"Leafless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... from the north. The snow lay all over the ground, like soft feathers, and the hay-ricks looked as though each one wore a dunce-cap, like the dull boy in Dame Week's school over by the green. The icicles hung down by the thatch, and the little birds crouched shivering in the bare and leafless hedge-rows. ...
— Pepper & Salt - or, Seasoning for Young Folk • Howard Pyle
... leafless grove. We had not walked many steps in that direction, when the very animal we were in search of appeared on the ground before us. It was quite three feet long, thick, broad in the back, and arched from the nose to the tail. It was of a speckled grey colour, but with the roughest ...
— The Desert Home - The Adventures of a Lost Family in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... dripping leafless woods, The stirrup touching either shoe, She rode astride as troopers do; With kirtle kilted to her knee, To which the mud splash'd wretchedly; And the wet dripp'd from every tree Upon her head and heavy hair, And on her eyelids ...
— The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems • William Morris
... not know that the exudation of water into the earth, through the bark or at the extremities of these latter organs, has been proved, but the other known modes of carrying off the surplus do not seem adequate to dispose of it at the almost leafless period when it is most abundantly received, and it is possible that the roots may, to some extent, drain as well as flood the water-courses of their stem. Later in the season the roots absorb less, and the now developed leaves ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... no woeful memories now for Narcissa. She loved to sit on the step of the stile and watch through the leafless sunlit trees the silver haze shimmering in the valley, where the winter wheat was all of an emerald richness, and the blue mountains afar off so near akin to the aspect of heaven that one might hardly mark where the horizon line merged the sweet solitudes of earth into the solitary sky. Many ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... exactly five minutes past five when they reached St. James's Square. The sun, a globe, set in thin lines of yellow light, shone out above the trees, which were dull but not yet leafless. Grey and sulphurous and gold-edged clouds floated in masses on the blue sky. It had been a day of changes—yet it seemed to Sara, whose own moods had been as various, the ordinary passing ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... strong, wintry gusts, as they passed through the leafless woods. Helen shivered with cold, in spite of the warm garments that sheltered her. The scarlet of the horizon had faded into a chill, darkening gray, and as they moved through the shadows, they ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... beside Sir Baldwin Frazer on a wooden bench, under a leafless tree, from the ghostly limbs whereof rain trickled down upon me! In the gray light, which, I thought, must be the light of dawn, I discerned other trees about us and an open expanse, tree-dotted, stretching into the ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... the moon awaken'd, forth they move, And fright the songsters with their cheerless love; So two sear trees, dry, stunted, and unsound, Each other catch, when dropping to the ground: Entwine their withered arms 'gainst wind and weather, And shake their leafless heads and drop together: So two cold limbs, touch'd by Galvani's wire, Move with new life, and feel awaken'd fire; Quivering awhile, their flaccid forms remain, Then turn to cold torpidity again. "But ever frowns your Hymen? man and maid, Are all repenting, suffering, or betray'd?" Forbid ...
— The Parish Register • George Crabbe
... that the stuff was poor and beneath the standard of publication. The book had taken a year and a half in the making; it was a pious attempt to translate into English prose the form and mystery of the domed hills, the magic of occult valleys, the sound of the red swollen brook swirling through leafless woods. Day-dreams and toil at nights had gone into the eager pages, he had labored hard to do his very best, writing and rewriting, weighing his cadences, beginning over and over again, grudging no patience, no trouble if only it might be pretty ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... clear. The blindly floating boat had drifted upon a snag, seemingly the major portion of a tree, now held by some spit of sand. I struggled vainly in an attempt to release the grip which, held us, but the force of the current had securely wedged the boat's bow beneath a limb, a bare, leafless tentacle, making all my efforts useless. The ceaseless water rippled about me, the only sound in the silent night, and despairing of any escape, I found a submerged branch on which to stand, gripped ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish
... jasmine burns Its fragrant lamps, and turns Into a royal court, with green festoons, The banks of dark lagoons: In the deep heart of every forest tree The blood is all a-glee; And there's a look about the leafless bowers As if ...
— The New McGuffey Fourth Reader • William H. McGuffey
... redwings, cowbirds, and blackbirds, all mingled together as though the hard and fast lines of species had been obliterated and made as meaningless as the concededly evanescent shades of variety, trooping busily over the lawn and blackening the leafless China-trees. But they have a crony never seen by us. This is the crow-blackbird of the South, or jackdaw as it is wrongly called, otherwise known as the boat-tailed grackle, from his over-allowance of rudder that pulls him side-wise and ruins his dead-reckoning ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... little, caressing murmurs of love. She made up little love phrases, which she would have been inexpressibly ashamed to have had overheard. "Little honey love" was one of them—"Sister's own little honey love." Once, when walking on Elm Street under the leafless arches of the elms, where she thought she was quite alone, although it was a very bright, warm afternoon, and quite dry—it was not a snowy winter—she spoke more loudly than she intended, and looked up to see another, bigger girl, the daughter of the Edgham lawyer, whose name was ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... the best highways in the world. Anon, the clearings began to diminish, and tall woods arose on either side of the path; their solemn aspect, and the deep silence that brooded over their vast solitudes, inspiring the mind with a strange awe. Not a breath of wind stirred the leafless branches, whose huge shadows reflected upon the dazzling white covering of snow, lay so perfectly still, that it seemed as if Nature had suspended her operations, that life and motion had ceased, and that she was sleeping in her winding-sheet, ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... those alone when good "flying" may be reckoned on. When it is good, the sport must be superb: it is the very sublimation of "rocketing." You must hold straight and forward to stop a cock-pheasant whizzing over the leafless tree-tops—well up in the keen January wind; but a swifter traveler yet is the canvas-back drake, as he swings over the bar, at the fullest speed of his whistling pinions, disdaining to turn a foot from his appointed course, albeit vaguely suspecting the ambush below. The ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... five hundred coffins were laid in the pits. Dusk fell, and still the banners came drooping and fluttering, the band played the Funeral March, and the huge assemblage chanted. In the leafless branches of the trees above the grave the wreaths were hung, like strange, multi-coloured blossoms. Two hundred men began to shovel in the dirt. It rained dully down upon the coffins with a thudding ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed
... than to pray. When the children cried for food, Father de Smet took down the rifle from the wall and went out with it, coming back only when he could feed the hungry. There were places where the prairie was black with buffalo, and the shy deer showed their delicate heads among the leafless willows of the Papillion. When they—the children—were cold, this young man brought in baskets of buffalo chips from the prairie and built them a fire, or he hung more skins up at the entrance to the tepees. If he wanted ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie
... fine old mansion, partaking more of the character of a castle than a Court, with its keep and towers, battlements, heavily grated mullioned windows, and machicolated gallery. It stood, sombre and grey, in the midst of gigantic but now leafless sycamores—trees that had to thank themselves for being sycamores; for, had they been oaks, or other marketable wood, they would have been made into bonnets or shawls long before now. The building itself was irregular, ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... distracted mind than to throw the sword and scarf of Gabrielle over his shoulders, and to hasten forth under the solemn starry canopy of the wintry sky. He walked in deep thought backwards and forwards under the leafless oaks and the snow-laden firs which grew on the ...
— Sintram and His Companions • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... the bitter yew His leaves that live December through; Break no rosemary, bright with rime And sparkling to the cruel clime; Nor plod the winter land to look For willows in the icy brook To cast them leafless round him: bring No spray that ever buds ...
— A Shropshire Lad • A. E. Housman
... a silence of some moments. The train rushed on, past fields desolate under patches of snow, and stark, leafless trees; over rivers dotted with cakes of grimy ice; between banks of frost-gnawed rock. The landscape in the dim January afternoon was gray and gloomy; and as day declined everything became more lorn and forbidding. Maurice ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... make peace, my father! Most gladly would I give the blood-stained laurel For the first violet [5] of the leafless spring, Plucked in those quiet ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... hemlock, and a multitude of other forms which, though mostly ranking as herbs, attain gigantic dimensions in some species found in Africa and Kamskatka (Umbelliferae); the very singularly-shaped group of cactuses (Cactaceae), with leafless fleshy stems, which sometimes look like dry columns and sometimes are globular; the begonias (Begoniaceae); the cucumbers, melons, and vegetable marrows (Cucurbitaceae); the singularly-formed passion-flowers (Passifloraceae); the ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... the Potomac a party of us unwittingly made our camp near the foot of a bee-tree, which next day the winds of heaven blew down, for our special delectation, at least so we read the sign. Another time, while sitting by a waterfall in the leafless April woods, I discovered a swarm in the top of a large hickory. I had the season before remarked the tree as a likely place for bees, but the screen of leaves concealed them from me. This time my former presentiment occurred to me, and, looking sharply, sure enough there were the bees, ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... past midnight I was awaked by a violent knocking. It was now deep winter; it had snowed, and was still snowing; the wind whistled in the leafless trees, despoiling them of the white flakes as they fell; its drear moaning, and the continued knocking, mingled wildly with my dreams— at length I was wide awake; hastily dressing myself, I hurried to discover the ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... has returned for good, and the short winter day is drawing to a gloomy close. It is after three, and we have been working, with one brief interval, for nearly five hours. The signal is given to take shelter. We huddle together under the leafless trees, and get wetter. ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... there is a lull, after the bustle and racket of the afternoon. The day has been splendid—crisp, bright, and invigorating, and all the dandies and beauties of Paris have been abroad, driving in the Champs Elysees, galloping through the leafless avenues of the Bois de Boulogne, basking in the winter sun upon the cheerful Boulevards. The morning's amusements are over; those of the night have not yet begun. It is the moment of the interlude, the hour of dine, and Paris is busied in the most important of its diurnal ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... full, rich, luscious tones, with just a tinge of plaintiveness in them, are poured forth with spontaneous abandon. Such a song at such a time is enough to summon anybody with a musical ear out of doors under the leaden skies to where the delicious notes issue from the leafless shrubbery by the roadside. Watch the singer until the song ends, when he will quite likely descend among the dead leaves on the ground and scratch among them like any barn-yard fowl, but somehow contriving to use both feet at once in the ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... destruction of which has caused here, as at St. Helena, and at some of the Canary islands, almost entire sterility. The broad, flat-bottomed valleys, many of which serve during a few days only in the season as water-courses, are clothed with thickets of leafless bushes. Few living creatures inhabit these valleys. The commonest bird is a kingfisher (Dacelo Iagoensis), which tamely sits on the branches of the castor- oil plant, and thence darts on grasshoppers and lizards. It is brightly coloured, but not so beautiful as the European species: ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... certain of possessing, to the cold blast and dripping grass of a bivouac. Night, however, fell fast; darkness, without an intervening twilight, set in, and we lost our way. A bleak table-land with here and there a stunted, leafless tree was all that we could discern by the pale light of a new moon. An apparently interminable heath uncrossed by path or foot-track was before us, and our jaded cattle seemed to feel the dreary uncertainty of the ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... the leafless boughs, and there was every appearance of an early and severe winter, as indeed befell. Long before eleven o'clock all was hushed and quiet within the house, and indeed without (nothing was heard), except the cold wind ...
— The Book of Hallowe'en • Ruth Edna Kelley
... their mothers' skirts, the men sullenly watching the light of the flames in the dark, starless sky. All night long they were left alone, though far off they heard the dropping shots of scattered firing, and in the leafless woods around them the swift flight of woodland beasts startled from their sleep, and the hurrying feet of sheep terrified from their ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... the contours of the town began to come into clearer view: the fronts of the houses shining from their recent drenching; the eaves dripping with the last few drops of rain; the roofs gleaming like polished silver; the trees along the broader avenues, naked and shorn as brooms, shaking their leafless branches, while water seemed to ooze from their ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... wind howled in the street without, beat upon the window-panes, and rustled through the trees, which stood, tall and leafless, in the big ...
— Miscellanea • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... one day, when the apple and pear-tree were fruitless and leafless, when the flowers and butterflies and bees had all disappeared, down the garden came the master ...
— His Big Opportunity • Amy Le Feuvre
... unremembered moons ago, When the streams were dumb and palsied, all the earth was white with snow, When the eerie wind went chasing evil spirits through the wood, 'Neath the gaunt and leafless tree-tops, an old Indian teepee stood. In it lived an old man only, with white locks and flowing beard, Clad in furs from head to foot-sole, like one to the ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • Various
... sturdy breeze In chimley-tops did grumble, Or, tearing throug'h the leafless trees, On lang dark neets did rumble, A lot o' young folks, smart an' gay, An' owds uns, free an' hearty, Agreed amang thersels at they Would have a Christmas party At hame ...
— Yorkshire Dialect Poems • F.W. Moorman
... petals and sepals chocolate-brown, barred with yellow, lip large, of colour varying from rose to purple. C. Acklandiae is found at Bahia, where it grows side by side with C. amethystoglossa, also a charming species, very tall, leafless to the tip of its pseudo-bulbs. Thus the dwarf beneath is seen in all its beauty. As they cling together in great masses the pair must make a flower-bed to themselves—above, the clustered spikes of C. amethystoglossa, dusky-lilac, purple-spotted, ...
— About Orchids - A Chat • Frederick Boyle
... customer having jeopardized his chance of sharing in the sensation of the day. The other neighbors all wore their coats closely buttoned. Blinks carried his violin hung upon his back; the sharp timbre of the wind, cutting through the leafless boughs of the stunted woods, had a kindred fibrous resonance. Clouds hung low far beneath them; here and there, as they looked, the trees on the slopes showed above and again below the masses of clinging vapors. Sometimes close at hand a peak would ...
— The Riddle Of The Rocks - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... terms, and Cuthbert turned, with a strange smile on his brave young face, for a last look at the old Gate House, the gray masonry of which gleamed out between the dark masses of the leafless trees, a single light flickering ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... heavy. The peasants were still at work, scattered through the fields, waiting for the stroke of the Angelus to call them back to the farmhouses, whose thatched roofs were visible here and there through the branches of the leafless trees which protected ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... her mamma to pay some morning calls. But it struck me that I ought to leave these selfish pleasures, and the park with its glorious canopy of bright blue sky, the west wind sounding through its yet leafless branches, the snow-wreaths still lingering in its hollows, but melting fast beneath the sun, and the graceful deer browsing on its moist herbage already assuming the freshness and verdure of spring—and ...
— Agnes Grey • Anne Bronte
... height I watch them swiftly come and go, Or round the leafless wood, Like flurries of wind-driven snow, Revolving in perpetual flight, A ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography, Vol. II., No. 5, November 1897 - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... and the birds sang industriously among the leafless trees of our large sunny garden in beautiful Blackheath. (The author is sorry to see he is getting poetical. It shall not happen again, and it was an extra fine day, really, and the birds did sing, ...
— New Treasure Seekers - or, The Bastable Children in Search of a Fortune • E. (Edith) Nesbit
... small to hold. The results weren't as pronounced as before, but they quite repaid me. I sold my best table to a general, which gave me a lot of confidence, but my greatest triumph was a hat-rack. It was a barren, gaunt-looking affair, like a leafless tree in winter, but it was mahogany, and it was old. Two ladies who were excitedly buying tables spied it, and exclaimed in rapture. I rose to ...
— The Smiling Hill-Top - And Other California Sketches • Julia M. Sloane
... received orders to send off to Versailles from La Meilleraye the orange trees which the Duke of Mazarin gave the king," writes Superintendent Foucauld in his journal. "M. Louvois, in spite of the representations I made him, would have them sent by carriage through the snow and ice. They arrived leafless at Versailles, and several are dead. I had sent him word that the king could take towns in winter, but could not make orange trees bear removal from their hothouses." The nature and the consciences of the Protestants were all that withstood Louis ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... Yet here and there Half hid 'mid leafless groves they go; As men who ply through traceries high Of turreted marbles show— So dwindle these to eyes below. But fronting shot and flanking shell Sliver and rive the inwoven ways; High tops of oaks and high hearts fall, But never the ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville
... no further need of sleep; and for a long while he stood at the windows watching the lamps of cabs and carriages sparkling through the leafless thickets of the park ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... earliness of the hour would not have deterred her from at once commencing a round of visits to the friends she had in the place; but the gates of the lovely environs of Fife House stood open, and although there were no flowers now, and the trees were leafless, waiting in poverty and patience for their coming riches, they drew her with the offer of a plentiful loneliness and room. She accepted it, entered, and for two hours wandered about ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... other days. But we are not to talk sentiment now;—even May would not understand that maudlin language. We must get on. What a wintry hedgerow this is for the eighteenth of April! Primrosy to be sure, abundantly spangled with those stars of the earth,—but so bare, so leafless, so cold! The wind whistles through the brown boughs as in winter. Even the early elder shoots, which do make an approach to springiness, look brown, and the small leaves of the woodbine, which have also ventured to peep forth, are of a sad purple, frost-bitten, like a dairymaid's ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... intuitively inculcates a serious consideration of the value and blessings of a temperate; and well-spent life; it induces a thoughtful reflection that a life of goodness alone insures an end of peace. The holly, the mistletoe, the ivy, the acorn shell, the leafless branch, and the fruitless vine encircle the brow-fit emblems of the period which marks an exchange of time for eternity. All the figures are rendered complete by a carved lion's foot, at the bottom of ...
— Young Americans Abroad - Vacation in Europe: Travels in England, France, Holland, - Belgium, Prussia and Switzerland • Various
... Our donkeys lived exclusively upon the dhurra (Sorghum Egyptiaca) that we carried with us, and the camels required a daily supply of corn in addition to the dry twigs and bushes that formed their dusty food. The margin of the river was miserable and uninviting; the trees and bushes were entirely leafless from the intense heat, as are the trees in England during winter. The only shade was afforded by the evergreen dome palms; nevertheless, the Arabs occupied the banks at intervals of three or four miles, wherever ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... fine mornings in March when the air is dry, the earth pure, the sky clear, and the atmosphere a contradiction to the leafless trees; the season was so mild that the eye caught glimpses ...
— An Historical Mystery • Honore de Balzac
... and made little golden lights dance in the shadows of her eyes uplifted to mine. The mysterious fragrance of late autumn, of dying leaves and bare brown earth, and ripening nuts and late grapes hanging on the vines, and luscious persimmons on the leafless trees, rose like incense to my nostrils and intoxicated me. I hardly knew how I answered as I looked deep into her shadowy eyes, and I was almost glad that, our way crossing the little river by a steep path leading down to a shallow ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon
... sensitive in every leafless twig to spring, stood in silence and dim nightfall around a lodge. Wherever a human dwelling is set in the wilderness, it becomes, by the very humility of its proportions, a prominent and aggressive point. But this lodge of bark and poles ...
— The Chase Of Saint-Castin And Other Stories Of The French In The New World • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... as ashes, and their beady little eyes shone like the facets of cut stones, flashing in all directions. And while they danced in and out amongst each other, never breaking the semicircle round the bed, they sang a low, mournful song that sounded like the wind whispering through a leafless wood. ...
— Jimbo - A Fantasy • Algernon Blackwood
... before Whitehall Charles walked, surrounded by soldiers, through the leafless avenues of St. James' Park. It was a bitterly cold morning. Evelyn records that the Thames was frozen over. The season was so sharp that the King asked to have a shirt more than ordinary when he carefully dressed himself. He left St. James' at ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... stood back from the road and seemed abandoned. It was fronted by a garden with its gate; behind extended an orchard planted with leafless saplings, with a water-mill. The orchard-wall was low and could be scaled with relative facility; no danger threatened; there were neither prying neighbours nor dogs; the nearest house, a marbler's workshop, was more than three hundred ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... particularly listless air. The leafless trees hung out long and drooping arms, that swayed to and fro in the biting wind. The sullen sky overhead added its tone of dreariness to the picture. There was no cheerful whir of factories and shops, no brisk steps of men going to and fro, though there were enough standing around in groups ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... remained passive, stunned, terrified by the blow at St. Joseph. It was spring of 1649 before the warriors reached Georgian Bay. March winds had cleared the trail of snowdrifts, but the forests were still leafless. St. Ignace mission lay between Lake Simcoe and St. Louis. Approaching it one windy March night, the Iroquois had cut holes through the palisades before dawn and burst inside the walls with the yells and gyrations of some ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... after-glow deepening into crimson and violet. The world looked near to them, and very great and beautiful, tingling with life even through its winter dress. The keen air, the crisp snow beneath their feet, the quivering stars that seemed to hang among the branches of the leafless trees, all gave them joy. They were healthily tired and heartily hungry; a good supper was just ahead of them, and beyond that a long life full of wonderful possibilities; and they were very glad to be alive. The two older children walked side by side pulling the sled ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... listened attentively, surveying the surrounding landscape on all sides with the close scrutiny of an experienced hunter, who had enjoyed many a lesson from the Indians. The piled-up rocks, scanty herbage, leafless and motionless trees gave no sign of life. No sound broke the intense solitude. Then, with startling suddenness, another cry, louder and more agonising than the former, echoed across the waste, and this was followed by a ...
— Brave and True - Short stories for children by G. M. Fenn and Others • George Manville Fenn
... Gyldenlove's house. There went the last of my daughters. Why could I not keep silence? Had she known nought, it may be she had been happy—after a kind. It was to be so. It is written up there in the stars that I am to break off one green branch after another, till the trunk stand leafless at last. 'Tis well, 'tis well! I am to have my son again. Of the others, of my daughters, I will not think. My reckoning? To face my reckoning?—It falls not due till the last great day of wrath.—That comes ...
— Henrik Ibsen's Prose Dramas Vol III. • Henrik Ibsen
... only because it is then most divided, but because it is divided in a different way. Even in the unwooded parts, where the horizon is large, here and there against the background of a dark and distant mass of trees, now leafless or still keeping their summer foliage unchanged, a double row of orange-red chestnuts seemed, as in a picture just begun, to be the only thing painted, so far, by an artist who had not yet laid any colour on the rest, and ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... on a heap of beech branches opposite the doorway, picking off the bronze buds and biting them. The blanched skeleton of Sammy's whiting, sad relic of happier moments, grinned up at her from the earthen floor. Outside, the old pear-tree on the left, leafless now and motionless, showed distinctly in silhouette against the night-sky. Its bare branches made black bars on the face of the bright white moon which was rising behind it. What a strange thing time is! day and night, day and night, ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... and, perhaps, the mail brings some to me, this time from Pennsylvania or New Jersey, and soon I can no longer ignore the trays of tight, leafless bunches for sale on street corners and behind plate-glass windows. "From York State," they tell ...
— More Jonathan Papers • Elisabeth Woodbridge
... looked and saw Ferrari approaching with his two associates. He walked slowly, and was muffled in a thick cloak; his hat was pulled over his brows, and I could not see the expression of his face, as he did not turn his head once in my direction, but stood apart leaning against the trunk of a leafless tree. The seconds on both sides now ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... her unbounded delight, slender suckers grew up from an exposed root. She released the razor and chewed upon one of them until she had browsed it down to a leafless stub ...
— The She Boss - A Western Story • Arthur Preston Hankins
... sleet; the wind howls bitterly about the house; relentless in its desperate speed, it whirls by green crosses from the fir-boughs in the wood,—dry russet oak-leaves,—tiny cones from the larch, that were once rose-red with the blood of Spring, but now rattle on the leafless branches, black and bare as they. No leaf remains on any bough of the forest, no scarlet streamer of brier flaunts from the steadfast rocks that underlie all verdure, and now stand out, bleak and barren, the truths and foundations of life, when its ornate glories are fled away. The ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... sitting so when a servant slipped in and stood motionless a minute, and went to the wide window where the west light glared through leafless branches outside, and drew the shades lower, and went to the fireplace and touched a match. Wood caught and crackled and a cheerful orange flame flew noisily up the chimney, but the man sitting on the divan did not notice. The butler waited ...
— The Lifted Bandage • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... one morning, at daybreak, I went on deck, and saw the shores of England. Only a few days before, we had left America behind us, brown and leafless, just emerging from the long gloom of winter; and now the slopes of another world arose green and inviting in the flush of spring. There was a bracing breeze; the dingy waters of the Mersey rolled up in wreaths of beauty; the fleets ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... now I mark thy angry wave Rush headlong to the stormy sea; Wildly the blasts of winter rave, Sad rustling through the leafless tree Loose on its spray the alder leaf Hangs wavering, trembling, sear and brow And dark thy eddies whirl beneath, And white thy foam comes ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... on which we rested—a space of two or three acres— was still free from the snow-drift, on account of its exposure to the wind. Straggling pines, stunted and leafless, grew over its surface, in all about fifty or sixty trees. From these we obtained our fires; but what were fires when we had no meat to cook ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... the sickly yellow stems continue to flourish and spread, drawing their nourishment not from the soil itself, but by strangling and sucking the life juices of the hosts on which it feeds. I have seen whole byways covered thus with yellow dodder—rootless, leafless, parasitic—reaching up to the sunlight, quite cutting off and smothering the plants which gave it life. A week or two it flourishes and then most of it perishes miserably. So many of us come to ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... sheeted in heavy snow, through which here and there in the pastures, a craggy bowlder lifted its face and frowned, and along the woods the stunted pines and hemlocks blackened against a background of leafless oaks and birches. A northwest wind cut shrill across the white wastes, and from the crests of the billowed drifts drove a scud of stinging particles in their faces, while the sun, as high as that of Italy, coldly blazed from a cloudless ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... on his stomach in the short turf and wound himself along until he could see down into the bushes. With his gun at his shoulder, and his finger on the trigger, he gazed down into the hollow. To his surprise he could see no signs of the fugitive. The leafless boughs afforded but slight shelter, and after gazing fixedly at them for two or three minutes, he became convinced that the man was no longer there. As soon as he came to this conclusion he stood up and looked over the surrounding country. It was bleak ...
— Through Russian Snows - A Story of Napoleon's Retreat from Moscow • G. A Henty
... storms were howling o'er the ocean, Leafless trees and sombre landscape cold and drear, Bitter winds, and driving rains, or white commotion Of the whirling snow that drifted far and near; Then my heart, which had been strong, was bowed and broken, I was crushed with sudden sense of loss and fear, Dull as silence passed the days ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... than of fire. As they drank now, the breeze played with their manes and forelocks, brushing them about their drooping necks and meek faces. Caius pumped the water for them, and watched them meditatively the while. There was a fire low down in the western sky; over the purple of the leafless woods and the bleak acres of bare red earth its light glanced, not warming them, but showing forth their coldness, as firelight glancing through a window-pane glows cold upon the garden snows. The big butter-nut-tree that stood up high and strong over the pump rattled its twigs in ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... immediately there came the thunder, and after the thunder the shower. And such a thunderstorm they had never known before. After the shower had ceased, the sky became clear, and on looking at the tree, they beheld it completely leafless. Then the birds descended upon the tree. And the song of the birds was far sweeter than any strain they had ever heard before. Then they beheld a knight, on a coal-black horse, clothed in sating coming rapidly towards them. ...
— The Junior Classics, V4 • Willam Patten (Editor)
... Lewis wandered with his flock over the low hills. When the rains had been kind and the wilderness was a riot of leaf and bloom above long reaches of verdant young grass, his journeys were short. But when the grass was dry, the endless thorn-trees leafless, and the whole earth, stripped of Nature's awnings, weltered under a brazen sky, the hardy goats carried him far in their ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... old, nor change, nor pass away! Your gentle voices will flow on forever, When life grows bare and tarnished with decay, As through a leafless ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... seen at a distance, in great numbers; some of them, the steamers, with plumes of smoke; the others, the sailing vessels, drawn by almost invisible tugs, lifting towards the sky their bare masts, like leafless trees. ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
... with hunger gnawing savagely at their stomachs, wander about stripping the trees of their leaves until half Prince Su's grounds have leafless branches. Some of the mothers have taken all the clothes off their children on account of the heat, and their terrible water-swollen stomachs and the pitiful sticks of legs eloquently tell their own tale. ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... all leafless, and snow-clad the ground, Sweet pleasures at home in our cottage we found; 'Round our bright blazing fire, we'd work, read, or play, And find sweet employment to fill ...
— The Snow-Drop • Sarah S. Mower
... trees will have withered ere long, The last bird already is ending his song; And soon will be leafless and shadeless the bow'rs... I long, oh I long for the perfume of flow'rs! To feel for a moment ere stripped are the trees, In meadow lands open, the breath of the breeze. —You long for the meadow lands breezy and fair? O, soon enough others ...
— Songs of Labor and Other Poems • Morris Rosenfeld
... rise; And starts, amidst the thirsty wilds, to hear New falls of water murmuring in his ear. On rifted rocks, the dragon's late abodes, The green reed trembles, and the bulrush nods. Waste sandy valleys, once perplexed with thorn, The spiry fir and shapely box adorn: To leafless shrubs the flowery palms succeed, And odorous myrtle to the noisome weed. The lambs with wolves shall graze the verdant mead And boys in flowery bands the tiger lead: The steer and lion at one crib shall meet, And ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... approaching dimness, in the low-gliding and pale-beaming sun. I was a mile from Thornfield, in a lane noted for wild roses in summer, for nuts and blackberries in autumn, and even now possessing a few coral treasures in hips and haws, but whose best winter delight lay in its utter solitude and leafless repose. If a breath of air stirred, it made no sound here; for there was not a holly, not an evergreen to rustle, and the stripped hawthorn and hazel bushes were as still as the white worn stones which causewayed ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... wrath and stretched out a warning arm among her leafless roses; but Camilla placed both hands on the fence top and leaned swiftly down ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... under a clear sky the soft rich green of the grass gleamed out with the brightness of spring. They soon turned into the park, and the house itself began to be visible through the budding, but still leafless, trees. Both father and son were silent. To the one, every foot of the road they traversed was haunted by the memories of thirty years ago; to the other, this coming home was a step towards the fulfilment of his hopes. They followed their own meditations, glad or sorrowful, until ...
— A Canadian Heroine - A Novel, Volume 3 (of 3) • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... was frightened at my own wild imaginings. I thought of the nuns who had been murdered so cruelly, and I listened to the voice of the storm, as to the despairing wail of a lost soul. The wind swept fiercely through the leafless branches, now roaring like a tornado, again rising to a shrill shriek, or a prolonged whistle, then sinking to a hollow murmer, and dying away in a low sob which sounded to my excited fancy like the last convulsive sigh of a breaking heart. Once and again I paused, faint and dizzy with ...
— Life in the Grey Nunnery at Montreal • Sarah J Richardson
... foot half falters; scarce she yet may know The leafless blackthorn-blossom from the snow; And through her bowers the wind's way ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... the tread of many feet, Which downward from the hillside beat? What forms were those which darkly stood Just on the margin of the wood?— Charred tree-stumps in the moonlight dim, Or paling rude, or leafless limb? No,—through the trees fierce eyeballs glowed, Dark human forms in moonshine showed, Wild from their native wilderness, With painted limbs ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... tree (Erythrina indica) and the flame-of-the-forest (Butea frondosa). The sub-Himalayan forests become yellow-tinted owing to the fading of the leaves of the sal (Shorea robusta), many of which are shed in March. The sal, however, is never entirely leafless; the young foliage appears as the old drops off; while this change is taking place the minute pale ...
— A Bird Calendar for Northern India • Douglas Dewar
... the sunrise was whispering to the leafless branches overhead, and there was nothing in all Dame Nature's peaceful setting of the scene to hint at the impending war-clash. Yet the war portent was abroad in all the peaceful morning, and my mood marched with the lad's when ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... lead. They drew level, then flashed apart, then again drew level, and so passing and repassing raced into the myriad lights upon the opposite bank. That bank was visible to him through a tracery of leafless twigs, for a tree grew in front of his window on the farther edge of the gardens, and he could see the lights upon its roadway dancing, twirling, clashing in the clear night, just as they clashed and twirled and danced ...
— The Philanderers • A.E.W. Mason
... Suddenly he stopped, hesitated, and uttered an impatient ejaculation. The light had disappeared. He turned sharply on his heel, and retraced his steps until opposite a farm-shed that stood a few paces from the wall. Hard by, a large elm cast the gaunt shadow of its leafless limbs on the wall and surrounding snow. The stranger stepped into this shadow, and at once seemed to become a part of its ...
— Thankful Blossom • Bret Harte
... surface of the earth or about 2 inches; they are more succulent than the grasses and less so than most of the fillies hyesinths &c.- the peduncle is soletary, proceeds from the root, is columner, smooth leafless and rises to the hight of 2 or 21/2 feet. it supports from 10 to forty flowers which are each supported by seperate footstalk of 1/2 an inch in length scattered without order on the upper portion ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... I felt that fourteen or fifteen pairs of very keen eyes were on me, seeing me very plainly indeed, for in my curiosity and excitement I had come out from the thicker bushes to place myself behind a ragged, almost leafless shrub, which afforded the merest apology for a shelter. Putting a bold face on the matter, although I did not feel very easy, I came out and advanced to them, removing my battered old hat on the way, and bowing repeatedly to the assembled company. My courteous salutation was not returned; ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson
... eyes sparkling, she stopped opposite a point of the island which, forming a curve at this place, was nearest to the mainland. Through the leafless branches of the willows and poplars, La Louve could see the roof of the house, where, perhaps, Martial was dying. At this sight, uttering a fearful groan, she tore off her shawl and cap, and slipping down her robe, keeping on her petticoat, she threw herself into the river, and waded until she ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... streaks of light, coming from one knew not where, filtered through the trees. No breath was stirring; the wheels and horses' hoofs made no sound on the deep fern mould. All around, the burnt tree-trunks, leafless and jagged, rose like withered giants, the passages between them were black, the sky black, and black the silence. No one spoke, and literally the only sound was Pippin's breathing. What was it that was so terrifying? Scorrier had a feeling of entombment; that nobody could help him; the feeling ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the 'poor' soil should not be drawn out by the living roots, and the natural grass (on which Australian stock depends) should have a better show. The hard, dead trees raised their barkless and whitened trunks and leafless branches for three or four miles, and the grey and brown grass stood tall between, dying in the first breaths of the coming drought. All was becoming grey and ashen here, the heat blazing and dancing across objects, and the pale brassy dome ...
— Joe Wilson and His Mates • Henry Lawson
... comparatively bare and lifeless, even the Brambles and Woodbine, which straggle over the tangle of underwood being almost leafless. ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... and not a breath of air disturbed the sharp, still outlines of the leafless trees. The sky was slightly veiled with a thin scud of clouds. As the day advanced these increased in density ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... cattle grazing about them. But more numerous are to be seen those that are not survivors, though still standing, drained of their sap of life by the woodman's ax, which hacked those jagged girdles around their huge trunks. Standing there leafless, rigid, and gray, they remind us, in their branching nakedness, of the antlered elk, and in their gigantic unsightliness of the monstrous mastodon, that thing of grisly bone which, as a thing of life, no son of Adam ever beheld. Hard by stands an enormous oak, whose main bough, ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady
... man see that tall, dry pine, in the quiet valley below, with a slender young tree shooting up, and tenderly spreading its green branches around that aged trunk, so it would shield its bare sides in the colds of winter, and fan its leafless head in ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... whereas the following morning, when we rose to depart, a fog had settled on the mountain, making movement upon it doubtful and even to a slight degree dangerous. The lake, some six miles by ten, and abounding in islets, lay smiling under the bright, wintry sun, its shores clad with leafless forests mingled with evergreens, save the barren slopes of the volcano itself; beneath the distant lava stream of which we were told seventeen hundred people lay, buried by the last eruption. The scene tempted me more than most to description, for the brilliant stillness of a clear ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... lonely as he drove through the bare March fields and leafless woods on his way to town. The sky had clouded again, like his prospects, and he had the dreary sense of desolation which overwhelms a quiet, domestic man who feels that his home and all to which ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe |
