"Tuft" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... it was always on his head; and he had two of them—nightcaps, of course. The old fellow was a subject for a painter. He was as thin as a lath, had wrinkles clustering round his eyes and mouth, and long bony fingers, and bushy grey eyebrows: over the left eye hung quite a tuft of hair, and that did not look very handsome, though it made him very noticeable. People knew that he came from Bremen; but that was not his native place, though his master lived there. His own native place was in Thuringia, the town of Eisenach, close by the Wartburg. ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... found missing in one or more places on a finished animal and in such case "Old Dr. Le Page's Liquid Hair Restorer" is the only remedy. The place to be covered is coated with glue and a small tuft of hair from the same or another skin grasped with a forceps, the base touched with glue and carefully placed. The hair is arranged with a setting needle before the glue hardens, and though a tedious operation it may be performed so well as to ...
— Home Taxidermy for Pleasure and Profit • Albert B. Farnham
... years seemed to have passed over him, and he saw the world with a new eye. Each sound and scent plucked at him in passing: the roadside started into detail like the foreground of some minute Dutch painter; every pendent mass of fern, dark dripping rock, late tuft of harebell called out to him: "Look well, for this is your last sight of us!" His first sight too, it seemed: since he had lived through twelve Italian summers without sense of the sun-steeped quality of atmosphere that, even ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... into his new lord's. He wagged the tuft at the end of his shaven tail. Andrew knelt down, planted his fingers in the lion shagginess of mane above his ears and said in the ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... broadcloth "sewed close up to their round slops or breeches, as if they were all but of one piece." Later on, none were allowed to wear "any girdle, point, garters, shoe-strings, or any kind of silk or ribbon, but stockings only of woollen yarn or kersey; nor Spanish shoes; nor hair with any tuft or lock, but cut short in decent and comely manner." If an apprentice broke these rules, or indulged in dancing or masking, or "haunting any tennis court, common bowling alley, cock-fighting, etc., or having without his master's knowledge any chest, ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... nearer, however, they could see that it was not a turkey, or, indeed, any bird with which they were familiar, but a most curious-looking creature. It had an oddly-shaped beak, webbed feet, and a funny great tuft of feathers for ...
— Dick, Marjorie and Fidge - A Search for the Wonderful Dodo • G. E. Farrow
... dress of pale silk, which floated after her along the dirty pavement, much, I remember, to my admiration. Above this was some tight-fitting thing with a good deal of lace about it, which was crowned by a fragile and flowery bonnet, and such a tuft of white lace at the end of a white stick as just sheltered her nose, which was aquiline, from the sunshine. She was prettily dressed for an open carriage, a flower-show, or a wedding breakfast; for walking through the streets ...
— Six to Sixteen - A Story for Girls • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... was given, and while we were still laughing at the recent adventure, which reminded us of Sinbad's mistaking a whale for a solid rock, our eyes were attracted by the sight of another island, much smaller than the first. It seemed, indeed, like a little grove or tuft of palm-like foliage, rising out of the water somewhat in the fashion of our Prince of Wales' feather. None of the party had ever seen such a tree before, and every one tried to guess what it might be; but all were ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall
... nightcaps I mean, not heads. Anthony was one of the oldest of the clerks, and just the subject for a painter. He was as thin as a lath, wrinkled round the mouth and eyes, had long, bony fingers, bushy, gray eyebrows, and over his left eye hung a thick tuft of hair, which did not look handsome, but made his appearance very remarkable. People knew that he came from Bremen; it was not exactly his home, although his master resided there. His ancestors were from Thuringia, and had lived in the town of Eisenach, ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... in reefing the mainsail and sweating it up—probably not more than fifteen minutes; but the felucca had in the meantime so shortened the distance between us that I now saw the tuft of hair on the heads of the crew,—by which, it is said, Mohammed will pull the villains up into heaven,—and they were coming on like the wind. From what I could clearly make out now, I felt them to be the sons of generations of pirates, and I saw by their movements ...
— Sailing Alone Around The World • Joshua Slocum
... those feathers came out of one breast? There are hundreds and hundreds of us here, and every one of us can spare a little tuft of soft breast feathers to help to keep ...
— The Book of Dragons • Edith Nesbit
... till he is fairly upon them. The hen-hawk swoops down upon the meadow-mouse from his position high in air, or from the top of a dead tree; but the marsh hawk stalks him and comes suddenly upon him from over the fence, or from behind a low bush or tuft of grass. He is nearly as large as the hen-hawk, but has a much longer tail. When I was a boy I used to call him the long-tailed hawk. The male is of a bluish slate-color; the female reddish-brown, like the hen-hawk, with ...
— Bird Stories from Burroughs - Sketches of Bird Life Taken from the Works of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... counterbalancing weight—fire being in the grating—to the height of 700 feet. At this height it remained stationary eight and a half minutes As it was drawn back, a wind from the east bore it against a tuft of very tall trees in a neighbouring garden, where it got entangled, without, however, losing its equilibrium. The gas was renewed by Roziers, and the balloon again rising, extricated itself from among ...
— Wonderful Balloon Ascents - or, the Conquest of the Skies • Fulgence Marion
... What a slow and horrible agony for the paralysed victim, should some glimmer of consciousness still linger in its puny brain! What a terrible nightmare for the little field-cricket, suddenly plunged into the den of the Sphex, so far from the sunlit tuft of thyme which ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... blushing for 'Abdul the d——d'; Year that in guise of a herald declaring the close of the tourney Clears the redoubtable lists hot with the Battle of Bays; Binds on the brows of the Tory, the highly respectable Austin, Laurels that Phoebus of old wore on the top of his tuft; ...
— The Battle of the Bays • Owen Seaman
... ever will be. As I said, it was a great day for me, but I don't remember that the oxen cared much about it. They sagged along in their great clumsy way, switching their tails in my face occasionally, and now and then giving a lurch to this or that side of the road, attracted by a choice tuft of grass. And then I "came the Julius Caesar" over them, if you will allow me to use such a slang expression, a liberty I never should permit you. I don't know that Julius Caesar ever drove cattle, though he must often have seen the peasants from the Campagna "haw" and ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... lizards and numberless other chirping things began to send forth their evening hymn to the great Being who made them and us, and a solitary white-sailing owl would every now and then flit spectrelike from one green tuft, across the bald face of the cliff, to another, and the small divers around us were breaking up the black surface of the waters into little sparkling circles as they fished for their suppers. All was becoming ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 579 - Volume 20, No. 579, December 8, 1832 • Various
... eminent men, who afterwards became viceroys, as their fellow classman and collegian at Christ Church. At that time two of them were only younger sons in their "pupa" or pupil phases of Ramsay and Bruce, and wore the same commoner's gown as myself; the third, though a "tuft" by courtesy, had not yet come to his heritage. All these three succeeded one another in the high position of a Governor-General of India, and were famous architects of our imperial greatness. I remember on either side of me in Biscoe's memorable Aristotle class before ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... revealed everything. Gainor stiffened a little and the tuft of beard which ran down to a point on his chin quivered and jutted out. The sheriff seemed to feel nothing more than a mild surprise and curiosity. And the three went silently, side by side, under the spruce. They were glorious trees, strong of trunk and nobly proportioned. ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand
... a glance. The little stream is gurgling downward in a half choked frozen way. There is a huge sodden hemlock lying across it. One clip of the hatchet shows it will peel. There is plenty of smaller timber standing around; long, slim poles, with a tuft of foliage on top. Five minutes suffice to drop one of these, cut a twelve-foot pole from it, sharpen the pole at each end, jam one end into the ground and the other into the rough back of a scraggy hemlock and there is your ridge pole. Now go—with your hatchet—for ...
— Woodcraft • George W. Sears
... and, as she did so, was aware of a scent about her, not strong, but deliciously clean and fragrant. It came from a tuft of wild thyme on which her palm had been pressing while ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... would have looked ridiculous. The majesty of a bull moose, however, is too secure to be marred by the incongruous pettiness of his tail. From the lower part of his neck, where the great muscles ran into the spacious, corded chest, hung a curious tuft of long and very coarse black hair, called among woodsmen the "bell." As he turned to his browsing, his black form stood out sharply against the background of the firs. Far down the silent, glittering slope, a good mile distant, a tall, gray figure on snow-shoes appeared for a ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... it is called, line the bottom and sides of my pool. They grow in tufts, standing upright on the rock, and looking exactly like hard gray seaweeds, while there is nothing to lead you to suspect that they are anything else. Yesterday I chipped off very carefully a piece of rock with a tuft upon it, and have kept it since in a glass globe by itself with sea-water, for the little creatures living in this marine city require a very good supply of healthy water and air. I have called it a "marine city," and now ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... stop the action at once by immersing the print in a 10-per-cent solution of borax. The prints may be allowed to remain in this last solution until they are finished. A good final washing completes the process. This washing must be thorough and a sponge or a tuft of cotton used to clean ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... round its neck and rested his head between its horns. I was anything but pleased with these antics, fearing that this effusion was only a dodge to cut the beast's throat. Much to my astonishment, I found that the young Jogpa had seized a tuft of the yak's hair with his teeth and was trying to tear it off, while the unfortunate beast was making desperate efforts to shake off its persecutor. The hair eventually gave way, and with a mouthful of it hanging from both sides of his tightly closed ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... this further oddity, that above the nape of his neck was a whitish tuft which, though he took great pains to conceal it, continually obtruded through the darker hair like the cottontail on the ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon
... and all around the place, as he stroked the dense brake of black-brown beard that cleverly filled in the interval between Mr. Van Busch's luxuriant whiskers. Presently he stooped and picked up a little tan-leather glove, lying in a tuft of pink flowers. The daintiness of the little glove brought home to Bough more forcibly than anything else, that the Kid had ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... [7] a tuft of winged seed That, from the dandelion's naked stalk, Mounted aloft, is suffered not to use Its natural gifts for purposes of rest, 140 Driven by the autumnal whirlwind to and fro Through the wide element? or have you marked The heavier substance of a leaf-clad bough, ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... mine at La Boisselle was a wonderful sight. One morning I was wandering about the old battlefield, and I came across a great wilderness of white chalk—not a tuft of grass, not a flower, nothing but blazing chalk; apparently a hill of chalk dotted thickly all over with bits of shrapnel. I walked up it, and suddenly found myself on the lip of the crater. ...
— An Onlooker in France 1917-1919 • William Orpen
... the Jaintia Hills, the head of the corpse is shaved, but a tuft of hair in the middle of the head is left; this is called (u'niuh Iawbei), the great grandmother's lock. At Nartiang betel-nut, which has been chewed by one of the mourners is put into the mouth ...
— The Khasis • P. R. T. Gurdon
... the fall of both into the water. Now it became the object of each to drown his antagonist, and the efforts to accomplish this were continued for some time with alternate success;—first one and then the other, being under water. At length, catching hold of the long tuft of hair which had been suffered to grow on the head of the chief, Poe held him under water, until he supposed him dead; but relaxing his hold too soon, the gigantic savage was again on his feet and ready for another grapple. In this both were carried beyond their depth, and ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... Mahony's room faced a wide view: not a fence, hardly a bit of scrub or a tuft of grass-tree marked the bare expanse of uneven ground, now baked brown as a piecrust by the December sun. He looked across it to the cemetery. This was still wild and unfenced—just a patch of rising ground where it was permissible to bury the dead. ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... thoughts of the hunter. The paintings were drawn from nature, and the words few and simple, that spoke to the hearts of these sons of the forest. "The broad woods," he pursued, "would stretch beneath their eyes, when the mountain summits were gained, one extended tuft of blossoms. The cane was a tangle of luxuriance, affording the richest pastures. The only paths through it were those made by buffaloes and bears. In the sheltered glades, turkeys and large wild birds were so abundant, that a hunter could supply himself ...
— The First White Man of the West • Timothy Flint
... was at large, and might waylay me from any bush or tuft of grass. The moonbeams were ghostly and the stillness of the wide solitude was eerie. Being but a child,—and a girl-child,—I thought of these things, and of the likelihood of meeting runaway negroes, and ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... small brown spots are noted. These become larger, and at length the whole leaf is destroyed. When attacked by this disease the tree makes no progress. An examination of the discolored areas, under a microscope, shows the presence of tuft-like growths of spores upon short conidiophores. As they become matured the spores are scattered by the rain or wind and so the disease is spread. It probably lives over from one season to another on the ...
— The Pecan and its Culture • H. Harold Hume
... considerable beauty in a small coral reef, when seen from a ship's mast-head, at a short distance, in clear weather. A small island with a white sand-beach and a tuft of trees, is surrounded by a symmetrically oval space of shallow water, of a bright grass-green colour, enclosed by a ring of glittering surf as white as snow; immediately outside of which is the rich dark blue of deep water. All the sea is perfectly clear from any mixture ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... whose trunk was coated over With the Dead-man's Moccasin-leather, With the fungus white and yellow. Suddenly from the boughs above him Sang the Mama, the woodpecker: "Aim your arrows, Hiawatha, At the head of Megissogwon, Strike the tuft of hair upon it, At their roots the long black tresses; There alone can he be wounded!" Winged with feathers, tipped with jasper, Swift flew Hiawatha's arrow, Just as Megissogwon, stooping, Raised a heavy stone to throw it. Full upon the crown ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... the same place, but that was long, long ago; in fact, it was when in boyhood we had first entered into that awful wilderness. We had reached the top of Ben Muich Dhui early in the day. Our little wallet of provisions we had left on a tuft of heather where we had lain down to rest, and we could not afterwards find the spot. Somewhat tired, and faint with hunger, we descended the rocks by the side of the cataract, believing that Loch Avon, seemingly so small from the summit of the mountain, was the little Tarn of Etichan, which ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... and a pair of big, tuft-eared, wild-eyed lynxes living about the lake, and these all came creeping up one after another, under the cover of the thickets, to stare in amazement at the alien little one so tenderly mothered by the great cow moose. They had seen calves, on the farms of the ...
— Children of the Wild • Charles G. D. Roberts
... large as a man. These rat-kangaroos have most interesting tails, covered with long hair which forms itself into a crest near the tip. Their homes are found among small grassy hills, where there are a few trees and bushes. They scratch out a small hole in the ground, near a tuft of tall grass, and so bend the grass as to form a complete roof to the house, which is rather poorly constructed, and whose chief interest lies in the unusual way the kangaroos have of carrying ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... an annual herb with stems radiating in all directions from a centre. The plant is fixed to the soil by a tuft of fibrous roots all springing from the bases of the stems. In addition to this crown of fibrous roots, there may be roots at the nodes of some of the prostrate branches. The stems and branches are short at first, and leaves arise on them one after the other ...
— A Handbook of Some South Indian Grasses • Rai Bahadur K. Ranga Achariyar
... not all, for at every ten or twenty paces was a dense tuft of willow bushes, growing for the most part upon the higher knolls where it was dry and sunny, their roots heaped round with drift wood, from the decay of which had shot up a dense tangled growth of cat-briers. In these the birds were lying, all but some five or six which ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... from John, when he was younger. Now he has started, I am afraid he will repeat the experiment, he has had such a good time to-day. It just makes me want to whip him!" And Mrs. Adams glared out at the unconscious Job who was quietly cropping a tuft of green grass. ...
— Half a Dozen Girls • Anna Chapin Ray
... their country-houses, to recreate themselves. Our gentry in England live most part in the country (except it be some few castles) building still in bottoms (saith [3154]Jovius) or near woods, corona arborum virentium; you shall know a village by a tuft of trees at or about it, to avoid those strong winds wherewith the island is infested, and cold winter blasts. Some discommend moated houses, as unwholesome; so Camden saith of [3155]Ew-elme, that it was therefore unfrequented, ob stagni vicini halitus, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... painful reverie. He sat with it in hand, staring straight ahead. Then a strange thing happened. The office door opened and Mrs. Blair, the nurse, entered. She was dressed in black, she carried a black travelling bag, and she wore a black bonnet, with a high black tuft on the top by way of trimming. Mrs. Blair was very tall, and this black tuft, when she entered the ...
— 'Doc.' Gordon • Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman
... many months,—did, and reasonably might, interest many Manchester people on her behalf. In all this there was nothing to be ashamed of; and, judging from what personally I witnessed, this seems to have been the true nature and extent of the "tuft-hunting;" and I have noticed it at all simply because there is a habit almost national growing up amongst us of imputing to each other some mode of unmanly prostration before the aristocracy, but with as little foundation for ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... straps, one of which passed around the neck of the oxen, and the other, fastened to the first, passed under their belly. Their high withers, their broad dewlaps, their clean limbs, their small hoofs, shining like agate, their tails with the tuft carefully combed, showed that they were thorough-bred and that hard field-work had never deformed them. They exhibited the majestic placidity of Apis, the sacred bull, when ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... with the history of this bird is his oven-shaped nest. It is commonly placed on the ground, under a knoll of moss or a tuft of grass and bushes, and is formed almost entirely of long grass neatly woven. It is covered with a roof of the same materials, and a round opening is made at the side, for the bird's entrance. The nest is so ingeniously covered with grass and disguised with the appearance of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... a plain nest in the open field, without so much as a bush or thistle or tuft of grass to protect it or mark its site; you may step upon it, or the cattle may tread it into the ground. But the danger from this source, I presume, the bird considers less than that from another. ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... water in four or five pits, three quarters of a mile from the shore. I had forty tons from one well, which we rolled in hogsheads to the beach. The people were tractable, but we got little else besides water. A tuft of date trees by the watering place bore N.W. by W. from our anchorage, and the other end of the island N.E. 1/2 E. five leagues off. The 12th we sailed for the N.E. end of the island, and in the afternoon came to anchor in a fair bay, having ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume IX. • Robert Kerr
... projectiles is as undistinguishable as light in daytime, the field resembles a field, the road resembles a road. Ultimately one makes out some corpses, but what a strangely little thing is a corpse in a field—a tuft of colorless flowers which the shortest blades of grass disguise! At one moment there was a ray of sunshine, and it ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... has in it something aristocratic and supercilious. He looks upon this crumb-scattering as a duty society owes him, and determines generously to leave for the others all he can not eat up himself. But I think I see a tuft on ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... a paper in the Ceylon Miscellany, July, 1843, recorded the results of some experiments, made near Colombo, as to the daily variation of temperature and Its effects on cultivation, from which it appeared that a register thermometer, exposed on a tuft of grass in the cinnamon garden in a clear night and under the open sky, on the 2nd of January, 1841, showed in the morning that it had been so low as 52 deg., and when laid on the ground in the place in the sunshine on the ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... set up, but his complexion "swart or blackish, his face large, his cheeks sticking out and somewhat hollow underneath," his hair long unless recently cut, his beard cut close, "saving littell mustachoes and a littell tuft under his lower lippe," his age about forty. Equally precise descriptions are given of Greenway and Garnet; the former being represented as of "meane stature, somewhat grosse," his hair black, his beard bushy and brown, his forehead broad, and his age about the same as that of Gerrard; whilst ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume II • Reginald R. Sharpe
... great pass, full of rugged rocks and seamed with roaring torrents—indeed, the very pass of Bally-Brough in which the reivers had last been spied—across weary and dangerous morasses, where Edward had perforce to spring from tuft to tussock of coarse grass, Evan Dhu led our hero into the depths of the wild Highland country,—where no Saxon foot trod or dared to tread without the leave of Vich Ian Vohr, as the chief's foster-brother took occasion to ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... when he was quite a baby, he had a funny little tuft of hair on his head, so he was called Tufty Riquet, for ...
— My Book of Favorite Fairy Tales • Edric Vredenburg
... and disposition, and also in the quality of their hair. The standard calls for a small head, with not too long a nose, large eyes that should harmonize in color with the fur, small, pointed ears with a tuft of hair at the apex, and a very full, fluffy mane around the neck. This mane is known as the "lord mayor's chain." The body is longer than that of the ordinary cat in proportion to its size, and is extremely graceful, ...
— Concerning Cats - My Own and Some Others • Helen M. Winslow
... imposing in her barouche, and we were glad that she wore one of her handsome black silks instead of her sensible short costume. There was a good deal of jet about the waist, and her bonnet was all made of jet, with a beautiful tuft of pink roses on the front, and she glittered resplendently as she rode past, sitting up very straight, as befitted the dignity ...
— The Jamesons • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... than chowder—real good clam chowder." His mouth opened to take in a spoonful, and his ponderous jaws worked slowly. There was nothing gross in the action, but it might have been ambrosia. He had pushed the big spectacles up on his head for comfort, and they made an iron-gray bridge from tuft to tuft, framing the ...
— Uncle William - The Man Who Was Shif'less • Jennette Lee
... horn handle; long leathern gaiters came above his knees; the horn went over his shoulder from right to left, the wide-expanded opening under his arm; on his head a wide-brimmed hat, with a heron's plume in the buckle. His profile, coming to a point in a reddish tuft, ...
— The Man-Wolf and Other Tales • Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian
... the uneven allotment of nature that the male bird alone has the tuft, but we have not yet followed the advice of hasty philosophers who would have us copy nature entirely in these matters; and if Mr. Mallinger Grandcourt became a baronet or a peer, his wife would share the title—which in addition to his actual ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... strong. It ought to be cut before its wood hardens; and to be green as its leaf, which ought, however, to have a bluish eye or cast. When cut it is conveyed into the rotting-tub, as we shall presently explain. According as the soil is better or worse, it shoots higher or lower; the tuft of the first cutting, which grows round, does not exceed eight inches in heighth and breadth: the second cutting rises sometimes to a foot. In cutting the Indigo you are to set your foot upon the root, in ...
— History of Louisisana • Le Page Du Pratz
... The vane on the barn was delicately sifted over, and the top of every picket in the high front-yard fence had a fluffy peak. But it was chiefly in the woods that the rapture and flavor of the time ran riot in making beauty. There every fir branch swayed under a tuft of white, and the brown refuse of the year was ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... acted as her counsel, and enhanced the sober yet genial decorum of his bearing. His slightly pontifical air seemed an assurance against ill-timed levity. His cheeks were still fat and smooth shaven, but, like many of the successful men of Benham, he now wore a chin beard—a thick tuft of hair which in his case tapered so that it bore some resemblance to the beard of a goat, and gave a rough-and-ready aspect to his appearance suggestive alike of smart, solid worth and an absence of dandified tendencies. Mr. Parsons had a thicker ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... project in an elegant curve, and are used by it for making prey of small fish." The very ancient error was to mistake the foot of the shell-fish for the neck of a goose, the shell for its head, and the tentacula for a tuft of feathers. As to the body, non est inventus. The Barnacle Goose is a well-known bird: and these shell-fish, bearing, as seen out of the water, resemblance to the goose's neck, were ignorantly, and without investigation, confounded with ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 201, September 3, 1853 • Various
... Amid yon tuft of hazel trees, That twinkle to the gusty breeze, Behold him perch'd in ecstasies, Yet seeming still to hover; There, where the flutter of his wings Upon his back and body flings Shadows and sunny glimmerings, That cover him ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... The tuft feathers of the red-headed woodpecker are used to ornament the stems of the Indian pipe, and ...
— The Myth of Hiawatha, and Other Oral Legends, Mythologic and Allegoric, of the North American Indians • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... in a succatash {sic}. Half the people who see these good things daily spread on the board before them, are only acquainted with vegetables after they have been mutilated and disguised by cookery. They would not know the leaf of a beet from that of the spinach, the green tuft of a carrot from the delicate sprigs of parsley. Now, a bouquet of roses and pinks is certainly a very beautiful object, but a collection of fine vegetables, with the rich variety of shape and colour, in leaf, fruit, and root, such as nature ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... flung the reins over the pony's head and slipped to the ground. For a minute or longer he lay outstretched, limp and white-faced. When he looked up, the pony was stolidly cropping a tuft of grass. Beasts are not often troubled with imagination. The hunter remembered his brandy flask. After two long pulls at its contents, the vivid coloring began to return to ...
— Out of the Depths - A Romance of Reclamation • Robert Ames Bennet
... that the chief cause of disease and death was a monstrous serpent, that lived under the earth. By touching a tuft of hair, a feather, or a fragment of bone, with a portion of his flesh or fat, the sorcerer imparted power to it of entering the body of his victim, and gradually killing him. It was an important part of the doctor's function to extract these ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... was slightly aquiline, just enough to give character to his countenance, the hair which was rather scant, was dark like the mustache and the small tuft on his chin. He wore fine, high cavalry boots, reaching above the knees, a sword and like the captain was armed ...
— A Waif of the Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... 1821. It stands on the right hand, a little way leading up the vale from Grasmere to Rydal. We have been in the habit of calling it the glow-worm rock, from the number of glow-worms we have often seen hanging on it as described. The tuft of primrose has, I fear, been washed away ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... to begin with, Bruce, on parasites and parvenus, tuft-hunting freshmen, and the tenth transmitters of a foolish face," retorted Lillyston, ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... hints foresay the berry, On spray of haw and tuft of brier, Then, wandering incendiary, You set ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... Kennedy as Senora Mendez took one of the little buttons out of the silver tray. Carefully paring the fuzzy tuft of hairs off the top of it—it looked to me very much like the tip of a cactus plant, which, indeed, it was—she rolled it into a little pellet and placed it in her mouth, chewing it slowly ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve
... excellent swordsman, and had fought several duels; but he was quite disconcerted by the deadly reality of Neil's attack. In the second thrust, his foot got entangled in a tuft of grass; and, in evading a lunge aimed at his heart, he fell on his right side. Supporting himself, however, on his sword hand, he sprang backwards with great dexterity, and thus escaped the probable death-blow. But, as he was bleeding from a wound in the throat, his second interfered, and proposed ...
— The Bow of Orange Ribbon - A Romance of New York • Amelia E. Barr
... dividing, at the fore fork, into two parts, one running down the front of each leg, as low as the shank. The horns, unlike the character of the order generally, have a quadrangular base, and, sweeping inwards, terminate in a sharp point. The tail, about seven inches long, ends in a tuft of stiff hairs. From this remarkable muffler-looking beard, the French have given the species the name of Mouflon a manchettes. From the primitive stock eleven varieties have been reared in this ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... draw some flowers in a glass before her-a little purple, green-winged orchis, a cowslip, and a quivering dark-brown tuft of quaking grass. He came and ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... brown bird with yellow breast and a black crescent on his throat. The meadow-lark is about the size of a quail. He stands erect when he sings, and he has a rather long beak. The nest can be found, if you look for it, but is generally out of sight under a loosened clod of earth or tuft ...
— On the Trail - An Outdoor Book for Girls • Lina Beard and Adelia Belle Beard
... ridgy roll of wind-smoothed, rain-washed rock. Not a tuft of grass or a bunch of sage colored the dull rust-yellow. He saw where, to the right, this uneven flow of stone ended in a blunt wall. Leftward, from the hollow that lay at his feet, mounted a gradual slow-swelling slope to a great height topped by leaning, cracked, ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... (fig. 423).—This stitch which is composed of several loops forming a tuft, can only be worked from one side, consequently all one way. It looks best in a coarse material to show the interlacing ...
— Encyclopedia of Needlework • Therese de Dillmont
... a little man, with a high tuft of hair on his forehead and moustaches, in a cinnamon-coloured frock-coat and striped cravat. His yellow, mobile features were certainly full of cleverness and sarcasm. His lips were perpetually curved in a flitting ironical smile; little black eyes, screwed up with an impudent ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... way he told me to do it," said Samuel, seizing the tuft of hair on the head of the man who had instructed him in scalping. He ran the keen edge of a knife around the skull and, by a quick jerk, ...
— The Witch of Salem - or Credulity Run Mad • John R. Musick
... a person of any poetry, who came under this tree," said John Effingham, "that did not fall into this very train of thought. I once brought a man celebrated for his genius here, and, after gazing for a minute or two at the high, green tuft that tops the tree, he exclaimed, 'that mass of green waved there in the fierce light when Columbus first ventured into the unknown sea.' It is, indeed, eloquent; for it tells the same glowing tale to all who approach it—a tale fraught with ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... hand a thicket she surveys Gay with the flowering thorn and vermeil rose: The tuft reflected in the stream which strays Beside it, overshadowing oaks enclose. Hollow within, and safe from vulgar gaze, It seemed a place constructed for repose; With bows so interwoven, that the light Pierced not the tangled screen, far ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... dandelion blooming in a tuft of grass between the loosened bricks of the pavement, and I imprisoned it in my bare toes while I waited ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... and candy-tuft, are early blooming, while others, such as aster and cosmos, bloom in late summer, hence a selection should be made that will yield a succession of bloom throughout ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education
... a dear gazelle; But I was given a parroquet— (How I did nurse him if unwell!) He's imbecile, but lingers yet. He's green, with an enchanting tuft; He melts me with his small black eye; He'd look inimitable stuffed, And knows it—but ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... lips and was silent, sitting gazing past the boy and through the window, so full of thought that he broke off another grape, raised it to his lips, and then threw it through the opening into a tuft of ...
— Marcus: the Young Centurion • George Manville Fenn
... the panther across the puddle had had enough; I saw him lift his grateful head up to the flare; saw the limp red tongue licking the black nose, the green eyes shining like opals, the water dripping in threads of diamonds from the hairy tag under his chin and every tuft ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... pockets with them for the ladies at home. Now the path was lost, having vanished in the six months' growth of weeds; and we had to beat about for it over fallen logs, through tangles of liane and thickets of the tall Arouma, {221} a cane with a flat tuft of leaves atop, which is plentiful in these dark, damp, northern slopes. Now we struggled and hopped, horse and man, down and round a corner, at the head of a glen, where a few flagstones fallen across a gully gave an uncertain foothold, and paused, under damp rocks covered with white and pink Begonias ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... by the physicians was over fifty years of age. His hair was very thin and quite gray and his face was closely shaven, excepting a thick tuft of hair on his rather prominent chin. He was very poorly clad, wearing a soiled woolen blouse and a pair of dilapidated trousers hanging in rags over his boots, which were very much trodden down at the heels. The ...
— Monsieur Lecoq • Emile Gaboriau
... has pitched upon the best stories, which he does not, like M. Dalambert, spoil in the reading—"Perseverance against Fortune," "The Price of a Victory," and "Capriole." We were reading an account of the pinna the other day, and very much regretted that your pinna's brown silk tuft had been eaten by the mice—what will they not eat?—they have eaten my thimble case! I am sorry to say that, from these last accounts of the pinna and his cancer friend, Dr. Darwin's beautiful description is more poetic than accurate. The cancer is neither watchman nor market-woman to ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... the finest gut, is not a likely manoeuvre. The grayling behaved well for a couple of yards or so, and then bethought himself of plunging, the consequence being that I lost my hook, and he dropped into a tuft of bracken in a niche ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... expected; and it contained sundry articles of furniture, such as a handsome press and sideboard, which no one would have dreamt of finding under such a roof. In one corner there stood an old spinning-wheel covered with dust, and with a smoke-blackened tuft of wool still hanging from its reel; from which, and from other small indications, it might be surmised that there had once been a woman in the house, and that tuft of wool had probably ...
— The Pilot and his Wife • Jonas Lie
... to the reader to know, that the Highland cattle are peculiarly liable to be taken, or infected, by spells and witchcraft, which judicious people guard against by knitting knots of peculiar complexity on the tuft of hair which terminates the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume X, No. 280, Saturday, October 27, 1827. • Various
... become silent, a Rakshasa of the name of Charvaka, who had disguised himself as a Brahmana, addressed the king. He was a friend of Duryodhana and stood there in the garb of a religious mendicant. With a rosary, with a tuft of hair on his head, and with the triple staff in his hand, he stood proudly and fearlessly in the midst of all those Brahmanas that had come there for pronouncing benedictions (upon the king), numbering ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... of the world, have done to themselves in order to improve their personal appearance. The flat-head Indian of North America squeezes his forehead out of shape; the Eastern beauty blackens her teeth and nails; the Chinaman shaves the hair off his head, leaving a tuft on the top; the Englishman shaves the hair off his face, leaving a tuft on each cheek,—and all of these deluded mortals run thus deliberately in the face of nature, under the impression that by so doing they ...
— The Cannibal Islands - Captain Cook's Adventure in the South Seas • R.M. Ballantyne
... by this home thrust, the poor monkey stops, rolls up her eyes, moves her lips, and growling confusedly her complaints and reproaches, crouches beneath a tuft of the sapota, leaving the man to pursue ...
— The Solitary of Juan Fernandez, or The Real Robinson Crusoe • Joseph Xavier Saintine
... soldiers. Around the table shone two rows of cranial spheres, reddish or dark. Their ears stood out grotesquely, and their jaw bones were in strong relief owing to their thinness. Some had preserved the upright moustache in the style of the Emperor; the most of them were shaved or had a stubby tuft ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... the different inflections of her voice and the meanings of her expressive glance; he studied the variegation of the spots which shaded the dead gold of her robe. Mignonne no longer growled when he caught the tuft of her dangerous tail and counted the black and white rings which glittered in the sunlight like a cluster of precious stones. He delighted in the soft lines of her lithe body, the whiteness of her belly, the grace of her charming head: but above all he loved to watch her as she gamboled ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... place at the chief's left hand. It was evident that his thoughts were far away, for his drinking-horn stood forgotten at his elbow and he was humming absently as he worked. His fingers were busy with a long splinter and a tuft of fox-hairs, that he was pulling carefully from the rug on which ...
— The Thrall of Leif the Lucky • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... 'A tuft of daisies on a flowery lay They saw; and thitherward they bent their way; To this both knights and dames their homage made, And due obeisance to the daisy paid. And then the band of flutes began to play, To which ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 427 - Volume 17, New Series, March 6, 1852 • Various
... tail. They are perfectly harmless, and subsist upon frogs and insects. One variety of this species, found in the district of King George's Sound, was brought to my notice by my brother. It is usually found in a tuft of grass, where it lies completely hidden except its tongue, which is thrust upwards, and bears an exact resemblance to the petal of a flower, crimson and pink. Flies seem to delight in resting upon this deceptive flower, ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... it was surrounded on all sides, supplied what was wanting in the courtesy of his pursuers. The sides of the glen were broken banks of earth and rocks of rotten stone, which sunk sheer down to the little winding stream below, affording here and there a tuft of scathed brushwood or a patch of furze. Along the edges of this ravine, which, as we have said, was very narrow, but of profound depth, the hunters on horse and foot ranged themselves; almost every farmer ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... the cow had been getting more and more nervous. Every day she thought of the poor old man and his meek little legs and his sweet old smile, and just how his coat-tails looked as he went up; till at last she laid her head down on a tuft of grass by the brook, and ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 4, February 1878 • Various
... fashion in "oversea" hair cuts. The victims sat on a ration box while the barber mowed great swaths through tangled thatch with a pair of close-cutting clippers. But instead of making a complete job of it, a thick fringe of hair which resembled a misplaced scalping tuft was left for decorative purposes, just above the forehead. The effect was so grotesque that I had to invent an excuse for laughing. It was a lame one, I fear, for Shorty looked at me warningly. When we had gone on a little way ...
— Kitchener's Mob - Adventures of an American in the British Army • James Norman Hall
... the mass of fugitives, hewing them down in hundreds. Those nearest to the river dashed in, and numbers were drowned in striving to cross it. The main body, however, made for the swamp, and though in the crush many sank in and perished miserably here, the great majority, leaping lightly from tuft to tuft, gained the heart of the morass, the pursuing horse ...
— In Freedom's Cause • G. A. Henty
... very thin and bony, and seemed not to have an ounce of flesh about his face or body. He had large, black whiskers,—coarse and jet black,—which did not quite meet beneath his chin. And he wore no other beard, no tuft, no imperial, no moustachios; but when he was seen before shaving on a morning, he would seem to be black all over, and his hair was black, short, and harsh; and though black, round about his ears it was beginning ...
— The Landleaguers • Anthony Trollope
... surface the least fleck shows, and I can never forget how beautiful some swamp-hens, with their dark blue plumage, short, pert, white tails, and long bright legs, looked, as they searched slowly along the banks of the swollen creek for some traces of their former haunts; but every tuft of tohi-grass lay bent and buried deep beneath its heavy covering. The gentlemen wanted me to go home before they attempted to see the extent of the disaster, which we all felt must be very great; but I found it impossible to do anything ...
— Station Life in New Zealand • Lady Barker
... and fields. The manner in which they eat the roots of the plaintain in the grass walk is very curious; with their upper mandible, which is much larger than the lower, they bore under the plant, and so eat the root off upward, leaving the tuft of leaves untouched. ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... was allowed to get well ahead, and crawling cautiously, a step at a time, he went, setting down his moccasined foot only after he had tried and selected a place. Once or twice he threw into the air a tuft of dry grass to make sure that the wind was right, and by slow degrees he reached the edge of a ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... cannot rise from the horizon; but, obeying an impulse from higher currents, their dense consistency slowly yields. The gloom upon them deepens; and they soon present to our view a ponderous mass of almost level surface. From time to time a fleecy tuft of mist, with yet some gleaming light left upon it, drops down upon the dense floor of grey, and loses itself in the opaque ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... Peregrine wash his face and hands, smooth the hair ruffled in his nap, freshly tying his little cravat and the ribbons on his shoes and at his knees. To make his hair into anything but elf locks, or to obliterate the bristly tuft that made him like Riquet, was impossible, illness had made him additionally lean and sallow, and his keen eyes, under their black contracted brows and dark lashes, showed all the more the curious variation in their tints, ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... rush fringe; you have the atoll of Kauehi. And for either shore of it at closer quarters, conceive the line of some old Roman highway traversing a wet morass, and here sunk out of view and there re-arising, crowned with a green tuft of thicket; only instead of the stagnant waters of a marsh, the live ocean now boiled against, now buried the frail barrier. Last night's impression in the dark was thus confirmed by day, and not corrected. We sailed indeed by a mere causeway in the sea, of nature's handiwork, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Desert. A Badawi always hails with pleasure the first sight of the Ghaza, after he has sojourned for a time away from his wilds. Mr. Palgrave (i. 38) describes the "Ghada" as an Euphorbia with a woody stem often 5-6 feet high and slender, flexible green twigs (?), "forming a feathery tuft, not ungraceful to the eye, while it affords some shelter to the traveller, and food ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... the bravest, north or south, east or west. Unnamed, unknown, remain, and still remain, the bravest soldiers. Our manliest—our boys—our hardy darlings; no picture gives them. Likely, the typic one of them (standing, no doubt, for hundreds, thousands,) crawls aside to some bush-clump, or ferny tuft, on receiving his death-shot—there sheltering a little while, soaking roots, grass and soil, with red blood—the battle advances, retreats, flits from the scene, sweeps by—and there, haply with pain and suffering (yet less, far ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... puffed and tucked up about the waist, till she was all over in a flutter of silk, and lace, and black beads, with a dashing bonnet on her head high enough for a trooper's training-cap, all shivery with lace and bows, with one long feather curling half way round it, and a white tuft sticking up straight on the top, ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens |
