran up the burnside, crawling over the open places, and for a large part wading in the shallow stream. I found a deserted cottage with a row of phantom peat-stacks and an overgrown garden. Then I was among young hay, and very soon had come to the edge of a plantation of wind-blown firs. From there I saw the chimneys of the house smoking a few hundred yards to my left. I forsook the burnside, crossed another dyke, ...
— The Thirty-nine Steps • John Buchan
... in 1863 in a peat bog of Schleswig; that is in the very country of the Angles; judging by the coins found at the same time, it must belong to the third century. It measures 22 metres 67 centimetres in length, 3 metres, 33 centim. in breadth, and 1 metre 19 centim. in height. Specimens of Scandinavian ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... retired not to her couch. She passed softly through the courtyard, looking round as though in search of some individual. This proved to be the hunchback Gregory, whom she found esconced behind a peat-stack in marvellous profundity of thought. With a soft step, and one finger raised to her lips, she gently ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby |
