"White birch" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the river is made by night, and the traveler finds himself in Ha-ha Bay in the morning. The steamer lies here several hours before starting on her return trip, and takes in large quantities of white birch wood, as she does also at Tadousac. The chief product of the country seemed to be huckleberries, of which large quantities are shipped to Quebec in rude board boxes holding about a peck each. Little girls ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... foot of a ragged white birch which leaned from the upper rim of the pot. He held his pipe unlighted, while he watched the logs with a half-fascinated stare. Outside, in the river, he saw them in a clumsy panic haste, wallowing down the white rapids to their awful plunge. When a ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... white world with a sky of such deep blue it almost sparkled. Leafless trees stretched out long black or gray arms, and here and there a white birch stood up grandly, like some fair goddess astray. Stretches of evergreens suggested life, but beyond them hills of snow rising higher and higher, until they seemed lost in the blue, surmounted by a ...
— A Little Girl in Old Quebec • Amanda Millie Douglas
... the four great lakes forming the chief links of this singular chain of inland waters, the base-line of their operations. Phillips and Codman, having procured a wide strip of the outer bark of the white birch,—ever the woodman's substitute for writing paper, when writing becomes necessary,—then proceeded to draw a map, from personal recollection, of the strangely-irregular lake in question. By this, when completed, ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... Lake Michigan they used long bark canoes in which they carried their whole families and enough provisions to last them all winter. These canoes were made very light, out of white birch bark, and with a fair wind they could skip very lightly on the waters, going very fast, and could stand a very heavy sea. In one day they could sail quite a long distance along the coast of Lake Michigan. When night overtook them they would land and ...
— History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of Michigan • Andrew J. Blackbird
... native birches, and one foreigner—the true white birch—whose cut-leaved form, a familiar lawn tree of drooping habit, is worth watching and liking. The name some of the nurserymen have given it, of "nine-bark," is significantly accurate, for at least nine layers may be peeled ...
— Getting Acquainted with the Trees • J. Horace McFarland
... resolutely wound the offending sweater about a great white birch tree that stood at ...
— The Story of Sugar • Sara Ware Bassett
... morning as they came to the road, they saw a man not far off busily sketching a clump of white birch trees a short distance away. So intent was he upon his work that he did not appear to notice the two who were watching him ...
— Under Sealed Orders • H. A. Cody
... oblong in shape and contained an area of three or four acres. Its rocky surface sustained a scant growth of gnarled black spruce and stunted white birch, with here and there patches ...
— The Gaunt Gray Wolf - A Tale of Adventure With Ungava Bob • Dillon Wallace
... The griffins on the doorstep stared straight before them with an expression of utter indifference; the feathery foliage of the white birch swayed gently back and forth; the peonies lifted their crimson heads airily; the snowball bush bent under the weight of its white blooms till it swept the ...
— Mr. Pat's Little Girl - A Story of the Arden Foresters • Mary F. Leonard
... stakes are connected by one or more battens nailed along them, or by wires. They are cut eight or nine feet in length, so as to allow of a good six feet above ground when set up. Red, black, and white birch are used, also red and white ti-tree, the last variety being most esteemed, as it is more durable. A stake-fence ought to be proof against both pigs and cattle, and is reckoned to be good for seven years; if of white ti-tree it will last ten or ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... trees and bushes joined hands with their leaves, like young men and maidens standing ready for a dance around a married pair. In the midst of the company stood the pair, distinguished from all the rest of the forest throng by gracefulness of form and charm of colour; the white birch, the beloved, with her husband the hornbeam. But farther off, like grave elders sitting in silence and gazing on their children and grandchildren, stood on this side hoary beeches, and on that matronly poplars; ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... cord the split wood in the shed beside the house, where it was sheltered from the snow; the huge piles mingling the resinous cypress which gives a quick hot flame, spruce and red birch, burning steadily and longer, close-grained white birch with its marble-like surface, slower yet to be consumed and leaving red embers in the morning after ...
— Maria Chapdelaine - A Tale of the Lake St. John Country • Louis Hemon
... of stocks of red birch, white birch and scrub oak grafted with European hazels and chinkapins, but the grafts all died. The grafting was done as an experiment in the hope that we might possibly utilize our waste lands which are covered with birch and scrub ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various
... extreme West produce a pine closely resembling the European umbrella-pine.] which also bears a seed agreeable to the taste, and which, from the color of its foliage and the beautiful form of its dome-like crown, is among the most elegant of trees, the white birch of Central Europe, with its pendulous branches almost rivalling those of the weeping willow in length, flexibility, and gracefulness of fall, and, especially, the "cypresse funerall," might be introduced into the United States with great advantage to the landscape. The European beech ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... white birch. The beautiful satin bark at once kindled into a soft, pure, but brilliant flame, something like that of naphtha. There is no other wood flame so rich, and it leaps up in a joyous, spiritual way, as if glad to burn for the ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... but said nothing. Once or twice she rose upright, standing straight in her stirrups to scan the distance under a small, inverted hand. East and north the pine forest girdled the vlaie; west and south hardwood timber laced the sky-line with branches partly naked, and the pine's outposts of white birch and willow glimmered like mounds of crumpled gold along the edges ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... there. The moon, high in the heavens, gave pearly tints to the clouds that floated near it; the pines on the shore flung dark masses against the oaks and maples, or stood as a Rembrandt background for the boughs of the trees on which the moonlight fell, or for some ghostly procession of the white birch trunks. The water, in the shadows as dark and smooth as a Claude Lorraine glass, showed far off in the moonlight faint quivers of its surface here and there, as if the breeze so longed for were coming to the idle boat. But it was too far off, or too faint, for ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume II. No. 2, November, 1884 • Various
... a crown of white birch bark and her braid of hair, twined with running ever-green, fell to her waist. Patty was wreathed with columbines and decked with some turkey feathers that she had put in her basket as too pretty to throw away. Waitstill looked ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... separated the two, and the yellowing turf of long meadow grass was interspersed here and there with clumps of goldenrod and asters and wild shrubs and with small second-growth trees. At the side of the doorway was the tree which they had collided with, a twenty-foot white birch. The hut was even more dilapidated than they had supposed. It looked as if a good wind would send its twisted, sun-split grey boards into a heap. Inside, however, with the sunlight streaming through doorway, window and cracks, it looked more inviting than it had at night. ...
— Left Tackle Thayer • Ralph Henry Barbour
... I give pre-eminence to the cut-leaf weeping birch. Possessing all the good qualities of the white birch, it combines with them a beauty and delicate grace yielded by no other tree. It is an upright grower, with slender, drooping branches, adorned with leaves of deep rich green, each leaf being delicately ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... only species of these trees found in North America. The genus Betula (so called from the Celtic word batu, which means birch) has at least half-a-dozen other known representatives in these parts. There is the "white birch," a worthless tree of some twenty feet in height, and less than six inches diameter. The bark of this species is useless, and its wood, which is soft and white, is unfit even for fuel. It grows, however, in the poorest soil. Next ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... the bush stepped Jack, the little Mother Goose boy. In his hand he held a piece of white birch bark, prettily colored red, green and pink, and on it was a little verse ...
— Uncle Wiggily and Old Mother Hubbard - Adventures of the Rabbit Gentleman with the Mother Goose Characters • Howard R. Garis
... French family, and they are pioneers, and the family has a place that slopes down to the water through white birch trees, and it is of the kind very tenacious of its own land. In two hundred years this will be a great resort; bound to be—beautiful, salubrious, ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... that months had passed since last those white birch stems had leaned toward her and waved green banners of welcome. "Ah. Listen!" she exclaimed. A tuneful jangle as of melodious bells fell on the quiet air, and then, like the clear tones of ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham
... Now the white birch beckons. How its face shines in the light of the early morning! But dark or light I can distinguish it from all its fellows. Always white of face and clean of life. So I ...
— The Children's Six Minutes • Bruce S. Wright
... this important purpose of relief in the landscapes of Nature. Trees of this species are abundant in sandy levels, in company with the slender and graceful White Birch, "The Lady of the Woods," as the poet Coleridge called it. From these Pines proceed those delightful odors which are wafted to our windows by a mild south wind, not less perceptible in winter than in summer, and which are in a different manner as charming ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... (Quercus robur, L.) occurs with the alder, birch (Betula verrucosa, Ehrh.), and hazel. The oak has now in its turn been almost superseded in Denmark by the common beech. Other trees, such as the white birch (Betula alba), characterise the lower part of the bogs, and disappear from the higher; while others again, like the aspen (Populus tremula), occur at all levels, and still flourish in Denmark. All the land and freshwater shells, and all ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... man of whom she was in search. In her agony of mind Miss Sommerton had expected to come upon him pacing moodily up and down before the falls, meditating on the ingratitude of womankind. She discovered him in a much less romantic attitude. He was lying at full length below a white birch-tree, with his camera-box under his head for a pillow. It was evident he had seen enough of the Shawenegan Falls for one day, and doubtless, because of the morning's early rising, and the day's long ...
— One Day's Courtship - The Heralds Of Fame • Robert Barr
... leaves, which taper to a very long, slender point, have a habit of trembling like those of the poplars. The branches are of a dark chocolate color which contrasts very prettily with the grayish-white trunk, and their extreme slenderness causes them to droop somewhat like those of the willow. The white birch will spring up in the poorest kind of soil, and it is found in the highest latitude in which any tree can live. Its leaf is 'deltoid' in shape and indented at the edge. The bark of this species is said to be more durable than any other vegetable substance, and a piece ...
— Among the Trees at Elmridge • Ella Rodman Church
... house caught on fire last Tuesday night. He reckons it was caused by a defective flue, for the fire caught in the north wing. This is one of Plum's bon mots, however. He tries to make light of it, but the wood he has been using all winter was white birch, and when he got a big dose of hickory at the same place last week it was so dark that he didn't notice the difference, and before he knew it he had a bigger fire than he had allowed. In the midst of a pleasant flow of conversation gas collected in the wood and caused an explosion ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... white birch in the spring, in the Spring? When the sunlight gleams upon her branches in the spring? When her green leaves, young and tender, Through their soft concealment render Glimpses of her outlines ...
— Ohio Arbor Day 1913: Arbor and Bird Day Manual - Issued for the Benefit of the Schools of our State • Various |
