"Fern" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the comprehension and tastes of the masses, who cared nothing for the higher class periodicals. He proceeded very cautiously, however, and it was not until some time after that he made the Ledger entirely a literary paper, and issued it in its present form. He induced Fanny Fern, who was then in the flush of the reputation gained for her by her "Ruth Hall," to write him a story, ten columns long, and paid her one thousand dollars in cash for it. He double-leaded the story, and made it twenty columns in length, and advertised in nearly ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... 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 ...
— The Slowcoach • E. V. Lucas
... like two strangers, they walked silently side by side, and looked now and then at the collection of flowers and plants. Iris noticed a delicate fern which had fallen away from the support to which it had been attached. She stopped, and occupied herself in restoring it to its place. When she looked round again, after attending to the plant, her husband had disappeared, and Mr. Vimpany ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins
... for spring garments. "I bet yer, Mawruss! You take my Rosie for instance: at her age you got no idee what a sport she is. Yesterday afternoon she went to a bridge-whist party by Mrs. Koblin's and she won a sterling solid-silver fern dish. And mind you, Mawruss, she only just found out how to play ...
— Abe and Mawruss - Being Further Adventures of Potash and Perlmutter • Montague Glass
... chafing saddles the sweltering roans lurched off suddenly through a great snarl of bushes into a fern-shaded spring-hole and stood ankle-deep in the boggy grass, guzzling noisily at food and drink, with the chunky gray crowding greedily against first one rider and ...
— Little Eve Edgarton • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... of fancy turn Where the tumbled pippins burn Like embers in the orchard's lap of tangled grass and fern,— There let the old path wind In and out and on behind The cider-press ...
— Riley Farm-Rhymes • James Whitcomb Riley
... Colocasia, Colocasia esculenta and macrorhizon), is an important esculent root in the Polynesian islands. In the dry method of culture practised on the mountains of Hawaii, the roots are protected by a covering of fern leaves. The cultivation of taro is hardly a process of multiplication, for the crown of the root is perpetually replanted. As the plant endures for a series of years, the tuberous roots serve at some of the rocky groups as a security against famine. It is also extensively cultivated in Madeira ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... the company that had dined in the valley making their way up the dry bed of a stream, through a gorge which cleft a line of precipitous hills. On either hand the bank rose steeply, giving no footing for man or beast. The road was a difficult one; for here a tall, fern-crowned rock left but a narrow passage between itself and the shaggy hillside, and there smooth and slippery ledges, mounting one above the other, spanned the way. In places, too, the drought had left pools of dark, still water, difficult to avoid, and not infrequently the ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... that, toiling With wild white roses' bloom— No printers' vats a-boiling Nor labour of the loom— With fern and foxglove chalice On tiny feet or wings Titania's elves made sallies, And that's how Lady Alice Had on ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 25, 1919 • Various
... and silvered the white trunks of the sycamores till they looked like a row of ghosts standing with outstretched arms along the creek. It was so lovely there above the water. All the sweet woodsy smells of fern and mint and fallen leaves seem stronger after nightfall. Everybody enjoyed the feast so much, and was in such high spirits that we all felt a shade of regret that it had to come to ...
— The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor • Annie Fellows Johnston
... Ingleborough proved to be quite correct, for they paused at a rugged archway between piled-up fern-hung blocks, out of which the water rushed in a fairly large volume, but not knee-deep; and, upon leaving his horse with his comrade and boldly wading in, West found that the cave expanded as soon as the entrance was ...
— A Dash from Diamond City • George Manville Fenn
... I am afraid I am too matter-of-fact to sympathise very clearly with this form of aestheticism; but here is a charming bit of forest scenery. Look at that old oak with the deer under it; the long and deep range of fern running up from it to that beech-grove on the upland, the lights and shadows on the projections and recesses of the wood, and the blaze of foxglove in its foreground. It is a place in which a poet might look for a glimpse of ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... for skeleton-leaf bouquets it is not necessary to place them in the macerating bowl before bleaching, as the texture of the fern is so delicate as to be ruined by maceration. Before bleaching, the fern should be pressed, and as it becomes dry and brittle, more care is required in the bleaching process than for skeleton leaves. Hang your sprays in the jar, and fill gently with warm water. Then pour in the bleaching ...
— Harper's Young People, July 13, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... while after this, Arthur thought that he had had about enough dancing for awhile, and went and sat by himself in a secluded spot under the shadow of a tree-fern in a temporary conservatory put up outside a bow-window. The Chinese lantern that hung upon the fern had gone out, leaving his chair in total darkness. Presently a couple, whom he did not recognize, for he only saw their backs, strayed in, and placed themselves on a bench before ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... bananas, mangoes, breadfruit palms, and two or three fern-trees. The leaves of the latter are in shape like those of the English fern, but of gigantic proportions, and grow on the top of a stem thirty feet in height. The sugar-cane is the chief cultivated production of the island on all the ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... frogs, sunning themselves on a large, moss-grown rock, projecting above the water's edge; from shady nooks and crevices peeped clusters of early white violets; graceful maidenhair ferns, and hardier members of the fern family, called "Brake," uncurled their graceful, sturdy fronds from the carpet of green moss and lichen at the base of tree trunks, growing along the water's edge. Partly hidden by rocks along the bank of the stream, nestled a few belated cup-shaped anemones or "Wind Flowers," from which most ...
— Mary at the Farm and Book of Recipes Compiled during Her Visit - among the "Pennsylvania Germans" • Edith M. Thomas
... a man variously and mysteriously alive, very different from every other man and especially from certain kinds of man. When you look at a larch wood with a floor of fern in October at the end of twilight, you are not content to have that wood described as so many hundred poles growing on three acres of land, the property of a manufacturer of gin. Still less was Borrow content to sit down at Oulton, while the blast howled ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... probably the birds carry the seeds; yet it grows freely after a clearing has been made. Nature lays down a green sward directly on the rich virgin mould, and sets to work besides to cover up the unsightly stems and holes of the fallen timber with luxuriant tufts of a species of hart's-tongue fern, which grows almost as freely as an orchid on decayed timber. I was so still and silent that innumerable forest birds came about me. A wood pigeon alighted on a branch close by, and sat preening her radiant plumage in a bath of golden sunlight. The profound stillness ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... to hear if all was quiet. Then Jean threw a white cloak round her, and stole about the edges of the camp and the wood. She knew that if any wandering man came by, he would not stay long where such a figure was walking. The night was cool, the dew lay on the deep fern; there was a sweet smell from the grass and ...
— The Gold Of Fairnilee • Andrew Lang
... red and yellow fern-like fronds grew rankly all about us to the height of several feet ...
— Warlord of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... 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 one at ...
— Sketches of Our Life at Sarawak • Harriette McDougall
... come the furrow, as it were, shall open, and the great buttercup of the waters will show a broad palm of gold. You never know what will come to the net of the eye next—a bud, a flower, a nest, a curled fern, or whether it will be in the woodland or by the meadow path, at the water's side or on the dead dry heap of fagots. There is no settled succession, no fixed and formal order—always the unexpected; and you cannot say, 'I will go and find this or that.' The sowing ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... beeches. Newbury found a seat for Marcia on a fallen trunk, and threw himself beside her. The world seemed to have been all washed by the thunder-storm of the night before; the odors of grass, earth, and fern were steaming out into the summer air. The wood was alive with the hum of innumerable insects, which had become audible and dominant with the gradual silencing of the birds. In the half-cut hay-fields the ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... reminds me of an absurd bit of information I picked up from Kippy that made me feel as flat as a pressed fern. We were wandering along the shore one morning and she suddenly pointed to the ...
— The Cruise of the Kawa • Walter E. Traprock
... of the leaf, it is bipartite; if to the base, it is bisect. Thus, too, a pod of a cruciferous plant is a siliqua, if it is four times as long as it is broad, but if it be shorter than this it is a silicula. Such terms being established, the form of the very complex leaf or frond of a fern (Hymenophyllum Wilsoni) is exactly conveyed by the following phrase: 'fronds rigid pinnate, pinnae recurved subunilateral, pinnatifid, the segments linear undivided or ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... of the Captain secures us a good view from "the bridge" as we approach our first port. A great white rock juts up in the bay like a fragment of some Titan's fortress; a lighthouse stares out to sea from a cliff at the harbour's entrance; the tall cocoa palms wave their fern leaves in the blinding sunshine, and red-roofed houses huddle below the dome of the Cathedral rising ...
— Under the Southern Cross • Elizabeth Robins
... is free, neat, copious, and a perpetual bloomer, as is also Corydalis lutea (yellow). The climbing fumitory comes up of itself from seed every year, and is now running over bushes, stakes, and strings, and is full of fern-like leaves and flesh-colored flowers. The long, scarlet wands of Pentstemon barbatus are conspicuous in the borders; this should be in every garden, it is so profuse and hardy. Many speedwells still remain in fine condition, notably Veronica longifolia; they are a hardy and a showy race of ...
— Scientific American Suppl. No. 299 • Various
... terminating at last in the enormous masses of Pennygent and Ingleborough,—its deep and secluded valleys, containing within their hoary ramparts of gray limestone fertile fields and pleasant pasturages,—its wide-spreading moors, covered with the different species of moss and ling, and fern and bent-grass, which variegate the brown livery of the heath, and break its sombre uniformity,—its crystal streams of unwearied rapidity, now winding a silent course "in infant pride" through the willows and sedges which fringe their banks, and now bounding with impetuous rage over the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 354, Saturday, January 31, 1829. • Various
... AUSTRALIS.—This beautiful tree-fern attains a height of stem of 25 to 30 feet, with fronds spreading out into a crest 26 feet in diameter. These plants are among the most beautiful of all vegetable productions, and in their gigantic forms indicate, in a meager degree, the extraordinary beauty of the vegetation ...
— Catalogue of Economic Plants in the Collection of the U. S. Department of Agriculture • William Saunders
... is a greenhouse variety, bearing fern-like foliage. The seeds should be sown in slight heat ...
— Gardening for the Million • Alfred Pink
... on the borders, of a conflict of a mysterious and terrible nature, between mortals and the spirits of the wilds. This superstition is incidentally alluded to by Jackson, at the beginning of the 17th century. The fern seed, which is supposed to become visible only on St John's Eve,[A] and at the very moment when the Baptist was born, is held by the vulgar to be under the special protection of the queen of Faery. But, as the seed was supposed to have the quality ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott
... superintending gardener—the same 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
... history, and have left Victoria—absorbed in her thoughts—driving over a wood road of many puddles that led to the Four Corners, near Avalon. The road climbed the song-laden valley of a brook, redolent now with scents of which the rain had robbed the fern, but at length Victoria reached an upland where the young corn was springing from the, black furrows that followed the contours of the hillsides, where the big-eyed cattle lay under the heavy maples and oaks or gazed at her across ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Fur-clad, what do they care for the cold? Greenland with its rolling drifts is safer hunting than this forest world. What glory, doomed prisoners between the woods and the sea within the shadow of the great forests and a great fear? The smell of wildwood things, of flower banks, of fern mold, came dank and unwholesome to these men. Their {3} nostrils were for the whiff of the sea; and every sunset tipped the waves with fire where they longed to sail. And the shadow of the fear fell on Gudrid. Ordering the vessels loaded with timber good for ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... sassafras, crowfoot, platain, shepherd's purse, mallows, wild marjoram, crane's bill, marsh-mallows, false eglantine, laurel, violet, blue flag, wild indigo, solomon's seal, dragon's blood, comfrey, milfoil, many sorts of fern, wild lilies of different kinds, agrimony, wild leek, blessed thistle, snakeroot, Spanish figs which grow out of the leaves,(2) tarragon and numerous other plants and flowers; but as we are not skilled in those things, we cannot ...
— Narrative of New Netherland • Various
... lived, or what evil deed he had done. 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. Tillers of the land, yeomen, and some say knights, went on their ways freely, for of them Robin took no toll; but lordly churchmen with money-bags well filled, ...
— Heroes Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... The trees were smaller and scantier here, owing to the rocky nature of the ground, which sloped rather rapidly down; but it was moist and overgrown with mosses, ferns, creepers, and low shrubs, all of the liveliest green. I could not see many yards ahead owing to the bushes and tall fern fronds; but presently I began to hear a low, continuous sound, which, when I had advanced twenty or thirty yards further, I made out to be the gurgling of running water; and at the same moment I made the discovery that my throat was parched ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... 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 their ...
— The Lilac Lady • Ruth Alberta Brown
... of your readers want something odd and interesting in the way of plants let them try one of your Little Monarch Fern Balls. I have had rather hard luck with mine. I received the Fern Ball about a year ago, and every member of the family except myself condemned it at once as being "no good," but I kept it watered and in a few weeks it began to show signs of life and had ...
— The Mayflower, January, 1905 • Various
... gravely, as they both settled themselves upon the floor of the loft, and the bundles of straw and dried-fern litter which the priest had added for their comfort rustled loudly while they placed themselves in restful postures. "I used to find it a ...
— !Tention - A Story of Boy-Life during the Peninsular War • George Manville Fenn
... people in the shaky, rattly little car when Lois and Dosia entered it, whizzing off, a moment later, down a lonely road with wooded hills sloping to the track on one side and a wooded brook on the other. The air grew aromatic in the chill spring dusk with the odor of damp fern and pine. Both women were silent, and the baby, rolled in his long cloak, had slept all the way. It was but seven miles to Collingswood, yet the time seemed longer than all the rest of the journey before they were finally dumped out at the little empty station with the hills towering ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... attain their full luxuriance they may be seen in extensive groves as well as in little groups. Four kinds of maidenhair, always light and graceful and attractive, are found; and of ferns common to Europe, Osmunda regalis, the Royal fern of Europe, and the European moonwort and alder's-tongue ferns. Then there is a fern which attains to gigantic proportions, especially in the cool forests, where its massive fronds grow to more than 5 yards in length and 3 in breadth, with a spread over ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... effect in the sunny landscapes of the South. There they may be seen bending over fields tapestried with Passion-Flowers and verdurous with Myrtles and Orange-trees, and presenting their long shafts to the tendrils of the Trumpet Honeysuckle and the palmate foliage of the Climbing Fern. But the slender Palms, when solitary, afford but little shade. It is when they are standing in groups, their lofty tops meeting and forming a uniform umbrage, that they afford any important protection from the heat ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... fact, the natural form which most frequently occurs in the capitals of our cathedral—by no means a remarkably flowery one—is the episcopal crozier as seen in the young shoots of the fern." ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... persecutor from tracking our defenceless flight. So we journeyed onward, discoursing of many dear and tender cares, often looking round, and listening when startled by the wind whispering to the heath and the waving fern, till the shadows of evening began to fall, and the dangers of the night ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... said Philip, still in his tall silk hat and his knickerbockers. He had been standing alone among the dead brown fern, the withering gorse, and the hanging brambles, gripping the apple-tree and swallowing the cry that was bubbling up to his throat, but forcing himself to look upon Pete's happiness, which was his own calamity, though it was tearing his heart out, ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... remarkable variation in its fruit—a crown of secondary capsules being added to the normal central capsule. A field of such poppies was grown, and M. Goeppert, with seed from this field, obtained still this monstrous form in great quantity. Deformities of ferns are sometimes sought after by fern-growers. They are now always obtained by taking spores from the abnormal parts of the monstrous fern; from which spores ferns presenting the same peculiarities invariably grow.... The most remarkable case is ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... height of the season at any watering-place depresses me. If I could wear fern seed in my shoes to make me invisible, and sit on the piazza railing in a shirt-waist and a short skirt, I would love it. But both Bee and Mrs. Jimmie, with the light of heaven in their eyes, pulled out and put on their most be-yew-tiful Paris clothes, and if ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell
... delightful talk, We rested from our walk. Beyond the shadow, large and staid, Cows chewed with drowsy eye Their cud complacently: Elegant deer walked o'er the glade, Or stood with wide bright eyes Gazing a short surprise; And up the fern ...
— My Beautiful Lady. Nelly Dale • Thomas Woolner
... don't mean—and her spirit becomes one with my spirit. And I feel I can never again misunderstand her, never again fail to interpret her, never again wander so far away from her that every white anemone and every seedling fern disowns me, and waits in silence till the alien has gone from among them. And I come home, Rachel, and I try, sometimes I try for half the night, to find words to translate it into. But there are no words, or, if there are, I cannot find them, and at last I fall back on some coarse simile, and in ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... appearances—a snug ravine, well shaded by mahogany-trees, the ground covered with the luxuriant vegetation of that tropical region, a little stream bubbling and leaping and dashing down one of the high rocks that flanked the hollow, and rippling away through the tall fern towards the rear of the spot where we had halted, at the distance of a hundred yards from which the ground was ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... noisy haunts of men, Whose ruts the solitary lime cart tracks, Whose hedge-sides, propp'd by many a mossy stone, Are checker'd o'er with foxglove's purple bloom, Or graceful fern, or snakehood's curling sheath, Or the wild strawberry's crimson peeping through. There, where it joins the far-outstretching heath, A lengthen'd nook presents its glassy slope, A couch with nature's velvet verdure ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... sympathising fully with the ardent pursuits of boyhood, had been over-indulgent in the matter of granting whole Wednesdays, instead of half-holidays. Any excuse sufficed. Skating on inland ponds in the winter; fishing in the bay, as the year wore on; and, latterly, digging for primrose or fern roots in Brattlesby Woods. But Philip Price was beginning to find out by results that too much play and not enough work was making dull scholars of his pupils, and he had determined to stand out firmly against any more indulgences in the future. It was ...
— The Captain's Bunk - A Story for Boys • M. B. Manwell
... jest like a fern with a lot of roots. My mother used to grow them in the corner of our garden. ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: Volume IV, Georgia Narratives, Part 1 • Works Projects Administration
... hovered apparently motionless, as though looking at their beautiful bodies reflected on the bright surface. On one bank, too, a bright little green lizard was captured, and carefully secured, to place in one of the fern cases; besides which there were rose beetles, watchmen, spiders, and tiny flies, that Fred considered were neither curious nor pretty, but which Mr Inglis said were quite the contrary, being both curious and pretty, or, rather, beautiful, as he would show Master Fred when they reached home. ...
— Hollowdell Grange - Holiday Hours in a Country Home • George Manville Fenn
... speak again among the hills that we dived into; the air grew chillier as we climbed; forest and wet rocks closed round us in the mist, to the sound of waters trickling alongside; there was a tang of wet fern, cut pine, and the first breath of autumn when the road entered a tunnel and ...
— France At War - On the Frontier of Civilization • Rudyard Kipling
... exquisite grounds, with evidences everywhere of wealth to be sure, but of individual taste and refinement. How sweet and cool are these winding ways in the wonderful woods, overrun with vegetation, the bayberry, the sweet-fern, the wild roses, wood-lilies, and ferns! and it is ever a fresh surprise at a turn to find one's self so near the sea, and to open out an entrancing coast view, to emerge upon a promontory and a sight of ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... 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, and we perceived the fern-leaf within apparently ...
— Psychic Phenomena - A Brief Account of the Physical Manifestations Observed - in Psychical Research • Edward T. Bennett
... fronds of a giant fern; a cautious step beyond his hands touched a slippery, pliant vine. And his whisper ended as he felt the thing turn and twist beneath his hand. It was alive!—writhing!—cold as the body of a monster snake, and just as vicious and savage in ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... eye could embrace such vast proportions, had stooped to study the glowing illuminations painted upon the wings of the fragile butterfly. She had traced the symmetrical and marvellous network which the fern extends as a canopy over the wood strawberry; she had listened to the murmuring of streams through the long reeds and stems of the water-grass, where the hissing of the "amorous viper" may be heard; she had followed ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... the pasture, Ray kept springing ahead with his elastic foot, threshing the juniper-plats that little Jane had already searched, and scattering about them the pungent fragrance of the sweet-fern thickets,—the breath of summer itself; then returning for a sober pace or two, would take off his hat, thrust a hand through the masses of his hair that looked like carved ebony, and show Vivia that his shadow was exactly as long as her own. And ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... one side or the other, drawing his limbs up to his body, and resting his head on his hand. When the night is cold, windy, or rainy, he usually covers his body with a heap of 'Pandanus', 'Nipa', or Fern leaves, like those of which his bed is made, and he is especially careful to wrap up his head in them. It is this habit of covering himself up which has probably led to the fable that the Orang builds huts ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... aesthetic pleasure. A line may be pleasing to sense-perception, and in addition illustrate expressional value by suggested ease of movement or pose. Similarly, a concrete form, e.g. that of a sculptured human figure in repose, or of a graceful birch or fern, owes its aesthetic value to a happy combination of pleasing lines and of ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... MALE FERN. The Roots. L. E. D.—They are said to be aperient and anthelmintic. Simon Pauli tells us, that they have been the grand secret of some empirics against the broad kind of worms called taenia; and that the dose is one, two, or three drams of the powder. ...
— The Botanist's Companion, Vol. II • William Salisbury
... seen from the country to which I was going, where it might be useful to me in fixing other points; the other being to obtain a view of Port Phillip, and thus to connect my survey with that harbour. But the tree-fern, musk-plant, brush, and lofty timber together shut us up for a long time from any prospect of the low country to the southward, and it was not until I had nearly exhausted a fine sunny afternoon in wandering round the broad ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... lays; Sweet silvern murmurs from some deep-delled spring, Brook, tree and flower and each insensate thing, The throstle's call, the calm of sun-steeped days, A glint of sunshine on the swallow's wing, Fern-filagrees, the drowsy drone of bee Made drunk with draughts of purple wild-grape wine; All these Orphean music holds for thee, And all thy days and dreams companioning Walks Nature with her hand close-clasped ...
— The Path of Dreams - Poems • Leigh Gordon Giltner
... beauty of the scene was so great, however, that these occasional obstructions, so far from diminishing, actually heightened the charm of the whole. The forest was full of the most luxuriant underwood, creepers, palms, and fern plants; the latter, in many instances sixteen feet high, proved a no less effectual screen against the burning rays of the sun than did ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... our knowledge were the manchineal and a species of purow: also some palm-trees, the tops of which we cut down, and the soft interior part or heart of them was so palatable that it made a good addition to our mess. Mr. Nelson discovered some fern-roots, which I thought might be good roasted, as a substitute for bread, but it proved a very poor one: it however was very good in its natural state to allay thirst, and on that account I directed a quantity to ...
— A Narrative Of The Mutiny, On Board His Majesty's Ship Bounty; And The Subsequent Voyage Of Part Of The Crew, In The Ship's Boat • William Bligh
... day on which her neighbors started from Green River to visit her, she was out in the pasture trying to fill her pail with blueberries. All the sunlight seemed to centre on her black figure like a burning-glass; the thick growth of sweet-fern around the blueberry bushes sent a hot and stifling aroma into her face; the wild flowers hung limply, like delicate painted rags, and the rocks were like furnaces. Mrs. Field went out soon after dinner, ...
— Jane Field - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... But on the fern-wove mattress lay No weary guest. St. Colum kneeled, And found no trace; but, ashen-grey, Far off he ...
— Christmas in Legend and Story - A Book for Boys and Girls • Elva S. Smith
... passed back over the fern path and were in the pasture before either spoke again. Then Murray said, "We have left Eden behind—but we can always return there when we will. And although we were only playing at paradise, I was not playing at love. I ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... going to tell you. Zephyrus will only be represented by the effect of the wind seen on the bushes, on the trees, and every blade of grass or fern in the picture. These small tamarisk trees that fringe the glade will be bent nearly double. The spirit of the wind must be in the whole painting. That will be the great effect, ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... finished in this hasty world. But ah! this other, this that never ends, Still climbing, luring fancy still to climb, As full of morals, half divined, as life, Graceful, grotesque, with ever new surprise Of hazardous caprices, sure to please, Heavy as nightmare, airy light as fern, Imagination's ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... far in the branches; and in the greater distance I know that green parrots are flying in twos from tree to tree. The plant forms are strange and various, making mosaic of contrasting range of leaf-size and leaf-shape, palm and grass and fern, epiphyte and liana and clumpy mistletoe, of grace and clumsiness and even misproportion, a tall thick landscape all mingled into a symmetry of disorder that charms the attention and ...
— The Apple-Tree - The Open Country Books—No. 1 • L. H. Bailey
... bolted from Sylvester's on the flat; How the sun-dried reed-beds crackled, how the flint-strewn ranges rang To the strokes of 'Mountaineer' and 'Acrobat'; Hard behind them in the timber, harder still across the heath, Close behind them through the tea-tree scrub we dashed; And the golden-tinted fern leaves, how they rustled underneath! And the honeysuckle osiers, how ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... bodies and faces all over with ashes, and wear cords round their necks for a hundred days in token that they are not eating good food.[581] They imagine that as soon as the soul quits the body at death, it mounts into a tree where there is a bird's nest fern, and sitting there among the fronds it laughs and mocks at the people who are crying and making great lamentations over his deserted tabernacle. "There he sits, wondering at them and ridiculing them. ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... near it, and near, too, to the boys, who could now distinguish their long, erect ears, slender limbs, and graceful motions—resembling, in fact, those of the common hare. Their colour, however, was different. It was a rusty fern, lighter underneath, but in no part—not even under the tail—did any white appear. It was a beautiful sight to behold these innocent little creatures, now nibbling at the blades of grass, now leaping a few ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid
... on in front to give notice of my approach, and at each village they had the inevitable hot yams ready to eat, which Masirewa made the most of. At the entrance to each village there was usually a palisade of bamboo or tree-fern trunks, and here a crowd of girls and children would often be waiting, and on my approach they would set up loud yells and scamper off, till I began to think that I must look a very ferocious kind ...
— Wanderings Among South Sea Savages And in Borneo and the Philippines • H. Wilfrid Walker
... pleasure almost 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 ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... brother have near him these things of which he is dreaming, as a remembrance of what his soul loveth." Then, turning to the tree and the plant and the pool, he blessed them and said: "O little tree and starry plant and cool well and transparent fern, and whatsoever else Bresal now sees, arise in the name of the Lord of the four winds and of earth and water and fire, arise and go and make real the dream that ...
— A Child's Book of Saints • William Canton
... put down their tools, for a sharp, ringing noise rolled across the woods. When they reached camp Jim was surprised to note two hobbled horses among the springing fern. The big pack-saddles stood near the fire and a man was helping Carrie to fill the tin plates. He stopped when Jim advanced, and Carrie said, "This is Mr. Davies; he was at ...
— Partners of the Out-Trail • Harold Bindloss
... past one, under a strong blue sky, Turnbull got up out of the grass and fern in which he had been lying, and his still intermittent laughter ended ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... above me, concealed by a vase fern, reposed that lovely creature of the twilight, the luna moth, just out of her chrysalis, drying and inflating her wings. I chanced to lift the fern screen, and there was this marvel! Her body was as white and spotless as the snow, and her wings, ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... respectable land-owners and farmers of the county of Wilts, to take into consideration the propriety of presenting Petitions to both Houses of Parliament, on behalf of the proprietors and occupiers of land. Thomas Grove, Esq. of Fern, one of the gentlemen who called the meeting, having taken the chair, Mr. Benett addressed them at a very considerable length in favour of a petition that he submitted for their adoption, expressive ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 3 • Henry Hunt
... carpeted the earth, and out of it grew a natural fernery." He turned his face a little, involuntarily seeking Mrs. Weatherbee. "I wish you could have seen that place," he said. "Imagine a great billowing sea of infinite shades of green, fronds waving everywhere, light, beautifully stencilled elk-fern, starting with a breadth of two feet and tapering to lengths of four or five; sword-fern shooting stiffly erect, and whole knolls mantled ...
— The Rim of the Desert • Ada Woodruff Anderson
... One!" exclaimed Petro: "Give them here! I'm ready for anything!" They struck hands upon it. "See here, Petro, you are ripe just in time: to-morrow is St. John the Baptist's day. Only on this one night in the year does the fern blossom. Delay not. I will await thee at midnight ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Russian • Various
... reached its destination, and the 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 ...
— A History of the English Church in New Zealand • Henry Thomas Purchas
... peaks, just tipped with snow, standing out crisp and clear against the cloudless sky, formed a fitting frame to the lovely picture before us; the pretty village, trees blossoming on all sides, fresh green pastures overgrown in places by masses of fern and wild flowers, and the white foaming waterfall dashing down the side of the mountain, to lose itself in the blue waters of a huge lake just visible in the plains below. The neighbourhood of the latter teems with game of all kinds—leopard, gazelle, and wild boar, ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt
... upon our feet again. We crept through this queer tunnel for a long time and then I felt that we were ascending gradually and that the air was growing purer. In a few moments more, we emerged from another narrow crevice hidden under the gnarled roots of a live-oak. Moss, lichen and fern covered this opening so completely that no one would have dreamed there was an entrance there to ...
— The Blue Birds' Winter Nest • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... grew here just as they did along the bank of the Laughing Brook, only more of them. There were pretty birch-trees and wild cherry-trees. It was still and dark and oh, so peaceful! Peter liked that place and sat down under a big fern to rest. He didn't hear a sound excepting the beautiful silvery voice of Veery the Thrush. Listening to it, Peter fell asleep, ...
— Mrs. Peter Rabbit • Thornton W. Burgess
... Thus we speak not of repose in a stone, because the motion of a stone has nothing in it of energy nor vitality, neither its repose of stability. But having once seen a great rock come down a mountain side, we have a noble sensation of its rest, now bedded immovably among the under fern, because the power and fearfulness of its motion were great, and its stability and negation of motion are now great in proportion. Hence the imagination, which delights in nothing more than the enhancing of the characters of repose, effects this usually by either attributing to ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... Greening's was like a pressed fern," said Winnie. "Do you remember the fad we had for pressed flowers and skeleton leaves? We used to keep them inside all ...
— The Nicest Girl in the School - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... of these Pasture or Meadow Grounds being supposed to be, either Weeds, Moss, Sour-grass, Heath, Fern, Bushes, Bryars, Brambles, Broom, Rushes, Sedges, Gorse or Furzes: what are the ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various
... brand and spear and bended bow, In osiers pale 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 ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... eyas-heart, and fliest my dream; Thou swing'st the hammers of my forge; As the innocent moon, that nothing does but shine, Moves all the labouring surges of the world. Pierce where thou wilt the springing thought in me, And there thy pictured countenance lies enfurled, As in the cut fern lies the imaged tree. This poor song that sings of thee, This fragile song, is but a curled Shell outgathered from thy sea, And murmurous still of its nativity. Princess of Smiles! Sorceress of most unlawful-lawful wiles! Cunning pit for gazers' senses, ...
— Sister Songs • Francis Thompson
... best use of her memory, and Alton listened gravely. "Yes," he said. "I seem to see it. The rose garden on the south side, the big lawn, and the lake. There's a little stream on the opposite side of it that comes down through the fern ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... this grave of the dead summer lacked neither fretted tomb nor wreathing garland; for above, the bittersweet hung out heavy festoons of coral berries over the pall of its faded leaves, and beneath, on frond of fern and stalk of aster, and on rough surface of lichen-covered rock, the frost had turned the spray of water to white crystals, and the stream, with imprisoned far-off murmur, made its little leaps within fairy palaces ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... loveliness of that scent which monopolised and mounted to my brain until I was beginning to be drunk with the sheer pleasure of it. And there in the centre of the space stood a plant not unlike a tree fern, about six feet high, and crowned by one huge and lovely blossom. It resembled a vast passion-flower of incredible splendour. There were four petals, with points resting on the ground, each six feet long, ivory-white inside, exquisitely patterned ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... like the ballons of the Vosges, once rich of grass as they, now shorn of wood, and even of undergrowth, lift a bare stony front to the lovely sunlight, and never more will root of tree, or seed of flower or of fern, find bed there. ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... Germany— The children will look for them still; They will search all about till the sunlight slips out And the trees stand frowning and chill. "The flowers," they will say, "have all vanished, And where can the fairies be fled That played in the fern?"—The flowers will return, But I fear that the ...
— Punch, 1917.07.04, Vol. 153, Issue No. 1 • Various
... 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 other thing ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... beginnings of trees, to the pre-historic times when this bed rock was laid down, when all this region was an inlet or bay from the Atlantic Ocean and the upland was treeless as our rock record shows. Then there were the beginnings of low fern-like growth and clotted mass which gradually increased in size until they assumed the enormous proportions which made the coal beds possible. And then I like to follow the growth of trees on to the broad leaf. We have the beginnings of the broad leaf, the sassafras, the poplars, the maples, ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various
... wilderness, and finding each other unexpectedly in nooks and dips and sunny silences, where the wind purred and gentled and went softly. When the sun began to hang low, sending great fan-like streamers of radiance up to the zenith, we foregathered in a tiny, sequestered valley, full of young green fern, lying in the shadow of a wooded hill. In it was a shallow pool—a glimmering green sheet of water on whose banks nymphs might dance as blithely as ever they did on Argive hill or in Cretan dale. There we sat and stripped the faded leaves and stems from ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... down?' said Carinthia, for she knew a little cascade near the house, showering on rock and fern, and longed ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... close quarters, reveals all its mysteries to you. An ant, staggering like a woodcutter under his burden, drags a piece of bark larger than himself; a beetle crawls along a blade of grass stretched like a bridge from trunk to trunk; while, beneath a tall fern standing by itself in a clearing carpeted with velvety moss, some little blue or red creature waits, its antennae on the alert, until some other beast, on its way thither by some deserted path, arrives at the rendezvous under the gigantic tree. ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... here, with the dreariness of decay superadded. A few paces from the cabin there was a rough enclosure, which, in the brief days of Tennessee's Partner's matrimonial felicity, had been used as a garden, but was now overgrown with fern. As we approached it we were surprised to find that what we had taken for a recent attempt at cultivation was the broken soil about ...
— Tennessee's Partner • Bret Harte
... 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 ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... he that knew the names, Long-learned names of agaric, moss and fern, [1] Who forged a thousand theories of the rocks, Who taught me how to skate, to row, to swim, Who read me rhymes elaborately good, His own—I call'd him Crichton, for he seem'd All-perfect, finish'd to the finger nail.[2] And once I ask'd him of his early life, ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... as he saw the blue haze across the doorway, hiding the moss and a tiny fern that grew on the shaft ...
— Wulfric the Weapon Thane • Charles W. Whistler
... and I was spending the autumn at a village by the New Forest. One day I came upon a man kneeling under a hedge, examining some object on the ground,—fern or flower, or perhaps insect. His costume showed that he was no native of the locality; I took him for a stray townsman, probably a naturalist. He wore a straw hat and a rough summer suit; a wallet hung ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... can scarcely be raised; and from 1000 to 1200 feet is the more common limit of the cereal and the esculent. On this point a statement is made, which may be useful to cultivators in the hill districts: it is, that 'the common brake-fern (Pteris aquilina), distributed throughout Britain, is found to be limited by a line running nearly level with the limit of cultivation, and thus affords a test, when cultivation may be absent, where nature does not deny it success. In one sheltered spot in the woods ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 438 - Volume 17, New Series, May 22, 1852 • Various
... 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
... Down on Fern Avenue, which is a wide, grassy road and no avenue at all, Uncle Roger Allan is carefully painting his chicken coops. Roger Allan is a tall, twinkling, smooth-shaven old man, and he lives in a house as twinkling and as tidy as himself. He is a bachelor, but years ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... forest scenery, and undisturbed by any traces of human habitation, except in those rude paths which occasionally open a passing view into the remoter parts of the forest. At others, the path winds through great masses of rock, piled in endless confusion upon each other, in the crevices of which the fern and the heath grow in all the luxuriance of southern vegetation; while their summits are covered by aged oaks of the wildest forms, whose crossing boughs throw an eternal shade over the ravines below, and afford room ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... rugged, leaving, in the interspaces, very large valleys, and gently-rising grounds about their sides. These hills, though of a rocky disposition, are, in general, covered, almost to their tops, with trees; but the lower parts, on the sides, frequently only with fern. At the bottom of the harbour, where we lay, the ground rises gently to the foot of the hills, which run across nearly in the middle of the island; but its flat border, on each side, at a very small distance from the sea, becomes quite ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... granite-moulding aeons' gloom; Is told in stony record of the roar Of long Silurian storms, and tempests huge Scourging the circuit of Devonian seas; Is whispered in the noiseless mists, the gray Soft drip of clouds about rank fern-forests, Through dateless terms that stored the layered coal; Is uttered hoarse in strange Triassic forms Of monstrous life; or stamped in ice-blue gleams Athwart the death-still years of ...
— In Divers Tones • Charles G. D. Roberts
... poised themselves high in air near the rocks. The Cove lay in sunshine, its rough stone chimneys and rude slate roofs overgrown with moss and fern, rising rapidly, one above the other, in the fast descending hollow, through which a little stream rushed to the sea,—more quietly than its brother, which, at some space distant, fell sheer down over the crag ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... irritating to him. He could not bear to hear him speak with trembling voice and gleaming eyes of the grand mountains and the silent corries around Ben-Nevis, the red deer trooping over the misty steeps, and the brown hinds lying among the green plumes of fern, and the wren and the thrush lilting ...
— Scottish sketches • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... since disappeared. At that moment there seemed to rise before me, sporting among the gnarled branches of the old thorn-trees, the graceful form of Mary Stanley, followed by old Sergeant, bounding and barking through the fern; and the General looking on from a distance, pretending to be angry, and desiring her to come out of the covert and not disturb the game. Exactly thus, and there, I beheld them for the first time. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... calling to them in friendly fashion, at which they always answered back. Patsy listened silently, wrapped in the delight and beauty of it. On went the brook—dancing here in a broken patch of sunshine—quieting there between the banks of rock-fern and columbine, to better paint their prettiness; and all the while singing one farther and farther into the woods. She was just wondering if there could be anything lovelier than this when the tinker stopped, still and tense as a pointer. She ...
— Seven Miles to Arden • Ruth Sawyer
... tracery of fern to rust; The shouldering hills to level dust,— This is the law of rhythmic nature, The ebb and flow of ...
— Song-waves • Theodore H. Rand
... their perpetual summer—or of the Hesperides, (if they were flat, and not close to Atlas,) golden apples and all, I would give away in an instant, for one mossy granite stone a foot broad, and two leaves of lady fern. ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin
... lonely wineglass at the fern-dish and smashed a decanter. Then she pushed off the table about a hundred dollars' worth of chinaware, and kicked her chair over backward. She had been famous for her back-kick in ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes |
