"Prickly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... they also passed on. Night had already fallen; they nevertheless rode over half a mile, and halted only in a place where the ravine widened again into a small amphitheatrical vale, overgrown with dense thorns and prickly ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... Uncle Lucky did, and of course he got stuck with one of those prickly, stickery porcupine needles and it was an awful bother to ...
— Billy Bunny and Uncle Bull Frog • David Magie Cory
... possess certain subtle qualities, which excite terrific enthusiasm for its destruction on the part of the dog. Either there is an hereditary feud between the dog and the echidna, which the former is bound in honour to push to the last extremity, or else the dog regards the prickly creature as a perpetual affront, or specially created to provide opportunities for displaying fanatic hatred and hostility. No dog of healthy instinct is able to pass an echidna without some sort of an attempt upon its life. The long tubular nose of the echidna is ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... Europe, fell exhausted at last upon the shore of Terceira. There were no insects then for the poor bird to feed upon, so it died of starvation and weariness before the day was out; but a little earth that clung in a pellet to one of its feet contained the egg of a land-shell, while the prickly seed of a common Spanish plant was entangled among the winged feathers by its hooked awns. The egg hatched out, and became the parent of a large brood of minute snails, which, outliving the cold spell ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... to him since we went into that store," Bob said again and again, as he puzzled his wits to hit upon an explanation for the animal's remarkable antics. "Now, what could it have been? Would any fellow be so mean as to fasten some of those prickly sand burrs under his tail? Or perhaps it's a poison thorn ...
— The Saddle Boys of the Rockies - Lost on Thunder Mountain • James Carson
... goodwill had been won by his kind and conciliatory manners, while their admiration and respect had been thoroughly roused and excited by his prowess and valour in the chase. On one occasion, it is recorded, word was brought to Outram of the presence of a panther in some prickly-pear shrubs on the side of a hill near his station. He went to shoot it with a friend, Outram being on foot and his friend on horseback searching through the bushes. When close on the animal, Outram's friend ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... reprimand, to be anxious about? There she is, a lily of the valley, untinted, needing no tint. What change could improve her? What pencil dare to paint? My sweetheart, if I ever have one, must bear nearer affinity to the rose—a sweet, lively delight guarded with prickly peril. My wife, if I ever marry, must stir my great frame with a sting now and then; she must furnish use to her husband's vast mass of patience. I was not made so enduring to be mated with a lamb; I ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... Morning as often as the Nature of the Service will permit. However the following Caution, mentioned by Dr. Lind, ought to be observed, which is, not to go into the cold Bath when overheated with Work or Liquor, or when the Stomach is full, or when a critical Eruption, called the prickly ...
— An Account of the Diseases which were most frequent in the British military hospitals in Germany • Donald Monro
... green piled one upon another, with the strange light of the noonday sun playing over them and turning their colours into a blaze of glory. Beyond was a stretch of sand, broken here and there by sage-brush, greasewood, or cactus rearing its prickly spines grotesquely. ...
— The Man of the Desert • Grace Livingston Hill
... took the first opportunity of leaving the place for Teneriffe, so that the few Europeans had no expectation of any medical assistance except that of the natives. Plaisters of gum ammoniac, and the juice of the leaves of the opuntia, or kermuse ensarrah, i.e. prickly pear, were universally applied to the carbuncles, as well as to the buboes, which quickly brought them to suppuration: many of the people of property took copious draughts of coffee and Peruvian bark. The Vinaigre ...
— An Account of Timbuctoo and Housa Territories in the Interior of Africa • Abd Salam Shabeeny
... soldiers. When Stedman describes himself as killing thirty-eight mosquitoes at one stroke, we must perhaps pardon something to the spirit of martyrdom. But when we add to these the other woes of his catalogue,—prickly-heat, ringworm, putrid-fever, "the growling of Col. Fougeaud, dry sandy savannas, unfordable marshes, burning hot days, cold and damp nights, heavy rains, and short allowance,"—we can hardly wonder that three captains died in a month, and that in two months his detachment of ...
— Black Rebellion - Five Slave Revolts • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... the gun-barrel road into a desert green and beautiful with vegetation. Now he passed a blooming azalea or a yucca with clustering bellflowers. The prickly pear and the cat-claw clutched at his chaps. The arrowweed and the soapweed were everywhere, as was also the stunted creosote. The details were not lovely, but in the sunset light of late afternoon the silvery sheen of the mesquite had its own ...
— A Man Four-Square • William MacLeod Raine
... of Frank and Art from the Corner House, Jemmy Murray and another man were one day in the beginning of May strolling through one of his pasture-fields. His companion was a thin, hard-visaged little fellow, with a triangular face, and dry bristly hair, very much the color of, and nearly as prickly as, a withered furze bush; both, indeed, were congenial spirits, for it is only necessary to say, that he of the furze bush was another of those charital and generous individuals whose great delight consisted, like his friend Murray, in watching the seasons, and speculating ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... sediment and decayed vegetable matter, revealing the pebbly bottom, fresh and bright, with one or two fish suspended over the centre of it, keeping watch and ward. If an intruder approached, they would dart at him spitefully. These fish have the air of bantam cocks, and, with their sharp, prickly fins and spines and scaly sides, must be ugly customers in a hand-to-hand encounter with other finny warriors. To a hungry man they look about as unpromising as hemlock slivers, so thorny and thin are they; yet there is sweet meat in them, ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
... from the palace, within sight of the square, a fort or inclosure, about nine feet high, had been built of adobe, and surrounded by a pile of tall, prickly briers. Within this barrier, secured to stakes, stood fifty captives who were to be immolated at the opening of the festival. When the drill of the amazons and the royal review were over, there was, ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... Cordillera, across the continent. I saw it in unfrequented spots in Chile, Entre Rios, and Banda Oriental. In the latter country alone, very many (probably several hundred) square miles are covered by one mass of these prickly plants, and are impenetrable by man or beast. Over the undulating plains, where these great beds occur, nothing else can now live. Before their introduction, however, the surface must have supported, as in other parts, a rank herbage. I doubt whether any case is on ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... my luggage up the zigzags for an hour and a half through dust and sunshine, past orchards of lemons and oranges, among prickly pears and agave overgrown with pink and red geranium, by rocky slopes of mesembryanthemum, yellow marguerites, broom and sweet peas, between white walls with roses straggling over them and occasional glimpses of the sea dotted with fishing boats and, now and then, of the land covered with ...
— Diversions in Sicily • H. Festing Jones
... I said. "Here, let me look." He slowly laid the little prickly animal down on the earthen floor and pushed it towards me—a concession of civility that was wonderful for Shock; and I eagerly examined the curious little creature, pricking my fingers a good deal ...
— Brownsmith's Boy - A Romance in a Garden • George Manville Fenn
... Mountain and wooded headland are solid, deep to the eye, spirit-speaking to the mind. They throb. You carve shapes of Gods out of that sky, the sea, those peaks. They live with you. How they satiate the vacant soul by influx, and draw forth the troubled from its prickly nest!—Well, and you are my sunlighted land. And you will have to be fought for. And I see not the less repose in the prospect! Part of you may be shifty-sand. The sands are famous for their golden shining—as you shine. Well, then, we must ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... The rose trees are dragging at Will with their prickly fingers. With great effort he burst away from them, and rushed out, with no worse mischance than a rent ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... was waiting for. And as soon as the frosts came and burst open the prickly pods that covered the beechnuts he intended to lead the first nutting party of the season to the place ...
— The Tale of Jasper Jay - Tuck-Me-In Tales • Arthur Scott Bailey
... wounded were necessarily abandoned to their fate. For some time the Giljyes seemed not to be on the alert; but in the defile, at the top of the rise, further progress was obstructed by barriers formed of prickly trees. This caused great delay, and "a terrible fire was poured in from all quarters—a massacre even worse than that of the Tunga Tarikee[24] commenced, the Affghans rushing in furiously upon the pent-up crowd of troops and followers, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... over a sheep, whose fleece he was relieving of a strange growth of burrs and prickly, brambly strands with ...
— First in the Field - A Story of New South Wales • George Manville Fenn
... into the castle court, His charger trampling many a prickly star Of sprouted thistle on the broken stones. He looked and saw that all was ruinous. Here stood a shattered archway plumed with fern; And here had fallen a great part of a tower, Whole, like a crag that tumbles from the cliff, And like a crag was gay with wilding ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... imagination with an independent legend. All over the slope of the mountain are scattered the pagodas, mosques, and temples of numberless sects. Here and there the hot rays of the sun strike upon an old fortress, once dreadful and inaccessible, now half ruined and covered with prickly cactus. At every step some memorial of sanctity. Here a deep vihara, a cave cell of a Buddhist bhikshu saint, there a rock protected by the symbol of Shiva, further on a Jaina temple, or a holy tank, all covered with sedge and filled with water, once blessed by a Brahman ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... indicates silent love—refraining from unclosing "her cup of paly gold until her lowly sisters are rocked into a balmy slumber." The bramble, from its manner of growth, has been chosen as the type of lowliness; and "from the fierceness with which it grasps the passer-by with its straggling prickly stems, as ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... that Pool; and near it, then, Was neither rotten marsh nor boggy fen. It was not overgrown with boisterous sedge, Nor grew there rudely, then, along the edge A bending willow, nor a prickly bush, Nor broad-leafed flag, nor reed, nor knotty rush: But here, well ordered, was a grove with bowers; There, grassy plots, set round about with flowers. Here, you might, through the water, see the land Appear, strewed o'er with white or yellow sand. Yon, deeper was it; and the ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... proclivities by losing me job, bein' already harassed in me soul on account of havin' quarrelled with Norah Flynn a week before by reason of hard words spoken at the Dairymen and Street-Sprinkler Drivers' semi-annual ball, caused by jealousy and prickly heat and that divil, ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... pencil and across the top of her sheet indicated an open sky with scarcely a hint of cloud. Across the bottom she outlined a bit of Sunland Desert she well remembered, in the foreground a bed of flat-leaved nopal, flowering red and yellow, the dark red prickly pears, edible, being a near relative of the fruits she had used in her salad. After giving the prickly pear the place of honor to the left, in higher growth she worked in the slender, cylindrical, jointed stems of the Cholla, shading the flowers ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... Indian corn peeping amidst masses of granite rock and tangled brushwood. The vine and the olive grew wild on every side; while the orange and the arbutus, loading the air with perfume, were mingled with prickly pear-trees and variegated hollies. We followed no regular track, but cantered along over hill and valley, through forest and prairie, now in long file through some tall field of waving corn, now in open order upon some level plain,—our Portuguese guide riding a little in advance of us, upon a jet-black ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... all quadrangular, and much curved. The upper shell is of a black colour inclining to green; the feet and claws are like those of the arrau. The whole animal is of an olive-green, but it has two spots of red mixed with yellow on the top of the head. The throat is also yellow, and furnished with a prickly appendage. The terekays do not assemble in numerous societies like the arraus, to lay their eggs in common, and deposit them upon the same shore. The eggs of the terekay have an agreeable taste, and are ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... were very near their camp, which is called in their language Berkelet. But the short distance of the Moors was found very long by the females and the children, on account of the downs of sand which we had to ascend and descend every instant, also of prickly shrubs over which we were frequently obliged to walk. Those who were barefooted, felt most severely at this time the want of their shoes. I myself lost among the bushes various shreds of my dress, and my feet and legs were all streaming ...
— Perils and Captivity • Charlotte-Adelaide [nee Picard] Dard
... us across a meadow, which I can well remember was surrounded by a very thick thorn hedge, which delayed us very much, as we had to jump over it; and I not being much of a jumper myself, managed to find myself in the middle of it. It was a very prickly berth, and became more so when our sergeant, who had got clear himself, came to my assistance to pull me through. I got scratched all over, but that was not so bad as the thought of the bullets that were peppering through the ...
— The Autobiography of Sergeant William Lawrence - A Hero of the Peninsular and Waterloo Campaigns • William Lawrence
... looked barren and prickly, Without the sign of a leaf; Over the flower there bowed a heart Grown cold with ...
— Landscape and Song • Various
... They were light green in color, narrow and long-pointed at the upper end, and spiny along the sides. This plant, named guamara, bears spikes of yellow fruits which are pointed at the upper end, but in color, size, texture, structure and taste reminded us of podophyllum, though it leaves a prickly sensation in the mouth, much like that produced by fresh pineapples. There were also many trees bearing little limes or lemons, of which we gathered abundance for making lemonade. At two o'clock our man pointed out a ranch-house near the road, in front of which two men sat eating, and told ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr
... gardens, inclosed by high and substantial walls, which now contain a great variety of fruit-trees and shrubbery. I noticed the orange, fig, palm, olive, and grape. There are also large inclosures hedged in by the prickly-pear (cactus), which grows to an enormous size, and makes an impervious barrier against man or beast. The stalks of some of these plants are of the thickness of a man's body, and grow to the height of fifteen feet. A juicy fruit ...
— What I Saw in California • Edwin Bryant
... I entered a fir wood, and I began to feel more my real self. I saw the dark pines, from whose prickly foliage the snow crystals were falling; I realized a stern beauty in the scene; but I had not time to think about it. I felt I was near the end of my journey, and I began to wonder at my condition. I had not gone far ...
— Weapons of Mystery • Joseph Hocking
... letters in the States, that favourite theme for boasting and bragging over the unenlightened and analphabetic Old World, has tended only to exaggerate the defective and disagreeable side of a national character lacking geniality and bristling with prickly individuality. This disposition of mind, whose favourable and laudable presentations are love of liberty and self-reliance, began with the beginnings of American history. The "Fathers," Pilgrim and Puritan, who left their country for their ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... settlement there ought to be a live one, I reasoned, unless those who are buried here date from Peninsular battles. The first part of the road to Blanche's Castle is level, and bordered with thick growths of prickly pear; there is a view of the sea, and of the Guadalate, spanned by a metal bridge—a Menai on a small scale. Farther on, as we get to a district called La Piedad, the country is diversified by swampy flats at one ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... Furrow the brows of all the impending hills. The water-gods to floods their rivulets turn, And each, with streaming eyes, supplies his wanting urn. The fauns forsake the woods, the nymphs the grove, And round the plain in sad distractions rove: In prickly brakes their tender limbs they tear, And leave on thorns their locks of golden hair. With their sharp nails, themselves the satyrs wound, And tug their shaggy beards, and bite with grief the ground. Lo Pan himself, beneath a blasted oak, Dejected lies, his pipe in pieces broke See Pales ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... sentences has not yet entirely departed from the schools. Familiar are: "Up the high hill he heaved a huge round stone; around the rugged riven rock the ragged rascal rapid ran; Peter Piper picked a peck of prickly pears from the prickly-pear trees on the pleasant prairies," and many others still in use traditionally among the school-children of to-day, together with linguistic exercises of nonsense-syllables and the like, pronouncing ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... grapes; and then, after crossing a few broad valleys of green turf, our progress was stopped by hundreds of acres of plum trees, bending to the very ground with their fruit. Among these were interspersed patches of rose trees, wild currants, and gooseberries, with prickly pears, and the most ...
— History, Manners, and Customs of the North American Indians • George Mogridge
... easterly, but we went in a northerly direction in order to avoid the Indians. We travelled all that night, the next day, and a portion of its night until we reached the Arkansas River, and, having eaten nothing during that whole time excepting a few prickly-pears, were beginning to feel weak from the weight of our burdens and exhaustion. At this point we decided to lighten our loads by burying all of the money we had carried thus far, keeping only a small sum for each man. Proceeding ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... northward, turning again after a while due west on to General Stanhope's road. But that was nothing to me then. Turning my back upon it, I took another path, in woeful disrepair, which led me down by many windings between high stone walls and straggling clumps of prickly pear. There were few houses to stop the view—only some two or three farm buildings. Cottages can scarcely be said to exist. The labourer either lives in the towns, or else he lodges under his master's roof. But the high walls and the hummocks shut one in, and I was perpetually having to climb ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... near this camp, and having boiled them thoroughly, we made of them a hearty if not quite an appetizing meal. They did not seem unpalatable at the time, and had we possessed salt to add taste and digestibility to our prickly diet, we might have felt quite happy. We supplied the deficiency by mixing with them a double quantity of pepper. At any rate, it was a relief to know that, while nettles lasted near our camp, we should at least not die ...
— An Explorer's Adventures in Tibet • A. Henry Savage Landor
... are. At last, at last. Now let's try and find a place where we can sit down. The grass is full of that horrid prickly gorse." ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... a heap of round ironstones piled one upon another, as over some giant's grave. Here and there a few tufts of grass or small succulent plants had sprung up among its stones, and on the very summit a clump of prickly-pears lifted their thorny arms, and reflected, as from mirrors, the moonlight on their broad fleshy leaves. At the foot of the kopje lay the homestead. First, the stone-walled sheep kraals and Kaffer huts; beyond ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... prickly Holly,' said her father. 'You know that I allow no lady to be spoken against ...
— Hollyhock - A Spirit of Mischief • L. T. Meade
... to Jerusalem and Egypt, past Lubia and other Syrian hamlets, perched, in the unvarying style, upon the summit of steep mounds and hills, and fenced round about with giant cactuses, (the sign of worthless land,) with prickly pears upon them like hams, and came at last to the battle-field ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the devices of military engineers had been provided for the Turks by Dame Nature. Along the southern outskirts of the town all the fields were enclosed by giant cactus hedges, sometimes with stems as thick as a man's body and not infrequently rearing their strong limbs and prickly leaves twenty feet above the ground. The hedges were deep as well as high. They were at once a screen for defending troops and a barrier as impenetrable as the walls of a fortress. If one line of cactus hedges had been cut through, infantry would ...
— How Jerusalem Was Won - Being the Record of Allenby's Campaign in Palestine • W.T. Massey
... rose, until a great soft barrier seemed erected before us, almost as high as the trees; dense at their roots, tapering away to indistinctness at their tops, where the sunset glow lay warm and bright upon their prickly branches. ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... blanket, he took two tough prickly burrs of the sweet-gum and placed one on each side of the pony's spine, where the saddle would rest. Then he put the blanket and saddle back, taking care to place them on very gently and tighten ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... table-lands, upholding mountains whose peaks were veiled in cloud. The solitude of the plain was rendered more impressive by the absence of wild creatures of any kind: there were no birds nor insects nor ground-squirrels nor snakes. The cactus generally grew in clumps, but sometimes it formed a green prickly wall on either side of the road, between which we had to pass as between the bayonets of sentinels. Wherever the road widened out we clattered along, six abreast, at full speed. Maria, the native woman, presented a picturesque appearance with her black dress and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... three crops of vegetables are raised each year. Much of the land was rocky and uncultivated. Very few trees were seen and those were dwarfed. One species of evergreen tree, called the Carob, grew only ten feet in height, but spread to three times that in breadth. In some neglected spots the prickly pear grew in rank masses. The houses along the way, built of yellow or gray stone, had a weather-beaten look, and the yards around them were enclosed with high walls. The small square windows in the houses and the flat stone roofs with enclosing parapets reminded us of ...
— A Trip to the Orient - The Story of a Mediterranean Cruise • Robert Urie Jacob
... I felt prickly all over, and there was a damp patch on the pillow, which was soon explained by a heavy drop of moisture falling on ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... one who had been through the same educational mill as himself, than if they had merely come from some rough diamond, some artist, some foreigner, even from a doctor like George. And they always made him uncomfortable, like the touch of a prickly leaf; they did not amuse him. Certainly Edward Pierson shrank from the rough touches of a knock-about philosophy. After all, it was but natural that ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... rear, the shelter afforded by the belt of furze bushes was artificially improved by an inclosure of upright stakes, interwoven with boughs of the same prickly vegetation, and within the inclosure lay a renowned Marlbury-Down breeding flock of eight ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... examples of that inspired soliloquy, those conversations of one, which are our nearest approach to the talk of other days. How good it is to listen to one of these!—for it is the great charm of their talk that we remember nothing. There were no prickly bits of information to stick on one's mind like burrs. Their talk had no regular features, but, like a sunrise, was all music ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... symptoms of yellow bile and what is to be feared there-from?' (A.) 'The symptoms are, sallow complexion and dryness and bitter taste in the mouth, failure of the appetite, and rapid pulse; and the patient has to fear high fever and delirium and prickly heat and jaundice and tumour and ulceration of the bowels and excessive thirst.' (Q.) 'What are the symptoms of black bile and what has the patient to fear from it, if it get the mastery of the body?' (A.) 'The symptoms are deceptive appetite and great mental disquiet and care and ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume IV • Anonymous
... upright, or only a little arched at the top, but in the greater number it is prostrate and arched, the ends of the shoots rooting when they reach the ground, and forming new plants, sometimes at the distance of several yards from the parent root. The branches and stems are all more or less prickly; those of the common bramble being armed with strong and sharp spines, and even the leaf-stems lined with very sharp reflected prickles, which hitch in everything they come near, and inflict sharp wounds. The corolla is formed of an inferior calyx of one leaf, divided into five segments, of five ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 462 - Volume 18, New Series, November 6, 1852 • Various
... landed with Banks and Solander in a large bay, in search of a spot where he could have the keel and bottom of his vessel repaired, but they were scarcely on terra firma, when they found their progress impeded by a thick shrub, prickly and studded with sharp seeds, no doubt a species of "spinifex," which clung to the clothes, pierced them, and penetrated the flesh. At the same time, myriads of gnats and mosquitoes attacked them, and covered ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... are imported are excellent breakfast fruits, such as the alligator pear, Lechosa prickly pear, pomegranate, ...
— Breakfast Dainties • Thomas J. Murrey
... six miles of prairie to traverse before he should reach the Jefferson Fork of the Missouri; how could he hope to hold out such a distance with the fearful odds of several hundred to one against him! The plain, too, abounded with the prickly pear, which wounded his naked feet. Still he fled on, dreading each moment to hear the twang of a bow, and to feel an arrow quivering at his heart. He did not even dare to look round, lest he should lose an inch of that distance on which his life depended. He had ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... girl she used to look for them among bushes in a field. There was no occasion to tell them at such a critical moment for their spirits that it was mid-winter, or that whins would be found rather prickly by poultry, or that there were no hens in the island but Mrs Macdonald's well sheltered pets. They were told that the first egg they found was to be presented to Lady Carse; and they themselves might divide ...
— The Billow and the Rock • Harriet Martineau
... didn't hear anything, outside or in. It was a very still night, and there wasn't even the creaking of the branches against each other. But Billy Jones was in the room. I wasn't afraid, but I felt queer. I had a kind of prickly feeling all over me. The hair on my head moved somehow, according to the feeling it gave me. Perhaps that was being afraid, only I don't take it so. The reason I think differently is that I didn't want it to stop. If Billy Jones was there, I didn't want him to go ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... might wade anywhere. Down in these waters, as transparent as air, you see coral plants of every hue and shape imaginable:—antlers, tufts of azure, waving reeds like stalks of grain, and pale green buds and mosses. In some places, you look through prickly branches down to a snow-white floor of sand, sprouting with flinty bulbs; and crawling among these are strange shapes:—some bristling with spikes, others clad in shining coats of mail, and here and there, round forms all ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... spread themselves across the pathway. Straight up over the mountain-tops on into the city of God runs this straight and narrow road. It is named the path of Goodness. And ever will the thorns prick and the briars spread, for few there be who tread far on this rough and prickly road. ...
— Stories from the Ballads - Told to the Children • Mary MacGregor
... side of the rose thicket, he would certainly have supposed that some old dame with a school was hidden away there, or at the least an anxious Mamma with a family of unruly children. But if this somebody had gone into the thicket, bobbing his head to avoid the prickly, wreath-like branches, he would have found on the other side only one person, little Lota Bird, playing all alone with her dolls. "Lady Bird" Nursey called Lota, because when, six years before, Papa fetched ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... tiptoe. So cautious did they become as they drew near, and came within the light of the lamp, that Barney at length attempted to step over his own shadow for fear of making a noise; and, in doing so, tripped and fell with considerable noise through a hedge of prickly shrubs that encircled the ...
— Martin Rattler • R.M. Ballantyne
... many other plants that live in safety because they are defended by poison, or thorns, or prickles, or some peculiar shape. The leaves of the common holly are only prickly on the lower branches, where it needs protection ...
— Woodside - or, Look, Listen, and Learn. • Caroline Hadley
... promising purple flesh, and look cooling and desirable, but are not to be attempted twice under penalty of gastric inconvenience. Plums and nuts abound, and are followed by a second course of hard, unripe, and tasteless nectarines and peaches. The season is closing fast, for the prickly pods of the ripening chestnut now begin to gape, and the indifferent grapes of the district attain their imperfect maturity, and are gathered for the wine-press. September is in its last week, and in less than another month we must all migrate somewhere for the winter. The baths, on the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... out on the ground now, picking their way carefully, for they were surrounded by clumps of prickly bushes. Mother Blossom joined Father Blossom, who was anxiously inspecting ...
— Four Little Blossoms on Apple Tree Island • Mabel C. Hawley
... quantities of gold in their channels. The inland inhabitants, called Monacaboes, are a barbarous and savage people, whose chief delight is in doing injury to their neighbours. On this account, the peasantry about Malacca sow no grain, except in inclosures defended by thickset prickly hedges or deep ditches: For, when the grain is ripe in the open plains, the Monacaboes never fail to set it on fire. These inland natives are much whiter than the Malays of the lower country; and the king of Johor, whose subjects they are or ought to be, has ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... about 67 leagues in circumference, and surrounded by towering rocks, which seemed to be meant to protect it from invasion. It was in the year 1325 that the Aztecs paused upon the shore of the lake, and saw, as the sun rose, a splendid eagle perched upon a prickly pear which shot out of a crevice in the rock. It held a large serpent in its claws, and its broad wings were opened towards the rising sun. The Aztecs saw in this a most favourable omen, and there and then set about ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... darkness and vapour obliterated the landscape. The going was not otherwise difficult, and here and there cowslips glimmered in patches of dancing yellow, while the springy turf made it easy to keep up speed; yet in the gloom I frequently tripped and plunged into prickly gorse near the ground, so that from shin to knee was soon a-tingle with sharp pain. Odd puffs and spits of rain stung my face, and the periods of utter stillness were always followed by little shouting gusts ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... never offered such a lovely retreat. There, the arid mesa had grown thorny mesquite, scraggled cypress, or stunted live-oak for a shade; sand had whirled ceaselessly before a high, hot wind; no flowers had bloomed but the pale toadflax and the prickly-pear; and beside the salt lakes of that almost waterless waste had nested only ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... hillsides. Dominant trees are large oaks and pines; a characteristic pine is the sad or drooping-needle pine, locally called "pino triste." The vegetational cover is usually open, including grasses, small oaks and pines, broad-leaved shrubs and herbs, prickly pears, magueys, thorny acacias, bracken fern, and epiphytes in trees. Ferns occur in moist protected places, and orchids are occasional, ...
— A New Species of Frog (Genus Tomodactylus) from Western Mexico • Robert G. Webb
... Little Brother," calls Arul, as she hurries back on the narrow path that winds between boulders and thickets of prickly pear cactus. Green parrots are screaming in the tamarind trees and overhead a white-throated Brahmany kite wheels motionless in the vivid blue. The sun is blazing now, but Arul runs unheeding. It is time for school—she ...
— Lighted to Lighten: The Hope of India • Alice B. Van Doren
... one had seen him; no one was sure of recognizing him, but everyone hugged the belief that he was on the train. Although the sun was sinking the heat seemed not to abate. Attitudes grew more limp, more abandoned. Soot and prickly dust flew in unceasingly at the open windows. The train stopped at Bonnard, Chemilly, and Moneteau, each time before a waiting crowd that invaded it. And at last, in the great station at Auxerre, it poured out an incredible mass of befouled humanity that spread over everything ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... leaves are seen, Wrinkled and keen; No grazing cattle, through their prickly round, Can reach to wound; But, as they grow where nothing is to fear, Smooth and unarmed ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... hospital stood in a field outside the village, surrounded by a thick, high hedge of prickly material. Within, the enclosure was filled by a dozen little wooden huts, painted green, connected with each other by plank walks. What went on outside the hedge, nobody within knew. War, presumably. War ten kilometres away, to judge by the map, and by the noise of the guns, ...
— The Backwash of War - The Human Wreckage of the Battlefield as Witnessed by an - American Hospital Nurse • Ellen N. La Motte
... green and less compliant than they were; And twisted in those mossy tufts that grow On brakes of roses when the roses fade: And as he passes on, the little hinds That shake for bristly herds the foodful bough, Wonder, stand still, gaze, and trip satisfied; Pleased more if chestnut, out of prickly husk Shot from the sandal, roll along the glade. And thus unnoticed went he, and untired Stepped up the acclivity; and as he stepped, And as the garlands nodded o'er his brow, Sudden from under a close alder sprang Th' expectant ...
— Gebir • Walter Savage Landor
... velocity, nothing gave us any particular trouble before dinner, which we ate in the shade of a mesquite on the right at the mouth of a couple of giant gulches. Here we discovered a large patch of cacti loaded with the red prickly pears or cactus apples, as we called them. They were ripe,—seeming to me to be half way between a fig and a tomato,—and very welcome for dessert, as we had eaten no fresh fruit since a watermelon brought along as far as the ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... growing shallower, it reached our knees, then our ankles; and at last we felt dry land! We had dragged the boat so far, but our strength failed us, and we left it. A black log of wood lay across our path; we jumped over it, and stepped with our bare feet on to some prickly grass. It seemed unkind of the land to give us such a cruel welcome, but we did not heed it, and ran toward the fire. It was about a mile away; but it shone cheerily through the hovering gloom of the night, and seemed to smile a ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky
... that a very old man on the Narran, dead some years ago, would show me his yunbeai if I wished; it was Oolah, the prickly lizard. ...
— The Euahlayi Tribe - A Study of Aboriginal Life in Australia • K. Langloh Parker
... climb that was! Up and up we struggled and toiled, perspiring all the way and gasping with heat and thirst. We tore all the skin off our arms and legs in forcing ourselves through the prickly patches of jungle, and almost splintered our feet against the rocks and gnarled roots of some of the trees, besides bruising our bodies all over with the repeated falls we had; and, all the while, we were suffering the most unmitigated pangs of hunger and thirst ...
— The Penang Pirate - and, The Lost Pinnace • John Conroy Hutcheson
... came away in his hand without any cutting. He tried another. That too was loose. He took off his jacket and threw it over his hands to protect them, and seizing an armful of furze pulled, and fell back, a great bundle of the prickly stuff on top of him. True was pulling like mad at the chain. Edred scrambled up; the furze he had pulled away disclosed a hole, and True was disappearing down it. Edred saw, as the dog dragged him close to the hole, that it ...
— Harding's luck • E. [Edith] Nesbit
... them. They save the bones of the fish they consume, the snakes and other animals, that they may afterward beat them together and eat the powder." During these painful periods, they bade Cabeza de Vaca "not to be sad. There would soon be prickly pears, although the season of this fruit of the cactus might be months distant. When the pears were ripe, the people feasted and danced and forgot their former privations. They destroyed their female infants to prevent them being taken by their enemies and thus becoming ...
— The Red Man's Continent - A Chronicle of Aboriginal America, Volume 1 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Ellsworth Huntington
... which guards one unkempt zone, Where vines and weeds and scrub-oaks intertwine Safe from the plough, whose rough, discordant stone 80 Is massed to one soft gray by lichens fine, The tangled blackberry, crossed and recrossed, weaves A prickly network of ensanguined leaves; Hard by, with coral beads, ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... distance rose bare hills, without ling or ploughed land; the prickly heath looked brown and yellow on the sharp declivities. A little boy and girl herded sheep by the way-side; the boy played the Pandean pipe, the little girl sang a psalm,—it was the best song which she knew how to sing to the traveller, in order ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... bunches of cactus with prickly leaves. Look out! don't catch your toe in those sea-ferns. Even that sweet green maiden-hair fern might pin down your foot so firmly that it would take a fish's sharp ...
— Lord Dolphin • Harriet A. Cheever
... on, my face and hands scratched by prickly vines and my clothing torn by fighting through thickets, and a panic began to grow on me that I was lost, although I refused to admit it. I soon had to stop running from exhaustion, the torment ...
— The Devil's Admiral • Frederick Ferdinand Moore
... and less water, and daily Billy Muck and Cheon scrimmaged over its yield; for Billy's melons were promising to pay a liberal dividend, and Cheon's garden was crying aloud for water. Every day was filled with flies, and dust, and prickly heat, and daily and hourly our hands waved unceasingly, as they beat back the multitude of flies that daily and hourly assailed us—the flies and dust treated all alike, but the prickly heat was more chivalrous, and refrained from annoying ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... been much delighted with the new and lovely scenery of our road: the prickly cactus, and aloe, with its white flowers; the Indian fig; the white and yellow jasmine; the fragrant vanilla, throwing round its graceful festoons. Above all, the regal pineapple grew in profusion, and we feasted on it, for the first time, ...
— The Swiss Family Robinson; or Adventures in a Desert Island • Johann David Wyss
... the port, but by the road that descends on the other side of the headland. We passed by groves of lemon, star-scattered with fruit and blossom and enclosed in rough walls of black lava; by the grey-green straggling of the prickly pears and by vines climbing up their canes. We caught glimpses of promontories dotted with pink and white cottages and of the thread of foam that outlines the curve of the bay where a train was ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones
... in shape, being more inclined to square than round, which they are in that fish: the under jaw is furnished much in the same manner as the upper: the breathing holes are five in number, as is usual in the genus: on the back are two fins, and before each stands a strong spine, much as in the Prickly Hound, or Dog, fish: it has also two pectoral, and two ventral fins; but besides these, there is likewise an anal fin, placed at a middle distance between the last and the tail: the tail itself, is as it were divided, the upper part ...
— The Voyage Of Governor Phillip To Botany Bay • Arthur Phillip
... relieved of our obligatory fast, and enabled to look with contempt upon the humble prickly pears, which for many a long day had been our only food. Daily now we came across herds of fat buffaloes, and great was our sport in pursuing the huge lord of the prairies. One of them, by-the-bye, gored my horse to death, and would ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... feel a light tingle over his body, tiny needles delicately jabbing every inch. His face became wooden, felt prickly. He tried to lick his lips and could feel no sensation there. His vision fogged again, and he knew it was not from acceleration this time, it was ...
— Sound of Terror • Don Berry
... a rude clan, grazing on the heads of the prickly eryngo, despise all tender preliminaries. A few rapid vibrations of the antennae on the males' part; and that is all. The declaration could not be briefer. The pairing, with the creatures placed end to end, lasts ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... 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, for the mountain ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... know. It begun then—at the time of the trouble with her lover," nodded Old Tom; "and it seems as if she'd been feedin' on wormwood an' thistles ever since—she's that bitter an' prickly ter deal with." ...
— Pollyanna • Eleanor H. Porter
... assisted by a caste of small colored children. They were the lions, I, with the choice of parts, electing invariably to play the persecuted and finally triumphant biped. The fury of forty wild beasts was in my heart, as I pushed aside the prickly branches and crept into my lair. The den was paved with bricks, loosely laid. With a pointed stick I pried one up, and scooped out with my hands a grave deep enough to hold the hateful book with the few pictures and the much reading. I thrust it in without benefit of clergy, ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... national custom to eat rusks with 'muisjes' on on these occasions, and these little sweets are manufactured of two kinds. The sugar coating is smooth when the child is a girl, and rough and prickly like a chestnut burr when the child is a boy; and when one goes to buy 'muisjes' at a confectioner's he is always asked whether boys' or girls' 'muisjes' are required. Hundreds-and-thousands, the well-known decoration on buns and cakes in an English pastry-cook's shop, bear ...
— Dutch Life in Town and Country • P. M. Hough
... temporarily disposed of, there followed the strong and able-bodied, who took ashore with them spars, tackles, and spare sails, with which to rig up temporary tents; and soon the greensward was dotted with busy men, who, in the intervals of their labour, drank coconuts or eagerly devoured bananas, prickly pears, guavas, soursops, grapes, mangoes, and the various other fruits with which the island abounded. By and by, when a certain large tent had been erected beneath the shade of a giant ceiba tree, a boat put off from ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... with the closest fidelity, and arranged with exquisite taste. At the foot are models of the glorious water-lily of Guyana, the recently discovered Victoria Regia, in several stages of its development, from the close shut bud with its prickly calyx to the expanded flower. Some idea of the dimensions of this giant bouquet may be formed from the fact that it stands nearly six feet in height, and that the bent plate-glass shade with which it is ...
— The Royal Guide to Wax Flower Modelling • Emma Peachey
... I felt myself weary. Choosing an aromatic bed by the roadside where no prickly cactus thrust its way through the heather, I opened my wallet; pulled forth a sausage, a crust, and a skin of wine; supped; and stretched myself to sleep through the short ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... and their circuit had lasted a weary while, and made them exhausted and breathless, when looking round for their bearings, they found themselves in an enchanted maze of gray rocks, half hidden in myrtle, beset by the bristly battledores of prickly pear, and shaded by cork trees. Above was the castle, perched up, and apparently as high above them as when they began their enterprise; below was a steep descent, clothed with pines and adorned with white heaths. The place was altogether strange; they had ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... acicular, aciform^; aculeated^, acuminated^; pointed; tapering; conical, pyramidal; mucronate^, mucronated^; spindle shaped, needle shaped; spiked, spiky, ensiform^, peaked, salient; cusped, cuspidate, cuspidated^; cornute^, cornuted^, cornicultate^; prickly; spiny, spinous^, spicular; thorny, bristling, muricated^, pectinated^, studded, thistly, briary^; craggy &c (rough) 256; snaggy, digitated^, two-edged, fusiform [Micro.]; dentiform^, denticulated; toothed; odontoid^; starlike; stellated^, stelliform^; sagittate^, sagittiform^; arrowheaded^; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... missiles flung from so great a height, acted like miniature bombshells, exploding with a loud report as they touched the deck, and flying into myriad fragments. Not even the most rage-intoxicated Malay could withstand the shock. The noise, the prickly splinters of glass, peppering their half-naked bodies like a charge of small shot, altered their blind fury to dismay and panic. With screams of affright they rushed to the sides of the junk. But the men left in the praus had already begun to paddle frantically away, heedless ...
— Round the World in Seven Days • Herbert Strang
... is afterwards? It is nothing to you or me. Afterwards means the time when you and I are buried, and the next generation are writhing in hair shirts of their own making, and prickly girdles which they put on ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... down all about the great dwelling, like a curtain. The roses weighted the air with their delicious scent. She even had to reach forth and separate the prickly vines carefully so as to make an opening through which she ...
— Nan Sherwood at Rose Ranch • Annie Roe Carr
... appeared upon the scene, the genius loci of the old stable, namely, the "fretful porcupine." We had seen the marks and work of these animals about the shanty, and had been careful each night to hang our traps, guns, etc., beyond their reach, but of the prickly night-walker himself we feared we should not get ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... the Human System.—Carbon dioxide, or carbonic anhydride, carbonic acid, etc., CO2, is a heavy gas, without color or odor. It has a sharp, prickly taste, and is commonly reckoned as poisonous if inhaled in large quantities, though it does not chemically combine with the blood as CO does. Ten per cent in the air will sometimes produce death, and five per cent produces drowsiness. It exists ...
— An Introduction to Chemical Science • R.P. Williams
... nobody writes anything but accounts of amusements in the Hill-stations or obituary notices. Then the telephone becomes a tinkling terror, because it tells you of the sudden deaths of men and women that you knew intimately, and the prickly-heat covers you as with a garment, and you sit down and write:—“A slight increase of sickness is reported from the Khuda Janta Khan District. The outbreak is purely sporadic in its nature, and, thanks to the energetic efforts of ...
— The Man Who Would Be King • Rudyard Kipling
... an Italian cathedral; but the garb of the Franciscan order is ill-fitted to the peculiarities of the California mesa. For the vegetation of Lower California makes up in bristliness what it lacks in luxuriance. Bush cactuses, so prickly that it makes one's eyes smart to look at them, and bunch cactuses, in wads of thorns as large as a bushel-basket, swarm everywhere. Before the barefooted Padre had traveled far, so Miss Graham tells us in her charming little ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... I saw it!" I shouted. Then, shrinking from the hysterical loudness of my own voice, I lowered my tone. "Something that looks human has occupied some of those prickly, six-foot shells. I saw arms—and a man's head! ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... large portion of wheat bran with either cold or lukewarm water, and use it as a bath twice or thrice a day. Children who are covered with prickly heat in warm weather will be thus effectually relieved from that tormenting eruption. As soon as it begins to appear on the neck, face or arms, commence using the bran water on these parts repeatedly through the day, and it may probably ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... become tame, and will allow you to stroke their cheeks. You remember our placing a hedgehog on the study table, and seeing how it got off on to the ground. It came to the edge, and threw itself off, coiling up its body partly as it fell; the elastic nature of its prickly covering enabling it to bear the shock of the fall ...
— Country Walks of a Naturalist with His Children • W. Houghton
... required, and battalions must be provided with a liberal supply of cutting tools, felling axes, hand axes and bill hooks to enable them, the instant the battalion marches into bivouac, to cut down small trees or strong branches of prickly trees with which to ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... not eczema! It's indigestion—and prickly heat. I'm afraid Ann's stomach has been giving trouble. It has been hotter than is usual here, I understand. Heat often upsets children. While I write out a prescription, you might bathe ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... orangeries, among the huge masses of fortifications, many of them seeming almost as thick as the gardens inclosed by them are broad. Pomegranate in (beautiful secicle) flower. Under a bridge over a dry ditch saw the largest prickly pear. Elkhorns for trunk, and then its leaves—but go and look and look.—(Hard rain.) We sheltered in the Botanic Garden; yet ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... my soul, But now, before the fearful shadow came That since my boyhood often visits me, And with dark musings fills my brain perturb'd; Making the current of my life-blood stagnate, My heart the semblance of a muffled bell, Within my ribs, its tomb; my flesh creep like The prickly writhings of a new-slough'd snake; Each several moment as the awaken'd glare Of the doom'd felon starting from his sleep, While the slow, hideous meaning of his cell Grows on him like an incubus, until The truth shoots like an ...
— Cromwell • Alfred B. Richards
... has got a touch of prickly heat and is thirsty," I thought, nor was I mistaken, for, on arriving at the edge of the fountain, the tramp knelt down and drank copiously, making a moaning sound as he gulped the water, which was very peculiar and unpleasant to ...
— Doctor Therne • H. Rider Haggard
... "is like a little plain, hedged round with prickly pear, and put on the top of a mountain. No one ever comes in, and we never ...
— An Australian Lassie • Lilian Turner
... in the subsoil that they establish themselves and travel to and fro; with the help of their powerful mandibles, their hard cranium, their strong, prickly legs, they easily make themselves paths in the loose earth. They are living ploughshares. By the end of August, therefore, the female population is for the most part underground, busily occupied in egg-laying and provisioning. ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... sheep-walks of Maryland; a second spring seemed to clothe the fields, but with grief and shame I confess, that of these precious blossoms I scarcely knew a single name. I think the Michaelmas daisy, in wonderful variety of form and colour, and the prickly pear, were almost my only acquaintance: let no one visit America without having first studied botany; it is an amusement, as a clever friend of mine once told me, that helps one wonderfully up and down hill, and must be superlatively valuable ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... innumerable nuisances, when we set foot within the filthy and miserable town. After winding through some narrow dusty lanes, hemmed in by high walls of sun-baked bricks, that had fallen in gaps in several places, exposing gardens of prickly pears and date palms, we at length arrived at a large open place, that, if possible, smelt more strongly than the landing spot. Around this square, which was full of holes where the mud had been excavated for brickmaking, were the better class of houses; this ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... midst like a shadowy island, relieved the monotony of the waste. No living thing was moving throughout the vast landscape, except the lizards that darted over the sand and through the rank grass and prickly-pear just at our feet. And yet stern and wild associations gave a singular interest to the view; for here each man lives by the strength of his arm and the valor of his heart. Here society is reduced to its original elements, ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... an electric-arc bath there is obtained an action upon the skin, the patient experiences a pleasant and slightly prickly sensation. There is produced, even from a short exposure, upon the skin of some patients a slight erythema, while with others there is but little such effect even from long exposures. The face assumes a normal rosy coloring and ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... the woods, he leading the way. By that time we were faint with hunger and could well have done with a meal, but though there were, doubtless, Indian villages close at hand we dare enter none of them, and so went forward with empty stomachs. In the woods, however, we came upon prickly pears, which there grow wild, and these we essayed to eat; but had great difficulty in stripping them of the prickles, which, if they enter the tongue, do cause an unpleasantness that is not soon forgot. Our hunger ...
— In the Days of Drake • J. S. Fletcher
... now and then glancing on the crest of the dancing billows, shone the steady light of Scarthey. The rising wind whistled in the prickly star-grass and sea-holly. Beyond these, not a sight, not a ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... range themselves. However, the scheme of defence was never put to the test. In an old cactus-bound garden about 1500 yards in front of Yapton we had a day observation post perched in a tree. The cactus hedge was a mass of ripe prickly pears, and the art of eating them was only learnt after a lengthy period spent in extracting the fine thorns from one's fingers, mouth, tongue and throat. Within the hedge were fig trees, small vines, tomatoes, pomegranates and a small native hut, but huts in ...
— The Fifth Battalion Highland Light Infantry in the War 1914-1918 • F.L. Morrison
... not at all abashed at being discovered listening. "It's better than any circus band I ever heard. It's like Jenny Lind when the sun is shining and she has had a leaf of fresh lettuce. It makes me feel in my heart like soda water feels in my nose, all prickly and light," vaguely. "It's—it's wonderful! Take this place," she moved generously away from the crack that Miss Proctor might put her ear to it. "You can hear better. When I grow up I want to play just like ...
— Mary Rose of Mifflin • Frances R. Sterrett
... the cottage was sitting in an arm-chair by the fire. There was very little light in the room, for the only window looked into a miniature conservatory, where there were all manner of prickly and spiky plants of the cactus kind, which had been the delight of the late owner ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... where the bottom was hard and firm. We approached this position with our carts, in the midst of smoke and flame; the natives having availed themselves of a hot wind to burn as much as they could of the old grass, and a prickly weed which, being removed, would admit the growth of a green crop, on which the kangaroos come to feed, and are then more easily got at. Latitude of this camp, 26 deg. 12' 47" S. Thermometer, at sunrise, 40 deg.; at 4 P. M., 78 deg.; at 9, ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell
... of the crops, my child (Although not nearly all): Bananarcissus and cucumberries, And violettuce small; Potatomatoes, melonions rare, And rhubarberries round, With porcupineapples prickly-rough On a little bush ...
— Zodiac Town - The Rhymes of Amos and Ann • Nancy Byrd Turner
... was comforted of his friends at Swarthmoor, and inwardly refreshed. Yet the matter of his encounter with the haughty lady, and of her prickly thistle nature, rested on his mind, and he could not be content without giving her yet one more chance to doff her prickles and become a sweet and fragrant flower in the garden of the Lord. Therefore, three months later, being continually ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... account."—Ib. "Millenium, the thousand years during which Satan shall be bound."—Ib. "Millenial, pertaining to the millenium, or to a thousand years."—Ib. "Thraldom; slavery, bondage, a state of servitude."—See Johnson's Dict. "Brier, a prickly bush; Briery, rough, prickly, full of briers; Sweetbriar, a fragrant shrub."—See Johnson, Walker, Chalmers, Webster, and others. "Will, in the second and third Persons, barely foretels."—British Gram., p. 132. "And therefor there is no Word ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... and feet. As they marched through the Metropolis they felt their ears growing hot and red. Beneath the chilly stare of the populace they experienced all the sensations of a man who has come to a strange dinner-party in a tweed suit when everybody else has dressed. They felt warm and prickly. ...
— The Swoop! or How Clarence Saved England - A Tale of the Great Invasion • P. G. Wodehouse
... gentle little girl, and Fanny was a very headstrong pony; consequently Fanny had it all her own way. When she was trotting along the road, with Louise on her back, if she chanced to spy a nice prickly thistle away up on a bank, up she would scramble, as fast as she could go, the sand and gravel rolling down under her hoofs; and, no matter how hard Louise pulled on the reins, there she would stay until she had eaten the thistle down to the very roots. ...
— The Nursery, May 1877, Vol. XXI. No. 5 - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest Readers • Various
... the moulding of a branch of chestnut, which carried her back to the first time she saw those prickly clusters, on that day of opening Paradise at Richmond, with Joe by her side, then still Mr. Brownlow to her, Joe, who had seemed so much closer to her side in these last few days. The Colonel might call ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... stubble field where the wheat had been harvested. Gray squirrels were barking in the woods, and their cousins the reds, less shy, were scurrying along the fence rails and up the chestnut-trees to send the prickly burrs to the ground. The first tinge of autumn was on the elms and maples. Jenny had been to market so many times she could be trusted to take the right road, and he could lie upon his sack of wool and ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin
... thoughtfully: "The tree of Cerdic has borne many nuts with prickly rinds in former times, but there has been wont to be good meat inside. Since Ethelred, I have been in fear that the tree is ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... Balanophoraceae, not before known as Australian, which was found here in abundance in the gloomy brushes, parasitic upon the roots of the tallest trees. We also met with here—in probably its southern limit upon the coast—a species of rattan (Calamus australis) with long prickly shoots, well illustrated in the annexed drawing by Mr. Huxley, representing the process of cutting through the scrub, during an excursion made with Mr. Kennedy, for the purpose of searching for a way out from the low ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... reached the bottom of the hill now, and as the team reached the level ground, the driver lined them out and settled back in his seat with a satisfied grunt. About both sides of the trail at this point grew great thickets of brush—paloverde, the darker mesquites, and grotesque bunches of prickly pear. One of the bronchos ...
— Kid Wolf of Texas - A Western Story • Ward M. Stevens
... fetch to the persons he loved, mashed into premature jam in his small fist; exciting turtles with variegated carapaces, and heads and feet that went in and out; occasional newts from the plashy places; and in autumn, hatfuls of walnuts. There were chestnuts, too, upon whose prickly hulls the preoccupied children would sometimes inadvertently plump themselves. Our father was a great tree-climber, and he was also fond of playing the role of magician. "Hide your eyes!" he would ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... not moving fast enough to suit the Blackfeet. An old fellow commenced to shout at him, and motion for him to go faster. But he didn't wish to go faster; the ground was thickly grown to prickly-pear cactus, and he had to pick his path ...
— Boys' Book of Frontier Fighters • Edwin L. Sabin
... at whose name the verse feels loath, Fill the place with a monstrous undergrowth, Prickly, and pulpous, and blistering, and blue, Livid, and ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... hundred years or so. It has a veranda on the side which I can't draw and a sweet porch in front. The picture really doesn't do it justice—those things that look like feather dusters are maple trees, and the prickly ones that border the drive are murmuring pines and hemlocks. It stands on the top of a hill and looks way off over miles of green meadows to ...
— Daddy-Long-Legs • Jean Webster
... days slipped by. June came, with more leisure for the shepherds, better grazing for the sheep, heavier dews, lighter frosts, snow-squalls half rain, and bursting blossoms on the prickly thorns, wild-primrose patches in every shady spot, and bluebells lifting wan azure faces ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey |
