"Fir tree" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... minutes the clouds parted and the moon shone out, feeble, no doubt—for she is but in her first quarter—and her beams fell right through an opening in the wood, and revealed the figure of a little child seated at the foot of a fir tree. Alone in the Forest at that time of night! My heart seemed to stand still, and I said to myself, 'Elsie is right after all. That can only be some spirit child, some ...
— Little Frida - A Tale of the Black Forest • Anonymous
... charge of her; and, large as she was, he made her move with ease, and said, "he thought she go there well, though great blow wind!" He did not know that I meant to make a mast and sail. I cut down a young fir tree for the mast, and then I set to work at the sail. It made me laugh to see my man stand and stare, when he came to watch me sail the boat. But he soon gave a jump, a laugh, and a clap of the hands when he saw the sail ...
— Robinson Crusoe - In Words of One Syllable • Mary Godolphin
... more knowing in the ways of the trees and the moss and the snow on the ground, and all things are my friends. The stump of a fir tree stands thawing in the sun; I feel my familiarity with it grow, and sometimes I stand there loving it, for there is something in it that moves my soul. The bark is badly broken. One winter in the deep snow, the tree must have been crippled, and now it points upward long and naked. I put myself ...
— Look Back on Happiness • Knut Hamsun
... and the handsomest man in the village; nearly six feet tall, straight as a fir tree, and black as a bull-moose in December. He had natural force enough and to spare. Whatever he did was done by sheer power of back and arm. He could send a canoe up against the heaviest water, provided he did not get mad and break his paddle—which he often did. He ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke
... "I never heard of a stork that when it met with a fir tree demurred as to its right to build its nest there; and I never heard of a coney yet that questioned whether it had a permit to run into the rock. Why, these creatures would soon perish if they were always doubting and fearing as to ...
— The Way to God and How to Find It • Dwight Moody
... night, until the dawn began to separate each fir tree from the black mass of the forest. Twice in the night, with shame I confess it, I opened my door and looked down the little passage-way; and twice I closed the door and threw myself upon my bed in an agony of torment. It ...
— The Diary of a U-boat Commander • Anon
... sides of the scene are heavy forest trees, mostly pine and cedar. Across the stage there winds a narrow and very rough road. It is the scene of Winthrop's camp, six months before. On the left a large fir tree, with branches low to the ground; on the right, some scrub pine and oak. Some traces of the camp are still to be seen; some broken boxes; the charred remains of a fire at the right, near front. The sound of the ...
— The Southern Cross - A Play in Four Acts • Foxhall Daingerfield, Jr.
... says the giant. "Now," says the giant, "there is a fir tree beside that loch down there, and there is a magpie's nest in its top. The eggs thou wilt find in the nest. I must have them for my first meal. Not one must be burst or broken, and there are ...
— Celtic Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... for all practical purposes, have been much more usefully employed if covered a few fathoms deep with salt water. To M. Bremontier came the happy idea of planting the waste land with fir trees. Nothing else would grow, the fir tree might. And it did. To-day the vast extent of the Landes is almost entirely covered with dark forests in ...
— Faces and Places • Henry William Lucy
... the dog has anything to do with it, Ned; it is a natural law. Now, if a fir tree is in a sheltered place, where the soil is deep and sandy, it grows to a tremendous size; but if the seed falls in a rocky place, where it has to get its roots down cracks to find food, and cling tightly against the cold freezing winds, it keeps down close to ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn
... distance from the great house, were the stately mansions of the dead, a place of somber aspect. Vast tombs, embowered beneath the weeping willow and the fir tree, told of the antiquities of the Lloyd family, as well as of their wealth. Superstition was rife among the slaves about this family burying ground. Strange sights had been seen there by some of the older slaves. Shrouded ghosts, riding on great black horses, had been ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... she lay under the mosquito netting awaiting the warning of the dressing bell, and even felt thankful to a crow which suddenly perched itself on the top twig of a fir tree, and shrieked its condemnation of the sunset, the star just above its head, and ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... twigs, put into the hollow, and so filled it up. Having improved things thus far, he rose and strode out of the circle of light into the wood. In a few minutes he reappeared, bearing a young spruce fir tree on his shoulder, which with the axe he stripped of its branches. These branches were flat in form, and elastic—admirably adapted for making a bed on; and when Charley spread them out under the canoe in a pile of about four inches in ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... pleasant ride at sunset brought us to Orange Town, to the lone field where Major Andre was executed. It is planted with potatoes, but the plough spares the spot on which was once his gallows and his grave. A rude heap of stones, with the remains of a dead fir tree in the midst, are all that mark it; but tree and stones are covered with names. It is on an eminence commanding a view of the country for miles. I gazed on the surrounding woods, and remembered that on this ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 218, December 31, 1853 • Various
... out his eyes and turned him adrift, in spite of his prayers and tears; but, as the boat drifted, the lions swam after, and at last they laid hold of it and dragged it ashore on an island, and placed the lad under a fir tree. They caught game for him, and they plucked the birds and made him a bed of down; but he was forced to eat his meat raw, and he was blind. At last, one day the biggest lion was chasing a hare which ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... of "The Passage of the Rubicon," but Pharaoh, badly disguised under the mantle of Caeser, was recognized and rejected with all the honors due him. Next year, Marcel threw a coat of white over the foreground, to imitate snow, planted a fir tree in one corner, and dressing an Egyptian like a grenadier of the Imperial Guard, christened his picture, ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... everything goes well with him. Unfortunately, however, the murdered man, with that superhuman strength which on the stage and in novels always accompanies the agony of death, had managed in falling from the dog-cart to throw the marriage certificate up a fir tree! There it is found by a worthy farmer who talks that conventional rustic dialect which, though unknown in the provinces, is such a popular element in every Adelphi melodrama; and it ultimately falls into the hands of an unscrupulous young ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... on the hills against the sky, A fir tree rocking its lullaby Swings, swings, Its emerald wings, Swelling the ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... 1642, the forest of Freiberg presented a scene of the busiest activity. Several hundred men were at work, and many a great pine and fir tree bowed its lofty head beneath the stroke of axe and saw, to fall at last crashing to earth. The wood-cutters from the mines vied with those from the city—joiners, carpenters, wheelwrights, and coopers—in thinning the dense masses of beautiful forest trees as rapidly as possible. Burghers and ...
— The Young Carpenters of Freiberg - A Tale of the Thirty Years' War • Anonymous
... beautiful ranges of fertile soil, clothed with every kind of fruit trees, such as the olive and orange; in the plains, vines, and chestnut trees; along the shore, the hazel and the oak; upon the sides and summits of the mountains, the larch and the fir tree, as in the Alps—every where were signs both of a land promising rich rewards to the laborer, and but few inhabitants. The expatriation was decided on; the young, ready to depart, married; proprietors ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... "'The fir tree on the mountain stands, The little cottage at its foot, And Mashenka is there. Her father comes to look for her, He wakens her and coaxes her: ''Eh, Mashenka, come home,'' he cries, ...
— Who Can Be Happy And Free In Russia? • Nicholas Nekrassov
... tree was like a fir tree; and it is remarkable that a Chinese Pharmacology quoted by Bretschneider says the like, which looks as if their information came from a common source. And yet I think Polo's must have been oral. One of the meanings of Luban, from the Kamus, is Pinus (Freytag). This ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... of milk and cream, and with rows of cheeses standing on the ledges of rock. While the Greeks were regaling themselves, a noise was heard, and great flocks of sheep and goats came bleating in. Behind them came a giant, with a fir tree for a staff, and only one eye in the middle of his forehead. He was Polyphemus, one of the Cyclops, sons of Neptune, and workmen of Vulcan. He asked fiercely who the strangers were, and Ulysses told him that they were shipwrecked sailors, imploring ...
— Aunt Charlotte's Stories of Greek History • Charlotte M. Yonge
... that the Puritans strove vainly against the veneration of the Maypole as the spirit of the new vegetation, [335] and against the old nature-rites observed at Christmas, the veneration of fire as the preserver of life against cold, and the veneration of the evergreen plants, the fir tree, the holly, and the mistletoe, which retained their foliage through the long night of the northern winter, and were thus a pledge to man of the return of warmth and the renewal of vegetation in the spring. And it therefore seems not altogether improbable that the Puritans may ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... an old mother-tengu, who had always laughed at the idea of obeying a little dumpling of a fellow like Kintar[o], flew up to her nest in a high fir tree. Kintar[o] watched to see where it was, and waited till she left it to go and seek for food. Then going up to the tree, he shook it with all his might, until the nest came tumbling down, and the two young squabs ...
— Japanese Fairy World - Stories from the Wonder-Lore of Japan • William Elliot Griffis
... hops may be strong, and not good. They should be bright, of a pleasant flavour, and have no foreign leaves or bits of branches among them. The hop is the husk or seed pod of the hop vine, as the cone is that of the fir tree; and the seeds themselves are deposited, like those of the fir, round a little soft stalk, enveloped by the several folds of this pod or cone. If in the gathering, leaves or tendrils of the vine are mixed with ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... a cup-shaped structure, composed exteriorly of twigs, grass, and moss, and lined with stalks of maiden-hair fern and fine roots. It is usually placed high up in a fir tree. Colonel Rattray believes that the birds bring up two broods in the year. They lay first in May, and, as soon as the young are able to shift for themselves, a second nest is made. Thus in July both young birds ...
— Birds of the Indian Hills • Douglas Dewar
... have a word for you, old fellow. You will take Martha to her betrothed, and I'll tell you the way. You go straight along, and then take the road to the right into the forest ... you know ... straight to the big fir tree that stands on a hillock, and there you will give Martha to her betrothed and leave her. He will be waiting for her, and his name ...
— Old Peter's Russian Tales • Arthur Ransome
... numerous things that floated in our company. I must have been delirious, for I even sought amusement in speculating upon the relative velocities of their several descents toward the foam below. 'This fir tree,' I found myself at one time saying, 'will certainly be the next thing that takes the awful plunge and disappears'—and then I was disappointed to find that the wreck of a Dutch merchant ship overtook it and went down before. At length, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... into his plans as if they had no other end in all their being. If a man wants a house, he expects the solidity of the rock, all the adaptations of wood that has been growing for a century, expects the beauty of the fir tree, the pine, and the box to come together to beautify the place ...
— Among the Forces • Henry White Warren |
