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More "Thistle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... learned her enough English to say "yes," for she took possession of our camp and begun to order me around. First thing she lugged our Navajo blankets to the creek, washed 'em, then spread 'em over some bushes and beat 'em with a stick until they were as clean and soft as thistle-down. I'll admit she made a pleasant picture against the bright colors of them blankets, and I couldn't altogether blame Mike for losin' his head. He'd lost it, all right. Every time she looked at him out of them big black eyes ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... said the Doctor, with a sigh, "for God's sake, and your own, do study Euclid if you can! Don't you see that your mind is always sky-rocketing and chasing thistle-down ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... bitter cold. Dust, too, was stirred up, and swept along so thickly that the day became as dark as night. Then the rain burst upon them like a waterspout, and, mingling with the flying dust overhead, came down in the form of mud, mixed with flying sticks and stones, and grass, and prickly thistle-heads. ...
— The Rover of the Andes - A Tale of Adventure on South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... pile of rock; — it well deserves its name of Hurtado, or separated. The mountain is steep, extremely rugged, and broken, and so entirely destitute of trees, and even bushes, that we actually could not make a skewer to stretch out our meat over the fire of thistle- stalks. [1] The strange aspect of this mountain is contrasted by the sea-like plain, which not only abuts against its steep sides, but likewise separates the parallel ranges. The uniformity of the colouring gives ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... his harp, And turned his face to the naked sky, Where, blown before the wastrel wind, The thistle-down she ...
— Verses 1889-1896 • Rudyard Kipling
... old lord about London in those days,—or, rather, one who was an old Liberal but a young lord,—one Lord Mount Thistle, who had sat in the Cabinet, and had lately been made a peer when his place in the Cabinet was wanted. He was a pompous, would-be important, silly old man, well acquainted with all the traditions of his party, and perhaps, on that account, useful,—but a bore, and very apt to meddle when he was not ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... elegant; some of our most ancient patterns were scriptural or mathematical; the age ruled the prevailing taste and fashion, and everything in and out of Nature has had its turn and its day. Then, again, nationality goes for something: the Frenchman is fond of his lis and the Scot of his thistle. ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... gentleness, the fidelity and devotedness of woman! How strangely, how wonderfully formed is the heart of man, which, disdaining the terrors of the rope of the executioner, breaks and succumbs at the touch of the thistle-down of a woman's love! This creature, sir, gave me my fortune, made me what I am, left for me her country and her friends, adhered to me through good and evil report—and I prepared for her a cruel death! ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... she had said anything of the kind; and though she still held her nose rather high when Paul was near, she would have answered for his honesty as readily as for that of her own brothers. But hers had not been the charity that thinketh no evil, and her idle words had been like thistle-down, lightly sent forth, but when they had lighted, ...
— Friarswood Post-Office • Charlotte M. Yonge
... emerges upon an open space so full of sunshine that the strawberries are already ripening; near them are stacked the tender young trees, ready for spacing, and the billets of wood piled up and half covered with thistle and burdock leaves; and a little farther away, half hidden by tall weeds, teeming with insects, rises the peaked top of the woodsman's hut. Here one walks beside deep, grassy trenches, which appear to continue without end, along the forest level; farther, ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... have I jeopardised my life in your good cause, and I fear no charge of cowardice more than I fear thistle-down." ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... herself in the ball with her young, which moreover would be daily increasing in bulk. This wonderful procreant cradle, an elegant instance of the efforts of instinct, was found in a wheat-field suspended in the head of a thistle. ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1 • Gilbert White
... certainly it does her the greatest credit, and it is a great satisfaction to us all to have these things to show. I am sure nobody would ever think that ass was made of crape, and how naturally it seems to be eating the beautiful chenille thistle! I declare, I think the ass is as like an ass as ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... its progress. It is searching the consciences; it is exercising the reason; it is appealing to the noblest characteristics of intelligent Virginians. It is no foreign influence. From every abandoned plantation where the profitless fern and thistle have sprung up under the heel of slavery; from every falling mansion of the master, through whose windows the fox may look out securely, and over whose hearth-stone the thin grass is creeping, a warning voice is sinking deeply into all hearts not ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... The poet-priest appeared to be a director of the intellectual amusements of the day. But although they delighted the multitude, and he afterwards immortalised the marriage of his royal master, by his exquisite poem of "The Thistle and the Rose," he was doomed to experience that genius could neither procure the patronage of kings nor church preferment; and, in truth, it was small preferment with which Dunbar would have been satisfied, for, ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... and Norman was summoned to help them to trace out the old lines of encampment, ditch, rampart, and gates— happy work on those slopes of fresh turf, embroidered with every minute blossom of the moor—thyme, birdsfoot, eyebright, and dwarf purple thistle, buzzed and hummed over by busy, black-tailed, yellow- banded dumbledores, the breezy wind blowing softly in their faces, and the expanse of country—wooded hill, verdant pasture, amber harvest-field, winding river, smoke-canopied town, and brown moor, melting ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... a greengage. I returned home loaded with this undescribed genus: I found likewise a fine Buddleia, and Menispermum, with some rare Compositae, among which was an arborescent Eupatorium and a gigantic thistle, a Prunus in flower and fruit, and a neat Liparis, Calamus, Tree- fern, Tupistra, Pandanus, were likewise observed, and a beautiful Viburnum, Corol sterilibus, 4 phyllis, foliis niveis carneo venosis: petal fertil calyptratis, deciduis, intus caeruleo tinctis: staminibus ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... one short moment their eyes also. It was only a glance, but for the first and last time the woman's intuition cast a light for itself into the dark places of a strong man's soul. She gave a little gasp, and her other hand rested for an instant, as white and as light as thistle-down, upon his shoulder. ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... otherwise. It takes the bloom off the freshness of young writers if they are determined to exhibit the last new words that are in, or out of season. New words have a doubtful position at first. They float here and there like thistle-down, and their future depends upon where they settle. But until they are established and accepted they are out of place for children's use. They are contrary to the perfect manner for children. We ask ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... "Because it appears to me horrible, to see a poor girl lost and buried in some ugly and selfish man, and become, as they say seriously, the better half of the monster—yes! a fresh and blooming rose to become part of a frightful thistle!—Come, my dear count; confess there is something odious in this conjugal metempsychosis," added Adrienne, ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... nuthatches, titmice, woodpeckers, and brown creepers find larvae, grubs, borers, and insects' eggs in the crannies of the bark and other nooks and niches; the goldfinches find something to their taste in the buds of the trees and also make many a meal of thistle and sunflower seeds; the juncos and tree sparrows, forming a joint stock company in winter, rifle all kinds of weeds of their seedy treasures; the blue jays lunch on acorns and berries when they cannot find enough ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... it that I am to eat my meal standing, the same as a crane in a shallow, or moving from tuft to thistle like you'd see a jennet ...
— Three Wonder Plays • Lady I. A. Gregory
... dangers, and then back again to see a horse rolling on the ground, the gaunt man standing and slashing over it at a rent and fluttering mass of grey that streamed and wrapped about them both. And thick and fast as thistle-down on waste land on a windy day in July the ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... with a platinum spatula, and place over calcium chloride in a desiccator for some days. Reweigh. The loss equals moisture. This is generally very small. Or Handy's method may be used. The dried sample is then transferred to a small thistle-headed funnel which has been cut off from its stem, and the opening plugged with a little glass wool, and round the top rim of which a piece of fine platinum wire has been fastened, in order that it may afterwards be easily removed from the Soxhlet tube. The weight of this funnel and the glass ...
— Nitro-Explosives: A Practical Treatise • P. Gerald Sanford
... your money," said Berrow slowly; "the Thistle can't hold a candle to the Good Intent, and you know it. Many a time that little schooner o' mine has kept up with ...
— Many Cargoes • W.W. Jacobs
... the pasture's rude embrace, All o'errun with tangled vines, Where the thistle claims its place, And the straggling hedge confines, Bearing still the sweet impress 5 Of unfettered loveliness, In the field and by the wall, ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... said MacIan, and stared steadily at the heavy hilt of his standing sword, which in the slight wind swayed on its tempered steel like some huge thistle on its stalk. ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... Light as thistle-down were his feet, but no sooner had the Giant felt their tread than he gave a great start, and lifting his hand struck himself a tremendous blow upon his forehead. Pease-Blossom would have been crushed to death had he not ...
— The Story-teller • Maud Lindsay
... towards the evening; and as they walked on, having left the town, the sun poured his last beams on a group of persons that appeared hastily collecting and gathering round a spot, well known in the neighborhood of Knaresborough, called Thistle Hill. ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... to pieces with the fingers. v. ad loc. et Junius, voce Tease. Hence teasing for carding wool with teasels, a specics of thistle or instrument. ...
— The Forme of Cury • Samuel Pegge
... mossy passes, Saucy grasshoppers Leapt about the grasses And the thistle-burs; And the whispered chuckle Of the katydid Shook the honeysuckle Blossoms where ...
— Riley Child-Rhymes • James Whitcomb Riley
... the grace of young girls, daintily costumed, in robes with long fluttering sleeves... And old Japanese proverb declares that even a devil is pretty at eighteen: Oni mo jiu-hachi azami no hana: "Even a devil at eighteen, flower-of-the-thistle." ...
— Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things • Lafcadio Hearn
... however, coming from the lips of prophetical men. The first is that of Jotham: "The trees went forth on a time to anoint a king over them; and they said unto the olive-tree, Reign thou over us," etc. Judg. 9:8-15. The second is that of Jehoash: "The thistle that was in Lebanon sent to the cedar that was in Lebanon, saying, Give thy daughter to my son to wife: and there passed by a wild beast that was in Lebanon, and trode down the thistle." ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... surveyed and explored the mountain. There are a lot of strawberries planted there, which do very well, but there were not many ripe. The common weeds and plants of the top were very like English ones, such as buttercups, sow-thistle, plantain, wormwood, chickweed, charlock, St. John's wort, violets and many others, all closely allied to our common plants of those names, but of distinct species. There was also a honey-suckle, and a tall and very pretty kind of cowslip. None of these are found in the low tropical ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... vegetable kingdom. Every living plant has life-producing seed, or some method of reproducing itself. The thistle: who can count the number of plants that one thistle can produce in a year? One hundred strawberry plants can be made in ten years to produce more than a thousand ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... arms and legs, I sank back to the grid-floor; and in a moment I was able to stand upright with so slight a feeling of weight that I could have been a bit of thistle ready to blow ...
— Wandl the Invader • Raymond King Cummings
... quite so ridiculous,' said Miss Delacour; 'but as those silly children are going to dress, I suppose I had better put on the gown which I call my thistle gown. The thistle is the emblem of Scotland. I suppose you know ...
— Hollyhock - A Spirit of Mischief • L. T. Meade
... criticisms. His perception is so fine and his taste so exquisite that points of failure which a generous mind would overlook he discerns and speaks of with unfailing fidelity. He would at any time rather rub his nose against a thistle ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... Cobweb, good Mounsier get your weapons in your hand, & kill me a red hipt humble-Bee, on the top of a thistle; and good Mounsieur bring mee the hony bag. Doe not fret your selfe too much in the action, Mounsieur; and good mounsieur haue a care the hony bag breake not, I would be loth to haue you ouerflowne with a hony-bag signiour. Where's ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... think it necessary to show any difference between the foliage of an elm and an oak; and the gift-books of Christmas have every page surrounded with laboriously engraved garlands of rose, shamrock, thistle, and forget-me-not, without its being thought proper by the draughtsman, or desirable by the public, even in the case of those uncommon flowers, to observe the real shape of the petals of ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... The thistle-birds have changed their dun, For yellow coats, to match the sun; And in the same array of ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... which the hills fall with a series of the most lovely sweeping curves, known as "the Giant's Stairs." They are not a bit like stairs, but I never saw anything like them anywhere else, with their short green turf, and tender bluebells, and gossamer and thistle-down gleaming in the sun and the sheep-paths running along ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... summer weather, Come hither, for my darling loved ye well;— Here floats the thistle down for you to gather, And bearded grasses ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean
... simple words of the prophet Elisha on his death-bed would bring him victory. Yet so much greater was his force than that of Judah, that when Amaziah sent him a challenge, he replied by the insulting parable of the thistle and the cedar. Jeroboam II., his son, was likewise prosperous; but neither blessings nor warnings would induce these kings to forsake their golden calves. Amos, the herdsman-prophet of Tekoa, was warned to say nothing against the king's chapel at Bethel; and Hosea in vain declared that Ephraim ...
— The Chosen People - A Compendium Of Sacred And Church History For School-Children • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... grazing-grounds, and by the brink of the dull-green, serried hop-rows, talking at rare intervals about the value of the crops, the drainage of the estate, the village schools, the Primrose League, and the iniquities of Mr. Gladstone, while Oke of Okehurst carefully cut down every tall thistle that caught his eye—I sometimes felt, I say, an intense and impotent desire to enlighten this man about his wife's character. I seemed to understand it so well, and to understand it well seemed to imply such a comfortable ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... to the great Alps, which await him at the close of the day. It is about Mulhausen that he begins to feel a change in the landscape. The fields broaden into rolling downs, watered by clear and running streams; the green Swiss thistle grows by riverside and cowshed; pines begin to tuft the slopes of gently rising hills; and now the sun has set, the stars come out, first Hesper, then the troop of lesser lights; and he feels—yes, indeed, there is now no mistake—the well-known, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... mean to keep it, Jane Sidney Vance," retorted Dotty, as fierce as a thistle; and finished undressing at the top ...
— Dotty Dimple's Flyaway • Sophie May
... I was in admiration of a plant, whose stem was about two feet high, and which had a round, shining, pale purple, beautiful flower, the waggoner, with a look of extreme scorn, exclaimed, 'Help thee, lad, does not thee know 'tis a common thistle? Didst thee not know that a thistle would prick thee?' continued he, laughing at the face I made when I touched the prickly leaves; 'why my horse Dobbin has more sense by half! he is not like an ass ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... properties. Gathering in groups, they appeared to consult whether such a peculiar substance could be converted into use, or whether the glove should be drawn by main force, and precipitated to the sow-thistle below. Unlike any large assemblage of men that I have ever seen, they wasted no time in long speeches, but speedily came to a decision; and approaching the thumb of my glove, some thirty or forty stalwart artificers took hold of the seam that passes inside, and pulled stoutly. The glove moved. This ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... dip here; The blow-ball of the thistle slip, And no wind breathing—but my lip Next to your anxious cheek and ear, To tell you I am near, my love, To tell you I ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... bee, just pausing ere he daubs his thigh With pollen from a hollyhock near by, Declares he never heard in terms so just The labor problem thoughtfully discussed! The browsing ass looks up and clears his whistle To say: "A monologue upon the thistle!" Meanwhile the lark, descending, folds his wing And innocently asks: "What!—did ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... either," cried Kirkpatrick, once more looking boldly up, and shaking his broad claymore: "My thistle has a point to sting all to death who would pass between this arm and ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... thyme, blue harebells and pale bents of quiver-grass edged the path, and thistledown, drifting from the chalk uplands, lay like snow in the hollows, or danced like living things on the path before her. A brood of goldfinches, with merry twitter and flashing wings, flitted round a tall milk thistle with variegated leaves and a little farther on, just at the opening of a glade from the path, she beheld a huge dragon-fly, banded with green, black, and gold, poised on wings invisible in their ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... with his tiny hand as he spoke and looked so brave and warlike that he seemed at least an inch taller than he had before. Toinette admired him very much; and Peascod slunk away with an abashed giggle muttering that Thistle needn't be so ready ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... his "other legs" and gave him, then led Balaam away from the late thistle blooms he was browsing. Hallam mounted, crossed his crutches before him, and lifted his cap. Amy tossed him a kiss and turned millward, while he ascended the hill road. But no sooner was she out of sight than ...
— Reels and Spindles - A Story of Mill Life • Evelyn Raymond
... Betty, "it's but little I drame, anyway. Jist keep an 'asy conscience and a plenty of the stuff in ye, and ye'll sleep like an infant. The last drame I had was when the boys put the thistle tops in the blankets, and then I was thinking that Captain Jack's man was currying me down, for the matter of Roanoke, but it's no trifle I mind either ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... burrowing owl from the late slant light of the mesa. If the fine vibrations which are the golden-violet glow of spring twilights were to tremble into sound, it would be just that mellow double note breaking along the blossom-tops. While the glow holds one sees the thistle-down flights and pouncings after prey, and on into the dark hears their soft pus-ssh! clearing out of the trail ahead. Maybe the pinpoint shriek of field mouse or kangaroo rat that pricks the wakeful pauses of the night is extorted by these mellow-voiced ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... progenitors, David and Solomon; and he let him know, that if he would not be so wise as to do what he commanded him, he must fight for his dominion. To which message Joash returned this answer in writing: "King Joash to king Amaziah. There was a vastly tall cypress tree in Mount Lebanon, as also a thistle; this thistle sent to the cypress tree to give the cypress tree's daughter in marriage to the thistle's son; but as the thistle was saying this, there came a wild beast, and trod down the thistle: and this may be a lesson to thee, not to be so ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... Angora came down the walk to meet her, her tail like a great plume, her soft coat as fluffy as thistle down. Proudly she walked as if ...
— Princess Polly's Gay Winter • Amy Brooks
... very great numbers, like the field-poppy, so that some of them are sure to survive. The winds carry other seeds to great distances, because they have beautiful feathery down attached to them, which causes them to be easily blown about—such as thistle ...
— Woodside - or, Look, Listen, and Learn. • Caroline Hadley
... said the fierce young Norman, and, breaking off the conversation, switched savagely at the head of a thistle close at ...
— The Rival Heirs being the Third and Last Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... form of predigested food, that it usually does not stop to consider whether the material was worth collecting in the first place. Gleaner after gleaner has worked in the field of English literature, sorting and sifting, until almost the last grain, husk, straw and thistle have been gathered and stored with their kind. But instead of making an anthology, we have gone on the assumption that something more than accidental identity of subject-matter holds together the apparently desultory remarks of poets on the subject of the poet's eyebrows, ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... passed. Then, one day, there had been a great chattering about the warm cup of milkweed fiber and thistle-down in the elder-bush, husky cheeping from the nest mingling with the joyous chirps of the mother-bird as she tilted and danced on its edge or fluttered ecstatically above it; and from the end of a swaying twig close by had swelled the proud ...
— The Biography of a Prairie Girl • Eleanor Gates
... that Mr. Alexander should attend, instead of his brother; and as the said Mr. Alexander was deservedly celebrated for possessing all the pertinacity of a bankruptcy-court attorney, combined with the obstinacy of that useful animal which browses on the thistle, he required but little tuition. He was especially enjoined to make himself as disagreeable as possible; and, above all, to black-ball the Tauntons at ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... opportunity of writing a few lines to you, my dear uncle, as I have a chance of sending it ashore by the revenue cutter Thistle, which is lying alongside of us. Between us, we have just captured a rascally smuggling lugger, with a cargo of lace, silk, and spirits. You will, I am sure, be surprised and grieved to hear that among ...
— With Wolfe in Canada - The Winning of a Continent • G. A. Henty
... just one tiny nap, because he had had so little sleep of late; and then he would be fresh for her, fresh for youth and beauty, coming towards him across the sunlit lawn—lady in grey! And settling back in his chair he closed his eyes. Some thistle-down came on what little air there was, and pitched on his moustache more white than itself. He did not know; but his breathing stirred it, caught there. A ray of sunlight struck through and lodged on his boot. A bumble-bee alighted and strolled on the crown of his Panama hat. And the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... is even without God in the world. He converses only with the spirits of the departed, with the motionless and silent clouds. The cold moonlight sheds its faint lustre on his head, the fox peeps out of the ruined tower, the thistle waves its beard to the wandering gale, and the strings of his harp seem as the hand of age, as the tale of other times passes over them, to sigh and rustle like the dry reeds in the winter's wind! If it were indeed possible to shew that this writer was nothing, it would only be another ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 1, November 1875 • Various
... was the prime adventurer of the party, now got ready to settle at Portland Bay. He chartered a small schooner, "The Thistle", loading her with stores and live stock, and with selections of seed, fruit trees, vegetables, etc., part of them bought from Fawkner, who had then a market garden on Windmill Hill, near Launceston, besides keeping the Cornwall Hotel there; and with ...
— Personal Recollections of Early Melbourne & Victoria • William Westgarth
... had instructed the House how to discover the emblems on the new Treasury Note—the rose, the thistle, the shamrock and the daffodil (this last for Wales). On the Treasury Bench the daffodil is rarely to be descried; but the thistle is in full ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Vol. 152, February 21st, 1917 • Various
... situation. I laughed, danced, drank, through the night; I drank deep of a dozen rosy ways to forgetfulness, till my mind was a great confusion, full of flitting pictures of loveliness, till life itself was an illusive pantomime, and my will but thistle-down on the folly of the moment. I drank with those gentle roisterers all through their starlit night, and if we stopped when morning came it was more from weariness than virtue. Then the yellow-robed slaves gave us the wine of recovery—alas! my faithful An was not amongst ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... case of plants, the power of increase is even greater and its effects more distinctly visible. Hundreds of square miles of the plains of La Plata are now covered with two or three species of European thistle, often to the exclusion of almost every other plant; but in the native countries of these thistles they occupy, except in cultivated or waste ground, a very subordinate part in the vegetation. Some American ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... Langham exchanged a few commonplaces till the others joined them, and then for a while the attention of everybody in the group was held by the squire's sister. She was very small, as thin and light as thistle-down, ill-dressed, and as communicative as a babbling child. The face and all the features were extraordinarily minute, and moreover, blanched and etherealised by age. She had the elfish look of a little withered ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... farmhouse; for you remember that Abraham Lincoln's literary models were "Aesop's Fables," "The Pilgrim's Progress" and the Bible. Perhaps he read the fable of the Fig Tree, Olive, Vine, and Bramble from the ninth chapter of Judges, or that of the Thistle and Cedar from the fourteenth chapter of II Kings and noted that teaching by story-telling was still well in vogue six ...
— The Talking Beasts • Various
... shot out instantly to the full length of the trail-rope—a heavy "pluck" sounded in my ears, and the next instant I saw my horse part from the tree, and scour off over the prairie, as if there had been a thistle under his tail. I had knotted the rope negligently upon the bit-ring, and the knot ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... to curse Hamilton, too, but didn't have the time. He seemed to be hurtling to one side of the ring and then the other, yet effortlessly, as lightly as thistle-down. Couldn't stop for anything—Holliday insisted on fighting right along. He couldn't remember it was so long since he had laid ...
— Winner Take All • Larry Evans
... ma Coronet Is comin' off, but not juist yet; Aw'm haudin' oot for somethin' smarter, For choice the Thistle or the Garter; Whichever ribbon is the broader A'll tak wi' joy," ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, June 10, 1914 • Various
... dish essentially Provencal, carde. The carde is a giant thistle that grows to a height of five or six feet, and is so luxuriantly magnificent both in leaf and in flower that it deserves a place among ornamental plants. The edible portion is the stem—blanched like celery, ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... heel and toe, — I will blow a thunder note From my brazen bugle's throat Till the sand and thistle know The leveled walls of Jerico, Jerico, Jerico, Jerico. ...
— The Second Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... Faylinn, held a great banquet and assembly of the lords and princes of the Wee Folk. And all their captains and men of war came thither, to show their feats before the King, among whom was the strong man, namely Glowar, whose might was such that with his battle-axe he could hew down a thistle at one stroke. Thither also came the King's heir-apparent. Tiny, son of Tot, and the Queen Bebo with her maidens; and there were also the King's harpers and singing-men, and the chief poet of the court, who ...
— The High Deeds of Finn and other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland • T. W. Rolleston
... my Lord of Glandine, Thistle-eaters the stoutest gave way, Outdone in their own special line By the ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... kingdom with civil war and confusion. The queen conferred titles upon those who appeared to have influence in the nation [118] [See note Y, at the end of this Vol.] and attachment to her government, and revived the order of the thistle, which ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... down by the early train, Whirl down with shriek and whistle, And feel the bluff North blow again, And mark the sprouting thistle Set up on waste patch of the lane Its ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... Varying the sea-green wave; while the young moon, Scarce visible amid the warmer tints Of western splendours, slowly lifts her brow Modest and icy-lustred! O'er the plain The light dews rise, sprinkling the thistle's head, And hanging its clear drops on the wild waste Of broomy fragrance. Season of delight! Thou soul-expanding pow'r, whose wondrous glow Can bid all nature smile! Ah! why to me Come unregarded, undelighting still ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson
... matter about how she came to die. She reached the Union early Sunday morning, and died in the afternoon—that's clear enough.' Then I asked what she'd been doing lately, and Mr. Boldwood turned round to me then, and left off spitting a thistle with the end of his stick. He told me about her having lived by seampstering in Melchester, as I mentioned to you, and that she walked therefrom at the end of last week, passing near here Saturday night in the dusk. They then said I had better just name a hint of her death to you, and away they ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... say what there was about my partner—a whimsical humor, a slight mocking sound in his voice, which pleased me; he took nothing seriously; everything he said was as light as a thistle-down; he reminded me of the wit of grandmamma and the Marquis; we got ...
— The Reflections of Ambrosine - A Novel • Elinor Glyn
... of the almost incredible power of multiplication of an animal or plant when taken into a new environment, removed from conditions which held it in check, as the introduction of the mongoose into Jamaica, the rabbit into Australia, the thistle into New South Wales and the ...
— Disease and Its Causes • William Thomas Councilman
... teach the bloodhounds a lesson. I never entered the filthy place but once. There were two sons and a daughter. Oh, how immortally beautiful that girl was! Such velvet darkness in the eye, such statuesque lines, such rose-leaf color, such hair—'hair like the thistle-down tinted with gold,' as John Mills, the Scotch poet-player, sang. The old man Raynier worshipped her, perhaps as a wild beast loves its whelp. But he had all sorts of fanciful names for her, Heart's-ease and Heart's Delight, and Violet and Rose ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... vividness and intensity beyond that of other places. I see it in the yellows of hawkweed, rock-rose, and birds'-foot-trefoil, in the innumerable specks of brilliant colour—blue and white and rose—of milk-wort and squinancy-wort, and in the large flowers of the dwarf thistle, glowing purple in its green setting; and I hear it in every bird-sound, in the trivial songs of yellow-hammer and corn-bunting, and of ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... infatuation peculiar to a man in love, he look a pleasure in being near one so closely connected with Lucy, although that one was the very person who had deprived him of all he valued on earth. So it fell out that Sir Hugh Horsingham and Ned Meredith were supping at the Rose and Thistle in close alliance, the table adjoining them being occupied by those staunch Hanoverians, Colonel Bludyer ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... it were, a Plant growing out of a Plant, or somewhat like the hairs of Animals) as there is to be found amongst small shrubs that compose bushes; but for the most part, they consist of small transparent parts, some of which grow in the shape of small Needles or Bodkins, as on the Thistle, Cowag-ecod and Nettle; others in the form of Cat's claws, as in Cliders, the beards of Barley, the edges of several sorts of Grass and Reeds, &c. in other, as Coltsfoot, Rose-campion, Aps, Poplar, Willow, and almost all other downy Plants, they grow in ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... kindness have been of untold benefit to millions of people. You remember he said, "When they lay me away let it be said of me that as I traveled along life's road I have always endeavored to pull up a thistle and plant a rose in ...
— Dollars and Sense • Col. Wm. C. Hunter
... of a thistle (Cersium virginianium, or Carduus virginianus), which are about the ordinary size of carrots, are also eaten by them. They are sweet and well flavored, but require a long preparation to fit ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... scarlet cicadas crouched in ranks: Slack the thistle-head piled its down-silk grey: Scarce the stony lizard sucked hollows in his flanks: Thick on spots of umbrage our drowsed flocks lay. Sudden bowed the chestnuts beneath a wind unheard, Lengthened ran the grasses, the sky grew slate: Then amid a swift flight of winged seed white ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Scotsmen are a pertinacious brood; Fitly you wear the thistle in your cap, As in your grim theology. O we're not all so fierce! God knows you'll find, Well-combed and smooth-licked gentlemen enough, Who will rejoice with you To sneer at Calvin's close-wedged ...
— An Orkney Maid • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... here to this tea-meetin' an stravagin' yonder to some bit choir practise, an' here awa, there awa, until Ah dinna ken what's to be the end o' it! Aye, an' the next thing they've gotten intill their bit heids is that they must get a bit o' an idolatrous music boax for the kirk! Yon bit thistle heid o' a schoolmaister cam' till me aboot the thing the day; what d'ye ...
— Duncan Polite - The Watchman of Glenoro • Marian Keith
... then, a wish, (I mind its pow'r), A wish that to my latest hour Shall strongly heave my breast, That I for poor auld Scotland's sake Some usefu' plan or book could make, Or sing a sang at least. The rough burr-thistle, spreading wide Amang the bearded bear, I turn'd the weeder-clips aside, An' spar'd the symbol dear: No nation, no station, My envy e'er could raise; A Scot still, but blot still, I ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... wait long for company. For one by one, the Lovely Ladies, wild with the joy of the mazy dance, the soft rush of the wind and the laughing and clapping of the little leaves, loose their hold, and drift to earth light as thistle-down, and that is the end of their dancing for that year. Where do they go to while the year goes by? I have never found out, but I think it most likely that they go to the ...
— Piccaninnies • Isabel Maud Peacocke
... waste grasses on my spear, I ride forever seeking after God. My hair grows whiter than my thistle plume And all my limbs are loose; but in my eyes The star of an unconquerable praise; For in my soul one hope forever sings, That at the next white corner of the road My eyes may ...
— Leaves of Life - For Daily Inspiration • Margaret Bird Steinmetz
... me fairly away!' she said, jumping up and floating off to the mill door like any thistle down, on the tips of ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... like a ton of hay. But the next day!—my Lord alive, you remember the next day, don't you, Mrs. Lathrop, 'n' it must have been arsenic as them four had put in his bottle, for I was up in the garret makin' a thistle-down pillow 'n' there come Ed tearin' up on his bicycle to tell me as I must stick in ten dollars more on a margin. 'On a what?' I hollered from the window. 'On a margin,' he hollered from under the porch. Well, really, Mrs. Lathrop, I do ...
— Susan Clegg and Her Neighbors' Affairs • Anne Warner
... as the brutal law of the land went. But the road-menders, with better hearts, from that day to this have always kept up the mound. However beautiful the day, however beautiful the beech trees and the ashes that stand apart, there is always a melancholy feeling in passing the place. This thistle-grown mound saddens the whole; it is impossible to forget it; it lies, as it were, under everything, under the beeches, the sunlit sward and fern. The mark of death is there. The dogs and the driven cattle tread the spot; a human being has passed into dust. The circumstance ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... what she put in his button-hole; a thistle, thorns and all, would have been precious to him if her hands had touched it, and he would have torn his fingers against the prickles with an exquisite sense ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... and rolled into hollows rich in mulcted earth; parachutes, buoyed on thistle silk, sailed from distant jungle plants; every swirl of breeze brought spores of lichens and moss, and even the retreating water unwittingly aided, having transported hither and dropped a cargo of living things, from tiniest plant to seeds of mightiest mora. Though in the ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... the mead There swelled a sob of minstrelsy, Faint sackbuts and the dreamy reed, And plaintive lips of maids thereby, And songs blown out like thistle seed. ...
— Gloucester Moors and Other Poems • William Vaughn Moody
... put his acorn helmet on; It was plumed of the silk of the thistle down; The corslet plate that guarded his breast Was once the wild bee's golden vest; His cloak, of a thousand mingled dyes, Was formed of the wings of butterflies; His shield was the shell of a lady-bug green, ...
— The Posy Ring - A Book of Verse for Children • Various
... to lack a knowledge of the chemical properties of the food we eat, and the suitability of it to our organism. Yet the latter bears direct and intimate relation to man's physical, mental, and moral well-being, while the former is but a 'sapless, heartless thistle for pedantic chaffinches,' ...
— No Animal Food - and Nutrition and Diet with Vegetable Recipes • Rupert H. Wheldon
... if it were the wind, and they, the sand and pebbles, of our illustration; or, on the other hand, as if the intelligence of a gardener had been operative in cutting the weaker organisms down. The thistle, which has spread over the Pampas, to the destruction of native plants, has been more effectually "selected" by the unconscious operation of natural conditions than if a thousand agriculturists had spent ...
— Criticisms on "The Origin of Species" - From 'The Natural History Review', 1864 • Thomas H. Huxley
... in foreign lands. The Devonshire shepherd will weep over the recollections which a little daisy will bring back to him of the old country of his childhood, when standing beneath an Australian gum tree. I have seen a Scotchman in America cherish a thistle, as if it were the rarest of plants, from its native associations; and I know of a potted shamrock which was brought all the way across the ocean in an emigrant ship, by an Irish miner, and which now adorns the window of a veranda-fronted cottage ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... and the verification of it are of so recent a date, that we cannot resist giving it a place in our pages. In the account of the late Captain Flinder's voyage of discovery, is the melancholy relation of the loss of the master, Mr. Thistle, with seven others, in a boat, on the inhospitable shores of Terra Australia. To this narrative, the following note is subjoined, which we shall here quote in Captain Flinder's own words: "This evening, Mr. Fowler, the lieutenant, ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... gardens, with bells large and clear; crimson pinks; the Michaelmas daisy; a plant with a thin, radiated yellow flower, of the character of an aster; a centaurea of a light purple, handsomer than any English one; a thistle in the dryest places, resembling an eryngo, with a thick, bushy top; mulleins, yellow and white; the wild mignonnette, and the white convolvulus; and clematis festooning the bushes, recalled the flowery fields and lanes of England, and yet told us that we were not there. The meadows ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... is what is intended for a mock shield of Scotland. The shield is perforated with holes for eyes and a mouth so as to represent a mask, and it is charged with a crowned thistle; the supporters are an ass's head, plaided and wearing a Scotch bonnet, and a peacock. Motto, "Impudent, Rebellious, Lazy ...
— Trial of Mary Blandy • William Roughead
... work, and forgotten work, this peopled, clothed, articulate-speaking, high-towered, wide-acred world. For the thistle a blade of grass, later a drop of nourishing milk, later a nobler man. Man perfects himself as well as the ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... it is with plants; cases could be given of introduced plants which have become common throughout whole islands in a period of less than ten years. Several of the plants, such as the cardoon and a tall thistle, which are now the commonest over the wide plains of La Plata, clothing square leagues of surface almost to the exclusion of every other plant, have been introduced from Europe; and there are plants which now range in India, as I hear from Dr. ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... the thistle burrs off my trousers, "let us sit down for a spell, shall we?" To my surprise, they consented. We went round to the stoop and I took a big rocker. For a moment they stared, as though considering me in the new light of ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... heart of gold, Bravely defying winter's cold, When dreary north winds shrilly whistle Over the desolate fields of thistle; Thou comest to bless in beauty's ways, With memories of summer days, When at the touch of gentle showers, Decked were the fields in myriad flowers; Yet more than all I praise to-day This blossom bright, Since on her breast it lay Only ...
— Cap and Gown - A Treasury of College Verse • Selected by Frederic Knowles
... darkened by dust. The greater part of the place is in deep shadow, and the walls are stained and tinted by time and weather. A marble figure of Mary is stretched upon the tomb, round which is an iron railing, much corroded, bearing her national emblem—the thistle. I was weary with wandering, and sat down to rest myself at the monument, revolving in my mind the chequered and disastrous story of ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various
... fellow prowled about promiscuously a while, assailing one and another in French, to about as much purpose as one might have tried to storm the walls with discharges of thistle down; all smoked and drank as before. But as several other visitors arrived, and it became evident that if we did not come to see the castle, it was not likely we came for any thing else, a man was fished up from some depths unknown, with a promising bunch of keys. He ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... em the correlation of the body with the ether, and by thinking of it as light as thistle-down, will come the power ...
— The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali • Charles Johnston
... First published in the Contemporary Review for April, 1885; and now included in Volume XXII of the "Thistle Edition": Charles Scribner's Sons. ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... [Carlina. l. 7. Carline Thistle. Of the class Confederate Males. The seeds of this and of many other plants of the same class are furnished with a plume, by which admirable mechanism they perform long aerial journeys, crossing lakes and deserts, and are thus disseminated far from the ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... these words, all the deities that were present, having first filled the court with murmurs, answered in this manner: 'Great goddess, be pleased to reflect a little on the animosities such a choice may create among the rival flowers; even the worthless Thistle will pretend to deserve the crown, and if denied, will perhaps grow factious, and disturb your peaceful reign.' 'Your fears are groundless,' replied the goddess; 'I apprehend no such consequence; my resolution ...
— On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening, • Samuel Felton
... House. Then, when the first meeting of the Cabinet was summoned after his return, it became known that he also had resigned his office. There was nothing said about his resignation in the House. He had resigned on the score of ill-health, and that very worthy peer, Lord Mount Thistle, formerly Sir Marmaduke Morecombe, came back to the Duchy of Lancaster in his place. A Prime Minister sometimes finds great relief in the possession of a serviceable stick who can be made to go in and out as occasion may require; only it generally happens that the stick will expect some ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... velvet, was relieved by ornaments in silver and a radiated oval of white satin with golden rays. The back was fluted in white satin, enriched with the Royal Arms in burnished gold. The State chair was covered with crimson velvet with the Royal Arms and Crown, with the rose, thistle and ...
— Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign • John Ashton
... and was silent. So, too, was the actress, for some moments; then, softened almost to tears, half closing her eyes, and letting her fancy float away like thistle-down over town and country, upland, valley, and moor, she said softly,—"Dear Burleigh Grange, how lovely it must be now! What a verdurous twilight reigns under the old elms of the avenue!—in what a passion ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... boundaries are no barriers against contagion. Rivers and mountains are easily crossed by corrupting example. Ardent spirits, like all other fluids, perpetually seek their level. In vain does the farmer eradicate from his fields the last vestige of the noisome thistle, while the neighboring grounds are given up to its dominion, and every wind scatters the seed where it listeth. The effort against intemperance, to be effective, ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... Simon went to look If plums grew on a thistle; He pricked his fingers very much, Which ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... the Wrath of God And the curse of thistle and thorn— But Tubal got him a pointed rod, And scrabbled the earth for corn. Old—old as that early mould, Young as the sprouting grain— Yearly green is the strife ...
— Songs from Books • Rudyard Kipling
... blessed." Gen 22, 18. It is inconsistent for a Christian to curse even his most bitter enemy and an evil-doer; for he is commanded to bear upon his lips the Gospel. The dove did not bring to Noah in the ark a poisonous branch or a thistle sprig; she brought an olive-leaf in her mouth. Gen 8, 11. The Gospel likewise is simply a gracious, blessed, glad and healing word. It brings only blessing and grace to the whole world. No curse, but pure blessing, goes with the Gospel. ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. II - Epiphany, Easter and Pentecost • Martin Luther
... of the wall a perfectly gorgeous fringe of Epilobium obcordatum with flowers an inch wide, crowded together in lavish profusion, and colored as royal a purple as ever was worn by any high-bred plant of the tropics; and best of all, and greatest of all, a noble thistle in full bloom, standing erect, head and shoulders above his companions, and thrusting out his lances in sturdy vigor as if growing on a Scottish brae. All this brave warm bloom among the raw stones, right in the face of ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... aversion, and the very strangeness of the experience was not without attraction for his eager and dominant temperament. What a queer little oddity she was, he thought as he glanced up at the grave old house before turning rapidly away—as light and sensitive as thistle-down, as vivid as flame. He tried to recall her delicately distinguished figure and profound dark eyes, but her charming smile seemed to come between him and her features, and her face was obscured for him in a mysterious radiance. Her features taken in themselves were plain, he supposed, ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... project—but the cost! The Montyon prize of 2000 francs has been awarded to M. Mosson, for his method of drying and preserving vegetables for long sea voyages, as published a few months ago. M. Naudin states, that a certain kind of furze or thistle, of which cattle are very fond, may be made to grow without thorns—an important consideration, seeing that at present, before it can be used as food, it has to undergo a laborious beating, to crush and break the prickles with which it is covered. As the plant thrives best on poor soils, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 448 - Volume 18, New Series, July 31, 1852 • Various
... That she had a burly millionaire husband who still was under her spell and watched her jealously only made her more interesting, and they pitied her for being tied to a man twice her age and bulky as a bale of cotton. She who could dance like a sylph and was light on her little feet as a thistle down. Though wise ones sometimes said that Opal had her young eyes wide open when she married Ed Verrons, and she had him right under her little pink well manicured thumb. And some said she was not nearly ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... the foolish clown, 'kill me the red humble bee on the top of that thistle yonder; and, good Mr. Cobweb, bring me the honey-bag. Do not fret yourself too much in the action, Mr. Cobweb, and take care the honey-bag break not; I should be sorry to have you overflown with a honey-bag. Where ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... once or twice tried the experiment of leaving Paul with his grand-parents and calling for him in the late afternoon; but one day, on re-entering the Malibran, he was met by a small abashed figure clad in a kaleidoscopic tartan and a green velvet cap with a silver thistle. After this experience of the "surprises" of which Gran'ma was capable when she had a chance to take Paul shopping Ralph did not again venture to leave his son, and their subsequent Saturdays were passed ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... among the feelings that drew me homeward. At my departure their tomb had been hidden in the morning mist. Beholding it in the sunshine now, I felt a sensation through my frame as if a breeze had thrown the coolness of September over me, though not a leaf was stirred, nor did the thistle- down take flight. Was I to roam no more through this beautiful world, but only to the other end of the village? Then let me lie down near my parents, but not with them, because I love a green ...
— Fragments From The Journal of a Solitary Man - (From: "The Doliver Romance and Other Pieces: Tales and Sketches") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... cutting the outline of a thistle on a spruce staff he was carving for the boy. Donald watched him in silence as he worked in the fading light. The sun had set behind the chain of near hills, and the plateau where they were camping was gray with shadows. Through the dusk they could see the flock lazily browsing ...
— The Story of Wool • Sara Ware Bassett
... and flower, grain and grass, root, stem, and branch, all are composed or made up of these same dozen elements. If I ask you what bread is made of, you say it is composed of the dozen elements aforesaid. If I ask what wheat-straw is made of, you answer, the dozen. If I ask what a thistle is made of, you say the dozen. There are a good many milk-weeds in my strawberry patch, and I am glad to know that the milk-weed and the strawberry are both composed of the same dozen elements. Manure is the food of plants, and the food of plants is composed of the above dozen elements, and ...
— Talks on Manures • Joseph Harris
... could double that in an hour. I just jotted that down as I came up the valley from Paw-paw in the Chattanooga Limited. Why, just lookin' out of the cyah windo' would give me notions. I saw a thistle. Down she went on the list, an' down went whistle next her, suggested by our locomotive. Thistle. Whistle. Look at those disgraces. Look at the dead wood in 'em. Are not they just congested all up with pitfalls for the young? Once we get to work at Arkansopolis, ...
— How Doth the Simple Spelling Bee • Owen Wister
... innumerable grew on this plain, mixed with grass of a tawny brown-green. There were cactuses, red and yellow, scarlet and white gillias, tall spikes of yucca in full bloom, and masses of a superb white poppy with an orange-brown centre, whose blue-green foliage was prickly like that of the thistle. Here and there on the higher uplands appeared strange rock shapes of red and pink and pale yellow, which looked like castles with towers and pinnacles, or like primitive fortifications. Clover thought it all strangely beautiful, ...
— Clover • Susan Coolidge
... His feet refused to move, his hands hung powerless at his side, his tongue refused to utter a word. The bow and arrow fell from his hand, and his spear lay powerless. A little child, not so high as the fourth leaf of the thistle, came and spat on him, and a company of the spirits danced around him singing a taunting song. When they had thus finished their task of preparatory torture, a thousand little spirits drew their bows, and a thousand arrows pierced his heart. In a moment innumerable mattocks were employed ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends: North American Indian • Anonymous
... out of veins. In the receptacle formed where the bases of the upper leaves grow together, rain and dew are found collected - a certain cure for warts, country people say. Venus' Cup, Bath, or Basin, and Water Thistle, are a few of the teasel's folk names earned by its curious little tank. In it many small insects are drowned, and these are supposed to contribute nourishment to the plant; for Mr. Francis Darwin has noted that protoplasmic filaments reach out ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... woodman, and could fell and saw With lusty arm. You know that huge round beam Which props the hanging wall of the old chapel? Beneath that tree, while yet it was a tree He found a baby wrapt in mosses, lined With thistle-beards, and such small locks of wool As hang on brambles. Well, he brought him home, And reared him at the then Lord Velez' cost. And so the babe grew up a pretty boy, A pretty boy, but most unteachable— And never learnt a prayer, nor told a bead, ...
— Lyrical Ballads 1798 • Wordsworth and Coleridge
... skill and ingenuity, and a vast deal of perseverance. The castles are mounted upon the backs of elephants, which Johnny innocently mistook for enormous swine with two tails apiece. The knights are provided with shields, bearing Saint Andrew's cross and the thistle for a device, and would have been arrayed, without doubt, in kilt and tartan had it been possible. The bishops wear grotesque-looking cocked hats, intended for mitres, and their countenances are so singularly truculent and unprepossessing, that Max accuses ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... absolute rule, and the husbandman and hunter acknowledge her for their mistress. Asters and golden-rods reign along the way, and the life-everlasting withers not. The fields are reaped and shorn of their pride, but an inward verdure still crowns them. The thistle scatters its down on the pool, and yellow leaves clothe the vine, and naught disturbs the serious life of men. But behind the sheaves, and under the sod, there lurks a ripe fruit, which the reapers have not gathered, the true harvest of the year, which it bears forever, ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... which the careful farmer must contend are the wild garlic, tribby weed, dog fennel, two varieties of the common daisy, oxeye daisy, St. John's wort, blue thistle, common thistle, pigeon-weed, burdock, broad and narrow-leaved dock, poke-weed, clot-bur, three-thorned bur, supposed to have been introduced from Spain by the Merino sheep, Jamestown or "jimson" weed, sorrel, ...
— History and Comprehensive Description of Loudoun County, Virginia • James W. Head
... a crucifix, the cross and the figure of our Lord being in full relief. In the panel to the left are the arms of the See of Connecticut, resting on branches of oak. In the one to the right are the arms of the Bishop of Aberdeen, encircled by branches of the thistle. In the panel opposite that containing the crucifix are the emblems of St. Peter and St. Paul. The remaining four panels are filled with the emblems of the four Evangelists. From this part of the base rises a richly moulded ...
— Report Of Commemorative Services With The Sermons And Addresses At The Seabury Centenary, 1883-1885. • Diocese Of Connecticut
... from the name there given it of Fico del inferno, or the Devil's Fig: it has long been introduced to this country; GERARD, who cultivated it with success, ludicrously attributes its nickname to a different source: "The golden Thistle of Peru, called in the West-Indies, Fique del inferno, a friend of mine brought it unto me from an iland there, called Saint Johns Iland, among other seedes, what reason the inhabitants there have to call it so it is unto me unknown, unless it be bicause of his fruite, which doth much resemble ...
— The Botanical Magazine Vol. 7 - or, Flower-Garden Displayed • William Curtis
... in the romantic, A hundred thousand have run frantic— There's not a hideous highland spot, (Long fallowed to the core by Scott)— No rill, through rack and thistle dribbling, But has its deadlier crop of scribbling. Each fen, and flat, and flood, and fell, Gives birth to verses by the ell— There Wordsworth, for his muse's sallies, Claims all the ponds, the lanes, and alleys— There Coleridge swears none else shall ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... almost everywhere bare and barren, and yet these great beasts roam about and thrive excellently. They live on mosses and lichens, which they lick up with the tongue, and for this purpose their tongues are provided with hard, sharp, horny barbs like a thistle. In the same way they crop the velvety grass, less than half an inch high, which grows on the edges of the high alpine brooks, and which is so short that a horse ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... above, and kept his eye fixed there)—"I believe that we shall; that His great love shall so delight in making complete our happiness, even by such little memorials of our earthly affections (which must seem like waifs of thistle-down beside the great harvest of His abounding grace); that all the dear faces of those written in the Golden Book shall beam a welcome, all the more bounteous because reflecting His joy who has ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... anything to learn from the past. The Ignatian meditation on the "Kingdom of Christ" evoked heroic response in an age impregnated with the sentiments of chivalry, but to-day it needs to be adapted to a great extent, and some have vainly hoped to gather grapes from a thistle by substituting a parable drawn from some soul-stirring commercial ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... some coarse grass which was in full seed, and therefore very nourishing for the horses; also abundance of anise and sow- thistle, of which they are extravagantly fond, so we turned them loose and prepared to camp. Everything was soaking wet and we were half-perished with cold; indeed we were very uncomfortable. There was brushwood about, but we could get no fire till we had shaved off the wet ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... the weather, and of the celebrated Doctor McQ——, who was expected to give us an argumentative sermon that morning, until my argument came floating in at the door like a calm little bit of thistledown, to which our previous conversation had been as the thistle's self. ...
— On the Church Steps • Sarah C. Hallowell
... republican government in America the angel of freedom and the demon of slavery wrestled for the mastery. Tallyrand has beautifully and forcibly said: "The Lily and Thistle may grow together in harmonious proximity, but liberty and slavery delight in the separation." The pronounced policy of the best minds at the adoption of the Federal Constitution was to repress it as ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... for impure, bestial and selfish thoughts to blossom into loving and altruistic habits. Thistle seeds bring forth only the thistle. Contrariwise, it is entirely impossible for continual altruistic, sympathetic, and serviceful thoughts to bring forth a low and vicious character. Either thoughts or feelings precede and determine all our actions. Actions develop into habits, habits constitute ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... It is in spots impracticable, in a forest of brambles, on a wild moor where thorn and thistle intertwining forbid approach. The night she passes under an old cromlech. If anyone finds her there, she is isolated by the common dread; she is surrounded, as it were, ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... the foolish clown, "kill me the red humblebee on the top of that thistle yonder; and, good Mr. Cobweb, bring me the honey-bag. Do not fret yourself too much in the action, Mr. Cobweb, and take care the honey-bag break not; I should be sorry to have you overflown with ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... away, pulled up an iron-weed growing on the road-side, and fell to whipping a large purple thistle. Her thirst grew; she left the thistle and fell to whipping the rank grass. Then was heard an angry buzz, as the assaulted bees swarmed out of their defenses and literally ...
— That Old-Time Child, Roberta • Sophie Fox Sea
... became as dark as night. Then the rain burst upon them like a waterspout, and, mingling with the flying dust overhead, came down in the form of mud, mixed with flying sticks and stones, and grass, and prickly thistle-heads. ...
— The Rover of the Andes - A Tale of Adventure on South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... grew into months, and still Princess Sudolisu's kingdom looked like one large bedchamber. The people snored in the streets, the brave army lying in the fields slept soundly, hidden in the long grass under the shadow of nettle, wormwood, and thistle, rust and dust marring the brightness of their armour. Inside the palace everything was the same. The twelve maids of honour lay motionless. The princess alone kept watch, silent amid this reign of sleep. She ...
— Fairy Tales of the Slav Peasants and Herdsmen • Alexander Chodsko
... and shadow. Directly below was the Broom Road. Umbrageous flamboyants—the royal poincianas, or flame-trees—sheltered the short stretch of sward to the water, and their blossoms made a red-gold litter upon the grass. A giant acacia whose flowers were reddish pink and looked like thistle blooms, protected two canoes, one my own and one Afa's. The Annexe was bounded by the Broom Road and the rue de Bougainville, and across that street was the restaurant of Mme. Fanny. It was built over a tiny stream, which emptied fifty feet away into the lagoon. A clump of banana-trees ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... smiled above his harp, And turned his face to the naked sky, Where, blown before the wastrel wind, The thistle-down ...
— Verses 1889-1896 • Rudyard Kipling
... plant a garden with weeds and then pull them up again in secure trust that no lurking burdocks and Canada thistle shall remain? Dear model mothers and prudent papas, be not afraid of wholesome fiction, as such, duly labelled and left uncorked. It will be far better to administer plenty of "Robinson Crusoe" and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... you let us?" asked Betty eagerly, jumping up and dropping a kiss, light as thistle-down, upon the old face. "And we'll bring you flowers, whole bunches of them. Will you promise to be happy while ...
— The Outdoor Girls at the Hostess House • Laura Lee Hope
... know upland spirits too Who love the shadeless downs to climb; There, in the far-off fabled time, Men called them when the moon was new, And built them little huts of stone With briar and thistle over-grown. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 5, 1920 • Various
... candles were lighted. Rite slipped in, and, after having flown about like a thistle-down for a while, mounted a chair and put her arms about her mother's shoulders. Then Mr. Raleigh, sitting silently on a sofa, attracted her, and shortly afterward she had curled herself beside him and fallen asleep with her head upon his ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... melting in the tenderness of her gaze that again he was impelled by a strange influence, and he bent and kissed the hand. As he did so, she laid her other one upon his bent head; it was a touch soft as thistle-down, as caressing as that of a mother; and as he felt it, something tugged at Derrick's heart-strings. He turned away and left the ...
— The Woman's Way • Charles Garvice
... season begins to dim, the foliage of the trees and woods to tarnish, the plumage of the birds to fade, and their songs to cease. The hints of approaching fall are on every hand. How suggestive this thistle-down, for instance, which, as I sit by the open window, comes in and brushes softly across my hand! The first snowflake tells of winter not more plainly than this driving down heralds the approach of fall. ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... the opportunity of writing a few lines to you, my dear uncle, as I have a chance of sending it ashore by the revenue cutter Thistle, which is lying alongside of us. Between us, we have just captured a rascally smuggling lugger, with a cargo of lace, silk, and spirits. You will, I am sure, be surprised and grieved to hear that among the crew of the lugger was James Walsham. I could hardly believe ...
— With Wolfe in Canada - The Winning of a Continent • G. A. Henty
... tale aboot ma Coronet Is comin' off, but not juist yet; Aw'm haudin' oot for somethin' smarter, For choice the Thistle or the Garter; Whichever ribbon is the broader A'll tak wi' ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, June 10, 1914 • Various
... may bloom for England, The lily for France unfold; Ireland may honor the shamrock, Scotland her thistle bold; But the shield of the great Republic, The glory of the West, Shall bear a stalk of the tasseled corn— Of all our wealth the best. The arbutus and the golden-rod The heart of the North may cheer; And the mountain laurel for Maryland Its ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... fulsome thistle in the prime: Young trees bend lightly, but grow strong in time. Were I the worthiest to advise your honour, You should pursue him with your spredding bandes Swifter in march then is the lightning flame, And take him tardy whilst his plots ...
— A Collection Of Old English Plays, Vol. IV. • Editor: A.H. Bullen
... thistle-sifter, sifted a sieve of unsifted thistles. If Theophilus Thistle, the thistle-sifter, sifted a sieve of unsifted thistles, where is the sieve of unsifted thistles that ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... number of individuals of two species zigzagging over the summit, and occasionally settling upon the rocks right by the fields of snow. What kind of nectar they sipped I know not, for there were no flowers or verdure on the heights. They were the Painted Lady or Thistle Butterfly (Pyrameis cardui) and the Western White (Pieris occidentalis). He captured an individual of the latter species with his net, and to-day it graces his collection, a memento of a hard but glorious climb. ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... pinks nodded, and its stone-covered roofs overgrown with white sedum. I was struck by the number of prickly plants on the sandy banks of the Tarn. Those which now made the best show of bloom were the star-thistle centaurea and ononis repens. The appearance of this last was very curious, for in addition to its pink pea-blossoms it seemed to be sprinkled over with little flowers the colour of forget-me-nots. These, however, were not flowers at all, but ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... recounted o'er Strange tales of days when other forms he wore: How, far above the highest airy plain Where soars and sings the weird, fantastic crane, Wafted like thistle-down he strayed at will, With power almost supreme for good or ill, Over all lands and nations near and far, Beyond the seas, or 'neath the northern star, And long had pondered where were best to dwell When he should deign a human shape to wear. "Whether to be of them that buy ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • Various
... general direction was north-north-east. We saw, for the first time, pure greenish-yellow chlorite outcropping from the granite. The animals were apparently hibernating, and plants were rare; we remarked chiefly the sorrel and the blue thistle, or rather wild artichoke, the Shauk el-Jemel, a thorn loved by camels (Blepharis edulis), which recalled to mind the highlands of Syria. The second short-cut, the Wady el-Ga'agah, alias Sawawin, was the worse of the two: the deep drops and narrow gutters ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... dangerous classes? They live, they do not starve; they live on honest people. Judges, police, and jailers are fed by those who never trouble them. Crime is like a leech on the body, it will have blood. The wrongdoers are not the thorn hedge which we need for our protection, but the thistle, which has rare powers of reproduction, and uses the wind as its chariot to ride to other lands. Is it any wonder that wickedness is so difficult to eradicate? Those of us who have tried to keep our gardens free have sorrowed many a time when we have ...
— Broken Bread - from an Evangelist's Wallet • Thomas Champness
... and beeches still wore their liveries of rustling amber, the short grass on hill-side pastures was intensely green, flocks of thistle-birds disguised in demure russet passed in wavering flight from thicket to thicket, and over all a hot sun blazed in a sky of sapphire, linking summer and autumn together in the magnificence of a ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... forgot to say this morning that she thinks it would be better that the Investiture of the Thistle should be put off for ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume 1 (of 3), 1837-1843) • Queen Victoria
... multiplication of an animal or plant when taken into a new environment, removed from conditions which held it in check, as the introduction of the mongoose into Jamaica, the rabbit into Australia, the thistle into New South Wales and the water-plant ...
— Disease and Its Causes • William Thomas Councilman
... open to all comers, but as we heard that the duke was entertaining a distinguished company, including Lord Delamere of Vale Royal from our own county of Cheshire, we did not apply for permission to enter the grounds, and thus missed seeing the great Scotch thistle, the finest in all Scotland. This thistle was of the ordinary variety, but of colossal proportions, full seven feet high, or, as we afterwards saw it described, "a beautiful emblem of a war-like nation with his radious crown of ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... Nummy Tangye, of the Touch-me-not, relinquished his command. Captain Tangye's baptismal name was Matthias, and Bideford, in Devon, his native town. But the Touch-me-not, which he had commanded for thirty-five years, happened to carry for figurehead a wooden Highlander holding a thistle close to his chest, and against his thigh a scroll with the motto, Noli Me Tangere, and this being, in popular belief, an effigy of the captain taken in the prime of life, Mr. Tangye cheerfully accepted the fiction with its implication ...
— The Laird's Luck • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... to look If plums grew on a thistle; He pricked his fingers very much, Which made poor ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... failed; the dews no longer freshened the grass, and the hot sun began to tell on shepherds and sheep. Both sought the shade. The flowers withered first—all the blue-bells and lavender patches of primrose, and pale-yellow lilies, and white thistle-blossoms. Only the deep magenta of cactus and vermilion of Indian paint-brush, flowers of the sun, survived the heat. Day by day the shepherds scanned the sky for storm-clouds that did not appear. ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey
... practically saying: "When there are so many honest and beautiful maidens of your own country, are you so hard put to for a lifetime partner that you propose conjugality with this foreign flirt? Is there such a dearth of lilies in our Israelitish gardens that you must wear on your heart a Philistine thistle? Do you take a crabapple because there are no pomegranates? Is there never a woman among the daughters of thy brethren, or among all my people, that thou goest to take a ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... one glory of thine own art thou. When the Fates took thee hence, then Pales' self, And even Apollo, left the country lone. Where the plump barley-grain so oft we sowed, There but wild oats and barren darnel spring; For tender violet and narcissus bright Thistle and prickly thorn uprear their heads. Now, O ye shepherds, strew the ground with leaves, And o'er the fountains draw a shady veil- So Daphnis to his memory bids be done- And rear a tomb, and write thereon this verse: ...
— The Bucolics and Eclogues • Virgil
... bur-thistle spreading wide Amang the bearded bear, I turn'd the weeder-clips aside, And spared the ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... increased suddenly, a cold steady wind, coasting down the Argentine pampas, bending the sparse trees and giant thistle, ruffling the river, shallowing it, until to-morrow many a poor sailorman would regret his optimistic anchorage ... Shane shivered.... To-morrow October would be making a din in the streets.... And the poor skippers fighting their way round the Horn, ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... bush (Leptospermum scoparium) the latter a low shrub with handsome white or pinkish flowers. In some of the ravines two species of tree-ferns of the genus Cyathea grow luxuriantly in the moist clayey soil. Everywhere one sees common English weeds scattered about, especially the sow-thistle and common dock, and a British landshell (Helix cellaria) has even found its way to New Zealand and is to be met with in some of ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray
... privation—the loss of all things, of friends, of good name, of country—he is even without God in the world. He converses only with the spirits of the departed, with the motionless and silent clouds. The cold moonlight sheds its faint lustre on his head, the fox peeps out of the ruined tower, the thistle waves its beard to the wandering gale, and the strings of his harp seem as the hand of age, as the tale of other times passes over them, to sigh and rustle like the dry reeds in the winter's wind! If it were indeed possible to shew that ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 1, November 1875 • Various
... Cabinet was summoned after his return, it became known that he also had resigned his office. There was nothing said about his resignation in the House. He had resigned on the score of ill-health, and that very worthy peer, Lord Mount Thistle, formerly Sir Marmaduke Morecombe, came back to the Duchy of Lancaster in his place. A Prime Minister sometimes finds great relief in the possession of a serviceable stick who can be made to go in and out as occasion may require; only it generally happens that the stick will expect some reward ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... all the friends and families of the prisoners together on the public square. Then they dug five graves. Then five Japanese officers came stalking across the public square, whisking at the thistle-tops with swords as they came; and then walked up to these innocent Russian boys, and ...
— Flash-lights from the Seven Seas • William L. Stidger
... held up the book, and displayed a head, sketched, it is true, with admirable spirit and cleverness, but—the head of an ass, with a thistle in its mouth! ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... one the canoes of the Alachuas glided away from the water gate noiselessly as so many thistle-downs, and were instantly lost to view in the night mist that hung like a soft gray curtain over the whole river. Rene watched the last one depart, and then going to his own room, he flung himself on a couch and was ...
— The Flamingo Feather • Kirk Munroe
... be modified into thorns for protection, as we see in many trees and shrubs, and parts of leaves may be similarly changed, as in the thistle. The underground stems often become much changed, forming bulbs, tubers, root stocks, etc. much as in the monocotyledons. These structures are especially found in plants which die down to the ground each year, and contain supplies ...
— Elements of Structural and Systematic Botany - For High Schools and Elementary College Courses • Douglas Houghton Campbell
... of law and order, the eye of a country gentleman and a justice of the peace, the spectacle was scandalously disreputable. It was moss-grown; it was worm-eaten; it was broken right in the middle; through its four socketless eyes, neighbored by the nettle, peered the thistle:—the thistle!—a forest of thistles!—and, to complete the degradation of the whole, those thistles had attracted the donkey of an itinerant tinker; and the irreverent animal was in the very act of taking his luncheon out of the eyes and ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... hop-rows, talking at rare intervals about the value of the crops, the drainage of the estate, the village schools, the Primrose League, and the iniquities of Mr. Gladstone, while Oke of Okehurst carefully cut down every tall thistle that caught his eye—I sometimes felt, I say, an intense and impotent desire to enlighten this man about his wife's character. I seemed to understand it so well, and to understand it well seemed to ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... cried Kirkpatrick, once more looking boldly up, and shaking his broad claymore: "My thistle has a point to sting all to death who would pass between this arm and my ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... later I went back to the Little Country to be counsellor at law to its people in time of need, and a father to Solon Denney and his two children. Solon could direct large affairs acceptably, but he and his babes were as thistle-down in a prairie wind. ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... the eastern part of Leo. Unfortunately for those who expect only brilliant revelations when they look through a telescope, this throng of nebulae consists of small and inconspicuous wisps as ill defined as bits of thistle-down floating high in the air. There are more than three hundred of them all told, but even the brightest are faint objects when seen with the largest of our telescopes. Why do they congregate thus? That is the question which lends an interest to ...
— Pleasures of the telescope • Garrett Serviss
... by the early train, Whirl down with shriek and whistle, And feel the bluff North blow again, And mark the sprouting thistle Set up on waste patch of the lane Its ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... line; but one is subdivided in the extreme, the other broad in the extreme, and both are beautiful. The Byzantine mind delighted in the delicacy of subdivision which nature shows in the fern-leaf or parsley-leaf; and so, also, often the Gothic mind, much enjoying the oak, thorn, and thistle. But the builder of the Ducal Palace used great breadth in his foliage, in order to harmonize with the broad surface of his mighty wall, and delighted in this breadth as nature delights in the sweeping freshness of the dock-leaf ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... fruit. The conspicuous racemes of the choke-cherries, or the shining scarlet globes of the cultivated fruit, fairly shout aloud to the birds—"Come and eat us, we're as good as we look!" But Mother Nature looks on and laughs to herself. Thistle seeds are blown to the land's end by the wind; the heavier ticks and burrs are carried far and wide upon the furry coats of passing creatures; but the cherry could not spread its progeny beyond ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... a change in her, from the beginning of their talk. Why had she sent for him? The wildest notions had possessed him, ever since her letter reached him. Yet, now that he saw her, they seemed to float away from him, like thistle-down on ...
— Helena • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... in the settlement was plentiful, but, from being fed chiefly on sow thistle during the general deficiency of hard food, the animals looked ill, and were as badly tasted. The Pitt, however, took from the island a great quantity of stock; barrow pigs and fowls, pumpkins and other vegetables; for which Captain Manning and his officers ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins
... anything quite so ridiculous,' said Miss Delacour; 'but as those silly children are going to dress, I suppose I had better put on the gown which I call my thistle gown. The thistle is the emblem of Scotland. I ...
— Hollyhock - A Spirit of Mischief • L. T. Meade
... used for Gooch filters, 1 mm. thick. The tube is then filled with the amalgamated zinc (Note 1) to within 50 mm. of the top, and on the zinc is placed a plug of glass wool. If the top of the tube is not already shaped like the mouth of a thistle-tube (B), a 60 mm. funnel is fitted into the tube with a rubber stopper and the reductor is connected with a suction bottle, F. The bottle D is a safety bottle to prevent contamination of the solution by water from the pump. ...
— An Introductory Course of Quantitative Chemical Analysis - With Explanatory Notes • Henry P. Talbot
... soon after. She is intent upon my acting Mlle. Mar's part in "Henri Trois." I can do nothing with any French part in Covent Garden. If they can find a theater of half that size to get it up in, well and good; but seen from a distance, which defies discrimination of objects, a thistle is as good as a rose, and in that enormous frame refinement is mere platitude, and finish of ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... parables in the strictest sense the Old Testament contains only two" (2 Sam. 12:1-; and Isa. 5:1-). "Other stories, such as that of the trees assembled to elect a king (Judges 9:8), and of the thistle and cedar (2 Kings 14:9), are more strictly fables. Still others, such as Ezekiel's account of the two eagles and the vine (17:2-), and of the caldron (24:3-) are allegories. The small number of parabolic narratives to be found in the Old Testament must not, however, ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... sorry to think," I broke in, "that that sweet little floating thistle-down of a child I once knew was to be done ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... sends," he resolved to go in search of the boy himself. Storing himself with gold and precious jewels, he set off, attended only by his faithful De Fistycuff. From place to place he wandered, year after year, till his locks were turned to silvery grey, and his beard became like the down of a thistle. One evening his heart fainting, and his once firm knees trembling, he reached the gate of a monastery in Bohemia. Then he sunk down before even his Squire could ring the bell to summon the monks to his assistance. When the porter opened the door, the Lord High Steward of England had breathed his ...
— The Seven Champions of Christendom • W. H. G. Kingston
... by the quartermaster for his services as pilot. I afterward saw these ladies at St. Augustine, and years afterward the younger one came to Charleston, South Carolina, the wife of the somewhat famous Captain Thistle, agent for the United States for live-oak in Florida, who was noted as the first of the troublesome class of inventors of modern artillery. He was the inventor of a gun that "did not recoil at all," or "if anything it ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman
... this propensity of inventing tales and allegories, which is so common to our Indians, is one of the most general traits of the human mind. The most ancient effort of this kind by far, in the way of the allegorical, is in the following words: "The Thistle that was in Lebanon sent to the Cedar, saying, give thy daughter to my son to wife: and there passed by a wild beast and trod down the ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... us only a few miles on our general course or rout. there is but very little timber on this fork principally the under brush frequently mentioned. I observe a considerable quantity of the buffaloe clover in the bottoms. the sunflower, flax, green swoard, thistle and several species of the rye grass some of which rise to the hight of 3 or 4 feet. there is a grass also with a soft smooth leaf that bears it's seeds very much like the timothy but it dose not grow very luxouriant or appear as if it would ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... Thistle Grove Lane is one of those quaint survivals which enable us to reconstruct the past topographically, in the same way as the silent letters in a word, apparently meaningless, enable us to reconstruct the philological past. It is no longer a lane, but a narrow passage, and ...
— The Kensington District - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... stem throws out close above the surface of the ground, breaks the length of fibre and renders it unfit for those purposes for which, in the northern regions of Europe, its tall branchless stem is so well adapted. The sow thistle, a plant that occurs in almost every part of the world, was nothing different here from its usual habit in Europe. We observed also a species of Chenopodium and of Artemisia or wormwood; abundance of the Pe-tsai, and other ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... see the yellow-horned poppy and the golden thistle growing in abundance; many another flower, too, as brilliant brightens the way-a large, handsome broom, several kinds of mullein, with ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... who was sunning himself on the top of a thistle, Frank prepared to strike, when it suddenly mounted and flitted over a hedge. In a moment the boys had scrambled through the gap and were in full pursuit. The butterfly flitted here and there, sometimes allowing the boys to approach within a few ...
— By Sheer Pluck - A Tale of the Ashanti War • G. A. Henty
... eyes, long dimm'd with weeping, In the silent dust are sleeping; When above my lowly bed The breeze shall wave the thistle's head, Thou wilt think of ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... little donkey on wheels. It had never wagged its tail, or tossed its head, or said, "Hee-haw!" or tasted a tender thistle. It always went about, anywhere that anyone pulled it, on four wooden wheels, carrying a foolish knight, who wore a large cocked hat and a long cloak, because he had no legs. Now, a man who has no legs, and rides a donkey ...
— Very Short Stories and Verses For Children • Mrs. W. K. Clifford
... watch him go; He seems a floating flake of snow: Now to a milkweed bloom he's clinging; There on a buttercup he's swinging; And now he makes a little stop Upon a scented thistle-top. ...
— The Nursery, No. 103, July, 1875. Vol. XVIII. - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest Readers • Various
... moisture of the night had ornamented with shimmering edges of crystal beads. She found the phantom of the night before browsing among flowers behind the cottage, and very kindly disposed to make her acquaintance. As he had a thistle blossom sticking out of his mouth, she forthwith named him Thistle. She soon returned to the house with her apron full of vines, and blossoms, and prettily tinted leaves. "See, Tulee," said she, "what ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child
... from active duty on the field, Mr. M'Quarrie is even now in football harness as the treasurer of the Partick Thistle. He did not play in many of the first eleven matches of the club, but being a promising lad was always available as first reserve forward. He was rather a neat dribbler and good backer-up, but a little slow ...
— Scottish Football Reminiscences and Sketches • David Drummond Bone
... went straight to his work, And filled all the stockings; then turned with a jerk, And laying his finger aside of his nose, And giving a nod, up the chimney he rose; He sprang to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle, And away they all flew like the down on a thistle. But I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight, "Happy Christmas to all, and to ...
— Poems Every Child Should Know - The What-Every-Child-Should-Know-Library • Various
... set light to the dried sage, and thistle and thorn, and soon the whole place was blazing. It was a fearful sight. Many wounded tried to crawl away, dragging their broken arms and legs out of the burning bushes and were ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave
... vain colossal England mows, With ponderous strength, the yielding foes; In vain fair Scotia, by her side, With courage flushed and Highland pride, Whirls her keen blade with horrid whistle And lops off heads like tops of thistle; In vain brave Erin, famed afar, The flaming thunderbolt of war, Profuse of life, through blood does wade, To lend her sister kingdom aid: Our conquering thunders vainly roar Terrific round the Gallic shore; ...
— Cottage Poems • Patrick Bronte
... Geraint into the castle court, His charger trampling many a prickly star Of sprouted thistle on the broken stones. He look'd and saw that all was ruinous. Here stood a shatter'd archway plumed with fern; And here had fall'n a great part of a tower, Whole, like a crag that tumbles from the cliff, And like a crag was gay with wilding flowers: And high above a piece ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester
... with the Duke of Cumberland whom he succeeded. A cheerful, singularly polite, modest, well-conditioned man withal. To be slightly better known to us, if we live. He at present is a Boy of ten, chasing the thistle's beard. ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... wall a perfectly gorgeous fringe of Epilobium obcordatum with flowers an inch wide, crowded together in lavish profusion, and colored as royal a purple as ever was worn by any high-bred plant of the tropics; and best of all, and greatest of all, a noble thistle in full bloom, standing erect, head and shoulders above his companions, and thrusting out his lances in sturdy vigor as if growing on a Scottish brae. All this brave warm bloom among the raw stones, right in the face ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... Emblem:— The lily of France may fade, The thistle and shamrock wither, The oak of England may decay, But the ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... and the centrepiece is enclosed within a transverse oval band inscribed "CANADA POSTAGE" at the top, and "THREE PENCE" below. Above the beaver is an Imperial crown which breaks into the oval band and divides the words "CANADA" and "POSTAGE." This crown rests on a rose, shamrock, and thistle (emblematic of the United Kingdom) and on either side are the letters "V R" (Victoria Regina, i.e. Queen Victoria). In each of the angles is a large uncolored numeral "3". Mr. Howes tells us that this stamp was designed by Sir Stanford Fleming, ...
— The Stamps of Canada • Bertram Poole
... enviable being! No storms, no clouds, in thy blue sky foreseeing, Play on, play on, My elfin John! Toss the light ball, bestride the stick,— (I knew so many cakes would make him sick!) With fancies buoyant as the thistle-down, Prompting the face grotesque, and antic brisk, With many a lamb-like frisk! (He's got the scissors snipping at your gown!) Thou pretty opening rose! (Go to your mother, child, and wipe your nose!) Balmy and breathing music ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... heard Robert Collyer speak in a sermon of James Oliver as "a transplanted thistle evolved into a beautiful flower," and "the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... canoes to apprise the Indians, if there were any in the neighbourhood, of our being white men and their friends; but we were not so fortunate as to discover any of them. Along the shores we saw great quantities of the common thistle, and procured a further supply of wild onions and a species of garlic growing on the highlands, which is now green and in bloom: it has a flat leaf, and is strong, tough, and disagreeable. There was also ...
— History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, Vol. I. • Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
... furrows—as if a drove of hogs had been "rooting" the ground. On the bottoms of the streams he also digs up the "kamas" root (camassia esculenta), the "yampah," (anethum graveolens), the "kooyah" (Valeriana edulis), and the root of a species of thistle (circium virginianum). Many species of fruits and berries furnish him with an occasional meal; and the sweet pods of the mesquites (species of acacia), and the cones of the pinon tree (pinus edulis) form portions ...
— Bruin - The Grand Bear Hunt • Mayne Reid
... head, splash into the water. Now, when she saw three big fellows close by, she stooped for a stone, and just at that minute a gale of wind nearly took the umbrella out of her hand. She clutched it fast; and away she went like a thistle-down, right up in the air, over river and hill, houses and trees, faster and faster, till her head spun round, her breath was all gone, and she had to let go. The dear red umbrella flew away like a leaf; and Lily fell down, down, till she went crash ...
— The Louisa Alcott Reader - A Supplementary Reader for the Fourth Year of School • Louisa M. Alcott
... poplar trees—for the sake of the evening coolness and the gradual approach to the great Alps, which await him at the close of the day. It is about Mulhausen that he begins to feel a change in the landscape. The fields broaden into rolling downs, watered by clear and running streams; the green Swiss thistle grows by riverside and cowshed; pines begin to tuft the slopes of gently rising hills; and now the sun has set, the stars come out, first Hesper, then the troop of lesser lights; and he feels—yes, indeed, there is now no mistake—the well-known, well-loved magical fresh air, that never fails ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... to Robert Loveman, best known for his felicitous "Rain Song," a poem too well known to be quoted here. Any poet who has ever lived might have been proud to have written that poem. It goes as lightly as thistle-down, yet is freighted with thought. Its philosophy is so sublimated and so natural and easy that we are likely to forget that it has any philosophy at all. The fifty or more stanzas of his "Gates of Silence" are probably far less well known. Let me quote ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... structure of stone, inconvenient and gloomy, with narrow windows and an uninviting door. The pine forest touched it on one side, a brawling stream twisted itself like a live snake half round it on the other. A plot of green grass, ill kept and deformed, with noxious weeds, dock, fennel, thistle, and foul stramonium, was surrounded by a rough wall of loose stones, forming the lawn, such as it was, where, under a tree, seated in an armchair, was a solitary woman, whom Fanchon recognized as her aunt, Marie Josephte ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... picked up his "other legs" and gave him, then led Balaam away from the late thistle blooms he was browsing. Hallam mounted, crossed his crutches before him, and lifted his cap. Amy tossed him a kiss and turned millward, while he ascended the hill road. But no sooner was she out of sight than her assumed cheerfulness ...
— Reels and Spindles - A Story of Mill Life • Evelyn Raymond
... chiefly on the seeds of weeds and thistles, groundsel, and dandelion, and he is therefore a friend to the farmer, but in captivity be will thrive on canary and German rape with several hemp-seeds daily, and now and then lettuce, thistle-seed, and fruit. ...
— What Shall We Do Now?: Five Hundred Games and Pastimes • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... from his degradation on that day: and in June 1562, the Magistrates directed the portraiture of the Saint, which had served as their emblem, to be cut out of the city standard, as an idol, and a Thistle to be inserted, "emblematical (as a recent writer remarks) of rude reform, but leaving the Hind which accompanied St. Giles, as one of the heraldic supporters of the city arms."—(Caledonia, vol. ii. ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox
... said anything of the kind; and though she still held her nose rather high when Paul was near, she would have answered for his honesty as readily as for that of her own brothers. But hers had not been the charity that thinketh no evil, and her idle words had been like thistle-down, lightly sent forth, but when they had lighted, ...
— Friarswood Post-Office • Charlotte M. Yonge
... sharp-taloned Goblins when the thorns of the Ryls reached their savage hearts and let their life-blood sprinkle all the plain. And afterward from every drop a thistle grew. ...
— The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus • L. Frank Baum
... the light, and then escorted the ladies home. But Thumbelina could not sleep that night; so she got out of bed, and plaited a great big blanket of straw, and carried it off, and spread it over the dead bird, and piled upon it thistle-down as soft as cotton-wool, which she had found in the field-mouse's room, so that the poor little thing should lie ...
— The Yellow Fairy Book • Various
... dandelion, thistle, and other triumphant strugglers for survival, the milkweed sends its offspring adrift on the winds to found fresh colonies afar. Children delight in making pompons for their hats by removing the silky seed-tufts from pods before they burst, and ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... or design were vain. There must be courage to reject no less than to gather. A man is at liberty to neglect things that are repugnant to his disposition. He may, if he please, have nothing to do with thistle or thorn, with bramble or brier.... Nevertheless sharp and severe things are yet dear to some souls. Nor should I understand the taste that would reject the wildness of the thorn and holly, or the child-loving labyrinths of the bramble, or wholesome ranges of the downs ...
— The Mind of the Artist - Thoughts and Sayings of Painters and Sculptors on Their Art • Various
... flew to one, that, by man and beast Was shunned for its stinging bristle; But it injured not the Bee in the least; And she filled her pocket, and had a feast, From the bloom of the purple Thistle. ...
— The Youth's Coronal • Hannah Flagg Gould
... remind the English settler of his old home. It has spread very rapidly, and on thousands upon thousands of acres it has rooted out the native grasses and taken full possession of the soil. Another plant has a history which would be ludicrous if it were not so serious, and that is the thistle." ...
— The Land of the Kangaroo - Adventures of Two Youths in a Journey through the Great Island Continent • Thomas Wallace Knox
... beautiful surroundings I differ entirely from Mr. Whistler. An artist is not an isolated fact; he is the resultant of a certain milieu and a certain entourage, and can no more be born of a nation that is devoid of any sense of beauty than a fig can grow from a thorn or a rose blossom from a thistle. That an artist will find beauty in ugliness, le beau dans l'horrible, is now a commonplace of the schools, the argot of the atelier, but I strongly deny that charming people should be condemned to live with magenta ottomans and Albert-blue curtains in their rooms ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... towers Survey Boeotia;—Caledonia's ours. 130 And well I know within that bastard land [10] Hath Wisdom's goddess never held command; A barren soil, where Nature's germs, confined To stern sterility, can stint the mind; Whose thistle well betrays the niggard earth, Emblem of all to whom the Land gives birth; Each genial influence nurtured to resist; A land of meanness, sophistry, and mist. [xv] Each breeze from foggy mount and marshy plain Dilutes with drivel ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... happy, and alleviated the distress of many a poor soul whom I never expect to see. It is more than one can often say that, in doing right, one has made two happy in one day. Speed, die when I may, I want it said of me by those who know me best, that I always plucked a thistle and planted a flower when I thought a flower would grow."—(Vouched for by Joshua R. Speed, the first to be friend to Lincoln when he set out to become a lawyer, at Springfield, ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... the other horn of the dilemma. That, too, one will find as ill a resting place as an upright thistle. Let the wages,—as with Mr. Bellamy,—all be equal. The managers then cannot vote themselves large emoluments if they try. But what about the purple citizens? Will they work, or will they lie round in their ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... running about evidently blind in one eye. Numbers of small birds, as ducks, hawks, and partridges, were killed. I saw one of the latter with a black mark on its back, as if it had been struck with a paving-stone. A fence of thistle-stalks round the hovel was nearly broken down; and my informer, putting his head out to see what was the matter, received a severe cut, and now wears a bandage. The storm was said to have been of limited extent: we certainly ...
— The Rain Cloud - or, An Account of the Nature, Properties, Dangers and Uses of Rain • Anonymous
... immortal shield from Neptune she received, 780 When first her head above the waters heaved; Loose floated o'er her limbs an azure vest, A figured 'scutcheon glitter'd on her breast; There from one parent soil for ever young, The blooming rose and hardy thistle sprung: Around her head an oaken wreath was seen, Inwove with laurels of unfading green. Such was the sculptured prow; from van to rear The artillery frown'd, a black tremendous tier! Embalm'd with orient gum, ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... said S.C. to the children, and he turned to the big book and began to run his fingers down the pages in a business-like manner. "Ah! here she is!" he exclaimed at last. "Blue eyes, if you please, Thistle, and golden hair. And let it be a big one. She ...
— Little Saint Elizabeth and Other Stories • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... words of the prophet Elisha on his death-bed would bring him victory. Yet so much greater was his force than that of Judah, that when Amaziah sent him a challenge, he replied by the insulting parable of the thistle and the cedar. Jeroboam II., his son, was likewise prosperous; but neither blessings nor warnings would induce these kings to forsake their golden calves. Amos, the herdsman-prophet of Tekoa, was warned to say nothing against the king's chapel at Bethel; and ...
— The Chosen People - A Compendium Of Sacred And Church History For School-Children • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... time,' returned John Thistle-wood, 'that's a thing as few can charge me with as a general rule. And in this particular case, you see, I can't help myself. The day I see you married I shall make up my mind to leave you alone until such time as you might happen to be a widow, and if that should ...
— Bulldog And Butterfly - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... taken full possession of California; how that cattle and horses, introduced by the Spaniard, have spread as widely and made themselves as much at home on the plains of La Plata as on those of Tartary; and that the cardoon-thistle-seeds, and others they brought with them, have multiplied there into numbers probably much exceeding those extant in their native lands; indeed, when we contemplate our own race, and our particular stock, taking such recent but dominating possession ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... mortal has a right to wag his tongue, much less to wag his pen, without saying something; he knows not what mischief he does, past computation, scattering words without meaning, to afflict the whole world yet before they cease. For thistle-down flies abroad on all winds and airs of wind.... Ship-loads of fashionable novels, sentimental rhymes, tragedies, farces ... tales by flood and field are swallowed monthly into the bottomless pool; still does the press toil,... and still in torrents rushes on the great army ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... Franciscan order and became an itinerant preaching friar, in which capacity he wandered over the length and breadth of the land, enjoying good cheer by the way; was some time in the service of James IV., and wrote a poem, his most famous piece, entitled "The Thistle and the Rose," on the occasion of the King's marriage with the Princess Margaret Tudor, daughter of Henry VII. His poems were of three classes—allegoric, moral, and comic, the most remarkable being "The Dance," in which he describes the procession of the seven deadly sins in ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... city—are yet sweet to the living. "They have only a pleasure like that of the brutes," we say with scorn. But what a racy and substantial pleasure is that! The flashing speed of the swallow in the air, the cool play of the minnow in the water, the dance of twin butterflies round a thistle-blossom, the thundering gallop of the buffalo across the prairie, nay, the clumsy walk of the grizzly bear; it were doubtless enough to reward existence, could we have joy like such as these, and ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... had convinced that the English capital, with its "beryl streamis pleasant ... where many a swan doth swim with wingis fair", was "the flower of cities all", wrote the well-known poem on the Union of the Thistle and the Rose to welcome this second English Margaret to Scotland. But the time was not yet ripe for any real union of the Thistle and the Rose. Peace continued till the death of Henry VII; but during these years ...
— An Outline of the Relations between England and Scotland (500-1707) • Robert S. Rait
... would preserve his equilibrium miraculously, when his perpendicular had been lost long ago: he never fell upon me but once (sleeping on a sofa, I was exposed defenselessly to all such contingencies), and then lightly as thistle-down. On the rare occasions when the mal-de-mer proved too much for his valiant self-assertion, he yielded to an overruling fate without groan or complaint: folding the scanty coverlet around him, he would subside ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... as I have seen many a morning rise at Enderley—misty and grey; but oh, so heavenly fair! with a pearly network of dewy gossamer under foot, and overhead countless thistle downs flying about, like fairy chariots hurrying out of sight of the sun, which had only mounted high enough above the Flat to touch the horizon of hills opposite, and the tops of my four poplars, leaving Rose Cottage and the valley ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... plants, the power of increase is even greater and its effects more distinctly visible. Hundreds of square miles of the plains of La Plata are now covered with two or three species of European thistle, often to the exclusion of almost every other plant; but in the native countries of these thistles they occupy, except in cultivated or waste ground, a very subordinate part in the vegetation. Some American ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... were light as thistle-down compared with the need of finding Marigny. He and Dale began to hunt London for the Frenchman. But they had to deal with a wary bird, who would not break covert till it suited his own convenience. And then, the sublime cheek of the man! On the Friday morning, when Medenham rose with ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... mathematical; the age ruled the prevailing taste and fashion, and everything in and out of Nature has had its turn and its day. Then, again, nationality goes for something: the Frenchman is fond of his lis and the Scot of his thistle. ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... the Devil's maxims," exclaimed Flora, earnestly. "God calls it sowing to the flesh: and He says the harvest of it is corruption. Some flowers seed themselves: thistles do. Did you ever know roses grow from thistle seed? No: 'whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he reap.' Ah ...
— Out in the Forty-Five - Duncan Keith's Vow • Emily Sarah Holt
... of a Scotch theatre, at which F.G. Cooke was playing Macbeth, seeing him greatly exhausted towards the close of the performance, offered him some whiskey in a very small thistle-glass, saying at the same time, by way of encouragement, "Take that, Mr. Cooke; take that, sir; it is the real mountain dew; that will never hurt you, sir!"—"Not if it was vitriol!" was ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... corn-field ran near, and, stripped of blade and tassel, the stalks and hooded ears looked in the coming dusk a little like monks at prayer. In the sunlight across the river the corn stood thin and frail. Over there a drought was on it; and when drifting thistle-plumes marked the noontide of the year, each yellow stalk had withered blades and an empty sheath. Everywhere a look of vague trouble lay upon the face of the mountains, and when the wind blew, the silver of the leaves showed ...
— A Cumberland Vendetta • John Fox, Jr.
... your pardon, my friend," said Pierre gravely; "in the vegetable world I prefer a rose to a thistle; in the moral world, I prefer you to Trecoeur. You were born a gallant fellow; I rejoice at it, and I make ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... been in that car, so he could have seen Miss Flyaway trying to prop her mother's head against her own morsel of a shoulder—about as secure a resting-place as a piece of thistle-down. ...
— Dotty Dimple at Play • Sophie May
... has grown up with me, as well as thousands of my Western and Southern friends. We have always been taught to look upon the people of New England as a selfish, cunning set of fellows, that was fed on fox-ears and thistle-tops; that cut their wisdom-teeth as soon as they were born; that made money by their wits, and held on to it by nature; that called cheatery mother-wit; that hung on to political power because they had numbers; that raised up manufactures ...
— David Crockett: His Life and Adventures • John S. C. Abbott
... describes an arc of three or four feet in the air, and there is one bright flash where it emerges, and another where it strikes the water; sometimes the whole silvery arc is revealed; or here and there, perhaps, is a thistle-down floating on its surface, which the fishes dart at and so dimple it again. It is like molten glass cooled but not congealed, and the few motes in it are pure and beautiful like the imperfections in glass. You may often detect ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... fallen state, to possess all the earth and its advantages, without labour,—without fulfilling his destiny? No. Ferocious and noxious animals disappear only before cultivation. It is part of the labour to which he has been sentenced, that he should rend them out as the 'thistle and the thorn;' or drive them to those regions, which are not yet required by him, and of which they may continue to have ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... conquer his desires and make light of pain and discomfort. He needs no Aristotle to teach him the value of habits; he is soon forced to use them as defences against his pet weaknesses; above all he finds that self-denial has its reward in perfect health; that the thistle pain, too, has its flower. It is a truism that 'Varsity athletes generally succeed in life, Spartan discipline proving itself ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... there followed for M. de Cussy an extremely bad quarter of an hour. M. de Cussy, in fact, deserves your sympathy. His self-sufficiency was blown from him by the haughty M. de Rivarol, as down from a thistle by the winds of autumn. The General of the King's Armies abused him—this man who was Governor of Hispaniola—as if he were a lackey. M. de Cussy defended himself by urging the thing that Captain Blood had so admirably urged already on his behalf—that ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... to get an armful of the hay, but sputtered out a chapter of malediction as his bare hands touched the masses of thistle and briers. His companions laughed at his mishap. He went to the fire and vowed he'd stick a brand in it and back he came with ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... Lily of France may fade, The Thistle and Shamrock wither, The Oak of England may decay, But the Stars ...
— Cupology - How to Be Entertaining • Clara
... Wading in the water, leaping over the stones, clambering on the trunks—aw, dear! aw, dear! Bareheaded and barefooted in those times, sir; but smart extraordinary, and a terble notion of being dressy, too. Twisting ferns about her lil neck for lace, sticking a mountain thistle, sparkling with dew, on her breast for a diamond, twining a trail of fuchsia round her head for a crown—aw, dear! aw, dear! And now—well, well, to think! ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... that the land, about which I was consulted, had not been plowed for several years, and that although nature had done all she could to clothe the soil with vegetation, the most disheartening feature in the case was, the poverty of the weeds. A thistle may be a giant or a dwarf, according to circumstances; here they were all dwarfs. The plaintain, which I believe is sometimes sown in these districts for food, has a very deep root; here the plants were abundant, but the leaves were very small and lay so close to the ground, that, as the manager ...
— Talks on Manures • Joseph Harris
... Pottsville,—and at the parish sociable in Northfield? Then you are sure of the benefits which will crown your lives if you obey these three precepts; and you will, with unfaltering step, move quickly over the kettle-de-benders of this broken essay, and from the thistle, danger, will pluck the three more flowers which I have promised. I ...
— How To Do It • Edward Everett Hale
... X-rays he photographs the bone incased in flesh, the coins contained in the purse. With his magnet the scientist throws a rope around the cathode rays and drags them whithersoever he will. In the field the inventor uses an electric hoe to kill the germs of the thistle and deadly nightshade. Strange that he cannot invent an instrument for killing the germs of hatred and envy in his own heart! The gardener easily masters the art of cultivating roses and violets, but breaks down in trying to produce in himself those beauteous ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... watched children knows the extraordinary amount of pleasure that they can extract out of the simplest materials. To keep a shop in the corner of a garden, where the commodities are pebbles and thistle-heads stored in old tin pots, and which are paid for in daisies, will be an engrossing occupation to healthy children for a long summer afternoon. There is no reason why that kind of zest should not be imported into later life; and, as a matter of fact, people who practise self-restraint, ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the Villa of the Grand Duchess Helena of Russia, he wore no jewel save the diamond- studded star presented to him by the Czar. At the reception given by the "English Colony" to Sir Walter Scott, the great sculptor wore a modest thistle-blossom in his lapel, which caused Lord Elgin to offer odds that if O'Connell should appear in Rome, Thorwaldsen would wear a sprig of shamrock in his hat and say nothing. The thistle caught Sir Walter, and the next day when he came ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... which they had brought on the honour of the Banda Oriental could only be washed away with their blood. Pointing to the advancing troops, he said that when those miserable hirelings were scattered like thistle-down before the wind, the entire country would be with him, and the Banda Oriental, after half a century of degradation, free at last and for ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson
... covered with vegetation. You can lie on the blossoming clover, where the bees hum and the crickets chirp around you, and can look through the arch which frames its own fair picture. In the foreground lies the steep slope overgrown with bayberry and gay with thistle blooms; then the little winding cove with its bordering cliffs; and the rough pastures with their grazing sheep beyond. Or, ascending the parapet, you can look across the bay to the men making hay ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... right there. I quite go with that line of reasoning. By their fruits shall ye know them. A man don't usually go to a thistle to find grapes. But let me ask you, Ned, do you usually find that murderers, drunkards, burglars, thieves, and blackguards in general are students of the Bible and given to prayer ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... Gently as thistle-downs are borne away From the dry stem, went Ellen yesterday. I heard her dying utterance; it was: "I'm coming, Teddy! Bless you, dear Miss Linda!" No priest was by, so sudden was her going. When Blount came in, there was no tenderness In his sleek, gluttonous ...
— The Woman Who Dared • Epes Sargent
... spreading and seeding potentialities of a thistle-down or a catchy phrase? Within twenty-four hours after the appearance of Banneker's editorial, the apocryphal boast of Mayor Laird to his wife had become current political history. Current? Rampant, rather. Messenger boys greeted each other with ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... nest in the open field, without so much as a bush or thistle or tuft of grass to protect it or mark its site; you may step upon it, or the cattle may tread it into the ground. But the danger from this source, I presume, the bird considers less than that from another. Skunks and foxes have a very impertinent curiosity, as Finchie well knows; and ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... ornament, and all decorative needlework. It is, in fact, the fabric for the million which most especially needs the careful study of guiding rules. When a plant sends forth hundreds of winged, wind-blown seeds, like the thistle, it spreads itself over wide fields, and is more mischievous than a more noxious growth, such as the deadly nightshade, which only drops an occasional berry into the earth. So a common cheap chintz or carpet, with a poor, gaudy, motiveless design, ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... goodwill of the wounded, she could accept with as much pleasure as any of her sex; but she had not yet recognized that type of man who looks at a pretty woman and is disposed to make love to her at once. "Why does Captain Maynard stare at me so?" she asked herself, "when I don't care a thistle for him and never will. Why should I care? Why should he care? Does he think I'm silly and shallow enough to be amused by this kind of thing when that brave old colonel is dying ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe
... is a' my merry young men, Whom I gi' meat and fee, To pu' the thistle and the thorn, To burn ...
— Ballads of Romance and Chivalry - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - First Series • Frank Sidgwick
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