"Sumach" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... acquaintance' sake, I put a leaf into my mouth I was half glad to fancy it a thought less savory than some I had tasted in Yankeeland. I took a kind of foolish satisfaction, too, in the obvious fact that certain plants—the sumach and the Virginia creeper, to mention no others—were less at home here than a thousand miles farther north. With the wild-cherry trees, I was obliged to confess, the case was reversed. I had seen larger ones in Massachusetts, perhaps, but none that looked half ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... ghosts, and the governor turned to the murmuring shore with its gentle mimicry of ocean. Half sheltered by a clump of sumach sat a woman upon a bit of driftwood and flung pebbles in the lake. He stared, and then went ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... nigella, zinnias, polyanthuses, love-apples, mignonette, capsicums, Michaelmas daisies, auriculus, asters or stars, and China-asters. The additional trees and shrubs in flower are the tamarisk, altheas, Venetian sumach, pomegranates, the beautiful passion-flower, the trumpet flower, and the virgin's bower or clematis, which is such a quick and handsome climber. But the quantity of fruit is considerably multiplied, especially that ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 267, August 4, 1827 • Various
... maple, the American elm, and the purple-blossomed sumach, the huge scorched and leafless stems of pines would throw up their giant arms as if to tell of some former conflagration. In clearings among these woods, slopes of ground are to be seen covered with crops of oats and maize, varied with potatoes ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... he put my pleading sternly aside, but a couple of hours later, when the afternoon was already waning, he relented sufficiently to take me out on the ragged hill, which was covered thickly with pokeberry, yarrow, and stunted sumach. Before our feet the ground sank gradually to the sparkling river, and farther away I could see the silhouette of an anchored vessel etched boldly against the rosy clouds ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... anno 1757), about forty feet high, and five feet four inches in girth; a cedar of Libanus (planted in 1756), eight feet eight inches in girth; a willow-leaved oak (sown anno 1757), four feet in girth; the Rhus Vernix, or varnish sumach, four feet in girth; and a stone pine of very singular growth. Its girth at one foot from the ground is six feet four inches; at that height it immediately begins to branch out, and spreads, at least, twenty-one feet on each side, forming ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker
... shewing behind the green of an unchanged maple; near by stood another maple the leaves of which were all seemingly withered, a plain reddish light wood-colour; while below its withered foliage a thrifty poison sumach wreathing round its trunk and lower branches, was in a beautiful confusion of fresh green and the orange and red changes, yet but just begun. Then another slight maple with the same dead wood-coloured leaves, into which to the very top a Virginia creeper had ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... return, I had got up when he was called to help rustle the horses. We had every horse under hand before the sun peeped over the eastern horizon, and when returning to camp with the remuda, as I rode through a bunch of sumach bush, I found a wild turkey's nest with sixteen fresh eggs in it. Honeyman rode up, when I dismounted, and putting them in my hat, handed them up to Billy until I could mount, for they were beauties and as precious to us as gold. ...
— The Log of a Cowboy - A Narrative of the Old Trail Days • Andy Adams
... sumach bushes, not because he knew anything about ice-cream or cared a great deal about the berries; but sometimes there were plump little morsels hidden among them, that he liked to pull out and eat. If there was anything there that morning, ...
— Bird Stories • Edith M. Patch
... again, when goldenrod stood brown and sere upon the hillside and the sumach glowed red in the fence corners and thickets, when the fall crickets were chiming their dirge down amid the grass roots and the air was growing frosty at nights, then the Bob Whites grew restless and took flight for a far-off pea field, ...
— Plantation Sketches • Margaret Devereux
... was neatly swept; and overhead the rafters were concealed by heavy garlands of white pine, golden maple leaves, and red oak branches, that swept from the roof downwards like a tent. Butternut leaves wreathed their clustering gold among the dark green hemlock, while, sumach cones, with flame-colored leaves, shot through the gorgeous forest branches. The rustic chandelier was in full blaze, while now and then a candle gleamed out through the garlands, starring them to the roof. Still, the ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... night Its wing was plumed by the moon's cold ray, And noiseless it flew o'er the hills away. It flew, yet its dallying fingers played, With a thrilling touch, through the maple's shade; It toyed with the leaves of the sturdy oak, It sighed o'er the aspen, and whispering spoke To the bending sumach, that stooped to throw Its chequering shade o'er a brook below. It kissed the leaves of the beech, and breathed O'er the arching elm, with its ivy wreathed: It climbed to the ash on the mountain's height— It flew to the meadow, and hovering light O'er leafy forest and fragrant dell, It bound ...
— Poems • Sam G. Goodrich
... sumac (sumach) Shrubs or small trees of the genus Rhus, having compound leaves, clusters of small greenish flowers, and usually red, hairy fruit. Some species, such as the poison ivy and poison oak, cause an acute itching ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... crimson maple leaf had faded on the trees into more sombre colors, or, falling to the ground, been whirled by the wind among heaps of other leaves, where its splendor no more attracted attention. Of the gaiety of autumn, only the red bunches of the sumach were left as a parting present to welcome winter in. The querulous note of the quail had long been heard calling to his truant mate, and reproaching her for wandering from his jealous side; the robins had either sought a ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... up to the Horseshoe, Dakie Thayne and Ruth met them. They had been getting "spiritual ferns" and sumach leaves with Dorris; "the dearest little tips," Ruth said, "of scarlet and carbuncle, ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... Slipp'd on soft feet, swift stealing through the gloom, Eager for light and for the frolic winds. In this shrill moon the scouts of winter ran From the ice-belted north, and whistling shafts Struck maple and struck sumach—and a blaze Ran swift from leaf to leaf, from bough to bough; Till round the forest flash'd a belt of flame. And inward lick'd its tongues of red and gold To the deep, tranied inmost heart of all. Rous'd the ...
— Old Spookses' Pass • Isabella Valancy Crawford
... cognizance, and the tragedies were magnified a hundred fold. Thus it would be: on the low, white ceiling five cracks came together, and that was a device. And the device would take on color, red-bronze like the sumach in the autumn and streaks of vermilion, and two glowing coals that were eyes, and above them eagles' feathers, and the cracks became bramble bushes. I was behind the log, and at times I started and knew that it was a hideous dream, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... The mother-bird's knowledge of healing was only to follow natural impulse. The eager, feverish craving for something, she knew not what, led her to eat, or try, everything that looked eatable and to seek the coolest woods. And there she found a deadly sumach laden with its poison fruit. A month ago she would have passed it by, but now she tried the unattractive berries. The acrid burning juice seemed to answer some strange demand of her body; she ate and ate, and all her family joined in the strange feast of physic. No human ...
— Lobo, Rag and Vixen - Being The Personal Histories Of Lobo, Redruff, Raggylug & Vixen • Ernest Seton-Thompson
... the existing vegetation of Europe. They also comprise more species common to the antecedent Miocene period. Among the genera of flowering plants, M. Gaudin enumerates pine, oak, evergreen oak, plum, plane, alder, elm, fig, laurel, maple, walnut, birch, buckthorn, hickory, sumach, sarsaparilla, sassafras, cinnamon, Glyptostrobus, Taxodium, Sequoia, Persea, Oreodaphne (Figure 134), Cassia, and Psoralea, and some others. This assemblage of plants indicates a warm climate, but not so subtropical an ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... neither cool nor shady. All the springs seemed suddenly to have dried up. Out of every hour there was a halt of ten minutes, and it was needed. The men dropped by the roadside, upon the parched grass, beneath the shadow of the sumach and the elder bushes, and lay without speaking. The small farmers, the mountaineers, the hunters, the ploughmen fared not so badly; but the planters of many acres, the lawyers, the doctors, the divines, the merchants, the millers, and the innkeepers, the undergraduates ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... aster Nods its purple plumes in pride; When the black-eyed Susan coyly 'Neath the gorgeous sumach hides; And the golden-rod so stately, To outshine all others tries; In the mist of early evening Two dark forms are seen ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • Various
... felt sure, by what I now experienced in myself, that, were I to live in that family one week, all such little deviations from the one accepted pattern of propriety would fall off, like many-colored sumach-leaves after the first hard frost. I began to feel myself slowly stiffening, my courage getting gently chilly. I tried to tell a story, but had to mangle it greatly, because I felt in the air around me that parts of it were too vernacular and emphatic; and then, as a man who is freezing makes ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... scientific fact than has been generally supposed,—particularly as one of the phenomena that perhaps distinguish the productions of the eastern from those of the western coasts of the two grand divisions of the earth. I have observed that the Smoke-tree, which is a Sumach from China, and the Cydonia Japonica, are as brightly colored in autumn as any of our indigenous shrubs; while the Silver-Maple, which, though indigenous in the Western States, probably originated on the western coast of America, shows none of the fine tinting so remarkable in the other American ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... out of the hundreds known; flowering almond, Indigo shrub, wahoo or fire-shrub, the mountain-ash, althea, snowball, lilac, fringe-tree, snow-drop, double-flowering peach, Siberian crab, the smoke-tree, or French tree, or Venitian sumach, honeysuckle, ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden
... had worn a distinct trail through the woods to the edge of the bluff, and down the steep to the water; but only two pair of feet had ever turned aside, midway the descent, and found the path to Eden. Like a rosy curtain, a tall sumach bush hid the trail's beginning; the overhanging bluffs concealed it from above; the tangle of shrubs and vines which covered the bank from the water's edge screened it from below. Hardly more than a ...
— The Thrall of Leif the Lucky • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... been different she could never have lived, it seemed to her, through the fearful hour of humiliation on the Glen Road. She stooped for a spray of scarlet sumach one early autumn afternoon. They had been looking through the hedges for the first hazel nuts and he was standing beside her when, in some way, the little picture worked its way out of her soft silk blouse and fell ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... on the dead branch of a pine-tree; we saw a rabbit cross the road and disappear in a clump of juniper, and squirrels run up and down trees and along the stone-walls with acorns in their mouths. We passed straggling thickets of the upland sumach, leafless, and holding high their ungainly spikes of red berries; there were sturdy barberry-bushes along the lonely wayside, their unpicked fruit hanging in brilliant clusters. The blueberry-bushes made patches of dull red along the hillsides. The ferns were whitish-gray and brown at the edges ...
— Deephaven and Selected Stories & Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... rapid and prosperous improvement were visible. The devious course of a deep and swift brook, that in the other hemisphere would have been termed a river, was to be traced through the meadows by its borders of willow and sumach. At a point near the centre of the valley, the waters had been arrested by a small dam; and a mill, whose wheel at that early hour was without motion, stood on the artificial mound. Near it was the site ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... house stands on a little knoll, about a hundred yards from the open ocean. Behind it rises a ledge of rocks, where cedars and hemlocks make deep shadows into which the sun shoots golden shafts of light, illuminating the scarlet feathers of the sumach, which throw themselves jauntily forth from the crevices; while down below, in deep, damp, mossy recesses, rise ferns which autumn has just begun to tinge with yellow and brown. The little knoll where the cottage stood had on its ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... though durable before the addition of logwood, faded rapidly after logwood was added to them. Sugar was shown to have an especially hurtful action on the durability of inks containing logwood—indeed, on all inks. Many other plain inks were exhibited, and their properties described —as gallo-sumach ink, myrabolams ink, Runge's ink, —inks in which the tanno-gallate of iron was kept in solution by nitric, muriatic, sulphuric, and other acids, or by oxalate of potash, chloride of lime, etc. The myrabolams was recommended as an ink of some promise ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... desirable vines are the Ampelopsis, which vies with the Sumach in richness of color in fall, the Bittersweet, with its profusion of fruitage as brilliant as flowers, and the Clematis, beautiful in bloom, and quite as attractive later, when its seeds take on their peculiar feathery appendages that make the plant look ...
— Amateur Gardencraft - A Book for the Home-Maker and Garden Lover • Eben E. Rexford
... losing not one feature of the landscape—the light-gray sky, the encircling forest, the yellow broom-straw clothing the hill-sides, the crooked fences, lined with purple brush, golden-rod, black-bearded alder and sumach, flaming with scarlet berry cones and motley leaves. It was her principle and habit to seize upon whatever morsels of delight were dropped in her way, and she had a taste for attractive bits of scenery, as for melody. There ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... they objected to most was the sale of arms to the infidel. From Barbary came sugar, saltpetre, dates, molasses and carpets. Andalusia demanded fine cloth and cambric in return for wines called "seckes," sweet oil, raisins, salt, cochineal, indigo, sumac, silk and soap. Portugal took butter, cheese, fine cloth "light green or sad blue," lead, tin and hides in exchange for salt, oil, soap, cinnamon, cloves, nutmegs, pepper and all other ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... was found by the Licentiate Polo in a house where it was kept concealed, in the city of Cuzco. It was guarded by two of his servants named Hualpa Titu and Sumac Yupanqui. His idol or guauqui was called Huaraqui Inca. It was a great image of gold, which has not been found ...
— History of the Incas • Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa
... had been kindled near the centre of a little glade, but its flame cast a red glare upon the trees at a distance, until the grey bark of the button-wood, the pale foliage of the acacias, and the scarlet leaves of the sumac, all appeared of one colour: while the darker llianas, stretching from tree to tree, encircled the little glade with a series ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... and went, and the hush settled down once more at the station. From where he lay, hidden under a ledge, with a thick growth of laurel and sumac between him and the world, Billy could not see the station platform, and had no means of telling whether Pat was about ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... called Cho-tanka (big pith) is of two varieties—one made of sumac, the pith of which is punched out. The second variety is made of the long bone of the wing or thigh of the swan or crane. They call the first the bubbling chotanka from the tremulous note it gives when blown with all the holes stopped. Riggs' ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon |
