"Pruning" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... little pruning in the proper season, these unshapely bushes might become things of beauty, and not only look better, but will do better, if given a severe trimming in the spring. Hedges of Privet, Purple Barberry, and Japan Quince, look much prettier along the walk than the ...
— Your Plants - Plain and Practical Directions for the Treatment of Tender - and Hardy Plants in the House and in the Garden • James Sheehan
... pillory, am broken on the wheel, and dragged asunder by wild horses. Yes, yes, Bardianna, all is in a nut, as thou sayest; but all my back teeth can not crack it; I but crack my own jaws. All round me, my fellow men are new-grafting their vines, and dwelling in flourishing arbors; while I am forever pruning mine, till it is become but a stump. Yet in this pruning will I persist; I will not add, I will diminish; I will train myself down to the standard of what is unchangeably true. Day by day I drop off my redundancies; ere long I shall have stripped ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... contending armies, the women undertook to care for the vines when the time came, risking their lives rather than sacrifice the next year's vintage. Captain Sweeney of the Foreign Legion told me that when the French soldiers were not firing they amused themselves watching these women pruning and trimming as fatalistically as if guns were not thundering east and west of them, shells singing overhead. For the most part they were safe enough, and nerves had apparently been left out of them; ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... the cacao-tree is not greatly unlike one of our own orchard trees, and trained by the pruning knife it grows similar in shape to a well-kept apple tree, no very low boughs being left, so that a man on horseback can generally pass freely down the long glades. Left to nature, it will in good soil reach ...
— The Food of the Gods - A Popular Account of Cocoa • Brandon Head
... something from the chaise and lay it on the grass. Then they saw him hacking at the harness with his pruning-knife until the pony was free, when the man led it to another gate-post and tied it there. Then Kink hacked again, and drew the carriage away from the pony that was lying on the ground; and then he and the man lifted the bundle once more and came with it very carefully to the Slowcoach, ...
— The Slowcoach • E. V. Lucas
... husband, I a Vine: Whose weaknesse married to thy stranger state, Makes me with thy strength to communicate: If ought possesse thee from me, it is drosse, Vsurping Iuie, Brier, or idle Mosse, Who all for want of pruning, with intrusion, Infect thy sap, and liue on ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... with the cures of the parishes, why sweep away these fantastic figures who, without any religious character, recruited from the farms, never educated in seminaries, peasants at bottom, in no way priests, capable, when required, to give a helping hand with the pruning knife in the vineyard, or with the pole among the olives, or the sickle among the corn. Alas! they had their weaknesses, and these weaknesses worked their ruin." The salt had lost its savour, wherewith could ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... decay was set upon everything. The garden, no longer the choice home of choice flowers, was weed-grown and neglected. The greenhouses were empty, and falling to pieces for lack of a few simple repairs. The shrubs and evergreens had all run wild for want of pruning, and in several places the dividing hedges were broken down, and through the breaches sheep had intruded themselves into the private grounds. Even the house itself had a shabby out-at-elbows air, ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 4, April, 1891 • Various
... the police are satisfied, but the majestic and imposing order of human societies,—that I sometimes find myself embarrassed in attacking certain abuses. I like to rebuild with one hand when I am compelled to destroy with the other. In pruning an old tree, we guard against destruction of the buds and fruit. You know that as well as any one. You are a wise and learned man; you have a thoughtful mind. The terms by which you characterize the fanatics of our day are strong ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... never brought home a nest of young birds without lying awake in misery half the night after, and often reinstating them and the nest in their original place the next morning. He could scarcely bear to see trees cut down or lopped, from a fancy that it hurt them; and late pruning, when the sap was up and the tree bled profusely, had been a positive grief to him in his infancy. This weakness of character, as it may be called, suggested that he was the sort of man who was born to ache a good deal before the fall of the ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... typewriters, because my uncle hated the clatter—and a casual person or two sitting about, projectors whose projects were being entertained. Here and in a further room nearer the private apartments, my uncle's correspondence underwent an exhaustive process of pruning and digestion before it reached him. Then the two little rooms in which my uncle talked; my magic uncle who had got the investing public—to whom all things were possible. As one came in we would find him squatting with his cigar up and an expression ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... stopped to cast an inquisitive look over his garden palings. They saw him dressed in a linen jacket, with the glorious ribbon adorning his button-hole, weeding his flower-garden, turning up his walks, pruning his trees, clearing his flowers of caterpillars, watering his borders, with great drops of sweat pouring down, bending over his labour like a negro under ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... beautiful; he said he did so because the colours of their petals were not sharply defined, and that they would spoil the seed of the others. Thus I learnt to know the good and the bad—how to lay carnations, and how to distinguish between the leaf and fruit buds in pruning fruit trees; this kind of knowledge was of no practical use, for, as my after-life was spent in towns, I never had a garden, to my ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville
... form of long shears used in arboriculture for "averruncating" or pruning off the higher branches of trees, &c. The word "averruncate" (from Lat. averruncare, to ward off, remove mischief) glided into meaning to "weed the ground," "prune vines," &c., by a supposed derivation from the Lat. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... his prime, Ere the pruning-knife of Time Cut him down, Not a better man was found By the crier on his ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... sorrows, and losses of our lives are parts of our Father's husbandry, ought to silence every question, quiet every fear, and give peace and restful assurance to our hearts in all their pain. We cannot know the reason for the painful strokes, but we know that he who holds the pruning-knife is our Father. That ought always to be enough for us ...
— Making the Most of Life • J. R. Miller
... country of the Mogul. The present narrative is said, in its title in the Pilgrims, to have been written to the company, and evidently appears to have been penned by Hawkins himself, without any semblance of having been subjected to the rude pruning knife of Purchas; except omitting so much of the journal as related to occurrences before landing at Surat. Purchas gives the following account of it in ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. VIII. • Robert Kerr
... He confined himself to men of substantial consideration, and generally took care to be himself the cleverest person present; while he turned the conversation on serious matters crammed for the occasion—politics, stocks, commerce, and the criminal code. Pruning his gaiety, though he retained his frankness, he sought to be known as a highly-informed, painstaking man, who would be sure to rise. His connections, and a certain nameless charm about him, consisting chiefly in a pleasant countenance, ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the sunny side of the house; the auctioneer, at the window, was selling pots and candles and pruning-shears and kitchen chairs. Felicia felt somehow curiously aloof, and almost like an intruder, in this crowd of people, all of whom had known each other for long years in Asquam. They shouted pleasantries across intervening ...
— The Happy Venture • Edith Ballinger Price
... gardeners to force the Rose Tree into an unnatural way, curtailing all the energies of her nature. What could be more outrageous, for example, than to see one rose growing in the shape of a bush on the top of the stem of another? "Think of all the pruning necessary," cried he, "to keep the poor thing in the round shape so much admired! And what is the matter with the beautiful straggling branches, that they are to be cut off as fast as they appear? Why not allow the ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... Architect acting as chief director. In a very short time, the children acquired a kind of character. It was found easy to mold them into what was desired; and they went through their work not without a sort of manoeuvre. As they marched along, with their garden shears, their long-handled pruning-knives, their rakes, their little spades and hoes, and sweeping-brooms; others following after these with baskets to carry off the stones and rubbish; and others, last of all, trailing along the heavy iron roller—it was a thoroughly pretty, delightful procession. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... and as the States were impoverished by the late war, and the people generally detested war, a long peace of forty years (with a short interval of a year) was secured to Germany, during which prosperity returned and the population nearly doubled. The Germans turned their swords into pruning-hooks, and all kinds of industry were developed, especially manufactures. The cities were adorned with magnificent works of art, and libraries, schools, and universities covered the land. No nation ever made a more signal progress in material prosperity than did the German ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume X • John Lord
... from the garden below seemed a primrose whiff from the lane behind his father's house. He could hear the cocks crowing in Surrey, and the lowing of the kine. There was a robin singing in a bush under the window, and there was some one in the garden with a pair of pruning-shears. Snip-snip! snip-snip! he heard them going. The light in the east was pink as a peach-bloom and too ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... ornamental gate, encloses a front yard in which are some forlorn-looking shrubs, a rosebush or two, and a couple of scraggy altheas. Workmen had been about the place for some time, putting everything in order, and of course we took the liveliest interest in all that went on, from the pruning of the shrubs to the carrying in of the furniture; and the day the new people moved in, Miss Marston could hardly keep us younger ones from the windows: indeed, for that matter, Nora was just as ...
— We Ten - Or, The Story of the Roses • Lyda Farrington Kraus
... vegetable kingdom. He who sits under the shade of his own vine and fig-tree (or even those which are leased or rented) will find the shade and the fruit of his vine and his tree greatly increased by judicious and seasonable pruning. The theories of Science and the practice of horticulturists have made this fact so potent that it is needless to enlarge upon it now. But Science stops here. What she has given the world, in respect to this important subject, is ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 35, November 26, 1870 • Various
... she lay down her pen in the midst of some work requiring the whole energy of her mind, and much concentration of thought, and go to her garden for half an hour; and while apparently wholly absorbed in pruning or transplanting, she was really engaged in her work; and the apparent loss of time was amply repaid by the rapidity with which she wrote out the ideas conceived and matured during this healthful recreation. A word, however, spoken to her at such times, would have caused a most painful interruption ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth
... morning had brought everybody around the fire. Thompson was pruning and cleansing his nails; the Kentuckian was cutting a fresh "chunk" from his plug of "James's River;" the doctor had just returned from the stream, where he had refreshed himself by a "nip" from his pewter flask; Besancon was packing up his portfolios; the ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... disclosed by one of his own opinions. Corrupted ere yet he had left his home, whilst in age a boy, there is, however, the comfort of reflecting that he outlived his vices. Fox, with a green apron tied around his waist, pruning and nailing up his fruit-trees at St. Ann's Hill, or amusing himself innocently with a few friends, is a pleasing object to remember, even whilst his early career ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson
... parental duties, without endeavoring to ascertain the will of God and the requirements of his law, expect that the blessing of obedient and sanctified children will crown their days. Let not those who suffer their children to grow up around them like weeds, without religious culture or pruning, who demand no obedience, who command no reverence, who offer no earnest, ceaseless prayer, let them not suppose that the blessing of the God who spoke from Horeb will come upon their families. "He is in one mind and who ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... from helping in the more onerous tasks, but he followed Lubin about indefatigably, watching everything he did with eager vigilance, whether he was planting ranunculuses and anemones, or clipping hedges, or trimming evergreens; while he himself was fain to be content with pruning and budding, and directing how the plants should be most fitly set. He said he wanted the show of flowers next year to be a triumph of gardencraft. The garden was a sort of holy of holies to him, and he ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... expenditures for the military and naval establishments should be kept at about $2,500,000—somewhat below the normal appropriation before the recent war-flurry; and that wherever possible expenses should be reduced by careful pruning of the list of employees at the navy yards. Such was the programme of humdrum economy which President Jefferson laid before Congress. After the exciting campaign of 1800, when the public was assured that the forces of Darkness and Light were ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... observes, "such a composed gait, not a step awry?" Why are they like so many Sybarites, or Nero's Poppaea, Ahasuerus' concubines, so costly, so long a dressing, as Caesar was marshalling his army, or a hawk in pruning? [5002]Dum moliuntur, dum comuntur annus est: a [5003]gardener takes not so much delight and pains in his garden, a horseman to dress his horse, scour his armour, a mariner about his ship, a merchant his shop ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... children of the soil," said Balafre, drawing up his gigantic height. "Thus says King Louis 'My good French peasant—mine honest Jacques Bonhomme, get you to your tools, your plough and your harrow, your pruning knife and your hoe—here is my gallant Scot that will fight for you, and you shall only have the trouble to pay him. And you, my most serene duke, my illustrious count, and my most mighty marquis, e'en rein up your fiery courage till it is wanted, for it is apt to start out of ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... of happy days in the grey vista of a life; away in the cliffs yonder, the rock-doves were preparing to nest by hundreds, and waking the silence with their cooing and the flutter of their wings. Even the grim old eagle perched on the pinnacle of the peak was pruning himself, contentedly happy in the knowledge that his mate had laid an egg in that dark corner of the cliff. All things rejoiced and cried aloud that summer was at hand and that it was time to bloom and love and nest. Soon it would be winter again, when things ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... time frustrated every serious endeavour to bring about the better state of things which they expect from—what? From "things as they are!" As well expect grapes from thorns, or figs from thistles. While the tree remains the same, no amount of weeding, or pruning, or manuring, or change of culture, will make it bring forth different fruit. Mr. Dicey, among others, has demolished what Lord Beaconsfield used to call the "bit-by-bit" reformers of Irish Government—those who would administer homoeopathic doses of local self-government, ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... places, where there are Laurels grow wild, without Cutting or pruning, I mean, the Lauro-Cerasus, as we find in many old Gardens, that Plant is apt to bear Berries, which in reality are Cherries, from whence it has its Name; these Berries, or Cherries, are ripe about this time, and make a fine Cordial, if we infuse them in Brandy for two ...
— The Country Housewife and Lady's Director - In the Management of a House, and the Delights and Profits of a Farm • Richard Bradley
... nothing, I feed the sparrows with hemp-seed and prune a rose-tree a day. After my pruning, the roses flower magnificently. I am not looking after ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... will be blackberries—Burbank's, he lives at Santa Rosa—Loganberries, Mammoth berries. But don't fool with strawberries. That's a whole occupation in itself. They're not vines, you know. I've examined the orchard. It's a good foundation. We'll settle the pruning and grafts later." ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... this city, were taken away to adorn the town hall, churches, capitals and libraries. Of this collection, (of which no inconsiderable portion, both for number and intrinsic value, came from the neighbouring monastery of Eichstadt,[32]) there has of course been a pruning; and many flowers have been transplanted to Munich. Yet there are graphic treasures in Augsbourg well deserving the diligent search and critical examination of the English Antiquary. The church of the Recollets has an organ which is considered among the noblest ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... still inclining to green, and are spread out on mats in the sun to dry, when in three days they become black, just as brought to us. The fruitfulness of these plants proceeds entirely from the goodness of the soil in which they grow, as they do not require pruning or lopping like vines with us. This region also produces ginger, some roots weighing twelve ounces, though they do not penetrate the ground above three or four spans. When the roots are dug up, the uppermost joint is again set in the ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... first-class raisin land that is within ten miles of any large place. It costs $75 an acre to get a raisin vineyard into bearing. In the third year the vines pay for cultivation, and from that time on the ratio of increase is very large. Much of the work of pruning, picking, and curing grapes is light, and may be done by women and children. The only heavy labor about the vineyard is the plowing and cultivating. Fresno is a hot place in the summer, the mercury running up to 110 degrees in the shade, but this is a dry heat, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 829, November 21, 1891 • Various
... over which he was now passing, he observed, had been planted in winter wheat, and that just beyond, at the edge of the meadow, was the young orchard well grown and badly in need of pruning. The route he had taken soon brought him out into the lane at the foot of the hill, near the cider mill, where he stopped to drink of the cool sap that flowed into a large tin pail, from one of the ...
— Hidden Treasure • John Thomas Simpson
... shook herself, feeling that the young tree of her experience, unrestrainedly shooting out in all directions within the space of a few hours, would require the sharp edge of the pruning knife if it was to be kept to the merest outline of the shape common to the ordinary life she had led up ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... deal to do to it yet—revising and pruning and so forth," he said, "but in the main it's done. I wrote the last sentence this morning. If I can find a publisher for it it will probably be out next summer ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... in a carved chair, warming his bare feet at a blazing fire. Generally, when he is thus represented, there is a pot hung over the fire, from the top of the chimney. Sometimes he is pruning ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... coin;[257] but his great art lies in the application of existing materials, in converting the very disadvantages of the language into beauties,[258] in enriching it with circumlocutions and metaphors, in pruning it of harsh and uncouth expressions, in systematizing the structure of a sentence.[259] This is that copia dicendi which gained Cicero the high testimony of Caesar to his inventive powers,[260] and which, ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... temperament was ready to crop out on the slightest encouragement afforded to it. During his best period he had a mentor at his elbow in Charles Lemesle, who always read what he wrote before it went to the printer; and Balzac, though vain, was too intelligent not to avail himself of this friend's pruning. Under the new regime the revising was impossible, and, as a result, that difficult perfection which he had so perseveringly sought was destined to be attained but rarely in the rest of ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... plant them earlier? I don't believe you know any of the tricks of your profession, James. You never seem to graft anything or prune anything, and I'm sure you don't know how to cut a slip. James, why don't you prune more? Prune now—I should like to watch you. Where's your pruning-hook? You can't possibly do ...
— Happy Days • Alan Alexander Milne
... which enlivened with its verdure the trees and hedges on the road we passed, and the meadows already smiled with flowers. The cheerful inhabitants were busy in adjusting their limits, lopping their trees, pruning their vines, tilling their fields: but when we entered Savoy, nature wore a very different face; and I must own, that my spirits were great sufferers by the change. Here we began to view on the nearer mountains, covered ...
— The History of Sir Charles Grandison, Volume 4 (of 7) • Samuel Richardson
... and inlaid with brass. At the bottom are great deep drawers, pulled open with brass rings ornamented with dogs' heads. In these drawers are kept cow-drenches—bottles of oils for the wounds which cattle sometimes get from nails or kicks; dog-whips and pruning-knives; a shot-belt and powder-flask; an old horse-pistol; a dozen odd stones or fossils picked up upon the farm and kept as curiosities; twenty or thirty old almanacs, and a file of the county paper for forty years; and a hundred similar odds and ends. Above the drawers ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies
... pursue this controversy any further. "The Christian is enabled," you say, "to hope for existence with God in an eternal state, and this is as much as our present welfare requires." Most excellent! To this proposition I cherfully assent. Yea, I would consent even to pruning it a little, which no doubt would spoil it in your view. Instead of 'this is as much as,' read, 'even this is more than,' and your proposition would stand exactly right. ...
— A Series of Letters In Defence of Divine Revelation • Hosea Ballou
... the last generation, gave birth to the neology, now so destructive of the internal peace of the churches. Neology has not come from Deism, for this power assails the outworks of Christianity; while the school of criticism is but a severe pruning knife of internal verbiage. Although the language quoted is harsh, the arguments common-place, which, although true, are now discarded by the educated Freethinker; yet if for no stronger language than this men were ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... Mr. Huneker has told of him that "he would annotate three hundred volumes for a page of facts.... In twenty pages he sometimes saved three or four from destruction," and, in the course of twenty-six years' polishing and pruning of The Temptation of Saint Anthony, he reduced his original manuscript of 540 pages down to 136, even reducing it still further after ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... praying at the bush I have spoken of, for the shade of the dead man appeared there at times. The bush remains to this day: once portion of a hedge, it now stands by itself, for no one dare put spade or pruning-knife about it. As to the strange sounds and voices, they did not cease till a few years ago, when, during some repairs, a snipe flew out of the solid plaster and away; the troubled ghost, say the neighbours, of the note-finder ...
— The Celtic Twilight • W. B. Yeats
... the knife he had brought. It was the big pruning-knife out of the drawer in the hall. He pulled it out. He would cut away some of the furze branches. Perhaps Dickie was lying bound, hidden in the middle of the ...
— Harding's luck • E. [Edith] Nesbit
... intruders, I got a glimpse of that man through the heavy iron gate. He was smooth-shaven, slightly drooped, sprinkled with gray and with a scar upon his forehead near the roots of his hair—a little to one side. He was twirling a pruning knife in his left hand and speaking in English to a boy who scampered up to him ahead of four beautiful girls and a very dignified woman moving leisurely over the lawn in the ...
— Rescuing the Czar - Two authentic Diaries arranged and translated • James P. Smythe
... wine; we drank. I showed them my book, and as my pencil needed sharpening the large man lent me his knife for courtesy. When I got it in my hand I saw plainly that it was no knife for stabbing with; it was a pruning-knife, and would have bit the hand that cherished it (as they say of serpents). On the other hand, it would have been a good knife for ripping, and passable at a slash. You must not expect too much ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... mutable and ill-fated Belfield. Erring, yet ingenious young man! what a lesson to the vanity of talents, to the gaiety, the brilliancy of wit, is the sight of that green fallen plant! not sapless by age, nor withered by disease, but destroyed by want of pruning, and bending, breaking ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... Boots informed us pleasantly, that he came to know all about it by reason of his being in his then capacity as Mr. Wahners' under-gardener, always about in the summer time, near the windows, on the lawn "a-mowing and sweeping, and weeding and pruning, and this and that"—with his eyes and ears open, of course, we may presume, in a ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... not, however, forget the good done by insects. They undoubtedly tend by their attacks to prevent an undue growth of vegetation. The pruning done to a tree or herb by certain insects undoubtedly causes a more healthy growth of the branches and leaves, and ultimately a greater production fruit. Again, as pollen-bearers, insects are a most powerful agency in nature. It is undoubtedly the fact that the ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... into over-positive refinements of literary criticism. Separate shorter poems there doubtless existed narrating separate episodes of the story, but these are no longer to be arrived at by a process of critical disintegration and pruning of the epic as we have it. An examination of the twenty lieder according to Lachmann's division convinces us that they are not separate units in the sense he conceived them to be. Though these twenty lieder may be based ...
— The Nibelungenlied - Translated into Rhymed English Verse in the Metre of the Original • trans. by George Henry Needler
... vine-growers; and it needed some courage to go among them. At the moment when he showed himself at the hotel-de-ville, a man from the faubourg de Rome slung a "volant" round his neck (the "volant" is a huge pruning-hook fastened to a pole, with which they trim trees) crying out, "No more clerks, or there's an end to compromise!" The fellow would have taken off that honored head, left untouched by sixteen years of war, had it not been for the hasty intervention of one of the leaders of the revolt, to ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... plums almost for nothing; but by far the best is the passion-fruit. Neither vegetables nor fruit, as sold in the markets and shops, are as good as those you buy in England. The inferior quality is due to the grow-as-you-please manner in which the fruit is cultivated, pruning and even the most ordinary care being neglected; but you can get as fine-flavoured fruit here as anywhere, and to taste grapes in perfection you ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... to know how charcoal was made. Sumichrast led him close to a recently-felled oak, the small branches of which an Indian was cutting into pieces two or three inches long, by means of an instrument something like an enormous pruning-knife. A little farther, on the open ground, two men were collecting these pieces of wood in circular rows. This pile was already seven feet in circumference, and about the same in height, although it was not half finished. Lucien could easily see this when ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... slippers of the same for holidays, and a suit of the best homespun, in which he adorned himself on week-days. His family consisted of a housekeeper above forty, a niece not quite twenty, and a lad who served him both in the field and at home, who could saddle the horse or handle the pruning-hook. The age of our gentleman bordered upon fifty years: he was of a strong constitution, spare-bodied, of a meagre visage, a very early riser, and a lover of the chase. Some pretend to say that his surname was Quixada or Quesada, for on this point ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... caught up his hat and began to descend his thirteen steps cautiously, noiselessly, like a cat. He had still the most important thing to do—to steal the axe from the kitchen. That the deed must be done with an axe he had decided long ago. He had also a pocket pruning-knife, but he could not rely on the knife and still less on his own strength, and so resolved finally on the axe. We may note in passing, one peculiarity in regard to all the final resolutions taken by him in the matter; they had one strange characteristic: the more final they ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... the description of varieties. Acknowledgments are due to F. Z. Hartzell for reading the chapter on Grape Pests and their Control and for furnishing most of the photographs used in making illustrations of insects and fungi; to F. E. Gladwin for similar help in preparing the two chapters on pruning and training the grape in eastern America; to Frederic T. Bioletti for permission to republish from a bulletin written by him from the Agricultural Experiment Station of California almost the whole chapter on Grape Pruning ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick
... of a smith, but I can blow the bellows like hooray, and when the time comes, as it says in the Bible, I'll make the fire roar while some one hammers all the swords and spears into plough-shares and pruning-hooks, and cuts all the gun-barrels up into pipes. That's ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... the materials of poetry, but he was hardly a great poet. He improved his Pleasures of the Imagination in the subsequent editions, by pruning away a great many redundances of style and ornament. Armstrong is better, though he has not chosen a very exhilarating subject—The Art of Preserving Health. Churchill's Satires on the Scotch, and Characters of the Players, are as good ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... even hear the humble symphony of the hundreds of bees drawing their treasure from the golden hearts of the roses; and did not see, across the path a score of yards away, the tall figure of Joe Ellison among the rosebushes, pruning-shears in hand, with which he had been cutting out dead blossoms, gazing at her with that hungry, admiring, speculative look with which he had regarded the young ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... went back to Fernley House, the beloved home where she lived with her uncle John Montfort: to the rose-garden, where they loved to work together, the sunny lawns, the shady alleys of box and laurel, the arbors of honeysuckle and grape-vine. She could almost see the beloved uncle, pruning-knife in hand, bending over his roses; if only he did not cut back the Ramblers too far! She could almost see her little cousins, her children, as she called them, Basil and Susan D., running about with their butterfly-nets, shouting and calling to each other. Did they think of her, ...
— The Merryweathers • Laura E. Richards
... year, of course, we hold a Peace Sunday and on that day we pray mightily that God will give us peace in our time and that war shall be no more, and the spear shall be beaten into the pruning hook. But the next day we show God that he need not take us too literally, for we go on with the military training, and the building of the battleships, and our orators say that in time of peace we must ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... to success, when there isn't any such thing, and neglecting the hard work which has brought honor and success to all who have reached a high place? If you are doing any of these things, get out the pruning hook of good resolution and the sharp ax of determination. Trim off all these useless things. Gather them in a heap and burn them. Then, in the years to come, will you find that you have been able to be of use to the world and to yourself. But you ...
— Crayon and Character: Truth Made Clear Through Eye and Ear - Or, Ten-Minute Talks with Colored Chalks • B.J. Griswold
... nor encourage war, when the property destroyed is their own and not to be replaced. When wars are no longer the usurer's opportunity, but the consumption of his wealth, Mammon himself will beg that swords may be beaten into plow-shares and spears into pruning-hooks. ...
— Usury - A Scriptural, Ethical and Economic View • Calvin Elliott
... is, however, the comfort of reflecting that he outlived his vices which seem to have "cropped out" by his ancestral connection in the female line with the reprobate Charles II., whom he was thought to resemble in features. Fox, afterwards, with a green apron tied round his waist, pruning and nailing up his fruit trees at St Ann's Hill, or amusing himself innocently with a few friends, is a pleasing object to remember, even whilst his early career occurs forcibly ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... masses of his picture, which we will suppose partly prepared. When this form is set down, he assuredly finds it has done something he did not intend it to do. It has mimicked some prominent line, or overpowered some necessary mass. He begins pruning and changing, and after several experiments, succeeds in obtaining a form which does no material mischief to any other. To this form he proceeds to attach a trunk, and having probably a received notion or rule (for the unimaginative ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... "I know what I carry under my belt; we have more time than money, and he who has time has life." So saying, he got up, and sticking a pruning-knife in his belt and taking the plant, he went his way to the dragon's cave, which was under a mountain of such goodly growth, that the three mountains that were steps to the Giants would not have reached up to its waist. When he came there, he threw the plant into the cave, and instantly ...
— Stories from Pentamerone • Giambattista Basile
... of "thinning and pruning" in plantations planters—like doctors—differ. An amusing story was sent to Mr. Loudon by the Duke of Bedford, in reference to his grandfather, who was an advocate for vigorous ...
— Miscellanea • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... his prime, Ere the pruning-knife of time Cut him down, Not a better man was found By the Crier on his round ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... entered the large and beautifully-kept greenhouse, Hutchinson came from the further end of it to meet them an old man, of most respectable appearance. He bowed very civilly, and then slipped his pruning-knife into his left hand, to leave the right at liberty for John, who ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell
... the Latin goddess of plenty. Single parts of her province were taken over by various other divinities, among whom was Pomona (pomorum patrona, "she who cares for fruits"). She is represented as a maiden with fruit in her arms and a pruning-knife in ...
— The Book of Hallowe'en • Ruth Edna Kelley
... Christian, so that every free line, every vigorous pose or energetic action, was forging ahead into a new country, a voyage of adventure for the daring artist. Quite another affair was this from modern restraint which consists in pruning down the voluptuous lines following ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... justice. By thee, rid of their native rudeness, their minds and tongues being polished, the thorns of vice being torn up by the roots, those men attain high places of honour, and become fathers of their country, and companions of princes, who without thee would have melted their spears into pruning-hooks and ploughshares, or would perhaps be feeding swine ...
— The Philobiblon of Richard de Bury • Richard de Bury
... immediately set about preparing feasts under the tree upon which it grows; at the same time, in the most solemn manner, two white bulls are brought forth to be sacrificed. After the feast has been prepared and the sacrifice made ready, the priest ascends the tree and with a golden pruning-knife cuts the sacred branches of the mistletoe, dropping them into a white cloth prepared for the occasion. The bulls are then sacrificed and a prayer offered that "God would render his own gift prosperous to those on whom he has bestowed it." They believed that ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... happy picture, I behold the native Indian exulting in the works of peace and civilization; his bloody hatchet he buries deep under ground, and his murderous knife he turns into a pruning fork, to lop the tender vine and teach the luxuriant shoot to grow. No more does he form to himself a heaven after death (according to the poet), in company with his faithful dog, behind the cloud-topped ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... Sweating he walks, while loads of golden grain O'ercharge the shoulders of the seeming swain: Oft o'er his back a crooked scythe is laid, And wreaths of hay his sunburnt temples shade: Oft in his harden'd hand a goad he bears, Like one who late unyoked the sweating steers: Sometimes his pruning-hook corrects the vines, And the loose stragglers to their ranks confines: Now gathering what the bounteous year allows, He pulls ripe apples from the bending boughs: 40 A soldier now, he with his sword appears; A fisher next, his trembling angle ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... dealing with your little "olive plants," "let patience have her perfect work," and of a truth you shall "be perfect and entire wanting nothing." Much of redeeming grace is needed to enable the parent to be calm and kind under the many trying circumstances connected with the pruning and training of the "fruit of the womb." It is a source of great joy, however, to know that God's grace ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr
... her face wrinkling all up with fun; "but I have enough for that. I have learned so much. And pruning is very pretty work. This is not ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... all fruitbearing plants on earth there is none that produces fruit so full of spirit, from which spirit can be so abundantly distilled, as the vine. And of all fruitbearing plants there is none that is so ready to run into wild wood, and for which pruning and cleansing are so indispensable. The one great work that a vinedresser has to do for the branch every year is to prune it. Other plants can for a time dispense with it, and yet bear fruit: the vine must have it. And so the one thing the branch that desires to abide in Christ and ...
— The Ministry of Intercession - A Plea for More Prayer • Andrew Murray
... following him like his dog or his cow, wherever he goes! His homestead is not planted till you are planted; your roots intertwine with his; thriving best where he thrives best, loving the limestone and the frost, the plow and the pruning knife, you are indeed suggestive of hardy, cheerful industry, and a healthy life in ...
— The New McGuffey Fourth Reader • William H. McGuffey
... in other unevangelized countries, women spend their days in out-door labor. They weed the cotton, and assist in pruning the vines and gathering the grapes. They go forth in the morning, bearing not only their implements of husbandry, but also their babes in the cradle; and returning in the evening, they prepare their husband's supper, and set it before him, but never think of eating ...
— Woman And Her Saviour In Persia • A Returned Missionary
... or subdue; nor will it be by patience of others' suffering, but by the offering of your own, that you ever will draw nearer to the time when the great change shall pass upon the iron of the earth;—when men shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks; neither shall ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... woman,"—he said, with his most magisterial air—"if you will kindly manage your own business, which is that of pruning the olive and uprooting the vine, and leave me to manage my establishment as the reversible movement of the age requires, it will be better for the equanimity ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... rapid and luxurious growers, and it is necessary to pay them constant attention in pruning or nipping the extremities of the shoots, or they will soon become ill-formed and straggling. This is particularly requisite during the rains, when heat and moisture combine to increase their growth to excess; allowing them to enjoy the full influence of the sun during the ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... shareholder, the parasitic speculator and the wretched multitudes of the Abyss. The New Republicans will constitute an informal and open freemasonry. In all sorts of ways they will be influencing and controlling the apparatus of the ostensible governments, they will be pruning irresponsible property, checking speculators and controlling the abyssward drift, but at that, at an indirect control, at any sort of fiction, the New Republic, from the very nature of its cardinal ideas, will not rest. The clearest ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... diminishing the force of what has been written. An article or two from the daily paper, and an occasional page from some recent work of fiction will afford further opportunity for profitable practice in pruning. ...
— Slips of Speech • John H. Bechtel
... had the cow for its centre of interest, mine had the Delaware grape. And Father made a success of his vineyards. I can see him now summer pruning, he on one side of the row, I on the other, "pulling down" as we called the summer pruning, or he was stamping lids or tying up bundles of baskets. Many of the lids had sawdust on them which had to be blown or brushed off before they could be ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... no waste, no burden is too much In the most bitter strife; Beneath the direst buffet is His touch, Who holds the pruning knife. We are redeemed through sorrow, and the thorn That pierces is His kiss, As through the grave of grief we are re-born And out of the abyss. The blood of nations is the precious seed Wherewith He plants our gates And ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... where no trial is. They can glorify God only with the crown; you can glorify Him with the cross and the prospect of the crown together! Ah, if He be dealing severely with you—if He, as the great Husbandman, be pruning His vines, lopping their boughs, stripping off their luxuriant branches and "beautiful rods!" remember the end!—"He purgeth it, that it may bring forth more fruit," and ...
— The Words of Jesus • John R. Macduff
... the purpose of getting out an early edition of spring chickens that I am averse to. It is the aged hen, who is in her dotage, and whose eggs, also, are in their second childhood. Upon this hen I shower my anathemas. Overlooked by the pruning hook of time, shallow in her remarks, and a wall-flower in society, she deposits her quota of eggs in the catnip conservatory, far from the haunts of men, and then in August, when eggs are extremely low and her collection of no value to any one but the antiquarian, she proudly ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... the Constituent Assembly, the mission of M. and Madame Roland having terminated, they quitted Paris. This woman, who had just left the centre of faction and business, returned to La Platiere to resume the cares of her rustic household and the pruning of her vines. But she had quaffed of the intoxicating cup of the Revolution. The movement in which she had participated for a moment impelled her still, though at a distance. She carried on a correspondence with Robespierre and Buzot; political and formal ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... princes in Christendom, and that valuable member of society is himself, Gulielmus Temple, Baronettus. One sees him in his retreat; between his study-chair and his tulip-beds, clipping his apricots and pruning his essays,—the statesman, the ambassador no more; but the philosopher, the Epicurean, the fine gentleman and courtier at St. James's as at Shene; where in place of kings and fair ladies, he pays his court to the Ciceronian majesty; or walks a minuet ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... delightfully clear exposition of cacao cultivation which he gave to the native farmers and chiefs of the Gold Coast in 1906, said: "In pruning, it is necessary always to bear in mind that the best shape for cacao trees is that of an enlarged open umbrella," with a height under the umbrella not exceeding seven feet. With this ideal in his mind, the planter should train up the tree in the way it should go. Viscount Mountmorres ...
— Cocoa and Chocolate - Their History from Plantation to Consumer • Arthur W. Knapp
... oasis to be given over to Sicilian cultivators. Apart from the fact that the wealthy Kaid of Gafsa, who is the chief owner of it, would have something to say on the subject, these advantages would be limited to pruning the trees and grafting some of them; introducing, possibly, a few more vegetables, and having the ground more parsimoniously tended than at present. The magnesia in the water is hostile to the majority of delicate European growths. Something, ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... love, that is not only seen in its wish and struggle to quicken all with the warm throb of happy life, but is also clearly manifested in the lingering over its creations with clinging fondness, 'hating nothing that it maketh,' pruning, elaborating, and laboring to gift with beauty the works of its patient hands, finishing every line in love, that it too may feel its creations to be 'good.' For Love not only gives wings, but also vital heat and life, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... 12o. which was Queen Elizabeth's own book, and her own hand writing appears at the beginning, viz.: "August. I walke many times into the pleasant fieldes of the Holy Scriptures, where I plucke up the goodliesome herbes of sentences by pruning: eate them by reading: chawe them by musing: and laie them up at length in the hie seate of memorie by gathering them together: that so having tasted their sweetenes I may the lesse perceave the bitterness of this miserable life." The covering is done in needle work ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... old passion rising;—that passion which in times gone by had drawn us from our sleep at dawn, and scissors and pruning knife in hand, how many happy hours had H. and I thus spent; he at his fruit trees, I at my flower beds, cutting, trimming, scraping, clipping; inwardly conscious of other duties neglected, but held as though fascinated by the ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard
... acquired taste with them, they had learned to eat the fruit for love of their friend, and since he has gone they have not eaten the chicken roast nor the fruit, and it seems to them that they should have eaten of these things in memory of him. In the Spring they come upon his pruning-knife, and discourse sadly on the changes he would have advised. Spring opens into summer, and when summer drops into the autumn Kilcarney's black passes into grey; he appears one morning in a violet tie, and the tie, picked out of a drawer with indifferent hand, causes Violet to doubt her husband's ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... "what there is of it." And then she laughed a little. "That miserable O'mie came up here the day after we went to Red Range and persuaded mother to cut it all down except one straight stick of a bush. He told her it was dying, and that it needed pruning, and I don't know what. And you know mother. I was over at the Anderson's, and when I came home the whole clump was gone. I dreamed the other night that somebody was hiding in there. It was all dead in the middle. Do you remember when we played ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... exercise their elaborate and often tiresome ingenuity. Binding down an heroic or dramatic poet to the block upon which they have previously dissected his words and sentences, they proceed to use the axe and the pruning knife by wholesale, and inconsistent in everything but their wish to make out a case of unlawful affiliation, they cut out book after book, passage after passage, till the author is reduced to a collection of fragments, or till those, who fancied they possessed the works ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... pruning either in the field or the garden beyond the cutting out of the old canes and the shortening in of the new growth. There is a difference of opinion as to whether the old canes should be cut out immediately ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... gave it some hemp-seed and corn and watched it pruning its feathers as it glanced warily at its new home and its new mistress. On the following morning, just as day was breaking, the Patin woman distinctly heard a loud, deep, roaring voice calling: "Are you ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... just dreadful! I hope there will never be a war where such terrible guns will be used—never any more at all; but that very soon, as the Bible says, the people 'shall beat their swords into plough-shares, and their spears into pruning-hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they ...
— Elsie at the World's Fair • Martha Finley
... Apricot seems to have been grown as a standard; I gather this from the description in Nos. 2 (see the entire passage s.v. "Pruning" in Part II.) and 3, and from the following ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... object. Fruit, grain, pulse, herbs, flax, and other vegetable products, receiving assiduous attention, will afford ample manual occupation, and chaste supplies for the bodily needs. It is intended to adorn the pastures with orchards, and to supersede the labor of cattle by the spade and the pruning-knife. ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... small Gothic temple overshadowed by wide-spreading oaks, which, sheltered by the surrounding hills, had numbered more than a century of unscathed and undiminished beauty, and had as yet escaped the rude pruning of the woodman's axe. The morning habit of the noble Constance fitted tightly to the throat, where it was terminated by a full ruff of starched muslin, and the waist was encircled by a wide band of black crape, from which the ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... in her very duties to herself—in the kitchen, the garden or the, field, she will have ample opportunity of descanting on the beauties and glories of the animal and vegetable world, and on the wonders of the starry heavens. In pruning, and watering, and weeding the vines and plants, she may drink in as much as she pleases of the living green, as well as feast her eyes, anon, on the blue expanse; and in her walks of charity and mercy, whether alone or in company with others, she may also receive the nectar ...
— The Young Woman's Guide • William A. Alcott
... Malcom had brought her a pair of pruning nippers, such as she had seen him use, and she kept up a delicate show of work, trimming the rose-bushes and shrubs, while she watched him. She could not bring her mind to anything that looked like real work as yet, ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... This is nothing. There stands a neophite glazing of his face, Pruning his clothes, perfuming of his hair, Against his idol enters; and repeats, Like an unperfect prologue, at third music, His part of speeches, and confederate jests, In passion to himself. Another swears His scene of courtship over; ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... off upon his welcome mission. The round-eyed sisters saw yellow horse and twinkling man sweep round the skirt of the wood, caught a last glimmer of him through the tree-trunks, and paced slowly back to their pruning and their planting, their minds filled with the beauty and the terror of that outer world beyond ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... up with sauce, here or at Sans Souci, what you may perhaps whisper to Charlotte[17] or Annie in the boscages or the bathing-house. Forgive me for being so admonitory, but after your last letter I have to take the diplomatic pruning-knife in hand a bit. Do not write me anything that the police may not read and communicate to King, ministers, or Rochow. If the Austrians and many other folks can succeed in sowing distrust in our camp, they will thereby attain one of the principal objects of their letter-pilfering. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... a letter from Spedding, the editor of Bacon, printed in the Life of Huxley, ii, 239. Spedding, his senior by a score of years, describes the influence of Bacon on his own style in the matter of exactitude, the pruning of fine epithets and sweeping statements, the reduction of numberless superlatives to positives, and asserts that if, as a young man, he had fallen in with Huxley's writings before Bacon's, they would have produced the same effect ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... discovered afterwards that there was another reason, viz., that it was unlucky to break off even a small twig from a bourtree bush. In some parts of the Continent this superstitious feeling is so strong that, before pruning it, the gardener says—"Elder, elder, may I cut thy branches?" If no response be heard, it is considered that assent has been given, and then, after spitting three times, the pruner begins his cutting. According to ...
— Folk Lore - Superstitious Beliefs in the West of Scotland within This Century • James Napier |
