"Feathery" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... across a field at a cluster of trees, there may be a doubt as to the identity of an oak, a chestnut, a maple, an ash, but no mistake can be made in regard to an elm—it stands alone in the simple elegance of its vase-like form, while its feathery branchlets, waving in the lightest breeze, add to the refined and classic effect. I use the word "classic" advisedly, because, although apparently out of place in describing a tree, it nevertheless seems needed for the form of the ...
— Getting Acquainted with the Trees • J. Horace McFarland
... had a glimpse of the lake, dotted with many motor boats and other craft, as the airship ascended until it was above the clouds. Then, for a time, nothing could be seen by the occupants but masses of feathery vapor. ...
— Tom Swift among the Fire Fighters - or, Battling with Flames from the Air • Victor Appleton
... arrived when Robert and Shargar must return to Rothieden. A keen autumnal wind was blowing far-off feathery clouds across a sky of pale blue; the cold freshened the spirits of the boys, and tightened their nerves and muscles, till they were like bow-strings. No doubt the winter was coming, but the sun, although his day's work was short and slack, was still as ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... neighbourhood. Often chestnut-trees in full glory of white blossom, as if blazing with fairy candles, lined our way for miles. There was snow of hawthorne too—"May," our two men called it—and ranks of little feathery white trees, such as I knew no name for, looking like a procession of brides, or young girls going to their first communion. Then, to brighten the white land with colour, there were clumps of lilac, clouds of rose-pink apple blossoms, blue streaks that meant beds of violets, and a ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... glory from ruin, was hurrying in rosy masses away from under the loftier vault of blue. The ordered shocks upon twenty fields sent their long purple shadows across the flush; and the evening wind, like the sighing that follows departed tears, was shaking the jewels from their feathery tops. The sunflowers and hollyhocks no longer cowered under the tyranny of the rain, but bowed beneath the weight of the gems that adorned them. A flame burned as upon an altar on the top of every tree, and the very pools that lay on the ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... blue, sunny sky, By what breeze would my pinions be stirred? To what beautiful land should I fly? Would the gorgeous East allure, With the light of its golden eyes, Where the tall green palm, over isles of balm, Waves with its feathery leaves? Ah! no! no! no! I heed not its tempting glare; In vain should I roam from my island home, For ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... quieter-coloured onion crops vary the green of the landscape. The scent of flowering bean-fields fills the air, and the hum of wild bees is heard above the other sounds of the fields. Palm groves lift their feathery plumes towards the sky, and mulberry-trees and dark-toned tamarisks shade the water-wheels, which, with incessant groanings, are continually turned by blindfolded bullocks. Villages and little farmsteads are frequent, and everywhere are the people, men, women, ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Egypt • R. Talbot Kelly
... the terrestrial crew, Who teaches Greek, Latin, and likewise Hebrew; He has taught Captain Dampier, the first in the race, Swirling his hat with a feathery grace, Cookson the marshal, and Willoughby, of size, Making minor serjeant-majors ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... General varnished it. There was varnish in Mrs General's voice, varnish in Mrs General's touch, an atmosphere of varnish round Mrs General's figure. Mrs General's dreams ought to have been varnished—if she had any—lying asleep in the arms of the good Saint Bernard, with the feathery ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... is expressive; it is a contraction of the Anglo-Saxon fepern, and so shows that some of our ancestors marked its feathery form; and its history as a garden plant is worth a few lines. So little has it been esteemed as a garden plant that Mr. J. Smith, the ex-Curator of the Kew Gardens, tells us that in the year 1822 the collection of Ferns at Kew ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... minute, the rain-drops shining on her cheeks and in her hair. In the hollow of her firm hands she held a feathery brown little body, limp and warm. We examined it carefully. It was stunned, but not killed, and apparently neither ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... of the beet; the long, waving leaf of the maize, with the silky tassels of its ears, were beautiful in his eyes; and so were the rich, white heads of the cauliflower, delicate as carved ivory, the feathery tuft of the carrot, the purple fruit of the egg-plant, and the brilliant scarlet tomato. He came nearer than most Christians, out of Weathersfield, to sympathy with the old Egyptians in ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... every two or three minutes: some uprooted, partly on account of the loose, water-soaked condition of the ground; others broken straight across, where some weakness caused by fire had determined the spot. The gestures of the various trees made a delightful study. Young Sugar Pines, light and feathery as squirrel-tails, were bowing almost to the ground; while the grand old patriarchs, whose massive boles had been tried in a hundred storms, waved solemnly above them, their long, arching branches streaming fluently ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... many of which are injurious to crops, are commonly thought to feed on clothes and carpets. The true carpet and clothes moths are minute species, which flutter noiselessly about our apartments. Their narrow, feathery wings are edged with long silken fringes, and almost the slightest touch ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... wings, she had two little feathery arms, with which she fanned herself, and complained of the ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... to come back and tell us about them; and, alas! some heroes have not returned, but have lain down there to perish of cold and hunger. Doesn't it look cold, the clear blue ice, almost as blue as the air? And look at the snow, drifts upon drifts, and the air filled with feathery flakes ...
— The Seven Little Sisters Who Live on the Round Ball - That Floats in the Air • Jane Andrews
... and watch the stream, and not to fear reproof because she had ceased from toil. At Mauleverer, at this tranquil afternoon hour, while those rooks were sailing so calmly high above her head—yonder belated butterfly fluttering so happily over the feathery grasses—all nature so full of rest—they were grinding away in the hot schoolroom, grinding at the weekly geography lesson, addling their brains with feeble efforts to repeat by rote dry-as-dust explanations about the equator and the torrid zone, latitude, longitude, ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... the Gate to swoop down to the South Seas. Do you think a man who has felt his ship's bows heave and plunge under him in the long Pacific swell—just ahead of him a reef breaking white into the lagoon, and beyond a fence of feathery palms—cares to follow hounds over gray hedges under a gray November sky? And the society? A man who's got a speaking acquaintance in every port from Acapulco to Melbourne, who knows every den and every longshoreman in it from a South ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... saw them march away up the hill. They still clung to their bags and bundles. Some of them, lifting shaky voices, tried to sing in chorus. One of the Zouaves angrily shouted to them to be quiet. They obeyed, and disappeared heavily into the shadows, staring about them anxiously at the feathery palms that clustered in this new and dark country, and at the shrouded figures of Arabs who met them ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... predicted, slowly froze among the trees, rolled themselves in the sleigh-robes and huddled together. It was blowing strongly now, and a numbing drowsiness had to be grappled with as the warmth died out of them. At last when a few feathery flakes came floating down, the Sheriff shook himself with ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... of its cloud-capped tors, but the wildness of Exmoor is blended with a sweet and gentle charm which is all its own. It presents us with a panorama of misty woods, gleaming water, and glowing heather; a combe-furrowed moorland clothed with scrub oaks and feathery larches. After leaving this forest shrine the Exe enters Devonshire, where, after flowing through richly wooded and fertile valleys, it sweeps past the ancient town of Tiverton, where it is swelled by the waters of the Loman. Three miles from Tiverton it reaches Bickley Bridge, beyond ...
— Exeter • Sidney Heath
... on a snowy November morning. The Adirondack Lake, where I was staying that autumn, was not yet frozen; but a few days before there had been a light fall of snow, and on this morning the evergreens were draped in a feathery shroud. While I was yet asleep my guide, Rufe, had caught a glimpse of a deer, swimming near the shore. No hounds were heard; and, after an early breakfast, Rufe and I got into our boat and paddled along the water's edge to discover, ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls, Vol. XIII, Nov. 28, 1891 • Various
... wall of reeds. Occasionally the reeds would sway and rustle against one another apparently without cause. Seen from down below, against the clear part of the sky, their waving tufts looked like the feathery branches of trees. Close in front at his very feet was the bank, and at its base the rushing torrent. A little farther on was the moving mass of glassy brown water which eddied rhythmically along the bank and round the shallows. ...
— The Cossacks • Leo Tolstoy
... reach Vera Cruz before the heat of the day begins. We passed over a dreary district, generally too dry for anything but cactus and acacias, but now and then, when a little water was to be found, displaying clumps of bamboos with their elegant feathery tufts. Then the railway took us through the dismal downs, with their swamps and sand-hills, and ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... visible, all but its base, from the very mouth of the river. Its central spire, full three hundred feet in height, towers grandly above the surrounding turrets and pagodas, the white walls gleaming out from the dark foliage of the banian, and the feathery fringes of the palm reflected on ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... surf, yet seem to be merely sporting, chasing the sea as it retires, and running up before the impending wave. Sometimes they let it bear them off their feet, and float lightly on its breaking summit; sometimes they flutter and seem to rest on the feathery spray. They are little birds with gray backs and snow-white breasts; their images may be seen in the wet sand almost or quite as distinctly as the reality. Their legs are long. As you draw near, they take a flight of a score of yards or more, and then recommence their dalliance with the surf-wave. ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... contracted a slight stoop. The former delicacy of his complexion had gone—the sickly paleness of it was all that remained. His thin flaxen mustaches were no longer pragmatically waxed and twisted into a curl: their weak feathery ends hung meekly pendent over the querulous corners of his mouth. If the ten or twelve weeks since his marriage had been counted by his locks, they might have reckoned as ten or twelve years. He stood at the window mechanically picking ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... Ladas, Rhesus' chariot yok'd to snowy coursers, Add each feathery sandal, every flying Power, ask fleetness of all the winds of heaven, 20 Mine, Camerius, and to me devoted; Yet with drudgery ...
— The Poems and Fragments of Catullus • Catullus
... the grain to smooth, hard ground spaces, where it is threshed by a heavy roller stone drawn by a donkey or an ox or by men, and several times I saw it drawn by women. Then it is winnowed by being pitched into the air for the wind to drive out the feathery chaff. The methods vividly illustrate the first Psalm and other Bible references— gleaning, muzzling "the ox when he treadeth out the corn,'' the threshing floor and "the chaff which ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... and misty night, full of all the heavy perfumes of new vegetation not yet dried by hot sun, and among these particularly the scent of the fern. The lantern, dangling from Christian's hand, brushed the feathery fronds in passing by, disturbing moths and other winged insects, which flew out and ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... sheep an' cattle an' horses,' But the young horse just wiggled and wiggled,"—I could hear my daughter suiting the action to the word upon her audience's knee,—"and pwesently his halter was off! Then out he rushed, kicking up the nimble snow with his feathery heels, and—what?" ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay
... flat arc. The sky to the north was empty, colorless. There had been no wind for some time, and now the firs sagged beneath burdens of white; even the bare birch branches carried evenly balanced inch-deep layers of snow. Underfoot, the earth was smothered in a feathery shroud as light, as clean as the purest swan's-down, and into it Pierce's moccasins sank to the ankles. He walked as silently as a ghost. Through this queer, breathless hush the sounds of chopping, of distant voices, ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... park in its spring glory. They lunched in a little inclosure, rosy with the pink and white magnolia blossoms, where the uncut grass was already ankle-deep and the rose-bushes almost hid the gray stone wall with the feathery abundance of their first pale green leaves. From a remark of the girl's that perhaps this was the very spot where Marie Antoinette had once gathered about her gay court of pseudo-milkmaids, they fell into a discussion of that ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... a Christmas eve in the beginning of the sixteenth century, and through the streets of Nuremberg came drifting a feathery snow that heaped itself in fantastic patterns on the projecting windows and fretted stone balconies of the quaint and crowded houses. It was not an honest and single-minded snow-storm, such as would seek to shroud the ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book II - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... pleasant bridle-path through Maudesley Park, that delicious grassy arcade where the overarching branches of the old elms made a shadowy twilight, only broken now and then by sudden patches of yellow sunshine; where the feathery ferns trembled with every low whisper of the autumn breeze: where there was a faint perfume of pine wood; where every here and there, between the lower branches of the trees, there was a blue glimmer of still water-pools, half-hidden under flat green leaves of wild aquatic plants, where there ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... the Alsatian's hand, stepped out, and pressed himself against the side of the house. The breeze still blew upon his face, revivifying and intoxicating. The lazy, feathery clouds were yet drifting ...
— The Forest of Swords - A Story of Paris and the Marne • Joseph A. Altsheler
... skin of a curious pale silvery gray, and pale, pure-white hair rising in what looked like a feathery crest. The eyes were long and slanting, the forehead high and narrow, the nose delicately thin and chiseled with long vertically slit nostrils, the ears long, pointed and lobeless. The mouth looked almost human, though the chin was abnormally ...
— The Colors of Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... she began to long secretly for Starker's Millinery Saloons. In the saloon you walked looking beautiful through a flowery and a feathery grove of hats. You had nothing to do but to try hats on and to sell them, and each sale was a personal triumph for the seller. Violet knew she could sell more hats than any other of the girls at Starker's; she knew she had a pretty way of putting on a hat, of turning slowly round and ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... It was not at all dreamlike, but perfectly clear and solid-looking in the candle-light. He saw the hairy body, and the short feathery antennae, the jointed legs, even a place where the down was rubbed from the wing. He suddenly felt angry with himself for being afraid ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... highest part of the island, but that another hill lay beyond, with a wide valley between it and the one on which we stood. This valley, like the first, was also full of rich trees, some dark and some light green, some heavy and thick in foliage, and others light, feathery, and graceful, while the beautiful blossoms on many of them threw a sort of rainbow tint over all, and gave to the valley the appearance of a garden of flowers. Among these we recognised many of the bread-fruit ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... which let in plenty of air, as there was no glass; but outside were six stout bars of iron, and the lattice was securely fastened. I stared through the pattern of wood into a very small but charming patio, paved with brick and tiles, and having in the centre a fountain, with a shallow basin. Feathery plumes of water played over a few low palms in great blue and white pots of Triana ware, but as I looked the plumes shrank almost to nothing, then ceased to wave. The fountain was asleep ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... we all looked out. The ground was deep with snow, and it was still falling in great feathery flakes. Old Blacky was loose, and looked in at us with a ...
— The Voyage of the Rattletrap • Hayden Carruth
... just as Nature meant them to be, unaffected bits of colour and grace, upspringing from the sod. In the cathedral at Berne is a happy example of the use of these sweet flowers, as they appear at the feet of the sacred group, and as they carry the eye into the sky by means of the feathery branches like fern-fronds which tops the scene; but we find them nearer home, in almost ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... evergreen leaves; beds of rare lilies, purely white or brilliant with colour; roses in their perfection of bloom; flowers of forms she had never figured to herself, shaded by wondrous trees, the exquisite weeping deodara, the delicate mimosa, the scaly Himalaya pines, the feathery gigantic ferns of the ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... The novice was saying goodbye to the convent garden, and the long straight path under the wall, where every day for many years she had walked, spring and summer, autumn and winter; days of rain, days of sun, days of boisterous wind, days of white feathery snow—all the days through which she had passed, on her way from childhood to womanhood. Best of all, she had loved the garden and her favourite path in spring, when vague hopes like dreams stirred in her blood, when it ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... immediately took advantage of the only remaining cover, the body of the Synapta, snoodling beside it so artfully that they were quite concealed. The protector did not appear to resent the close company of the fish, which remained perfectly motionless. In a few seconds the Synapta began to extrude its feathery gills, which had been partly retracted on disturbance. I counted the gills, and while my forefinger indicated the sixth, a little fish, not previously noticed, appeared at the focus and edged off to the margin of the ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... bolt upright, and looked wistfully out of the windows as we drew near the end of our journey. The aspect of the country was quiet and pastoral. Woodley stood among fields; and there was an old-fashioned garden where roses and currant-bushes touched each other, and where the feathery asparagus formed a pretty background to the pinks and gilly-flowers; there was no drive up to the door. We got out at a little gate, and walked up ...
— Cranford • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... be faced, and a secret vein of cruelty in Lawrence was not averse from facing it. This storm had been brewing all summer.—They were alone, for the beechen way was used only as a short cut to the vicarage. Above them the garden wall lifted its feathery fringe of grass into great golden boughs that drooped over it: all round them the beech forest ran down into the valley, the eye losing itself among clear glades at the end of which perhaps a thicket of hollies twinkled darkly or a marbled gleam of blue shone ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... been fresh and keen in the air, but it had not yet brought much green to the brown earth or to the trees. The cotton-woods showed a light feathery verdure. The long grass was a bleached white, and low down close to the sod fresh tiny green blades showed. The great fern leaves were sear and ragged, and they rustled in the breeze. Small gray sheath-barked trees with clumpy foliage ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... she grasped Ray's hand, pulled him toward the mushroom jungle. I followed, and we slipped in between the brilliantly golden, fleshy stalks. They rose to the tangle of bright feathery fringes above, huge and substantial as the trunks ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... to a heavy downpour, and by the time we mounted to our rooms, three pair up in the hotel, it was storming in a fine fury over the bay under them, and sweeping the curving quays and tossing the feathery foliage of the tamarisk-shaded promenade. The distinct advantage of our lofty perch was the splendid sight of the tempest, held from doing its worst by the mighty headlands standing out to sea on the right and left. ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... but two little wings, And were a little feathery bird, To you I'd fly, my dear! But thoughts like these are idle things, ...
— The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872 - A Typographic Art Journal • Various
... the anemones, the orchis and trillium followed, then the yellow gerardias and the feathery purple pogonias, and finally the growing gleam of the golden-rods along the wood-side and the red umbels of the tall eupatoriums in the meadow announced the close of summer. One evening, as Richard, in displaying his ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor
... down to the edge of its watery mirror, wherein, beside a semi-tropical vegetation, we see the image of some medieval castle, of some historic tower, and thence the eye strays up to sunless gorges, swept with avalanches, and steaming with feathery cascades; and higher yet one sees against the skyline ranges of terrific crags, girt with glaciers, and so often wreathed in ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... the snow, marked across with the zigzag gray lines of the fences, and spotted here and there with little clumps of woods or patches of bushy pasture. The sky above was white as the earth below, being mantled with snow-laden cloud not yet ready to spill its feathery burden on the world. One little farm-house, far down the valley, served but to emphasize the spacious emptiness of the silent ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... and looking cautiously through the screen of feathery leaves, Jethro saw that the elephants were standing immovable. Their great ears were erected and their trunks outstretched as if scenting the air. After two or three minutes hesitation they continued ...
— The Cat of Bubastes - A Tale of Ancient Egypt • G. A. Henty
... with its deep and dark foliage defying the sun's rays; the guava, growing at its feet, like an infant of the same family; the mammee—or abricot de St. Domingue—with its rich green fruit hanging in clusters, and a foliage rivalling the mango; the dark and feathery tamarind; the light and graceful indigo; the slow-growing arrowroot, with its palmy and feathery leaves spreading like a tender rampart round its precious fruit; boundless fields of the rich sugar-cane; acres of the luscious pine apple; groves of banana and plantain; forests of cedar ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... like a mad dog! It steamed and hissed, with angry spurts and flashes! In a second it had grown bigger than a small snowbank, and whiter. It surged, and boiled, and walloped, and overflowed, and sputtered—sent off feathery flakes like down from a shot swan! The froth poured creaming over his face, and got into his eyes. It was the most sinful shampooing of ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... early start for home, feeling somewhat anxious for its safety on "the glorious Fourth." The club separated into two ranks, and, as Aunt Stanshy passed along, each one of the "knights" touched his feathery head-gear, while every horn sent out as ...
— The Knights of the White Shield - Up-the-Ladder Club Series, Round One Play • Edward A. Rand
... stood the tall, dry reeds. The blackbirds and starlings perched upon the willows seemed swollen into feathery balls, the fur started on the backs of hares, and a four-horse wain could travel in safety over swamps where at any other time a schoolboy dared not ...
— Red Eve • H. Rider Haggard
... day came the finish which all had wished but scarcely dared hoped for, a fleecy fall of snow that drifted in feathery particles down through the still atmosphere, and covered the ground with an inch-deep carpet of white. I well remember old Delmar, with his wrinkled, kindly face and abundant white hair, and his "By Jove, isn't that just the thing!" as he stood on the porch and looked with ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... gold points of light. Islands with the virgin forest stretchin' down to the edge of the water, and cool green shadders layin' on the velvet and mossy sward as you could see as you looked into the green aisles. And all sorts of trees with different foliage, some loose and feathery, some with shinin' leaves, glitterin' where the rain had washed 'em the night before; some towerin' up towards the heavens, shakin' their heads at the sun; some droopin' down as if weighted with their wealth of branches ...
— Samantha at Coney Island - and a Thousand Other Islands • Marietta Holley
... a blue Canton ginger-jar filled with branches of feathery bamboo that spread its lace-like foliage far and wide over the ceiling and walls, quite covering the large spot where the roof had leaked. Various stalks of tropical-looking palms, distributed artistically about, concealed the gaping wounds in the walls, ...
— Polly Oliver's Problem • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... Deutscher's Vaterland? Is it near the ocean wild? Is it where the feathery palm-trees grow? Not there, not there, ...
— The American Baron • James De Mille
... "came the dreaded snow. Around the camp-fires under the trees great feathery flakes came whirling down. The air was so full of them that one could see objects only a few feet away. The Indians knew we were doomed and one of them wrapped his blanket about him and stood all night under ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... greenish-yellow flowers of the Stinging Nettle grow in long feathery clusters on stalks which spring from the main stem close to a ...
— Wildflowers of the Farm • Arthur Owens Cooke
... by its side, waving its willow-like sprays in the wind; a pair of mango-trees near, hung with fruit just ripening and reddish blossoms just opening, and a cocoa-tree or two lifting high above the rest its immense feathery leaves and its ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... and in the drawing-room ready to receive her little friends, by half-past two; and very nice she looked in her light-blue merino frock, with its pretty embroideries, her long golden hair curled in the feathery ringlets Susan was so proud of making, her sleeves looped up with new bracelets, and a little embroidered handkerchief just ...
— Outpost • J.G. Austin
... my way eastward on foot, across Union Square. The snow had been falling all night and was still sifting down in big, flowery flakes. The trees under their soft, feathery burdens looked like those that grow only in a child's picture-book. The slat-benches were covered with soft white blankets that were as yet undisturbed, for the habitual bench tramp was not abroad so early in ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... eggs, and thought of no other thing that might chance: so I spread a soft fall below, and with a long pole I broke the floor of the nest. Then with a sudden stir of horror I saw soft things falling along with the clay, tiny and feathery. Two were killed by the breakage that fell with them, but one was quite alive and unhurt. I gathered up the remnants of the nest and set it with the young one in it by the loft window where the parent-birds might see, making clumsy strivings of pity to quiet my conscience. The parent-birds ...
— An Englishwoman's Love-Letters • Anonymous
... of Lubyantsev the notary, a handsome young woman of five-and-twenty, was walking slowly along a track that had been cleared in the wood, with Ilyin, a lawyer who was spending the summer in the neighbourhood. It was five o'clock in the evening. Feathery-white masses of cloud stood overhead; patches of bright blue sky peeped out between them. The clouds stood motionless, as though they had caught in the tops of the tall old pine-trees. It was ...
— The Party and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... can fathom the life, for instance, of yonder mysterious, almost voiceless, Humming-Bird, smallest of feathery things, and loneliest, whirring among birds, insect-like, and among insects, bird-like, his path untraceable, his home unseen? An image of airy motion, yet it sometimes seems as if there were nothing joyous in him. He seems like some exiled pigmy prince, banished, but still regal, and doomed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... knee and the cast leapt out in feathery coils. Once, twice it swished; the third time it alighted like thistledown on the surface. There was a tiny splash, a laugh, and the little greenheart rod flicked a trout high over his head. It was the merest baby—half-an-ounce, perhaps—and it fell from the hook into the herbage some yards ...
— Uncanny Tales • Various
... England it is considered a sign of summer when the housewives fill the fireplaces with branches of mountain laurel, and, later, with the feathery stalks of the asparagus. This is often, too, the timid expression of a tender feeling, under Puritanic repression, which has not sufficient vent in the sweet-william and hollyhock at the front door. This is a yearning after ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... unreachable horizon, the feathery cloud from its stack lying over against the leaden sky, shaped like a finger that pointed mockingly the way ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... air are good," she thought, watching the sun-rays pierce the purple hearts of a passion-flower, the shadows move across the deep brown water, the radiant butterfly alight upon a lily, the scarlet-throated birds dart in and out through the yellow feathery blossoms of the limes. ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... Englishman. The sheet is drawn very tight over his chest; his face is flushed and he is breathing rapidly, in short jerks. At first you do not see that he, too, is not more than a boy, for he is so big and tall, and a little brown feathery beard has begun to curl ...
— A Journal of Impressions in Belgium • May Sinclair
... corralled Jerry, whom she found translating Latin with a dictionary on her lap and a terrible frown on her brow, and together they hurried to Pat's house. It was a soft May evening—the air was filled with the throaty twitter of robins, the trees arched feathery green against the twilight sky. Pat and Peggy sat bareheaded on the steps of the Everett house, waiting for them. A great fragrant flowering honeysuckle brushed their shoulders. A more perfect setting could not have been found for the finish of ...
— Highacres • Jane Abbott
... much that of an unpeeled almond; when she smiles, they grow red. She has an object in life which can hardly be called a mission. She is rather tall, and quite graceful, though not altogether natural in her movements. Her dress gives a feathery impression to one who rather receives than notes the look of ladies. She has a good hand—not the doll hand so much admired of those who can judge only of quantity and know nothing of quality, but a fine sensible hand,—the best thing ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... course of the river, and had gradually descended from the higher grounds to the immediate banks, which here spread out into a small meadow on each side. There were not now many flowers, but Saffy was pulling stalks of feathery-headed grasses, while Mark was walking quietly along by the brink of the stream, stopping every now and then to look into it. The bank was covered with long grass hanging over, here and there a bush of rushes amongst ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... with small green particles whirling and floating downward. Feathery, yet clumsy, they refused to obey gravity and seek the earth urgently, but instead shifted and changed direction, coyly spiraling upward and sideways before yielding to ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... low and rugged hills cut against the pale-saffron sky. The valley between was filled with blue shadow, but in the foreground a river twinkled in the fading light. Feathery larches grew close up to the house, and a beck splashed in the gloom among their trunks. Farther off, a dog barked, and there was a confused bleating of sheep, but this seemed to emphasize ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss
... branch which has thrust itself among them, which you take for a dark copper-coloured fern, so finely divided are its glossy leaves. It is really a Mimosa—Bois Mulatre, {139d} as they call it here. What a contrast again, the huge feathery fronds of the Cocorite palms which stretch right away hither over our heads, twenty and thirty feet in length. And what is that spot of crimson flame hanging in the darkest spot of all from an under-bough of that low weeping tree? ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... still beautiful and attractive. And what beautiful colors greeted our weary eyes as we drew nigher. I thought of that gate of Jerusalem the Golden, all enamelled with emerald, amethyst, chalcedony, and pearl sot in gold. The golden brown earth made from melted lava, the feathery foliage of the palms that riz up beyend the dazzlin' white beach, the crystal blue waters with myriad-hued fishes playing down in its crystal depths. Oh, how fair the seen as we approached nearer and see plainer and plainer the pictured beauty of the shore. Shinin' green valley, emerald-topped mountain, ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... under the green and snaky cat-briers, with their retractile thorns and vicious clinging grasp,—now dashing along the woodman's paths,—now struggling among the opposing underwood. At last a little sprig of feathery green catches the eye. It is a tuft of moss. No,—it is the running ground-pine; and clearing away, with both eager hands, leaves, sticks, moss, and all the fallen exuciae of the summertime, you tear up ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... islands is greatly increased by the date-palm, with its gracefully curved fronds and refreshing light green color, near the bottom of the picture, and the lofty palmyra towering far above, and casting its feathery foliage against a cloudless sky. It being winter, we had the strange coloring on the banks which many parts of African landscape assume. The country adjacent to the river is rocky and undulating, abounding in elephants and all other large game, except leches and nakongs, which seem ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... rocks the Psyche "appears in the balcony of her boudoir, in the rays of the caressing sun; lying on the cloudy softness of an incomparable eider-down." She awaits the visit of the spouse, "the gentle Bombyx," who, for the ceremony, "has donned his feathery plumes and his mantle of black velvet." "If he is late in coming, the female grows impatient; then she herself makes the advances, and sets forth in ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... say where policy ended and unpolicied nature began. My lord had been led by the influence of Mr. Sheriff Scott into a considerable design of planting; many acres were accordingly set out with fir, and the little feathery besoms gave a false scale and lent a strange air of a toy-shop to the moors. A great, rooty sweetness of bogs was in the air, and at all seasons an infinite melancholy piping of hill birds. Standing so ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the whereabouts of his mate, and leads him wandering through the night? What organ does this sense affect? One suspects the antennae; in the male butterfly they actually seem to be sounding, interrogating empty space with their long feathery plumes. Are these splendid plumes merely items of finery, or do they really play a part in the perception of the effluvia which guide the lover? It seemed easy, on the occasion I spoke of, to devise ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... leaves whence the mother root threw Up its crown of rich purple, bejewelled with dew, These feathery nothings, barbed, sparsely, with seeds, Must struggle for life with the brambles ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... window-seat. Something gray and soft. It had a round feathered head, with two feathery horns jutting from it; it had round bright eyes, which blinked curiously at the astonished girls. Below the head were—arms, were they, or wings? They were feathery too, and they drooped over something that might be a skirt, though no feet were visible. In the ...
— Peggy • Laura E. Richards
... delicious waves of warmth over the reeking earth,—is lighting both heart and hope, and quickening into activity a thousand thoughts of what has been and of what will be. The meadow stretching away under its golden flood,—waving with grain, and with the feathery blossoms of the grass, and golden buttercups, and white, nodding daisies,—comes to my eye like the lapse of fading childhood, studded here and there with the bright blossoms of joy, crimsoned all over with the flush of health, and enamelled ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... Northern Dawn in idle play Mocks their sad souls, now trickling down the sky In many-quivering lines of golden spray, Then blazing out, an Iris-arch on high, With fiery lances fill'd and feathery bars, And sheeny veils that ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... whether she had seen Miss Rossiter but had not the courage. A little misty rain made feathery ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... pigfish, and blackfish may be caught as quickly as they can be hauled out. I look to the sea birds and the turtles to afford our principal source of revenue. Trinidad is the breeding-place of almost the entire feathery population of the South Atlantic Ocean. The exportation of guano alone should make my little country prosperous. Turtles visit the island to deposit eggs, and at certain seasons the beach is literally alive with them. The only drawback to my projected kingdom is the fact that it has ...
— Real Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... thicket of lilacs, with the old scent of the spring blossoms yet hanging on their boughs; along the bank, where her foot had sunk deep into plushy moss, where he had gathered a cluster of fern and put it into her hand. Its pale feathery green was not more quaint or pure than the delicate love in the uncouth man beside her,—not nearer kin to Nature. Did she know that? Had it been like the breath of God coming into her nostrils to be so loved, appreciated, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... and velvety blackness of night was giving place to a pearly grey, and the feathery streaks of a trembling dawn were shooting heavenward when a man, whose head had been pillowed on a Mexican saddle, rose from the ground in front of a tepee, made of blankets on crossed sticks, and seated himself on an old tree-stump where he proceeded ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco
... to despair, our head Krooman drew the captain's attention to the westward and said the breeze was coming. We saw no signs of it, but his quick eye had noticed light feathery clouds rising to the westward, a sure indication of the coming breeze. Soon we could see the glassy surface ruffled at different points as the breeze danced over it, coming on like an advancing line of skirmishers; and as we ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... which used to gush with wondrous music only scarlet drops of blood now trickled. The manikins were ruthless. Their faces were ten times wickeder than ever, as they roamed from cage to cage, slaughtering with a fury that seemed entirely unappeasable. Presently the feathery rustlings became fewer and fainter, and the little pipings of despair died away; and in every cage lay a poor murdered minstrel, with the song that abode within him forever quenched;—in every cage but two, and those two were high up on the wall; and in each glared ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... Miss Wetherby rescued her pillow shams, and with the other, forcibly removed the dog which had lost no time in following his master into the feathery nest. Then she abruptly left the room; she could not ...
— The Tangled Threads • Eleanor H. Porter
... child at play, Like a living ocean-child, Through the feathery spray she cleaves her way To the billows' music wild; The sea is her wide-spread pleasure ground, And the waves around her leap, As with joyous bound, to their mystic sound, She dances ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... help the neighbours. She had no relations living, but she never went short of food, for the fishers and the farm people, and even the pitmen, took care to give her shelter and enough to eat. She was mostly bare-headed, but in September, when the cotton-grass grew feathery, she liked to make herself a head-dress out of the grey plumes. When her Sunday hat, as she called it, was on, she was fond of putting the red fronds of the dying bracken into her belt, and with those adornments ...
— The Romance of the Coast • James Runciman
... Yarnall received a bad scalp-wound, which fairly drenched his face with blood. As he groped his way towards the cock-pit he passed a lot of hammocks stuffed with "cat-tails" which had been stowed on the bulwarks. The feathery down of the "cat-tails" filled the air, and settled thick upon the head and face of the officer, robbing his countenance of all semblance to a human face. As he descended the ladder to the cock-pit, his owl-like air roused the wounded to great shouts of laughter. "The Devil has come ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... looked away. The tops of the distant trees beyond the bounds of the plantation interested him: he had not before observed how light and feathery they were, nor how darkly blue the sky was, even among their branches, where they somewhat paled it with their green; above him it appeared almost black. "It will be uncomfortably hot here," he thought, "as the day advances. I wonder which ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... purpose as those forms of ape and ibis inside the Egyptian caverns—serve to illustrate the shapes and idolatries of human conceit. At any rate, there is no doubt of the essential nobility of that man who pours into life the honest vigor of his toil, over those who compose this feathery foam of fashion that sweeps along Broadway; who consider the insignia of honor to consist in wealth and indolence; and who, ignoring the family history, paint coats of arms to cover up the leather ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... under the arch, but halting there, within sight of his companions, he clasped a projection with one hand as if he were giddy, and turning his head gazed intently at the crest of the wall. Every broken edge, every tuft of feathery grass, every aspiring ivy-spray, stood sharply out against the sunny blue. The breeze had gone down, and neither blade nor leaf stirred in the hot stillness of the air. There was the way by which ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... than milk. There are the starry clematis, cream-coloured or white, and the manuka, with tiny but numberless flowers. The yellow kowhai, seen on the hillsides, shows the russet tint of autumn at the height of spring-time. Yet the king of the forest flowers is, perhaps, the crimson, feathery rata. Is it a creeper, or is it a tree? Both opinions are held; both are right. One species of the rata is an ordinary climber; another springs sometimes from the ground, sometimes from the fork of a tree into which the seed is blown or dropped. Thence it throws out long rootlets, some to ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... away their books and their sewing to go down to dinner, a few uncertain feathery flakes were softly sifting down and late that night it began to snow ...
— Betty Gordon at Boarding School - The Treasure of Indian Chasm • Alice Emerson
... near the fording point, there was a little island which lay like a feathery tree-top upon the tinted water; and as Dan went by, he felt the brush of willows on his face and heard the soft lapping of the small waves upon the shore. The keen smell of the sycamores drifted to him from ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... painting of Bernhardt in an upper gallery at the Club, that he had regarded with no little emotion during past days. The face of the greatest actress, so intensely feminine, in strangely effective profile between a white feathery collar and a white fur hat, had made him think of Beth Truba in a score of subtle ways. They told him that the painting had been done by a young Italian, who had shown the good taste to worship the creator of La Samaritaine.... Bedient wished he could paint ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... gone round to all the neighbours to tell them the grand joke about One-Eye, the potato-wife. Sometimes he told it through the window, and sometimes he stood at the door. Sometimes he told it to a gnome who was fine and feathery, and sometimes to one who was making bread. But all the time he laughed, laughed, laughed, till he was scarcely fit ...
— The Book of Stories for the Storyteller • Fanny E. Coe
... see from the steamer was the sandy beach on which the white surf was breaking, a fringe of bushes with a few coco-nut palms holding up their feathery crowns, and in the distance a low background of dark foliage. Before we anchored a gun was fired, and in quick answer to the signal some canoes, paddled by negroes of the Mosquito coast, here called "Caribs," were seen ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... The feathery white moon never let the sky grow dark; all night the chestnut blossoms were white in the green; dim was the ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... to 4 feet; second week of July; flowers, very numerous, dull white, borne in large compound heads, having a soft, feathery appearance. ...
— Manual of Gardening (Second Edition) • L. H. Bailey
... So wondrously fair; Illumining grasses And painting the air? You dear little shells, O, why do you shine? And feathery sea-weed ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... never love; as you, in your woman's heart, can never dream of loving—with every thought, with every fibre, with every pulse, with every breath; with a love that is burning the old oak through and through, root and branch, core and knot, to feathery ashes that you may scatter with a sigh—the only sigh you will ever breathe for me, Unorna. Have I loved? Can I love? Do I love to-day as I loved yesterday and shall love to-morrow? Ah, child! That you should ask that, with your angel's face, when I am in hell for you! When I ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... marked distance in those ancient times, No longer heeded in this headlong age, When we count moments by the miles we pass; And one may see the sun sink out of sight. Behind great banks of gray and wintry clouds, While feathery snowflakes fill the frosty air, And after quiet sleep may wake next day To see it bathe green fields with floods of light, And dry the sparkling dew from opening flowers, And hear the joyful burst of vernal song, And breathe the balmy air ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles
... the farm was composed of a dozen century-old oaks, a sprinkling of feathery pepper-trees, and many clumps of brilliant-blossomed cacti. The veranda and outbuildings were heavily hung with creepers, and great barrels of begonias and geraniums stood about. Within a few hundred yards of the house, ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... and gets mixed up in the tangle that such interference is bound to bring on anybody who attempts it. I didn't know, and therefore I should have thrown up the job as soon as I began to get wound in it. You have heard that gentle hum of the buzz-saw? You have seen how still it runs and how its feathery edge seems calm during the lull in the sawmill? You also noticed that no one who understands the sawmill business ever goes near it to give it a friendly tap just when it is looking that way? It is ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... grimed, dusty, hatless, and his hair on end, and Rollo following with his feathery tail singed, hurried up at once. "I'm not fit to touch, Lady Rosamond," as he showed a black hand, and bowed ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... clearly brought out all its beauties: first you note the long white winding thread-line of beach-coral and bright sand;—then the deep green fringe of vegetation through which roofs and spires project here and there, and quivering feathery heads of palms with white trunks. The general tone of this verdure is sombre green, though it is full of lustre: there is a glimmer in it as of metal. Beyond all this coast-front long undulations of misty pale, green are visible,—far ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... the starting-out of an old, respectable family in any new ebullition of fancy and fashion is like a dandelion going to seed. You have not only the airy, fairy globe; but every feathery particle thereof bears a germ which will cause similar feather bubbles all over the country; and thus old, respectable grass-plots become, in time, half dandelion. It is to be observed that, in all questions of life ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... and billowy deep, Where the whale, the shark, and the sword-fish sleep; And amidst the plashing and feathery foam, Where the ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... was very beautiful as she tripped along in the pure snow. The flakes had fallen thick and fast the day before, and now lay in feathery heaps all over the trees and fences and trellises, and there was but just a narrow path for her feet to tread upon. Men and boys were all about with their shovels, busily working, and the pure mass ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... wasn't. The northern quadrant was a great fen of colour and cloud, that spread ribs of feathery pink, fleece-frilled, from the horizon to the zenith. It was all amazing. Four sunsets at the one time in the sky! Each quadrant glowed, and burned, and pulsed with a ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... away and in another moment returned with a chair; whereupon the dog, with slightly waving, feathery tail, transferred his attention ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... brown head; and then up came a brown feathery body; and last of all came the slender legs on to the edge of the nest. There she turned, and, looking down into the nest, from which came a whole litany of chirpings for breakfast, said, 'Lie still, little ones.' Then she turned ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 3 • George MacDonald
... third was before us. The eastern bank had become steep, overhanging, and clothed with a mass of luxuriant creepers; whilst on the opposite side was a low woody patch, partly immersed by the lake-like glassy water of the river, into which one slender tree dipped its feathery crest, appearing like another Narcissus, to admire its own beauty in the stream. In front, the eye could penetrate far down the reach hemmed in as it was by trees that clustered ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... of the houses was an inn. Just by the inn the road turned away sharply up the valley; the very last slope of the Jura, the last parallel ridge, lay straight before me all solemn, dark, and wooded, and making a high feathery line against the noon. To cross this there was but a vague path rather misleading, and the name of the ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... masks and Nell Gwyn dresses and men in King Charles knee-breeches and long curled hair, and the second time a bunch of people and creatures just wild: all sorts and colors of clothes, humans with hoofs for feet and antennae springing from their foreheads, furry and feathery things that had more arms than two and in one case that many heads—as if they were dressed up in our Tempest, Peer Gynt and Insect People costumes and ...
— No Great Magic • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... swept off his feet by this torrent of uncommon and mystical language, and passing a moist hand through his feathery hair. He was not entirely ignorant, of course, of the alleged use of sound in the various systems of so-called magic that have influenced the minds of imaginative men during the history of the world. He had heard, more or less vaguely, perhaps, ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood
... of graceful palm-trees, with their tall thin stems, and bending feathery crowns, languid and beautiful. Around, the verdant sod gleamed like an emerald: silver streams, flowing from a bubbling parent spring, wound their white forms within the bright green turf. From the grove arose the softening song of doves, and showers of gay ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli
... which the trees were of the light and springing variety with slender, pale trunks, but high overhead a mass of feathery leaves made a ...
— The Story of Bawn • Katharine Tynan
... remarkable to be seen. In front rose up the feathery hand of an elm, then the shuttered windows across the court, the roof, and above that the morning sky, a little heavy and dusky as before a storm; ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... the whole country, leaving some parts bare, and others buried beneath heaps on heaps of snow, called here snaw-wreaths. For the word snow-wreaths does not mean the lovely garlands hung upon every tree and bush in its feathery fall; but awful mounds of drifted snow, that may be the smooth, soft, white sepulchres of dead men, smothered in the lapping folds of the almost solid wind. Path or way was none before him. He could see ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... storm rushes upon the deep woods, It lets down curtains of mist And sheets of rain, that drip Crystal beads among the trees. Way above, the branches lash and moan And weave. Below, it is still, Still as the undersea. Soft fern and feathery bracken Loom through the mist Like branching coral, And drifting leaves float down Like snowy fishes, ...
— A Little Window • Jean M. Snyder
... longevity of some of the founders of the family, for Annaeus seems to be connected with annus, a year, and Seneca with senex, an old man. The common English composite plant ragwort is called senecio from the white and feathery pappus or appendage of its seeds; and similarly, Isidore says that the first Seneca was so named because "he ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... with their orange and purple bloom sprawl over the rocks and run riot among the borders. In the gardens South American aloes throw up their flowering stalks heavy with aromatic fragrance, 20 feet high, and giant dracaenas wave their feathery heads in the balmy breeze. Exotic palms, the bamboo, the sugar-cane, and the cotton plant grow in the open, and tropical mosses and orchids hang from the trees. Outside on the breezy downs one may drink in pure ozone from the Atlantic, and revel in an atmosphere untainted by microbes ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... species grows between the others as to elevation; its leaves, then orange-colored, are strikingly pitted and reticulated. Another alpine shrub, a species of sericocarpus, covered with handsome heads of feathery achenia, beautiful dwarf echiverias with flocks of purple flowers pricked into their bright grass-green, cushion-like bosses of moss-like foliage, and a fine forget-me-not reach to the summit. I may also mention a large mertensia, a fine ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... shows a rice field in the foreground, tea alongside the buildings, and the graceful feathery bamboo in the background; also, an unusual sight on a Japanese farm, a group of cattle. The lower picture shows the ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... during the preceding night had been killed; it therefore remained to try our fortune by simply beating the high grass jungle in line, on speculation, and in the same manner to drive the occasional dense coverts of feathery tamarisk. ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... is thy range; with varied skill Thy muse may, like those feathery tribes which spring From their rude rocks, extend her skirting wing 140 Round the moist marge of each cold Hebrid isle, To that hoar pile[48] which still its ruins shows: In whose small vaults a pigmy ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... of nuts adroitly laid, to disport themselves on the shining cherry tea-table that stood between the windows; and we youngsters used to sit entranced with delight as they gambolled and waved their feathery tails in frolicsome security, eating rations of gingerbread and bits of seed-cake with as good a relish ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... wild soul waited on as falcons hover. I beat the reedy fens as I trampled past. I heard the mournful loon In the marsh beneath the moon. And then — with feathery thunder — the bird of my desire Broke from the cover Flashing silver fire. High up among the stars I saw his pinions spire. The pale clouds gazed aghast As my falcon stoopt upon him, and gript and ...
— The Second Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... blue, out of which the sun darted his flaming rays by day, and in which the stars blazed like jewels at night; of tranquil seas of sapphire in which creatures of strange forms and brilliant hues disported themselves; of tropic shores, coral fringed and clothed with graceful feathery palms backed by noble forest trees of precious woods, made glorious by flowers of every conceivable hue and shape, amid which hovered birds of such gorgeous plumage that they gleamed and shone in the sun like living gems; of rich and luscious fruits to be had for the mere trouble of plucking; ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... and then, once in four or five years perhaps, the feathery snow lies a foot deep, fresh-fallen, on the still country-side and in the woods; and the waxing moon sheds her large light on all, and Nature holds her breath to wait for the happy day, and tries to sleep but cannot, from sheer happiness and peace. Indoors the fire is glowing on the wide ...
— The Little City Of Hope - A Christmas Story • F. Marion Crawford
... buttercups flaunted themselves gaily, careless of the pitiless night, rejoicing in the sunshine, as before they had rejoiced in the enlivening rain. The pleasant rain-drops still lingered on the daisies. The feathery ball of the dandelion, carried by the breeze, floated past like a symbol of the life of man—a random thing, resistless to the merest breath, with no mission but to spread its seed upon the fertile earth, so that things like unto it should spring up in the succeeding ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... westward o'er the steaming rain-washed slopes, Now satisfied with sunshine, and behold Those lustrous clouds, as glorious as our hopes, Softened with feathery fleece of downy gold, In all fantastic, huddled shapes uprolled, Floating like dreams, and melting silently, In the blue upper regions ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... compound eyes are the most conspicuous part of the head (Fig. 39). In front, between the eyes, are the three-jointed antennae, the last joint bearing a short, feathery bristle. From the under side of the head arises the long, fleshy proboscis (Fig. 40). When this is fully extended it is somewhat longer than the head; when not distended and in use it is doubled back in the cavity on the under side of the head. About half-way ...
— Insects and Diseases - A Popular Account of the Way in Which Insects may Spread - or Cause some of our Common Diseases • Rennie W. Doane
... charred trunks cast only thin strips of shade, while a scorching sun poured down an almost intolerable heat into the deep valley. The ground was ankle-deep in dust and charcoal, and, as they floundered through it, feathery ash rose in clouds. Their clothing grew crusted with it, and it worked through and irritated their heated skin; while every now and then one of them was compelled to stop and splutter. Their throats, as Grenfell remarked, certainly ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... there was another Death's Head in the room, a burly, headlong, infatuated male which drove headlong at the tumbler and clung to it, slipping, sliding, filling the room with a feathery tattoo ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers |
