"Stalk" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... stalk in youthful prime With high Proctorial mien: We saw the majesty sublime Which marked the Junior Dean; O pundit grave! O sage M.A.! Say in what happy part Thou wilt before the crowd ...
— The Casual Ward - academic and other oddments • A. D. Godley
... and he was a great bragger. He was tellin' 'bout corn in Texas. 'Dere,' he said, 'corn grow twenty feet high, with stalks as big as the arm of John L. Sullivan, when he whupped Kilrain, and half a dozen big ears on each stalk.' De crowd ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 1 • Various
... wid the names on the hairbs an' save them; that wuz fwhat Docther Carmartin done whin Oi was larnin' him. Thayer, now, that's it," she added, as Yan took the hint and began slipping on each stalk a ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... occurrence in that of others, in the same neighborhood, was not observed. Some, as I have been told, have lost ten, twelve, or a greater number of patients, in scarcely broken succession; like their evil genius, the puerperal fever has seemed to stalk behind them wherever they went. Some have deemed it prudent to retire for a time from practice. In fine, that this fever may occur spontaneously, I admit; that its infectious nature may be plausibly disputed, I do not deny; but I add, considerately, ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... sensitiveness to all outside the group, is, of course, obvious from the history of nations. Groups thus endowed with a sense of solidarity and sensitiveness become highly vitalized and persistent personalities which stalk through the pages of history with tremendous power and tenacity of purpose. Nations thus live intensely, and in their intense feelings and personal attributes there are expressed purposes and ideals, conscious and ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... "I've turned over the newest leaves I could. Of course you can't turn over a leaf unless it's big enough to turn over. When a leaf is so young that it wraps itself around the main stalk it's useless to try to turn it over. And it's a great waste of time waiting for it to grow.... But it's easy to turn over a big one." Suiting his action to his words, Grandfather Mole stepped up to a loose-growing head of lettuce, and thrusting his long nose under a drooping leaf he lifted ...
— The Tale of Grandfather Mole • Arthur Scott Bailey
... lightning, now found himself strangely put out and disturbed in his usual composure by the innocent aspect, and harmless perfume of a rose,—a mere little pink petalled thing, with not even a thorn on its polished green stalk! He had placed it in a glass of water on his writing table, and his eyes rested upon it the morning after he had received it with almost a reproachful air. What was its golden-hearted secret? Why, when he studied it, did he see the soft hue of a fair cheek, the flash of a bright ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... tissue of palest blue, spangled with silver dots which glittered through antique Burano lace of an indefinable tint of white inclining to yellow. The flower, like something evil generated by a malignant spell, rose quivering on its slender stalk out of the fragile tube which might have been blown by some skilful artificer from a ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... named all the birds without a gun? Loved the wood-rose, and left it on its stalk? At rich men's tables eaten bread and pulse? Unarmed, faced danger with a heart of trust? And loved so well a high behaviour, In man or maid, that thou from speech refrained, Nobility more nobly to repay? O, be my friend, and teach me to ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... who had died for her in vain. No—not in vain! She breathed a prayer for them—a word of love for Larry. Larry, the waster of life, yet the faithful, the symbol of brotherhood. As long as she lived she would see him stalk before her with his red, blazing fire, his magnificent effrontery, his supreme will. He, who had been the soul of chivalry, the meekest of men before a woman, the inheritor of a reverence for womanhood, had ruthlessly shot out of his way ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... quick wit and a shrewd judgment go to the making up of wisdom, wise in his generation, and a pedant by the right of pedantry, conceded at that time to all men of learning (Bacon for example),—his error, I say, consisted in the notion, that because the stalk and foliage were originally contained in the seed, and were derived from it, therefore they remained so in point of right after their evolution. The kingly power was the seed; the House of Commons and the municipal charters and privileges the stock of foliage; the unity of the realm, ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... place 227 withered leaves of various kinds, mostly of English plants, were pulled out of worm-burrows in several places. Of these, 181 had been drawn into the burrows by or near their tips, so that the foot-stalk projected nearly upright from the mouth of the burrow; 20 had been drawn in by their bases, and in this case the tips projected from the burrows; and 26 had been seized near the middle, so that these had been drawn in transversely and were much crumpled. Therefore 80 per cent. ...
— The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the action of worms with • Charles Darwin
... these blissfully "heathen" people, have become the most consummate of sharpers. I walk up to buy something of the value of only a few cash, and on all sides are nets and traps, like spider-webs, and the fly that these gentry would catch, as they see me stalk around inspecting their wares, is myself. They seem to lie in wait for one, and for an article for which a coolie would pay a few cash as many dollars are demanded of the foreigner. My boy stands by, however, magnificently proud of his lucrative and important post, yelling ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... the smaller hospitals that had sprung from the parent stalk, was crowded. The operating theatre had been turned into a ward where the lane between the beds just gave room for a surgeon or a nurse to pass, and hourly the cry went up: "Room, more room for the wounded and the sick!" And among ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... daughter born to him named Talia, commanded the seers and wise men of his kingdom to come and tell him her fortune; and after various counsellings they came to the conclusion, that a great peril awaited her from a piece of stalk in some flax. Thereupon he issued a command, prohibiting any flax or hemp, or such-like thing, to be brought into his house, hoping thus ...
— Stories from Pentamerone • Giambattista Basile
... told Smith that he couldn't see any sense In goin' to such a tremendous expense Fer the sake o' such no-account experiments "That'll never make corn! As shore's you're born It'll come out the leetlest end of the horn!" Says Brown, as he pulled off a big roastin'-ear From a stalk of his own That had tribble outgrown Smith's poor yaller shoots, and says he, "Looky here! THIS corn was raised in the old-fashioned way, And I rather imagine that THIS corn'll pay Expenses fer RAISIN' it!—What ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... I assured him. "Indeed, I'm not easily kept awake. I don't believe I could keep awake if I knew that a ghost would stalk through ...
— The Mayor's Wife • Anna Katharine Green
... little apartment which she was to share with Muriel and her mother, and she fancied that she had been very crafty and very natural in her manner all the while he was with her, and that Lite did not dream of what she had in her mind to do. At any rate, she watched him stalk away on his high-heeled riding-boots, and she thought that his mind was perfectly at ease. (Jean, I fear, never will understand Lite half as well as Lite ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... is now up, and about three inches high. It is sowed in rows two feet or two and a half feet apart, and is pretty thick in the row. Doubtless they mean to thin it. There is a great deal of a forage they call farouche. It is a species of red trefoil, with few leaves, a very coarse stalk, and a cylindrical blossom of two inches in length, and three quarters of an inch in diameter, consisting of floscules, exactly as does that of the red clover. It seems to be a coarse food, but very plentiful. They say it is for ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... Mr. Hartman found a new form of agave with delicate stripes of white on the lanceolate leaves that constitute the basal rosette of the plant. The flower stalk is only twelve or thirteen inches high, and I should not wonder if this diminutive and beautiful century plant some day became fashionable in greenhouses. It grows in large numbers in the crevices of the rocks, the perpendicular walls of canons often being studded with the bright little rosettes ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... other: 'It is the Night of the World, and still long till it be Day: we wander amid the glimmer of smoking ruins, and the Sun and the Stars of Heaven are as if blotted out for a season; and two immeasurable Phantoms, HYPOCRISY and ATHEISM, with the Gowl, SENSUALITY, stalk abroad over the Earth, and call it theirs: well at ease are the Sleepers for whom Existence is ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... crimson blossoms clustering on long stalks above great floating leaves—leaves nearly approaching three feet in diameter I think; and everywhere about the leaves hover birds and along the margins of the lagoons stalk countless waders, cranes, jabiroos, and ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... fill with shrieks the air Where waving fields and smiling homes Now deck the sunny plain, And laughter-loving childhood roams Unmoved by care or pain; Let famine gaunt and grim despair Behind you stalk along, And pestilence taint all the air With victims from the strong Let dogs from mangled beauty's cheeks The flesh and sinews tear, And craunch the bones around for weeks, And gnaw the skulls till bare Let ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies
... learnt when still a lad to make flutes out of a kind of reed. He used to burn out the heart of the stalk, make holes where necessary, drill them, fix a mouthpiece at one end, and tune them so well that it was possible to play almost any air on them. He made a number of them in his spare time, and sent them ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... grown. His grapes also took the first prize at Rotherham, at a competition open to all England. He was extremely successful in producing melons, having invented a method of suspending them in baskets of wire gauze, which, by relieving the stalk from tension, allowed nutrition to proceed more freely, and better enabled the fruit to grow ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... the dead and I together The quick among, Elbowing our kind of every feather Slowly and long; Yea, long and slowly. That a phantom should stalk there With me seemed nothing strange, and talk there That winter night By flaming ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... Goethe gave botany a new scientific basis. Sitting in his favorite seat near the castle of Heidelberg one day, the great poet was picking in pieces an oak leaf. Suddenly his imagination transformed the leaf. Under its touch the central stalk lifted itself up and became the trunk of the tree; the veins of the leaf were extended and became boughs and branches; each filament became a leaf and spray; the imagination revealed each petal and stamen ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... and fortitude, great voyages of discovery to the polar regions, and to open new highways for commerce, new treasures for science. Many things of this nature had been done by the new commonwealth; but, alas! she did not drape herself melodramatically, nor stalk about with heroic wreath and cothurn. She ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... columns reel. The demon statue rises on its throne, and a stream of flame issues from its brow. The doors of the cells burst open, and with the clanking of chains, and other dismal noises, skeleton shapes stalk forth, from them, each with a pale blue light above its head. Monstrous beasts, like tiger-cats, with rough black skins and flaming eyes, are moving about, and looking as if they would spring upon the captive. Two gravestones are now pushed aside, and from the cold earth arise the forms of ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... Northwest Mounted Police. The white-washed homes of the employes of The Company, little match-boxes dazzling in the sun, stretch from one end of the beach to the other. In among the half-breed populace stalk policeman and priest, red jacket keeping the dark-skinned people straight in this world and black robe laying out conditions for the world to come. So is Chipewyan fate chequered with the rouge et ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... you, in the series of types of the power of the Greek gods, placed in your educational series, by the blossom of the wild strawberry; which in rising from its trine cluster of trine leaves,—itself as beautiful as a white rose, and always single on its stalk, like an ear of corn, yet with a succeeding blossom at its side, and bearing a fruit which is as distinctly a group of seeds as an ear of corn itself, and yet is the pleasantest to taste of all the pleasant things prepared by nature for the food of men, [1]—may accurately symbolize, and ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... for the month past, since James came from sea, she had been living in an enchanted land,—that Newport harbor, and every rock and stone, and every mat of yellow seaweed on the shore, that the two-mile road between the cottage and the white house of Zebedee Marvyn, every mullein-stalk, every juniper-tree, had all had a light and a charm which were suddenly gone. There had not been an hour in the day for the last four weeks that had not had its unsuspected interest,—because he was at the white house, because, possibly, he might be going by, or ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... remind the European of his native country, as, for instance, the Dandelion (Taraxacum officinale); a kind of Rose, (Rosa lucida,) with its sweet-scented blossoms, has a great predilection for this dry soil. With surprise we meet here also with many plants with hairy, greenish-gray leaves and stalk-covers, as, for instance, the Onosmodium molle, Hieracium longipilum, Pycnanthemum pilosum, Chrysopsis villosa, Amorpha canescens, Tephrosia Virginiana, Lithospermum canescens; between which the immigrated Mullein (Verbuscum thapsus) may be found. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... the swaying top of a mullein-stalk near by, and poured out a strong, swelling, joyous song that ...
— Tom Grogan • F. Hopkinson Smith
... timber line. On all sides can be seen strange flowers, of lovely forms and varied hues. Plants which attain considerable proportions on the plains are here reduced to their lowest forms. It is not an unusual thing to find a sunflower stalk in the prairies rising from a height of eight to ten feet; here they grow like dandelions in the grass, yet retaining all their characteristics of form and color. Beyond this mountain meadow are great fields of disintegrated granite, ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... who has stolen the lotus-stalk touch kine with his foot, make water facing the sun, and study the ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... had decorated the town from the station to the school in a generous manner. In order to economize in the matter of time, we arranged to have the whole school pass in review before the President. Each student carried a stalk of sugar-cane with some open bolls of cotton fastened to the end of it. Following the students the work of all departments of the school passed in review, displayed on "floats" drawn by horses, mules, and oxen. On these floats ...
— Up From Slavery: An Autobiography • Booker T. Washington
... Bahia, my attention was drawn by observing many spiders, cockroaches, and other insects, and some lizards, rushing in the greatest agitation across a bare piece of ground. A little way behind, every stalk and leaf was blackened by a small ant. The swarm having crossed the bare space, divided itself, and descended an old wall. By this means many insects were fairly enclosed; and the efforts which the poor little creatures made to extricate ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... which the high religious character of the grandmother exerted on the intellectual character of her descendant. The nobility of the humble family from which he sprung was derived evidently from this source. That character, to borrow a homely but forcible metaphor from Burns, was the sustaining 'stalk of carle hemp' which bore it up and kept it from grovelling on the depressed level of its condition. How very interesting a subject of thought and inquiry! A little Highland girl, when tending cattle ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... they do the lightning and the storm, the zephyr that cools the brow, and the tornado that levels the forest; how they summon the rain to fertilize the seed and refresh the shrivelled leaves; how they aid the hunter to stalk the game, and usher in the varying seasons; how, indeed, in a hundred ways, they intimately concern his comfort and his life; and it will not seem strange that they almost occupied the place of all other gods in the mind of the child of nature. Especially as those who gave or withheld the rains ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... often severely whipped. I saw one woman very severely whipped for accidentally cutting up a stalk of cotton.[8] When they were whipped they were commonly held down by four men: if these could not confine them, they were fastened by stakes driven firmly into the ground, and then lashed often so as to draw blood at each blow. I saw one woman who had lately been delivered of a child ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... all, Miss Lydia wandered in her full black gown, putting aside her filmy ruffles as she tied back a hanging spray or pruned a broken stalk, sometimes even lowering her thread lace cap as she weeded the tangle of sweet Williams and touch-me-not. Since her gentle girlhood she had tended bountiful gardens, and dreamed her virgin dreams in the purity of their box-trimmed walks. In a kind of worldly piety she had bound her ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... of moisture. It looked as if all his hard work would be in vain. The poor farmer thought of his wife and children, who were likely to starve in the coming winter. He shed many tears, but they could not moisten one little stalk. ...
— Among the Forces • Henry White Warren
... grass grew on these plains, one of them, a brome grass, possessing the remarkable property of shooting up green from the old stalk." ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... lights still twinkling in the windows. Presently the tall Highlander stood up and sniffed. Then motioning Waverley to do as he did, he began to crawl on all fours toward a low and ruinous sheep-fold. With some difficulty Edward obeyed, and with so much care was the stalk conducted, that presently, looking over a stone wall, he could see an outpost of five or six soldiers lying round their camp-fire, while in front a sentinel paced backward and forward, regarding the heavens and whistling Nancy Dawson as placidly as if he were a hundred ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... heard with displeasure. A young man goes up a mountain, and as he goes higher and higher, he repeats Excelsior: but excelsior is only taller in the comparison of things on a common basis, not higher, as a detached object in the air. Jack's bean-stalk was excelsior the higher it grew: but Jack himself was no more celsus at the top than he had ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... recounted to her sister the story Ian had told her, it certainly was silly enough. She had retained but the withered stalk and leaves; the strange flower was gone. Christina judged it hardly a story for a gentleman ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... plant from Panama and southward. Panama hats are made from the leaves of this plant. The leaves are cut when young, and the stiff parallel veins removed, after which they are slit into shreds, but not separated at the stalk end, and immersed in boiling water for a short time, ...
— Catalogue of Economic Plants in the Collection of the U. S. Department of Agriculture • William Saunders
... step beside her is a human skull, across which lies a stalk of lilies. The flowers are an Easter emblem, and symbolize the Resurrection. The skull is the token of death. Thus are we taught the victory over death through the ...
— Van Dyck - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Painter With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... sir; I'll reach up for it." Not all the conductors I met afterwards were as polite as this, but he has as good a right to pose as the type of American conductor as the overbearing ruffians who stalk through the books of sundry British tourists. In judging him it should be remembered that he democratically feels himself on a level with his passengers, that he would be insulted by the offer ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... These animals, alike fond of the flesh of the young turtles, devour an innumerable quantity. They fish during the night, for the tortuguillos do not come out of the earth to gain the neighbouring river till after the evening twilight. The zamuro vultures are too indolent to hunt after sunset. They stalk along the shores in the daytime, and alight in the midst of the Indian encampment to steal provisions; but they often find no other means of satisfying their voracity than by attacking young crocodiles of seven or eight inches long, either on land ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... doth the purple floweret, dying, droop, Smit by the ploughshare. So the poppy frail On stricken stalk its languid head doth stoop, And bows o'erladen with the drenching hail. But onward now, through thickest ranks of mail, Rushed Nisus. Volscens only will he slay; He waits for none but Volscens. They assail From right and left, and ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... the sweet strains, as he drew near they became more beautiful; he listened till he learned them and could make the same sweet sound, then he knew that it was a plant with a tall green stem and long tapering leaves. He took his knife and cut the stalk, but ere he had scarcely finished, it healed and was the same as before; he cut it again, and again it healed. Then he knew it would heal diseases, he took it home, dried it by the fire, pulverized it, and applied a few particles of it to a dangerous wound; no sooner had it touched the wound ...
— Legends, Traditions, and Laws of the Iroquois, or Six Nations, and History of the Tuscarora Indians • Elias Johnson
... a tall, elegant, faded woman, dressed in black, her little upright head balanced upon a long thin stalk of neck. Though undeniably faded, there was, as now seen in the quiet evening light, a suggestion of youthfulness about her. He brown eyes, pretty though rather small, snapped even as did those of the parrot. Excitement—to-night she was very much excited—invariably ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... the dancer said, "Stick out your toes—stick in your head, Stalk on with quick, galvanic tread— Your fingers thus extend; The attitude's considered quaint." The weary Bishop, feeling faint, Replied, "I do not say it ain't, But 'Time!' ...
— The Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... other. The victim of one believes all kinds of absurdities blindfold, oblivious of evidence or causality. The upsetting of a salt-cellar or the fall of a mirror is to him a harbinger of disaster, entirely irrespective of any possible connection between the cause and the effect. A bit of stalk floating on his tea presages an unlooked-for visitor, and the guttering of a candle is a sign of impending death. All this he believes firmly, and acts upon, although he would candidly acknowledge his inability to explain the principle ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... loves to grow, and to its long, ribbon-like leaves the eel-fishers fastened their lines securely, baiting each alternate hook with mutton and worms. I declared this was too cockney a method of fishing, and selected a tall slender flax-stick, the stalk of last year's spike of red honey-filled blossoms, and to this extempore rod I fastened my line and bait. When one considers that the old whalers were accustomed to use ropes made in the rudest fashion, from the fibre of this very plant, ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... are a very fickle baby that must have new toys every day. The "righteous" cry against the white slave traffic is such a toy. It serves to amuse the people for a little while, and it will help to create a few more fat political jobs—parasites who stalk about the world as inspectors, investigators, ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... with some sprigs cut off from a plant of picris, these plants were chosen because their blood is white, after some hours, and on the next day, on taking out either of these and cutting off from its bottom about a quarter of an inch of the stalk an internal circle of red points appeared, which were the ends of absorbent vessels coloured red with the decoction, while an external ring of arteries was seen to bleed out hastily a milky juice, and at once evinced both the absorbent and arterial system. These absorbent ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... why the hill Misses my wonted feet, Or how I've learned a lethal skill At mimic butts that bodes him ill When next I stalk his beat. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 27, 1917 - 1917 Almanack • Various
... that never call me mother again! But you have made him tenfold dearer to me. My poor lost boy! I shall soon see him again shall hold him in my arms, and set him on my knees. Ay, you may stare! You are too crafty, and yet not crafty enow. You cut the stalk away; but you left the seed—the seed that shall outgrow you, and outlive you. Margaret Brandt is quick, and it is Gerard's, and what is Gerard's is mine; and I have prayed the saints it may be a boy; and it will—it must. Kate, when I found it was so, my bowels yearned over ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... I don't want! I don't want to stalk in and say here's the hero of romance that has saved your brother! I want to get her home, and show her that I can be civil without being satirical, and then, perhaps, she ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of view the stalk was nothing more than an ordinary one—down-hill, through split and crannied rocks, unsafe, perhaps, if a man did not keep his wits by him, but no worse than twenty others he had undertaken. Yet his men—they refused ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... bishna is ripe in June and July; as are beans. Allila may be sown at all seasons; it requires water only every eight or ten days. Their beans are like the small Mazagan beans, and are sown in March; the stalk is short, but full of pods. The allila produces a ...
— An Account of Timbuctoo and Housa Territories in the Interior of Africa • Abd Salam Shabeeny
... knows how greatly the various kinds of cabbage differ in appearance. In the island of Jersey, from the effects of particular culture and of climate, a stalk has grown to the height of sixteen feet, and "had its spring shoots at the top occupied by a magpie's nest:" the woody stems are not unfrequently from ten to twelve feet in height, and are there used as rafters[579] ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... man's struggle was for life and the mainstay of life was food. Perhaps the original discoverer of wheat was a meat-eating savage who, in roaming the forests and fields, forced by starvation to eat bark and plant and berry, came upon a stalk of grain that chewed with strange satisfaction. Perhaps through that accident he became a sower ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... peril, the beat of the young settler's heart seemed to be almost normal. He watched a little field mouse that fearlessly peered up at him from the ground. He even counted the swings of a spider making her web between the swaying branches of an enormous stalk of corn. ...
— Scouting with Daniel Boone • Everett T. Tomlinson
... pipe of hers is mute, Or thrown away; but with a flute Her loneliness she cheers: This flute, made of a hemlock stalk, At evening in his homeward walk 245 The Quantock ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... the preparations, and went home again. The next morning, when Thomasin withdrew the curtains of her bedroom window, there stood the Maypole in the middle of the green, its top cutting into the sky. It had sprung up in the night, or rather early morning, like Jack's bean-stalk. She opened the casement to get a better view of the garlands and posies that adorned it. The sweet perfume of the flowers had already spread into the surrounding air, which, being free from every taint, conducted to her lips a full measure of the fragrance received ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... for them grew. The one I had watched stalk the marmot increased my admiration of their cunning. I eventually learned that they are extremely alert and agile, despite their seemingly stupid lumbering about, that they employ keen eyes and sensitive ears and high-power noses to the best advantage. As my respect ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills
... particularly keen. They never drilled as a battalion, but simply assembled in bunches for orders, when Birge would ask: "Canteens full? Biscuits for all day?" After which he would sing out: "All right, boys, hunt your holes"; and off they would go to stalk the enemy with their ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood
... an approach to reason which is sometimes almost startling. She mimics all that she sees us do, with the dexterity of a monkey, and far more of gravity and apparent purpose; cracks nuts and eats them; gathers currants and severs them from the stalk with the most delicate nicety; filches and munches apples and pears; is as dangerous in an orchard as a schoolboy; smells to flowers; smiles at meeting; answers in a pretty lively voice when spoken to (sad pity that the language should be unknown!) ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... thus, with glorious air and proud disdain, He boldly stalk'd, the foremost on the plain, Him Menelaus, loved of Mars, espies, With heart elated, and with joyful eyes: So joys a lion, if the branching deer, Or mountain goat, his bulky prize, appear; Eager he seizes and devours the slain, Press'd by bold ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... the disordered bed linen were a few petals of some kind of blossom, three of them still attached to a fragment of slender stalk. ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... truth. Professor Morris was a changed man. For the first time in all his orderly humdrum student existence, he had had to face war and death and murder, and all the crimes that stalk through a land at ...
— The Boy Scouts in Front of Warsaw • Colonel George Durston
... is after a cariboo that isn't there. He is "stalking" it. With his stomach. Of course, away down in his heart he knows that the cariboo isn't there and never was; but that man read my pamphlet and went crazy. He can't help it: he's GOT to stalk something. Mark him as he crawls along; see him crawl through a thimbleberry bush (very quietly so that the cariboo won't hear the noise of the prickles going into him), then through a bee's nest, gently and slowly, so that the cariboo will not take fright when the ...
— Literary Lapses • Stephen Leacock
... as its name implies, attacks the stalk, and is an intermittent pest, though quite annoying at times. It is difficult to combat, but its injuries may be prevented by care in keeping down, and by promptly destroying, the weeds after they are pulled or hoed out during the growing season. If weeds are left to ...
— Tomato Culture: A Practical Treatise on the Tomato • William Warner Tracy
... have another Mackenzie. Bigger men may arise. More unusual characters may stalk out of obscurity into places of eminence and power. But there never again can be an era like the Mackenzie epoch, because that kind of experience is suffered and enjoyed but once in a nation's lifetime. He still has big interests, some ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... us a quantity of wild artichokes, which the mice collect and hoard in large numbers. The root is white, of an ovate form, from one to three inches long, and generally of the size of a man's finger, and two, four, and sometimes six roots are attached to a single stalk. Its flavor as well as the stalk which issues from it resemble those of the Jerusalem artichoke, except that the latter is ...
— First Across the Continent • Noah Brooks
... footfalls Hither adown the pleach'd walk? No; the over-ripened fruit falls, Heavy-swollen, from off its stalk! ...
— Rampolli • George MacDonald
... to foot with snow when he stopped before the stone porch, and rang a bell, that made a clanging noise in the stillness of the night. He looked like some grim white statue that had descended from its pedestal to stalk hither ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... through the grass that grows tall down there," said Rogers. "They're more bent on battle than I thought they'd be. It seems that they mean to stalk us, so we'll just ...
— The Sun Of Quebec - A Story of a Great Crisis • Joseph A. Altsheler
... replied Mr Vuffin, contemplating the fire with a sigh. 'Once get a giant shaky on his legs, and the public care no more about him than they do for a dead cabbage stalk.' ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... that the seed of all discoveries, past and present, was scattered ages ago—perhaps at the very creation of the world—in the mind of man; that when it had rested there long enough, and the season of its ripening came, up grew the stalk and the ear, and the harvest was gathered, and mankind garnered it up as a provision for them and their heirs for ever. The sense of beauty lay for generation and generation, germinating in the intellects and hearts of men; and, when the time came, a whole harvest of it was gathered ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... with the cart and horses out of sight under the shelter of the rise, John crouched upon his hands and knees and proceeded to carry out his stalk. All went well till he was quite close to the dead cow, and was congratulating himself on the prospect of an excellent shot at the wounded bull, when suddenly something struck the ground violently just beneath his body, throwing up a cloud of earth and dust. He stopped amazed, ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... dame would follow, tricked out in a man's shirt, and nothing else; another one would enter with a flourish, with simply the sleeves of a bright calico dress tied around her waist and the rest of the garment dragging behind like a peacock's tail off duty; a stately "buck" Kanaka would stalk in with a woman's bonnet on, wrong side before—only this, and nothing more; after him would stride his fellow, with the legs of a pair of pantaloons tied around his neck, the rest of his person untrammeled; in his rear would come another gentleman simply ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... I read in the lives of our companions the same processes of reason, the same antique and fatal conflicts of the right against the wrong, and of unbitted nature with too rigid custom; I see them with our weaknesses, vain, false, inconstant against appetite, and with our one stalk of virtue, devoted to the dream of an ideal; and yet, as they hurry by me on the street with tail in air, or come singly to solicit my regard, I must own the secret purport of their lives is still inscrutable to man. Is man the friend, or is he the patron only? Have they indeed ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... proudly as she might have gone the moment before, but covered with confusion and shame, her head drooping like some crushed lily on a bleeding stalk. Through her soul rushed indignation, mighty and forceful; indignation and shame, for her sister, for David, for herself. She did not stop to analyze her various feelings, nor did she stop to speak further with those in the house. She fled to her own room, and burying ...
— Marcia Schuyler • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... next to me saw my distress, and offered to do my sums for me. I accepted her proposal, feeling, however, that I was a miserable cheat. But I was afraid of the master, who was tall and gaunt, and used to stalk across the schoolroom, right over the desk-tops, to find out if there was any mischief going on. Once, having caught a boy annoying a seat-mate with a pin, he punished the offender by pursuing him around the ...
— A New England Girlhood • Lucy Larcom
... heart, be calm a space In this gloomy vigil place; Though these confines haunted be Naught of harm can come to thee— Nothing canst thou see or hear Of the ghosts that stalk anear, For around thee Membril flings Charms of Fay and ...
— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field
... and I tell you there ain't one in a thousand that knows a grain about either on 'em. You hear folks say, Oh, such a man is an ugly-grained critter, he'll break his wife's heart; jist as if a woman's heart was as brittle as a pipe-stalk. The female heart, as far as my experience goes, is jist like a new india-rubber shoe: you may pull and pull at it till it stretches out a yard long, and then let go, and it will fly right back to its old shape. Their hearts are made of stout leather, I tell you; there's ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various
... them. Life, in all its forms, is most abundant near water. The rank vegetation nurtures the insects, and the insects draw the birds. The first week in March, on some southern slope where the sunshine lies warm and long, I usually find the hepatica in bloom, though with scarcely an inch of stalk. In the spring runs, the skunk cabbage pushes its pike up through the mould, the flower appearing first, as if ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... fine fair creature, quite perfect in its hues and shapes. "I never saw a prettier!" said an emperor butterfly, pausing near for a moment; at that moment the knife of the gardener severed the rosebud's stalk. ...
— Bimbi • Louise de la Ramee
... Kyle,—for we still lacked wind to sail down it,—we brought up from below, on one of the anchor-flukes, an immense bunch of deep-sea tangle, with huge soft fronds and long slender stems, that had lain flat on the rocky bottom, and had here and there thrown out roots along its length of stalk, to attach itself to the rock, in the way the ivy attaches itself to the wall. Among the intricacies of the true roots of the bunch, if one may speak of the true roots of an alga, I reckoned from eighteen to twenty different forms of animal life,—Flustrae, Sertulariae, Serpulae, Anomiae, ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... snake before him, whose flat head stood stiffly up from his coil, and waved a little to the motion of his master's finger; in another, a man was bending over a flower-pot with a wand in his hand, and as he moved the wand a stalk grew from the pot and at its end a bud appeared and unfolded into a flower before the very eyes of his audience; in another a great ape was marking down figures with chalk as his master called them; in another a shuttle ...
— The Old Tobacco Shop - A True Account of What Befell a Little Boy in Search of Adventure • William Bowen
... Stagnation senmoveco. Staid deca, kvieta. Stain makuli. Stain makulo. Stair sxtupo. Staircase (stairs) sxtuparo. Stake paliso, fosto. Stake (wager) veto. Stalactite stalaktito. Stalagmite stalagmito. Stale malfresxa. Stalk (plant) trunketo. Stall (at market, etc.) budo. Stall (for beast) stalo. Stallion cxevalviro. Stamen (bot.) paliseto. Stamin stamino. Stammer balbuti. Stamp (to mark) stampi. Stamp (brand) stampajxo. Stamp, postage posxtmarko. Stamp with foot ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... so much uv them old Greek fighters 'long side the fellers that fight the warriors nowadays in these woods. You rec'lect we talked that over once before. Now, how would A-killus, all in his brass armor with his shinin' sword an' long spear come out try in' to stalk an' Injun camp. Why, they'd hear his armor rattlin' a quarter uv a mile away, an', even ef they didn't, he'd git his long spear so tangled up in the bushes an' vines that he couldn't move 'less he left it ...
— The Keepers of the Trail - A Story of the Great Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... that Price is! He's the very salt of the earth!' murmured the old captain, as he threaded his way later through the unsavoury streets, now ablaze with lights that enticed and beckoned forth misery to stalk out from every dark corner. 'He is a true Christian—that's what it is! To think how my boys have ill-treated him, and here he is caring for Alick so tenderly that the poor boy's mother couldn't have done more, had she been spared! That's what you call returning good ...
— The Captain's Bunk - A Story for Boys • M. B. Manwell
... stripped skin by skin,—like a cluster of dates may it be cut off,—like a bunch of flowers may it be uprooted! The spell, may heaven avert it,—may the earth avert it!" The god himself deigned to point out the remedy: the sick man was to take a clove of garlic, some dates, and a stalk bearing flowers, and was to throw them into the fire, bit by bit, repeating appropriate prayers at each stage of the operation. "In like manner as this garlic is peeled and thrown into the fire,—and the burning flame consumes ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... the witches are flocking— Merry meet—merry part—how they gallop and drive, Yellow stubble and stalk are rocking, And young green corn is merry alive, With the shapes and shadows swimming by. To the highest heights they fly, Where Sir Urian sits on high— Throughout and about, With clamour and shout, Drives ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... dried potato in the other for ever so long, but nothing seems to do me any good. I am going to have a new doctor soon if I don't get well. Oh my, yes, and some pepper hash on bread and butter also! Ha! Hum! Oh my! Ouch! and Jack and the Bean Stalk!" Uncle Wiggily called out that last because ...
— Lulu, Alice and Jimmie Wibblewobble • Howard R. Garis
... to have wealth and to know how to spend it is to be the equal of princes! The salons of the beautiful fly open before you, great men will clamour for your friendship, all the sweetest triumphs which love and sport can offer are yours. You stalk amongst a world of pygmies a veritable giant, the adored of women, the envied of men! You may be old—it matters not; ugly—you will be fooled into reckoning yourself an Adonis. Nobility is great, art is great, genius is great, but the key to the pleasure ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... in no other place on the globe, but this can hardly be possible. If its evolution took place in one crater, it would take place in another. It consists of a great mass of silvery-white, bristling leaves resting upon the ground, from which rises a stalk, strung with flowers, to the height of five or six feet. It is evidently of the Yucca type of plant, and has met with a singular transformation in the sleeping volcano's mouth, all its harsh and savage character turned into gentleness and grace, its armament of needles and daggers giving place ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... bitterest month of all for the Wood Folk, even Wayeeses was often hard pressed to find a living. Small game grew scarce and very wild; the caribou had wandered far away to other ranges; and the cubs would dig for hours after a mouse, or stalk a snowbird, or wait with endless patience for a red squirrel to stop his chatter and come down to search under the snow for a fir cone that he had hidden there in the good autumn days. And once, when the hunger within ...
— Northern Trails, Book I. • William J. Long
... with thronging figures, men, horses, women—they reached no more than the outer retina of her eye. She remembered fleetingly that they had something to do with the story of Ste. Genevieve. She wanted intensely to escape from this phantom whom she herself had called up from the void to stalk at her side. But she felt she ought not to let pass, even coming from such a source, such utterly frenzied imaginings against one to whom she owed loyalty. She spoke coldly, with extreme distaste for the subject: "You're entirely wrong about Aunt Victoria. She's not in the least that kind ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... upon men; - Foes of good Gaea; until dispossessed By light from her, born of the love of her, Their lordship the illumined brain rejects For earth's beneficent, the sons of Law, Her other name. So spake she in their heart, Among the wheat-blades proud of stalk; beneath Young vine-leaves pushing timid fingers forth, Confidently to cling. And when brown corn Swayed armied ranks with softened cricket song, With gold necks bent for any zephyr's kiss; When vine-roots daily down a rubble soil Drank fire ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... might be conducted in a dangerous, captious, and ensnaring manner—that CALAMITY might be involved therein. Observe, for example, the indefatigable, inevitable English utilitarians: how ponderously and respectably they stalk on, stalk along (a Homeric metaphor expresses it better) in the footsteps of Bentham, just as he had already stalked in the footsteps of the respectable Helvetius! (no, he was not a dangerous man, Helvetius, CE SENATEUR POCOCURANTE, ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... the human hunts which the collectors of the revenue added to their other avocations there—the Roman rule, barely tolerable even from the first, pressed so heavily on Asia that neither the crown of the king nor the hut of the peasant there was any longer safe from confiscation, that every stalk of corn seemed to grow for the Roman -decumanus-, and every child of free parents seemed to be born for the Roman slave-drivers. It is true that the Asiatic bore even this torture with his inexhaustible passive endurance; but it was not patience ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... sanctification,' and let us understand how summer and winter, springtime and harvest, tempest and fair weather, do all together make up the year, and ensure the springing of the seed and the fruitfulness of the stalk. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... I must have a hand in it, For won't I teach the supers how to stalk and stand in it? Tho' that blessed Shakespeare never gives a ray to them, I explain the text, and then it's clear as day to them![1] Plain as A B C is a plot historical, When I overhaul allusions allegorical! ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry |
