"Spruce" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... wings, as you may choose to call them, stretching more than twenty feet from tip to tip; every volition of yours extending as perfectly into them as if your spinal cord ran down the centre strip of your boat, and the nerves of your arms tingled as far as the broad blades of your oars,—oars of spruce, balanced, leathered, and ringed under your own special direction. This, in sober earnest, is the nearest approach to flying that man has ever made or perhaps ever will make. As the hawk sails without flapping ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... late years been introduced'. The teapot and the mug of ale jointly possessed the breakfast table, and meat and pudding smoked on the board every noon. Formerly one might see at church what was the cut of a coat half a century ago, now dress was spruce and modern.[481] As a proof of the spirit of improvement among farmers, Marshall instances the custom in the Midlands of placing their sons as pupils on other farms to widen their experience. 'Their entertainments are as expensive as they ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... superfine Hopkins, how different from the personage we saw but lately plunging like a maniac at the fire-bell! Could it have been thee, Hopkins? Is it possible that anything so spruce, dignified, almost stately, could have fallen so very low? We fear it is too true, for human nature not unfrequently furnishes instances of tremendous contrast, just as material nature sometimes furnishes the spectacle ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... have been granted a new lease of life and may be found moored at the wharfs, beached on the marine railways, or anchored in the stream, eagerly awaiting their turn to refit. It is a matter of vital concern that the freight on spruce boards from Bangor to New York has increased to five dollars a thousand feet. Many of these craft belong to grandfatherly skippers who dared not venture past Cape Cod in December, lest the venerable Matilda ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... hard woods which may be added to the list. Sugar, particularly, is a good-working wood, but maple is more difficult. Spruce, on the other hand, is the strongest and toughest wood, considering its weight, which is but a little ...
— Carpentry for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... ceremonies. Parades, reviews and other ceremonies, with their martial music, the presence of spectators, etc., are intended to stimulate the interest and excite the military spirit of the command. Also, being occasions for which the soldiers dress up and appear spruce and trim, they inculcate habits of tidiness,—they teach a lesson in cleanliness of ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... are narrow and without timber; the country is high and broken; a large portion of black rock and brown sandy rock appears in the face of the hills, the tops of which are covered with scattered pine, spruce, and dwarf cedar; the soil is generally poor, sandy near the tops of the hills, and nowhere producing much grass, the low grounds being covered with little else than the hyssop, or southernwood, and ...
— First Across the Continent • Noah Brooks
... camping-place below. On a spit of the north shore was the camping-place known as Devil's Point, where no voyageur would ever stay because the long point was inhabited by demons. The bank is steep here, flanked by a swamp of huge spruce trees criss-crossed by the log-jam of centuries. The reason for the ill omen of the place is plain enough—a long point running out with three sides ...
— The "Adventurers of England" on Hudson Bay - A Chronicle of the Fur Trade in the North (Volume 18 of the Chronicles of Canada) • Agnes C. (Agnes Christina) Laut
... shrink smaller and smaller before my eyes. Then he edged sidewise to a great stump, hid himself among the roots, and stood stock-still,—a beautiful picture of innocence and curiosity, framed in the rough brown roots of the spruce stump. It was his first teaching to hide and be still. Just as he needed it most, he had forgotten ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... the Atlantic, but Mr. Balfour's trees have thriven remarkably well. He tried all sorts, convinced that something should be done, and that an ounce of experiment was worth a pound of theory. Sycamore, ash, elm, beech, birch, poplar, alder, larch, Scotch fir, spruce, silver fir, sea buckthorn, elder, and willow—he gave them all a chance, some as main plantations, some as shelter belts. All proved successful except the silver fir. Besides this, three hundred and fifty holdings have been planted with shelter ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... enumerate the various trees, in groups or single specimens, which most invite our notice, would interfere with the main object of our visit. We have come for a special purpose, and we can only allude to a very few of the species to which our attention may be supposed to be directed. A white spruce, in rich luxuriance, measuring, as the branches trail upon the sward, upwards of sixty feet in circumference; the Himalayan white pine, with its deep fringe-like foliage, twenty-five feet in height; the Cephalonian fir, with leaves as pungent as an Auricaria, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... a grievous load, And Chelsea, flower'd and spruce, And antique thingummies in spode; The only thing that none ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 25, 1914 • Various
... mile in from Radnor road, with a thick spruce wood atween them and all the rest of the world. They never go away anywheres, except to church—they never miss that—and nobody goes there. There's just old Thomas, and his sister Janet, and a niece of theirs, and this here Neil we've been talking about. ...
— Kilmeny of the Orchard • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... open her little gate, hung crookedly in a very compact and prim spruce hedge, she stopped in amazement and said, "Well, ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... a couple of streets, we came to a humble but neat-looking dwelling house, with an apology for a garden in front. Tables and seats were arranged beneath some trees; "spruce beer" was advertised for sale, but there were indications that other kinds of refreshments could be obtained. The place wore a comfortable aspect. We nodded smilingly to each other, as much as to say, "This will ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... although it was no laughing matter, at the plight the liquidator was now in. He was changed in a moment from the spruce and natty personage into a miserable and draggled being. From every part of him the salt water was streaming, and the curl was completely taken out of his whiskers. He could not speak from terror, which the boat-boys soon saw, for none are quicker than negroes ...
— Stories by English Authors: Africa • Various
... "osculatory" of the mediaeval Church?[94] So with "Ash-Wednesday," a single syllable opens a whole chapter of Church history. Again, the Latin headings to the psalms of the Psalter; with what an impatient gesture can we imagine a spruce reviser brushing these away as so much trash! They are not trash, they are way marks that tell of times when devout men loved those catchwords, as we love the first lines of our favorite hymns. A few of the headings, such as "De Profundis" and "Miserere," still possess such associations for ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... ordered. Three minutes later he was joined by his friend. Until the trail took them down into a draw grown up in spruce Chuck's gun remained very much in evidence. Any unbiased spectator without a knowledge of the facts would have said that he was keeping a ...
— The Heart of the Range • William Patterson White
... encountered a steeper ascent than any I had yet climbed. Here the character of the forest began to change. There were other trees than pines, and particularly one kind, cone-shaped, symmetrical, and bright, which Dick called a silver spruce. I was glad it belonged to the conifers, or pine-tree family, because it was the most beautiful tree I had ever seen. We climbed ridges and threaded through aspen thickets in hollows till near sunset. Then Stockton ordered a ...
— The Young Forester • Zane Grey
... very neat and spruce; it had suffered a restoration lately. The walls were stripped of their old plaster and pointed, so that the inside is now rougher than the outside, a thing the ancient builders never intended. The altar is fairly draped with good hangings behind, ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the topmost source—fons et origo—of our chosen river. This single spring, crystal-clear and ice-cold, gushing out of the hillside in a forest of spruce and yellow birch and sugar maple, gave us the clue that we must follow for a week through ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... apple-tree. Be it said, in understanding of the subject, that there are naturally dwarf forms of many plants, and probably all ordinary plants are capable of producing them. Thus there are very compact condensed forms of arbor-vitae, Norway spruce, peach-tree. These have originated as seed sports and are multiplied by cuttings. So are there dwarf tomatoes, dwarf China asters, dwarf sweet peas, all coming more or less true from seeds, for these species (of short generations) have been bred to reproduce their variations. The ...
— The Apple-Tree - The Open Country Books—No. 1 • L. H. Bailey
... posts hissed in the fine rain, and around it crouched several urchins busy making oatmeal cakes in the embers. On one side a respectable lean-to had been constructed by nailing a plank to two fir-trees, running sloping poles thence to the ground, and thatching the whole with spruce branches and heather. On the other side two small dilapidated home-made tents were pitched. Dougal motioned his companion into the lean-to, where they had some privacy from the rest ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... is known as the bitter boletus, because of a bitter taste of the flesh. It usually grows on or near much decayed logs or stumps of hemlock spruce. It is said to be easily recognized by its bitter taste. I have found specimens of a plant which seems to have all the characters of this one growing at the base of hemlock spruce trees, except that the taste was not bitter. At Ithaca, however, the plant occurs ...
— Studies of American Fungi. Mushrooms, Edible, Poisonous, etc. • George Francis Atkinson
... how Jim loved her, all the details of that night became vivid. She sat alone under the spruce-trees near the cabin. The shadows thickened, and then lightened under a rising moon. She heard the low hum of insects, a distant laugh of some woman of the village, and the murmur of the brook. Jim was later than usual. Very likely, as her uncle had hinted, Jim had ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... angles, and, when set, were blocked up on the sidewalks opposite each other in the two tunnels. A temporary platform was laid on the bottom chord angles of the ribs, on which the concrete was dumped, the same as on the form carriages. The lagging used was 3 by 3-in. dressed pine or spruce 16 ft. long, and was placed as the concreting of the arch proceeded above the 15 deg. line on the side-wall and above the sidewalk on the core-wall. After the arch had reached such a height that the concrete could not be passed ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, Vol. LXVIII, Sept. 1910 • James H. Brace and Francis Mason
... and finest cloth. Black broad-cloth frocks, and satin or velvet vests, were quite common. Individuals thus attired formed a majority of the guests—for in young settlements the "hotel" or "tavern" is also a boarding-house, where the spruce "storekeepers" and better class of clerks take their meals—usually sleeping in the office ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... mind; There were things in crates and boxes, there was stuff in bags and bales, There were tea-chests wrapped in matting, there were Eastern-looking frails, There were baulks of teak and greenheart, there were stacks of spruce and pine, There was cork and frozen carcasses and casks of Spanish wine, There was rice and spice and cocoa-nuts, and rum enough was there For to warm all London's innards up and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 4th, 1920 • Various
... the "Antiquarian Repertory" (ed. 1807), i. 251-270, the reader will find an interesting account of the Trained Bands and the Artillery Company. Old writers are fond of sneering at the City warriors. The following passage is from Shirley's "Witty Fair One," v. 1:—"There's a spruce captain newly crept out of a gentleman-usher and shuffled into a buff jerkin with gold lace, that never saw service beyond Finsbury or the Artillery-Garden, marches wearing a desperate feather in his lady's beaver, while a poor soldier, bred up in ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various
... of the Rockies, a morning clear, cold, and tense, with a bell-like quality in the frosty air to make the cracking of a snow-laden spruce-bough resound like a pistol-shot. For Denver and the dwellers on the eastern plain the sun is an hour high; but the hamlet mining-camp of Argentine, with its dovecote railway station and two-pronged siding, still lies in the steel-blue ...
— A Fool For Love • Francis Lynde
... farm-yard; but he could not help overhearing some of the conversation, which seemed to him carried on too much in the tone of equality. "And who's yon?" asked the old labourer at last. "Is he your sweetheart? Your missis's son, I reckon. He's a spruce ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... house at my service, and our coming was celebrated by a dinner of wild goose, plum pudding, and coffee. After the voyage from Halifax it seemed good to rest a little with the firm earth under foot, and where the walls of one's habitation were still. Through the open windows came the fragrance of the spruce woods, and from the little piazza in front of the house you could look down and across Lake Melville, and away to the blue mountains beyond, where the snow was still ...
— A Woman's Way Through Unknown Labrador • Mina Benson Hubbard (Mrs. Leonidas Hubbard, Junior)
... The spruce Falve, curled and anointed for the bridal, found no wife, but his mother, who called him a fool, a knave, a notorious evil-liver and contemner of holy persons. This was hard to bear, for part of it at least he knew to be quite true. What was harder was, ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... trappers think it gives a taint which scares their game away. The paddles were and are of all shapes and sizes, long and short, broad and narrow, spoon-blade and square; and they were and are made of all kinds of wood, from the lightest spruce to the much heavier but handsomer bird's-eye maple. Sails were and are only used with light winds dead aft, and not often in birch-barks even then, because there is ...
— All Afloat - A Chronicle of Craft and Waterways • William Wood
... Rainbow People, to work for the people of Ha-arts, the earth. He divided this creation into six parts, and each had its home in a spring in the heart of a great mountain upon whose summit was a giant tree. One was in the spruce tree on the Mountain of the North; another in the pine tree on the Mountain of the West; another in the oak tree on the Mountain of the South; and another in the aspen tree on the Mountain of the East; the fifth was on the cedar tree on the Mountain ...
— Myths and Legends of California and the Old Southwest • Katharine Berry Judson
... is a beautiful public park on one of the wooded islands near Stockholm. There one finds forests of gigantic oaks, dense groves of spruce, smiling meadows, winding roads and shady paths. Through the tree-branches one catches a glimpse of the blue waters of the fjord, rippling and sparkling in the sun; little steamers go puffing briskly to and fro; and great vessels sail slowly down ...
— Gerda in Sweden • Etta Blaisdell McDonald
... innocent fun of electioneering, the speeches, riotings, mud-throwings, everybody happy as sandboys or mudlarks. What a great day that was—Plancus being M. P. and I a boy in a provincial town—when the Blues and the Reds meant broken heads, and the flowing tide of beer, and spruce carriages with beribboned horses, and jocund waggonettes, and bands and banners, and "hoorays," and shuttered shops, and an outpour of citizens; a day festive, yet solemn, pregnant with mysterious ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... Dogwood. 8 feet thick at the butt [A]; does Pine. not transplant well; best rais'd the Elm. from seeds—the lumbermen Chesnut. call it yellow poplar.) Linden. Sycamores. Aspen. Gum trees, both sweet and sour. Spruce. Beeches. Hornbeam. Black-walnuts. ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... from the ceiling and the little room exactly suited its mistress both were neat and clean, trim and spruce, simple and yet nice. Snowy transparent curtains enclosed the bed as a protection against the mosquitoes, a crucifix of delicate workmanship hung above the head of the couch, and the seats were covered with good cloth of various ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... aggressor; she was irresistibly drawn, she would not be repulsed. A stenographer in the Wessex National Bank, she boarded with a Welsh family in Spruce Street; matter-of-fact, plodding, commonplace, resembling—as Janet thought—a horse, possessing, indeed many of the noble qualities of that animal, she might have been thought the last person in the world to discern and appreciate in Janet the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... thing there. Hamilcar, the carriage-driver, (we did not say "coachman") had on his Christmas suit, including a shaggy overcoat for which his master had given him an order upon a Richmond tailor, and was spruce exceedingly. To ensure our perfect safety and respectability we had an outrider in the shape of Mr. James Ireton, a young fellow-countryman, who was returning from ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... on each side of the front step. A servant threw open the door of the breakfast room, and Delme mechanically entered it. It was filled with strangers; on some of these the spruce undertaker was fitting silk scarfs; while others were busy at the ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... the wild beasts roared about her, but none did her any harm. In the evening she came to a little cottage, and went in there to rest herself, for her weary feet would carry her no further. Everything was spruce and neat in the cottage: on the table was spread a white cloth, and there were seven little plates with seven little loaves and seven little glasses with wine in them; and knives and forks laid in order, and by the wall stood seven little beds. Then, as she was very hungry, ...
— My Book of Favorite Fairy Tales • Edric Vredenburg
... morning was delightful. The song-sparrows, perched at a safe distance, poured forth floods of melody, the Peabody bird added his high weird note, while other wild birds occasionally chimed in. The path led up through forests of black spruce whose sighing branches whispered softly over our heads. Every one was in excellent humor and had a capital story or a bit of geological scientific or botanical wisdom. The wild-flowers were scarcer than on Cardigan but there was greater variety of ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 5 • Various
... land our empty casks, to fill water, and to cut down wood for fuel; all of which were absolutely necessary occupations. We also began to brew beer from the branches or leaves of a tree, which much resembles the American black- spruce. From the knowledge I had of this tree, and the similarity it bore to the spruce, I judged that, with the addition of inspissated juice of wort and molasses, it would make a very wholesome beer, and supply the want of vegetables, which this place did not afford; and ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... resin which exudes from the spruce-fir, and is used by some polishers in the making of ...
— French Polishing and Enamelling - A Practical Work of Instruction • Richard Bitmead
... which the fish went in thousands, was broad, deep, and rapid. Its banks were clothed with spruce-fir and dense underwood. There was little of the picturesque or the beautiful in the scenery. It was a bleak spot ...
— Fort Desolation - Red Indians and Fur Traders of Rupert's Land • R.M. Ballantyne
... AMERICAN SPRUCE. In the spring of the year, this valuable extract is obtained from the young shoots and tops of the pine or fir trees; and in autumn, from their cones. These are merely boiled in water, to the consistence of honey or molasses. The bark ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... the bothy door, and walked with a steady and fixed purpose, never turning her head, out into the lane, through the gate and up the hill. We watched her spellbound till she reached the horizon, and there saw her pause, roll up her sleeves and furiously attack an old spruce tree. ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 7, 1914 • Various
... kills another hour discussing the merits of the different animals he meets with there. These important duties being done, he strolls to an exhibition, or to a print-shop, and looks over a portfolio of caricatures; thence he keeps on moving to a fashionable hotel, to take white spruce beer(!) and sandwiches; here, after arranging his parties for the evening, be returns home to dress. After looking over the cards which have been left for him, he proceeds to his toilette with his valet, and is dressed about seven, when his chariot is at the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... eighty-foot maple, four feet in the butt, dropped, deftly as a fly is cast, in the only place where it will not outrage the feelings and swipe off the tops of fifty juniors, is a revelation. White pine, hemlock, and spruce share this country with maples, black and white birches, and beech. Maple seems to have few preferences, and the white birches straggle and shiver on the outskirts of every camp; but the pines hold together in solid regiments, sending out skirmishers to invade a neglected ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... be it spoken, thy horses at your owne proper costs and charges shall kneed vp to the knees all the while thou art here in spruce beere & lubeck licour. Not a dog thou bringst with thee but shall be banketted with rhenish wine and sturgion. On our shoulders we weare no lamb skin or miniuer like these academikes, yet wee can drinke to the confusion of all thy enemies. ...
— The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton - With An Essay On The Life And Writings Of Thomas Nash By Edmund Gosse • Thomas Nash
... was the drive up to the house-door, and a sweep, or small oval plot, of turf, surrounded by gravel; and a gate at the corner of this sweep opened into a grove of the grandest old spruce-firs in the island. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... Was he not a "squatter sovereign," or the son of one, free in his habits as the Indian that roamed the prairies of his frontier home? He had not heard of "the latest fashion," and paid no attention to the cut of his garments, although, it must be confessed, he sometimes wished them a trifle more spruce and comfortable. His home, as I have hinted, was on the prairie. Nevertheless, the family domain was an unpretending one. Less than an acre, fenced in the rudest manner, enclosed the "farm and farm buildings," ...
— The Cabin on the Prairie • C. H. (Charles Henry) Pearson
... strangely dressed, I should find for certain a large milliner's shop; in that one the shop is empty, but it wants cleaning plain enough. But there would also be some good stately shops among them. Alas!" sighed he, "I know one in which all is stately; but there sits already a spruce young shopman, which is the only thing that's amiss in the whole shop. All would be splendidly decked out, and we should hear, 'Walk in, gentlemen, pray walk in; here you will find all you please to want.' Ah! I wish to Heaven I could walk in and take a trip right ...
— Andersen's Fairy Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... an' don't reckon I'll be much use any more, nohow. Vina's tuk car' ob me more'n two year now. She's had a sight ob beaux, but she's allus tole 'em she couldn't leab her ole fader. Las' one was dat spruce yaller schoolmarster from Oberlin. Says I, 'Vina, why don't yer git married? 'Pears like yer'd feel less onsettled an' lonesome ef yer had an ole man.' Says she, 'I'se got one ole man: dat's 'nuff.' Says I, 'But don't yer nebber t'ink yer'd like to git married, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... for directly in front of them was a wigwam, so cunningly built in behind a growth of small spruce trees that unless one knew of its whereabouts it might be easily passed by. The Indian girl laughed at Anne's exclamation, and nodded at her in ...
— A Little Maid of Massachusetts Colony • Alice Turner Curtis
... and Norway spruce bordered the road, and, with the aid of a stone wall, shut off from the highway a prosperous-looking vegetable garden. Farther along, a flower garden glowed in the fantastic coloring which gardens acquire when planted for the love of flowers rather than for definite ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger
... long one. It was the 29th of July when they reached a point far down the lake, near the present site of Crown Point. They had paddled all night. They hid here all day. Champlain fell asleep on a heap of spruce boughs, and in his slumber dreamed that he had seen the Iroquois drowning in the lake, and that when he tried to rescue them he had been told by his Algonquin friends to leave them alone, as they were not worth the trouble ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... appointed, as I stood in the hall, a tall, clean-shaven, rather spruce young man entered and spoke to the concierge, who at once ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux
... Porta, in this wilderness, a hillock of grass, descending into which you find a small chamber painted all round with a deep hedge of orchard and woodland plants, pomegranates, apples, arbutus, small pines and spruce firs, all most lovingly and knowingly given, with birds nesting and pecking, in brilliant enamel like encaustic on ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee
... faith to urge them, opened wide and heartily, and began to twinkle again. The bar was in festive array: Christmas greens, red berries, ribbons, tissue-paper and gleaming tinfoil—flash of mirrors, bright colour, branches of pine, cedar and spruce from the big balsamic woods. It was crowded with lumber-jacks—great fellows from the forest, big of body and passion, here gathered in celebration of the festival. John Fairmeadow, getting all at once ...
— Christmas Eve at Swamp's End • Norman Duncan
... foggy morning, with a drizzling mist. No matter; it was their wedding-day, thought Will, and no one could be more cheerful than he as he donned his becoming sailor suit and brushed his curly hair, and made himself look as spruce and neat as any jack-tar in the land. Rain and mist were nothing to this son of the briny ocean, the sunshine was in his heart, and he could scarcely believe in the wonderful good fortune which was to give him the brightest, ...
— A Girl of the People • L. T. Meade
... a figure in the upper left-hand corner, "that came from station 'D,' on the corner of Spruce and Elm Streets." ...
— Bert Wilson on the Gridiron • J. W. Duffield
... On the shore above lay 1000 Frenchmen under Lieutenant Colonel de Saint Julien, with eight cannons, on swivels, planted to sweep every part of the beach. The intrenchments, behind which the troops were lying, were covered in front by spruce and fir trees, felled and laid on the ground ...
— With Wolfe in Canada - The Winning of a Continent • G. A. Henty
... the garden as she was desired, and found the six lizards, which she put into her apron and brought to the faery. Another touch of the wonderful wand soon converted them into six spruce footmen in dashing liveries, with powdered hair and pig-tails, three-cornered cocked hats and gold-headed canes, who immediately jumped up behind the carriage as nimbly as if they had been footmen and nothing else ...
— Cinderella • Henry W. Hewet
... below them the valley had suddenly brimmed with sunshine that flickered and twinkled on the birch leaves or shimmered on sombre stretches of pine and spruce. Close at hand, pennyroyal grew thick in the shadow of the wall; and just beyond, mullen candles cast slender bars of shade across the grass. The sunken graves and the lines of iron markers lay ...
— The Way to Peace • Margaret Deland
... to be turned back by a foot or two of water in their path over the ice, so long as the foundation remained firm, drew up a long spruce pole from a neighboring fence, and, shooting it forward through the first stream of water, passed over upon it to the uncovered ice; and then, drawing their spar-bridge to the water next the other bank, went through the same ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... flowers, and virgin soil. In the center was a beautiful lake, its ice cold water well stocked with the finny tribe of speckled mountain trout, the delight of the angler. The park was inclosed by mountains of great height and grandeur, their rocky slopes were dotted with spruce, pine, and cottonwood, and capped with ages of crystal snow, presenting a sight more pleasing to the eye than the Falls of Niagara, and a perfect haven for an ...
— Dangers of the Trail in 1865 - A Narrative of Actual Events • Charles E Young
... a journalist in a small way, fair-haired and spruce, a pretty fellow enough, but with a face marked by the faded look peculiar to waiters at all-night restaurants, actors and prostitutes, made up of conventional grimaces and the sallow reflection of the gas. He ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... caching which is sometimes resorted to is to place the articles in the top of an evergreen tree, such as the pine, hemlock, or spruce. The thick boughs are so arranged around the packages that they can not be seen from beneath, and they are tied to a limb to prevent them from being blown out by the wind. This will only answer for such articles as will not become injured by ...
— The Prairie Traveler - A Hand-book for Overland Expeditions • Randolph Marcy
... children of the wilderness. It is one charm of their music that it always comes, or seems to come, from such a distance,—from far up the mountain-side, or from the inaccessible depths of some ravine. I shall not soon forget its wild beauty as it rose out of the spruce forests below me, while I was enjoying an evening promenade, all by myself, over the long, flat summit of Moosilauke. From his habit of singing late at night this sparrow is in some places known as the nightingale. His more common name is the Peabody bird; while a Jefferson man, who was driving ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... was rapidly descending in the west. The tall pines and spruce threw their shadows over the fortification. The roar of the cannon, the sighing of the shot, the groans of the wounded, the dark shades of approaching evening, all conspired to render the scene one of intense gloom. They longed for the approaching ...
— Autographs for Freedom, Volume 2 (of 2) (1854) • Various
... armorial bearings, and drawn by two richly-caparisoned steeds, the Jehu on the box wearing, according to the fashion of those days, a coat of many capes, a powdered wig, and gloves a l'Henri Quatre, and two spruce footmen in striking but not gaudy livery, with long canes in their hands, daily made its appearance in the Park from four to seven in the height of the season. Mrs. King was a fine-looking woman, and being dressed in the height of fashion, she ...
— Reminiscences of Captain Gronow • Rees Howell Gronow
... them. She put the bunches made of the delicate, feathery hemlock, and the dark glossy laurel, over the windows, and suspended the wreaths where the bay-windows projected from the room. Small branches of cedar and spruce were tastefully arranged in vases, relieved by the rich, green leaves of the ivy, and the ...
— The Nest in the Honeysuckles, and other Stories • Various
... my old-time evening-school instructor. I had not seen him for more than three years, during which time he had developed a pronounced tendency to baldness, though his apple face had lost none of its roseate freshness. He looked spruce as ever, his clothes spick and span, his "four-in-hand" tastefully tied, his collar and cuffs immaculate. His hazel eyes, however, had a worn ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... climes that lie Where day never shuts his eye, Up in the broad fields of the sky. There I suck the liquid air, All amidst the gardens fair Of Hesperus, and his daughters three That sing about the golden tree. Along the crisped shades and bowers Revels the spruce and jocund Spring; The Graces and the rosy-bosomed Hours Thither all their bounties bring. There eternal Summer dwells; And west winds with musky wing About the cedarn alleys fling Nard and cassia's balmy smells. ...
— L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Comus, and Lycidas • John Milton
... Queen Dolores, saying: "I have studied mathematics. I will question this young man, in my tent to-night, and in the morning I will report the truth as to his claims. Are you content to endure this interrogatory, my spruce young fellow who wear the shirt ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... there be any, are fashioned into grotesque figures; and even the "air neglige" and general dilapidation of the building tell a thousand times more agreeably to an eye accustomed to the picturesque, than the spruce preservation of ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin
... shimmy up a tree that was reflected there. He even claimed that he got a splinter in his hand, so doing! Upside down or wedged across a channel under water, trees were all the same to Hervey Willetts. He lived in trees. He knew nothing whatever about the different kinds of trees and he could not tell spruce from walnut. But he could hang by one leg from a rotten branch, the while playing a harmonica. He was for the boy scout movement, because he was for movement generally. As long as the scouts kept moving, he was with them. He had a lot of merit badges but he did not ...
— Tom Slade's Double Dare • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... five hundred feet high, being the highest land on the Atlantic coast of the Province. The general aspect of the shore is low, rocky, and desolate, strewn often with huge boulders of granite or quartzite,—and where not bleak and rocky, it is covered with thick forests of spruce and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... cold and fallen, on the watry fields; And Nature to the waste dominion yields, Stript her last robes, with gold and purple gay.— So droops my life, of your soft beams despoil'd, Youth, Health, and Hope, that long exulting smil'd; And the wild carols, and the bloomy hues Of merry Spring-time, spruce on every plain Her half-blown bushes, moist with sunny rain, More pensive thoughts in my sunk heart infuse Than Winter's grey, and desolate domain, Faded, like my lost Youth, that no ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... ever known Mrs. Bast, and prosecute her for libel. Perhaps he never had known her. Here was Margaret, who behaved as if he had not. There the house. Round them were half a dozen gardeners, clearing up after his daughter's wedding. All was so solid and spruce, that the past flew up out of sight like a spring-blind, leaving only the last ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... close, neighboring, adjacent, contiguous. Neat, tidy, orderly, spruce, trim, prim. Needful, necessary, requisite, essential, indispensable. Negligence, neglect, inattention, inattentiveness, inadvertence, remissness, oversight. New, novel, fresh, recent, modern, late, innovative, unprecedented. Nice, fastidious, dainty, finical, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... scratching of feet, and a string of ice-rimed wolf-dogs, with hot-lolling tongues and dripping jaws, pulled up the slope and turned into the path ahead of them. On the sled, a long and narrow box of rough-sawed spruce told the nature of the freight. Two dog-drivers, a woman walking blindly, and a black-robed priest, made up the funeral cortege. A few paces farther on the dogs were again put against the steep, and with whine and shout and clatter the unheeding ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... On this I felt contempt for him in comparison with myself. "What!" said I, "you pitiful sluggard, have you so managed matters as to have no hope left? Have you lost your wits together with your estate? Don't you see me, who have risen from the same condition? What a complexion I have, how spruce and well dressed, what portliness of person? I have every thing, {yet} have nothing; and although I possess nothing, still, of nothing am I in want." "But I," {said he}, "unhappily, can neither be a butt nor submit to blows."[42] "What!" {said I}, "do you suppose it is managed by those ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence
... and he determined to erect suitable habitations for his people before snowfall. With this in view he crossed over to the Nelson {46} and ascended it until he reached a high clearing on its left bank, near which grew an abundance of white spruce. He brought up a body of men, most of whom now received their first lesson in woodcraft. The pale and flaky-barked aromatic spruce trees were felled and stripped of their branches. Next, the logs were 'snaked' into the open, where the dwellings were to be erected, and hewed into proper shape. These ...
— The Red River Colony - A Chronicle of the Beginnings of Manitoba • Louis Aubrey Wood
... come under this class, and are excellent climbers. One of the most remarkable is the Marcgravia umbellata, the stem of which in the tropical forests of South America, as I hear from Mr. Spruce, grows in a curiously flattened manner against the trunks of trees; here and there it puts forth claspers (roots), which adhere to the trunk, and, if the latter be slender, completely embrace it. When this plant has ...
— The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants • Charles Darwin
... appear'd, what a shout rent the air! The spruce widow affords the most excellent cheer; For comfort in quarters there's nothing can beat her, So up rose the lads with a welcome to greet her: The muse with true gallantry led her to place, And Truth said good humour was ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... wit, admired by herself, and one more," her lover, Ben Jonson, in his "Every man out of his humour," makes her talk "Arcadianism." Her lover, who is quite the man to appreciate these elegancies of speech, being "a neat, spruce, affecting courtier, one that wears clothes well and in fashion, practiseth by his glass how to salute ... can post himself into credit with his merchant, only with the gingle of his spur and the jerk of his wand," ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... religion, Sir, the thing can't never be; Nut but wut I respeck," sez she, "your intellectle part, But you wun't noways du for me athout a change o' heart: Nothun religion works wal North, but it's ez soft ez spruce, Compared to ourn, for keepin' sound," sez she, "upon the goose; A day's experunce'd prove to ye, ez easy 'z pull a trigger, It takes the Southun pint o' view to raise ten bales a nigger; You'll fin' thet human natur, South, ain't wholesome more 'n ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... A Norway spruce cone. When it is dry its scales are open. I filled them with grass seed and put the cone in a small tumbler so that the lower end might be damp all the time. The dampness makes the scales close and starts the seed to sprouting. This has been growing a few ...
— Ethel Morton's Enterprise • Mabell S.C. Smith
... Street, and so on in order, in the plain Quaker fashion which had thus entitled the days of the week and the months of the year. Eight were to lie parallel with High, and to be called after the trees of the forest,—Spruce, Chestnut, Pine. In the midst of the city, at the crossing of High and Broad Streets, was to be a square of ten acres, to contain the public offices; and in each quarter of the city was to be a similar ...
— William Penn • George Hodges
... trickled through a reedy marsh, and so spreading a single floor of shining water over the whole valley. The trees, or most of them, that stand about the banks have grown since the Duke saw the water. There are old oaks on the northern shore, but the southern and eastern sides were planted with spruce and other conifers at the end of the eighteenth century and beginning of the nineteenth, when all that remained of the victor of Culloden was his horrible nickname and his obelisk above the lake. The trees are glorious in December or ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... carried ashore, and placed upon an elevated rock on one side of the cove, close to the Resolution. A party of men, with an officer, was sent to cut wood, and to clear a place for the conveniency of watering. Others were employed to brew spruce-beer, as pine-trees abounded here. The forge was also set up, to make the iron-work wanting for the repairs of the fore-mast. For, besides one of the bibs being defective, the larboard trestle-tree and one ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... the next day there was one old bull moose kept just ahead of us. We knew he was old because of his size and his being alone. Two or three times we passed other bulls with two or three cows and their calves of that season yarding among the young spruce, but the old bull kept on steadily down the mountain. His years had made him weather-wise. The third day the wind shifted the snow, and we saw him on the round crown of a hill ...
— The Trail Book • Mary Austin et al
... designed by Kent; but the most execrable performance you ever beheld. The graving not worse than the drawing; awkward knights, scrambling Unas, hills tumbling down themselves, no variety Of prospect and three or four perpetual spruce firs. ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... were two families besides our own, and outside of them were a number of young men, plowmen and shepherds, intent on getting land and sending for their people to join them the next spring. There was an exception in a middle-aged man, brisk and spruce, who held himself to be above his fellow-passengers, and said nothing about where he came from or who he was. The only information he gave was, that he had been in the mercantile line, and that he was to be addressed as Mr Snellgrove. He waved his right hand in conversation and spoke ...
— The Narrative of Gordon Sellar Who Emigrated to Canada in 1825 • Gordon Sellar
... shadow from the spruce there, Ranald," she cried, pointing to a deep, black turn in the road. For answer there came from behind them the long, mournful hunting-cry of the wolf. He was on their track. Immediately it was answered by a chorus of howls from the bush on the swamp side, but still far away. There was no ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... around the fort is one immense level swamp, thickly covered with willows, and dotted here and there with a few clumps of pine-trees. The only large timber in the vicinity grows on the banks of Hayes and Nelson Rivers, and consists chiefly of spruce fir. The swampy nature of the ground has rendered it necessary to raise the houses in the fort several feet in the air upon blocks of wood; and the squares are intersected by elevated wooden platforms, which form the only promenade the inhabitants have ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... laid lengthwise, and rudely plastered at each point of contact with adobe, the material from which the chimney, which entirely occupied one gable, was built. It was pierced with two windows and a door, roofed with smaller logs, and thatched with long half cylinders of spruce bark. But the interior gave certain indications of the distinction as well as the peculiar experiences of its occupant. In place of the usual bunk or berth built against the wall stood a small folding camp bedstead, and upon a rude deal table that held a tin wash-basin and ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... of different materials, black walnut, mahogany, birch, spruce, and maple being the most largely used, but mahogany and birch seem to be ...
— Aeroplanes • J. S. Zerbe***
... tanquam te, His humour is lofty, his discourse peremptorie: his tongue filed, his eye ambitious, his gate maiesticall, and his generall behauiour vaine, ridiculous, and thrasonicall. He is too picked, too spruce, too affected, too odde, as it were, too peregrinat, as I may ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... beech, birch, ash, hackmatack, hemlock, spruce, bass-wood, maple, interweave their foliage in the natural wood, so these mortals blended their varieties of visage and garb. A Tartar-like picturesqueness; a sort of pagan abandonment and assurance. Here reigned the dashing and all-fusing spirit of the West, whose type is the Mississippi itself, ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... who might dare to look upon them. The height of land or plateau which constitutes the interior of the Labrador peninsula is from 2,000 to 2,500 feet above the sea level, fairly heavily wooded with spruce, fir, hackmatack, and birch, and not at all the desolate waste it has been pictured by many writers. The barrenness of Labrador is confined to the coast, and one cannot enter the interior in any direction without being struck by the latent possibilities of the peninsula were it not ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 822 - Volume XXXII, Number 822. Issue Date October 3, 1891 • Various
... Draget fine, Mead, Mattebru, and the Metheling. Red wine, the claret and the white, with Tent and Alicant, in whom I delight. Wine of Languedoc and of Orleans thereto: Single beer, and other that is double: Spruce beer, and the beer of Hamburgh: Malmsey, ...
— Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine • William Carew Hazlitt
... declared the elder brother. "You stay right here and watch, and I'll get some wood." Nuck had brought a tomahawk which, with his skinning knife, was thrust into his belt. With the hatchet he obtained dry branches from the lower limbs of some spruce-trees which grew near, and packed a big fagot through the mire to the hillock where Bryce stood guard. This wood he flung into the mouth of the lair, started the fire with his flint and steel, and when ...
— With Ethan Allen at Ticonderoga • W. Bert Foster
... out on the snow and slept on spruce boughs while we were after the moose, the dogs used to be a great comfort to us. They slept at our feet and kept us warm. Poor brutes, they mostly had a rough time of it. They enjoyed the running and chasing as much as we did, but when it came to broken ...
— Beautiful Joe • Marshall Saunders
... carrying powdered snow dust, nipped round the gateways of the dormitories and Tait McKenzie's fine statue of Whitefield stood sharply outlined against a cold blue sky. I lunched at a varsity hash counter on Spruce Street and bought tobacco in a varsity drug store, where a New York tailor, over for the day, was cajoling students into buying his "snappy styles" in time for Christmas. There is no more interesting game than watching a lot ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... can scarcely even be called torrents, being precipitated as it were in one leap from the Lebanon to the Mediterranean. Olives, vines, and corn cover the maritime plain, while in ancient times the heights were clothed with impenetrable forests of oak, pine, larch, cypress, spruce, and cedar. The mountain range drops in altitude towards the centre of the country and becomes merely a line of low hills, connecting Gebel Ansarieh with the Lebanon proper; beyond the latter it continues without interruption, till at length, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... Patty turned the point well. "Why, dear, seeing you were so particular in your letter that I should spruce up to receive you and your husband, I thought I could do no less ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... coast "Down East." Later we were shocked by rumours of a canoe trip through Canadian waterways. Hereupon the usually benevolent Dennis protested as he glanced approvingly at the well-kept Tuscan landscape. "Crocker needn't rub it in," he opined. "Why, it's the same scrubby spruce tree from the Plains of Abraham to James's Bay-and Emma, who hated being bored! Why, it's marriage by capture; it's barbaric." "It's worse; it's rheumatic," shuddered Harwood as he declined Marsala and took whisky. ...
— The Collectors • Frank Jewett Mather
... washing-pan. They sought no farther. Each day they worked earned them thousands of dollars in clean dust and nuggets, and they worked every day. The gold was sacked in moose-hide bags, fifty pounds to the bag, and piled like so much firewood outside the spruce-bough lodge. Like giants they toiled, days flashing on the heels of days like dreams as they heaped ...
— The Call of the Wild • Jack London
... to admire the brilliant yellow of the renewed sheets, standing out in vivid blots against the tarnished verdigris of the old. To pass from Blackpool to the West, however, is a tardy process; and when Rainham reached the spruce, little house in one of the most select of the discreet and uniform streets which adjoin Portman Square, he found the clatter of teacups for the most part over. There were, in fact, only two persons in the long room, which, with its ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... with tarred lampblack, fine threads plaited together in strands, cotton soaked in boiling tar, lamp-wick, twine, tar and lampblack mixed with a proportion of lime, vulcanized fibre, celluloid, boxwood, cocoanut hair and shell, spruce, hickory, baywood, cedar and maple shavings, rosewood, punk, cork, bagging, flax, and a host of other things. He also extended his searches far into the realms of nature in the line of grasses, plants, canes, ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... speaking to Rosebud. She sank down upon a rustic bench and instantly noticed a couple turn behind the spruce hedge. ...
— The Motor Girls • Margaret Penrose
... copied; her low toned voice, her never seeming to hurry and yet going about any matter as if it was the first thing to be done; her little orderly methods. She kept her mother's room neat, she put the books back in their places; there was a cluster of autumn leaves in a vase, or a sprig of spruce or cedar that for a long while would put forth new leaves. She was very glad now that she had taken so much pains. Was she rather unpolished when they had first come from Laconia. But her circle ...
— The Girls at Mount Morris • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... pleased with himself; and, since there was not a bit of chocolate on his trousers, he looked unusually spruce and handsome, too. Sara skipped along beside him delightedly; only, sometimes when she looked back, she wished she could stay with Avrillia while she was in such a lovely mood, and all those interesting children. Still, Sara's dear, self-willed mother had taught her to be a considerate ...
— The Garden of the Plynck • Karle Wilson Baker
... more crowded district again. She began to be a little perturbed, forgot her anger; at least it was dimmed. Coming to Spruce Street she saw the usual crowd of men hanging about the door of the Ardmore. They always stood there, clustered about on the steps, with their cigarettes and their half-burned cigars and their flashy clothes and their burnt-out ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... mulch. Solanum Dulcamara. Solanum jasminoides. solidagos. Sophora Japonica. Sorbus species. sorrel. sorrel-tree. sourwood. South Carolina, rock. sowing the seeds. sparrows, poisoning. Spartium junceum. spearmint. spider, red. spinach. Spiraea Aruncus. spireas. spraying. spring beauty. spruce. spuds. squash. squash insects. squill. stake labels. staphylea species. Statice latifolia. stem cuttings. Sterculia platanifolia. stevia. Stewart, quoted. stink-bug. St. John's wort. stocks. storing of fruits and ...
— Manual of Gardening (Second Edition) • L. H. Bailey
... far-off days when fashion itself had not become old-fashioned and got improved into Smart Society,—this haunted half-mile or more still retains many fine old residences of brown stone and of red brick, which are spruce and well-kept. One such, on the west side of the street, of red brick, with a high stoop of brown stone, is a boarding-house, and in it is an apartment to which, on a certain clear, cold afternoon in October, the reader's presence in ...
— The Mystery of Murray Davenport - A Story of New York at the Present Day • Robert Neilson Stephens
... sketching and noting, and any form of climbing. I escaped from the gorge about noon, after accomplishing some of the most delicate feats of mountaineering I ever attempted; and here the canyon is all broadly open again—the floor luxuriantly forested with pine, and spruce, and silver fir, and brown-trunked libocedrus. The walls rise in Yosemite forms, and Tenaya Creek comes down seven hundred feet in a white brush of foam. This is a little Yosemite valley. It is about two thousand feet ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... along the side of the Red-Brook marsh. But after paying taxes on it for generations all during the time when it was too far away to make it profitable to lumber, it was snatched away from them, seven years ago, just as modern methods and higher prices for spruce would have made it very valuable. A lawyer from New Hampshire named Lowder turned the trick. I won't bother you going into the legal details—a question of a fake warranty deed, against 'Gene's quit-claim deed, which was all he ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... to turn out standard hunting arrows: The first requisite is the shaft. Having tested birch, maple, hickory, oak, ash, poplar, alder, red cedar, mahogany, palma brava, Philippine nara, Douglas fir, red pine, white pine, spruce, Port Orford cedar, yew, willow, hazel, eucalyptus, redwood, elderberry, and bamboo, we have adopted birch as the most rigid, toughest and suitable in weight for hunting arrows. Douglas fir and Norway pine are best for target shafts; bamboo for ...
— Hunting with the Bow and Arrow • Saxton Pope
... the starlight they threaded the spruce forest down by the sea, and found the "camp," a wooden box, with a broad veranda hanging over ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... stir about twenty yards before him, followed by a roar from his deep tongue, and a fine buck bolted up the brae. I gave a short whistle to stop him, and immediately he stood to listen, but behind a great spruce fir, which then, with many others, formed a noble group upon the summit of the terrace. The sound of the dog dislodged him in an instant, and he shot out through the open glade, when I followed him with the rifle, and sent him over on his horns like a wheel down the ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... the charbanc, and is going to drive us all to Chart, where we will lunch," said Lady St. Jerome; "'tis a curious place, and was planted, only seventy years ago, by my lord's grandfather, entirely with spruce-firs, but with so much care and skill, giving each plant and tree ample distance, that they have risen to the noblest proportions, with all their green branches far-spreading on the ground like ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... Carlotta's lap and idly parted the rank grass in search of the noisy intruder, and by good luck I found him. I beckoned Carlotta, who glided down, and there, with our heads together and holding our breath, we watched the queerest little love drama imaginable. Our cicada stood alert and spruce, waving his antenna with a sort of cavalier swagger, and every now and then making his corslet vibrate passionately. On the top of a blade of grass sat a brown little Juliet—a most reserved, discreet little Juliet, but evidently much interested in ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... fair world with such an immensity of kingly trees. Towering into the sky to unthinkable heights, they stand as living monuments to the fecundity of natural life. Imagine, if you can, the vast wide region of the West coast, hills, slopes and valleys, covered with millions of fir, spruce and cedar trees, raising their verdant crests a hundred, two hundred or two hundred and fifty ...
— The Centralia Conspiracy • Ralph Chaplin
... rock under a friendly dwarf spruce they lay still as two rabbits, watching with round eyes, eager but unafraid, the antics of three brown wolf cubs that were chasing the flies and tumbling over some invisible plaything before ...
— Northern Trails, Book I. • William J. Long
... Hudson Bay service consisted of from four to twenty boats; each boat was supposed to carry from eighty to a hundred pieces of goods or bales of fur in addition to the supplies for the men. They were made out of spruce or balsam, and were like large skiffs, sharp ...
— Three Boys in the Wild North Land • Egerton Ryerson Young
... was smartly dressed, and in a rather affected way. His hair was long, he wore a moustache and a short imperial, and talked in a languid way in a somewhat obscure manner. These were the traits Juliet disliked in Basil. She would rather have seen him a spruce well-groomed man about town like Cuthbert. But at the present moment Basil's face was flushed, and he spoke hurriedly, evidently laboring under great stress ...
— The Secret Passage • Fergus Hume
... right or left, but always with the same suddenness, leaving her to question herself whether she existed, for more of life seemed to be with their mystery than with her speculations. The phantom ring of mist enclosing for miles the invariable low-sweeping dark spruce-fir kept her thoughts on them as close as the shroud. She walked fast, but scarcely felt that she was moving. Near midday the haunted circle widened; rocks were loosely folded in it, and heads of trees, whose round intervolving roots grasped the yellow roadside soil; the mists shook like a curtain, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... second time, and the baby squirrels began playing among the mosses. There was the smell of newly plowed fields. The tinkle of sheep and cow bells could be heard, and the pine and spruce trees covered themselves with red cones, ...
— Tell Me Another Story - The Book of Story Programs • Carolyn Sherwin Bailey
... to have been sick of the scurvy at Stadacona, so that Cartier was much surprised to see him out and well. He contrived to make him relate the particulars of his recovery, and thus found out that a decoction of the bark and foliage of the white spruce-tree furnished the savages with a remedy. Having recourse to this enabled the French captain to arrest the progress of the disease among his own people, and, in a short time, to bring about their ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various |
