"Spruce" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... summer they continued to arrive, until about 5,000 had settled between Parrtown (St. John) and St. Anne's. The peninsula now occupied by the city of St. John was then almost a wilderness, covered with shrubs, scrubby spruce, and marsh. Large numbers of emigrants also arrived at Annapolis, Port Roseway, and other points; and Governor Parr, in a letter to Lord North in September, 1783, estimates the whole number that had arrived ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... rings; now, the mangy patch of unlet building ground outside the stagnant town, with the larger ring where the Circus was last week. The temperature changed, the dialect changed, the people changed, faces got sharper, manner got shorter, eyes got shrewder and harder; yet all so quickly, that the spruce guard in the London uniform and silver lace, had not yet rumpled his shirt-collar, delivered half the dispatches in his shiny little pouch, or ...
— The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices • Charles Dickens
... ounce of hops and a spoonful of ginger to a gallon of water. When well boiled, strain it and put in a pint of molasses, or a pound of brown sugar, and half an ounce or less of the essence of spruce; when cool, add a teacupful of yeast, and put into a clean tight cask, and let it ferment for a day or two, then bottle it for use. You can boil the sprigs of spruce fir in place of ...
— The Whitehouse Cookbook (1887) - The Whole Comprising A Comprehensive Cyclopedia Of Information For - The Home • Mrs. F.L. Gillette
... until they came to a growth of spruce so dense that it formed a shelter from both snow and wind, with a thick carpet of brown needles under foot. They were shut out from the stars, and in the darkness MacVeigh began to whistle cheerfully. He unstrapped his pack and spread out one of his blankets ...
— Isobel • James Oliver Curwood
... sitting in his barrel chair, a single tallow candle on the shelf above his head, his ever present pipe between his lips, and his lame leg stuck up on a bench before the tumbledown stove, where a good spruce fire crackled and burned. For the first time the extreme poverty of the place struck Jacky's senses. He realized instantly, but for the first time, how much in need of money the poor old cripple must be, but, nevertheless, his voice shook ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson
... whole divan, one swimming circle glides Swift without stop: the old bashaws click time, As if on polish'd ice; in trance sublime The iman hoar with some spruce courtier slides. Nor rank nor age from capering refrain; Nor can the king his royal foot restrain! He too must reel amid the frolic row, Grasp the grand vizier by his beard of snow, And teach the aged man once more to bound ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... 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 ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... crust had formed upon the snow—a crust that was just strong enough to support Dickie's weight. And he made swiftly for the spruce woods, to hunt for his supper, for he knew he could find nothing on the ground, covered as ...
— The Tale of Dickie Deer Mouse • Arthur Scott Bailey
... distance to soften their ruggedness and enrich their tintings; a Californian forest is best at a little distance, for there is a sad poverty of variety in species, the trees being chiefly of one monotonous family—redwood, pine, spruce, fir—and so, at a near view there is a wearisome sameness of attitude in their rigid arms, stretched down ward and outward in one continued and reiterated appeal to all men to "Sh! —don't say a word!—you might disturb somebody!" Close at hand, too, there is a reliefless and relentless ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... air. For making clear weather, they use a small stick to the end of which a string is tied. A small flat piece of wood is attached to the end of the string, and this implement is shaken. Storm is produced by strewing down on the ends of spruce branches" ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... 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 ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... Minick said George was right. He said everybody was right. You would hardly have recognized in this shrunken figure and wattled face the spruce and dressy old man whom Ma Minick used to spoil so delightfully. "You know best, George. You know best." He who used to stand up to George until Ma Minick was moved to say, "Now, Pa, you ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... the clerk's appearance was, to say the least, not reprehensibly "spruce." For one thing, what with the moisture and the sharp stones, he was already becoming jealous of his shoes, lest they should not hold together till he could get back ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... 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 ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... Mountains common. Rare on Vancouver Island. Brooks says common resident in the spruce zone on the ...
— Catalogue of British Columbia Birds • Francis Kermode
... much about girls and society and dances and theatres, and nothing about work. Remember, I am footing the bills. When I was your age I got up at 4 in the morning and toiled away in the fields till sundown, and then I was too tired to spruce up and play at being a gentleman. If you're going to be a doctor, you'd better ...
— The Mermaid of Druid Lake and Other Stories • Charles Weathers Bump
... even the most careful observer, would have recognised in the two dusty figures, the once spruce forms of Captain Thomas Tomb ...
— The Pirate's Pocket Book • Dion Clayton Calthrop
... abode among these islands we found reasonable quantity of wood, both fir, spruce, and juniper; which, whether it came floating any great distance to these places where we found it, or whether it grew in some great islands near the same place by us not yet discovered, we know not. ...
— Voyages in Search of the North-West Passage • Richard Hakluyt
... hired a horse and gig With promises to pay; And he pawned his horns for a spruce new wig, To redeem as he came away: And he whistled some tune, a waltz or a jig, And drove off at ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... the mighty river a low chain of hills, fringed at the base with a scattered growth of scrubby spruce, birch, willow, and cotton-wood. Timber line was only two hundred feet above the river brink; beyond that height, rocks and moss covered with ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... wind abated greatly, and small, infrequent snowflakes came drifting by. Snow also spread more abundantly below, and the only trees were clumps of pine and spruce in the lower valleys. Kurt went with three men into the still intact gas-chambers, let out a certain quantity of gas from them, and prepared a series of ripping panels for the descent. Also the residue of the bombs and explosives in the magazine were thrown overboard and fell, detonating loudly, ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... The spruce bank-clerk was subdued in a moment, in the twinkling of one of Rachel's beautiful black eyes—his matrimonial intentions had been rudely reduced to a basis of pounds, shillings ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... him, therefore, to watch Defago turn over the canoe upon the shore, pack the paddles carefully underneath, and then proceed to "blaze" the spruce stems for some distance on either side of an almost invisible trail, with the careless remark thrown in, "Say, Simpson, if anything happens to me, you'll find the canoe all correc' by these marks;—then strike doo west into the sun to hit ...
— The Wendigo • Algernon Blackwood
... later a couple of rather spruce looking young men alighted from an eastern train in Paris and, strolling forth in the crowd of passengers, ...
— Our Pilots in the Air • Captain William B. Perry
... fascinated. The view of the beach seemed to come into sharper focus as he watched, and he saw now that it was an incredibly lonely scene, with the sea stretching away to a vanishing point and a stand of stunted spruce flanking the width of sand. But what caught his eye and held him almost in a trance was the array of objects littering the sand at ...
— Made in Tanganyika • Carl Richard Jacobi
... fragrant the new logs are for the dwelling, and how sweet the pine and spruce boughs for a bed! A good new log house in the green woods is the best home in ...
— The Seven Little Sisters Who Live on the Round Ball - That Floats in the Air • Jane Andrews
... but Paul and I believe it will be the coming wood for them," said John with enthusiasm. "We have used it plain on this machine. On a large airplane it ought to be reinforced with transverse sections of very thin spruce laid latticewise. That would add considerably to its natural strength, and increase ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... a crackling roar this blazed up. In a moment it was a column of fire stretching skyward. The sight was terrible to behold. Then like a whirlwind the arms of fire reached out and enveloped another tree, and sparks flying with the wind lodged in a spruce nearby and converted it into a roaring furnace. And thus in the space of a minute a ...
— The Boy Scout Fire Fighters • Irving Crump
... that for an instant I saw the treetops beneath it. But it came back to earth with awful force, and I felt the ground tremble as it crushed a wide way through the woods. It finally brought up at the bottom of a gulch with a wreckage of hundreds of noble spruce trees that it had crushed down and ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... surrounding his good-humoured face, as he came out of the office with Mary on his arm, and a young Master Jupp and another little Mary toddling behind them—the whilom porter no longer dressed in grimy velveteens, but in a smart black frock-coat, his Sunday best, while his wife was equally spruce. ...
— Teddy - The Story of a Little Pickle • J. C. Hutcheson
... picturesque dimness of the lofty cabin, under the void where the roof shut off the stars, and talked of the pine-woods, of logging, measuring, and spring-drives, and of moose-hunting on snow-shoes, until our mouths had a wild flavor more spicy than if we had chewed spruce-gum by the hour. Spruce-gum is the aboriginal quid of these regions. Foresters chew this tenacious morsel as tars nibble at a bit of oakum, grooms at a straw, Southerns at tobacco, or school-girls ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... others produce numerous seeds which are easily dispersed and may remain for a long time capable of germinating, as is the case with Calluna, Picea excelsa, and Pinus; or still other species, such as beech and spruce, have the power of enduring shade or even suppressing other species by the shade they cast. A number of species, such as Pteris aquilina, Acorus Calamus, Lemna minor, and Hypnum Schreberi, which are social, and likewise very widely distributed, multiply nearly exclusively by vegetative ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... upon it when the man came in. He was a prodigiously fat man, with a pigeon breast, and a neck so short that his tufted chin was set low down between his high shoulders. He was dressed in actual burlesque of the fashion then prevailing; but, spruce as he was, he nursed undisguisedly a huge quid of tobacco in one clean-shaven cheek, and his hands, which were covered with rings of no great apparent value, were very dirty, and the nails uncared for. He bowed with a great flourish of politeness, spat copiously in the fire, and bade the count ...
— In Direst Peril • David Christie Murray
... Bereft of her love, Robert had sunk steadily. Gambling, drink, morphia, billiards and cigars—he had taken to them all; until now in the wretched figure of the outcast on the Embankment you would never have recognized the once spruce figure ...
— The Holiday Round • A. A. Milne
... can any lover of nature enter the old piles of Oxford and English cathedrals without feeling that the forest overpowered the mind of the builder, and that his chisel, his saw and plane, still reproduced its ferns, its spikes of flowers, its locust, elm, pine, and spruce." ...
— A Cathedral Courtship • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... rooms, chatting gaily with very distinguished looking young gentlemen, with gold brooches, and party-coloured inside waistcoats; sundry elderly ladies sat at card-tables, discussing the "lost honour by an odd trick they played," with heads as large as those of Jack or Jill in the pantomime; spruce clerks in public offices, (whose vocation the expansive tendency of the right ear, from long pen-carrying, betokened) discussed fashion, "and the musical glasses" to some very over-dressed married ladies, who preferred flirting to five-and-ten. The tea-table, ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 2 • Charles James Lever
... sustenance to see her for a moment! To leave my work and go without food was the least of it! I must traverse the streets of Paris without getting splashed, run to escape showers, and reach her rooms at last, as neat and spruce as any of the coxcombs about her. For a poet and a distracted wooer the difficulties of this task were endless. My happiness, the course of my love, might be affected by a speck of mud upon my only white waistcoat! Oh, to miss the sight of her because I was wet through and bedraggled, and had not ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... limbs dangle the tempting wares, and a stump serves as a chopping-block. Under the shrubbery, where the sun cannot penetrate, are stored home-made firkins full of yellow butter, and great cheeses, and heaps of substantial home-baked bread. Kegs of hard cider and spruce beer and perhaps more potent brews are abroach, and behind the haggling and jesting and bustle you may catch the sound of muskets or the whoop of the Indians from afar. Meanwhile, in the settlements, all manner of industries were stimulated, and a great number of women throughout ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... tidy, orderly, trim, clean, cleanly; tasteful, trim, finished, artistic, nice, excellent, adroit; dainty; spruce; dapper, natty. Antonyms: dowdy, slovenly, slatternly, untidy, tawdry, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... were of wolfskin, and on his shoulder he carried an axe, with broad, shining blade. He was a mighty woodsman now, and could make a spray of chips fly around him as he hewed his way through the trunk of spruce-tree. ...
— The First Christmas Tree - A Story of the Forest • Henry Van Dyke
... in Keeko's attitude. At her feet lay the low, long mound which marked her mother's grave. Beyond, at the head of it, was a rough wooden cross, hewn from stout logs of spruce. And deeply cut on the cross-bar was her mother's name prefixed by words of endearment. Just behind the girl stood the heavily blanketed figure of Lu-cana, whose eyes were shadowed by a grief which her lips lacked the power ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... they were to be measured. The good old gentlewoman was not so simple as to go into his projects—she began to smell a rat. "This Trim," quoth she, "is an odd sort of a fellow; methinks he makes a strange figure with that ragged, tattered coat appearing under his livery; can't he go spruce and clean, like the rest of the servants? The fellow has a roguish leer with him which I don't like by any means; besides, he has such a twang in his discourse, and an ungraceful way of speaking through ...
— The History of John Bull • John Arbuthnot
... place the Indians of the East traveled on foot or used canoes. In the northern parts where birch trees were plentiful, the canoe was of birch bark stretched over a light wooden frame, sewed with strips of deerskin, and smeared at the joints with spruce gum to make it watertight. In the South tree trunks hollowed out by fire and called dugouts were used. In the West there were "bull boats" made of skins stretched over wooden frames. For winter travel the Northern and Western Indians ...
— A Brief History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... bringing up the things from the boats. "We must spread a flooring of some sort. It will not do for Mrs Morley and the young ladies to lie on the bare ground." Saying this, and summoning the other women, she hurried off to the wood. In a short time she and her attendants returned with loads of spruce fir-tops. These were spread over the ground at one end of the tent. The cutter's foresail had been triced up, and served as a partition. "There, marm," she said, addressing Mrs Morley; "we have fitted up a room for you, and the two young ...
— The Voyages of the Ranger and Crusader - And what befell their Passengers and Crews. • W.H.G. Kingston
... us worked our way leisurely through the crowd toward the side-street down which Anazeh had led his party. We found them looking very spruce and savage, four abreast, drawn up in the throat of an alley, old Anazeh sitting his horse at their head like a symbol of the ancient order waiting to assault the new. My horse was close beside him, held by Ahmed, acting ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... such good time that Kit had rubbed down the pony and made him as spruce as a race-horse, before Mr Garland came down to breakfast; which punctual and industrious conduct the old lady, and the old gentleman, and Mr Abel, highly extolled. At his usual hour (or rather at his usual minute and second, for he was the soul of punctuality) ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... stirred the generous spruce and darkening pinewoods. The drooping, westering sun, already athwart the barren crown of the hill tops, left a false, velvety suggestion of twilight in the heart of the valley, while a depressing superheat enervated ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... woollen yarn, and they dragged their provisions and blankets on sleds or toboggans. At night they would use their snow-shoes to shovel a wide, circular pit in the snow, clearing it away to the bare earth. In the centre of the pit, they would build their camp fire, and sleep around it on piles of spruce boughs, secure from the winter wind. The leaders, usually members of the nobility, fared on these expeditions as rudely as their men, and outdid them in courage and endurance. Some of the most noted chiefs of the ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... of 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
... 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 ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... mounted them, so that, in the event of the vessel being searched by the Spanish authorities, there should be nothing in the nature of concealed weapons on board to afford an excuse for the making of trouble. Thus, by the end of the afternoon watch the yacht was again spruce and clean as a new pin, and made a very brave show with her brand-new, silver-bright guns grinning threateningly out over the rail, and the two Maxims all ready for action on the top of the deck-house. Her appearance said, as plainly as words: "Touch me who dares!" yet ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... particular they can make good or bad weather. They produce rain by spilling water from a basket in the air; they make fine weather by shaking a small flat piece of wood attached to a stick by a string; they raise storms by strewing down on the ends of spruce branches. ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... and its dark-green, wax-like leaf and purple flower; of Mingo's mighty oak that weathered six hundred winters; of our highest peak, Spruce Knob, bony above the lush forest; of Cranberry Glades and their strong plants native to Equator and Pole; bracing altitudes, averaging highest east of ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... grew faster As he passed each camping place, Marking well the lessening distance In the long-contested race. Riding through Wyoming's foothills, With their rugged summit lines Stretched across the clear horizon, Fringed with pointed spruce and pines, He beheld, one early morning, Rising slowly to the sky, Smoke—the thin and gauzy column Of a camp fire built close by; And, on looking down the valley With exultant, ringing cheer, He beheld the prairie ...
— Nancy MacIntyre • Lester Shepard Parker
... little grove about a mile from my house, to see the grave of a beautiful little child, that was buried on the summit of a little hill, covered with pines, spruce and ...
— Parker's Second Reader • Richard G. Parker
... of the northern lights in the desolate land he explored in his youth, there grows in the shelter of the spruce forests a flower which he found and loved beyond any other, the Linnaea borealis, named after him. In some pictures we have of him, he is seen holding a sprig of it in his hand. It is the twin flower of the ...
— Hero Tales of the Far North • Jacob A. Riis
... take delight to equip themselves for the celebration of the Sabbath in the little chapel; and Lady Jones and Mr. Williams came in her chariot, and the two Misses Darnford in their own. And we breakfasted together in a most agreeable manner. My dear father appeared quite spruce and neat, and was quite caressed by the three ladies. As we were at breakfast, my master told Mr. Williams, We must let the Psalms alone, he doubted, for want of a clerk: but Mr. Williams said, No, nothing should be wanting that ...
— Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded • Samuel Richardson
... of strawberries, old England's grace and glory, Emblazoned o'er the castle-keeps that moulder nigh and hoary, What comfort for your drooping days, what balm in dire dejection, That yonder orchid spruce ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, April 2, 1892 • Various
... was a small boy I was fortunate enough to be raised on a farm in Butler County, Iowa, that was well protected by a good Norway spruce, white pine and Scotch pine windbreak. The Norway spruce and white pine are still there and if anything better than they were thirty years ago. At that time my father fed from one to five carloads ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... contain more than seven or eight cottages, each half-buried in trees, or overgrown with creepers, except one red brick house, that flared in all the pride of newness, and of the gaudy flowers in its spruce little garden. In the middle of the irregular square, or rather of the wide part of the village road, for it could not be called a street, stood a tall May-pole, still adorned with two or three faded remnants ...
— Ellen Middleton—A Tale • Georgiana Fullerton
... essential service to a friend of mine, who from the inability to walk a mile for some years, was believed to be restored by the use of this medicine to a good state of health, so as to walk ten miles a day. In addition to this medicine I drank, as my common beverage with my meals, spruce beer. I had so high an opinion of this medicine in the gout, and of spruce beer as an antiscorbutic, that I contemplated with much satisfaction, and with very little doubt, the perfect restoration of my health and strength; but I was miserably deceived; for ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... great deal of pity for those honest but misguided people who call their little, spruce suburban towns, or the shaded streets of their inland cities,—the country and I have still more pity for those who reckon a season at the summer resorts—country enjoyment. Nay, my feeling is more violent than pity; and ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... ground, the valleys being generally clear or covered with sagebrush. Still higher up yellow pines become abundant and in places spread out into magnificent forests, while in some mountain regions scrub oak, quaking asp, and even spruce trees ...
— The Cliff Ruins of Canyon de Chelly, Arizona • Cosmos Mindeleff
... the left, close to the inn, and then go straight on; it is the third house past Poret's. There is a small spruce fir close to the gate; you cannot make ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... for any kind of civilization rather than a continuance of the eternal snows, wondered if this were any better. Jim pitched the tent under some spruce-trees and high up on a bluff ...
— Colorado Jim • George Goodchild
... carried allurement in every tendril. Here was a flower that was like a story for interest, and there was a bush that bore a secret worth the telling. Even Simeon Holly glowed into a semblance of life when David had unerringly picked out and called by name the spruce, and fir, and pine, and larch, and then, in answer to Mrs. Holly's murmured: "But, David, where's the difference? They look so ...
— Just David • Eleanor H. Porter
... buildings. With its verandah, that was polished like a deck, and its spotless life-belts and brilliant port-hole windows, it had the air of a ship which had been exiled to land but was trying to bear up; and so, too, had the three old captains, spruce little men, with sea-reflecting eyes and pointed, grizzled beards, whom Richard brought out of the club after he had got the boathouse keys. Ellen liked them very much indeed. She had never before had any chance of seeing the beautiful and generous emotion that old ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... blow upward. The fields of full-grown, nodding rye slowly stir and sway like vast assemblages of people. How the chimney swallows chipper as they sweep past! The vireo's cheerful warble echoes in the leafy maples; the branches of the Norway spruce and the hemlocks have gotten themselves new light green tips; the dandelion's spheres of ethereal down rise above the grass: and now and then one of them suddenly goes down: the little chippy, or social sparrow, has thrown itself ...
— The Wit of a Duck and Other Papers • John Burroughs
... regular curve: there winds a gravel walk: here are parts of the old wood, left in these majestic circular clumps, disposed at equal distances with wonderful symmetry: there are some single shrubs scattered in elegant profusion: here a Portugal laurel, there a juniper; here a laurustinus, there a spruce fir; here a larch, there a lilac; here a rhododendron, there an arbutus. The stream, you see, is become a canal: the banks are perfectly smooth and green, sloping to the water's edge: and there is Lord Littlebrain, rowing ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock
... is cast in a different mould. He is essentially unconventional. And yet, though his mother sighs now and then over his repugnance to young ladies, and tries to badger him into looking a little more spruce, I can perceive that she is thoroughly proud of his originality and independence, and believes that he is even more likely than his conventional brother to distinguish himself and immortalize the family name. Josephine used to say, ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... (we are at the old Homestead,) the snow has melted away, and an impatient crocus is just peeping up to get a look at the warm sun. The spruce, at whose foot it grows all the winter long, has kindly extended one of its lower branches over it, to shield it from the frost, and now straitens it up again to give the poor little plant a glimpse or two of the warm blue sky and the golden sun. And here, ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... wood, walking through lines of spruce firs of deep golden green in the yellow beams. One of these trees among its well-robed fellows fronting them was all lichen-smitten. From the low sweeping branches touching earth to the plumed top, the tree was dead-black as its ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... in the grape-stake deal and established an unlimited credit thereby, the West Coast Lumber Company, per Senor Felipe Luiz Almeida, alias Live Wire Luiz, decided to purchase a little jag of spruce from the Ricks Lumber & Logging Company. Cappy Ricks looked at the proffered order, saw that it called for number one clear spruce, and promptly accepted it at a dollar under the market. He was to bring the spruce in to San Francisco ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... of Thlinget myth and legend, croaked spasmodically from the white branch of a dead spruce behind them. The damp air had in it the freshness of new-cut hemlock boughs, a wild, vigorous fragrance that stirs the imagination with strange, ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... made a circle round, the clergyman in his white surplice among the ladies' gay dresses, the white figure of Chatty leaning with her hand on the table, her mother's anxious face close behind her. Poor Dick in his spruce wedding clothes, with his ghostly face, stood drawing back a little, staring with eyes that seemed to sink deeper in their sockets as he gazed. He had never looked upon that face since he parted with her in utter disgust and misery six years before. She came in, almost forced into the ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... short time they had gathered enough brush to start their camp fire. A short search soon resulted in their finding an old fallen tree, and in a few minutes they had procured from this enough firewood to last them out the night. The last task before rolling in for the evening was to get a number of spruce boughs for making the usual mattress for anyone sleeping out in the open in the great forests ...
— The Ranger Boys and the Border Smugglers • Claude A. Labelle
... Bessie was left at liberty to enjoy it, and also to take note of the many gay and fashionable folk who enrich and embellish Ryde in the season; for Mr. Cecil Burleigh was entirely engrossed with another person. The party they had joined consisted of a very thin old gentleman, spruce, well brushed, and well cared for; of a languid, pale lady, some thirty years younger, who was his wife; and of two girls, their daughters. It was one of these daughters who absorbed all Mr. Cecil Burleigh's attention, and Bessie recognized her at once as that ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... the dry season is broken by a rainy fit commencing a few days after the autumnal equinox, and called el Cordonazo de San Francisco. "Throughout South America (observes Mr. Spruce) the periodical alternations of dry and rainy weather are laid to the account of those saints whose 'days' coincide nearly with the epochs of change. But if the weather be rainy when it ought to be fair, or if the rains of winter ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... It was in a long lane bordered on both sides by dark spruce and beeches decked out in the golden brown tints of autumn. The sunbeams, distinctly bluish in the fine mist, slantingly penetrated the dark spruce, and fell in golden radiance upon the pale green moss, and the blue ether and the brown and green foliage ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... an enormous spruce lay the dead body of a man. Standing silent above it they noted such particulars as first strike the attention—the face, the attitude, the clothing; whatever most promptly and plainly answers the unspoken ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... never blushed,—but he looked "voolish" enough to warrant the suspicion that his errand was a tender one, and he had no other reason to give for his spruce appearance ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... lay for many miles over a barren, rocky, undulating country, covered with var and spruce trees, with an undergrowth of raspberry, wild rhododendron, and alder. We passed a chain of lakes extending for sixteen miles, their length varying from one to three miles, and their shores covered ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... for her in the passage. Always punctilious in his dress to-day he was exceptionally spruce, his tie very new, and clothes without ...
— Grey Town - An Australian Story • Gerald Baldwin
... guest—Miss Louisa Patterson, of Philadelphia. This lady was no longer young, according to the severe standards of that time of early marriages and correspondingly early "old-maidenhood," but so much the better, as she was therefore of suitable age for the elderly though spruce and prosperous widower. She was, withal, a decidedly personable woman with the elegant manners and conversation of the inner circles of the exclusive, stately society in which she had been nurtured—just ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... not a few rabbits were caught in trees, mostly spruce-firs and larches. For salmon, they were taken everywhere—among grass, corn, and potatoes, in bushes, and hedges, and cottages. One was caught on a lawn with an umbrella; one was reported to have been found in a press-bed; another, coiled round in a pot hanging from the crook—ready to ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... her trafficking peers, the wind-wise, journeyed ships, At the black wharves no more, nor at the weedy slips, She comes to port with cargo from many a storied clime. No more to the rough-throat chantey her windlass creaks in time. No more she loads for London with spices from Ceylon,— With white spruce deals and wheat and apples from St. John. No more from Pernambuco with cotton-bales,—no more With hides from Buenos ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... the little yard in front of the shed. A stable boy, spruce and smart in his holiday attire, met them with a broom in his hand, and followed them. In the shed there were five horses in their separate stalls, and Vronsky knew that his chief rival, Gladiator, a very tall chestnut horse, had been brought there, and must be standing among them. ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... star-tremulous sky; sculptured buttresses of snow, enclosing hollows filled with diaphanous shadow, and sweeping aloft into the upland fields of pure clear drift. Then came the swift descent, the plunge into the pines, moon-silvered on their frosted tops. The battalions of spruce that climb those hills defined the dazzling snow from which they sprang, like the black tufts upon an ermine robe. At the proper moment we left our sledge, and the big Christian took his reins in hand to follow us. Furs and greatcoats were abandoned. ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... morning and picking out your shoes and stockings from among seventeen pairs of them. Imagine yourself a child, gentle reader, in a family where you would be called upon, every morning, to select your own cud of spruce gum from a collection of seventeen similar cuds stuck on a window sill. And yet B. Franklin never murmured or repined. He desired to go to sea, and to avoid this he was apprenticed to his brother James, who was a printer. ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... factor: "It's glorious! It's God's Country!" And the factor had turned his tired, empty eyes upon him with the words: "It was—before SHE went. But no country is God's Country without a woman," and then he took Philip to the lonely grave under a huge lob-stick spruce, and told him in a few words how one woman had made life for him. Even then Philip could not fully understand. But he ...
— God's Country—And the Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... bottom consists of three strips of wood, either hemlock, spruce, or pine (the first mentioned being the most durable), a little longer than the width of the pot, about 2-3/4 inches wide and 1 inch thick. In the ends of each of the outer strips a hole is bored to receive the ends of a small branch of pliable wood, which is bent into a regular semicircular curve. ...
— The Lobster Fishery of Maine - Bulletin of the United States Fish Commission, Vol. 19, Pages 241-265, 1899 • John N. Cobb
... way to the front door, but returned almost immediately. Drawing the major aside, I whispered a request, which led to a certain small article being passed over to me, after which I sauntered out on the stoop just in time to encounter the spruce but irate figure of Mr. Moore, who had ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... it is time the reader should be introduced, lay bathed in the ruddy glow of the setting sun, whose rays tinged the branches of the groves of aspen, birch, poplar, and spruce, which could be seen at some distance away, both to the east and west. It stood on the top of some high ground, rising abruptly from the margin of a stream flowing by on ...
— The Frontier Fort - Stirring Times in the N-West Territory of British America • W. H. G. Kingston
... unwieldy, as well as any other part of the human frame. Some of our best poets have written in paroxysms of hunger, and I really believe that Addison would have had more point if he had had less victuals; and if you do not restrict yourself to a sheep's trotter and spruce beer, your style will betray your luxury." But soon came an increase of the very thing feared for her fame, in the form of an invitation from Lady Abercorn and the marquis to pass the chief part of every year with them. This was accepted, and thus ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... the 13th, about half the army glided down with the tide. When the cove was reached, General Wolfe and the troops with him leaped ashore, and clambered up the steep hill, holding by the roots and boughs of the maple, spruce and ash trees, that covered the declivity, and with but little difficulty dispersed the picket which guarded the height. At daybreak General Wolfe, with his battalions, stood on the plains of Abraham. When the news was carried to Montcalm, he said, ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... wrote in the far-off days when it was the abode of fashion,—the 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 ...
— The Mystery of Murray Davenport - A Story of New York at the Present Day • Robert Neilson Stephens
... what he was told, and he caved in at once and obeyed the policeman's orders, that worse might not overtake him. So he sat tight and waited, and then Teddy Pegram and his dog and his air-gun crept out of the woods with a load of ten birds. They roosted in the spruce firs, you understand, and 'twas as easy to slay them as blackbeetles, for Teddy's eyes, helped by the moon, marked 'em above ...
— The Torch and Other Tales • Eden Phillpotts
... a pile of calico. A little further up the street and near the one tall-spired white church Mrs. Mears, the village gossip, may be sitting on the veranda of a small house almost hid by luxuriantly growing Norway spruce, and idly rocking while she chats with the widow Sloper, who lives there, and whose mission in life is to cut and fit the best "go to meetin'" gowns of female Sandgate. Both dearly love to talk over all that's going on, and whether this or that village swain is paying especial attention ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... bit muggerishlike— A ragtag hipplety-clinch: but I've been travelling Mischancy roads; and I'm fair muggert-up. Yet, why should that stagnate you? Where's the sense Of expecting a mislucket man like me To be as snod and spruce as a young shaver? But I'm all right: there's naught amiss with Jim, Except too much of nothing in his belly. A good square meal, and a pipe, and a decent night's rest, And I'll be fit as a fiddle. I've hardly slept ... Well, now I'm home, ...
— Krindlesyke • Wilfrid Wilson Gibson
... among the men the smoke was creepin' out between the lids of the hatch. We ripped that off and began diggin' up the cargo—crates of chairs, rolls of mattin', some spruce scantling—runnin' the nozzle of the hose down as far as we could get it. There were no water-tight compartments which we could have flooded in those days as there are now, or we could have smothered it first off. What we had to do was to fight it inch ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith
... caused the estate to be confiscated, and sold as national property; but the baronial castle is now standing, and displays, in two of its towers, and in a chimney of unusual form, a portion of its ancient character. The rest of the building is modernized into a spruce, comfortable residence, which, in 1818, was occupied by an English general ...
— Architectural Antiquities of Normandy • John Sell Cotman
... have passed, and their trail is still fresh in the snow. There are many of them, and our wigwam will again be full of fat venison. Hist, yonder they are; they will see us if we do not move with great caution. You take the circuit round that clump of spruce to the right, and I will keep ...
— The American Family Robinson - or, The Adventures of a Family lost in the Great Desert of the West • D. W. Belisle
... 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 ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... the dying fire, 5 Watching the spruce boughs glow and pale, I heard outside a tumult dire, And the fierce ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... branches brushed into the carriage as we passed along, and left us with that pleasant woody smell belonging to leaves. One of the ladies, catching a bit of green from one of these intruding branches, said it was cedar, and another thought it spruce. ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... birches, Gordonia, {83c} Michelias, etc, most of them species hitherto unnoticed by botanists; but some exactly the same as in Europe, such as the yew, holly, hornbeam, walnut, Weymouth pine, (Pinus strobus, W.) and common spruce fir, (Pinus picea, W.) As, however, the greater part are of little value, from the inaccessible nature of the country, I shall only particularize a ...
— An Account of The Kingdom of Nepal • Fancis Buchanan Hamilton
... all, the thing you had under your coat was a saw. I saw you hide something under the woodpile here, but I'm so dumb that I didn't think much of it at the time. Now, the log over the gully was a spruce log, wasn't it?" ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys as Sergeants - or, Handling Their First Real Commands • H. Irving Hancock
... miles distant. In Yalbury Bottom, or Plain, at the foot of the hill, he listened. At first nothing, beyond his own heart-throbs, was to be heard but the slow wind making its moan among the masses of spruce and larch of Yalbury Wood which clothed the heights on either hand; but presently there came the sound of light wheels whetting their felloes against the newly stoned patches of road, accompanied by the ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... "you empty it before breaking camp, and in the evening fill it again. Plenty of hemlock or spruce handy, whenever you choose to stretch out your hand ...
— The Boy Scouts of Lenox - Or The Hike Over Big Bear Mountain • Frank V. Webster
... right about her own house. Two coats of paint outside gave it a decidedly spruce appearance, while, inside, that lady's vision as to its capabilities had been more than realized. The blending of roughness and luxury, of camp and home characteristics, gave the large central apartment a quaintness that had real charm ...
— Sara, a Princess • Fannie E. Newberry
... came out of a mine, looked about him, inhaled the odor from the stunted spruce trees, looked up at the clear skies, then called to a boy idling in a shed at a little distance from the mine buildings, telling him to bring out the horse and buckboard. The name of the man who had issued from the mine was Julius Corbett, and he was a civil engineer. ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... Captain Cook. Chart of the Southern Hernifphere, showing Captain Cook's tracks, and those of some of the most distinguished navigators. Port Praya, in the Island of St. Jago, one of the Cape de Verds. View of the Ice-Islands. New Zealand spruce. Family in Dusky-Bay, New Zealand. Sketch of Dusky Bay, New Zealand. Flax plant of New Zealand. Poi Bird of New Zealand. Tea Plant of New Zealand. Van Diemen's Land. Otoo King of Otaheite. Plant used at Otaheite to catch fish by intoxicating them. Potatow, Chief of Attahourou, in ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World, Volume 1 • James Cook
... German oak, those of the lower deck and half-deck of pitch-pine and Norwegian fir. All the deck planks are of Norwegian fir, 4 inches in the main-deck and 3 inches elsewhere. The beams are fastened to the ship's sides by knees of Norwegian spruce, of which about 450 were used. Wooden knees were, as a rule, preferred to iron ones, as they are more elastic. A good many iron knees were used, however, where wood was less suitable. In the boiler and engine room the beams of the lower ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... dishes, knives, forks, spoons, and other essentials. About nine o'clock she was driven over to the home, where, with a certain amount of trepidation, the expectant family were awaiting her coming. They had been at work very early and never did a floor made of well-planed spruce boards shine whiter. For hours it had been scrubbed; an unlimited amount of elbow-grease aided by some soft soap made out of strong lye and the grease of a fat dog, had done the work most completely. The faces of the children showed ...
— On the Indian Trail - Stories of Missionary Work among Cree and Salteaux Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young
... I was thru with my trubbel with wimmin's warin apparel for one day, so I started hum. I'd ony got to the corner of Spruce street, wen a grate strappin perliceman cum up to me, and clappin me on the shoulder, sed: "I've got you, sunny, this time; cum along, now, or I'll be after makin you." I seen discreshun was the better part of valler, so I let him leed me. Wen we got to the stashun he preferred ...
— The Bad Boy At Home - And His Experiences In Trying To Become An Editor - 1885 • Walter T. Gray |
