"Prickly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... terrific velocity, nothing gave us any particular trouble before dinner, which we ate in the shade of a mesquite on the right at the mouth of a couple of giant gulches. Here we discovered a large patch of cacti loaded with the red prickly pears or cactus apples, as we called them. They were ripe,—seeming to me to be half way between a fig and a tomato,—and very welcome for dessert, as we had eaten no fresh fruit since a watermelon brought ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... the railroad had been burnt over; it was a smudge prickly with charred stalks of weeds. Beyond the undeviating barbed-wire fences were clumps of golden rod. Only this thin hedge shut them off from the plains-shorn wheat-lands of autumn, a hundred acres to a field, prickly and gray near-by but in the blurred ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... growing there, in vast beds, as high as a horse's back, has been struck with its peculiar appearance; but whether it differs in any important point from the cultivated Spanish form, which is said not to be prickly like its American descendant, or whether it differs from he wild Mediterranean species, which is said not to be social, ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... convict settlement—is only to be attempted in calm weather. The sea-line is marked with wrecks. The sunken rocks are dismally named after the vessels they have destroyed. The air is chill and moist, the soil prolific only in prickly undergrowth and noxious weeds, while foetid exhalations from swamp and fen cling close to the humid, spongy ground. All around breathes desolation; on the face of nature is stamped a perpetual frown. The shipwrecked sailor, crawling painfully to the summit of ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... twenty kinds of wild flowers? Around San Francisco and the bay counties you will count, after the poppy and baby blue-eyes, the shining yellow buttercup, the blue and yellow lupines that grow in the sand, the tall thistle whose sharp, prickly leaves and thorny red blossoms spell "Let-me-alone," the blue flag-lilies and red paint-brush, yellow cream-cups, and wild mustard, and an orange pentstemon. These with many yellow compositae or flowers like the dandelion, you will find growing on the windy hills and dry, sunny places. Hiding ...
— Stories of California • Ella M. Sexton
... of the road, between them and the fir-tree, was something neither of them had seen;—a huge tree just fallen, with its high, prickly branches on. ...
— Gypsy's Cousin Joy • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... further to be seen," answered stork-mamma. "Behind this delightful region there are luxuriant forests, whose branches are interlaced with one another, while prickly climbing plants close up the paths—only the elephant can force a way for himself with his great feet; and the snakes are too big, and the lizards too quick for us. If you go into the desert, you'll get your eyes full of sand when there's a light breeze, but when it ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... and they turned their backs on the stubborn brook and set off across a meadow which presently gave place to a hill-side field overgrown with bushes and weeds and prickly vines which clung to their trousers and snarled around their feet. Clint said they were wild raspberry and blackberry vines and Amy replied that he didn't care what sort of vines they were; they were a blooming nuisance. To avoid them, they struck westward again toward a stone wall, climbed ...
— Left Tackle Thayer • Ralph Henry Barbour
... forest. On one side of the road which runs through the village is the river; on the other, green vineyards and orchards, beyond which are seen the driftsands of the Nogay Steppe. The village is surrounded by earth-banks and prickly bramble hedges, and is entered by tall gates hung between posts and covered with little reed-thatched roofs. Beside them on a wooden gun-carriage stands an unwieldy cannon captured by the Cossacks at some time or other, and which has not been fired for a hundred ...
— The Cossacks • Leo Tolstoy
... broom, crowned with luxuriant hedgerows, and famous for their summer smell of thyme. How lovely these banks are now—the tall weeds and the gorse fixed and stiffened in the hoar-frost, which fringes round the bright prickly holly, the pendent foliage of the bramble, and the deep orange leaves of the pollard oaks! Oh, this is rime in its loveliest form! And there is still a berry here and there on the holly, 'blushing in its natural coral' ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... cimicifera), two species of olive (Olea paniculata and Notoloea punctata), and three palms, namely the Corypha australis or large fan palm, the Seaforthia elegans, and another, remarkable for its prickly leaves. We also found and procured seeds of Sophora tomentosa, and a plant of the natural order scitamineae, Hellenia coerulea, Brown: two parasitical plants of orchideae were found growing upon the bark of trees in the shady place near our watering-place; ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia - Performed between the years 1818 and 1822 • Phillip Parker King
... is a fine forest, the entrance to which is protected by prickly shrubs. The commonest trees are the beech, with trunks between eighty and ninety feet high, and three or four in diameter; Winteria aromatica, a kind of bark which has long since replaced the cinnamon, and a species ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... squires who succeeded him, than to the mighty barons his ancestors. It was substantial and well built, with a square gravelled court in front, and great, solid, folding gates opening into a lane, bordered with very tall well- clipped holly hedges, forming a polished, green, prickly wall. There was a little door in one of these gates, which was scarcely ever shut, from whence a well-worn path led to the porch, where generally reposed a huge Newfoundland dog, guardian of the hoops and walkingsticks that ...
— Scenes and Characters • Charlotte M. Yonge
... he came, clad in his usual suit of black velvet. A swarthy and ill-favoured wight he was, with a beard, as the story goes, that would have swept off the prickly gorse-bush in its progress. He was received with a great show of humility, and all made their best obeisance. But this deputy, representative, or vicegerent of "Old Hornie," he stood erect, among the obsequious guests, in a posture not at all either ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... Additional note on Ilex. The efficient cause which renders the hollies prickly in Needwood Forest only as high as the animals can reach them, may arise from the lower branches being constantly cropped by them, and thus shoot forth more luxuriant foliage: it is probable the shears in garden-hollies may produce the same effect, ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... three skeleton trees (one of which had a stout lateral branch from which a weather-wasted rope still significantly dangled), half a hundred gravelly mounds, a score of rude headboards displaying the literary peculiarities above mentioned and a struggling colony of prickly pears. Altogether, God's Location, as with characteristic reverence it had been called, could justly boast of an indubitably superior quality of desolation. It was in the most thickly settled part ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... their promising purple flesh, and look cooling and desirable, but are not to be attempted twice under penalty of gastric inconvenience. Plums and nuts abound, and are followed by a second course of hard, unripe, and tasteless nectarines and peaches. The season is closing fast, for the prickly pods of the ripening chestnut now begin to gape, and the indifferent grapes of the district attain their imperfect maturity, and are gathered for the wine-press. September is in its last week, and in less than another month we must all migrate somewhere for ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... donned gorgeous vestments of golden-rod and sumach. In the centre of the waste, standing alike grim and majestic at all seasons, there was the charred skeleton of a gigantic tree, which had been stripped naked by a bolt of lightning long years ago. At its foot a prickly clump of briars surrounded the blackened trunk in a decoration of green or red, and from this futile screen the spectral limbs rose boldly and were silhouetted against the far-off horizon like the masts of a wrecked and deserted ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... find cocoanut palms, tamarinds, prickly pears, guavas, mangoes, bananas, oranges, limes, cacao (or cocao) ...
— A Little Journey to Puerto Rico - For Intermediate and Upper Grades • Marian M. George
... sound especially pleasant," said the little man, looking at the one with the star uneasily. "But never mind. I'll beat Old Prickly, ...
— Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz • L. Frank Baum.
... Newcastle, a rushing town, capital of the rich coal regions. Approaching Scone, wide farming and grazing levels, with pretty frequent glimpses of a troublesome plant—a particularly devilish little prickly pear, daily damned in the orisons of the agriculturist; imported by a lady of sentiment, and contributed gratis to the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... taken along, he was astounded at the amount of work that had been done. Everywhere the ground was pitted with deep holes, capable of sheltering from fifteen to twenty men. The hedge was a high one, and was formed for the most part of prickly bushes. The position was, indeed, a formidable one; manned, as it was, by ...
— With Kitchener in the Soudan - A Story of Atbara and Omdurman • G. A. Henty
... Wilhelm journeys towards Mannheim: human politeness will have to cloak well, and keep well down, a good many prickly points in the visit ahead. Alas, poor Friedrich Wilhelm has got other matter to think of, by the ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... eyes burned to kill, their thick brows quite united by the energy of her frown as she gazed across a sand-dell, chary of vegetation but profuse in potsherds, towards the white walls and high red roof of the Mission-house seen above a wave of tamarisks on the opposite dune. The hedge of prickly pear defining her small domain did not obstruct the view, for it consisted largely of gaps, by one of which a group of three Frankish ladies had just gone from her. She could see their white-clad forms, under sunshades, down there in the hollow, battling ungracefully with the sand ...
— The Valley of the Kings • Marmaduke Pickthall
... silvery, modest mistletoe, Wreath'd round winter's brow of snow, Clinging so chastely, tenderly: Hail holly, darkly, richly green, Whose crimson berries blush between Thy prickly foliage, modestly. Ye winter-flowers, bloom sweet and fair, Though Nature's garden else be bare— Ye vernal glistening emblems, meet To twine a ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... Metropolis they felt their ears growing hot and red. Beneath the chilly stare of the populace they experienced all the sensations of a man who has come to a strange dinner-party in a tweed suit when everybody else has dressed. They felt warm and prickly. ...
— The Swoop! or How Clarence Saved England - A Tale of the Great Invasion • P. G. Wodehouse
... enough herb, a prickly plant which sprawled low in the shadow of the trees. Its root was black, and it had a milk- white flower; the Gods called it Moly, and no mortal strength could avail to pull it from the soil; but as Odysseus says, telling the story, "There is nothing which the Gods cannot do"; ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... not moving fast enough to suit the Blackfeet. An old fellow commenced to shout at him, and motion for him to go faster. But he didn't wish to go faster; the ground was thickly grown to prickly-pear cactus, and he had to pick his path amidst ...
— Boys' Book of Frontier Fighters • Edwin L. Sabin
... comforted of his friends at Swarthmoor, and inwardly refreshed. Yet the matter of his encounter with the haughty lady, and of her prickly thistle nature, rested on his mind, and he could not be content without giving her yet one more chance to doff her prickles and become a sweet and fragrant flower in the garden of the Lord. Therefore, three months later, being continually urged thereunto ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... agonizing jerk of his neck the Senior Surgeon rooted his mud-gagged mouth a half inch further towards free and spontaneous speech. Very laboriously, very painstakingly, he spat out one by one two stones and a wisp of ground pine and a brackish, prickly tickle of ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... than the boy" was all Alfred remained to hear. Half naked, half dazed—for Alfred feared his grandfather's wrath greatly—down the big hill the boy fairly flew, through the Jimson weeds, their prickly pods stinging his bare breast and arms until the blood flowed. Nor did he slacken his pace until the old coal road was reached. Then along the dusty road to Krepp's coal bank; into the dark tunnel penetrating the hill, nor did he stop until so far under ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... letter, and here it is. I was sure to remember it; for you are as hard to forget, as you are soft to roll down a hill with. What fun it was! only so prickly, I thought I had a porcupine in one pocket, and a hedgehog in the other. The next time, before we kiss the earth, we will have its face shaved well. Did you ever go to Greenwich Fair? I should like to go there ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... tossed down, and Ripton, who had just succeeded in freeing his limbs from the briar, prickly as a hedgehog, collared ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... ripe, and falling from the bushes at a touch. The vines that wreathed the low bushes and climbed the trees were loaded with clusters of grapes; but these were yet hard and green. Dwarf filberts grew on the dry gravelly sides of the hills, yet the rough prickly calyx that enclosed the nut filled their fingers with minute thorns that irritated the skin like the stings of the nettle; but as the kernel, when ripe, was sweet and good, they did not mind the consequences. The moist part of the valley was occupied by a large bed of May-apples, ...
— Lost in the Backwoods • Catharine Parr Traill
... resistance; her head remained motionless on his breast. Sedulously he bent over her; the warm breath reassured him; tired nature had simply succumbed. Irresolute he paused, little liking the sequestered gulch for a resting-place; divining the prickly thicket and almost impenetrable brushwood that lined the road. An unhealthy miasma seemed to ascend from below and clog the air; through the tangle of forest, phosphorus gleamed and glowworms flitted ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... tin with prickly eruptions on one side. Place one each end of the ice-patch, prickly side down, and stamp on the smooth side. Why these pieces of tin are called "crampits" I can't tell you, unless it's just ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 146., January 21, 1914 • Various
... appearance, although the golden fringes upon the clouds, which floated in broad belts in the horizon, indicated his glorious yet withering approach. The dew moistened each leaf, or hung in glittering pendant drops upon the thorn of the prickly pears which lined the roads. The web of the silver-banded spider was extended between the bushes, and, saturated with moisture, reflected the beams of the rising orb, as the animals danced in the centre, to dazzle their expected prey. The mist still hovered on the valleys, ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... branches off to the northward, turning again after a while due west on to General Stanhope's road. But that was nothing to me then. Turning my back upon it, I took another path, in woeful disrepair, which led me down by many windings between high stone walls and straggling clumps of prickly pear. There were few houses to stop the view—only some two or three farm buildings. Cottages can scarcely be said to exist. The labourer either lives in the towns, or else he lodges under his master's roof. But the high walls and the hummocks shut one in, and I was perpetually having to climb ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... to the quick and bleeding. She swayed with only an atom of gravity lacking to send her to death below. Instantly Kut-le was back beside her, his sinewy hand between her shoulders, supporting and lifting her to the ledge above. As they neared the top the broken surface became prickly with cactus and Rhoda winced with misery as the thorns pierced and tore her flesh. But finally, in what actually had been an incredibly short time, they emerged on the plateau, where the two squaws huddled ...
— The Heart of the Desert - Kut-Le of the Desert • Honore Willsie Morrow
... and they were nearer. They were like a long drawn p-u, p-u, p-u. The tone was of indescribable ferocity. Ned was brave, but he shivered all over and there was a prickly sensation at the roots of his hair. He felt like some primeval youth who with club alone must face the rush of the saber-toothed tiger. But he drew upon his reserves of pride which were large. He would not awaken Obed, but, drawing the pistol and ...
— The Texan Star - The Story of a Great Fight for Liberty • Joseph A. Altsheler
... had many inhabitants and Sammy was soon on very good terms with a couple of jolly sea-urchins, whose round, prickly bodies were half hidden in the little holes which they had bored in the rock. The sea-urchins made him acquainted with some relations of theirs, a family of star-fish living on a flat shelf of rock near by. The star-fishes ...
— How Sammy Went to Coral-Land • Emily Paret Atwater
... their wonderful greenness denotes a cooler climate and more copious rains, also their slopes and valleys are densely wooded, and Kauai obviously has its characteristic features, one of which must certainly be a superabundance of that most unsightly cactus, the prickly pear, to which the motto nemo me ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... abundance in the gloomy brushes, parasitic upon the roots of the tallest trees. We also met with here—in probably its southern limit upon the coast—a species of rattan (Calamus australis) with long prickly shoots, well illustrated in the annexed drawing by Mr. Huxley, representing the process of cutting through the scrub, during an excursion made with Mr. Kennedy, for the purpose of searching for a way out from the low swampy district ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... they kept on to the end of the two hundred-mile voyage. At any rate, they did, and they found the Scotch heather here. Here, too, one finds another strange plant, plentiful over on the sandy peninsula of Coatue, the Opuntia or prickly pear, a variety of cactus common enough in Mexico and portions of our Southwest, but ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... and confronting the difficulties and perils that lay before them with a courage born of national pride. Before them were the mountains with their almost impassable roads, the jungles filled with poisonous plants and the terrible prickly underbrush and pointed grass, in which skulked the land crab and various reptiles whose bite or sting was dangerous; twenty miles of this inhospitable country lay between them and Santiago, their true objective. ...
— The Colored Regulars in the United States Army • T. G. Steward
... I felt prickly all over, and there was a damp patch on the pillow, which was soon explained by a heavy drop of moisture ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... said Mr. Linden,—"I see and hear a good many things. But nobody can get on in the world after such a prickly fashion,—why even a porcupine smooths himself down before he tries to go ahead. If you were to be a lawyer Phil, you'd fight your clients instead of helping them fight,—and if you were a farmer, you'd be like the man ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... little girl, and Fanny was a very headstrong pony; consequently Fanny had it all her own way. When she was trotting along the road, with Louise on her back, if she chanced to spy a nice prickly thistle away up on a bank, up she would scramble, as fast as she could go, the sand and gravel rolling down under her hoofs; and, no matter how hard Louise pulled on the reins, there she would stay until she had eaten the thistle down to the very ...
— The Nursery, May 1877, Vol. XXI. No. 5 - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest Readers • Various
... whim of beginning his allegory with a description, twenty-one stanzas long, of the season of floods. A description, full of infinitely delicate minute detail: of the plants which have kept their foliage while the others are bare—the prickly juniper, the myrtle and bay; of the flocks of cranes printing the sky with their queer shapes, of the fish under the ice, and the eagle circling slowly round the ponds—little things which affect us mixed up as they are with all ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... persuasive charm. There was something almost boyishly disarming about his manner. It was as though for a moment a prickly, ungracious husk had dropped away, revealing the real man within. He held out his hand, and as Ann laid hers within it she felt her spirits ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... the most depressing things about my present condition is that I feel, not only so useless, but so prickly, so ugly, so unlovable. Even Maud's affection, stronger and more tender than ever, does not help me, because I feel that she cannot love me for what I am, but for what she remembers me as being, and hopes that I may be again. I know it is not so, and that she would love me ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... deep and beautiful yellow. In a ditch, of this marshy meadow was a great bunch of woodruff, above whose green whorls the white flowers were lifted. Over them the brambles arched, their leaves growing in fives, and each leaf prickly. The bramble-shoots, as they touch the ground, take root and rise again, and thus would soon cross a field were they ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies
... weeks in early summer the table-lands are seen in their most attractive guise. The open stretches of the mesas are carpeted with verdure almost hidden under a profusion of flowers. The gray and dusty sagebrush takes on a tinge of green, and even the prickly and repulsive greasewood clothes itself with a multitude of golden blossoms. Cacti of various kinds vie with one another in producing the most brilliant flowers, odorless but gorgeous. But in a few weeks all this brightness ...
— Navaho Houses, pages 469-518 • Cosmos Mindeleff
... it and turned to the right, Mary, with Alice again in her arms, moved somewhat ahead of her companion, her indifferent horsemanship having compelled him to drop back to avoid a prickly bush. His horse was just quickening his pace to regain the lost position when a man sprang up from the ground on the farther side of the highway, snatched a carbine from the earth ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... name and seems to be a millionaire, and something else which I could not catch, but by the sound of the Prickly-Thistleton's voice it ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... gallows-tree, and here the projecting end of a fallen cross. Between showed no vestige of an opening; dark, impervious, formidable as a fortress wall, the tunal met the eye. Ferne, attacking it with his sword, thrust aside a heavy curtain of broad-leaved vine, came upon a network of thorn and spike and prickly leaf, hewed this away, to find behind it a like barrier. Evidently the man had lied!—to what purpose Sir Mortimer Ferne would presently make it his business to discover.... There overtook him a sudden revulsion of feeling, depression ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... superstition that elves and fairies hover about all Christmas fetes. Hence, branches are hanging in hall and bower in order that these invisible guests may "hang in each leaf and cling on every bough." The holly, its prickly leaves symbolic of the crown of thorns, and its red berries of the blood of Christ, banishes the ivy and other greens, and becomes the popular favourite that it has since ...
— Shakespeare's Christmas Gift to Queen Bess • Anna Benneson McMahan
... meandering rivulets, the fertile plains, the silent villages, and on the distant horizon, the sea, rising like a blue wall, standing like a stage scene; on the other, a howling immensity of boulders and prickly shrubs and plants, an arid wilderness—the haunt of the eagle, the mountain bear, and the goatherd. One step in this direction, and the entire panorama of verdant hills and valleys is lost to view. Its ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... How prickly were the growths which yet how smooth, Along the hedgerows of this journey shed, Lie by Time's grace till night and sleep may soothe! Even as the thistledown from pathsides dead Gleaned by a girl in autumns of her youth, Which one new ...
— The House of Life • Dante Gabriel Rossetti
... between are tufts of rushes and rotten branches; the shallows are covered with green and brown river-shells; on the marshy parts round holes are washed out, in which, at the sound of approaching footsteps, hundreds of crabs rush to hide. The shore is covered along its whole length with prickly willow, which the ice-floes shave off every ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... progress was a work of no slight difficulty, and even danger. Occasionally plunging to the knees in a deep bog, then wading to the girth in a hillock of sand and prickly bent grass (the Arundo arenaria, so plentiful on these coasts), the horses were scarcely able to keep their footing—yet were they still urged on. Every step was expected to bring them within sight ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... a great soft barrier seemed erected before us, almost as high as the trees; dense at their roots, tapering away to indistinctness at their tops, where the sunset glow lay warm and bright upon their prickly branches. ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... cuckoo. The context, however, suggests that the word may be a misprint for mezquitas, referring to the mezquit (Algarobia) of Nueva Espana—the writer meaning that along the Quingua valley were numerous thickets of some shrub resembling the mezquit. The river is now fringed with clumps of prickly bamboo. It is also possible that mosquitas is simply ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXIII, 1629-30 • Various
... morning sky. He could see no trail, so he determined to reach Snake Peak by a direct cross line. The peak would be lost to view when he reached the valley below so he sighted a lonely cedar on the crest of the opposite range and began to climb downward. It was stiff going. The prickly pear cactus and the ollas grew thick and the ground was covered with broken rock that made short work ...
— The Forbidden Trail • Honore Willsie
... Scottish parish, I believe), but by the greatest good luck the rival minister was away and the congregations were assembled together. I gathered afterwards that this happy result was partly due to the hope of seeing the laird's mysterious guest, and that several very prickly theological scruples were swallowed by divers of the other congregation. At all events the church was crowded and I ...
— The Man From the Clouds • J. Storer Clouston
... produced certain effects, if placed in her hands; white grapes produced different effects. The bone of an elk would throw her into an epileptic fit. The tooth of a mammoth produced a feeling of sluggishness. A spider's web rolled into a ball produced a prickly feeling in the hands, and a restlessness in the whole body. Glow-worms threw her into the magnetic sleep. Music somnambulised her. When she wanted to be cheerful, she requested Kerner to magnetise the water she drank, by playing the Jew's-harp. She used to say in her sleep, "Magnetise the ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... low wall, which guards one unkempt zone, Where vines and weeds and scrub-oaks intertwine Safe from the plough, whose rough, discordant stone 80 Is massed to one soft gray by lichens fine, The tangled blackberry, crossed and re-crossed, weaves A prickly network of ensanguined leaves; Hard by, with coral beads, the ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... twenty or thirty soldiers, who marched, on each side of us, with their muskets and bayonets fixed, about three yards from each other. In another hour we were clear of the town, and threading our way through a lane bounded on each side by prickly pears and other shrubs. There was no want of merriment among the party; they talked and laughed with one another, and the soldiers who guarded them, and appeared to care little for their fate. As for me, I was broken-hearted ...
— The Privateer's-Man - One hundred Years Ago • Frederick Marryat
... edge very white and lifeless. An arm stuck straight out with a dark palm turned up, and thick fingers half closed. Two light snores, that did not synchronise, quarrelled in funny dialogue. Singleton stripped again—the old man suffered much from prickly heat—stood cooling his back in the doorway, with his arms crossed on his bare and adorned chest. His head touched the beam of the deck above. The nigger, half undressed, was busy casting adrift the lashing of his box, and spreading his bedding in an upper berth. ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... is a small thick oval-shaped species of cucumber with a hairy or prickly surface, and is cultivated solely for pickling. It is customary to let the stems remain on them. Wipe them dry, put them into a broad stone jar, and scald them five or six times in the course of the day with salt and water strong enough to bear an egg, and let ...
— Directions for Cookery, in its Various Branches • Eliza Leslie
... journey, rugged and uneven, Through prickly moors or dusty ways must wind; But hearing thee, or others of thy kind, As full of gladness and as free of heaven, I, with my fate contented, will plod on, And hope for higher raptures, when ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... It begun then—at the time of the trouble with her lover," nodded Old Tom; "and it seems as if she'd been feedin' on wormwood an' thistles ever since—she's that bitter an' prickly ter deal with." ...
— Pollyanna • Eleanor H. Porter
... the party now found themselves straitened for want of it, and the journey, too, began to tell upon the horses. Thick scrubs of eucalyptus brush, overrun with creepers and prickly acacia bushes, soon helped to bar the way, and when they at last reached the point of a range, which they named Peel Range, Oxley reluctantly abandoned his idea of making for the coast in a south-west direction, and turned north. ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... town hall he saw through the open door the captain's cot, and a guard standing motionless beside it. The captain had elected to remain there for the night, while his men found a prickly hospitality among the cowering townsfolk. Jose knew now that the hand which Don Mario had dealt himself in the game inaugurated by Wenceslas had been from a stacked deck. He knew that the President ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... parsley and ill-smelling garlic. Here it was calm and peaceful as in some village church. Tall willows bent dreamily over the stream; the steep, green banks were bathed in sunlight; tall burdocks flourished amid the nettles, and prickly thistles became entangled in the lace trimming of Lida's dress. One huge plant powdered her ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... ploughshares, of its own accord produced everything; and men, contented with the food created under no compulsion, gathered the fruit of the arbute-tree, and the strawberries of the mountain, and cornels, and blackberries adhering to the prickly bramble-bushes, and acorns which had fallen from the wide-spreading tree of Jove. {Then} it was an eternal spring; and the gentle Zephyrs, with their soothing breezes, cherished the flowers produced without any seed. Soon, too, the Earth unploughed ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... humble town where I am not understood, where I shelter my pride, my suffering, and my joy, where I have hardly any other distraction than that of listening to the barking of my old dog and watching the faces of the poor. But I reach the hillside where the prickly furze is spread, and in musing upon my difficulties I am filled with a beneficent gentleness. To-day it is no longer the coarse and disdainful laugh of the public, nor the terrible doubt of everything, which disturbs me. The laugh of my detractors ...
— Romance of the Rabbit • Francis Jammes
... tired heads, dreamed dreams, and listened to tender talk on it as young women. They all loved it, for it was a family refuge, and one corner had always been Jo's favorite lounging place. Among the many pillows that adorned the venerable couch was one, hard, round, covered with prickly horsehair, and furnished with a knobby button at each end. This repulsive pillow was her especial property, being used as a weapon of defense, a barricade, or a stern ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... to use at night is made of one ounce of glycerine, half an ounce of rosemary (fluid), and twenty drops of carbolic acid. This is excellent for any irritation of the skin, and also for prickly heat. The face must always be well washed with water and pure soap before applying any of these preparations. If the skin is oily, bathe with diluted camphor (a teaspoonful to a pint of water), but it is injurious to ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... disposition is the blossom of a cactus—the "prickly-pear," as we call it in Eastern gardens, where we cultivate it for its oddity, I suppose. When the sojourner in this land of flowers sees, opening on all sides of this inhospitable-looking plant, rich cream-colored cups, the size of a Jacqueminot bud, and of a rare, satiny ...
— A Bird-Lover in the West • Olive Thorne Miller
... he had no difficulty with the mare. She came straight to him in spite of all the flopping trappings. With prickly ears and eyes lighted with kindly curiosity she looked the dusty ...
— Ronicky Doone • Max Brand
... parent—say, once amongst several million individuals—and it reappears in the child, the mere doctrine of chances almost compels us to attribute its reappearance to inheritance. Every one must have heard of cases of albinism, prickly skin, hairy bodies, &c., appearing in several members of the same family. If strange and rare deviations of structure are truly inherited, less strange and commoner deviations may be freely admitted to be inheritable. ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin
... The first time of its visitation was after a great fruit season when durian, that rich and luscious fruit, had been particularly abundant. A durian is somewhat larger than a cocoa-nut in its inner husk; it has a hard prickly rind, but inside lie the seeds, enclosed in a pulp which might be made of cream, garlic, sugar, and green almonds. It is very heating to the blood, for when there are plenty of durians the people always ...
— Sketches of Our Life at Sarawak • Harriette McDougall
... parts of the Empire quite understand one another, and realise that to be great the Empire must disregard temperatures as it does prickly heat and chilblains. Only the casual ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... yielded less and less water, and daily Billy Muck and Cheon scrimmaged over its yield; for Billy's melons were promising to pay a liberal dividend, and Cheon's garden was crying aloud for water. Every day was filled with flies, and dust, and prickly heat, and daily and hourly our hands waved unceasingly, as they beat back the multitude of flies that daily and hourly assailed us—the flies and dust treated all alike, but the prickly heat was more chivalrous, and refrained from annoying a woman. "Her usual luck!" the men-folk ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... advice an' tell 'em nothin'. Wait till they're frizzlin' in the Red Sea, an' I've worked some of the grease out of 'em. By that time, wot between prickly heat an' high livin', they'll be ready to kill any ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... with baskets of food, and to Aissa with the order to found a sect. The allegory expressed by the disgusting actions of the order would seem to be that anything is nourishment to the true believer. They therefore exhibit themselves as eating red-hot iron, scorpions and prickly cactus. Various travelers, some of them cool hands and accurate observers, have seen these khouans at their horrible feasts without being able to explain the imposture. A British soldier, an experienced Indian officer, happened to be in Kabylia just before ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... after a full year's deprivation of all nourishment, as much as three gallons of perfectly sweet and fresh water have been found in their bags. Their food is chiefly wild parsley and celery, with purslain, sea-kelp, and prickly pears, upon which latter vegetable they thrive wonderfully, a great quantity of it being usually found on the hillsides near the shore wherever the animal itself is discovered. They are excellent and highly nutritious food, and ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... showed a pallid bronze sheen, forsythias were as yellow as scrambled eggs, maples grew knobby with red buds. Among the fresh bright grass came, here and there, exhilarating smells of last year's buried bones. The little upward slit at the back of Gissing's nostrils felt prickly. He thought that if he could bury it deep enough in cold beef broth it would be comforting. Several times he went out to the pantry intending to try the experiment, but every time Fuji happened to be around. Fuji was a Japanese pug, and rather correct, so Gissing was ashamed to do ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... fell back and stood motionless, there came from behind a dense screen of shrubs which would have resembled aloe and prickly pear bushes, save that they were as big as oak trees, a ghastly howling. The next second, hopped and hurtled across the beach toward the girls, a group of hair-covered, shaggy creatures which were neither apes nor men. The faces, contorted with ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... we made a test of the water from the river, and found that it contained 20 per cent of an alkaline silt. When we had to use this water, we bruised the leaf of a prickly pear cactus, and placed it in a bucket of water. This method, repeated two or three times, usually clears the muddiest water. We also dug holes in the sand at the side of the river. The water, filtering through the sand, was often clear enough to develop the tests ...
— Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico • E. L. Kolb
... quarter of an hour's trampling through grass and bush and prickly thorn, a fine deer offered himself as a target to my rifle; he was on his way to the river, when, hearing our approach, he stopped to listen, and in so doing turned his shoulder toward me. Lifting my rifle, I took ...
— Harper's Young People, March 2, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... at last relieved of our obligatory fast, and enabled to look with contempt upon the humble prickly pears, which for many a long day had been our only food. Daily now we came across herds of fat buffaloes, and great was our sport in pursuing the huge lord of the prairies. One of them, by-the-bye, gored my horse to death, and would likely have put an end ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... thine own art thou. When the Fates took thee hence, then Pales' self, And even Apollo, left the country lone. Where the plump barley-grain so oft we sowed, There but wild oats and barren darnel spring; For tender violet and narcissus bright Thistle and prickly thorn uprear their heads. Now, O ye shepherds, strew the ground with leaves, And o'er the fountains draw a shady veil- So Daphnis to his memory bids be done- And rear a tomb, and write thereon this verse: 'I, Daphnis in the woods, from hence in fame Am to the stars exalted, guardian once Of ...
— The Bucolics and Eclogues • Virgil
... and blanket, he took two tough prickly burrs of the sweet-gum and placed one on each side of the pony's spine, where the saddle would rest. Then he put the blanket and saddle back, taking care to place them on very gently and tighten ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... the head, so well adapted to its offices of digging and rooting, would be extremely beautiful. The great bag hanging to the bill of a pelican, a thing highly useful to this animal, would be likewise as beautiful in our eyes. The hedge-hog, so well secured against all assaults by his prickly hide, and the porcupine with his missile quills, would be then considered as creatures of no small elegance. There are few animals whose parts are better contrived than those of a monkey: he has the hands of a man, joined ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... returned Dr. Lane. "They've got prickly heat. If Dr. Caxton called that scarlet fever, what would he call a real case of ...
— The Campfire Girls Go Motoring • Hildegard G. Frey
... he hissed with pain from the tingling of the prickles, "shall be a bald-headed bird as long as I am a red prickly lizard." ...
— Australian Legendary Tales - Folklore of the Noongahburrahs as told to the Piccaninnies • K. Langloh Parker
... (Ceratona siliqua), the Tree Veronica, the magnolia, and different species of the Eucalyptus or gum tree and of the true Acacia. In marshy places the common bamboo (Arundo donax) attains a great height; while the Sedum dasyphyllum, the aloe, and the Opuntium or prickly-pear, clothe the dry rocky banks with verdure. The most important tree commercially is the olive, which occupies the lower part of the mountains and immense tracts in the valleys. The higher elevations are divided among the cork tree (Quercus suber), the Maritime, Aleppo, and umbrella pines, ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... are strong enough to grasp a mussel shell, and hold it firmly until its contents are devoured. At the least touch a dark color instantly appears spread over the whole body of this curious creature, and dark prickly spines arise, which impart a stinging sensation when handled, like the ...
— Harper's Young People, April 13, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... went prickly hot. The girls in that neighborhood were held in esteem, and there was that in his tone ...
— Flying U Ranch • B. M. Bower
... timidly out of the parched earth, then shoot up as rapidly as the beanstalk of the fairy tale. But inside houses dampness reigns. Green fungus adorns boots and all things of leather, tobacco reeks with moisture, and the white man scratches himself and curses the plague of prickly heat. ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly |
