"Weeding" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... true, Barnes says. And so mother said I might take them some bread and a pot of marmalade, and butter, and a packet of tea, and sixpence to buy milk with, and then just as I was starting father gave me the six-pence he said he would for weeding the big bed beside the lawn; and so I spent it on biscuits and sugar for the children, because tea is horrid without sugar, isn't it? And that's the secret, Una," said Tom, getting rather red in the face, "and I haven't told anyone but you, because, because, oh—I don't know! But ...
— The Gap in the Fence • Frederica J. Turle
... "general language." He sends Prince Charles the Advancement in its new Latin dress. "It is a book," he says, "that will live, and be a citizen of the world, as English books are not." And he fitted it for continental reading by carefully weeding it of all passages that might give offence to the censors at Rome or Paris. "I have been," he writes to the King, "mine own Index Expurgatorius, that it may be read in all places. For since my end of putting it in Latin was to have it read everywhere, it had been an ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... you are weeding, foretells that you will have difficulty in proceeding with some work which will bring ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... one state, or with a gradual retrogression. Suppose, for example, a return of the glacial epoch and a spread of polar climatal conditions over the whole globe. The operation of natural selection under these circumstances would tend, on the whole, to the weeding out of the higher organisms and the cherishing of the lower forms of life. Cryptogamic vegetation would have the advantage over Phanerogamic; Hydrozoa over Corals; Crustacea over Insecta, and Amphipoda and Isopoda over ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... under one arm and a brown bunny bulging from the other, Peter ran full tilt down the beaten path to his snug home on the river bank, where Thomas was weeding the garden. ...
— Some Three Hundred Years Ago • Edith Gilman Brewster
... good helps at the raising; and in the course of a few weeks they had the comfort of seeing a more commodious dwelling than the former one put up. The finishing of this, with weeding the Indian corn, renewing the fence, and fishing, and trapping, and shooting partridges and ducks and pigeons, fully occupied their time this summer. The fruit season was less abundant this year than the previous one. The fire had done this mischief, and they had to go far a-field ...
— Canadian Crusoes - A Tale of The Rice Lake Plains • Catharine Parr Traill
... tender babes and infants suck and thrive at the same breast: Though there are some indeed will not so well prosper in company; requiring peculiar juices: But this niceness is more conspicuous in flowers and the herbacious offspring, than in foresters, which require only diligent weeding and frequent cleansing, till they are able to shift for themselves; and as their vessels enlarge and introsume more copious nourishment, often starve their neighbours. Thus much for the nursery and ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... bispinosa), which is everywhere as regularly planted and cultivated in fields under a large surface of water, as wheat or barley is on the dry plains. It is cultivated by a class of men called Dhimars, who are everywhere fishermen and palankeen bearers; and they keep boats for the planting, weeding, and gathering the 'singhara'.[10] The holdings or tenements of each cultivator are marked out carefully on the surface of the water by long bamboos stuck up in it; and they pay so much the acre for the portion they ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... Paul reached the stone house that afternoon they found Miss Lavendar and Charlotta the Fourth in the garden, weeding, raking, clipping, and trimming as if for dear life. Miss Lavendar herself, all gay and sweet in the frills and laces she loved, dropped her shears and ran joyously to meet her guests, while ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... bestowed on rice, though all cultivated lands are remarkably free from weeds. The rice sementeras are carefully weeded, "suckers" are pulled out, and the beds are thinned generally, so that each plant will have all needful chance to develop fruit. This weeding and thinning is the work of women and half-grown children. Every day for nearly two months, or until the fruit heads appear, the cultivators are diligently at work in the sementeras. No tools or agricultural implements other than bare hands are used ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... the sun, went into the garden, and commenced weeding, intending to do my quota of work before breakfast, and then devote the day to reading and conversation. I was presently joined by Shelldrake and Mallory, and between us we finished the onions and radishes, stuck the peas, and cleaned ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor
... garden, in the distant meadows, ploughmen were plodding back and forth in the purple furrows. Peace had descended here at least, and, with a smile, he detected Betty's abounding energy in the moving spirit of the place. He saw her in the freshly swept walks, in the small negroes weeding the blue-grass lawn, in the distant ploughs that made blots upon the meadows. For a moment he hesitated, and laid his hand upon the iron gate; then, stifling the temptation, he turned back into the white sand of the road. Before he met Betty's eyes, he meant ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... chiming rill, Weeding down yon cot-crown'd hill, The torrent's dash, the river's gush, The mighty wind-resounding crush Of the fallen monarch of the wood, Re-echo'd ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various
... described as triumphs of Nature over Art,—our New England horticulture being, on the contrary, the triumph of Art over Nature, after a hard-fought battle. Here, the avenues of palm and cocoa are magnificent, and the flowers new to us, and very brilliant. But pruning and weeding out are hard tasks for Creole natures, with only negroes to help them. There is for the most part a great overgrowth and overrunning of the least desirable elements, a general air of slovenliness and unthrift; in all artificial arrangements decay seems imminent, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... we set ourselves was threefold. First, the weeding out from our circles of the secret agents of the Oligarchy. Second, the organizing of the Fighting Groups, and outside of them, of the general secret organization of the Revolution. And third, the ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... worse, far worse, this extraordinary scene, had it not been for the swiftness and tact of the young man to whom so much was entrusted. Meriwether Lewis hastened here and there, weeding out those who could not convince him that they were invited to dine. He separated as best he might the socially elect from those not yet socially arrived, until at length he stood, almost the sole barrier against ...
— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough
... After a week of weeding in the vegetable garden, Collie was put to work repairing fence. There were many miles of it, inclosing some twenty thousand acres of grazing-land, and the cross-fencing of the oat, alfalfa, fruit, and vegetable acreage. ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... an hour's weeding in my kitchen-garden that you can easily do before dark, and then you shall have bread and cheese, and may sleep in the loft. Where have ...
— Our Frank - and other stories • Amy Walton
... here was an opportunity to prove it. The first customer was a child, sent for three penn'orth of potatoes. As children are naturally careless, Mrs Partridge saw here an excellent opportunity for weeding out the stock, and went to a lot of trouble in picking out the small and damaged tubers, reserving the best for customers who came to choose for themselves. Five minutes later she was exchanging them for the largest in the sack under the direction of an infuriated mother. This flustered her slightly, ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... footmen who were in good training followed so quickly after them that they were able to take part in the battle. Lenoir says the number was only five or six hundred. The modern accounts generally fail to notice this Green River weeding out of the weak men, or confuse it with what took place at the Cowpens; hence many of them greatly exaggerate the number of Americans who fought in the battle.] In the afternoon they passed by several large bands of tories, who had assembled ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Two - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1777-1783 • Theodore Roosevelt
... officer who was studying when his friends were at polo or tennis, was under no illusions as to the havoc which an over-accentuation of the sporting and social side of life was playing with the officers' work. Nowadays, like Kitchener, he is bent on producing the professional and weeding out the "drawing-room" soldier. No wonder that his favourite authors are those acutest critics of English social life and English foibles, Dickens and Thackeray. The former's "Bleak House" and the latter's "Book of Snobs" ...
— Sir John French - An Authentic Biography • Cecil Chisholm
... made of a rag wick floating in native butter in a calabash. From time to time he was called upon to witness the wonderful evolutions, manoeuvres, and mock fights in the camp. The men were solely soldiers; the women did all the work, planting maize, weeding corn, and herding cattle, and thus the more wives a man had the more slaves he could employ. Every wife had a value, and could only be obtained from her father for a certain price in cattle, varying according to his rank. If the full rate were not paid, ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... commenced weeding our cotton, some of the hands who were threatened with a whipping for not finishing their tasks, ran away. The overseer and myself went out after them, taking with us five bloodhounds, which were ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... swear, though Tady's locks could hold Ten thousand lice, and every louse was gold; Him on my lap you never more shall see; Or may I lose my weeding knife—and thee! ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... Trees grow great, will be noysome, and deforme your allies, walkes, beds, and squares, your vnder Gardners must labour to keepe all cleanly & handsome from them and all other filth with a Spade, weeding kniues, rake with iron teeth: a skrapple of Iron ...
— A New Orchard And Garden • William Lawson
... the Paris proletarians broke out, and it was crushed in blood. The wholesale shooting of the working-men, the mass deportations to New Guinea, and finally the Napoleonian coup d'etat followed. The Socialists were prosecuted with fury, and the weeding out was so terrible and so thorough that for the next twelve or fifteen years the very traces of Socialism disappeared; its literature vanished so completely that even names, once so familiar before 1848, were entirely forgotten; ideas which were then current—the stock ideas of the Socialists ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... Korea, but its beauty and prosperity required seeing to be believed. It afforded an amazing contrast to the dirt and apathy of Seoul. Here every one worked. In the fields the young women were toiling in groups, weeding or harvesting. The young men were cutting bushes on the hillsides, the father of the family preparing new ground for the fresh crop, and the very children frightening off the birds. At home the housewife was busy with her children and preparing her simples and stores; and even the old men busied ...
— Korea's Fight for Freedom • F.A. McKenzie
... two or three weeding-outs, and it got along toward the middle of October, and Bi was still with us. We were shy on plunging halfs that fall and so I got my chance at last. I had to fight hard, though, for I was up against Murray, last year's first sub. Then a provisional Varsity ...
— The New Boy at Hilltop • Ralph Henry Barbour
... she has no claim to the Haygarth estate?" he exclaimed presently, looking with half-contemptuous indignation upon the broken-down Bohemer. "I loved her long before I knew the name of Haygarth; I should have loved her if I had found her a beggar in the London streets, a peasant-girl weeding for sixpence a day in some dismal swamp of agricultural poverty and ignorance. I am not going to say that this money would not have brought us pleasure; pictures and gardens, and bright rooms, and books without number, and ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... ashamed of being red; and only a suit of drab apiece seemed wanting, to make the pumpkins as respectably grave as the other members of the community. Two small boys, in wide-brimmed hats and legs of discreet tint, were weeding these decorous vegetables. They raised their heads and took one good stare as the big wagon rattled past, then they lowered them again, and went on with their work, laying the pig-weeds, which they pulled out of the ground, in neat little ...
— Eyebright - A Story • Susan Coolidge
... herd of animals. So far there had been no attempt of the old males to drive the young ones out of the herd, destroy them, but that might come in time; as surely as the old males on Earth by tacit agreement on both sides, were always able to work up a war for the purpose of weeding out and destroying lusty ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... little weeding it'll be fine. I'm ashamed to see our path, and the wallflowers are nearly choked, but I daren't do it. ...
— The Making of Mona • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... to her conscience for the destruction of the green and yellow bowl by faithfully weeding the garden, a task which she hated above all else, was singing a hymn among the sweet peas, and her red braids were over her shoulders. This ought to have warned Miss Corona, but Miss Corona was thinking of other things, and kept ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... to-night," said the kind man. "To-morrow he shall have his first lesson in weeding the ...
— Allegories of Life • Mrs. J. S. Adams
... in a vain attempt to get frowsy ne'er-do-wells to do intelligent work; and his long, patient striving with "help" that does nothing but loaf when his back is turned. In every store and factory there is a constant weeding-out process going on. The employer is continually sending away "help" that have shown their incapacity to further the interests of the business, and others are ...
— A Message to Garcia - Being a Preachment • Elbert Hubbard
... fishpole up on to the roof of the wood shed and went around to the front of the house. There she found Mrs. Apgarth weeding in what had been Ruth's own ...
— The Shepherd of the North • Richard Aumerle Maher
... crossing has largely modified some breeds, no one who will study what has been written on this subject—for instance, Mr. Spooner's paper—will dispute; but to produce uniformity in a crossed breed, careful selection and "rigorous weeding," as this author expresses it, are indispensable. (3/95. 'Journal of R. Agricult. Soc. of England' volume 20 part ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... overcrowding, for on the evening that the massacring was to begin there was added to the number of persons usually quartered in the servants' room a special force of old women, four or five in number, who at other times earned a living at washing or weeding. ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... keep us awake groaning at nights. He had been a good-looking young fellow, my old granny used to say. I never saw him good-looking. In the winter we always had poor relief. We should have starved if we hadn't. My father got up at four and came home after dark. My mother used to go weeding and gleaning. I went to scare crows when I was five years old. All the same, we were a family of paupers. Proud to be an Englishman, Geisner! Be an English pauper, and ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... beginning is over, and now you will have a good deal of hoeing and weeding to do for a month to come. I am not sure but that you will ...
— Rollo at Work • Jacob Abbott
... at last I found his brain quite turned with their discourses. The first symptoms which he discovered of his being a virtuoso, as you call him, poor man! was about fifteen years ago; when he gave me positive orders to turn off an old weeding woman, that had been employed in the family for some years. He told me, at the same time, that there was no such thing in nature as a weed, and that it was his design to let his garden produce what ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... like the labors of the Rationalists of the Paulus school, so graphically described by the German writer whom I have already referred to. 'It is sad, no doubt,' says he, or something to the same effect, 'that, after fifty years' exegetical grubbing, weeding, and pruning at 'the mighty primitive forest of the Bible, the next generation should persist in saying that the Rationalist had destroyed the forest only in his own addled imagination, and that it ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... might settle in a minute's swift thought, but the discovery of who had betrayed him—for his whole life had been given to bringing together his machine of service. You might determine an alliance or a divorce between breath and breath; but the training of your instruments, the weeding out of them that had flaws in their fidelities; the exhibiting of a swift and awful vengeance upon mutineers—these were the things that called for thinking and long furrowing of brows. He considered of this point whilst Wriothesley spoke long ...
— Privy Seal - His Last Venture • Ford Madox Ford
... left records behind them, one strange and the other cruel, in the parish annals. One was a remarkable person named Mary Tofts, wife of a clothworker, who in 1726 professed to have had a lamentable misadventure. She asserted that while she was weeding in a field she was startled by a rabbit jumping up near her, and that subsequently, she presented her husband, instead of a fine boy, with quantities of rabbits. The effect of the announcement was prodigious. More than one well-known ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... called amusing themselves? It was a good thing that he should learn it for once, but like it he could not. Anyhow, it was nicer at home, and, besides, who could know whether the servants had finished weeding in time—whether the peat had not been piled up too damp? There was much to do at home, while he was lingering about here, entering into silly games like a fool. If it had not been for Elsbeth—but, indeed, what good was she to him? As she smiled at him so she smiled at them ...
— Dame Care • Hermann Sudermann
... generals, had to some extent earned his reputation among the Republicans. Thus of those volunteer generals who never became good soldiers he is said to have been the only one that escaped the constant process of weeding out. To the end he kept confidently claiming higher rank in the Army, and when he had signally failed under Grant at Petersburg he succeeded somehow in imposing himself upon that, at first indignant, general. Nothing actually came of the ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... our author, gives us the vision of the ideal, this Power which sets the mark of its approval upon our surrender to its behests, this Power which manifests its character in doing justice upon individuals and nations alike, weeding out the selfish, the wanton, the luxurious, and preserving the pure and upright; may we not ask what reason there is for withholding from that Power the ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... this remark an aged man, hearing our wheels, rose suddenly in the garden where he was weeding, with his face toward us. Something strangely familiar in his looks at once riveted my attention. I bade the driver stop and, jumping out, climbed the log fence inclosing the garden and ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... Mountain by front attack up river face; commands District of Kanawha, headquarters at Charleston; ordered to report to Buell in Kentucky, countermanded on Rosecrans' protest; first military execution ordered; weeding out incompetents and improving drill and discipline of Kanawha division; scrutiny of correspondence between confederates and residents within the lines; dealing with non-combatants; disapproves of test oaths; policy with regard to escaped slaves; controversies ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... came to weeding a garden or hoeing a field of corn I was not to be relied upon, but at laying out a ball, ground I was a whole team. The public square at Marshalltown, the land for which had been donated, by my father, struck me as being an ideal place to play ball in. There were too many trees growing there, ...
— A Ball Player's Career - Being the Personal Experiences and Reminiscensces of Adrian C. Anson • Adrian C. Anson
... well as they might. They need your tender care. I don't have much time to pet them along. The onions are doing pretty well, but they need weeding badly. ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower
... squad was not yet formally organized for training and practice, yet, up to the last few days, it had been expected that a finer gridiron crowd than usual would present itself for weeding, sifting and training by Coach Morton. The latter was also one of the submasters ...
— The High School Left End - Dick & Co. Grilling on the Football Gridiron • H. Irving Hancock
... gathered into her dainty salons the fruit of many years' careful study and tireless "weeding" will ask anxiously if you are quite sure you like the effect of her latest acquisition—some eighteenth-century statuette or screen (flotsam, probably, from the great shipwreck of Versailles), and listen earnestly ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... parched by the broiling sun. Even the bees had stopped humming, and the butterflies had hid themselves under the broad leaves of the burdock. Without a morsel of dinner, the poor child was put in the garden, and set to weeding it, her arms, neck, and head completely bare. Unaccustomed to toil, Clotelle wept as she exerted herself in pulling up the weeds. Old Dinah, the cook, was a unfeeling as her mistress, and she was pleased to see the child made to work in ...
— Clotelle - The Colored Heroine • William Wells Brown
... afternoon, Sally was weeding onions in the garden;—heroines did, in those days;—the currant-bushes had but just leafed out; so George Tucker, going by, saw her; and she, who had seen him coming before she began to weed, accidentally of course, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... was strangled by them, and her blood lapped up. Of a third they ate merely a portion of the stomach. One evening at dusk, Pierre leaped over a garden wall, and came upon a little maiden of nine years old, engaged upon the weeding of the garden beds. She fell on her knees and entreated Pierre to spare her; but he snapped the neck, and left her a corpse, lying among her flowers. On this occasion he does not seem to have been in his wolf's shape. He fell upon a goat which he found in the field of Pierre Lerugen, and bit ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... yet hers. But, Child, I've no advice to give! Rules only make it hard to live. And where's the good of having been Well taught from seven to seventeen, If, married, you may not leave off, And say, at last, 'I'm good enough!' Weeding out folly, still leave some. It gives both lightness and aplomb. We know, however wise by rule, Woman is still by nature fool; And men have sense to like her all The more when she is natural. 'Tis true, that if we choose, we can Mock to a miracle the man; But iron in the fire red hot, ...
— The Victories of Love - and Other Poems • Coventry Patmore
... of culture, we could in some way find a market for all we could produce,—although I did not contemplate inviting customers to our house to eat sour strawberries and such terribly diluted cream as they were selling. I often saw the Tetchy girls hoeing and weeding, and have no doubt they performed a very large part of that important labor. It was light work, as well as home-work, such as I was extremely anxious to obtain. The wholesome out-door exercise, I was confident, would give robustness to my health,—and, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... vicinity of the village the land was laid out in little gardens and fields, and in these the people—men, women, and children,— were busily engaged in hoeing the ground, weeding, planting, or gathering the fruits ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... Fred's enjoyment; they went out together to see all the poor people, and particularly the Simmons family, who were getting on very well, now that the father was recovered. Fred had a wheelbarrow and a nice box that Simmons had made him, and Clara and he worked away famously in the garden, weeding, or planting, or picking up stones. Aunt Mary says, 'This is what we have been trying to do for you, dear Freddy. Weeding out the naughty bitter weeds, putting in seeds that we hope will spring up, and grow to be beautiful ...
— Aunt Mary • Mrs. Perring
... an essential condition of bad breeding also; and bad breeding is indispensable to the weeding out of the human race. When the conception of heredity took hold of the scientific imagination in the middle of last century, its devotees announced that it was a crime to marry the lunatic to the lunatic or the consumptive to the consumptive. ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... easily defeat their own ends; wealth does not necessarily accumulate in proportion to a man's miserliness; the ardent but unenlightened philanthropist may do his fellow-man more harm than good. Long views are of no little service in weeding out inconsistent actions and introducing order and unity ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... may be said to have done the greatest work of his life upon that farm. It was while one day weeding the "kailyard," or garden, with his brother, that he first decided, after they had talked it carefully over, to be an author, and to write verses that would "bear publishing." It is to be noticed that from this hour he became more methodical with his muse and seemed to work toward a purpose; ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... had been a hard one. Her parents had been hideously poor. Her marriage had scarcely bettered her condition. She had laboured in the fields always, hoeing and weeding and reaping and carrying wood and driving mules, and continually rising with the first streak of daybreak. She had known fever and famine and all manner of earthly ills. But now in her old age she had peace. Two of her dead sons, ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... have another hour's smart fielding practice. If he is still alive and still talks about golf, why then, I won't say but what he mightn't be allowed to plan out a little course—or, at any rate, to do a little preliminary weeding." ...
— The Holiday Round • A. A. Milne
... court. Ask for the old grandmother. You remember she never learned any English. And now they've told her it's dangerous to talk German, she don't talk at all and hides away from everybody. If I go by early in the morning, when she's out weeding the garden, she runs and squats down in the gooseberry bushes till I'm out ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... out, bareheaded, with a spade in his hands. In front of the door there was a small cultivated patch containing potatoes, peas and other forms of green stuff, and here he proceeded to busy himself, trimming, weeding and arranging, singing the while in a powerful though not very musical voice. He was all engrossed in his work, with his back to the cottage, when there emerged from the half-open door the same attenuated ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... hour, each went to her calling. Commonly we took it turn about, the girls and I—one with the mistress in the kitchen, one with the maids in the chambers, and the third, if the weather was fine, a-weeding the posies in the garden, or, if wet, at her sewing in the parlour. Then the great bell was rung for breakfast, and we all gathered again in the kitchen. For breakfast were furmety, eggs, and butter, and milk, for the women; cold bakemeats and ...
— The Maidens' Lodge - None of Self and All of Thee, (In the Reign of Queen Anne) • Emily Sarah Holt
... days more, and the day of departure was almost at hand; but it seemed a very long time coming. What he needed was a material occupation, and he spent hours in his garden watering and weeding, and at gaze in front of a bed of fiery-cross. Was its scarlet not finer than Lady Hindlip? Lady Hindlip, like fiery-cross, is scentless, and not so hardy. No white carnation compares with Shiela; but her calyx often bursts, and ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... sharp edges of which the pods are cut from the higher branches without injury to the tree. Men and women all carry cutlasses, the one instrument needful for all work on the estate, serving not only for reaping the lower pods, but for pruning and weeding, or "cutlassing," as the process of clearing away the weed ...
— The Food of the Gods - A Popular Account of Cocoa • Brandon Head
... she said breathlessly when she came upon him in his shirt sleeves, weeding his pansy-bed, "but Mother's got a very shabby Russian, and I'm sure he'll have to belong to your Club. I'm certain he hasn't got any money. We found him at ...
— The Railway Children • E. Nesbit
... He had Sister and Old Lem Camp out in the garden, hand-weeding and thinning the carrots, onions, and other tender plants. That Saturday he went through the entire garden—that part already planted—with either the horse cultivator, or ...
— Hiram The Young Farmer • Burbank L. Todd
... secretary's desk and added: "We must win this strike. The directors meet to-day and those English share-holders are getting nervous. They can't understand that this fight is necessary—that we are fighting for peace hereafter; weeding out a pestilence that threatens, not only the future of railway corporations, but the sacred rights of American citizens—the right to engage in whatever business or calling one cares to follow, and to employ whom he will at whatever wages the employer and employed ...
— Snow on the Headlight - A Story of the Great Burlington Strike • Cy Warman
... implements of agriculture—ploughs, harrows, rakes, carts, sleds, all as innocent of metal as the oxen which draw the various instruments; wheels for irrigation made of bamboo, both frame and buckets; various cutting, weeding and grubbing implements, made by a sort of rude Catalan process from the native iron ore. The plough is a little better than that of Egypt of three thousand years ago, and the sickle is inferior. When Sir Stamford ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... sea, embowered in forest, which is our strangling enemy, and which we combat with axes and dollars. I went crazy over outdoor work, and had at last to confine myself to the house, or literature must have gone by the board. NOTHING is so interesting as weeding, clearing, and path-making; the oversight of labourers becomes a disease; it is quite an effort not to drop into the farmer; and it does make you feel so well. To come down covered with mud and drenched with sweat and rain after some ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... as I was thus employed, a face appeared at the window with which I had once been familiar. It was the pretty daughter of the elder Day-kau-ray. She had formerly visited us often, watching with great interest our employments—our sewing, our weeding and cultivating the garden, or our reading. Of the latter, I had many times endeavored to give her some idea, showing her the plates in the Family Bible, and doing my best to explain them to her, but of late I had quite lost sight of her. Now, how changed, how wan she looked! As I addressed her ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie
... near four hundred feet in height, abrupt and sheer. All about the city spread the carrot, swede, and turnip fields of the Food Company, vegetables that were the basis of a thousand varied foods, and weeds and hedgerow tangles had been utterly extirpated. The incessant expense of weeding that went on year after year in the petty, wasteful and barbaric farming of the ancient days, the Food Company had economised for ever more by a campaign of extermination. Here and there, however, neat rows ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... "answers the purpose," but to systematize or standardize reinforced concrete and put it on a basis of rational analysis and common sense, such a basis as structural designing has been or is being placed on, by a careful weeding out of all that is ...
— Some Mooted Questions in Reinforced Concrete Design • Edward Godfrey
... of the fur trade, Governor Dallas is of opinion that a considerable reduction may be made in the number of the employes; and that by a judicious weeding out of those who, in all large establishments managed from a distance, either were originally, or have become, inefficient, not only will expenses be saved, but a much larger trade be ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... After they are transplanted, we are told that "the soil best adapted to the growth of tobacco is a light, friable one, or what is commonly called a sandy loam; not too flat, but rolling, undulating land." Long processes of hand-weeding must be gone through, and equal parts of plaster and ashes are put on each plant. "Worms are the worst enemy," and can be effectually destroyed only by hand. "When the plant begins to yellow, it is time to put it away; and it is cut off ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... cabin on the Curragh, not a hundred miles from here. My father was kill . . . but never mind about that now. When he left us it was middling hard collar work, I can tell you—what with me working the bit of a croft and the mother weeding for some of you—some of your fathers I mane—ninepence a day dry days, and sixpence all weathers. When I was a lump of a lad I was sworn at in the high road by a gentleman driving in his grand carriage, and the mother was lashed by his . . . but never mind about that neither. ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... ventured to use this term 'selection' of the process of nature. Perhaps he was hardly justified in adopting the term, as nature does not select; she only passes by. At the same time, artificial selection also includes, although it is not limited to, this negative or weeding-out process. When you select a certain plant for growth in your garden you weed out the neighbouring plants which encroach upon it, so as to give it a chance to grow and thrive. By removing its competitors, you let air and light surround the plant, ...
— Recent Tendencies in Ethics • William Ritchie Sorley
... Culture. Weeding and occasionally stirring the soil, and sticking such as require support, is all the cultivation necessary for annuals. If it be desired to save seed, some of the earliest and most perfect blossoms should be preserved for this purpose, ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... sleep. I say, though, Ned; think we shall really get away from this bothering old hoeing and weeding ...
— The Peril Finders • George Manville Fenn
... — N. fewness &c adj.; paucity, small number; small quantity &c 32; rarity; infrequency &c 137; handful, maniple; minority; exiguity. [Diminution of number] reduction; weeding &c v.; elimination, sarculation^, decimation; eradication. V. be few &c adj.. render few &c adj.; reduce, diminish the number, weed, eliminate, cull, thin, decimate. Adj. few; scant, scanty; thin, rare, scattered, thinly scattered, spotty, few and ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... of weeding usually performed by men, might be more cheaply done by horses. There are various implements for this purpose, some of which are coming, in many parts of the ...
— The Elements of Agriculture - A Book for Young Farmers, with Questions Prepared for the Use of Schools • George E. Waring
... expenditures were cut off. Gates, instead of being repaired, were propped up by running a pole across. Labour was eschewed in every possible way. Hedges were left uncut; ditches were left uncleaned. The team of horses was reduced, and the ploughing done next to nothing. Cleaning and weeding were gradually abandoned. Several fields were allowed to become overrun with grass, not the least attention being paid to them; the weeds sprang up, and the grass ran over from the hedges. The wheat ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... More weeding would follow and the talk would become fragmentary. His hands would become earthy, his nails black, weeds would snap off in his careless grip, leaving the roots behind. The world would darken. He would look at his ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... besides, while it has at the same time frustrated every serious endeavour to bring about the better state of things which they expect from—what? From "things as they are!" As well expect grapes from thorns, or figs from thistles. While the tree remains the same, no amount of weeding, or pruning, or manuring, or change of culture, will make it bring forth different fruit. Mr. Dicey, among others, has demolished what Lord Beaconsfield used to call the "bit-by-bit" reformers of Irish Government—those who would ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... year after year; the same rhododendrons and azaleas opened their big bunches of bloom. Eden could have hardly owed less to culture. The noble old cedars, the mediaeval yews, needed no gardener's hand. There was a good deal of weeding, and mowing, and rolling done from week's end to week's end; and the borders were beautified by banks of geranium and golden calceolaria, and a few other old-fashioned flowers; but scientific horticulture there was none. Some alterations had been begun under Captain ...
— Vixen, Volume II. • M. E. Braddon
... a half feet apart; this will allow the use of a small horse and cultivator, which will destroy nearly all the weeds. Use a potato-fork or hoe, across the rows, among the seedlings, and very little weeding will be necessary. It is not more than one fourth of the ordinary work to keep a nursery clean in this way. Two thirds of those thus planted and cultivated will be large enough for root-grafting the first season, and for cleft-grafting the second. When your seedlings are six inches high, if you ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden
... plantations at present are Italians. They come in large numbers to work on these estates. Each family is given a certain number of trees to look after; sometimes a single family will take care of several thousand trees. They have to do a lot of hoeing and weeding. The soil is almost red and these workmen take on largely the color of the soil as their faces and clothes are stained with red dust and water. Families are furnished houses to live in and they live their own lives as if they were in their ...
— Birdseye Views of Far Lands • James T. Nichols
... in the spade down yonder among the ground-nuts, where you see the johnswort waving. I think that I may warrant you one worm to every three sods you turn up, if you look well in among the roots of the grass, as if you were weeding. Or, if you choose to go farther, it will not be unwise, for I have found the increase of fair bait to be very nearly as the squares ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... himself to the uttermost in a work which was so obviously a matter of life and death. It was, however, scarcely necessary to urge these men, for they were almost all willing. But not all; in nearly every flock there is a black sheep or so, that requires weeding out. There were two such sheep among the builders of the Eddystone. Being good at everything, Smeaton was a good weeder. He soon had them up by the roots and cast out. A foreman proved to be disorderly, and tried to make the men promise, "that if he should ...
— The Story of the Rock • R.M. Ballantyne
... made a journey to town together, and came back laden with sundry parcels; and notwithstanding all this business, Henry found time to be very industrious in weeding the flower-beds, for which my father paid him so much an hour—and I noticed that he was uncommonly punctual in presenting his bills. Without being very penetrating, we discovered that the scheme, whatever it might be, was one ...
— A Grandmother's Recollections • Ella Rodman
... because it would abolish the competitive system and put an end to the struggle for existence. According to the objectors, this would be to destroy an invaluable school of character and testing process for the weeding out of inferiority, and the development and survival as leaders of the best types of humanity. Now, if your contemporaries had excused themselves for tolerating the competitive system on the ground that, bad and cruel as it was, the world was not ripe for any other, the ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... everything during the two months that followed. He hurried through his Aunt Jane's chores in an impatient way, doing as little as possible in order to get back to his own work. She wondered why he was so absorbed in his garden. When he was not weeding or watering or planting, he was counting the number of pea-pods on every vine, or the ears of corn as they tasselled out on each stalk. He had put brains as well as muscle into his summer's work, asking questions and advice of every gardener in Bardstown, and carefully reading the agricultural ...
— The Quilt that Jack Built; How He Won the Bicycle • Annie Fellows Johnston
... stranger into our home as a constant caller puzzled me. It occurred on a Sunday afternoon in summer. I was sitting out on the porch reading, when a strange young man came up the path from the gate, and asked to see my father. I called to him—he was weeding the flowerbed around the corner of the house—and when he came, I went up to my room, leaving them alone together. I didn't go, though, until I had seen their meeting, and one thing about it seemed strange ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... planters employ Chinese to cultivate the plants, who are very careful in hoeing and weeding the tobacco, living an apparently jolly life in shanties near the fields. A witty California correspondent of the Tobacco Leaf writes concerning the early cultivation of tobacco ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... the head of each department responsible. He converted the Army and Navy (who were eating up the hard-earned wages of the working men and women of our land in idleness and dissipation), into a great industrial army and assigned them to work under the different departments as they were required, weeding out the worthless and reducing to the ranks all officers that conducted themselves in a manner unbecoming a gentleman and by election of officers giving every soldier equal opportunity to rise to the highest rank. This great measure eliminated the ...
— Eurasia • Christopher Evans
... companion out of the tail of his eye. "I s'pose it's your education, boy. That's what's wrong with you. Your head's running wheels. You come into cattle too late. You've got city doings down your backbone, and I guess you need weeding bad. Say, you're a West Point man, ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... with him I learned that Gladstone was an omnivorous reader; that he ordered his books by the cart-load, and that his home in Hawarden literally overflowed with books. He made a practice, I was told, of overhauling his library once in so often and of weeding out such volumes as he did not care to keep. These discarded books were sent to the second-hand dealers, and it is said that the dealers not unfrequently took advantage of Gladstone by reselling him over and over again (and at advanced prices, too) the very ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... who can write can give in short, simple sentences the main things noticed from day to day. They should give the day and date when the seeds were planted, when plants came up, when rain storms occurred, when work in weeding, thinning, and cultivating was done, when the plants were fit to use, and how they were disposed of, etc. This will serve as profitable seat work in writing, drawing, and language. Simple problems based upon dimensions of plots and the ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education
... they holed twelve acres within six days with great ease, having had an hour, more or less, every evening to spare, and the like experiment was repeated with the like success. More experiments with such premiums on weeding and deep hoeing were made by task-work per acre, and all succeeded in like manner, their premiums being all punctually paid them in proportion to their performance. But afterwards some of the same people being put without premium to weed on a loose cultivated soil in the common manner, ...
— Thoughts On The Necessity Of Improving The Condition Of The Slaves • Thomas Clarkson
... on a Farm A Garden on the Roof The Truck Garden My First Attempt at Gardening Raspberrying Planting Time The Watermelon Patch Weeding the Garden Visiting in the Country Getting Rid of the Insects School Gardens A Window-box Garden Some Weeds of our Vicinity The Scarecrow Going to Market "Votes for Women" How Women Rule A Suffrage Meeting Why I Believe [or do not Believe] in ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... afraid of you!" boasted Danny, but he kept on out of the gate just the same. Sam went back to his work, of weeding the vegetable garden and Bert watered the flowers. ...
— The Bobbsey Twins at School • Laura Lee Hope
... short?' No! I reply; very little. I am satisfied to take the results of others' exertions. I have no wish to plod i' the mold,' not the slightest objection to others doing that business for me. I am too indolent to like out-door work very well; much too fond of late rising to enjoy weeding, digging, etc., in the early morning air. I think likely I ought to feel differently, but I don't. Suffer me to inquire why people insist on peeping behind the scenes of nature's stage, when she seems to take such pains to conceal her 'modus operandi'? Let me ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... extreme, but who managed to struggle along fairly well. Lastly, there was a minority to whom it was little more than discomfort. They were the seasoned veterans of the trail to whom its trials were all in the day's work. It was as if the Great White Land was putting us to the test, was weeding out the fit from the unfit, was proving itself a land of the Strong, ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... which may be prosperous enough, as of the old days when the peasant was taxed beyond possibility of payment, and lived, in Michelet's image, like a hare between two furrows. These very people now weeding their patch under the broad sunset, that very man and his wife, it seems to us, have suffered all the wrongs of France. It is they who have been their country's scape-goat for long ages; they who, generation ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... had been effectual for man's comfort and prosperity. The stone walls, in some places thin and open, told of times when they had been hurriedly put up; moss on the rail fences said the rails had been long doing duty; within them no fields failed of their crops, and no crops wanted hoeing or weeding. No straw lay scattered about the ricks; no barrack roofs were tumbling down; no gate-posts stood sideways; no barnyards shewed rickety outhouses or desolate mangers. No cattle were poor, and seemingly, no ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... contrary, in certain places must be stirred with a fork only and that with the greatest care, for, if well-planned, plants of low growth will carpet the ground between tall standing things, so that in many spots the fingers, with a small weeding hoe only, are admissible. Thus a blade of grass here, some chickweed there, the seed ball of a composite dropping in its aerial flight, and lo! presently weedlings and seedlings are wrestling together, and ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... often denounced as a violation of natural law, is nothing more or less than the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit, of preventing the birth of defectives or of those who will become defectives. So, in compliance with nature's working plan, we must permit womanhood its full development before we can expect of it efficient motherhood. ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger
... amusing to hear, how even in the midst of their weeding, the little ones pursued their calculations of the anticipated half-farthings, and discussed the niceness and prices of the various descriptions ...
— Aunt Judy's Tales • Mrs Alfred Gatty
... strange indeed to see women cleaning the streets; huge broom in hand they marched about and swept the paths, while a whole gang of female labourers were weeding the roadways. ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... at work together on a large flower-bed. Her father was trimming some rose-bushes, and she was kneeling beside him on a little mat, weeding. ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand |
