"Cactus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... horticulture. 604 Chelidonium majus lacinatum. Dwarf and spineless varieties. Laciniate leaves. Monophyllous and broom-like varieties. [xvi] Purple leaves. Celosia. Italian poplar. Cactus dahlia. Mutative origin of Dahlia fistulosa, and Geranium praetense in ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries
... fumbled with the string. It was a curious-shaped parcel, and Penelope kept enjoining her to be very careful, and not to turn it over. When at last she did undo the wrappings, and the box inside, and found a tiny red flower-pot with a baby cactus in it, her joy ...
— The Carroll Girls • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... grow upon a cactus plant. Little though she recked of botany, Miss Brewster was aware of this fundamental truth. Neither do they, without extraneous impulsion, go hurtling through the air along deserted mountain-sides, to find a resting-place far below; another natural-history fact which the young lady appreciated ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... Rose. "How I did detest that old man! He was a hideous old thorny cactus, all covered with warts and knobs and sharp spines. Dear mother was very proud of him, and she was always hoping he would blossom, but he never did. He lived in the house in winter, but in spring Mother set him out in the flower-bed, ...
— Hildegarde's Holiday - a story for girls • Laura E. Richards
... you think that of us, Stephen," she answered, as if relieved by this unexpected turn. "Pat is truly of the desert. He was born and bred in this land of amole and cactus." ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton
... sun. The Aztecs saw in this a most favourable omen, and there and then set about building themselves a city, laying its foundations upon piles in the marshy ground beside the lake, and to this day the eagle and the cactus form the ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... was the Moorish capital. I went there the day that I lunched with Emile Ollivier this time. There was a foot of ice on the top, at La Garde-Freinet, and one looked back, down on to Grimaud, standing baked by an African sun, and could make out the ripe oranges and the heads of the great cactus." ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... wounding truth; and Courtnay sprang up and dashed for him. Tinker bolted round a group of shrubs, Courtnay after him. Finding him unpleasantly quick on his feet Tinker bolted into the shrubs. Courtnay plunged after him right into a well-grown specimen of the flowering cactus. It brought him up short. He began to swear, and though he could have sworn with equal fluency and infelicity in French, German, or Italian, in the depth of his genuine emotion he returned to the tongue of ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson
... and glass in the Moorish style of the twelfth century, also a permanent structure, was erected by Philadelphia. Here, one walked amid the glories of tropical vegetation. Palm, orange, lemon, camphor, and india-rubber trees rose on every hand. The cactus of the desert, rare English flowering plants, strange growths from islands of the sea, here flourished each in its peculiar soil and climate. Outside the building were beds of hardy flowering plants covering twenty-five acres. Besides these five main structures, ...
— History of the United States, Volume 4 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... sunshine of that May morning, after they had unsaddled at Moreno's, after the sergeant, wearied with the vigils of two successive nights, had gone to sleep in the coolest shade he could find, there came riding across the sun-baked, cactus-dotted plain at the west a young man who had the features of the American and the grave, ...
— Foes in Ambush • Charles King
... the town, turning toward the south and west. Before him there stretched days of lonely traveling through the sand and cactus of the desert, of blistering sun and cold nights, of anxious searches for water-holes. It was because of the water-holes that he headed southwest, for such as they were they lay in tiny hidden oases ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... places in his cart. When Thea dragged him over the hill and made a camp under the shade of a bush or a bank, he would waddle about and play with his blocks, or bury his monkey in the sand and dig him up again. Sometimes he got into the cactus and set up a howl, but usually he let his sister read peacefully, while he coated his hands and face, first with an all-day sucker and then ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... hot winds come in the Summer and burn the buffalo grass to a tinder and the monotony of the plains weighs on you as it does now, there's a common, low-growing cactus scattered over the prairie that blooms into the gayest red flower you ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... a tuna cactus growing at their feet, and they ate of its red fruit greedily, but all around them was naught but water. When night came on they retired to the ark and slept—a night, a month, a year, perhaps a century, for when they awoke the water was gone, the vales were filled ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... Cactus plants in hundreds of varieties grew in great abundance on these dry plains. They were beautiful to the eye, but a thorn in the flesh. As we walked through them their sharp needles would run through ...
— A Gold Hunter's Experience • Chalkley J. Hambleton
... Tonia Round The Circle The Rubber Plant's Story Out of Nazareth Confessions of a Humorist The Sparrows in Madison Square Hearts and Hands The Cactus The Detective Detector The Dog and the Playlet A Little Talk About Mobs ...
— Waifs and Strays - Part 1 • O. Henry
... Henry W. Longfellow, without knocking, entered the sitting-room, his hair white as if he had walked through the snow with his hat off; and William H. Prescott, with his eyesight restored, happened in from Mexico, a cactus in his buttonhole; and Audubon set a cage of birds on the table—Baltimore oriole, chaffinch, starling and bobolink doing their prettiest; and Christopher North thumped his gun down on the hall floor, and hung his 'sporting jacket' on the hat-rack, ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... made and provided!" The field member of the firm slapped his thigh and laughed loudly. "Then to forget the whole fracas and shake hands on it! That's handsome! Mr. Gray, I'm here to say there's a lot of boys going to lay off you like you was a cactus." ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... here now, but they may take it into their heads to come back and search. We had better make for the trees; by keeping close to that cactus hedge we shall be in shadow ...
— In Times of Peril • G. A. Henty
... fond of flowers, and have collected a number, are generally willing to give their young friends a few plants; and where we succeed in raising a fine plant from a slip, or cutting, we value it more than one that has been purchased at a green-house. Geraniums, cactus', wax plants, cape and catalonian jessamines, and some others, are easily cultivated in a parlor. Roses, camelias, and azaleas bloom best in a moderate temperature, as the heat of a parlor (unless very large) dries ...
— Domestic Cookery, Useful Receipts, and Hints to Young Housekeepers • Elizabeth E. Lea
... Berg Brothers, Omaha. Strictly business. Known among the trade as the human cactus. Canceled a ten-thousand-dollar order once because the grateful salesman called her 'girlie.' Stick ...
— Emma McChesney & Co. • Edna Ferber
... Bela Moshi rode it barebacked, urging it at a gallop and finishing by taking a formidable obstacle in the shape of a cactus-bush. ...
— Wilmshurst of the Frontier Force • Percy F. Westerman
... the small sand dunes as he passed them, and he kept a vigilant eye upon the dead rocks that dotted the level at infrequent intervals. Even the cactus clumps received flattering attention; and the little stretches of greasewood that came within range of ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... curly head deep into the water-bowl, and coming up looking like a little drowned kitten. 'When you want to be hateful, you don't stop to think whether you're looking at a cactus or a rosebush, ...
— A Summer in a Canyon: A California Story • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... level, rising gradually to the foot of the rock, which then rose steeply up. A few houses were scattered about, surrounded by gardens. Hedges of cactus lined the road. Parties of soldiers and sailors, natives with carts, and women in picturesque costumes passed along. The vegetation on the low ground was abundant, and Bob looked with delight at the ...
— Held Fast For England - A Tale of the Siege of Gibraltar (1779-83) • G. A. Henty
... a species which has the habit of feeding upon the cactus, is used for a dye stuff, for which service the brightly colored body is appropriated. Although the creature is deliberately planted where it is to feed, and thus is in a way submitted to culture, it cannot fairly be said to have been entered in the domesticated circle of man. ...
— Domesticated Animals - Their Relation to Man and to his Advancement in Civilization • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... tracks, then, now through narrow gullies in brown and barren mountains, now striking some village path amidst peach trees and marguerites, Jose Medina drove Martin Hillyard down to the edge of the sea. Here amongst cactus bushes in flower, with turf for a carpet, a camp had been prepared near to one of the two tiny villages. Jose Medina was king in this region. The party arrived in the afternoon of the twenty-sixth day of the month, ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... constantly on his lips and he had wonderful tales to tell to all who would listen of his past experiences, in every one of which he unblushingly figured as the hero. But he really handled the big touring car in an admirable manner, and when one afternoon a tire was punctured by a cactus spine by the roadside—their first accident—they could not fail to admire the dexterous manner in which he changed the ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces and Uncle John • Edith Van Dyne
... far-more-lovely-than possible faded purple and lilac rug. Also, the pathetically trodden-down-to-bits porphyry discs in the doorway. And the little cippus of a Roman girl who lived sixteen years and twenty-eight days. Against the apse, outside, the great python of a cactus. ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee
... farther and he stopped again. It was no well-trodden path that Garry followed, but he knew his landmarks. There was the big split rock a half mile ahead, and the three-branched cactus beside it. But between these and the place where Garry stood was a fan-shaped sweep of boulders—and this where smooth going had ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... mile or so the route lay through fertile gardens and fields. Then suddenly the cultivation ended abruptly on the edge of a sandy desert that, seamed with nullahs, or deep, steep-sided ravines, and dotted with tall clumps of thorny cactus, stretched away to the horizon. The road became a barely discernible track; but the two sowars cantered on, confidently heading for the spot where the fresh horses ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly
... speaker might possibly have the power to enforce his sentence diverted my attention from the slate, and I looked round. In front of the Jack-in-a-box stood a tiny red flower-pot and saucer, in which was a miniature cactus. My thoughts flew back to a bazaar in London where, years ago, a stand of these fairy plants had excited my warmest longings, and where a benevolent old gentleman whom I had not seen before, and never saw again, bought this one and gave it to me. Vague memories of his directions for ...
— The Brownies and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... barrels or pipes of an organ, and being covered with prickles, the plants growing close together, and about six feet high, makes the strongest natural fence imaginable, besides being covered with beautiful flowers. There is also another species of cactus, the nopal, which bears the tuna, a most refreshing fruit, but not ripe at this season. The plant looks like a series of flat green pin-cushions fastened together, and ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... traversed the plain from east to west. A thicket of cactus covered part of its summit. Toward the thicket I ...
— Thrilling Adventures by Land and Sea • James O. Brayman
... came within a closer range of vision spun past the car windows like a bit of stage mechanism, a gigantic panorama rotating to simulate a race at breakneck speed. But Miss Carmichael looked with unseeing eyes; the whirling prairie with its golden flecks of cactus bloom was but part of the universal strangeness, and the dull ache of ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... Mother. Charles Grafly A simple, dignified woman dressed in home-spun. At her knees a boy and a girl - the future builders of the Western country. She has crossed the cactus-covered plains, has endured the greatest hardships, that she may rear her sturdy little ones to lay the foundations of a mighty Western empire. The bulls' heads are symbolic of sacrifice; oak leaves symbolize strength. She is ...
— Sculpture of the Exposition Palaces and Courts • Juliet James
... and the way was long. As the ground rose again, it was stony and overgrown with cactus. A great desolation took possession of the girl. She felt as if she were in an endless flight from an unseen pursuer, who would never give ...
— The Girl from Montana • Grace Livingston Hill
... to be seen if we hadn't been in a box. Of course no one comes there but stately old farmers and their smart daughters. I saw one with a Gainsborough hat, and a bunch of cock's feathers, with a scarlet cactus cocking it up behind." ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... Jain asceticism with the mellower and richer fancy of the luxurious Mohammedan has resulted in a perfect work of that art which makes death lovely by recalling its spiritual significance. Besides, a holy silence broods about the cactus and the euphorbian foliage, so that a word will send the paroquets, accustomed to such unbroken stillness, into hasty flights. The tomb proper is in the chamber at the centre, enclosed by delicately-trellised walls of stone. I can easily fancy that the soul of Allum Sayed is sitting by ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... tints upon their ground of ebony, or to realise the blueness of the Mediterranean except in contrast with the lava where it breaks into the sea. Copses of frail oak and ash, undergrown with ferns of every sort; cactus-hedges, orange-trees grafted with lemons and laden with both fruits; olives of scarce two centuries' growth, and fig-trees knobbed with their sweet produce, overrun the sombre soil, and spread their boughs against the deep blue sea and the translucent ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... say, the flower of a prickly-pear cactus, full of sunlight from behind, which a fairy took the fancy ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... raised up in a sitting posture, "Would ye's moind lettin' me help ye to yer fate, Miss?" said Mike. "O, I'm so tired and weak I can't stand," said the girl. "They have almost killed me dragging me over the cactus." ...
— Thirty-One Years on the Plains and In the Mountains • William F. Drannan
... environments. Yet witness the motly products of evolution: Man, ape, elephant, skunk, scorpion, lizard, lark, toad, lobster, louse, flea, amoeba, hookworm, and countless microscopic animals; also, the palm, lily, melon, maize, mushroom, thistle, cactus, microscopic bacilli, etc. All developed from one germ, all in some way related. Mark well the difference in size between the elephant, louse, and microscopic hookworm, and the difference in intellect ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... t'ing is brek my 'eart," said the Mexican, sadly. "It seem like the Senorita Mora is sing that song to me. Mebbe she knows I'm set out 'ere on cactus an' listen to her. Ah, I ...
— Going Some • Rex Beach
... reads My questioning thought and shows me yuccas, cactus Whose thick leaves in the rainless places thrive. And shows me leaves that must have rain, and roots That must have water where the river flows. And how the spirit of life, though turned or driven This way or that beyond a course begun, Cannot be stayed or quenched, but moves, conforms To ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... Perhaps that is why they kept on to the end of the two hundred-mile voyage. At any rate, they did, and they found the Scotch heather here. Here, too, one finds another strange plant, plentiful over on the sandy peninsula of Coatue, the Opuntia or prickly pear, a variety of cactus common enough in Mexico and portions of our Southwest, but surprising ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... resumed a study of the immediate landscape. It had not changed as we progressed: ocean, sand, low dunes crowned with impenetrable tangles of wild bay, sparkleberry, and live-oak, with here and there a weather-twisted palmetto sprawling, and here and there the battered blades of cactus and Spanish-bayonet thrust menacingly forward; and over all the vultures, sailing, sailing—some mere circling motes lost in the blue above, some sheering the earth so close that their swiftly sweeping shadows slanted ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... drink; the dark caverns under the shelving cliffs, where the water murmured with such hollow mockery; the low spear-pointed gray plants, resembling century plants, and which Glenn called mescal cactus, each with its single straight dead stalk standing on high with fluted head; the narrow gorges, perpendicularly walled in red, where the constricted brook plunged in amber and white cascades over fall after fall, tumbling, rushing, ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... me that day I was starving and tried to catch you to eat." And they all laughed, for once Button had nearly caught Black Wings, but he proved too quick for the half starved cat and flew up in a cactus plant and cawed and scolded Button. Afterwards they became good friends, and Black Wings carried a message to Nannie telling her that Billy, Stubby and Button would be back at the old farm on Billy's birthday. They had ...
— Billy Whiskers' Adventures • Frances Trego Montgomery
... vineyards. The ashfield of ten square miles above Nicolosi, created by the eruption of 1669, which was entirely barren in 1835, is now planted with vines almost to the summits of Monte Rosso, at a height of three thousand feet" Ueber den Sicilianischen Ackerbau, p. 19.] But the cactus is making inroads even here, while the volcanic sand and molten rock thrown out by Vesuvius soon become productive. Before the great eruption of 1631 even the interior of the crater was covered with vegetation. ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... hundred feet high; the huge sigillaria, found in our coal mines; tree ferns, as tall as our fir-trees in northern latitudes; lepidodendra, with cylindrical forked stems, terminated by long leaves, and bristling with rough hairs like those of the cactus. ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... from the cochineal insect, (or Coccus cacti,) which feeds upon the leaves of several species of the plant called cactus, and which is supposed to derive its coloring matter from its food. Its natural color is crimson; but by the addition of a preparation of potash, it ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... plant, when mature, resembles a cactus. The flattened hypocotyl is fleshy, enlarged in the upper part, and bears two rudimentary cotyledons. It breaks through the ground in an arched form, with the rudimentary cotyledons closed or in contact. A filament ...
— The Power of Movement in Plants • Charles Darwin
... by the sumach-wood's red skirts; and there, they waved their cherry stalks, and heavy bloated cactus leaves, their crimson blossoms armed with nettles; and before us flung shining, ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... verge of the crater, at the very summit of the mountain, commanded a view of all the surrounding country. The rock upon which it was built projected over a precipice, whose abysses were concealed by creeping plants, cactus, and bamboos. The species of table-rock thus formed had been encircled with a railing and transformed into a terrace, on a level with the sleeping-room, by my predecessor in this hermitage. His last wish had been to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... blown out and trampled out by a blind and deaf world. But we of America are loath to admit this. And if we do not think of genius as an unquenchable flame, we are apt to think of it as an amazingly hardy plant, more tough than horse-brier or cactus. Only a few of us have yet begun to realize that the flower of genius is not the flower of an indestructible weed, but of a fastidious exotic, which usually demands good conditions for bare existence, and needs a really excellent environment and constant tending if it is to thrive and ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... Florence L. Snow, Neosho Falls, is an artistic and finished writer of verse and prose. She is the author of "The Lamp of Gold." Sharlot M. Hall, Lincoln, writes prose and verse. A volume of poems, "Cactus And Pine," "History of Arizona," "A Woman of the Frontier," "The Price of The Star" and short stories are her important works. Mrs. A. S. McMillan, Lyons, a poetess, song writer and licensed preacher, writes clever verse, much of which has been set to music. "Land Where Dreams ...
— Kansas Women in Literature • Nettie Garmer Barker
... race, say, of rose and chrysanthemum, of potato and cereal. The evolution of cultivated plants is continuing before our eyes, and the creations of Mr. Luther Burbank, such as the stoneless plum and the primus berry, the spineless cactus and the Shasta daisy, are merely striking instances of what ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... the gate, and although he listened hard could only hear his own steps and voices in a neighboring street. Yet his nerves tingled and his muscles got tense. In front, a thick, dark mass that looked like a clump of euphorbia or cactus stood beside the path, and just beyond it a bright beam of moonlight shone between the drooping ...
— The Buccaneer Farmer - Published In England Under The Title "Askew's Victory" • Harold Bindloss
... goes down there. Some hunters tried to cut steps in the rock once, but they didn't get higher than a man can reach. The Bluff's all red granite, and Uncle Bill thinks it's a boulder the glaciers left. It's a queer place, anyhow. Nothing but cactus and desert for hundreds of miles, and yet right under the Bluff there's good water and plenty of grass. That's why the bison used to go ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... but it is not a handy way to direct a garden. When the last rosebush is in, including some that Will is gloomily certain will never grow, I think I shall go away for a rest to some place where there is only cactus ...
— The Smiling Hill-Top - And Other California Sketches • Julia M. Sloane
... the four days we turned in at a deep bay and came to anchor. The country was the usual proposition—very light-brown, brittle-looking mountains, about two thousand feet high; lots of sage and cactus, a pebbly beach, and not a sign ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White
... beaver stories, the country was known, you might say. It was at the Three Forks that Colter and Potts, two of the Lewis and Clark men, were attacked by the Blackfeet, and Potts killed and Colter forced to run naked, six miles over the stones and cactus—till at last he killed his nearest pursuer with his own spear, and hid under a raft of ...
— The Young Alaskans on the Missouri • Emerson Hough
... some hidden song-bud open bright As the resplendent cactus of the night That floods the gloom with fragrance and ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... neatly divided into patches—each hedged off in squares in which flourished all sorts of vegetables, including sweet corn and potatoes and several other less familiar varieties. In pastures, fenced in with mathematical regularity by hedges of the African cactus thorn, herds of humped cattle were feeding contentedly in the mellow glow of the setting sun, occasionally lowing softly, which latter made Billy, as he expressed it, "long for ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... viz., milk and gum. Milk I have mentioned as supporting the Touaricks exclusively six or more months in the year. Gum, also, in the Western Sahara, furnishes tribes with an exclusive sustenance for many months. Even the prickly-pear, or fruit of the cactus, will support a Barbary village for three months. It is, therefore, not surprising the Irish peasant may live on potatoes and milk the greater part of the year. The bead on the date-stone is the part (vital) whence commences germination, ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... pretty; but they're doing wonderful things with potatoes these days. I'd rather improve the breed of a squash than to have an orchid named after me. Wonderful discovery of Luther Burbank's— creating an edible cactus. Sometimes I feel bitter thinking what I might have done with vegetables, when I ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm • David Belasco
... hedge of cactus plants around the goat-pasture. This kind of cactus grows straight up in tall, round spikes about as large around as a boy's leg, and higher than a man's head. The spikes are covered with long, stiff spines that stick straight ...
— The Mexican Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... grateful, cool shade, whence the ranch had drawn its name, "de las Sombras"—of the shadows. The house, of red brick, one story, ran low and long beneath the trees. Through its middle, dividing its six rooms in half, extended a broad, arched passageway, picturesque with flowering cactus and hanging red earthern jars. A "gallery," low and broad, encircled the building. Vines climbed about it, and the adjacent ground was, for a space, covered with transplanted grass and shrubs. A little lake, long and narrow, glimmered in the sun at the rear. Further away stood the shacks of ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... successive terraces of the opposite mountains, the evergreen pine, the cedar, with its stiff, angular branches, and the cottonwood, with its varied curves and bright colours, were crowded into bunches or strung into zigzag lines, interspersed with shrubs and mountain plants, among which the flaming cactus was conspicuous. To the right and left, the bare cones of the barren peaks rose in multitude, with their calm, awful forms shrouded in snow, and their dark shadows reflected far into the valleys, like spectres from a ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... to your body. I will do the same. Take all you can carry and follow in my wake." Jones, as he spoke, seized a torch, extinguished it, and handed it to Dick. Equipped as he had directed, they set out, half crawling, half swimming, to avoid the volumes of smoke hovering in the thick, cactus-like leaves of the wild laurel. Presently they emerged, after toil and misery, that excitement alone enabled the boy to support, into what seemed a cleared space. But as soon as their eyes could distinguish clearly, they found themselves on the edge of a wide pond. The fire was now behind ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... manuscripts is found this beautiful symbol:—'There is a species of Cactus, from whose outer bark, if torn by an ignorant person, there exudes a poisonous liquid; but the natives, who know the plant, strike to the core, and there find a sweet, refreshing juice, that renews their strength.' Surely the preceding extracts prove that she was ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... came to a stop at last at the siding of the station. Benito was a typical desert settlement, the very last link with civilization. For beyond the three squat adobe shacks, lay the sandy, cactus-dotted land that stretched far out in every direction to the rising foothills that skirted ...
— The Merriweather Girls in Quest of Treasure • Lizette M. Edholm
... gents can't see more in their girls than I can.' This yere wisdom don't apply none to the Mockin' Bird. Them wooers of hers, to say nothin' of Turkey Track, possesses jestification for becomin' so plumb maudlin'. Lovely? She's as pretty as a cactus flower, or a ...
— Faro Nell and Her Friends - Wolfville Stories • Alfred Henry Lewis
... She saw the giant cactus in full bloom, a miracle of orange, pink, and crimson; and as they sped south the mountainsides were aflame ...
— The Bad Man • Charles Hanson Towne
... a miracle out of the Arabian Nights. Your backyard becomes voluptuous with pomegranate and almond trees, lemon groves, and hedges of flowering cactus, dazzling banks of azaleas, marble- basined fountains, in which chestnut-and-white pond-herons step daintily amid exotic water-lilies, while golden pheasants strut about on alabaster terraces. The whole effect rather suggests the idea that Providence and Norman Wilkinson have ...
— The Toys of Peace • Saki
... usually extremely hot, and in winter the snow falls only to melt when it reaches the ground. Here the more common European plants and trees give place to the wild olive, the caper bush, the aloe, the cactus, the evergreen oak, the orange, the lemon, the palm and other productions of a tropical climate. On the coasts of the Mediterranean about Marbella and Malaga, the sugar-cane is successfully cultivated. Silk is produced in the same ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... goes there. They call it the north pasture, but it's never used. There's nothin' there but sand an' cactus an' all that; a goat couldn't hardly keep body an' soul together. Except once lookin' for strays that got through the fence, I never set ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... course of time he began to ascend the wooded hill with its villas and walls and cactus-hedges. At a certain turning, where he could not be observed by any one behind him, he turned sharp off to the left, and stood behind a wooden gate; a couple of minutes afterward the young man came along, more rapidly ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... and precocious theories; American liberty a contradiction; American character a compound of quackery and pretension; American society (except at Mrs. Evelyn's) an anomaly; American destiny the same with that of a cactus, or a volcano a period of rest followed by a period of excitement; not, however, like the former, making successive shoots towards perfection, but, like the latter, grounding every new face of things upon the demolition of that which went before. Smoothly and pleasantly Mr. Stackpole ...
— Queechy, Volume II • Elizabeth Wetherell
... drop in upon every one else at pleasure. Mrs. Boulte put on a big terai hat, and walked across to the Vansuythens's house to borrow last week's Queen. The two compounds touched, and instead of going up the drive, she crossed through the gap in the cactus-hedge, entering the house from the back. As she passed through the dining-room, she heard, behind the purdah that cloaked the drawing-room door, her husband's voice, saying—"But on my Honor! On my Soul and Honor, I tell you she doesn't care for me. She told me so last night. I would have told ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... town, made for the open, to give a better chance to his preponderating numbers. Akbar carried the town with a rush, and then dashed in pursuit. But the country was intercepted by lanes, {111} bordered on both sides by cactus hedges, and the horsemen of Akbar were driven back into a position in which but three of them could fight abreast, the enemy being on either side of the cactus hedges. The Emperor was in front of his men, having by his side the gallant Rajput prince, Raja Bhagwan Das of Jaipur, whose ...
— Rulers of India: Akbar • George Bruce Malleson
... you when the sun was set climb up the cactus-covered slope To meet your swarthy Ethiop whose ...
— Poems • Oscar Wilde
... of creamy stone and rose-red brick perched on a ledge of rock midway between earth and heaven, the cliff falling almost sheer to the valley two hundred feet and more, the mountain rising behind straight towards the sky; all the rocks covered with cactus and dwarf fig-trees, the convent draped in smothering roses, and in front a terrace with a fountain in the midst; and then—nothing—between you and the sapphire sea, six miles away. Below stretches the Eden valley, the Concha d'Oro, gold-green fig orchards ...
— Black Spirits and White - A Book of Ghost Stories • Ralph Adams Cram
... saw him wet and cold from a hard day of loading ship through the surf and insisted on "mothering" him to the extent of seeing that he had dry clothing and other comforts. And, although the difference between the green tropic isle beyond the sunset which lay enshrined in her memory and this barren cactus-grown pile of volcanic rocks was immeasurable, yet the one, in its peace, its soft sweet air, and the near presence of the murmuring sea, ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... desert. The dragoons were surrounded and in bad shape; but Carson and Lieutenant Beale of the Navy and an Indian crawled and sneaked through the California lines, the whole distance to San Diego, and brought word to Stockton to hurry up and send reinforcements. Carson nearly lost his feet, by cactus, and Beale was laid up for a year. During the war San Diego was no easy place to get into, or ...
— Gold Seekers of '49 • Edwin L. Sabin
... all be of one mind on this subject of a Pacific Republic. Raise aloft the flag of the hydraheaded cactus of the western wilds and call upon the enlightened nations of the earth to acknowledge our independence and protect us from the wreck of a once ...
— Starr King in California • William Day Simonds
... it to some one of his officers, or pawn it to foreign sympathizers for military stores. The neighborhood of Rivas was dotted with ranch-houses, distenanted by these means,—rank grass growing in the court-yards, the cactus-hedges gapped, and the crops swept away by the foragers. Perhaps, had these men been let alone, jealousy toward foreigners would not, of itself, have made them enemies; but General Walker was obliged to provide arms and provisions for his soldiers, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... slope of sand, isn't it?" she whispered. "Sand and cactus,—no roses blooming here ...
— Sunny Slopes • Ethel Hueston
... the cactus by its roots, and trampled on the scarlet blossoms. They hurried about, calling to each other, ...
— A House of Pomegranates • Oscar Wilde
... through a hotbed of sensuality and a hailstorm of seduction, on a single twilight eve in London had four or five encounters the particulars of which remained in my memory as barbed arrows remain imbedded in the flesh, smarting and itching and burning like the thorny fibres of cactus or sweetbriar seed with which one has come into too ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... left the highway and was following the wheel-tracks which led across the desert to Camelback Mountain. The horse dropped into a plodding walk as the wheels began pulling heavily through the sand, and the postman yawned. This stretch of road through the cactus and sage-brush was the worst part of his daily trip. He rarely passed anything more interesting than a jack-rabbit, but this morning he spied something ahead that ...
— The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor • Annie Fellows Johnston
... see the meet and we had a short run after a fox who went to earth, much to my relief, in about three minutes and before I had been thrown off. There are no fences but the ground is one mass of rocks and cactus and ravines down which these English go with an ease that makes me tremble with admiration. We had not come out to follow, so we, being quite soaked through and very hungry, went to an inn and it was such an inn as Don Quixote used to stop at, with the dining-room over ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis
... paths, with borders of box, which form hedges of great height and density, and as even as a brick wall at the top and sides. There are also alleys forming long vistas between the trunks and beneath the boughs of oaks, ilexes, and olives; and there are shrubberies and tangled wildernesses of palm, cactus, rhododendron, and I know not what; and a profusion of roses that bloom and wither with nobody to pluck and few to look at them. They climb about the sculpture of fountains, rear themselves against pillars and porticos, run brimming over the walls, and strew the ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... he cursed were in Elysium compared to the place where he tortured himself. There are desert birds that silently surround a rattlesnake, as he sleeps, with little bundles of cactus-heads and their million needles, so that, when the reptile wakes, it cannot escape through the palisade of bristling weapons by which it is surrounded; and in ghoulish anger it strikes its fangs into its own body until ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... running along the quay down-stream. The Rocio has been planted with mean trees, greatly to the disgust of the average Lusitanian, who hates such sun-excluding vegetation like a backwoodsman; yet the Quintella squarelet shows what fine use may be made of cactus and pandanus, aloes and palms, not to mention the ugly and useful eucalyptus. The thoroughfares are far cleaner than they were; and Lisbon is now surrounded by good roads. The new houses are built with some respect for architectonic ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... been a very good one anyhow," I said encouragingly. "It wasn't typical. Dahlia should have had an orange in her hand, and Myra might have been resting her cheek against a cactus. Try it again, Simpson, and get a ...
— The Sunny Side • A. A. Milne
... lips are like this cactus cup; With my hand I crush it up; I tear its flaming leaves apart;— Would that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... telling me the most thrilling tale the other day. He said that the country Mexicans have a sort of secret religious fraternity that most of the men belong to, and that they meet every Good Friday and beat themselves with whips and sit down on cactus and crucify a man on a cross and all sorts of horrible things {HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS} for penance you know, just like the monks and things in the Middle Ages.{HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS} He claims he saw them once and that they had blood running down to ...
— The Blood of the Conquerors • Harvey Fergusson
... blue, with the flag of the UK in the upper hoist-side quadrant and the colonial shield centered on the outer half of the flag; the shield is yellow and contains a conch shell, lobster, and cactus ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... these her favorites. Her face grew young as she looked, her hands touched them with a lingering tenderness as if to her they were half human, and her own eyes were so busy enjoying the gold and purple spread before her, that she did not see another pair peering at her over an unneighborly old cactus, all prickles, and queer knobs. Presently a voice ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott
... contrast was the sandy plain over which we rode. On this grew the short, stubby buffalo-grass, the dust-colored sage-brush, and cactus in rank profusion. Over to the right, perhaps a mile away, a long range of foothills ran down to the horizon, with here and there the great canons, through which entrance was effected to the upland country, each canon bearing ...
— Last of the Great Scouts - The Life Story of William F. Cody ["Buffalo Bill"] • Helen Cody Wetmore
... All was soft, white, slumbering, but I lifted my eyes; high in the heavens floated a flock of birds flying back to us.... 'Spring! welcome spring!' I shouted aloud: 'welcome, life and love and happiness!' And at that instance, with sweetly troubling shock, suddenly like a cactus flower thy image blossomed aflame within me, blossomed and grew, bewilderingly fair and radiant, and I knew that I love thee, thee only—that I am all filled full ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... the proved asylum of the spineless. Nature has flung them broadcast. She starts low down among the plants, thorn and thistle, gorse and cactus. Then she turns to the sea-urchins and caterpillars and beetles, then she fashions the globe-fish and thorny devil-lizard, then she comes to the birds—spikes are their only weapons—lastly, in me and mine, she reaches the fulness ...
— "Wee Tim'rous Beasties" - Studies of Animal life and Character • Douglas English
... uneven. He imagined what these ideas would be like if they had surfaces. Of course in putting these conceptions into language he was creating figures of speech, some of them startlingly apt, some of them merely far-fetched. He said a man had a rough voice, as though the voice were like a cactus in its prickly irregularities. By rough he meant what his fellows meant when they spoke of the voice as harsh, grating, jarring, discordant, inharmonious, strident, raucous, or unmusical. Going farther, that early poet said the weather was rough. He thought of clement weather ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... Stuart's picture almost seemed to bring Phil before her eyes, and for a moment, instead of the familiar walls of her room, she saw the moonlighted desert, and smelled the orange-blossoms, and heard a strong young voice ringing out across the silence of the sandy cactus plains: ...
— The Little Colonel's Christmas Vacation • Annie Fellows Johnston
... dragged across the portage. It was hard, hot work. Grizzlies prowled round the camp at night, wakening the exhausted workers. The men actually fell asleep on their feet as they toiled, and spent half the night double-soling their torn moccasins, for the cactus already had most of the men limping from festered feet. Yet not one word of complaint was uttered; and once, when the men were camped on a green along the portage, a voyageur got out his fiddle, ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... of a Mr. Peek, where the luminous affection reminds one of the chromatic hallucinations produced by the intoxicant cactus buds called mescal by ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... now, lost to all the world beside, from the mystery of one beautiful and strange green thing to another she went wondering and admiring, and now and then timidly advancing her nose to see if something glorious was something sweet too. She could hardly leave a superb cactus, in the petals of which there was such a singular blending of scarlet and crimson as almost to dazzle her sight; and if the pleasure of smell could intoxicate, she would have reeled away from a luxuriant daphne odorata in ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell
... 9 A.M. we started. Our road lay at first over a ridge of high hills, from which we saw nothing of the ship. We then crossed a sandy plain covered with the cactus, which severely wounded my feet. Afterwards passed through some wooded ravines, and over an extensive marsh intersected with brooks. Towards the evening a horseman overtook us, who seeing the tired condition of the steward, his ...
— Narratives of Shipwrecks of the Royal Navy; between 1793 and 1849 • William O. S. Gilly
... bulbs, can be sent in wooden boxes, pierced with little holes, and kept dry; all the old leaves should be taken off, as, in their decay, they cause dampness, and the roots wrapped in dry moss or cloth. The same means may be used for the pulpy plants, such as the cactus: any dry flexible substance, not subject to dampnes, as hairwool etc. may be used to pack them. These pulpy plants, if large, should be separated from the others, so that they may not be tainted ...
— Movement of the International Literary Exchanges, between France and North America from January 1845 to May, 1846 • Various
... the patriotic skipper, "if they ain't gone and histed a Mexican cactus flag, then I'm blowed." He seriously thought of hauling down his beloved national colors again, resenting the insult of hoisting a foreign flag on American soil. He pocketed the affront, however, remarking that "they probably knew that a Bolinas butter-boat was not much of ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... subsist the year round on the open range. The strongest point in the original Spanish cattle was their inborn ability as foragers, being inured for centuries to drouth, the heat of summer, and the northers of winter, subsisting for months on prickly pear, a species of the cactus family, or drifting like game animals to more favored localities in avoiding the natural afflictions that beset an arid country. In producing the ideal range animal it was more important to retain those rustling qualities than to gain a better color, ...
— Reed Anthony, Cowman • Andy Adams
... take new strength from the indignities inflicted upon it and it increased, if anything, its tempo of growth. It plunged into the ocean in a dozen spots at once. It swarmed over sand which had never known anything but cactus and the Sierra Madres became great humps of green against the skyline. This last conquest shocked those who had thought the mountains immune in their inhospitable heights. Cynodon dactylon, uninoculated, had always shunned coldness, though it survived some degrees ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... largely to the marsh-forests. They were characterized, then, as now, by the small size of the leaves growing close against the stem, so that the stem itself, though covered with leaves, looks almost naked, like the stem of the Cactus. Beside these, there are the tree-like Equiseta, in which we find the articulations on the trunk corresponding exactly to those now so characteristic of those marsh-grasses which are the modern representatives of this family of plants, with cone-like fructifications ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... equal vertical bands of green (hoist side), white, and red; the coat of arms (an eagle perched on a cactus with a snake in its beak) is centered in ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... the usual crooked posts. Here were Chug Springs, the head of a branch stream, and from thence we went over what we were told was the toughest divide in the whole country. The heat was scorching over the dreary, dusty wastes of sand and alkali, where hardly the cactus could find sustenance. This was our first glimpse of the Mauvaises Terres, the alkali-lands, which turn up their white linings here and there, but do not quite prevail on this side the Platte. The Black Hills of Wyoming, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... to be noted that we had not seen cactus nor sandy wastes, nor were the trees thorny, while many of the wild trees yielded good fruit. It is also to be noted that we did not see snow on the mountains, nor were there any mosquitos or ants in the land, which are very harmful, both ...
— The First Discovery of Australia and New Guinea • George Collingridge
... without enthusiasm and with very little show of pleasure. They found a table on the terrace in a retired corner, surrounded with flowering cactus plants and drooping mimosa, and overhung by a giant oleander tree. He talked to her easily but in gossiping fashion only, and always with the greatest respect. It was not until the arrival of their coffee that he ventured to become at ...
— Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... excellent order, turning at intervals and discharging their muskets, while every now and then their guns were faced about and unlimbered, and round-shot and grape sent among our ranks. As we advanced, the vegetation became thicker, and we were confronted at times by high hedges of prickly-pear and cactus, growing so close together that it was impossible to make our way through. This occasioned several detours, the sepoys lining the hedges and firing at us through loopholes and openings, cursing the gore log[1] and ...
— A Narrative Of The Siege Of Delhi - With An Account Of The Mutiny At Ferozepore In 1857 • Charles John Griffiths
... long experience in the cattle country I had traveled every known trail, and over immense stretches of country where there was no sign of a trail, nothing but the wide expanse of prairie; bare except for the buffalo grass, with here and there a lone tree or a giant cactus standing as a lone sentinel in the wildest of long stretches of grazing land rolling away in billows of hill and gully, like the waves of the ocean. Likewise I could read, identify and place every brand or mark placed on a horse or steer between the Gulf of ...
— The Life and Adventures of Nat Love - Better Known in the Cattle Country as "Deadwood Dick" • Nat Love
... told me of all that I had missed seeing at the various places where they had touched: they talked to me with provoking fluency of the culture of manioc; of the root of cassada, of which tapioca is made; of the shrub called the cactus, on which the cochineal insect swarms and feeds; and of the ipecacuanha-plant; all which they had seen at Rio Janeiro, besides eight paintings representing the manner in which the diamond and gold mines in the Brazils are worked. Indeed, upon cross-examination, I found that these pictures ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... profits by their moisture, whereas the regions east of it receive it to the full. Hence the almost tropical fertility of Natal and eastern Cape Colony, with their high rainfall, their luxuriance of vegetation, indigo, figs, and coffee, and the jungles of cactus and mimosa which choke their torrid kloofs. Hence, equally, the more austere veld of the central tableland, the great grass wildernesses, which are as characteristic of South Africa as the prairies and the pampas of America, and, like them, became the home and hunting-ground of a race of ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice
... smile of greeting—a beautiful woman, pale with her suffering, pale as the flower of a night-blooming cactus, but warm with the vitality given to women who love. The pink light of dusk was on her ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... a little girl ten years old. I live in Arizona, where the great silver mines are, and where the cactus grows forty feet high. There were only three white families in this place when we came, three years ago. The place was called Picket Post then, because soldiers were stationed here. I have several pets. Nuisance is my pet deer. She is almost two ...
— Harper's Young People, April 6, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... decorations would scarcely have commanded the approval of those good English folk who think that no plant is genial unless it is prickly, and that prickly things represent appropriately to the eye the inward peace and good will that grows, like a cactus, perhaps within the heart. He did not put holly rigidly above his doors. No mistletoe drooped from the apex of the tentroom. Instead, he filled his flat with flowers, brought from English conservatories or from abroad. Crowds of strange and spotted orchids stood together in the drawing-room, ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... was still on the acacia, from this nearer point looking like a great scarlet blossom of some cactus, so intense was the colour; but Winifred was distracted from her interest in the bird by seeing the old house more plainly than she had ever seen it before. It stood, a large substantial dwelling, built not without the variety of outline which custom has given to modern villas, ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... village of Khan Yunus, a beautiful sight, and one never to be forgotten. Everywhere was green; fields of young barley rippled in the light breeze, palms and almond trees nodded to the morning, and between the rows of cactus and prickly pear ran the slim grey ribbon of the caravan road winding ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... enough to suit the Blackfeet. An old fellow commenced to shout at him, and motion for him to go faster. But he didn't wish to go faster; the ground was thickly grown to prickly-pear cactus, and he had to pick his path amidst ...
— Boys' Book of Frontier Fighters • Edwin L. Sabin
... this, destitute of trees and all vegetation save small bushes few and prickly cactus a-many, a desolation of grim and jagged rocks and barren, sandy wastes full of sun-glare and intolerable heat. And now, our water being gone, we began to be plagued with thirst and a great host of flies so bold as to settle on our mouths, nostrils and eyes, ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... cottonwood as well as willow, alder, and walnut, which, with smaller growths, are interwoven with vines of grape, hop, and columbine, in places forming a veritable jungle. On every hand, whether on mountain or in valley, many varieties of cactus grow in profusion; and in springtime canon and vale, mountain-side and mesa, are ...
— The North American Indian • Edward S. Curtis
... not be rank and luxurious, because there is not enough sunlight or heat for that; nor will it be gnarled and tough, but more likely spongy and cactus-like. The weak gravity will oppose but a mild resistance to the activity and climbing propensities of vegetable sap, however, which is likely to result in very tall, slender trees. The forces that lie hidden in an acorn should be able ...
— Pharaoh's Broker - Being the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner • Ellsworth Douglass
... fortress, from which one looks down over precipices of red rock with the prickly pear clinging to their clefts and ledges, or across a rift of sea to the huge bare front of the Testa del Cane with gigantic euphorbias, cactus, and orange-gardens fringing its base. A bribe administered to Talleyrand is said to have saved the political existence of Monaco at the Congress of Vienna: but it is far more wonderful that, after all the annexations ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... a mass Of dry red cactus ruled the land: The sun rose right above and fell, As falling molten from the skies, And no winged thing was seen to ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes
... a soft crashing of waves upon the Black Sea shores, where the huge Caucasus beckoned in the sky beyond; a rustling in the umbrella pines and cactus at Marseilles, whence magic steamers start about the world like flying dreams. He heard the plash of fountains upon Mount Ida's slopes, and the whisper of the tamarisk on Marathon. It was dawn once ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... largely of hot-headed youths trained to the use of arms, each of whom has a code of honor as sensitive as a mimosa plant and as prickly as a cactus, the lot of their commanders is not happy. It may have been Ojeda's treasured talisman which saved him from several sudden deaths during the following weeks, but Juan de la Cosa privately believed it was partly the memory of the pig. The young man had what ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey |
