"Fern" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... as a tin-white metal of great lustre, and susceptible of a fine polish. It has a fibrous structure, crystallizes easily in regular octahedrons, presenting often the peculiar arborescent appearance of the fern. It is soft, but harder and more tenacious than tin; it can be bent, filed, and easily cut: it imparts to paper a color like that of lead. It is very malleable and ductile, and can be hammered into thin leaves. It is easily fused, and melts before it glows (450 deg.). At a temperature ...
— A System of Instruction in the Practical Use of the Blowpipe • Anonymous
... South Wales, this is a stately tree. Here it is grown as a pot plant, and the finely cut, drooping, fern-like foliage produces one of the most graceful decorative subjects we possess. Its value is enhanced by the fact that it withstands the baneful influences of gas, dust, and changes of temperature better than ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons
... young rabbit sat up in a fern patch and examined Langdon with dark, moist eyes. He sat there for several minutes, and might have remained for several more if a sound, unheard by Langdon and by Sayre, had not set the bunch of whiskers on his restless nose twitching, and sent him scurrying off ...
— The Gay Rebellion • Robert W. Chambers
... They were pretty little creatures, in form and look like human beings,—the tallest about six inches high, and the smallest as long as your little finger. In summer they lived in mossy bowers and under the leaves of the tall fern; in winter they nestled among the roots of trees, in the holes of some gnarled old trunk, and crept into the clefts in the rocks. Their dress was fine and elegant: the little men wore coats and hose of moss, and the little women dresses of pretty variegated flowers, leaves, and gossamer, ...
— The King of Root Valley - and his curious daughter • R. Reinick
... soon forgotten; there amid tilth and pasture, gentle hills and leafy hollows of rural Devon, the eye rests and the mind is soothed. By lanes innumerable, deep between banks of fern and flower; by paths along the bramble-edge of scented meadows; by the secret windings of copse and brake and stream-worn valley—a way lies upward to the long ridge of Haldon, where breezes sing among the pines, or sweep rustling through gorse and bracken. Mile after mile of rustic ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... spring had lost its way Amid the grass and fern; A passing stranger scooped a well Where weary men might turn. He walled it in, and hung with care A ladle on the brink; He thought not of the deed he did, But judged that Toil might drink. He passed again; and lo! the well, By summer ...
— Poems Every Child Should Know - The What-Every-Child-Should-Know-Library • Various
... distant purple haze, Offered ten thousand chances of success. But why the future, when the present seemed A flower-decked meadow in eternal spring? When every woodland glade its secrets told To us, and us alone. The grown-up eye Saw sun-flecked oaks, and tinkling, fern-fringed stream, Nor knew that 'neath their shade most doughty Knights Daily rode forth to deeds of chivalry; And ruthless ruffians waged relentless war On those who strayed (without the Talisman Which turned their fury into ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... five miles, we sat us down on a bridge to rest a while, and there the Don left us to go a little way up the course of the stream that flowed beneath, and he came back with a posey of sweet jonquils set off with a delicate kind of fern very pretty, and this he presents to Moll with a gracious little speech, which act, it seemed to me, was to let her know that he respected her still as a young gentlewoman in spite of her short petticoat, and Moll was not dull to ...
— A Set of Rogues • Frank Barrett
... beautiful hall with everything he could desire at his command, and here he pleasantly passed the time ere he retired to rest. In the morning when he awoke, instead of finding himself on a couch in Fairy Hall, be found himself lying on a heap of fern ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... many embittered, disappointed, old maids of New England. The noble apology which Edmund Burke once offered for his countrymen always recurs to my mind when I hear these 'women's conventions' alluded to: 'Because half-a-dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, while thousands of great cattle repose beneath the shade of the British oak, chew the cud, and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field; that, of course, they ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... was not so large or rambling as to tire the mind or foot, yet wide enough and full of change—rich pasture, hazel copse, green valleys, fallows brown, and golden breast-lands pillowing into nooks of fern, clumps of shade for horse or heifer, and for rabbits sandy warren, furzy cleve for hare and partridge, not without a little mere for willows and for wild-ducks. And the whole of the land, with a general slope of liveliness and rejoicing, spread itself well to ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... the exquisitely pinnated feathery fronds of the ferns to tremble incessantly. In another part was a little patch of mossy meadow, and again there were decaying logs out of which sprang various ferns in wild luxuriance, as one has seen them in deeply-shaded, low-lying woods. The maiden-hair fern was here seen ranging from leaves as large as one's thumb-nail to a species with leaves the size of pin-heads. There was a charming harmony in the whole arrangement; nothing seemed abrupt, each effect blended gracefully with those surrounding it, like well-balanced colors ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... come from haunts of coot and hern, I make a sudden sally, And sparkle out among the fern, To bicker down ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... because you don't care what I am or what I do. I thought a man's friendship didn't mean much!" She crushed the fern into a rough ball and threw it over the edge ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... his labour, painted the wide landscape in every direction. On mountain sides, and across the undulating lowland, wall or hedge mapped his conquests of nature, little plots won by the toil of successive generations for pasture or for tillage, won from the reluctant wilderness, which loves its fern and gorse, its mosses and heather. Near and far were scattered the little white cottages, each a gleaming speck, lonely, humble; set by the side of some long-winding, unfrequented road, or high on the green upland, trackless save for the feet ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... this district is at its best. It is a riot of rugged boulder, fern, and heather, through which rushing streams, full of trout, flow swiftly southward to the Channel. The Tors here are not the highest of the moor, yet many of them rise well above ...
— Legend Land, Volume 2 • Various
... it proved a great surprise, for no one saw the wheel-chair which Hicks rolled stealthily into the tiny church early that morning and hid so skilfully behind tall banks of fern and great clusters of roses that only the lovely face of the lame girl could be seen by the congregation—she was still very sensitive concerning her sad affliction. And when the happy-hearted children, almost covered with the garlands of flowers they carried, took their places around ...
— The Lilac Lady • Ruth Alberta Brown
... hostile scouts searching the obvious bits of cover, but they did not find me there; and, like the elephant hunter among the fern trees, or a boar in a cotton crop, so a boy in the currant bushes is invisible to the enemy, while he can watch every move of ...
— My Adventures as a Spy • Robert Baden-Powell
... Fern fronds are particularly liable to this kind of subdivision, and they exhibit it in almost every degree, from a simple bifurcation of the frond to the formation of large tufts of small lobes all formed on the same plan by the repeated forking of the pinnules. These ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters
... great green park with the wooden palings - The wooden palings so hard to climb, There are fern and foxglove, primrose and violet, And green things growing all the time; And out in the open the daisies grow, Pretty and proud in their proper places, Millions of white-frilled daisy faces, Millions ...
— Many Voices • E. Nesbit
... on their drive in high spirits. It was a lovely July evening, and the air was delicate with the scent of the pine-woods. Now and then they heard a wood pigeon brooding over its own sweet voice, or saw, deep in the rustling fern, the burnished breast of the pheasant. Little squirrels peered at them from the beech-trees as they went by, and the rabbits scudded away through the brushwood and over the mossy knolls, with their white tails in the air. As they entered the avenue of Canterville Chase, however, ...
— Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories • Oscar Wilde
... thoughts no longer hover Over the mountains, on that northern shore, Resting their wings where heath and fern-leaves cover Thy noble heart for ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... Ant Fly—dubbed with the blackish brown hair of a cow, warp some red silk in for the tag of the tail, the wings from a woodcock. 2. The Fern Fly—dubbed with the fur from a hare's neck, which is of a fern colour, wings dark grey feather of mallard. 3. The White Palmer—dubbed with white peacock's harl, and a black hackle over it. 4. The Pale Blue—dubbed ...
— The Teesdale Angler • R Lakeland
... Come, little boy, come and look! The instinct of the salmon for the sea. The river where he was spawned hurries to the sea, and his instinct is to go with it, not against it.... It deepens and broadens, and ahead is always a clearer pool, a more shadowy rock, a softer water-fern. It is pleasant to swim under the sallow-branches, and rapids whip.... And there is the lull of an estuary, and the chush-chush of little waves, and he is in the sea.... And now he must lay his own course.... The lure of the river has brought ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... silvery spring I spied, Gurgling through moss and fern along, Waiting to bless with cooling tide All who were gladdened ...
— The Mountain Spring And Other Poems • Nannie R. Glass
... him I wonder if there could be a face behind that nose and those whiskers, which give his head the appearance of a fern dish. He wears an old silk hat whose nap is attacked with a skin disease. They say he belongs to one of the first families of this town—first on the way coming up from the station I suppose. He was ...
— Letters of a Dakota Divorcee • Jane Burr
... not think the enemy In Spring-tide on the Chersonnese Was any whit less vile or venomy When all the heavens whispered Peace; Though wild birds babbled in the cypress dim, And through thick fern the drowsy lizards stole, It never had the least effect on him— He ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, May 10, 1916 • Various
... may smoke." And thereafter the hours go idly by. Your friend at the easel labours doggedly a little way off, in the wide shadow of the tree; and yet farther, across a strait of glaring sunshine, you see another painter, encamped in the shadow of another tree, and up to his waist in the fern. You cannot watch your own effigy growing out of the white trunk, and the trunk beginning to stand forth from the rest of the wood, and the whole picture getting dappled over with the flecks of sun that slip through the leaves overhead, and, as ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... however willing, in recovering the truant. Why, Dulcie found his own hat for him, and put it on his head to boot one day. He had deposited it on a stone, that he might the better look in the face a dripping rock, shaded with plumes of fern and tufts of grass, and formed into mosaic by tiny sprays of geranium faded into crimson and gold. It was a characteristic of Will that while he was so fanciful in his interpretation, the smallest, commonest text sufficed him. The strolls of these short autumn days were never barren of interest ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... men, became more singularly manifest. He reverted to some former habit of mind and body. He was as slow as a shadow, absolutely silent, and the gaze that roved ahead and all around must have taken note of every living thing, of every moving leaf or fern or bough. The hound, with hair curling up stiff on his back, stayed close to Wade, watching, listening, and stepping with him. Certainly Wade expected the rustlers to have some one of their number doing ...
— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey
... each bears a future summer of buds safe nestled on its bosom, as a mother reposes with her baby at her breast. The same security of life pervades every woody shrub: the alder and the birch have their catkins all ready for the first day of spring, and the sweet-fern has even now filled with fragrance its folded blossom. Winter is no such solid bar between season and season as we fancy, but only a slight check and interruption: one may at any time produce these March blossoms by bringing the buds into the warm house; and the petals of the May-flower sometimes ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... got up and looked out, wishing the children a happy Christmas. Then we dressed, for there was a great deal to do. Papa had many services in church, Chinese, English, and Dyak. I had the wreaths to make. The church had been decked with moss fern the day before, but the flowers must be added in the morning, or they would be faded. So Julia and I made a crown of French marigolds to hang on the cross over the altar, two large wreaths for either side, and ...
— Sketches of Our Life at Sarawak • Harriette McDougall
... so acute as these two. But of less ingenious readers I would ask, if any single word can be found equal to "monumental" in its power of suggesting to the imagination the historic oak of park or chase, up to the knees in fern, which has outlasted ten generations of men; has been the mute witness of the scenes of love, treachery, or violence enacted in the baronial hall which it shadows and protects; and has been so associated with man, that it is now rather a column and memorial obelisk ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... also newspapers in Boston, Albany and Worcester. About 1851 he bought out the Merchants Ledger, a paper devoted to the commercial interests of the country. This he transformed into a family story paper, and christened it the New York Ledger. Fanny Fern was just appearing in the columns of literature. Bonner offered her $1,000 to write a story for the Ledger, enclosing his check for the amount. As this was a very high price in those days, of course she ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... deep, rutty lane by this time, a lane with banks rich in ferns and floral growth, and here came Blanche and Eva and the youngest boy, released from Latin grammar and Greek delectus at an earlier hour than usual. The car was sent on to the wood, and Bessie and her two sisters produced their fern trowels, and began digging and delving for rare specimens—real or imaginary—assisted by Mr. Jardine, who had more knowledge but less enthusiasm than ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... o'clock, and in the Biological Laboratory the lamps were all alight. The class was busy with razors cutting sections of the root of a fern to examine it microscopically. A certain silent frog-like boy, a private student who plays no further part in this story, was working intently, looking more like a frog than usual—his expression modest with a touch of effort. Behind Miss Heydinger, jaded and untidy in her early manner ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... revelation of which Wordsworth and Emerson are the prophets in literature, but which is written no less in many a heart quite untaught of books. The face of Mother Earth is the book in which many a man and woman and child read lessons of delight, spelled in letters of rock and fern, of brook and cowslip, of maple leaf and goldenrod. Such lessons mean little save to ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... virgin forest at the end of Livezey's Lane in Germantown on the banks of Wissahickon Creek, stands Glen Fern, more commonly known as the Livezey house, with numerous old buildings near by which in years past were mills, granaries and cooper shops. The house is of typically picturesque ledge-stone construction and interesting arrangement, ...
— The Colonial Architecture of Philadelphia • Frank Cousins
... Taraha—small parties waited on visitors, formed in procession before and behind, and escorted them round, explaining all mysteries, and insisting upon due admiration. Everything had to be interviewed, from teaspoons to pots of fern. This concluded, the guests were politely dismissed, and departed, let us hope, properly penetrated with a sense of ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael
... she cried, and everyone gathered round to see what she had found. Even Susie peered into the hole, and poked a bit of fern gently at the toad, which sat there gazing quietly ...
— The Kitchen Cat, and other Tales • Amy Walton
... Active cast anchor off the Bay of Rangihoua. From her deck the mission families could now gaze upon the scene of their future home. The bracken and manuka with which the farther slopes were clad might remind them of the fern and heather of old England, but their gaze would be chiefly attracted to an isolated hill of no great height which rose steeply from the sea on the left side of the little bay. To this hill had come the remnant of Te Pahi's people after the slaughter on the ...
— A History of the English Church in New Zealand • Henry Thomas Purchas
... delicately wrought that I could have admired them for hours, and the whole of their groundwork is stained by time with the softest colours. Some of those leaves and flowers were tinged perfectly green, and at one part the effect was most exquisite: three or four leaves of a small fern, resembling that which we call adder's tongue, grew round a cluster of them at the top of a pillar, and the natural product and the artificial were so intermingled that at first it was not easy to distinguish the living plant from the other, they being of an equally determined green, though the ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... some little bird might be the better for it. All around her, too, the life of the world that had so troubled her,—who could tell, in the tangle of green, where the good and the gift might ripen and fall? Every little fern-frond has ...
— A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life. • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... friends rode side by side for miles through the jungle of fern and palm, and then began to enter a more open but scrubby country. The scouts could be seen half a mile ahead. Not a sign of natives had been discovered on the march. More than once Barre had expressed his anxiety at this. He knew it pointed to concentrated trouble ahead, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... been building innumerable tents of white and green as they slept. The silence was absolute, the forest's unconscious tribute to the Wonder Worker. Even the trout brook, running black as night among its white-capped boulders and delicate arches of frost and fern work, between massive banks of feathery white and green, had stopped its idle chatter and tinkled a low bell under the ice, as if only the Angelus could express the wonder of ...
— Secret of the Woods • William J. Long
... was ill. All this flashed through the boy's mind as he flung out his weaponless hands in despair, but the gesture was the salvation of the household. His fingers touched something cold, hard, polished. It was a huge, heavy, brass bowl that held a fern. How often his strong young fingers had cleaned that bowl with powder and chamois skin, with never a thought that it would serve him well some time! Now he grasped it, and creeping noiselessly around ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson
... Thistles, and Goldenrod; in the fields and meadows, we would see the Ox-eye Daisy, Black-eyed Susan, Wild Carrot, and the most beautiful fall flower of the northeastern United States, the Fringed Gentian; in the woods, Mountain Laurel, Pink Azalea, a number of wild Orchids, Maidenhair Fern, and Jack-in-the Pulpit; in the marshes, Pink Rose-mallow, which reminds us of the Hollyhocks of our Grandmother's garden, Pickerel-weed, Water-lily, and ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts
... a good family drink. A handful of hops, to a pailful of water, and a half-pint of molasses, makes good hop beer. Spruce mixed with hops is pleasanter than hops alone. Boxberry, fever-bush, sweet fern, and horseradish make a good and healthy diet-drink. The winter evergreen, or rheumatism weed, thrown in, is very beneficial to humors. Be careful and not mistake kill-lamb for winter-evergreen; they ...
— The American Frugal Housewife • Lydia M. Child
... beside the Burn, We play the sad 'two more'; How often at the turn, The heather must we spurn; How oft we've 'topped and swore,' In bent and whin and fern! ...
— Ban and Arriere Ban • Andrew Lang
... announcing Act II of the play. It is a night scene in a wood near Athens; mossy banks and green trees; clouds and twinkling stars in the heavens; forms of fairies sitting about like humming birds, or resting in nodding fern leaves. They sing in quick, short rhymes, suiting ...
— Shakespeare's Christmas Gift to Queen Bess • Anna Benneson McMahan
... smooth fern-mantled stone She sat, and watched the wicket-gate, Not timid in her woman's throne, Nor lonely in her sinless state, ...
— Fringilla: Some Tales In Verse • Richard Doddridge Blackmore
... gardens of themselves; creepers, yards in length that sprung from the mouths of water-pots hidden behind objects of interest, and these framed the pictures in living green; a huge wide-mouthed vase stood in the bay window filled with a great pulu fern still nourished by its native soil—a veritable tropical island this, now basking in the moonlight far from its native clime. Japanese and Chinese lanterns were there; and an ostrich egg brought from ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... to say good-night to Professor Tenison. "Come again, sir!" said Mr. Paget, heartily; the boys slid their hands, still faintly suggestive of fish, cordially into his; Rebecca promised to mail him a certain discussed variety of fern the very next day; Bruce's voice sounded all hearty good-will as he hoped that he wouldn't miss Doctor Tenison's next visit. Mrs. Paget, her hand in his, raised keen, almost anxious ...
— Mother • Kathleen Norris
... Winthrop's strong arm; although in many a rough pitch and steep rise of the way, young hickories and oaks lent their aid to her hand that was free. Mosses and lichens, brown and black with the summer's heat, clothed the rocks and dressed out their barrenness; green tufts of fern nodded in many a nook, and kept their greenness still; and huckleberry bushes were on every hand, in every spare place, and standing full of the unreaped black and blue harvest. And in the very path, under their feet, sprang many an unassuming ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... which gave me any pleasure. I can see vividly the banks of the Mohawk, where we used to fish for perch, bream, and pike-perch; recall where, with my brother Charles, we found the rarer flowers of the valley, the cypripediums, the most rare wild-ginger, only to be found in one locality, the walking fern, equally rare, and the long walks in the pine forests, whose murmuring branches in the west wind fascinated me more than any ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... incurved hooks, is over it all. Huge cables of vines trail from tree to tree, hanging in loops and knots and festoons, the largest (ENTADA SCANDENS) bearing pods 4 feet long and 4 inches broad, containing a dozen or so brown hard beans used for match-boxes. Along the edge of the jungle, the climbing fern (LYNGODIUM) grows in tangled masses sending its slender wire-like lengths up among the trees—the most attractive of all the ferns, and glorified by some with the title of "the Fern of God," so surpassing ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... his eye upon the fern in the window, missed the significance. It had registered his sincere regret—that fern—at the need of pawning Brian's fishing rods and golf clubs. Like Brian! He had failed utterly to comprehend the ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... cork trees and palms growing almost side by side with the birch, the pine, and the spruce. Among other things, their attention was attracted to some beautiful fern trees, which were fully twenty feet high, and there were climbing plants in great profusion, some of them clinging to the trees, and others ...
— The Land of the Kangaroo - Adventures of Two Youths in a Journey through the Great Island Continent • Thomas Wallace Knox
... through a frost-leaved forest-crypt, 190 Long, sparkling aisles of steel-stemmed trees Bending to counterfeit a breeze; Sometimes the roof no fretwork knew But silvery mosses that downward grew; Sometimes it was carved in sharp relief With quaint arabesques of ice-fern leaf; Sometimes it was simply smooth and clear For the gladness of heaven to shine through, and here He had caught the nodding bulrush-tops And hung them thickly with diamond drops, 200 That crystalled the beams ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... as bid. For a moment the fern smouldered and smoked, then the flame ran crackling along and shot up in the darkness, weirdly lighting the scene: to the right the low wood, a block of solid blackness against the sky; in front the wall of sheep, staring out of the ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... along the gorge, the voices of the singing birds died away, and the air grew cold and dark about him. But the distant valley with its houses was all the brighter for that. He came presently to talus, and among the rocks he noted—for he was an observant man—an unfamiliar fern that seemed to clutch out of the crevices with intense green hands. He picked a frond or so and gnawed its stalk, ...
— The Door in the Wall And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... He is over at the horse show at Fern Dyke, and won't be back till late. And if he has been forgathering with his boon companions he won't ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... with birch and fern A sweeter memory blow; And there in spring the veeries sing The ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... behind the house in a land of angle, with opening, enough at their termination to form a vista, through which its white walls glistened with beautiful effect in the calm splendor of a summer evening. Above the mound on which it stood, rose two steep hills, overgrown with furze and fern, except on their tops, which were clothed with purple heath; they were also covered with patches of broom, and studded with gray rocks, which sometimes rose singly or in larger masses, pointed or rounded into curious and fantastic shapes. Exactly between these hills the sun went down during ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... deliciously of lavender. The feeling was so new to them and so pleasant, that for a while they lay in luxurious ease, gazing out upon so much of the world as could be seen beyond the window—a green hillside scattered with gorse-bushes, sheeted with yellowing brake-fern and crossed by drifting veils of mist: all golden in the young sunshine, and all framed in a tangle of white-flowered solanum that clambered around the open casement. Arthur Miles lay and drank in the mere beauty of it. How should he not? Back at the ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... used for this belt, said that the split cane-like material is a strip from the periphery of the petiole or stem of a palm, and that the other material is sclerenchyma fibre from the petiole or rhizome of a fern, and not that of a creeping plant. I may say that I felt a doubt at the time as to the complete accuracy of the information given to me concerning the vegetable materials used for the manufacture of various articles, and there may well be ...
— The Mafulu - Mountain People of British New Guinea • Robert W. Williamson
... ceased when it was repeated with tenfold fierceness; the bushes and fern leaves shook violently, and an enormous and beautifully spotted jaguar shot through the air as if it had been discharged from a cannon's mouth. The hermit's eye wavered not; he bent forward a hair's-breadth; the ...
— Martin Rattler • R.M. Ballantyne
... must be the internal force and the external stimulus. Neither is enough by itself. A rose will not flower in the dark, and a fern will not flower anywhere. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... Figgis had arrived from Brighton, to find that it was superfluous to look any further or inquire any more concerning the whereabouts of the missing man. All that was mortal of him was here, the head covered with a cloth, and bits of the fresh summer growth of fern and frond ...
— The Blotting Book • E. F. Benson
... foliage." It was ascertained that this variety could be propagated by grafts.[870] The varieties of some trees with cut leaves, as the oak-leaved laburnum, the parsley-leaved vine, and especially the fern-leaved beech, are apt to revert by buds to the common form.[871] The fern-like leaves of the beech sometimes revert only partially, and the branches display here and there sprouts bearing common leaves, fern-like, and variously shaped leaves. Such cases differ but little from the so-called ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... different world, an old, old world, with magic that lurked in each dusky vista, breathed from the perfume of leaf and fern, and whispered in the music of the trees, as if we had strayed upon the ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... by small yeomen.[40] Passing to a less fortunate region, he explains that the prince de Soubise has a vast property there. The property of a grand 'seigneur' is sure to be a desert.[41] The signs which indicate such properties are 'wastes, landes, deserts, fern, ling.' The neighbourhood of the great residences is well peopled—'with deer, wild boars, and wolves,' 'Oh,' he exclaims, 'if I was the legislator of France for a day, I would make such great lords skip again!' 'Why,' he asked, ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... section. In his early days he had gone occasionally to see a play, and in 1875 he went to see Irving in Hamlet and liked him better than Macready, whom he had seen in the part. Still later he went to see Lady Archibald Campbell act when ‘Becket’ was given “among the glades of oak and fern in the Canizzaro Wood at Wimbledon.” But handicapped as he was by ignorance of drama as a stage product how could ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... mulga break the even line of the horizon, and, in the valleys, thickets or belts of bloodwood are seen. In these hollows one may hope to find feed for the camels, for here may grow a few quondongs, acacia, and fern-tree shrubs, and in rare cases some herbage. The beefwood tree, the leaves of which camels, when hard pressed, will eat, alone commands the summit of the undulations. As for animal life—well, one forgets that life exists, until occasionally reminded of the fact by a bounding spinifex ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... Preface Introduction Key to Genera Classification of Ferns The Polypodies The Bracken Group: Bracken Cliff Brakes Rock Brake The Lip Ferns (Cheilanthes) The Cloak Fern (Notholaena) The Chain Ferns The Spleenworts: The Rock Spleenworts. Asplenium The Large Spleenworts. Athyrium Hart's Tongue and Walking Leaf The Shield Ferns: Christmas and Holly Fern Marsh Fern Tribe The Beech Ferns The Fragrant ...
— The Fern Lover's Companion - A Guide for the Northeastern States and Canada • George Henry Tilton
... made twenty and a half kilometres. We passed signs of Indian habitation. There were abandoned palm-leaf shelters on both banks. On the left bank we came to two or three old Indian fields, grown up with coarse fern and studded with the burned skeletons of trees. At the mouth of a brook which entered from the right some sticks stood in the water, marking the site of an old fish-trap. At one point we found the tough vine hand-rail ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... latter treated for the most part of castles and seas rather than of the surrounding altitudes, but Cynthia came to a pause of blank surprise in front of a shadow rather than a picture which represented a spring of still brown water in a mossy cleft of a rock where the fronds of a fern seemed to stir in the foreground. "I hev viewed the like o' that a many a time," she said disparagingly. To her it hardly seemed rare enough for the blue ribbon on ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... especially, his tongue to it. He once more returned to the fire, and again placed the chimney on the upper bar, the end of the glass resting amidst the red coals. He left it there and walked about the room, selected a small fern-leaf from a vase of flowers, and raising the chimney, placed it within, and replaced the chimney among the coals. After a few moments he told us to observe very carefully, as the experiment would be very pretty. Mr. Home now held up the glass, ...
— Psychic Phenomena - A Brief Account of the Physical Manifestations Observed - in Psychical Research • Edward T. Bennett
... made an end of weeks of drought, ran, noisily full, between two steep banks of mossy crag. From the crag, oaks hung over the water, at fantastic angles, holding on, as it seemed, by one foot and springing from the rock itself; while delicate rock plants, and fern fringed every ledge down to the water. A seat on the twisted roots of an overhanging oak, from which, to either side, a little green path, as though marked for pacing, ran along the stream, was one of her favourite haunts. From up-stream a mountain ...
— Helena • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... day, though one or two did speak for the daisy, the maiden-hair fern and the pussy willow. All this was before the subject of the national ...
— Holiday Stories for Young People • Various
... with them, and now Jack lost no time in digging up the fern and placing it in the corner of one of the boxes. Several other plants were located nearby, and all the boys and girls were soon busy. Some of the ferns were quite small, but others were of good size, and all showed up well when ...
— The Rover Boys in the Land of Luck - Stirring Adventures in the Oil Fields • Edward Stratemeyer
... corner came new recruits to swell the ranks of our followers. "Merry Christmas," cried everyone in Spanish or Visayan, and "Merry Christmas" we responded, though June skies bending down toward tropical palms and soft winds just rustling the tops of tall bamboos, so that they cast flickering fern-like shadows over thatched nipa roofs, but ill suggested Christmas ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel
... Mr Banks and Dr Solander walked along the shore of the bay by themselves without anxiety, and collected numerous plants. They visited several huts, and found the inhabitants at dinner, their food consisting, at this time of the year, of fish and the root of a large fern. The roots were prepared by scorching them over a fire, and then beating them till the charred bark fell off. The remainder was a clammy, soft substance, not unpleasant to the taste, but mixed with three times its bulk of fibres, which could not be swallowed. This part was spat out into ...
— Captain Cook - His Life, Voyages, and Discoveries • W.H.G. Kingston
... Jane had got a great big book from some firm in New York that tells alt about herb-growing, and how difficult it is to get the ones needed for condiments and perfumes, and offering to buy first-class lavender and thyme and bergamot and sweet fern and things of that kind in any quantities at a good price. She had shown it to the little old ladies who had been secretly grieving at the separation from their garden out on their poorly rented farm, and the leaven had worked—on Mrs. Hargrove also. They go back to the farm ...
— The Tinder-Box • Maria Thompson Daviess
... back into the kitchen to find her father sitting placidly in the rocking-chair by the window. He had lighted his corn-cob pipe, in which he always smoked a mixture of dried sweet-fern as being cheaper than tobacco, and his face wore something resembling a smile—a foxy smile—as he watched his youngest-born ploughing down the hill through the deep snow, while the more obedient Waitstill moved about the room, setting supper ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... below its surface crawl The reptile horrors of the Night— The dragons, lizards, serpents—all The hideous brood that hate the Light; Through poison fern and slimy weed, And under ragged, jagged stones They scuttle, or, in ghoulish greed, They lap a dead ...
— John Smith, U.S.A. • Eugene Field
... of the observations made during his stay at Rio, when tropical nature was still a fresh and unexplored page to the young observer, are wonderful. Cabbage palms, liana creepers, luxuriant fern leaves—roads, bridges, and soil—planarian worms, frogs which climbed perpendicular sheets of glass, the light of fireflies, brilliant butterflies, fights between spiders and wasps, the victories of ants over difficulties, the habits of monkeys, the little Brazilian boys practising knife-throwing—all ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... birth hath in itself the germ of death, But death hath in itself the germ of birth. It is the falling acorn buds the tree, The falling rain that bears the greenery, The fern-plants moulder when the ferns arise. For there is nothing lives but something dies, And there is nothing ...
— Mysticism in English Literature • Caroline F. E. Spurgeon
... local in the uncomfortable sounding Akenside (oak), Fearenside (fern), but Heaviside appears to be a nickname. Handyside may mean "gracious manner," from Mid. Eng. side, cognate with Ger. Sitte, custom. See Hendy (Chapter XXII). The simple end survives as Ind or Nind (Chapter III) and in Overend (Chapter XII), ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... Florent turned round and strolled about, loitering among the flowers. They halted with some curiosity before several women who were selling bunches of fern and bundles of vine-leaves, neatly tied up in packets of five and twenty. Then they turned down another covered alley, which was almost deserted, and where their footsteps echoed as though they had been walking ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... "Drawbacks at Quicksands! I'd like to know what they are. Don't be silly, Howard. You get more for your money there than any place I know." Suddenly the light of an inspiration came into her eyes, and she turned to her husband. "Sid, the Alfred Fern house is for rent, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... through the pleasure-grounds, they entered by a wicket a part of the park where the sunny glades soon wandered among the tall fern and wild groves of ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... slippers and my dressing-gown. I wiped away a tear with which the north wind blowing over the quay had obscured my vision. A bright fire was leaping in the chimney of my study. Ice-crystals, shaped like fern-leaves, were sprouting over the windowpanes and concealed from me the Seine with its bridges and the Louvre of ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... heads which the great slow deer raised out of a forest of bracken that promised to autumn lovers such cover as was never seen before. And now and again, as the amorous perfume of chestnut flowers and of fern was drifted too near, one would say to the other: "My dear! ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... indigenous flora.... Among the minor valleys Birmal perhaps takes precedence by right of its natural beauty. Here are stretches of park-like scenery where grass-covered slopes are dotted with clumps of deodar and pine and intersected with rivulets hidden in banks of fern; soft green glades open out to view from every turn in the folds of the hills, and above them the silent watch towers of Pirghal and Shuidar ... look down from their snow-clad heights across the Afghan uplands to the hills beyond Ghazni." ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... a girl and a boy. They walked along by the "zanja," or irrigation ditch, that here bordered the road. The fern-leaved pepper trees beside the zanja were dotted with clusters ...
— Out of the Triangle • Mary E. Bamford
... days before the summer holidays came to an end that Charlie asked me to come down to the farm and help him to put away his fern collection and a lot of other things into the places that he had arranged for them in his room; for now that the school-room was wanted again, he could not leave his papers and boxes about there. Charlie lived at the farm altogether now. He was better there than on the moors, so he boarded ...
— We and the World, Part I - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... the lane, Beneath the elms and out again, Across the rippling fields of grain, Where softly flashes A slender brook 'mid banks of fern, At every sigh my pulses burn, At every thought I slowly turn ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... did sever From the white flock, but pass'd unworried By angry wolf, or pard with prying head, Until it came to some unfooted plains Where fed the herds of Pan: ay great his gains Who thus one lamb did lose. Paths there were many, Winding through palmy fern, and rushes fenny, 80 And ivy banks; all leading pleasantly To a wide lawn, whence one could only see Stems thronging all around between the swell Of turf and slanting branches: who could tell The freshness of the space ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... morasses. The haunts of the snipe and the hern— (I shall question the two upper classes On aquatiles, when we return)— Why, I see on them absolute masses Of filix or fern. ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... soft music plays, while Pierrot gathers together fern and foliage into a rough couch at the foot of the steps which lead to the Temple d'Amour. Then he lies down upon it, having made his ...
— The Poems And Prose Of Ernest Dowson • Ernest Dowson et al
... and copses low; It seemed as if their mother Earth Had swallowed up her warlike birth. The wind's last breath had tossed in air Pennon and plaid and plumage fair,— The next but swept a lone hill-side Where heath and fern were waving wide: The sun's last glance was glinted back From spear and glaive, from targe and jack,— The next, all unreflected, shone On bracken green ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... than opposite the break in the reef, the artu came in places right down to the water's edge; the breadfruit trees cast the shadow of their great scalloped leaves upon the water; glades, thick with fern, wildernesses of the mammee apple, and bushes of the scarlet "wild cocoanut" all slipped by, as the dinghy, hugging the shore, ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... so they sat through a long silence. At last he heard Edith draw a quick breath, and lifting his head he looked where she pointed. Up a fern stalk climbed a curious looking object. They watched breathlessly. By lavender feet clung a big, pursy, lavender-splotched, yellow body. Yellow and lavender wings began to expand and take on colour. ...
— A Girl Of The Limberlost • Gene Stratton Porter
... quiet, pretty, green meadow lane. She often walked there, and on this eventful morning Hugh saw her sitting in the midst of the fern leaves. He was by her side in a minute, and his dark, handsome ...
— Dora Thorne • Charlotte M. Braeme
... too openly. They chatted lightly on many subjects as they walked together, knee-deep, at times, among scarlet wine-berries, and the delicate green and ebony of maidenhair fern. The scents and essence of summer hung heavy in the air. Shafts of golden sunlight, piercing the somber canopy of the forest isles, touched, and, it seemed to Geoffrey, etherealized, his companion. The completeness of his enjoyment troubled the man, and ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... Westminster, my Lord being gone before my coming to chapel. I and Mr. Sheply told out my money, and made even for my Privy Seal fees and gratuity money, &c., to this day between my Lord and me. After that to chappell, where Dr. Fern, a good honest sermon upon "The Lord is my shield." After sermon a dull anthem, and so to my Lord's (he dining abroad) and dined with Mr. Sheply. So, to St. Margarett's, and heard a good sermon upon the text "Teach us the old way," or ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... confidence a bit. The drarmer isn't goin' as I tipped. I corfs, an' makes another shot at it; While 'e looks at me like 'e thinks I'm dipped. "Well—jist suppose," I sez; an' then I turn An' see 'er standin' there among the fern. ...
— Digger Smith • C. J. Dennis
... more quickly than it can be related. Within ten seconds most of the cabin was coated by the yellow stuff; grotesquely formed clumps and feathers hung from the ceiling; fern-like fingers kept spurting everywhere. Friday stepped back, before the advance, but not the Hawk. Useless to try and evade the stuff, he knew, and he was fairly positive that there was no immediate danger: the tough fabric ...
— Hawk Carse • Anthony Gilmore
... upon the down, Alone amid a prospect wide; There's neither Johnny nor his horse, Among the fern or in the gorse; There's ...
— Lyrical Ballads, With Other Poems, 1800, Vol. I. • William Wordsworth
... the pool rough steps built of clods enabled any one who wished to do so to mount the bank; which the woman did. Within was a paddock in an uncultivated state, though bearing evidence of having once been tilled; but the heath and fern had insidiously crept in, and were reasserting their old supremacy. Further ahead were dimly visible an irregular dwelling-house, garden, and outbuildings, backed by ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... earth's progress. It was surrounded by an atmosphere absolutely fatal to animal life; an atmosphere which, while it stimulated vegetable growth, no living thing could breathe and continue to live. Hence it was, that vegetation, gigantic almost beyond conception, covered its surface. Fern, which is now a pigmy plant, nowhere higher than a few feet, grew tall and overshadowing like great oaks, while oaks, it is fair to presume, towered thousands of feet towards the sky. These stupendous ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... she couldn't trace his pleasure to his delicious feeling of surprise. If she had ceased to be a dryad in a wood, it was to become the Armida of an enchanted garden. She could have no idea of the figure she presented to a connoisseur in girls as from a background of palms, fern-trees, and banked masses of bloom she stared at him with lips half ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... selected was a typical old-fashioned French cottage, venerable in scaling plaster and fern-tufted tile roof, but cool and roomy within as uninviting without. A small inland garden surprised the eye as one entered the battened gate at its side, and a dormer-window in the roof looked out upon the rigging of ships at ...
— Solomon Crow's Christmas Pockets and Other Tales • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... fro by the breath of heaven"—the lakes uncover their sweet faces, and their mimic shores steal down in quiet evenings to bathe themselves in the transparent waters—far into the depths of the great forest speeds the glad message of returning glory, and graceful fern, and soft velvet moss, and white wax-like lily peep forth to cover rock and fallen tree and wreck of last year's autumn in one great sea of foliage. There are many landscapes which can never be painted, photographed, or described, but which the mind carries away instinctively to look ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... jolly bunch assembled to squabble good-naturedly over the various packages and bundles assigned to them to be carried. Under the hostess's direction they betook themselves via footpath and trail to a stone-walled pasture spicy with sweet fern. ...
— Entertaining Made Easy • Emily Rose Burt
... of enchantment was in the place; brooding in the delicate, luminous midday twilight; hushing the song of the strong-flowing river to a humming murmur; casting a spell of beautiful immobility on the slender flower-stalks and fern-fronds and trailing shrubberies of the undergrowth, while the young leaves of the tree-tops, far overhead, were quivering and dancing in the sunlight and the breeze. Here Oberon and Titania might sleep beneath a bower of motionless royal Osmunda. Here Puck might have ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... he answered huskily. "We found a horse—a big white horse they call the Fern Outlaw"—the Silent One started and came closer, listening intently; evidently he knew the horse—"saddled in the corral, and the gate tied shut. We dubbed around a while, but we didn't find—Harry. So we camped down by the corral and waited. ...
— Rowdy of the Cross L • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B.M. Bower
... that are the most violent cathartics you ever dreamed of. And a little silvery fern that tastes like vanilla flavored candy and paralyzes you stiff as a board on the third swallow. It's an hour before you come ...
— Space Prison • Tom Godwin
... three principal groups, based upon the form of the foliage: (1) Plain varieties, in which the leaves are nearly as they are in nature; (2) moss-curled varieties in which they are curiously and pleasingly contorted; and (3) fern leaved, in which the foliage is not curled, but much divided into ...
— Culinary Herbs: Their Cultivation Harvesting Curing and Uses • M. G. Kains
... to bend over very low. Then, taking her hand, he guided her along an ascending gulley, knee-deep in fern and brake and brier, to a sort of ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... strong, and well adapted for digging, the hind one being a thick, horny spur. To add to the singularity of this creature, it has no tail whatever. The kirvi-kirvi conceals itself among the extensive beds of fern which abound in the middle island of New Zealand, and it makes a nest of fern for its eggs in deep holes, which it hollows out of the ground. It feeds on insects, and particularly worms, which it disturbs by stamping on the ground, and seizes the instant ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... Waterman.—In his description of the Flowering Fern (Osmunda regalis), Mr. Newman observes, that "the rhizoma [root-stock], when cut through, has a whitish centre or core, called by old Gerarde in his Herbal, 'the heart of Osmund the waterman.' My lore is insufficient to furnish ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 43, Saturday, August 24, 1850 • Various
... the sun rose yellow and bright, Bessie came into the woods with a basket and a trowel. It was nearly winter, and she knew that soon the snow would fall and cover all the pretty growing things. So she dug up, very carefully, roots of plumy fern and partridge berries with their leaves, and wintergreen and boxberry plants, to grow in her window-garden in the winter. She took the Violet too, bringing away so much of the earth around her roots that the little thing scarcely felt that she had been moved. As Bessie put ...
— The Story Hour • Nora A. Smith and Kate Douglas Wiggin
... the apple line reg'lar. I'm a fern-gatherer, that's wot I am. On'y nature don't keep ferning all the year round, so I'se forced to go fruiting winter times—buying apples same as them from off'n the farmers down the country, and bringing 'em up to Covent Garden. ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... to the common way. The mouths of the beautiful tributary ravines are crossed either by graceful iron spans, which frame charming undercut glimpses of sparkling waterfalls and deep tangles of moss and fern, or by graceful stone arches draped with vines. There are terraced vineyards, after the fashion of the Rhineland, and the gentle arts of the florist and the truck-gardener are much in evidence. The winding river frequently sweeps at the base of rocky escarpments, but upon one side or the other ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... Shepherd hears, A cry as of a dog or fox; He halts—and searches with his eyes Among the scattered rocks: And now at distance can discern 5 A stirring in a brake of fern; And instantly a dog is seen, Glancing through that covert ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... objects in question, or of bits of leaf or stick, then push away eight and count up the remainder. A dodge sometimes adopted, especially by the Kenyah, for counting the persons present, is to take a fern-leaf with many fronds, tear off a half of each frond, handing each piece to one of the men, until every man present affirms that he has a piece, and then to count the number of torn ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... liberty to modify its conditions as I chose. To meet in Paris a fisher-girl from Balbec or a peasant-girl from Meseglise would have been like receiving the present of a shell which I had never seen upon the beach, or of a fern which I had never found among the woods, would have stripped from the pleasure which she was about to give me all those other pleasures in the thick of which my imagination had enwrapped her. But to wander thus among ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... made for himself a bed of fern and hay in the stable of the ox and the ass, and lay close to them for warmth. And, lo! in the middle of the night the ass brayed and the ox bellowed, ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book II - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... (Fagus sylvatica), and its weeping, purple-leaved, and fern-leaved varieties, are frequently met with in parks and may be told from the native species by its darker bark. The weeping form may, of course, be told readily by its drooping branches. The leaves of the European beeches are broader ...
— Studies of Trees • Jacob Joshua Levison
... the Hemlock spruce of America; which, while growing by itself in open ground, is the most wilful and fantastic, as well as the most graceful, of all the firs; imitating the shape, not of its kindred, but of an enormous tuft of fern. ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... walking over to the window and drumming his fingers on the glass fern-shade. "At breakfast, is he? That's the mistake I made: turning out early on ...
— In a German Pension • Katherine Mansfield
... was an outlaw, and any man might kill him and never pay penalty for it. But, outlaw or not, the poor people loved him and looked on him as their friend, and many a stout fellow came to join him, and led a merry life in the greenwood, with moss and fern for bed, and for meat the King's deer, which it was death to slay. Peasants of all sorts, tillers of the land, yeomen, and as some say Knights, went on their ways freely, for of them Robin took no toll; but lordly churchmen with money-bags well filled, or proud Bishops ...
— The Book of Romance • Various
... vainly attempted at first to assume. This moment of calm Roland took advantage of to apprise her of the necessity of recruiting her spirits with a few hours' asleep; for which purpose he began to look about him for some suitable place in which to strew her a bed of fern and leaves. ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... the small craft. Nearly 50,000 miles of scenic highway, passable for twelve months in succession, are ready for your automobiles. Game, both large and small, feathered and hoofed, will lure you through many a jungle of delicate fern and sweet scented bramble; while countless streams and lakes teem ...
— The Beauties of the State of Washington - A Book for Tourists • Harry F. Giles
... fern in situ occurs with Sigillaria and Stigmaria, or that the affinities of Calamites and Lepidodendron (supposing that they are found in situ with Sigillaria) are so CLEAR, that they could not have been marine, like, but in a greater degree, than the mangrove ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... the left, among the fern and heather, leads to a well, famed for its healing properties—it is called the Nun's Well; even now, the peasants believe that its waters are a cure for diseases of the eye; the path is steep and dangerous, and it is far ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... Shakoan, which signifies the nation of seven (council) fires. This refers to the following division which formerly prevailed among them, viz.:— 1. Mende-Wahkan-toan, or people of the Spirit Lake. 2. Wahkpa-toan, or people of the leaves. 3. Sisi-toan, or Miakechakesa. 4. Yank-toan-an, or Fern leaves 5. Yank-toan, or descended from the Fern leaves. 6. Ti-toan, or Braggers. 7. Wahkpako-toan, or the people ...
— Minnesota and Dacotah • C.C. Andrews
... seamanship to bear the motion of a Quantuck box cart; it requires still better seamanship to navigate one of them along the rutted roads. For some time, it took all of Dr. McAlister's energy to keep from landing himself and Allyn head foremost in the thickets of sweet fern and beach plum. By degrees, however, he became more expert in avoiding pitfalls and in keeping both wheels in the ruts, and he turned ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... the stream, she came at last to another wood—not a wild wood like the first, but a tame, domesticated wood. The dead limbs were cut away, and the ground was neatly brushed up under the trees. The brook flowed sedately between fern-bordered banks, under rustic bridges, and widened occasionally into pools carpeted with lily pads. Mossy paths set with stepping-stones led off into mysterious depths that the eye could not penetrate: the leaves were just out enough ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster
... that cheered the last hours of Mrs. Warren. He recognizes Vivien and salutes her gravely. Seeing that she is accompanied by a gentleman in khaki he discreetly withdraws out of hearing and tidies up a tree fern. Vivien and Michael seat themselves on two green iron chairs under the fronds and in front ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... come from a long way over the mountains. In the course of time they grew tired, and I very sleepy. I made signs as though I would sleep on the floor in my blankets, but they gave me one of their bunks with plenty of dried fern and grass, on to which I had no sooner laid myself than I fell fast asleep; nor did I awake till well into the following day, when I found myself in the hut with two men keeping guard over me and an old woman cooking. When I woke ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... had given them, speaking as an old campaigner, some very useful if simple hints, such as always pitching the tent with its back to the wind; and keeping inside a supply of dry wood to light the fires with; and tying fern on Moses's head, against the flies; and carrying cabbage leaves in their own hats, against the heat; and walking with long staves instead of short walking sticks—after this he made them all sit round their fire, and sketched them, and the picture hangs at this very ...
— The Slowcoach • E. V. Lucas
... luxuriant vines, indicating our nearness to the tropic, wreathed gayly over the tall and branchless trunks of the trees: some, like the Bignonia, in a full blaze of crimson; others, like the Climbing Fern, draping the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... covered with ivy and tufted plants, now ruddy with autumnal tints, stood the ruined walls of a little chapel. In the dilapidated vault close by lay buried many of his ancestors, and under the little wavy hillocks of fern and nettles, slept many an humble villager. He sat down upon a worn tombstone in this lowly ruin, and with his eyes fixed upon the ground, he surrendered his spirit to the stormy and evil thoughts which he had invited. Long and motionless he sat there, while his foul fancies and schemes ...
— The Evil Guest • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... face at a light footfall. Whereupon there passed by him the fairest woman he had ever known, and such sudden beauty startled the man and sent his own thoughts flying. It was as though from the desolate waste there had sprung a magical and exotic flower; or that the sunset lights, now deepening on fern and stone, had burned together and became incarnate in this lovely girl. She was slim and not very tall. She wore no hat and the auburn of her hair, piled high above her forehead, tangled the warm sunset beams and burned like a halo round her head. The colour was glorious, that rare but perfect reflection ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... villages in the valley. Forty miles away, untouched by cloud or storm, the white shoulder of Donga Pa—the Mountain of the Council of the Gods—upheld the Evening Star. The monkeys sang sorrowfully to each other as they hunted for dry roosts in the fern-wreathed trees, and the last puff of the day-wind brought from the unseen villages the scent of damp wood-smoke, hot cakes, dripping undergrowth, and rotting pine- cones. That is the true smell of the Himalayas, and if once it creeps into the blood of a ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... styles, but 2-cleft, thus appearing to be twice as many. Scape: 4 to 10 in. high. Leaves: Growing in an open rosette on the ground; round or broader, clothed with reddish bristly hairs tipped with purple glands, and narrowed into long, flat, hairy petioles; young leaves curled like fern fronds. ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... upon the moor. Meadows had brought a shawl, and spread it on a rock, full under the moonlight. There they sat, close together, feeling all the goodness and glory of the night, drinking in the scents of heather and fern, the sounds of plashing water and gently moving winds. Above them, the vault of heaven and the friendly stars; below them, the great hollow of the valley, the scattered lights, the sounds of ...
— A Great Success • Mrs Humphry Ward
... sea—still so far away. As I had no need to hurry, I sat awhile in the late afternoon upon a low mossy wall, in the deep shade of a dripping, whispering rock, from which hung delicate green tresses of the maiden's-hair fern. Above, the rock was lost in a steep wilderness of trees and dense undergrowth, which met the radiant sky somewhere where the eye could not follow. The bell-like tinkle of water out of sight was the only sound until I heard a patter-patter of webbed feet coming ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... one, like infant elves at play Amid the night-winds, in their lonely way— Some whistling and some moaning, some asleep, And dreaming dismal dreams, and sighing deep Over their couches of green moss and flowers, And solitary fern, and heather bowers. ...
— The Death-Wake - or Lunacy; a Necromaunt in Three Chimeras • Thomas T Stoddart
... fern-wove mattress lay No weary guest. St. Colum kneeled, And found no trace; but, ashen-grey, Far off he heard glad ...
— Christmas in Legend and Story - A Book for Boys and Girls • Elva S. Smith
... Die mir zur See Begleiter waren; Zum guten Zeichen nehm' ich euch, Mein Los, es ist dem euren gleich: 20 Von fern her kommen wir gezogen Und flehen um ein wirtlich Dach. Sei uns der Gastliche gewogen. Der von dem Fremdling wehrt ...
— A Book Of German Lyrics • Various
... husbanded, 10 By exhortation of my frugal Dame,— Motley accoutrement, of power to smile At thorns, and brakes, and brambles, and, in truth, More ragged than need was! O'er pathless rocks, Through beds of matted fern and tangled thickets, 15 Forcing my way, I came to one dear nook Unvisited, where not a broken bough Drooped with its withered leaves, ungracious sign Of devastation; but the hazels rose Tall and erect, with tempting clusters hung, 20 A virgin ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... ledge was cushioned with moss and ferns, intermingled with long green ropes of woodbine, Here were vast hanging gardens of many gradations of green, softened by gleams of pale light from the afternoon sun. The rays falling among these fern beds made rare masses of delicate mosaics, giving them that indescribable charm which the level beams produced. Perhaps thirty feet below us we saw a phoebe perched on a dead twig that grew from a cleft in the ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... I hear my little readers echo, knitting their brows; "frontier life,—I wish FANNY FERN wouldn't write about things ...
— Little Ferns For Fanny's Little Friends • Fanny Fern
... was repeated, and presently was heard a panting and 'plaining, a snuffling and a shuffling, and into the light of the fire hobbled the old Witch. Beholding Jocelyn sitting cross-legged on his couch of fern, she paused and, leaning on her crooked stick, viewed him with her wise, ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... dark, in sun and storm, for years, and the old instinctive sense of direction, of location, had not deserted him. In a little while he came out abreast of Cradle Bay. The Gower house, all brightly gleaming windows, loomed near. He struck down through the dead fern, ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... verse witch crease built calf search script eaves squint half fern guess heave live talk kern start leap stick walk sperm wrath knee cliff chalk serve floor spleen writ lawn were czar have bronze daub herb haunch frank buzz fault strength flaunt slake snatch spawn sneak haunt smack dredge drift purse sharp ...
— McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book • W. H. McGuffey
... through their ranks sae rude, As he would through the moorland fern, And ne'er let the gentle Norman bluid Grow cauld for the ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... shift a numbing muscle of his lean old body, in all the constraint of a standing posture, he was held in the flexure of the rock like some of its fossils,—as unsuspected as a ganoid of the days of eld that had once been imprisoned thus in the sediment of seas that had long ebbed hence,—or the fern vestiges in a later formation finding a witness in the imprint in the stone of the symmetry of its fronds. He listened to the hue and cry for him; then to the sudden tramp of hoofs as a pursuing party went out to overtake him, presumably ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... months something further happens; little ferns begin to grow and they live a very long time indeed. There is at Rothamsted a bottle of soil that was put up just like this as far back as 1874. For a number of years past a beautiful fern has been growing inside the bottle, and even now it is very healthy and vigorous. If, instead of being kept moist, the rich garden soil is left in a dry shed during the whole of the winter so that it gradually loses its moisture, it ...
— Lessons on Soil • E. J. Russell |
