"Spruce" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... brandies of the trees, from whose low limbs dangle the tempting wares, and a stump serves as a chopping-block. Under the shrubbery, where the sun cannot penetrate, are stored home-made firkins full of yellow butter, and great cheeses, and heaps of substantial home-baked bread. Kegs of hard cider and spruce beer and perhaps more potent brews are abroach, and behind the haggling and jesting and bustle you may catch the sound of muskets or the whoop of the Indians from afar. Meanwhile, in the settlements, all manner of industries were stimulated, and a great number of women throughout ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... filled. It had never looked handsomer. The rival factions had vied with each other in decorating it. Spruce and hemlock sprouted everywhere, and garlands of ground-ivy festooned walls and chancel. The delicious odor of balsam and of burning wax-candles was in the air. The people were all there in their Sunday clothes ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... an' him wi't, an' there he was, clappin' his hands, an' stanin' juist like's he'd on a wid crinoline. You never heard sic a roostin' an' roarin' an' hear-hearin' an' hurrain'! I had to shut my een for fear o' bein' knokit deaf a'thegither. Stumpie Mertin jumpit up as spruce as gin he had baith his legs, instead o' only ane, an' forgettin' whaur he was, he glowered a' roond the wa' an' says, "Whaur's the ...
— My Man Sandy • J. B. Salmond
... more severe climate. In a lignite bed (a species of coal) found in nearly the same latitude as the forest growth just mentioned, we detect the presence of trees that grow only in cold northern climates, such as birch, mountain pine, larch, and spruce. And in some peat-bogs of Southern Europe belonging to this age are found willows now growing only in Spitzbergen, and some species of mosses that only thrive far to the north. It is quite evident that this deposit testifies to an altogether different climate from that indicated ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... of the younger group and led them through the garden to where some young spruce trees hid the wall. Here a surprise awaited them in the shape of two of the largest of the growing trees festooned with ribbons and laden with strange fruit in the shape of coloured toy balloons that bobbed about and tugged at their moorings as if anxious ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... twenty minutes. The waters fairly swarmed with them, and we could always get enough for the "pot" in a half-hour's fishing at any time during the trip. The Abwees were canoeing, not hunting or fishing; though, in truth, they did not need to hunt spruce-partridge or fish for bass in any sporting sense; they simply went out after them, and never stayed over half an hour. On a point we stopped for lunch: the Scotchman always struck the beach a-cooking. He had a "kit," which was a big camp-pail, and inside of it were more ...
— Crooked Trails • Frederic Remington
... stiffly up under loads of pretty things which threaten to make the tapers turn bottom upward! Part and parcel of all this was I, Christopher, most reckless of rheumatism, most careless of dignity, the round, bald top of my head to be seen emerging everywhere from the thick boughs of the spruce, now devising an airy settlement for some gossamer-robed doll, now adjusting far back on a stiff branch Tom's new little skates, now balancing bags of sugar-plums and candy, and now combating desperately ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... hatchet she had attacked the under branches of the spruce and low pine trees, and soon had a good heap of these dead sticks near the tent. She turned over a flat stone that lay near by for a hearth. Before the other girls and Mrs. Havel were dressed and had washed ...
— Wyn's Camping Days - or, The Outing of the Go-Ahead Club • Amy Bell Marlowe
... wretched puritan's garb of mine is hardly worth brushing," said Wildrake; "and but for this hundred-weight of rusty iron, with which thou hast bedizened me, I look more like a bankrupt Quaker than anything else. But I'll make you as spruce as ever was a ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... Theophilus mentions are asserted by some writers (with whom I do not agree) to be those commonly known as the "Norway spruce," a species of pine of lofty proportions sometimes rising to the height of 150 feet with a trunk from four to five feet in diameter. It lives to a great age believed to exceed in many instances 450 years. The leaves (needles, thorns) are short but ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... tanquam te. His manner is lofty, his discourse peremptory, his tongue filed, his eye ambitious, and his general behaviour, vain, ridiculous and thrasonical. He is too picked, too spruce, too affected, too odd, and, as it were, too peregrinate, as ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... usual structure of logs, laid lengthwise, and rudely plastered at each point of contact with adobe, the material from which the chimney, which entirely occupied one gable, was built. It was pierced with two windows and a door, roofed with smaller logs, and thatched with long half cylinders of spruce bark. But the interior gave certain indications of the distinction as well as the peculiar experiences of its occupant. In place of the usual bunk or berth built against the wall stood a small folding camp bedstead, and upon ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... three hundred thousand copies per week, and is growing in the public favor. From the profits of his business Mr. Bonner has built a splendid marble publishing-house at the corner of William and Spruce Streets, in New York, from which the "Ledger" is now issued. It is one of the most complete establishments in the world, and is fitted up with every convenience necessary to the performance of the work upon the paper in the most perfect and expeditious manner. Mr. ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... beautifully clear water. Upon either side the valley, the hills rose about 1400 feet; at that season (September) the summits were in some places capped with snow. The sides of the hills, sloping towards the glen, were either covered with forests of spruce firs, or broken into patches of prairie grass and sage bush, the latter about as high as the strongest heather, and equally tough ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... myself. "What!" said I, "you pitiful sluggard, have you so managed matters as to have no hope left? Have you lost your wits together with your estate? Don't you see me, who have risen from the same condition? What a complexion I have, how spruce and well dressed, what portliness of person? I have every thing, {yet} have nothing; and although I possess nothing, still, of nothing am I in want." "But I," {said he}, "unhappily, can neither be a butt nor submit to blows."[42] ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence
... fashionable table with scraps and songs and theatrical slip-slop. The second-rate actors have their second-rate friends and admirers, with whom they likewise spout tragedy and talk slip-slop; and so down even to us; who have our friends and admirers among spruce clerks and aspiring apprentices, who treat us to a dinner now and then, and enjoy at tenth hand the same scraps and songs and slip-slop that have been served up by our more fortunate brethren at the tables ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... "Antiquarian Repertory" (ed. 1807), i. 251-270, the reader will find an interesting account of the Trained Bands and the Artillery Company. Old writers are fond of sneering at the City warriors. The following passage is from Shirley's "Witty Fair One," v. 1:—"There's a spruce captain newly crept out of a gentleman-usher and shuffled into a buff jerkin with gold lace, that never saw service beyond Finsbury or the Artillery-Garden, marches wearing a desperate feather ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various
... and he settled down to work with praiseworthy energy. He had considerable shrewdness, and it was plain that he would eventually become as good a merchant as his father. He was little older than Lucy, but his fair hair and his clean-shaven face gave him a more youthful look. With his spruce air and well-made clothes, his conversation about hunting and golf, few would have imagined that he arrived regularly at his office at ten in the morning, and was as keen to make a good bargain as any of the men he came ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham
... canyon filled with fir and spruce trees, he stopped in this haven to rest his tired eyes. When his vision had cleared, his heart gave a bound; he thought he could see a moccasin track ahead in the trail. He was off like a deer, ...
— The Sheep Eaters • William Alonzo Allen
... skill their nets in the emerald waters. Two hundred white winters and more have fled from the face of the Summer Since DuLuth, on that wild, somber shore, in the unbroken forest primeval, From the midst of the spruce and the pines, saw the smoke of the wigwams up-curling, Like the fumes from the temples and shrines of the Druids of old in their forests. Ah, little he dreamed then, forsooth, that a city would stand on that hill-side, ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... shabby, and the gendarmes could not have been impressed with respect by it. On the other hand, had I used the best style of public equipage, the likatchi, the kind which consists of an elegant little sledge, a fine horse, and a spruce, well-fed, well-dressed driver, it is probable that they would not have let me pass at all. Ladies are not permitted, by etiquette, to patronize these likatchi, alone, and no man will take his wife or a woman whom he respects to drive ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... hundreds of Mr. Robinson's Irish emigrants camped on the plains. Many had built themselves huts of pine and spruce boughs; some with slabs and others with logs of trees. Three or four Government store-houses and a house for the Superintendent, the Hon. Peter Robinson, were in course of erection. I had letters of introduction to that gentleman, and also to the Hon. T. A. Stewart, and Robert Reid, Esq. The ...
— Twenty-Seven Years in Canada West - The Experience of an Early Settler (Volume I) • Samuel Strickland
... drummer-boys practising in a distant courtyard; the men at drill on the parade; the two soldiers carrying a basket between them, who winked to each other as he went by, and slily pointed to their throats; the spruce serjeant who hurried past with a cane in his hand, and under his arm a clasped book with a vellum cover; the fellows in the ground-floor rooms, furbishing and brushing up their different articles of dress, who stopped to look at him, and whose voices as they spoke together echoed loudly ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... fashionable cut and finest cloth. Black broad-cloth frocks, and satin or velvet vests, were quite common. Individuals thus attired formed a majority of the guests—for in young settlements the "hotel" or "tavern" is also a boarding-house, where the spruce "storekeepers" and better class of clerks take their meals—usually sleeping in ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... flattery is beastly. Afterwards to St. James's Park, seeing people play at Pell Mell; where it pleased me mightily to hear a gallant, lately come from France, swear at one of his companions for suffering his man (a spruce blade) to be so saucy as to strike a ball while his master was playing on ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... to the bazaar, and purchasing here and there—at one place a vest, at another a shawl, and at another a turban—I threw off my dress of a dervish, hastened to the bath, and after a few minutes under the barber, came out like a butterfly from its dark shell. No one would have recognised in the spruce young Turk, the filthy dervish. I hastened to Constantinople, where I lived gaily, and spent my money; but I found that to mix in the world, it is necessary not only to have an attaghan, but also to have the courage to use it; and in several broils which took place, ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat
... fellow-countrymen—(Mr. Marble was observed by the chairman to bite his lips, to keep in a good round laugh, when those words, fellow-countrymen, came out)—I tell you what it is, the things that are wanted now are boots, and shoes, and stockings, and jackets—and not gingerbread, and sugar plums, and spruce beer, ...
— Mike Marble - His Crotchets and Oddities. • Uncle Frank
... come in competition, By virtue of some sly petition: Yet mum for that; hope still the best, Nor let such cares disturb thy rest. Methinks I hear thee loud as trumpet, As bagpipe shrill or oyster-strumpet; Methinks I see thee, spruce and fine, With coat embroider'd richly shine, And dazzle all the idol faces, As through the hall thy worship paces; (Though this I speak but at a venture, Supposing thou hast tick with Hunter,) Methinks I see a blackguard ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... grievous load, And Chelsea, flower'd and spruce, And antique thingummies in spode; The only thing that none ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 25, 1914 • Various
... them up a hill, and as Faith, with a little tired sigh, seated herself on a moss-covered rock, she looked about with a little exclamation of wonder. Close beside the trail was a rough shelter made of the boughs of spruce and fir trees, and near at hand was piled a quantity of wood ready for a fire. There was a clearing, and the rough shelter was shaded by two ...
— A Little Maid of Ticonderoga • Alice Turner Curtis
... hills were literally carpeted with flowers. I could not learn that any skilled botanist had ever visited Kamchatka and classified its flora. Among the arboreal productions the alder and birch were the most numerous. Pine, larch, and spruce grow on the Kamchatka river, and the timber from them is brought to Avatcha from ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... rocks fringing the land within, and another dark strip fringing the barren Eilean Chaisteil outside,—lay the Betsey, looking wonderfully diminutive, but evidently a little thing of high spirit, taut-masted, with a smart rake aft, and a spruce outrigger astern, and flaunting her triangular flag of blue in the sun. I pointed first to the manse, and then to the yacht. The minister shook ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... too fast, Mrs Minx, and are a little too Confident: For tho 'tis my place to attend, yet 'tis I that give a Credit and Reputation to all you do; I walk along the Streets so boldly, and so spruce, and so all-to-be-sented with sweet Powder, cocking my Beaver and looking big, that I make the greatest Gallant I meet give me the Wall, as if I were a Person of Quality; And when any comes hither they are won by my complemental ...
— The London-Bawd: With Her Character and Life - Discovering the Various and Subtle Intrigues of Lewd Women • Anonymous
... and also among the whip gentry, this word signifies natty, spruce, dashing; e.g. he is quite varmint; he sports a varmint hat, ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... <complaisant, elegant, trim, dapper, spruce, genteel, urbane, well-bred, gracious, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... level we encountered a steeper ascent than any I had yet climbed. Here the character of the forest began to change. There were other trees than pines, and particularly one kind, cone-shaped, symmetrical, and bright, which Dick called a silver spruce. I was glad it belonged to the conifers, or pine-tree family, because it was the most beautiful tree I had ever seen. We climbed ridges and threaded through aspen thickets in hollows till near sunset. Then Stockton ordered a ...
— The Young Forester • Zane Grey
... serenity of nature. Surely good courage will not flag here on the Atlantic border, as long as we are flanked by the Fur Countries. There is enough in that sound to cheer one under any circumstances. The spruce, the hemlock, and the pine will not countenance despair. Methinks some creeds in vestries and churches do forget the hunter wrapped in furs by the Great Slave Lake, and that the Esquimaux sledges are drawn by dogs, and in the twilight of the northern night, the hunter does not ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... ounces of hops, let them boil half an hour in one gallon of water, strain the hop water then add sixteen gallons of warm water, two gallons of molasses, eight ounces of essence of spruce, dissolved in one quart of water, put it in a clean cask, then shake it well together, add half a pint of emptins, then let it stand and work one week, if very warm weather less time will do, when it is drawn off to bottle, add one spoonful of ...
— American Cookery - The Art of Dressing Viands, Fish, Poultry, and Vegetables • Amelia Simmons
... price of a week's sustenance to see her for a moment! To leave my work and go without food was the least of it! I must traverse the streets of Paris without getting splashed, run to escape showers, and reach her rooms at last, as neat and spruce as any of the coxcombs about her. For a poet and a distracted wooer the difficulties of this task were endless. My happiness, the course of my love, might be affected by a speck of mud upon my only white waistcoat! Oh, to miss the sight of her because ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... the pound was imposed upon the importation of foreign brown linen yarn, instead of much higher duties, to which it had been subjected before, viz. of 6d. the pound upon sail yarn, of 1s. the pound upon all French and Dutch yarn, and of 2:13:4 upon the hundred weight of all spruce or Muscovia yarn. But our manufacturers were not long satisfied with this reduction: by the 29th of the same king, chap. 15, the same law which gave a bounty upon the exportation of British and Irish linen, of which the price did ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... Laborers found rarely a more liberal employer than he. He was generous in the wages he gave; he allowed more resting hours than any of his neighbors; he was less exacting in his demands; he always reserved the finest lambs and chickens to supply his table in that season; he had the best of spruce beer in Summerfield, and the clearest crystal water. And while with these mitigations, the toils of the harvesters were still hot and heavy to be borne, there was that in their fare, in their songs, and animation, which told of as much happiness, as may crown the ...
— Summerfield - or, Life on a Farm • Day Kellogg Lee
... of our abode among these islands we found reasonable quantity of wood, both fir, spruce, and juniper; which, whether it came floating any great distance to these places where we found it, or whether it grew in some great islands near the same place by us not yet discovered, we know not. But we judge that it groweth ...
— Voyages in Search of the North-West Passage • Richard Hakluyt
... evidently very great. Large quantities of wood pipe have been removed from trenches in Boston, New York City. Philadelphia, Baltimore, and elsewhere, usually in perfectly sound condition. It was commonly made of logs of spruce, yellow pine, or oak, from 12 to 18 ft. long, 12 to 24 in. in diameter, and with a bore from 3 to 6 in. in diameter. Some 6-in. pipe taken up in Philadelphia had an external diameter of 30 in. The ends were usually bound with wrought-iron collars, and adjacent lengths were ...
— The Water Supply of the El Paso and Southwestern Railway from Carrizozo to Santa Rosa, N. Mex. • J. L. Campbell
... seemed to hesitate. "Well," he began slowly, "I've often heard my father tell it. When they came to that tree with the mark on it, grandfather said, 'Boys, we have reached our home. Let us thank God.' He went up to a big spruce tree, drove his ax in to the butt, then kneeled down with the two little boys beside him, and I have heard my father say that when he looked away up between the big trees and saw the bit of blue sky there, he thought God was listening at that blue hole between ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... the bark carefully away from the hindquarters of a spruce tree and remove the tenderloin. One of last year's Christmas trees is excellent for the purpose. Chop it up fine and place in a saucepan. Add boiling water and let it simper two hours. Season with a pinch of salt, and if this is not satisfactory, ...
— The Silly Syclopedia • Noah Lott
... yarn, and they dragged their provisions and blankets on sleds or toboggans. At night they would use their snow-shoes to shovel a wide, circular pit in the snow, clearing it away to the bare earth. In the centre of the pit, they would build their camp fire, and sleep around it on piles of spruce boughs, secure from the winter wind. The leaders, usually members of the nobility, fared on these expeditions as rudely as their men, and outdid them in courage and endurance. Some of the most noted chiefs of the wood-rangers were scions ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... appointed, as I stood in the hall, a tall, clean-shaven, rather spruce young man entered and spoke to the concierge, who at once ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux
... form the two sides of the house, bent till they met, and lashed together at the top. To these other poles were bound transversely, and the whole was covered with large sheets of the bark of the oak, elm, spruce, or white cedar, overlapping like the shingles of a roof, upon which, for their better security, split poles were made fast with cords of linden bark. At the crown of the arch, along the entire length of the house, an opening a foot wide was left for the admission of light and the escape of smoke. ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... Devonshire; and Anna might wander about the old house and grounds as she chose, and feel how much better she had loved it in its tumble-down state, the state she had known as a child, when her mother lived there and was happy. Everything was aggressively spruce now, indoors and out. Susie's money and Susie's taste had rubbed off all the mellowness and all the romance. Anna was glad to leave it again, and be taken to Marienbad, or any place where there was royalty, for Susie loved royalty. But what a ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... created a sort of endless canopy which the sun was unable to penetrate. The cool, dry wind that swept the slope would account, however, for the surprising absence of moisture in soil and vegetation in the dense shade of the trees. Oak, elm, spruce, even walnut, and other trees of a sturdy character indigenous to the temperate zone were identified. What appeared to be a clump of cypress trees, fantastic, misshapen objects that seemed to, shrink back in terror from the assaulting breakers, stood out in bold relief ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... may on high days and holidays visit the people of the new district, generally takes up its quarters among the operatives of the old town. Merchants, retail traders, and artisans have common interests which unite them together. On Sundays only, the masters make themselves spruce and foregather apart. On the other hand, the labouring classes, which constitute scarcely a fifth of the population, mingle with ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... hardii (Taylor), is a plethodontid of relict distribution in the spruce-fir vegetational formation from 8500 to 9600 feet elevation in Otero and Lincoln counties, New Mexico. The salamanders on which most of this report is based were collected three, four, and six miles northeast of Cloudcroft in the Sacramento Mountains. Additional individuals were collected on ...
— Natural History of the Salamander, Aneides hardii • Richard F. Johnston
... friction at first, then smoothly and swiftly as if they had never stopped. Summer reddened into autumn; autumn bronzed into fall. The maples and poplars were bare. The oaks alone kept their rusted crimson glory, and the cloaks of spruce and hemlock on the shoulders of the hills grew dark with wintry foliage. Keene's transitions of mood became more frequent and more extreme. The gulf of isolation that divided him from us when the black days came seemed wider and more unfathomable. ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke
... rapidly in the Alexander, notwithstanding the precautions of smoking the ship, washing with vinegar, and distributing porter, spruce-beer, and wine among the seamen. On the 2d of September six men and a boy, on the 5th eight, and on the 8th ten, were disabled by it from performing any duty. An increase of this kind, in the midst of all the efforts that could be made to counteract the malignity of the disorder, gave but too ...
— The Voyage Of Governor Phillip To Botany Bay • Arthur Phillip
... before noon next day, and was over in little more than half an hour. Soames—pale, spruce, sad-eyed in the witness-box—had suffered so much beforehand that he took it all like one dead. The moment the decree nisi was pronounced he left the Courts ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... they came to a growth of spruce so dense that it formed a shelter from both snow and wind, with a thick carpet of brown needles under foot. They were shut out from the stars, and in the darkness MacVeigh began to whistle cheerfully. He ...
— Isobel • James Oliver Curwood
... operations immediately, to find the rate of the time-keeper, and to make other observations. The remainder of the empty water-casks were also sent on shore, with the cooper to trim, and a sufficient number of sailors to fill them. Two men were appointed to brew spruce beer; and the carpenter and his crew were ordered to cut wood. A boat, with a party of men, under the direction of one of the mates, was sent to collect grass for our cattle; and the people that ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... music-case under his arm. He had an eternal interest for Jeremy because, whenever he was mentioned, the phrase was: "Poor little Mr. Dawson!" Why he was to be pitied Jeremy did not know. He looked spruce and bright enough, and generally whistled to himself as he walked; but "poor" was an exciting adjective, and Jeremy, when he passed him, felt a little shudder of drama ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole
... 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. There are two methods of manufacturing wood pulp; the mechanical, by grinding up the wood, and the chemical, by treating it chemically. By the mechanical method the wood is pressed against a large ...
— Makers of Many Things • Eva March Tappan
... slept he caused birch, spruce, and cottonwood trees to spring up in the low places, and when the people awoke in the morning they clapped their hands in delight, for the birds were singing in the tree-tops and the green leaves with the sunlight flickering through them made it seem like a ...
— A Treasury of Eskimo Tales • Clara Kern Bayliss
... wild goose honked. White-winged gulls soared gracefully overhead. Now and again a seal rose to gaze for an inquisitive moment at the passing boat, and once a flock of ducks settled upon the waters. The air was redolent with the pungent odour of spruce and balsam fir—the perfume of the forest—and Shad, lounging contentedly at the bow of the boat, drank in ...
— The Gaunt Gray Wolf - A Tale of Adventure With Ungava Bob • Dillon Wallace
... degradation of its own dignity. The sharp retort, the sly innuendo, the dexterous hint, the hard, keen subtlety, the rough common sense, all valuable in their degree, and all profitable to their possessor, are only of an inferior grade. Let the true orator come forth, and the spruce pleader is instantly flung into the background. Let the appeal of a powerful mind be made to the jury, and all the small address, and practical skill, and sly ingenuity, are dropped behind. The passion of the true orator communicates its ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... poet pens his odes and sonnets spruce With quills plucked from the ordinary goose, While critics write their sharp incisive lines With quills snatched from ...
— Cobwebs from a Library Corner • John Kendrick Bangs
... on snow-shoes. Their way was over the ice of Lake Champlain, for more than a century the great thoroughfare of war-parties. They bivouacked in the forest by squads of twelve or more; dug away the snow in a circle, covered the bared earth with a bed of spruce boughs, made a fire in the middle, and smoked their pipes around it. Here crouched the Christian savage, muffled in his blanket, his unwashed face still smirched with soot and vermilion, relics of ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman
... and then every schoolboy walked across to Camden and back, as if it had been a pilgrimage or religious duty, while meantime there was always a kind of Russian carnival on the ice, oxen being sometimes roasted whole, and all kinds of "fakirs," as they are now termed, selling doughnuts, spruce-beer, and gingerbread, or tempting the adventurous with thimblerig; many pedestrians stopping at the old-fashioned inn on Smith's Island for hot punch. Juleps and cobblers, and the "one thousand and one American fancy ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... winding away too far for the roar of its rushing waters to reach our ears. No sound of civilization came to us, and no life was to be seen unless a crow chanced to fly overhead in search of some morsel of food. Large forest trees there were none. Tall, straight saplings of poplar, spruce and pine pointed their slender fingers heavenward, and ...
— A Woman who went to Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... appear'd, what a shout rent the air! The spruce widow affords the most excellent cheer; For comfort in quarters there's nothing can beat her, So up rose the lads with a welcome to greet her: The muse with true gallantry led her to place, And Truth said good humour was writ in ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... particularly of the evergreen class. Their branches brushed into the carriage as we passed along, and left with us that pleasant woodsy smell belonging to fresh leaves. One of the ladies, catching a bit of green from one of these intruding branches, said it was cedar, and another thought it spruce. 'Let me discourse on a theme I understand,' said the President. 'I know all about trees, by right of being a backwoodsman. I'll show you the difference between spruce, pine, and cedar, and this shred of green, which is neither one ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... shoes on the great square flags of the ground-floor rooms. She ran in to see who it was. Confused at being caught by a priest with a fruit in one hand and another in her mouth, she made no answer to the questions of the handsome young abbe. She had never imagined such an abbe,—dapper and spruce as hands could make him, in dazzling linen and fine black ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... ago, Was moving home at two, sedate and slow, Old, and fatigued with pleading at the bar, And grumbling that he lived away so far, When suddenly he chanced his eye to drop On a spruce personage in a barber's shop, Who in the shopman's absence lounged at ease, Paring his nails as calmly as you please. "Demetrius"—so was called the slave he kept To do his errands, a well-trained adept— "Find out about that man for me; enquire His name and rank, his patron or his ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... Spruce gum, warmed on the fire, and mixed with a little linseed oil, is also excellent. For a genuine fly trap, ...
— Camp Life in the Woods and the Tricks of Trapping and Trap Making • William Hamilton Gibson
... It was Steel, spruce and serene as ever, a pink glow upon his mobile face, a pink flower in his reefer jacket, a jaunty Panama straw covering his white hairs, and buckskin shoes of kindred purity upon his small and well-shaped feet. Langholm greeted him in turn, only trusting ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... this, here is my second: "Nor can any lover of nature enter the old piles of Oxford and English cathedrals without feeling that the forest overpowered the mind of the builder, and that his chisel, his saw and plane, still reproduced its ferns, its spikes of flowers, its locust, elm, pine, and spruce." ...
— A Cathedral Courtship • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... fault that all that piece of the earth had grown so dusty and untidy; it was Mother Nature's own fault for being so long coming with those big buckets of hers. How could any land, however willing, look spruce and green and clean with no rain for four months? No wonder there was such a commotion, and it was such a noisy, vigorous business, when at last the rain did come! Every tree and every blade and every flower had a special ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... She found a beautiful spruce tree, which had evidently been growing all these years on purpose for a Christmas tree, so straight it stood, and so wide and ...
— Kristy's Rainy Day Picnic • Olive Thorne Miller
... force seems to uplift one as on wings; and one flies, and everything else flies, but contrariwise—both the verst stones, and traders riding on the shafts of their waggons, and the forest with dark lines of spruce and fir amid which may be heard the axe of the woodcutter and the croaking of the raven. Yes, out of a dim, remote distance the road comes towards one, and while nothing save the sky and the light clouds through which the moon is cleaving her way seem ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... children are going to do," said Meg as she and Bobby walked down Spruce Avenue, "but I am awfully glad they found homes for the kittens; Mr. Fritz will be glad, too. I don't believe he wanted them drowned, but he didn't know what to ...
— Four Little Blossoms at Oak Hill School • Mabel C. Hawley
... in the open season, which lasted from May to October, were low and muddy; the country through which it flowed, known as the barren lands, was for the most part flat and densely wooded with a stunted growth of black spruce, jackpine, tamarack, poplar, willow, and birch. The river was the only highway: much of the forest which lay back from its banks was entirely unexplored on account of its swamps and the closeness of its underbrush. There were places within ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... several thousand feet of butternut lumber from my farmland through my own sawmill and used it for a variety of purposes. It is probably the strongest wood for its weight except spruce. I have used it successfully to make propellers which operate electric generators for deriving power from the wind. Because butternut is so light and, properly varnished, resists weathering and decay to so great an ...
— Growing Nuts in the North • Carl Weschcke
... he get it but up where he lives?" she asked. "Rufous never has to worry about food. It is all around him. You see, so far as known, he lives wholly on the thick parts of the needles, which you know are the leaves, of fir and spruce trees, and on the bark of tender twigs. So you see he is more of a tree dweller than any of the Squirrel family. While Rufous has the general shape of Danny and his relatives, he has quite a long tail. Now ...
— The Burgess Animal Book for Children • Thornton W. Burgess
... salmon was unexceptionable, and had completed the most arduous day's walk in his journal, nearly thirteen miles, in a state of dust and heat far from agreeable to a stoutish gentleman of forty, who usually looked as spruce as if he came out of a band-box. Hanmer and he seemed really glad to see each other. On those "oxless" shores, where, as Byron says, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... snow on the ground and they scraped bare a place for their camp-fire beside a big stump and gathered enough fuel from windfalls for the night. Then they rolled a log beside the fire for a seat and built a soft bed with fragrant branches of hemlock and spruce. They roasted the chicken over a thick bed of glowing coals and baked potatoes in the ashes of the fire. The chicken was carved with their pocket knives and they got along without forks or plates. By using bark gathered from a birch and softening it over their fire they made cups with which they ...
— Dick in the Everglades • A. W. Dimock
... found in magnificent wildness and disarray, her hair quite unkempt. Great pines, shooting up immense distances in the sky skirted the path and flung their green-gray, trailing mosses abroad on the breeze; crowds of fir, spruce, hemlock, and cedar trees stood waving aloft their rich, dark banners; clusters of tall, white birches, scattered here and there, relieved and brightened the sombre evergreen depths, and the maple with its affluent foliage crowned each swell of the densely covered land. Here and ...
— Adele Dubois - A Story of the Lovely Miramichi Valley in New Brunswick • Mrs. William T. Savage
... had become more a signature than a person to her. Nevertheless, the memory of her girlish triumph the last time they had met caused her to hasten her toilet and put in an appearance in the private salon she had at the hotel in something less than half an hour. There she found the young banker very spruce in his frock coat and silk hat, which he had furnished himself with in America and assumed the day of his arrival on English soil. He was taking a vacation, he promptly explained to Adelle, in which, of course, he should do several pieces of important business. But he gave the girl to understand ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... was fuel to the already boiling blood of Stockington. The week following, what was their astonishment to find a much frequented ruin gone! it was actually gone! not a trace of it; but the spot where it had stood for ages, turfed, planted with young spruce trees, and fenced off with post and rail! The exasperated people now launched forth an immensity of fulminations against the churl Sir Roger, and a certain number of them resolved to come and seat themselves in the street of the hamlet and there dine; but ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... abiding-place, with a retinue of human servants to minister to his comfort. Yet he was modest and unassuming, and appeared really to enjoy his life of hard work; varying his struggles with a kernel of hard corn on the ground, where his color shone out like a flower against the green, with a rest on a spruce-tree, where ...
— A Bird-Lover in the West • Olive Thorne Miller
... the edge of a beaver meadow, feasting on trout fresh caught from a deep pool beneath a short fall. And in the morning, still following the stream, they came to the trappers' cabin, set in a grove of young spruce. ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... reply, being plainly at a loss to understand how there could be any doubt about the matter. Alice went to the round drawing-room, where she found Mr. Parker examining a trophy of Indian armor, and presenting a back view of a short gentleman in a spruce blue frock-coat. A new hat and pair of gloves were also visible as he stood looking upward with his hands behind him. When he turned to greet Alice lie displayed a face expressive of resolute self-esteem, with eyes whose watery brightness, together with the bareness of ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... August evening was so hot and close that the crowded cars were stifling. Nobody ever knew just why trains stopped at Millward siding. Nobody was ever known to get off there or get on. There was only one house nearer to it than four miles, and it was surrounded by acres of blueberry barrens and scrub spruce-trees. ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... well have been just beyond the spruce thicket, Thayer reflected. The description was too accurate to be artistic; it amounted to mere photography. As far as his own eyes could see, the earth lay buried in a deep, soft blanket of snow, and the air above was misty with flakes which neither fell nor scurried before the wind, but ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... looped, Bear Creek tumbled out of the southeast, and roved between noble borders of silver spruce into the shadows of the Blue Mountains of the north, half a dozen miles across and ten long of grazing and farm land, rich, loamy bottom ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand
... paused before she came to the door, to watch the smoke curling up from the chimney straight as a column, for there was not a breath of air stirring. The sun was almost gone, and the strong bluish light was settling on everything, giving even the green spruce-trees a ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... days when it was the abode of fashion,—the far-off days when fashion itself had not become old-fashioned and got improved into Smart Society,—this haunted half-mile or more still retains many fine old residences of brown stone and of red brick, which are spruce and well-kept. One such, on the west side of the street, of red brick, with a high stoop of brown stone, is a boarding-house, and in it is an apartment to which, on a certain clear, cold afternoon in October, the reader's presence in the spirit ...
— The Mystery of Murray Davenport - A Story of New York at the Present Day • Robert Neilson Stephens
... his, but they did not turn aside. "I think I'm going there with some one else," she said softly, and before her vision of this eager lover there popped a spruce ...
— Moor Fires • E. H. (Emily Hilda) Young
... with his little dreadful air of fervid solemnity—and I don't know whether I dreamed it or whether it was really there—very spruce and strutting about the lawns of Amerley Park at that garden-party they ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair
... mountainous, and evergreen country, this style of cottage is peculiarly appropriate. It takes additional character from bold and picturesque scenery, with which it is in harmony. The pine, spruce, cedar, or hemlock, or the evergreen laurel, planted around or near it, will give it increased effect, while among deciduous trees and shrubs, an occasional Lombardy poplar, and larch, will harmonize ...
— Rural Architecture - Being a Complete Description of Farm Houses, Cottages, and Out Buildings • Lewis Falley Allen
... city newspapers are located in or around Printing House Square, immediately opposite and east of the City Hall. One of the greatest curiosities of this square is a huge engine, which runs a large number of presses. It is situated in Spruce street, between William and Nassau streets, and occupies the basement of the building in which it is located. There are two engines here—one of 150 horse power, which is used during the day, and a smaller one of ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... that Cartier was much surprised to see him out and well. He contrived to make him relate the particulars of his recovery, and thus found out that a decoction of the bark and foliage of the white spruce-tree furnished the savages with a remedy. Having recourse to this enabled the French captain to arrest the progress of the disease among his own people, and, in a short time, to bring about ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... was, and imperfectly educated, he aspired to be a lawyer; and at eighteen years of age he became a law-student in the office of Mr. Spruce McCay in Salisbury, North Carolina. Two years later, in 1787, he was admitted to the bar. Not making much headway in Salisbury, he wandered to that part of the State which is now Tennessee, then an almost unbroken wilderness, exposed to Indian massacres and depredations; and finally ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XII • John Lord
... it is to this day. Like Cain, I was branded—branded by Nature with the stamp of abnormal ugliness, as I was gifted by Nature with iron and abnormal strength and considerable intellectual powers. So ugly was I that the spruce young men of my College, though they were proud enough of my feats of endurance and physical prowess, did not even care to be seen walking with me. Was it wonderful that I was misanthropic and sullen? Was it wonderful that I brooded and worked alone, and had ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... waste dominion yields, Stript her last robes, with gold and purple gay.— So droops my life, of your soft beams despoil'd, Youth, Health, and Hope, that long exulting smil'd; And the wild carols, and the bloomy hues Of merry Spring-time, spruce on every plain Her half-blown bushes, moist with sunny rain, More pensive thoughts in my sunk heart infuse Than Winter's grey, and desolate domain, Faded, like my lost Youth, ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... the higher hills. Towering, broken crags loomed ahead darkly in the gathering gloom. The vast riven facets cut the sky-line, and black patches of pine forests, and spruce, gave a ghostly, threatening outlook. They must have been riding over two hours when Scipio realized they were passing over a narrow cattle track on the summit of a wooded hill. Then presently their horses began a steep shelving descent which required great caution to ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... row of hemlocks and Norway spruce bordered the road, and, with the aid of a stone wall, shut off from the highway a prosperous-looking vegetable garden. Farther along, a flower garden glowed in the fantastic coloring which gardens acquire when planted for the love of flowers rather than for definite artistic ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger
... you git religion, Sir, the thing can't never be; Nut but wut I respeck," sez she, "your intellectle part, But you wun't noways du for me athout a change o' heart: Nothun religion works wal North, but it's ez soft ez spruce, Compared to ourn, for keepin' sound," sez she, "upon the goose; A day's experunce'd prove to ye, ez easy 'z pull a trigger, It takes the Southun pint o' view to raise ten bales a nigger; You'll fin' thet human natur, South, ain't wholesome ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... being tapped, the men left in camp have been busy enough building the rude shanties of logs and spruce boughs that are to shelter them while they remain in the bush, cutting quantities of fire-wood, and swinging the great kettles into place on the iron bar that rests on two forked posts solidly fixed in the ground. Sometimes great shallow pans of iron, ...
— Harper's Young People, May 4, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... sooner been converted to the vernacular, and disappeared, than another stranger entered the room. He had evidently been lurking in the passage: it was a man of smallish stature, singularly gaunt, angular, and haggard, but dressed in a spruce suit of black, tight, new, and glossy. In short, he looked like Romeo's apothecary gone to Stultz with the money. He fluttered in with pale cheek and apprehensive body, saying hurriedly, "Now, my dear sir, be calm: pray be calm. I have come down all the ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... not get fat and unwieldy, as well as any other part of the human frame. Some of our best poets have written in paroxysms of hunger, and I really believe that Addison would have had more point if he had had less victuals; and if you do not restrict yourself to a sheep's trotter and spruce beer, your style will betray your luxury." But soon came an increase of the very thing feared for her fame, in the form of an invitation from Lady Abercorn and the marquis to pass the chief part of every year with them. This was accepted, and thus she met her fate. Lord ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... this gallant and spruce company (for every man had donned his best, and dressed himself with the utmost care) came Caron La Boulaye. He walked alone, for although their comrade in death, he was their comrade in nothing else. Their heads might ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... most remarkable company that ever was seen proceeded down the Via Ripetta towards the Porta del Popolo. All eyes were turned upon them, and people asked each other if these were maskers left from the Carnival. Signor Pasquale Capuzzi, spruce and smug, all elegance and politeness, wearing his gay Spanish suit well brushed, parading a new yellow feather in his conical hat, and stepping along in shoes too little for him, as if he were walking amongst eggs, was leading pretty Marianna on his arm; her ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... guidance, to try to keep straight any more? Bereft of her love, Robert had sunk steadily. Gambling, drink, morphia, billiards, and cigars—he had taken to them all; until now in the wretched figure of the outcast on the Embankment you would never have recognised the once spruce figure of Handsome Hardrow. ...
— Happy Days • Alan Alexander Milne
... products of the country. There were tin mines, he found, in parts of the island, and iron in small quantities; but copper was imported from the Continent. The vegetation resembled that of France, save that he saw no beech and no spruce pine. Of more consequence were the people and the distribution of them. The Britons of the interior he conceived to be indigenous. The coast was chiefly occupied by immigrants from Belgium, as could be traced in the nomenclature of places. The ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... of mean finery or shabby splendour, as now it does. 'Voluble' was an epithet which had nothing of slight in it, but meant what 'fluent' means now; 'dapper' was what in German 'tapfer' is; not so much neat and spruce as brave and bold; 'plausible' was worthy of applause; 'pert' is now brisk and lively, but with a very distinct subaudition, which once it had not, of sauciness as well; 'lewd' meant no more than unlearned, as the lay or common ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... strewed about here, were a spearshaft, eight feet in length, recently made and ochred; parts of old canoes, fragments of their skin-dresses, &c. For some distance around, the trunks of many of the birch, and of that species of spruce pine called here the Var (Pinus balsamifera) had been rinded; these people using the inner part of the bark of that kind of tree for food. Some of the cuts in the trees with the axe, were evidently made the preceding year. Besides these, we were elated by other ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 387, August 28, 1829 • Various
... which suddenly appears through bud-variation on a Provence-rose, with the gall of red moss growing from the inoculated leaf of a wild rose, with each filament symmetrically branched like a microscopical spruce-fir, bearing a glandular tip and secreting odoriferous gummy matter.[708] Or compare, on the one hand, the fruit of the peach, with its hairy skin, fleshy covering, hard shell and kernel, and on the other hand one of the more complex galls with its epidermic, spongy, and woody ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... rock under a friendly dwarf spruce they lay still as two rabbits, watching with round eyes, eager but unafraid, the antics of three brown wolf cubs that were chasing the flies and tumbling over some invisible plaything before ...
— Northern Trails, Book I. • William J. Long
... in a wood, walking through lines of spruce firs of deep golden green in the yellow beams. One of these trees among its well-robed fellows fronting them was all lichen-smitten. From the low sweeping branches touching earth to the plumed top, the tree was dead-black as its shadow; ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... force, perhaps a hundred and fifty strong, fell in one solid mass on the mob, knocking men over right and left, and laying heads open at every blow. The panic-stricken crowd fled up Chatham Street, across the Park, and down Spruce and Frankfort Streets, punished terribly at every step. The space around the building being cleared, a portion of the police rushed inside, where the work of destruction was going on. The sight of the blue-coats in their midst, ...
— The Great Riots of New York 1712 to 1873 • J.T. Headley
... never showed signs of disapproving it, for they knew that my designs were honourable and virtuous; and I know that they often said as much to Leonisa, in order to dispose her to receive me as her betrothed; but she had set her heart on Cornelio, the son of Ascanio Rotulo, whom you well know—a spruce young gallant, point-de-vice in his attire, with white hands, curly locks, mellifluous voice, amorous discourse—made up, in short, of amber and sugar-paste, garnished with plumes and brocade. ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... Street line, which had been but recently started, was paying six hundred dollars a day. A project for a West Philadelphia line (Walnut and Chestnut) was on foot, as were lines to occupy Second and Third Streets, Race and Vine, Spruce and Pine, Green and Coates, Tenth and Eleventh, and so forth. They were engineered and backed by some powerful capitalists who had influence with the State legislature and could, in spite of great public protest, obtain franchises. ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... three all-important features in flying machine construction, viz.: lightness, strength and extreme rigidity. Spruce is the wood generally used for glider frames. Oak, ash and hickory are all stronger, but they are also considerably heavier, and where the saving of weight is essential, the difference is largely in favor of spruce. This will be seen in ...
— Flying Machines - Construction and Operation • W.J. Jackman and Thos. H. Russell
... of Nova Scotia, a maritime province, there is a ridge called North Mountain, overlooking the Bay of Fundy on one side and the fertile Annapolis valley on the other. On the northern slope of the range grows the hardy spruce-tree, well adapted for ship-timbers, of which many vessels of all classes have been built. The people of this coast, hardy, robust, and strong, are disposed to compete in the world's commerce, and it is nothing ...
— Sailing Alone Around The World • Joshua Slocum
... Daddy!" exclaimed Dotty; "I'm so glad there are a lot of flower-beds and nice big shrubs, and lovely blue spruce trees and lots of things that ...
— Two Little Women • Carolyn Wells
... OR DOUBLE SPRUCE.) Leaves about 1/2 in. long, erect, stiff, somewhat 4-sided, very dark green or whitish-gray; branchlets pubescent. Cones persistent, 1 to 1 1/2 in. long, ovate or ovate-oblong, changing from dark purple to dull reddish-brown; scales ...
— Trees of the Northern United States - Their Study, Description and Determination • Austin C. Apgar
... his bed, and the little room looked spruce. Chris walked into one of the niches made by the projecting windows, pushed up the ...
— Mr. Wicker's Window • Carley Dawson
... seen everything," he remarked. "But yellow pine, spruce, tamarack, apples, oaks, palms, oranges, cedars, joshua trees and cactus—just to name a few—all growing on ...
— Masters of Space • Edward Elmer Smith
... this day and till the middle of the next forenoon, concealing the landscape almost entirely; but we had hardly got out of the streets of Bangor before I began to be exhilarated by the sight of the wild fir and spruce tops, and those of other primitive evergreens, peering through the mist in the horizon. It was like the sight and odor of cake to a schoolboy. He who rides and keeps the beaten track studies the fences chiefly. Near Bangor, the fence-posts, on account of the frost's heaving them in the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various |
