"Spruce" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... beech tree above Davos about 5,500 feet above the sea, but it has never succeeded in topping the huge boulder which shelters it from the North. The silver fir is healthy at 4,000 feet, but is seldom found much above that level, while the spruce or fir goes up to 7,000 feet and does best there. Larches seem to thrive best at about 5,000-6,000 feet, but may be seen almost as high as the top of the Bernina Pass on the south side facing Italy. The cembra pine, like a great cedar, is the finest ...
— Ski-running • Katharine Symonds Furse
... desirable region, with the hills and mountains for forty miles, containing inexhaustible quantities of timber. We noticed tall cedar and oaks of every description; one kind more interesting than the others, being a white oak from twenty to forty feet in the body. Pine and spruce, with superior white ash and walnut, were found, and the most gigantic cotton-woods, particularly on the Sonoita. * * * * "The mountains in the neighborhood are filled with minerals, and the precious metals are said to abound. ...
— Memoir of the Proposed Territory of Arizona • Sylvester Mowry
... to climb, except east, where you might roll if you chose; in fact, you could hardly do otherwise. The first day of my hunt I started west. I climbed a hill devoted to pasture, passed through the bars, and faced my mountain. It presented a compact front of spruce-trees closely interlaced at the ground, and of course impassable. But a way opened in the midst, the path of a mountain brook, deserted now and dry. I sought an alpenstock. I abandoned all impedimenta. I started up that stony path escorted ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... strange appearance. It is full of young spruce trees, and the lower branches have been lopped down, but not cut through or killed. Under each tree there is now a grand hiding-place for foxes and rabbits—a sort of big umbrella turned topsy-turvy. The rabbits appreciate the pains we have been at; ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... Every blessed brand of merchandise a man could bring to mind; There were things in crates and boxes, there was stuff in bags and bales, There were tea-chests wrapped in matting, there were Eastern-looking frails, There were baulks of teak and greenheart, there were stacks of spruce and pine, There was cork and frozen carcasses and casks of Spanish wine, There was rice and spice and cocoa-nuts, and rum enough was there For to warm all London's innards up and leave a drop ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 4th, 1920 • Various
... a strange meeting when she came out a few minutes later. There was the monk, unshaven and pale under the eyes, with his thinned face that gave no smile as she came in; her father desperately white and resolved; Mr. Morris, spruce and grave as usual sitting with his hat between his knees behind the others;—he rose deferentially as she ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... reputation was that of "a hard case, and addicted to drink," I found also in hospital in Korogwe, recovered from an operation for abscess of the liver, and living in hospital with his wife. Spruce and rather jumpy he insisted on exhibiting his operation wound to me, paying heavy compliments to English skill in surgery; not, mark you, that he had any but the greatest contempt that all German ...
— Sketches of the East Africa Campaign • Robert Valentine Dolbey
... several urchins busy making oatmeal cakes in the embers. On one side a respectable lean-to had been constructed by nailing a plank to two fir-trees, running sloping poles thence to the ground, and thatching the whole with spruce branches and heather. On the other side two small dilapidated home-made tents were pitched. Dougal motioned his companion into the lean-to, where they had some privacy from the rest ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... work by Mr. Hough, entitled, "The Complete Boy Camper," of which, as I have remarked before, I already had a copy by me, there was a chapter describing how a balmy couch, far superior to any ordinary bed, might be constructed of the boughs of the spruce, the hemlock, the cedar, or other evergreen growths indigenous to our latitude; and also a chapter describing methods of cooking without pots or pans over a wood fire. The author went so far as to say that bacon was never so delicious as when broiled on a pointed stick above the glowing coals ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... Kitty Spruce went up on spec? Very enterprising of you both, I am sure! And did you make ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... mingling of tenderness and admiration in the glance she bent upon him. He was a goodly youth to look at, tall and strongly knit in figure, upright as a young spruce fir, with a keen, dark-skinned face, square in outline and with a peculiar mobility of expression. The eyes were black and sparkling, and the thick, short, curling hair was sombre as the raven's wing. There was no lack of intellect in the face, but the chief characteristic ...
— For the Faith • Evelyn Everett-Green
... the outer ward of the financial stronghold he had penetrated, with its curving sweep of counters, brass railings, and wirework screens defended by the spruce clerks behind them, he was again impressed with the position of the man he had just quitted, and for a moment hesitated, with an inclination to go back. It was with no idea of making a further appeal to his old comrade, but—what would have been odd in any ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... of the front step. A servant threw open the door of the breakfast room, and Delme mechanically entered it. It was filled with strangers; on some of these the spruce undertaker was fitting silk scarfs; while others were ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... "In a spruce-fir was a hang-nest of some unknown bird, suspended at the four corners to the boughs; it was open at top an inch and a half in diameter, and two deep; the sides and bottom thick, the materials moss, worsted, and birch-bark, lined with hair ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson
... "Spruce, fir, pine," growled the bear. His voice was very gruff. But all these were only different names ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten
... were in one leap from the Lebanon to the Mediterranean. Olives, vines, and corn cover the maritime plain, while in ancient times the heights were clothed with impenetrable forests of oak, pine, larch, cypress, spruce, and cedar. The mountain range drops in altitude towards the centre of the country and becomes merely a line of low hills, connecting Gebel Ansarieh with the Lebanon proper; beyond the latter it continues ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... the leading and all the lateral shoots excepting one. But we believe that they were too old when experimented on; and some were pinched too severely, and [page 188] some not enough. Only one case succeeded, namely, with the spruce-fir. The leading shoot was not killed, but its growth was checked; at its base there were three lateral shoots in a whorl, two of which were pinched, one being thus killed; the third was left untouched. These lateral shoots, when operated on (July 14th) ...
— The Power of Movement in Plants • Charles Darwin
... second time, and the baby squirrels began playing among the mosses. There was the smell of newly plowed fields. The tinkle of sheep and cow bells could be heard, and the pine and spruce trees covered themselves with red cones, like kings ...
— Tell Me Another Story - The Book of Story Programs • Carolyn Sherwin Bailey
... the stillness of the desolation. It was too late for the life of day, too early for the nocturnal roamings and voices of the creatures of the night. Like the basin of a great amphitheater the frozen lake lay revealed in the light of the moon and a billion stars. Beyond it rose the spruce forest, black and forbidding. Along its nearer edges stood hushed walls of tamarack, bowed in the smothering clutch of snow and ice, ...
— The Wolf Hunters - A Tale of Adventure in the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... "The spruce young spark," says Sizer, "who thinks chiefly of his mustache and boots and shiny hat, of getting along nicely and easily during the day, and talking about the theatre, the opera, or a fast horse, ridiculing the faithful young fellow who came to learn the business and make a man of ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... and gig With promises to pay; And he pawned his horns for a spruce new wig, To redeem as he came away: And he whistled some tune, a waltz or a jig, And drove off ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... of it. He thought of the old house and the woman who lived there with him as things defeated and done for. The hotel in which he had begun life so hopefully was now a mere ghost of what a hotel should be. As he went spruce and business-like through the streets of Winesburg, he sometimes stopped and turned quickly about as though fearing that the spirit of the hotel and of the woman would follow him even into the streets. "Damn such a life, damn it!" he ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... led him to a partly dry muskeg bottom. Beyond this was a thicker growth of timber, mostly spruce and cedar, from behind which came the rushing sound of water. A few moments more and he stood with the wide tumult of the Athabasca at his feet. He had chosen this spot for his little cabin because the river ran wild here among the rocks, and because pack-outfits going ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... family—I have Locusts. seen it in Michigan and southern Birches. Illinois, 140 feet high and Dogwood. 8 feet thick at the butt [A]; does Pine. not transplant well; best rais'd the Elm. from seeds—the lumbermen Chesnut. call it yellow poplar.) Linden. Sycamores. Aspen. Gum trees, both sweet and sour. Spruce. Beeches. Hornbeam. ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... them a 'barometer had of late years been introduced'. The teapot and the mug of ale jointly possessed the breakfast table, and meat and pudding smoked on the board every noon. Formerly one might see at church what was the cut of a coat half a century ago, now dress was spruce and modern.[481] As a proof of the spirit of improvement among farmers, Marshall instances the custom in the Midlands of placing their sons as pupils on other farms to widen their experience. 'Their entertainments are as expensive as they ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... he could, and was as happy as any of them. In the afternoon their mother assisted them. She put the bunches made of the delicate, feathery hemlock, and the dark glossy laurel, over the windows, and suspended the wreaths where the bay-windows projected from the room. Small branches of cedar and spruce were tastefully arranged in vases, relieved by the rich, green leaves of the ivy, and the bright, lively ...
— The Nest in the Honeysuckles, and other Stories • Various
... to the salt gales of the Atlantic, but Mr. Balfour's trees have thriven remarkably well. He tried all sorts, convinced that something should be done, and that an ounce of experiment was worth a pound of theory. Sycamore, ash, elm, beech, birch, poplar, alder, larch, Scotch fir, spruce, silver fir, sea buckthorn, elder, and willow—he gave them all a chance, some as main plantations, some as shelter belts. All proved successful except the silver fir. Besides this, three hundred and fifty ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... a true word spoken from the chest," I sighed, just as Uncle Peter made his first cast and cleverly wound about eight feet of line around a spruce tree on ...
— Back to the Woods • Hugh McHugh
... topped the rise and leveled to the tree-girdled mesa. Young Pete stared. This was the most beautiful spot he had ever seen. Ringed round by a great forest of spruce, the Blue Mesa lay shimmering in the sunset like an emerald lake, beneath a cloudless sky tinged with crimson, gold, and amethyst. Across the mesa stood a cabin, the only dwelling in that silent expanse. And ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... we camped in a tiny temple which nestled into a grove of spruce trees on the outskirts of a straggling village. To the north the Snow Mountain rose almost above us, and on the east and south a grassy rock-strewn plain rolled away in gentle undulations to a range of hills which jutted into the valley like a great ...
— Camps and Trails in China - A Narrative of Exploration, Adventure, and Sport in Little-Known China • Roy Chapman Andrews and Yvette Borup Andrews
... through a couple of streets, we came to a humble but neat-looking dwelling house, with an apology for a garden in front. Tables and seats were arranged beneath some trees; "spruce beer" was advertised for sale, but there were indications that other kinds of refreshments could be obtained. The place wore a comfortable aspect. We nodded smilingly to each other, as much as to say, "This will do!" entered the gateway, ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... redwood and the sequoia the most massive of living things, furnished most of them. But the largest happen to be the two giant incense cedars, which stand on either side of the main entrance. These are eight feet and ten inches in diameter. Then there are two columns on the south side, both cut from a spruce that was four feet seven inches through at 101 ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... first in humble quarters in Spruce street, and since then it has occupied rooms in Beekman, John and Reade streets. These down-town locations have served some valuable purposes. They were accessible to the teachers and workers in passing to and from the ...
— The American Missionary - Vol. 44, No. 3, March, 1890 • Various
... quickly joined in the laugh against himself. He then accompanied Alick into the hospital, where, in a tub with some hot water and soap, and some alkali the doctor gave them, they very soon got washed white, and returned on deck as spruce-looking midshipmen as they usually appeared. Theirs and Jack's great regret was, that as Alick had to go back to the brig, and they must join the frigate, they would again be separated. Rogers and Adair were once more or board ...
— The Three Midshipmen • W.H.G. Kingston
... spreading a single floor of shining water over the whole valley. The trees, or most of them, that stand about the banks have grown since the Duke saw the water. There are old oaks on the northern shore, but the southern and eastern sides were planted with spruce and other conifers at the end of the eighteenth century and beginning of the nineteenth, when all that remained of the victor of Culloden was his horrible nickname and his obelisk above the lake. The trees are glorious in December or June, when the green ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... brooches, and party-coloured inside waistcoats; sundry elderly ladies sat at card-tables, discussing the "lost honour by an odd trick they played," with heads as large as those of Jack or Jill in the pantomime; spruce clerks in public offices, (whose vocation the expansive tendency of the right ear, from long pen-carrying, betokened) discussed fashion, "and the musical glasses" to some very over-dressed married ladies, ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 2 • Charles James Lever
... squirrel were brought down together, and carried right into the garden, where the former was placed upon one of the flower-beds, and disappeared at once; the latter held up to a branch of the ornamental spruce, into which it ran, and then there was a scuffling noise, and Dexter ran away back to the stable, afraid to stop, lest the little ragged jacketed animal should leap back upon him, and make him more weak ...
— Quicksilver - The Boy With No Skid To His Wheel • George Manville Fenn
... raining, they sat beside their fire in a desolate gorge. A cold wind swept between the thin spruce trunks that loomed vaguely out of the surrounding gloom as the red glare leaped up, and wisps of acrid smoke drifted about the camp. There was a lake up the hollow, and now and then the wild and mournful ...
— The Intriguers • Harold Bindloss
... is worse now, Harry,' continued Aubrey. 'So spruce and silky out of doors, and such a regular old tyrannical bachelor indoors. He is jealous of Leonard, any one can see, and that's the reason he won't give him ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... shouting with joy. It was not their fault that all that piece of the earth had grown so dusty and untidy; it was Mother Nature's own fault for being so long coming with those big buckets of hers. How could any land, however willing, look spruce and green and clean with no rain for four months? No wonder there was such a commotion, and it was such a noisy, vigorous business, when at last the rain did come! Every tree and every blade and every flower had a special little life-plan of its own to carry ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... inflammation of the lungs. If Bergenheim were to see him sweating and panting like this in this bleak wind, he would give me a sound blowing-up. Upon my word, it is becoming comical! There are no more young girls! I shall see her appear presently as spruce and conceited as if she had been playing the finest trick in the world. It will do for once; but if we sojourn in these quarters some time yet, she must be educated and taught to say, 'If you please' and 'Thanks.' Ah! ha! she has no idea what sort of man she is dealing with! Half past eight! ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... skins, he took his traps and camping outfit and set out for that region of country, although it was more than two hundred miles away. Here he found tracks in abundance, and so before he made his little hunting lodge in the midst of a spruce grove, he set his traps for the fierce wolves in a spot which seemed to be a rallying place of theirs. As they are very suspicious and clever, he carefully placed two traps close together and sprinkled them over with snow, leaving visible only the dead rabbits which served as bait. Then ...
— Oowikapun - How the Gospel Reached the Nelson River Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young
... Philip!" and the poor soldier went towards the laburnum-tree; but when he stood three paces away, the Countess eyed him almost defiantly, though there was timidity in her eyes; then at a bound she sprang from the laburnum to an acacia, and thence to a spruce-fir, swinging from bough ...
— Farewell • Honore de Balzac
... opposed them. But so it was, as great men and princes are said to call in their flatterers when dinner has been served, so the Athenians, upon slight occasions, entertained and diverted themselves with their spruce speakers and trim orators, but when it came to action, they were sober and considerate enough to single out the austerest and wisest for public employment, however much he might be opposed to their wishes and sentiments. This, indeed, he made ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... It lay in the bowels of a hollow. The hollow was crowded with spruce, a low, sparse-growing scrub, and mosquitoes. Its approach was a defile which suggested a rift in the hills at the back. Its exit was of a similar nature, except that it followed the rocky bed of a trickling mountain stream. A mile or so further on this gave on to the more gracious ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... waste dominion yields, Stript her last robes, with gold and purple gay.— So droops my life, of your soft beams despoil'd, Youth, Health, and Hope, that long exulting smil'd; And the wild carols, and the bloomy hues Of merry Spring-time, spruce on every plain Her half-blown bushes, moist with sunny rain, More pensive thoughts in my sunk heart infuse Than Winter's grey, and desolate domain, Faded, like my lost Youth, that ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... Rainbow People, to work for the people of Ha-arts, the earth. He divided this creation into six parts, and each had its home in a spring in the heart of a great mountain upon whose summit was a giant tree. One was in the spruce tree on the Mountain of the North; another in the pine tree on the Mountain of the West; another in the oak tree on the Mountain of the South; and another in the aspen tree on the Mountain of the East; the fifth was on the cedar tree on the Mountain of the Zenith; and the last in ...
— Myths and Legends of California and the Old Southwest • Katharine Berry Judson
... a couple of rather spruce looking young men alighted from an eastern train in Paris and, strolling forth in the crowd of passengers, looked ...
— Our Pilots in the Air • Captain William B. Perry
... set of people fill the streets. The goods in the shop-windows are invitingly arranged; the shopmen in their white neckerchiefs and spruce coats, look as it they couldn't clean a window if their lives depended on it; the carts have disappeared from Covent-garden; the waggoners have returned, and the costermongers repaired to their ordinary 'beats' in the suburbs; clerks are at their offices, and gigs, ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... come in competition, By virtue of some sly petition: Yet mum for that; hope still the best, Nor let such cares disturb thy rest. Methinks I hear thee loud as trumpet, As bagpipe shrill or oyster-strumpet; Methinks I see thee, spruce and fine, With coat embroider'd richly shine, And dazzle all the idol faces, As through the hall thy worship paces; (Though this I speak but at a venture, Supposing thou hast tick with Hunter,) Methinks I see a blackguard ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... was stated that Professor Lawson had prepared a new dye of great richness, in the laboratory of Queen's College, Canada, from an insect, a species of coccus, found the previous summer for the first time on a tree of the common black spruce (Abies nigra), in the neighbourhood of Kingston. Having been but recently observed, a sufficient quantity had not been obtained for a complete series of experiments as to its nature and uses; but the habits ...
— Field's Chromatography - or Treatise on Colours and Pigments as Used by Artists • George Field
... me think of our first Tree, in some way," said Polly softly, with glistening eyes, looking up at the beautiful branching spruce, its countless arms shaking out brilliant pendants, and gay with streamers and candles, wherever a decoration could be placed, the whole tipped with a shining star. "Oh, Bensie, can you ever ...
— Five Little Peppers Grown Up • Margaret Sidney
... full-size bed blanket of heavy gray wool. The man's ingenuity seemed endless. Without seeming to have any extra luggage, he had nevertheless carried a very efficient camp outfit with him. He took his hunting knife, went to the spruce grove and cut many small, green branches, returning with all he could hold in his arms. She watched him lay them tips up for a mattress, and was secretly glad that she knew this much at least of camp comfort. He spread the blanket over them and ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... ever hereafter a very clounch and bacon-slicer of Brene. This pleased Grangousier very well, and he commanded that it should be done. At night at supper, the said Des Marays brought in a young page of his, of Ville-gouges, called Eudemon, so neat, so trim, so handsome in his apparel, so spruce, with his hair in so good order, and so sweet and comely in his behaviour, that he had the resemblance of a little angel more than of a human creature. Then he said to Grangousier, Do you see this young boy? He is not as ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... dull step in the whole distance. The Tennessee warbler was singing; but perhaps the pleasantest incident of the walk to the Profile House—in front of which the mountain footpath is taken—was a Blackburnian warbler perched, as usual, at the very top of a tall spruce, his orange throat flashing fire as he faced the sun, and his song, as my notebook expresses it, "sliding up to high Z at the end" in his quaintest and most characteristic fashion. I spent nearly three hours ...
— The Foot-path Way • Bradford Torrey
... they had rather have their own Christmas tree, no matter how small; rather go into the woods and mark it weeks ahead, as we always do, and then go bring it home the day before, than to look at the tallest spruce that the Mayor could fetch out of the forests of Maine and set up on the Common. Where do such simple-minded children live, and in such primitive conditions that they can carry an axe into the woods these days ...
— The Hills of Hingham • Dallas Lore Sharp
... and white, differs in many respects from the balsam-fir: the needles are sharp-pointed, not blunt, and instead of being flat like the balsam-fir, they are four-sided and cover the branchlet on all sides, causing it to appear rounded or bushy and not flat. The spruce-gum sought by many is found in the seams of the bark, which, unlike the smooth balsam-fir, is scaly and of a brown color. Early spring is the time to look for spruce-gum. Spruce is a soft wood, splits readily and is good for ...
— On the Trail - An Outdoor Book for Girls • Lina Beard and Adelia Belle Beard
... and Vermont,—abundant, filling swamps acres in extent, alone or associated with other trees, mostly black spruce; growing depressed and scattered on Katahdin at an altitude of 4000 feet; Massachusetts,—rather common, at least northward; Rhode Island,—not reported; Connecticut,—occasional in the northern half of the state; reported as far ...
— Handbook of the Trees of New England • Lorin Low Dame
... head of the lake, on the east side, is a deep bay at the head of which enters a little brook that comes creeping along for a mile among the tangled roots of ancient hemlocks and spruce, singing gaily among the loose stones, sometimes disappearing entirely beneath bridges of moss, and sometimes sparkling in the sunlight, on its way to the lake. This little stream we found swarming with speckled trout of the size of minnows, and at its mouth the large ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... wide and heartily, and began to twinkle again. The bar was in festive array: Christmas greens, red berries, ribbons, tissue-paper and gleaming tinfoil—flash of mirrors, bright colour, branches of pine, cedar and spruce from the big balsamic woods. It was crowded with lumber-jacks—great fellows from the forest, big of body and passion, here gathered in celebration of the festival. John Fairmeadow, getting all at once and vigorously under ...
— Christmas Eve at Swamp's End • Norman Duncan
... On which, a spruce boy that served us with warm water, began to imitate a nightingale; till Trimalchio giving the word, a servant that waited on Habinas, set up another humour, and, as I believe, commanded by ...
— The Satyricon • Petronius Arbiter
... I was thru with my trubbel with wimmin's warin apparel for one day, so I started hum. I'd ony got to the corner of Spruce street, wen a grate strappin perliceman cum up to me, and clappin me on the shoulder, sed: "I've got you, sunny, this time; cum along, now, or I'll be after makin you." I seen discreshun was the better part of valler, so I let him leed me. ...
— The Bad Boy At Home - And His Experiences In Trying To Become An Editor - 1885 • Walter T. Gray
... the programme was signalled. The orchestra struck up a rollicking measure and Tony Luton made his entrance amid a rousing storm of applause. He was dressed as an errand-boy of some West End shop, with a livery and box- tricycle, as spruce and decorative as the most ambitious errand-boy could see himself in his most ambitious dreams. His song was a lively and very audacious chronicle of life behind the scenes of a big retail establishment, and sparkled with allusions ...
— When William Came • Saki
... Lake lay Happy Camp—so named because here was found the uppermost fringe of the timber line, where men might warm themselves by fire again. Scarcely could it be called timber, for it was a dwarf rock-spruce that never raised its loftiest branches higher than a foot above the moss, and that twisted and grovelled like a pig-vegetable under the moss. Here, on the trail leading into Happy Camp, in the first sunshine of half a dozen days, Old Tarwater rested his pack against a huge boulder ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... and Spruce McCrary is the onliest white folks I remember bein' with. I don't know whether they was our ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Arkansas Narratives Part 3 • Works Projects Administration
... they crawled into wagon sheds and slept upon loads of grain or produce that had been gotten ready for the morrow's marketing. More frequently they bivouacked in the open, under the blue canopy of heaven, merely sheltered a little by a friendly spruce or pine, with the silver moon for a lamp, and the bright stars for candles. The great shaggy beast and the little dark man slept in one bed, as it were. Pedro usually pillowed his head upon Black Bruin and so the bear had to lie very still and not disturb his master, for he ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes
... and barn, in most cases the two buildings touching at some point,—an arrangement doubtless prompted by the deep snows and severe cold of this latitude. The typical Canadian dwelling-house is also presently met with on entering the Dominion,—a low, modest structure of hewn spruce logs, with a steep roof (containing two or more dormer windows) that ends in a smart curve, a hint taken from the Chinese pagoda. Even in the more costly brick or stone houses in the towns and vicinity this style is adhered to. It ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... winds a gravel walk: here are parts of the old wood, left in these majestic circular clumps, disposed at equal distances with wonderful symmetry: there are some single shrubs scattered in elegant profusion: here a Portugal laurel, there a juniper; here a laurustinus, there a spruce fir; here a larch, there a lilac; here a rhododendron, there an arbutus. The stream, you see, is become a canal: the banks are perfectly smooth and green, sloping to the water's edge: and there is Lord Littlebrain, ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock
... the Speech House the place teems with interest. In the last years he would walk every evening to look at the great stag-headed ruins of the oaks, which thrust their gnarled and crooked limbs fantastically into the closing night, or stand watching the shadows fall on the spruce rides which stretch out near the old inn, till, in the fading light, it seemed as though figures were moving in and out on the greensward of the great vistas. In the bright sunshine, imposing silence on himself and his companions, he would ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... side. Then yonder is spruce. And our gardens! If you women-folks love posies as most females does, you'd ought to be here a spell later. Roses ain't out yet but ...
— Dorothy's Travels • Evelyn Raymond
... the little yard in front of the shed. A stable boy, spruce and smart in his holiday attire, met them with a broom in his hand, and followed them. In the shed there were five horses in their separate stalls, and Vronsky knew that his chief rival, Gladiator, a very tall chestnut horse, had been brought there, and must be standing ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... neat, and spruce" Doctor of Laws, William Parry, who had been busying himself at about the same time with his memorable project against the Queen of England, proved as successful as Balthazar Gerard, the fate of Christendom would have been still darker. Fortunately, that member of Parliament ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the line which divides the spruce vices from the ugly; and hence, though his morals had hardly been applauded, disapproval of them had frequently been tempered with a smile. This treatment had led to his becoming a sort of regrater of other men's gallantries, to his own aggrandizement as a Corinthian, rather ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... glided on its way, now in the shadow of the heights, now on the broad expanse, now among the devious channels of the Narrows, beset with woody islets where the hot air was redolent of the pine, the spruce, and the cedar,— till they neared that tragic shore where, in the following century, New England rustics battled the soldiers of Dieskau, where Montcalm planted his batteries, where the red cross ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop
... and vain, They seem to think they may well disdain With the peasant a glass of his wine to drain But, soft—to the left o' the fire I see Three riflemen, who from the Tyrol should be Emmerick, come, boy, to them will we. Birds of this feather 'tis luck to find, Whose trim's so spruce, and their purse ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... enough not to be mistaken, and described his appearance with great exactness. The boy is extremely handsome, give him his due; has dark hazel eyes, auburn hair, and very elegant proportions. His air and gait have nothing of the clown in them. Take away his jacket and trousers, and you have as spruce a fellow as ever came from dancing-school or college. He is the exact picture of his mother, and the most perfect contrast to the sturdy legs, squat figure, and broad, unthinking, sheepish face of the father that can be imagined. You ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... walking through lines of spruce firs of deep golden green in the yellow beams. One of these trees among its well-robed fellows fronting them was all lichen-smitten. From the low sweeping branches touching earth to the plumed top, the tree was dead-black as its shadow; ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... see her for a moment! To leave my work and go without food was the least of it! I must traverse the streets of Paris without getting splashed, run to escape showers, and reach her rooms at last, as neat and spruce as any of the coxcombs about her. For a poet and a distracted wooer the difficulties of this task were endless. My happiness, the course of my love, might be affected by a speck of mud upon my only white waistcoat! Oh, to miss the sight of her because I was wet through and bedraggled, ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... that there would be spoils, that he must even touch this hedged young goddess. So as she stood, doubleted, breeched, and in his long red hose, he hovered round her. Soon she was lightened of her load of glory, and as spruce as a chamber-page. ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... pinon trees in that country, but because there are so few of them in the canyon of the stream. There are all sorts higher up on the slopes,—long-leaved yellow pines, thimble cones, tamarack, silver fir, and Douglas spruce; but in the canyon there is only a group of the low-headed, gray nut pines which the earliest inhabitants of that ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... the court plan that they had agreed on and they gave him the dimensions of their buildings. Against walls sixty feet high he planned to place trees that should reach nearly to the top. For his purpose he found four kinds of trees most serviceable: the eucalyptus, the cypress, the acacia and the spruce. In his search for what he wanted he did not confine himself to California. A good many trees he brought down from Oregon. Some of his best specimens of Italian cypress he secured in Santa Barbara, in Monterey and in San Jose. He also drew largely ...
— The City of Domes • John D. Barry
... the fancy of the wealthier natives. Every fine day mats are spread before the doors and the tripang is put out to dry, as well as sugar, salt, biscuit, tea, cloths, and other things that get injured by an excessively moist atmosphere. In the morning and evening, spruce Chinamen stroll about or chat at each other's doors, in blue trousers, white jacket, and a queue into which red silk is plaited till it reaches almost to their heels. An old Bugis hadji regularly takes an evening ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume II. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... forward into the inner room, where, leaning lazily back before a desk, smoking a cigar over his newspaper, arrayed in a loose white jacket, with open throat and slippered feet, reposed a gentleman, much transformed from the spruce butler, but not difficult of recognition. He started to his feet with equal alacrity and consternation, and bowed, not committing himself until he should see whether he were actually known to his lordship. Fitzjocelyn was in too great haste to pause on this matter, ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge
... luck I found him. I beckoned Carlotta, who glided down, and there, with our heads together and holding our breath, we watched the queerest little love drama imaginable. Our cicada stood alert and spruce, waving his antenna with a sort of cavalier swagger, and every now and then making his corslet vibrate passionately. On the top of a blade of grass sat a brown little Juliet—a most reserved, discreet little Juliet, but ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... a spruce young gentleman, in a loud summer suit, with a rose in his button-hole, and the air of assurance which befits the commissioner ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... back.' An' all the gents was a-sittin' at breakfast, with the winders wide open an' the smell of 'am an' eggs comin' through strong, an' they larfed fit to split theirselves, an' one on 'em tried to kiss Kitty Spruce, an' she spanked ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... so there was a long table elaborately set out with silver-branched candlesticks and all the Governor-General's fine collection of plate, but the servants waited in heavy fur-coats and caps. Of course no flowers could be used in that temperature, so the silver vases held branches of spruce, hemlock, and other Canadian firs. The French cook had to be very careful as to what dishes he prepared, for anything with moisture in it would freeze at once; meringues, for instance, would be frozen into uneatable cricket-balls, and tea, coffee, and soup had to simmer perpetually ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... would have probably ensued, but it was prevented by the spruce toastmaster, who gave a sentiment, and turning to the two politicians, "Pray, gentlemen," said he, "let us have done with these musty politics: I would always leave them to the beer-suckers in Butcher Row. Come, let us have something of ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie
... unappropriate environment of the Collector's office. The evolutions of the parade; the tumult of the battle; the flourish of old heroic music, heard thirty years before—such scenes and sounds, perhaps, were all alive before his intellectual sense. Meanwhile, the merchants and ship-masters, the spruce clerks and uncouth sailors, entered and departed; the bustle of his commercial and Custom-House life kept up its little murmur round about him; and neither with the men nor their affairs did the General appear to sustain the most distant relation. He was as ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... those happy climes that lie Where day never shuts his eye, Up in the broad fields of the sky. There I suck the liquid air, All amidst the gardens fair Of Hesperus, and his daughters three That sing about the golden tree. Along the crisped shades and bowers Revels the spruce and jocund Spring; The Graces and the rosy-bosomed Hours Thither all their bounties bring. There eternal Summer dwells; And west winds with musky wing About the cedarn alleys fling Nard and cassia's balmy smells. Iris there with humid bow Waters the odorous banks, that ...
— L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Comus, and Lycidas • John Milton
... fresh flowers, or indications of metal or other minerals where the cliff was bared or splintered by some fall from above. But over the camp-fire at night, in some rocky nook, or beneath the spreading boughs of a gigantic spruce-fir, a hint or a word or two brought him back to the prime motive ...
— The Peril Finders • George Manville Fenn
... brown fellow with the silk handkerchief knotted over his flannel shirt, greeting tremendously the spruce civilian, who had a rope-colored mustache and bore a fainthearted resemblance to him. The story was plain on its face to the passers-by; and one of the ladies who had come in the car with Lin turned twice, and ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... this day and till the middle of the next forenoon, concealing the landscape almost entirely; but we had hardly got out of the streets of Bangor before I began to be exhilarated by the sight of the wild fir and spruce tops, and those of other primitive evergreens, peering through the mist in the horizon. It was like the sight and odor of cake to a schoolboy. He who rides and keeps the beaten track studies the fences ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... from the stone pick or hatchet. It is said that the women of the North American tribes used a hoe made of an elk's shoulder-blade and a handle of wood. In Sweden the earliest records of tillage represent a huge hoe made from a stout limb of spruce with the sharpened root. This was finally made heavier, and men dragged it through the soil in the manner of ploughing. Subsequently the plough was made in two pieces, a handle having been added. Finally a pair of cows yoked together were compelled to drag ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... Privet Pruning Propagate by cuttings Pyracantha Radishes Ranunculus Raspberries Rhubarb Rockets Roses Rue Rustic Vases Sage Salvias Savoys Saxifrage Scarlet Runner Beans Seeds Sea Daisy or Thrif Seakale Select Flowers Select Vegetables and Fruit Slugs Snowdrops Soups Spinach Spruce Fir Spur pruning Stews Stocks Strawberries Summer-savory Sweet Williams Thorn Hedges Thyme Tigridia Pavonia Transplanting Tree lifting Tulips Turnips Vegetable Cookery Venus's Looking-glass Verbenas Vines ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 43, Saturday, August 24, 1850 • Various
... and sympathy it really seemed—in this fiction—that a catastrophe might be averted. You may imagine what a drove of little grubs those children looked in the course of half an hour. Not that any of them were particularly spruce to ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... is to place the body doubled up on its side in a box of plank hewed out of spruce logs and about four feet long. This is elevated several feet above the ground on four posts which project above the coffin or box. The sides are often painted with red chalk in figures of fur animals, birds, and fishes. According to the wealth of the ...
— A Further Contribution to the Study of the Mortuary Customs of the North American Indians • H.C. Yarrow
... economic reasons suggest it, we may use the selection system as a basis for artificially managing the shade bearing species such as hemlock, white fir, cedar, spruce, and even Western yellow pine. We may cut the largest and oldest trees and still have a well started second crop. If there is not much young growth to leave, even a little is valuable. It may be decidedly best to leave medium sized trees, which otherwise ...
— Practical Forestry in the Pacific Northwest • Edward Tyson Allen
... gentlewoman was not so simple as to go into his projects—she began to smell a rat. "This Trim," quoth she, "is an odd sort of a fellow; methinks he makes a strange figure with that ragged, tattered coat appearing under his livery; can't he go spruce and clean, like the rest of the servants? The fellow has a roguish leer with him which I don't like by any means; besides, he has such a twang in his discourse, and an ungraceful way of speaking through the nose, that one can hardly understand him; I wish the fellow be not tainted with ...
— The History of John Bull • John Arbuthnot
... That might be. I was told during the First World War when they wanted straight-grained spruce for airplanes they found they could tell a straight-grained spruce from a spiral, so they wouldn't waste their time ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 44th Annual Meeting • Various
... a fair in the town the day I left Kronstadt. The field where it is held is right opposite Hotel "No. 1," and the whole place was crowded with country-folks in quaint costumes—spruce, gaily-dressed people mixed up with Wallack cattle-drivers and other picturesque rascals, such as gipsies and Jews, and here and there a Turk, and, more ragged than all, a sprinkling of refugee Bulgarians. Though it was a scene of strange incongruities—a very jumble of races—yet it was ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... as he expressed it, "rigged himself out," in a spruce blue coat with brass buttons; blue vest and trousers to match; a white dicky with a collar attached and imitation carbuncle studs down the front. To these he added a black silk neckerchief tied in a true sailor's knot but ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... lampblack, fine threads plaited together in strands, cotton soaked in boiling tar, lamp-wick, twine, tar and lampblack mixed with a proportion of lime, vulcanized fibre, celluloid, boxwood, cocoanut hair and shell, spruce, hickory, baywood, cedar and maple shavings, rosewood, punk, cork, bagging, flax, and a host of other things. He also extended his searches far into the realms of nature in the line of grasses, plants, canes, and similar products, and in these experiments ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... very becoming sense of his own position in society; two mild-spoken bookseller's clerks, who scarcely find their voices till the evening is far advanced; my friend and fellow-tramp the glovemaker; a spruce little model of a man, with the crispest hair, and the fullest and best trimmed moustache in the world, and who is no doubt a great man somewhere; a tremendous fellow of a student, who talks of cannon-boots, rapiers, and Berliner Weiss Bier; and an individual whose only distinguishing ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... as we ate it; and the more so that as soon as he saw us well started, in place of hanging about to be asked to join, he whetted his knife again, trotted off, and began to collect pine-needles, and cut down boughs of fir and spruce to pack together under the biggest tree for ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn
... loot back into his pockets and came closer to the fire. Its warmth felt most comfortable, for the Spring night was growing chill. He looked about him at the motley company, some half-spruce in clothing that suggested a Kuppenmarx label and a not too far association with a tailor's goose, others in rags, all but one unshaven and all more or less dirty—for the open road is close to Nature, which is ...
— The Oakdale Affair • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... that it takes an army of choppers twenty years to cut it over. By the time it is done a new growth has sprung up, and an intermediate one is large enough to cut; so the chopping goes on year after year. The first or primeval growth is pine. That is most valuable. After the pines are cut, spruce and hemlock spring ...
— Illustrated Science for Boys and Girls • Anonymous
... it. Had there been any survivors, nails being much prized by these people, they never having held intercourse with Europeans, such an article would most likely have been taken out for use again. All the birch trees in the vicinity of the lake had been rinded, and many of them, and of the spruce fir, or var, had the bark taken off, to use the inner part of it for food, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 388 - Vol. 14, No. 388, Saturday, September 5, 1829. • Various
... Timmis, at the suggestion of my good friend Mr. Wallis, offered me, as a treat, a row in the boat they had engaged for the occasion; which, as a matter of course, I did not refuse: making myself as spruce as my limited wardrobe would permit, I trotted at their heels to the foot of ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... westward and ascending to the alpine heights among the mountains, where they find the subartic conditions that are congenial to their natures without travelling so great a distance. Here they build their nests in the pine or spruce trees, rear their families, and as autumn approaches, descend to the plains, tarry there a week or two, then hie to their winter ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... plant walnuts with white spruce. The idea is that spruce will shade the ground, kill the side branches of the walnut, and help to force the walnuts to grow long slender poles. It is understood, and expected, that the spruce will be ruined, as their leaders would grow into the ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Thirty-Eighth Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... sick of the scurvy at Stadacona, so that Cartier was much surprised to see him out and well. He contrived to make him relate the particulars of his recovery, and thus found out that a decoction of the bark and foliage of the white spruce-tree furnished the savages with a remedy. Having recourse to this enabled the French captain to arrest the progress of the disease among his own people, and, in a short time, to bring about their restoration ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... the spirit of a Lady Abbess in and out, in winged lace headdress and black silk. Your letter was a bomb of joy to me last evening.—I have taken heaps of your clothes to mend. What a rag-fair your closet was—and you did not tell me! Mrs. Alcott brought me some beer made of spruce only, and it was nice. Thou shalt have thy own beer, when you come home.—Bab went to see Mrs. Alcott, and I resumed weeding. At seven I heard thirteen cannon-shots, and did not understand it. Then I possessed The ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... came down from Ochre Lake three hours later, the invalid was still out-of-doors, only now he was seated on a bank in the shade of a spreading spruce, while the twins played round him, building houses of fir cones, and laying out gardens in patterns ...
— A Countess from Canada - A Story of Life in the Backwoods • Bessie Marchant
... picture. The sun is just beginning to pour into the garden. He is looking through the apple trees and having hard work to make even a splash of golden green upon the lawn, but the silver spruce and the tiara of roses get the full measure of his morning smile and are doing their best to show that they understand, appreciate, and are glad. Oh, it is a ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... glittering bayonets he caught the flourish of energetic drumsticks. The big drum gave forth its clamor with window-shaking insistence; it seemed to be the summons of power that all else should stand aside. On they came, these spruce Guards, each man a marching machine, trained to strut and pose exactly as his fellows. There was a sense of omnipotence in their rhythmic movement. And they all had the grand manner—from the elegant captain in command down to the smallest drummer-boy. Although ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... hooded form scudded across the snowy plain and pushed in among the dark cluster of spectators at the door. All made way for the child, and in a moment, whether in the body or out she could not tell, Dolly was sitting in a little nook under a bower of spruce, gazing at the star and listening to ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various
... strange clacking sound came ringing across the snow in the crisp winter air. I ran ahead to a point of woods that cut off my view from a five-mile barren, only to catch breath in astonishment and drop to cover behind a scrub spruce. Away up the barren my caribou, a big herd of them, were coming like an express train straight towards me. At first I could make out only a great cloud of steam, a whirl of flying snow, and here and there the angry shake of ...
— Wilderness Ways • William J Long
... Anne, for directly in front of them was a wigwam, so cunningly built in behind a growth of small spruce trees that unless one knew of its whereabouts it might be easily passed by. The Indian girl laughed at Anne's exclamation, and nodded at her ...
— A Little Maid of Massachusetts Colony • Alice Turner Curtis
... sail-makers and coopers to repair the sails and casks in; to land our empty casks, to fill water, and to cut down wood for fuel; all of which were absolutely necessary occupations. We also began to brew beer from the branches or leaves of a tree, which much resembles the American black- spruce. From the knowledge I had of this tree, and the similarity it bore to the spruce, I judged that, with the addition of inspissated juice of wort and molasses, it would make a very wholesome beer, and supply the want of vegetables, which this place did ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... moments and then said: "Well, in my courting-days, you know, I used to go around fixed up in style. Many and many a time I've heard the girls whisper to one another and say, 'Oh, my! Ain't Mr. Rabbit looking spruce to-day?' There was one season in particular that I was careful to primp up and look sassy. I put bergamot oil on my hair, and kept it brushed so slick that a fly would slip up and cripple himself ...
— Little Mr. Thimblefinger and His Queer Country • Joel Chandler Harris
... people.—To be spruce is not altogether foolish, for it proves that a great number of people work for one. It shows by one's hair, that one has a valet, a perfumer, etc., by one's band, thread, lace, ... etc. Now it is not merely superficial nor merely outward show to have many arms at command. The ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... we encountered a steeper ascent than any I had yet climbed. Here the character of the forest began to change. There were other trees than pines, and particularly one kind, cone-shaped, symmetrical, and bright, which Dick called a silver spruce. I was glad it belonged to the conifers, or pine-tree family, because it was the most beautiful tree I had ever seen. We climbed ridges and threaded through aspen thickets in hollows till near sunset. Then Stockton ordered a ...
— The Young Forester • Zane Grey
... lovely day—a shade too hot, if anything was to be urged against it. The sun struck great shafts of golden light amid the rich green of the forest, splashing the great tree boles with bold light and shade. The air was fragrant with spruce and pine and faint, aromatic wintergreen. A hot little wind rocked the reflections in the river and blew its wimpling ...
— The Innocent Adventuress • Mary Hastings Bradley
... log-houses—the ladies collected pillows and buffalo blankets, and, making a great bed, all slept in one room. We men slept in waggons or under a tent, which was not quite large enough for all. The Indian women cut spruce twigs and laid them over-lapping on the ground for our bed. By preference I took the outside, al fresco. One night we stayed at a house which had an upper and a lower storey. The ladies camped upstairs. ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... very dark shadow from the spruce there, Ranald," she cried, pointing to a deep, black turn in the road. For answer there came from behind them the long, mournful hunting-cry of the wolf. He was on their track. Immediately it was answered by a chorus of howls from the bush on the swamp side, but still ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education
... days and help him with the new inclosure. To this Edward cheerfully consented; and as soon as they arrived at the cottage, and Humphrey had his breakfast, they took their axes and went out to fell at a cluster of small spruce-fir about a mile off. ...
— The Children of the New Forest • Captain Marryat
... are perfectly acclimatized, and where the race is kept pure it seems to be even improved. Some very valuable notes on this subject were furnished to the present writer by the well-known botanist, Richard Spruce, who resided many years in South America, but who was prevented by ill health from publishing his researches (see A. R. Wallace, Notes of a Botannist, 1908). As a careful, judicious and accurate observer, both of man and nature, he had few superiors. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... quarter was flashed past our eyes, we entered the Russian settlement across a small river. Several Russian soldiers and four very spruce-looking Mongolian women stood on the bridge as we passed. The soldiers snapped to salute like immobile statues and fixed their eyes on the severe face of their Commander. The women first began ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski
... security; and, chuckling beforehand over its success, took my place among the elders at the edge of the wood, whence I could command the door of the pavilion. The shutters were all once more closed, which I remember thinking odd; and the house, with its white walls and green venetians, looked spruce and habitable in the morning light. Hour after hour passed, and still no sign of Northmour. I knew him for a sluggard in the morning; but, as it drew on toward noon, I lost my patience. To say the truth, I had promised myself ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... slept he caused birch, spruce, and cottonwood trees to spring up in the low places, and when the people awoke in the morning they clapped their hands in delight, for the birds were singing in the tree-tops and the green leaves with the sunlight flickering through ...
— A Treasury of Eskimo Tales • Clara Kern Bayliss
... stopped at a spruce residence, approached by a long lane, and on knocking at the porch with his ponderous fist, a woman came timidly ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... the plain my breath. No woodsman am I. My eyes are set For the wide low lines. The level rim Of the prairie land is mine. The semi-gloom of the pointed firs, The sleeping darks of the mountain spruce, Are prison and poison to such as I. In the forest I long for the rose of the plain, In the dark of the ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... eighty-foot maple, four feet in the butt, dropped, deftly as a fly is cast, in the only place where it will not outrage the feelings and swipe off the tops of fifty juniors, is a revelation. White pine, hemlock, and spruce share this country with maples, black and white birches, and beech. Maple seems to have few preferences, and the white birches straggle and shiver on the outskirts of every camp; but the pines hold together in solid regiments, sending out skirmishers to invade a neglected pasture ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... overgrown with high grass, wild flowers and clover, they came to the woods. Surprising to say, scarcely any underbrush was seen, but trees everywhere—stately Lebanon cedars, spruce and spreading hemlock, pin oaks, juniper trees which later would be covered with spicy, aromatic berries; also beech trees. Witch hazel and hazel nut bushes grew in profusion. John Landis cut a ...
— Mary at the Farm and Book of Recipes Compiled during Her Visit - among the "Pennsylvania Germans" • Edith M. Thomas
... 31st, 1884, at 8 P.M., the Commission met at the house of the Provost, 1811 Spruce Street, for the purpose of sealing a slate to be left with the Medium, Mrs. Patterson, who was to try to procure independent writing upon the inside surfaces. There were present Dr. Pepper, Mr. Furness, Professor Thompson and Mr. Fullerton. Mr. Furness brought the slate and seals. ...
— Preliminary Report of the Commission Appointed by the University • The Seybert Commission
... two of us worked our way leisurely through the crowd toward the side-street down which Anazeh had led his party. We found them looking very spruce and savage, four abreast, drawn up in the throat of an alley, old Anazeh sitting his horse at their head like a symbol of the ancient order waiting to assault the new. My horse was close beside him, held by Ahmed, acting ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... and full of cheer. Wooden benches and chairs, some of the former with an arm and a cushion of spruce twigs covered with a bear or wolf skin, though in the finer houses there were rush bottoms and curiously stained splints with much ornamental Indian work. A dresser in the living room displayed not only Queen's ware, but such silver and pewter as the early colonists possessed, and there were pictures ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas |
