"Orchid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... worshippers that cover the floor, lighted candle in hand, rocking themselves ecstatically and droning and chanting. A weird scene, in truth. And the coachman was quite right in his surmise as to the difference in temperature. It is hot down here, damply hot, as in an orchid-house. But the aroma cannot be described as a floral emanation: it is the bouquet, rather, of thirteen centuries of unwashed and perspiring pilgrims. "TERRIBILIS EST LOCUS ISTE," says an inscription over the entrance of the shrine. Very ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... his feet were shod in patent-leather boots, in the rack overhead rested a shining silk hat of the newest fashion, an orange-wood walking-stick, and a pair of gray suede gloves. An evening paper lay between his feet, open, as though it had been read, and in his buttonhole there was a single mauve orchid of exquisite beauty and delicacy. The body was quite alone in the compartment, and there was not a scrap of ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... flowers, if she could get them, sweet williams, pansies, pinks, wallflowers, white violets, stocks, Canterbury bells. Sometimes she came home with wild flowers, and had once given a little dinner with foxgloves for a table decoration. An orchid, a gardenia, even a hyacinth, was never to be seen in the little house. Rosamund confessed that hyacinths had a lovely name, and that they suggested spring, but she added that they smelt as if they had always lived in hothouses, and were ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... settings. We will mention them here, as they might be valuable in selecting frocks for such occasions as mentioned. Violet and orange, both pale and not vivid, offer a delicate harmony of color that is nothing short of exquisite. Old rose and Nile green are equally effective. Orchid, for the person whose complexion can bear it, may be combined with such vivid colors as red, green and blue, presenting a contrast so strong and clear and beautiful that it reminds one of a glorious sunset. Black satin, for the elderly person, ...
— Book of Etiquette • Lillian Eichler
... Oregon is wet as Spring, And green, with little singings in the grass, And pheasants flying, Gold, green and red, Great, narrow, lovely things, As if an orchid had snatched wings. There are strange birds like blots against a sky Where a sun is dying. Beyond the river where the hills are blurred A cloud, like the one word Of the too-silent sky, stirs, and there stand Black trees on either hand. Autumn in Oregon ...
— The Second Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... periodical. Let us leave the subject of what Miss Mitford was to those of her day who knew her; a thousand lovely personalities pass away every year and in a little while are no more remembered than the bright-plumaged bird that falls in the tropical forest, or the vanished orchid bloom of which some one has said that the angels in heaven can look on no more beautiful thing. Leaving all that, let us ask what remains to us of another generation of all ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... The orchid family has a few curious saprophytic representatives on the lower slopes. Mertin's coral-root is one of the most common. This generally grows in clusters in the mossy woods, along the trail or government road above Longmire Springs. It is very ...
— The Mountain that was 'God' • John H. Williams
... to the garden what the Orchid is to the greenhouse. Its colors are of the richest—blue, purple, violet, yellow, white, and gray. It blooms in great profusion, for weeks during the early part of summer. It is a magnificent flower. It will be found most effective when grouped, but ...
— Amateur Gardencraft - A Book for the Home-Maker and Garden Lover • Eben E. Rexford
... orchid house at four o'clock, her arms filled with an unprecedented collection for Conny's book. The big yellow four-in-hand coach was standing outside the stable being washed. She ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster
... say, if he has been dwelling on the mental image of this bird, he will recognize one at a distance more quickly than he would otherwise have done. Such a simple mental operation as the recognition of one of the less common flowers, say a particular orchid, will vary in duration according as we have or have not been recently forming an image of this flower. The obvious explanation of this is that the mental image of an object bears a very close resemblance to the corresponding percept, differing ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... of Batavia, the European or Australian traveller begins to want a change. It is not that there is at any time any extraordinary thermometrical heat to be encountered. It is simply that, not being an orchid, he finds it does not suit him to live in the warm damp atmosphere of a hothouse. What he suffers from most is the want of sleep. Probably he has not learnt to take two solid hours of sleep in the afternoon. He says to himself, "Pooh! this is nothing to the sun in India." He ...
— A Visit to Java - With an Account of the Founding of Singapore • W. Basil Worsfold
... year sold the largest half of his country seat—Spencer Wood—to the Government, as a gubernatorial residence for the hospitable and genial Earl of Elgin, reserving the smaller half (now owned by the writer), on which he built conservatories, vineries, a pinery, orchid house, &c., far more extensive than those of Spencer Wood proper. Though the place was renowned for its magnificence and princely hospitality in the days of Lord Elgin, there are amongst the living plenty to testify to the fact that ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... beautiful faces. The flowers are different, but they are all beautiful. How is it possible for us, now that we know the charm of each one, to be indifferent to any, or to set the beauty of one above the other? We have learned the beauty of the orchid, but surely we have not unlearned the rose; and would you say that orchid or rose is more beautiful than the lily? Surely not. They are differently ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... its delicately diamonded trunk, the great bread-fruit tall as a beech, and shadowy as a cave, the aoa, and the eternal cocoa-nut palm all grew here like brothers. Great ropes of wild vine twined like the snake of the laocoon from tree to tree, and all sorts of wonderful flowers, from the orchid shaped like a butterfly to the scarlet hibiscus, ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... in the housekeeper's room at Monkland there lived a magpie who had once sought shelter in an orchid-house from some pursuer. As soon as they thought him wedded to civilization, they had let him go, to see whether he would come back. For hours he had sat up in a high tree, and at last come down again to his cage; whereupon, fearing lest the rooks should ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... into the dining-room, where, in her slim fairness, Mary was like a pale lily, among all the tulip women, and poppy women, and orchid women, and night-shade women of ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... sometimes it leads to the mountain, to the light of the lone camp-fire, And you gnaw your belt in the anguish of hunger-goaded desire. And sometimes it leads to the Southland, to the swamp where the orchid glows, And you rave to your grave with the fever, and they rob the corpse for its clothes. And sometimes it leads to the Northland, and the scurvy softens your bones, And your flesh dints in like putty, ...
— Songs of a Sourdough • Robert W. Service
... and as all clerical work for the day was now finished, Peter suggested and Mr. Semple readily agreed to a walk in the gardens. There was nothing left in the flower-beds, but the conservatories and the orchid-house were a real feast of pleasure to the lawyer. He went into the outer hall to fetch his stick and coat, and then, turning back towards his host, he made a humorous signal to convey the intelligence that some callers had driven up to the door. Peter retreated ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... and began to turn the leaves of the newspaper file. Raymer took it as his dismissal and went to the desk to get the orchid book. When he looked in again on his way to the street, Miss Grierson had gone, leaving the file of the Pioneer Press open on the reading desk. Almost involuntarily he glanced at the first-page headings, thrilling to a little shock of surprise when one of them proved to be the caption of ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... her lord and master and looked at him anxiously. He was not seeing her at all. His eyes looked beyond, across the fragile, lily-petals, through the solid black wall, at a vision he saw in the world. Dong-Yung bent her head to sniff the familiar sweet springtime orchid hanging from the jade stud on ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... bifurcates, forming an upper and a lower route, both of which lead to Luz, if desired. The lower, which is the direct route from Gavarnie to Luz, we abstained from taking, preferring the upper road to the right, which leads past fields resplendent with flowers (among which the "bee" orchid is noticeable), to the ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough
... Georgia and Missouri, there is a sweet-scented, little yellow-and-brown flower called the yellow lady's-slipper, the plant of which is said to have the same effect when handled as poison-ivy. This flower is an orchid. The stalk, from one to two feet high, bears a single blossom at the top, and the leaves, shaped and veined like those of the lily-of-the-valley, grow alternately down the stem. The plant does not branch. Like the ivy, the yellow lady's-slipper does not poison ...
— On the Trail - An Outdoor Book for Girls • Lina Beard and Adelia Belle Beard
... of the district I have referred to a rare species of orchid, almost green, and with a peculiar scent, is sometimes met with. I recognized the heavy perfume at once. I take it that the thing which kills the traveler is attracted by this orchid. You will notice ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... factory hours always drove Amherst forth long before his wife's day began, and in the course of one of his early tramps he met Miss Brent and Cicely setting out for a distant swamp where rumour had it that a rare native orchid might be found. Justine's sylvan tastes had developed in the little girl a passion for such pillaging expeditions, and Cicely, who had discovered that her step-father knew almost as much about birds and squirrels ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... thousand homes, impoverished two whole lands, and brought death and disablement to fifty thousand men, was presented as a quite comical quarrel between a violent queer being named Chamberlain, with an eyeglass, an orchid, and a short temper, and "old Kroojer," an obstinate and very cunning old man in a shocking bad hat. The conflict was carried through in a mood sometimes of brutish irritability and sometimes of lax slovenliness, the merry peculator plied his trade congenially in that asinine squabble, and ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... with the orchid, it was perhaps natural and excusable that popular prejudice should have associated the subject of cross-fertilization with the orchid alone; for it is even to-day apparently a surprise to the average mind that ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... stream of a diseased animal. Yes, by the miracles of the camera we may trace the life of nature even in forms which no human observation really finds in the outer world. Out there it may take weeks for the orchid to bud and blossom and fade; in the picture the process passes before us in a few seconds. We see how the caterpillar spins its cocoon and how it breaks it and how the butterfly unfolds its wings; and all which needed days and months goes on in a fraction of a minute. ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg
... man—would consider that I had paid my just debts and was quits with the world—and with you. But not being ordinary—on the contrary, and without undue pride, denominating myself as a most extraordinary, rare, and orchid-like male creature, I feel that the appended narrative, albeit I do not figure therein as Sir Galahad or King Arthur, is no more than your just due. I relinquish the steel helmet and holy grail adjuncts, and exploit ...
— At Home with the Jardines • Lilian Bell
... "That orchid-collector was only thirty-six—twenty years younger than myself—when he died. And he had been married twice and divorced once; he had had malarial fever four times, and once he broke his thigh. He killed a Malay once, and ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... Why won't I agree! Why won't I agree! Because I don't want you to leave home. I know you're a born genius—a marvel, a miracle, a prodigy, an incredible orchid, the most brilliant journalist in London. I'm fully aware of all that. But I do not and will not see you as a literary bachelor living with a cause and holding receptions of serious people in chambers furnished by Roger Fry. I like to think of you at home, ...
— The Title - A Comedy in Three Acts • Arnold Bennett
... that could happen would be the discovery on this spot of anything more precious than an orchid. Gold, which would transform the Isle into a desert, is therefore selfishly concealed, and the reason for the concealment remains an incomprehensible enigma. Was it not the pinnacle of folly to ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... vurst! to be vurst! Dat is you English top and toe! Do I vas hunt de orchid to be vurst discoverer? Not mooch. I hunt him for money. Do I cross de Channel in my machine to be vurst? Nein, nein. I cross him for de tousand pounds. And you I vould not take, no, not for de oder tousand pound. Bah! You vas not at all von vonder-child; you vas von ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson
... matron, or wherever a touch of lavender is desired. It is effectively combined with violets, or lilies-of-the-valley and maidenhair fern. The petals are made of satin ribbon one and one-quarter inches wide and of the peculiar pinkish lavender orchid shade. There are five petals in all—each calls for seven inches of ribbon. If possible, three of the petals should be one or two shades darker than ...
— Make Your Own Hats • Gene Allen Martin
... Many of us spend our lives loving other women, but we have skill. Being part women, we know how to approach women. We are not blundering and crude. Men want a certain thing from you. It is delicate and easy to kill. Love is the most sensitive thing in the world. It's like an orchid. Men try to pluck orchids with ice tongs, ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... bloom stalk rising a foot and a half perhaps above, and at its tip the wonderful pink, dreaming Buddha of the forest, that so commands the heart? It was not entirely the beauty of the softly glowing orchid that charmed Johnnie Consadine's eyes; it was the significance of the flower. Somehow the finding this rare, shy thing decking her path toward labour and enterprise spoke to her soul of success. For a long time she knelt, her ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... Grower's Guide Book, By H.A. Burberry (Orchid Grower to the Rt. Hon. J. Chamberlain, M.P.). Second Edition, with coloured plates. Containing sound, practical information, and advice for Amateurs, giving a List with Cultural Descriptions of those most suitable for Cool-house, Intermediate-house, and Warm-house ...
— Hardy Ornamental Flowering Trees and Shrubs • A. D. Webster
... stem, this orchid attracts us by its flaunted beauty and decorative form from tip to root, not less than the aesthetic little bees for which its adornment and mechanism are so marvellously adapted. Doubtless the heavy, oily odor is an additional attraction ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... "I won't wait till to-morrow. Mary shan't take the chances. Who knows if I shall be here to-morrow? If I drive out to Marleigh I shall just catch Buckton. He will be pottering round that orchid-house of his. He will just be home from the office. He can make me a new will there as well as here. Indeed, I ought not to have postponed it for ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... jewel-weed with all its beauty has none that my sense can perceive. But that of Chelone glabra, as modest and withdrawn as the flower itself, seems hardly to belong in the swamp for all the beauty of the place. It should rather be that of some delicately nurtured plant, some rare orchid of sheltered conservatories, it is so ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... history of the Semitic nations. He took me down to dinner last night, and we talked in the most intelligent manner about the various ways of preparing crabs. He liked them in five styles; I wouldn't subscribe to more than three. That little man with the orchid that daddy has just seized is the author of the last of the 'Rulers of India' series—Sir Somebody Something, K.C.S.I. My unconscionable humbug of a parent probably wants to get something approaching a fact out of him. Daddy's writing a thing ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... her flesh was all girlhood in one flower of lithe stem, leaf, petal, sepal, and perfume. There was nothing of the opiate poppy, the ominous orchid, or even that velvet voluptuary, the rose. She was like a great pink, sweet, shy, fragrant, common ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... extraordinary magnetic attraction which glass has for the missile of the juvenile thrower, the orchid-house, on the opposite side of the path from the pear-tree, drew the errant stone to its ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... spur of this orchid, one of the handsomest and most striking of its clan, and the heavy perfume of the flower, would seem to indicate that only a moth with a long proboscis could reach the nectar secreted at the base of the thread-like passage. Butterflies, attracted by the conspicuous color, sometimes ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... elbows on a balcony and gave jubilant, ceremonial praises to the sun, or else they moved together on the air in wavering dances intricate and swift, or turned aside to avoid the onrush of some drop of water that a breeze had shaken from a jungle orchid, chilling the air and driving it before it, as it fell whirring in its rush to the earth; but all the while they sang triumphantly. "For the day is for us," they said, "whether our great and sacred father ...
— A Dreamer's Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... to mount, for the main trunk ended about twelve feet from the ground, and after a little feeling about amongst the dense orchid growth, he soon found a position where he could sit astride, and support his back in a comfortable half-reclining posture, perfectly safe from all risk of falling, so that there was every prospect ...
— Fire Island - Being the Adventures of Uncertain Naturalists in an Unknown Track • G. Manville Fenn
... blooms, groups of feathery ferns whose plumes were starred with fragrant white and blue flowerets, slender creepers swinging from the branches of the strangely trunked trees, bearing along their threads orchid-like blossoms both ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... vast external world which recks so little of the happiness, of the marriages or deaths of individuals. In order to give her examples of what he was saying, Denham led the way, first to the Rock Garden, and then to the Orchid House. ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... pepper trees. Tunisia exists for needy people in search of work. If you can't make it pay, leave it alone. You have every facility for buying land, for importing this and that—why don't you settle down and make yourselves at home? A colony, my friend, is not an orchid." ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... something in it from men to men. "You here?" I said. "Where aren't you nowadays And what's the news you carry—if you know? And tell me where you're off for—Montreal? Me? I'm not off for anywhere at all. Sometimes I wander out of beaten ways Half looking for the orchid Calypso." ...
— Mountain Interval • Robert Frost
... burrowing insects, ravines formed by the draining off of the rains. Ants and beetles bustled along them, pressing up hill and down to some mysterious goal. Above them a cunning red spider was tying a blade of grass to an orchid leaf, the pillars it had chosen for its future web; and when the wind shook the leaves and the sun pierced through to this spot, I saw the delicate ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... recognize,—that she could never love a man of his temperament. It would have been very easy for him to love Mercy. He was not a man of a passionate nature; but he felt himself strangely stirred whenever he looked into her sensitive, orchid-like face. He felt in every fibre of him that to have the whole love of such a woman would be bewildering joy; yet never for one moment did he allow himself to think of seeking it. "I might make her think she loved me, perhaps," ...
— Mercy Philbrick's Choice • Helen Hunt Jackson
... Nothing would do but the microscopic animal must be fetched from her ample bed on the horse's back, and displayed proudly. Her master, a very large dark man, stuck the dog into the breast of his coat, whence her miniature head protruded like a peculiar orchid. ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... of exploring the Ironice Mountains. Hearing they abound with frozen mud which would be most useful if it could be removed to the plains below without melting. The watercress plant too might be grown on the summit, if it is practicable to take up orchid-forcing houses. Ought to get the Gold Medal of the Geographical Society if I open out this region that will be fraught with such blessings to commerce. So far as I can judge, it will only be necessary to take twenty batteries of Artillery, a dozen squadrons of Cavalry, and (say) sixteen battalions ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, August 13, 1892 • Various
... of gardening papers and catalogues which came in his way was eagerly read, and to this source he owed his first interest in the fascinating orchid. ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... society had originated with Humfrey Charlecote, for the benefit of the poor as well as the rich; and the summer exhibition always took place under the trees of a fragment of the old Forest, which still survived at about five miles from Hiltonbury. The day was a county holiday. The delicate orchid and the crowned pine were there, with the hairy gooseberry, the cabbage and potato, and the homely cottage-garden nosegay from many a woodland hamlet. The young ladies competed in collections of dried flowers for a prize botany book; and the subscriptions were so arranged that ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the steep road, formed by hundreds of moss-grown steps. Plantations of coffee, cinchona, and tapioca girdle the lower slopes of the mountain, hedges and thickets of red and purple coleas bordering the primeval jungle of orchid-decked trees on the higher levels, the moss-grown boughs wreathed with epiphytal plants, the trunks covered with branching ferns, and the thick ropes of matted lianas strangling the dense forest in their green embrace. Wild oleander mingles ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... strongly subjective, and, like the one just quoted, mainly evolved from his imagination, like orchids living in the air. It was also about this time that Carlyle wrote to Emerson concerning the Dial that it seemed "like an unborn human soul." The orchid imagination was an influence of the time, penetrating ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... heed to his explanation, but continued: "Nobody imagined he had the energy to do anything good, but on varnishing day the Salon was astonished by the entrance of Monsieur Clifford, who strolled about as bland as you please with an orchid in his buttonhole, and a beautiful ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... there is the matter of tackle. Some people think collecting orchids is expensive—and I guess it is, the way the orchid market is at present; and some say matching up pearls costs money. They should try buying fishing tackle once. If J. Pierpont Morgan had gone in for fishing tackle instead of works of art he would have died in the hands ...
— Cobb's Bill-of-Fare • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... reached personal expression in a new medium in a month or so, and apparently without effort. It was Beardsley's writing that first won Oscar to recognition of his talent, and for a while he seemed vaguely interested in what he called his "orchid-like personality." ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... for air. Green conquerors from overhead Bestrode the bodies of their dead; The Caesars of the silvan field, Unused to fail, foredoomed to yield: For in the groins of branches, lo! The cancers of the orchid grow. Silent as in the listed ring Two chartered wrestlers strain and cling, Dumb as by yellow Hooghly's side The suffocating captives died: So hushed the woodland warfare goes Unceasing; and the silent foes Grapple and smother, strain and clasp Without a cry, without a gasp. Here also ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 14 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... clasp her in his arms! How would he ever live through the hours till Sunday afternoon, forsooth! She was jealous of the applause he lavished on Nelly O'Neill, incensed at his levity, at his immaculate evening-dress, at his white orchid. How dare he be so gay and debonair? Her anger rose as she read his protestations, his romantic professions. "O my darling, I shall sit up all night, thinking of you, re-reading all your dear letters, recalling our past, ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... she seemed to be crying just for the pure enjoyment of it. She touched my leaves like she loved 'em, and she bent down her head and kissed each one of 'em. I guess I'm about the toughest specimen of a peripatetic orchid on earth, but I tell you it made me feel sort of queer. Home never was like that to me before. Generally I used to get chewed by poodles and have shirt-waists hung on me to dry, and get watered with coffee grounds ...
— Waifs and Strays - Part 1 • O. Henry
... for kindly gentleness is but a fancy vain! Thy charms that they can match the olea or orchid, but thoughts inane! While an actor will, envious lot! with fortune's smiles be born, A youth of noble birth will, strange to say, be ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... Regla. A ride over the hills brought us to a wood of oaks, with their branches fringed with the long grey Spanish moss, and a profusion of epiphytes clinging to their bark, some splendidly in flower, showing the fantastic shapes and brilliant colours one sees in English orchid-houses. Cactuses of many species complete the picture of the vegetation in this beautiful spot. This is at the top of the barranca. Then imagine a valley a mile or two in width, with sides almost perpendicular and capped with basaltic pillars, and at the bottom a strip of ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... back to where Bess had stopped to look at a beautiful orchid, in shape itself not unlike some bird of ...
— The Motor Girls on Waters Blue - Or The Strange Cruise of The Tartar • Margaret Penrose
... kill it, in imitation of those born to idleness and to no necessity of making an exertion, may be ornamental, but having no root in any established privilege to sustain them, they will soon wither away in this atmosphere, as a flower would which should set up to be an orchid when it does not belong to the orchid family. It is required here that those who are emancipated from the daily grind should vindicate their right to their position not only by setting an example of self-culture, but by contributing something ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... And checks of a similar nature to these no doubt have acted in other parts of the world, and have prevented such an extraordinary development of nectary as has been produced by favourable conditions in Madagascar only, and in one single species of Orchid. I may here mention that some of the large Sphinx moths of the tropics have probosces nearly as long as the nectary of Angraecum sesquipedale. I have carefully measured the proboscis of a specimen of Macrosila ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... of the energetic new sort; he also seemed to deal in most things, flowers among them. He told Julia something about that part of his business, for he and it interested her so much that she asked him leading questions. He explained how the beautiful orchid he wore in his coat had decreased in value lately. A few years ago, when there had been but one specimen with just that marking in all the world, the plant had sold for L900; now that it had been multiplied it was worth only ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... lady. She was an orchid, a princess. She ruled father with her little finger—a beautifully manicured, rose-and-white finger, such as he had hardly seen when he was young. There was so much of himself in Ena that Peter yielded to her mandates as to the inarticulate cry of his own soul translated into words. The princess ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... and being filled with importance too, showed it to the doctor and to Mr. Fenton. It was withered and faded in hue, but it was unmistakably an orchid ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green
... Besides, it's expensive. Singleton's fee wasn't so big, because he shared the cost of his orchid collecting or something of the kind with us. Then he might talk, and there would always be the risk of somebody's challenging us with suppressing his report. If things went wrong, ...
— Ranching for Sylvia • Harold Bindloss
... wringing his hands 'cause the prize roses have got bugs on 'em he sets to work and kills the bugs; sprays the plants same's he would ordinary bushes, and they go to growing again like any other civilized flowers. An orchid ain't no more to him than a buttercup. He's too used to 'em. He's used to dogs as well, and with the shifting fashions he's seen during his fifty years with the family he's had experience with most every kind of dog that ever was. For there's fashions in ...
— Walter and the Wireless • Sara Ware Bassett
... never knew what they meant until one day a small colony of five was brought ashore. Boltenia, the scientists call them, tall, queer-shaped things; a stalk six to eight inches in length, with a knob or oblong bulb-like body at the summit, looking exactly like the flower of a lady-slipper orchid and as delicately coloured. This is a member of that curious family of Ascidians, which forever trembles in the balance between the higher backboned animals and the lower division, where are classified ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... the mountain as far as the edge. Only in the ravine did the trees attain any height. The lower declivities were covered with aroids and ferns; towards the summit were tendrils and mosses; and here I found a beautiful, new, and peculiarly shaped orchid. [153] The Cimarrons had cut down some cane; and, beating down our road for ourselves with bolos, we arrived at the summit a little before ten o'clock. It was very foggy. In the hope of a clear evening ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... pony's hoofs he pressed his own pony forward, and she pointed out to him what in the tropic abundance about them she found most beautiful. Sometimes it was the tumbling waters of a cataract; sometimes, high in the topmost branches of a ceiba-tree, a gorgeous orchid; sometimes a shaft of sunshine as rigid as a search-light, piercing the shadow of the jungle. At first she would turn in the saddle and call to him, but as each day they grew to know each other better she need only point with her whip-hand ...
— The Lost Road • Richard Harding Davis
... sold for as little as two-pence each at a recent sale, and alarmed growers are clamouring for the immediate appointment of an Orchid Controller. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Dec. 26, 1917 • Various
... to a perfection as accurate as Banneker's own, and excelling him in one distinctive touch, a coat-flower of gold-and-white such as no other in New York could wear, since only in one conservatory was that special orchid successfully grown. By it Banneker recognized Poultney Masters, Jr., the son and heir of the tyrannous old financier who had for years bullied and browbeaten New York to his wayward old heart's content. In his son there was nothing of the bully, but through the ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... afterwards Almayer was telling the story of the great revolution in Sambir to a chance visitor from Europe. He was a Roumanian, half naturalist, half orchid-hunter for commercial purposes, who used to declare to everybody, in the first five minutes of acquaintance, his intention of writing a scientific book about tropical countries. On his way to the interior he had quartered himself upon Almayer. He was a man of some education, but he drank ...
— An Outcast of the Islands • Joseph Conrad
... the long room's boundary shadow. There was about her a sense of white and gray with a knot of pale colour in her hat and an orchid on her white coat. Mrs. Hastings, taking no more account of her presence than she had of St. George's, tilted back her head and looked at the primroses in the window as closely as at anything, and ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... Lily, Rock, n. an orchid, Dendrobium speciosum, Smith, N.O. Orchideae. although not a Lily, it is always so called, especially in Sydney, where it ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... green room, festooned with vines and tendrils and hung about with leaves. Nothing is beautiful here, but everything is curious. It is a curiosity shop, where one pays with the sweat of one's brow, with the languor of one's body, and the remembrance of one's past, for the sight of an orchid shaped like a bird, or a flower shaped like a jug, or a bird whose flight is ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... way back in the Gem with the girls and Mr. Stonington, told his story. He had prepared the luncheon, and, seeing the girls going out on the little neck of land to gather flowers, he recalled seeing some blooms, of the orchid variety, farther in ...
— The Outdoor Girls in Florida - Or, Wintering in the Sunny South • Laura Lee Hope
... shoulders, and said to his nephew, "Your aunt must feel that I give her diamonds from love and not from vanity, as she never lets me have the pleasure of seeing them." The sole ornament of Adriana was an orchid, which had arrived that morning from Hainault, and she had presented its fellow ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... of this cup are the various indications of pleasure and social enjoyment. These being shown by the cake and butterfly, while the orchid in conjunction predicts that the consultant's personal charm and power of attraction will result in a future ...
— Telling Fortunes By Tea Leaves • Cicely Kent
... with staring, curious, uninvited people on either side of the church, and when the carriage containing the bride drove up, the surge forward to see her was as fierce as though she had been a defaulting bank-president being taken to prison. The police had to intervene. The interior, fern and orchid swathed, very dimly lighted by rich purple stained glass and aristocratic dripping wax candles instead of the more convenient electric imitations, was murmurous with the wonderful throbbing notes of a great organ and with the discreet low tones of the invited guests as ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... was her explanation. I think there was some blackmail; she had to pay some money to the dead man's relations for letters. These sensual American women are like orchids, and who would hesitate between an orchid and a rose? It was twenty years ago since she turned round on me in the gloom of her brougham unexpectedly, and it was as if some sensual spirit had come out of a world ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... us a brief but modest account of his short tour of exploration. He had brought back a new species of orchid, several undescribed beetles, and a pocketful of coontie seed. He appeared, however, to be tired and singularly depressed, and ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... of the flowers was missing, a little one of a fairy pink and shape, and almost immediately she heard footsteps on the grass and saw a man approaching with the orchid in his hand. She recognized the man she had seen riding the black horse on the day she arrived in Radstowe and her heart fluttered. This was romance, this, she had time to think excitedly, must be preordained. But when ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... beside her with his coat-collar turned up. Her ample form with the small round head on the top looked like a short-funnelled locomotive engine, and he like the driver on the foot-plate. The perfidious things had said they were going to consult over the orchid. Did orchids grow on the lawn? It was news to Miss Mapp if ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... joint with a fresh link of gut, and finally produces out of his hat a "hook"—he will not call it a fly—of his own dressing. It is a particolored father-long-legs, a thing which only some frantic specimen of orchid ever seriously approached, a creature whose wings were two strips of the fringe of a peacock's tail, whose legs descended from blue jay through red to brown, and terminated in a pair of pink trailers two ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... orchids who make it their business to imitate a fly with their petals. This lie they dispose so cunningly that real flies, thinking the honey is being already plundered, pass them without molesting them. Watching intently and keeping very still, methought I heard this orchid speaking to the offspring which she felt within her, though I saw them not. "My children," she exclaimed, "I must soon leave you; think upon the fly, my loved ones, for this is truth; cling to this great thought in your passage through life, for it ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... to analyze and to give the reasons for Germany's development along these meretricious and disappointing lines, but I am the last to admit that the outcome is satisfactory, or that the rest of the world should look to Germany to point out the way of salvation. A steaming orchid-house is not the place to go to learn to grow the fruits of the earth in their due season for the nourishment of a free people. You will find some brilliantly colored flowers there, in the gay uniforms of the artificial tropics, but they shrink and shrivel ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... in a Bath-chair is quite superfluous. Resolved to take exercise, for the future, in a hammock, just outside the garden-door. Must practise speech-making to the gardener. Good idea—Orchids. Asked him what he thought about the new Orchid. Miserable fool answered, "Awkud, zur? Dunno waht thaht be." I said that was "awkud," and had to laugh at the highly original side-splitter myself, as ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 15, 1892 • Various
... morbid and warped self and the bigness and nobility of his friend passed through Aladdin's mind. He glanced covertly at the strong, emaciated face beside him, and noted the steadiness and purity of the eyes. A little quixotic flame, springing like an orchid from nothing, blazed suddenly in his heart, and for the instant he was the better ...
— Aladdin O'Brien • Gouverneur Morris
... gymnastics—occupying the space of a few seconds—it came to him with a shock that here was a new specimen of the species. At the same time he comprehended that she was as pure and lovely as the white orchid of Borneo and that she did not carry that ridiculous shield called false modesty. He could talk to her as frankly as he could to a man, that she would not take offence at anything so long as it was in the form of ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... Amye Sinclair on the program; Minnie Schottman in the Hoboken family Bible. She's a nice girl but a trifle unintellectual. She threw me a papier mache orchid ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... by mere man," she smiled—"except the magnolias and dog-wood. No, Mr. Hamil, the riotous tropical bloom one reads about is confined to people's gardens. When you come upon jasmine or an orchid in the woods you notice the colour at once in the green monotony. But think how many acres of blue and white and gold one passes in the North with scarcely a glance! The South is beautiful too, in its way; but it is not that way. Yet I care for it even more, perhaps, ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... newer European importation, happily a plant not true to the American soil. We strangers too often see but the cut flowers, showy, glaring, to-day; jaded, gone to-morrow. We do not see the cultured orchid or the natural wild flowers of America, for the simple reason we do not look for them in seeing that wonderful country in ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... Edward was cruising up the Hudson with a yachting party one Saturday afternoon, the sight of Jay Gould's mansion, upon approaching Irvington, awakened the desire of the women on board to see his wonderful orchid collection. Edward explained his previous association with the financier and offered to recall himself to him, if the party wished to take the chance of recognition. A note was written to Mr. Gould, and sent ashore, and the answer came back that they were welcome to visit ...
— A Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward Bok
... tincture was extracted from a plant which Theophrastus, Dioscorides, and Pliny respectively name. The last calls it the Phycos thalassion. This was not a sea-weed, but a lichen—probably the same from which the orchid purple of modern art is prepared. See Birdwood, ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... pots of the former on my balcony, and the united efforts of Stenson, Antoinette, and myself have not yet succeeded in making them bloom; but I love the unassuming velvety leaves. Carlotta is a flaring orchid and produces on my retina a ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... and far the Surrey sun Spread cowslips far and gay, Lit wide the orchid's purple flame, The white fire ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... Babylon is so Babylonish but that a Church of God may be found planted in it. No circumstances are so unfavourable to the creation and development of the religious life but that the religious life may grow there. An orchid will find footing upon a bit of stick, because it draws nourishment from the atmosphere; and they who are fed by influx of the Divine Spirit may be planted anywhere, and yet flourish in the courts of our God. So 'the church that is in ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... Killings and stealing were a business to him, and he had the most efficient spying system on any planet. It was well known unofficially that he kept an underground factory busy extracting a drug from the stamen of the swamp-orchid. The drug was labeled "Venus-snow," and Relegar found it highly profitable to trade it to the fish in the Sea-Swamp on the southwest and to the semi-aquatic people in the great Gallium Bogs to the southeast—some ...
— The Wealth of Echindul • Noel Miller Loomis
... "Rough" near the house of his friend Sir Thomas Farrer. He never was quite idle even on these holidays, and found things to observe. At Hartfield he watched Drosera catching insects, etc.; at Torquay he observed the fertilisation of an orchid (Spiranthes), and also made out the relations of ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... persisted, punctuated by the harsh scream of a green parrot or the squawks of a troop of monkeys. In the faintly spattered sunlight percolating through the bowered roof vivid lizards rivalled in colour the rare finger of an orchid clinging to the great tree beside the hut. Through the humid air came the faint chant of carriers at the end of a journey; swelled louder and ceased. At the mutter of greeting ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... her guest, and Rochester exchanged greetings with some callers who had just arrived. To Saton he merely nodded, but when a little later Lois rose, and announced that she was going to show Mr. Saton the orchid houses, ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... that. But there'll be thousands of people there, all with gardens of their own, all pointing to things and saying, 'We've got one of those in the east bed,' or 'Wouldn't that look nice in the south orchid house?' and you and I will be quite, quite out of it." I sighed, and helped ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 27, 1914 • Various
... sands of African and Indian deserts, grow abundantly. Common weeds of cultivation are Fumaria parviflora, a near relation of the English fumitory, Silene conoidea, and two Spergulas (Caryophyllaceae), and Sisymbrium Irio (Cruciferae). A curious little Orchid, Zeuxine sulcata, is found growing among the grass on canal banks. The American yellow poppy, Argemone Mexicana, a noxious weed, has unfortunately established itself widely in the Panjab plain. Two trees of the order Leguminosae, the shisham or tali (Dalbergia Sissoo) and the siris ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... distorts, deforms, and with his strong, fluid line modulates his material as he wills, but he never propounds puzzles in form, as do the rest of the experimentalists. The human shape does not become either a stovepipe or an orchid in his hands. His young mothers are sometimes dithyrambic (as in Madonna) or else despairing outcasts. One plate of his which always affects me is his Dead Mother, with the little daughter at the bedside, the cry of agony arrested on her lips, the death chamber exhaling ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... an orchid she was wearing and tried to pin it on his coat. "I am afraid," said Von Barwig, "that it is healed ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... anything of the kind poor lonely old Priscilla Friday and patiently enduring Robin Clifford were more likely to be hurt than gratified. For a silence had fallen between that past life, which had been like a wild rose blossoming in a country lane, and the present one, which resembled a wonderful orchid flower, flaming in heat under glass,—and though she wrote to Robin now and again, and he replied, his letters were restrained and formal—almost cold. He knew too well how far she was removed from him by more than ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... whom presumably he could have had for the asking; but none was, in his own phraseology, "just the right thing." He wanted something unusual, and yet not exotic—something obvious, which no one else had observed—something cultivated, and yet native—something as exquisite as any hothouse orchid, but with the keen, fresh scent of the American woods and waters on its bloom. It was not a thing to be picked up every day, and so he kept on the lookout for it, and waited. Even when he found it, he was not certain, on the spur of the moment, that it would ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... breakfast cups. The huge trees which border the road have their stems and branches nearly hidden by orchids and epiphytes—chiefly that lovely and delicate one whose likeness to a hovering dove won for it the name of the "Flower of the Holy Ghost," an orchid (Peristeria elata) which lives but for a day, but in its brief life fills the air with fragrance. Then the trees change, the long tresses of an autumn-flowering orchid fall from their branches over the road; dead trees appear transformed into living beauty by multitudes of ferns, among which ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... sir," Winfree said. "You don't understand. Potlatch is a wonderful day for children, a glorious introduction to the science of economics. The boys light Roman candles, shooting crimson and orchid and brass-flamed astonishers into the clouds. A soft fog of snow makes fuzzy smears of the pinwheels, of the children racing, sparklers in both hands, across the frozen lawn. Dad lights the strings of cannon-crackers—at our house they used to dangle from a wire strung across the porch, ...
— The Great Potlatch Riots • Allen Kim Lang
... I envy you yet more that you should have had the courage to venture into regions which, I confess, frightened me. And I know so well that, in spite of the spring-board of prayers and fasts, in spite of the green house, or orchid house atmosphere, wherein mysticism is grown, I should wither away in these regions without ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... enjoying a late dejeuner at the Monte Rosa. There existed between them a pleasant comradeship that was in no wise affected by divergent tastes and temperaments. Dick had just attained his captaincy, and was the youngest man of his rank in the service. He did not know an orchid from a hollyhock, but no man in the army was a better judge of a cavalry horse, and if a Wagner recital bored him to death his spirit rose, nevertheless, to the bugle, and he drilled his troop until he could play with it and snap it ...
— The Port of Missing Men • Meredith Nicholson
... there he had discovered the lack of several other essentials for a quiet "mountain life" (as he appropriately phrased it), and these defects were rapidly being remedied as our friend drove up. The conservatory was already completed, with the exception of the orchid and palm houses; the aviary was practically ready, and several crates of the rarer humming-birds were expected per goods train that evening; while a staff of electricians could be seen erecting the ...
— Count Bunker • J. Storer Clouston
... To enlist the services of Saunderson, would be almost impossible; he lives in his orchid houses; they are his world. In matters of ordinary life I can trust him above most ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... the orchid-house, we went through it, and she explained all its beauties, its singularities, and its rarities. When we came out again, I asked myself: "Is she in the habit of doing all this to chance visitors? Would she treat a Brown or a Robinson in the way she is treating ...
— A Bicycle of Cathay • Frank R. Stockton
... 5,000 feet. The natives call it "a little man's bread," in allusion to the tradition that the Neilgherries were once peopled by a race of dwarfs.[AM] At first it was supposed that these were the bulbs of some orchid, but later another view was held of their character. Mr. Scott, who examined the specimens sent down to him, remarks that, instead of being the product of orchids, it is that of an underground fungus of the genus Mylitta. It indeed seems, he says, very ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... state on paper what I have to say. I can readily appreciate that the encounter is disagreeable. To meet one who has made a thing impossible to you sets the nerves on edge." He caught up his opera hat, his cane and gloves. He raised the lapel of his coat and sniffed at the orchid ...
— Arms and the Woman • Harold MacGrath
... orchid," was the hotel man's answer. "I don't know much about such things myself, but Mr. Madison, the girls' father, is quite a naturalist, and I guess they take after him. He collects birds, bugs and flowers, and the ...
— The Moving Picture Girls Under the Palms - Or Lost in the Wilds of Florida • Laura Lee Hope
... very far from the Arcadian condition, in which I meet people here at every step. You are intricate; you are like an orchid, one stem of which has a flower in the form of a butterfly, while the next ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... it was only to stop every now and then before some fresh find—sometimes it would be a curiously-shaped orchid, or a pitcher-plant half full of dead insects. Then some great forest tree full of sweet-scented blossoms, and alive with birds and insects, would arrest our attention; or down in some moist hollow, where a tiny stream trickled from the rocks, there would be enormous tree-ferns ...
— Nat the Naturalist - A Boy's Adventures in the Eastern Seas • G. Manville Fenn
... been made. Nature lays down a green sward directly on the rich virgin mould, and sets to work besides to cover up the unsightly stems and holes of the fallen timber with luxuriant tufts of a species of hart's-tongue fern, which grows almost as freely as an orchid on decayed timber. I was so still and silent that innumerable forest birds came about me. A wood pigeon alighted on a branch close by, and sat preening her radiant plumage in a bath of golden sunlight. The profound stillness ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... connection is local, based on belonging to one country or hunting-ground; this name a child takes from its mother wherever it may happen to be born. Any one who is called a Noongahburrah belongs to the Noongah-Kurrajong country; Ghurreeburrah to the orchid country; Mirriehburrah, poligonum country; Bibbilah, Bibbil country, and so on. This division, not of blood relationship, carries no independent marriage restriction, but keeps up a feeling equivalent to Scotch, Irish, or English, and is counted by the blacks as 'relationship,' but not sufficiently ...
— The Euahlayi Tribe - A Study of Aboriginal Life in Australia • K. Langloh Parker
... musk-rat, the musk-duct, the musk-beetle; while among plants which have received their names from a real or supposed musky odor are, besides several that are called musk-plant, the musk-rose, the musk-hyacinth, the musk-mallow, the musk-orchid, the musk-melon, the musk-cherry, the musk-pear, the musk-plum, muskat and muscatels, musk-seed, musk-tree, musk-wood, etc.[60] But a musky odor is not merely widespread in Nature among plants and the lower animals, it is peculiarly associated with man. Incidentally we have ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... water, to keep up the vitality sufficient to produce the secretions necessary to carry them safely through the dull days of winter. Look over all growing plants, and see that they do not suffer for want of water. Look to every Orchid, even the smallest growing on blocks or in baskets, they all require attention. Repot or surface dress any that require it. A favourable day to be chosen to wash the lights for the more free admission of that ...
— In-Door Gardening for Every Week in the Year • William Keane
... sovereign to reward merit, or abolished to punish offences, are numerously recorded. Thus, when (A.D. 413) the future consort of the Emperor Inkyo was walking in the garden with her mother, a provincial ruler (miyatsuko), riding by, peremptorily called to her for a branch of orchid. She asked what he needed the orchid for and he answered, "To beat away mosquitoes when I travel mountain roads." "Oh, honourable sir, I shall not forget," said the lady. When she became Empress, she caused the nobleman to be sought for, and had him deprived of his rank in lieu of ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... in the grate, and some palest orchid-mauve silk curtains were drawn in the lady's room when Paul entered from the terrace. And loveliest sight of all, in front of the fire, stretched at full length, was his tiger—and on him—also at full length—reclined ...
— Three Weeks • Elinor Glyn
... associated personally with the evil one may be mentioned the henbane, which is known in Germany as the "devil's eye," a name applied to the stich-wort in Wales. A species of ground moss is also styled in Germany the "devil's claws;" one of the orchid tribe is "Satan's hand;" the lady's fingers is "devil's claws," and the plantain is "devil's head." Similarly the house-leek has been designated the "devil's beard," and a Norfolk name for the stinkhorn is "devil's horn." Of further plants related to his Satanic majesty is the clematis, termed ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... that your hands (that never took mine) your hands that I could see drift over the orchid heads so carefully, your hands, so fragile, sure to lift so gently, the fragile flower stuff— ah, ah, how ...
— Hymen • Hilda Doolittle
... for his delight the entire gamut of roses from the Maryland to the American Beauty, the violet and its college-bred descendant the pansy, the heliotrope, the gladiolus, the carnation, the primrose, the chrysanthemum, the sweet pea, the aster, and the orchid. But, if he can reach the high plane of the lily-of-the-valley, in all its daintiness, delicacy, chastity, and fragrance, he will have achieved distinction. When society shall have attained to the lily-of-the-valley plane, life will be fine, ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... a young, keen-eyed doctor,[44] glanced quickly through the trees and occasionally turned aside to pick some strange orchid and to slip it into his collecting case. The other strode steadily along with that curious, "resolute forward tread" of his.[45] He was David Livingstone. Behind them came a string of African bearers carrying in bundles on their heads the tents ...
— The Book of Missionary Heroes • Basil Mathews
... woods, we come upon other plants, not really "Alpine" at all, but of great and special beauty. We found four kinds of winter-green (Pirola), one with a very large, solitary flower, white and wax-like, and the beautiful white butterfly-orchid with nectaries three quarters of an inch long, and other large-flowered orchids. We were anxious to find the noble Martagon lily, and hunted in many glades and forest borders for it. At last, concealed on a bank in a wood, between Glion and Les Avants, it revealed itself in ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... ceremony of getting married at the finish, or decline into the most delicately-finished melancholy that resignation, or more properly, renunciation can produce. Yet the atmosphere in which they dwell is sickly to the sound soul. It is as if one were placed in an orchid house full of dainty and rare plants, and kept there until the quiet air and the light scents overpowered every faculty. In all the doings of these superfine Americans and Frenchmen and Britons and Italians there is something almost inhuman; the record of a strong speech, a blow, a ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... "-glass," lorneto. operate : funkciigi; (med.) operacii. opinion : opinio; ("be of—"), opinii. opium : opio. opportunity : okazo. oppress : subpremi. or : aux. oracle : orakolo. orange : orangx'o, -kolora. orbit : orbito. orchard : fruktarbejo. orchestra : orkestro. orchid : orkideo. order : ordo; klaso; ordoni; mendi; (postal) posxtmandato, (decoration) ordeno. ore : minajxo, mineralo, metalo. organ : organo, -ilo; (music) orgeno. organic : organika. organise : organizi. origin : deveno, origino. original : original'a, -o. ornament : ornamo; garnituro. ...
— The Esperanto Teacher - A Simple Course for Non-Grammarians • Helen Fryer
... The great orchid family is well known on account of the singular form and brilliant colors of the flowers which have no equals in these respects in the whole vegetable kingdom. As might be expected, there are numerous contrivances ...
— Elements of Structural and Systematic Botany - For High Schools and Elementary College Courses • Douglas Houghton Campbell
... your eye lifting to note it. As you entered this tent from the town side, there were on either side three tiers of Burmese ladies sitting one above the other, their faces becomingly powdered with yellowish powder, and their eyebrows strongly pencilled, and they each had a yellow orchid in their black hair, and their dresses were of silks of infinite variety of tint—primrose, rose, and delicate white—"soft as puff, and puff, of grated orris root" and they glittered with diamonds and emeralds, and each ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... design, have received at the hands of Mr. Darwin a very different interpretation. The lobster's powerful claw, the butterfly's gorgeous tints, the rose's delicious fragrance, the architectural instinct of the bee, the astonishing structure of the orchid, are no longer explained as the results of contrivance. That simple but wasteful process of survival of the fittest, through which such marvellous things have come into being, has little about it that is analogous to the ingenuity of human art. The infinite ...
— The Destiny of Man - Viewed in the Light of His Origin • John Fiske
... account, though that, of course, would depend on the flower-girl. To buy other things with flowers were not so incongruous. I have often thought of trying my tobacconist with a tulip; and certainly an orchid—no very rare one either—should cover one's household expenses for a ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... wheat-fields of the West, its ranches, mines, colossal slaughter-houses,—all the formidable traffic of this country of effort and struggle, all its labor,—these are what have made possible this woman, this living orchid, unexpected masterpiece of ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... well-kept paths among the rhododendra and through the private gate into the woods where the bluebells and common orchid were in profusion. Never before had I tasted so completely the fine sense of privilege and ownership. And all this has to end, I told myself, all ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... that grows in an absurd way on the top of a tree. Why shouldn't a young man go as far as Germany after a beautiful Princess, who walks on the ground, and who can talk and think and feel? She is much more worth while than an orchid." ...
— The Princess Aline • Richard Harding Davis
... depths of the sea, the freshwaters, the dry land, and the air. In the deep sea there are no plants at all; in the air the only plants are floating bacteria, though there is a sense in which a tree is very aerial, and the orchid perched on its branches still more so; in the other four haunts there is a flora as well as a fauna—the two working into one another's hands in interesting and often subtle inter-relations—the ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... best of my knowledge the plant, from the blade of grass to the oak or the orchid, always fulfils its life-span, unless some act or accident cripples or destroys it. I mean that we never see God bringing the shoot above the soil just to nip it before it unfolds. We never see Him bring the bud to the eve of blossoming just to wither it. Having given it its mission He supplies ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... she might achieve notoriety. Not now, perhaps, but later when she had developed into a woman and knew her own power. Paris loved all things strange, and gave homage to the woman who was among her fellows as the orchid among flowers. ...
— The Hippodrome • Rachel Hayward
... Returning I entered my office; the phone jangled. The burly tenor was tearfully sobbing and moaning over the wire; Tremor and emotion choked his throat. This was his ominous message: A taxicab accident almost had killed him two and one half days ago; He had escaped with his body and orchid-lined voice— And not a line in the mornings or evenings! What could I do ...
— The Broadway Anthology • Edward L. Bernays, Samuel Hoffenstein, Walter J. Kingsley, Murdock Pemberton
... across a Sunday-noon, lace-spread breakfast table, when she was slim and cool fingered in orchid-colored draperies, and his newest gift of a six-carat, pear-shaped diamond blazing away on her right hand. "Say, aren't these Yvette bills ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... supernatural Artificer has been founded. His book is a repository of the most startling facts of this description. Take the marvellous observation which he cites from Dr. Krueger, where a bucket, with an aperture serving as a spout, is formed in an orchid. Bees visit the flower: in eager search of material for their combs, they push each other into the bucket, the drenched ones escaping from their involuntary bath by the spout. Here they rub their backs against the viscid stigma of the flower and obtain glue; then against the pollen ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... visiting list, the other being a list of his engagements from day to day. He and his accomplishments were a finished work of art between them. But in a larger world his development would have been no more possible than the development of an orchid in the middle ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... are white, oval and very small. They measure barely two-thirds of a millimetre[8] in length. They stick together slightly and are piled in a shapeless heap which might be likened to a good-sized pinch of the unripe seeds of some orchid. As for their number, I will admit that it tried my patience to no purpose. I do not, however, believe that I am exaggerating when I estimate it as at least two thousand. Here are the data on which I base this figure: the laying, as I have said, lasts thirty-six hours; ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... that; he's a blooming orchid," said Diogenes, with intense enthusiasm. "I think I'll get my X-ray lantern and ...
— The Pursuit of the House-Boat • John Kendrick Bangs
... Swing it! Sure, we're in the groove now, but you never can tell! I'll buy you an orchid, honey! Not roses, just one orchid—black like your hair! Ever see a black orchid, hon? They're ...
— The Man from Time • Frank Belknap Long
... that we can learn in nature could no more be covered in a chapter in this book than the same space could cover a history of the world. I have two large books devoted to the discussion of a single kind of flower, the "orchid." It is estimated that there are about two hundred thousand kinds of flowers, so for this subject alone, we should need a bookshelf over a mile long. This is not stated to discourage any one for of course no one can learn all there is to know ...
— Outdoor Sports and Games • Claude H. Miller
... a time I knew a lovely way to tell for certain By looking in the ears. But I forget it. Er, let me see. I think I'll take the right. That's sure to be right even if it's wrong. Come, hold it out. Don't change.—A Ram's Horn orchid! A Ram's Horn! What would I have got, I wonder, If I had chosen left. Hold out the left. Another Ram's Horn! Where did you find those, Under what beech tree, on what woodchuck's knoll?" Anne looked at the large lawyer at her ...
— North of Boston • Robert Frost
... work, having regard to Tom's share in the disaster at Lowndes Square; and the more so because Geraldine's visit to Dawes Road had not been a dazzling success. Geraldine in Dawes Road had somehow the air, the brazen air, of an orchid in a clump of violets; the violets, by their mere quality of being violets, rebuked the orchid, and the orchid could not have flourished for any extended period in that temperature. Still, Mrs. Knight and Aunt Annie said to ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... through this sandy expanse lovely oases, locally known as "hammocks", usually in hollows, and consisting of several acres of rich soil where tropic and sub-tropic trees grow as luxuriantly as in a jungle, where undergrowth and vine run riot, where orchid and airplant and wondrous-hued flowers blaze through the green ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... awry! Great, jagged leaves covered with prickles and stained all over with blotches as of spilt poison, . . thick brown stems glistening with slimy moisture and coiled up like the sleeping bodies of snakes, . . masses of purple and blue fungi, . . and blossoms seemingly of the orchid species, some like fleshy tongues, others like the waxen yellow fingers of a dead hand, protruded spectrally through the matted foliage,—while all manner of strange, overpowering odors increased the swooning oppressiveness ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... for news of the years between then and now. It was so wonderful that the surly young beginner in vaudeville should have evolved into this orchid of the salons. He was interested in the working of such social machinery. ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... living presence, rather than to consider them merely for the timber value. But the point of view differs immensely with one's occupation. I remember finding in the depths of an Alleghany forest a comparatively rare native orchid, then new to me—the round-leaved or orbicular habenaria. While I was gloating over it with my camera a gray-haired native of the neighborhood joined me, and, to my surprise, assisted in the gloating—he, too, loved ...
— Getting Acquainted with the Trees • J. Horace McFarland
... strike his fancy, could add two or three handsome ties. They strolled along Kearney Street and Post Street, and Susan selected an enormous bunch of violets at Podesta and Baldocchi's, declining the unwholesome-looking orchid that was Peter's choice. They bought a camera, which was left that a neat "P.W.C." might be stamped upon it, and went into Shreve's, a place always fascinating to Susan, to leave Mr. Coleman's watch to be regulated, and ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris |
