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More "Fern" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... wants to have her regular nap," she told them. "Frances, take Mrs. Kennedy to the fern walk and show her the famous 'Newbury Bubble' among the rocks. I want to be rid of you ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1904 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... the ground among the fern, but the prince picked it up, and, unfastening the strap, took out his second flask of wine and another loaf of bread. 'We will have supper together,' he remarked politely; but the bear, who had never been taught manners, made no reply, and ate as fast as ...
— The Brown Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... laugh. She was not much given to laughter. Her life had been singularly monotonous and, having seen very little of the world, she had that self-distrust which is afraid to laugh unless other people are laughing, too. She taught singing at Fern Hill, a private school in Mercer's suburbs. She did not care for the older pupils, but she was devoted to the very little girls. She played wonderfully on the piano, and suffered from indigestion; her face ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... customary 3 Carnations and 1 Maiden-Hair Fern gracing the center of the Board, the terrified Guests saw a Wagon-Load of tropical Bloom which pleased them very much as soon as each had secreted a new kind of Cocktail, served in a Goblet, with a Stick of Dynamite substituted ...
— Knocking the Neighbors • George Ade
... a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... amalgama tears it from the intestine by mechanical pressure, acting upon it the whole way. Electric shocks through the duodenum greatly assists the operation. Large doses of tin in powder. Iron filings in large doses. The powder of fern-root seems to be of no use, ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... A rippling breeze usually wimples and dimples its laughing surface, but in calmer moods it reflects, as in a polished mirror, the lofty, overhanging mountains, with every stately pine, bounding rivulet; blossoming shrub, waving fern, and—high above all, on the right—the clinging, thread-like line of the snow-sheds of the Central Pacific. When the railroad was being constructed, three thousand people dwelt on its shores; the surrounding ...
— History of the Donner Party • C.F. McGlashan
... months something further happens; little ferns begin to grow and they live a very long time indeed. There is at Rothamsted a bottle of soil that was put up just like this as far back as 1874. For a number of years past a beautiful fern has been growing inside the bottle, and even now it is very healthy and vigorous. If, instead of being kept moist, the rich garden soil is left in a dry shed during the whole of the winter so that it gradually loses its moisture, it will generally ...
— Lessons on Soil • E. J. Russell
... the act of kicking out a dung fire. Rajah headed directly toward them, the fire evidently being in the line of path he had chosen. This rare and unexpected freedom, this opportunity to go whither he listed, was as the giant fern he used to eat in the days when he was ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... fern-house, which is just beyond here," she said. "We have got such exquisite maidenhairs and such a splendid Killarney fern. ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... the old pasture, which was overgrown with buckbushes and sassafras sprouts, which were turning into great pink and green fern clumps in the warm April sunshine, I gave the two or three Saint-Saens Delilah notes which had been robbed of any of their wicked Delilah flavor for me by having heard Mr. G. Bird sing them so beautifully on the stage of the Metropolitan in that first dream night in Elmnest. But ...
— The Golden Bird • Maria Thompson Daviess
... a more beautiful and instructive example of this play of molecular force than that furnished by water. You have seen the exquisite fern-like forms produced by the crystallization of a film of water on a cold window-pane.[15] You have also probably noticed the beautiful rosettes tied together by the crystallizing force during the descent ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... her, and stole about the edges of the camp and the wood. She knew that if any wandering man came by, he would not stay long where such a figure was walking. The night was cool, the dew lay on the deep fern; there was a sweet smell from the grass ...
— The Gold Of Fairnilee • Andrew Lang
... daily experience of the pupil. The background of country life is nature; therefore nature study is fundamental in the new curriculum. Careful observation of natural objects comes first, until the child is able to identify bird and bee and flower. To knowledge is added appreciation. The beauty of fern and leaf, of brookside and hillside, of star-dotted and cloud-dappled sky, is not appreciated by mere observation, but waits on the education of the mind. This is part of the task of the teacher. The economic use of natural objects and natural forces is secondary, and should ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... above an impenetrable growth which, the guides tell us, is the home of tigers, rhinoceroses, panthers, bears, wild hogs, buffaloes, deer and all sorts of beasts, and snakes as big around as a barrel. Fern trees are lovely, and are found here in their greatest glory, but nevertheless we have foliage at home, and they are no more beautiful than our elms, oaks, and other ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... were daily and nightly committed. Damage was also received from the little stock which remained alive; the owners, not having wherewith to feed them, were obliged to turn them loose to browse among the grass and shrubs, or turn up the ground for the fern-root; and as they wandered without any one to prevent their doing mischief, they but too often found an easy passage over fences and through barriers which were now grown weak and perishing. It was ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins
... about 3 ft. high, but in its native woods its stems are many feet long, and pendulous from the branches of trees. It may be grown in a warm house, in a pot, and its branches supported by a stake; or its lower stems may be fastened against a piece of soft fern-stem, into which its numerous stem-roots penetrate freely. In the winter it should be kept almost dry. The flowers remain fresh for several days, and are fragrant. A well-grown plant, when in flower, is an interesting ...
— Cactus Culture For Amateurs • W. Watson
... Palaeolithic, or Primary Epoch, constitutes the Age of Fishes and Fern Forests, and is made up of the ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott
... A wheen fern and horse little that I fired in the courtyard, after sending back the loon of a footman; and, to speak Heaven's truth, the next time that ye send or bring ony body here, let them ge gentles allenarly, without ony fremd servants, like that chield Lockhard, to be gledging ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... disappeared. At that moment there seemed to rise before me, sporting among the gnarled branches of the old thorn-trees, the graceful form of Mary Stanley, followed by old Sergeant, bounding and barking through the fern; and the General looking on from a distance, pretending to be angry, and desiring her to come out of the covert and not disturb the game. Exactly thus, and there, I beheld them for the first time. What would I not give ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... new Of purple hue Inside the border of bright thin grass: For all that has Been left by November of leaves is torn From hazel and thorn And the greater trees. Throughout the copse No dead leaf drops On grey grass, green moss, burnt-orange fern, At the wind's return: The leaflets out of the ash-tree shed Are thinly spread In the road, like little black fish, inlaid, As if they played. What hangs from the myriad branches down there So hard and bare Is twelve yellow apples lovely to ...
— Last Poems • Edward Thomas
... mushrooms any more, but we gathered gay red berries for decoration, bunches of late fern, sprays of bittersweet; we raked over the leaves for nuts, and sometimes found bits of spicy wintergreen or checkerberry, the kind that always flavored old-fashioned lozenges which our grandmothers bought in little rolls for a penny, on the way to school. ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Another of his cures for the same malady is a wreath of fleabane placed on the head, but it must not touch the earth.[44] On the same condition a decoction of the root of elecampane in wine kills worms; a fern, found growing on a tree, relieves the stomach-ache; and the pastern-bone of a hare is an infallible remedy for colic, provided, first, it be found in the dung of a wolf, second, that it docs not touch the ground, and, third, that it is not touched by a woman.[45] Another cure for colic is effected ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... stigma of mauvais ton, and establish our fair name in opposition to the mal-impressions which have gained currency respecting the Australian colonists, I have been induced to add another to the tales of Australian life, and to lay "Fern ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... into the house, and laid me down on the lit de fouaille—a wooden frame forming a sort of couch, and filled with dried fern, which forms the principal piece of furniture in every farm-house kitchen in the Channel Islands. Then he cut away the boot from my swollen ankle, with a steady but careful touch, speaking now and then a word of encouragement, as if I were a child whom ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... place, where there was room but for one vehicle to pass at a time, and seeing a bunch of wild fern, Cora got out of the car to gather some. As she did so she heard a girl's voice pleading ...
— The Motor Girls • Margaret Penrose
... avoid every occasion of its mention,—if, when you speak, she drops into silence and changes the subject,—why, look there for something! just as, when going through deep meadow-grass, a bird flies ostentatiously up before you, you may know her nest is not there, but far off, under distant tufts of fern and buttercup, through which she has crept with a silent flutter in her spotted breast, to act her pretty little ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... extent of the island run many little streams, sometimes between high banks of rock, covered with moss and magnificent fern, with great pools of clear, deep water at the base of high waterfalls, and in those places where the stream cuts its way through the level plains double rows of the royal palm mark its course. The royal palm is the characteristic ...
— Cuba in War Time • Richard Harding Davis
... under the crowding alders, gathered a big bunch of the purple flag lilies with their silky petals, and started homeward, whistling cheerily as he stepped briskly along the fern-carpeted wood path that wound up the hill ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... slept. The silence was absolute, the forest's unconscious tribute to the Wonder Worker. Even the trout brook, running black as night among its white-capped boulders and delicate arches of frost and fern work, between massive banks of feathery white and green, had stopped its idle chatter and tinkled a low bell under the ice, as if only the Angelus could express ...
— Secret of the Woods • William J. Long
... now by the abundant rains which had made an end of weeks of drought, ran, noisily full, between two steep banks of mossy crag. From the crag, oaks hung over the water, at fantastic angles, holding on, as it seemed, by one foot and springing from the rock itself; while delicate rock plants, and fern fringed every ledge down to the water. A seat on the twisted roots of an overhanging oak, from which, to either side, a little green path, as though marked for pacing, ran along the stream, was one of her favourite haunts. From up-stream a mountain ...
— Helena • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the pretty table with appreciative eyes. In the centre a bowl of pink roses reflected in its shining facets the lights of the pink candies which filled the candelabra at the ends of the table. Broad, pink satin ribbons, with rosebuds and maidenhair fern dropped upon them at intervals, ran from the flower bowl in the centre to the comers of the polished table, and in front of papa's plate was a huge birthday cake resplendent with pink and white icing ...
— Glenloch Girls • Grace M. Remick
... Tarn to the gorge where the river took its rise. Here a stream of considerable force thundered along between high walls of rock. It was a picturesque spot; rowan-trees hung from clefts in the crags, their bright berries rivalling the scarlet of the hips and haws; green fronds of fern bent at the water's edge, and brilliant carpets of moss clothed the boulders. At one point a great tree-trunk, a giant of the fells, rotten through many years of braving the strong west wind, had fallen and lay across the torrent. It stretched from bank to bank ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... both were brought to full accord, She rose, and set before him all he will'd; And after these had comforted the blood With meats and wines, and satiated their hearts— Now talking of their woodland paradise, The deer, the dews, the fern, the founts, the lawns; Now mocking at the much ungainliness, And craven shifts, and long crane legs of Mark— Then Tristram laughing caught ...
— The Last Tournament • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... like an obscene nightingale beneath wet leaves. Children ran across the road. Here and there one could see brown panelling inside the hall door.... The march that the mind keeps beneath the windows of others is queer enough. Now distracted by brown panelling; now by a fern in a pot; here improvising a few phrases to dance with the barrel-organ; again snatching a detached gaiety from a drunken man; then altogether absorbed by words the poor shout across the street at each other (so outright, so lusty)—yet all ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... half past one, under a strong blue sky, Turnbull got up out of the grass and fern in which he had been lying, and his still intermittent laughter ended ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... longer doubted any of those wild tales of glamour concerning Goliath's Land; and for though the rocks were the same, and though the conies still stood gazing at the doors of their dwellings, though the hawks still cried out shrilly, though the fern still shook in the wind, yet beyond, oh such a land! not to be described by any because of its great beauty, lying, a great hollow land, the rocks going down on this side in precipices, then reaches and reaches of loveliest country, trees and ...
— The Hollow Land • William Morris
... so they sat through a long silence. At last he heard Edith draw a quick breath, and lifting his head he looked where she pointed. Up a fern stalk climbed a curious looking object. They watched breathlessly. By lavender feet clung a big, pursy, lavender-splotched, yellow body. Yellow and lavender wings began to expand and take on colour. Every instant great beauty became more apparent. ...
— A Girl Of The Limberlost • Gene Stratton Porter
... seamanship to bear the motion of a Quantuck box cart; it requires still better seamanship to navigate one of them along the rutted roads. For some time, it took all of Dr. McAlister's energy to keep from landing himself and Allyn head foremost in the thickets of sweet fern and beach plum. By degrees, however, he became more expert in avoiding pitfalls and in keeping both wheels in the ruts, and he turned ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... but 2-cleft, thus appearing to be twice as many. Scape: 4 to 10 in. high. Leaves: Growing in an open rosette on the ground; round or broader, clothed with reddish bristly hairs tipped with purple glands, and narrowed into long, flat, hairy petioles; young leaves curled like fern fronds. ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... in the lower lands at the western end of the valley, the dainty rose gerardia, just now coming into bloom; the pretty Polygala polygama,—pretty, but not in the same class with the rose gerardia; ladies' tresses; bayberry; sweet fern; crisp-leaved tansy; beach grass; huckleberry bushes, for whose liberality I had frequent occasion to be thankful; bear oak; chinquapin; chokeberry; a single vine of the Virginia creeper; wild carrot; wild cherry; the common brake,—these and doubtless many more were there, for I made no attempt ...
— The Foot-path Way • Bradford Torrey
... coming to colonize some new and virgin land, until now utterly unknown to the rest of the world. The shores we have passed along have presented to us every possible variety of savage wilderness, rocks and bush and scrub and fern, but no appearance of settlement at all, not even any signs of aboriginal life have ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... oil at bed time. Two hours after breakfast next morning give one-half dram of the oleoresin of male-fern in emulsion or capsule. Very light nourishment should be taken during the day, composed of gruels and soups. When the worm is passed it should be examined to find if the head is present; if not, the treatment should be ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume IV. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • Grant Hague
... of the Flowering Fern (Osmunda regalis), Mr. Newman observes, that "the rhizoma [root-stock], when cut through, has a whitish centre or core, called by old Gerarde in his Herbal, 'the heart of Osmund the waterman.' My lore is insufficient to furnish my readers with the history of the said Osmund." (History of ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 43, Saturday, August 24, 1850 • Various
... pale orange with centres of deep maroon, the wild galliardia, and the wild peony with its variegated leaves. Many other delicate blossoms which we cannot stop to describe are there too. And the ferns! All kinds may be found by the initiated, and many are close at hand. The fern lined with gold or with silver, the running ferns, the ferns of lace-like fineness, the ferns as soft as velvet, all growing in the greatest profusion. And each day of the week a ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn
... a greenhouse variety, bearing fern-like foliage. The seeds should be sown in slight ...
— Gardening for the Million • Alfred Pink
... than the drive to Strathfield-saye, passing, as we do, through a great part of Heckfield Heath,* a tract of wild woodland, a forest, or rather a chase, full of fine sylvan beauty—thickets of fern and holly, and hawthorn and birch, surmounted by oaks and beeches, and interspersed with lawny glades and deep pools, letting light into the picture. Nothing can be prettier than the approach to the duke's lodge. And the entrance to the demesne, through a deep dell dark ...
— The Lost Dahlia • Mary Russell Mitford
... of the earth in this climate is 48 degrees, those tender trees which will bear bending down, are easily secured from the frost by spreading them upon the ground, and covering them with straw or fern. This particularly suits fig-trees, as they easily bear bending to the ground, and are furnished with an acrid juice, which secures them from the depredations of insects; but are nevertheless liable to be eaten by mice. ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... He had made a pretence to murder me with the same idea. But he didn't believe they were taken in. "There'll be warrants out before morning, if they ain't too shaken. But what were you doing in the business? The two Spaniards were lying in the fern looking on when you come blundering your clumsy nose in. If it hadn't been for Rooksby you might have——— Hullo, there!" he ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... blaze of sunshine and a bower of spring freshness and fragrance, for here Rose had let her fancy have free play, and each garland, fern, and flower had its meaning. Mac seemed to have been reading this sweet language of symbols, to have guessed why Charlie's little picture was framed in white roses, why pansies hung about his own, why Psyche was half hidden among feathery sprays of maidenhair, ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... recollection of life. I was barely three. I can remember the majestic gum-trees surrounding us, the sun glinting on their straight white trunks, and falling on the gurgling fern-banked stream, which disappeared beneath a steep scrubby hill on our left. It was an hour past noon on a long clear summer day. We were on a distant part of the run, where my father had come to deposit salt. He had left home ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... a whole pile of such shiners."— "It is the Evil One!" exclaimed Petro: "Give them here! I'm ready for anything!" They struck hands upon it. "See here, Petro, you are ripe just in time: to-morrow is St. John the Baptist's day. Only on this one night in the year does the fern blossom. Delay not. I will await thee at midnight ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Russian • Various
... yards behind, almost went to sleep in his saddle, so dragging was the tread the mare must follow. The dark aisle of the forest led presently through a gorge where the woods were in effect primeval. Upon the one hand rose a bank, thick with delicate moss and fern and shaded by birch and ash; on the other the ravine fell precipitously to hidden water, and was choked by towering pine and hemlock. The air was heavy, cool, and dank, the sunshine entering sparsely. The place was, however, a haunt of ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... of the place, Whose green, wild margin now no more erase Art's works; nor must the delicate waters sleep Prisoned in marble—bubbling from the base Of the cleft statue, with a gentle leap The rill runs o'er—and round, fern, flowers, and ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... out of the ground, huge fern-like plants with crimson scaled trunks. Toward a clump ...
— The People of the Crater • Andrew North
... gentleman, whose name I have forgotten, sent me a collection of fossils—tiny mollusk shells beautifully marked, and bits of sandstone with the print of birds' claws, and a lovely fern in bas-relief. These were the keys which unlocked the treasures of the antediluvian world for me. With trembling fingers I listened to Miss Sullivan's descriptions of the terrible beasts, with uncouth, unpronounceable names, ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... smell, not so fine an odor as the Bible, but so delectable that I loved to bury my nose in its opened pages. What caused this odor I cannot tell—perhaps it had been used to press flowers or sprigs of sweet fern. ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... and lunched on a green bank among the fern, under some old oaks. The sunlight fell among the glades; a flock of tits, chirruping and hunting, rushed past them and plunged downward into the wood. They could hear a dove in the high trees near them, crooning a song of peace and infinite content. Mr. Sandys, ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Sounds of labor not far off told that camp was being built. Presently the absent five returned, two of the Mayorunas carrying a crude but strong litter constructed from saplings and giant-fern leaves. McKay rose ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel
... assembled over-night in a Highland glen, consisting of sportsmen, deer-stalkers, a piper and two deer-hounds, cooking their supper, and concluding it with the never-failing accompaniment of whisky-toddy. Let us fancy them reposing on a couch of dried fern and heather, and being awoke in the morning with the lively air of "Hey, Johnny Cope." While their breakfast is preparing, they wash and refresh themselves at a pure mountain stream, and are soon ready to issue forth with Buskar and ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... of "The Five-Mile Point."—where Deerslayer gave himself up to merciless Indian justice at the Huron Camp, and later was rescued by British regulars—is the rocky gorge, Mohican Glen, through which a purling brook ripples by its stone-rift banks thatched with great clumps of rose and fern. From the gravel-strewn shore of Hutter's Point beyond, the eyes of Leatherstocking first fell upon the Glimmerglass, and impressed by its wonder and beauty he exclaimed: "This is grand! 't is solemn! 't is an edication of itself." Leaning on his rifle and gazing in every ...
— James Fenimore Cooper • Mary E. Phillips
... creation, they would stare fashionably at the antlered heads which the great slow deer raised out of a forest of bracken that promised to autumn lovers such cover as was never seen before. And now and again, as the amorous perfume of chestnut flowers and of fern was drifted too near, one would say to the other: "My dear! What a ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... him scurried a cotton-tail. A snake slid, hissing, out of sight under a jungle of fern. A butterfly, dull brown and ocher, settled upon a branch in the sunlight, where it began slowly opening ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... level with the coping, and the horseman can decipher their inscriptions in passing, at the risk of a twisted neck—the base of the churchyard wall is pierced with a low archway, festooned with toad-flax and fringed with the hart's-tongue fern. Within the archway bubbles a well, the water of which was once used for all baptisms in the parish, for no child sprinkled with it could ever be hanged with hemp. But this belief is discredited now, ...
— I Saw Three Ships and Other Winter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... park, studded with stately trees; here and there an avenue of Spanish chestnuts or a grove of oaks; sometimes a gorsy dell, and sometimes a so great spread of antlered fern, taller than ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... a little patch of garden ground with a brier hedge all round it, in that byway which lies between Laeken and Brussels, in the heart of flat, green Brabant, where there are beautiful meadows and tall, flowering hedges, and forest trees, and fern-filled ditches, and a little piece of water, deep and cool, where the swans sail all day long, and the silvery willows dip and sway with ...
— Bebee • Ouida
... shift a numbing muscle of his lean old body, in all the constraint of a standing posture, he was held in the flexure of the rock like some of its fossils,—as unsuspected as a ganoid of the days of eld that had once been imprisoned thus in the sediment of seas that had long ebbed hence,—or the fern vestiges in a later formation finding a witness in the imprint in the stone of the symmetry of its fronds. He listened to the hue and cry for him; then to the sudden tramp of hoofs as a pursuing party went out to overtake him, presumably on his way ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... feet long and six inches in width, pointed to the higher plant world that was to come. Between these gaunt towering trunks the graceful tree-ferns spread their canopies at heights of twenty, forty, and even sixty feet from the ground, and at the base was a dense undergrowth of ferns and fern-like seed-plants. Mosses may have carpeted the moist ground, but nothing in the nature of grass or flowers had ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... generalization. In the first stratified rocks in which any organic remains are found, the highest animals are fishes, and the highest plants are cryptogams; in the middle periods reptiles come in, accompanied by fern and moss forests; in later times quadrupeds are introduced, with a dicotyledonous vegetation. So closely does the march of animal and vegetable life keep pace with the material progress of the world, that we may well consider these three divisions, included under ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... down before him, and he promptly dipped a fern root into it; then started back with a cry ...
— "Some Say" - Neighbours in Cyrus • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... and the poisonous growth of great water-plants, and the parasite twining of honeysuckle and briony. In one of these rambles he discovered a red earth which he made into a pigment, and he found in the unctuous juice of a certain fern an ingredient which he thought made his black ink still more glossy. His book was written all in symbols, and in the same spirit of symbolism he decorated it, causing wonderful foliage to creep about the text, and showing ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... that Mrs. Lyman says is too true," thought Willy, taking a piece of chalk out of his pocket, and drawing a profile of Miss Judkins on the door-sill, while that young lady tripped along the road, brushing the golden-rod and sweet-fern with the skirt ...
— Little Grandfather • Sophie May
... by the old oak tree, Where waters ripple over clean white stones, And cresses, mint with feathered fern grown high. In such a place the peaceful thoughts will come; There is no hurry there where nature plays. Soft gentle breezes wave the grass and sedge; White fluffy clouds pass overhead and roll. Now dreaming, I ...
— Clear Crystals • Clara M. Beede
... flame of oxygen, they paved the way for the more symmetrical life of those who should follow. If our lungs find in the atmosphere the aliment they need, it is thanks to the inconceivably incoherent forests of arborescent fern. We owe our brains and nerves of to-day to fearful hordes of swimming or flying reptiles. These obeyed the order of their life. They did what they had to do. They modified matter in the fashion prescribed to them. And we, by carrying particles of this same matter to ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... culinary vegetable. The tender shoots are likewise eaten. The stem is short and knobby, the lower part of each branch (if branches they may be called) prickly, and the blossom yellow. The term paku, applied to it by the Malays, shows that they consider it as partaking of the nature of the fern (filix) and Rumphius, who names it Sayor calappa and Olus calappoides, describes it as an arborescent species of osmunda. It is well depicted in ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... believe what strange bugbears Mankind creates itself of fears That spring like fern, that insect weed, Equivocally, without seed; And have no possible foundation, 5 But merely in th' imagination; And yet can do more dreadful feats Than hags, with all their imps and teats Make more bewitch and haunt themselves Than all their nurseries ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... a perfect place, old as the hills that surround it, and wild in its loveliness. To right and left great trees, gnarled and moss-grown, and dipping tangles of blackberry and fern; patches of sunlight, amidst the gloom, that rests lovingly upon a glowing wilderness of late bluebells, and, beyond all these broad glimpses of the glorious, restless ocean, as it sleeps in its ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... me little pleasure. I miss the deer; and when the first park that one ever knew was Buxted, with its moving antlers above the brake fern, one almost is compelled to withhold the word park from any enclosure without them. It is impossible to lose the feeling that the right place for cattle—even for Alderneys—is the meadow. Cows in a ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... in my new quarters above five minutes when two elderly women entered, each bearing upon her head a large bundle of dry fern, which they cast down in one of the two corners of the hut most distant from the door and proceeded to spread there in such a fashion as to form a most comfortable bed, upon which I at once flung myself, for I was very weary. But before I could compose myself ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... am afraid I am too matter-of-fact to sympathise very clearly with this form of aestheticism; but here is a charming bit of forest scenery. Look at that old oak with the deer under it; the long and deep range of fern running up from it to that beech-grove on the upland, the lights and shadows on the projections and recesses of the wood, and the blaze of foxglove in its foreground. It is a place in which a poet might look for a ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... like two strangers, they walked silently side by side, and looked now and then at the collection of flowers and plants. Iris noticed a delicate fern which had fallen away from the support to which it had been attached. She stopped, and occupied herself in restoring it to its place. When she looked round again, after attending to the plant, her husband had disappeared, and Mr. Vimpany was ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins
... little spring had lost its way Amid the grass and fern; A passing stranger scooped a well Where weary men might turn; He walled it in, and hung with care A ladle at the brink; He thought not of the deed he did, But judged that Toil might drink. He passed again; and lo! the well, By summer never ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... with the ardent pursuits of boyhood, had been over-indulgent in the matter of granting whole Wednesdays, instead of half-holidays. Any excuse sufficed. Skating on inland ponds in the winter; fishing in the bay, as the year wore on; and, latterly, digging for primrose or fern roots in Brattlesby Woods. But Philip Price was beginning to find out by results that too much play and not enough work was making dull scholars of his pupils, and he had determined to stand out firmly ...
— The Captain's Bunk - A Story for Boys • M. B. Manwell
... stood by herself, while the others laughed, chattered, and flew about like gauzy butterflies. The hard, bitter feeling was getting pretty bad, when the maid brought in a box of flowers. Before she could speak, Annie had the cover off, and all were exclaiming at the lovely roses, heath, and fern within. ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... boy?" she cried. "They shall never see me hoist signals of distress. We must all die, and the secret of the thing is to die game, by Jove! Did you ever hear of Laura Fern? a superb girl! handsomer than your humble servant—if you'll believe it—a 'Miss' in the bargain, and as a consequence, I suppose, a much greater rake. She was in the hunting-field. Her horse threw her, and she fell plump on a stake. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... them three hundred feet long, on the second story. In this garden, which is perhaps a hundred feet square by forty in height, rise clumps of Italian cypress and laurel from beds of emerald turf and blooming hyacinths. In the centre a fountain showers over fern-covered rocks, and the gravel-walks around the border are shaded by tall camellia-trees in white and crimson bloom. Lamps of frosted glass hang among the foliage, and diffuse a mellow golden moonlight over the enchanted ground. The corridor adjoining the garden ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... upright scars visible as far as Fife, and Allermuir the tallest on this side: with wood and tilled field running high up on their borders, and haunches all moulded into innumerable glens and shelvings and variegated with heather and fern. The air comes briskly and sweetly off the hills, pure from the elevation, and rustically scented by the upland plants; and even at the toll, you may hear the curlew calling on its mate. At certain seasons, when ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... very steep and rugged, leaving, in the interspaces, very large valleys, and gently-rising grounds about their sides. These hills, though of a rocky disposition, are, in general, covered, almost to their tops, with trees; but the lower parts, on the sides, frequently only with fern. At the bottom of the harbour, where we lay, the ground rises gently to the foot of the hills, which run across nearly in the middle of the island; but its flat border, on each side, at a very small ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... her face away, stooping to pluck the withered frond of a fern that grew in the path. When she looked up at him again all the bloom ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... that her step-father knew almost as much about birds and squirrels as Miss Brent did about flowers, was not to be appeased till Amherst had scrambled into the pony-cart, wedging his long legs between a fern-box and a lunch-basket, and balancing a Scotch terrier's telescopic body ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... "the bridge" as we approach our first port. A great white rock juts up in the bay like a fragment of some Titan's fortress; a lighthouse stares out to sea from a cliff at the harbour's entrance; the tall cocoa palms wave their fern leaves in the blinding sunshine, and red-roofed houses huddle below the dome of the Cathedral rising white ...
— Under the Southern Cross • Elizabeth Robins
... could obtain it. The difficulty was to find shade, as the sun was beating down with intense heat on the sand, though while they were in exercise they did not think of it. The palm trees afforded but a scant shelter; however, by going a little way inland they obtained some enormous fern-leaves, with which they quickly built several huts, sufficient to shelter all the party, with the exception of two, who were stationed on the top of the bank to keep watch; Green deeming it prudent not to run any risk of being caught napping. It fell to the lot of Archie and ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... and spear and bended bow, In osiers pale and copses low; It seemed as if their mother Earth Had swallowed up her warlike birth. The wind's last breath had tossed in air Pennon and plaid and plumage fair,— The next but swept a lone hill-side Where heath and fern were waving wide: The sun's last glance was glinted back From spear and glaive, from targe and jack,— The next, all unreflected, shone On bracken green and cold ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... invade the roots; stony and rocky grounds, ivy, and all climbers, weeds, suckers, fern, wet, mice, moles, winds, &c. to these may be added siderations, pestiferous air, fogs, excessive heat, sulphurous and arsenic smoak, and vapours, and other plagues, tumours, distortions, lacrymations, tophi, gouts, carbuncles, ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... farm was not so large or rambling as to tire the mind or foot, yet wide enough and full of change—rich pasture, hazel copse, green valleys, fallows brown, and golden breast-lands pillowing into nooks of fern, clumps of shade for horse or heifer, and for rabbits sandy warren, furzy cleve for hare and partridge, not without a little mere for willows and for wild-ducks. And the whole of the land, with a general slope of liveliness ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... compacted mass of stones, are often formed by two exterior surfaces of stone, filled up with earth in the middle, which makes them very warm. The roof is generally bad. They are thatched, sometimes with straw, sometimes with heath, sometimes with fern. The thatch is secured by ropes of straw, or of heath; and, to fix the ropes, there is a stone tied to the end of each. These stones hang round the bottom of the roof, and make it look like a lady's hair in papers; but I should think ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... and certain facts of mountain scenery never but by them expressed, as, for instance, the stillness and depth of the mountain tarns, with the reversed imagery of their darkness signed across by the soft lines of faintly touching winds; the solemn flush of the brown fern and glowing heath under evening light; the purple mass of mountains far removed, seen against clear still twilight. With equal gratitude I look to the drawings of David Cox, which, in spite of their loose and seemingly careless execution, are not less serious ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... started from Green River to visit her, she was out in the pasture trying to fill her pail with blueberries. All the sunlight seemed to centre on her black figure like a burning-glass; the thick growth of sweet-fern around the blueberry bushes sent a hot and stifling aroma into her face; the wild flowers hung limply, like delicate painted rags, and the rocks were like furnaces. Mrs. Field went out soon after dinner, ...
— Jane Field - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... made for himself a bed of fern and hay in the stable of the ox and the ass, and lay close to them for warmth. And, lo! in the middle of the night the ass brayed and the ox bellowed, and Hilarion ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book II - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... on the centerpiece or the futile doily, but absurd little dresses with sleeves that she measured to the length of her hand, and yokes cut out to the pattern of a playing card, and all fretted over with feather-stitching that was frailer than maidenhair fern and must have cost many an eye-ache, which, because of its source, was easy ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... General Wemyss, on behalf of the Prince, and Messrs. Dray & Co. of Swan-lane, the agents for Mr. Hussey. The spot selected for the trial was behind the statue of George III, at the end of the Long Walk, fern—of which there is an abundance in that locality—being the article on which the machine had to operate. The Prince having from an early hour in the morning been engaged in shooting in the vicinity of the statue, at ...
— Obed Hussey - Who, of All Inventors, Made Bread Cheap • Various
... be Its own exceeding great reward! No thoughts to vex in all I see, No jeers to bear or disregard;— All creatures and inanimate things Shall be my tutors; I shall learn From beast, and fish, and bird with wings, And rock, and stream, and tree, and fern." ...
— Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan • Toru Dutt
... Colocasia, Colocasia esculenta and macrorhizon), is an important esculent root in the Polynesian islands. In the dry method of culture practised on the mountains of Hawaii, the roots are protected by a covering of fern leaves. The cultivation of taro is hardly a process of multiplication, for the crown of the root is perpetually replanted. As the plant endures for a series of years, the tuberous roots serve at some of the rocky groups as a security against famine. ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... produces, are several kinds of kangaroos, of the same species, but differing in size and colour. Beasts of prey have never been seen in the colony. The birds are, parrots, cockatoos, and a large one called emus, which have very long legs and scarcely any wings; they in general live upon fern, and weigh from seventy to eighty pounds; there are likewise a number of black swans. The woods abound with a number of dangerous reptiles, such as ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to India; of a Shipwreck on board the Lady Castlereagh; and a Description of New South Wales • W. B. Cramp
... land,' I beg to answer most decidedly in the affirmative. It is well known that these Aborigines in no instance cultivate the soil, but subsist entirely by hunting and fishing, and on the wild roots they find in certain localities (especially the common fern), with occasionally a little wild honey; indigenous fruits being exceedingly rare. The whole race is divided into tribes, more or less numerous, according to circumstances, and designated from the localities they inhabit; for although universally a wandering ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... that fellow Shaw if he doesn't keep off our land. I've had enough of it. They say he rode his confounded plough horse all over the west end the other day." Penelope smiled reflectively. "Trampled the new fern beds out of existence and all that. Hang him, Tompkins will get him if he persists. He has told the men to take a shot at the rascal on sight. Tompkins doesn't ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... pointed hoods pricked with fern leaves whirled about these edifices in the airiest fashion. It was common to see them leap up to the height of two or three storeys from the lava pavement and rebound like balls, their faces meanwhile preserving that ...
— Honey-Bee - 1911 • Anatole France
... semicircular hole, through which the pigeons crept to their lodgings in the same high quarters of the premises; and from this hole the sun shone in a bright yellow patch upon the figure of the maiden as she knelt and plunged her naked arms into the soft brown fern, which, from its abundance, was used on Egdon in packing away stores of all kinds. The pigeons were flying about her head with the greatest unconcern, and the face of her aunt was just visible above the floor of the loft, lit by a few stray motes of light, as she stood half-way ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... handy, far from speculative, and yet good at succedaneum: when his anger is kindled, it descends like lightning: unlike his dog, his wrath gives no notice by grumbling: he blazes up like one of his own fires of dried fern. Quarrels do not often take place among them, but when they do, they are dreadful. The laws of the country in which they sojourn have so far banished the use of knives from among them that they only ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 572, October 20, 1832 • Various
... would provide for the future beauty of your lawn or roadside, plant at least a few trees of the new Stabler Black Walnut. Its luxuriant fern-like foliage and its weeping twigs make it unique among shade trees—its thin-shelled nuts and heavy bearing habit put it at the top of the list as a nut producer. The only black walnut that yields a ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various
... Once at the sacred heat that opens regions beyond ordinary vision, imagination has its own laws; and where characters are so real as to be treated as existences, their creator himself cannot help them having their own wills and ways. Fern the farm-labourer is not here, nor yet his niece the little Lilian (at first called Jessie) who is to give to the tale its most tragical scene; and there are intimations of poetic fancy at the close of my sketch which the published story ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... remind Jacob if the larder was for many days deficient in that meat. Jacob had gone out accordingly; he had gained his leeward position of a fine buck, and was gradually nearing him by stealth, now behind a huge oak-tree, and then crawling through the high fern, so as to get within shot unperceived, when on a sudden the animal, which had been quietly feeding, bounded away and disappeared in the thicket. At the same time Jacob perceived a small body of horse galloping through the glen in which the buck had been feeding. Jacob had never ...
— The Children of the New Forest • Captain Marryat
... there was not a single living thing left. I didn't know about this, when I spoke to your man Democritus. I have ordered the service of Rhosian ware. But, hallo! what are you thinking of? You generally serve us up a dinner of herbs on fern-pattern plates, and the most sparkling of baskets: what am I to expect you to give on porcelain? I have ordered a horn for Phemius: one will be sure to turn up; I only hope he may play ...
— Letters of Cicero • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... you were exhausting the possibilities of the language. Before long you'll have to be calling them Oh Bel, Oh Hell, and Oh Go to Hell. Your 'Oh' was a mistake. You should have started with 'Red.' Then you could have had Red Bull, Red Horse, Red Dog, Red Frog, Red Fern—and, and all the rest of ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... proprietor had discovered the jewels during his occupancy, and that, like a prudent man, he kept his own counsel in the matter. But Sir Ralph still clung to the belief that somewhere in his grounds, "near the water and by the fern," the wealth he now so sorely needed lay concealed. That in this faith Sir Ralph lived and died was proved by his will, in which he bequeathed to the younger of his two sons, "and to his heirs," the jewels and other specified valuables which the testator firmly believed ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... immense genius is concealed under this unpolished person of his. Finally, sift yourself thoroughly, whether nature has originally sown the seeds of any vice in you, or even an ill-habit [has done it]. For the fern, fit [only] to be ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... into the water, and rushed to the spot where his brother's body lay. With a burst of passionate affection, he flung himself on his knees beside it, and took the cold hand in his own—the little rigid hand in which the green blades of grass, and fern, and heath, so tightly clutched, were unconscious of the ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... his throat. They boy laughed again, a laugh in which the snarl had nearly driven out the chuckle, and then, with another of his astonishing lightning movements, plunged out of view into a yielding tangle of weed and fern. ...
— Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches • Saki (H.H. Munro)
... the dusty road until he came to a point where the narrow bridlepath branched off the road and wound upward into the silent woods. Following this path until it became indistinguishable on a thick carpet of moss and leaves and coarse fern, he reached the big boulder at last; there he left Keno safely tied and hidden in a clump of alders. Then he went on, several rods down the trail, and took up his position directly across the stream from ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Geological Survey • Robert Shaler
... city is a lesser range, upon which to their very tops grow dense groves of palm and other fern-like trees. In the shelter of these groves are many ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... future summer of buds safe nestled on its bosom, as a mother reposes with her baby at her breast. The same security of life pervades every woody shrub: the alder and the birch have their catkins all ready for the first day of spring, and the sweet-fern has even now filled with fragrance its folded blossom. Winter is no such solid bar between season and season as we fancy, but only a slight check and interruption: one may at any time produce these March blossoms by bringing the buds into the warm house; and the petals ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... speak again among the hills that we dived into; the air grew chillier as we climbed; forest and wet rocks closed round us in the mist, to the sound of waters trickling alongside; there was a tang of wet fern, cut pine, and the first breath of autumn when the road entered a tunnel ...
— France At War - On the Frontier of Civilization • Rudyard Kipling
... hostile scouts searching the obvious bits of cover, but they did not find me there; and, like the elephant hunter among the fern trees, or a boar in a cotton crop, so a boy in the currant bushes is invisible to the enemy, while he can watch every move of the ...
— My Adventures as a Spy • Robert Baden-Powell
... pattern on it. His face, yellow as wax, with closed eyes and bluish eyelids, was turned towards the ceiling, no breathing could be discerned: he seemed a corpse. At his feet knelt the Malay, also wrapt in a red shawl. He was holding in his left hand a branch of some unknown plant, like a fern, and bending slightly forward, was gazing fixedly at his master. A small torch fixed on the floor burnt with a greenish flame, and was the only light in the room. The flame did not flicker nor smoke. The Malay did not stir at Fabio's entry, he merely turned his eyes upon him, and again bent ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... is impassable for horses. It has a very picturesque appearance; immense masses of rock—some thousands of tons in weight—which had fallen from the top of the cliff into the bed of the creek. Mr. Kekwick found a number of new plants, among them a fine climbing fern. Light winds, east. Plenty of permanent water in the creek. Latitude, 14 degrees ...
— Explorations in Australia, The Journals of John McDouall Stuart • John McDouall Stuart
... searched, and called aloud. But no child could she perceive or hear anywhere around. She returned to where she had stood when first beholding it, and looked in the same direction, but nothing reappeared. The only object at all resembling a little boy or girl was the upper tuft of a bunch of fern, which had prematurely yellowed to about the colour of a fair child's hair, and waved occasionally in the breeze. This, however, did not sufficiently explain the phenomenon, and she returned to make inquiries of the man whom she had left at work, removing ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... describe this dell as it should be described; and I will therefore only beg of thee, gentle reader, who peradventure mayst not have lingered in this classical neighbourhood, to fancy a deep, deep dell, its steep sides fringed down with hazel and beech, and fern and thick undergrowth, and clothed at the bottom with the richest and greenest sward in the world. You descend, clinging to the trees, and scrambling as best you may,—and now you stand on haunted ground! Tread softly, ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... shrubbery, for in such matters my mother was very strict and particular: Abeleia grandiflora, Laurestinus, Olea fragrans, Ligustrum napalense, Rosa watsoniana—— Now really could that thing be a rose? It looked more like a cross between a fern and an ostrich plume. I looked closer. Each slender light green leaf was mottled with lighter green, a miracle of exquisite tracing, and the thing was in bud, millions and millions of buds no bigger than the eggs in a shad roe. Yes, it was a rose. I looked ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris
... by side for miles through the jungle of fern and palm, and then began to enter a more open but scrubby country. The scouts could be seen half a mile ahead. Not a sign of natives had been discovered on the march. More than once Barre had expressed his anxiety at ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... away," I said, "for the next carnage will not only stop, but come over;" and Bessie suffered herself to be led through the little tangle of brier and fern, past the gray old gravestones with "Miss Faith" and "Miss Mehitable" carved upon them, and into the leafy shadow of the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... the uncomfortable sounding Akenside (oak), Fearenside (fern), but Heaviside appears to be a nickname. Handyside may mean "gracious manner," from Mid. Eng. side, cognate with Ger. Sitte, custom. See Hendy (Chapter XXII). The simple end survives as Ind or Nind (Chapter III) and in Overend (Chapter XII), ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... gives me little pleasure. I miss the deer; and when the first park that one ever knew was Buxted, with its moving antlers above the brake fern, one almost is compelled to withhold the word park from any enclosure without them. It is impossible to lose the feeling that the right place for cattle—even for Alderneys—is the meadow. Cows in ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... interested, but Mrs. John Coulson drew her away towards the palm and fern-embowered door of the drawing-room. She was somewhat disappointed at the news of Mrs. Oliver's non-appearance, for that meant that neither was Mrs. Jarvis present. The fates did seem ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... up from Hepburn to please her. Behind the house a bit of uneven ground with clothes-lines strung across it stretched up to a dry wall, and beyond the wall a patch of corn and a few rows of potatoes strayed vaguely into the adjoining wilderness of rock and fern. ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... no second warning. There was a rush for the boats by all but Janstins, who seemed as one amazed, and incapable of action at the sight of the monster. I could not leave him to the fate which threatened him, so, running to his assistance, I dragged him down behind some fern trees, where we hid out of sight of the mother-bird, who seemed bewildered by the unaccustomed sound of firearms, and perplexed at the death of her chick, for which she could not account. But we both knew ...
— Adventures in Southern Seas - A Tale of the Sixteenth Century • George Forbes
... years return And hearts unwounded sing again, Comes Taffy dancing through the fern To lead the ...
— Songs from Books • Rudyard Kipling
... behind it—a hush of light, deeply pervasive and friendly. The sunshine slanted across the gleaming wet rocks in the river, lit up the rain-darkened trunks of the hemlocks, glinted on the low-hanging leaves, and flashed through the dripping edges of sagging fern fronds. As twilight came on, we canoed across to the side of the river where the road lay—the other side was steep and pathless woods—and walked down to the nearest farmhouse to buy eggs for the morning. Back again by the ...
— More Jonathan Papers • Elisabeth Woodbridge
... and painting never. Colour is life.—We are now at the end of this magnificent avenue, and at the top of a steep eminence commanding a wide view over four counties—a landscape of snow. A deep lane leads abruptly down the hill; a mere narrow cart-track, sinking between high banks clothed with fern and furze and low broom, crowned with luxuriant hedgerows, and famous for their summer smell of thyme. How lovely these banks are now—the tall weeds and the gorse fixed and stiffened in the hoar-frost, which fringes round the bright prickly holly, ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... do you see now once again The glen And fern, the highland, and the thistle? And do you still remember when We heard the bright-eyed woodcock whistle Down by the ...
— The Dog's Book of Verse • Various
... the fern fronds tall Fashion a lace-work over your head, Hemming you in with a high, green wall; Then, when the thrush calls once, stop dead. Ask of the old grey wallaby there— Him prick-eared by the woollybutt tree— How to encounter ...
— The Glugs of Gosh • C. J. Dennis
... in the fading light, These men of battle, with grave, dark looks, As plain to be read as open books, While slowly gathered the shades of night. The fern on the slope was splashed with blood, And down in the corn, where the poppies grew, Were redder stains than the poppies knew; And crimson-dyed ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... ascension of the night We heard the mellow lapsing and return Of night-owls purring in their groundling flight Through lanes of darkling fern. ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)
... vegetable ivory tree remained, with a great profusion of wonderful orchids, among which I learned to recognize the rare Nuttonia Vexillaria and the glorious pink and scarlet blossoms of Cattleya and odontoglossum. Occasional brooks with pebbly bottoms and fern-draped banks gurgled down the shallow gorges in the hill, and offered good camping-grounds every evening on the banks of some rock-studded pool, where swarms of little blue-backed fish, about the size and shape of English trout, gave ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... and set out again over the bracken-covered hill-side. Another half-mile and they had reached the bourne of their expedition. The narrow track through the gorse and fern widened suddenly into a lane, a lane with very high, unmortared walls, over which grew a variety of bramble with a particularly luscious fruit. Every connoisseur of blackberries knows what a difference there is between the little hard seedy ones that commonly flourish ...
— For the Sake of the School • Angela Brazil
... results of his labour, painted the wide landscape in every direction. On mountain sides, and across the undulating lowland, wall or hedge mapped his conquests of nature, little plots won by the toil of successive generations for pasture or for tillage, won from the reluctant wilderness, which loves its fern and gorse, its mosses and heather. Near and far were scattered the little white cottages, each a gleaming speck, lonely, humble; set by the side of some long-winding, unfrequented road, or ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... Down through a frost-leaved forest-crypt.[19] 190 Long, sparkling aisles of steel-stemmed trees Bending to counterfeit a breeze; Sometimes the roof no fretwork knew But silvery mosses that downward grew; Sometimes it was carved in sharp relief[20] 195 With quaint arabesques[21] of ice-fern leaf; Sometimes it was simply smooth and clear For the gladness of heaven to shine through, and here He had caught the nodding bulrush-tops And hung them thickly with diamond drops, 200 Which crystalled the beams ...
— Narrative and Lyric Poems (first series) for use in the Lower School • O. J. Stevenson
... and the telegraph posts seem to have started off into a frantic gallopade along the line, we plunge into a plantation. Long vistas of straggling trees—and leaf-strewn pathways winding in among them—give way to scattered clumps of firs and tangled masses of fern and brushwood, while broken fences come dancing up between, and then shrink down again behind rising knolls covered with a sudden growth of gorse and heather. A pit yawns into a pond; the pond squeezes itself longways into a thin ditch, which turns off sharply at a corner, and leaves ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... by an enclosure from the open country, and divided by numerous hedges into small fields. In some of these fields the rye, the pease, and the oats were high enough to conceal a man. Others were overgrown with fern and brambles. A poor woman reported that she had seen two strangers lurking in this covert. The near prospect of reward animated the zeal of the troops. It was agreed that every man who did his duty in the search should have a ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... to work on a stone and most patiently shapes it. He carves that bit of fern, putting all his skill and taste into it. And by-and-by the master says, "Well done," and takes it away and gives him another block and tells him to work on that. And so he works on that from the rising of the sun till the going down of the same, and he only knows that he is ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... loiter by the old oak tree, Where waters ripple over clean white stones, And cresses, mint with feathered fern grown high. In such a place the peaceful thoughts will come; There is no hurry there where nature plays. Soft gentle breezes wave the grass and sedge; White fluffy clouds pass overhead and roll. Now dreaming, I hear the cricket's gay song. O river bank ...
— Clear Crystals • Clara M. Beede
... Verne's romances. Big canoes, manned by dark-skinned men in white turbans and loin-cloths, floated round our ship, or lay poised on the clear depths of aquamarine water, with fairy freights—forests of coral white as snow, or red, pink, violet, in massive branches or fern-like sprays, fresh from their warm homes beneath the clear warm waves, where fish as bright-tinted as themselves flash through them like "living light." There were displays of wonderful shells, too, of pale rose-pink, and others with rainbow tints which, like rainbows, ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... live? Oh, just anywhere—all about; among the fern, in the long grass, down on the sands, in all the places babies ...
— Piccaninnies • Isabel Maud Peacocke
... as I passed Down beechen alleys beautiful and dim, Perhaps by some deep-shaded pool at last My feet would pause, where goldfish poise and swim, And snowy callas' velvet cups are massed Around the mossy, fern-encircled brim. Here, then, that magic summoning would cease, Or sound far off again among the ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... truant. Why, Dulcie found his own hat for him, and put it on his head to boot one day. He had deposited it on a stone, that he might the better look in the face a dripping rock, shaded with plumes of fern and tufts of grass, and formed into mosaic by tiny sprays of geranium faded into crimson and gold. It was a characteristic of Will that while he was so fanciful in his interpretation, the smallest, commonest text sufficed him. The strolls of these short autumn ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... a wild currant bush, glistening with its luscious black berries, and began nibbling at them. A gopher, coming to his supper bush, gave a little squeak of annoyance, and Peter saw the bright eyes of the midget glaring at him from under a big fern leaf. Peter wagged his tail, for the savagery of his existence was qualified by that mellowing sense of humor which had always been a part of his master. He yipped softly, in a companionable sort ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... our fern-house, which is just beyond here," she said. "We have got such exquisite maidenhairs and such a splendid Killarney fern. ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... alone, before the green grass would be covered, and the old apple-trees would grow mossy and die for lack of room and sunlight in the midst of the young woods. It was a perfect acre of turf, only here and there I could already see a cushion of juniper, or a tuft of sweet fern or bayberry. I walked the horse about slowly, picking a hard little yellow apple here and there from the boughs over my head, and at last I found a cellar all grown over with grass, with not even a bit of a crumbling brick to be seen in the hollow of it. No doubt there were some underground. It ...
— Deephaven and Selected Stories & Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... haply winter have forgotten one green leaf for our home vase—in vain we rake, freezing our fingers through our fur gloves—there is not one. An icicle has pierced every heart; and there are no fern leaves except those miniature ones which each plant is holding in its heart, to be sent up in next summer's hour of joy. But here are mosses—tufts of all sorts; the white, crisp and crumbling, fair as winter frostwork; and here the feathery green of which French ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... are mines of carbon once abstracted from the atmosphere by plants. In these coal-beds are often found fern leaves, toads, whole trees, and in short all forms of organized matter. These all existed as living things before the great floods, and at the breaking away of the barriers of the immense lakes, of which our present lakes were ...
— The Elements of Agriculture - A Book for Young Farmers, with Questions Prepared for the Use of Schools • George E. Waring
... while coming," said Rob, after another pause, during which they watched the stars overhead, smelt the sweet fern crushed under foot, and ...
— Little Men - Life at Plumfield With Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... of my archipelago tell very much the same story as the birds and the plants. Here, too, winged species have stood at a great advantage. To be sure, the earliest butterflies and bees that arrived in the fern-clad period were starved for want of honey; but as soon as the valleys began to be thickly tangled with composites, harebells, and sweet-scented myrtle bushes, these nectar-eating insects established themselves successfully, and kept their breed true by occasional crosses with fresh arrivals ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... commoners, trespasses in the fence month and winter haining, and in the enclosures; keeping hogs, sheep, goats, and geese, being uncommonable animals, in the Forest; cutting and burning the nether vert, furze, and fern; gathering and taking away the crabs, acorns, and mast; and other purprestures and offences; carrying away such timber trees as were covertly cut down in the night time; by which practices several ...
— The Forest of Dean - An Historical and Descriptive Account • H. G. Nicholls
... come from haunts of coot{1} and hern,{2} I make a sudden sally, And sparkle out among the fern, To bicker{3} down ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... scores of these beautiful crystals and never duplicate a figure. Some are almost solid and tabular, others are simple stars or fern-branched. Then we may detect compound forms, crystals within crystals, and, rarest of all, doubles, where two different forms appear as joined together by a tiny pillar. In all of these we have an epitome of the crystals of the rocks beneath our ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... the pine trees far up above, and while it lasted it deadened the jarring discord of the human tones. She sat quite motionless upon the log, not lifting a finger nor speaking a word, as she had promised, and her gaze was fixed steadily upon a bit of dried fern growing between the roots of ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... jolly bunch assembled to squabble good-naturedly over the various packages and bundles assigned to them to be carried. Under the hostess's direction they betook themselves via footpath and trail to a stone-walled pasture spicy with sweet fern. ...
— Entertaining Made Easy • Emily Rose Burt
... Walter Scott, to read aloud to him while he sketched, or to read him to sleep with very often. And then what delight it had been to sit by his side while he lay at full length upon the mossy turf, or half-buried in fern—to sit by him supremely happy, reading or drawing, and looking up from her occupation every now and then to glance at the sleeper's handsome ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... Think'st thou scorn of him? Hath a near view revealed him satyr-shaped Of chin and nostril? I shall hang me soon. See here ten apples: from thy favourite tree I plucked them: I shall bring ten more anon. Ah witness my heart-anguish! Oh were I A booming bee, to waft me to thy lair, Threading the fern and ivy in whose depths Thou nestlest! I have learned what Love is now: Fell god, he drank the lioness's milk, In the wild woods his mother cradled him, Whose fire slow-burns me, smiting to the bone. O thou whose glance is beauty and whose heart All marble: O dark-eyebrowed maiden mine! Cling ...
— Theocritus • Theocritus
... really was a bit of hollow, where no one could see them from the beach, or lane, or even from the Round-house. Scudamore, who understood his man, obeyed; and Tugwell came to his bearings on a clump of fern ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... deep in fern, Old oak, I love thee well; A thousand thanks for what I learn And what remains to tell." ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... brake or bracken fern, Pteris aquilina, has been considered responsible for the poisoning of many horses and cattle. Many cases have been reported in England and Germany, and some well-authenticated cases in the United ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... upon a broad and true generalization. In the first stratified rocks in which any organic remains are found, the highest animals are fishes, and the highest plants are cryptogams; in the middle periods reptiles come in, accompanied by fern and moss forests; in later times quadrupeds are introduced, with a dicotyledonous vegetation. So closely does the march of animal and vegetable life keep pace with the material progress of the world, that we may well ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... unequivocal married person. And then you would turn over all the little things of old, and wrangle a bit over details here and there; and all the while you would be the very selfsame two that were young and were lost in the wood and trampled down the fern and saw the squirrels overhead all those ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... gloom; Is told in stony record of the roar Of long Silurian storms, and tempests huge Scourging the circuit of Devonian seas; Is whispered in the noiseless mists, the gray Soft drip of clouds about rank fern-forests, Through dateless terms that stored the layered coal; Is uttered hoarse in strange Triassic forms Of monstrous life; or stamped in ice-blue gleams Athwart the ...
— In Divers Tones • Charles G. D. Roberts
... malformed hands, lacking sometimes even three digits. But guessing this was in some way a greeting, I did the same thing by way of reply. He grinned with immense satisfaction. Then his swift roving glance went round again; he made a swift movement—and vanished. The fern fronds he had stood ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... of the season, after the first snows have fallen, but when there is still plenty of moisture in the ground, the loveliest fern-fronds of pure rime may be found in myriads on the meadows. They are fashioned like perfect vegetable structures, opening fan-shaped upon crystal stems, and catching the sunbeams with the brilliancy of diamonds. Taken at certain angles, they decompose light into iridescent colours, appearing ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... Jasper," promised Polly. So he turned the corner, to go to his school. But presently he heard rapid footsteps back of him. "Oh Jasper," cried Polly, flushed and panting, as he whirled about, "tell Phronsie I won't forget the little fern-roots. Be ...
— Five Little Peppers at School • Margaret Sidney
... flowed out of a dense fern-brake, slipped down a mossy-lipped stone, and ran across the path at their feet. From the valley arose the mellow song of meadow larks, while about them, in and out, through sunshine and ...
— Brown Wolf and Other Jack London Stories - Chosen and Edited By Franklin K. Mathiews • Jack London
... stout sticks with which to poke among the dense undergrowth of laurel, holly, and hazel that formed such a close cover for the game of various sorts with which the wood was so thickly populated. Now and then from her form amid the withered fern a frightened hare leaped among their very feet. Startled rabbits scurried here and there over the soft moss and rustling leaves. The cry of a night-bird from time to time broke the intense stillness of the lonesome place, while more than once they were alarmed by a soft something that ...
— Two Little Travellers - A Story for Girls • Frances Browne Arthur
... be awakened into transcendent splendor. The echoes of the Danaan music were ringing in her still; and are now, heaven knows;—and how would they not be, when what to our eyes are the hills of her green with fern, to eyes anointed, and to the vision of the spirit, are the palaces of the Danaan Sidhe, and the topless towers ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... half-blown bud would say a great deal from a lover to his idol; and this heliotrope be most encouraging to a timid swain. Here is a rosy daisy for some merry little damsel; there is a scarlet posy for a soldier; this delicate azalea and fern for some lovely creature just out; and there is a bunch of sober pansies for a spinster, if spinsters go to 'Germans.' Heath, scentless but pretty, would do for many; these Parma violets for one with a sorrow; and this curious purple flower with ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott
... reappeared, drew them apart, and stood aside as his mistress swept out, the same cold blond woman I had seen in the market, but now most exquisitely clad in a pale gray gown of crepe embroidered with silver fern fronds and held at the neck by a deep collar of splendid pearls, pearl rings alone upon her hands, in her hair a spray of silver mistletoe with pearls for berries. She made an exquisite picture as she advanced swiftly to meet us, a half ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... a peasant in order to conceal himself. The peasant was discovered by the pursuers, who now redoubled the diligence of their search. At last, the unhappy Monmouth was found, lying in the bottom of a ditch, and covered with fern; his body depressed with fatigue and hunger; his mind by the memory of past misfortunes, by the prospect of future disasters. Human nature is unequal to such calamitous situations; much more the temper of a man softened by early ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part F. - From Charles II. to James II. • David Hume
... so long? Violet was tired, no doubt, but could she not have walked as fast as Eva, or was Kennedy's arm less stout than Julian's? She lingered, it seemed, with something of a conscious pleasure, now to pluck a flower or a fern, now to look at some yellow lichens on the purple crags; and once, when Julian looked back, the two were some way behind the rest of the party. They were standing on a rock gazing on the fading splendour of the mountains in front of them, while the light wind ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... knows what I'd have done if it hadn't been for her," he laughed. "I wanted to plant American Beauty roses and maiden-hair fern all over the place. I even think I had some notion of growing four-dollar orchids on the pear trees. The idea of putting in things that would really grow was ...
— The Lilac Girl • Ralph Henry Barbour
... shedding welcome shadows on the river path; and many a bold round hill like the ballons of the Vosges, once rich of grass as they, now shorn of wood, and even of undergrowth, lift a bare stony front to the lovely sunlight, and never more will root of tree, or seed of flower or of fern, find ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... distinguish the nest-building of the California miner, were all here, with the dreariness of decay superadded. A few paces from the cabin there was a rough enclosure, which, in the brief days of Tennessee's Partner's matrimonial felicity, had been used as a garden, but was now overgrown with fern. As we approached it we were surprised to find that what we had taken for a recent attempt at cultivation was the broken soil about an ...
— Tennessee's Partner • Bret Harte
... body. Its nostrils, strange to say, are at the tip of the beak. The toes are strong, and well adapted for digging, the hind one being a thick, horny spur. To add to the singularity of this creature, it has no tail whatever. The kirvi-kirvi conceals itself among the extensive beds of fern which abound in the middle island of New Zealand, and it makes a nest of fern for its eggs in deep holes, which it hollows out of the ground. It feeds on insects, and particularly worms, which it disturbs by stamping on the ground, and seizes the instant they make ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... tope, clump of trees, thicket, spinet, spinney; underwood, brushwood; scrub; boscage, bosk[obs3], ceja[Sp], chaparal, motte [obs3][U.S.].; arboretum &c. 371. bush, jungle, prairie; heath, heather; fern, bracken; furze, gorse, whin; grass, turf; pasture, pasturage; turbary[obs3]; sedge, rush, weed; fungus, mushroom, toadstool; lichen, moss, conferva[obs3], mold; growth; alfalfa, alfilaria[obs3], banyan; blow, blowth[obs3]; floret[obs3], petiole; pin grass, timothy, yam, yew, zinnia. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... to Earth—her frail Decaying children dread decay. Yon wreath of mist that leaves the vale, And lessens in the morning ray: Look, how, by mountain rivulet, It lingers as it upward creeps, And clings to fern and copsewood set Along the green and dewy steeps: Clings to the fragrant kalmia, clings To precipices fringed with grass, Dark maples where the wood-thrush sings, And bowers of fragrant sassafras. ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant
... seemed to see some reflection of that wizard brightness in the room; the pale walls and the white bed and his wife's face lying amidst brown hair upon the pillow were illuminated, and listening he could almost hear the corncrake in the fields, the fern-owl sounding his strange note from the quiet of the rugged place where the bracken grew, and, like the echo of a magic song, the melody of the nightingale that sang all night in the alder by the little brook. There was nothing that he could say, but he slowly ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... not talking then, so they sat through a long silence. At last he heard Edith draw a quick breath, and lifting his head he looked where she pointed. Up a fern stalk climbed a curious looking object. They watched breathlessly. By lavender feet clung a big, pursy, lavender-splotched, yellow body. Yellow and lavender wings began to expand and take on colour. Every instant great beauty became ...
— A Girl Of The Limberlost • Gene Stratton Porter
... daily the knife-grinder and I (for as long as his tent continued pleasantly to interrupt my little wilderness) sat on two stones, and smoked, and plucked grass and talked to the tune of the brown water. His children were mere whelps, they fought and bit among the fern like vermin. His wife was a mere squaw; I saw her gather brush and tend the kettle, but she never ventured to address her lord while I was present. The tent was a mere gipsy hovel, like a sty for pigs. But the grinder himself ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... red-hot earth, cooling, put on an outer crust, when gravity drew into deep hollows the waters that cooled the earth and purified the upper air—and then follow on in nature's footsteps, passing up the stairway of ascending life from lichen, moss and fern, on to the culminating moment in man, we shall ever find that increase of value means an increase of time for growth. The fern asks days, the reed asks weeks, the bird for months, the beast for a handful ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... romantic view and mark our progress towards the foot of the hill. I was particularly struck, during the walk, with the richness of the undergrowth in most places, and recognised many berries and plants that resembled those of my native land, especially a tall, elegantly formed fern, which emitted an agreeable perfume. There were several kinds of flowers, too; but I did not see so many of these as I should have expected in such a climate. We also saw a great variety of small birds of bright plumage, and many paroquets similar ...
— The Coral Island • R.M. Ballantyne
... the midst of an open space covered with the greenest sward, stood a mighty broad-armed oak, beneath whose ample boughs, though as yet almost destitute of foliage, while the sod beneath them could scarcely boast a head of fern, couched a herd of deer. There lay a thicket of thorns skirting a sand-bank, burrowed by rabbits, on this hand grew a dense and Druid-like grove, into whose intricacies the slanting sunbeams pierced; on that extended a long glade, formed ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... get on our dry pastures, and still less in our cultivated fields. But in these islands there are two noble species, at least, which are true swamp-ferns; the Lastraea Thelypteris, which of old filled the fens, but is now all but extinct; and the Osmunda, or King-fern, which, as all know, will grow wherever it is damp enough about the roots. In Hampshire, in Devon, and Cornwall, and in the southwest of Ireland, the King-fern too is a true swamp fern. But in the Tropics I have seen more than once noble tree-ferns growing in wet savannahs ...
— Town Geology • Charles Kingsley
... night, before sunset, they can see the green feathery tops of the palm-trees before them. The palms have no branches, but only great clusters of fern-like leaves at the top of the tree, under which ...
— The Seven Little Sisters Who Live on the Round Ball - That Floats in the Air • Jane Andrews
... The last year's leaves stay on through the winter brooding over the little fresh sprouts. These embryo flowers are further protected by a fuzzy covering. This reminds one of a similar protective covering which new fern leaves have. In the spring a hepatica plant wastes no time on getting a new suit of leaves. It makes its old ones do until the blossom has had its day. Then the new leaves, started to be sure before this, have a chance. These delayed, are ...
— The Library of Work and Play: Gardening and Farming. • Ellen Eddy Shaw
... not conceal it) a journey to a place so far from Paris as the Riviera was no slight labour. Even from the roses, the palms, the siren sea, the wells of water under the fronds of maiden-hair fern, his mind travels back wistfully to the city ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... jungle, dark and gloomy—and very wet. Palm-like, the gigantic trees were, or fern-like, flinging clouds of feathery green foliage high against a somber sky ...
— The Cosmic Express • John Stewart Williamson
... have been told, and do not doubt, That Devon lanes are dim with trees, And shagged with fern, and loved of bees, And all with roses pranked about; I do believe that other-where The woods are green, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 5, 1920 • Various
... beech (Fagus sylvatica), and its weeping, purple-leaved, and fern-leaved varieties, are frequently met with in parks and may be told from the native species by its darker bark. The weeping form may, of course, be told readily by its drooping branches. The leaves of the European beeches ...
— Studies of Trees • Jacob Joshua Levison
... looking back, when engaged on any dealings with supernatural powers, is insisted on in the tales and practices of the Russians, Eskimos, Zulus, and the Khonds of Orissa. In Russia the watcher for the golden fern-flower must seize it the instant it blossoms and run home, taking care not to look behind him: whether through fear of giving the demons, who also watch for it, power over him, or whether through a dread of the flower losing its magic powers if this precaution is neglected, Mr. Ralston ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Anonymous
... cathedral, another of a huge crouching lion, all known to the two cousins by name, and owned as familiar friends. On the other side, between two hills, each surmounted by its own rocky crest, lay nestled in woods the grey Church tower and cottages of the village of Fern Torr; and far away stretched the rich landscape of field, wood, and pasture, ending at length in the blue line of horizon, where sky and ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... lay slices of bread on top of the stove," she explained. "She said she always makes toast that way, and no one could tell the difference! I never heard of such a thing—did you, Manley? But I've been attending a cooking school ever since you left Fern Hill. I didn't tell you—I wanted it for a surprise. I could have done better with the toast before a wood fire—I think poor Arline was nearly distracted at the way I poked coals down from the grate; but she didn't say anything. Isn't it funny, to have ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower
... and Mr. MacAngus had given them, speaking as an old campaigner, some very useful if simple hints, such as always pitching the tent with its back to the wind; and keeping inside a supply of dry wood to light the fires with; and tying fern on Moses's head, against the flies; and carrying cabbage leaves in their own hats, against the heat; and walking with long staves instead of short walking sticks—after this he made them all sit round their fire, and sketched them, and the picture hangs ...
— The Slowcoach • E. V. Lucas
... was, if possible, yet more surprising, namely, the whole of Will Fern's finest speech: an address full of rustic eloquence that one can't help feeling sure would have told wonderfully as Dickens could have delivered it. However, the story, foreshortened though it was, precisely as he related it, was told with a due regard to its ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... sacrilegious feet carry me a little way within that violated enclosure. But it was only a very tiny raid we made. We stood quietly for two or three minutes, just feeling the place, then scurried hastily away like two timorous hares; and as I have since lost a much prized little fern-leaf plucked within the enclosure, I think Mr. Tennyson should agree that this intrusive American has been quite severely enough punished, and that much ought to be forgiven one who ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... are bunches of cactus with prickly leaves. Look out! don't catch your toe in those sea-ferns. Even that sweet green maiden-hair fern might pin down your foot so firmly that it would take a fish's sharp ...
— Lord Dolphin • Harriet A. Cheever
... but sent at the florist's discretion, not chosen to suit her gown, and it did not suit it, so that she could not have used it in any case; yet she put it down with a sigh. The next was of yellow roses, violets, and maidenhair fern, very sweet: "With Lord Groome's compliments," she read on the card that was tied to it. "He is back then, I suppose," she thought. "Funny old man! Very sorry, but you won't do." The next was from one of the survivals, a man she loathed. She thought it an impertinence for him to have sent her ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... many a briered rock, and dingle buff with littered fern, green holly copse where lurked the woodcock, and arcades of zigzag oak, Frida kept her bridal robe from spot, or rent, or blemish. Passing all these little pleadings of the life she had always loved, at last she turned ...
— Frida, or, The Lover's Leap, A Legend Of The West Country - From "Slain By The Doones" By R. D. Blackmore • R. D. Blackmore
... riddles.... Come, little boy, come and look! The instinct of the salmon for the sea. The river where he was spawned hurries to the sea, and his instinct is to go with it, not against it.... It deepens and broadens, and ahead is always a clearer pool, a more shadowy rock, a softer water-fern. It is pleasant to swim under the sallow-branches, and rapids whip.... And there is the lull of an estuary, and the chush-chush of little waves, and he is in the sea.... And now he must lay his own course.... The lure of the river ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... arose a crack-cracking as of men coming closer among the scrub of heather and fern which surrounded the Dower House, only it was quite momentary. The stick which she had half-lifted, an unconscious act of readiness for defence, tapped back on to the floor, and my sword-point made a sharper rattle, though I was ...
— The Black Colonel • James Milne
... of the cavern, brought him again to a consideration of his predicament. He could not be restrained from speech, however—though, as he spoke, the old women saluted his face on all hands with strokes from brushes of fern, which occasioned him no small inconvenience. But he had gone too far now to recede; and, in a broken manner—broken as much by his own hurry and vehemence as by the interruptions to which he was subjected—he contrived to say enough to Lucy of ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... my Lord being gone before my coming to chapel. I and Mr. Sheply told out my money, and made even for my Privy Seal fees and gratuity money, &c., to this day between my Lord and me. After that to chappell, where Dr. Fern, a good honest sermon upon "The Lord is my shield." After sermon a dull anthem, and so to my Lord's (he dining abroad) and dined with Mr. Sheply. So, to St. Margarett's, and heard a good sermon upon the text "Teach us the old way," or something like it, wherein ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... on the ground beside his upturned "billy," and the fern about the spring looked as if it ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various
... Weird Sisters crooning over their horrible cauldron? In Germany the forests are magic-mad. Walking under the huge oaks of the Thuringian Forest or the Taunus, or in the pine woods of Hesse, one can see the flutter of airy garments in the chequered sunlight falling upon fern and moss; one can glimpse goblins and kobolds hiding behind the roots and rocks; one can hear the King of the Willows[1] and the Bride of the Wind moaning and calling in the rustling of the leaves. On a summer's day the calm of pools is so complete that it seems as ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... grey on the hills. The north wind resounds through the woods. White clouds rise on the sky: the trembling snow descends. The river howls afar, along its winding course. Sad, by a hollow rock, the grey-hair'd Carryl sat. Dry fern waves over his head; his seat is in an aged birch. Clear to the roaring winds he lifts ...
— Fragments Of Ancient Poetry • James MacPherson
... than a hollow place, even as the word 'den' is," says John Ridd. "It is a pretty place," he adds, "though nothing to frighten any body, unless he hath lived in a gallipot." The valley is well protected from the wind, and "there is shelter and dry fern-bedding and folk to be seen in the distance from a bank whereon the sun shines." Here John Ridd came to consult the wise woman toward the end of March, while the weather was still cold and piercing. In the warm ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... into the copse along the green track, with the tall thistles and the fern on each side of him, he caught little bits here and there of what they were saying; it was always the same, who was going to be king, and what would Choo Hoo do? How long would it be before the emperor's army could be got together again to come sweeping back and exact a dire vengeance ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies
... might come to me. I had danced with her, I had talked with her under the stars, but what might she expect me not to do? And what was an Occidental, a city man, before her? She retired behind a bird's-nest fern, on the long, lanceolate leaves of which were the shells of the mountain snail. At her feet was the bastard canna, the pungent root of which makes ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... Pennsylvania are mines of carbon once abstracted from the atmosphere by plants. In these coal-beds are often found fern leaves, toads, whole trees, and in short all forms of organized matter. These all existed as living things before the great floods, and at the breaking away of the barriers of the immense lakes, of which our present lakes were merely the deep holes in their beds, ...
— The Elements of Agriculture - A Book for Young Farmers, with Questions Prepared for the Use of Schools • George E. Waring
... hidden from the wallowing hippopotami by the crest of the knoll. The human squatting-place was a trampled area among the dead brown fronds of Royal Fern, through which the crosiers of this year's growth were unrolling to the light and warmth. The fire was a smouldering heap of char, light grey and black, replenished by the old women from time to time with brown leaves. Most of the men were asleep—they slept ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... stone, because the motion of a stone has nothing in it of energy nor vitality, neither its repose of stability. But having once seen a great rock come down a mountain side, we have a noble sensation of its rest, now bedded immovably among the under fern, because the power and fearfulness of its motion were great, and its stability and negation of motion are now great in proportion. Hence the imagination, which delights in nothing more than the enhancing of the characters ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... leads the way round the place, through brake fern wetter than waves, to indicate the position of the tennis-courts, and in course of time you are allowed to return to the dry and spend the rest of the day in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 28th, 1920 • Various
... meadows, harmonizing in their semi-unconsciousness with the large gray earth; mist hung in the sedges, floated evanescent upon the surface of the water, within reach of his oars, floated and went out in the sunshine. But on the verge of an oak wood, amid tangled and tawny masses of fern and grass, a hound stopped and looked up. Then the huntsman appeared galloping along the upland, and turning in his saddle, he blew ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... proposed a stroll through the conservatories, and while the elders stopped to admire a fern or a rare exotic, Will and Gwenda roamed on under the palms and greenery to where a sparkling fountain rose, and flung its feathery ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine
... among the fern-decked rocks before quite finishing the ascent to the actual outside world, the mercury lost little time in registering ...
— Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills • Luella Agnes Owen
... roar ceased when it was repeated with tenfold fierceness; the bushes and fern leaves shook violently, and an enormous and beautifully spotted jaguar shot through the air as if it had been discharged from a cannon's mouth. The hermit's eye wavered not; he bent forward a hair's-breadth; the glittering spear-point ...
— Martin Rattler • R.M. Ballantyne
... into his mouth, applying, especially, his tongue to it. He once more returned to the fire, and again placed the chimney on the upper bar, the end of the glass resting amidst the red coals. He left it there and walked about the room, selected a small fern-leaf from a vase of flowers, and raising the chimney, placed it within, and replaced the chimney among the coals. After a few moments he told us to observe very carefully, as the experiment would be very pretty. Mr. Home now held up the glass, and we perceived ...
— Psychic Phenomena - A Brief Account of the Physical Manifestations Observed - in Psychical Research • Edward T. Bennett
... the hardihood to seek the exquisite Lacryma produced on the southwester slopes of the hill, will remember a peculiar ravine running for nearly a mile from the sandy part of the cone, and covered with a stunted green bush of fern-like leaves. It is the nearest green spot to the calcined cone. It assumes a gentle declivity towards the sea, and is then lost in the beautiful vineyards and gardens that cover the slopes of the mountain down to the houses of Torre del Greco. The view from this spot is magnificent. On the left ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... trees, oaks and ashes, and in between the trees and under them tangled bushes and creeping ivy. There were beech-trees too, but there was nothing under them but their own dead red drifted leaves, and here and there a delicate green fern-frond. ...
— The Story of the Amulet • E. Nesbit
... is, that it is a difficult matter to hear a story among English Gipsies which is not mangled or marred in the telling; so that to print it, restitution and invention become inevitable. But with a man who lived in a tent among the gorse and fern, and who intermitted his earnest conversation with a little wooden bear to point out to me the gentleman on horseback riding over the two beautiful little girls in the flowers on the carpet, such fables as I have given sprang up of themselves, owing nothing to books, though ...
— The English Gipsies and Their Language • Charles G. Leland
... have seen hostile scouts searching the obvious bits of cover, but they did not find me there; and, like the elephant hunter among the fern trees, or a boar in a cotton crop, so a boy in the currant bushes is invisible to the enemy, while he can watch every move of the ...
— My Adventures as a Spy • Robert Baden-Powell
... of the village, and paused among the trees and fern on the summit of the hill above, to take breath, and to look down at the beautiful sea. Suddenly the captain gave his leg a resounding slap, and cried, "Never knew such a right thing in all ...
— A Message from the Sea • Charles Dickens
... comfortably on the steps of the cottage when a distressing accent struck upon their ears, and simultaneously they turned in the direction of the sound. There on a tiny verandah, almost hidden behind a large fern growth, a little girl sat on a low chair crying softly and pathetically as though her small heart were broken. The children stood for a moment not knowing just what to do. Then Maizie, the same one, thought Peter satirically (he could see all that went on from his place beyond) who had suggested ...
— Suzanna Stirs the Fire • Emily Calvin Blake
... Keenly alive to the adventure, we obeyed. At last, after taking a wide circuit, we came out upon the farthest shore of the lake. It was a wide, dewy, space; lighted up by a full moon, and carpeted with a minute species of fern growing closely together. It swept right down to the water, showing the village ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... August, woodcocks are to be found in elevated spots, such as mountains covered with large trees, or in warm open places on their slopes. At the first approach of cold weather they leave the hills, and come down into the plains, concealing themselves in the underwood, or the fern, or in the high grass, when the snow begins to fall. The woodcock is a melancholy bird, and somewhat misanthropic. Its habits are eminently anti-social; it flies but little, so little indeed that its wings seem scarcely of any use, and with the laziness already alluded to that forms ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... my archipelago tell very much the same story as the birds and the plants. Here, too, winged species have stood at a great advantage. To be sure, the earliest butterflies and bees that arrived in the fern-clad period were starved for want of honey; but as soon as the valleys began to be thickly tangled with composites, harebells, and sweet-scented myrtle bushes, these nectar-eating insects established themselves successfully, and kept ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... luxuriant herbage. The cattle, quietly standing in the lake, were refreshing themselves after the heat of the day, and the deer lay in groups under the shade, or crouching in their lairs, partly concealed by the underwood and fern. All was in repose and beauty, and the dying man watched the sun, as it fast descended to the horizon, as emblematical of his race, so shortly to be sped. He surveyed the groups before him—he envied even the beasts of the field, and the reclaimed ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... wonder to hear. Instantly, from the dimness beyond the cavern-mouth, the cry was repeated, and presently was heard a panting and 'plaining, a snuffling and a shuffling, and into the light of the fire hobbled the old Witch. Beholding Jocelyn sitting cross-legged on his couch of fern, she paused and, leaning on her crooked stick, viewed him with her ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... of hoar Frost, and the Vortices on windows: several Observations on the branched Figures of Urine: the Figures of Regulus Martis stellatus, and of Fern. Of the Figures of Snow. ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... is,' cried Polly, boldly; 'and it's going to "continner." Meg, you're a darling in that blue print and pretty hat. I'll fill my fern-basket with flowers, and you can take it, as to have something in your hand to play with. You look nicer than any Phoebe I ever saw, that's a fact. And now, hurrah! we're all ready, and there's the boys' bell, so let us assemble out in the kitchen. Oh dear! I believe I'm frightened, in spite ...
— A Summer in a Canyon: A California Story • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Her life had been singularly monotonous and, having seen very little of the world, she had that self-distrust which is afraid to laugh unless other people are laughing, too. She taught singing at Fern Hill, a private school in Mercer's suburbs. She did not care for the older pupils, but she was devoted to the very little girls. She played wonderfully on the piano, and suffered from indigestion; her face was at times almost beautiful; she had a round, full chin, and ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... Australian continent have any idea of property in land,' I beg to answer most decidedly in the affirmative. It is well known that these Aborigines in no instance cultivate the soil, but subsist entirely by hunting and fishing, and on the wild roots they find in certain localities (especially the common fern), with occasionally a little wild honey; indigenous fruits being exceedingly rare. The whole race is divided into tribes, more or less numerous, according to circumstances, and designated from the localities they inhabit; for although universally a wandering race with respect to places of ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... tree-tops made an arcade of foliage—a lane whose beauty even Vixen could not gainsay. Ah, there were the Hampshire ferns on the steep green banks! She gave a little choking sob at sight of them, as if they had been living things. Hart's-tongue, and lady-fern, and the whole family of osmundas. Yes; they were all there. It was like home—with ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... one morning when there was no little excitement on board, the news having oozed out that the sloop was bound for New Zealand, a place in those days little known, save as a wonderful country of tree-fern, pine, and volcano, where the natives were a fierce fighting race, and did not scruple to eat those whom they ...
— The Adventures of Don Lavington - Nolens Volens • George Manville Fenn
... they had left, the burst of torch-light, and heard the mob hounding on their track. But the thick copses, with their pale green just budding into life, were at hand. On they fled. The deer started from amidst the entangled fern, but stood and gazed at them without fear; the playful hares in the green alleys ceased not their nightly sports at the harmless footsteps; and when at last, in the dense thicket, they sunk down on the mossy roots of a giant oak, the nightingales ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... surcharges of commoners, trespasses in the fence month and winter haining, and in the enclosures; keeping hogs, sheep, goats, and geese, being uncommonable animals, in the Forest; cutting and burning the nether vert, furze, and fern; gathering and taking away the crabs, acorns, and mast; and other purprestures and offences; carrying away such timber trees as were covertly cut down in the night time; by which practices several hundred fine oaks were yearly destroyed, and the ...
— The Forest of Dean - An Historical and Descriptive Account • H. G. Nicholls
... of the other criptogamous plants, such as the fern, mosses, lichens, mushrooms large and small, are prepared in herbals as ...
— Movement of the International Literary Exchanges, between France and North America from January 1845 to May, 1846 • Various
... Morgan leaders and they started, swaying in the sand ruts and jolting over the great stones that cropped out of the road. Up they climbed, through narrow ways in the forest—ways hedged with alder and fern and sumach and wild grape, adorned with oxeye daisies and tiger lilies, and the big purple flowers which they knew and loved so well. They passed, too, wild lakes overhung with primeval trees, where the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... way! Shall be late again now, and get bad marks. Not my fault. Horrid old servants! Wish they'd do their own work, and leave my things alone." So on, and so on, until at last the missing article was found, folded up in a magazine, or thrust beneath a fern-pot, when Kitty would seize it resentfully, and stalk down the garden-path on her long brown legs, puffing and fuming, and feeling herself the most ill- used of mortals. On the present occasion Elsie and Agatha entered the room as she finished undressing, and the former immediately ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... him. He could not bear to hear him speak with trembling voice and gleaming eyes of the grand mountains and the silent corries around Ben-Nevis, the red deer trooping over the misty steeps, and the brown hinds lying among the green plumes of fern, and the wren and the ...
— Scottish sketches • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... have been infants characterized by their enormous size at birth. Among the older writers, Cranz describes an infant which at birth weighed 23 pounds; Fern mentions a fetus of 18 pounds; and Mittehauser speaks of a new-born child weighing 24 pounds. Von Siebold in his "Lucina" has recorded a fetus which weighed 22 1/2 pounds. It is worthy of comment that so great ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... the Wild Gardens are most enjoyed from below. Trails of no difficulty lead from the settlements to Fern and Odessa Lakes in a canyon unsurpassed; to Bear Lake at the outlet of the Tyndall Gorge; to Loch Vale, whose flower-carpeted terraces and cirque lakelets, Sky Pond and the Lake of Glass, are encircled with mighty canyon walls; and to Glacier Gorge, which ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... stood before us on the grass and smiled as if her performance was now complete. The next thing she did, however, was to stoop straight down and pluck—quite as if it were all she was there for—a big, ugly spray of withered fern. I instantly became sure she had just come out of the copse. She waited for us, not herself taking a step, and I was conscious of the rare solemnity with which we presently approached her. She smiled and smiled, and we met; but it was all done in a silence by this time flagrantly ominous. ...
— The Turn of the Screw • Henry James
... he stood so, caught into a joy that was almost anguish, and then at a sudden thought he shrank together, his arm crooked over his eyes. He sank forward, still covering his eyes, into a great bed of fern, just beginning to unroll their whitey-green balls into long, pale plumes. There he lay as still as if ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... Corn in swift, revolving rows, Dripping sunlight where it goes, Wheels and glitters and returns: Bladed beauty's lifted urns; Woods all shadowed, cooling earth, Murmuring of a quiet mirth, Pour damp odours where they pass, Breath of fern and earth and grass ... Ramblers on a lichened wall, Ramblers, ramblers pouring all Colour that the world has known Out upon an aging stone.— Little towns of street and spire, Dooryard roses, heart's desire, Light a dream within the mind, Light ...
— Ships in Harbour • David Morton
... "If the rock-bound coasts, sullen, defiant, and lowering, seemed uninviting, these were occasionally broken into charmingly alluring coves floored with golden sand, clad with evergreen shrubbery, and adorned with every variety of indigenous wattle, she-oak, wild flower, and fern, from the delicately graceful 'maiden-hair' to the palm-like 'old man'; while the majestic gum-tree, clean and smooth as the mast of 'some tall admiral' pierces the clear air to the height of ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... her house. Yes, there she was at the window, attending to her flowers and carefully shielding a much-prized little maidenhair fern with a bell glass from the rays of the sun, which beamed as though Phoebus had mistaken the season and thought it a ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... bunches of cactus with prickly leaves. Look out! don't catch your toe in those sea-ferns. Even that sweet green maiden-hair fern might pin down your foot so firmly that it would take a fish's sharp tooth to ...
— Lord Dolphin • Harriet A. Cheever
... thickets, like those tropic labyrinths where traveller and hunter have to cut their path through tangled bushes and interlacing creepers. Their general hue is not light but dark green, relieved, it is true, by soft fern fronds, light-tinted shrubs, and crimson or snow-white flowers. Still the tone is somewhat sombre, and would be more noticeably so but for the prevalent sunshine and the great variety of species of trees and ferns growing side by side. The distinction of the forest scenery ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... wicked Mal-sum thought in his heart, 'What would it matter even if he knew the truth? I shall slay him before he can harm me.' So he answered truly, 'By the stroke of a fern-root only can I be slain. Now what ...
— The Magic Speech Flower - or Little Luke and His Animal Friends • Melvin Hix
... they had been raised by the magic of some indigenous Amphion's music, the materials could not have adjusted themselves more beautifully in accord with the surrounding scene; and time has still further harmonized them with weather stains, lichens, and moss, short grasses, and short fern, and stone-plants of various kinds. The ornamented chimneys, round or square, less adorned than those which, like little turrets, crest the houses of the Portuguese peasantry; and yet not less happily suited to their place, the hedge of clipt box beneath the windows, the rose-bushes ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... should each plant side by side a twig or sprout of some tree or herb, and he to whose plant God gave growth should be the owner of the farm. This advice was accepted; for God, both thought, was a safer arbiter than man. One of the brothers, Arne, chose a fern (Ormgrass), and the other, Ulf, a sweet-brier. A week later, they went with the wise man and two other neighbors to the remote pasture at the edge of the glacier where, by common consent, they had made their appeal to ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... (he does not conceal it) a journey to a place so far from Paris as the Riviera was no slight labour. Even from the roses, the palms, the siren sea, the wells of water under the fronds of maiden-hair fern, his mind travels back wistfully to the city of ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... rested on the sloping ground—he raised one knee, and left the other foot over the verge where the tip of the tallest rushes touched it. Before he had been there a minute he remembered the secret which a fern had ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... at the top of the brow, rising out of the rich green scrub? Verily, again, we are in the Tropics. They are palms, doubtless, some thirty feet high each, with here and there a young one springing up like a gigantic crown of male-fern. The old ones have straight gray stems, often prickly enough, and thickened in the middle; gray last year's leaves hanging down; and feathering round the top, a circular plume of pale green leaves, like those ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... the even line of the horizon, and, in the valleys, thickets or belts of bloodwood are seen. In these hollows one may hope to find feed for the camels, for here may grow a few quondongs, acacia, and fern-tree shrubs, and in rare cases some herbage. The beefwood tree, the leaves of which camels, when hard pressed, will eat, alone commands the summit of the undulations. As for animal life—well, one forgets that life exists, until occasionally ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... some sorts of soft rock with a surface thin as paper but as hard as granite. In spite of the hardness, the features were not really strong. There was refinement in them, however, of the same kind which the daughter had, and as much, though less pleasing. A fern—a spray of maiden's-hair—loses much of its beauty but none of its refinement when petrified in limestone ...
— Adam Johnstone's Son • F. Marion Crawford
... discontents are soon forgotten; there amid tilth and pasture, gentle hills and leafy hollows of rural Devon, the eye rests and the mind is soothed. By lanes innumerable, deep between banks of fern and flower; by paths along the bramble-edge of scented meadows; by the secret windings of copse and brake and stream-worn valley—a way lies upward to the long ridge of Haldon, where breezes sing among the pines, or sweep ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... to tire. On Dunsmoor Heath, a hedge doth there enclose Grounds, on the right hand, there I did repose. Wit's whetstone, Want, there made us quickly learn, With knives to cut down rushes, and green fern, Of which we made a field-bed in the field, Which sleep, and rest, and much content did yield. There with my mother earth, I thought it fit To lodge, and yet no incest did commit: My bed was curtained with good wholesome ...
— The Pennyles Pilgrimage - Or The Money-lesse Perambulation of John Taylor • John Taylor
... magic moorland with wild winds drifting by, And pools among the peat-hags that mirror back the sky; And there in golden bracken the fronds that toss and turn Are really little people pretending to be fern. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov. 28, 1917 • Various
... causeway, under enlacing limes, past the fine church, under the hanging woods of Houghton Hill—and here we found a mill, a big, timbered place, with a tiled roof, odd galleries and projecting pent-houses, all pleasantly dusted with flour, where a great wheel turned dripping in a fern-clad cavern of its own, with the scent of the weedy river-water blown back from the plunging leat. Oh, the joyful place of streams! River and leat and back-water here ran clear among willow-clad islands, all fringed deep with meadow-sweet and comfrey and butterbur and ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... don't. Robina is not artistic, not in that sense. I tried her once with a harpsichord I picked up cheap in Wardour Street, and a reproduction of a Roman stool. The thing was an utter failure. A cottage piano, with a photo-frame and a fern upon, it is what the soul cries out for in connection with Robina. Dick is not artistic. Dick does not go with peacocks' feathers and guitars. I can see Dick with a single peacock's feather at St. Giles's ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... man variously and mysteriously alive, very different from every other man and especially from certain kinds of man. When you look at a larch wood with a floor of fern in October at the end of twilight, you are not content to have that wood described as so many hundred poles growing on three acres of land, the property of a manufacturer of gin. Still less was Borrow content to sit down at Oulton, while the blast howled amid the ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... happen. A barrel-organ played like an obscene nightingale beneath wet leaves. Children ran across the road. Here and there one could see brown panelling inside the hall door.... The march that the mind keeps beneath the windows of others is queer enough. Now distracted by brown panelling; now by a fern in a pot; here improvising a few phrases to dance with the barrel-organ; again snatching a detached gaiety from a drunken man; then altogether absorbed by words the poor shout across the street at each other (so outright, so lusty)—yet ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... mind, if I may smoke." And thereafter the hours go idly by. Your friend at the easel labours doggedly a little way off, in the wide shadow of the tree; and yet farther, across a strait of glaring sunshine, you see another painter, encamped in the shadow of another tree, and up to his waist in the fern. You cannot watch your own effigy growing out of the white trunk, and the trunk beginning to stand forth from the rest of the wood, and the whole picture getting dappled over with the flecks of sun ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... with yellow bottles and green bottles and a water spigot with a neck like a giraffe's that rose out of the bar beside a varnished wood pillar that made the decoration of the corner, with a terra cotta pot of ferns on top of it. From where Andrews sat on the padded bench at the back of the room the fern fronds made a black lacework against the left- hand side of the window, while against the other was the brown silhouette of the old man's head, and the slant of his cap. The stove hid the door and the white ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... varieties in its component arrangement. It may be low and flat, like a floral mat, in the middle of the table, or it may be a lofty epergne, or an inter-lacing of delicate vine-wreathed arches, or a single basket of feathery maidenhair fern—in fact, anything that is pretty and which the inspiration of the moment may suggest. In early autumn, in country homes or in suburban villas, nothing is more effective than masses of golden-rod and purple asters, gathered by the hostess or her guests during their afternoon ...
— Etiquette • Agnes H. Morton
... certainty which was a cunner and which was a sculpin, when she caught it, and with an equal horror of both the nasty, wriggling things. When they went a walk together, her notion of a healthful tramp was to find a nice place among the sweet-fern or the pine-needles, and sit down in it and talk, or make a lap, to which he could bring the berries he gathered for her to arrange in the shallow leaf-trays she pinned together with twigs. She really ...
— Between The Dark And The Daylight • William Dean Howells
... long as the tree shall put forth its tender greenery of leaf in the spring, blossom into gold and fire in summer and in the autumn bow down with fruits; so long as water shall leap and foam and thunder in cataracts down the mountain-side, or ripple and smile over the pebble or under the fern—so long shall the heart of man respond to sun and moon and stars, to flower and tree and stream, and there ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... prettier than the drive to Strathfield-saye, passing, as we do, through a great part of Heckfield Heath,* a tract of wild woodland, a forest, or rather a chase, full of fine sylvan beauty—thickets of fern and holly, and hawthorn and birch, surmounted by oaks and beeches, and interspersed with lawny glades and deep pools, letting light into the picture. Nothing can be prettier than the approach to the duke's lodge. And the entrance to the demesne, ...
— The Lost Dahlia • Mary Russell Mitford
... of the chiefs, coming first. If he is willing to go through with the business, I.E. to take part in the attack, he slashes a chip from the beam with his PARANG and passes under it. On the far side of the beam stands a chief holding a large frond of fern, and, as each man passes under, he gives him a bit of the leaf, while an assistant cuts a notch on a tally-stick for each volunteer. If for any reason any man is reluctant to go farther, he states his excuse, perhaps a bad dream or illness, or sore feet, and ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... back to our raking. Above us, among the stones of the slope, hang bunches of Christmas fern; around the foot of the trees we uncover trailing clusters of gray-green partridge vine, glowing with crimson berries; we rake up the prince's-pine, pipsissewa, creeping-Jennie, and wintergreen red with ripe berries—a whole bouquet of evergreens, exquisite, fairy-like forms that ...
— The Hills of Hingham • Dallas Lore Sharp
... Joan everything was delightful. There had been the hay harvest, and the corn harvest, and the cutting of fern on the mountains for winter fodder, and the threshing of the corn on the barn-floor, and the piling up of great heaps of straw in the wide bays on each side ...
— The Christmas Child • Hesba Stretton
... a wheat-ear, because they call it here a fern-knacker; but since he knew it was a wheat-ear, he is extremely concerned. You are desired to acquaint Miss Smith that the Duchess was upon the brink of leaving off painting the first week she came here, but hath since taken it ...
— Life And Letters Of John Gay (1685-1732) • Lewis Melville
... forest-crypt.[19] 190 Long, sparkling aisles of steel-stemmed trees Bending to counterfeit a breeze; Sometimes the roof no fretwork knew But silvery mosses that downward grew; Sometimes it was carved in sharp relief[20] 195 With quaint arabesques[21] of ice-fern leaf; Sometimes it was simply smooth and clear For the gladness of heaven to shine through, and here He had caught the nodding bulrush-tops And hung them thickly with diamond drops, 200 Which crystalled the beams of moon and sun, And made ...
— Narrative and Lyric Poems (first series) for use in the Lower School • O. J. Stevenson
... also, where, from the loftiest part of the platform, a view was obtained over the tree-tops up the defile between the mountains, other two watchers were stationed, stretched at full length amongst the fern, and peering out through laurel bushes, with whose dark foliage their bronzed physiognomies were confounded beyond ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... only a very tiny raid we made. We stood quietly for two or three minutes, just feeling the place, then scurried hastily away like two timorous hares; and as I have since lost a much prized little fern-leaf plucked within the enclosure, I think Mr. Tennyson should agree that this intrusive American has been quite severely enough punished, and that much ought to be forgiven one who has loved ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... had got a great big book from some firm in New York that tells alt about herb-growing, and how difficult it is to get the ones needed for condiments and perfumes, and offering to buy first-class lavender and thyme and bergamot and sweet fern and things of that kind in any quantities at a good price. She had shown it to the little old ladies who had been secretly grieving at the separation from their garden out on their poorly rented farm, and the leaven had worked—on ...
— The Tinder-Box • Maria Thompson Daviess
... is sometimes used as an anthelmintic, so is wormwood, and the liquid extract of male fern, and in America spigelia root ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... things," she said, now, taking up the strip of linen, on which graceful maidenhair fern was growing rapidly. "I don't see where you get time to do ...
— Cricket at the Seashore • Elizabeth Westyn Timlow
... black-and-gilt Etruscan patera filled with white anemones; on another table near by stood a silver one filled with the same flowers, pink and yellow. Each was circled round the edge with fringing masses of maiden-hair fern. Every lounge and chair had a low, broad foot-stool before it, ruffled with the chintz; and in one corner of the room were a square pink and white and green Moorish rug, with ten or a dozen chintz-covered pillows, piled up in a sort of chair-shaped bed ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson
... my brother have near him these things of which he is dreaming, as a remembrance of what his soul loveth." Then, turning to the tree and the plant and the pool, he blessed them and said: "O little tree and starry plant and cool well and transparent fern, and whatsoever else Bresal now sees, arise in the name of the Lord of the four winds and of earth and water and fire, arise and go and make real the dream ...
— A Child's Book of Saints • William Canton
... while I drank my fill at the rill, bathed head, neck, face and arms, and, feeling delightfully refreshed, leaned back against the fern-covered slab ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers
... probable that the late Cromwellian proprietor had discovered the jewels during his occupancy, and that, like a prudent man, he kept his own counsel in the matter. But Sir Ralph still clung to the belief that somewhere in his grounds, "near the water and by the fern," the wealth he now so sorely needed lay concealed. That in this faith Sir Ralph lived and died was proved by his will, in which he bequeathed to the younger of his two sons, "and to his heirs," the jewels and other specified valuables which the testator firmly believed were still concealed somewhere ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... workmen, and many a time were her cares forgotten, and her active spirits resumed, while Louis acted carpenter under her directions, and rectified errors of the workmen. It might not be poetical, but the French sky-blue paper, covered with silvery fern-leaves, that Louis took such pains to procure, and the china door-handles that he brought over in his pockets, and the great map which Mary pasted over the obstinate spot of damp in the vestibule, were the occasions of the greatest blitheness and merriment that they ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the cup down before him, and he promptly dipped a fern root into it; then started back ...
— "Some Say" - Neighbours in Cyrus • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... of wives upon the heath, And someone saw thy willy-nilly nun Vying a tress against our golden fern. ...
— Queen Mary and Harold • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... heath-berries, cranberries, bilberries, &c., furnishing the poor with a source of profit, and the rich of luxury. What a pleasure it is to throw ourselves down beneath the verdant screen of the beautiful fern, or the shade of a venerable oak, in such a scene, and listen to the summer sounds of bees, grasshoppers, and ten thousand other insects, mingled with the more remote and solitary cries of the pewit and the curlew! Then, to think of the coach-horse, urged on his sultry stage, or ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 262, July 7, 1827 • Various
... wives, and as many embittered, disappointed, old maids of New England. The noble apology which Edmund Burke once offered for his countrymen always recurs to my mind when I hear these 'women's conventions' alluded to: 'Because half-a-dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, while thousands of great cattle repose beneath the shade of the British oak, chew the cud, and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... himself as best he might, Dawn approached Edith and seated herself beside a bed of deep green moss, and watched, with intense interest, the growing picture for a long time; then her mind became abstracted and cloudy. She was no longer in the green woods, amid the fern and wild flowers, but away, far away on life's great highway, where the dust, rising at every step, ...
— Dawn • Mrs. Harriet A. Adams
... **Ivy-leaved Geraniums. German Ivy. Indian Strawberry Vine. Kenilworth Ivy. Lycopodium. Moneywort. **Trailing Blue Lobelia. *Cissus discolor. **Lysimachia (Moneywort). **Tropaeolums. **Torrenia Asiatica. **Mesembryanthemums (Ice Plant). **Cobaea scandens. **Pilogyne suavis. Lygodium scandens (Climbing Fern). ...
— Your Plants - Plain and Practical Directions for the Treatment of Tender - and Hardy Plants in the House and in the Garden • James Sheehan
... which ones back is turned as one ascends. All day long the villages of Dalpe and Cornone had been tempting me, so I resolved to take them next day. This I did, crossing the Ticino and following a broad well-beaten path which ascends the mountains in a southerly direction. I found the rare English fern Woodsia hyperborea growing in great luxuriance on the rocks between the path and the river. I saw some fronds fully six inches in length. I also found one specimen of Asplenium alternifolium, which, however, is ...
— Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino • Samuel Butler
... seaward, and curve east and north in a succession of beaches. It is on the point, and mainly short of its wooded extremity, that the cottages of our settlement are dropped, as near the ocean as may be, and with as little order as birds' nests in the grass, among the sweet-fern, laurel, bay, wild raspberries, and dog-roses, which it is the ideal to leave as untouched as possible. Wheel-worn lanes that twist about among the hollows find the cottages from the highway, but foot-paths approach one cottage from another, and ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... the scene was so great, however, that these occasional obstructions, so far from diminishing, actually heightened the charm of the whole. The forest was full of the most luxuriant underwood, creepers, palms, and fern plants; the latter, in many instances sixteen feet high, proved a no less effectual screen against the burning rays of the sun than did the palms ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... look, even with all these conditions fulfilled, how diverse is life on this earth itself, the one place we really know—varying as much as from the oak to the cuttle-fish, from the palm to the tiger, from man to the fern, the sea-weed, or the jelly-speck. Every one of these creatures is a complex result of very complex conditions, among which you must never forget to reckon the previous existence and interaction of all the antecedent ones. Is it probable, then, even a priori, that if life or anything like ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen
... "white as snow." Some of these crystals are simply flat slabs with six sides, others are stars with six rods or spikes springing from the centre, others with six spikes each formed like a delicate fern. No less than a thousand different forms of delicate crystals have been found among snowflakes, but though there is such a great variety, yet they are all built on the six-sided and six-pointed plan, and are all rendered dazzlingly white by the reflection ...
— The Fairy-Land of Science • Arabella B. Buckley
... Down on Fern Avenue, which is a wide, grassy road and no avenue at all, Uncle Roger Allan is carefully painting his chicken coops. Roger Allan is a tall, twinkling, smooth-shaven old man, and he lives in a house as twinkling and as tidy as himself. He is a bachelor, but years ago he ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... In another part was a little patch of mossy meadow, and again there were decaying logs out of which sprang various ferns in wild luxuriance, as one has seen them in deeply-shaded, low-lying woods. The maiden-hair fern was here seen ranging from leaves as large as one's thumb-nail to a species with leaves the size of pin-heads. There was a charming harmony in the whole arrangement; nothing seemed abrupt, each effect blended ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... once more, to stare again at the great, tumbled stretches of granite, the long spaces of green-black pines, showing in the distance like so many upright fronds of some strange, mossy fern; at the blank spaces, where cold stone and shifting shale had made jagged marks of bareness in the masses of evergreen, then on to the last gnarled bulwarks of foliage, struggling bravely, almost desperately, to hold on to life where life was impossible, the dividing line, as sharp ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... gulches here, full of trees and moss and fern. Wild-cats, wolves, and California lions live here, and they often steal our chickens. We dare not go far from the house at night. From this you would think that it is a very wild country, but it is not, and there ...
— Harper's Young People, August 24, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... with the shape of an oyster. The coconut plantation covered the west side. From the white beach the palms ran in serried rows quarter of a mile inland, then began a jungle of bamboo, gum-tree, sandalwood, plantain, huge fern, and choking grasses. The south-east end of the island was hillocky, with volcanic subsoil. There was plenty of ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... mankind were gazing that night. She was in dashing spirits, a glorious color diffused her cheeks, her eyes fairly danced. Her dress was of feathery black tulle, and a broad silver ribbon, like an order, went over her shoulders. In the shining black braids glistened fern leaves of silver filigree. Fortunately, Fred and I discovered them—Leonora and her inseparable cavalier, Denis, I mean—in an alcove of roses and jessamines. She admiring the flowers, and he talking with a fervor very easy to read. She listening, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... bridge which spans the ravine. The aqueduct carried by the bridge is still full of flowing water, and the drops which fall from it in a fine mist make a little rainbow as the afternoon sun shines through the archway draped with maidenhair fern. On the stone pavement of the bridge we trace the ruts worn two thousand years ago by the chariots of the men who conquered the world. The chariots have all rolled by. On the broken edge of the tower above the gateway sits a ragged Bedouin boy, making shrill, ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... hills. The north wind resounds through the woods. White clouds rise on the sky: the trembling snow descends. The river howls afar, along its winding course. Sad, by a hollow rock, the grey-hair'd Carryl sat. Dry fern waves over his head; his seat is in an aged birch. Clear to the roaring winds he lifts his voice ...
— Fragments Of Ancient Poetry • James MacPherson
... come to a wood about a mile from this 'ere village, and I says to myself, "I'll stay here and go on in the morning." So I began looking about and found some fern and cut an armful and made a bed under a oak-tree. I slep' there till about three this morning. When I opened my eyes, what should I see but a bird sitting on the ground close to me? I no sooner ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... might give her fine houses and costly upholstery; but only the Tropic of Cancer could give her larger and brighter stars, a world of richer colouring, a land of perpetual summer, nights luminous with fire-flies, gardens in which the fern and the cactus were as forest trees, and where humming-birds flashed among the foliage like living flowers; nay, where the flowers themselves took the forms of the animal world and seemed instinct with life ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... better answer up, if you know what's good fern you," broke in Andy Jimson. "Sack doesn't stand ...
— The Rover Boys on the Plains - The Mystery of Red Rock Ranch • Arthur Winfield
... hut, and Raven took out the key from under the stone. Close by, there was a velvet fern frond ready to unfurl. He unlocked the door and they went in. Her last question he did not answer until he had thrown up windows and brought out chairs to the veranda at the west. When they were seated, he went on probing for his past ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... sang with the girls. The joy of her laughter was contagious. Everybody fell a victim to her gaiety. We have been on picnics up the river in a sampan where we waded and fished, then landed on an island of bamboo and fern and cooked our dinner over a hibachi. We have had concerts, tableaux and charades, here at the school, with a big table for the stage and a silver moon and a green mosquito-net for ...
— The Lady and Sada San - A Sequel to The Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... ferns growing on stems some twenty feet in height, and about the thickness of a boat-oar. It then throws out a number of leaves in every direction, four or five feet in length, very similar in appearance to the common fern. Another curious tree had a stem sixteen feet long; after which it branched out in long spiral leaves which hung down on all sides, resembling those of the larger kinds of grass. From the centre of the ...
— Twice Lost • W.H.G. Kingston
... granite-moulding aeons' gloom; Is told in stony record of the roar Of long Silurian storms, and tempests huge Scourging the circuit of Devonian seas; Is whispered in the noiseless mists, the gray Soft drip of clouds about rank fern-forests, Through dateless terms that stored the layered coal; Is uttered hoarse in strange Triassic forms Of monstrous life; or stamped in ice-blue gleams Athwart the death-still ...
— In Divers Tones • Charles G. D. Roberts
... which had made an end of weeks of drought, ran, noisily full, between two steep banks of mossy crag. From the crag, oaks hung over the water, at fantastic angles, holding on, as it seemed, by one foot and springing from the rock itself; while delicate rock plants, and fern fringed every ledge down to the water. A seat on the twisted roots of an overhanging oak, from which, to either side, a little green path, as though marked for pacing, ran along the stream, was one of her favourite haunts. From up-stream a mountain peak now kerchiefed ...
— Helena • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... that, Endecott?" she said, with a bright amused face.—"Only a fern leaf. One that waved a few thousand years before the deluge, and was safely bedded in stone when the children of Israel passed through the Red Sea. I went to see an old antiquarian friend this morning, and out of his precious ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... of pink flowers over there, and those green rushes, and those fern-like plants? Well, they are all living polyps, or colonies of polyps, some kinds of which leave coral when they die, like the ...
— How Sammy Went to Coral-Land • Emily Paret Atwater
... midst of which, covered with ivy and tufted plants, now ruddy with autumnal tints, stood the ruined walls of a little chapel. In the dilapidated vault close by lay buried many of his ancestors, and under the little wavy hillocks of fern and nettles, slept many an humble villager. He sat down upon a worn tombstone in this lowly ruin, and with his eyes fixed upon the ground, he surrendered his spirit to the stormy and evil thoughts which he had invited. Long ...
— The Evil Guest • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... shin"— Adiantum pedatum— Maidenhair Fern: Used either in decoction or poultice for rheumatism and chills, generally in connection with some other fern. The doctors explain that the fronds of the different varieties of fern are curled up in the young plant, but unroll and straighten ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... Grey!" she cried, and everyone gathered round to see what she had found. Even Susie peered into the hole, and poked a bit of fern gently at the toad, which sat there gazing ...
— The Kitchen Cat, and other Tales • Amy Walton
... the highest that we could see were crowned with wood, but of what kind I know not: Those that were of the same height with that which we had climbed, were woody on the sides, but on the summit were rocky and covered with fern. Upon the flats that appeared below these, there grew a sedgy kind of grass and weeds: In general the soil here, as well as in the valley, seemed to be rich. We saw several bushes of sugar-cane, which was very large and very good, growing wild, without the least culture. I likewise found ginger ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... this journey. Having gone about five miles, we sat us down on a bridge to rest a while, and there the Don left us to go a little way up the course of the stream that flowed beneath, and he came back with a posey of sweet jonquils set off with a delicate kind of fern very pretty, and this he presents to Moll with a gracious little speech, which act, it seemed to me, was to let her know that he respected her still as a young gentlewoman in spite of her short petticoat, and ...
— A Set of Rogues • Frank Barrett
... miles, through an intolerable thickets of Small pine, a groth much resembling arrow wood on the Stem of which there is thorns; this groth about 12 or 15 feet high inter lockd into each other and Scattered over the high fern & fallen timber, added to this the hills were So Steep that I was compelled to draw my Self up by the assistance of those bushes- The Timber on those hills are of the pine Species large and tall maney of them more than 200 feet high ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... varieties of it, though I am not sure whether two of them may not be the same, varied somewhat by soil and position. The third grows only in high situations, and is unknown upon the plains; it has leaves very minutely subdivided, and looks like a fern, but the blossom and seed are nearly identical with the other varieties. The peculiar property of the plant is, that, though highly nutritious both for sheep and cattle when eaten upon a tolerably full stomach, it is very fatal ...
— A First Year in Canterbury Settlement • Samuel Butler
... had yet seen of its kind. In many places the trees formed long aisles and vaulted colonnades and arches so regular that it seemed as though they had been planted by the hand of man. Elsewhere the chaos of tree and shrub, flower and fern and twining root was so indescribable, that it seemed as if chance and haphazard had originated it all; but the mind of our hero was cast, if we may say so, in too logical a mould to accept such an ...
— The Rover of the Andes - A Tale of Adventure on South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... caravans of slaves had followed this road. For a mile Dick Sand and his companions struck against these scattered bones at each step, putting to flight enormous fern-owls. Those owls rose at their approach, with a heavy flight, and turned ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... source of the extreme western branch of our noble river is Hendricks Spring, so named in honor of Hendricks Hudson. We found Hendricks Spring in the edge of a swamp, cold, shallow, about five feet in diameter, shaded by trees, shrubbery, and vines, and fringed with the delicate brake and fern. Its waters, rising within half a mile of Long Lake, and upon the same summit-level, flow southward to the Atlantic more than three hundred miles; while those of the latter flow to the St. ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop
... sure that he would, and they promised to set his water, and to give as little trouble as possible; so, finally, the Tailor took up his shears and went up the valley, where the green banks sloped up into purple moor, or broke into sandy rocks, crowned with nodding oak fern. On to the prosperous old farm, where he spent a very pleasant time, sitting level with the window geraniums on a table set apart for him, stitching and gossiping, gossiping and stitching, and feeling secure of honest payment when his work was done. The mistress ...
— The Brownies and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... said the fern, "but you do not know the world yet as well as I do, for my sticks are knotty;" and then it sung ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... cleared a little space on the floor, and put the papers lightly over one another. Setting a match to them, he watched them light up and curl into brittle tinder, and dissolve from that stage into a heap of charred ashes, which he gathered up with a careful hand and put into the soft earth of a fern-box outside his veranda door. This being done, he sat down and began to think steadily, letting the names drift through his brain, one by one, until they sorted themselves, and he felt for the most useful name to ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... steaming oceans. The water warred against the land, tearing and breaking at its rock formation and distributing it in new strata, each buried beneath the next and holding fast within it the fossilized remains that form the record of its history. Huge fern plants spread their giant fronds in the dank sunless atmospheres, to be buried later in vast beds of decaying vegetation that ...
— The Dawn of Canadian History: A Chronicle of Aboriginal Canada • Stephen Leacock
... pine forest and fern, The stalwart New Zealanders turn To the land of their sires, For with ancestral fires Their bosoms ...
— War Rhymes • Abner Cosens
... The longer the {54} soil is left the better. Often after several months something further happens; little ferns begin to grow and they live a very long time indeed. There is at Rothamsted a bottle of soil that was put up just like this as far back as 1874. For a number of years past a beautiful fern has been growing inside the bottle, and even now it is very healthy and vigorous. If, instead of being kept moist, the rich garden soil is left in a dry shed during the whole of the winter so that it gradually loses its moisture, it will ...
— Lessons on Soil • E. J. Russell
... a smooth fern-mantled stone She sat, and watched the wicket-gate, Not timid in her woman's throne, Nor lonely in her sinless state, Though ...
— Fringilla: Some Tales In Verse • Richard Doddridge Blackmore
... entrance gates there is a wilderness of fern, or bracken, as high as your waist. Hidden in the midst of this unlikely place Jones has found the dagger. It is as if the party, going down the ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... name given in New Zealand to the fern Marattia fraxinia, Sm., called in Australia the Potato-Fern. See ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... looks the Alpine chain when one goes from Le Locle to Neulfchatel: so did I see it when I descended the Jura for the list time. It was in August. The trees, with their autumnal foliage, stood yellow and red between the dark firs; barberries and hips grew among the tall fern. The Alps lay in such a beautiful light, their feet blue as heaven, their peaks snow-white in the clear sunshine. I was in a sorrowful mood; I was leaving my mountains! Then I wrote in my book—O, I remember it so ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... a scream; the lightning was now forked and intensely blue. It flashed into every cranny in the cave, showing the barnacles on the roof, the little bits of fern, the strange stalactites. After the flash had passed, the darkness which followed was so intense that the light of the dim candle could scarcely be seen. Presently the rain thundered down upon the bare rock ...
— Light O' The Morning • L. T. Meade
... hills and the sea; a vast barren land stretching away in wave-like undulations far as eye can reach; marsh and heath and sand, sand and heath and marsh; here and there a stretch of scant coarse grass, a mass of waving reeds, a patch of golden-brown fern—the Landes. ...
— Life of St. Vincent de Paul • F.A. [Frances Alice] Forbes
... from haunts of coot and hern, I make a sudden sally, And sparkle out among the fern, To bicker down ...
— Practice Book • Leland Powers
... family drink. A handful of hops, to a pailful of water, and a half-pint of molasses, makes good hop beer. Spruce mixed with hops is pleasanter than hops alone. Boxberry, fever-bush, sweet fern, and horseradish make a good and healthy diet-drink. The winter evergreen, or rheumatism weed, thrown in, is very beneficial to humors. Be careful and not mistake kill-lamb for winter-evergreen; they resemble each other. Malt ...
— The American Frugal Housewife • Lydia M. Child
... can see. It is a revelation of which Wordsworth and Emerson are the prophets in literature, but which is written no less in many a heart quite untaught of books. The face of Mother Earth is the book in which many a man and woman and child read lessons of delight, spelled in letters of rock and fern, of brook and cowslip, of maple leaf and goldenrod. Such lessons mean little save ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... breeze touched them. They were queer, those ferns. They were not quite so slender and tapering and gothic as the ferns we see to-day. They were a trifle more lush and ragged, and their tips were sometimes almost rounded. But Ab noted little of fern or bird. It was only the general sensuousness that was upon him. The smell of the pines was a partial tonic to the healthy, half-awakened man, and, though he lay back upon the rugged wooden bed and half ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo
... to look at that which had taken the doctor's attention, for he was gazing into a side nook that suggested, from a dry heap of fern-like growth and grass, that it had ...
— Dead Man's Land - Being the Voyage to Zimbambangwe of certain and uncertain • George Manville Fenn
... blocks of rock, often split in a vertical direction. I saw long fissures of eight or ten feet in breadth, and from ten to fifteen feet in depth. In these clefts the flowers blossom earlier, and the fern grows taller and more luxuriantly, than ...
— Visit to Iceland - and the Scandinavian North • Ida Pfeiffer
... pleasure. I miss the deer; and when the first park that one ever knew was Buxted, with its moving antlers above the brake fern, one almost is compelled to withhold the word park from any enclosure without them. It is impossible to lose the feeling that the right place for cattle—even for Alderneys—is the meadow. Cows in a park are a poor makeshift; parks are for deer. ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... trees and palms growing almost side by side with the birch, the pine, and the spruce. Among other things, their attention was attracted to some beautiful fern trees, which were fully twenty feet high, and there were climbing plants in great profusion, some of them clinging to the trees, and others fastened ...
— The Land of the Kangaroo - Adventures of Two Youths in a Journey through the Great Island Continent • Thomas Wallace Knox
... their late visit. The room into which they had been shown was his consulting room, furnished in the simplest fashion—almost shabbily. There were chairs and table and a couch, a small stand for a pile of magazines, a bookcase containing some medical works, and a sprawling hare's-foot fern in a large flowerpot by the window. Mr. Pendleton seated himself near the fern, examining it as though it was a botanical rarity, and left his wife to undertake the conversation. Mrs. Pendleton was accustomed to take ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... I tell you this was a grand place? Why, it must be a two-pounder;" and I stood gloating over the vividly-bright colour of my capture, while Mercer knelt down, took out the hook, and finally deposited the fish in a hollow, and covered it with fern fronds. ...
— Burr Junior • G. Manville Fenn
... with cornfields and pastures. Through this vale winded a small river for many miles: much cattle were feeding on its banks. Here and there lesser eminences arose in the valley: some covered with wood, others with corn or grass, and a few with heath or fern. One of these little hills was distinguished by a parish church at the top, presenting a striking feature in the landscape. Another of these elevations, situated in the centre of the valley, was adorned with a venerable holly-tree, which has grown there for ages. Its singular height and ...
— The Annals of the Poor • Legh Richmond
... without concern The cockchafer on thorns, Or beetles smashed, themselves will turn If, walking through the slippery fern, ...
— More Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... high in air near the rocks. The Cove lay in sunshine, its rough stone chimneys and rude slate roofs overgrown with moss and fern, rising rapidly, one above the other, in the fast descending hollow, through which a little stream rushed to the sea,—more quietly than its brother, which, at some space distant, fell sheer down over the crag in a white line of foam, brawling with a tone of its own, distinguishable ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... bird might be the better for it. All around her, too, the life of the world that had so troubled her,—who could tell, in the tangle of green, where the good and the gift might ripen and fall? Every little fern-frond has its seed. ...
— A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life. • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... was quite unacquainted with its mysteries—the fern-glades, the woodbine tangles, and the stream, that, if you listened attentively, you could hear faintly gurgling ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... Trevor proposed a stroll through the conservatories, and while the elders stopped to admire a fern or a rare exotic, Will and Gwenda roamed on under the palms and greenery to where a sparkling fountain rose, and flung its feathery spray into ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine
... together with serpent-like lianas, stag-horn ferns, and green veils of filmy moss fluttering from every bough. A swampy path through rank grass and rough boulders pierces the dense thickets, matted together with inextricable confusion, teak and tamarind, acacia and bread-fruit, palm and tree-fern losing their own characteristics and merging themselves into concrete form. The appalling stillness and solemnity of the dense jungle appears emphasised by a solitary brown figure, with pipe and betel-box, beneath a thatched shed at an angle of the narrow track, where he ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... Abbey's broadest wall, Where ruining ivies propp'd the ruins steep— Her folded arms wrapping her tatter'd pall, [73:2]Had Melancholy mus'd herself to sleep. The fern was press'd beneath her hair, The dark green Adder's Tongue[74:1] was there; And still as pass'd the flagging sea-gale weak, The long lank leaf bow'd fluttering o'er ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Kentucky; deep, umbrageous woodlands fragrant with fern, dreaming noons, shimmering in the heat, with the locust drowsily shrilling; warm and silver nights, made musical by the loves of many mocking-birds; the waste places green tangles of blossoming weed, the roads a-flutter with hovering yellow butterflies, over ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... began to feel ashamed of young life's selfish outburst, and the vehement spring of mere bodily health. On this account I sat down sadly in a little cove of hill, whereto the soft breeze from the river came up, with a tone of wavelets, and a sprightly water-gleam. And here, in fern and yellow grass and tufted bights of bottom growth, the wind made entry for the sun, and they ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... books with brown-paper backs, and Dr. Brown has given me a packet of bottle labels. You've only got to lick them and stick them on, and write the titles. He gave me some before, you remember, to cut into strips to fasten the specimens in my fern collection. I've got a dozen and a half books, but there will not be one too many. You see eight will go at once, with the four seasons 'on my face,' and the four 'on my back.' Then I want two or three for the garden. For one thing I must have a list of our perennials. I am collecting a good ...
— We and the World, Part II. (of II.) - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... spring had lost its way Amid the grass and fern; A passing stranger scooped a well Where weary men might turn; He walled it in, and hung with care A ladle at the brink; He thought not of the deed he did, But judged that Toil might drink. He passed again; and lo! the well, By summer never dried, ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... a—little! To brood a baby forest in one's arms—if only for a single day—? Think of the experience!" Even at the very thought of it she began to shine all over again! "Funny little fluff o' green," she laughed, "no fatter than a fern!" Her voice went suddenly all wabbly like a preacher's. "But, oh, the glory of it!" she said. "The potential majesty! Great sweeping branches—! Nests for birds, shade for lovers, masts for ships to plow the great world's waters—timbers ...
— Fairy Prince and Other Stories • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... Puants were sitting around the camp fire eating their supper of half-raw meat. Their horses were hobbled a little beyond, munching such picking as could be found among the fern. Gabriel went back as still as a snake and whispered his orders to ...
— The Chase Of Saint-Castin And Other Stories Of The French In The New World • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... holly—and where no flowers but of the hardiest species would bloom—found a charm both potent and permanent. They clung to the purple moors behind and around their dwelling—to the hollow vale into which the pebbly bridle-path leading from their gate descended, and which wound between fern-banks first, and then amongst a few of the wildest little pasture-fields that ever bordered a wilderness of heath, or gave sustenance to a flock of grey moorland sheep, with their little mossy- faced ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... a mushroom. With the exception of a few berries, chiefly of a dwarf arbutus, the natives eat no vegetable food besides this fungus. In New Zealand, before the introduction of the potato, the roots of the fern were largely consumed; at the present time, I believe, Tierra del Fuego is the only country in the world where a cryptogamic plant affords ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... down upon La Bresse after our climb of two hours and more, we seem to be at the world's end. Our road has led us higher and higher by dense forests and wild granite parapets, tasselled with fern and foxglove, till we suddenly wheel round upon a little straggling town marvellously placed. Deep down it lies, amid fairy-like greenery and silvery streams, whilst high above tower the rugged forest peaks and far-off ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... considerable distance. The ground was rolling and tree-dotted and covered with grazing animals, alone, in pairs and in herds—a motley aggregation of the modern and extinct herbivore of the world. A huge woolly mastodon stood swaying to and fro in the shade of a giant fern—a mighty bull with enormous upcurving tusks. Near him grazed an aurochs bull with a cow and a calf, close beside a lone rhinoceros asleep in a dust-hole. Deer, antelope, bison, horses, sheep, and goats were all in sight ...
— The People that Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... get bad marks. Not my fault. Horrid old servants! Wish they'd do their own work, and leave my things alone." So on, and so on, until at last the missing article was found, folded up in a magazine, or thrust beneath a fern-pot, when Kitty would seize it resentfully, and stalk down the garden-path on her long brown legs, puffing and fuming, and feeling herself the most ill- used of mortals. On the present occasion Elsie and Agatha entered the room as she finished undressing, and the former immediately set ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... had followed this road. For a mile Dick Sand and his companions struck against these scattered bones at each step, putting to flight enormous fern-owls. Those owls rose at their approach, with a heavy flight, and turned round in ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... grave as he saw the blue haze across the doorway, hiding the moss and a tiny fern that grew on the shaft walls over ...
— Wulfric the Weapon Thane • Charles W. Whistler
... "Drawbacks at Quicksands! I'd like to know what they are. Don't be silly, Howard. You get more for your money there than any place I know." Suddenly the light of an inspiration came into her eyes, and she turned to her husband. "Sid, the Alfred Fern house is ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... her. "Fritz is getting gray and stout. I'm growing as thin as a shadow, and am thirty. We never shall be rich, and Plumfield may burn up any night, for that incorrigible Tommy Bangs will smoke sweet-fern cigars under the bed-clothes, though he's set himself afire three times already. But in spite of these unromantic facts, I have nothing to complain of, and never was so jolly in my life. Excuse the remark, but living among boys, I can't help using ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... landscapes of the South. There they may be seen bending over fields tapestried with Passion-Flowers and verdurous with Myrtles and Orange-trees, and presenting their long shafts to the tendrils of the Trumpet Honeysuckle and the palmate foliage of the Climbing Fern. But the slender Palms, when solitary, afford but little shade. It is when they are standing in groups, their lofty tops meeting and forming a uniform umbrage, that they afford any important protection from the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... passing through wide glades in the sparse oak forest, where the trees all leaned one way, now over bare, wind-swept downs; or once and again descending into a chalky bottom, where the stream bubbled through deep beds of fern, and a lonely farmhouse nestled ...
— The House of the Wolf - A Romance • Stanley Weyman
... knoll o'erlooks a dale Where Earn meanders down the vale; A knoll enwreathed in oak and fern, The sweetest nook in all Strathearn. The morn there breaks with earliest ray, Here latest shines the lingering day, There summer reigns supremely fair, And winter ev'n is lovely there. Its eastern prospect looks entire Along the glades of Ochtertyre; Its south, a mountain forest shade ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... coasts, sullen, defiant, and lowering, seemed uninviting, these were occasionally broken into charmingly alluring coves floored with golden sand, clad with evergreen shrubbery, and adorned with every variety of indigenous wattle, she-oak, wild flower, and fern, from the delicately graceful 'maiden-hair' to the palm-like 'old man'; while the majestic gum-tree, clean and smooth as the mast of 'some tall admiral' pierces the clear air to the height of 230 feet ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... worn, with all their rents and crevices widened into caves; and mark, at a picturesque angle of the rock, what must have been once an insulated sea-stack, some thirty or forty feet in height, standing up from amid the rank grass, as at one time it stood up from amid the waves. Tufts of fern and sprays of ivy bristle from its sides, once roughened by the serrated kelp-weed and the tangle. The Highlanders call it M'Dougal's Dog-stone, and say that the old chieftains of Lorne made use of it as a post to which to fasten their dogs,—animals wild and gigantic as themselves,—when the ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... maidenhair fern was probably chilled in some way; it needs warmth and dampness. Your education should be quite completed before you think of society and its distractions. When you are twenty (about) will be time enough. Do not write to us again on blue ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII. No. 358, November 6, 1886. • Various
... hoarse wind is raving, Rocks where the weary floods murmur and wail, Wilds where the fern by the furrow is waving, Reeled with the echoes that rode on the gale; Far as the tempest thrills Over the darkened hills Far as the sunshine streams over the plain, Roused by the tyrant band, Woke all the mighty land, Girded for battle, from ...
— How the Flag Became Old Glory • Emma Look Scott
... afternoon we arrived at Lulo Pakko (lulo river; pakko edible fern), situated in a beautiful hilly country. The natives very obligingly helped to make camp in the usual way. Raja Besar, who made himself at home in the gallery of the long communal house, told me that he wanted his "children," as he called the men, to remain ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... Lindemann, through wild but picturesque moorland, carpeted with wild flowers,[87] and strewn with grey rocks and boulders. A species of pink heather grows freely here, the scent of which and the presence of bubbling fern-fringed brooks, and crisp bracing air, recalled many a pleasant morning after grouse in Bonnie Scotland. A raw-boned Aberdonian on the train remarks on the resemblance of the landscape to that of his own country and is flatly contradicted by an American sitting beside him, who, however, owns that ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... property; for robberies of gardens and houses were daily and nightly committed. Damage was also received from the little stock which remained alive; the owners, not having wherewith to feed them, were obliged to turn them loose to browse among the grass and shrubs, or turn up the ground for the fern-root; and as they wandered without any one to prevent their doing mischief, they but too often found an easy passage over fences and through barriers which were now grown weak and perishing. It was however ordered, that the stock should ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins
... it was the same; he saw no man, but only the beasts now and then, walking beneath the high branches in the sylvan twilight, over the dead leaves and the fern, and seeing now and again, as he expressly told me, for it seemed he had some lesson from it, the hot light that danced in the open spaces ...
— The History of Richard Raynal, Solitary • Robert Hugh Benson
... mass of stones, are often formed by two exterior surfaces of stone, filled up with earth in the middle, which makes them very warm. The roof is generally bad. They are thatched, sometimes with straw, sometimes with heath, sometimes with fern. The thatch is secured by ropes of straw, or of heath; and, to fix the ropes, there is a stone tied to the end of each. These stones hang round the bottom of the roof, and make it look like a lady's hair in papers; but I should think that, when there is wind, they would come down, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... said Shelton; "we take peoples entirely different from our own, and stop their natural development by substituting a civilisation grown for our own use. Suppose, looking at a tropical fern in a hothouse, you were to say: 'This heat 's unhealthy for me; therefore it must be bad for the fern, I 'll take it up and plant it outside in ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... mother was very strict and particular: Abeleia grandiflora, Laurestinus, Olea fragrans, Ligustrum napalense, Rosa watsoniana—— Now really could that thing be a rose? It looked more like a cross between a fern and an ostrich plume. I looked closer. Each slender light green leaf was mottled with lighter green, a miracle of exquisite tracing, and the thing was in bud, millions and millions of buds no bigger than the eggs in ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris
... solved the question of the passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific, or else we should have had a certain convocation of politic wolves or bears, busy in rendering us and our horses invisible; for, after all, they have the true receipt of fern seed, and you can walk about, after having suffered transmigration into their substance, without its ever being suspected that you were either an officer of engineers or a ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... There lay the natural retreats of the lynx, the bear, and the outlaw like himself; and, as he fled farther from them, it was with the same frenzied instinct to return that the driven stag must feel toward the bed of fern from which he has been roused. But, for the minute, there was one imperative necessity—to go on—to go on anywhere, anyhow, so long as it took him far enough from the spot where masked men had loosed the handcuffs from his wrists and stray shots had come ringing after him. In his path there were ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... is now covered with a luxuriant vegetation of broom, furze, and fern, with groves of firs and larches, amongst which the explorer makes his way with difficulty to the fortifications, or rather to the piles of massive blocks to which that name has been given. These blocks form an acropolis of oval ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... to descend the narrow cork-screw stair, so dark and cool, I caught a glimpse, one turn down, by the feeble light that came through its chinks after it was shut behind us, of a tiny maiden-hair fern growing out of the wall. I stopped, and said to ...
— The Seaboard Parish Volume 1 • George MacDonald
... founded upon a broad and true generalization. In the first stratified rocks in which any organic remains are found, the highest animals are fishes, and the highest plants are cryptogams; in the middle periods reptiles come in, accompanied by fern and moss forests; in later times quadrupeds are introduced, with a dicotyledonous vegetation. So closely does the march of animal and vegetable life keep pace with the material progress of the world, that we may well consider ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... be in a pretty glen three or four miles north of the village, where there was shade on a bit of level green, and a spring bubbling out of a fern-hung bluff: from which you looked down the glen over a stretch of the river. Marcia had planned that they were to drive thither in a four-seated carryall, but the addition of ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... in a hundred years. Therefore I am forced to leave their part of the telling to Fancy, and you may believe or discredit as much or as little as you choose; only I am hoping that by this time you have acquired at least a sprinkling of fern-seed in your eyes. You may have forgotten that fern-seed is the most subtle of eye-openers known to Fancy; and that it enables you to see the things that have existed only in your imagination. It is very scarce nowadays, and hard to find, for the bird-fanciers ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer
... cataracts or Alpine glens are the still hidden streams which Bewick has immortalized in his vignettes, and Creswick in his pictures; the long glassy shallow, paved with yellow gravel, where he wades up between low walls of fern-fringed rock, beneath nut, and oak, and alder, to the low bar over which the stream comes swirling and dimpling, as the water-ouzel flits piping before him, and the murmur of the ringdove comes soft and sleepy through the wood. There, as he wades, he sees a ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... the roar ceased when it was repeated with tenfold fierceness; the bushes and fern leaves shook violently, and an enormous and beautifully spotted jaguar shot through the air as if it had been discharged from a cannon's mouth. The hermit's eye wavered not; he bent forward a hair's-breadth; the glittering spear-point touched the animal's breast, pierced through ...
— Martin Rattler • R.M. Ballantyne
... cleave to Earth—her frail Decaying children dread decay. Yon wreath of mist that leaves the vale, And lessens in the morning ray: Look, how, by mountain rivulet, It lingers as it upward creeps, And clings to fern and copsewood set Along the green and dewy steeps: Clings to the fragrant kalmia, clings To precipices fringed with grass, Dark maples where the wood-thrush sings, And bowers of fragrant sassafras. Yet all ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant
... time" of its prosperity, and already in a green premature decay; he recalled the Express Office and Town Hall, also passing away in a kind of similar green deliquescence; the little zinc church, now overgrown with fern and brambles, and the two or three fine substantial houses in the outskirts, which seemed to have sucked the vitality of the little settlement. One of these—he had been told—was the property of his rich and wicked maternal uncle, the hated appropriator of his red-headed cousin's affections. He ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... to produce them. The trees that came within our knowledge were the manchineal and a species of purow: also some palm-trees, the tops of which we cut down, and the soft interior part or heart of them was so palatable that it made a good addition to our mess. Mr. Nelson discovered some fern-roots, which I thought might be good roasted, as a substitute for bread, but it proved a very poor one: it however was very good in its natural state to allay thirst, and on that account I directed a quantity to be collected to ...
— A Narrative Of The Mutiny, On Board His Majesty's Ship Bounty; And The Subsequent Voyage Of Part Of The Crew, In The Ship's Boat • William Bligh
... our progress towards the foot of the hill. I wag particularly struck, during the walk, with the richness of the undergrowth in most places, and recognised many berries and plants that resembled those of my native land, especially a tall, elegantly-formed fern, which emitted an agreeable perfume. There were several kinds of flowers, too, but I did not see so many of these as I should have expected in such a climate. We also saw a great variety of small birds of bright plumage, and many paroquets similar to the one that awoke Peterkin so rudely ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... windy pasture slope in silence; the mullein candles blossomed shoulder-high, and from underfoot came the warm, aromatic scent of sweet-fern. Once they stopped for some more blueberries, with a desultory word about the heat; then they picked their way around juniper-bushes, and over great knees of granite, hot and slippery, and through low, sweet thickets of bay. ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various
... of Geber (EX NOMINE CUJUS VENIT VERBUM VERNACULUM, GIBBERISH). He cured wounds by salving the weapon instead of the sore; told fortunes by palmistry; discovered stolen goods by the sieve and shears; gathered the right maddow and the male fern seed, through use of which men walk invisible; pretended some advances towards the panacea, or universal elixir; and affected to convert good lead ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... As Phillips was only a beginner at piracy, he was very glad to get the aid of such an old hand at the game as John Archer, whom he promptly appointed to the office of quartermaster in the pirate ship. This quick promotion caused some murmuring amongst Phillips's original crew, the carpenter, Fern, being particularly ...
— The Pirates' Who's Who - Giving Particulars Of The Lives and Deaths Of The Pirates And Buccaneers • Philip Gosse
... the stable lantern to give them light, armed with stout sticks with which to poke among the dense undergrowth of laurel, holly, and hazel that formed such a close cover for the game of various sorts with which the wood was so thickly populated. Now and then from her form amid the withered fern a frightened hare leaped among their very feet. Startled rabbits scurried here and there over the soft moss and rustling leaves. The cry of a night-bird from time to time broke the intense stillness of the lonesome place, while more than once they were alarmed by a soft something ...
— Two Little Travellers - A Story for Girls • Frances Browne Arthur
... is found in mangrove swamps and flooded marshy lands. It has the appearance of a gigantic fern, and thrives best in those lands which are covered by the sea at high tide. In the same manner as the cocoanut-palm, the sap is extracted by incision made in the fruit-bearing stalk, and is used for distilling a liquid known as nipa wine, ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... the forest pond, An elfin tarn green-shadowed in the fern; Nine yews ensomber the wet bank, beyond The autumn branches of the beeches burn With yellow flame and red amid the green, And patches of the darkening ...
— The Five Books of Youth • Robert Hillyer
... themselves comfortably on the steps of the cottage when a distressing accent struck upon their ears, and simultaneously they turned in the direction of the sound. There on a tiny verandah, almost hidden behind a large fern growth, a little girl sat on a low chair crying softly and pathetically as though her small heart were broken. The children stood for a moment not knowing just what to do. Then Maizie, the same one, ...
— Suzanna Stirs the Fire • Emily Calvin Blake
... pushed aside the curtain of silk and the drooping fronds of gigantic fern. Looking up she saw a tall, young man, wearing a dark blue uniform, who bowed with grace, and stood aside that she might pass if she chose. He showed no recognition, and there was the pause of an instant. She could feel the color leave her face. ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... place below the spring where the maidenhair fern grew thick and spread out wide, perfect fronds on slender brown stems, shading fairy bowers; and where taller ferns grew high and leaned over like a delicate fairy forest; and where the wild violets grew so thick you could not see the ground beneath them, and the grass was lush and long ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... every little while you might see a great hole scooped out in the rock, where the water lay dark and silent, or a little precipice over which it dashed and foamed. This was a favourite wood with the children. In summer they often spent whole days there, gathering wild flowers or the beautiful fern leaves, which grew in every nook and corner. And now that the bright autumn leaves were scattered everywhere, and the tempting berries covered the ground, they found employment for many a spare hour. To-day the little girls ...
— Nanny Merry - or, What Made the Difference • Anonymous
... about provender left for the keeper's palfrey, he dragged out of a recess a bundle of forage, which he spread before the knight's charger, and immediately afterwards shook down a quantity of dried fern in the corner which he had assigned for the rider's couch. The knight returned him thanks for his courtesy; and, this duty done, both resumed their seats by the table, whereon stood the trencher of pease placed between them. The hermit, ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... of Pennsylvania are mines of carbon once abstracted from the atmosphere by plants. In these coal-beds are often found fern leaves, toads, whole trees, and in short all forms of organized matter. These all existed as living things before the great floods, and at the breaking away of the barriers of the immense lakes, of which ...
— The Elements of Agriculture - A Book for Young Farmers, with Questions Prepared for the Use of Schools • George E. Waring
... tutor, sympathising fully with the ardent pursuits of boyhood, had been over-indulgent in the matter of granting whole Wednesdays, instead of half-holidays. Any excuse sufficed. Skating on inland ponds in the winter; fishing in the bay, as the year wore on; and, latterly, digging for primrose or fern roots in Brattlesby Woods. But Philip Price was beginning to find out by results that too much play and not enough work was making dull scholars of his pupils, and he had determined to stand out firmly against any more ...
— The Captain's Bunk - A Story for Boys • M. B. Manwell
... before him, and he promptly dipped a fern root into it; then started back with a cry ...
— "Some Say" - Neighbours in Cyrus • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... pulverized and dried iron sulphate and 1/2 pound bicarbonate of soda, and give one teaspoonful each morning until the medicine is gone. After the last dose give the following: Turpentine, 2 ounces; fluid extract male fern, 1/2 ounce; Pearson's Creolins, 1 ounce; raw linseed oil, 1 pint. Mix and give all at one dose. To improve the general condition one may give artificial Carlsbad salts, 1 tablespoonful in each feed, and each dose to have added to it 3 to 5 grains arsenious acid. If ...
— One Thousand Questions in California Agriculture Answered • E.J. Wickson
... cat's claws, and the unequivocal married person. And then you would turn over all the little things of old, and wrangle a bit over details here and there; and all the while you would be the very selfsame two that were young and were lost in the wood and trampled down the fern and saw the squirrels overhead all ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... devoted to rival railway lines, the central one to the common way. The mouths of the beautiful tributary ravines are crossed either by graceful iron spans, which frame charming undercut glimpses of sparkling waterfalls and deep tangles of moss and fern, or by graceful stone arches draped with vines. There are terraced vineyards, after the fashion of the Rhineland, and the gentle arts of the florist and the truck-gardener are much in evidence. The winding river frequently sweeps at ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... debilitated condition. My immediate ambition therefore extended no further than to find in a suitable spot some tree, of thick enough foliage and with widespreading branches near enough the ground to afford good protection from the dew, beneath which beds of dry fern, or something of that sort, might be arranged for the night. On the morrow I would see if I could not contrive something more effective in the shape of a hut; while ultimately, if circumstances seemed to demand it, I might seriously consider the possibility of erecting some simple form of ...
— The First Mate - The Story of a Strange Cruise • Harry Collingwood
... face, and abundant yellow hair of marvellous length, and of such uncommon brightness that even in the shade it shone like gold. She was dressed in grass green, and from her knees downwards she was hidden by the clumps of fern and rushes that grew ...
— Old-Fashioned Fairy Tales • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... sweet with fern and rose, Our hills are maple crowned, But not from them our fathers chose The village ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... after this, Arthur thought that he had had about enough dancing for awhile, and went and sat by himself in a secluded spot under the shadow of a tree-fern in a temporary conservatory put up outside a bow-window. The Chinese lantern that hung upon the fern had gone out, leaving his chair in total darkness. Presently a couple, whom he did not recognize, for he only saw their backs, strayed in, and placed ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... thick leafage of a hazel hedge, or at the sight of a family of rabbits scurrying over the cropped woodland grass at the sound of his horse's feet, their short white tails marking their leaps as they dart from one fern shelter to the other; and to slacken his horse's pace as he rides past village greens, marking how the little children ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... vegetation in the early part of the era was very different both from the gloomy forests of the more ancient Coal Era and from that which prevails today. Cycads, ferns and fern-like plants, coniferous trees, especially related to the modern Araucaria or Norfolk Island Pine, Ginkgos still surviving in China, and huge equisetae or horsetail rushes, still surviving in South American swamps and with dwarfed ...
— Dinosaurs - With Special Reference to the American Museum Collections • William Diller Matthew
... of the sweet, old-fashioned "lad's-love." A rose, a bunch of mignonette would be to her too gay a posy for the Lord's House and the Lord's Day. And balmier breath than was ever borne by blossom is the pure fragrance of green growing things,—southernwood, mint, sweet fern, bayberry, sweetbrier. No rose is half so fresh, ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... I'll tell you and maybe I won't. I don't know yet." Red broke a long, supple stem from a fern they passed, methodically stripped it of its leaflets and swung what was left whip-fashion. For a moment, he was on a wild charger, which reared and champed under his iron control. Then he got tired, tossed the whip aside and stowed the charger away in a corner ...
— Youth • Isaac Asimov
... covered with fruit, white houses smothered in flowers, gardens overrun with roses, tall groups of eucalyptus trees giving an impression of elegant nakedness, long lines of pepper trees with frail fern-like branches, and these things continued for the rest of the way; but they would have been as nothing without that beautiful, great bland light. The twins had had their hot summers in Pomerania, and their July days in England, but had not yet seen anything like this. Here was summer ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim
... blossom into gold and fire in summer and in the autumn bow down with fruits; so long as water shall leap and foam and thunder in cataracts down the mountain-side, or ripple and smile over the pebble or under the fern—so long shall the heart of man respond to sun and moon and stars, to flower and tree and stream, and ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... seemed as if I could see every pebble at the bottom, except where they were hidden in the ripples which spread away from beneath the fall. The pool is like the bottom of a well; high rocks rear themselves round it to a great height; they are veiled in a greenness of fern and moss, and near the top many trees have found a roothold in the crevices and bend forward towards each other over the water, as divers poise themselves before leaping down. Through a narrow opening opposite the fall the river makes its way onward. As I stood there a stone must ...
— The Ashiel mystery - A Detective Story • Mrs. Charles Bryce
... turned as one ascends. All day long the villages of Dalpe and Cornone had been tempting me, so I resolved to take them next day. This I did, crossing the Ticino and following a broad well-beaten path which ascends the mountains in a southerly direction. I found the rare English fern Woodsia hyperborea growing in great luxuriance on the rocks between the path and the river. I saw some fronds fully six inches in length. I also found one specimen of Asplenium alternifolium, which, ...
— Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino • Samuel Butler
... are typical of Filipinoland generally. Rather sparsely settled, only the smaller part of the land is under cultivation, the rest grown up in horse-high tigbao or Tampa grass, or covered with small forest trees. Among trees the feathery, fern-like foliage of the bamboo is most in evidence; but the broad-leaved banana ranks easily next. The high topknot growth of the cocoanut palm and the similar foliage of the tall-shanked papaya afford a spectacle ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... bunch of fern," he whispered; "just the colour of the dead leaves. Do you see? ... Don't you see that big woodcock squatted flat, bill pointed straight out and resting ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... turned round and strolled about, loitering among the flowers. They halted with some curiosity before several women who were selling bunches of fern and bundles of vine-leaves, neatly tied up in packets of five and twenty. Then they turned down another covered alley, which was almost deserted, and where their footsteps echoed as though they had been walking ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... People began arriving from every direction. There were the Blue Water Children, bright pebbles around their necks, and white sea shells in their blue hair. The Forest Children were crowned with maidenhair fern. The Tree Girl was the most beautiful of all in her silver cobweb frock and her cloudy hair. The Tree Man stood still in the shadow, but his long white beard gleamed out, and his deep eyes. Wild ...
— The Little House in the Fairy Wood • Ethel Cook Eliot
... special haunt and had just gone out. On a round mosaic table stood an exqusite black-and-gilt Etruscan patera filled with white anemones; on another table near by stood a silver one filled with the same flowers, pink and yellow. Each was circled round the edge with fringing masses of maiden-hair fern. Every lounge and chair had a low, broad foot-stool before it, ruffled with the chintz; and in one corner of the room were a square pink and white and green Moorish rug, with ten or a dozen chintz-covered pillows, piled up ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson
... little sugar ant made up his mind to roam— To fare away far away, far away from home. He had eaten all his breakfast, and he had his ma's consent To see what he should chance to see and here's the way he went— Up and down a fern frond, round and round a stone, Down a gloomy gully where he loathed to be alone, Up a mighty mountain range, seven inches high, Through the fearful forest grass that nearly hid the sky, Out along a bracken bridge, bending in the moss, Till he reached a dreadful desert that ...
— A Book for Kids • C. J. (Clarence Michael James) Dennis
... went, slowly, down amongst fern-hung rocks, and narrow ravines full of rich foliage, while tall palms stood up every here and there like columns; and then all at once the General stood aside, and the party, with the earth trembling beneath their feet, passed through a screen of trees, and stood ...
— Off to the Wilds - Being the Adventures of Two Brothers • George Manville Fenn
... kitchen to find her father sitting placidly in the rocking-chair by the window. He had lighted his corn-cob pipe, in which he always smoked a mixture of dried sweet-fern as being cheaper than tobacco, and his face wore something resembling a smile—a foxy smile—as he watched his youngest-born ploughing down the hill through the deep snow, while the more obedient Waitstill moved about the room, setting supper ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Newbury found a seat for Marcia on a fallen trunk, and threw himself beside her. The world seemed to have been all washed by the thunder-storm of the night before; the odors of grass, earth, and fern were steaming out into the summer air. The wood was alive with the hum of innumerable insects, which had become audible and dominant with the gradual silencing of the birds. In the half-cut hay-fields ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... succession of hills, of which each descent, however steep, leads to a still longer ascent, until you reach the high level of Exmoor. The first six miles are through real Devonshire lanes; on each side high banks, all covered with fern and grass, and topped with shrubs and trees; for miles we were hedged in with hazels, bearing nuts with a luxuriance wonderful to the eyes of those accustomed to see them sold at the corners of streets for a penny the dozen. In spring ...
— A New Illustrated Edition of J. S. Rarey's Art of Taming Horses • J. S. Rarey
... almost too openly. They chatted lightly on many subjects as they walked together, knee-deep, at times, among scarlet wine-berries, and the delicate green and ebony of maidenhair fern. The scents and essence of summer hung heavy in the air. Shafts of golden sunlight, piercing the somber canopy of the forest isles, touched, and, it seemed to Geoffrey, etherealized, his companion. The completeness of his enjoyment troubled the man, and presently he ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... (Filices).—A seedling fern of this species came up by chance in a flowerpot near its parent. The frond, as yet only slightly lobed, was only .16 of an inch in length and .2 in breadth, and was supported on a rachis as fine as a hair and .23 of an inch in height. A very thin glass filament, which projected ...
— The Power of Movement in Plants • Charles Darwin
... you will find the strange relics of a former race: stone circles, barrows, cromlechs, and prehistoric dwellings mingling with the fern and heather and stunted grass of the hillside, and you breathe in tonic air that has come to you across two thousand ...
— Legend Land, Volume 2 • Various
... elves at play Amid the night-winds, in their lonely way— Some whistling and some moaning, some asleep, And dreaming dismal dreams, and sighing deep Over their couches of green moss and flowers, And solitary fern, and heather bowers. ...
— The Death-Wake - or Lunacy; a Necromaunt in Three Chimeras • Thomas T Stoddart
... ground will permit the use of a harrow good results are obtainable by scarifying the soil in strips about 10 feet apart and sowing the seed in these strips. On unburned areas covered with a dense growth of fern, salal, moss, grass, or other plants, this covering must be removed by the seed spot method. This consists in removing the ground cover with a grub hoe or mattock in spots of varying diameter (6 inches to 3 feet) ...
— Practical Forestry in the Pacific Northwest • Edward Tyson Allen
... highway, then up a trail where the Gomez brushed the undergrowth on each side as it desperately dug into moss, rain-gutted ruts, loose rocks, all on a vicious slant which seemed to push the car down again. Beside them, the mountain woods were sacredly quiet, with fern and lily and green-lit spaces. They came out in a clearing, before dusk. Beside the clearing was a brook, with a crude cradle—sign of a not very successful gold miner. Before a log cabin, in a sway-sided rocker, creaked a tall, white, flabby woman, once nearly beautiful, now rubbed ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... 1818, and presents itself as a tin-white metal of great lustre, and susceptible of a fine polish. It has a fibrous structure, crystallizes easily in regular octahedrons, presenting often the peculiar arborescent appearance of the fern. It is soft, but harder and more tenacious than tin; it can be bent, filed, and easily cut: it imparts to paper a color like that of lead. It is very malleable and ductile, and can be hammered into thin leaves. It is easily fused, and melts before it glows (450 deg.). ...
— A System of Instruction in the Practical Use of the Blowpipe • Anonymous
... created the hopeless forest, sheltered by the great n'sambya trees, they lie; pools of shadowy and tranquil water, broken by reflections of branches and mirroring speargrass ten feet high and fanlike fern fronds. ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... paces distant, standing amidst the long and rank fern that grew on each side of their path, quite motionless, and looking on the pair with a sarcastic smile, stood the ominous stranger whom we first met at the sign of ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various
... ice in the bottom of each shell; fill with the pulp, mixed thoroughly with powdered sugar and a little sherry, if desired; and place a maraschino cherry or bit of bright-colored jelly in the centre of each. Lay on paper doilies or surround with bits of asparagus fern. ...
— The International Jewish Cook Book • Florence Kreisler Greenbaum
... to say. If any of the class to whom I appeal incline to let "I dare not wait upon I would," hear the experience of a bold enthusiast, as recounted by Mr. Castle in his small brochure, "Orchids." This gentleman had a fern-case outside his sitting-room window, six feet long by three wide. He ran pipes through it, warmed presumably by gas. More ambitious than I venture to recommend, "in this miniature structure," says Mr. Castle, "with ...
— About Orchids - A Chat • Frederick Boyle
... down into the jungle to try and make my way up the opposite side where the other monkeys had fallen. It was dangerous work, for the rocks were covered with a thin layer of earth which supported a dense growth of vegetation. If I tried to let myself down a steep slope by clinging to a thick fern it would almost invariably strip away with a long layer of dirt and send ...
— Camps and Trails in China - A Narrative of Exploration, Adventure, and Sport in Little-Known China • Roy Chapman Andrews and Yvette Borup Andrews
... heat 'mong the fern-stalks green,— Or dreameth of elves 'neath the forest treen: He wrappeth him up when the oak leaves sere And the ripe acorns fall, at the wane o' the year; And he tippleth at Yule, by the log's cheery glow.— Come, jollily trowl The brown round bowl, And pledge ...
— The Baron's Yule Feast: A Christmas Rhyme • Thomas Cooper
... exquisitely pinnated feathery fronds of the ferns to tremble incessantly. In another part was a little patch of mossy meadow, and again there were decaying logs out of which sprang various ferns in wild luxuriance, as one has seen them in deeply-shaded, low-lying woods. The maiden-hair fern was here seen ranging from leaves as large as one's thumb-nail to a species with leaves the size of pin-heads. There was a charming harmony in the whole arrangement; nothing seemed abrupt, each effect blended gracefully with those surrounding ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... path little animals came out of the fern to meet them; the very first that they met were Peter ...
— The Great Big Treasury of Beatrix Potter • Beatrix Potter
... came to Rocky Canyon except for provisions; his logs were slipped down a "shoot" or slide to the river, where they voyaged once a month to a distant mill, but HE did not accompany them. The daughter, seldom seen at Rocky Canyon, was a half-grown girl, brown as autumn fern, wild-eyed, disheveled, in a homespun skirt, sunbonnet, and boy's brogans. Such were the plain facts which skeptical Rocky Canyon opposed to the passengers' legends. Nevertheless, some of the younger miners found it not out of their way to go ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... she drops into silence and changes the subject,—why, look there for something! just as, when going through deep meadow-grass, a bird flies ostentatiously up before you, you may know her nest is not there, but far off, under distant tufts of fern and buttercup, through which she has crept with a silent flutter in her spotted breast, to act her ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... latest book on the Origin of Life Dr. Charlton Bastian tells of using two solutions. One consisted of two or three drops of dilute sodium silicate with eight drops of liquor fern pernitratis to one ounce of distilled water. The other was composed of the same amount of the silicate with six drops of dilute phosphoric acid and six grains of ammonium phosphate. He filled sterilised tubes, sealed them ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... went up and down, still following the water. Hazel and birch, oak and pine, overhung and darkened it. Bosses of rock thrust themselves forward, patched with lichen and moss, seamed and fringed with fern and heath. Roots of trees, huge and twisted, spread and clutched like guardian serpents. In places where rock had fallen the earth seemed to gape. In the shadow it looked a gnome world—a gnome or a dragon world. Then upon ledge or bank showed bells or disks or petaled ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... that it was superfluous to look any further or inquire any more concerning the whereabouts of the missing man. All that was mortal of him was here, the head covered with a cloth, and bits of the fresh summer growth of fern and frond ...
— The Blotting Book • E. F. Benson
... mount guard over the cottage, and to make pleasant shady places on the wide, sunny lawns that stretched before and behind it. The brook no longer murmured unseen, but laughed now in the sunlight, and reflected every manner of pretty thing,—fleecy cloudlet, fluttering bird or butterfly, nodding fern ...
— Hildegarde's Holiday - a story for girls • Laura E. Richards
... the Widow Bogart was Fern Mullins, a girl of twenty-two who was to be teacher of English, French, and gymnastics in the high school this coming session. Fern Mullins had come to town early, for the six-weeks normal course for country teachers. Carol had noticed her on the street, had heard almost as much about her as ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... same relation to light. In the hollows we met with superb ferns growing on stems some twenty feet in height, and about the thickness of a boat-oar. It then throws out a number of leaves in every direction, four or five feet in length, very similar in appearance to the common fern. Another curious tree had a stem sixteen feet long; after which it branched out in long spiral leaves which hung down on all sides, resembling those of the larger kinds of grass. From the centre of the leaves sprang a foot-stalk twenty feet in length, exactly like the sugar-cane, ...
— Twice Lost • W.H.G. Kingston
... towards the north, the soil being thrown back so as to cover their stems; or they may be taken up and laid in closely in deep trenches, so that none of the lower bare portion of the stem may be exposed. Some dry fern may also be laid over the tops. The spring varieties are extremely valuable, as they come at a season when the finer vegetables are scarce. They afford a supply from ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... feet square, and from fifteen to twenty high. When lighted up by the torches, it had a very wild and picturesque appearance. The horses were tethered in one part, while we all went out and collected grass and fern leaves for our beds, and a good supply of fuel for our fire. Having cooked our supper, we sat round the fire, while one of the natives, who spoke English very well, told us some of the wonderful ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... one understood the cool nature of that organ better than Melanie herself. The ladies in the apartment at the Archangel had lingered at their breakfast, the austerity of which had been mitigated by a center decoration of orchids and fern, fresh-touched with dew; or so Madame Reynier had described them to Melanie, as she brought them to her with the card of Mr. Lloyd-Jones. Miss Reynier smiled faintly, admired the ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger
... as well in its new as in its old home, and indeed often supplants the native species. As the Maoris say,—"As the white man's rat has driven away the native rat, so the European fly has driven away our fly, so the clover kills our fern, and so will the Maori himself disappear before the ...
— The Scientific Evidences of Organic Evolution • George John Romanes
... string looks jest like a fern with a lot of roots. My mother used to grow them in the corner of our garden. ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: Volume IV, Georgia Narratives, Part 1 • Works Projects Administration
... fitted for high enjoyment, both loving as ardently and deeply as it is possible for human beings to love. Through the rich and beautiful woods of the park, over the sunny lawns and grassy savannas—where the wild deer, nested in the tall fern, raising its dark eyes and antlered head to gaze above the feathery green at the passers by—Wilton and Laura wandered on, pouring forth the tale of affection into each other's hearts, gazing in each other's eyes, and seeming, through ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... thick hair, and did not even get his feet wet as they swam across the Straits of Messina. On the other side, not far from Rome, was a forest of tall trees, and as by this time it was getting dark, the wolf placed William on a bed of soft fern, and broke off a branch of delicious fruits, which he gave him for supper. Then he scooped out a deep pit with his paws, and lined it with moss and feathery grasses, and there they both lay down and slept till morning; in spite of missing ...
— The Red Romance Book • Various
... I (for as long as his tent continued pleasantly to interrupt my little wilderness) sat on two stones, and smoked, and plucked grass and talked to the tune of the brown water. His children were mere whelps, they fought and bit among the fern like vermin. His wife was a mere squaw; I saw her gather brush and tend the kettle, but she never ventured to address her lord while I was present. The tent was a mere gipsy hovel, like a sty for pigs. But the grinder himself had the fine self-sufficiency and grave politeness of the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... circumstances they would have rejoiced over the trip, for it was carrying them back to the gleam of leaf-dappled streams and waving trees and deep, cool forests. It made their nostrils dilate with pleasure as they whirled past fern-filled ravines, out of which the rivulets stole with stealthy circuits under mossy rocks. They were both forest-born, and it was like getting back home out of a strange desert country to come back ...
— A Little Norsk; Or, Ol' Pap's Flaxen • Hamlin Garland
... By angry wolf, or pard with prying head, Until it came to some unfooted plains Where fed the herds of Pan: ay great his gains Who thus one lamb did lose. Paths there were many, Winding through palmy fern, and rushes fenny, 80 And ivy banks; all leading pleasantly To a wide lawn, whence one could only see Stems thronging all around between the swell Of turf and slanting branches: who could tell The freshness of the space of heaven above, Edg'd round with dark tree tops? through which a dove ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... in the uncomfortable sounding Akenside (oak), Fearenside (fern), but Heaviside appears to be a nickname. Handyside may mean "gracious manner," from Mid. Eng. side, cognate with Ger. Sitte, custom. See Hendy (Chapter XXII). The simple end survives as Ind or Nind (Chapter III) and in Overend (Chapter XII), Townsend. ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... more limited height, it at length reaches the bottom of the valley. It is only on the precipices about the fall that the Chamaerops appears to grow; at the foot of a precipice a little to the right (going from Churra,) a tree fern grows, which I have Wallich's authority for stating to be Polypod giganteum, a fern which occurred at Mahadeb, and which I have seen in somewhat similar situations at Mergui. All my excursions have ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
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