"Pruning" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... came, risking their lives rather than sacrifice the next year's vintage. Captain Sweeney of the Foreign Legion told me that when the French soldiers were not firing they amused themselves watching these women pruning and trimming as fatalistically as if guns were not thundering east and west of them, shells singing overhead. For the most part they were safe enough, and nerves had apparently been left out of them; but once in ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... performances require the pruning knife so much, and would so amply repay the trouble, as some of those of Otway. In the Orphan there are some passages as gross and offensive as are to be found, probably in any tragedy whatever. There is moreover too much of horror in ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 6, June 1810 • Various
... plants grow side by side. "You must either," he declares, "admit—which you do not—that both good and evil were chance sown, or refer their joint presence to some necessary or pre-ordained connection between them. In the latter case you may use your judgment in pruning away the too great exuberance of the noxious plant, but if you destroy it once for all, you have frustrated the intentions of ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... poem as published in 1893 is purified of such tricks. These alterations are characteristic of Locker's literary method. He was keenly critical of himself—"never," says Mr Birrell, "could mistake good verses for bad"—and was therefore always changing and polishing his work, adding here, pruning there. Thus only eight poems from the 1857 volume form part of the "London Lyrics" of 1893, and only five of these—"Bramble-Rise," "Piccadilly," "The Pilgrims of Pall Mall," "Circumstance," "The Widow's Mite"—have maintained their footing ...
— London Lyrics • Frederick Locker
... your occupation, dog; bind up the jessamines in yonder arbour, and handle your pruning-knife with dexterity: tightly I say, go tightly to your business; you have cost me much, and must earn it in your work. Here's plentiful provision for you, rascal; salading in the garden, and water in the tank, and on ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... vp wyth Ewes Milke, and Lambes wyth Goates, the woll of thone will grow more rough and hard, and the heare of the other more tender and soft. In trees also and fruites, there is for the most part, a greater force and power in the nature of the soile and water where they grow, eyther for the pruning and planting, then there is if straunge impes and seedes be grifted and sowen there. And many times you see, that a fruitfull tree, caried and set in an other place, decayeth, throughe the nature of the ...
— The Palace of Pleasure, Volume 1 • William Painter
... above, and these, tumbling merrily in, shake the pool to its black heart, fill it with drowsy eddies, and set the curded froth of many other mills solemnly steering to and fro upon the surface. Or so it was when I was young; for change, and the masons, and the pruning-knife, have been busy; and if I could hope to repeat a cherished experience, it must be on many and impossible conditions. I must choose, as well as the point of view, a certain moment in my growth, so that the ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... they owned their own homes and the plots of ground they gardened, and I do contend that the watering-can and the spade and the pruning knife are a means of grace. Very many of them made twelve shillings a day, which is three dollars in our good Canadian money, and some of the highest paid made twice as much. And there was work for them every working day and every working hour of ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... ourselves? Does the water-lily, rocking in her triple bath of water, air, and light, relish in no wise her own beauty? When the plant in our room turns to the light, closes her blossoms in the dark, responds to our watering or pruning by increase of size or change of shape and bloom, who has the right to say she does not feel, or that she plays a purely passive part? Truly plants can foresee nothing, neither the scythe of the mower, ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... endeavour to bring about the better state of things which they expect from—what? From "things as they are!" As well expect grapes from thorns, or figs from thistles. While the tree remains the same, no amount of weeding, or pruning, or manuring, or change of culture, will make it bring forth different fruit. Mr. Dicey, among others, has demolished what Lord Beaconsfield used to call the "bit-by-bit" reformers of Irish Government—those who would administer ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... on their way to their fields sometimes stopped to cast an inquisitive look over his garden palings. They saw him dressed in a linen jacket, with the glorious ribbon adorning his button-hole, weeding his flower-garden, turning up his walks, pruning his trees, clearing his flowers of caterpillars, watering his borders, with great drops of sweat pouring down, bending over his labour like a negro ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... cockney adopts Savage's view. Thales, who is generally supposed to represent Savage (and this coincidence seems to confirm the opinion), is to retire "from the dungeons of the Strand," and to end a healthy life in pruning walks and twining bowers ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... Sounding brass Source of sympathetic tears South, o'er my ear like the sweet Sow, wrong, by the ear Soweth, shall reap, as he Space and time annihilate Spare the rod Sparks fly upward Sparrow, caters for the —, providence in the fall of a —, fall, or hero perish Speak of me as I am Spears into pruning-hooks Speculation in those eyes Speech, thought deeper than Speed the going guest —the parting guest Spenser, renowned Spin, nor toil not Spirit wounded —, haughty —return unto God —indeed is willing —, ...
— Familiar Quotations • Various
... Peace was not indeed in our island so long continued or so unbroken as in the Mediterranean lands, where, for centuries on end, no weapon was used in anger. But even here swords were beaten into ploughshares and spears into pruning-hooks to an extent never known before or since in our annals. So profound was the quiet that for a whole generation Britain vanishes from history altogether. All through the Golden Age of Rome, the reigns of Nerva and Trajan, no writer even names ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... perhaps the acts of St. Martin carved between the doors, and below them three reliefs of the months, where in January you see man sitting beside the fire; in February, as is most right, fishing in the Serchio; in March, wisely pruning his trees; in April, sowing his seed; in May, plucking the spring flowers; in June, cutting the corn; in July, beating it out with the flail—the flail that is used to-day in every country place ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... patient repetition, I hoped some day to get a 'spate of style' and burnish it - fine mixed metaphor. I am now so sick that I intend, when the Letters are done and some more written that will be wanted, simply to make a book of it by the pruning-knife. ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Drinks, extracted from Fruits: to which is added, a Discourse on Bees; 8vo., second impression, much enlarged, 1678. He therein thus paints the pleasures of a garden:—"The exercises of planting, grafting, pruning, and walking in them, very much tendeth to salubrity, as also doth the wholesome airs found in them, which have been experienced not only to cure several distempers incident to our nature, but to tend towards the prolongation of life. For nothing can be more available ...
— On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening, • Samuel Felton
... we felt to be free again; and when we quitted Goch, the German frontier station, I thought how blessed would be that day when "They shall beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up a sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig-tree; and none shall make ...
— A War-time Journal, Germany 1914 and German Travel Notes • Harriet Julia Jephson
... no trial is. They can glorify God only with the crown; you can glorify Him with the cross and the prospect of the crown together! Ah, if He be dealing severely with you—if He, as the great Husbandman, be pruning His vines, lopping their boughs, stripping off their luxuriant branches and "beautiful rods!" remember the end!—"He purgeth it, that it may bring forth more fruit," and "Herein ...
— The Words of Jesus • John R. Macduff
... called upon this person at once and ordered the three loads of black dirt to be delivered immediately. I then bethought myself that I required an outfit of garden tools; so I made my way to the nearest hardware shop and purchased a spade, a hoe, a rake, a wheelbarrow, a watering can, a trowel, and a pruning-knife. I trundled the barrow home, with the ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field
... grounds of expediency, never amounts to much; and such taking in hand was all that Charlotte had as yet attempted. In a little passion of self-reproach and mortification, she occasionally lopped off ugly shoots; but the root was still vigorous and lusty, and only grew the better for its petty pruning. Richard looked very much displeased at his brother's rudeness, and tried to make up for it by ...
— Richard Vandermarck • Miriam Coles Harris
... the hill to the cottage. The tenant was a newcomer to the town, and had lately been appointed musketry-instructor to the battery above. He was in the garden pruning the rose-tree, but did not particularly notice the boy. And the boy ...
— Noughts and Crosses • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... hunting, and fishing, and stuffing his birds, and preserving the skins of rare quadrupeds, and planting and pruning his trees, and teaching his boys, and training his dogs and horses, Landi was far from being idle. His boys, of course, assisted him in these occupations, as far as they were able. But he ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid
... The whole family was in the garden, Lasse Frederik digging, Pelle pruning the espalier round the garden door, and Ellen tying it up. The children were trying to help everybody and were mostly a hindrance. One or other of them was always doing something wrong, treading on the beds or pulling up the ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... we are told of the glad day, which we are now trying to hasten, when swords shall be beaten into ploughshares, and spears into pruning-hooks—when nations shall not lift up the sword against nations or learn war ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan
... friend must do all this with due delicacy and tact. If he takes advantage of his position to exercise his censoriousness upon us we speedily vote him a bore, and take measures to get rid of him. But when done with gentleness and good nature, and with an eye single to our real good, this pruning of the tendrils of our inner life is one of the most precious ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... devoutly to be wished, that the manly employment of agriculture, and the humanizing benefits of commerce, would supersede the waste of war and the rage of conquest; that the swords might be turned into plowshares, the spears into pruning-hooks, and, as the Scriptures express it, the "nations ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... combination of words. Some terms, indeed, his philosophical subjects obliged him to coin;[257] but his great art lies in the application of existing materials, in converting the very disadvantages of the language into beauties,[258] in enriching it with circumlocutions and metaphors, in pruning it of harsh and uncouth expressions, in systematizing the structure of a sentence.[259] This is that copia dicendi which gained Cicero the high testimony of Caesar to his inventive powers,[260] and which, we may add, constitutes ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... into the verandah, and Farmer Hosking pocketed the pruning-knife which he had been using on a ...
— Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... beds of torrents dry during the summer, are confined in straight channels by stone walls and embankments; the slopes are broken up and disfigured by terraces; and the trees are kept down by constant pruning and lopping, until half way up the sides of the Appenines, where the limit of cultivation is reached, and thence to the summit is a barren steep of rock, without herbage or soil. The grander features of the landscape, however, are fortunately beyond the power of man ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various
... number of labourers being employed in it, but in the fact that I love the work. Do you understand? I love it perhaps more than myself. Look at me; I do everything myself. I work from morning to night: I do all the grafting myself, the pruning myself, the planting myself. I do it all myself: when any one helps me I am jealous and irritable till I am rude. The whole secret lies in loving it— that is, in the sharp eye of the master; yes, and in the master's hands, and in the feeling that makes one, when one goes anywhere ...
— The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... couple of secretaries—no typewriters, because my uncle hated the clatter—and a casual person or two sitting about, projectors whose projects were being entertained. Here and in a further room nearer the private apartments, my uncle's correspondence underwent an exhaustive process of pruning and digestion before it reached him. Then the two little rooms in which my uncle talked; my magic uncle who had got the investing public—to whom all things were possible. As one came in we would find him squatting with his cigar ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... religious man, yet many passages of Scripture that he had learned at his mother's knee clung to him through his long life and leaped easily to his tongue. One of his favorite and oft-quoted verses was this from Isaiah, "And they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... lecture—that the whole theory is a speculation invented by cowards to excuse knaves. My belief is, that so far as this old English stock is concerned it has in it as much sap and vitality and power as it had two centuries ago; and that, with due pruning of rotten branches, and due hoeing up of weeds, which will grow about the roots, the like products will be yielded again. The "weeds" to which I refer are mainly three: the first of them is dishonesty, the second ...
— William Harvey And The Discovery Of The Circulation Of The Blood • Thomas H. Huxley
... the sitting-room of his country cottage, staring through the open windows at his pretty garden. He is a very old man, and is sometimes bewildered nowadays. He calls to Dering, the gardener, who is on a ladder, pruning. Dering, who comes to him, is a rough, capable young fellow with fingers that are already becoming stumpy because he so often uses his hands instead of a spade. This is a sign that Dering will never get on in the world. His mind is in the same condition as his fingers, working back to ...
— Echoes of the War • J. M. Barrie
... seems also to have been a Persian weapon. Its blade appears to have been slightly curved, like that of a pruning-hook. It was worn in a sheath, and was probably thrust into the belt or girdle like the similar weapon, half knife, half dagger, of a ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 5. (of 7): Persia • George Rawlinson
... from his brief and clouded holiday to his work in that corner of the great vineyard, so overcrowded with busy husbandmen that they were always plucking up each others' plants, and pruning and repruning each others' vines, till they made a wilderness where there should have been a harvest, he found that his special plot there had suffered much damage. John Nixey, following up the impression he had so successfully made, had spread his story abroad, and ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... permanent commander of the national forces. Next the Imperator (Emperor) caused himself to be invested with the authority of Censor. This enabled him to revise the list of Senators, and to restore to this body something of its ancient respectability. By judicious pruning he reduced the number to six hundred, and required a property qualification for membership. He placed himself at its head as PRINCEPS (prince), a title which implied that the Emperor was the first citizen, without ...
— History of Rome from the Earliest times down to 476 AD • Robert F. Pennell
... for he compels you to look after him, and if you are to look after him, you must know something about his art, and if you do not know, you must learn. So we Anglo-Indians are gardeners almost to a man, and spend many pure, happy hours with the pruning shears and the budding knife, and this we owe to the Malee. When I say you must look after him, I do not disparage his skill; he is neat handed and knows many things; but his taste is elementary. He has an eye for symmetry, ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA
... Rosa—Loganberries, Mammoth berries. But don't fool with strawberries. That's a whole occupation in itself. They're not vines, you know. I've examined the orchard. It's a good foundation. We'll settle the pruning and grafts later." ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... Iohns inheritance, who deceased issuelesse: and being yet scarcely entred the limits of an healthfull olde age, seeth his pedigree extended into two farther descents. As for those outreaching mans memory, I haue seene them very sufficiently verified: his Armes are, O. an Eagle displayed B. pruning her ...
— The Survey of Cornwall • Richard Carew
... rosebush or two, and a couple of scraggy altheas. Workmen had been about the place for some time, putting everything in order, and of course we took the liveliest interest in all that went on, from the pruning of the shrubs to the carrying in of the furniture; and the day the new people moved in, Miss Marston could hardly keep us younger ones from the windows: indeed, for that matter, Nora was just as curious as we were, for all she talks about "vulgar curiosity." They came in a carriage, and there were ...
— We Ten - Or, The Story of the Roses • Lyda Farrington Kraus
... a bowl of wine in his hand. He stood up and said: "Here, now, I call a health to the wrights of Kent who be turning our plough-shares into swords and our pruning-hooks into spears! Drink around, ...
— A Dream of John Ball, A King's Lesson • William Morris
... this controversy any further. "The Christian is enabled," you say, "to hope for existence with God in an eternal state, and this is as much as our present welfare requires." Most excellent! To this proposition I cherfully assent. Yea, I would consent even to pruning it a little, which no doubt would spoil it in your view. Instead of 'this is as much as,' read, 'even this is more than,' and your proposition would stand exactly ...
— A Series of Letters In Defence of Divine Revelation • Hosea Ballou
... dragged asunder by wild horses. Yes, yes, Bardianna, all is in a nut, as thou sayest; but all my back teeth can not crack it; I but crack my own jaws. All round me, my fellow men are new-grafting their vines, and dwelling in flourishing arbors; while I am forever pruning mine, till it is become but a stump. Yet in this pruning will I persist; I will not add, I will diminish; I will train myself down to the standard of what is unchangeably true. Day by day I drop off my ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... rain. This will harden them so that they will not be apt to be injured by the cabbage beetle, as well as chilled and put back by the change. Should the plants be getting too large before the season for transplanting, they should be checked by root pruning,—drawing a sharp knife within a couple of inches of the stalk. If it is desirable still further to check their growth, or harden them, transplant into another cold frame, allowing each plant double ...
— Cabbages and Cauliflowers: How to Grow Them • James John Howard Gregory
... tree had given up blooming, nor could all the pruning and care given it coax a single blossom from it. Miss Corona, tinctured with the superstition apt to wait on a lonely womanhood, believed in her heart that the rosebush had a secret sympathy with the fortunes of the Gordon women. ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... there is, however, the comfort of reflecting that he outlived his vices which seem to have "cropped out" by his ancestral connection in the female line with the reprobate Charles II., whom he was thought to resemble in features. Fox, afterwards, with a green apron tied round his waist, pruning and nailing up his fruit trees at St Ann's Hill, or amusing himself innocently with a few friends, is a pleasing object to remember, even whilst his early career ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... concurrence of the Spirit on the other,—which is more independent of our modification than the remote sun,—yet they must feel responsible, after all, for the perfection of the development, in so far as removing every impediment, preserving every condition, and pruning every redundance. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... kind invitation, And much bustle it caused in the plumed creation; Such ruffling of feathers, such pruning of coats, Such chirping, such whistling, such clearing of throats, Such polishing bills, and such oiling of pinions, Had never been known in the biped ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... and come to seem a part of the almost sentient life around them. If the description of such dutifulness seems fanciful, the thing itself surpasses all supposition. Hedges and shrubbery, clipped into the most fantastic shapes, accept the suggestion of the pruning-knife as if man's wishes were their own whims. Manikin maples, Tom Thumb trees, a foot high and thirty years old, with all the gnarls and knots and knuckles of their fellows of the forest, grow in his parterres, their native vitality not a whit diminished. And they are not regarded as monstrosities ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... Arrowhead; and then of Squat, our youngest cowboy, from whose fair brow the intrepid veterinary, on his last previous visit, had removed a sizable and embarrassing wen with what looked to me like a pair of pruning shears. ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... Prince of Orange; but there is one person whose ease and comfort he loves more than all the princes in Christendom, and that valuable member of society is himself, Gulielmus Temple, Baronettus. One sees him in his retreat; between his study-chair and his tulip-beds, clipping his apricots and pruning his essays,—the statesman, the ambassador no more; but the philosopher, the Epicurean, the fine gentleman and courtier at St. James's as at Shene; where in place of kings and fair ladies, he pays his court to the Ciceronian ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... and took his great pruning-knife from his coat pocket, opened it with his teeth, and cut the strip of sweet-scented Russia mat. Then holding them ready in his arms he stood there while I slowly scattered the beautiful flowers down more and more, more and more, till the coffin was nearly covered, ...
— Brownsmith's Boy - A Romance in a Garden • George Manville Fenn
... foliage becomes poor and scanty, and the tree has a tendency to run too much to thick bole, and thick branches, which are poorly supplied with smaller branches and foliage. When about thirty years old, I have generally found this tree to be a poor shader, but it can be much improved by severe pruning, or rather lopping. When thinning out shade on this estate about twenty years ago, a twelve year old tree had every branch removed preparatory to cutting down, but by some accident the tree was left standing, and the stumps of the branches threw out fresh shoots, and the tree is now flourishing, ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... day of our beginning to take up plants: we had much pleasure in collecting them for the natives offered their assistance and perfectly understood the method of taking them up and pruning them. ...
— A Voyage to the South Sea • William Bligh
... truth, till he quitted the San Josef, to go on board La Minerve; and that, farther than this, the detail should not be printed. As he does not write for the press, he modestly intimates, there may be parts which require the pruning-knife, which he desires him to use at discretion, without fear. "I pretend not to say," concludes he, "that these ships might not have fallen, had I not boarded them: but, truly, it was far from impossible that they might have forged into ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) • James Harrison
... O glorious day Of Freedom crowned with Peace. God's will be done! God's will is peace on earth—good-will to men. The chains all broken and the bond all free, O may this nation learn to war no more; Yea, into plow-shares may these brothers beat Their swords and into pruning-hooks their spears, Clasp hands again, and plant these battle-fields With golden corn and purple-clustered vines, And side by side re-build the broken walls— Joined and cemented as one solid stone With patriot-love ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... shall take the smallest cyons or wands, such as are not aboue two yeeres groath, being full of short heauie twigges, and grow from the roote of the maine tree, and set them in a loose mould, a foote deepe, without pruning or cutting away any of the branches, and they will prosper to your contentment. Now for all sorts of Plumbe-trees, Apple-trees or other fruit-trees which are not grafted, if you take the young cyons which ...
— The English Husbandman • Gervase Markham
... embroidered muslin with short sleeves displayed her arms, and a blue sash surrounded her thin and delicate form. She gathered a few flowers, and cut away a few bad branches of the rose-trees with an elegant English pruning-knife. Then after having passed two or three times up and down the alley in front of the portal, she put her hand to her brow as if to make a visor to shield her eyes from the burning rays of the sun. Just in front ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... "Between you and me, I may say that I shall doubtless get over it; but I'm a good bit hurt, because it had got to be an understood thing and I little like changes. But there it is: the man's getting restless and be pruning his wings for flight if I ...
— The Torch and Other Tales • Eden Phillpotts
... the talk to themselves. Persis' absorption was penetrated now and then by references to the miracles wrought by scientific spraying and pruning, or the possibility of heating orchards so that late frosts would no longer have terrors for the fruit grower, sober facts which the literature of the Apple of Eden Investment Company had enveloped in the rosy atmosphere of romance. Like many people ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... gather from these unconscious touches everything of real importance in regard to the character and life of this woman. Much as we should have enjoyed the letters and journals in a complete form, untouched by pruning fingers, we cannot but heartily approve the wisdom of Mr. Cross in carefully selecting and editing them. He has shown himself a person of excellent taste and judgment, and one could scarcely ask to fall into better hands, if ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... their elaborate and often tiresome ingenuity. Binding down an heroic or dramatic poet to the block upon which they have previously dissected his words and sentences, they proceed to use the axe and the pruning knife by wholesale, and inconsistent in everything but their wish to make out a case of unlawful affiliation, they cut out book after book, passage after passage, till the author is reduced to a collection ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... lay entirely in his beautiful garden. There the Scythian found him, pruning hook in hand, cutting away the useless wood from his fruit trees; lopping here, pruning there, trimming this and that, and everywhere aiding Nature, who repaid ...
— The Original Fables of La Fontaine - Rendered into English Prose by Fredk. Colin Tilney • Jean de la Fontaine
... had escaped—it was learned, afterward, by hiding in the huge safe where were stored the secret archives of his empire. And when he emerged he was a very penitent war lord, and like the Mikado of Japan he was set to work beating his sword-blades into ploughshares and pruning-hooks. ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... man and most loved by him, following him, like his dog or his cow, wherever he goes! His homestead is not planted till you are planted, your roots intertwine with his; thriving best where he thrives best, loving the limestone and the frost, the plow and the pruning-knife: you are indeed suggestive of hardy, cheerful industry, and a healthy life in the open air. Temperate, chaste fruit! you mean neither luxury nor sloth, neither satiety nor indolence, neither enervating heats nor the frigid zones. Uncloying fruit,—fruit whose best sauce is the open air, whose ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... your little "olive plants," "let patience have her perfect work," and of a truth you shall "be perfect and entire wanting nothing." Much of redeeming grace is needed to enable the parent to be calm and kind under the many trying circumstances connected with the pruning and training of the "fruit of the womb." It is a source of great joy, however, to know that God's grace ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr
... do not as yet know anything. With the same scientific exactitude the laboratory must investigate the milking, or the making of butter, the feeding of the cattle and the picking of the fruit, the use of the scythe and the axe, the pruning and the husking. The mere fact that every one, even with the least skill, is able to carry out such movements with some result, does not in the least guarantee that any one carries them out to-day with ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... consideration, and generally took care to be himself the cleverest person present; while he turned the conversation on serious matters crammed for the occasion—politics, stocks, commerce, and the criminal code. Pruning his gaiety, though he retained his frankness, he sought to be known as a highly-informed, painstaking man, who would be sure to rise. His connections, and a certain nameless charm about him, consisting chiefly in a pleasant countenance, ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... fellow, you'd be better for a little of the same pruning!" Sherringham retorted; and the young men continued their walk and their gossip, jerking each other this way and that, punching each other here and there, with an amicable roughness consequent on their having, been boys together. ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... in extra time; and, if they had not been made, nothing else would have been made. Even to munitions of war this principle applies; they partly represent the work of men who, if they had not made spears, would never have made pruning hooks, and who are incapable of any ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... That is, the Sabbatical year or the year of release (ha-shemittah). See Ex. XXIII, 10 et seq., and Lev. XXV, 1-7. It is commanded that the land be allowed to lie fallow during that year, that there be no sowing, nor reaping, nor pruning of the vineyards, and that the servants, strangers, and animals, as well as the owner, shall share in the spontaneous growth of the fields and the vineyards. See also Deut. XV, 1-11, and Tractate Shebiit of ...
— Pirke Avot - Sayings of the Jewish Fathers • Traditional Text
... large pruning-knives, or a sort of sickles, with about six or seven inches aperture, which should be pretty strong. It ought to be cut before its wood hardens; and to be green as its leaf, which ought, however, to have a bluish eye or cast. When cut it is conveyed into the ...
— History of Louisisana • Le Page Du Pratz
... a wholly redeeming feature, and turned his garb from that of a thousand corporals into the homely attire of a gentleman farmer. So soon as you saw them, you forgot the War. The style of them was most effective. It beat the spear into a pruning hook. With this to leaven them, the rough habiliments were most becoming. In a word, they supplied the very setting which manhood should have; and since Anthony, sitting there at his meat, was the personification ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... ranked it as inferior, but has not however been niggard in its praise. The work is read, and always will be read, with high interest. This, perhaps, is capable of augmentation; and the Editor much deceives himself if he has not accomplished this effect by his labours, as well in pruning off the redundant moralizings and cumbrous ratiocinations of Dr Hawkesworth, as in contributing new but relevant matter to the mass of amusing and instructive information which that gentleman has recorded. He confesses that he has far less delicacy in doing either ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... first began them—not that anything like this time, or the half of it, has been devoted to it. It was one of my amusements in the long winter evenings—the only time of the year when Indians will tell stories and legends. They required pruning and dressing, like wild vines in a garden. But they are, exclusively (with the exception of the allegory of the vine and oak), wild vines, and not pumpings up of my own fancy. The attempts to lop off excrescences are not, perhaps, always happy. There might, perhaps, ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... work. It happened this day, that Mr. Edwards, who was continually intent upon increasing the comforts and happiness of his slaves, sent his carpenter, while Caesar was absent, to fit up the inside of his cottage; and when Caesar returned from work, he found his master pruning the branches of a tamarind tree that over-hung the thatch. "How comes it, Caesar," said he, "that you have not pruned ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... stimulus, but the latter fails in qualitative effect, much more than the former. There, the objector submits, lies the quintessence of the matter. Both systems need watching, need criticism, the pruning knife and the stimulant, and neither is bad enough to justify a revolutionary change to the other. In some such conclusion as this most of the English people with whom one can discuss this question have come to ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... the wilderness. The effects of sin followed her from generation to generation. The gloom of the night is still over her as she spends her days in out-door labor. She weeds the cotton, and assists in pruning the vine and gathering the grapes. She goes forth in the morning, bearing not only her implements of husbandry, but also her babes in the cradle; and returning in the evening, she prepares her husband's ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton
... whittle, razor, razor blade, safety razor, straight razor, electric razor; scalpel; bistoury[obs3], lancet; plowshare, coulter, colter[obs3]; hatchet, ax, pickax, mattock, pick, adze, gill; billhook, cleaver, cutter; scythe, sickle; scissors, shears, pruning shears, cutters, wire cutters, nail clipper, paper cutter; sword &c. (arms) 727; bodkin &c. (perforator) 262; belduque[obs3], bowie knife[obs3], paring knife; bushwhacker [U.S.]; drawing knife, drawing shave; microtome[Microbiol]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... with her uncle John Montfort: to the rose-garden, where they loved to work together, the sunny lawns, the shady alleys of box and laurel, the arbors of honeysuckle and grape-vine. She could almost see the beloved uncle, pruning-knife in hand, bending over his roses; if only he did not cut back the Ramblers too far! She could almost see her little cousins, her children, as she called them, Basil and Susan D., running about with their butterfly-nets, shouting and calling ...
— The Merryweathers • Laura E. Richards
... promised faithfully to give up tree climbing, fishing in the pond, and many other favourite sports, and commenced to dig in the piece of kitchen garden under their grandmother's direction. In fact so zealous did Tuttu become that he borrowed a knife from one of the farm labourers who was vine pruning, and cut the whole of the branches off a vine near the house, ending with a terrible gash in his own thumb, which necessitated his being carried in an ox-cart to the hospital in Siena, supported in his ...
— Soap-Bubble Stories - For Children • Fanny Barry
... away in the cliffs yonder, the rock-doves were preparing to nest by hundreds, and waking the silence with their cooing and the flutter of their wings. Even the grim old eagle perched on the pinnacle of the peak was pruning himself, contentedly happy in the knowledge that his mate had laid an egg in that dark corner of the cliff. All things rejoiced and cried aloud that summer was at hand and that it was time to bloom and love and nest. Soon it would be winter again, when things died, and next summer ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... plums almost for nothing; but by far the best is the passion-fruit. Neither vegetables nor fruit, as sold in the markets and shops, are as good as those you buy in England. The inferior quality is due to the grow-as-you-please manner in which the fruit is cultivated, pruning and even the most ordinary care being neglected; but you can get as fine-flavoured fruit here as anywhere, and to taste grapes in perfection you ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... is not greatly unlike one of our own orchard trees, and trained by the pruning knife it grows similar in shape to a well-kept apple tree, no very low boughs being left, so that a man on horseback can generally pass freely down the long glades. Left to nature, it will in good soil reach a height of over ...
— The Food of the Gods - A Popular Account of Cocoa • Brandon Head
... know all this? Why, through being under-gardener. Of course he couldn't be under-gardener, and be always about, in the summer-time, near the windows on the lawn, a mowing, and sweeping, and weeding, and pruning, and this and that, without getting acquainted with the ways of the family. Even supposing Master Harry hadn't come to him one morning early, and said, "Cobbs, how should you spell Norah, if you was asked?" and then began cutting it in print all ...
— The Holly-Tree • Charles Dickens
... window, where her eye was immediately caught by a long pruning ladder, leaning against the house a dozen feet away. Alma, the little waitress, quietly mixing a mayonnaise on the kitchen porch, was pressed into service, and five minutes later Sally's suit-case was cautiously lowered, on the end of a Mexican lariat, and Sally was steadying the top of ...
— Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby and Other Stories • Kathleen Norris
... drums and the bugle's wailing Vex the air of our vales-no more; The spear is beaten to hooks of pruning, The share is the sword the ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... turbans and shoes, and one has ankle band-ages. In the angle is an octagonal shaft of green marble which continues round the arch. The reliefs on Eve's side in the next order show details of burgher life and agriculture, probably labours of the months or seasons—pruning leafless trees, the preparation of leather, a man seated by a fire on which is a cauldron, whilst a woman fills his cup from a skin over her shoulder, behind hang sausages. Above is a pig which a man is about ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson
... the happy savage, and the agreeable simplicity of country people, appear to very great advantage when contrasted on this side with the often unlimited narrowness of a special trade, and the endless curtailing of the wholeness of man by the pruning processes of city life. Thus the often abused savage has his hut, his family, his cocoa tree, his weapons, his passions; he fishes, hunts, plays, fights, adorns himself, and enjoys the consciousness that he is the centre of a whole, while a modern citizen is ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... the mill, twittering and chirping as if seeking for food on the sill; clinging to the ivy with their tiny, pink claws, looking at her expectantly out of their bright, roving eyes, pruning their feathers. The ...
— The Black Cross • Olive M. Briggs
... he had brought. It was the big pruning-knife out of the drawer in the hall. He pulled it out. He would cut away some of the furze branches. Perhaps Dickie was lying bound, hidden in the middle ...
— Harding's luck • E. [Edith] Nesbit
... a pleasant way of running into danger," said Mr. Thorn, who was leisurely pruning the prickles from ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... among the brush, looking utterly neglected; they are old trees mostly, and were planted by the more enterprising ancestors of the present owners, who would appear to be altogether unworthy of their sires, since they evidently do nothing in the way of trimming and pruning, but merely accept such blessings as unaided nature vouchsafes to bestow upon them. Moss-grown gravestones are visible here and there amid the thickets; the graveyards are neither protected by fence nor shorn of brush; in short, this aggressive ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... it easier or more difficult for me to sum up the history of mediaeval romance in Renaissance Italy; nor whether the recollection of certain Tuscan farms, the well-known scent of the sun-dried fennel and mint under the vine-trellis, the droning song of the contadino ploughing or pruning unseen in the valley, the snatches of peasants' rhymes, the outlines of peasants' faces—things all these of this our own time, of yesterday or to-day; whether all this, running in my mind like so many scribbly illustrations ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... request Malcom had brought her a pair of pruning nippers, such as she had seen him use, and she kept up a delicate show of work, trimming the rose-bushes and shrubs, while she watched him. She could not bring her mind to anything that looked like real work as yet, but she had a feeling that it must come. ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... Queen Elizabeth's own book, and her own hand writing appears at the beginning, viz.: "August. I walke many times into the pleasant fieldes of the Holy Scriptures, where I plucke up the goodliesome herbes of sentences by pruning: eate them by reading: chawe them by musing: and laie them up at length in the hie seate of memorie by gathering them together: that so having tasted their sweetenes I may the lesse perceave the bitterness of this miserable ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... ivy has entirely covered the south wall, and the acacia is so tall and spreading, that I longed to have the pruning of it. Old Will keeps ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... was busily engaged in pruning some fruit trees. As he paused in his work to wipe his perspiring brow he formed a picture of contentment in complete harmony with the scene of which he was a part. This was Oliver Whyte, the owner of the house and garden, which he had ...
— Australia Revenged • Boomerang
... of the interruption to get to his room and change clothes, then went up to the hangar and got out an air-cavalry mount. About fifty men were working on High Garden Terrace, pruning and trimming and leveling the lawns. There was a big vitrifier on the Mall—even at five hundred feet he could feel the heat from it—chuffing and clanking and pouring lavalike molten rock for a new pavement. And all the nymphs and satyrs and dryads and fauns and centaurs had had their ...
— The Cosmic Computer • Henry Beam Piper
... say that in his prime, Ere the pruning-knife of Time Cut him down, Not a better man was found By the crier on his ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... pruning it, and re-writing some of the verses," Margaret explained. "He wanted to make it ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls, Vol. XIII, Nov. 28, 1891 • Various
... and luxurious growers, and it is necessary to pay them constant attention in pruning or nipping the extremities of the shoots, or they will soon become ill-formed and straggling. This is particularly requisite during the rains, when heat and moisture combine to increase their growth to excess; allowing them to enjoy ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... patience of others' suffering, but by the offering of your own, that you ever will draw nearer to the time when the great change shall pass upon the iron of the earth;—when men shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks; neither shall they ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... suspended during active service, resume their importance with a month or two of quiet. It really costs unceasing labor to keep a regiment in perfect condition and ready for service. The work is made up of minute and endless details, like a bird's pruning her feathers or a cat's licking her kittens into their proper toilet. Here are eight hundred men, every one of whom, every Sunday morning at farthest, must be perfectly soigne in all personal proprieties; he must exhibit himself provided with every article of clothing, buttons, shoe-strings, ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... she lay down her pen in the midst of some work requiring the whole energy of her mind, and much concentration of thought, and go to her garden for half an hour; and while apparently wholly absorbed in pruning or transplanting, she was really engaged in her work; and the apparent loss of time was amply repaid by the rapidity with which she wrote out the ideas conceived and matured during this healthful recreation. A word, however, spoken to her at such times, would have caused a ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth
... be displeased at being told every slight circumstance of the manner in which Dr. Johnson contrived to amuse his solitary hours. He sometimes employed himself in chymistry, sometimes in watering and pruning a vine, sometimes in small experiments, at which those who may smile, should recollect that there are moments which admit of being ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... when she entered it, for Kate had so beautifully proven her religious earnestness, and more than all had shown such a Christ-like spirit, that the "sword was beaten into a plowshare and the spear into a pruning hook." ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... looked through the glass door of the salon at the little wild garden, where the prickwood and the lilies looked as though they had never known the pruning-knife and were likely never to know it. 'You expect the ...
— Putois - 1907 • Anatole France
... public nor the honorable body to which it was directly addressed took the new governor's message stressing general retrenchment and the pruning of useless offices seriously. Nothing in the recent course of the party wooed faith in its promises to purge and live cleanly, and the accident of a huge majority in the late elections, owing to national issues, had set ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... would be capable of second-hand descriptions only, so I resolved to approach the fountain-head and interrogate Aleck in person. I found the youth in the garden of Fanellan farm, evidently just passing the time by a cursory pruning of berry bushes. He had on his Sunday suit, and was unusually smartened up for a weekday; for it was but natural that neighbors might be expected to drop in for information as to the supernatural manifestations he had experienced, and it was well to be prepared. ...
— Up in Ardmuirland • Michael Barrett
... and walked along the tiny path, bordered by oyster shells, to the red currant bushes beyond, he laid his pruning-knife on the ground, and sat down on an old bench beside a little green table, on which a sparrow was hopping about. On his seventy-fifth birthday he had resigned his profession to take to gardening, and I had heard from no less an authority than the General that "that old fool Theophilus ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... come when these warlike tribes shall beat their spears into pruning-hooks, and their assagais into ploughshares, and shall learn war no more! The skill and cunning of their artificers shall be consecrated to the higher and nobler ends of civilization, and the noise of battle shall die amid the music of ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... our trouble, and the world cannot be saved by physical means, but only by the spiritual forces which change the mental attitude. When the sword shall be beaten into the ploughshare and the spear into the pruning-hook, that will be the outward sign of the change of thought from destructive, competitive methods to constructive and cooeperative regeneration of the world! It is interesting to note that the sword and spear are not going to be thrown on the scrap-heap; they are to be ...
— The Next of Kin - Those who Wait and Wonder • Nellie L. McClung
... the parishes, why sweep away these fantastic figures who, without any religious character, recruited from the farms, never educated in seminaries, peasants at bottom, in no way priests, capable, when required, to give a helping hand with the pruning knife in the vineyard, or with the pole among the olives, or the sickle among the corn. Alas! they had their weaknesses, and these weaknesses worked their ruin." The salt had lost its savour, wherewith could ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... to produce atavistic buds, may be expected to do the same thing again. And then there is a very good chance that by combining this view with the idea that dormant buds are more apt to revert than young ones, we may get at a method for further investigation, if we recur to the practice of pruning. By cutting away the young twigs in the vicinity of dormant buds, we may incite these to action. Evidently we are not to expect that in so doing they will all become atavistic. For this result is not at all assured; on the contrary, all that we might hope to attain ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries
... journeys in uneventful directions, was divided between music, which greatly occupied his younger thought, and literature, which slowly, but more and more exclusively, engaged his attention." There is truth in the statement; still this pruner of roses, who of rose-pruning knew absolutely nothing, was one who best loved the sea when the sea was rough, who always put into port of a Sunday that his men might "get their hot dinner." He was one who would give his friend of the best—oysters, maybe, and audit ale, which "dear old Thompson" ...
— Two Suffolk Friends • Francis Hindes Groome
... was covered by a grape-vine that yielded, I remember, small green grapes for pies in the spring, and imperfectly ripe black grapes in favourable autumns for the purposes of dessert. The grape-vine played an important part in my life, for my father broke his neck while he was pruning ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... Death is the Lord of the land of life, When your hot race is run. Meet then his scythe and, pruning-knife When the fray ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... blessings. It refers to God: (1) As a nourisher, strength-giver, satisfier and a strong one who gives; (2) As the giver of fruitfulness which comes through nourishment. He was to make Abraham fruitful, Gen. 17:1-8; (3) As Giver of chastening. This he does in the way of pruning that there may be ...
— The Bible Book by Book - A Manual for the Outline Study of the Bible by Books • Josiah Blake Tidwell
... Surgeon-General a different showing. It was one of the surprising things, in a statistical way, to find that city-bred boys stood the marching and exposure of the Civil War campaigns better than their country brothers, and that the yard-stick turned into as effective a sword as the pruning-hook. Garrison, who maintained for so many years that men should not vote because the government was founded on force, had the grace not to speak on this phase of the question, but he said it was cruel that ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson
... land, and I see this spirit of brotherhood among the nations has broken down international barriers, and international hatred is no more. The sword is beaten into a ploughshare, the spear into a pruning-hook, and the peoples of all lands are one, each freely sharing of its special bounties to add to ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... below seemed a primrose whiff from the lane behind his father's house. He could hear the cocks crowing in Surrey, and the lowing of the kine. There was a robin singing in a bush under the window, and there was some one in the garden with a pair of pruning-shears. Snip-snip! snip-snip! he heard them going. The light in the east was pink as a peach-bloom and ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... There stands a neophite glazing of his face, Pruning his clothes, perfuming of his hair, Against his idol enters; and repeats, Like an unperfect prologue, at third music, His part of speeches, and confederate jests, In passion to himself. Another swears His scene of courtship over; bids, believe ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... revolution in the tenets of the church, which, in the last generation, gave birth to the neology, now so destructive of the internal peace of the churches. Neology has not come from Deism, for this power assails the outworks of Christianity; while the school of criticism is but a severe pruning knife of internal verbiage. Although the language quoted is harsh, the arguments common-place, which, although true, are now discarded by the educated Freethinker; yet if for no stronger language than this men were imprisoned only ten years ago, what must we say to ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... afforded to it. During his best period he had a mentor at his elbow in Charles Lemesle, who always read what he wrote before it went to the printer; and Balzac, though vain, was too intelligent not to avail himself of this friend's pruning. Under the new regime the revising was impossible, and, as a result, that difficult perfection which he had so perseveringly sought was destined to be attained but rarely in ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... dramatic genius, at a time when, happily, the critical faculty is not by any means so fully awake as are the receptive and exultant faculties, and when what the nature chiefly needs is excitement to growth, without which all pruning, the most artistic, is useless, as ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... foot. The handles are about six feet long and end like a mop-stick, without any crossbar. A slight alteration would turn these tools into pikes, a much more likely operation than the beating of swords into plough-shares and spears into pruning-hooks. Meanwhile the length of the handle keeps the worker from too dangerous proximity to his work. There is a broader pattern of blade, but the handle is always of the same sanitary length. The children of the soil turn it over at a wholesome distance. They keep six feet of ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... hope the time is near, when sweet peace her olive wand To lay the fiend of war shall soon stretch o'er every land, When swords turn'd into ploughshares and pruning-hooks shall be, An' the nations a' live happy in their ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... I behold the native Indian exulting in the works of peace and civilization; his bloody hatchet he buries deep under ground, and his murderous knife he turns into a pruning fork, to lop the tender vine and teach the luxuriant shoot to grow. No more does he form to himself a heaven after death (according to the poet), in company with his faithful dog, behind the cloud-topped hill, to enjoy solitary quiet, far from the haunts of faithless men; but, better instructed ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... some hemp-seed and corn and watched it pruning its feathers as it glanced warily at its new home and ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... soil and aspect, he brings adequate supplies of nourishment within reach of it. By manuring it at the right season, he both adds to its store of nourishment and gives it the stimulus which will help it to absorb and assimilate the nourishment that is immediately available for its use. And, by pruning and training it judiciously, he gives it the guidance which will enable it to develop itself to the best advantage from the fruit-bearing point of view (fruit-bearing being the end which he sets it). He does these three things for it, but he does no more than these. ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... archipelagoes spread before him; and another separate one representing the long eastern coasts of the Japanese islands—Niphon, Matsmai, and Sikoke. With his snow-white new ivory leg braced against the screwed leg of his table, and with a long pruning-hook of a jack-knife in his hand, the wondrous old man, with his back to the gangway door, was wrinkling his brow, and tracing his old ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... feathered people were pruning their wings for a long flight to the warm Southland, and the four-footed folk were gathering nuts ...
— Little Jack Rabbit and the Squirrel Brothers • David Cory
... strawberries spilled, and lessons disregarded in unbroken sequence. In later life Miss Edgeworth confessed to having occasionally introduced in "Harry and Lucy" some nonsense as an "alloy to make the sense work well;" but as all her earlier children's tales were subjected to the pruning scissors of Mr. Edgeworth, this amalgam is to-day hardly noticeable in "Popular Tales," "Early Lessons," and "Frank," which preceded the six volumes of "Harry ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey
... following him like his dog or his cow, wherever he goes. His homestead is not planted till you are planted, your roots intertwine with his; thriving best where he thrives best, loving the limestone and the frost, the plow and the pruning-knife, you are indeed suggestive of hardy, cheerful industry, and a healthy life in the open air. Temperate, chaste fruit! you mean neither luxury nor sloth, neither satiety nor indolence, neither enervating ...
— Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and, Other Papers • John Burroughs
... can grow without hinderance from the ignorant and the unsympathetic; where they can reach out for the sun on all sides and stretch their long arms skyward; where each vine can grow as it would in all the luxuriance of its nature, free from the pruning-knife of criticism and the straitlaced trellis of conventionality—a planet on which the Puritan with his creeds, customs, fads, issues, and dogmas, and the Cavalier with his traditions and time-honored notions never sat foot. ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... new hay His temples bound, who turns the fresh cut grass He might be thought. Oft in his horny hand He bears a goad; then might you swear, that now The weary oxen he had just unyok'd. Arm'd with a pruning hook, he one appears Who lops the vines. When he the ladder lifts, Apples about to pluck he seems. His sword Shews him a soldier; and his trembling reed An angler. Thus a thousand shapes he tries, T' enjoy the pleasure of her beauteous sight. Now leaning on a staff, his temples clad ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... the slopes, the rude old plough of the Georgics, dragged by great gray oxen, turns up the rich loam, that "needs only to be tickled to laugh out in flowers and grain." In the olive-orchards, the farmers are carefully pruning away the decayed branches and loosening the soil about their old roots. Here and there, the smoke of distant bonfires, burning heaps of useless stubble, shows against the dreamy purple hills like the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... gain the liberty to distinguish the difference 'twixt a Father and a Fool, to look below, and spie a younger Brother pruning up, and dressing up his expectations in a rare glass of beauty, too good for him; those dreaming Scholars then turn Tyrants, Andrew, and ...
— The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher - Vol. 2 of 10: Introduction to The Elder Brother • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... even now I think a little of it was genuine anger. It came over me that perhaps I was overcrowding it and treating the whole copper enterprise too much as if it were my personal property; for here was something I had had nothing to do with, the setting out, pruning, and gathering the fruit from, this particular plum-tree, and so I ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... more clearly, from the shareholder, the parasitic speculator and the wretched multitudes of the Abyss. The New Republicans will constitute an informal and open freemasonry. In all sorts of ways they will be influencing and controlling the apparatus of the ostensible governments, they will be pruning irresponsible property, checking speculators and controlling the abyssward drift, but at that, at an indirect control, at any sort of fiction, the New Republic, from the very nature of its cardinal ideas, will ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... sideways. Great, thick necks hulked forward in impatient jerks; and those dagger-pointed horns, sharper than a pruning hook, promised no boy's sport for our company. The buffalo sees best laterally on the level, and as long as we were quiet we remained undiscovered. At the prospect, some of the hunters grew excitedly profane. ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... kind of character. It was found easy to mold them into what was desired; and they went through their work not without a sort of manoeuvre. As they marched along, with their garden shears, their long-handled pruning-knives, their rakes, their little spades and hoes, and sweeping-brooms; others following after these with baskets to carry off the stones and rubbish; and others, last of all, trailing along the heavy iron roller—it was a thoroughly ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... Woodhall Spa, beyond the Stixwould-road, near the vicarage, and northward, the surface sand, in some parts, at the depth of a foot, or slightly more, hardens into an ironstone, so compact that tree roots cannot penetrate it. In root-pruning or manuring apple-trees, I have found the tap-root stunted into a large round knob, further downward growth being prevented by this indurated formation. This oxide of iron also pervades the sandy soil, in parts, to a depth ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... whatsoever the toil was in which he had a part the work was better done. From the taskmaster this change became known to the chief head of all the lands, who thereupon had him set to other more important tasks, so that at last he was not only a toiler with pick and spade and pruning knife, but his counsel was sought in everything that concerned the larger works on the land; in forming plantations, in the draining of wet grounds and building of houses and bridges and the making of new roads. And in all these works he ...
— Dead Man's Plack and an Old Thorn • William Henry Hudson
... that in a perfect Italian setting we should have stumbled on an Italian gardener, who whistles Verdi as he works. True, he doesn't know the flowers by name, and in his hands a pair of clippers are as fatal as the shears in the hands of Atropos, but he is in the picture. When I see gardeners pruning I realize that that lady of destiny shows wonderful restraint about our threads of fate—the temptation to ...
— The Smiling Hill-Top - And Other California Sketches • Julia M. Sloane
... that all shrubs are the bodies of Goddesses. Farewell, dear husband; and thou, sister; and, {thou} my father; in whom, if there is any affection {towards me}, protect my branches from the wounds of the sharp pruning-knife, {and} from the bite of the cattle. And since it is not allowed me to bend down towards you, stretch your limbs up hither, and come near for my kisses, while they can {still} be reached, and lift up my little son. More ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... themselves, to this or that particular point of benefit or use; and to prepare the sweet virgin soil of their minds to receive the seeds of virtue and goodness so early, that, as they grow up, one need only now a little pruning, and now a little water, to make them the ornaments and delights of the garden of this life! And then their pretty ways, their fond and grateful endearments, some new beauty every day rising to observation—O ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... world may expect ever and anon to hear the voice of Joel sounding out this trumpet call, "Prepare ye war; wake up the mighty men; let all the men of war draw near—beat your ploughshares into swords and your pruning-hooks into spears—put ye in the sickle, for the harvest ...
— The Angels' Song • Thomas Guthrie
... to be made, fields to be ploughed and sown, pleasant wooden houses to be built, bees to be sheltered and encouraged, and schools to be erected where song and music were taught. O a truly great man was Hu Gadarn! though a warrior, he preferred the sickle and pruning hook to the sword, and the sound of the song and lute to the hoarse blast ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... change of the scene. We had left behind us a blooming spring, which enlivened with its verdure the trees and hedges on the road we passed, and the meadows already smiled with flowers. The cheerful inhabitants were busy in adjusting their limits, lopping their trees, pruning their vines, tilling their fields: but when we entered Savoy, nature wore a very different face; and I must own, that my spirits were great sufferers by the change. Here we began to view on the nearer mountains, covered with ice and snow, notwithstanding the advanced season, the rigid winter, ...
— The History of Sir Charles Grandison, Volume 4 (of 7) • Samuel Richardson
... the thrifty English and French care of woodlands, and felt as if it were a great pity not to take better care of the precious legacy. Aunt Barbara sometimes sent Jonathan and Seth Pond to care for the trees that needed pruning or covering at the roots, but hardly any one else in Tideshead did anything but chop them up and clear them away when they ...
— Betty Leicester - A Story For Girls • Sarah Orne Jewett
... horticulturist. Teaching how to raise pears intelligently, and with the best results, how to find out the character of the soil, the best methods of preparing it, the best varieties to select under existing conditions, the best modes of planting, pruning, fertilizing, grafting, and utilizing the ground before the trees come into bearing, and, finally, of gathering and packing for market. Illustrated. Cloth, ...
— The Peanut Plant - Its Cultivation And Uses • B. W. Jones
... strewn with branches of rose vine, and the pruning shears lay open upon them, just as they had fallen from the old man's hand. The sun had passed several degrees below the meridian, and the shadows of the twisted iron columns were aslant eastward, but the glare of light shone on the plate-glass door, which ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... penances than Father Dominic used to do; that he treated her mistakes as mistakes only, and not as sins; that generally his ideas of sin had to do rather with the root of evil in the heart than with the diligent pruning of particular branches; that he said a great deal about Christ, and not much about the saints. So Maude's change of opinion came, over her so gradually and noiselessly that she never realised herself to have undergone any change at ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... fuel, or for timber, require more or less training in order to yield the best returns. The experiments of the Vicomte de Courval in sylviculture throw much light on this subject, and show, in a most interesting way, the importance of pruning forest-trees. The principal feature of De Courval's very successful method is a systematical mode of trimming which compels the tree to develop the stem, by reducing the lateral ramification. Beginning ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... parts of our Father's husbandry, ought to silence every question, quiet every fear, and give peace and restful assurance to our hearts in all their pain. We cannot know the reason for the painful strokes, but we know that he who holds the pruning-knife is our Father. That ought always to be enough for us ...
— Making the Most of Life • J. R. Miller
... pruning-hooks into spears," chanted an unseen voice, sadly, behind Courtland. His face set sternly. He turned ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz |
