"Birch" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... day of July Sylvia found a little birch bark boat full of strawberries at the beech in the hollow. They were the earliest of the season; the Old Lady had found them in one of her secret haunts. They would have been a toothsome addition to the Old Lady's own slender bill of fare; but she never thought of eating them. ...
— Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... eyes look from the thicket, Saw two nostrils point to windward, And a deer came down the pathway, Flecked with leafy light and shadow. 205 And his heart within him fluttered, Trembled like the leaves above him, Like the birch-leaf palpitated, As the deer came down the pathway. Then, upon one knee uprising, 210 Hiawatha aimed an arrow; Scarce a twig moved with his motion, Scarce a leaf was stirred or rustled, But the wary roebuck ...
— The Song of Hiawatha - An Epic Poem • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... gate, and all the family went out to inspect the articles of their own manufacture, which the Indians humbly offered for sale. These consisted of baskets ornamented with porcupine quills, moccasins of deer-skin, and boxes of birch bark. Mrs. Lee's and Aunt Abby's heart bled for the way-worn looking mothers and their patient babes; they relieved their feelings, however, by making them eat as much as they would. Uncle John and Tom were glad to buy some of the ...
— The Young Emigrants; Madelaine Tube; The Boy and the Book; and - Crystal Palace • Susan Anne Livingston Ridley Sedgwick
... pleasant springs on a hillside, bubbling forth among the first trees we had seen since we left the Laramie. Then we descended into a fine shady valley: all our old friends were there in thickets—the box-elder, willow, birch and cottonwood, the alder, osier and wild cherry, currant, gooseberry, buffalo-berry and clematis. As we went on, brushing through the thick foliage, the hills on either side became higher, and grew into bastions, castles, donjon-keeps and fantastic clustered chimneys, like Scott's description ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... and where what ought to be put clearly is presented in a confused and intricate way as if it were a collection of puzzles." The poor boys, he declared, were almost frightened to death. They needed skins of tin; they were beaten with fists, with canes and with birch-rods till the blood streamed forth; they were covered with scars, stripes, spots and weals; and thus they had learned to hate the schools and all that was ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... was reddening before sunrise, we had slipped swiftly through still-sleeping Vienna, leaving it a couple of hours later a mere patch of smoke against the blue hills of the Wienerwald on the horizon; we had breakfasted below Fischeramend under a grove of birch trees roaring in the wind; and had then swept on the tearing current past Orth, Hainburg, Petronell (the old Roman Carnuntum of Marcus Aurelius), and so under the frowning heights of Thelsen on a spur of the Carpathians, where the March steals in quietly ...
— The Willows • Algernon Blackwood
... ounces of white soap, cut small, dissolved in four pints of water, rather hot, in a large basin; make the solution into a lather, by beating it with birch rods, or wires. Introduce the feathers, and rub well with the hands for five or six minutes. After this soaping, wash in clean water, as hot as the hand ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... not understand the life we lead; If we asked Dr. Birch to play, no doubt he'd rather read; He hates all scrambling restlessness, and chattering, scuffling noise; If he could catch us we should fare ...
— Verses for Children - and Songs for Music • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... formidable thing, but when made by a multitude is a most hideous shriek, almost as terrible as an Indian yell; the people crying, "Kill them, kill them. Knock them over," heaving snowballs, oyster shells, clubs, white-birch sticks three inches and a half in diameter; consider yourselves in this situation, and then judge whether a reasonable man in the soldiers' situation would not have concluded they were going to kill him. I believe ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... green sward and the luxuriance of its wild woodland, from the contiguity of overhanging mountains, and from the beauty of Lovel Tarn, a small lake belonging to the property, studded with little islands, each of which is covered with its own thicket of hollies, birch, and dwarfed oaks. The house itself is poor, ill built, with straggling passages and low rooms, and is a sombre, ill-omened looking place. When Josephine Murray was brought there as a bride she thought it to be very sombre and ill-omened; but ...
— Lady Anna • Anthony Trollope
... above them breathless, he looked up to the maple-twigs, over which a faint reddish bloom had been cast in the night, beyond to the lower slopes of the mountain, delicately patterned with innumerable white stems of young birch-trees, and clasped his hands to see that a shimmer of green hung in their tops like a mist. His lips quivered, he laid his hand upon a tuft of grass with glossy, lance-like blades, and ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... and found the desired implement, but he could not find paper. The lining of his cap occurred to him; it was soft and unfit for his purpose. Looking sadly round, he observed that the tree against which he leaned was a silver-stemmed birch, the inner bark of which, he knew, would serve his purpose. With great difficulty he tore off a small sheet of it and began to write, while a little smile of contentment played ...
— Twice Bought • R.M. Ballantyne
... me some finely woven baskets, and a beautiful pappoose-basket or cradle, such as they carry their own babies in. This was made of the lightest wood, and covered with the finest skin of fawn, tanned with birch bark by their own hands, and embroidered in blue beads; it was their best work. I admired it, and tried to express to them my thanks. These squaws took my baby (he was lying beside me on the bed), then, cooing and chuckling, they looked about the room, until they found a small pillow, which they ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes
... despair. A little crisp rustle ran along the bushes; the leaves fluttered, then hung quite still. And he heard a voice—Alicia's—speaking. "My lovely, lovely world!" And moving forward a step, he saw her standing on the river-bank, braced against the trunk of a birch-tree, her head thrown back, and her arms stretched wide apart as though to clasp the lovely world she had apostrophised. To have gone up to her would have been like breaking up a lovers' interview, and he turned round instead and ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy
... O Birch-tree! Of your yellow bark, O Birch-tree! Growing by the rushing river, Tall and stately in the valley! I a light canoe will build me, Build a swift Cheemaun for sailing, That shall float upon the river, Like a yellow leaf in Autumn, Like a ...
— The Children's Own Longfellow • Henry W. Longfellow
... singing and hardly breathed, they stood so still. They looked at St. Nicholas with big, big eyes. In one hand St. Nicholas carried two large packages; in the other, a birch rod. ...
— The Dutch Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... retorted, "he may possibly deprive you of your nursing-bottle, or he may even birch you, but he will most assuredly not fight you, so long as I have any say in the affair. I' cod, we are all friends here, I hope. D'ye think Mr. Vanringham has so often enacted Richard III. that to strangle infants is habitual ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... ever forget it as long as they live. The hit does that; for a kick is a very striking thing, that's a fact. There has been no good scholars since birch rods went out o' school, and sentiment ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... just been at a neighbouring farm-house, where there lived one of Mr. Walsingham's tenants; a man of the name of Birch, a respectable farmer, who was originally from Ireland, and whose son was at sea with Captain Walsingham. The captain had taken young Birch under his particular care, at ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... as destructive to the intestinal dragons he promises to destroy. Then we turned away to the glen down which the torrent plunged. And there, at the foot of the fall, in the midst of the boiling water, the foam, and spray, rose a tall crag crowned with silver birch, and hung with moss and creeping vines, bearing on its gray, weather-beaten face: "Rotterdam Schnapps." Bah! it made us sick. The caldron looked like a punch-bowl, and the breath of the zephyrs smelt of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... we passed was very beautiful, commencing with dark-green ilex, glistening holly, and sombre brown oak, interspersed with groups of the dainty, graceful, white-stemmed birch, and wreathed with festoons of the scarlet Himalayan vine. As we mounted higher, trees became fewer and the foliage less luxuriant, till at length only oaks were to be seen, their branches twisted ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... for gutta percha is obtained by boiling the bark of the birch tree, especially the outer part, in water over an open fire. This produces a black fluid mass, which quickly becomes solid and compact upon exposure ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1157, March 5, 1898 • Various
... woman kneeling before a shrine, who did not even turn round as we approached, but seemed in the self-surrender of devotion to have neither eyes nor ears for the outer world. There were many things new to me. For instance, hay-ricks in the trees, and here and there very beautiful masses of weeping birch, their white stems shining like silver through the delicate ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... away, for the eddies around the tent will make the stove smoke occasionally beyond all endurance. Since you will need but little fire to keep you warm, you can use a funnel made of boards, barrel-staves, old spout, and the like. Old tin cans, boot-legs, birch-bark, and stout paper can be made to do service as elbows, with the assistance of turf, grass-ropes, and large leaves. But I forewarn you there is not much fun, either in rigging your stove and funnel, or in sitting by it and waiting for the storm to blow it ...
— How to Camp Out • John M. Gould
... bought you shall be given to Nannie Cameron, and you shall wear your old one to the kirk. How will that suit your vanity? And you may be off to bed now directly, without any supper. There are twigs enough for a birch rod, my lady, if bed does not bring you to a better frame of mind. Run in now, and don't let me see your face before six o'clock ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... strange lot. Of the nine men, five were brown-skinned Kanakas, but the other four were white, and seemed to be all old men, though they moved about spryly enough. Dailey was wrinkled and leathery, Birch had only one very black and sparkling eye, Yorke's mouth was twisted into a perpetual smile, and Borden was a quiet little man like ...
— The Pirate Shark • Elliott Whitney
... girls were glad to throw themselves down and sleep, while Claude kept watch by the fire outside. On the next day, and the two following ones, he employed himself in thatching the primitive dwelling with birch bark and whatever materials he could find which would shed the rain from its sloping sides. For himself, he found a sheltered hollow among the rocks, where neither wind nor rain could affect him greatly, and their stores he disposed among the many ...
— Marguerite De Roberval - A Romance of the Days of Jacques Cartier • T. G. Marquis
... They did all the work on the early pioneer farm. They were the gods whose rude strength first broke the soil. They could live where the moose and the deer could. If there was no clover or timothy to be had, then the twigs of the basswood and birch would do. Before there were yet fields given up to grass, they found ample pasturage in the woods. Their wide-spreading horns gleamed in the duskiness, and their paths and the paths of the cows became the future roads and highways, or even the ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... ascended the preceding evening; but to his astonishment a mountain stream was now foaming down it, leaping from rock to rock, and filling the glen with babbling murmurs. He, however, made shift to scramble up its sides, working his toilsome way through thickets of birch, sassafras, and witch-hazel, and sometimes tripped up or entangled by the wild grapevines that twisted their coils from tree to tree, and spread a kind of ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... and the bird flew away. The man took the feather and carried it to his brother, who looked at it and said, "It is pure gold!" and gave him a great deal of money for it. Next day the man climbed into a birch-tree, and was about to cut off a couple of branches when the same bird flew out, and when the man searched he found a nest, and an egg lay inside it, which was of gold. He took the egg home with him, and carried it to his brother, who ...
— Household Tales by Brothers Grimm • Grimm Brothers
... changed the course of his vessel by reason of the mysterious conduct of that man-of-war hawk, not a soul would probably have survived the night. It was stated by the rescued passengers, among whom was Billy Birch, that the Central America had sailed from Aspinwall with the passengers and freight which left San Francisco on the 1st of September, and encountered the gale in the Gulf Stream somewhere off Savannah, in which she sprung a leak, ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... of about five miles on the left of the town the course of the river was interrupted by a small and thickly wooded island, along whose sandy beach occasionally rose the low cabin or wigwam which the birch canoe, carefully upturned and left to dry upon the sands, attested to be the temporary habitation of the wandering Indian. That branch of the river which swept by the shores of Canada was (as at this day) the only ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... BIRCH.—Everyone knows what "the Assisted Education (Ireland) Bill" is. Why should not an Assisted Education (England) Bill be brought in to enable public school-boys to secure, without payment of any additional fee beyond that included for "swishing" in the Bill sent home to the parents, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 102, February 27, 1892 • Various
... thing, or struck with that, which, on minds of a different cast, makes no extraordinary impression. I have some favourite flowers in spring, among which are the mountain-daisy, the hare-bell, the fox-glove, the wild brier-rose, the budding birch, and the hoary hawthorn, that I view and hang over with particular delight. I never hear the loud, solitary whistle of the curlew in a summer noon, or the wild mixing cadence of a troop of grey plovers, ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... third strake under the wale were found to be stove in, and the timbers within started. The farther they proceeded in removing the sheathing, the more they discovered the decayed state of the ship's hull. The chief damage was repaired with a birch tree, which had been cut down when they were there before, and was the only one in the neighbourhood large enough for the purpose; but Captain King gave orders that no more sheathing should be ripped off, being apprehensive ...
— Captain Cook - His Life, Voyages, and Discoveries • W.H.G. Kingston
... Old Birch, who taught the village school, Wedded a maid of homespun habit; He was stubborn as a mule, And she was playful as a rabbit. Poor Kate had scarce become a wife Before her husband sought to make her The pink of country polished life, And prim and formal—as ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... as fond fathers, Having bound up the threatening twigs of birch, Only to stick it in their children's sight For terror, not to use, in time the rod Becomes more mock'd than fear'd; so our decrees, Dead to infliction, to themselves are dead; And liberty plucks justice by the nose; The baby beats the nurse, and ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... the Council of State are met at Whitehall, Annesley in the chair as usual. Colonel Birch, one of the members, entering late, informs General Monk that there is a gentleman at the door who desires to speak with him. Monk goes to the door, finds Sir John Greenville there, and receives him as a perfect stranger, the guards looking on. Sir John delivers to him a letter, and tells him ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... in sight of Loughveigh lying cradled among the rocks, and got a glimpse of the white tower of Glenveigh Castle. There is a small skirting of wood near the castle where the silver barked birch prevails from which the glen takes its name, interspersed with holly trees, which grow here in profusion, and some dark yews, prim and stately, drawn up like sentinels to guard ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... a deep breath. The safe disappearances he had read about flashed through his mind. But he didn't believe it. It couldn't be! Yet, there was the empty corner with the birch panels forming the back of the show-windows, and no safe. In a daze, he walked over to the corner, intending to feel about with his hands and make sure the safe was really gone. Before he got there, there flashed into sight in place of the safe, ...
— The Einstein See-Saw • Miles John Breuer
... distressed nor a widow ill-treated by me. I have never repelled a workman nor hindered a shepherd. I gave alike to the widow and to the married woman, and have not preferred the great to the small in my gifts." And we have the high authority of the late Dr. Samuel Birch for the statement that the inscriptions of the twelfth dynasty abound in injunctions of a high ethical character. "To feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, bury the dead, loyally serve the king, formed the first duty of a pious man and faithful subject." ...
— The Evolution of Theology: An Anthropological Study - Essay #8 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... heather than oats, more boulders than trees, and more snow than anything. It was a solitary, thinly peopled region, mostly of bare hills, and partially cultivated glens, each with its small stream, on the banks of which grew here and there a silver birch, a mountain ash, or an alder tree, but with nothing capable of giving much shade or shelter, save cliffy banks and big stones. From many a spot you might look in all directions and not see a sign of human or any other habitation. ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... put yourself to school among pedants and Jacobites, when you might be pushing your fortune in the world! Why not go to Westminster or Eton at once, man, and take to Lilly's Grammar and Accidence, and to the birch, too, ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... to travel along the road, through forests and villages, with a birch-bark sack over her shoulders, and a staff ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... of Indians shooting rapids in their birch-bark canoes? And perhaps you have yourself sailed a toy boat on a stream, and made a dam of clay, and waited with more or less patience till the water rose nearly to the top, and then broken a bit of your dam out and made a waterfall ...
— The Magic City • Edith Nesbit
... sides. When it weeps, it weeps like some little old peasant woman crouching and rocking in her grief. It has all the boisterousness and hoarseness of voices that sound out of peasant-cabins and are lodged in men who wear birch-bark shoes and eat coarse food and suffer cold and hunger. Within its idiom there are the croonings and wailings of thousands of illiterate mothers, of people for whom expression is like a tearing of entrails, ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... and yet never got any farther. There might be seen machinery for making spools—with water-driven lathes, which turned these articles, variously known as "bobbins" and "pirns," literally off the reel by the thousand. It was a sweet, birch-smelling place and my favourite haunt on all holidays. William Lyon, my grandfather, had had a tempestuous youth, from which, as he said, he had been saved "by the grace of God ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... grey fur is interspersed with numerous black and white long hairs. They breed perfectly true, and have long been kept in warrens. When they escape and cross with common rabbits, the product, as I hear from Mr. Wyrley Birch, of Wretham Hall, is not a mixture of the two colours, but about half take after the one parent, and the other half after the other parent. Secondly, chinchillas or tame silver-greys (I will use the former name) have short, paler, mouse or slate-coloured fur, interspersed with long, ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... beside my fire, slipping on a great roll of birch bark which blazed up brightly, filling the woods with light. There, under a spruce, where a dark shadow had been a moment agone, stood the mother, her eyes all ablaze with the wonder of the light; now staring steadfastly ...
— Wood Folk at School • William J. Long
... sticks to be had in that part of the wood; twigs and branches from the dead tree, fragments of bark, odds and ends of dry brush. Close by stood a white birch. The thin, paper-like covering hung loose on its stem, like grey-white curls. Archie could pull off large pieces, and he enjoyed this so much that he pulled till the birch trunk, as far up as he could reach, was perfectly ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... been for many years the permanent senior officer of the Post Office, married my sister, whom he took with him into Cumberland, where he was stationed as one of our surveyors. He has been my friend for more than forty years; as has also Peregrine Birch, a clerk in the House of Lords, who married one of those daughters of Colonel Grant who assisted us in the raid we made on the goods which had been seized by the Sheriff's officer at Harrow. These have been the oldest and ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... gilded drinking vessels of various makes—Venetian, Turkish, Tscherkessian, which had reached Bulba's cabin by various roads, at third and fourth hand, a thing common enough in those bold days. There were birch-wood benches all around the room, a huge table under the holy pictures in one corner, and a huge stove covered with particoloured patterns in relief, with spaces between it and the wall. All this was quite familiar to the two young men, ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... (which are ranged there for the purpose) with sweetmeats or rods, according to his opinion of their owner's conduct during the past year. The Saint is supposed to travel through the air, and to be followed by an ass laden with two panniers, one of which contains the good things, and the other the birch, and he leaves his ass at the top of the chimney and comes down alone. The same belief is entertained in Holland; and in some parts of Germany he is even believed to carry off bad boys and girls in his sack, answering in this ...
— Melchior's Dream and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... I declare I was beat, and I hav'n't never got over bein' beat about that. So we growed up together, always out in the woods between schools, huntin' checker-berries, and young winter-greens, and prince's piney, and huckleberries, and saxifrax, and birch, and all them woodsy things that children hanker arter; and by-'n'-by we got to goin' to the 'Cademy; and when Hetty was seventeen she went in to Hartford to her Aunt Smith's for a spell, to do chores, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... of this stolen reading by a circumstance that stirs your young blood very strangely. The master is looking very sourly on a certain morning, and has caught sight of the little weak-eyed boy over beyond you, reading "Roderick Random." He sends out for a long birch rod, and having trimmed off the leaves carefully,—with a glance or two in your direction,—he marches up behind the bench of the poor culprit,—who turns deathly pale,—grapples him by the collar, drags him out over the desks, his ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... That evening the birch which Sister Gabrielle kept in the dormitory was put away in a cupboard, and in the refectory the salad was turned with two long wooden spoons. These were the only changes. We went into class from nine o'clock till twelve, and in the afternoon we cracked nuts, which ...
— Marie Claire • Marguerite Audoux
... as the horses climbed the crest of the long hill the lady in green was by his side on the box. He looked anxiously ahead, and there, in a hedge of young alder bushes, he saw something stirring, and, unless he was greatly mistaken, a birch broom lay on the ground near ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin
... on the other shore, each surrounded with its patch of cleared land, were sadly distant from one another. Behind the clearings, and on either side of them to the river's bank, it was always forest: a dark green background of cypress against which a lonely birch tree stood out here and there, its bole naked and white as the column of a ...
— Maria Chapdelaine - A Tale of the Lake St. John Country • Louis Hemon
... first mentioned No. 81, and occurs but rarely after [88]; 'tis found but once in the Editor's MS, where it is written boter. The usual substitutes for it are oil-olive and lard; the latter is frequently called grees, or grece, or whitegrece, as No. 18. 193. Capons in Grease occur in Birch's Life of Henry prince of Wales, p. 459, 460. and see Lye in Jun. Etym. v. Greasie. Bishop Patrick has a remarkable passage concerning this article: 'Though we read of cheese in Homer, Euripides, Theocritus, and others, yet they never mention butter: nor hath Aristotle ...
— The Forme of Cury • Samuel Pegge
... have already come several four-foot maple-leaved vibernums, which, though moved in June, throve and have made a fine new growth. There will be, also, a shadbush or two and certainly some hobble bushes, with here and there a young pine and small, slender canoe birch. Here and there will be a clump of flowering raspberry. I shall not scorn spireas, and I must have at least one big white syringa to scent the twilight; but the great mass of my screen will be exactly what nature would plant there if she were left alone—minus the choke cherries. You always ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... beautiful than the touch of any woman; and then to sting one's thigh against the living dark bristles of the fir-boughs; and then to feel the light whip of the hazel on one's shoulders, stinging, and then to clasp the silvery birch-trunk against one's breast, its smoothness, its hardness, its vital knots and ridges—this was good, this was all very good, very satisfying. Nothing else would do, nothing else would satisfy, except this coolness ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... prevents its rising. Most ovens require heating an hour and a half for bread. A brisk fire should be kept up, and the doors of the room should be kept shut, if the weather is cold. Pine and ash, mixed together, or birch-wood, is the best for heating an oven. To ascertain if your oven is of the right temperature, when cleaned, throw in a little flour; if it browns in the course of a minute, it is sufficiently hot; ...
— The American Housewife • Anonymous
... source of wealth to Mongolia lies in her magnificent forests of pine, spruce, larch and birch which stretch away in an almost unbroken line of green to far beyond the Siberian frontier. As yet but small inroads have been made upon these forests, and as I stood one afternoon upon the summit of a mountain gazing over the miles of timbered hills ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... The strong double-bladed pocket knife is the best model I have yet found and, in connection with the sheath knife, is all sufficient for camp use. It is not necessary to take table cutlery into the woods. A good fork may be improvised from a beech or birch stick; and the half of a fresh-water mussel shell, with a split stick by way of handle, ...
— Woodcraft • George W. Sears
... we spent after our little caribou hunt. Miss Jelliffe, who had had some slight experience with small target rifles, made a good shot at a fine stag, and we were all very cheerful. The fire burned brightly before the tent she shared with Susie, and the dry dead pine with logs of long-burning birch crackled merrily. Over the little lake, behind the dark conifers and the distant hills, the sun had gone down in a glory ...
— Sweetapple Cove • George van Schaick
... wood, either green or dry, the latter lying along the shore on both sides the straits, which are almost covered with the trees, that, having grown on the banks, have been blown down by the high winds. These trees are somewhat like our birch, but are of so considerable a size, that the trunks of some of them are two feet (surely an error, yards must be intended) and a half in diameter, and sixty feet in length. Many of these we cut down for our carpenters ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... it is who proposes the correcting of pretentiousness, of inflation, of dulness, and of the vestiges of rawness and grossness to be found among us. She is the ultimate civilizer, the polisher, a sweet cook. If, he says, she watches over sentimentalism with a birch-rod, she is not opposed to romance. You may love, and warmly love, so long as you are honest. Do not offend reason. A lover pretending too much by one foot's length of pretence, will have that foot caught in her trap. In Comedy is the singular scene of charity ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... showed. They were valuable, for, in Scattergood's rude printing, one could read upon them the owner of every piece of timber, every farm, the acreage in each piece of timber, with a careful estimate of the amount of timber to the acre—also its proportions of spruce, beech, birch, ...
— Scattergood Baines • Clarence Budington Kelland
... is wild and rugged. It is a lofty eminence covered with huge boulders of sandstone, between which rise birch trees and oaks, their foliage already yellowed by autumn. These tall trees stand out from the background of red light, which the sun has left in the west, resembling the ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... was flooded in moonlight and the birch trees wavered their stark shadows across it like supplicating arms. Suddenly I heard the soft padded sound of snow falling upon snow, to slowly perceive a figure, the slender figure of a young child attempting to arouse itself ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... a dinner we have but one or two remarks to offer. If he be a bachelor, he had better give his dinner at a good hotel, or have it sent in from Birch's or Kuehn's. If a married man, he will, we presume, enter into council with his wife and his cook. In any case, however, he should always bear in mind that it is his duty to entertain his friends in the best manner that his means permit; ...
— Routledge's Manual of Etiquette • George Routledge
... crossed the trails of Indian hunting parties, and at last they came to a deserted village. Either it had been abandoned because of warfare or to escape an unhealthy location, but the five examined it with great curiosity. Many of the lodges built of either poles or birch bark were still standing, with fragments of useless and abandoned household goods here and there. Paul found in one of the lodges a dried scalp with long straight hair, but, obeying a sensitive impulse he hid it from the ...
— The Border Watch - A Story of the Great Chief's Last Stand • Joseph A. Altsheler
... Chipmunk were having a play party in the woods. They had their lunch in little birch-bark baskets, and they used a nice, big, flat stump for a table. They took an old napkin for a tablecloth, and they had pieces of carrots boiled in molasses and chocolate, and cabbage with pink frosting on, and nuts all covered with candy, ...
— Bully and Bawly No-Tail • Howard R. Garis
... The birch, most shy and ladylike of trees, 50 Her poverty, as best she may, retrieves, And hints at her foregone gentilities With some saved relics of her wealth of leaves; The swamp-oak, with his royal purple on, Glares red as blood across the sinking sun, 55 As one ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... and fastening the cap together, he dropped it down, and, leaning forward, tried to catch the top of a young birch rustling close by the wall. Twice he missed it; the first time he frowned, but the second he uttered ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott
... of certain trees must be procured, so if you can find either oak, hemlock, birch or beech trees, we can probably make a tanning compound which will ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Exploring the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay
... agrees with Lord Mayor Birch (grandfather of Dr Samuel Birch of the British Museum) to pay L600, for the transfer to himself, of Medina's Broker's medal (at that time the few Jewish brokers admitted had to pay an extraordinarily high fee for the privilege); he is engaged ...
— Diaries of Sir Moses and Lady Montefiore, Volume I • Sir Moses Montefiore
... Brandy, Laurel. Birch-Wine. Brewing. Beef Cake-Soup. Ditto to Pot like Venison. Beef, to Collar. Brocoli, to boil. Butter, good in Suffolk. Buckingham-Cheese, to make. Butter, why good or bad. Ditto in general. Butter, what Milk is good. Ditto made over the Fire. Ditto wash'd. Ditto churn'd in Summer. ...
— The Country Housewife and Lady's Director - In the Management of a House, and the Delights and Profits of a Farm • Richard Bradley
... woodman's axe had opened only here and there a patch of the woods to the light of the sun. These forests abounded with game, and had long been the hunting ground of the red men. The river swarmed with water-fowl of various names and plumage, and often the Indian's birch canoe darted over its ...
— From Farm House to the White House • William M. Thayer
... from the service by Perron, who had probably very good reason to believe that they would not join in fighting against the army of their own sovereign. Carnegie, Stewart, Ferguson, Lucan, two Skinners, Scott, Birch, and Woodville, are the only names recorded, but there may have been others also who were dismissed from the army at Perron's disposal. The prospects of those who were absent on duty in the Deccan, and elsewhere, soon became far more serious. Though not at present ...
— The Fall of the Moghul Empire of Hindustan • H. G. Keene
... had been taking short trial runs, to test our pace and powers of endurance; and Birch (my fellow-"hare") and I had more than once surveyed the course we proposed to take on the occasion of the "great hunt," making ourselves, as far as possible, acquainted with the bearings of several streams, ploughed ...
— Parkhurst Boys - And Other Stories of School Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... scene it is early morning; the servants come in and adorn the inn with boughs of birch as is the custom ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... and tore deep through the skin before he could lift his wide-flung arms to protect it. And then, almost before he realized what had happened, she stood back, groping blindly away from him until her hands found a birch sapling. She clung to it with a desperately tight clasp as if to hold herself erect. A little spot of red flecked her own lip where her locked teeth had cut through. She swayed a moment, dizzily, the too-tight little waist gaping at ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... of a diameter of one hundred and fifty feet, as nearly as I could estimate. They were formed by stumps of trees and poles, set upright on the ground, and these were linked together by horizontal poles, and against the latter were reared birch poles and branches of trees, varying from six to ten feet in height, without the slightest attempt at neatness, the whole being as rude as well could be; but withal, this inclosure was sufficiently secure to answer the purpose of its builders. On the south ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... required. Nothing remained but to 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
... himself out to rightward, so as to outflank Kesselsdorf;—neglecting Grune (refusing Grune, as the soldiers say):—"our horse of the right wing reached from the Wood called Lerchenbusoh (LARCH-BUSH) rightward as far as Freyberg road; foot all between that Lerchenbusch and the big Birch-tree on the road to Wilsdruf; horse of the left wing, from there to Roitsch." [Stille (p. 181), who was present. See Plan.] It was about two P.M. before the old man got all his deployments completed; ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... every child seen speaking to another child with a lower-class badge, or any child wearing a higher badge than that allotted to it by, say, the College of Heralds, should immediately be skinned alive with a birch rod. It might even be insisted that girls with high-class badges should be attended by footmen, grooms, or even military escorts. In short, there is hardly any limit to the follies with which our Commercialism would infect any system that it would tolerate at all. But something ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... detail, exactly the same things were seen then that may yet be beheld. The reeds had the same height, and bore the same kind of long leaves and bluish-brown feathery plumes that they bear now; the birch stood there, with its white bark and its fine loosely-hanging leaves, just as now; and as regards the living creatures that dwelt here—why, the fly wore its gauzy dress of the same cut that it wears now; and the favourite colours ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... A low barren cliff overhung the house in which he was born, fir and birch looked down on the roof, and wild-cherry strewed flowers over it. Upon this roof there walked about a little goat, which belonged to Oeyvind. He was kept there that he might not go astray, and Oeyvind carried leaves and grass up to him. One fine day the goat leaped down, and—away to the ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf; a Practical Plan of Character Building, Volume I (of 17) - Fun and Thought for Little Folk • Various
... the winter," said the old goblin, "and also about the fir and the birch-trees, and the ghost stories, and of the tingling frost. You shall tell your tales, for no one over there can do it so well; and we will sit in the stone rooms, where the pine logs are burning, and drink mead out of the golden drinking-horn of the old Norwegian ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... used-up little fellow, suffering from the sad effects of a night's carouse. But he is an honest bird, notwithstanding his late hours and his idle sleeping days; he is also domestic in his habits, and the father of an interesting family, close at hand, in a hollow white-birch, and he is ever ready to give them ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... leisure, and the opportunity of consulting many books, both printed and manuscript, are as necessary as they are impossible to be attained in my present way of life. However, to acquire a general insight into my subject and resources, I read the life of Sir Walter Raleigh by Dr. Birch, his copious article in the General Dictionary by the same hand, and the reigns of Queen Elizabeth and James the First in Hume's History of England." Beriton, January 1762. (In a month's absence from the Devizes.)—"During this interval ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... harmony that strikes us in the wildest natural landscapes,—in the relative shapes of rocks, the harmony of colours in the heaths, ferns, and lichens, the leaves of the beech and the oak, the stems and rich brown branches of the birch and other mountain trees, varying from verging autumn to returning spring,—compared with the visual effect from the greater number of artificial plantations?—From this, that the natural landscape is effected, as it were, by a single energy modified ab ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... trip. He wanted to try his own mouth at 'calling.' He had never really done it before. But he had been practicing all winter in imitation of a tame cow moose that Johnny Moreau had, and he thought he could make the sound 'b'en bon.' So he got the birch-bark horn and gave us a sample of his skill. McDonald told me privately that it was 'nae sa bad; a deal better than Pete's feckless bellow.' We agreed to leave the Indian to keep the camp (after locking up the whisky flask in my bag), and take Billy with us on Monday to ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... principles. The anticipated day and Susan arrived. She looked very meek to the barbarian of fifteen, so he soon began his antics. He was called to the platform, told to lay aside his jacket, and, thereupon, with much astonishment received from the mild Quaker maiden, with a birch rod applied calmly but with precision, an exposition of the argumentum ad hominem based on the a posteriori method of reasoning. Thus Susan departed from her principles, but not ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... half a bow-shot from the house on that side (i.e. due north thereof) was a little hazel-brake, and round about it the trees were smaller of kind than the oaks and chestnuts he had passed through before, being mostly of birch and quicken-beam and young ash, with small wood betwixt them; so now he passed through the thicket, and, coming to the edge thereof, beheld the Lady and the King's Son walking together hand in ...
— The Wood Beyond the World • William Morris
... of style in the work of various countries are well indicated by Walter de Gray Birch, who says: "The English are famous for clearness and breadth; the French for delicate fineness and harmoniously assorted colours, the Flemish for minutely stippled details, and the Italian for the gorgeous yet calm dignity apparent in their ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... not really fair play. The true woodcrafter limits himself to the things that he can get in the woods, and in all my recent fire-making I have contented myself with the tinder used for ages by the red men: that is, cedar wood finely shredded between two stones. Some use the fringes that grow on birch, improving it by rubbing ...
— Boy Scouts Handbook - The First Edition, 1911 • Boy Scouts of America
... don't think it can all be fancy. I am sure I mind the lake, with the swans sailing, on it, and the wee green islets, and the branches of the birch trees drooping down into the water. Don't ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... in large flocks, fly about sundown to selected roosting-places on tall trees, and to feeding-places in the morning,—unhusked corn-fields, if any are to be found in the neighborhood, or thickets of dwarf birch and willows, the buds of which furnish a considerable part of their food ...
— The Story of My Boyhood and Youth • John Muir
... vapour that settled upon the hair of their bodies and formed into crystals of frost. Leather harness was on the dogs, and leather traces attached them to a sled which dragged along behind. The sled was without runners. It was made of stout birch-bark, and its full surface rested on the snow. The front end of the sled was turned up, like a scroll, in order to force down and under the bore of soft snow that surged like a wave before it. On the sled, securely lashed, was a ...
— White Fang • Jack London
... But instead of that he found himself hors'd up in a trice, though he appeal'd in vain to the priviledges of the University, pleaded adultus and invoked the mercy of the spectators. Nor was he let down till the master had planted a grove of birch in his back-side for the terrour and publick example of all waggs that divulge the secrets of Priscian and make merry with their teachers. This stuck so with Triplet that all his life-time he never forgave the doctor, ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... for the occasion, and attended, at a little distance, by Robin Hood, Maid Marian, Friar Tuck, the Hobby-horse, and a band of morrice-dancers. Then came the crowd, pellmell, laughing, shouting, and huzzaing,—most of the young men and women bearing green branches of birch and other ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 1 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth
... firewater burst upon the red men and swept their whole race away from the cold fountains. Endicott and his followers came next, and often knelt down to drink, dipping their long beards in the spring. The richest goblet then was of birch-bark. Governor Winthrop, after a journey afoot from Boston, drank here out of the hollow of his hand. The elder Higginson here wet his palm and laid it on the brow of the first town-born child. For many years it was the watering-place, and, as it were, the washbowl, of the vicinity, ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... active, with clean-cut aquiline features, olive-red complexion and long dark hair; but developed by her white-man training so that the shy Indian girl had given place to the alert, resourceful world-woman, at home equally in the salons of the rich and learned or in the stern of the birch canoe, where, with paddle poised, she was in absolute and fearless control, watching, warring and winning against the grim rocks that grinned out of the white rapids to tear the frail craft and mangle ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson
... Harvey Birch, the hero of The Spy, is a portrait from the life of a revolutionary patriot who appears in the book as a peddler with a keen eye to trade as well as to the movements of the enemy. One of the best ...
— The Greatest Highway in the World • Anonymous
... of summer thicken, And the ice breaks, and the birch-buds quicken, Yearly you turn from our side, ...
— Songs from Books • Rudyard Kipling
... of which was sent to General Monk. It was chiefly brewed from the rind and tops of firs, and was esteemed very powerful against the formation of stone, and to cure all scorbutick distempers. Various herbs, as best approved by the maker, were infused with the mum in concocting it, such as betony, birch, burnet, brooklime, elder-flowers, horse-radish, [582] marjoram, thyme, water-cress, pennyroyal, etc., together with several eggs, "the shells not cracked or broken"! The Germans, especially in Saxony, have so great a veneration for mum that they fancy their bodies ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... year 343. It was once the custom to send a man around to personate St. Nicholas on St. Nicholas Eve, and to inquire how the children had behaved through the year, who were deserving of gifts, and who needed a touch of the birch rods that he carried with him into every home. St. Nicholas still goes about in some parts of the country, and in the bazaars and shops are sold little bunches of rods, real or made of candy, such as St. Nicholas is supposed to deal in. In some places Knight Rupert takes the place ...
— Yule-Tide in Many Lands • Mary P. Pringle and Clara A. Urann
... was worthy of its name that day, and it was considerably past noon before they arrived at the Indian village to which they were bound. At first they could not find anyone at home, the whole community being away in the forest peeling bark from the birch trees for the making of canoes. But the same kind of thing had happened before, so Katherine was not at a loss. Picking up a tin pan, she commenced beating a military tattoo upon it with a thick stick; while Phil, with a trumpet improvised from ...
— A Countess from Canada - A Story of Life in the Backwoods • Bessie Marchant
... the tent. In the open ground, on the way to a solitary birch-tree, we could see a group of soldiers.... Sara pointed to them ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... or 10 per cent. birch tar, which has a characteristic pungent odour and is recommended as a remedy for eczema ...
— The Handbook of Soap Manufacture • W. H. Simmons
... who punished with death any one who might dare to look upon them. The height of land or plateau which constitutes the interior of the Labrador peninsula is from 2,000 to 2,500 feet above the sea level, fairly heavily wooded with spruce, fir, hackmatack, and birch, and not at all the desolate waste it has been pictured by many writers. The barrenness of Labrador is confined to the coast, and one cannot enter the interior in any direction without being struck by the latent possibilities of the peninsula were it not for the abundance ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 822 - Volume XXXII, Number 822. Issue Date October 3, 1891 • Various
... inward man there is no live coal, but all is burnt-out to a dead grammatical cinder? The Hinterschlag Professors knew syntax enough; and of the human soul thus much: that it had a faculty called Memory, and could be acted-on through the muscular integument by appliance of birch-rods. ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... other trees. It is made by steeping it in a strong solution of saltpetre and cutting it in small pieces. It is also called German tinder. Thome says that Boletus laricis and Polyporus fomentarius yield the "amadou" of commerce. Then, again, the birch Polyporus, P. betulinus, is used for razor strops. We need not say anything on the uses of fungi as articles of food. This subject has been exhausted by many able mycologists, and, excepting the mere mention ...
— Among the Mushrooms - A Guide For Beginners • Ellen M. Dallas and Caroline A. Burgin
... and thither he would go when this heart-sickness seemed too grievous to be borne. It was down in a glen beyond the fir-wood; and here the ordinary desolation of this bleak coast ceased, for there were plenty of young larches on the sides of the glen, with a tall silver-birch or two; while down in the hollow there were clumps of alders by the side of the brawling stream. And this dell that he sought was hidden away from sight, with the sun but partially breaking through the alders and rowans, and bespeckling ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... crimson ray would often rest on the end of his long nose, and the word "rum" be passed tittering along the benches. For some men are born to the mill, and others to the mitre, and still others to the sceptre; but Mr. Daaken was born to the birch. His long, lanky legs were made for striding after culprits, and his arms for caning them. He taught, among other things, the classics, of course, the English language grammatically, arithmetic in all its branches, book-keeping in the Italian manner, and the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... [Footnote 2: Dr. Thomas Birch, in a letter dated June 15, 1764, says that this letter was by Mr. Philip Yorke, afterwards Earl of Hardwicke, who was author also of another piece in the Spectator, but his son could not ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... command was heard to "mount" and the soldiers crossed themselves and mounted. Rostov riding in front gave the order "Forward!" and the hussars, with clanking sabers and subdued talk, their horses' hoofs splashing in the mud, defiled in fours and moved along the broad road planted with birch trees on each side, following the infantry and a battery that had ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... manipulated the birch. Head was all; heart and hand nothing. This was schoolteaching. As a punishment for failure to memorize lessons, there were various plans to disgrace and discourage the luckless ones. Standing in the corner with face to the wall, and the dunce-cap, had ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... catfish and tapping the birch trees for sap, had been suffered to fall into disuse. Rather, it seemed interesting to wander vaguely together, or in the long grass to read together from the books which Reuben would borrow from the cobwebby library of ...
— Earth's Enigmas - A Volume of Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... coniferae, especially of the Lawsoniania and the Douglassi— the latter being one of the finest accessions to our list of conifers. It is graceful in form, and perfectly hardy. I also interspersed with these several birch-trees, whose slender and graceful habit of growth forms so fine a contrast to the dense foliage of the conifers. To thus paint, as it were, with trees, is a high source of pleasure in gardening. Among my various enjoyments this has been ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth |
