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More "Backwoods" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of nobility, was eliminated because, as Jefferson wrote to Madison, "it was thought an improper place to encounter them." The contest against the introduction of aristocracy was unlikely to be precipitated in the backwoods bordering the Ohio River. Yet the provision would have been in keeping with the spirit of the times. Congress had recently rejected a proposition made to Washington by the Polish Order of Knights of Divine Providence that ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks
... what the world thinks," Gillespie said, and he spoke of the small backwoods settlement as if it were some great center of opinion such as in great communities dispenses fame and infamy, and makes its judgments supremely dreaded. "Besides," he faltered, "no one is knowing but ourselves to his coming back. It can seem ...
— The Leatherwood God • William Dean Howells
... catamount or panther, the saddest and most mournful sound that ever broke the solitude of forest gloom. A sound at times so like the shrieking wail of a child in mortal agony, that heard close at hand it has caused the face of many a brave wife of the backwoods settler, even when all her loved ones were safe with her within the strong walls of the log house, to blanch with terror and to cry out with fear. Its despairing wail seemed to poor Oowikapun as the echo of the feeling of ...
— Oowikapun - How the Gospel Reached the Nelson River Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young
... only what every settler who builds himself a hut in the backwoods must feel, Bert. It is the work of every wood-cutter and charcoal-burner; it is a good deal like the work of every miner. You have been brought up ...
— The Treasure of the Incas • G. A. Henty
... desire. Yet it was not until the French gave up this region that they could even venture lawlessly into it, and it was not until it fell from Great Britain to the new power of the United States that the borderers began openly to press into the backwoods, singly as hunters and trappers, in families as neighborhoods as the founders of villages and towns. The pioneers felt that they were going to take their own wherever they found it, from the savages who could not and ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... Pennsylvania, I was benighted, and obliged to beg for hospitality at the gate of a wealthy planter, who was a Frenchman by birth. He bade me sit down beside his fire, and we began to talk with that freedom which befits persons who meet in the backwoods, two thousand leagues from their native country. I was aware that my host had been a great leveller and an ardent demagogue, forty years ago, and that his name was not unknown to fame. I was therefore not ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... Ohio, and get men. And then he picked up Clark where Louisville now is. And then he left the Ohio River and crossed by horseback to the Army post across from here, to get still more men for the expedition—soldiers, you see, good hardy men they were, who knew the backwoods life and feared nothing. So after they got all of the expedition together, they made winter quarters over yonder, and in the spring they came over here, and the great fleet of three boats and forty-five men started ...
— The Young Alaskans on the Missouri • Emerson Hough
... drive cattle, or chop down trees in the backwoods," she replied, lifting demure eyebrows. "Oh, Dick, don't be foolish. See—there's ...
— Viviette • William J. Locke
... the America, he had hitherto sought in vain, with its suggestion of the backwoods of civilization, the pioneer, the primitive. And to emphasize and give the suggestion point, here was an example of the finest feminine beauty left to this degenerating world, beauty such as the Greeks knew, large-limbed, deep-bosomed, clear-eyed, product of a vigorous ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... remembering in our history. Not without abundant New Testament antecedents, it naturalized itself at once on our soil as a natural expedient for scattered frontier populations unprovided with settled institutions. By a natural process of evolution, adapting itself to other environments and uses, the backwoods camp-meeting has grown into the "Chautauqua" assembly, which at so many places besides the original center at Chautauqua Lake has grown into an important and most ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... and coffee were in use in this country they were not known in the backwoods. The people on the frontier drank tea made from the root of the sassafras tree or from the leaves of some wild vines. The whole work of preparing food was done at home. When they wanted to grind ...
— Stories of American Life and Adventure • Edward Eggleston
... Brant was in the thick of the fight in this vicinity. It is possible, too, that he was with Colonel Bouquet in August at the battle of Bushy Run, near Fort Pitt. In this engagement, after two days of strenuous backwoods fighting, the Indians were finally worsted. Pontiac's star had begun to set. With hopeless odds against him, the stubborn chief of the Ottawas kept up the struggle until the following year, but at last he was ...
— The War Chief of the Six Nations - A Chronicle of Joseph Brant - Volume 16 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • Louis Aubrey Wood
... best chances now for intensive cultivation are in New Jersey, in the backwoods of the Middle states now made accessible by cheap autos—and in ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall
... People who live in the backwoods and miles from a railroad are not apt to be leaders of fashion. Doubtless her hands will be red and her face will be red and her hair will be ...
— The Man in Lonely Land • Kate Langley Bosher
... down. During the respectful, appreciative buzz of voices that followed the speech, General Montero raised a pair of heavy, drooping eyelids and rolled his eyes with a sort of uneasy dullness from face to face. The military backwoods hero of the party, though secretly impressed by the sudden novelties and splendours of his position (he had never been on board a ship before, and had hardly ever seen the sea except from a distance), understood ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... Ship Inn, for it looked as if it had been built the day before yesterday. Everything was new and shiny, and we had our supper at a long table with about twenty other people, just like a boardinghouse. Some of their ways reminded me of the backwoods, and I suppose there is nothing more modern than backwoodsism, which naturally hasn't the least alloy of the past. When the people got through with their cups of coffee or tea, mostly the last, two women went around ...
— Pomona's Travels - A Series of Letters to the Mistress of Rudder Grange from her Former - Handmaiden • Frank R. Stockton
... green zenith of June when MacPhairrson went away. When he returned, hobbling up with his tiny bundle, the backwoods world was rioting in the scarlet and gold of young October. He was quite cured. He felt singularly well. But a desperate loneliness saddened his home-coming. He knew his cabin would be just as he had left it, there on its steep little ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... soldering-iron-looking nose; by him was a circus-rider, whose breath was enough to breed yaller fever and could be felt just as easy as cotton velvet! A cross old woman came next, whose look would have given any reasonable man the double-breasted blues before breakfast; alongside of her was a rale backwoods preacher, with the biggest and ugliest mouth ever got up since the flood. He was flanked by the low comedian of the party, an Indiana Hoosier, 'gwine down to Orleans to get an army contrac' to supply the forces, ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume II. (of X.) • Various
... slightly different flavour to what it had in this country. You could always distinguish an American apple by its peculiar piquancy—a sub-acid piquancy, a wild strawberry piquancy, a sort of woodland, forest, backwoods delicacy of its own. And so on, and so on—"talk, talk, ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... open-mouthed among the oaks and other trees beneath which it finds the yellow underwings and cockchafers on which it feeds, and I have more than once watched it hunting its victims with the beak closed. I noticed this particularly when camping in the backwoods of Eastern Canada where the bird goes by ...
— Birds in the Calendar • Frederick G. Aflalo
... red-skinned or white, who know the country you have to traverse better than our friend Jean Baptiste Boulanger, woodman, voyageur, trader in peltries, and everything else that can make a man at home in the backwoods." ...
— The King's Warrant - A Story of Old and New France • Alfred H. Engelbach
... many thousands of them in my long service in the Legislature. The hayseeds think we are like the Indians to the National Government—that is, sort of wards of the State, who don't know how to look after ourselves and have to be taken care of by the Republicans of St. Lawrence, Ontario, and other backwoods counties. Why should anybody be surprised because ex-Governor Odell comes down here to direct the Republican machine? Newburg ain't big enough for him. He, like all the other upstate Republicans, wants to get hold of New York City. New York is ...
— Plunkitt of Tammany Hall • George Washington Plunkitt
... years of this century, ranged through the wilderness of Canada, fording or swimming rivers, toiling through forests and swamps, and carrying the gospel of Christ to the remotest settlers in the backwoods. ...
— Neville Trueman the Pioneer Preacher • William Henry Withrow
... second son of Jake Benton, the backwoods holiness preacher of the Ozarks. At the age of twenty-one he had become the husband of Eva Gray, who was two years younger than he. This union had been a blessed happy one. If all of Chicago's homes were like that of Harry ...
— The Deacon of Dobbinsville - A Story Based on Actual Happenings • John A. Morrison
... the visitor, "but I always had the idea that we should meet again. Your photograph has been with me all over the world. In the backwoods of Canada, in the bush of Australia, it has been my one comfort and guiding star. If ever I was tempted to do wrong, I used to take your photograph ...
— Short Cruises • W.W. Jacobs
... work their brains till they haven't got any more backbone than a caterpillar, but as for manual labor, it's old-timey and out of fashion. I wonder how these farms would ever have been carved out of the backwoods, if the old Puritans had sat down on the rocks with their noses in a lot of books, and tried to figure out just how little work they could do, ...
— Beautiful Joe • Marshall Saunders
... exclusively confined to these subjects in France, the class of works to which we are now referring differs entirely in subject and style. In England and America the roving life of the colonies, the backwoods, the Western States, and the Indian frontiers has created an unique school of realistic fiction in which Mr. Kipling is at this moment the chief professor. There is moreover a manifest affinity between ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... both pay and plunder out of government, while taking excellent care that government got very little out of him. A shrewd, slow-spoken, self-reliant specimen, was Flint; yet something of the fresh flavor of the backwoods lingered in him still, as if Nature were loath to give him up, and left the mark of her motherly hand upon him, as she leaves it in a dry, pale lichen, on the bosom of the ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott
... Congress, and, with his prospects, throws himself away on a skinny little old-maid school-teacher in the backwoods, one that he's been making love to for years, they might say almost anything. Why can't he hand her over to Joe Lane? ...
— In the Arena - Stories of Political Life • Booth Tarkington
... wall, before he lays on the new. The initial gift that comes from being laid hold of by Jesus Christ is the burning off of the old coat of paint. But that is only the preliminary to the laying on of the new. A man away in the backwoods will spend a couple of years after he has got his bit of land in felling and burning the trees, and rooting out and destroying the weeds. But is that what he got the clearing for? That is only a preliminary to sowing the seed. My ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... business. He has been a settler for some years in Canada, and the accounts he has given me of the colony are so favourable, and hold out such encouragement of ultimate success and independence, that they have decided me in my choice of making a trial of the backwoods. I promised to meet him this morning at the Crown Inn (where he puts up), to look over maps and plans, and have some further talk upon the subject. I thought, dear, that it was better for me to consult you ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... heard women talk of greenhorns and backwoods boys in those days when I had lived a life in which women played an important, a disturbing, and a baleful part for every one but the boy who lived his strange life on the tow-path or in the rude cabin; and ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... you," he said, in tones of reproach, "that he wasn't safe to monkey with. Keith and I thought he was just a fat, backwoods rube, but we got burnt, and burnt good. We were going to let him alone, but you got us into this—and now you've got to get us out again. Know what he's done? Nothing much but start condemnation proceedings against us to take our mill yards down on the railroad for a site for a depot and ...
— Scattergood Baines • Clarence Budington Kelland
... gazing up at Henri, whom she subjugated at once by a look charged with passion, "why, my dear boy, I am married; we are in Paris, not in the savannah, the pampas, the backwoods of America.—My dear Henri, my first and only love, listen to me. That husband of mine, a second clerk in the War Office, is bent on being a head-clerk and officer of the Legion of Honor; can I help his being ambitious? Now for the ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... mistake. It's just sich as you used to git when chopping away down in the backwoods ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... he vainly peered along the earth for the missing traces of the route. He looked up for the openings in the tree-tops—he looked west, at the rapidly speeding sun, and shook his head at his horse. Though bold of heart, no doubt, and tolerably well aware of the usual backwoods mode of procedure in all such cases of embarrassment, our traveller had been too gently nurtured to affect a lodge in the wilderness that night—its very "vast contiguity of shade" being anything but attractive in his present mood. No doubt, he could have borne ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... confirmed this opinion. They said over a hundred salmon had been taken in that one pool this season. The nearest settlement, and only one on the whole east branch, is about six miles out from there, and the young men go on Sundays and fish with drift-nets. No regular fishing for market—only a backwoods local supply can be used. These fish were about of one size—say ...
— New England Salmon Hatcheries and Salmon Fisheries in the Late 19th Century • Various
... the 22nd of September, 1827, the Angel of the Lord delivered unto Joseph Smith, Jr., an ignorant farmer-youth in a "backwoods" part of New York State, some plates which had "the appearance of gold". As we know from the scriptures, it is the habit of the Angel of the Lord to appear in unexpected places and to make miraculous revelations to men in humble walks of life; so, as devout believers, we hold ourselves ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... can shut my eyes and almost fancy I see your home in the backwoods. There are your two sisters running about ...
— Our American Cousin • Tom Taylor
... events, and has now spent a year in a very arduous course of education; he has a flexible mind, capable of much expansion, and convertible towards far loftier studies and activities than those of his early life; and if he came to Washington a backwoods humorist, he has already transformed himself into as good a statesman (to speak moderately) as ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... politician's meanness, a great man without a great man's vices, a philanthropist without a philanthropist's dreams, a christian without pretensions, a ruler without the pride of place or power, an ambitious man without selfishness, and a successful man without vanity. Humble man of the backwoods, boatman, axman, hired laborer, clerk, surveyor, captain, legislator, lawyer, debater, orator, politician, statesman. President, savior of the republic, emancipator of a race, true christian, ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... passing neighbor handed him a letter which he had found at the little village post office. It was addressed to Mr. Si Jackson, and bore the Springs postmark. Silas was immediately converted from a raw backwoods boy to a man of the world. Save the little notes that had been passed back and forth from boy to girl at the little log schoolhouse where he had gone four fitful sessions, this was his first letter, and it was the ...
— The Strength of Gideon and Other Stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... an ambitious, backwoods Ohio boy who rose to prominence. Everyday humor of American rustic life ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... however, a young farmer from the backwoods settlement over behind Ringwaak chanced to visit the valley. The sheep of his settlement were not only hornless, but small and light-wooled as well, and the splendid, horned ram took his fancy. Here was a chance to improve his breed. He bought the ram for what he was worth to the butcher, ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... ten years old, and little for his age. One midwinter night she was taken desperately ill, and Paddy, reckless of the terrors of the midnight solitudes, ran wildly to get help. The moon was high and full, and the lifeless backwoods road was a narrow, bright, white thread between the silent black masses of the spruce forest. Now and then, as he remembered afterwards, his ear caught a sound of light feet following him in the dark beyond the roadside. But his plucky little heart was too full ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... Harry; and here had we two met, three thousand miles from home, after almost ten years of separation, just the same careless, happy, dare-all do-no-goods that we were when we parted in St. James's street,—he for the West, I for the Eastern World—he to fell trees, and build log huts in the backwoods of Canada,—I to shoot tigers and drink arrack punch in the Carnatic. The world had wagged with us as with most others: now up, now down, and laid us to, at last, far enough from the goal for which we started—so that, as I have said already, on landing in New York, having ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... was Harlson. His backwoods training would not allow of that. In every class encounter, in every fray with townsmen, it is to be feared in almost every hazing, after his own gruesome experience—for they hazed then vigorously—he was a factor, and beefsteak had been bound upon his cheek on more than one occasion. ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... loneliness of our moose-camp on Skeleton Lake had impressed us from the beginning—in the Quebec backwoods, five days by trail and canoe from civilisation—and perhaps the singular name contributed a little to the sensation of eeriness that made itself felt in the camp circle when once the sun was down and the ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... not sorry for you! I just mean, you couldn't have had so terribly much fun, after you were eighteen or so. Schoenstrom must have been a little dull, after very many years there. This stuff about the charm of backwoods villages—the people that write it seem to take jolly good care to stay in ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... care of a whole family grandfather had beside ours; and paying back some people grandfather did out of a lot of money on a timber deal fifty years ago; and making it up to a little village in the backwoods that grandfather persuaded to bond itself for a railroad that he knew ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... with her! Unfortunately it is not the woman—nor the man either, for that matter—who drives around in a car, that will buckle down and do this nation's work! I also knew there were others like myself who think this backwoods bushland God's own earth and second only to Paradise—but few! And these young girls that quake at their loneliness and yet go for a pittance and fill a mission! But was not my wife of ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... in which the record of his extraordinary success was deliberately omitted from the second edition of a work which records the minutest contrivance of any English amateur,—the first edition having already mentioned the "young artist living in the backwoods,"—will recognize in it something of the old style in which the mother-country used ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... tyranny, have prevented the development of that feeling of independence among the lower orders, which in a freer race finds its expression in ill manners and discourtesy to superiors. I knew a gentleman in the West whose circumstances had forced him to become a waiter in a backwoods restaurant. He bore a deadly grudge at the profession that kept him from starving, and asserted his unconquered nobility of soul by scowling at his customers and swearing at the viands he dispensed. I remember the deep sense of wrong with which he would growl, "Two buckwheats, begawd!" ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... could produce harvest in seedtime, and that to look for a final and complete deliverance from the 'veil that was spread over all nations,' at this stage, is like expecting a newly reclaimed bit of the backwoods to grow grass as thick and velvety as has carpeted some lawn that has been mown and cared for for a century. Grave condemnation is the due of these short-memoried rebels, who set up their 'abomination' in sight of the fire on Sinai; but that should not prevent ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... she would show the neighbors the proper Old Country way of treating a servant. Sarah Emily was far from the Old Country type, however, and William seemed to have forgotten that servants had a place of their own since he had lived so long in the backwoods. When the family would arrange themselves at table, with the maid standing properly behind her mistress, Mr. Gordon would wait for her to be seated before asking the blessing, regarding her with ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... and his guide, Hank Davis, there was young Simpson, his nephew, a divinity student destined for the "Wee Kirk" (then on his first visit to Canadian backwoods), and the latter's guide, Defago. Joseph Defago was a French "Canuck," who had strayed from his native Province of Quebec years before, and had got caught in Rat Portage when the Canadian Pacific Railway ...
— The Wendigo • Algernon Blackwood
... land of the palms!" announced the manager. "You know I spoke of tentative plans for a drama down there when we were in the backwoods. Now I have everything arranged, and we will leave on a steamer for St. Augustine ...
— The Moving Picture Girls Under the Palms - Or Lost in the Wilds of Florida • Laura Lee Hope
... the presence of the dog, grew faintly alarmed, but I persevered till the last man staggered surfeited from the feast. It was my first and, I may add, almost my only triumph as a minister's wife on a backwoods circuit. ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... Celia with all her might, and declared her intention of going immediately on the 'regular' stage; but Jack somewhat destroyed her hopes by affirming that her nose and hair wouldn't be just the thing on the metropolitan boards, although they might pass muster in a backwoods theatre. ...
— A Summer in a Canyon: A California Story • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... off. If the enemy was this barbarian from the backwoods, well and good! His mind was again relieved; he nodded to acquaintances and looked quite cheerful. He had for a moment felt aggrieved that anybody should be grumbling behind his back, but that was now forgotten; it ...
— Shallow Soil • Knut Hamsun
... ears of Matheson, and set up a curious train of thought as he drove in his cab to his office in the Rue Laffitte. The words carried him back to a forest-clearing in the backwoods of Ontario, where he and his half-brother had made holiday camp some eighteen years before. They were comparing ambitions—two young men unusually alike in features but very different in temperament and will-power. John Riviere, the elder of the two, was dreaming of fame in the ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... out as a light shining in the darkness. In Germanic eyes Ottokar's fault was that of being a Slav, successful and of great ability. I cannot agree with the German chronicler's estimate of Rudolph. We are expected to accept him as a modest sort of backwoods peer, the kind that wears flannel next its skin and keeps its small estates unencumbered. We have also a pretty picture in verse of this Rudolph. He is described as meeting a priest carrying the Host, on the bank of a foaming ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... introduced;" but this state of ignorance is, fortunately, not very common. It should be met by the surprised rejoinder of the Hoosier school-mistress: "Don't yer know enough to speak when yer spoken to?" Let every woman remember, whether she is from the backwoods, or from the most fashionable city house, that no such casual conversation can hurt her. It does not involve the further acquaintance of these two persons. They may cease to know each other when they go down the front steps; ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... of the women of these classes was shabbier still, their costumes, for the most part, comprising stamped cotton and white dimity gowns, coarse shift (osnaburg), country cloth, and black quilted petticoats. In the backwoods and the primitive German settlements the women all wore the short gowns and petticoats, also tight-fitting calico caps. In summer, when employed in the fields, they wore only a linen shift and a petticoat of home-made linsey. All their clothing, ...
— History and Comprehensive Description of Loudoun County, Virginia • James W. Head
... belonging to me, or associated with me in any way, who had literary tastes or ideas, the nearest I can make to it is that my great-grandfather was a circuit writer, a Welshman, known as "Priest" Jones in the backwoods, where his enthusiasm led him ...
— The House of Pride • Jack London
... &c. and that they saw one rattlesnake of extraordinary size. They experienced inconvenience from musquitoes in a few damp spots, just as they would have done from gnats in England. In their late expeditions in the Illinois, where they led the lives of thorough backwoods-men, if they were so unfortunate as to pitch their tent on the edge of a creek, or near a swamp, and mismanaged their fire, they were teased with musquitoes, as they would have been in the fens of Cambridgeshire: but this was the sum total of their ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley
... Indian corn. His drowsy lids snap at some trivial sound, With lazy yawns he slips towards the ground, Then with an idle whistle lifts his load And shambles home along the country road That stretches on, fringed out with stumps and weeds, And finally unto the backwoods leads, Where forests wait with giant trunk and bough The axe of ...
— Flint and Feather • E. Pauline Johnson
... planters and their slaves one other class of human beings in the South especially attracted the attention of the local colorists—the mountaineers. Certain distant cousins of this backwoods stock had come into literature as "Pikes" or poor whites in the Far West with Bret Harte and in the Middle West with John Hay and Edward Eggleston; it remained for Charles Egbert Craddock in Tennessee and John Fox in Kentucky to discover the heroic and sentimental qualities ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... America there has been no man who started lower and climbed higher than Abraham Lincoln, the backwoods boy. He never "slipped back." He always kept going ahead. He broadened his mind, enlarged his outlook, and led his companions rather than let them lead him. He was jolly company, good-natured, kind-hearted, fond of jokes and stories ...
— Heroes Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... rough backwoods bunch always drifting around Clinch's place in those days. There were fights. And not so many miles from Clinch's there was highway robbery and a murder ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert Chambers
... 1748, at which time the rifle was used only by the hunters of the Alps and the hunters of the American backwoods; the latter having doubtless derived it from the former through German immigration. Bull's conservatism, however, was in the way. The lessons of Fort Duquesne, of Saratoga and of New Orleans were successively wasted on him. He did arm one regiment, the Ninety-fifth, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... [Footnote: James Du Pre, third Earl of Caledon, was then unmarried. His mother, Catherine, daughter of the third Earl of Hardwicke, lived with him when he was in Ireland.] gave me a history of his life in the backwoods of America, and gave me a piece of pemmican, and I enclose a bit, and I hope it will not have greased everything! and when I said that after a youth in the backwoods it was well to have such a place as Caledon to fall back upon, there was a glance at ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... things in connection with our rides about the countryside was Culhane's attitude toward life and the natives and passing strangers as representing life. Thus one day, as I recall very well, we were riding along a backwoods country road, very shadowy and branch-covered, a great company of us four abreast, when suddenly and after his very military fashion there came a "Halt! Right by fours! Right dress! Face!" and presently we were all lined up in a row facing a greensward which had suddenly been revealed ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... almost unknown Canadian West had been growing upon him, and as it grew he shrank more and more from disclosing his plans to his fiancee. Had she been one of the country girls of the neighbourhood, a daughter of the sturdy backwoods pioneers, bred to hard work in field and barnyard, he would have hesitated less. But she was sprung from gentler stock. It seemed almost profane to think of her in the lonely life of a homesteader on the bleak, unsettled ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... month's duty in a drafted militia company in guarding Continental stores here [Fort Burd] in 1778." The term "Big Knives" or "Long Knives" may have had reference either to the long knives carried by early white hunters, or the swords worn by backwoods militia officers. See Roosevelt's Winning of ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... extended itself into every part of the country. If we inquire what the world thought of it, we have still more to raise our wonder; for, not to mention the excitement it caused in England, the movement and its party-names were known to the police of Italy and to the backwoods-men of America. And so it proceeded, getting stronger and stronger every year, till it came into collision with the Nation and that Church of the Nation, which it began ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... out with a superior air: "Wal, sonny, you come from the backwoods shore ef you never heerd tell ...
— The Boy from Hollow Hut - A Story of the Kentucky Mountains • Isla May Mullins
... girl no more than seven years old holding a baby at least a year old. Beside them was a boy of about nine. In the background was a miserable hovel made of crude lumber and patched windows. This couple and their baby had been discovered by a geological survey outfit living in the backwoods hills. Relief, aid, and help were being rushed, and the legislature was considering ways and means of their schooling. Neither of them could read ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... women unfitter than the far lower negroes, to whom full political equality was conceded in North America? And shall a highly intellectual woman be vested with lesser rights than the rudest, least cultured man,—an ignorant day-laborer of the backwoods of Pomerania, or an ultramontane canalman, for instance, and all because accident let these come into the world as men? The son has greater rights than his mother, from whom, perchance, he derives his best qualities, ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... There are heaps and heaps of railway sleepers down in the wood heap, and we could pile them up into a hut. It's only what people do out in Canada. Gibbie's always telling us tales of women who emigrate to the backwoods, and build colonies of log-cabins. Ave, you're not going to ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... it's impossible to see you and remember any such promise. Besides, it's sober truth,' he replied, growing bolder still. 'Let me get you some tea. Isn't it rather lively here? Doesn't it make you regret having buried yourself in the backwoods at the very beginning ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... Clinton County, and David C. Busler, near Collomsville, Lycoming County, have had arms loving pilgrims of note from all over the State to learn the last dying secrets of the Kentucky rifles, which, despite their name, were mostly made in Pennsylvania. Often the backwoods arms enthusiast would insist that the shutters be closed and the smith's work carried on by candle-light, lest a passing hechs cast a glance upon the barrel, which would ever afterward be deprived of the power to kill. The proud owner of a cherished ...
— A Catalogue of Early Pennsylvania and Other Firearms and Edged Weapons at "Restless Oaks" • Henry W. Shoemaker
... custom of the backwoods people in that section of country to cross the Sacramento on the Yellow Dragon cable. For this service a small toll was charged, which tolls the Yellow Dragon Company applied to the payment ...
— Dutch Courage and Other Stories • Jack London
... for the backwoods!" said Ernest Wilton lightly, as he quickened his steps to join Seth Allport, who had hailed out to the two stragglers to "hurry up," for the "lazy lubbers" that they were; the ex-mate of the Susan Jane having awaited with some considerable impatience, ...
— Picked up at Sea - The Gold Miners of Minturne Creek • J.C. Hutcheson
... old gentleman is said to have invoked the backwoods 'Chandlers' and 'Hoveys,' I will obligingly translate for you, as possibly you may not be able to read it in the original Sanscrit! Oh! don't tell me that you 'won't trouble me,' and all that. I will bore you, and nobody ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... the battle between the otter and the beavers, filled him with a new eagerness to observe these wonderful little engineers with other eyes than those of the mere hunter and trapper. In the face of all the Boy's exact details he grew almost deferential, quite laying aside his usual backwoods pose of indifference and half derision. He made no move to go to bed, but refilled his pipe and watched his young comrade's face with shrewd, bright eyes grown ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... blood-curdling scenes or nothing startling or sensational in the plot or characters. The story, however, may be regarded as a biting sarcasm on a hypocritical society in which a gang of instructors of dark character at a middle school in a backwoods town plays a prominent part. The hero of the story is made a victim of their annoying intrigues, but finally comes out triumphant by smashing the petty red tapism, knocking down the sham pretentions ...
— Botchan (Master Darling) • Mr. Kin-nosuke Natsume, trans. by Yasotaro Morri
... coming nearer and nearer. The door opened and revealed a young man in work-a-day black suit and derby, with a candle in one hand and a property spear in the other. He conducted us down a narrow, drafty hallway, into a hall in which were wooden benches as rude as those in the bandstand of a backwoods country fair in the States, and a slightly raised platform at the farther end. We were soon in eager conversation with young store clerks and typists and artisans who were about to set to work at that in which their hearts lay, the interpreting of plays out of Ireland's ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... up in the woods the scattered acorns of legal lore. It was a true enough description, but after all, there were very few college-bred lawyers in the Eighth Illinois Circuit or anywhere else who could hold their own, even in a purely professional struggle, with that long-armed logician from the backwoods. ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... only she's poky, and doesn't seem to fit in somehow. You would understand if you had seen her the day she came. Mrs. Gray has dressed her up, as you might be sure she would; but then she looked like the backwoods, didn't ...
— A Little Country Girl • Susan Coolidge
... different antecedents, ancestry, and surroundings as Billy O'Neill and I would have had far more difficulty in coming together. I came from the biggest city in America and from the wealthiest ward of that city, and he from a backwoods county where he kept a store at a crossroads. In all the unimportant things we seemed far apart. But in all the important things we were close together. We looked at all questions from substantially the same view-point, and we stood shoulder to shoulder in ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... faded considerably into the background of late: indeed, to say truth, whenever I think of myself in America, it is as in the Backwoods, with a rifle in my hand, God's sky over my head, and this accursed Lazar-house of quacks and blockheads, 'and sin and misery (now near a head) lying all behind me forevermore. A thing, you see, which is and can be at bottom but a daydream! To rest through the summer: that is my only fixed wisdom; ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... Limit. — N. limit, boundary, bounds, confine, enclave, term, bourn, verge, curbstone[obs3], but, pale, reservation; termination, terminus; stint, frontier, precinct, marches; backwoods. boundary line, landmark; line of demarcation, line of circumvallation[obs3]; pillars of Hercules; Rubicon, turning point; ne plus ultra[Lat]; sluice, floodgate. Adj. definite; conterminate|, conterminable[obs3]; terminal, frontier; bordering. Adv. thus far, thus far and no further. Phr. stick ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... In the "backwoods" of Pennsylvania stood a little mill. The miller appertaining unto this mill was a Pennsylvania Dutchman—a species of animal in which for some centuries sauerkraut has been usurping the place of ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... Convicts; or Recollections of Sixteen Years' Labour in the Australian Backwoods,' ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... conditions that they have to do either a good deal of outdoor work or a good deal of what might be called natural outdoor play do not need the athletic development. In the Civil War the soldiers who came from the prairie and the backwoods and the rugged farms where stumps still dotted the clearings, and who had learned to ride in their infancy, to shoot as soon as they could handle a rifle, and to camp out whenever they got the chance, were better fitted ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... a rael satisfaction tae read yir letter frae the backwoods—or was't a public-hoose in New York? ma memory's no what it used to be—tellin' hoo ye were aye thinkin' o' yer auld granny, and wantin' tae come hame and be a comfort tae her if she wud send ye ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren
... for Canada that these canallers are not usually inclined to settle, but wander about from work to work, and generally, in the end, go to the United States. The Irish who settle are fortunately a different people; and, as they go chiefly into the backwoods, lead a peaceful and ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... The backwoods lawyer was better fitted to conciliate the good-will than to command the obedience of his men. There were many serving under him, who both from character and education could better ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... fertile districts about Albemarle Sound. Nearly everywhere in the lowlands, however, the land was too barren for any distinct prosperity. The settlements were quite isolated, the communications very poor, and the social tone mostly that of the backwoods frontier. An Anglican missionary when describing his own plight there in 1711 discussed the industrial regime about him: "Men are generally of all trades and women the like within their spheres, except some who are the posterity of old planters and have ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... around the firesides of the backwoods people, the conversation generally runs into hunting stories, Indian reminiscences, and wild tales of what the pioneers suffered while establishing themselves in their forest homes. One event of startling interest had ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop
... County. After staying overnight here they took a stage, and for a whole day travelled over pleasant roads, through sweet-scented forests of spruce and balsam, broken here by clearings and thrifty farms, until at last the journey ended in the pretty little backwoods settlement ...
— Wakulla - A Story of Adventure in Florida • Kirk Munroe
... equally littered with proofs of essays, sermons, leaders and leaderettes for the secular and Sunday Press. As a novelist he has scarcely fulfilled his early promise, but it is on record that he was once introduced to a stranger from the backwoods, who asked ignorantly, "Am I speaking to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, November 17, 1920 • Various
... reminded me of one I had witnessed in Georgia a fortnight before, on my way south. The train stopped at a backwoods station; some of the passengers gathered upon the steps of the car, and the usual bevy of young negroes came alongside. "Stand on my head for a nickel?" said one. A passenger put his hand into his pocket; the boy did as he had promised,—in no very professional style, be it said,—and ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... sturdy pioneer virtues, he becomes by necessity the direct antithesis to the riverman. The purchase of a bit of harness, a vehicle, a necessary tool or implement is a matter of close economy, long figuring, and much work. Interest on the mortgage must be paid. And what can a backwoods farm produce worth money? And where can it find a market? Very little; and very far. A man must "play close to his chest" in order to accomplish that plain, primary, simple duty of making both ends meet. The extreme of this virtue ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... a little beauty," said Alfred to himself, as he watched the graceful rider disappear. "What spirit! Now, I wonder who she can be. She had on moccasins and buckskin gloves and her hair tumbled like a tomboy's, but she is no backwoods girl, I'll bet on that. I'm afraid I was a little rude, but after taking such a stand I could not weaken, especially before such a haughty and disdainful little vixen. It was too great a temptation. What eyes she had! Contrary ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... women, and of parents and children. It is true that the habits of a community can make such cruelty rare, but these habits, I fear, are only to be produced through the prolonged reign of law. Experience of backwoods communities, mining camps and other such places seems to show that under new conditions men easily revert to a more barbarous attitude and practice. It would seem, therefore, that, while human nature remains as it is, ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... "I'd be flattered to death to think a simple backwoods maiden could make such a profound impression on a young man from the city—but ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... the comfortless tents grew less comfortless, for Elizabeth interpreted literally the general's permission to do here what she chose. The eyes of the soldiers followed both women with delight, and one rugged fellow, a backwoods man, whose cheerfulness not even a broken leg and a great gash in his forehead could destroy, volunteered the statement: "By George! whether in peace or war we need our women." This was responded to by a cheer ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 6 • Various
... of the sea to my backwoods eyes; enough to pluck the heart out of a man. Has either ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... of Thomas, was a notable man. His parents were poor, and in early life he went into the backwoods of Virginia as a surveyor. He is described as a person of great stature and strength. His mind was equally robust. He was a natural mathematician, and was remarkable for hardihood and perseverance. His temper was equable, but his passions ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... through my poems, See, in my poems immigrants continually coming and landing, See, in arriere, the wigwam, the trail, the hunter's hut, the flat-boat, the maize-leaf, the claim, the rude fence, and the backwoods village, See, on the one side the Western Sea and on the other the Eastern Sea, how they advance and retreat upon my poems as upon their own shores, See, pastures and forests in my poems—see, animals wild and tame—see, beyond the Kaw, countless herds ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... like the "Pathfinder Tales" of J. Fenimore Cooper, combine historical information relating to early pioneer days in America with interesting adventures in the backwoods. Although the same characters are continued throughout the series, each book is complete in itself, and, while based strictly on historical facts, is an interesting and exciting tale ...
— The Little Colonel's Christmas Vacation • Annie Fellows Johnston
... more, but Harry had learned that, when quite a small boy, he had ridden horses in backwoods races for a sport-loving uncle. But Stuart continued his jests and Jackson secretly enjoyed them. The two men were so opposite in nature that they were complements and each liked the society of ...
— The Star of Gettysburg - A Story of Southern High Tide • Joseph A. Altsheler
... self-argument. "It wouldn't stand many wearings before it would look a sight. It wouldn't wash—man as you are, Mr. Mostyn, you know it wouldn't wash. I'm going to take it off and try to have some sense. I'm in no position to try to make a show. School-teachers here in the backwoods have no right to excite comment by the gaudy finery they wear. I'm paid by people's taxes. Did you know that? I might find myself out of a job—out of employment, I mean. Some of these crusty old ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... Miss Bilbrough drove us out into the cleared backwoods to visit some of our children. The country was charming; woods and green valleys, with every now and then rich orchards laden with rosy apples; the long Concession roads, forming at times magnificent avenues, in which here and there a maple, which ...
— God's Answers - A Record Of Miss Annie Macpherson's Work at the - Home of Industry, Spitalfields, London, and in Canada • Clara M. S. Lowe
... likely," asked Wayward, "that a man who has just married several millions will do duty as your superintendent in the backwoods?" ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... said the schoolmaster thoughtfully. "It is wonderful what the energy and directing mind of one man can do. That name alone is enough to change the nature of a whole campaign. 'Tis lucky that we have this Caesar of the backwoods to defend us. What is ...
— The Border Watch - A Story of the Great Chief's Last Stand • Joseph A. Altsheler
... me, young as I was, not less than the strange figure of the old poet who lived unknown in the backwoods, and who died, I dare say, with many a finer song in his heart. I remember how he stood in the firelight and chanted the words in a sing-song tone. He gave us that rude copy of the poem, and here ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller
... a cabin in the backwoods of Tennessee but he was raised under influences that make real men. A boy's ideal, in his early life, is the father who guides him, and Sergeant York had before him a character that was picturesque in its rugged manhood and honesty, and inspiring in its devotion to right and justice. ...
— Sergeant York And His People • Sam Cowan
... Jackson. Whether as a youth, or as a man pursuing his career of village lawyer in the backwoods of a frontier settlement, he was about the last person of whom one would predict that he should arise to a great position and unbounded national popularity. His birth was plebeian and obscure. His father, of ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XII • John Lord
... felly doublin' the fence corner? Ye're a fine lot of jays up here in th' backwoods! Do I know him? Full well I do! An' that shows, ye what honest workin'men has got to come to, these days. Didn't ye see him sittin' there on that castin'? Th' bosses put him there to keep tricks on ye. If ye have the nerve of a bunch ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... not dare to shoot," ejaculated Grell smilingly. "Oh, I know. We're in England, not in the backwoods. Come downstairs and have a drink. I don't want you to arrest me until we've had a talk. By the way, may I ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... rocking-chairs in Triana, as there were none in our backwoods, and the little maids tilted to and fro on the fore legs and hind legs of their chairs and lulled their charges to sleep with seismic joltings. When the street turned into a road it turned into a road a hundred feet wide; one of those roads which Charles ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... clever stratagem, assists Capt. Wharton to escape. James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) was born at Burlington, N.J., but was reared in the wild country around Otsego Lake, in central N.Y., on the yet unsettled estates of his father. It was here he learned the backwoods lore, which in combination with his romantic genius, made him one of ...
— The Greatest Highway in the World • Anonymous
... way of looking at it, Major," answered Life, to whom the backwoods manner of talking was now a thing of the past. Deck had taught him how to speak correctly, and for this the tall Kentuckian was exceedingly grateful. He often declared that it was Deck who had made him fit to be an ...
— An Undivided Union • Oliver Optic
... Have virtue and the people will be virtuous." If Thoreau had made the first sentence read: "If all men were like me and were to live as simply," etc., everyone would agree with him. We may wonder here how he would account for some of the degenerate types we are told about in some of our backwoods and mountain regions. Possibly by assuming that they are an instance of perversion of the species. That the little civilizing their forbears experienced rendered these people more susceptible to the physical than to the spiritual influence of nature; ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... was a splendid specimen of the backwoods' gentleman—you will admit there are gentlemen in the backwoods." (Here the doctor glanced good-humouredly, first at our English friend Thompson, and then at the Kentuckian, both of whom answered him with a laugh.) "His house was the type of a backwoods mansion; a wooden structure, ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... one other time for about a month when I was 21. It happened because I had nothing to do while visiting my mother before returning to University except help with housework and prepare meals. The food available in the backwoods of central B.C. didn't appeal to me because it was mostly canned vegetables, canned milk, canned moose meat and bear meat stews with lots of gravy and greasy potatoes. I decided to pass on it altogether. I remember rather enjoying that time as a fine rest and I left feeling very good ready ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
... dreams of lords and ladies, queens and dukes, I found myself deeply concerned with backwoods farming, spelling schools, protracted meetings and the like familiar homely scenes. This serial (which involved my sister and myself in many a spat as to who should read it first) was The Hoosier Schoolmaster, by Edward Eggleston, and a perfectly successful attempt to interest western ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... excited, under the belief that the creeping form had been one of his enemies, bent on effecting his capture, with the idea of furnishing sport for the idlers at the river town, through the medium of a little "tar and feathers party," so popular in some sections of the Southern backwoods. ...
— The Outdoor Chums on the Gulf • Captain Quincy Allen
... Clarksburg, now the county-seat of Harrison, but then no more than a village in the Virginia backwoods, Thomas Jonathan Jackson was born on January 21, 1824. His father was a lawyer, clever and popular, who had inherited a comfortable patrimony. The New World had been generous to the Jacksons. The emigrant of 1748 left a valuable estate, and his many ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... of the beat men I over knew," said Phoebus. "He was a remarkable instance of energy combined with softness of disposition. In my opinion, however, he ought never to have visited Europe: he was made to clear the backwoods, and govern man by the power of his hatchet and the mildness of his words. He was fighting for freedom all his life, yet slavery made and slavery destroyed him. Among all the freaks of Fate nothing is more surprising than that this Transatlantic ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... averred finally. "Rather neat and tasty, if I do say it myself. 'Introducing The Pilgrim!' Hum-m-m. You can't quite appreciate it of course, but—oh, Flash, I wish you could have seen that big boy standing there in the door of that little backwoods tavern, just as I saw him, about a ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... van, at the head of his company of mounted riflemen, mounted on a splendid Kentucky bay, and rigged out in his dashing backwoods uniform, rode Captain Bushrod Reynolds, whom we left twenty-four years ago in the Paradise a sturdy urchin of nine, and still a candidate for breeches and boots. Yes, there he rode, a tall, athletic man, in the prime of his days, ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady
... Hail, of Osaka, tells me that even as late as 1885 an old man from the "backwoods," as we should say, came to a village where Dr. Hail's brother was a missionary, discovered for the first time that a man might be a Christian without being punished, and then confessed that each day he had worshipped secretly at a little ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... is, that you cannot give your man as much soil as he has on the prairies or in the Canadian lumber lands. This, no doubt, is true, but the squatter who settles in the Canadian backwoods does not clear his land all at once. He lives on a small portion of it, and goes on digging and delving little by little, until, after many years of Herculean labour, he hews out for himself, and his children after him, a freehold estate. Freehold ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... early history of Massachusetts, which was followed by "Redwood" and "The Linwoods, or Sixty Years Since in America." Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes studied New England village life in "Elsie Venner," and Sylvester Judd that of the Maine backwoods in "Margaret." Mr. T.W. Higginson has written "Malbone." Mr. W.D. Howells, Rev. Edward Everett Hale, and Miss E.S. Phelps are still adding to ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... and serious, is a product of the backwoods and a crack rifle shot. Quick thinking and pluck bring him a scholarship to Clarkville School where he is branded "grind" and "dub" by classmates. How his batting brings them first place in the League and how he secures his appointment to West Point make CRACKER ...
— Baseball Joe in the Big League - or, A Young Pitcher's Hardest Struggles • Lester Chadwick
... doubt you will find it," and the gentleman gave a disdainful shrug to his shoulders. "Out in the backwoods attending a hallelujah meeting! I am sure ...
— Four Girls at Chautauqua • Pansy
... much mischief for idle hands in Lindsay as anywhere else. The worst tragedy I ever heard of happened on a backwoods farm, fifteen miles from a railroad and five from a store. However, I expect your mother's son to behave himself in the fear of God and man. In all likelihood the worst thing that will happen to you over there will be that some misguided woman will put you to sleep ...
— Kilmeny of the Orchard • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... over again until he could almost repeat them by heart; but he never read a novel in his life. His education came from the newspapers and from his contact with men and things. After he read a book he would write out an analysis of it. What a grand sight to see this long, lank, backwoods student, lying before the fire in a log cabin without floor or windows, after everybody else was abed, devouring books he had borrowed but could not afford ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... if I wore a boot this evening, I should be taken with those torments again before the night was out." This last letter ended thus: "As a relief to my late dismal letters, I send you the newest American story. Backwoods Doctor is called in to the little boy of a woman-settler. Stares at the child some time through a pair of spectacles. Ultimately takes them off, and says to the mother: 'Wa'al Marm, this is small-pox. 'Tis Marm, small-pox. But I am not posted ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... author, born in 1803. She was the sister of the noted historical writer, Agnes Strickland. Her best book is "Roughing it in the Bush," a record of experiences in the backwoods of Canada. She died ...
— The New McGuffey Fourth Reader • William H. McGuffey
... pastures where the stumps are still standing, and arable lands well cleared. The little town itself has a thriving look. Its public buildings and its villas have risen, as by the sweep of an enchanter's wand, in these backwoods to the ...
— The Zeit-Geist • Lily Dougall
... dinners, assemblies without end?... There is to be a dinner in New York, ... to which I have had an invitation with every known name in America appended to it.... I have had deputations from the Far West, who have come from more than two thousand miles' distance; from the lakes, the rivers, the backwoods, the log-houses, the cities, factories, villages, and towns. Authorities from nearly all the states have written to me. I have heard from the universities, congress, senate, and bodies, public and private, ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... a nobleman had found a boy reading Newton's "Principia," and not only expressed his pleased surprise at the performance, but actually got the boy educated. But there was no nobleman in sight of the backwoods of Nova Scotia. I read in the autobiography of Franklin how he had made his way in life. But he was surrounded with opportunities from which I was cut off. It does seem a little singular that, well known as my tastes were to ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... moustache just shading the lips, that were continually curving into the sunniest smiles. His voice, deep and musical, instantly attracted attention; and his address, though not without soldierly brusqueness, was sincere and courteous. There was one thing his backwoods detractors could never forgive: he always dressed well; and sometimes wore the military insignia presented to him by different organizations. One of these, a gold circle, inscribed with the legend, NON NOBIS, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... humourless democracy detected in him no taint of the patronizing or supercilious, and if he was new to the backwoods, he paid his arrears of knowledge with the ready coin ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... him by a look, to set her free from general admiration, and send her back to Mrs. Blyth, Mat was watching her over the painter's shoulder. And when young Thorpe, who had devoted himself to helping her in communicating with the visitors, nodded to her as she left the room, his friend from the backwoods was ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... want no petticoats clinging to me—much less an ignorant backwoods clodhopper. She is probably a fit mate ...
— Deadwood Dick, The Prince of the Road - or, The Black Rider of the Black Hills • Edward L. Wheeler
... Cal," she interrupted placidly. "I know! You're going to tell me, once more, your pet theory that there's many a boy in that backwoods who might paint a great canvas, or model a deathless bronze—or—or lead a lost cause, if he could only be found and provided with the chance. It sounds—it sounds very big and grand and romantic, Cal, but has it ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... floor, passing her little hand-shuttle through the cotton-woof. Now she sang—and sweetly she sang—some merry air of the American backwoods that had been taught her by her mother; anon some romantic lay of Old Spain—the "Troubadour," perhaps—a fine piece of music, that gives such happy expression to the modern song "Love not." This "Troubadour" was a favourite with Rosita; and when ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid
... eastern there are distress and poverty enough, as part of the same body suffering from the same cause; but there is much to redeem. In the west it exhibits a people, not in the centre of Africa, the steppes of Asia, the backwoods of America—not some newly-discovered tribes of South Australia, or among the Polynesian Islands—not Hottentots, Bushmen, or Esquimaux—neither Mahommedans nor Pagans—but some millions of our own Christian nation at home, living in ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... refusing to make herself pleasant or one with us in any sort of way. Lucy Marsh and I had a long talk over her that night, and we put our heads together to concoct a nice little bit of punishment for her. You know she's horridly shy, and as gauche as if she lived in the backwoods, and we meant to 'send her to Coventry.' We had it all arranged, and a whole lot of girls would have joined us, for it's contrary to the spirit of a place like this to allow girls of the Priscilla Peel type to become popular or liked ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... invitation of a very gentlemanly fellow-passenger from Connecticut, to visit a farm a few miles in the interior, where resided a celebrated character, named Adam Poe, surnamed by the inhabitants, the "Indian-killer," who had acquired the summit of a backwoods-man's fame, by some forty years ago shooting "Black-foot," a formidable Indian marauder, who, for a long period, spread consternation and alarm among the early settlers. As this exploit (whether justified by the circumstances and times or not, ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... rescued from the Shawnees, was a comely maiden. Though attired in the homespun garb of the backwoods, she would have attracted attention in any society. If not beautiful, she certainly was handsome, being possessed of a countenance rich with expression, and a form of perfect grace. Blue eyes, golden hair, a well-turned head, small nose and a health-tinted complexion, ...
— The Riflemen of the Miami • Edward S. Ellis
... taught him great sympathy. His great sympathy for men gave him great influence over men. As a lonely motherless little boy living in the pitiless poverty of the backwoods he learned both humility and appreciation. Then from a gentle step-mother he learned the beauty ...
— Life of Abraham Lincoln - Little Blue Book Ten Cent Pocket Series No. 324 • John Hugh Bowers
... backwoods of North America lived a settler and his family, far away from towns and villages. The children of such families at an early age learn to take care of themselves, and fearlessly wander to a distance from home to gather wild fruits, to fish in the streams, or to search for ...
— Stories of Animal Sagacity • W.H.G. Kingston
... with all the comforts of civilization. There were fine carpets on the floors, oil paintings on the walls, and easy chairs, sofas, and musical instruments in abundance. The room the boys occupied was the only one in which could be found any traces of the backwoods. It was a pleasant, cheerful apartment, quite as nicely furnished as the other rooms in the house, and every thing about it bespoke the taste and character of its young masters. A stranger, having taken a single glance ...
— Frank Among The Rancheros • Harry Castlemon
... thing is for all of us to fall into line and forge ahead, Colonel. If we don't, we'll be left behind; and in these times to lag is to take to the backwoods." ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... of the balmy weather and the sweet profusion of birds and flowers, when there was more like to be a "sweet profusion" of Indians; and I nigh stifled with laughter to see this lumbering, free-voiced forest-runner transformed to a mincing, anxious, backwoods macaroni at the smile ...
— The Maid-At-Arms • Robert W. Chambers
... Mr. Robert savage. "This is neither a backwoods barroom nor a hunting camp, and I want to assure you right now, ...
— Torchy, Private Sec. • Sewell Ford
... ravening evil that had scathed and torn him so; He would seize it by the vitals; he would crush it day and night; he Would so pursue its footsteps, so return it blow for blow, That Old Brown, Osawatomie Brown, Should be a name to swear by, in backwoods ...
— Poems of American Patriotism • Brander Matthews (Editor)
... And for Radney, though in his infancy he may have laid him down on the lone Nantucket beach, to nurse at his maternal sea; though in after life he had long followed our austere Atlantic and your contemplative Pacific; yet was he quite as vengeful and full of social quarrel as the backwoods seaman, fresh from the latitudes of buck-horn handled Bowie-knives. Yet was this Nantucketer a man with some good-hearted traits; and this Lakeman, a mariner, who though a sort of devil indeed, might yet by inflexible ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... Florida—the land of the palms!" announced the manager. "You know I spoke of tentative plans for a drama down there when we were in the backwoods. Now I have everything arranged, and we will leave on a steamer for St. Augustine one week ...
— The Moving Picture Girls Under the Palms - Or Lost in the Wilds of Florida • Laura Lee Hope
... really cared. He was a tall, spare, sinewy man, with eyes like an eagle's, and muscles that never tired; the toil and hardship of his life made no impress on his iron frame, unhurt by intemperance of any kind, and he lived for eighty-six years, a backwoods hunter to the end of his days. His thoughtful, quiet, pleasant face, so often portrayed, is familiar to every one; it was the face of a man who never blustered or bullied, who would neither inflict nor suffer any wrong, and who had a limitless fund of fortitude, endurance, ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... that," he averred finally. "Rather neat and tasty, if I do say it myself. 'Introducing The Pilgrim!' Hum-m-m. You can't quite appreciate it of course, but—oh, Flash, I wish you could have seen that big boy standing there in the door of that little backwoods tavern, just as I saw him, about a week ago! Why, ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... western civilization had made their appearance and were expanding their control along the Eurasian trade routes and beginning to penetrate western and northern Europe. The Crusades had introduced Asian culture traits into the European backwoods. Hardy European and Asian mariners were penetrating the Americas. Dark ages of ignorance and superstition which had held sway in Europe for centuries were coming to an end. Western civilization was beginning to draw the breath of a ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... wrecked on some desert coast; but it is by no means generally known that scarcely a summer passes over the colonists in Canada, without losses of children from the families of settlers occurring in the vast forests of the backwoods, similar to that on which the narrative of the Canadian Crusoes is founded. Many persons thus lost have perished in the wilderness; and it is to impress on the memory the natural resources of this country, by the aid of ...
— Canadian Crusoes - A Tale of The Rice Lake Plains • Catharine Parr Traill
... still,—an older world than that of the eastern continents,—an older world, in the fashion and type of its productions, than the world before the Flood. And when the immigrant settler takes axe amid the deep backwoods, to lay open for the first time what he deems a new country, the great trees that fall before him,—the brushwood that he lops away with a sweep of his tool,—the unfamiliar herbs which he tramples under foot,—the lazy fish-like reptile that scarce stirs ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... school, disobeyed Isaac's commandments. To the mountains or the sea, or in hot water with the neighbours and the town authorities—it was all the same; he was everywhere save where the dull plod of work obtained. And work was work in those backwoods days, and he, Frederick, had done the work. Early and late and all days he had been at it. He remembered the season when Isaac's wide plans had taken one of their smashes, when food had been scarce on ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London
... Maurice Leigh was one that might have dazzled him a little, if he had not had a strong counteracting influence in the thought of all he had left in Canada. He found himself, without hesitation or difficulty, but with a suddenness which was like the transformations in a fairy tale, changed from a Backwoods farmer's son into an important member of an old and wealthy family. Only the other day he had been working hard and holding up to himself as the reward of his work, the hope of becoming a successful provincial ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 2 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... BACKWOODS SURGERY AND MEDICINE. By Charles S. Moody, M.D. A handy book for the prudent lover of the woods who doesn't expect to be ill but believes in being on the safe side. Common-sense methods for the treatment of the ordinary wounds and accidents ...
— Apple Growing • M. C. Burritt
... be given. A painter has to clear away the old paint off a door, or a wall, before he lays on the new. The initial gift that comes from being laid hold of by Jesus Christ is the burning off of the old coat of paint. But that is only the preliminary to the laying on of the new. A man away in the backwoods will spend a couple of years after he has got his bit of land in felling and burning the trees, and rooting out and destroying the weeds. But is that what he got the clearing for? That is only a preliminary to sowing ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... which Harvey, by a clever stratagem, assists Capt. Wharton to escape. James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) was born at Burlington, N.J., but was reared in the wild country around Otsego Lake, in central N.Y., on the yet unsettled estates of his father. It was here he learned the backwoods lore, which in combination with his romantic genius, made him one of the most ...
— The Greatest Highway in the World • Anonymous
... Charlestown, Beverly, Florence, Springfield, and other points in Massachusetts, and in Hartford, Connecticut; in 1844, in Cincinnati, Dayton, Zanesville, Springfield, Cleveland, Toledo, and several settlements in the backwoods of Ohio, and also in Richmond, Indiana; in 1845 and '46, I lectured three times in the Legislative Hall in Detroit, and at Ann Arbor and other places in Michigan; and in 1847 and '48, I spoke in Charleston ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... Cody ("Buffalo Bill"), the scout, guide, and Indian fighter, was born on the 26th of February, 1846, in a primative log-cabin in the backwoods of Iowa. In 1852, the family removed to Kansas, where the father of young Cody, two years later, became a martyr to the Free State cause. From the moment the family was thus deprived of its support, the only boy, though a mere child, at the age of nine years, commenced his career. As a collaborator ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... puzzling his brain as to how he could raise the necessary funds to pay off his friend, he saw the tall, ungainly form of a backwoods planter shuffling ...
— The Expressman and the Detective • Allan Pinkerton
... at which time the rifle was used only by the hunters of the Alps and the hunters of the American backwoods; the latter having doubtless derived it from the former through German immigration. Bull's conservatism, however, was in the way. The lessons of Fort Duquesne, of Saratoga and of New Orleans were successively wasted on him. He did arm one regiment, the Ninety-fifth, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... completely reverse, the current accounts of all the Indian fighting, both against the Cherokees and the Northwestern tribes; they give for the first time a clear view of frontier diplomacy, of the intrigues with the Spaniards, and even of the mode of life in the backwoods, and of the workings of the civil government. It may be mentioned that the various proper names are spelt in so many different ways that it is difficult to know which to choose. Even Clark is sometimes spelt Clarke, while Boon was apparently indifferent ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... in work-a-day black suit and derby, with a candle in one hand and a property spear in the other. He conducted us down a narrow, drafty hallway, into a hall in which were wooden benches as rude as those in the bandstand of a backwoods country fair in the States, and a slightly raised platform at the farther end. We were soon in eager conversation with young store clerks and typists and artisans who were about to set to work at that in which their hearts lay, the interpreting of plays out of Ireland's heart. ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... the bed, and every now and then put forth a hand and timidly stroked her father's clay-cold wrist. On the floor, on a mattress matching the one on which the boy lay, was stretched a gaunt giant from some backwoods or mountain clearing. Margaret knelt beside him and he smiled up at her. "I ain't much hurt, and I ain't sufferin' to amount to nothin'. Ef this pesky butternut wouldn't stick in this here hurt place—" She cut the shirt from a sabre wound with the scissors hanging at her waist, then bringing ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... morning of the 22nd of September, 1827, the Angel of the Lord delivered unto Joseph Smith, Jr., an ignorant farmer-youth in a "backwoods" part of New York State, some plates which had "the appearance of gold". As we know from the scriptures, it is the habit of the Angel of the Lord to appear in unexpected places and to make miraculous ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... declaring that his errand had to do with the preliminaries of a private quarrel between gentlemen. Yet I could scarce restrain a smile. For these upcroppings of courtier etiquette have ever seemed to march but mincingly with the free stride of our western backwoods. None the less, you are to suppose that I made shift to match his bow in some fashion, and to ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... one with us in any sort of way. Lucy Marsh and I had a long talk over her that night, and we put our heads together to concoct a nice little bit of punishment for her. You know she's horridly shy, and as gauche as if she lived in the backwoods, and we meant to 'send her to Coventry.' We had it all arranged, and a whole lot of girls would have joined us, for it's contrary to the spirit of a place like this to allow girls of the Priscilla Peel type to become popular or liked in any way. But, most unluckily, ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... a single generation. We ourselves have known a parallel instance in the children of a British soldier who deserted during the War of 1812; in tone of thought, accent, dialect, and physique they were unmistakably Yankee. If the backwoods Americanize men so fast, is it wonderful that two centuries of the Western Hemisphere should have produced a breed so unlike the parent Bull? It is time Bull began to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... poor curates, and, when met with, were equally as small; and so it happened, that as the landowners usually resided, like Mr. Honeywood, among their own people, a gentleman would occasionally be as badly off for a neighbour, as though he had been a resident in the backwoods of Canada. This evil, however, was productive of good, in that it ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... his way, invoked the saints, and cursed his director for his medley of directions many a time, before he stumbled at length on Mr. Boone's house. He was invited to sit down and dine, in the simple backwoods phrase, which is still the passport ...
— The First White Man of the West • Timothy Flint
... yet I feel certain that if I wore a boot this evening, I should be taken with those torments again before the night was out." This last letter ended thus: "As a relief to my late dismal letters, I send you the newest American story. Backwoods Doctor is called in to the little boy of a woman-settler. Stares at the child some time through a pair of spectacles. Ultimately takes them off, and says to the mother: 'Wa'al Marm, this is small-pox. 'Tis Marm, small-pox. But I am not posted ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... opportunity, on the invitation of a very gentlemanly fellow-passenger from Connecticut, to visit a farm a few miles in the interior, where resided a celebrated character, named Adam Poe, surnamed by the inhabitants, the "Indian-killer," who had acquired the summit of a backwoods-man's fame, by some forty years ago shooting "Black-foot," a formidable Indian marauder, who, for a long period, spread consternation and alarm among the early settlers. As this exploit (whether justified by the circumstances ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... me of one I had witnessed in Georgia a fortnight before, on my way south. The train stopped at a backwoods station; some of the passengers gathered upon the steps of the car, and the usual bevy of young negroes came alongside. "Stand on my head for a nickel?" said one. A passenger put his hand into his pocket; the boy did as he had promised,—in no very ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... the world thought of it, we have still more to raise our wonder; for, not to mention the excitement it caused in England, the movement and its party-names were known to the police of Italy and to the backwoods-men of America. And so it proceeded, getting stronger and stronger every year, till it came into collision with the Nation and that Church of the Nation, which it began ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... clinging to me—much less an ignorant backwoods clodhopper. She is probably a fit mate for an ...
— Deadwood Dick, The Prince of the Road - or, The Black Rider of the Black Hills • Edward L. Wheeler
... government and society. Are our women unfitter than the far lower negroes, to whom full political equality was conceded in North America? And shall a highly intellectual woman be vested with lesser rights than the rudest, least cultured man,—an ignorant day-laborer of the backwoods of Pomerania, or an ultramontane canalman, for instance, and all because accident let these come into the world as men? The son has greater rights than his mother, from whom, perchance, he derives his best qualities, the very qualities that alone make ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... beauty," said Alfred to himself, as he watched the graceful rider disappear. "What spirit! Now, I wonder who she can be. She had on moccasins and buckskin gloves and her hair tumbled like a tomboy's, but she is no backwoods girl, I'll bet on that. I'm afraid I was a little rude, but after taking such a stand I could not weaken, especially before such a haughty and disdainful little vixen. It was too great a temptation. What eyes she had! Contrary to what I expected, this little frontier settlement ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... In the backwoods of Cambodia live two mysterious sovereigns known as the King of the Fire and the King of the Water. Their fame is spread all over the south of the great Indo-Chinese peninsula; but only a faint echo of ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... object of these reflections was still in the pantry, mixing bread which was to be set to rise for breakfast. She was a tall, rather slender young woman. A heavy mass of jet-black hair crowned her small, well-set head. Her eyes, to quote one of her backwoods admirers, were "jest the color o' swamp blue-berries, and hed the same sort o' shiny mist in them." Her skin was dark, almost swarthy, but a perpetual fire burned on her smooth, oval cheeks, deepening and fading according to her moods. She wore the usual every-day attire of the women of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... numerous packs of skins. We would then make the best of our way home from our distant hunting-grounds; transporting our spoils, sometimes in canoes along the rivers, sometimes on horseback over land, and our return would often be celebrated by feasting and dancing, in true backwoods style. I have given you some idea of our hunting; let me now give you a ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... per mail train to London, has been converted to Christianity, and has been brought over to England under the auspices of the Church of England Missionary Society, in order that he may be instructed in Christian truth, fitting him to return as a native teacher and preacher among his tribe in the backwoods of America. A more appropriate lodging for 'a man of the Desert' cannot be found in the whole world than Leicester Square; though whether he would receive much Christian truth in that locality is another question. If he would send for his tribe, and encamp there permanently, ...
— Missionary Work Among The Ojebway Indians • Edward Francis Wilson
... and physical environment of Links was the far backwoods of Canada, but the spirit and thought of it were Irish. The inhabitants were nearly all of Irish origin, most of them of Irish birth, and the fates had ruled it so that they came from all parts of the green isle. The North was as well represented as the South, and the feuds of ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... rose for departure we felt like saying with the blind preacher, whom William Wirt, the orator of Virginia, heard concluding his sermon to a backwoods congregation: ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... her literary career with "Hope Leslie," a story founded on the early history of Massachusetts, which was followed by "Redwood" and "The Linwoods, or Sixty Years Since in America." Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes studied New England village life in "Elsie Venner," and Sylvester Judd that of the Maine backwoods in "Margaret." Mr. T.W. Higginson has written "Malbone." Mr. W.D. Howells, Rev. Edward Everett Hale, and Miss E.S. Phelps are ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... is, however, familiar with the dreaded cougar, catamount, or panther—sometimes called "painter"—of North American literature, thrilling descriptions of encounters with this imaginary man-eating monster being freely scattered through the backwoods or border romances, many of them written by authors who have the reputation of being true to nature. It may be true that this cougar of a cold climate did occasionally attack man, or, as it is often stated, follow him in the forest with the intention of springing on him unawares; ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... see no other room connected with the stone building—it was always possible, however, that there might be another shack—perhaps a crude palmetto-leaf hut, such as the poor whites in the backwoods lived in, somewhere not far away that served them for a shelter when it rained or a bustling Norther came howling down from the regions of snow ...
— Eagles of the Sky - With Jack Ralston Along the Air Lanes • Ambrose Newcomb
... first united efforts of human industry were made. The tongue of arid land was the cradle of those English colonies which were destined one day to become the United States of America. The centre of power still remains here; whilst in the backwoods the true elements of the great people to whom the future control of the continent belongs are gathering almost in ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... Lincoln the chances of his boyhood? The story of his life has been told so often that nothing new can be said about him. Yet every fresh reading of the story fills the reader anew with wonder and admiration at what was accomplished by the poor backwoods boy. ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden
... matter what the world thinks," Gillespie said, and he spoke of the small backwoods settlement as if it were some great center of opinion such as in great communities dispenses fame and infamy, and makes its judgments supremely dreaded. "Besides," he faltered, "no one is knowing but ourselves to his coming back. It can ...
— The Leatherwood God • William Dean Howells
... settlers is described with sympathetic accuracy by Theodore Roosevelt. "Louisiana was added to the United States because the hardy backwoods settlers had swarmed into the valleys of the Tennessee, the Cumberland and the Ohio by hundreds of thousands.... Restless, adventurous, hardy, they looked eagerly across the Mississippi to the fertile solitudes where the Spaniard was the nominal, and the Indian the real master; and with ...
— The American Empire • Scott Nearing
... make the opening prayer. It was considered a good prayer, generally speaking, but it was criticised as not containing anything attractive to young people. He was understood to be on his way to take charge of a backwoods church down in Aroostook County, where probably his prayers would be more acceptable to ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... the green zenith of June when MacPhairrson went away. When he returned, hobbling up with his tiny bundle, the backwoods world was rioting in the scarlet and gold of young October. He was quite cured. He felt singularly well. But a desperate loneliness saddened his home-coming. He knew his cabin would be just as he had left it, there on its steep ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... fall into excessive raptures over the barbarian's kindness. Emboldened by my sympathy, she told me how she had given up, little by little, what she imagined to be the weakness of her early education, until she found that she acquired but little strength in her new experience. How, translated to a backwoods society, she was hated by the women, and called proud and "fine," and how her dear husband lost popularity on that account with his fellows. How, led partly by his roving instincts, and partly from ...
— Legends and Tales • Bret Harte
... a rough backwoods bunch always drifting around Clinch's place in those days. There were fights. And not so many miles from Clinch's there was highway robbery and a ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert Chambers
... the record of his extraordinary success was deliberately omitted from the second edition of a work which records the minutest contrivance of any English amateur,—the first edition having already mentioned the "young artist living in the backwoods,"—will recognize in it something of the old style in which the mother-country ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... story," replied the visitor, "but I always had the idea that we should meet again. Your photograph has been with me all over the world. In the backwoods of Canada, in the bush of Australia, it has been my one comfort and guiding star. If ever I was tempted to do wrong, I used to take your photograph out ...
— Short Cruises • W.W. Jacobs
... a Refugee The Indian Bride, a Refugee's Story Mr. Hanselpecker Burning of Miramichi The Lost One—a tale of the Early Settlers The Mignionette Song of the Irish Mourner A Winter's Evening Sketch The School-mistress's Dream Library in the Backwoods The Indian Summer The Lost Children—a Poem Sleigh Riding Aurora Borealis Getting into ...
— Sketches And Tales Illustrative Of Life In The Backwoods Of New Brunswick • Mrs. F. Beavan
... shocking stories of the ferocity of bears. What a pity that the truth of these stories cannot always be run to earth! Billy Le Heup, a prospector and guide of northern Ontario, once having occasion to call for his mail in a little backwoods settlement, opened a newspaper and was shocked to learn that a most harrowing affliction had befallen an old friend of his, by name—But I'm sorry I have forgotten it, so let us call him Jones. The paper reported that while several of Jones's children were out berry-picking, a great, ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... had followed the fortunes of her brother, Daniel Hood, ever since the death of her husband. Love for her only brother induced her to forsake the peaceful village of Maryland and enter upon the wild life of a backwoods settlement. Dick's mother was thin, and old, and wrinkled, but her face was stamped with a species of beauty which never fades—the beauty of a loving look. Ah! the brow of snow and the peach-bloom cheek may ...
— The Dog Crusoe and His Master - A Story of Adventure in the Western Prairies • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... East we had traveled, me and my folks alone, And quick we went to workin' a piece of land of our own; Small was our backwoods quarters, and things looked mighty cheap; But every thing we put in there, we ...
— Farm Ballads • Will Carleton
... rael satisfaction tae read yir letter frae the backwoods—or was't a public-hoose in New York? ma memory's no what it used to be—tellin' hoo ye were aye thinkin' o' yer auld granny, and wantin' tae come hame and be a comfort tae her if she wud send ye ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren
... from the farm Sir John has never had a desire to return, even in sympathy. With a fine sense of humour he has never relished reminiscences of the backwoods and the smoke of the log heaps. His published "Reminiscences" are a fine contribution to our political history, but they show no real sympathy with the rude pioneer life from which the writer came and to which ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... dead as the days when daughters obeyed, and honored their fathers! Beggarly foreign professors wiped all that out of the minds of wealthy girls at boarding schools—just as they changed their backwoods pronunciation of French and Italian. Don't ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... what he was. Even his physical conditions are not to be forgotten in making up his character. We make too little always of the physical; certainly we make too little of it here if we lose out of sight the strength and muscular activity, the power of doing and enduring, which the backwoods-boy inherited from generations of hard-living ancestors, and appropriated for his own by a long discipline of bodily toil. He brought to the solution of the question of labor in this country not merely ...
— Addresses • Phillips Brooks
... do without it; but when we come to examine its meaning, we find that lie has no claim to it whatever. He may hold on to the name, but nothing more. The substance is as different from the view which forms a part of his creed, as a city on the Atlantic coast differs from a small village in the backwoods." (pp. ...
— The Calvinistic Doctrine of Predestination Examined and Refuted • Francis Hodgson
... log holds out very well while it is green, but has not substance enough for a backlog when dry. Seasoning green timber or men is always an experiment. A man may do very well in a simple, let us say, country or backwoods line of life, who would come to nothing in a more complicated civilization. City life is a severe trial. One man is struck with a dry-rot; another develops season-cracks; another shrinks and swells with every change ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... After her plain old backwoods aunt had admired and exclaimed over the butterfly so unexpectedly developed from the brown tailor-made chrysalis, Barbara determined to take a walk. She knew that over through that cool, fascinating forest, only a half-mile away, dwelt the Adamses. ...
— Blazed Trail Stories - and Stories of the Wild Life • Stewart Edward White
... on a little business trip. One of the big houses wants to get some papers and testimony and that sort of thing out of a man who is living in a backwoods village there for his health—and his liberty. None of their own men can afford time to go. And I got the chance, a very good one for me—but I ...
— New Faces • Myra Kelly
... legal lore. It was a true enough description, but after all, there were very few college-bred lawyers in the Eighth Illinois Circuit or anywhere else who could hold their own, even in a purely professional struggle, with that long-armed logician from the backwoods. ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... sentence read: "If all men were like me and were to live as simply," etc., everyone would agree with him. We may wonder here how he would account for some of the degenerate types we are told about in some of our backwoods and mountain regions. Possibly by assuming that they are an instance of perversion of the species. That the little civilizing their forbears experienced rendered these people more susceptible to the physical than to the spiritual influence of nature; in other words; if they had been purer ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... novelty of our associations, created a glow of spirit which burst forth in unrestrained conversation, mirth, and song. Now, then, I began to display my literary acquisitions. During the long evenings in our tent, or the wigwam of an Indian, or the log cabin of a backwoods settler, we alternated in reading aloud from an excellent collection of books I had prepared. Reading introduced topics of conversation, in which I employed all that I had in memory, and all that had been created ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... as much mischief for idle hands in Lindsay as anywhere else. The worst tragedy I ever heard of happened on a backwoods farm, fifteen miles from a railroad and five from a store. However, I expect your mother's son to behave himself in the fear of God and man. In all likelihood the worst thing that will happen to you over there will be that some misguided woman will put you to sleep in a spare ...
— Kilmeny of the Orchard • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... chances now for intensive cultivation are in New Jersey, in the backwoods of the Middle states now made accessible by cheap autos—and in ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall
... his chatter, a trifle too noisy to seem fully natural; and her smile, in the beginning mistrusting, wary, was softening and brightening. But she did not get on with the tea especially well. At home, in the backwoods village, where this beverage was still held a rarity, the dainty luxury of well-to-do families, to be brewed only for honored guests and on great holidays—there over the pouring of the tea officiated ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... Fielding at Snow Camp; Or, Lost in the Backwoods," the third volume of the series, are told the mid-winter sports of our heroine and her friends; and later, after the school year is concluded, we find them all at the seaside home of one of the Briarwood girls, and follow them through the excitement and incidents ...
— Ruth Fielding on Cliff Island - The Old Hunter's Treasure Box • Alice Emerson
... such to one ignorant of Indians, whose lonely path lies a long way through their lands, this, in the event, might prove not only injudicious but cruel. At least something of this kind would seem the maxim upon which backwoods' education is based. Accordingly, if in youth the backwoodsman incline to knowledge, as is generally the case, he hears little from his schoolmasters, the old chroniclers of the forest, but histories ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... militia company in guarding Continental stores here [Fort Burd] in 1778." The term "Big Knives" or "Long Knives" may have had reference either to the long knives carried by early white hunters, or the swords worn by backwoods militia officers. See Roosevelt's Winning of the West, ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... by law, it can hardly be doubted that cruelty would be rife in the relations of men and women, and of parents and children. It is true that the habits of a community can make such cruelty rare, but these habits, I fear, are only to be produced through the prolonged reign of law. Experience of backwoods communities, mining camps and other such places seems to show that under new conditions men easily revert to a more barbarous attitude and practice. It would seem, therefore, that, while human ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... Habsburg is made to stand out as a light shining in the darkness. In Germanic eyes Ottokar's fault was that of being a Slav, successful and of great ability. I cannot agree with the German chronicler's estimate of Rudolph. We are expected to accept him as a modest sort of backwoods peer, the kind that wears flannel next its skin and keeps its small estates unencumbered. We have also a pretty picture in verse of this Rudolph. He is described as meeting a priest carrying the Host, on ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... been in the backwoods for more than a month, ostensibly to fish and look at coal lands, but, really, to get away for a while, as his custom was, from his worse self to the better self that he was when he was in the mountains—alone. ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.
... "and would you imagine it, he seems to think that everything here goes on as it does in his d——d little backwoods ranch at home; talks about the pretty girls who walk alone in the street; says how sensible it is; and how French parents are misrepresented in America; says that for his part he finds French girls,—and he confessed to only knowing one,—as jolly ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... have imagined that they were about visiting some backwoods wilderness, some savage tract of country, "remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow," for they brought almost everything with them that men of elegant leisure could require, as if the hotel were but four walls and a roof, which they must furnish with their own chattels. I am ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various
... centuries white men struck their claws ever firmer into America. The Indians were forced back into the backwoods, and in North America they have been almost exterminated. Under French, and later, under English rule, those parts of North America have developed an unexpected power and wealth which were despised by the Spaniards, who in their ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... similar activities in which joint effort was usual. The women, too, exchanged visits and, on occasion, gathered at one place for quilting or other mutually shared activities.[10] Furthermore, the frontier journalists often noted the fine hospitality and congeniality of their backwoods hosts.[11] ...
— The Fair Play Settlers of the West Branch Valley, 1769-1784 - A Study of Frontier Ethnography • George D. Wolf
... so—perhaps it is the best thing to do with him, for he could buy a living with the money his grandfather left him, but there is no knowing what the boy will think of it when the time comes, and for aught we know he may insist on going to the backwoods of America, as so many other young men are doing now." . . . But, anyway, he would like making an organ, and this could do him no harm, so the ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... you were lost in the backwoods," I said, laughing. "How you manage to keep out of this charming place when you have only three steps to take to get into it is more than I have yet been able to discover. You hide away mighty well so long as ...
— The Aspern Papers • Henry James
... returned a positive answer that no inquest had been held, or any body found, which could by any possibility be that of the young Englishman. The only alternative appeared to be that he had taken the first opportunity to break all the old ties, and had slipped away to the backwoods or to the States to commence life anew under an altered name. Why he should do this no one professed to know, but that he had done it appeared only too probable from the facts. Hence many a deep growl of righteous anger rose from the brawny smacksmen when Mary with her pale face and sorrow-sunken ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... sallow-looking backwoodsman talk of having come lately from Paris, or Mecca, when instead of meaning the capital of La grande nation, or the city of "the holy prophet," he spoke of some town containing a few hundred inhabitants, situated in the backwoods of Kentucky, or amidst the gloomy forests of Indiana. The Americans too speak in prospective, when they talk of great places; no doubt "calculating" that, one day, all the mighty productions of the old world will be surpassed by ...
— A Ramble of Six Thousand Miles through the United States of America • S. A. Ferrall
... I can shut my eyes and almost fancy I see your home in the backwoods. There are your two sisters running ...
— Our American Cousin • Tom Taylor
... and abolished slavery. These barriers were raised too late. A call for help ran through the western border of the United States. The sentinels of the frontier answered. Davy Crockett, the noted frontiersman, bear hunter, and backwoods politician; James Bowie, the dexterous wielder of the knife that to this day bears his name; and Sam Houston, warrior and pioneer, rushed to the aid of their countrymen in Texas. Unacquainted with the niceties of diplomacy, ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... a blue cotton umbrella, though there may have been under it at times and seasons. Skeletons of the species, much faded as to color, much weakened as to whalebone, may still be found here and there in backwoods settlements, where they are known as "umbrells;" there are but few ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 2, April 9, 1870 • Various
... at him, but he returned my gaze with interest. There was a deal of backwoods justice in his rough reasoning, although its morality was indefensible. It was the law of property expounded a la Lynch. What is very certain is, that in a new country especially, absenteeism ought to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... abuse our hospitality, insult our peculiar institutions, set at defiance all the refinements of life, and return home, lamenting the social anarchy of America, and retailing their own indecent conduct as the ordinary customs of the country.... The pranks which, in a backwoods American, would be stigmatized as shocking obscenity, become, when perpetrated by a rich Englishman, charming ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... to this is, that you cannot give your man as much soil as he has on the prairies or in the Canadian lumber lands. This, no doubt, is true, but the squatter who settles in the Canadian backwoods does not clear his land all at once. He lives on a small portion of it, and goes on digging and delving little by little, until, after many years of Herculean labour, he hews out for himself, and his children after him, a freehold ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... knew flint and steel, or a brimstone stick. He explained to Larry how easy it was to cook game, by making a fire in a hole until it had become very hot, and then placing the meat therein; sealing the oven until hours had elapsed; which backwoods method of cooking was really the first ...
— Chums in Dixie - or The Strange Cruise of a Motorboat • St. George Rathborne
... novelty and interest of our tour," we say. We rather hope it will prove a very peculiar road, and are prepared for discomfort which we do not find; although, at Spring Hill, the point of divergence from the main line, such a queer train is waiting, that one exclaims, "Surely we have come into the backwoods at last!" ...
— Over the Border: Acadia • Eliza Chase
... in the mountains, and one of the best hunters with whom I ever traveled, was a man who had a peculiarly light-hearted way of looking at conventional social obligations. Though in some ways a true backwoods Donatello, he was a man of much shrewdness and of great courage and resolution. Moreover, he possessed what only a few men do possess, the capacity to tell the truth. He saw facts as they were, and could tell them as they were, and he never told an untruth unless for ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... scenes or nothing startling or sensational in the plot or characters. The story, however, may be regarded as a biting sarcasm on a hypocritical society in which a gang of instructors of dark character at a middle school in a backwoods town plays a prominent part. The hero of the story is made a victim of their annoying intrigues, but finally comes out triumphant by smashing the petty red tapism, knocking down the sham pretentions and by actual use of the fist on the Head Instructor ...
— Botchan (Master Darling) • Mr. Kin-nosuke Natsume, trans. by Yasotaro Morri
... consciences, with single-loading rifles; but along came the inventive Yankee and produced revolvers and repeaters, and Gatling guns, and magazine guns—guns that carried a dozen shots at a time. I didn't wonder at the curiosity exhibited in this direction by a backwoods Virginian we captured one night. The first remark he made was, "I would like to see one of them thar new-fangled weepons of yourn. They tell me, sah, it's a most remarkable eenstrument. They say, sah, it's a kind o' repeatable, which you can load it up enough on Sunday ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... liberty, here, of citing an instance of this. In 1861, when I found myself on the West Coast of Mexico, a dozen backwoods families determined upon settling in Sonora (forming an oasis in the desert); a plan which was frustrated by the invasion at that time of the European powers. Many native farmers awaited the arrival of these immigrants in order ...
— Lineage, Life, and Labors of Jose Rizal, Philippine Patriot • Austin Craig
... wearings before it would look a sight. It wouldn't wash—man as you are, Mr. Mostyn, you know it wouldn't wash. I'm going to take it off and try to have some sense. I'm in no position to try to make a show. School-teachers here in the backwoods have no right to excite comment by the gaudy finery they wear. I'm paid by people's taxes. Did you know that? I might find myself out of a job—out of employment, I mean. Some of these crusty old fellows that believe it is wrong ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... said at length, "you're goin' to have a great time at this little backwoods school—you're going to ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... contriving well-shaped boots and shoes for the very people who, if they were your countrymen, would be clumping about in wooden sabots. In works of scientific industry, hardly to be looked for among so new a people she has distanced your best artificers. The microscopes made at Canastota, in the backwoods of New York, look in vain for their rivals in Paris, and must challenge the best workmanship of London before they can be approached in excellence. The great eye that stares into the celestial spaces from its workshop in Cambridge, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... is coming," said the schoolmaster thoughtfully. "It is wonderful what the energy and directing mind of one man can do. That name alone is enough to change the nature of a whole campaign. 'Tis lucky that we have this Caesar of the backwoods to defend us. What is your ...
— The Border Watch - A Story of the Great Chief's Last Stand • Joseph A. Altsheler
... prophets of God. In one of these meetings of public thanksgiving Brigham had said from the tabernacle pulpit: "What is the strength of this man Lincoln? It is like a rope of sand. He is as weak as water,—an ignorant, Godless shyster from the backwoods of Illinois. I feel disgraced in having been born under a government that has so little power for truth and right. And now it will be broken in pieces like ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... the history of America there has been no man who started lower and climbed higher than Abraham Lincoln, the backwoods boy. He never "slipped back." He always kept going ahead. He broadened his mind, enlarged his outlook, and led his companions rather than let them lead him. He was jolly company, good-natured, kind-hearted, fond ...
— Heroes Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... long out before meeting with that characteristic feature of a scene on the Western plains, a "prairie schooner;" and meeting prairie schooners will now be a daily incident of my eastward journey. Many of these "pilgrims" come from the backwoods of Missouri and Arkansas, or the rural districts of some other Western State, where the persevering, but at present circumscribed, cycler has not yet had time to penetrate, and the bicycle is therefore to them a wonder to be gazed ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... of dying," observed Burlingham, in the light, jovial tone that would most quickly soothe her agitation, "but I think I'd take my chances with the worms rather than with the dry rot of a backwoods farm. You may not get your meals so regular out in the world, but you certainly do live. Yes—that backwoods life, for anybody with a spark of spunk, is simply being dead and knowing it." He tore the Courier into six pieces, flung them over the side. "None ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... alone by the wayside under nodding pines, with its streamlet and water-tank; its backwoods, toll-bar, and well-trodden croquet ground; the ostler standing by the stable door, chewing a straw; a glimpse of the Chinese cook in the back parts; and Mr. Hoddy in the bar, gravely alert and serviceable, and equally anxious to lend or ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the indiwidool," continued Mr. Tappan, "is what artists need. Woo the muses in solitude; cultiwate 'em in isolation. Didn't Benjamin West live out in the backwoods? And I guess he managed to make good without raising hell in the Eekole di Boze Arts with a lot of dissipated wagabonds at his elbow, inculcating immoral precepts and wasting his ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... rough, this shirt-sleeved Cid, This backwoods Charlemagne of Empires new. Who meeting Caesar's self would slap his back, Call him 'Old Horse' and ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... and far Cathay; to see the tropics and to live for a while in a tropical island; to be carried along the Grand Canal of Venice in a gondola; to see the gardens of Boccaccio and the cell of Savonarola; to camp and hunt in the backwoods of Canada, and to walk the streets of New York, all these things have I longed, from youth upwards, to see and to do—yea, as ardently as ever Drake desired to set an English sail upon the great and unknown sea, and all these ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... If the enemy was this barbarian from the backwoods, well and good! His mind was again relieved; he nodded to acquaintances and looked quite cheerful. He had for a moment felt aggrieved that anybody should be grumbling behind his back, but that was now forgotten; it would be foolish to take offence ...
— Shallow Soil • Knut Hamsun
... bare pine floor, small work-bench, wall bunk with amazingly neat bed, frying-pan and ash-stippled coffee-pot on the shelf behind the pot-bellied cannon-ball stove, backwoods chairs—one constructed from half a barrel, one from a tilted plank—and a row of books incredibly assorted; Byron and Tennyson and Stevenson, a manual of gas-engines, a book by Thorstein Veblen, and ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... most other countries two men of as different antecedents, ancestry, and surroundings as Billy O'Neill and I would have had far more difficulty in coming together. I came from the biggest city in America and from the wealthiest ward of that city, and he from a backwoods county where he kept a store at a crossroads. In all the unimportant things we seemed far apart. But in all the important things we were close together. We looked at all questions from substantially the same view-point, ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... her social reign as the Princess di Sereno, she had been a good deal spoiled—by every one except the Prince. Vaguely, and like a petted child, she had taken it for granted that all men were glad to be "nice" to her, and she thought the "forest creature" was showing himself a backwoods creature—rude and unenlightened. ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... Osaka, tells me that even as late as 1885 an old man from the "backwoods," as we should say, came to a village where Dr. Hail's brother was a missionary, discovered for the first time that a man might be a Christian without being punished, and then confessed that each day he had worshipped secretly at a little Catholic shrine hidden ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... N. limit, boundary, bounds, confine, enclave, term, bourn, verge, curbstone^, but, pale, reservation; termination, terminus; stint, frontier, precinct, marches; backwoods. boundary line, landmark; line of demarcation, line of circumvallation^; pillars of Hercules; Rubicon, turning point; ne plus ultra [Lat.]; sluice, floodgate. Adj. definite; conterminate^, conterminable^; terminal, frontier; bordering. Adv. thus far, thus far and ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... saw himself, his money all gone, but the luck still with him, at Mass on the Sunday before going to the backwoods lumber-camp for the winter, as boss of a hundred men. He had a way with him, and he had brains, had Jacques Grassette, and he could manage men, as Michelin the lumber-king himself had found in a great river-row and strike, when bloodshed seemed certain. Even now the ghost ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... detected in him no taint of the patronizing or supercilious, and if he was new to the backwoods, he paid his arrears of knowledge with the ready coin ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... the first great sorrow of his life befell the little boy. His mother died of a fever that appeared among the settlers, leaving Abraham and his sister Sarah, a little girl of eleven, to do the housework and the heavy chores of a backwoods farm. The following year Thomas Lincoln went away to Kentucky to marry again, and he brought back with him a big hearted woman named Sally Johnson, who had three children ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards
... But if it was the suggestion of the publisher, Griffin must have been a bold man. A writer whose acquaintance with animated nature was such as to allow him to make the "insidious tiger" a denizen of the backwoods of Canada,[2] was not a very safe authority. But perhaps Griffin had consulted Johnson before making this bargain; and we know that Johnson, though continually remarking on Goldsmith's extraordinary ignorance of facts, was of opinion that the History of Animated ...
— Goldsmith - English Men of Letters Series • William Black
... the Kentucky, the America, he had hitherto sought in vain, with its suggestion of the backwoods of civilization, the pioneer, the primitive. And to emphasize and give the suggestion point, here was an example of the finest feminine beauty left to this degenerating world, beauty such as the Greeks knew, large-limbed, deep-bosomed, clear-eyed, product of a vigorous past, ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... couldn't guess. People who live in the backwoods and miles from a railroad are not apt to be leaders of fashion. Doubtless her hands will be red and her face will be red and her hair ...
— The Man in Lonely Land • Kate Langley Bosher
... call on the President, Miss Merry. He receives Thursdays at the State House. Then you'll see a really great man in authority, not the backwoods clowns that have brought this country into ridicule—such a man as Virginia used to give the people for President," Rosa said in the tone a lady of Louis XVIII's court might have used to an adherent of ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... "homely verse," With country phrases, jokes and slang; With "jiminies!" "by hecks!" and such, With "backwoods" odor, taste and tang— This thing, I say, of making light Of country life is funny—Not! I'd like to know where we would be If farms were ...
— With the Colors - Songs of the American Service • Everard Jack Appleton
... form of the affidavit may be judged peculiar; but it was thought best not to startle the authorities with the admission that the man had not been baptized at all. They could easily believe that a State like Ohio, which some of them doubtless regarded as still in the backwoods and mainly tenanted by the aborigines, might have omitted, in days gone by, to require a Taufschein; but that an unbaptized Christian should offer himself to be married in Germany would perhaps have so paralyzed their powers of belief that permission for the ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... off, one by one, as the list expanded. They felt that it was like this Bishop—an unimportant and commonplace figure in Methodism, not to be mentioned in the same breath with Simpson and Janes and Kingsley—that he should begin with the backwoods counties, and thrust all these remote and pitifully rustic stations ahead of their own metropolitan charge. To these they listened but listlessly—indifferent alike to the joy and to the dismay which he was scattering among the divines ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... determined to tell the fresh story of the backwoods and the prairies, found a pattern ready to his hand in the Waverley novels, so Ibsen availed himself of the "well-made play" of Scribe when he wrote the 'League of Youth,' which is his earliest piece in prose presenting contemporary life and character in Norway. There is obvious ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... as much unknown to us as the backwoods. My father alone had been born and bred to village life and habits, for my mother had spent her youth in a succession of seaport towns, frequented by men-of-war. We heard, too, that Chantry House was very secluded, with only a few cottages near at hand—a mile and a half from the church ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... two or three hundred yards wide, extending from the upper limit of the tree-line to the bottoms of valleys and lake basins, are of common occurrence in all the upper forests, resembling the clearings of settlers in the old backwoods. Scarcely a tree is spared, even the soil is scraped away, while the thousands of uprooted pines and spruces are piled upon one another heads downward, and tucked snugly in along the sides of the clearing ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... In view of the geographical, social, political, and commercial conditions of Canada, the policy of his opponents was impracticable, and nothing less than a perpetual cordon of troops could have prevented the Canadians from escaping to the backwoods. In spite of all the evils that attended the forest posts, it would have been a blunder to abandon them. This quickly became apparent. Champigny himself saw the necessity of compromise. The instructions of the king were scarcely given before ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman
... of human nature served him in the graver experiences of life which followed. His stay in Quebec was short. A study of the ancient citadel and its incomplete fortifications occupied his time. In the summer of 1803 he was stationed at York, a hamlet carved out of the backwoods, sustaining a handful of people, but famous as the gathering-place of many wise men. He found that desertions in Upper Canada had become too frequent. The temptations offered by a long line of frontier easy of access, and the desperate discipline in the army, had led to much brutality ...
— The Story of Isaac Brock - Hero, Defender and Saviour of Upper Canada, 1812 • Walter R. Nursey
... in Triana, as there were none in our backwoods, and the little maids tilted to and fro on the fore legs and hind legs of their chairs and lulled their charges to sleep with seismic joltings. When the street turned into a road it turned into a road a hundred feet wide; one of those roads which Charles III., when he came to the Spanish ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... witnessed in London. In this they were not far out of the way; for all who witnessed the scene admitted that it could scarcely have been surpassed. My own idea of an illumination, as I had seen it in the backwoods of my own native land, dwindled into nothing when compared with ...
— Three Years in Europe - Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met • William Wells Brown
... from the peaks and entered a tiny hamlet of the backwoods, where he found among other things a two-weeks-old Richmond newspaper. Looking eagerly through its meager columns to see what had happened while he was buried in the hills, he learned that there was no new stage in the war—no other great ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... there. Oswald began to feel the water squelching in his boots, so we held our breath and listened. Oswald laid his ear to the road like a Red Indian. You would not do this in time of peace, but when your country is in danger you care but little about keeping your ears clean. His backwoods' strategy was successful. He rose and dusted himself ...
— The Wouldbegoods • E. Nesbit
... the matter, only she's poky, and doesn't seem to fit in somehow. You would understand if you had seen her the day she came. Mrs. Gray has dressed her up, as you might be sure she would; but then she looked like the backwoods, didn't ...
— A Little Country Girl • Susan Coolidge
... no "disorders" save that of carrying off the mules and horses of the convents; but when we think of the wild, free, peril-scorning life led in the backwoods of America, of how they recognized no law save their commander's orders, how little used he had been to receive command from any, it will be easily understood how this wild, tanned, quaintly dressed band filled the inhabitants of the towns through ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... sluggishly through the valley, which on either side had been dug up by prospectors for gold. All about on the slopes of the hills and in the valley were rude huts, hastily put together, the homes of the miners. Some of them were built of solid trunks of trees laid horizontally, after the American backwoods order of architecture. The interstices were generally daubed with clay to make them water-tight, and the roofs were covered with sheets of bark, kept down by logs laid upon them. There were tents, also, made of slabs, and covered with canvas. Still others ...
— In A New World - or, Among The Gold Fields Of Australia • Horatio Alger
... squalor of a front trench in Flanders, only a few yards from the enemy's lines, the cheery occupants offered to brew some tea, exactly as we "boil our kettle" and have a good time in the safety of our Northern backwoods. One day I picked up some bright blue crystals. They proved to be "blue-stone," or sulphate of copper. When my pilot noticed that its presence puzzled me, he remarked casually, "There was a regimental dressing-station there ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... was almost as tall as Humphrey, but of a much slighter build; yet he was wiry and muscular, as could well be seen, and plainly well used to the life of the wild woodlands. His dress was that of the backwoods, dressed deerskin being the chief material used. Both travellers wore moccasins on their feet, and carried the usual weapons of offence ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green
... a large number of emigrants aboard, many of them newly married couples, and the advantages of the different parts of the New World they expected to settle in were often discussed. My father started with the intention of going to the backwoods of Upper Canada. Before the end of the voyage, however, he was persuaded that the States offered superior advantages, especially Wisconsin and Michigan, where the land was said to be as good as in Canada and far more easily brought under cultivation; for in Canada the woods were so close and heavy ...
— The Story of My Boyhood and Youth • John Muir
... best writing with the life he knew at first hand is thus perfectly plain. In his novels dealing with the wilderness, popularly known as the Leatherstocking Tales, he drew directly on his knowledge of the backwoods and backwoodsmen as he gained it about Cooperstown. In The Pioneers (1823) he dealt with the scenes of his boyhood, scenes which lay very close to his heart; and in the other volumes of this series, The Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Prairie (1827), The Pathfinder (1840), and The Deerslayer ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... about Albemarle Sound. Nearly everywhere in the lowlands, however, the land was too barren for any distinct prosperity. The settlements were quite isolated, the communications very poor, and the social tone mostly that of the backwoods frontier. An Anglican missionary when describing his own plight there in 1711 discussed the industrial regime about him: "Men are generally of all trades and women the like within their spheres, except some who are the posterity ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... said he; "the house was very much crowded, and the first thing I noticed, was two wild cats in a cage. Some acquaintance asked me if they were like wild cats in the backwoods; and I was looking at them, when one turned over and died. The keeper ran up and threw some water on it. Said I, 'Stranger, you are wasting time: my look kills them things; and you had much better hire ...
— The Book of Anecdotes and Budget of Fun; • Various
... husking Indian corn. His drowsy lids snap at some trivial sound, With lazy yawns he slips towards the ground, Then with an idle whistle lifts his load And shambles home along the country road That stretches on, fringed out with stumps and weeds, And finally unto the backwoods leads, Where forests wait with giant trunk and bough The axe ...
— Flint and Feather • E. Pauline Johnson
... dear fellow—absolutely!" Lord Porthoning declared. "Of course you couldn't expect quite the same enthusiasm on the part of your friends when you marry a young lady who is a stranger to all of them and who comes from the backwoods of America. Can't think how it is you young Englishmen can marry nothing, nowadays, unless it shows its legs upon the stage or has a transatlantic drawl. I am going in to see if the champagne they're opening now is any better. The first glass I had ...
— An Amiable Charlatan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Johnson he lived on the Western border, Where he went to escape from 'law and order,' For Tom was a terrible fellow, was he, He drunk, and he swore, and he fou't[B] like the Old Harry—and Tom he had a wife: Fit partner she was of his backwoods life. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... man was Andrew Jackson. Whether as a youth, or as a man pursuing his career of village lawyer in the backwoods of a frontier settlement, he was about the last person of whom one would predict that he should arise to a great position and unbounded national popularity. His birth was plebeian and obscure. His father, of Scotch-Irish descent, lived in a miserable hamlet in North ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XII • John Lord
... death, the poor woman scarcely knew what she was doing; but she had the fighting instinct of all backwoods people, and her first motion was to snatch 30 off the wall, where it lay in a deer's-horn rest, a large horse pistol. With this in hand she ran to meet her children. Some hunter had broken the bear's ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... once read in some story, perhaps fictitious, how a nobleman had found a boy reading Newton's "Principia," and not only expressed his pleased surprise at the performance, but actually got the boy educated. But there was no nobleman in sight of the backwoods of Nova Scotia. I read in the autobiography of Franklin how he had made his way in life. But he was surrounded with opportunities from which I was cut off. It does seem a little singular that, well known as my tastes were to those around me, we never met a soul ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... I think," said the boy. "But I should imagine the youngsters wouldn't have much of a chance. It isn't any better than a backwoods life, away ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Foresters • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... Young Women," "Duties of Womanhood," and other ethical works of the day, that a sister's influence is illimitable, and she felt besides an added weight of responsibility towards her motherless sister and brothers. "I don't know, papa," she said at last, "unless we all take to the backwoods, live in a wigwam, and feast on the fruits of the chase. Edward chafes a good deal under the restraints ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam
... slowly, she is breathing her last. Yes, that poisonous breath, which has so long pervaded like numbing miasma the free air of the world, will soon be out of her foolish, hypocritical old body; and though it may still linger on here and there in provincial backwoods and suburban fastnesses, from the great air centres of civilization it will have passed ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... the Lord Strathcona of to-day. Sir Alexander Mackenzie's life presents even more dramatic contrasts. A clerk in a counting-house at Montreal one year, the next finds him at Detroit setting out for the backwoods of Michigan to barter with Indians for furs. Then he is off with a fleet of canoes forty strong for the Upper Country of forest and wilderness beyond the Great Lakes, where he fights such a desperate battle with rivals that one of his companions ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... one of the beat men I over knew," said Phoebus. "He was a remarkable instance of energy combined with softness of disposition. In my opinion, however, he ought never to have visited Europe: he was made to clear the backwoods, and govern man by the power of his hatchet and the mildness of his words. He was fighting for freedom all his life, yet slavery made and slavery destroyed him. Among all the freaks of Fate nothing is more surprising than that this Transatlantic planter should have been ordained to be the husband ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... rawboned and serious, is a product of the backwoods and a crack rifle shot. Quick thinking and pluck bring him a scholarship to Clarkville School where he is branded "grind" and "dub" by classmates. How his batting brings them first place in the League and how he secures his appointment to West Point make CRACKER STANTON ...
— Baseball Joe in the Big League - or, A Young Pitcher's Hardest Struggles • Lester Chadwick
... under sail and steam, and near it a coloured sectional map of some new township marked out in squares. These are the advertisements of an Atlantic or Australian line, or of both; and the editor is their agent. When the young ploughman resolves to quit the hamlet for the backwoods of America or the sheepwalks of Australia, he comes here to engage his berth. When the young farmer wearies of waiting for dead men's shoes—in no other way can he hope to occupy an English farm—he calls here and pays his passage-money, and his broad shoulders ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
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