"Furze" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... whistles from the thorny brake; The mellow bullfinch answers from the grove: Nor are the linnets, o'er the flowering furze Poured out profusely, silent. Joined to these, Innumerous songsters, in the freshening shade Of new-sprung leaves, their modulations mix Mellifluous. The jay, the rook, the daw, And each harsh pipe, discordant heard alone, Aid the full ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... surprised to find it open. He entered, and quietly closed it behind him. Then he went down the step past the bar-counter, and through to the lighted doorway of the kitchen. There sat his wife, planted in front of the range, where a furze fire was burning. She sat in a chair full in front of the range, her knees wide apart on the fender. She looked over her shoulder at him as he entered, but she did not speak. Then she stared in the ...
— England, My England • D.H. Lawrence
... soldier,—hands like those du Guesclin must have had, large, broad, hairy; hands that once had clasped the sword never, like Joan of Arc, to relinquish it until the royal standard floated in the cathedral of Rheims; hands that were often bloody from the thorns and furze of the Bocage; hands which had pulled an oar in the Marais to surprise the Blues, or in the offing to signal Georges; the hands of a guerilla, a cannoneer, a common solder, a leader; hands still white though the Bourbons of the Elder branch were again in exile. Looking at those hands ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... describes as follows his first view of them: "We came to the right bank of the river, and saw directly opposite a stone wall from 60 to 90 feet high, with furze growing out of the top, running north and south along the river 624 feet, in some places fallen, in others entire." This great wall supported the rear side of the elevated foundation of a great edifice. It was made of cut stone well laid in mortar or cement, the blocks of stone being 6 feet ...
— Ancient America, in Notes on American Archaeology • John D. Baldwin
... thatched and whitewashed, and English was written on it and on every foot of ground round it. A furze-bush had been planted by the door. Vertical oak palings were the fence, with a five-barred gate in the middle of them. From the little plantation, all the magnificent trees and shrubs of Australia had been excluded with amazing resolution ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... Florences. This iron-handed, hot-headed, adventurous race, placed as sovereign upon its little sandy hook, making ferocious exertions to swell into larger consequence, conquering a mile or two of morass or barren furze, after harder blows and bloodier encounters than might have established an empire under more favorable circumstances, at last dies out. The courtship falls to the house of Avennes, Counts of Hainault. Holland, together with Zeland, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the correction about furze: I found the seedlings just sprouting, and was so much surprised and their appearance that I sent them to Hooker; but I never plainly asked myself whether they were cotyledons or first leaves. (99/4. The trifoliate leaves of furze ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... or Furze, (ulex)[089] I cannot omit to notice, because it was the plant which of all others most struck Dillenius when he first trod on English ground. He threw himself on his knees and thanked Heaven that he had lived to see the golden undulation of acres of wind-waved gorse. Linnaeus ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... saying is true, for there is not a son of a king or of a lord is better in the battle than Duban, son of Cas; and I will go to my own death if I do not go beyond him." With that he went rushing through the battle like flames over a high hill that is thick with furze. Nine times he made a round of the battle, and he killed nine times ...
— Gods and Fighting Men • Lady I. A. Gregory
... found with his brother, the agent, yet still the land was far too dear, and that a large portion of it was worth nothing at all. "I pay eight and sixpence an acre for land that grows nothing but furze, that a few sheep can nibble round, an', begorra, 'tis not worth half-a-crown. Most iv it is worth just nothin' at all, an' yet I have to scrape together eight and sixpence an acre," said he. "'Tis not possible to get a livin' ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... might be more considerate. The object of the game is to strike a small gutta-percha ball into a hole about five inches wide, distant from the striker about three hundred yards, and separated from him by rough grass and smooth sand-pits, furze bushes, and perhaps a road or a brook. He who, of two players, gets his ball into the hole in the smallest number of strokes is the winner of that hole, and the party then play towards the next hole. All sorts of skill are needed—strength and adroitness, ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... now on level ground, being upon the very top of one of the highest mountains in Galicia. This level continued for about a league, when we began to descend. Before we had crossed the plain, which was overgrown with furze and brushwood, we came suddenly upon half a dozen fellows armed with muskets and wearing a tattered uniform. We at first supposed them to be banditti: they were, however, only a party of soldiers who had ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... gave place gradually to a wilderness—ugly brown and pock-marked. The roads became bare and dented, the fields were mottled by shell-holes, the woods looked like scraggy patches of burnt furze. It was a district of great deeds and glorious deaths—the desolation surrounding the Fronts of yesterday ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... witches were abroad and busy casting spells on cattle and stealing cows' milk. To counteract their machinations, pieces of rowan-tree and woodbine, but especially of rowan-tree, were placed over the doors of the cow-houses, and fires were kindled by every farmer and cottar. Old thatch, straw, furze, or broom was piled in a heap and set on fire a little after sunset. While some of the bystanders kept tossing the blazing mass, others hoisted portions of it on pitchforks or poles and ran hither and thither, holding them as high ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... is one of the handsomest-flowering shrubs in cultivation. U. europaeus flore-pleno (Double-flowered Gorse) is even more beautiful than the species, the wealth of golden flowers almost hiding the plant from view. U. europaeus strictus (Irish Furze) is of more erect and slender growth, and less ...
— Hardy Ornamental Flowering Trees and Shrubs • A. D. Webster
... little corner building which seemed to be a wayside inn, but was triumphantly lettered "hotel" along the top of its gable end, we at length debouched on to a solitary-looking semi-deserted row of red-brick houses that occupied one side of a wild-looking, furze- grown common, which I could perceive faced the sea; the sound of the low murmurs of the waves on the beach alone breaking the ...
— On Board the Esmeralda - Martin Leigh's Log - A Sea Story • John Conroy Hutcheson
... a clump or cluster of tall furze at the moment they were speaking, about half-way between the pier and the house, but not in a direct line, from which Nixon, whose object it was to gain time, had induced ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... lavender; and with sight-dazzling bougainvillea of five varieties, in mauve, pink, and orange sheets. Nor have the upper heights been wholly bared. The mountain-flanks are still bushy and tufty with broom, gorse, and furze; with myrtle, bilberry and whortleberry; with laurels; with heaths 20 feet high, and ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... found it a considerable labour to push my machine up from the pretty tree-hidden village of East Woodhay at its foot. The top is a league-long tableland, with stretches of green elastic turf, thickets of furze and bramble, and clumps of ancient noble beeches—a beautiful lonely wilderness with rabbits and birds for only inhabitants. From the highest point where a famous gibbet stands for ever a thousand feet above the ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... riding with all the vigor of an ancient mariner, looked well between his two fair daughters, as they turned their horses' heads inland, and made over the downs for Stonnington. Here was beautiful cantering ground, without much furze or many rabbit-holes, and lovely air flowing over green waves of land, to greet and to deepen the rose upon young cheeks. Behind them was the broad sea, looking steadfast, and spread with slowly travelling tints; before them and around lay the beauty of the earth, with the goodness of the sky ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... mile from the stables John Straker's overcoat was flapping from a furze-bush. Immediately beyond there was a bowl-shaped depression in the moor, and at the bottom of this was found the dead body of the unfortunate trainer. His head had been shattered by a savage blow from some heavy weapon, and he was wounded on the thigh, where ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... of that fortress; and now I had to try to get the others, my comrades. There was about a fathom of rope to spare; I got it by the end, and searched the whole ground thoroughly for anything to make it fast to. In vain: the ground was broken and stony, but there grew not there so much as a bush of furze. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... it, probably in imitation of St. Patrick, or other saints, who had there dedicated themselves to a penitential state. The penitents usually spend there several days, living on bread and water, lying on rushes or furze, and praying much, with daily ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... the open clearing. He walked with his head sunk, his shoulders curved, and his knees bent, as one who strives hard to remain unseen. Ten paces from the fringe of trees he glanced around, and waving his hand he crouched down, and was lost to sight among a belt of furze-bushes. After him there came a second man, and after him a third, a fourth, and a fifth stealing across the narrow open space and darting into the shelter of the brushwood. Nine-and-seventy Alleyne counted of these dark figures flitting across the line of the moonlight. ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... and plunged through the heath, the furze, the rank glistening pools, straight towards the light-as the swimmer ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 2 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... he came back round the hill, where he was hidden by the furze growing along a ditch. And when he came in sight of his cabin he saw that all the old men had gathered around it, and one of them was just at that time thrusting a rake with a wisp of lighted straw on it into ...
— Stories of Red Hanrahan • W. B. Yeats
... hill and dale, Affection for his guide: O'er the brown Heath his pathless journey lay, Where screaming Lapwings hail'd the op'ning day. High rose the Sun, the anxious Lover sigh'd; His slipp'ry soles bespoke the dew was dried: Her last farewell hung fondly on his tongue As o'er the tufted Furze elate he sprung; Trifling impediments; his heart was light, For Love and Beauty glow'd in fancy's sight; And soon he gaz'd on Jane's enchanting face, Renew'd his passion,—but, destroy'd his peace. Truth, at whose shrine he bow'd, inflicted pain; ...
— Rural Tales, Ballads, and Songs • Robert Bloomfield
... whatfore, wherefore. Whatna, what. What reck, what matter; nevertheless. Whatt, whittled. Whaup, the curlew. Whaur, where. Wheep, v. penny-wheep. Wheep, jerk. Whid, a fib. Whiddin, scudding. Whids, gambols. Whigmeleeries, crotches. Whingin, whining. Whins, furze. Whirlygigums, flourishes. Whist, silence. Whissle, whistle. Whitter, a draft. Whittle, a knife. Wi', with. Wick a bore, hit a curling-stone obliquely and send it through an opening. Wi's, with his. Wi't, with it. ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... Unfortunately Noah was seized with the idea of lighting a fire by which to cook the trout, the matches having been stolen from my room. It had been dry for several days, there was quite a wind, and the fire, catching the furze, quickly got beyond the one required for culinary purposes. The boys first tried to smother it with their coats, but finding that of no avail ran home to give the alarm. By the time the men could get to the spot the fire had spread so ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... and prayed over the first piece of English furze which he saw," said the Doctor, "what everlasting smelling-bottle hysterics he would have gone into in this country! I don't sympathise with his tears much, though, myself; though a new flower is a source of ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... marks, on this point of the peninsula, the last effort of the vigorous vegetation of Normandy. As soon as its edge has been crossed, the view extends suddenly and without obstacle over the vast moors which form the triangular plateau of the Cape La Hague; fields of furze and heather, stone fences without cement, here and there a cross of granite, on the right and on the left the distant undulations of the ocean—such is the severe but grand landscape that is suddenly unfolded to the eyes beneath the unobstructed ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... followed the directions, and in a few minutes he was climbing a slope of rough common-land, here velvety short turf full of wild thyme, which exhaled its pungent odour as his feet crushed its dewy flowers, there tufted with an exceedingly fine-growing, soft kind of furze, beyond which were clumps of the greater, with its orange and yellow blooms, and rough patches of pale-bloomed ...
— The Vast Abyss - The Story of Tom Blount, his Uncles and his Cousin Sam • George Manville Fenn
... like a wild, hunted creature, she never got back her memory sufficiently to tell them all that had happened to her after her husband's death. Nor did she seem as if she wanted to try to remember, she was garrulous only of her early days when the parish bells rang for her wedding, and the furze was in bloom. This was before the Big House on the hill had been built. The hill was then a fine pasture for sheep, and Margaret would often describe the tinkling of the sheep-bells in the valley, and the ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... I give a thousand furlongs of sea for an acre of barren ground; long heath, brown furze, any thing. The wills above be done! but I would fain die ...
— The Tempest • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]
... is a trout stream winding through meadows and fields of maize, and thoughts of bloodshed are the last that would occur to anyone contemplating its mild current. The mountains walling in the vale are lined with growths of heather, fern, and blossoming furze to their very crests, and the verdurous picture they hem is one of poetic calm and plenty. Labourers are digging away in the fields below, the tinkle of cow-bells is heard from the pastures, and anon blends with their Arcadian ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... over the ditch, "Look round, Pat," says he. And when Pat looked round, there were jewels and pearls lying at the roots of the furze-bushes on the ditch, ...
— Old-Fashioned Fairy Tales • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... only, and then a cloud crept up the water gullies from the valley of the Liffey, and in a moment I am cut off in a white silent cloud. The little turfy ridges on each side of the road have the look of glens to me, and every block of stone has the size of a house. The cobwebs on the furze are like a silvery net, and the silence is so great and queer, even weazels run squealing past me on the side of the road.... An east wind is rising. Once in every minute I see the little mounds in their natural shapes that have ...
— In Wicklow and West Kerry • John M. Synge
... on Cluan Leathan. The cuckoo is not to be seen on the furze; the leaves are withering and the trees complaining of the cold. There is no sun or moon in the air or in the sky, or no light in the stars coming down, with the stretching of O'Kelly in ...
— The Kiltartan Poetry Book • Lady Gregory
... off to the new home and the honeymoon. She resisted, and shrieked, and clawed like a wild-cat. Her mother, She Fox, came running out, club in hand, but was promptly knocked down by Fangs, who then dragged her into the cave again. Meanwhile the bridegroom was hauling the bride away through furze and bushes at a rapid rate. Red Lips had ceased to struggle, and was thinking. Her thoughts were not very well defined nor clear, but one thing she knew well—she did not want to live in a cave with Wolf. She had a ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... second course, last night, a custard came To th' board, so hot as none could touch the same: Furze three or four times with his cheeks did blow Upon the custard, and thus cooled so; It seem'd by this time to admit the touch, But none could eat it, 'cause it ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... closed up by wooden doors, like large presses. The whole family slept there. We confided the stranger, who was still insensible, to the care of the two girls of the house and their mother, and we stood outside the door, while they extended a mattress near the chimney, and having lighted a fire of furze, undressed her, dried her clothes, chafed her limbs, and wrung her streaming hair; they then carried her upstairs, and placed her in one of the beds, on which they had spread clean sheets, which had been warmed with one of the ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... purgatorial tortures of this infernal confine for the space of ninety-nine years, eleven months, and twenty-nine days, and all on account of the impropriety of my conduct yesternight under your roof. Here am I, laid on a bed of pitiless furze, with my aching head reclined on a pillow of ever-piercing thorn, while an infernal tormentor, wrinkled, and old, and cruel—his name I think is Recollection—with a whip of scorpions, forbids peace or rest to approach me, and keeps anguish eternally awake. Still, Madam, if I could in any measure ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... sustenance for Robin's stomach,—furze and heath were not at all to his mind, and he peeped about for a quiet resting-place. Here he was kicked and bitten by others of the herd; several of them were in the like pitiable condition with himself; but some were really of the brute kind, and these fared the best and were better mannered ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... a hiding-place for his unfortunate boots, and could tell Muggridge where to look for them. It was a splendid idea, he thought; there could not be a better hiding-place, and running as fast as his feet could carry him to a clump of furze, he pushed his boots far in under the bush, took one glance to see that all was safe, and fled back again to ...
— Paul the Courageous • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... he, to Monseigneur, "there is one thing which much embarrasses the feet, the furze that grows upon the ground, where M. le Marechal de Villeroy is encamped. The furze, it is true, is not mixed with any other plant, either hard or thorny; but it is a high furze, as high, as high, ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... represented. A stone in the foreground might in nature have been cold gray, but it will be drawn nevertheless of a rich brown, because it is in the foreground; a hill in the distance might in nature be purple with heath, or golden with furze; but it will be drawn, nevertheless, of a cool gray, because it is ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... morning lay cold and clear over that well-known scene. The pavilion was but a blackened wreck; the roof had fallen in, one of the gables had fallen out; and, far and near, the face of the links was cicatrised with little patches of burnt furze. Thick smoke still went straight upwards in the windless air of the morning, and a great pile of ardent cinders filled the bare walls of the house, like coals in an open grate. Close by the islet a schooner yacht lay-to, and a well-manned boat was ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... with joy. To see the pretty farm again nestling in its circle of tall tamarisks, to dream for hours by the seaside, to breathe the breath of furze and seaweed! The windows of her room overlooked the land on one side, and on the other she had wild ocean, studded with black rocks gleaming under ...
— The Idol of Paris • Sarah Bernhardt
... cottage gave signs of decay, though it was evident that such attempts as required no expense had been made to keep it in repair. The holes in the roof had been stuffed full of furze and grass, kept down by heavy stones from being blown off by the wind; the broken panes in the windows were replaced by pieces of board or stout paper; and rough stakes filled up the spaces where the once neat palings had given way. Each foot of the small garden was cultivated, though clearly by ...
— The History of Little Peter, the Ship Boy • W.H.G. Kingston
... forward over the open field in front; others skulked along by dykes and ditches; some, again, dodged here and there, as cover offered its shelter; but about a dozen, of whom I was one, kept the track of little cart-road, which, half-concealed by high banks and furze, ran in a zig-zag line toward the village. I was always smart of foot; and now, having newly joined the 'voltigeurs,' was naturally eager to show myself not unworthy of my new associates. I went on at my best pace, and being lightly equipped—neither musket nor ball-cartridge ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... moat were overgrown with furze and brambles, and we stole into this cover as they approached. The foremost bore the light, was armed at all points, and mounted on a fresh horse. I started with exultation where I lay—he was her father. His companion's black breeches and canting seat proclaimed a priest. ...
— Tales from Blackwood, Volume 7 • Various
... particularly attractive. Certainly they are without the added charm of a green drapery—creeper or ivy rose, clematis, and honeysuckle; and they are also mostly without the cottage-garden flowers, unprofitably gay like the blossoming furze, but dear to the soul: the flowers we find in so many of the villages along the rivers, especially in those of the Wylye valley to be described in ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... up a bohireen—i.e., a narrow and incredibly badly made lane—and I presently heard him cheering the hounds into covert. As to that covert, imagine a hill that in any civilised country would be called a mountain: its nearer side a cliff, with just enough slope to give root-hold to giant furze bushes, its summit a series of rocky and boggy terraces, trending down at one end into a ravine, and at the other becoming merged in the depths of an aboriginal wood of low scrubby oak trees. It seemed as feasible to ride a horse over it as over the roof of York Minster. I hadn't the ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... difficulty, I found myself upon somewhat uneven ground, the surface of which sloped slightly down toward the land. The soil was clothed with short, thick grass and closely overgrown with dense clumps of furze bushes, which I at once perceived would afford excellent cover for the approach of our men. Somewhat to my discomfiture, however, I saw a flock of sheep grazing at no great distance inland, while about a mile away to the south-west was a small village, ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... boy softly passed out of the shade into some sunny opening, he came upon little groups of deer—beautiful large-eyed thin-legged does, with their fawns—grazing peacefully on the soft grass which grew in patches between the tufts of golden prickly furze, for they were safe enough, the huntsmen being gone in search of the lordly bucks, with their tall flattened horns if they were fallow deer, small, round, and sharply pointed ...
— Young Robin Hood • G. Manville Fenn
... lines and warps fitted. Huers, as the men are called who watch for the fish, had taken their stations on every height on the look-out for their approach. Each huer kept near him the "white bush," which is the name given to a mass of furze covered with tow or white ribbons. This being raised aloft is the sign that a school is in sight. The boats employed were of two descriptions, the largest of from twenty to thirty tons, carrying seven or eight men; and the smaller somewhat larger than the "Dove," having only ...
— Michael Penguyne - Fisher Life on the Cornish Coast • William H. G. Kingston
... Myrtle Bee is the Dartford Warbler, would account for its "miniature pheasant-like appearance"); a bird which, as we are informed in Yarrell's Hist. of British Birds, 1839, vol. i. p. 311. et seq., haunts and builds among the furze on commons; flies with short jerks; is very shy; conceals itself on the least alarm; and creeps about from bush to bush. This description would suit the Myrtle Bee. Not so the colour, which is chiefly greyish-black and brown; whereas the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 216, December 17, 1853 • Various
... the furze a while back sprouting on the hill, and if you'd hold your tongue you'd hear the lambs of Grianan, though it's near drowned their crying is with the full river ...
— The Well of the Saints • J. M. Synge
... lime-kiln, with its white dusty heaps, and brown dusty men, its quivering mirage of hot air, its strings of patient hay-nibbling donkeys, which look as if they had just awakened out of a flour bin. Above, a green down stretches up to bright yellow furze-crofts far aloft. Behind a reedy marsh, covered with red cattle, paves the valley till it closes in; the steep sides of the hills are clothed in oak and ash covert, in which, three months ago, you could have shot more cocks in one day than you would in Berkshire in a year. Pleasant little ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... have carefully considered what we were discussin' last week, and I have decided to give three hundred pounds, twenty acres of rich loamy soil, without a rock, a furze bush, or a cobble stone in it, five milch cows, six sheep, three clockin' hens and a clutch of ducklin's. Provided, of course, that you will give the same. That much should be enough to give my daughter and your ...
— Duty, and other Irish Comedies • Seumas O'Brien
... all glorious with golden blossoming furze, with purple foxglove, or curious orchis hiding in stray corners; wild moor-like lands, beautiful with heaths and honey-bottle; grand stretches of sloping downs where the hares hid in the grass, and where all the ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies
... Pamisos with some difficulty, and ascended its right bank, to the foot of Mount Evan, which we climbed, by rough paths through thickets of mastic and furze, to the monastery of Vurkano. The building has a magnificent situation, on a terrace between Mount Evan and Mount Ithome, overlooking both the upper and lower plains of the Pamisos—a glorious spread ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... boys built huts in the furze-hill behind the College—little lairs whittled out of the heart of the prickly bushes, full of stumps, odd root-ends, and spikes, but, since they were strictly forbidden, palaces of delight. And for ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... concealed from her by some trees, a little in advance of her. She hastened forwards, and found him and all the others just emerged from the wood, and standing on an open bare common where neither castle nor cottage was to be seen, nothing but a carpet of purple heath, dwarf furze, and short soft grass upon which a few cows, a colt, and a donkey, were browsing. The party were standing together, laughing, ...
— Abbeychurch - or, Self-Control and Self-Conceit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... it was Coombes transfigured. The immaculate collar had been torn carelessly from his throat. His carefully-brushed silk hat, half-full of a crush of fungi, was under one arm; his coat was inside out, and his waistcoat adorned with bunches of yellow-blossomed furze. These little eccentricities of Sunday costume, however, were quite overshadowed by the change in his face; it was livid white, his eyes were unnaturally large and bright, and his pale blue lips were drawn back in a cheerless ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... front for a bit, so that Mr. Red House could come out and welcome us like Albert's uncle did the other antiquaries, but no one came, so we went round the garden. It was very brown and wet, but full of things you didn't see every day. Furze summer-houses, for instance, and a red wall all round it, with holes in it that you might have walled heretics up in in the olden times. Some of the holes were quite big enough to have taken a very small heretic. There was a broken swing, and a fish-pond—but we were on business, and Oswald ...
— New Treasure Seekers - or, The Bastable Children in Search of a Fortune • E. (Edith) Nesbit
... means he might win her, and exhorted him to exert all his courage, since her temporal and eternal happiness depended on the success of his attempt. The farmer, who ardently loved his wife, set out on Hallow-e'en and, in the midst of a plot of furze, waited impatiently for the procession of the Fairies. At the ringing of the Fairy bridles, and the wild unearthly sound which accompanied the cavalcade, his heart failed him, and he suffered the ghostly train to pass ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott
... short fine grass about the cattle-paths, there are hardly any grasses on the moor save deer's hair and glade-grass; and all the rest is heath, and moss, and furze, and fern. ...
— Madam How and Lady Why - or, First Lessons in Earth Lore for Children • Charles Kingsley
... little difficulty discovered a stone about the size of a parish church lying like a pebble at the foot of a mountain, with a projecting ledge on the lee side, sufficiently large to protect our party. Some dry furze happened, by a singular accident, to lie heaped in a corner of this natural shed. With a little judicious management it was ignited, and burned so well as to overcome the wetness of a mass of thick heather roots, which we added to it. We were ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... beside the anvil, and swords and spears lay waiting for repair, the blacksmith leant against his door-post, gazing idly up the hill-side. Gradually he was aware of a figure, which seemed to have grown into shape from a furze-bush, or to have risen from behind a stone; and as it descended the slope he eyed curiously the grimy face, long beard, and squat form of what he was half unwilling to recognize as a human being. Hobbling awkwardly, and shrugging his shoulders as though ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... Thereupon the Partan and Jamie Ladle jumped into a small boat and pulled out. Dubs, who had come from Scaurnose on the business of the conjuration, had stepped into the stern, not to steer but to show a white ensign—somebody's Sunday shirt he had gathered, as they ran, from a furze bush, where it hung to dry, between the Seaton and ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... wool. But every man, however Whiggish in his inclinations, entertains a secret respect for the powerful; and though I passed within a few feet of a large wasps' nest, suspended to a jutting bough of furze, the wasps I took especial care not to disturb. I pressed on, first through a broad belt of the forest, occupied mainly by melancholy Scotch firs; next through an opening, in which I found an American-looking ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... to his feet, untied the remainder of the rope from the skid and dropped it into the shaft, and turning his back on the mine fled away through the paddocks towards Waddy. As he issued from the bush a quarter of an hour later, and crossed the open flat, a slim figure slipped from the furze covering the rail fence and followed him ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... go and knock," he said to himself; but a new thought possessed him, and he bowed again behind the slender furze, his eyes still ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... moment by the fierceness of a terrific blast. It was the same terrible storm that began on the night of his father's death. Ralph had at first been anxious for the safety of the procession that was coming, but he had found a more sheltered pathway under a deep line of furze bushes, and through this he meant to pioneer the procession when it arrived. There was one gap in the furze at the mouth of a tributary ghyll. The wind was strong in this gap, which seemed like a natural channel to carry ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... in which our Division met with some loss, we took possession of the camp and strong position of Soult's army. We found the soldiers' huts very comfortable; they were built of branches of trees and furze, and formed squares and streets, which had names placarded up, such as Rue de Paris, Rue de Versailles, &c. We were not sorry to find ourselves in such commodious quarters, as well as being well ...
— Reminiscences of Captain Gronow • Rees Howell Gronow
... cultured monks and the uncivilized Britons delighted as much in the rugged scenery of the moor as I did that morning. For many miles in front of me the moor stretched out wild and treeless; the sun was shining brightly upon the mass of yellow furze and deep-red heather, drawing up the moisture from the ground, and causing a kind of watery haze to shimmer over the landscape; while the early mist was rising off the tors, or hill-tops, in the distance, curling in fanciful wreaths around the ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... itself. It was pleasant to rest. The walk had been a long one; but it now appeared to him that the labour of it had not been wholly in vain. For around him stretched a breezy common, broken by straggling bramble and furze brakes, and dotted with hawthorn bushes, upon the topmost branches of which the crowded pinkish-white blossoms still lingered. From one to another small birds flitted with a pretty dipping flight, uttering quick detached notes as in merry ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... with biting draughts. It stood in a slight hollow on the summit of a cliff overlooking Rocquaine Bay. Its mossy thatched roof overhung tiny latticed windows, whose panes were golden red from the light of the fire of dried sea-weed and furze heaped up on the hearth of stone raised above the ...
— Where Deep Seas Moan • E. Gallienne-Robin
... locust, considering that 'the acacia, not less valued for its airy foliage and elegant blossoms than for its hard and durable wood; the braziletto, logwood and rosewoods of commerce; the laburnum; the furze and the broom, both the pride of the otherwise dreary heaths of Europe; the bean, the pea, the vetch, the clover, the trefoil, the lucerne—all staple articles of culture by the farmer—are so many species of Leguminosae, and that the gums Arabic and Senegal, kino ...
— Among the Trees at Elmridge • Ella Rodman Church
... the shore. Here, instead of sands, low rocks, infinitively broken and jagged, filled all the tidal space—a region of ceaseless rush and shattered waters. High cliffs of gray and brown rock, orange and green with lichens here and there, and in summer crowned with golden furze, rose behind—untouched by the ordinary tide, but at high water lashed by the ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... heath, its yellow furze, Mole-hills and rabbit-tracks, that lead Through besom-ling and teasel burrs That spread a wilderness indeed: The Woodland oaks, and all below That their white powder'd branches shield, The mossy paths—the very crow Croaks music ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... is immense. It is a labyrinth of winding alley often ending in a cul-de-sac. But the downward sweep of the headlands is superb; and under the towering cliffs studded with bosses of golden furze lies a little pier and harbour with the sea-foam flying sharply round the jutting peaks of rock before a stiff south-wester, while the gulls wheel shrieking overhead, and out at sea a schooner is labouring heavily." Unfortunately, the cliffs, both here ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... everything would be strange to us. Many thousands of square miles which are now rich corn land and meadow, intersected by green hedgerows and dotted with villages and pleasant country seats, would appear as moors overgrown with furze, or fens abandoned to wild ducks. We should see straggling huts built of wood and covered with thatch, where we now see manufacturing towns and seaports renowned to the farthest ends of the world. The capital itself would shrink to dimensions not much exceeding ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... me, I had pitched head first into a furze bush which broke the fall, otherwise I must have met with serious injury. As it was, when I recovered my momentary loss of consciousness, I found that I had sustained no worse harm than a severe ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... committed, such as intercommuning of foreigners, surcharges of commoners, trespasses in the fence month and winter haining, and in the enclosures; keeping hogs, sheep, goats, and geese, being uncommonable animals, in the Forest; cutting and burning the nether vert, furze, and fern; gathering and taking away the crabs, acorns, and mast; and other purprestures and offences; carrying away such timber trees as were covertly cut down in the night time; by which practices several hundred fine oaks were yearly destroyed, ...
— The Forest of Dean - An Historical and Descriptive Account • H. G. Nicholls
... seeing from afar the steep pointed roof and lofty towers standing out against the sky, above the furze and heather that crowned the hill-top, would have pronounced it a rather imposing chateau—the residence probably of some provincial magnate; but as he drew near would have quickly found reason to change his opinion. The road which led to it from the highway was ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... I knew," answered Nicky-Nan. "I glimpsed him followin' me, back along the path; an' when I turned about for a chat, he dodged behind a furze-bush like as if he was pouncin' on some valuable butterfly. 'That's odd,' I thought: for I'd never heard of his collectin' such things. But he's often told me how lonely a constable feels, an' I thought he might have picked up wi' the habit to amuse himself. So ...
— Nicky-Nan, Reservist • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... time the leaders of the pack were well away up a ploughed field, over a fence and into a furze brake, from which their rejoicing yelps streamed back on the damp breeze. The Master of the Craffroe Hounds picked himself up, and sprinted up the hill after the Whip and Kennel Huntsman—a composite official recently promoted from the stable yard—in a way that showed that his ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... Catherine declared, emphatically: and she seemed to speak sincerely. 'Nelly, help me to convince her of her madness. Tell her what Heathcliff is: an unreclaimed creature, without refinement, without cultivation; an arid wilderness of furze and whinstone. I'd as soon put that little canary into the park on a winter's day, as recommend you to bestow your heart on him! It is deplorable ignorance of his character, child, and nothing else, which makes that dream enter your head. Pray, don't imagine that ...
— Wuthering Heights • Emily Bronte
... about the foot of that hill, where there is said to be a village, but it is invisible. Round the Salt Lake a good many trees are dotted about, likely olives and figs, and a good deal of bright green scrub exists on the lower hill slopes. This scrub Ashmead-Bartlett calls furze in his articles, but I have never seen furze in Gallipoli. This plant is generally 2 to 3 feet high, is in very solid bushes of a stiff, fibrey nature, with an ovate, dark green glaucous leaf. Thyme and numerous other plants abound. I have been interested in the ...
— The Incomparable 29th and the "River Clyde" • George Davidson
... honour all day yesterday," he said, "but you lay like a hare in a furze bush. Things is looking ...
— Weapons of Mystery • Joseph Hocking
... every side around the capital; and which is bounded on this side by the Tagus. The whole of the way to Toledo, I passed through only four inconsiderable villages; and saw two others at a distance. A great part of the land is uncultivated, covered with furze and aromatic plants; but here and there some corn land is to be seen." (Inglis, Spain in 1830, vol. i. p. 366.) What a contrast does all this present to the language of the Italians, Navagiero and Marineo, in whose time the country ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V3 • William H. Prescott
... the side of the beacon. The stones were still standing as they had been reared by Paslew, and on looking at them he was astonished to find the hollow within them filled with dry furze, brushwood, and fagots, as if in readiness for another signal. In passing round the circle, his surprise was still further increased by discovering a torch, and not far from it, in one of the interstices ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... scent of this rude plant, dear in its very homeliness, recalled former scenes associated with it. I recollect, too, that the mettlesome barb which bounded over the downs surrounding Longwood did not partake of my sympathy for the golden bough I had plucked. The smooth turf and the yellow furze had no charms for the exile of St. Helena. Never was the “lasciate ogni speranza” more applicable than to his island-prison, and in his melancholy hours his thoughts naturally reverted, with a gush of fond tenderness, to the land of his birth, little as ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... the form behind, made playful attempts to tread upon their fingers. Two rival factions in the rear of the room were waging war with paper darts; while a small, sandy-haired boy, whose tangled hair and disordered attire gave him the appearance, as the saying goes, of having been dragged through a furze-bush backwards, rapped vigorously with his knuckles upon the master's table, and inquired loudly how many more times he ...
— The Triple Alliance • Harold Avery
... covet the hut of Annie M'Donald as described by her grandson. 'It appeared,' he says, 'as if separated and raised above the world by the cultureless and elevated solitude on which it stood. Around it on every side were grey rocks, peering out from among tufted grass, heath furze, and many-coloured mosses; forming what had been, till more recently—when the whole was converted into a plantation—a rather extensive sheep-walk. For an extent equal to more than half the horizon, the eye might stretch ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... to be wondered at, that men with imagination, men like Furze, the Bishop of Pretoria, saw in a vision clear that the padre's job lay with the living and not with the dying, that he could point the way by the example of a splendid life with the soldier, far better than by a hundred discourses, as an officer, from the far detachment of the pulpit. Thus was ...
— Sketches of the East Africa Campaign • Robert Valentine Dolbey
... spoke in haste: "Good folk, I have no coin; To take were to purloin: I have no copper in my purse, I have no silver either, And all my gold is on the furze That shakes in windy weather Above the rusty heather." "You have much gold upon your head," They answered altogether: "Buy from us with a golden curl." She clipped a precious golden lock, She dropped a tear more rare than pearl, Then sucked ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... congregated upon it for various purposes. The turnips were destroyed in most places, but the parsnips survived. The destruction of shrubs and trees was immense, the frost making havoc equally of the hardy furze and the lordly oak; it killed birds of almost every kind, it even killed the shrimps of Irishtown Strand, near Dublin, so that there was no supply of them at market for many years from that famous shrimp ground.[18] Towards the end of the frost ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... them. It is among the rich and varied low colours of this season, in wood and field, that a true lover of nature detects some of her rarest touches of loveliness; the low western sun, falling athwart the bare boughs and striking a kind of subdued bloom into the brown hill-tops and across the furze and heather, sometimes reveals a hidden charm in the landscape which one seeks in vain when skies are softer and the green roof has been stretched over the woodland ways. In fact, one can hardly lay claim to any intimacy with Nature until he loves her best when ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... several of the tents was covered with rugs, and besides looms and confused heaps of what looked like rubbish, there were tea-churns, goatskin churns, sheep and goat skins, children's bows and arrows, cooking pots, and heaps of the furze root, which is ...
— Among the Tibetans • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs Bishop)
... characters are developed with consummate skill, but usually their progression is toward failure or death. These men and women are largely rustics who subsist by means of humble toil, such as tending sheep or cutting furze. The orbit of their lives is narrow. The people are simple, primitive, superstitious. They are only half articulate in the expression of their emotions. In Far From the Madding Crowd, for example, Gabriel Oak wished to have Bathsheba know "his impressions; but he would as soon have ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... of the house with a vast club, so that we crept sideways even to the windows to look out upon the world. There was everything to repel—the cold, the frost, the hardness, the snow, dark sky and ground, leaflessness; the very furze chilled and all benumbed. Yet the forest was still beautiful. There was no day that we did not, all of us, glance out at it and admire it, and say something about it. Harder and harder grew the frost, yet still the forest-clad hills ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... the foot of the cliff, as if seeking its protection, lay the little fishing fleet, with its brown sails giving warmth and colour to as bonny an English landscape as could well be seen. There up aloft, where the hill cliff was purple and gold and grey with heath and furze and crag, was the man with the bushes, signalling to his comrades in the boat, which seemed to be crawling slowly along, the piled-up filmy brown net, lying in a clumsy heap, so it seemed, but really in ...
— Menhardoc • George Manville Fenn
... shepherd bands! Whose care it is to guard a thousand flocks: Whether descended from beneath the rocks That overtop your mountains; whether come From vallies where the pipe is never dumb; 200 Or from your swelling downs, where sweet air stirs Blue hare-bells lightly, and where prickly furze Buds lavish gold; or ye, whose precious charge Nibble their fill at ocean's very marge, Whose mellow reeds are touch'd with sounds forlorn By the dim echoes of old Triton's horn: Mothers and wives! who day by day prepare The scrip, with needments, ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... bleak and desert moor, where monstrous masses of rude stone were cast about, as though it were the burial-place of giants; and water spread itself wheresoever it listed—or would have done so, but for the frost that held it prisoner; and nothing-grew but moss and furze, and coarse, rank grass. Down in the west the setting sun had left a streak of fiery red, which glared upon the desolation for an instant, like a sullen eye, and frowning lower, lower, lower yet, was lost in the thick ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... the foliage. The light of the morning lay cold and clear over that well-known scene. The pavilion was but a blackened wreck; the roof had fallen in, one of the gables had fallen out; and, far and near, the face of the links was cicatrized with little patches of burned furze. Thick smoke still went straight upward in the windless air of the morning, and a great pile of ardent cinders filled the bare walls of the house, like coals in an open grate. Close by the islet a schooner yacht lay to, and a well-manned ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... dye, She glooms the noontide dazzle where a bay Bites into vineyarded flats close-fenced by hills, Over whose tops lap forests of cork and fir And reach in places half down their rough slopes. Lower, some few cleared fields square on the thickets Of junipers and longer thorns than furze So clumped that they are trackless even for goats I know two things about that woman: first She is a slave and I am free, and next As mothers need their sons' love she needs mine. Longings to utter fond compassionate sounds Stir through me, checked by knowing wiser folk Reprobate such indulgence. ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... is a ridge running nearly north and south, with a series of smooth, steep summits, the breadth of the range being barely half a mile. Their slopes are of turf and furze, often as steep as the pitched roof of a house, with crags projecting here and there. The chief summits are the North Hill, rising eleven hundred and fifty-one feet above the Severn, the Worcestershire Beacon, fourteen hundred and forty-four ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... think that the sun was come out. He had none of the airs of mystagogue, but talked to men, as he did to beasts, in the speech which was habitual to them. The lagging fox understood him when, grinning his fear and fatigue, he drew himself painfully through the furze. So did the hounds, athirst for his blood. Buck- skinned gentlemen, no less, found him affable and full of information—about anything and everything in the world except the line of the hunted fox. "Oh, come," he said once, "don't ask me to give him away. You're ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... Lyme, moreouer, of another kind of Marle-stone, either by burning a great quantitie thereof together, with a seruent fire of Furze, or by maintaining a continuall, though lesser heate, with stone Cole in smaller Kils: this is accompted the better cheape, but ...
— The Survey of Cornwall • Richard Carew
... another stood: farther to the left Bulbarrow, where there was yet another. Not far from this came Nettlecombe Tout; to the west, Dogberry Hill, and Black'on near to the foreground, the beacon thereon being built of furze faggots thatched with straw, and standing on the spot where the monument now raises ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... fire and excitement! this Katterfelto of wonders! exceeded expectation, went beyond belief and soared above all the natural powers of description! She was nature itself! She was the most exquisite work of art! She was the very daisy, primrose, tuberose, sweet brier, furze blossom, gilliflower, wall flower, cauliflower, auricula, and rosemary! In short, she was the bouquet of Parnassus! When expectations were so high, it was thought she would be injured by her appearance, but it was the audience who were ...
— English as She is Wrote - Showing Curious Ways in which the English Language may be - made to Convey Ideas or obscure them. • Anonymous
... was no sound! Then skirting the furze bushes of the headland, the three assassins dragged their stiffened limbs along in the darkness, hastening to where the stout Hirondelle rocked easily in the dead water of the one protected cove to the ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... morn to shadowy-pale, And scuds the cloud before the gale, Ere the Morn, all gem-bedight, Hath streak'd the East with rosy light, We sip the furze-flower's fragrant dews, Clad in robes of rainbow hues.... Then with quaint music hymn the parting gleam By lonely Otter's sleep-persuading stream; Or where his wave with loud, unquiet song Dashed ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... There is no appreciation of the country about him; no love of Nature for its own sake. In winter he becomes an inmate of the workhouse, where he almost always proves himself turbulent and disorderly. As soon as it becomes warm enough to sleep in a haystack, or under a hedge, or in a thick clump of furze and bracken, he discharges himself from 'the Union' and takes to 'the roads.' From town to town he begs or steals his way, safe in the assurance that should things go amiss the nearest workhouse must always provide him with gratuitous board and lodging. Work of any kind, although ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... boars may have been prowling about in the woods and tangled thickets that covered this ridge back for several leagues. Bushes, bogs and briers, and coarse prairie grass roughened the bottom of this valley; matted heather, furze, broom and clumps of shrubby trees, all those hills and uplands arising in the background to the northward horizon. This declining sun, and the moon and stars that will soon follow in the pathway of its chariot, ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... and generally bears a close approximation to the colour of the land in which the animal lives: thus the ptarmigan, inhabiting snowy regions, is white; the grouse has the colour of heath; the hare that of dry fern or furze—a provision which has the effect of protecting the weaker tribes from the stronger and predatory ones. In domesticated animals, from causes apparently not as yet traced, the colour is variegated and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... a keg of fine old wine. Bring me lemons too, and sugar; For I feel a premonition As if May-drink would be wanted." Off they started. Under shelter Of a rock with a tall pine-tree, Some the hearth were getting ready, Bringing there dry boughs and fagots, Loads of furze and moss together. Others now prepared the fishes For the feast, and all the ladies Gathered herbs of spicy fragrance, Such as thyme and leaves of strawberries; Also gathered for the May-wine The white-blooming fragrant woodroof. ...
— The Trumpeter of Saekkingen - A Song from the Upper Rhine. • Joseph Victor von Scheffel
... and 1740 great numbers of fruit and other trees had been destroyed. In Devon what was called the 'Southams method' was used for top-dressing the roots of old apple trees, which was done in November with soil from the roads and ditches, or lime or chalk, laid on furze sometimes, 6 inches thick, for 4 or 5 ft. all round the trees. Great attention was paid there to keeping the heads of fruit trees in good order, so that branches did not interfere with each other,[435] and the heads were made to spread as much as possible. Many of the trees were grown ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... which had sheltered the Sunday League on its first expedition. The Surrey country was in its full glory: the first purple heather was fully out, and the distant hills rose blue and vaporous across stretches of vivid crimson, broken here and there by the dim gray greens of the furze or the sharper colour of the bracken. The chorus of birds had died away, but the nests were not yet tenantless. The great sand-pit near the farmhouse was still vocal with innumerable broods of sand-martins, still enlivened by the constant skimming ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... and the emissary despatched, the knight and his daughter left the high-road, and following a wandering path among sandy hillocks, partly grown over with furze and the long grass called bent, soon attained the side of the ocean. The tide was by no means so far out as they had computed but this gave them no alarm;there were seldom ten days in the year when it approached so near the cliffs as not to leave a dry passage. But, ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... romps. The sports led them to the great home-field on the opposite slope of the ridge from our own. The new farm-buildings were on the level ground at the bottom to the right, where the declivity was much more gradual than to the left, which was very steep, and ended in furze bushes and low copsewood. It was voted a splendid place for hide-and-seek, and the game was soon in such full career that Ellen, who had had quite running enough, could fall out of it, and with her, the other two elder girls. Emily felt Fanny Reynolds' ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... with a mule, which carried the chief part of the baggage. The country through which they travelled was of an undulating character, but parched by the suns of summer, the beds of the winter torrents being now stony ravines, and the only green visible being furze and palmetto, and here and there patches of Indian corn not quite ripe, though the stubble of fine wheat and barley extended over a considerable portion ...
— Salt Water - The Sea Life and Adventures of Neil D'Arcy the Midshipman • W. H. G. Kingston
... Second Pig's venture with a man with a load of furze. Builds a furze house. Wolf comes ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready
... was entered by a door that opened upon an ample patio, in which was a shed of pierced zinc; this protected from the rain, or tried to protect, at least, the loads of furze branch and the piles of wood that were heaped ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... at him," said Jorrocks to Nosey, after their mutual salutations were over. "I know where he is, and I think I can floor him." Browne handed the gun to Jorrocks, who, giving up his hunter in exchange, strode off, and having marked his bird accurately, he kicked him up out of a bit of furze, and knocked him down as "dead as a door-nail." By that pheasant's tail ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees
... said, "there's a furze-cutter's hut somewhere, I saw it as we crossed the downs to-day. Let us go and ...
— The Birthright • Joseph Hocking
... is zaral, ground covered with the cistus, numerous varieties of that beautiful plant abounding in the province. Captain Widdrington mentions four sorts he found in flower—the gum cistus, a large white species without spots, a smaller white, and the purple kind common in English gardens. Furze, then just breaking into flower, and retama, or brooms, vary the collection; interesting enough, no doubt, to the botanist, but a melancholy sight when one reflects on the far better purpose to which this fertile territory might ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... Flychett. Still the everlasting heath, the black hills bulging against the sky, the barrows upon their round summits like warts on a swarthy skin. The storm blew huskily over bushes of heather and furze that it was unable materially to disturb, and the travellers proceeded as before. But the horses were now far from fresh, and the time spent in reaching the next village was quite half as long as that taken up by the ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... more, he struck a light. In a corner lay furze and firewood, and from this store he drew, heaping the combustible material on the hearth, until a cheering blaze fairly illumined the worn and dilapidated interior. Near the fireplace were a pot and kettle, whose rusted appearance ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... light of the lamp was weak and uncertain; but the Solitary, without taking immediate notice of Isabella, otherwise than by motioning her to sit down on a small settle beside the fireplace, made haste to kindle some dry furze, which presently cast a blaze through the cottage. Wooden shelves, which bore a few books, some bundles of dried herbs, and one or two wooden cups and platters, were on one side of the fire; on the other were placed some ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott
... that skirted the road, the youth soon crossed the belt of furze and heather that lay between him and the river, about which he and his host had been conversing. Being unaccustomed to the nature of the Western Isles, he was a little surprised to find the country he had to cross extremely rugged and broken, and it taxed ...
— The Eagle Cliff • R.M. Ballantyne
... as though bewildered by the space, the sunshine, and the breeze, the great rabbit sat and stared about him; then suddenly old instincts came crowding back upon his rabbit brain, He saw furze and bracken, and rabbits' burrows all about him, he felt the turf under his feet, and life calling to ...
— Anxious Audrey • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... fall, and in the thinning branches there seemed to be an appearance of spring. From St. Peter's walk she strolled into the orchard, and then into the piece of uncultivated ground at the end of it. Some of the original furze bushes remained, and among these a streamlet trickled through the long grasses, and following it she found that it led her to the fish pond in the shrubbery, at the back of St. Peter's walk. There was there a pleasant, shady place, ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... Marlowe paced that green, with the moonlight on his white and working face, I was within a few yards of him, crouching in the shadow of the furze by the ninth tee. I dared not show myself. I was thinking. My public quarrel with Manderson the same morning was, I suspected, the talk of the hotel. I assure you that every horrible possibility of the situation for me had rushed across my mind the ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... wood, shut in by a few trees and great patches of golden-blossomed furze. The sun came down warmly, birds twittered in the boughs, and a couple of rabbits showed their white cottony tails for a moment or two as they plunged down into their burrows, while above all, in a low, deep, ...
— The Queen's Scarlet - The Adventures and Misadventures of Sir Richard Frayne • George Manville Fenn
... flying about her face, than he jumped from the cart, and took to his heels so fast that nothing could be seen of him through the dust he raised but the bright nails of his shoes, as he scampered away to the furze bushes. Item, followed the scriba, and lastly the executioner, to the great amusement of the common folk, who stood round the waggon, and now laughed and gibed at the authorities. Then the afore-mentioned peasant jumped upon the cart, and cut the cords ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... that skirts the way, With blossomed furze unprofitably gay, There in his noisy mansion,{6} skilled to rule, The village master taught his little school. A man severe he was, and stern to view; I knew him well, and every truant knew; Well had the boding{7} tremblers learned to trace The day's disasters in his morning face; ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... thorn-woods over Ethandune Stand sharp and thick as spears, By night and furze and forest-harms Far sundered were the friends in arms; The loud lost blows, the last alarms, Came ...
— The Ballad of the White Horse • G.K. Chesterton
... the little kitchen, so dark and cool to him after his sultry walk up the steep, long lanes, and sat watching her absently, yet with a pleasant consciousness of her presence, as she kindled her fire of dry furze and wood, and hung a little kettle to it by a chain hooked to a staple in the chimney, and arranged her curious old china, picked up long years ago by her father at village sales, upon the quaintly carved table set in the coolest spot of ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... from their holes along the bank not far from a rick-yard belonging to the inn, and then hunting them about the pool with as much noise and bustle as if he were close at the tail of a rabbit in the furze. He was so fond of the water that he became a rapid, untiring swimmer; and the boys trained him, in intervals of rat-hunting, to dive to the bottom of the river and pick up a white pebble thrown from the bank. Like Joker, also, he gained a name for pluck and ability; ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees
... Lapwater, And let them all to my elder daughter. The rent I shall ask of her will be only Each year's first violets, white and lonely, The first primroses and orchises— She must find them before I do, that is. But if she finds a blossom on furze Without rent they shall all for ever be hers, Codham, Cockridden, and Childerditch, Roses, Pyrgo and Lapwater,— I shall give them all ...
— Poems • Edward Thomas
... rid about a mile from home, we came upon a large heath, and the sportsmen began to beat. They had done so for some time, when as I was at a little distance from the rest of the company, I saw a hare pop out from a small furze-brake almost under my horse's feet. I marked the way she took, which I endeavoured to make the company sensible of by extending my arm; but to no purpose, until Sir Roger, who knows that none of my extraordinary motions are insignificant, ...
— The De Coverley Papers - From 'The Spectator' • Joseph Addison and Others
... Captain John; it was Hosking, once a man-of-war's man, and now supposed to be teaching her boy the carpentry trade. "This is what you bring en to, is it? You deceiver, you! You bare-faced villain!" (The man had a beard as big as a furze bush.) "Look at the poor lamb up there loadin' the hosses, and to think I bore and reared en for this! If you let one of they fellows lay hands on my Phoby I'll scratch out ivery eye in your ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... forceful manner. Contrast it with the simple statement—"His memory is good." Sometimes Simile is prostituted to a low and degrading use; as "His face was like a danger signal in a fog storm." "Her hair was like a furze-bush in bloom." "He was to his lady love as a poodle to its mistress." Such burlesque is never permissible. Mere likeness, it should be remembered, does not constitute a simile. For instance there is no simile when one city is compared to another. In order that there may be a rhetorical ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... the gardens into the pine-wood, and I had jumped the rusty banked stream that runs down the Bearshill valley, and clambered the barbed wire fence. I came up the steep bank and through a fringe of furze to where she stood in the shade; I kissed her hand, and discovered mine had been torn open by one of the thorns of the wire and was dripping blood. "Mind my dress," she said, and we laughed as we kissed with my ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... set to work to make themselves a house in the centre of this fairies' garden, as he called it. They managed it very much to their own satisfaction, by dragging some logs of wood and big stones from among the brushwood hard by, and filling the holes up with bracken and furze. ...
— The Cuckoo Clock • Mrs. Molesworth
... about a mile from home, we came upon a large heath, and the sportsmen began to beat. They had done so for some time, when, as I was at a little distance from the rest of the company, I saw a hare pop out from a small furze brake almost under my horse's feet. I marked the way she took, which I endeavored to make the company sensible of by extending my arm; but to no purpose, till Sir Roger, who knows that none of my extraordinary motions are insignificant, rode up to me and asked me ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... The land of promise; the great goal to which the thoughts of every man in two vast hosts had been turned for many months past. On the furze-clad common of Chobham camp, on the long voyage out, at Gallipoli, while eating out their hearts at irritating inaction; on the sweltering, malarious Bulgarian plains, fever-stricken and cholera-cursed; at Varna, waiting impatiently, almost hopelessly, for orders to sail, twenty ...
— The Thin Red Line; and Blue Blood • Arthur Griffiths
... dusk of the evening, with the wan light of the early moon deepening the shadows and transforming the clumps of furze into strange, unrecognizable shapes of darkness, it was an eerie enough place. Sara shivered a little, instinctively moving closer to her companion. And then, as they rounded a furze-crowned hummock, out of the hazy twilight, loping along on swift, padding ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... Necessity of the Eastern States sending their Troops to Tyconderoga immediately to supply the places of those who will return home, when the time of their Inlistments shall expire. I have good Information from England that a certain Captn Furze who [was] in Boston the last year & gaind the Confidence & recd the Civilities of the People; when he returnd gloried in the Deception & carried Intelligence to the British Ministry, particularly of the Fortifications in ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, vol. III. • Samuel Adams
... minny] mother. greet] mourn. westlin] western. its lane] alone, by itself. low'd] flamed. eiry leme] eery gleam. linn] waterfall. joup] mantle. swa'd] swelled. waik] a row of deep damp grass. wene] ?whin, a furze-bush. maike] a mate, match, equal. his lane] alone, by himself. happ'd] covered. speer] inquire. fere] fellow. eident] unintermittently. kemed] combed. kyth] show, appear. gleid] spark, glow. elyed] vanished. marled] variegated, parti-coloured. leifu'] lone, wistful. girn'd] snarled. ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... little Mabel Sweetwinter, often my playfellow and bedfellow, a curly-headed girl, who would have danced on Sunday for a fairing, and eaten gingerbread nuts during a ghost-story. She was sitting by a furze-bush in flower, cherishing in her lap a lamb that had been worried. She looked half up at me, and kept looking so, but would not nod. Then good-bye, thought I, and remembered her look when I had forgotten ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... fence that skirts the way, With blossom'd furze unprofitably gay, There, in his noisy mansion, skilled to rule, The village master taught his little school. A man severe he was, and stern to view; I knew him well, ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • E. S. Lang Buckland
... a turnip-field, two or three coveys spring wildly from the farther end, and fly, as I expect, to the adjoining common, where they are marked down on a brow thickly clothed with furze. Marching towards them with spaniels at heel, up jumps a hare under my nose, then another, then a rabbit. I reload rapidly, and on reaching the gorse 'put in' the dogs. Whirr! there goes a partridge! The spaniels drop to the ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... resistance in scowling black looks, in quick, frantic gestures and motions against the machinery that claims her impotent childhood. The nimbus around her furze of hair remains; there are other heads than saints—there are martyrs! Let the ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... of the little park into a by-lane; a vast tract of common land, yellow with furze and undulated with swell and hollow, spreading in front; to their right the dark beechwoods, still beneath the weight of the July noon. Lionel had been talking about the "Faerie Queene," knight-errantry, the sweet impossible dream-life that, safe from ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... gardener, took care to keep her beaupots constantly supplied from the first snowdrop to the last china rose. Nothing was too large for Cicely's good-will, nothing too small. Huge chimney jars of lilacs, laburnums, horse-chestnuts, peonies, and the golden and gorgeous double furze; china jugs filled with magnificent double stocks, and rich wallflowers,* with their bitter-sweet odour, like the taste of orange marmalade, pinks, sweet-peas, and mignonette, from her own little garden, or woodland posies that might beseem the hand of the faerie queen, ...
— Aunt Deborah • Mary Russell Mitford
... brought us hither, floating, like a white feather, slowly homewards to the yacht. The blue-bell and fox-glove were growing on every hand, and the heath throve in luxuriance, but, flowerless, seemed to miss the golden blossoms of the furze. ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... information uncommonly valuable. He has made the greatest improvements I have anywhere met with. The whole country twenty-two years ago was a waste sheep-walk, covered chiefly with heath, with some dwarf furze and fern. The cabins and people as miserable as can be conceived; not a Protestant in the country, nor a road passable for a carriage. In a word, perfectly resembling other mountainous tracts, and the whole yielding a rent of not more than ...
— A Tour in Ireland - 1776-1779 • Arthur Young
... Dartmoor the burning of the furze up the hillsides to let new grass grow, is called zwayling."—E. ...
— Beowulf • James A. Harrison and Robert Sharp, eds.
... earthquake! this Katterfelto of wonders! exceeded expectation, went beyond belief, and soared above all the natural powers of description! she was nature itself! she was the most exquisite work of art! she was the very daisy, primrose, tube rose, sweet-briar, furze blossom, gilliflower, wall-flower, cauliflower and rosemary! in short she was a bouquet of Parnassus. Where expectation was raised so high, it was thought she would be injured by her appearance; but it was the audience who were injured—several ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... his son, Mr. A.C. Benson. One day about the year 1860, the future archbishop was walking with the Rector of Eversley in a remote part of the parish, on a common, when Kingsley suddenly said—"I must smoke a pipe," and forthwith went to a furze-bush and felt about in it for a time. Presently he produced a clay churchwarden pipe, "which he lighted, and solemnly smoked as he walked, putting it when he had done into a hole among some tree ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... sinking gradually down to cornfields and meadows, and an old farmhouse, with pointed roofs and clustered chimneys, looking out from its blooming orchard, and backed by woody hills. The common is itself the prettiest part of the prospect; half covered with low furze, whose golden blossoms reflect so intensely the last beams of the setting sun, and alive with cows and sheep, and two sets of cricketers; one of young men, surrounded by spectators, some standing, some sitting, ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford |
