"Bracken" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Baboo is merely a grotesque Bracken shadow, but in the course of geological ages it might harden down into something palpable. It is this possibility that leads Sir Ashley Eden to advise the Baboo to revert to its original type; but it is not so easy to become homogeneous after ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... looked down into deep valleys and dingles, and beyond, across the trees, to remoter country, wild bare hills and dark wooded lands meeting the grey still sky. Immediately beneath his feet the ground sloped steep down to the valley, a hillside of close grass patched with dead bracken, and dotted here and there with stunted thorns, and below there were deep oak woods, all still and silent, and lonely as if no one ever passed that way. The grass and bracken and thorns and woods, all were brown and grey beneath the ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... entrance gates there is a wilderness of fern, or bracken, as high as your waist. Hidden in the midst of this unlikely place Jones has found the dagger. It is as if the party, going down the avenue, had flung ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... smile is on leaf, and flower, and waving bracken. And on Monica, too, as, with glad eyes and parted lips, she steps lightly into the shadow of the old porch at Moyne. No sweeter presence ever honored it. Leaning against one of the pillars, she steps forward, and gazes ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... out along the common, through heather which as yet was a mere brown expanse of flowerless undergrowth, and copses which overhead were a canopy of golden oak-leaf, and carpeted underneath with primroses and the young up-curling bracken. Presently through a little wood we came upon a pond lying wide and blue before us under the breezy May sky, its shores fringed with scented fir-wood and the whole air alive with birds. We sat down under a pile of logs fresh-cut and fragrant, and talked away vigorously. ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... until he reached a broad open common, thickly wooded, sprinkled with gorse and hazel and may, and faintly purple with fading heather. There he flung himself down in the beautiful sunlight, among the yellowing bracken, to ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... top of them. Furze brakes also are still numerous, the whole of the flat land on the top of the cliffs and the steep valleys and slopes down to the sea on the south and east side of the Island, from Fermain Bay to Pleimont, being almost uninterrupted wild land covered with heather, furze, and bracken; besides this wild furze land, there are several thick furze brakes inland in different parts of the Island. All these places seem to me to have remained almost without change for years. The furze, however, never grows very high, as it is cut every few years ...
— Birds of Guernsey (1879) • Cecil Smith
... the door opened and Dodge and a companion, who subsequently proved to be E. M. Bracken, alias "Bradley," an agent employed by Howe and Hummel, left the room, went to the elevator and descended to the dining-room upon the second floor. Jesse watched until they were safely ensconced at breakfast and then returned to the fourth ...
— True Stories of Crime From the District Attorney's Office • Arthur Train
... without charge), improving their schools, and visited from time to time by patients from abroad, drawn here by his fame as an oculist. Among these last came a Mr. Taufer, a resident of Hong-Kong, and with him his foster-child, Josephine Bracken, the daughter of an Irish sergeant. The pretty and adventurous girl and the banished patriot fell in ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... two rabbits stirred in the bracken in the near park—this was peace. Then Molly smiled tenderly at the dawn. There might come another solution in which life would be unselfish without such acute sacrifice, and in which evil possibilities would be starved for lack of ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... remark that no rowan-tree grows near, nor holly, nor bracken, and no horseshoe is ...
— J.S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 5 • J.S. Le Fanu
... hall whence God in an older mood received the praise of men; the top of it sloped the way of an ancient wind. Here they all halted and lighted a fire of branches, striking sparks from flint into a heap of bracken. They eased them of their armour, and sat round the fire, and Camorak stood up there and addressed them, and Camorak said: "We go to war with Fate, who has doomed that I shall not come to Carcassonne. And if we turn aside but one of the dooms of Fate, then the whole future of ...
— A Dreamer's Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... me into a steep forest, where I lost sight of the Tarn. The soil was too rocky for the trees—oaks and chestnuts chiefly—to grow very tall; consequently the underwood, although dense, was chequered all through with sunshine. Heather and bracken, holly and box, made a wilderness that spread over all the visible world, for the opposite side of the gorge was exactly similar. Shining in the sun amidst the flowering heather or glowing in majestic purple ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... was for ever staring out in front of her with her lips parted, as if she saw something wonderful; but when I came behind her and looked the same way, I could see nothing but the sheep's trough or the midden, or father's breeches hanging on a clothes-line. And then if she saw a lump of heather or bracken, or any common stuff of that sort, she would mope over it, as if it had struck her sick, and cry, "How sweet! how perfect!" just as though it had been a painted picture. She didn't like games, but I used to make her play "tig" and such like; but it was no fun, for I could always catch her in ...
— The Great Shadow and Other Napoleonic Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... more on his green native braes of the Nith, He pluck'd the wild bracken, a frolicsome boy; He sported his limbs in the waves of the Frith; He trod the green heather in gladness and joy;— On his gallant grey steed to the hunting he rode, In his bonnet a plume, on his bosom a star; He chased the red deer to its mountain abode, And track'd ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... is now the barren rock, As if by Heaven forsaken; Our shelter and our canopy, The heather and the bracken. ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... masses of dried bracken and coarse grass, turned sharply on hearing Vickers's call and stared hard and long in the direction which the young solicitor pointed out. His small, crafty eyes became dilated to their full extent—suddenly ...
— Scarhaven Keep • J. S. Fletcher
... himself on the ground, where the sand showed nothing but fine grass and some bracken in small hollows. Trees in which there was not the slightest motion towered above him all around, like slender pillars that seemed ...
— The Son of His Mother • Clara Viebig
... through the cloister some sunburned monk, soiled mattock or shovel in hand, with his gown looped to his knee, fresh from the fields or the garden. The lush green water-meadows speckled with the heavy-fleeced sheep, the acres of corn-land reclaimed from heather and bracken, the vineyards on the southern slope of Crooksbury Hill, the rows of Hankley fish-ponds, the Frensham marshes drained and sown with vegetables, the spacious pigeon-cotes, all circled the great Abbey round with the ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... thing in the world that he should be helping this girl, and he went forward with the greatest assurance to lift the black pot off the fire for her. The keen, acrid swirls of wood-smoke blew into his eyes, and the rank steam of yellow home-made soap, manufactured with bracken ash for lye, rose to his nostrils. Now, Ralph Peden was well made and strong. Spare in body but accurately compacted, if he had ever struggled with anything more formidable than the folio hide-hound Calvins and Turretins on his father's ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... the vanguard of the three, And bury me at yon bracken bush, That stands upon yon ...
— Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy • Andrew Lang
... driving: "You shouldn't be on the box at all; I never saw such a wild driver." "Drive!" said Jehu, in a voice of thunder. "Why, man, once every year, I drive the mail-coach down that steep hill-side among the bracken. And this is the day for it!" So saying, the humorous fellow made as if to whip the horses down the cliff, and the terrified tourist shrieked aloud. "Seeing I've such a nervous passenger," said the driver, with a guffaw, "I had better break my own rules, ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... rushes upon the deep woods, It lets down curtains of mist And sheets of rain, that drip Crystal beads among the trees. Way above, the branches lash and moan And weave. Below, it is still, Still as the undersea. Soft fern and feathery bracken Loom through the mist Like branching coral, And drifting leaves float down ...
— A Little Window • Jean M. Snyder
... the pine-wood he caught sight of Sir Geoffrey Clouston, the Duchess's brother, jerking two spent cartridges out of his gun. He jumped from the cart, and having told the groom to take the mare home, made his way towards his guest through the withered bracken and ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... children, and nursed each for one month. "The bearded woman" of every circus side-show is an evidence of the curious interest in which these women are held. The accompanying illustration is a representation of a "bearded woman" born in Bracken County, Ky. Her beard measured 15 inches ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... the forget-me-nots, and up the bluebell bank they struggled, with never a thought for the flowers; and they were just about to scramble over some felled trees when Raymonde, who was a yard in advance, caught her foot in a tangle of brier and fell on her hands and knees among the springing bracken. Fauvette, unable to stop herself, collided heavily and collapsed by her side. Too much out of breath to stir, the girls lay for a few ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... get further away from the town and enjoy what remained of the afternoon on higher ground and in purer air; he would go up to Hampstead, he thought, and see the lights sweeping over the rusty bracken on the heath, or walk down over Highgate Hill, and past the quaint old brick houses with their high-trim laurel hedges and their last century wrought-iron gateways and lamps in which the light of ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... the white bed and his wife's face lying amidst brown hair upon the pillow were illuminated, and listening he could almost hear the corncrake in the fields, the fern-owl sounding his strange note from the quiet of the rugged place where the bracken grew, and, like the echo of a magic song, the melody of the nightingale that sang all night in the alder by the little brook. There was nothing that he could say, but he slowly stole his arm under his wife's neck, and played with the ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... gone out alone, his mood pleasing itself best with solitude, and had lost his way and found himself crossing strange land. Being wearied and somewhat out of sorts, he had flung himself down among the heather and bracken, where he was well out of sight, and could lie and look up at the gray of the sky, his hands ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... so desolate as to offer no food at all for one who knows what to look for. There is usually some sort of berry available. One kind of acorn is not bad to eat. Shoots of bracken are not unlike asparagus. There are some spiny wild plants whose leaves, if plucked young enough, will yield some nourishment and of course there are mushrooms. Even on stone one can find liverish rock-tripe which is edible if one ...
— Operation Terror • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... the sap in each root and rhizome, Primrose yellow and snowdrop cold, Windyflowers when the chiffchaff flies home, Lenten lilies with crowns of gold. Soon the woods will be blithe with bracken, April whisper of lambs at play; Spring will triumph—and our old black hen (Thank the ...
— Punch, Volume 156, January 22, 1919. • Various
... should I sit and sigh, Pu'in' bracken, pu'in' bracken, Why should I sit and sigh, On the hill-side dreary— When I see the plover rising, Or the curlew wheeling, Then I know my mortal lover Back to me ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... entered the gorge of the Dordogne, where basaltic rocks were thrown up in savage grandeur, vividly contrasting with which were bands and patches of meadow, brilliantly green. Yellow spikes of agrimony and the fine pink flowers of the musk-mallow mingled with the wiry broom and the waving bracken about the rocks. ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... make myself red-hot running after them if we're going out in the boat. Besides, we haven't got any of your father's pill boxes to put 'em in. I say, how the things do grow down here! Look at that fern and the bracken." ...
— Cormorant Crag - A Tale of the Smuggling Days • George Manville Fenn
... the west side, above the road, there was a thick copse of hazel, oak, and birch. From a clearing in this wood a thin column of pale blue smoke was rising through the still air. A hut in the shape of a cone stood a few yards from the road. It was thatched from the ground upward with heather and bracken, leaving only a low aperture as door. Near the hut a small fire of hazel sticks crackled under the pot that swung from a forked triangle of oak limbs. Fagots were stacked at one end of the clearing; a pile of loose bark lay near. It was a charcoal pit, and behind a line ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... this path, lad; but I have travelled pretty well all over the Highlands, and, just as you found to be the case in Lancashire, there are few villages I do not know. I will first pull you a couch of this dead bracken, and then be off; an hour's sleep will do you almost as ...
— Bonnie Prince Charlie - A Tale of Fontenoy and Culloden • G. A. Henty
... managed to reach the schoolhouse in time but without a second to spare. The boys, who had to wriggle hastily down from the trees, were later; and Anne, who had not been picking gum at all but was wandering happily in the far end of the grove, waist deep among the bracken, singing softly to herself, with a wreath of rice lilies on her hair as if she were some wild divinity of the shadowy places, was latest of all. Anne could run like a deer, however; run she did with the impish result that she overtook the boys at the door and was swept into ...
— Anne Of Green Gables • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... free from the dangerous alternation of sunshine and frost. Put things of doubtful hardihood under a north wall, with plenty of sandy soil or ashes over their roots, some cinders on that, and perhaps a little light protection, like bracken, in front of them, and their chances will not be bad. Apropos to tender things, if your little garden is in a cold part of the British Isles, and has ungenial conditions of soil and aspect, don't try ...
— Last Words - A Final Collection of Stories • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... were unexpected little paths running out to promontories of the cliff and, at a sudden turn, she would find herself in what looked almost like danger. Below her the rock was at an angle to harbour hawthorn trees all in bud, blazing gorse bushes, bracken stiffly uncurling itself and many kinds of grasses, but there were nearly two hundred feet between her and the river, now at flood, and she felt that this was something of an adventure. She followed each ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... plant against their enemies; but I have never seen any reason to believe that this is so with the three species observed by me, namely, Prunus laurocerasus, Vicia sativa, and V. faba. No plant is so little attacked by enemies of any kind as the common bracken-fern (Pteris aquilina); and yet, as my son Francis has discovered, the large glands at the bases of the fronds, but only whilst young, excrete much sweetish fluid, which is eagerly sought by innumerable ants, chiefly belonging to Myrmica; and these ants certainly do not serve as a protection against ...
— The Effects of Cross & Self-Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom • Charles Darwin
... road, a good deal rutted, and seldom repaired. Opposite the gates rose the steep slope of a heathery hill, along the flank of which the girls were now walking. On their right lay a piece of rough moorland, covered with heather, patches of bracken, and coarse grass. A few yards to the right, it sank in a steep descent. Such was the disposition of the ground for some distance along the road—on one side the hill, on the other a narrow ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... homewards. Glyde, having Ingram on the ground, took him by the collar of his jacket and belaboured him with his open hand. He cuffed him like a schoolboy, boxed him about the ears and face, shook him well, and then cast him into the young bracken of his own avenue. "There's for you, seducer," he said; and that done, he walked steadily up the road towards the ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... pondered many things; as to what folk were about at Upmeads, and how his brethren were faring; and it was now about five hours after noon, and the sun's rays fell aslant through the boughs of the noble oaks, and the scent of the grass and bracken trodden by the horse-hoofs of that company went up into the warm summer air. A while he sat musing but awake, though the faint sound of a little stream in the dale below mingled with all the lesser noises ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris
... a rare sight in England to see land in a natural uncultivated state devoid of vegetation. The hills are covered with grasses and bushes, the moors with ling and heather, commons with grass, bracken and gorse, a garden tends to become smothered in weeds, and even a gravel path will not long remain free from grass. It is clear that soil is well suited for the growth of plants. We will make a few experiments to see what we can find out ...
— Lessons on Soil • E. J. Russell
... the woods near by, partly to discuss class matters, but chiefly to enjoy the crisp autumn weather. The woods were still gorgeous in russets and reds, in spite of the recent heavy frosts, and there was a smell of burning leaves and dry bracken in the air. The girls skipped about like ...
— Grace Harlowe's Plebe Year at High School - The Merry Doings of the Oakdale Freshmen Girls • Jessie Graham Flower
... deeper, lonelier places the blackthorn and hoe ran wild, and the dog-rose in wild confusion; the alder and the gorse too, the honeysuckle and ivy, climbed up over rocks and stems; you might see a laurel now and then, and bilberry bushes by thousands, and bracken everywhere in an endless profusion of ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... plantains, palms, and gigantic bamboos. Brambles, speedwells, forget-me-nots, and nettles grow mixed with figs, balsams, peppers, and huge climbing vines. The wild English strawberry is found on the ground, while above tropical orchids like the dendrobiums cover the trunks of the oaks. The bracken and the club-moss of our British moors grow associated with tree-ferns. And ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... shifted their feet in the dust,—and off I marched, still feeling that terrific smile like an east wind up my back. I never halted them till sunset, and'—he turned about and looked at Pook's Hill below him—'then I halted yonder.' He pointed to the broken, bracken-covered shoulder of the Forge Hill behind ...
— Puck of Pook's Hill • Rudyard Kipling
... but the younger maidens knew them and always ran to them singing, for all that their elders said: in evenings long ago they had danced to the woods of the oak-trees. Their children dwelt out-of-doors beyond the dells of the bracken, in the cool and heathery lands, and were now at ...
— Tales of Three Hemispheres • Lord Dunsany
... with the daylight shining through the empty windows. Beyond the houses, again, lie successive lines of hills, at this moment lit up by shafts of sunlight that lend a glowing warmth and richness to the fine colors of a late autumn. The hills are red and brown with rusted bracken and heather, and here and there the smooth waters of the bay catch a tinge of other and varied hues. In one of the fishing-smacks that lie almost underneath the shadow of the tall crag on which the castle ruins stand, an artist ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... step in?' she said, pushing the door of the cottage wider open. 'I've just tidied up, and I was fetching in a handful of bracken. It flames up ...
— Miss Mouse and Her Boys • Mrs. Molesworth
... angling than might be expected. A hardy race of trout will sometimes rise freely to the artificial fly when the natural fly is destroyed, and the angler is almost blinded with dusty snowflakes. All through midsummer the Scotch rivers lose their chief attractions. The bracken has not yet changed its green for the fairy gold, the hue of its decay; the woods wear a uniform and sombre green; the waters are low and shrunken, and angling is almost impossible. But with September the pleasant season returns for people who love "to be quiet, and go a-fishing," ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... Campbell, too, though one would never take him for an Ulster Scot, with his la-di-da ways and his Spanish lady. But the queer thing about the plantation was this, that within, half a mile through the trees, were the ruins of a house, bare walls and bracken and a wee place where there were five graves, two of them children's. A strange thing the lonely graves. In summer the sun would shine through the clearing of the trees, and there was always a bird singing somewhere near. But it ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... those charming reminiscences of George Borrow which appeared in The Athenæum. {25} I have been reading them, I may add, under the happiest conditions for enjoying them—amid the self-same heather and bracken where I have so often listened to Lavengro’s quaint talk of all the wondrous things he saw and heard in his wondrous life. So graphically has Mr. Hake depicted him, that as I walked and read his paper I seemed ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... native land better than I do when I am away from it. I can call to mind its innumerable beauties, and in fancy saunter once more through the summer woods, among the bracken, the bluebells, and the foxglove. I can wander by the banks of the Brock, where the sullen trout hide in the clear depths of the pools. I can walk along the path—the path to Paradise—still lined ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... of the way runs across a flat sandy tract called Mallory Heath, where the short greensward encroaches on the road, and where the eye roaming east or west or north can discern nothing except a limitless expanse of heather, broken here and there by patches of gorse and bracken, or by clumps of touselled and wind-thinned pines and Scotch firs. The tawny-coloured, sandy, track is difficult to follow in the dark, and there are posts set up at intervals on the skirts of the way for travellers' ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... the said fish is held only by a tiny golden palmer on 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 ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... of the glen there was very little snow, only a few veins and patches here and there, threading and seaming the steep, as if a white-footed hare had been coursing about. Little stubby brier shoots, and clumps of russet bracken, and dead heather, ruffling like a brown dog's back, broke the dull surface of withered herbage, thistle stumps, teasels, rugged banks, and naked brush. Down in the bottom the noisy brook was scurrying over its pebbles brightly, or ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... sprang up in front of his feet, the air was full of butterflies, a sweet fragrance rose from the wild grasses. The sappy scent of the bracken stole forth from the wood, where, hidden in the depths, pigeons were cooing, and from afar on the warm breeze, came the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... near the tree. He crept stealthily on his hands and knees through the bracken, and as stealthily climbed the wedge of outcrop, and then leaped like a wild cat on the tree. With incredible activity he lifted the balancing stone, and as the tree began to move, in a flash of perception transferred it to the other side ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... whose flowery carpet was torn by jagged nail-heads of rock. Cork trees, sombre as giant olives clad in mourning, strong in their corselets and shields of half-stripped bark as knights in armour, covered the hills like a vast army. At the foot of the hoary warriors, waved bracken and yellow iris in tangled masses; high above their heads sailed here and there a golden eagle of a vulture, looking like ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... woods of Chedworth the rose bay willow herbs grow taller and finer than is their wont elsewhere. In every direction they spring up in hundreds, painting the woodlands with a wondrously rich purple glow. Here, too, the bracken thrives, and many a fine old oak tree spreads its branches, revelling in the clay soil. On the limestone of the Cotswolds oaks are seldom seen; but wherever a vein of clay is found, there will be the oaks and the bracken. Every forest tree thrives ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... into the bracken like a rabbit. I bade him cut across Sir Michael Gregory's park, and if he caught my friend, to tell him I should probably be ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... sward beside the Stony Bottom there lay the ruffled body of a dead sheep. All about the victim the dewy ground was dark and patchy like dishevelled velvet; bracken trampled down; stones displaced as though by straggling feet; and the whole spotted with ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... of Caledonia sugar estate, in Province Wellesley, which is worth describing. It was constructed at the foot of a small hill, about a mile away from the estate, where there was a considerable area of secondary jungle and gigantic bracken fern, a favourite resort of tigers. A trench, about four or five feet wide, was opened in the sloping ground for a distance of ten or twelve feet; stout stakes were driven in the trench close to the sides, projecting some three or four feet above the ground, for about two-thirds the length ...
— Prisoners Their Own Warders - A Record of the Convict Prison at Singapore in the Straits - Settlements Established 1825 • J. F. A. McNair
... wrangle with you; already you are beneath the shadow of the great rock. Descending further, the bleak aspect of Nature is transformed. The heather gives place to dwarf shrubs; the bare, weather-beaten rocks are clothed with blackberry bushes, or hidden amid luxurious bracken. Dark hollies clinging to detached rocks present varied and life-like forms. The air has suddenly become still. The butterflies hover over the foxgloves. The wild strawberry is at your feet. The sloeberries ripen around you. The sea before you might ...
— A Child of the Glens - or, Elsie's Fortune • Edward Newenham Hoare
... kettle sang cosily. Gun-racks lined the walls, and dressers laden with valuable china, and these were seasonably adorned with sprigs of holly, ivy, and fir. A kissing-bush, even, hung from the bacon-rack that crossed the ceiling, with many hams wrapped in bracken, a brace of pheasants, and a 'neck' of harvest corn elaborately plaited: and almost directly beneath it stood a circular table with a lamp and a set of dominoes, the half of them laid out in an unfinished ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... futility of comparisons, I will mention one experience. I was returning home late one afternoon when a poorly-dressed, sunburnt woman overtook me. She bore on her head a basket of bracken, and her appearance was such that in any other country I should have expected a demand for alms. Greeting me, however, cheerfully and politely, she at once entered into conversation. She had seen me at church on Sunday, and went on to speak of the ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... chiffonery in that chamber. The spaces that were not piled high with vesture gave resting spots for cardboard boxes and packing-paper. Antoinette stood in a corner gazing at the spoil with a smile of beatific idiocy. I strode through the cardboard boxes which crackled like bracken, and remained dumb as a fish before these mysteries. Carlotta tried on hats. She shewed me patent leather shoes. She exhibited blouses and petticoats until my eyes ached. She brandished something in ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... demonstrated by my investigations at Lochlee and elsewhere. {28a} It would be still more necessary in a substratum of timbers that was intended (as will be afterwards explained) to bear the weight of a superincumbent cairn. Underneath the layers of horizontal woodwork some portions of heather, bracken, and brushwood were detected, and below this came a succession of thin beds of mud, loam, sand, gravel, and finally the blue clay which forms the solum of the river valley. {28b} The piles penetrated this latter, but not deeply, owing to its consistency; ...
— The Clyde Mystery - a Study in Forgeries and Folklore • Andrew Lang
... birdeen's blithie song, Ye'll hark till flo'ers lauchen; An' see the faeries trippit long By brook an' brae an' bracken. Sae doon your heid—an' shut your een; Gien ye'd be away, my dearie— An' the bonny sauncy faery queen ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer
... there was a waterfall, where gorgeous tree-ferns rose in natural bowers, while others further still leant over the lotus-covered stream, their giant leaves trailing in the slow-moving current. Tangled masses of bracken rioted in wild abundance over a velvety green sod, overshadowed by waving magnolias. Through the trees bright-plumaged birds were flitting from branch to branch in songless flight, flashing their brilliant ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... in autumn, with a sound of wintry breakers on the shore, the tall woods copper-colour, the thickets dishevelled, and the nuts, in the corries of Ardkinglas, the braes of Ardno, dropping upon bracken burned to gold. Until he was out of the glen and into the open land, the traveller could scarcely conceive that what by his chart was no more than an arm of the ocean could make so much ado; but when he found the incoming tide fretted here and there by black rocks, and elsewhere, ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... In the joy of his heart he must needs dance in derision and snap his fingers at the foolish men who had let him slip. He threw back his head, howling at them like a dog, and at the instant an arrow struck him full in the throat and laid him dead among the bracken. There was a hush of surprised silence and then a loud cheer burst ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... making a night of it. The parson who had been in at the death and who, during the settlement of my affair, had been busy in the stables, now joined us at dinner. He was but lately come from Cambridge, at which seat of learning the chief books appeared to be Bracken's Farriery and Gibson on the Diseases of Horses, with Hoyle's Whist as lighter reading for leisured hours. He was a hard rider, a hard swearer, and a hard drinker, and, after being double japanned, as he called it, by a friendly bishop, had been pitchforked by the Squire into a neighbouring ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... Pond has been enlarged, and is supplied by New River water. From this site a view of surprising beauty is seen—broken ground covered by bracken and gorse, bushes and trees, with the blue ...
— Hampstead and Marylebone - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... hand as he helped her up or down some steep or rugged bit of path—into the lingering look of her brown eyes, which thanked him, smiling—into the moments of silence, when they rested amid the springing bracken, and the whole scene of mountain, cloud and water spoke with that sudden tragic note of all supreme beauty, in a world of 'brittleness.' But they were not often silent. There was so much to say. They were still exploring each ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... snow, the high moors of the Pennine range present for eight months of the year a harmony of sober colours, in which the grey of the rocks, the bleached purple of the heather blossom and the faded yellows and browns of bent and bracken overpower the patches of green herbage. But twice in the course of the short summer the moors burst into flower and array themselves with a bravery with which no lowland meadow can compare. The first season of bloom is in early June, when the chalices or the cloud-berry and the nodding plumes ...
— Tales of the Ridings • F. W. Moorman
... the insect's partiality for rosebuds and blossoms, which it greedily devours. In the north of England, where it is much used as a killing bait for trout, the insect is commonly known by the name of 'bracken-clock,' a name of the same import with the Staffordshire term 'fernshaw,' each signifying 'fern-beetle.'" Another correspondent says—Scarabaeus horticola, called "the chovy" in Norfolk, is there deemed ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 566, September 15, 1832 • Various
... it 'long the cover side, A furlong "mesh an'-pin"; We sent the lurcher rangin' wide To drive the rabbits in; A soft, sweet night in late July We lay among the bracken 'igh That 'eld the mid-day sun, While mute an' wise ole Toby ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, January 28, 1914 • Various
... green forest of tall bracken-stalks, Whose interwoven fronds, a jade-green sky, Above me glimmer, infinitely high, Towards my giant hand a beetle walks In glistening emerald mail; and as I lie Watching his progress through huge grassy blades And over pebble boulders, my ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... big rock. The grass was short and green, and there were clothes-props cut from bracken stems, with lines of plaited rushes, and a heap of ...
— The Great Big Treasury of Beatrix Potter • Beatrix Potter
... out; a herd seeking his strayed cattle or a band of travelling musicians will get the wind of it. How many people will move through even the remotest wood in a year! The crows will tell a secret if no one else does; and under a bush, behind a clump of bracken, what eyes may there not be! But if your secret is legged like a young goat! If it is tongued like a wolf! One can hide a baby, but you cannot hide a boy. He will rove unless you tie him to a post, ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • James Stephens
... in the wood, still as the dreaming bracken, secretive, moving softly among the pines as a young witch gathering simples. She wore a hood of finely woven shadows, yet, though she drew it close, sunbeams trooping westward flashed strange lights across ...
— The Worshipper of the Image • Richard Le Gallienne
... Romsey at long intervals. On they went, sometimes through beech and oak woods of noble, almost primeval, trees, but more often across tracts of holly underwood, illuminated here and there with the snowy garlands of the wild cherry, and beneath with wide spaces covered with young green bracken, whose soft irregular masses on the undulating ground had somewhat the effect of the waves of the sea. These alternated with stretches of yellow gorse and brown heather, sheets of cotton-grass, and pools of white crowfoot, and all the vegetation of a mountain side, only that the mountain ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... decorations consist of devices placed at intervals on the walls. These devices are made up of Highland weapons, Highland plaids, Highland bonnets bearing the chief's feather or the badge of the clan. Doubtless tufts of purple heather and russet bracken, with bunches of the coral berries of the rowan, will supplement other adornments as the occasion calls for them; and when the lights gleam, the pipers strike up, and the nimble dancers foot it ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, (Victoria) Vol II • Sarah Tytler
... little isle of sheep, where the surf burst all about it in the midst of the sea, and it was all green with bracken, and all wet with dew, and the moon enlightened it. They ran the boat into a cove, and set foot to land; and the man came heavily behind among the rocks in the deepness of the bracken, but the Poor Thing went before him like a smoke in ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... emerging from the wood shelved along a green hillside, where bracken and golden spurge clothed the little hollows, while wild wall-flower, Jacob's Ladder, and a large purple cranes-bill brightened the slopes where happy cattle, but lately released from their winter's imprisonment, were feeding greedily on ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... he explored further and satisfied himself that there were no human beings, except the occupants of the tower, living on these rocks. He retired to his hiding-place to rest; before dawn he again ascended and concealed himself among the bracken and brambles which formed the only available shelter. During the whole day he saw but one person, an elderly woman, whose dark features and bright kerchief showed her to be of southern or gipsy origin, and who passed backwards ...
— The Forest of Vazon - A Guernsey Legend Of The Eighth Century • Anonymous
... us, who can tell for the morrow? During the full moon there is no night, only a change to silver light from golden; and the forest is full of delight. There are wood-cutters' huts in the ravines where the water falls, soft beds of torn bracken and fragrant grasses where great trees make a shelter from the heat; and for food, that is easily arranged. A basket of rice with a little salt-fish and spices is easily hidden in a favourable place. You only want a jar to ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding
... difficult country, bushes which caught his clothes as if they were trying to stop him in the interests of law and order, branches which lashed him across the face, and rabbit-holes half hidden in the bracken, and still he kept his lead. He was increasing it. He must win now. The man behind was panting in deep gasps, for the pace had been warm and he was not in training. Barrett cast a glance over his shoulder, and as he looked the keeper's foot caught ...
— The Pothunters • P. G. Wodehouse
... The air was mottled with pine-tassels and bright green plumes, that went flashing past in the sunlight like birds pursued. But there was not the slightest dustiness; nothing less pure than leaves, and ripe pollen, and flecks of withered bracken and moss. I heard trees falling for hours at the rate of one every two or three minutes: some uprooted, partly on account of the loose, water-soaked condition of the ground; others broken straight across, ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... promised. And now, let us be off. The waiting-maids, who have escorted me to the door, fall on all fours as a final salute, and remain prostrate on the threshold as long as I am still in sight down the dark pathway, where the rain trickles off the great overarching bracken upon my head. ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... still spreads around Carlsruhe ("Charles's Rest") to the eastward, but the bracken and underbrush have given way to beaten roads, which prolong with perfect regularity the fan of streets. An avenue of the finest Lombardy poplars in Germany, the trees being from ninety to a hundred and twenty feet high, extends for two miles to Durlach. Around the city spread rich plum and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... down in the dry ditch, full of bracken, and dozed with his head on his pack. All about him were stretched other men. Someone was resting his head on Chrisfield's thigh. The noise had subsided a little. Through his doze he could hear men's voices talking in low crushed tones, as if they ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... they progressed, closely scrutinising the ferny hollows, looking up into the trees, examining the thickets and clumps of shrubs. They had reached the centre of the wood, and were picking their way through a rank growth of nettles which covered the decayed bracken, when Colwyn experienced a mental perception as tangible as a cold hand placed upon the brow of a sleeper. He had the swift feeling that there was somebody else besides themselves in the solitude of the wood—somebody who was watching ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... young ladies in employment in Clapham, Miss Flossie Bright and Miss Edna Bunthorne, and it was resolved therefore to make a cheerful little cyclist party of four into the heart of Kent, and to picnic and spend an indolent afternoon and evening among the trees and bracken between Ashford ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... the expedition reached its destination, and the Active cast anchor off the Bay of Rangihoua. From her deck the mission families could now gaze upon the scene of their future home. The bracken and manuka with which the farther slopes were clad might remind them of the fern and heather of old England, but their gaze would be chiefly attracted to an isolated hill of no great height which rose steeply from the sea on the left side of the little ...
— A History of the English Church in New Zealand • Henry Thomas Purchas
... of food; at the thought of it nervous caution gave way to mere brute instinct, and he plunged recklessly into the cave. Inside, the sudden darkness blinded him for a moment. Then there began to be visible in one corner a bed of bracken and sweet-fern; in another an orderly arrangement of tin cans upon a shelf, and the ashes of a fire, where sat a Dutch oven. The sight of this last whetted Kerry's hunger; he almost ran to the shelf, and groaned as he found the first can filled ...
— Southern Lights and Shadows • Edited by William Dean Howells & Henry Mills Alden
... was clear: Rosinante could trust to her five wits better than I to mine. So leaving her to take what way she pleased, I rode on, till at length we approached the woods I had descried. Presently we were jogging gently down into a deep and misty valley flanked by bracken and pines, from which issued into the crisp air of morning a most delicious aromatic smell, that seemed at least to prove this valley not far remote ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... frisking in the roadway. Involuntarily they slackened. "Shoo!" said Mr. Hoopdriver, and the ponies kicked up their heels derisively. At that Mr. Hoopdriver lost his temper and charged at them, narrowly missed one, and sent them jumping the ditch into the bracken under the trees, leaving ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... like uncanny visitants from beyond the Styx. Poe's raven was not so ominous and strangely silent; these will not say even the one word, "Nevermore." They look like relics of a Saturnian reign before beauty and music and joy were known upon the earth. If there were charred stumps of trees in the Bracken which was shown to Faust, we should expect to see nighthawks squatted on them, wholly indifferent to the lamentations of lost souls. We go directly under the branch where one of them is sitting ten feet above and still he makes no sign. We throw a clod, but yet there ...
— Some Spring Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... the act of picking a bracken fern from the hedge with which to fan his face when he heard an alarmed shout. Turning his head he saw that a young bull had broken loose from his captors and was making a dash along ...
— 'Me and Nobbles' • Amy Le Feuvre
... stiller things than the stillness of a summer's noon such as this, a summer's noon in a broken woodland, with the deer asleep in the bracken, and the twitter of birds silent in the coppice, and hardly a leaf astir in the huge beeches that fling their cool shade over the grass. Afar off a gilded vane flares out above the grey Jacobean gables of Knoll, the chime of a village clock falls ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... incident, delightful, that is, in its beginning if a trifle indeterminate in the retrospect. It was perhaps half-way between Cobham and Ripley. Mr. Hoopdriver dropped down a little hill, where, unfenced from the road, fine mossy trees and bracken lay on either side; and looking up he saw an open country before him, covered with heather and set with pines, and a yellow road running across it, and half a mile away perhaps, a little grey figure by the wayside waving something ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... Uncounted Cost," which didn't show the ghost of a rape, could not even be advertised in the organ of The Times Book Club! After this, who can complain against a Library Censorship? It is true that while passing "His Hour," the same censorship puts its ban absolute upon Mr. John Trevena's new novel "Bracken." It is true that quite a number of people had considered Mr. Trevena to be a serious and dignified artist of rather considerable talent. It is true that "Bracken" probably contains nothing that for ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... marshland solitudes, lonely heaths and sandhills sloping downward to the sea; wildfowl-haunted shores and flats, rivers and lagoons through which the wherries glide, the calling of the herdman and the sighing of the sea-wind through bracken, gorse, and fir ridge—these are East Anglia, and, like voices heard in childhood, they are with her children wherever they may wander, until all earthly voices are ...
— George Borrow in East Anglia • William A. Dutt
... forests of remarkable trees on this portion of the Pacific coast, opposite the south end of Vancouver Island: the crooked oaks loaded with mistletoe, the tall wild cherry trees, the hazels with trunks thicker than a man's thigh, the evergreen arbutus, the bracken fern, blackberries, and black raspberries; and the game in these glades of trees and fern: small Columbian Mazama deer, large lynxes, bears, gluttons, wolves, foxes, racoons, and squirrels. Overhead soared huge Californian ...
— Pioneers in Canada • Sir Harry Johnston
... the same way, and at Resaca the cars were run on a siding. The "General," commanded by Andrews, was now forward, with one car, while the "Texas," commanded by Captain Fuller, and driven by Peter Bracken, was running tender forward, with Fuller standing on the brake board, or bumper. The locomotives were about evenly matched. Both had five-foot ten-inch drivers, and both were running under all the ...
— Stories Of Georgia - 1896 • Joel Chandler Harris
... statue were executed by Miss Enid Yandell, by birth a Kentuckian, but now of New York. The statues of James Monroe, James Madison, George Rogers Clark, on Art Hill, were, respectively, done by Julia M. Bracken, Chicago; Janet Scudder, Terre Haute, and Elsie Ward, Denver. The reclining figures over the central door of the Liberal Arts Building were by Edith B. Stephens, of New York, and the east and north spandrels of the Machinery Building were done by ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... foot with the other four for Sonoma Town, which we soon reached. It was a simple open square, around which were some adobe-houses, that of General Vallejo occupying one side. On another was an unfinished two-story adobe building, occupied as a barrack by Bracken's company. We soon found Captain Brackett, and I told him that I intended to take Nash a prisoner and convey him back to Monterey to answer for his mutinous behavior. I got an old sergeant of his company, whom I had known in the Third Artillery, quietly to ascertain the whereabouts ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman
... the gazer must ITSELF brim with a "purple light," intense enough to perpetuate the brief flower-flush of August on the heather, or the rare sunset-smile of June; out of his heart must well the freshness, that in latter spring and early summer brightens the bracken, nurtures the moss, and cherishes the starry flowers that spangle for a few weeks the pasture of the moor-sheep. Unless that light and freshness are innate and self-sustained, the drear prospect of a Yorkshire moor will be found as ...
— Poems • (AKA Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte) Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell
... visited it late at night, when the young moon was beginning to struggle through the cloudy sky, and looked down into the ravine which Cobbett declared was the most horrid place God ever made; but no sign of ghostly visitant could be caught among the bracken, no sound of the dead voices was audible in the air. It is the way with ghosts—they seldom appear where they might be looked for. It is the unexpected in the world of shadows, as in the workaday world, ...
— Real Ghost Stories • William T. Stead
... with all their seasons' changes, and the changing life of nature both by land and sea, and had made as little impression on the island as the ceaseless dashing of the waves against its coast. The cliffs, the caves and the sea-beaten boulders were the same; the colours of the bracken on the September hills, and of the sea anemones in their green, pellucid pools, were the same, and the fishermen's path down to the cove was the same. No iron chain had been put there, but the rope had never ...
— A Loose End and Other Stories • S. Elizabeth Hall
... breath, For their souls were strong within them, stronger than the grasp of death. Soon we heard a challenge-trumpet sounding in the pass below, And the distant tramp of horses, and the voices of the foe; Down we crouch'd amid the bracken, till the Lowland ranks drew near, Panting like the hounds in summer when they scent the stately deer. From the dark defile emerging, next we saw the squadrons come, Leslie's foot and Leven's troopers marching to the tuck of drum; Through the scatter'd wood ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... like a young roe in the bracken, and in deep and rapturous ease he slept this night. Another perfectly joyful day had passed and his Mother had liked Robin and kissed her. All was well with the world. As long as he had remained awake—and it had not been long—he had thought of delightful ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... listening, then crept across the Pulpit's ferny floor. Of a sudden he sprang up and fired full into a man's face; and struck the distorted visage with doubled fist, hurling it below, crashing down through the bracken. ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... Plantations. It is divided into two parts by a ravine passing immediately under the old Castle and traversing its entire length. The further side is called the Deer Park, inclosed and stocked by Sir John Glynne in 1739. Its banks and glades, richly timbered, and overgrown with bracken, afford from various points beautiful views over the plain of Chester, with the bold projections of the Frodsham and Peckforton hills. Along the bottom of the hollow flows Broughton brook. Two Waterfalls occur in its course through the Park: ...
— The Hawarden Visitors' Hand-Book - Revised Edition, 1890 • William Henry Gladstone
... any that we know to-day. No grass carpets the plains; none of the flowers or trees with which we are familiar, except conifers, are found in any region. Ferns grow in great abundance, and have now reached many of the forms with which we are acquainted. Thickets of bracken spread over the plains; clumps of Royal ferns and Hartstongues spring up in moister parts. The trees are conifers, cycads, and trees akin to the ginkgo, or Maidenhair Tree, of modern Japan. Cypresses, yews, firs, and araucarias (the Monkey ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... pinnatum. So it is with the petioles of Ranunculus ficaria, when they have to break through the ground, but when they arise from the summit of the bulb above ground, they are from the first quite straight; and this is a fact which deserves notice. The rachis of the bracken fern (Pteris aquilina), and of some, probably many, other ferns, likewise rises above ground under the form of an arch. No doubt other analogous instances could be found by careful search. In all ordinary cases of bulbs, rhizomes, [page 87] root-stocks, etc., ...
— The Power of Movement in Plants • Charles Darwin
... Wizard went over Three-Tree Common, his shoe became unstringed, and he bent down to refasten it. Then he saw Wry-Face, the gnome, hiding among the bracken and looking as mischievous as anything. In one hand he held a white fluff-feather. Now these feathers are as light as anything, and will blow in the wind; and whatever they are placed under, whether light or heavy, they ...
— The Book of Stories for the Storyteller • Fanny E. Coe
... of the elder, whose mingled odour is like the odour of the room of the dead, a vapour of incense and corruption. I stood at the edges of the wood, gazing at all the pomp and procession of the foxgloves towering amidst the bracken and shining red in the broad sunshine, and beyond them into deep thickets of close undergrowth where springs boil up from the rock and nourish the water-weeds, dank and evil. But in all my wanderings I avoided one part of the wood; it was not till yesterday that I climbed to the summit ...
— The Great God Pan • Arthur Machen
... morning-room windows was a triangular slope of turf, which the indulgent might call a lawn, and beyond its low hedge of neglected fuchsia bushes a steeper slope of heather and bracken dropped down into cavernous combes overgrown with oak and yew. In its wild open savagery there seemed a stealthy linking of the joy of life with the terror of unseen things. Sylvia smiled complacently as she gazed with a School-of-Art appreciation at the landscape, and then of a sudden ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... brimming over with mirth, full of quaint turns of thought and speech; all the country round London has for me bright memories of our wanderings—Richmond, where we tramped across the park, and sat under its mighty trees; Windsor, with its groves of bracken; Kew, where we had tea in a funny little room, with watercress ad libitum; Hampton Court, with its dishevelled beauties; Maidenhead and Taplow, where the river was the attraction; and, above all, Broxbourne, where he delighted to spend the day ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... into a steady gallop and the fields began to drift by under us, and a great wind arose full of fresh breath. We left the clay lands where the bracken grows and came to a valley at the edge of the chalk. As we went down into it we saw the fox go up the other side like a shadow that crosses the evening, and glide into a wood that stood on the top. We saw a flash of primroses in the wood and we were out the other side, hounds ...
— Tales of Wonder • Lord Dunsany
... motions of the northern spring had endeared to him all those sweet incipiencies preceding the full choral burst of leaf and flower: the mauve mist over bare woodlands, the wet black gleams in frost-bound hollows, the thrust of fronds through withered bracken, the primrose-patches spreading like pale sunshine along wintry lanes. He had always felt a sympathy for these delicate unnoted changes; but the feeling which had formerly been like the blind stir of sap in a plant was now a conscious ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... Weigall trod. He smiled as he recalled a remark of Gifford's: "An English wood is like a good many other things in life—very promising at a distance, but a hollow mockery when you get within. You see daylight on both sides, and the sun freckles the very bracken. Our woods need the night to make them seem what they ought to be—what they once were, before our ancestors' descendants demanded so much more money, in these so much more ...
— The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories • Gertrude Atherton
... and balmy as June. Great flocks of sea-gulls wheeled screaming round the cliffs, their wings flashing in the sunshine; red admiral and tortoise-shell butterflies still fluttered over late specimens of flowers, and the bracken was brown and golden underfoot. The girls were wild with the delight of a few hours' emancipation from school rules, and flew about gathering belated harebells, and running to the top of any little eminence ...
— A Patriotic Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... descend, the gardens, village, and river near below. There is a peculiar charm in these steep woods, where the tops of some trees are level with the eye, while the branches of others are overhead. As the paths go down the slope they lose their garden-like trimness among bracken and brambles. An oak fence separates the grounds of Pembroke Lodge ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... children I Was nurtured, being, as was deem'd, the child Of Hermes, or some mountain deity; For these with the wild nymphs are wont to lie Within the holy caverns, where the bee Can scarcely find a darkling path to fly Through veils of bracken and the ivy-tree. ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang
... foxy browns of withered bracken and pink-shot browns of withered heather gave richness of tone, the colouring of the great view was somewhat cold. It dealt in thin, uncertain green, the buff of stubble, in sharp slate-like blues blended in places with indigo, the black purple ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... bracken and ling Gladden my heart as it beats all aglow In a brotherhood true with each living thing, From the crimson-tipped bee, and the chaffer slow, And the small lithe lizard, with jewelled eye, To the lark that has lost herself ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... in which we lay there stretched out an avenue of timber trees, whereunder the bracken, breast high, had been cut to make a ride. Upon this bracken, and upon this smooth channel in the midst the late sun streamed toward us, a soft wash of gold. Behind all this the sky, pale to whiteness immediately overhead, deepened ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... the rowan red, And shakes the bracken spray: What joy on the heather to bound, old hound, Over the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Pauline in the country, against a background of golden beech trees and brown bracken, look even beautiful; but in London she lacks something, possibly the right background. She has glorious hair, but her maid can't do it. Pauline admits it, but she says she can't send a nice woman away on that account; besides, ...
— The Professional Aunt • Mary C.E. Wemyss |
