"Peat" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... shake their heads disconsolately, saying, "Winter is at hand!" Then the axe of the woodcutter echoes sharp and diligently in the forest; then the coal-merchants rejoice, because each shriek of Nature in her agony adds something to the price of coal per ton; then the peat-smoke spreads its aromatic fragrance through the atmosphere. A few days more; and at eventide, the children look out of the window, and dimly perceive the flaunting of a snowy mantle in the air. It is stern Winter's vesture. They crowd ...
— Snow Flakes (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... great deal of fine grass," said Sheila almost sorrowfully. "It is a beautiful ground for sheep—no rushes, no peat-moss, only fine, good grass and dry land. I should like my papa to see ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... and up to date many thousands of pounds have been spent on the work. It was not until these temporary supports had been fixed and excavations begun that the magnitude of the task was fully revealed. The Cathedral was found to have been built on an old "water-bed" having a foundation of peat, the distance between the ground level and the firm gravel beneath the peat being 27 feet. The only hope of saving the east end was to remove the peat and fill in the spaces with concrete and cement. With the removal of the peat, however, there was so great an ...
— Winchester • Sidney Heath
... fragment of their broken outline which gives them their pathetic power, and historical majesty. And this element among the wilds of our own country I found wholly wanting. The Highland cottage is literally a heap of gray stones, choked up, rather than roofed over, with black peat and withered heather; the only approach to an effort at decoration consists in the placing of the clods of protective peat obliquely on its roof, so as to give a diagonal arrangement of lines, looking somewhat as if the surface had been scored ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... gazing on the prospect an old man driving a peat cart came from the direction in which I was going. I asked him the name of the ravine and he told me it was Ceunant Coomb or hollow-dingle coomb. I asked the name of the brook, and he told me that it was called ...
— The Pocket George Borrow • George Borrow
... may accordingly be taken as existing in the country: Gold, silver, copper, lead, tin, hematite, antimony, quicksilver, zinc, iron, manganese and arsenic, plumbago, coal, kerosene, sulphur, bismuth, phosphorus, peat. ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... The plain and seemly countenance with which Ye dealt out your plain comforts? Yet had ye 505 Delights and exultations of your own. [k] Eager and never weary we pursued Our home-amusements by the warm peat-fire At evening, when with pencil, and smooth slate In square divisions parcelled out and all 510 With crosses and with cyphers scribbled o'er, We schemed and puzzled, head opposed to head In strife too humble to be named in verse: Or round the naked table, snow-white ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... sensitive to water, and storage material must be fairly dry and cool. In two large boxes of scions received last year from Germany, some 20 varieties of Persian walnut, all had dead buds when received. They were packed in German peat. When buds are covered with wax the wax must not be too hot or it will kill the buds. In placing grafted walnuts in sphagnum or sand they should not stay wet or the buds will die. Either unions must be above damp sand or sphagnum, or ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Thirty-Eighth Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... are—in one of Nature's hottest and dampest laboratories. Nearly eighty inches of yearly rain and more than eighty degrees of perpetual heat make swift work with vegetable fibre, which, in our cold and sluggard clime, would curdle into leaf-mould, perhaps into peat. Far to the north, in poor old Ireland, and far to the south, in Patagonia, begin the zones of peat, where dead vegetable fibre, its treasures of light and heat locked up, lies all but useless age after age. But this is the zone of illimitable sun-force, which ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... good-tempered because it is a fine day, will be ill-tempered when it rains: their selves are just the same both days; only in the one case, the fine weather has got into them, in the other the rainy. Rosamond, as she sat warming herself by the glow of the peat-fire, turning over in her mind all that had passed, and feeling how pleasant the change in her feelings was, began by degrees to think how very good she had grown, and how very good she was to have grown good, and how extremely ...
— A Double Story • George MacDonald
... meant agriculture, with side occupations such as hunting, fishing, weaving, tanning, pottery, thatching and peat cutting, in the all but continuous countryside. There was a very little mining, but outside of the commercial towns and the growing capital cities people made their living by taking care of domestic animals and tilling the soil. Between seed time and harvest they tightened ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... moved into position 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 was once driven back by ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... pipes in the old way, by picking up a live coal, or, in Ireland, a fragment of glowing peat, from the kitchen fire, with the ordinary tongs, and applying it to the pipe-bowl; but the old ember-tongs are seldom seen. They may still be found in some farmhouses and country cottages, which have not been raided by the agents of dealers ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... of wood and peat, though coal was also used. For artificial lighting oil-lamps (wicks in oil) and candles were used. A light was obtained from flint and tinder, the latter being ignited by a spark got from striking the flint ...
— Life in a Medival City - Illustrated by York in the XVth Century • Edwin Benson
... a magic moorland with wild winds drifting by, And pools among the peat-hags that mirror back the sky; And there in golden bracken the fronds that toss and turn Are really little people ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov. 28, 1917 • Various
... no cooking utensils but a cast-metal pot to boil potatoes,—almost the only food. There were no bedsteads, and but few blankets. The people slept in their clothes, the whole family generally in one room,—the only room in the cabin. For fuel they burned peat. In order to pay their rent, they sold their pigs. Beggars infested every road and filled every village. No one was certain of employment, even at twopence a day. Everybody was controlled by the priests, whose ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... and take comfort," said the tall lady in the green peaked hat. "Here is money enough to pay your rent and buy another cow." With that, she sat down at the round table near the peat fire. Opening her bag, the shining gold coins slid out and formed a little heap ...
— Welsh Fairy Tales • William Elliot Griffis
... the 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
... long as Saunders had the driving of it. Times had not been too good of late; and for some years—indeed, ever since the imposition of the tax on light-wheeled vehicles—the "tax-cart" had slumbered wheelless in the back of the peat-shed, and the Drumquhat folk had driven a well-cleaned, heavy-wheeled red cart both to kirk and market. But they were respected in spite of their want of that admirable local certificate of character, ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... fossil wood carbonized to a certain degree, but retaining distinctly its woody texture. Dr. MacCulloch, On Rocks, p. 636., observes: "In its chemical properties, lignite holds a station intermediate between peat and coal; while among the varieties a gradation in this respect may be traced; the brown and more organised kinds approaching very near to peat, while the more compact kinds, such ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 236, May 6, 1854 • Various
... nephew of the laird's younger brother, worthy Lord Bladderskate, whilk ye are aware sounds as like being akin to a peatship [Formerly, a lawyer, supposed to be under the peculiar patronage of any particular judge, was invidiously termed his PEAT or PET.] and a sheriffdom, as a sieve is sib to a riddle. Now, Peter Drudgeit, my lord's clerk, came to me this morning in the House, like ane bereft of his wits; for it seems that young Dumtoustie is ane of the Poor's lawyers, and Peter Peebles's ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... peace in quiet places; and even a cultivated man, if he be not callous with culture, may feel its attractiveness, a sense that the tide of life grows full in the still coves as well as on all the sounding beaches of the world; and an existence in which the smell of peat-smoke is an event, and the sight of some children paddling in the water is a day's memory, and the mere drawing in of the salt sea wind is life itself, may seem as important in its simplicity as the varied impressions of a day ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... gullies with greasy-looking banks and a dribble of iridescent water in the bottom. It is in the autumn that the moles heap up meanders of miniature barrows, built of the softest brown loam; and in the turbaries the turf-cutters pile larger and darker stacks of peat. ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... 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 manner in which the other members of the ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay
... the many rising grounds and eminences with which 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 ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... 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 three ...
— The Man From the Clouds • J. Storer Clouston
... 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, ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... sight of mortal eye, in a dip of the ground, Evan Jones sat down and took the small dark head between his knees—and you may be sure the dog's heart was heavy as the man's. "We did our pest, Pip," he cried brokenly, "but we're peat—the first time ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... And cannot be content with such a peat! Come to my closet, girl, make much of me; We'll appoint a meeting-place some twice a week, And I'll maintain thee like a ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VII (4th edition) • Various
... The speaker, 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
... between Fyvie and the east coast of Buchan. At Plaidy a patch of clay with Liassic fossils occurs. At several localities between Logie Coldstone and Dinnet a deposit of diatomite (Kieselguhr) occurs beneath the peat. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... and occasionally there were tears in Mary's eyes; and there were times when the past surged through my mind with such vividness that I could only look vacantly into the white flame of the peat fire. Once after a long silence my father spoke—his voice trembled, "Oh," he said, "if she cud just have weathered through till ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... about, all of you, and we'll have some dinner before we do anything else. Get some peats, will you, Reggie; some of the shepherd's peat-stack is still there, and it comes in very usefully ...
— The Adventure League • Hilda T. Skae
... grows in Denmark except under careful cultivation, which, however, is largely practised in Jutland (q.v.). But again, abundant traces of ancient extensive forests of fir and pine are found in the numerous peat bogs which supply a large proportion of the fuel locally used. In Bornholm, it should be mentioned, the flora is more like that of Sweden; not the beech, but the pine, birch and ash are ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... black flies, of the largest Thames and Kennet sizes, seem the only attractive baits: and for this reason, that they are the flies of the place. The cinnamon Phryganea comes up abundantly from among the stones; and the large peat moss to the west of the tarn abounds, as usual, in house-flies and bluebottles, and in the caterpillars of the fox and oak-egger moths: another proof that the most attractive flies are imitations of the real insects. On the other hand, there ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... grassy plains to the pampas of Buenos Ayres, is of opinion that they once formed part of the continent. These plains are low, marshy, covered with tall grass and shrubs, and are inundated in the winter. Peat is abundant and makes excellent fuel. The character of the soil has proved an obstacle to the growth of the trees which Bougainville endeavoured to acclimatize, of which scarce a vestige remained at the time of Freycinet's visit. The plant which reaches the greatest height and ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... than real. An amiable Crown-Prince, no soul in Custrin but would run by night or by day to serve him. He drives and rides about, in that green peaty country, on Domain business, on visits, on permissible amusement, pretty much at his own modest discretion. A green flat region, made of peat and sand; human industry needing to be always busy on it: raised causeways with incessant bridges, black sedgy ditch on this hand and that; many meres, muddy pools, stagnant or flowing waters everywhere; big muddy Oder, of yellowish-drab color, coming from the south, ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... was ringing. Far away through the forest might be heard its musical clangor and swell. Peat-cutters on Blackdown and fishers upon the Exe heard the distant throbbing rising and falling upon the sultry summer air. It was a common sound in those parts—as common as the chatter of the jays and the booming of the bittern. Yet the fishers and the peasants raised their heads and looked ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... not speak for some moments. The peat-fire was falling into masses of white ash, and she thought vaguely of putting on some more turf; then her attention was caught by the withering ferns in the flower-glasses, then by the soaking pasture-lands, then by the spiky branches of the chestnut-trees ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... 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 eaten ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... retire to their rooms; but Kenneth did not go to his until he had been to the butler's pantry, and then to the kitchen, which was empty, the servants having retired for the night, after banking up the fire with peat, which would go on smouldering and glowing for the rest of the night, and only want stirring in the morning to burst ...
— Three Boys - or the Chiefs of the Clan Mackhai • George Manville Fenn
... is from one to four tons of marketable shoots per acre, according to age and thrift of plants, etc., the largest yields being on the peat lands of the river islands. On suitable lands one ought to get at least two tons per acre. Roots may yield a few days' cuttings during their second year in permanent place; the third year they will stand ...
— One Thousand Questions in California Agriculture Answered • E.J. Wickson
... Bettisfield and Fenns Bank. This, it was supposed, might even be drained by making the railway across its quivering surface, but hopes of this sort were not to be realised, for it remains to-day a wild, but picturesque stretch of heather and silver birches, where the peat-digger plies his trade with, perhaps, as much profit as the farmer would in tilling it. But as to its power to bear the weight of passing trains the engineers had little doubt. The canal already crossed it, and though in making soundings ...
— The Story of the Cambrian - A Biography of a Railway • C. P. Gasquoine
... the North of Europe geologists find that a vegetation of fir exists at the lowest depth of peat deposits; that this was succeeded by a vegetation of oak, and this by a vegetation of beech. Even in the lowest stratum a stone implement was found under a fir, showing the presence ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... led away the talk to their home in Devonshire, and the red, bright earth, and the deep green combes, and the peat streams like cairngorm pebbles, and the wild moor with its high, cloudy tors for a giant background to the picture, till Tom got jealous, and stood up for the clear chalk streams, and the emerald water meadows and great ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... come with microscopes to the study of Burns. Far more interesting material awaited them farther on: The Poet's Welcome, for example! They could amplify that. Here, too, is the first hint of Burns's brilliant powers as a talker; a glimpse on this lonely peat moss of the man who, not many years afterwards, was to dazzle literary Edinburgh with the sparkle and ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... their inhabitants woodmen and rustics,—that is, selvaggia, and the inhabitants are salvages. A civilized man, using the word in the ordinary sense, with his ideas and associations, must at length pine there, like a cultivated plant, which clasps its fibres about a crude and undissolved mass of peat. At the extreme North, the voyagers are obliged to dance and act plays for employment. Perhaps our own woods and fields,—in the best wooded towns, where we need not quarrel about the huckleberries,—with the primitive ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... work. He was succeeded in 1738 by his son, who became Sir William Moncrieff Wellwood. In that year the old kirk was burned in rather curious circumstances. The kirk was being used as the parish school, and was heated by a peat fire. In the master's absence one day the boys amused themselves by throwing about the lighted peats. The kirk caught fire, and was burned to the ground. Sir Henry Moncrieff succeeded his father in 1771, the sixth minister of the family in a lineal descent. ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... memory he could see that her eyes were blue like his own, but her hair was black. He could hear the ring of her laugh as she told him Irish stories, and the soft drone of her voice as she sang him old Irish songs. It was she who told him about the fairies and witches that lived up behind the peat-flames. He remembered holding her hand and putting his cheek against it when the goblins came too near. Then the picture would go out, like a picture in a magic-lantern show, and sometimes Sandy could make it come back, and sometimes ...
— Sandy • Alice Hegan Rice
... to Peter M'Crawney, the agent, an eager-faced Scot with an insatiable desire for information on all sorts of subjects. Mrs. M'Crawney was an Irishwoman who was always sighing for the mild, moist climate and the peat reek of her childhood's home. But Peter knew when he was well off, and meant to stick to his post until he had saved enough money ...
— A Countess from Canada - A Story of Life in the Backwoods • Bessie Marchant
... collection of 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 photographed ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... matter into coal. All the coal dug from the earth represents vegetable life of a former period. Millions of years were required for the transformation; but the same change is in progress now, where peat ...
— An Introduction to Chemical Science • R.P. Williams
... always 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. Jarvis, could one read them year in, year out—the ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... said "Yes" nor "No." Moved by the soft and insinuating talkativeness of Herzog, she felt herself treading on dangerous ground. It seemed to her that her foot was sinking, as in those dangerous peat-mosses of which the surface is covered with green grass, tempting one to run on it. Cayrol was under the charm. He drank in the German's words. This clever man, who had never till then been duped, had found his master ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... John Mason preached over a hundred times the same sermon; and the text was: "To the poor the Gospel is preached." Lazarus went up, while Dives went down; and there are candidates for Imperial splendors in the back alley, and by the peat-fire of the Irish shanty. King Jesus set up His throne in a manger, and made a resurrection day for the poor widow of Nain, and sprung the gate of heaven wide open, so that all the beggars, and thieves, and scoundrels of the universe may come in if they will only repent. ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... exclamations of pity were profuse. There was a kettle of broth on the peat fire, and after placing the girl in a corner of the settle, she filled three wooden bowls, two of which she placed before Hal and the shepherd, making signs to the heavy-browed Piers to wait; and getting no reply from her worn-out guest, she took her in her arms, and ...
— The Herd Boy and His Hermit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... boating in secure wherry or light curricle with kedge anchor on reaches free from weirs and rapids (period of estivation), vespertinal perambulation or equestrian circumprocession with inspection of sterile landscape and contrastingly agreeable cottagers' fires of smoking peat turves (period of hibernation). Indoor: discussion in tepid security of unsolved historical and criminal problems: lecture of unexpurgated exotic erotic masterpieces: house carpentry with toolbox containing hammer, awl nails, screws, tintacks, gimlet, tweezers, bullnose plane and turnscrew. ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... nae heather, peat, nor birks, Nae trout in a' yer burnies lurks, There are nae bonny U.P. kirks, An awfu' place! Nane kens the Covenant o' Works Frae that ...
— Ban and Arriere Ban • Andrew Lang
... of the soil was found upon the sides of sloping hills, and in the broad valleys between them. Some parts that were low and level had a wet and peat-like surface, bounded by small tracts of flowering shrubs and odoriferous plants, that perfumed the air with the fragrance of their oils.* These retained in general the appearance of those in New South Wales, ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 2 • David Collins
... Athletics 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 numbers a match was arranged ...
— A History of Giggleswick School - From its Foundation 1499 to 1912 • Edward Allen Bell
... lies below the level of the sea, from which it is protected by embankments. This fenny district gradually had been reclaimed, and to-day the deep loam and peat-soils, not unlike the rich farms of Holland, are celebrated for their high condition of agriculture. What mortgages the Hon. George Searles held were secured upon Lincolnshire estates, ...
— The Harris-Ingram Experiment • Charles E. Bolton
... 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 of them also presented the ...
— The Eagle Cliff • R.M. Ballantyne
... fire was never allowed to go out, even in midsummer; an immense chimney with a sculptured mantel, all bristling with heavy iron andirons and cooking utensils, with one of those huge fires of mixed wood and peat which at night, in village streets make the reflection of forge windows stand out so red on the opposite walls. A big dog gravely seated in the ashes was turning a spit loaded with meat ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... and peat was glowing ruddily. The Indians were already deep within their fur-lined bags, and slumbering with the utter indifference engendered of complete weariness of body. Marcel and Keeko were squatting beside each other over the cheering warmth which kept the night chills ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... 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 was swamped there, how many centuries ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... provisions, and used every brutal method to make the girl disclose the secret of the retreat; but she was neither to be intimidated nor cajoled, and told them plainly that she would rather die, as her granduncle had done before her, than betray her trust. They threw her into a peat-hag filled with water, and left her to sink or swim. She did not swim, however, but sank never to rise again. Her spirit had been broken, and life had been rendered a burden to her. She expressed to ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... frightful spectacle we beheld. Women in tears, holding their children in their arms, ran like lunatics, uttering cries of despair, while men abandoned their houses, carrying off whatever was most valuable, running against and knocking each other over in the darkness. On all sides was heard, "Mauve qui peat; we are going to be blown up, we are all lost;" and the maledictions, lamentations, blasphemies, were sufficient to make your hair ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... Sources of Ammoniacal Products; Human Urine as a Source of Ammonia — Extraction of Ammoniacal Products from Sewage — Extraction of Ammonia from Gas Liquor — Manufacture of Ammoniacal Compounds from Bones, Nitrogenous Waste, Beetroot Wash and Peat — Manufacture of Caustic Ammonia, and Ammonium Chloride, Phosphate and Carbonate — Recovery of Ammonia from the Ammonia-Soda ...
— The Dyeing of Woollen Fabrics • Franklin Beech
... peat burns brimming from their cups of stone Glow brown and blood-red down the vast decline As if Christ stood on yonder clouded peak And turned its thousand ...
— Poems • G.K. Chesterton
... youths were grappling together like wild cats, striking, kicking, and biting with no thought except of who should have the best of the battle. They rolled on the floor, now tussling among the crackling faggots, anon pitching soft as one body on the peat dust in the corner, again knocking over a bench and bringing down the tools thereon to the floor with a jingle which might have been heard far out on the loch. They were still clawing and cuffing each other in blind rage, when a hand, heavy and remorseless, was laid upon each. ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... like a large collection of farm out-buildings without a farm-house. Muddy little lanes intersecting each other at every possible angle; rickety little cottages turned about to all the points of the compass; ducks, geese, cocks, hens, pigs, cows, horses, dunghills, puddles, sheds, peat-stacks, timber, nets, seemed to be all indiscriminately huddled together where there was little or no room for them. To find the inn amid this confusion of animate and inanimate objects, was no easy matter; and when we at length discovered it, pushed our way through the ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... shelter for a few hours, as he and his comrade had been benighted, and had been wandering about in the darkness many hours. The fare was very coarse and homely, but the famished lads were not disposed to find fault; and the cabin, if close, was at least warm, and, when a peat fire had been lighted, was a not altogether uncomfortable place for wanderers ...
— In the Wars of the Roses - A Story for the Young • Evelyn Everett-Green
... and autumn, and swept the whole year through by all the storms that accumulate upon the mountains filling the horizon to the south and east. The air is mountain-air, minus the aroma and stimulus of evergreen forests, and plus the miasma of miles of marsh and peat-land and the foulnesses of the city exhalations. It is the thin air of a high elevation, pleasantly bracing to persons so fortunate as to possess nerves of iron and lungs of leather, but extremely irritating to sensitive brains and delicate chests, and too ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... loves peace," said the Prince, haughtily; "but he never feared war. Ere he takes back yonder proud peat to his table and his bed, at the command of her father, Douglas must ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... old Beer's 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
... a leafless birch wood, close by, stood out in curiously fragile and delicate tracery against a paling saffron glow, though overhead the sky was barred with motionless gray cloud. A sharp smell of peat-smoke followed them as they clattered past a low white cottage with a yellow glow in one window; and then the earthy scent of rotting leaves replaced it as they plunged into the gloom of an oak wood beneath ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... summer, grandfather comes with a spade and turns my field of observation topsy-turvy. From under ground there comes, by the basketful and sackful, a sort of round root. I know that root; it abounds in the house; time after time I have cooked it in the peat stove. It is the potato. Its violet flower and its red fruit are pigeonholed for good and ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... his married life; the flower-market, where the middleclass people found the cheap floral decorations for their often gloomy interiors: the meat-market in the Nes: the Monday's market, on the Singel, of small furniture and kitchen-utensils: the vegetable- and peat-market on the Prinsengracht, etc. That all good housewives, even those of middle and upper classes, made it a rule to frequent these markets is revealed to us not only by contemporary pictures but also by a passage in one of Huygens's letters to the Prince of ...
— Rembrandt's Amsterdam • Frits Lugt
... a man of God coming over the narrow zigzag path that led across a Shetland peat moss. Swiftly and surely he stepped. Bottomless bogs of black peat-water were on each side of him, but he had neither fear nor hesitation. He walked like one who knew his way was ordered, and when the moss was passed, he pursued his journey over the rocky moor with the ...
— The Measure of a Man • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... started under the direction of Sir William Garstin in 1899. In 1900 the greater part of the sudd had been removed by the strenuous labours of Major Peake, and the Nile again became navigable from Khartum to Rejaf. The sudd was found to be piled up and of almost as close a structure as peat. It was sawn out in blocks ten feet square and carried away by gunboats. In the years 1901—02 further progress was made, and twenty thousand dollars appropriated for the work; and by means of constant patrolling the sudd is now ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 12 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... waste, in the shape of slag. By the new process the ore is to be kept separate from the sulphureous fuel in a compartment contrived for the purpose, in the centre of the furnace, where it will be in contact with peat only; and in this way the waste will be avoided, and a quality of metal will be produced fully equal to the best Swedish. The invention is likely to be one of considerable importance.——Professor JOHNSTON, the ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... so evidently prompted by kindness that I was fearful of hurting her by opposing her well-meant but exaggerated attentions. She swathed me in a Scotch plaid, and placed the bundle I had become in a cushioned and canopied arm-chair by the peat-fire, the smoke and unaccustomed odor of which stifled me; then she insisted upon removing my boots and stockings, and chafed my feet in her hands, to bring back a little warmth. Lastly, she hospitably brought ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... 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 ...
— Salted With Fire • George MacDonald
... from among the white water-lilies, and the curlews flit to and fro, crying "Tullie-wheep, mind your sheep"; and Dennis tells you strange stories of the Peishtamore, the great bogy-snake which lies in the black peat pools, among the old pine-stems, and puts his head out at night to snap at the cattle as they come down to drink?—But you must not believe all that Dennis tells you, mind; for if you ...
— The Water-Babies - A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby • Charles Kingsley
... by living roots as to form a raft, it will always float for a little while upon the current, provided that its specific gravity does not materially exceed that of the water; and those grasses that flourish best in water will spring up and grow upon these islands. Peat, too, in bogs, will float and form islands, for the simple reason that it is of less specific gravity than water; and vegetation will also spring up on these peat islands. But all this furnishes no evidence that the invariable law of nature, which carries to the bottom the heaviest body, ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... peat track brought us down to our friend's house.—Another fine moonlight night; but a thick fog rising from the neighbouring river, enveloped the rocky and wood-crested knoll on which our fancy cottage ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... that stretch away for miles and miles, feeding a few herds of mountain sheep, harbouring some wild conies and hares, giving a nesting-place to the birds of heaven, and, for the use of man, neither grain nor pasturage, but quarries of stone and piles of peat luridly smouldering up there on ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... shop in Sunny Street Next door to Mr Peter Peat. He every afternoon at two Sent his fair ...
— A Book for Kids • C. J. (Clarence Michael James) Dennis
... me, but to the shepherd of the Redswirehead, and I heard it from him in his dwelling, as I stayed the night, belated on the darkening moors. He told me it after supper in a flood of misty Doric, and his voice grew rough at times, and he poked viciously at the dying peat. ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... place for a gas-holder in a meadow in the town of St. Helier, Jersey, and carried their borings down to bed rock at about thirty feet, which roughly coincides with the present mean sea-level. The modern meadow-soil went down about five feet. Then came a bed of moss-peat, one to three feet thick. There had been a bog here at a time which, to judge by similar finds in other places, was just before the beginning of the bronze-age. Underneath the moss-peat came two or three feet of silt ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... fields, fenced with walls of earth as green as themselves, or of stones overgrown with moss, would stretch away on both sides, sprinkled with busily-feeding cattle. Now they would pass through a farm-steading, perfumed with the breath of cows, and the odour of burning peat—so fragrant! though not yet so grateful to the inner sense as it would be when encountered in after years and in foreign lands. For the smell of burning and the smell of earth are the deepest underlying sensuous bonds of the earth's unity, ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... the forests. Crasses grow luxuriantly in the river bottoms and wherever the tundra moss is destroyed to give them footing. Most distinctive is the ubiquitous carpeting of mosses, varying in colours from the pure white and cream of the reindeer moss to the deep green and brown of the peat moss, all conspicuously spangled in the briefsummer with bright flowers of the higher orders, heavy blossoms on stunted stalks. The thick peat moss or tundra of the undrained lowlands covers probably at least a quarter ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Fred's absence hardly a word had been spoken concerning him in the cottage. Mrs. O'Hara had feared the subject, and Kate had thought of him much too often to allow his name to be on her tongue. But now as they sat after dinner over their peat fire the mother began the subject. "Mr. Neville is to dine with Father Marty ...
— An Eye for an Eye • Anthony Trollope
... of forest fires: Surface fires, which burn just the upper layer of dry leaves and dry grass, brush, and small trees; ground fires, which burn deep amidst sawdust or pine needles or peat; and crown fires, which travel through the tops of the trees. Fires start as surface fires, and then can be beaten out with coats and sacks and shovels, and stopped by hoe and spade and plow. The ground fire does not look dangerous, but it is, and it is hard to get at. Crown ...
— Pluck on the Long Trail - Boy Scouts in the Rockies • Edwin L. Sabin
... lost the heather, and trod a bare spongy soil, something like dry, powdery peat. To my dismay it gave a momentary heave under me; then presently I saw what seemed the ripple of an earthquake running on before me, shadowy in the low moon. It passed into the distance; but, while yet I stared after it, a single wave rose up, and came slowly ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... defined. Formations of the Recent Period. Modern littoral Deposits containing Works of Art near Naples. Danish Peat and Shell-mounds. Swiss Lake-dwellings. Periods of Stone, Bronze, and Iron. Post-pliocene Formations. Coexistence of Man with extinct Mammalia. Reindeer Period of South of France. Alluvial Deposits ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... door was the sign "Water en vuur te koop."[1] It was not necessary for the children to go inside. They could see the whole apartment through the wide-open door-way. An old woman stood by a stove, or great oven, with a pair of tongs, taking up pieces of burning peat and dropping them into the buckets of the children, and then filling their tea-kettles with boiling water from great copper tanks on the stove. For this each child paid her a Dutch cent, which is less than half ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... help of the plank, after a good deal of slipping, which involved an exemplary drenching, I succeeded in getting him on to dry land. He was a distressing spectacle—his body and face all blackened with the slimy peat-mud; and he fell half-fainting on the grass, convulsed by a terrible cough. My first care was to give him whiskey, by perhaps a mistaken impulse of humanity; my next, as he lay, exhausted, was to bring water in my hat, and remove the ...
— Angling Sketches • Andrew Lang
... medley of colours. Even the sun, which sets there in greater beauty than anywhere else—blushing so deeply that the whole sky blushes with it, that the winding Venn rivulet hedged in by cushions of moss, that every pool, every peat-hole full of water reflects its beams ruddy-gold, and the sad Venn itself wears a mantle of glowing splendour—even this sun brought no glaringly bright light with it. It displayed its mighty disc in a grand dignified manner, a serious ...
— The Son of His Mother • Clara Viebig
... royal Frog, reproduction of, by Mr. Lowe Fruit preserving Fungi, eatable Gloucestershire, trip through Grove Gardens, noticed Guano, Peruvian Heating, galvanised iron for, by Mr. Ayres Holt forest Honey Implements, agricultural, at Gloucester Iron, galvanised Manure, peat mould as Mechi's (Mr.), gathering Mildew, grape Mulberries, to propagate, by Mr. Brown Mushrooms, bad Peat mould Plant-houses, to fumigate, Mr. Whalley Potato disease Potentillas Poultry at Gloucester Preserving fruit Roses, Bedding Sheep, breeds of ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 196, July 30, 1853 • Various
... Mr. Archer Wavy hair dancing wave ... Morris dance Mr. Morrison Black eyes white ... snow ... pure as snow Mr. Virtue Retreating chin retiring ... home-bird Mr. Holmes High instep high boots ... mud ... peat Mr. Peat Crooked legs broken legs ... crushed Mr. Crushton Apprehension suspension ... gallows Mr. Galloway Sombre sad ... mourning ... hat-band Mr. Hatton Music stave ... bar Mr. Barcroft Violinist violin ... high note ... whistle Mr. Birtwistle Painter paint ... colored cards ... whist ...
— Assimilative Memory - or, How to Attend and Never Forget • Marcus Dwight Larrowe (AKA Prof. A. Loisette)
... The farm-buildings of Belgium, Holland, France, and the Rhenish Provinces were much superior. In parts of England indeed no progress seems to have been made for generations at this date. Thousands of acres of peat moss in Lancashire were unreclaimed, and many parts of the Fylde district were difficult even to traverse. Even in Warwickshire, in the heart of England, between Knowle and Tamworth, instead of signs of industry and improvement ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... found on waste lands, where Heaths (Ericae) are produced: it is composed of decayed vegetable matter and white sand. The best sort is light when dry, of a black colour, and easily reduced to powder. Care should be taken to distinguish it from Peat, which is hard when dry, destitute in a great measure of the sand, and mostly of a red colour. This contains in great quantities sulphureous particles and mineral oil, which are known to be ...
— The Botanist's Companion, Vol. II • William Salisbury
... engraved with the three luces, the 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 their superior, was a ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... for three hours longer, through thin forests, over extensive beds of primitive rock, among fields of large boulders thickly strewn about, passing by numerous herds of buffalo, giraffe, and zebra, over a quaking quagmire which resembled peat, we arrived at the small stream of Sunuzzi, to a camping place only a mile removed from a large settlement of Wahha. But we were buried in the depths of a great forest—no road was in the vicinity, no noise ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... the man said. "We belonged to Kilbally. The Enniskilleners came that way, and burned it to the ground. They murdered my wife and many another one. I was away cutting peat with my wife's brother here. When we came back, everything was gone. A few had escaped to the bogs, where they could not be followed; the rest was, every mother's son of them, killed by those murdering villains. Your honour may guess what we felt, when we got ...
— Orange and Green - A Tale of the Boyne and Limerick • G. A. Henty
... struck the stone with her foot, and slipped, but Festing had time to clutch her first. He could not hold her back, but he could steady her, and for a moment felt his muscles crack and the peat tear out from the hole in the bank. Then his hands slipped and he fell, gasping and red in face, upon the ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss
... its old sense of 'assets'), and in May 1813, Scott seems to have thought that if John Ballantyne would curb his taste for long-dated bills, things might go well. Unluckily, John did not choose to do so, and Scott, despite the warning, was equally unable to curb his own for peat-bogs, marl-pits, the Cauldshiels Loch, and splendid lots of ancient armour. By July there was again trouble, and in August things were so bad that they were only cleared by Scott's obtaining from the Duke of Buccleuch a guarantee for L4000. It was in consenting ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... 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 tales in the gloaming that sent eerie shivers down the spines of her listeners, ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... they sat round the peat fire he bade them observe how beautiful the brass candlesticks and other glittering metals were in the glow from the hearth. Catherine's eyes sparkled at this observation, "And oh the sheets I lie in here," said he, "often my conscience pricketh me, and saith, 'Who art thou to lie ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... subject, to the matter in hand, let there be as many of them as possible. If 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, as unlike English: as ungrammatical, abrupt, insolved, transposed, ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... appeared in all respects the same; as indeed she was during school-hours. But when the little ones had gone home, and her household duties were all over, when there was no immediate call for exertion, her strength and spirits flagged. Sitting in the dim light of the peat fire, her weary eyes would close, and her work would fall upon her lap. It is true, the lowest tone of her aunt's voice would awaken her again, as indeed it would at any hour of the night; but, waking still weary and unrefreshed, no ...
— The Orphans of Glen Elder • Margaret Murray Robertson
... fully six miles from the nearest village. '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 either by grace or grandeur, mere undulating hills of grass and heather with peat bogs in the hollows between them.' So Froude describes the home where the Carlyles were to spend six years, the wife in domestic labours, in solitude, in growing ill-health, the husband in omnivorous reading, in digesting the knowledge that ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... Ravenswood. "Not a gleed of fire, then, except the bit kindling peat, and maybe a spunk ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... the room, and Kalle went groping about to light a candle. Twice he took up the matches and dropped them again to light it at the fire, but the peat was burning badly. "Oh, bother!" he said, resolutely striking a match at last. "We don't have ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... were snow-storm and sand-storms; the sand flew up to the houses, blocking the entrances, so that people had to creep up through the chimneys; that was nothing at all remarkable here. It was pleasant and cheerful indoors, where peat fuel and fragments of wood from the wrecks blazed and crackled upon the hearth. Merchant Bronne read aloud, from an old chronicle, about Prince Hamlet of Denmark, who had come over from England, landed near Bovbjerg, and fought a battle; close by Ramme ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... issuing from the safety-valve of a locomotive, when favourably observed, exhibits at a certain stage of its condensation the colours of the sky. It is blue by reflected light, and orange or red by transmitted light. The same effect, as pointed out by Goethe, is to some extent exhibited by peat-smoke. More than ten years ago, I amused myself by observing, on a calm day at Killarney, the straight smoke-columns rising from the cabin-chimneys. It was easy to project the lower portion of a column against a dark pine, and its ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... grandeur, in the glorious land of Scott and Burns, the Queen's journal, though a little clouded at the last, by that "great sorrow," is very pleasant, breezy reading. It gives one a breath of heather, and pine and peat-smoke. ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... is inconclusive, being a happy recollection that he had omitted any reference to stoofjes, the footstools filled with burning peat which are used to keep the feet warm in church. Such a custom was of course not less reprehensible than the building of dykes to keep out the sea. Hence these eight lines, which, however, would have come ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... square of the window and a red light in the oblong of the grate. A small boy with a toasting-fork knelt by the hearth. You disentangled a smell of stewed tea and browning toast from thick, deep smells of peat smoke and the sweat drying on Ned's shirt. When Farmer Alderson got up you saw the round table, the coarse blue-grey teacups and the brown glazed teapot on a brown ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... when 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 Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... not nest so far south, but pursue their course still onward to the Polar Sea. Here they build immense nests by raising heaps of peat moss, six feet in length by four in width, and two feet high. In the top of these heaps is situated the nest, which consists of a cavity a foot deep, and a foot and a half ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... in the 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, building ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... apparently level, from some cause which I know not, were formed into meriads of deep holes as if rooted up by hogs these the grass covered so thick that it was impossible to walk without the risk of falling down at every step. some parts of these bottoms also possess excellent terf or peat, I beleive of many feet deep. the mineral salts also frequently mentioned on the Missouri we saw this evening in these uneven bottoms. we saw many deer, Antelopes ducks, gees, some beaver and great appearance of their work. also a small bird and the Curlooe as ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... baith come bit by bit, a pickle at a time; and 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 and better sittin' in a peat-bog, like their forbears of the persecution, wi' a Bible under their oxter and a speerit o' prayer in their heart. There was nae doubt, onyway, but that Mr. Soulis had been ower lang at the college. ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... bench. Sooty cobwebs dripped from the joists, and great spiders ran nimbly over them; there were no beds, but on a heap of rotting skins in one corner two rats were busy, and in another were some dry leaves and bracken. There was no chimney either, though there was a peat fire smouldering in what you must call the hearth. The place was dense with the fog of it; it was some time, therefore, before Prosper could leave blinking and fit his eyes to see the occupants of his lodging.... Isoult, he saw, ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... mother who lived with them. She said if God had given her only one child, she could still help earn something to live on, but now He had given her two, she couldn't. When we reached Milltown I followed her home. It was in a long row of one-room things with a door—but no window. Some peat was smouldering under a hole in the roof called a chimney, and the place was thick with smoke. On the floor in one corner was some straw with a blanket on it, which she said was her bed; in another were some boards fastened into bed-shape, with straw packed in, and this belonged to her father ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... pray, Ha'd sinnahs trimble in dey seat Ter hyuh huh voice in sorro 'peat; (While all de chu'ch des sob an' weep) "O Shepa'd, dese, dy po' los' sheep!" ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... peing a coot poy today," returned the tremulous voice of a grey headed old man, who was leaning over a small peat fire on the hearth, sifting oatmeal through the fingers of his left hand into a pot, while he stirred the boiling mess with a short ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... freshly-sanded floor and its heavily-beamed, whitewashed ceiling, from which hung many a bunch of savory herbs or string of red pepper-pods or bunch of seed-corn, or perhaps even a round-backed ham, to get a little browner in the smoke that would sometimes pour out from the half-ignited mass of peat. In front of the kitchen was the "living-room," in one corner of which stood a carved high-post bedstead—glory of the Macys and envy of their neighbors—with its curtains of big figured chintz, brown sunflowers sprawling over a white ground, drawn aside in the daytime to display ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... slipper toe to the glowing peat, which by extraordinary effort had been brought up from the hotel kitchen, as a bit of local colour, "it is ridiculous that we three women should be in Ireland together; it's the sort of thing that happens in a book, and of which we say that it could ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... then, that 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 sporting tackle on the wall behind; the goodly ...
— Tales from Blackwood, Volume 7 • Various
... 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
... distilled from the Scotch mountains, flavoured with the peat of the valleys is highly prized by the natives, not only of Scotland but of all the English speaking countries ...
— This Giddy Globe • Oliver Herford
... from the brickfields of that almost suburban parish, the head and tusks of one of the largest mammoth elephants in the world. These river-gravel and brick-earth buried bones are rather earlier than those found in the peat and marl. The latter belonged to creatures which, though they no longer exist in England, are still found in temperate Europe—beavers, bears, bison, and wolves. But the Thames gravel and the London clay are in places full of the bones of another, and earlier, though by no means primaeval, ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... (rises). Your burning candle takes me back again to the days of me childhood in County Clare. Well do I mind me last Christmas Eve in ould Ireland, the little thatched cabin with its one window, the stinging smoke of the peat fire, the lads and the colleens and the ould piper—and the merry dances and songs, do ye remember, Mollie, darling? (Puts arms on hips, wags head from side to side ...
— The White Christmas and other Merry Christmas Plays • Walter Ben Hare
... there is no other, for divine Principle never pardons our sins or mistakes till they are corrected) leaves the offender free to re- 11:15 peat the offence, if indeed, he has not already suffered sufficiently from vice to make him turn from it with loathing. Truth bestows no pardon upon error, but 11:18 wipes it out in the most effectual ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... of Glenavon, and 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, ...
— McGill and its Story, 1821-1921 • Cyrus Macmillan
... walked with the desperate speed of passion through the village street, up the winding hill, across the common, along the avenue; and reached in less time than seemed possible the open grove of oaks, in one corner of which this obnoxious beer-house, the torment and puzzle of the magistrates, and the peat of the parish, was situated. There was no sign of death or sickness about the place. The lights from the tap-room and the garden, along one side of which the alley for four-corners was erected, gleamed in the darkness of a moonless summer night ...
— The Beauty Of The Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... a glad sight to see the green spread of the branches and the pleasant gardens which girt the hamlet round. All morning we had seen no sight of a human being, save the old hag upon the moor and a few peat-cutters in the distance. Our belts, too, were beginning to be loose upon us, and the remembrance of our ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... were also lighted in some districts of the north-east of Scotland, such as Buchan. Villagers and farmers alike must have their fire. In the villages the boys went from house to house and begged a peat from each householder, usually with the words, "Ge's a peat t' burn the witches." In some villages the lads collected the peats in a cart, some of them drawing it along and the others receiving the peats and loading them on the cart. Along with the peats they accumulated straw, ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... nothing to do any one in health any harm, especially when the walk there and back was over the fresh moor. He lectured Ethel herself on opening the window, now that she could; and advised Norman to go and spend an hour in the school, that he might learn how pleasant peat- smoke was—a speech Norman did not like at all. The real touchstone of temper is ridicule on a point where we do not choose to own ourselves fastidious, and if it and been from any one but his father, Norman would not have so entirely kept ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... and thou badst build a mighty pyre Of seasoned wood and well dried peat. But God Almighty blew the fire out. They fled, The twain together, ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... any grass or break-turf, that may be in danger of coming up as weeds to choke the vines. If you make the ground mellow below and then put on the sand, you will have a bed that will give you but little further trouble. Peat soils will do, if you take off the top and expose to the weather, frosts and rains, one year before planting. The first year, peat will dry and crack, so as to destroy young cranberry vines. But after one winter's frost, it becomes pulverized and will not again ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden
... wife, and idol; a proud mincing peat, and as perverse as he is officious. She dotes as perfectly upon the courtier, as her husband doth on her, and only wants the ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... certain that the quality of the waters in rivers generally varies very much with the season: thus the water of the Ribble, after a flood in summer, is always of a dark brown colour, being so coloured by the peat moss over which it passes, while in winter no such tinge can be observed; and there may be other differences with which we are unacquainted; however, whether this is the true reason or not, it certainly cannot ...
— Essays in Natural History and Agriculture • Thomas Garnett
... Harold by my side, I don't think we should ever have arrived, but Farmer Ogden and his son came out, and a man and boy or two; and when Eustace was recognised, they made what way they could for us, and we were landed at last in a scrupulously clean kitchen with peat fire and a limeash floor, where, alas! we were not suffered to remain, but were taken into a horrid little parlour, with a newly-lighted, smoking fire, a big Bible, and a ploughing-cup. Mrs. Ogden was a dissenter, so we had really no acquaintance, and, poor thing, had long been unable ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... his feelings come to the surface. He was a man who had the patience to wait for his vengeance. The longer it was delayed, the heavier would it be. A characteristic of his cold, callous temperament was that he took fire slowly, but, once lit, his hate endured like peat coals in a grate. A vain man, his dignity was precious to him. He writhed at the defeat Morse had put upon him, at his failure with Jessie, at the scornful public rebuke of her father. Upon all three of these some day he would work a sweet revenge. Like all gamblers, he followed ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... found these people lying consisted of straw, grass and bracken, spread upon the rock or shingle, and each was supplied with one or two dirty, ragged blankets or pieces of matting. Two of the beds were near the peat-fires, which were still burning, but the others were further back in the cave ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... cotyledons. This is the case with Cucurbita ovifera: nevertheless, in whatever position the seeds were buried, the hypocotyl always came up arched in one particular direction. Seeds were planted in friable peat at a depth of about an inch in a vertical position, with the end from which the radicle protrudes downwards. Therefore all the parts occupied the same relative positions which they would ultimately hold after the seedlings had risen clear ...
— The Power of Movement in Plants • Charles Darwin
... with heavy masses of violet 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 move in the ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... us as we loitered over the open moorland, a far-rolling sea of brown billows, reddened with patches of bell-heather, and brightened here and there with little lakes lying wide open to the sky. And were not these peat-cutters, with the big baskets on their backs, walking in silhouette along the ridges, the people that Sheila loved and tried to help; and were not these crofters' cottages with thatched roofs, like beehives, blending almost imperceptibly with ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... the lagoon-reefs, that we have no more reasons for supposing that their whole surface would grow up as quickly as the coral did in the schooner-channel, than for supposing that the whole surface of a peat-moss would increase as quickly as parts are known to do in holes, where the peat has been cut away. These agencies, nevertheless, tend to fill up the lagoon; but in proportion as it becomes shallower, so must the polypifers be subject to many injurious agencies, such as impure water and ...
— Coral Reefs • Charles Darwin
... hearts of the parliamentary soldiers as well as of the citizens of London. The city might now look for a plentiful supply of coal, a commodity which had become so scarce that in July the civic authorities had received permission from parliament to dig for turf and peat, by way of a substitute for coal, wherever they thought fit.(664) Seeing that it was by the aid of the city that a fleet had been maintained off the north coast, that Berwick had been secured for parliament, and that a free passage had thus ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume II • Reginald R. Sharpe
... scarcely 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
... barley: sometimes both molasses and corn are employed, particularly if there be a scarcity of grain. But the flavour of whiskey, which is made from barley and oats, is owing to the malted grain being dried with peat, the smoke of which ...
— A Treatise on Adulterations of Food, and Culinary Poisons • Fredrick Accum
... far as Brough under Stanemoor, and back by the great 'Nick,' and then athwart Cross Fell's desolate moor, but we had not taken the weather into our consideration, nor thought of possible sopping peat-hags on our ...
— Border Ghost Stories • Howard Pease
... convenient burning of coal. Hence the remnant of the raised hearth looked like wide hobs to the grate. The recess as a chimney-corner was thereby spoiled, for coal makes a very different kind of smoke from the aromatic product of wood or peat. ...
— The Flight of the Shadow • George MacDonald
... and traveller's joy, which gives it a variety of color. The currant bushes are pruned, and the long rose brandies are trimmed, and present a blooming appearance. This house, with forty acres of land, some rocky and sterile, and some rich meadow and peat, formed the possessions of the Prestons in Westmoreland. For two hundred years this land had been theirs. Mr. Preston and his wife were industrious and respectable people. They had two children, Martha and John. The sister eight years older than her brother and acted a motherly ...
— The Pearl Box - Containing One Hundred Beautiful Stories for Young People • "A Pastor"
... 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
... strange smell of the China Seas is to the far Eastern navigator, what the Mediterranean "cheesy odours" and the Eucalyptus scents of Australia are to the P. and O. officers, and what the pungent peat smoke of Ireland is to the North Atlantic seaman. I suppose the memory of the pack ice hissing around a wooden ship is one of the little voices that call—and they sometimes call as the memory of "a tall ship and a star to steer her by" calls John Masefield's ...
— South with Scott • Edward R. G. R. Evans
... pick his way through the mossy swamp, leading the pack-horse by the bridle. Sometimes he was ankle-deep in water of a greenish slime. Again he had to drag the animal from the bog to a hummock of grass which gave a spongy footing. This would end in another quagmire of peat through which they must plough with the mud sucking at their feet. It was hard, wearing toil. There was nothing to do but keep moving. The young man staggered forward till dusk. Utterly exhausted, he camped for the night on a hillock of moss ...
— The Yukon Trail - A Tale of the North • William MacLeod Raine
... be my birthday. I sat by the peat-fire, waiting for the lamp and the tea-tray, and contemplating my past life from the vantage-ground, so to speak, ...
— Little Novels • Wilkie Collins
... the morning," in an open carriage, General von Gortz along with him, and horses from his own post-stations; "travelled over Ferlaudt, Tirotz, Wustermark, Nauen, Konigshorst, Seelenhorst, Dechau, Fehrbellin," [See Reimann's KREIS-KARTEN, Nos. 74,73.] and twelve other small peat villages, looking all their brightest in the morning sun,—"to the hills at Stollen, where his Majesty, because a view of all the Colonies could be had from those hills, was pleased to get out for a little," as ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Appendix - Frederick The Great—A Day with Friedrich.—(23d July, 1779.) • Thomas Carlyle
... a place 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. ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... did so in groups to protect each other; and if night overtook them, they usually stopped at the humble cottage of the old woman and her sons, where cleanliness compensated for the want of luxury, and where, over a blazing fire of peat, the bolder spirits smiled at the imaginary terrors of the road, and the more timid trembled as they listened to the tales of terror and affright with which their hosts ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, No. 355., Saturday, February 7, 1829 • Various |
