"Prune" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... little ways like this an' entertained me fine; but it was mighty hard to wring any useful work out of him. He used to prune the rose vines, and now and again he'd do a little dustin'; but once when I had to bake sourdough bread, I pointed out that the garden needed weedin', an' explained to him just what effect weedin' had on garden ...
— Happy Hawkins • Robert Alexander Wason
... pruning, are from a distinguished horticulturist. Prune off all dead wood, and all the little twigs on the main limbs. Retrench branches, so as to give light and ventilation to the interior of the tree. Select the straight and perpendicular shoots, which give little ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... PRUNE TARTS—Wash the prunes thoroughly and soak over night or for several hours. Cook in the same water. When very tender rub them through a sieve. To one cup of the pulp add one tablespoon of lemon juice, the yolks of two eggs beaten with one-half cup of thin cream and a few ...
— Good Things to Eat as Suggested by Rufus • Rufus Estes
... knew she wasn't, just as he knew that she was a girl of education and refinement. A tantalizing thing to meet a disembodied voice like that, a low laugh, a mystery! The lady might have a face like a dried prune! (Only he knew that she hadn't!) Voices were not to be relied upon. Take that "hello-girl," for instance; she had had the softest lilting voice over the wire, then when he got a look at her she hadn't been a ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... taken crude little chromos and boxed them in gaudy frames, many of whose atrocities were aggravated by panels of plush of a color that could hardly be described by any other name than fermented prune. Over the corner of these they had thrown "throws" or drapes of malicious magenta horribly ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... true. We have seen very conclusively that when you prune even a little you are going to ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Forty-Second Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... knowledge of passions, and of sins, known only through their medium, but the skilful developement of which, subjects a female writer, and more particularly a youthful one, to ungenerous animadversion. It is to be hoped, that the friends of this gifted girl will so prune the luxuriance of her pen, as to leave nothing to detract from a work ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... these poets was twofold: they had not only to prune and purify their dialect and produce verses, they had also to find readers, to create a public, to begin a propaganda. The first means adopted was the publication of the Armana prouvencau, already referred to. In 1855, five hundred copies were issued, in 1894, twelve thousand. For four ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... then, however, with characteristic caution, denying the authorship of the bad jokes he took pains to circulate.[81] The proceedings of the Legislature he regarded with real alarm whenever their object was to alter what the public voice pronounced capable of amendment, or prune what was judged superfluous. The vote of the House of Commons on the 1st of March, for discontinuing the services of one of the Lords of the Admiralty, and that given on the 2nd of May for getting rid of one of the Postmasters-General, his Lordship called "stripping the Crown ...
— Memoirs of the Court of George IV. 1820-1830 (Vol 1) - From the Original Family Documents • Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... to begin at the back side of the garden, and prune them all, advancing regularly to ...
— Rollo's Experiments • Jacob Abbott
... select from all the forms of spelling, the most simple and consistent. Constant changes are taking place in the method of making words, and we would not refuse to cast in our mite to make the standard more correct and easy. We would prune off by degrees all unnecessary appendages, as unsounded or italic letters, and write out words so as to be capable of a distinct pronunciation. But this change must be gradually effected. From the spelling adopted two centuries ...
— Lectures on Language - As Particularly Connected with English Grammar. • William S. Balch
... And say, she's no prune-fed pacifist, Cousin Myra. Course, she don't swing the hammer quite so open when the folks get back, for Vee ain't one you can walk on with hobnails and get away with it. I guess Myra suspicioned that. But, when it comes to sly jabs and spicy little side remarks ...
— Wilt Thou Torchy • Sewell Ford
... stretch right across from the Drina to the Dobrava. The southern slopes of Tzer are less abrupt than those on the north and descend gradually into the Leschnitza Valley, out of which rise the lesser heights of the Iverak Mountains. Both these ranges are largely covered by prune orchards, ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... packed, transported and cared for in the field, the quicker will the roots take hold and the vines make the vigorous start on which so much depends. The nurseryman should be requested not to prune much before packing and to pack the vines well for shipping. The vines should be heeled-in as soon as they reach their destination. If the vines are dry on arrival, they should be drenched well before heeling-in. It sometimes happens that the vines are shriveled and ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick
... turned the color of a ripe prune; every hair in that stubble of beard stood straight out from his chin, and he looked as if murder would be a pleasant thing. He took the glass and deliberately emptied the whisky on the floor. "John Carleton's son, eh? I might 'a' known it—yuh look enough like him. Me drink with a son of John ...
— The Range Dwellers • B. M. Bower
... That is, prune off its branches; and another adage is to this effect: "Short boughs, long vintage." The constant blooming of the gorse has given rise ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... beareth fruit, he purgeth it, that it may bring forth more fruit." This purging is another process quite contrary to nature, for the term signifies an inward cleansing. A vine-dresser can prune or trim a branch and thereby practically make it clean outwardly from all unnecessary or harmful sprouts which would hinder it from bearing fruit, but there is no known natural process by which the grafted branch could ...
— Sanctification • J. W. Byers
... from a Late Lat. use of deputare, to cut off, allot; putare having the original sense of to trim, prune), one appointed to act or govern instead of another; one who exercises an office in another man's right, a substitute; in representative government a member of an elected chamber. In general, the powers and duties of a deputy are those of his principal ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... seem even to prune it of the greater part of its branches, and concentrate the threads of sap which remain in a few twigs;" and he thought of a Carmelite convent to which he had gone from time to time, remembered their failing, almost ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... thus, Sometime Latona's daughter we behold, When the impregnate air retains the thread, That weaves her zone. In the celestial court, Whence I return, are many jewels found, So dear and beautiful, they cannot brook Transporting from that realm: and of these lights Such was the song. Who doth not prune his wing To soar up thither, let him look from thence For tidings from the dumb. When, singing thus, Those burning suns that circled round us thrice, As nearest stars around the fixed pole, Then seem'd they like to ladies, from the dance Not ceasing, but suspense, in silent ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... forcing-pit, or any other such structures, merely for the blooming season, will require particular care to be taken in the application of water that they may not become sodden and diseased. Continue to stop, prune, or pinch back all rambling and luxuriant shoots in due time. Stir the surface of the bed in the conservatory, and apply fresh soil, to maintain the ...
— In-Door Gardening for Every Week in the Year • William Keane
... befell our friend Maistre Estienne le Gout, my lord the duke would turn it into the funniest of rondels, all the rhymes being the names of the cases of nouns or the moods of verbs; and Maistre Estienne would make reply in similar fashion, seeking to prune the story of its more humiliating episodes. If Fredet was too long away from Court, a rondel went to upbraid him; and it was in a rondel that Fredet would excuse himself. Sometimes two or three, or as many as a dozen, would set to work on the same refrain, the same idea, or in the same macaronic ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... weather is quite spring-like. Prune cherry trees and currant bushes. Transplant plum tree sprouts. Messrs. Biddle and Drew finish preparing their vessel, ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... them into sacks, and delivers them at the factory before the sun has risen. They are here taken in hand at once; on exceptional days as many as 160 tons being so treated in the whole province. After the following season, say end of June, the farmers prune their trees; these prunings are carted to the factory, where the leaves are separated ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 643, April 28, 1888 • Various
... the room in a procession of one." A low laugh startled Debby, though it was smothered like the babes in the Tower; and, turning, she beheld the trespasser scarlet with confusion, and sobered with a tardy sense of his transgression. Debby was not a starched young lady of the "prune and prism" school, but a frank, free-hearted little body, quick to read the sincerity of others, and to take looks and words at their real value. Dickens was her idol; and for his sake she could have forgiven a greater offence than this. The ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... part of its leaves at once, in the spring of the year, but if the thick wood be cut out from time to time, new leaves will continue to push below the parts so cut off during the whole season; and, accordingly, the Chinese are particularly attentive to prune afresh in the autumn, in order to obtain a supply of young leaves in the after spring. The thermometer at this place, on the 9th of November at sun-rise, stood at 64, and at noon in the shade ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... air, and sea. Then let us not think hard One easy prohibition, who enjoy Free leave so large to all things else, and choice Unlimited of manifold delights: But let us ever praise him, and extol His bounty, following our delightful task, To prune these growing plants, and tend these flowers, Which were it toilsome, yet with thee were sweet. To whom thus Eve replied. O thou for whom And from whom I was formed, flesh of thy flesh, And without whom am to no end, my guide And head! what thou hast said is just and ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... Our well-being consists in learning it and in adjusting our lives to it. When we cross it or seek to contravene it, we are destroyed. But Nature in her universal procedures is not rational, as I am rational when I weed my garden, prune my trees, select my seed or my stock, or arm myself with tools or weapons. In such matters I take a short cut to that which Nature reaches by a slow, roundabout, and wasteful process. How does she weed her garden? By the survival of the fittest. How does ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... his hair, and we will sell him for a hundred piasters to Bacon or to Bungay. The rubbish is saleable enough, sir; and my advice to you is this: the next time you go home for a holiday, take 'Walter Lorraine' in your carpet-bag—give him a more modern air, prune away, though sparingly, some of the green passages, and add a little comedy, and cheerfulness, and satire, and that sort of thing, and then we'll take him to market, and sell him. The book is not a wonder of wonders, but it ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... started from these they may be grafted or budded. In from six to twelve months from the time buds have started from the branches thus cut back, under average conditions the new shoots will have grown to sufficient size to permit of their being budded or grafted. The best time to prune back trees to start new shoots for top-working is early in the month of March. In removing large branches there is always danger of splitting, because of the weight of the heavy branches. This may be entirely ...
— The Pecan and its Culture • H. Harold Hume
... and prune the vines, which must be cleaned from all cankered and unhealthy leaves or other substances, to preserve them from insects. In July they should also be gone over, and pruned and nailed, where requisite. ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... sword! No more, no more, Thy steel no more shall sting and shine, Pass thro' the fusing fires again; And learn to prune the laughing vine. Fall sword, dread lord, with one accord, The plough and ...
— Old Spookses' Pass • Isabella Valancy Crawford
... was not worried, though she pretended to be. It was natural that having slept too much he should now sleep too little. She prescribed exercise and usefulness. One day she made him wash all the dishes, and prune all the rose-vines, and tie them in readiness for straw jackets when winter should set in, and she made him split wood in the cellar, and after dinner she made him go to the piano and play Irish music for her until the sweat stood out on his forehead. Then she ordered him under a cold shower, ...
— If You Touch Them They Vanish • Gouverneur Morris
... of nitre, one pound of cassia buds ground, one pound of bitter almond meal, (the cassia and almond meal to be mixed together before they are put to the spirits) two ounces of sliced orris root, and about thirty or forty prune stones pounded. Shake the whole well together, two or three times a day, for three days or more. Let them settle, then pour in one gallon of the best wine vinegar; and add to every four gallons, ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... now, if you will yourselves watch a few birds in flight, or opening and closing their wings to prune them, you will soon know as much as is needful for our art purposes; and, which is far more desirable, feel how very little we know, to any purpose, of even the familiar creatures ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... brought more than a dozen apple trees and cuttings, and is going to bring some young fig trees. Thus we shall have quite an orchard, if they grow, but the "if" is a big one. The people do not seem to take any trouble with their fruit trees and hardly ever prune them. Perhaps they are disheartened on account of the rats. Most of the orchards are a long way off in sheltered ravines round ...
— Three Years in Tristan da Cunha • K. M. Barrow
... "Matthew Wald," which is itself the history of a lunatic as full of horrors, and those of no very different kind, as the Confessions themselves. That editing, and perhaps something more than editing, on Lockhart's part would have been exactly the thing necessary to prune and train and direct the Shepherd's disorderly luxuriance into the methodical madness of the Justified Sinner—to give Hogg's loose though by no means vulgar style the dress of his own polished manner—to weed and shape and correct and straighten the faults ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... hour question and answer session was led by Professor J.G. Moore, University of Wisconsin, on pruning. This brought out a very lively discussion about how to prune young orchards and what age of trees to plant for commercial orchards. This question was not settled, as some preferred one year old trees, while others would plant nothing but two year ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... prevent their starving each other, when too numerous. It is only at that time that they have the trouble of watering them, nature alone performing the rest, and bringing them to maturity; which is known by the green rind beginning to change colour. There is no occasion to cut or prune them. The other species of melons are cultivated in the same manner, only that between the holes the distance is but ...
— History of Louisisana • Le Page Du Pratz
... and security; but living, and pressure to the square inch. Do you twig? All the old hard-and-fast traditions and drags on life are in the melting-pot. Death's boiling their bones, and they'll make excellent stock for the new soup. When you prune and dock things, the sap flows quicker. Regrets and repinings and repressions are going out of fashion; we shall have no time or use for them in the future. You're going to make life—well, that's something to be thankful for, anyway. You've kept Cyril Morland alive. And—well, you know, we've ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... place like this appeals to me. Now our places in England are all so large that they take an army of servants to run them, and the gardening and all that are done by one's men. But here with only yourselves you can do so much. You can feed your own chickens, you can prune your own trees, you can do such a lot yourselves. I should think it would ...
— At Home with the Jardines • Lilian Bell
... flowering season. Even a flower is not without honor, save in its own country. We have only to prepare a border of leaf mould, take up the young plant without injuring the roots or allowing them to dry, hurry them into the ground, and prune back the bush a little, to establish it in our gardens, where it will bloom freely after the second year. Lime in the soil and manure are fatal to it as well as to rhododendrons and azaleas. All they require is a mulch of leaves kept on winter and summer that ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... man read and looked at Casey humbly. "Well, I ain't never wrote a check in my life. Now I tell yuh. I ain't got the money to pay for these tires, but I tell yuh what I'll do; I'm goin' on up to my brother—he's got a prune orchard a little ways out from San Jose, an' he's well fixed. Now I'll write out an order on my brother, fer him to send you the money. He's good fer it, an' he'll do it. I'm goin' on up to help him work his place on shares, ...
— Casey Ryan • B. M. Bower
... train the mind to observe, reflect, and think; to assist the faculties in attaining their fullest and freest expression; and thus to add to the richness and variety of human thought. The French imperial system sought to prune away all mental independence, and to train the young generation in neat and serviceable espalier methods: all aspiring shoots, especially in the sphere of moral and political science, were sharply cut down. Consequently French thought, which had been ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... floor inhabited by old Madame Prune my landlady, and her aged husband; they are absorbed in prayer before ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... fields; the crops die down; Upsprings instead a shaggy growth of burrs And caltrops; and amid the corn-fields trim Unfruitful darnel and wild oats have sway. Wherefore, unless thou shalt with ceaseless rake The weeds pursue, with shouting scare the birds, Prune with thy hook the dark field's matted shade, Pray down the showers, all vainly thou shalt eye, Alack! thy neighbour's heaped-up harvest-mow, And in the greenwood from a shaken oak Seek solace for thine hunger. Now to tell The sturdy rustics' weapons, what they are, Without which, ...
— The Georgics • Virgil
... to have some sense. He would have that young hound at Sinkhole arrested as an accomplice of the horse thieves. He would put a bullet through that fool of a horse, Jake, and he would lynch Tex if he ever got his hands on him. He would sell out, by glory, and buy himself a prune orchard. ...
— Skyrider • B. M. Bower
... Pyramid. Last night before I went to bed, read over my copy of Ferlini's letters, to gain courage. Gained it for a little; but when I think of that desert I'm supposed to turn into a happy playground for trippers, and not a tent hired or a prune bought, or an egg laid, for all I know, I wish Anthony and I had let Lark stick ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... austere for many of us. Has untrammelled curiosity no charms? Would I, for example, forego my casual kakemonos, my ignorantly acquired majolica, some trifling accumulation of Greek coins, that handful of Eastern rugs? Could I prune away certain excrescent minor Whistlers? those bits of ivory cutting from old Italy and Japan? those tarnished Tuscan panels?—in truth, I could and would not. Yet had I stuck to my first love, prints, I should by this time be mentioned ...
— The Collectors • Frank Jewett Mather
... teaching, this is Worcester, Malevolent to you in all aspects; Which makes him prune himself, and bristle up The crest of youth ...
— King Henry IV, The First Part • William Shakespeare [Hudson edition]
... times. In the harbor of private life alone could that swell subside; and, however the country missed his warning eloquence, there is little doubt that his own mind and heart were gainers by a retirement, in which he had leisure to "prune the ruffled wings" of his benevolent spirit,—to exchange the ambition of being great for that of being useful, and to listen, in the stillness of retreat, to the lessons of a mild wisdom, of which, ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... North as the Border of the Arctic Sea, where it cultivates amicable relations with the hyperborean humming-bird, and Professor GRANT is at present attempting to naturalize it in Saint Domingo. The time is probably not far distant when it will prune its morning wing on the upper pole, and go to roost on the equator. It is, upon the whole, a grasping bird, and inspires the weaker tribes with terror; yet, notwithstanding its fierceness, it perches familiarly on the Arms of ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 14, July 2, 1870 • Various
... forsaken. A power which pierces, and an ambition which enjoys the future, accepts the martyrdom of the present. They feel loneliness in their own age, while with universal survey viewing the beacon-lights of history across the peaks of generations. Their seat of life is the literary faculty, and they prune and torture themselves only to maintain in this the highest intensity and capacity. They are in some sort rebels battling against time, not the humble well-doer content simply to live and bless God. Between them and living men there is the difference which exists ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... amount of new material, some of it home-made, some of it drawn from foreign sources, was added; but the great bulk of the new service-book had been contained in one or other of the older manuals. The Reformers did but clip and prune, with that exquisite taste and judgment which belong by tradition to English gardeners, the overgrowth and rank luxuriance of a too long neglected, "careless-ordered" garden. But whence came the earlier formularies ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... Sunsweet Recipe Packet—edited by Mrs. Belle DeGraf—will be nothing less than a revelation to you. The recipes are printed on gummed slips [5x3"] for easy pasting in your cook book. And it's free! California Prune & Apricot Growers Inc., 1196 Market ...
— American Cookery - November, 1921 • Various
... be easy to get wood. It is not. The army takes a lot of it, and those who, in ordinary winters, have wood to sell, have to keep it for themselves this year. Pere has cut down all the old trees he could find—old prune trees, old apple trees, old chestnut trees—and it is not the best of firewood. I hated to see even that done, but he claimed that he wanted to clear a couple of pieces of land, and I try to believe him. Did you ever burn green wood? If ...
— On the Edge of the War Zone - From the Battle of the Marne to the Entrance of the Stars and Stripes • Mildred Aldrich
... and a depth in the soul that them butter figgers can't touch—no, nor the pop-corn trees can't reach that height with their sorghum branches. It lays fur beyond the switchin' timothy tail of that seed horse or the wavin' raisen mane of that prune charger. It is a realm," sez I, "that I fear you will never stand ...
— Samantha at the World's Fair • Marietta Holley
... of a futurist artist. Silently I handed over the instrument. The monitor looked at it, and then at me without comment. But there is an international language of facial expression, and his said, unmistakably, "You poor, simple prune! You choice sample ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... answered, looking down at the queer little dots and spirals on her paper. "I daresay we'll have to prune it before it's printed. But it is a good fluency, a rich fluency. To me it is irresistible—like a spring freshet, like the sap rushing madly through all ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... quite responsive to such applications, and I have seen the defoliation of prune trees in New York State ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Thirty-Seventh Annual Report • Various
... Before I prune my spirit wings and rise To seek my loved ones in their paradise, Yea! even before I hasten on to see That lost child's face, so like a dream to me, I would be given this intermediate role, And carry comfort to each poor, dumb ...
— Poems of Progress • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... little while she led me, blinking, into the light. A tall stranger, a lady in prune-coloured silk, sat in ...
— Painted Windows • Elia W. Peattie
... about getting back that when Antonio left the corral gate open I never thought to speak to him. And Ruggles's Dynamo—they've let him run away again—just walked in and butted open the orchard bars and he's loose now eating the prune trees!" ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... towns fall for this: 'Manager Soandso is to be congratulated upon securing for his next week's attraction Mr. Suchandsuch's elaborate production of the great London success, 'The Rancid Prune,' with the following all-star cast of metropolitan favorites.' And some of ...
— The Sorrows of a Show Girl • Kenneth McGaffey
... rook; drake, rake; flute, lute; pearl, earl; plane, lane; wheel, heel; spine, pine; trout, rout; prune, rune. ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 4, February 1878 • Various
... why so harsh? why with remorseless knife Home to the stem prune back each bough and bud? I thought the task of education was To strengthen, not to crush; to train and feed Each subject toward fulfilment of its nature, According to the mind of God, revealed In laws, congenital with every kind And ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... flighty character of Funny Face. When Funny Face acquired a titbit, Darwin took up a hump-backed position near at hand, his bright little eyes fixed on his friend's activities. Funny Face would nibble relishingly at his prune for a moment or so; then an altogether astonishing butterfly would flitter by just overhead. Funny Face, lost in ecstasy would gaze skyward after the departing marvel. This was Darwin's opportunity. In two hops he was at Funny Face's side. With great deliberation, ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... yet, gentlemen, to men that are hungry, pig, with prune sauce, is very good eating. But, gentlemen, you are my guests, make what alterations you please. Is there anything else you wish to ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... teaching more frequently insisted upon in the Old and in the New Testament as the truth of a judgment, now, or in the future, upon the misdeeds or sins of men. Let criticism prune and cut as it will, while it exhibits the deplorably low standard of morality once prevalent among the Hebrew peoples, and therefore prevalent among their Gods, their Elohim, Adonai and Jahveh, one thing, at least, is undeniable—that that which ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... which, cold though they are, may warm the heart. Looking at them our mother told us how hunger hurts, and how painful want and misery are to bear, and we never left the Christmas fair without buying a few sheep or a prune man, though all we could do with them was to give them away again. When I wrote my fairy-tale, The Nuts, I had the Christmas fair at Berlin in my mind's eye, and I seemed to see the wretched little girl ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... incredible. Lucretius worked nearly a lifetime on one poem. It completely absorbed his life. It is said that Bryant rewrote "Thanatopsis" a hundred times, and even then was not satisfied with it. John Foster would sometimes linger a week over a single sentence. He would hack, split, prune, pull up by the roots, or practice any other severity on whatever he wrote, till it gained his consent to exist. Chalmers was once asked what Foster was about in London. "Hard at it," he replied, "at the rate of a line a week." Dickens, one of the greatest ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... compassionate." He held up his hand for inspection. "Look at that blister. It's as big as a dime and feels like a prune. They're not done yet and they'd induce you to duplicate it if they ever got you into their clutches. So long as it's all in the family I think one blister is about sufficient. Better lay low for a ...
— The Dominant Dollar • Will Lillibridge
... are required in vineyards at different seasons. In spring they prepare the soil; in summer they prune and tie up the vine branches; and in autumn all the joyous labour of the vintage comes suddenly on. Looking to the circumstance in the parable, that the labourers who began early counted much on having ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... clouds away, and welcome, day! With night we banish sorrow: Sweet air, blow soft; mount, lark, aloft, To give my love good-morrow. Wings from the wind to please her mind, Notes from the lark I'll borrow: Bird, prune thy wing; nightingale, sing, To ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... Anne, to quote but one example, the peerages become extinct since the twelfth century amounted to five hundred and sixty-five. The War of the Roses had begun the extermination of dukes, which the axe of Mary Tudor completed. This was, indeed, the decapitation of the nobility. To prune away the dukes was to cut off its head. Good policy, perhaps; but it is better to corrupt than to decapitate. James I. was of this opinion. He restored dukedoms. He made a duke of his favourite Villiers, who had made him a pig;[22] a transformation from the duke feudal to the ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... for novelty; but if you are true to your own vision, as heretofore you have been, you will always be original and personal in your work. In stating your opinion on the structural character of man, bird, or beast, always wilfully caricature; it gives you something to prune, which is ever so much more satisfactory than having constantly to fill gaps which an unincisive vision has caused, and which will invariably make work ...
— The Mind of the Artist - Thoughts and Sayings of Painters and Sculptors on Their Art • Various
... believe it ever does any one any good to be humbled!" maintained Jane, stoutly and with reason. "Especially if it's a poor, frail little soul that aint got no mother! I did what I thought best, though I can't afford it no way in the world! To prune and dress a lie aint going to make it grow into a truth!" She rose. "I guess I'll see if Henry Jonas'll be ...
— A Prairie Infanta • Eva Wilder Brodhead
... of,) to roast, Pork; (loin of,) to roast, Pork, (middling piece,) to roast, Pork pie, Pork steaks, Pork, to stew, Port wine jelly, Pot pie, Pot pie, (apple,) Potatoes, to boil, Potatoes, to fry, Potatoes, roasted Potato pudding Potato snow Pound cake Prawns, to boil Prune pudding Pudding catchup Pumpkin, to boil Pumpkin chips Pumpkin pudding Pumpkin yeast Punch Punch, (frozen,) Punch, (milk,) Punch, (fine milk,) Punch, (regent's,) Punch, (Roman,) ...
— Directions for Cookery, in its Various Branches • Eliza Leslie
... superabundant supply of self-reliant animals, have one flank and the rear exposed, and it is precisely these whom the lions take. Looking at the matter in a broad way, we may justly assert that wild beasts trim and prune every herd into compactness, and tend to reduce it into a closely-united body with a single well-protected leader. That the development of independence of character in cattle is thus suppressed below its otherwise natural standard by the influence ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... ambassadors came to see him, bragged of nothing more than of his orchard, hi sunt ordines mei. What shall I say of Cincinnatus, Cato, Tully, and many such? how they have been pleased with it, to prune, plant, inoculate and graft, to show so many several kinds of ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... satin coverlet. By the bed sat an old woman of the people. Her ragged white locks were bound about by a fillet of black silk; her face, dark as burnt umber, was seamed and lined like a withered prune; even her long broad nose was wrinkled; her dull eyes looked like mud-puddles; her big underlip was pursed up as if she had been speaking mincing words, and her chin was covered with a short white stubble. Over her coarse smock and gown she wore a black cotton ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... if you are not there, I have no more to say. But a ruffian gunner, whose charge was to attend the portcullis over the gate, let fly a cannon-ball at him, and hit him with that shot most furiously on the right temple of his head, yet did him no more hurt than if he had but cast a prune or kernel of a wine-grape at him. What is this? said Gargantua; do you throw at us grape-kernels here? The vintage shall cost you dear; thinking indeed that the bullet had been the kernel ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... seemed sad sophistry. Whitbread was the Demosthenes of bad taste and vulgar vehemence, but strong, and English. Holland is impressive from sense and sincerity. Lord Lansdowne good, but still a debater only. Grenville I like vastly, if he would prune his speeches down to an hour's delivery. Burdett is sweet and silvery as Belial himself, and I think the greatest favourite in Pandemonium; at least I always heard the country gentlemen and the ministerial devilry praise his speeches up stairs, and run down from Bellamy's when he was upon ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... come here 'cause you trust; but you make up what you lose by charging it to other people. Pa will make it hot for you the last of the week. He has been looking over your bill, and comparing it with the hired girl, and she says we haven't ever had a prune, or a dried apple, or a raisin, or any cinnamon, or crackers and cheese out of your store, and he says you are worse than the James brothers, and that you used to be a three card monte man, and he will have you arrested for ...
— Peck's Compendium of Fun • George W. Peck
... the unfortunate young prune's appearance. At Cannes she had been a happy, smiling English girl of the best type, full of beans and buck. Her face now was pale and drawn, like that of a hockey centre-forward at a girls' school who, in addition ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... friends, every recently made bridegroom ought to be Prince Aldobrandini. Profit by that unique minute in life to soar away to the empyrean with the swans and the eagles, even if you do have to fall back on the morrow into the bourgeoisie of the frogs. Don't economize on the nuptials, do not prune them of their splendors; don't scrimp on the day when you beam. The wedding is not the housekeeping. Oh! if I were to carry out my fancy, it would be gallant, violins would be heard under the trees. Here is my programme: sky-blue and silver. I would mingle with ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... be increased by seeds, by budding, or by grafting. The profuse brilliant orange-coloured berries of the C. Lelandii (Mespilus) ensures it a place on walls and trellises. A sunny position gives best results. Prune in March. ...
— Gardening for the Million • Alfred Pink
... he trains the branch of good Where the high blossoms be, And wieldeth still the shears of ill To prune and prune ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... revenue marine service, the coast survey, and the life-saving stations, all of which had been expanded during the war until the clerks and employees were numbered by thousands. General Grant wished to place at the head of this establishment a business man who could prune off its excrescences and reform its abuses. The place was offered to the millionaire merchant, Mr. A. T. Stewart, of New York, who accepted it with pleasure, and at once had a suite of rooms in the Ebbitt House, with a private entrance, fitted up for his occupancy until he could ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... Ogilvie since that Whit-sunday nearly two months ago when she saw him looking at her garden and invited him in, and every time he revisited the Vicarage he had devoted some of his time to helping her weed or prune or do whatever she wanted to do in her garden. He was also on friendly terms with Miriam, the elder of Mr. Ogilvie's two sisters, who was very like her brother in appearance and who gave to the house the decorous loving care he gave to the church. And however ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... apply the principles of acclimation, and those rich prairies will be among the great fruit-growing regions of the world. Two things are essential to successful fruit-culture, on all the alluvial soils of the Northwest: raise from seed, and prune closely and head-in short, and thus put back and strengthen the trees for the first ten years, and no more complaints ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden
... the table. Throughout the meal they looked down at their plates and did not lift their red eyes. They did not eat much, although they had been working in the cold all day, and there was a rabbit stewed in gravy for supper, and prune pies. ...
— O Pioneers! • Willa Cather
... sun-steeped hillside's hoard. Without a Past, you lack that southern wall O'er which the vines of Poesy should crawl; Still they're your only hope: no midnight oil Makes up for virtue wanting in the soil; 90 Manure them well and prune them; 'twon't be France, Nor Spain, nor Italy, but there's your chance. You have one story-teller worth a score Of dead Boccaccios,—nay, add twenty more,— A hawthorn asking spring's most dainty breath, And him ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... time the City Mouse had something new to show: he took the little Country Mouse into a corner on the top shelf, where a big jar of dried prunes stood open. After much tugging and pulling they got a large dried prune out of the jar on to the shelf and began to nibble at it. This was even better than the brown sugar. The little Country Mouse liked the taste so much that he could hardly nibble fast enough. But all at once, in the midst of their eating, there ...
— Stories to Tell to Children • Sara Cone Bryant
... say nought to your uncle. If somebody was to come and steal his legs I don't b'lieve he'd holler 'Stop thief!' but when it comes to my fruit, as I'm that proud on it grieves me to see it picked, walking over the wall night after night, I feel sometimes as it's no good to prune and train, and ...
— The Vast Abyss - The Story of Tom Blount, his Uncles and his Cousin Sam • George Manville Fenn
... vain for him to protest as to the pains that Corydon took to remove every tiniest fragment of the skin of a stewed prune. "Surely, dearest," he would argue, "the internal arrangements of a baby are not so delicate as to be torn by ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... He trains the branch of good Where the high blossoms be, And wieldeth still the shears of ill To prune and prime ...
— Songs Of The Road • Arthur Conan Doyle
... stronger held the city and drove out the other party, so that the fighting never ceased either inside or outside the gates. The peaceful country round about had been laid waste and desolate. The peasants did not dare go out to till their fields or prune their olive-trees. Mothers were afraid to let their little ones out of their sight, for hungry wolves and other wild beasts prowled ...
— Knights of Art - Stories of the Italian Painters • Amy Steedman
... satisfaction, that sometimes upon Sunday she might be allowed a bit of meat: on Fridays an egg and an apple contented her, and an occasional fish made her shout with joy. An old soldier, who had returned to his primitive employment of gardener, and lived near, undertook to dig, prune, and plant in the garden for a franc a day, during the time we ourselves were engaged with the inside of our mansion, and to come afterwards at 2d. an hour when we wanted him, either to go to C—— for marketing, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 437 - Volume 17, New Series, May 15, 1852 • Various
... oldest of the four, an old space-buster with a face wrinkled like a dried prune, burned by cosmic rays and the suns of worlds so far away they were scarcely credible, had taken command. Suddenly, Old Dunbar had known where they were. Suddenly, Dunbar knew ...
— To Each His Star • Bryce Walton
... dung and dig among cucumbers and gourds till new year's day, and they may also do so in a parched-up field. They may prune them, remove their leaves, cover them with earth, and fumigate them, till new year's day. R. Simon said, "one may even remove the leaf from the bunch of grapes ...
— Hebrew Literature
... could do no better than agree that they were both remarkably fine women, and that there was no nonsense about either of them—for which gentle recommendation they united in falling upon him frightfully. Then, too, here was Mrs General, got home from foreign parts, sending a Prune and a Prism by post every other day, demanding a new Testimonial by way of recommendation to some vacant appointment or other. Of which remarkable gentlewoman it may be finally observed, that there surely ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... the evenings (he slept at my father's) he would pick up my books and amuse himself with talking to me about them, laugh at my crude enthusiasms, clear up some difficult passage, prune away remorselessly the trash that had crept into my little collection, until, one day, returning from Cincinnati, where business had called him, he brought with him a store of books inexhaustible to my inexperienced eyes, and declared himself my ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... Rim or the Lorrigan outfit that's all wrong. I know all about grandad and all the various and sundry uncles and forbears that earned us the name of being bad; it makes darn interesting stuff to tell now and then to some of the fellows who were raised in a prune orchard and will sit and listen with watering mouths and eyes goggling. I've been a hero, months on end, just for the things that my grandad did in the seventies. Of course," he pulled his lips into their whimsical smile, ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... Prune thou thy words; the thoughts control That o'er thee swell and throng:— They will condense within thy soul, ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... fluttering thing, Must we no longer live together? And dost thou prune thy trembling wing, To take thy flight, thou know'st not whither? Thy humorous vein, thy pleasing folly, Lies all neglected, all forgot: And pensive, wavering, melancholy, Thou dread'st and ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... Horn, or harbour, terminates by the Valley of Sweet Waters, the sides of which are adorned with pleasure-grounds, and an imperial kiosk, near which, with extremely bad taste, art and expense have been exerted to the utmost to constrain and prune nature, so as to destroy the luxuriance and wildness of the rivulet and its banks, by giving them the appearance of a straight canal, passing through an avenue of formal trees, and occasionally over flights of marble steps, intended to represent cataracts. On gala days, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 10, No. 279, October 20, 1827 • Various
... been something to the food theory for the chipmunks that ate the prune pits got so big they killed all the wolves and years later the settlers ...
— The Marvelous Exploits of Paul Bunyan • W.B. Laughead
... with silk and velvet and gilding on them. They were called prunes, but the prunes you buy at the grocer's are quite different. But now there is seldom anything nice brought from London, and the turkey and the prune people have forgotten ...
— The Story of the Treasure Seekers • E. Nesbit
... is quality. The commercial grower cannot afford to grow the very finest fruit. Many of the best varieties are not large enough yielders to be available for his use, and he cannot, on a large scale, so prune and care for his trees that the individual fruits receive the greatest possible amount of sunshine and thinning out—the personal care that is required for the very best quality. Second, there is the beauty and the value that well kept fruit trees add ...
— Home Vegetable Gardening • F. F. Rockwell
... man," said the King, peevishly. "Dreams are the gifts of the saints, and are not granted to such as thou! Dost thou think that, in the prune of my manhood, I could have youth and beauty forced on my sight, and hear man's law and man's voice say, 'They are thine, and thine only,' and not feel that war was brought to my hearth, and a snare set ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... your body in subjection by some other mode of discipline." He went on, however, to say that fasting was, indeed, the greatest of all corporal austerities, since it puts the axe to the root of the tree. The others only touch the bark lightly; they only scrape or prune it. Whereas when the body waxes fat it often kicks, and from this sort of fatness sin is likely ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... unjust it is to despise any one for the plainness of his dress, and the rusticity of his manners. You may understand a little Latin, but you know not how to plough, sow grain, or reap the harvest, nor even to prune a tree. Sit down with being convinced that ...
— The Looking-Glass for the Mind - or Intellectual Mirror • M. Berquin
... flowers, models of fruit in wax and plaster, baskets and bunches of flowers, conservatories, all flowering plants from every country and the way to grow them. All sorts of seeds, grass, fruit trees of all kinds, and the best way to prune ...
— Samantha at the St. Louis Exposition • Marietta Holley
... Prune and chasten, then, Lycinus. All this is not quite like you, who never used to be over-ready with your commendation; you seem to have gone now to the opposite extreme of prodigality, and developed from a niggard ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... kingdom the controversy raged with unabated fury. The boiled prune, blandest and most inoffensive of breakfast dishes, formed the basis of a spirited debate. There were pro-prunists and there were con-prunists. The parsnip had its champions and its antagonists; the carrot its ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb
... p. 92, he wrote:—'Allow me, my friends and countrymen, while I with honest zeal maintain your cause—allow me to indulge a little more my own egotism and vanity. They are the indigenous plants of my mind; they distinguish it. I may prune their luxuriancy; but I must not entirely clear it of them; for then I should be no longer "as I am;" and perhaps there might be something ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... early fruits to gather, to bring to market, with their green crops of vegetables; their cattle, sheep, calves, fowls; (most of them prisoners,) and poultry to look after; their vines, as they shoot rampantly in the summer heat, to prune, and thin out the leaves when they are too thick; and any one may imagine what a scene of incessant labour it is."—Rural and Domestic ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... are passing a prune-orchard, when, as though for our especial benefit, a couple of peasants working there begin singing aloud, and with evident enthusiasm, some national melody, and as they observe not our presence, at my suggestion we ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... experience, or is willing to give time for the mastery of this subject, I should advise that he employ an experienced gardener to prune his vines after the second year. It is a brief task, but a great deal depends upon it. In selecting a man for the work I should require something more than exaggerated and personal assurances. In every village there are terrible butchers of vines and ...
— The Home Acre • E. P. Roe
... according to their merits and their needs. But though God is common, and though the sun shines on all trees, some trees remain without fruit, and others bear wild fruit useless to mankind. This is why we prune these trees and graft fertile branches upon them, that they may bear good fruit, sweet to taste and useful for men. The fertile branch which comes from the living paradise of the eternal kingdom, is the light of divine grace. No work ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... to relate to me, friend Beatrice? Does the nightingale still sing well? Does the lark soar as high as of yore? Does the linnet still prune itself?" ...
— Tales of Wonder Every Child Should Know • Various
... this play of the long speeches which went hand in hand with the learned reasoning and soliloquies of Sackville and Norton. Quite undeniably of classical influence, however, is the refinement and restraint noticeable throughout the play. These we welcome. They prune the tree of native drama without hacking off its stoutest limbs. Under their control tragedy steps upon the stage in an English dress to prove herself worthy of her Roman sister and ultimately capable of ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne |
