"Bracken" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... not behold the gruesome deed, but over the autumn sun was drawn a grey purple mist, and gloom settled upon the Maremma. And as the elements paled and were silent, a hush overspread wild nature, not a beast in the thicket, not a bird on the bough, stirred. Sighs siffled through the bracken and the heather, and the roar of the distant sea died away in moaning ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... mademoiselle. You must quit Perucca before the morning. The news is bad, I tell you frankly. The empire is tottering to its fall, and the news that I have in secret will be known all over Corsica to-morrow. Who knows? the island may flare up like a heap of bracken, and no one bearing a French name, or known to have French sympathies, will be safe. You know how you yourself are regarded in Olmeta. It is foolhardy to venture ...
— The Isle of Unrest • Henry Seton Merriman
... the great rock. Descending further, the bleak aspect of Nature is transformed. The heather gives place to dwarf shrubs; the bare, weather-beaten rocks are clothed with blackberry bushes, or hidden amid luxurious bracken. Dark hollies clinging to detached rocks present varied and life-like forms. The air has suddenly become still. The butterflies hover over the foxgloves. The wild strawberry is at your feet. The sloeberries ripen ...
— A Child of the Glens - or, Elsie's Fortune • Edward Newenham Hoare
... appear, and foxgloves of all sizes troop in the woods, and are succeeded by the rose bay willow herb, and lastly come perfect clouds of the little devils'-bit scabious. Ferns adorn the watery glens, and bracken spreads on the undulating ground in wild beauty of form, here and there enhanced by a bright faded ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... witches are said to dislike the bracken fern, "because it bears on its root the initial C, which may be seen on cutting the root horizontally."[26] and in most places equally distasteful to them is the yew, perhaps for no better reason than its having formerly been much planted in churchyards. The herb-bennett (Geum urbanum), ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... I was stumbling through the bracken of the little copse that was like a tuft of hair on the brow of the great white quarry. It was quite dark, in among the trees. I made the circuit of the copse, whistling softly my three bars of "Lillibulero." Then I plunged into it. The bracken underfoot rustled and rustled. ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... sharing the like fate by being sent out of the kingdom. His earnest words on his return to take the rule of this unhappy realm were these: 'Let God but grant me life, and there shall not be a spot in my realm where the key shall not keep the castle, and the bracken bush the cow, though I should lead the life of a ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge
... choked with fog that one could scarcely see a cow's length across a field. Every blade, twig, bracken-frond, and hoof-print carried water, and the air was filled with the noise of rushing ditches and field-drains, all delivering to the brook below. A week's November rain on water-logged land had gorged her to full flood, ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... it 'long the cover side, A furlong "mesh an'-pin"; We sent the lurcher rangin' wide To drive the rabbits in; A soft, sweet night in late July We lay among the bracken 'igh That 'eld the mid-day sun, While mute an' wise ole Toby ranged enjoyin' of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, January 28, 1914 • Various
... portion of the Pacific coast, opposite the south end of Vancouver Island: the crooked oaks loaded with mistletoe, the tall wild cherry trees, the hazels with trunks thicker than a man's thigh, the evergreen arbutus, the bracken fern, blackberries, and black raspberries; and the game in these glades of trees and fern: small Columbian Mazama deer, large lynxes, bears, gluttons, wolves, foxes, racoons, and squirrels. Overhead ...
— Pioneers in Canada • Sir Harry Johnston
... him and the rest in single file after me—up by the footpath through the woods, and forth into sunshine again upon the green dewy bracken of the deer-park. Here my companion spoke for the first time ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... which we lay there stretched out an avenue of timber trees, whereunder the bracken, breast high, had been cut to make a ride. Upon this bracken, and upon this smooth channel in the midst the late sun streamed toward us, a soft wash of gold. Behind all this the sky, pale to whiteness immediately overhead, deepened to the splendid orange of the sunset. Each ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... great cliffs of the Black Mountains on the one side and the ranges around the Sugar Loaf on the other. In places the cliffs are precipitous, but, generally, the lower slopes furnish pasture-land and occasional woods, while the upper parts are covered with bracken fern, with a few trees and copses. The priory stands on a gentle slope at the base of the Black Mountains, elevated a short distance above the stream. Its original name was Llanhodeni, or "the Place by the Hodeni." It was founded by two hermits in the ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... his green native braes of the Nith, He pluck'd the wild bracken, a frolicsome boy; He sported his limbs in the waves of the Frith; He trod the green heather in gladness and joy;— On his gallant grey steed to the hunting he rode, In his bonnet a plume, on his bosom a star; He chased the red ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... now, let us be off. The waiting-maids, who have escorted me to the door, fall on all fours as a final salute, and remain prostrate on the threshold as long as I am still in sight down the dark pathway, where the rain trickles off the great overarching bracken upon my head. ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... and now, towards sunset, there was a grand massing of rosy cloud along the edge of the down, and windy lights over the valley. Rachel, busy with the covering of the potato "clamps," laid down the bundle of bracken she had been handing to Peter Betts, and came quickly to meet her visitor. Her working dress was splashed with mire from neck to foot, and coils of brown hair had escaped from her waterproof cap, and hung about her brilliant cheeks. She looked ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... nurtured, being, as was deem'd, the child Of Hermes, or some mountain deity; For these with the wild nymphs are wont to lie Within the holy caverns, where the bee Can scarcely find a darkling path to fly Through veils of bracken and the ivy-tree. ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang
... Thee, Lord, For all Thy Golden Silences,— For every Sabbath from the world's turmoil; For every respite from the stress of life;— Silence of moorlands rolling to the skies, Heath-purpled, bracken-clad, aflame with gorse; Silence of grey tors crouching in the mist; Silence of deep woods' mystic cloistered calm; Silence of wide seas basking in the sun; Silence of white peaks soaring to the blue; Silence of dawnings, when, their matins ...
— 'All's Well!' • John Oxenham
... surface cold and glittering like steel. Walking a little in the rear of Adam, Eve shuddered as her eyes fell on the depths, over whose brink the narrow path they trod seemed hanging. Instinctively she shrank closer to the cliff-side, to be caught by the long trails of bramble which, with bracken and gorse, made the steep descent a bristly wall. Insensibly affected by external surroundings, unused to such complete darkness, the sombre aspect of the scene filled her with nervous apprehension: every bit of jutting rock she stumbled against was a yawning precipice, and at each ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... the waaste: theer warn't not fead for a cow: Nowt at all but bracken an' fuzz, an' looak at it now— Warn't worth nowt a haacre, an' now theer's lots o' fead, Fourscore yows upon it an' some on ...
— Enoch Arden, &c. • Alfred Tennyson
... hand, in a swinging chair with a little awning above it, is enshrined in a spacious half hemisphere of glass which forms a pavilion commanding the garden, and, beyond it, a barren but lovely landscape of hill profile with fir trees, commons of bracken and gorse, and ...
— Misalliance • George Bernard Shaw
... the still air, and between the winding avenues of birch, poplar and saskatoon bushes. Nothing to be heard save the occasional call of the grouse in the bracken, and the monotonous chafing of the harness. At dusk they arrived within a mile or two of the little ...
— The Rising of the Red Man - A Romance of the Louis Riel Rebellion • John Mackie
... garden gate, I said to my companion, "All this place is cursed, and I will not go near." And he applauded me, for he knew as well as I that if we had gone a few steps towards that orchard and that garden close, they would have turned into the bracken of the hillside, ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... knew them and always ran to them singing, for all that their elders said: in evenings long ago they had danced to the woods of the oak-trees. Their children dwelt out-of-doors beyond the dells of the bracken, in the cool and heathery lands, and were now at war ...
— Tales of Three Hemispheres • Lord Dunsany
... to walk home to Bracken-Braes, and Michael and Isabel sat by her bedside. All her strength was gone, and she lay at the mercy of the rustle of a leaf, or a shadow across the window. Thus hour after hour passed, till it was again twilight. "I hear footsteps coming up the brae," said Agnes, who had for some ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... seen Pauline in the country, against a background of golden beech trees and brown bracken, look even beautiful; but in London she lacks something, possibly the right background. She has glorious hair, but her maid can't do it. Pauline admits it, but she says she can't send a nice woman away on that account; besides, she suffers from rheumatism, and Pauline's particular part of the country ...
— The Professional Aunt • Mary C.E. Wemyss
... way or another from the attacks of animals. These neglected spots are overgrown with gorse, brambles, nettles, blackthorn, and mullein, as well as with the bitter spurges, and the stringy inedible bracken. So, too, while in our meadows we purposely propagate tender fodder plants, like grasses and clovers, we find on the margins of our pastures and by our roadsides only protected species; such as thistles, houndstongue, cuckoo-pint, charlock, nettles (once more), and ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... golden lights and blue shadows on their snow-clad summits, slanted obliquely into the rich plain before them, bathing with rosy splendour the leafless, snow-sprinkled trees, and fading gradually into shadow in the distance. To the south, too, they beheld a deep-shaded amphitheatre of heather and bracken; the course of the Esk, near Penicuik, winding about at the foot of its gorge; the broad, brown expanse of Maw Moss; and, fading into blue indistinctness in the south, the wild heath-clad Peeblesshire hills. In sooth, that scene was fair, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the door opened and Dodge and a companion, who subsequently proved to be E. M. Bracken, alias "Bradley," an agent employed by Howe and Hummel, left the room, went to the elevator, and descended to the dining-room upon the second floor. Jesse watched until they were safely ensconced at breakfast and then returned to the fourth ...
— The Lock and Key Library/Real Life #2 • Julian Hawthorne
... he said, and walked about the Heath for nearly an hour. The fresh smell of spring exhilarated them, and they sat for a little while on a seat which was perched on rising ground so that they were able to see far beyond the common. Young bracken fronds were thrusting their curled heads upwards through the old brown growth; and the buds on the blackened boughs were bursting from their cases and offering delicate green leaves to the sunlight; and the yellow whins shone like little golden stars on their ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... convolvulus hung in festoons across the bracken-bordered little winding pathways that led here and there through mazes of shrubbery and undergrowth, under the ...
— Bob Strong's Holidays - Adrift in the Channel • John Conroy Hutcheson
... a rivulet at Chama's village ten yards wide and thigh deep, and afterwards in an hour and a half came to a sedgy stream which we could barely cross. We hauled a cow across bodily. Went on mainly south, and through much bracken. ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... at once, retraced his steps, and hid himself in the bracken, for he knew from the descriptions given him that the Slyme ale-house lay there below him—the last place on the English border at which Alastair had been seen or heard of. The Slyme ale-house had an ill repute, and was said to be haunted moreover; none would ...
— Border Ghost Stories • Howard Pease
... misfortunes reached a climax when he used his last bullet on a rabbit and missed it. He went on for twelve hours, and in the darkness under a mass of dripping bracken began to think of Farleys less as a place of peril than as a refuge, even though known for what he was. But he pushed that thought away as other men push temptation and tried to sleep under his saturated tent. In the ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... through which no sunrays broke, though here and there a silver birch drew a shaft of light upon their sombre background. Here were no English woodlands, no stretches of pale green turf, no vistas opening beneath flattened boughs, with blue distant hills and perhaps a group of antlers topping the bracken. The wild life of these forests crawled among thickets or lurked in sinister shadows. No bird poured out its heart in them; no lark soared out of them, breasting heaven. At rare intervals a note fell ...
— Fort Amity • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... quoth the Friar, fanning himself with a frond of bracken, "'tis a hot day, a day reminiscent of the ultimate fate of graceless sinners, and I am like the day and languish for breath, yet, to thy so pertinent question I will, straightly and in few words, pronounce and answer thee, as followeth: Our Lady Benedicta hath run away ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... with a white smoke wreath, that betokens the action of the same forces which produced this gigantic inundation. Close to us the main river had parted above and united below a small mamane tree with bracken under its shadow, and there are several oases of the ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... the tree; his legs were shackled, and further cords fastened them to the bole. Also there was a halter round the trunk and just under his chin, so that while he breathed freely enough, he could not move his head. Before him was a tangle of bracken and scrub, and beyond that the gloom of dense pines; but as he could see only directly in front his ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... follow the road, but the burnside which flanked it on the right, where the bracken grew deep and the high banks made a tolerable screen. It was well I did so, for no sooner had I gained the hollow than, looking back, I saw the pursuit topping the ridge from which I ...
— The Thirty-nine Steps • John Buchan
... aloft. There was a frost last night and the leaves will soon fall. A beech leaf detaches itself now and then and flutters peacefully and waywardly to the ground, careless whether it finds its grave in the bracken or on the road where it will be trodden underfoot. The bramble is beginning to turn to blood. It is strange that leaves should show such character. Here is a corner on which there are not two of the same tint, but they spring from the same root, and the ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... one by which they had ascended, but steeper and dipping to the north. Before they reached it, before she could detect it even, Arthur Miles pointed to where it lay; and they had scarcely turned aside to follow it before a chimney—a genuine red-brick chimney—rose into sight above the dying bracken. ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... that were not piled high with vesture gave resting spots for cardboard boxes and packing-paper. Antoinette stood in a corner gazing at the spoil with a smile of beatific idiocy. I strode through the cardboard boxes which crackled like bracken, and remained dumb as a fish before these mysteries. Carlotta tried on hats. She shewed me patent leather shoes. She exhibited blouses and petticoats until my eyes ached. She brandished something in ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... on one side of the road, breaking into what are sometimes called "coombs" running precipitously towards the sea-coast, and slackening his pace a little he paused, looking through a tangle of shrubs and bracken at the pale suggestion of a glimmer of blue which he realised was the shining of the sunlit ocean. While he thus stood, he fancied he heard a little plaintive whine as of an animal in pain. He listened attentively. The sound was repeated, and, descending the shelving bank a few steps ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... fish is held only by a tiny golden palmer on the finest gut, is not a likely manoeuvre. The grayling behaved well for a couple of yards or so, and then bethought himself of plunging, the consequence being that I lost my hook, and he dropped into a tuft of bracken in a ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... night must be my bed, The bracken curtain for my head, My lullaby the warder's tread, Far, far from love and thee, Mary; To-morrow eve, more stilly laid My couch may be my bloody plaid, My vesper song, thy wail, sweet maid! It will ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... downs whose flowery carpet was torn by jagged nail-heads of rock. Cork trees, sombre as giant olives clad in mourning, strong in their corselets and shields of half-stripped bark as knights in armour, covered the hills like a vast army. At the foot of the hoary warriors, waved bracken and yellow iris in tangled masses; high above their heads sailed here and there a golden eagle of a vulture, looking like paper birds or ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... windings of the marge to hear The soft wind blowing over meadowy holms And alders, garden-isles [8]; and now we left The clerk behind us, I and he, and ran By ripply shallows of the lisping lake, Delighted with the freshness and the sound. But, when the bracken rusted on their crags, My suit had wither'd, nipt to death by him That was a God, and is a lawyer's clerk, The rentroll Cupid of ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... still show a few golden leaves, though each moment another went whirling away as the crests bowed and tossed before the wind. In the brown bracken beneath Harry Boyce stood waiting. His graces were set off with his customary rusty black. His hat was well down upon his bobwig, and he hunched his shoulders against the wind, making a picture of melancholy discomfort. He rocked ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... Carlsruhe ("Charles's Rest") to the eastward, but the bracken and underbrush have given way to beaten roads, which prolong with perfect regularity the fan of streets. An avenue of the finest Lombardy poplars in Germany, the trees being from ninety to a hundred and twenty feet high, extends for two miles to Durlach. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... the Sierra Nevada. Rolling slopes of brown, with olive trees instead of apple trees in the cultivated patches, and occasional prickly pears instead of gorse and bracken in the wilds. Higher up, tall stone peaks and precipices, all handsome and distinguished. No wild nature here: rather a most aristocratic mountain landscape made by a fastidious artist-creator. No vulgar ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... in from the woods and rocks without her trophies. Rare, lovely mosses and bits of most delicate ferns, maidenhair and lady-bracken, tiny trails of wintergreen and arbutus, filled a great shallow Indian china dish upon her bureau top, and grew, in their fairy fashion, in the clear, soft water she ...
— A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life. • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... easy for the brittle bedding of dried bracken and grass the beast had left burned quickly, cleansing with both fire and smoke. When they raked the ashes out with branches, Asaki and Nymani brought in handfuls of leaves which they crumpled and threw on the floor, spreading an aromatic odor which ...
— Voodoo Planet • Andrew North
... Douglas's chivalrous fortitude, and soldier-like desire to have his death concealed. Here every Scottish version follows Froissart. In Herd's fragment, Montgomery now attacks Percy, and bids him "yield thee to yon bracken bush," where the dead Douglas's body lies concealed. Percy does yield—to Sir Hugh Montgomery. The fragment has ...
— Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy • Andrew Lang
... deep cut of the glen there was very little snow, only a few veins and patches here and there, threading and seaming the steep, as if a white-footed hare had been coursing about. Little stubby brier shoots, and clumps of russet bracken, and dead heather, ruffling like a brown dog's back, broke the dull surface of withered herbage, thistle stumps, teasels, rugged banks, and naked brush. Down in the bottom the noisy brook was scurrying over its pebbles brightly, or plunging into gloom ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... torrent glints under the rowan red, And shakes the bracken spray: What joy on the heather to bound, old hound, Over ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... was a rough, country road, a good deal rutted, and seldom repaired. Opposite the gates rose the steep slope of a heathery hill, along the flank of which the girls were now walking. On their right lay a piece of rough moorland, covered with heather, patches of bracken, and coarse grass. A few yards to the right, it sank in a steep descent. Such was the disposition of the ground for some distance along the road—on one side the hill, on the other a narrow level, ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... walked along, picking their way among boulders and bracken and heather, he was asking her whether the heart-breaking accidents and bitter disappointments of salmon-fishing were not greater than its rewards; as to which she lightly ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... army was the command of General Reynolds, with headquarters at Cheat Mountain Pass,( 3) three miles from Huttonville on the Staunton pike. Here Colonel Sullivan's 13th Indiana, part of Loomis' battery, and Bracken's Indiana Cavalry were camped. On Cheat Mountain, at the middle mountain-top, about nine miles to the southeast of Huttonville on the Staunton pike, were the 14th Indiana, 24th and 25th Ohio, and parts of the same battery and cavalry, Colonel Nathan Kimball ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... of the plant against their enemies; but I have never seen any reason to believe that this is so with the three species observed by me, namely, Prunus laurocerasus, Vicia sativa, and V. faba. No plant is so little attacked by enemies of any kind as the common bracken-fern (Pteris aquilina); and yet, as my son Francis has discovered, the large glands at the bases of the fronds, but only whilst young, excrete much sweetish fluid, which is eagerly sought by innumerable ants, chiefly belonging to Myrmica; and ...
— The Effects of Cross & Self-Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom • Charles Darwin
... wild, rocky, and thickly wooded, at the bottom of which wound the silver river that ran through Grovebury. Civilization, in the shape of fields and hedges, stretched out fingers as far as Wynchcote, and there stopped abruptly. Past the bungalow lay the open wold with miles of heather, gorse, and bracken, and a road edged with low, grassy fern-covered banks instead of walls. The air blew freshly up here, and was far more bracing and healthy than down in the hollow of Grovebury. The residents of the new suburb affected seaside fashions, and went their ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... curiosity, he examined the ground in close proximity, and presently, he caught sight of a portion of the fringe of a bathing-towel. He took it from the thorn on which it hung, and fingered it absently; and while doing so, he noted the mark of footsteps which had trodden down the bracken in front of a certain bush. Almost at the same moment, he saw a little heap of dried leaves beneath the bush, and, mechanically, he stirred them with his foot. To his amazement, the displaced leaves ...
— The Woman's Way • Charles Garvice
... it entered a high forest growing on the abrupt slopes. Here it was cool and mysterious, with green shadows, and the swing of rope vines, and the sudden remoteness of glimpsed skies. The earth was soft and moist under foot; so the dampness of it rose to the nostrils. Vines and head-high bracken and feather growths covered the ground. In every shallow ravine were groves of tree ferns forty feet tall. A silence dwelt there, a different silence from that of the veldt at night; compounded of a few simple elements, such as the faint, incessant drip of hidden waters and occasional ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al
... I'll find the glad wee burn, And the bracken in the glen, And the fairy-thorn beyont the turn, And the same ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... those of the watch, and the light of the moon high aloft was mingled with the light of the earliest dawn; and as it happed he looked down, and lo! close to his feet the face of the Bride as she lay beside her grand-sire, her head pillowed on a bundle of bracken. She was sleeping soundly like a child who has been playing all day, and whose sleep has come to him unsought and happily. Her hands were laid together by her side; her cheek was as fair and clear as it was wont to be at her best; her face looked calm and happy, ...
— The Roots of the Mountains • William Morris
... Monkey being up a tree, and the Colonel having surreptitiously got rid of his Rabbit among the bracken, and the Tortoise having retired within his shell and firmly declined to come out again, sport is abandoned for the afternoon, to the scarcely disguised relief of the Curate, who is prevented from remaining to tea ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 10, 1892 • Various
... his elbows on his knees and sat staring at the pond. Overhead the trees were whispering; behind him, in and out of their holes the rabbits whisked; far off he could hear the twitter of a swallow; the foxglove was dead, the bracken was turning brown, the cones from the fir trees were lying on the ground. As he watched, a strange thing happened. Slowly and slowly the pond lengthened out and out, stretching away and away until it became a river—a long river that went on and on, right down the woods, past ...
— Very Short Stories and Verses For Children • Mrs. W. K. Clifford
... feeling that terrific smile like an east wind up my back. I never halted them till sunset, and'—he turned about and looked at Pook's Hill below him—'then I halted yonder.' He pointed to the broken, bracken-covered shoulder of the Forge Hill behind ...
— Puck of Pook's Hill • Rudyard Kipling
... a passionate burst that astonished Walter. "You do not know him as well as I do. I am acquainted with Van Shaw's history through the Raines-Bracken affair. You were not at Burrton when that happened. Nothing but the fear of losing some of old Van Shaw's legacies to the school prevented young Van Shaw's expulsion at the time. I can't go into the affair, Walter, but it gave me a loathing ...
— The High Calling • Charles M. Sheldon
... it down there," he said—"in that patch of bracken, Standish. I left it for you to bring up. ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay
... the sweetness of nature's symphony? Whose stealthy steps are those that steal so cautiously over the tell-tale twigs and withered bracken? What figures are they that crouch and slide from tree to tree, then pause within half a dozen yards of the wandered children, ready to pounce like cruel beasts ...
— Two Little Travellers - A Story for Girls • Frances Browne Arthur
... was a thick copse of hazel, oak, and birch. From a clearing in this wood a thin column of pale blue smoke was rising through the still air. A hut in the shape of a cone stood a few yards from the road. It was thatched from the ground upward with heather and bracken, leaving only a low aperture as door. Near the hut a small fire of hazel sticks crackled under the pot that swung from a forked triangle of oak limbs. Fagots were stacked at one end of the clearing; a pile ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... meantime, been mounting a rising ground, clothed with stunted wood, and came out on a wide heath, brown with dead bracken; a hollow, traced by the tops of leafless trees, marked the course of the stream that traversed it, and the inequalities of ground becoming more rugged in outlines and grayer in colouring as they receded, till they were closed by a dark fir ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... attempt! She had understood! And they walked on among the bracken, knee-high already, between the rabbit-holes and the oak-trees, talking of Jolly. He left her two hours later at the Richmond Hill Gate, and turned ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... her, stooped to snatch her weapon, a rook-rifle, from her, and swinging it high in the air, flung it back among the bushes and bracken he ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... sense of locality—is more expressive of the manners of the time and mood of the race—than those rough Border lays of moonlight rides, on reiving or on rescue bound, and of death fronted boldly in the press of spears or 'behind the bracken bush.' These are not tales of the infancy of a people. Scotland had already attained to something of national unity of blood and of sentiment before they came to birth. For generations and centuries she had to keep ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... we once thought the view included heaven, I stood by those beaten pines we named The Fort, counting jagged bits of glass and scraps of faded newspaper that marred the bright green of the sprouting bracken. ...
— The Garden of Survival • Algernon Blackwood
... there was not much time for questions; for the bairns came straggling back by twos and threes as they had gone away. Each brought some treasure found in their wanderings, and Marjorie would have been buried beneath the offerings of flowers, and tender green bracken, and "bonny stanies" that were brought to her, if Annie Cairns had not taken possession of them all, promising to carry them safe ...
— Allison Bain - By a Way she knew not • Margaret Murray Robertson
... Chedworth the rose bay willow herbs grow taller and finer than is their wont elsewhere. In every direction they spring up in hundreds, painting the woodlands with a wondrously rich purple glow. Here, too, the bracken thrives, and many a fine old oak tree spreads its branches, revelling in the clay soil. On the limestone of the Cotswolds oaks are seldom seen; but wherever a vein of clay is found, there will be ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... time with his hand, his eyes beaming, his hips moving as he followed the spirit-stirring ballad; and then, as Douglas falls, and is laid beneath the bracken bush, unseen by his men, and Montgomery forces Hotspur to yield, not ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... they walked back to Braeside. It was a pretty walk across a bit of moorland, through the heather and bracken, here and there a moss-grown rock, here and there across the path a tiny trickling ...
— Hunter's Marjory - A Story for Girls • Margaret Bruce Clarke
... still as the dreaming bracken, secretive, moving softly among the pines as a young witch gathering simples. She wore a hood of finely woven shadows, yet, though she drew it close, sunbeams trooping westward flashed strange lights ...
— The Worshipper of the Image • Richard Le Gallienne
... when the children of the poor gathered blackberries for preserves and home made wine; when the wild stock flowered in St. Ouen's Bay; when the bracken fern was gathered from every cotil, and dried for apple-storing, for bedding for the cherished cow, for back-rests for the veilles, and seats round the winter fire; when peaches, apricots, and nectarines made the walls sumptuous red and gold; ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... native land better than I do when I am away from it. I can call to mind its innumerable beauties, and in fancy saunter once more through the summer woods, among the bracken, the bluebells, and the foxglove. I can wander by the banks of the Brock, where the sullen trout hide in the clear depths of the pools. I can walk along the path—the path to Paradise—still lined with the blue-eyed speedwell and red campion; I know where the copse is carpeted with the bluebell ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... night, to Halberstadt; and thence rapidly by level roads to Berlin. It is sinking towards dark; the courier is forward to Elbingerode, ordering forty horses to be out. Roughish uphill road; winter in the sky and earth, winter vapors and tumbling wind-gusts: westward, in torn storm-cloak, the Bracken, with its witch-dances; highland Goslar, and ghost of Henry the Fowler, on the other side of it. A multifarious wizard Country, much overhung by goblin reminiscences, witch-dances, sorcerers'-sabbaths and the like,—if ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... like those great columns in an Egyptian hall whence God in an older mood received the praise of men; the top of it sloped the way of an ancient wind. Here they all halted and lighted a fire of branches, striking sparks from flint into a heap of bracken. They eased them of their armour, and sat round the fire, and Camorak stood up there and addressed them, and Camorak said: "We go to war with Fate, who has doomed that I shall not come to Carcassonne. And if we turn aside but one of the dooms of Fate, then the whole future of the world is ours, ...
— A Dreamer's Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... the bitterness of the anti-septo pill on his tongue, Ross helped Ashe limp upstream to the cave. He left the older man outside while he cleaned up the floor of the cave and then made his companion as comfortable as he could on a bed of bracken. The fire Ross had longed for was built. They stripped off their sodden clothing and hung it to dry. Ross wrapped a bird he had shot in clay and tucked it under the hot coals ...
— The Time Traders • Andre Norton
... under a big rock. The grass was short and green, and there were clothes-props cut from bracken stems, with lines of plaited rushes, and a heap of tiny ...
— The Great Big Treasury of Beatrix Potter • Beatrix Potter
... creature. She was by all odds the biggest thing alive—that is, the biggest that stood on legs, and moved. He was confident of this for a space of perhaps two minutes, when they came to the end of the fen. And here was a sudden snort, a crashing of bracken, the floundering of a huge body through knee-deep mud, and a monstrous bull moose, four times as big as Noozak, set off in lively flight. Neewa's eyes all but popped from his head. And STILL Noozak PAID ...
— Nomads of the North - A Story of Romance and Adventure under the Open Stars • James Oliver Curwood
... Newlands, with its keen, almost mountain, air, its views, its woodlands, its yews, its groves of ash, and oak, and thorn, its green paths winding through the greyer and deeper-toned gorse, heather, and bracken, is a thing to live for. If one can be grateful, as certainly one can, to things inanimate, I am grateful for the health and strength which Newlands has given me. But this must be told, if I ever write it, in the history of the house. Still, I regret ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... Cells, in Eilan na Naoimh (Nun's Island.) These old Strathearn churches would seldom be larger than 12 feet wide by 20 long, built of undressed land stones (like a field dyke), and thatched with heather, bracken, or sedge. The great storehouse of reliable material with minimum of controversy relative to the early Christianity of Scotland is Warren's Liturgy and Ritual of the Celtic Church. ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... young man's looks, and his short-sighted eyes, and his odd way of speaking, that was abrupt yet soft, just as his hands were sun-burnt and sinewy, yet with smooth nails like a woman's. His hair was sunburnt-looking too, or rather the colour of bracken after frost; his eyes grey, with the appealing look of the shortsighted, his smile shy yet confident, as if he knew lots of things she had never dreamed of, and yet wouldn't for the world have had her feel his superiority. But she did feel it, ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... to preach one half of the Sunday in Wend, the other in German. Among the Hills to south," well worth noting at present, "is one called CZARNABOG, or 'Devil's Hill;' where the Wendish Devil and his Witches (equal to any German on his Blocksberg, or preternatural Bracken of the Harz) hold their annual WITCHES'-SABBATH,—a thing not to be contemplated without a shudder by the Wendish mind. Thereabouts, and close from Hochkirch southward, all is shadowy intricacy of thicket ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... carpets the plains; none of the flowers or trees with which we are familiar, except conifers, are found in any region. Ferns grow in great abundance, and have now reached many of the forms with which we are acquainted. Thickets of bracken spread over the plains; clumps of Royal ferns and Hartstongues spring up in moister parts. The trees are conifers, cycads, and trees akin to the ginkgo, or Maidenhair Tree, of modern Japan. Cypresses, yews, firs, ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... abundantly good-natured, and was as much entertained with my observations as I was with the literary allusions of the landscape. We sat and smoked upon stiles, broaching paradoxes in the decent English air; we took short cuts across a park or two, where the bracken was deep and my companion nodded to the old woman at the gate; we skirted rank covers, which rustled here and there as wo passed, and we stretched ourselves at last on a heathery hillside, where, if the sun ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... ran along by the foot of the beautiful Quantock Hills, where heavy-wooded coombes are scattered over the broad heathery downs, deep with bracken and whortle-bushes. On either side of the track steep winding glens sloped downwards, lined with yellow gorse, which blazed out from the deep-red soil like a flame from embers. Peat-coloured streams ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Yet, as she passed now from the arcaded garden-hall, supporting the eastern bay of the Long Gallery, on to the level, green square of the troco-ground, and stood gazing out over the downward sloping park—the rough, short turf of it dotted with ancient thorn trees and broken by beds of bracken and dog-roses—to the Long Water, glistening like some giant mirror some quarter-mile distant in the valley, she became sensible of a novel element in her ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... the Wizard went over Three-Tree Common, his shoe became unstringed, and he bent down to refasten it. Then he saw Wry-Face, the gnome, hiding among the bracken and looking as mischievous as anything. In one hand he held a white fluff-feather. Now these feathers are as light as anything, and will blow in the wind; and whatever they are placed under, whether ...
— The Book of Stories for the Storyteller • Fanny E. Coe
... Caryll's footsteps died away on the stone quarries of the great hall within. Then she gently drew the heavy door to, and stepped out on to the centre of the terrace. The grass slopes of the park—dotted with thorn trees and beds of bracken,—the lime avenue running along the ridge of the hill, the ragged edge of the fir forest to the east, and the mass of the house, all these were softened to a vagueness—as the landscape in a dream—by the deepening twilight. An immense repose pervaded the whole ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... had sat cowering in the bracken, hare-like, when it might have loped away, selected this, the one moment when it ought to have sat still, to bolt frantically between Peter's bandy legs and speed away down ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... education, a belief in order, and in English parliamentary methods, and a fiery determination to put down the oppression of the nobles. "If God gives me but a dog's life," he said, "I will make the key keep the castle and the bracken bush keep the cow." Before his first Parliament, in May 1424, James arrested Murdoch's eldest son, Sir Walter Fleming of Cumbernauld, and the younger Boyd of Kilmarnock. The Parliament left a Committee ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang
... where their cordial postillion at a trot bumped the chariot against the sturdy wheels of a waggon, which sent it reclining for support upon a beech-tree's huge intertwisted serpent roots, amid strips of brown bracken and pendant weeds, while he exhibited one short stump of leg, all boot, in air. No one was hurt. Diana disengaged herself from the shoulder of Danvers, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... immediately under the old Castle and traversing its entire length. The further side is called the Deer Park, inclosed and stocked by Sir John Glynne in 1739. Its banks and glades, richly timbered, and overgrown with bracken, afford from various points beautiful views over the plain of Chester, with the bold projections of the Frodsham and Peckforton hills. Along the bottom of the hollow flows Broughton brook. Two ...
— The Hawarden Visitors' Hand-Book - Revised Edition, 1890 • William Henry Gladstone
... tapering rod fall into the hollow of his arm, swung round his creel to the front, and, raising the lid, peered down at his speckled prizes lying upon a bed of newly-picked bracken fronds. ...
— The Ocean Cat's Paw - The Story of a Strange Cruise • George Manville Fenn
... no bracken here the floor is good enough for me. Eh, but this sea-woman will have a thought in her mind over ...
— Nuala O'Malley • H. Bedford-Jones
... a large, circular enclosure, crammed to the very top of its girdling bank with furze-bushes, bracken, low hazel, and stunted Scotch firs. Its primary idea was woodcock, its second rabbits; beaters were in the habit of getting through it somehow, but a ride feasible for fox hunters had never so much as occurred to it. Into this, with practical assistance from ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... a great boar lying in a tangled thicket of boughs and bracken, a dark place where the sun never shone, nor could the rain pierce through. Then the noise of the men's shouts and the barking of the dogs awakened the boar, and up he sprang, bristling all over his back, and with fire shining from his eyes. ...
— Tales of Troy: Ulysses the Sacker of Cities • Andrew Lang
... going to Torre Garda?" she asked, after a long silence. "I hate towns ... and people. I want to smell the pines ... and the bracken." ...
— The Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman
... who has been indulging in a pleasant reverie upon a bank of bracken, wakes up and ...
— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)
... sight behind the moorland hills. In a high dogcart, behind a fast horse, we were soon rattling across the undulating stretches of an open and bleak country, the keen air stinging our cheeks and the scents of pine and bracken strong about us. Bare hills were faintly visible against the horizon, and the coachman pointed to a bank of distant shadows on our left where he told us the sea lay. Occasional stone farmhouses, standing back from the road among straggling fir trees, and large black barns that seemed to shift past ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... went over to the Conservative Party. I was trying—chaotic task—to gauge the possibilities inherent in the quality of the British aristocracy. There comes a broad spectacular effect of wide parks, diversified by woods and bracken valleys, and dappled with deer; of great smooth lawns shaded by ancient trees; of big facades of sunlit buildings dominating the country side; of large fine rooms full of handsome, easy-mannered people. As a sort of representative picture to set off against those ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... Oswald,' he said to his airy little companion, as they reached the old stone bridge that crosses the stream just below the mill-house; 'it's such a lovely day one feels loath to miss any of it, and the scenery here looks so bright and cheerful after the endless brown heather and russet bracken about Dunbude. Not that Exmoor isn't beautiful in its way, too—all Devonshire is beautiful alike for that matter; but then it's more sombre and woody in the north, and much less spring-like than this lovely ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... poet went on a tour in Devonshire, and began his Akbar, and probably wrote June Bracken and Heather; or perhaps it was composed when "we often sat on the top of Blackdown to watch the sunset." He wrote to ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... others were dark, with a rich, indefinable hue of their own, and as they moved, the earth seemed to burst into a deeper glow of color behind them. Close by, the broken hill-side was set here and there with oak and thorn, was everywhere deep in bracken, on whose large fronds lay the bluish bloom of their maturity. It all gained a definiteness of form, an air of meaning by its detachment from the ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... coppice, bocage^, tope, clump of trees, thicket, spinet, spinney; underwood, brushwood; scrub; boscage, bosk^, ceja [Sp.], chaparal, motte [U.S.]; arboretum &c 371. bush, jungle, prairie; heath, heather; fern, bracken; furze, gorse, whin; grass, turf; pasture, pasturage; turbary^; sedge, rush, weed; fungus, mushroom, toadstool; lichen, moss, conferva^, mold; growth; alfalfa, alfilaria^, banyan; blow, blowth^; floret^, petiole; pin grass, timothy, yam, yew, zinnia. foliage, branch, bough, ramage^, stem, tigella^; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... to be summer; the bracken was high and green. A man, clad in doublet and hose of Lincoln green, strode forward into the center of the picture. He was a slim fellow, not over tall, with a likeable face, bearded and bronzed; and a forester, too, if one might judge ...
— Robin Hood • Paul Creswick
... their seasons' changes, and the changing life of nature both by land and sea, and had made as little impression on the island as the ceaseless dashing of the waves against its coast. The cliffs, the caves and the sea-beaten boulders were the same; the colours of the bracken on the September hills, and of the sea anemones in their green, pellucid pools, were the same, and the fishermen's path down to the cove was the same. No iron chain had been put there, but the rope had ...
— A Loose End and Other Stories • S. Elizabeth Hall
... a steep forest, where I lost sight of the Tarn. The soil was too rocky for the trees—oaks and chestnuts chiefly—to grow very tall; consequently the underwood, although dense, was chequered all through with sunshine. Heather and bracken, holly and box, made a wilderness that spread over all the visible world, for the opposite side of the gorge was exactly similar. Shining in the sun amidst the flowering heather or glowing in majestic purple grandeur in the shade of shrubs stood many a foxglove, ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... well founded. I had long been aware of the insect's partiality for rosebuds and blossoms, which it greedily devours. In the north of England, where it is much used as a killing bait for trout, the insect is commonly known by the name of 'bracken-clock,' a name of the same import with the Staffordshire term 'fernshaw,' each signifying 'fern-beetle.'" Another correspondent says—Scarabaeus horticola, called "the chovy" in Norfolk, is there deemed very injurious to apple-trees, and other trees and plants, as it feeds ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 566, September 15, 1832 • Various
... suddenly stopped and said that he had certainly seen a man slinking off the path into the covert; and the Corporal at once hurried to the spot in the hope that it might be the idiot. Making his way through the thicket he presently came upon a man lying down in some bracken and evidently anxious to conceal himself. The fellow was ragged, unkempt and bearded, but he was not the idiot, and he seemed terrified at being discovered, stammering out something about meaning no harm, and begging to be allowed to go. The Corporal sent the children a little apart, felt ...
— The Drummer's Coat • J. W. Fortescue
... pleasaunce for the inhabitants of Midhurst; thickly carpeted with bracken and heather and broken by many picturesque knolls and hollows. The famous burned and ruined mansion lies on the west, close to the town and river. This beautiful old house was destroyed in 1793 ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... beautiful, telling of a time when Englishmen knew how to build whether for rich or poor; the gardens glow with flowers, and the air is delicately sweet. At the village end, I come into a lane, which winds upwards between grassy slopes, to turf and bracken and woods of noble beech. Here I am upon a spur of the Cotswolds, and before me spreads the wide vale of Evesham, with its ripening crops, its fruiting orchards, watered by sacred Avon. Beyond, softly blue, the hills of Malvern. On the branch ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... foot to the Telega Warna (Colour-changing Lake) while the ponies rested for the downward journey. The path is a difficult one, and the lake itself is less interesting than the lovely vegetation by which it is surrounded. Ferns and bracken cover the hillside, pollipods predominating, orchids cling to tree stems, and higher up, the curious nest-fern and various forms of plant life attract attention. Tree is woven to tree by a ...
— Across the Equator - A Holiday Trip in Java • Thomas H. Reid
... Martin, the woodcutter, wading in the bracken and looking about him in rather a lost fashion. The man seemed to be ...
— The Trees of Pride • G.K. Chesterton
... 30th last, and two or three days after were followed by Miss Blagden, Miss Bracken, and Lytton—all for our sake: they not otherwise wanting to come this way. Lytton arrived unwell, got worse soon, and last Friday week was laid up with a sort of nervous fever, caused by exposure to the sun, or something, acting on ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... were all visible, as distinctly outlined as any artist could have drawn them. Some of the most striking pictures are on the windows of the Milford Baptist Church, which are protected with shutters that are kept tightly closed. The people of Bracken county have not in years been more worked up over anything than they now are over ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... onto a slope of bracken, and before me at a few paces on the path were Madame Barras and two men; one at some distance in advance of her, disappearing at the moment behind a spur of the slope that hid us from the sea, and I got no conception of him; but the creature at her heels ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... the silvery sward beside the Stony Bottom there lay the ruffled body of a dead sheep. All about the victim the dewy ground was dark and patchy like dishevelled velvet; bracken trampled down; stones displaced as though by straggling feet; and the whole spotted with the ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... day, all the evening scents were abroad, carried by a gentle wind. Sir Arthur drank them in, with the sensuous pleasure which had been one of his gifts in life. The honey smell of the heather, the woody smell of the bracken, the faint fragrance of wood-smoke wafted from a bonfire in the valley below—they all carried with them an inexpressible magic for the man wandering on the moor. So did the movements of birds—the rise of a couple of startled grouse, the hovering of two kestrels, a flight ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... palace of the pre-Adamite kings, a city of the Anakim must have appeared so shapeless and yet so like the ruins of what had been shaped after the waters of the flood subsided." Great bowlders, half hidden by the bracken, lie about in wildest confusion; the remains of what seem to be Druidic circles can be traced here and there, and it is hard to persuade one's self that the ragged towers and picturesque piles of rock are not the work ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... filled with masses of dried bracken and coarse grass, turned sharply on hearing Vickers's call and stared hard and long in the direction which the young solicitor pointed out. His small, crafty eyes became dilated to their full extent—suddenly they contracted again with a ...
— Scarhaven Keep • J. S. Fletcher
... slept like a young roe in the bracken, and in deep and rapturous ease he slept this night. Another perfectly joyful day had passed and his Mother had liked Robin and kissed her. All was well with the world. As long as he had remained awake—and it had not been long—he had thought of delightful things unfeverishly. Of Robin, ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... whole of the flat land on the top of the cliffs and the steep valleys and slopes down to the sea on the south and east side of the Island, from Fermain Bay to Pleimont, being almost uninterrupted wild land covered with heather, furze, and bracken; besides this wild furze land, there are several thick furze brakes inland in different parts of the Island. All these places seem to me to have remained almost without change for years. The furze, however, never grows very high, as it is cut every few years for ...
— Birds of Guernsey (1879) • Cecil Smith |
