"Feathery" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... ballast among the ties of a narrow-gage railroad that wound up the hill panted as they swung their shovels. At its lower end, the ravine opened on to a valley that got greener as it ran down to the glittering sea, on the edge of which feathery palms ...
— Brandon of the Engineers • Harold Bindloss
... thirteen feet high. It still looms in my memory with undiminished grandeur. I can still see the trees and bushes growing smaller and smaller as I followed them up its huge slant with my eye, till they became a feathery fringe on the distant summit. This symmetrical Pyramid of Cheops—this solid mountain of stone reared by the patient hands of men—this mighty tomb of a forgotten monarch—dwarfs my cherished mountain. For ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... and foolish," rejoined Daisy lightly. "I didn't mean quite in that way, Blake. You at least are past the age for such feathery nonsense, or should be. ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... browns, and silvery grays. One little touch of bright color in his pictures makes them alive. The costumes of the nymphs were chosen for the very few bright touches in this painting, and the tall, slender tree near the left-hand side of the picture for the pale green feathery foliage of early spring. ...
— Stories Pictures Tell - Book Four • Flora L. Carpenter
... you can see that much." The Colonel drove his huge fist at the provision-bag, as though to beat the stiffnecked beans into a feathery yielding. "Blind submission don't come easy to most Americans. The Great Republic was built upon revolt;" and he pulled the covers over ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... little girl was yet only five and a half years old, she had tried many times in her life, without success, to make the slat cage the home of some feathery pet. Snipes and plover, orioles and ovenbirds, bobolinks and meadow-larks, all had lived in it by turns for a few days. But the snipes and plover had gone into a decline, the orioles and ovenbirds had ...
— The Biography of a Prairie Girl • Eleanor Gates
... side of the river were gorgeous with yellow buttercups, and here and there a patch of blue iris or wild sage. The black cherry trees were masses of snowy bloom; the water at the river's edge held spikes of blue arrowweed in its crystal shallows; while the roadside itself was gay with daisies and feathery grasses. ...
— Timothy's Quest - A Story for Anybody, Young or Old, Who Cares to Read It • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... slight stoop. The former delicacy of his complexion had gone—the sickly paleness of it was all that remained. His thin flaxen mustaches were no longer pragmatically waxed and twisted into a curl: their weak feathery ends hung meekly pendent over the querulous corners of his mouth. If the ten or twelve weeks since his marriage had been counted by his locks, they might have reckoned as ten or twelve years. He stood at the window mechanically picking leaves from a pot of heath placed in front of it, ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... Cocoa-nut palms formed a continuous fringe along the inner margin of the sandy beach; and beyond them were to be seen every imaginable species of tropical plant and tree, with foliage ranging in tint from the palest, most delicate green to deepest olive or purple black. The waving fronds of the delicate feathery bamboo were everywhere visible, while creepers in endless variety trailed their long cordlike stems and gaudy blossoms in all directions. The still, evening air vibrated with the continuous hissing buzz of countless millions ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... which often broods over a large house thinly inhabited. The room—Anne's bedroom—lay westward, and a good deal of sunshine was still glinting in. A few late bees were buzzing about the open window, cheated perhaps by the feathery seeds of the clematis, which had long ceased flowering. There was no other sound. But many fine prints, a few painted portraits, and several white-gleaming statuettes, seemed as the sunlight struck them to burst the ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... evening walk. Groups of Burmans of the better class with their wives promenade the cool avenues in happy contentment, or wend their way towards Dalhousie Park. The whole scene is pretty and domestic, and the roads themselves form beautiful vistas in the evening light, which gilds the feathery crests of the coco-nuts and gives added colour to the deep-toned foliage of the padouk and other trees which fringe them. Song-birds which are strange to us call each other from the groves, and in the bamboo clumps the grasshoppers are beginning to sing, while floating in the air, which is now fresh ...
— Burma - Peeps at Many Lands • R.Talbot Kelly
... terrestrial crew, Who teaches Greek, Latin, and likewise Hebrew; He has taught Captain Dampier, the first in the race, Swirling his hat with a feathery grace, Cookson the marshal, and Willoughby, of size, Making minor serjeant-majors in ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... of the oldest Jericho, which Joshua conquered and Hiel rebuilt. The spring, which is probably the same that Elisha cleansed with salt (II Kings ii: 19-22), sends forth a merry stream to turn a mill and irrigate a group of gardens full of oranges, figs, bananas, grapes, feathery bamboos and rosy oleanders. But the ancient city is buried under a great mound of earth, which the German Palaestina-Verein is ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... hand, on which the blue veins stood out so plainly, on Tom's great brown fist, and smiled at him; and then looked out of the window again, as if he couldn't bear to lose a moment of the sunset, into the tops of the great feathery elms, round which the rooks were circling and clanging, returning in flocks from their evening's foraging parties. The elms rustled, the sparrows in the ivy just outside the window chirped and fluttered about, quarrelling, and making it up again; the rooks, young and old, talked in chorus, and the ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... a place in which the trees were of the light and springing variety with slender, pale trunks, but high overhead a mass of feathery leaves made a ...
— The Story of Bawn • Katharine Tynan
... where it is threshed by a heavy roller stone drawn by a donkey or an ox or by men, and several times I saw it drawn by women. Then it is winnowed by being pitched into the air for the wind to drive out the feathery chaff. The methods vividly illustrate the first Psalm and other Bible references— gleaning, muzzling "the ox when he treadeth out the corn,'' the threshing floor and "the chaff which ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... like that, but not in the green shade of the old orchard. A weeping willow had been turned over in some winter gale many years ago, but had nevertheless managed to go on growing in its new position. It lay like a feathery plume along the side of the Raincy mausoleum. It was not the first time that Louis and Patsy had utilized it as ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... and Feathery Pets, and How they Live. Stories of Animals, Fishes and Birds for the Little Folks. Edited by Laura E. Richards. Illustrated with nearly 250 wood engravings, all original in design, and engraved by George T. Andrew. Quarto. ...
— Nautilus • Laura E. Richards
... black gateway to have led into so fair a garden! Hazel pauses at the entrance, her eyes glistening, her breath taken away with delight at the beauty of the scene before her. A paradise of fresh green shade and exquisite light and colouring. Wide-spreading chestnuts, graceful, feathery birches, and a hundred other trees, clothed and robed in their tender young leaves, mingle with a glory of pink and white spring blossom, which seems to fill the air like a snowstorm in the clear, blue sky. The South wind blows and fans Hazel's cheek, and wafts delicious ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII: No. 356, October 23, 1886. • Various
... So wondrously fair; Illumining grasses And painting the air? You dear little shells, O, why do you shine? And feathery sea-weed Grow ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... a snow fog hanging low, and feathery flakes were sinking upon the whitened street. "Listen!" cried the boy, excitedly, as they neared the Wickiup. From somewhere in the sky came the faint scream of a locomotive whistle. "That's them, all right. Gee! I'd like ...
— The Daughter of a Magnate • Frank H. Spearman
... already see thee helping some blushing milk-maid, with her pail, or, perhaps, leaning against a rail-fence, sketching her, as with bare feet and scanty skirt, she trips through the morning dew to feed her feathery brood." ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... water of the bay, in imitation of its mighty neighbor, echoed in mildest tones its restlessness, and tossed its feathery foam ...
— Janet of the Dunes • Harriet T. Comstock
... harbored Maya for the night; and then her way at dawn lay through a vast forest, where the dim tree-trunks stretched far away till they grew undefined as a gray cloud, and only here and there the sunshine strewed its elf-gold on ferns and mosses, feathery and soft as strange plumage and costly velvet. Sometimes a little brook with bubbling laughter crept across her path and slid over the black rocks, gurgling and dimpling in the shadow or sparkling in the sun, while fish, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... places the hedges were white with hawthorn; and in sheltered nooks they sped past primroses, like pale stars in the grass. There were plantations of feathery, exquisite larch trees, their lovely green enhanced by tall dark pines, standing among them like sentinels. In gay gardens joyous daffodils nodded and laughed to them as they whirled past. Sir Edwin ventured ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... following the course of the river, and had gradually descended from the higher grounds to the immediate banks, which here spread out into a small meadow on each side. There were not now many flowers, but Saffy was pulling stalks of feathery-headed grasses, while Mark was walking quietly along by the brink of the stream, stopping every now and then to look into it. The bank was covered with long grass hanging over, here and there a bush of rushes ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... Gottlieb came close to the great lady, robed in white, with blue feathery wings, to represent a little angel, and sang her the Easter greeting, she bent down and folded him in her arms, and ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 4, February 1878 • Various
... koomeriah, a royal or high-caste elephant, and still a youth, being but forty years of age, vide his ears. His height was ten feet at the shoulder, and would the mem-sahib note the perfect slope of the back down to the beautiful, long, feathery tail. Also the massive chest and head, with the prominent lump between the eyes so bright and kind, and full of knowledge. Notice also the deep barrel, and short, so very short, hind legs, the heaviness of the trunk, the plump cheeks which would ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... joy stick. Detached, feathery clouds spread across the sky, and he was climbing for them. Paula looked behind at him, and he pointed. He saw her seem to stiffen upon sight of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... eloquent look of her companion's, one of those looks which would convey intelligence to a brick wall. Louise directed her attention to a hat—Raoul's unlucky hat, which was set out in all its feathery splendor upon the table. ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... scarlet drops of blood now trickled. The manikins were ruthless. Their faces were ten times wickeder than ever, as they roamed from cage to cage, slaughtering with a fury that seemed entirely unappeasable. Presently the feathery rustlings became fewer and fainter, and the little pipings of despair died away; and in every cage lay a poor murdered minstrel, with the song that abode within him forever quenched;—in every cage but two, and those two were high up on the wall; ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... purple asters and golden-rod. Two children were to be baptized at noon, and on a little table, at the right of the pulpit, stood the small silver baptismal font, wreathed with white asters and the pale feathery green of the ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson
... gilded arms and silken cushions. The walls were set with carvings and perforated work. Here hung bars of musical bells; there stood great jars and vases; everywhere were fantastic furnishings of silks and costly metals. Feathery green bamboos grew in dragon pots. In the corners stood ...
— Little Sky-High - The Surprising Doings of Washee-Washee-Wang • Hezekiah Butterworth
... in the open cedar-grown field by the river; trees that Mr. Landholm had planted long ago. They were slow to turn, yet they were changing. One soft feathery head was in yellowish green, another of more neutral colour; and blending with them were the tints of a few reddish soft- tinted alders below. That group was not gay. Further on were a thicket of dull coloured alders at the edge of some flags, and above them blazed a giant ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... long and solemn as the supposition had grown stronger that the country was nothing better than a mangrove swamp, became more cheery of aspect, especially when, through an opening in the dense clumps of palms with their feathery tops, the blue line of a distant range of hills ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... an awful voice, and even in that moment she appreciated with an added pang the feathery beauty of a slice of Barnet's sponge-cake in the ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... lifting their high shoulders and half unfolding the stiff drapery of their wings. As they saw their fellow overwhelmed they launched themselves from their perch and came hooting hoarsely over the rank, green tops of the palms and feathery calamaries. Swooping and circling they gathered over the hideous final struggle, and from time to time one or another would drop perpendicularly downward to stab the crown or the face of one of the preoccupied fish-beasts with his trenchant beak. Such of the fish-beasts as were thus disabled ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... "Nobody loves me except Mark. And Mark isn't here." Mark's image haunted her. She shut her eyes and it slid forward on to the darkness, the strong body, the brave, straight up and down face, the steady, light brown eyes, shining; the firm, sweet mouth; the sparrow-brown hair with feathery golden tips. She could hear Mark's voice calling to ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... call itself a chateau so long as there were no real ones in the neighbourhood. Often chestnut-trees in full glory of white blossom, as if blazing with fairy candles, lined our way for miles. There was snow of hawthorne too—"May," our two men called it—and ranks of little feathery white trees, such as I knew no name for, looking like a procession of brides, or young girls going to their first communion. Then, to brighten the white land with colour, there were clumps of lilac, clouds of rose-pink apple blossoms, blue streaks that meant beds of violets, and ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... landscape, reacting on the dangerous softness of his mood, bent his nature toward her like a flame driven by the wind. Around them the red-topped orchard grass faded to pale rose in the twilight, and beyond the crumbling rail fence miles of feathery broomsedge swept to the pines that stood straight and black against the western horizon. Impressions of the hour and the scene, of colour and sound, were blended in the allurement which Nature proffered him, for her own ends, through the woman beside him. Not Blossom Revercomb, ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... at a short distance, she saw a great green dusk of trees spreading from the river-bank inland, sharply defined, with no ragged edges—a dusk that had been planned by man, not left to Nature's dealings. This was not a feathery dusk of palm-trees. ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... adorning a woman's head-dress, the term being also given to any similar ornament, in gems, &c. An aigrette is also worn by certain ranks of officers in the French army. By analogy the word is used in various sciences for feathery excrescences of like appearance, as for the tufts on the heads of insects, the feathery down of the dandelion, the luminous rays at the end of electrified bodies, or the luminous rays seen in solar eclipses, diverging from ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... indefinite width. Sometimes they passed directly under precipitous cliffs of fifteen hundred feet in height, rising abruptly out of the water, while from the deep clefts in the rocks evergreens of every tint appeared, and wherever a rivulet burst forth it was shaded by the graceful and feathery wild date. Numbers of hippopotami were sporting in the water, and crocodiles were numerous ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... man he started to climb Fuji as usual. Another bird told my father, however, that that year he never reached the top; but that Tsuki, touched with his devotion to her, had come with her maidens one night as he slept on the mountain side, and, wrapping him in their feathery mantles, had carried him, smiling in his sleep, to their ...
— More Tales in the Land of Nursery Rhyme • Ada M. Marzials
... green glen, with a brawling stream running in white cataracts and rapids down its midst. We were able to breathe freely now; we could enjoy the great tapering deodars that rose in ranks on the hillsides, the snow-clad needles of ramping rock that bounded the view to north and south, the feathery bamboo-jungle that fringed and half-obscured the mountain torrent, whose cool music—alas, fallaciously cool—was borne to us through the dense screen of waving foliage. Lady Meadowcroft was so delighted at having got clear away from those ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... day in this delightful land: My heart was thankful for the English tongue— For English sky with feathery cloudlets spanned— For English hedge with glistening dewdrops hung. I journeyed, and at glowing eventide Stopped at a rustic inn ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... pup or a grieving-eyed mother dog whose babies had been taken away from her. Such tiny creatures, even the mother dogs— those little Blenheim spaniels! Snub-nosed, round-headed with long silky flopping ears, soft curly coats and feathery tails. Felice liked the yellow and white ones, and always reached for them, but her grandfather coolly "weeded them out," as Zeb expressed it, because the Trenton ideal was a white dog marked ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... mountains of every variety of size, shape, and form occurs. This grand group recedes in a gentle sweep from the coast far inland, where it terminates in a high conical mountain, overtopping the entire mass of pinnacles which cluster around it. The whole is well clothed with trees of that feathery and graceful foliage peculiar to the spruce and larch, and interspersed with huge round clumps of evergreens, with alternations of long glades and great open patches of lawn covered with rich grass of that bright emerald green peculiar to California. This woodland scene, viewed of an early ...
— Handbook to the new Gold-fields • R. M. Ballantyne
... rose a thick jungle, dark and gloomy—and very wet. Palm-like, the gigantic trees were, or fern-like, flinging clouds of feathery green foliage high against a somber sky of ...
— The Cosmic Express • John Stewart Williamson
... Malacca and the Island of Madagascar. He had thence brought numerous things which have since been of great service to philosophers, in explaining difficulties and solving problems connected with the antiquities and history of the western aborigines. His museum of curiosities contained a feathery mantle such as were found enwrapping the American mummies, a pair of mocassins made of the rind of plants, curious carvings which were pronounced by the French savans to resemble much the pieces of sculpture brought by M. Jaques de Numskull from ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 1 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... guest-chambers, for my apartment, though small, was comfortable, and with the hatch securely closed, I was safe from invasion by man or beast, and enjoyed the well-earned repose with a full feeling of security. The owl softly winnowed the air with his feathery pinions as he searched for his prey along the beach, sending forth an occasional to-hoot! as he rested for a moment on the leafless branches of an old tree, reminding me to take a peep at the night, and to inquire "what its signs ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop
... death, and in many places there are no egrets left. Every feathery plume in the dainty bonnet means that at least one happy, innocent life has been taken. Do the feathers look quite so pretty to you when you think of all this? Is it comfortable to feel that for the sake of being in the fashion you have been the cause of such distress? If you can, for one ...
— Friends and Helpers • Sarah J. Eddy
... feet from the ground, to form a continuous pathway. A man must be a tight-rope walker to stick to the pole trail when ice and snow have sheathed its logs. If he makes a misstep, he is precipitated ludicrously into feathery depths through which he must flounder to the nearest timber horse before he can remount. In summer, as has been said, it resembles nothing so much as a thick one-rail fence of considerable height, around which a fringe ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... at half past four, and at that hour the little church, which looked perfectly lovely in the opinion of the decorators, was pleasantly filled with murmuring groups of Rosemont people, who agreed that the feathery decorations proved yet another plume in the caps of the Club members, and of New York people who gazed at the modest country chapel and ...
— Ethel Morton at Rose House • Mabell S. C. Smith
... objects for the aquarium. For a few hours after being placed in their new home they will remain closed, but as soon as they become accustomed to their surroundings, one after another will cautiously throw out his feathery casting-net in search of food. Then the reaching and grasping become so rapid and general that the eye can hardly follow ...
— Harper's Young People, August 17, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... Mother's rapturous joy in her awakening babe. A brilliant light floods the figures in the foreground and melts across the green slopes into the hazy distance of the sea-bound horizon. In the second it is twilight, and a calm stillness broods over all, as under the feathery palms the Mother bends, watchful, over her little one's slumbers. Such were the revelations of Nature to the country-bred painter from the little ...
— The Madonna in Art • Estelle M. Hurll
... upright, tranquil, immense hyacinths—their spear-points three feet above the water, their feathery streamers drifting six feet below; the broad, waxy leaves floating above their bulbous surface mats—they came on silently under the stars; they vanished under the stars seaward to ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... fruitful dust of these deposed monarchs of the forest sprang a numerous progeny—lusty claimants, every one of them,—their foliage feathery and of the most delicate green, being fed only by the thin sunshine that sifts through the dense canopy, supported far aloft by the majestic columns that clustered about us. Under foot the russet moss was of astonishing depth and softness. One walks with care upon it, for the foot breaks ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... Broad avenues of feathery pepper trees, long driveways between shadowy rows of the soldierly eucalyptus, wide lawns and gigantic palms of the southern isles, weaving pampas grass, gay as the plumes of romance, jasmine, orange-bloom, and roses everywhere. ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... some jokes and laughter; and they gathered near the hearthstone, where, in front of the unlit hickory logs, stood a tall blue jar filled with feathery branches of fennel and asparagus. But, as the jar of Virginia was passed round, Lysbet looked at Dinorah, and Dinorah went to the door and called, "Baltus;" and in a minute or two a little black boy entered with some hot coals on a brass chafing-dish, and the fire was as solemnly and silently ...
— The Bow of Orange Ribbon - A Romance of New York • Amelia E. Barr
... cupboard; tried the fastening of the window; and then, satisfied that I had taken every proper precaution, pulled off my upper clothing, put my light, which was a dim one, on the hearth among a feathery litter of wood-ashes, and got into bed, with the handkerchief full ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... the stream which foamed into the stealthy quiet of the wood, and on a large flat stone she sat and was splashed by the noisy water. The larch-trees were alive with feathery green, and their arms waved with the wind, but when Miriam peered through their trunks, all was grave and secret except the stream which shouted louder than before in proof of courage. She did not like the trees, but the neighbourhood of Halkett's Farm ...
— Moor Fires • E. H. (Emily Hilda) Young
... from the porch, surveying the flower-strewn grass, the feathery trees, and the pale gleam of the water. Mary began to show her some recent plantings, in particular a rose-bed which was her last ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... the occupants had to tunnel their way out. Deer fled from the slopes down into secluded glens which had been their safe refuge from Sierra storms before, but the white death followed them and softly folded its feathery wings about them. In the spring the dead deer were found in hundreds where they had "yarded" safely through many winters before the big snow. Warm weather before the storm had brought the bears out of their holes and ...
— Bears I Have Met—and Others • Allen Kelly
... slow cooling, as in the interior of the flow, it becomes a stony mass composed of crystals set in a glassy paste. In thin slices of volcanic glass one may see under the microscope the beginnings of crystal growth in filaments and needles and feathery forms, which are the rudiments of ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... time, after a careful stalk, one or other of the pittas, the exquisitely-coloured ground thrushes, in their uniforms of pale fawn and blue, turquoise, sapphire, and amethyst. And perhaps the next shot would be at one of the soft feathery trogons, cuckoo-like birds in their habits, but instead of being pale slate-coloured, barred and flecked like a sparrowhawk, Jack's specimens would display a breast of the purest carmine, and a back glistening with metallic ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn
... slender white shaft of the lighthouse, the red pyramidal roof of the Government Building, and the pale-yellow walls and cupola of the Key West Hotel—all interspersed with graceful leaning palms, or thrown into effective relief against dark masses of feathery ...
— Campaigning in Cuba • George Kennan
... of my rambles through the valley I happened to be near the chief's mausoleum, I always turned aside to visit it. The place had a peculiar charm for me; I hardly know why, but so it was. As I leaned over the railing and gazed upon the strange effigy and watched the play of the feathery head-dress, stirred by the same breeze which in low tones breathed amidst the lofty palm-trees, I loved to yield myself up to the fanciful superstition of the islanders, and could almost believe that the grim warrior was bound heavenward. In this mood when I turned to ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... collar and tie, a sweeping ulster, and beneath it a frock-coat, which was doubtless the pride of some West End tailor. His patent-leather boots were dandiacally diminutive; his glove fitted like that of a lady who lives but to be bien gantee. The feathery hair, which at Whitelaw he was wont to pat and smooth, still had its golden shimmer, and on his face no ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... A few feathery flakes began falling now, and there was the promise of more in the clouds overhead, and in the sighing of the ...
— The Moving Picture Girls Snowbound - Or, The Proof on the Film • Laura Lee Hope
... feathery palm-trees rise, And the date grows ripe under sunny skies? Or midst the green islands of glittering seas, Where fragrant forests perfume the breeze, And strange, bright birds, on starry wings, Bear the rich hues of all glorious things?" —"Not there, ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... had pretty, white chintz curtains tied with blue ribbon, and similar stuff draped the mirror. The bed was a big canopy affair—I had to stand on a chair in order to dive off into its feathery depths—everything was very neat and clean, and the dainty linen had a sweet smell of lavender. I took one parting look out through the open window at the ivy-mantled towers of the old castle, which were all sprinkled ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... that year; the trees showed gay sprigs of green already, the air was wonderfully mild and balmy, and in the exhilarating blue of the sky feathery white cloudlets were floating, whose course one was fain to follow with sweet dreams and fancies. It was a sin to stay indoors on such a lovely afternoon, Malvine declared, and so proposed that they should go ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... was filled with the golden light of the blazing fagots, and through the open door Alice could see the feathery crystals falling in a wondrous, glittering curtain across the night. The stream roared in subdued voice as though oppressed by the snows, and the shadow of the fugitive as he moved about the fire had a savage, primal significance which ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... westward o'er the steaming rain-washed slopes, Now satisfied with sunshine, and behold Those lustrous clouds, as glorious as our hopes, Softened with feathery fleece of downy gold, In all fantastic, huddled shapes uprolled, Floating like dreams, and melting silently, In the blue ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... perceived in the moment of their disappearance, serve only to enrich and replenish the mind's voluptuous repose. It was a joy to lie drowsily back upon the straw, awaiting sleep and looking out upon the stars through the open back of the cart, while the fire-flies darted across the feathery clusters of bamboo, and the cradling sound of wheels and footfalls called slumber up out of the darkness. And it was equal delight to spring from the cart at first flush of dawn, and see some far blue hill in the east lined like ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... were won in time by her blandishments to come and perch on her window-sills, and thence, by trains of nuts adroitly laid, to disport themselves on the shining cherry tea-table that stood between the windows; and we youngsters used to sit entranced with delight as they gamboled and waved their feathery tails in frolicsome security, eating rations of gingerbread and bits of seedcake with as good a relish as any child ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... together in the wood-hollow, where the little vines and ferns began. Leslie was quick to spy the bits of creeping Mitchella, and the wee feathery fronds that hid away their miniature grace under the feet of their taller sisters. They were so pretty to put in shells, and little straight tube-vases. Dakie Thayne helped Rose and Elinor to get the branches of white honeysuckle ...
— We Girls: A Home Story • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... the convent garden, and the long straight path under the wall, where every day for many years she had walked, spring and summer, autumn and winter; days of rain, days of sun, days of boisterous wind, days of white feathery snow—all the days through which she had passed, on her way from childhood to womanhood. Best of all, she had loved the garden and her favourite path in spring, when vague hopes like dreams stirred in her blood, when it ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... Death's Head in the room, a burly, headlong, infatuated male which drove headlong at the tumbler and clung to it, slipping, sliding, filling the room with a feathery tattoo ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... of external nature. There is in woods and waters a certain enticement and flattery, together with a failure to yield a present satisfaction. This disappointment is felt in every landscape. I have seen the softness and beauty of the summer clouds floating feathery overhead, enjoying, as it seemed, their height and privilege of motion, whilst yet they appeared not so much the drapery of this place and hour, as fore-looking to such pavilions and gardens of festivity beyond. It ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... basin. It was almost too lovely, and our little wayside friend sighed with a sense of overpowering astonishment at the wondrous beauties around, beauties that dazzled her unaccustomed eyes. Her place, however, was upon one of the lower shelves, and above her head waved the feathery leaves of tropical plants, which throve wonderfully well in the heated atmosphere of this ...
— Parables from Flowers • Gertrude P. Dyer
... bough was quivering a little, as if it were still amazed and terrified by the answer to its own calls, coming from the heart of the earth itself and surcharged with mystery. The moonlight turned it to a feathery mass of silver in which the cruel beak and claws showed like sharp pieces of steel. Yet the bird did not fly away, and Henry knew that it was held by fear as well as curiosity, the dangers near seeming less ...
— The Eyes of the Woods - A story of the Ancient Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... me!—I will flood thy silent shrine With my soul's sacred wine, And heap thy marble floors As the wild spice-trees waste their fragrant stores In leafy islands walled with madrepores And lapped in Orient seas, When all their feathery palms toss, plume-like, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... of Cloom. He lay there, grimly smiling, the pleasure of the successful creator in his mind as he thought over the last situation of his making. The smouldering patches of red on the crumbling logs shrank smaller and smaller as the close-set little points of fire died out, and the feathery ash-flakes fell in a ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... but two little wings, And were a little feathery bird, To you I'd fly, my dear! But thoughts like these are idle things, ...
— The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872 - A Typographic Art Journal • Various
... to stand about outside the tent and bask in the sun's rays. It was our first calm since we reached the summit too. Our socks and other damp articles which we hang out to dry at night became immediately covered with long feathery crystals ...
— South with Scott • Edward R. G. R. Evans
... kettle. After being cooked and cooled, split open the body and tail and crack the claws, to extract the meat. The sand pouch found near the throat should be removed. Care should be exercised that none of the feathery, tough, gill-like particles found under the body shell get mixed with the meat, as they are indigestible and have caused much trouble. They are supposed to be the cause of so-called poisoning from ...
— The Whitehouse Cookbook (1887) - The Whole Comprising A Comprehensive Cyclopedia Of Information For - The Home • Mrs. F.L. Gillette
... salt-peter was gwine gobern de world all your own way, didn't you? Heave me down in de wault to sleep long o' de rats, didn't you? Ah, ha! where you sleep las' night—and where you gwine to sleep to-night? Not in your feathery bed, dat's sartain! Send me 'cross de seas, to lib long ob de barbariums in de Stingy Islands, didn't you? Oh, ho! where you gwine be sent 'cross de seas? Not on a party ob pleasure, dat sartain, too! Ebber hear tell ob Bottommy Bay, eh? Dere where you gwine. ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... seven damsels who sat under the yellow feathery flowers of the mimosa bush, three of them—Peachy, Jess, and Delia—talked so hard and continuously that none of the others had a chance to chip in with anything more than an occasional yes or no. Irene realized in a vague way that Esther Cartmel was plain and stodgy looking, but that every now and ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... was the anniversary of the birthday of the Chinese goddess Kum Fa, or Golden Flower, guardian of children. She is worshipped chiefly by women; but some of the workers on the railroad begged branches of the feathery yellow acacia, which is now in bloom, to carry with them to the temple in San Francisco. They are so unpoetic in many ways, that we should hardly expect them to be so fond of flowers; but they mourn very much if the bulbs which they keep growing in stones and water in their ...
— Life at Puget Sound: With Sketches of Travel in Washington Territory, British Columbia, Oregon and California • Caroline C. Leighton
... of a windy, blustering day in 1821, two men were seated by a camp-fire in the depths of the wilderness of the northwest. The wind howled through the branches with a moaning sound such as often heralds the approach of bitter cold weather; and a few feathery flakes of snow that sailed along on the wind, proved that the season of storms was close ...
— The Lost Trail - I • Edward S. Ellis
... of Alaska. It is nevertheless difficult to catch a glimpse of them, on account of the enormous flocks of humming birds, which darken the air in that genial clime. Occasionally, however, the Arctic zephyrs disperse the feathery cloud, and then vast numbers of the timid creatures, with a sprinkling of the Walrus, may be seen by looking ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 26, September 24, 1870 • Various
... and were sitting in the desert watching the "common or garden" day's idleness of the inhabitants of a Bedouin camp. The tents were huddled together under the shade of some feathery-leaved palm-trees, a typical ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... land in which she woke. The leaves were just putting forth their feathery fronds of foliage, and the shorn lawns, the waving floods of growing wheat, and the smooth slopes of pastures presented pleasant pictures to the mountain-born girl. These thickly peopled farm-lands, the almost contiguous villages, the constant passing ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... champaign with its endless fleece Of feathery grasses everywhere! Silence and passion, joy and peace, An everlasting wash of air— ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... windows or rose-silk hangings. The soft light shone alike upon gems in sculpture and art on the walls painted in dreamy soul-entrancing landscapes, or gay grouping of the Graces; if the pictured female loveliness was clad only in feathery clouds of fleecy drapery, the few thought the painter might have been more lavish of robing; but the room was warm with gay laughter, warm with the sweet breath of warm hearts, with the warmth of the ...
— A Heart-Song of To-day • Annie Gregg Savigny
... Feathery smoke was rising from the funnels of the ship when Whistler and his chums had come aboard. Now great gray masses of oily smoke ballooned upward, drifting away to leeward before the gale. As soon as the anchors ...
— Navy Boys Behind the Big Guns - Sinking the German U-Boats • Halsey Davidson
... road and passed through the swing gate into the park, where the grass was up for hay, with red sorrel and buttercups and tall daisies and feathery flowered grasses, their colours all tangled and blended together like ravelled ends of silk on the wrong side of some great square of tapestry. Here and there in the wide sweep of tall growing things stood a tree—a may-tree shining like silver, a laburnum like fine gold. There ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... or rather what had been John Upham's farm (Doctor Prescott owned it now), began at the end of a long stretch of woods, with some fine fields sloping greenly towards the west. Farther on, behind a row of feathery elm-trees, stood the ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... flash of white lightning the birch, moving fastest of all, shot upward its slender stem. Even the feathery brown reeds had pierced their way through the clouds, and the birds sang and sang, and on the grass that fluttered to and fro like a streaming ribbon perched the grasshopper, while cockchafers hummed and bees buzzed. All was ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education
... level &c. 213; plane &c. (flat) 251; sleek, glossy; silken, silky; lanate[obs3], downy, velvety; glabrous, slippery, glassy, lubricous, oily, soft, unwrinkled[obs3]; smooth as glass, smooth as ice, smooth as monumental alabaster, smooth as velvet, smooth as oil; slippery as an eel; woolly &c. (feathery) 256. Phr. smooth as silk; slippery as coonshit on a pump handle; slippery as a ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... thus driven. A few hours of this would alter the face of the whole country, leaving some parts bare, and others buried beneath heaps on heaps of snow, called here snaw-wreaths. For the word snow-wreaths does not mean the lovely garlands hung upon every tree and bush in its feathery fall; but awful mounds of drifted snow, that may be the smooth, soft, white sepulchres of dead men, smothered in the lapping folds of the almost solid wind. Path or way was none before him. He could see nothing but the surface of a sea of froth and foam, as ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... the Pacific, lying like some huge stranded monster, formed the prominent feature in the landscape. The sun was powerful where its beams could penetrate; but where Mr. Seagrave stood, the cocoa-nuts waved their feathery leaves to the wind, and offered an impervious shade. A feeling of the extreme beauty of the scene, subdued by the melancholy created by the sight of the wrecked vessel, pervaded the mind of Mr. Seagrave ...
— Masterman Ready • Captain Marryat
... mango, with its deep and dark foliage defying the sun's rays; the guava, growing at its feet, like an infant of the same family; the mammee—or abricot de St. Domingue—with its rich green fruit hanging in clusters, and a foliage rivalling the mango; the dark and feathery tamarind; the light and graceful indigo; the slow-growing arrowroot, with its palmy and feathery leaves spreading like a tender rampart round its precious fruit; boundless fields of the rich sugar-cane; acres of the luscious pine apple; groves of banana and plantain; forests of ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... above my head, The prairie green below, And flickering o'er the tufted grass The shifting shadows go, Vague-sailing, where the feathery clouds Fleck white the tranquil skies, Black javelins darting where aloft The whirring ...
— Pike County Ballads and Other Poems • John Hay
... warfare of the waves on the surface of the sea, whilst profound peace reigns in the depths below. The billows clash and collide with each other, as they strive to find their level. A fringe of snow-white foam, feathery and frolicsome, follows their changing outlines. From time to time, the receding wave leaves behind a remnant of foam on the sandy beach. The child, who plays hard by, picks up a handful, and, the next moment, is astonished to find that nothing remains in his grasp but a few drops ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... strong ebb tide against us and the wind dropping to a calm, we revisited this sternpost of the Terpsichore. We got down mast and sails and took to our oars. The light air from the north-east blew golden feathery cloud-films across the great blue arch above our heads, and for once in the arctic summer of 1891 the air was warm and balmy. Starting from the North-west Goodwin buoy, we soon rowed into shallow water, crossing a long spit of sand on which, not far from us, a feathery breaker ...
— Heroes of the Goodwin Sands • Thomas Stanley Treanor
... came to the castle for a night's shelter, and the maids flocked to her, Anne held back. The winter was long and black and rainy. One day, in Yves de Cornault's absence, some gypsies came to Kerfol with a troop of performing dogs. Anne bought the smallest and cleverest, a white dog with a feathery coat and one blue and one brown eye. It seemed to have been ill-treated by the gypsies, and clung to her plaintively when she took it from them. That evening her husband came back, and when she went to bed she found the dog strangled ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... great, soft, feathery flakes which lighted upon her as softly as thistledown and melted each in a single glistening drop like a tear. The air was coldly still and the ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... she grasped Ray's hand, pulled him toward the mushroom jungle. I followed, and we slipped in between the brilliantly golden, fleshy stalks. They rose to the tangle of bright feathery fringes above, huge and substantial as ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... of snow; and the highest peaks soared in a transparency of amethystine light beneath a blue sky traced with filaments of windy cloud. Some storm must have disturbed the atmosphere in Italy, for fan-shaped mists frothed out around the sun, and curled themselves above the mountains in fine feathery wreaths, melting imperceptibly into air, until, when we had risen above the cembras, the sky ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... remember that it was first discovered in the Rip Van Winkle country. The wild ginger with its two large leaves and its queer little blossoms close to the ground is another delight to the saunterer along the rocky slopes, where the feathery shad-bush—the aronia of Whittier—with its wealth of snowy blossoms and the wild plum not far away, with its masses of pure white, are inspirations to clean and sweet lives, calling to mind the lines ...
— Some Spring Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... gaze—for in the sweltering surge Three sons of Saul were battling with the rest; His first-born, Jonathan; Abinadab; And Melchi-shua—idols of his life! Around him like a hurricane of hail The pinioned shafts with aim unerring sped, Bearing dark death upon their feathery wings. The clashing sword its dismal carnage made As foe met foe; and flashing sparks out-flew As blade crossed blade with murderous intent. The outcry rose—"They fly! they fly!" The King Looked ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... she began to long secretly for Starker's Millinery Saloons. In the saloon you walked looking beautiful through a flowery and a feathery grove of hats. You had nothing to do but to try hats on and to sell them, and each sale was a personal triumph for the seller. Violet knew she could sell more hats than any other of the girls at Starker's; she knew she had a pretty way of putting on a hat, of turning slowly round and round ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... forward and covered the mound with boughs of green, and clusters of flowers, and sprays of bright leaves, and Sydney laid about the whole grave a garland of feathery aster and delicate fern. Through the quiet came a sweet, sonorous voice reading ...
— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton
... Wegg sits down on a box in front of the fire, and inhales a warm and comfortable smell which is not the smell of the shop. 'For that,' Mr Wegg inwardly decides, as he takes a corrective sniff or two, 'is musty, leathery, feathery, cellary, gluey, gummy, and,' with another sniff, 'as it might be, strong of old ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... recesses of the woodland. The ray treads softly there. A film athwart the pathway quivers many-hued against purple shade fragrant with warm pines, deep moss-beds, feathery ferns. The little brown squirrel drops tail, and leaps; the inmost bird is startled to a chance tuneless note. From silence into ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... to the royal retreat of Chinon. The country is rich and noble, deep in grass and maize and corn, with meadows set in low broad hedgerows, and bare scratchy vineyards along the slopes. The road is lined with acacias, Tennyson's "milk-white bloom" hanging from their tender feathery boughs, and here beneath the hot sun of the South the acacia is no mere garden shrub but one of the finest and most graceful of trees. Everywhere along the broad sunlit river of Vienne nature is rich and lavish, and ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... gymnasium where glistening bamboo and red geraniums screened the chest-weights along the walls, and feathery branches of pepper climbed luxuriantly over the inclined ladders, she found the crowd characteristic of this occasion,—the Freshman men at one end, the Freshman girls at the other, and between them a neutral zone of old students chatting gayly, oblivious ...
— Stanford Stories - Tales of a Young University • Charles K. Field
... The moon flooded the valley one midnight. Dorthe lay on the bank of the creek in the fern forest. She and the frogs had held long converse, and she was staring up through the feathery branches, waving in the night wind, at the calm silver face which had ignored her overtures. Upon this scene entered a man. He was attenuated and ragged. Hair and beard fell nearly to his waist. He leaned on a staff, and ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... moved off to dress he had already left his perch among the sand bags. I climbed the ladder, and had my coffee. Soon after came the scurry to stations. We were coming into the bay in the glory of that morning under hangings of amber and rose and feathery grey. The four-inch gun's crew were in their places. I stood trying to read the Prayer before Action in its very small print. I murmured what I was doing to my cheery colleague, so much more enthusiastic than I was about what seemed ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... wheeling flight the water's brim; Wave in blue sky his silver sail Aloft, and frolic with the gale, Or sink again his breast to lave, And float upon the foaming wave. Oft o'er his form your eyes may roam, Nor know him from the feathery foam, Nor 'mid the rolling waves, your ear On ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [June, 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... track of the setting sun streamed across the mountain tops and turned to fiery red a feathery shock of distant clouds. High and clear came the note of a wild goose as he called to his mate on their homeward flight. In the city below a thousand lights danced and beckoned through the soft velvet shadows of coming night. There fluttered ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay
... the central portion being a framework of interlacing cream bands, forming diamond shaped panels alternating with circles, the centres of these panels being varied reds and greens; the framework surrounds four large panels of Pavonazzo d'Italie, each in six slabs. This is a beautiful marble of feathery purple grey veinings on a creamy white ground. This central part is flanked on each side by a broad band of the same Pavonazzo, which separates it from the large side panels of a bold design of squares of red, ...
— The Cathedral Church of Peterborough - A Description Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • W.D. Sweeting
... told no story it was otherwise with the wood, for Geoffrey could hear the rabbits thumping in their burrows among the roots of the thorn. Twice a cock-pheasant uttered a drowsy, raucous crow, and there was a blundering of unseen feathery bodies among the spruce, while, when this ceased, he heard a water-hen flutter with feet splashing across a hidden pool. Then heavy stillness followed, intensified by the clamor of a beck which came foaming down the side of a fell until, clattering loudly, wood-pigeons, ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... in England—and there had been. The word brought back memories of last summer holidays and everyone groaned; they thought of the white house with the beautiful tangled garden—late roses, asters, marigold, sweet mignonette, and feathery asparagus—of the wilderness which someone had once meant to make into an orchard, but which was now, as Father said, 'five acres of thistles haunted by the ghosts of baby cherry-trees'. They thought of the view across the valley, where the lime-kilns looked ...
— The Story of the Amulet • E. Nesbit
... body of the Synapta, snoodling beside it so artfully that they were quite concealed. The protector did not appear to resent the close company of the fish, which remained perfectly motionless. In a few seconds the Synapta began to extrude its feathery gills, which had been partly retracted on disturbance. I counted the gills, and while my forefinger indicated the sixth, a little fish, not previously noticed, appeared at the focus and edged off to the margin of the pool, now and again ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... rhythmic tinkle, the four ball-shaped box trees at either corner, the carved whiteness of the marble basin, and the massive pillar-fronted stone house beyond it, all spread a glamour of fairyland and foreign courts. Caroline bowed gravely to the cat, and, seizing his feathery paws, danced, bowing and posturing, in a bewitched abandon around the tinkling, glistening fountain. The plumy tail of Red Rufus flew behind him as he twirled, his little feet pattered furiously after Caroline's twinkling sandals. Stooping over the fountain, she threw a ...
— While Caroline Was Growing • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... specially fit to be a Sabbath-day posy. These traditions are softened by the influence of years into simply idealizing, in the mind of every country-bred New Englander, the peculiar refreshing scent of the southernwood as a typical Sabbath-day fragrance. Half a century ago, the pretty feathery pale-green shrub grew in every country door-yard, humble or great, throughout New England; and every church-going woman picked a branch or spray of it when she left her home on Sabbath morn. To this day, on hot summer ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle |
