"Thatch" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to Crochallan came; The old cock'd hat, the grey surtout the same; His bristling beard just rising in its might, 'Twas four long nights and days to shaving night: His uncomb'd grizzly locks, wild staring, thatch'd A head for thought profound and clear, unmatch'd; Yet tho' his caustic wit was biting-rude, His heart was ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... efore her th' owd mare, so that aw my stock be gone. Waes me! waes me! Nowt prospers wi' me. My poor dame is besoide hersel, an' th' chilter seems possessed. Ey ha' tried every remedy, boh without success. Ey ha' followed th' owd witch whoam, plucked a hontle o' thatch fro' her roof, sprinklet it wi' sawt an weter, burnt it an' buried th' ess at th' change o' t' moon. No use, mesters. Then again, ey ha' getten a horseshoe, heated it redhot, quenched it i' brine, an' nailed it to t' threshold wi' three nails, heel uppard. No more use nor t'other. Then ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... shifting under the thatch of his heavy brows; he was like an old rat seeking for any hole of refuge. "Well—maybe I might. Anyhow, I'll go on—with ye. Kin I sit up? I 'm ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... the same place of concealment, which was mostly, as we have said, under ground. The tobacco was weighed and subdivided into small quantities, which, in addition to what he carried in his pocket, were distributed in various crevices and crannies of the house; sometimes under the thatch; sometimes under a dish on the dresser, but generally in ...
— Phil Purcel, The Pig-Driver; The Geography Of An Irish Oath; The Lianhan Shee • William Carleton
... the doorpost, was gazing with ferocious solemnity at the open clothes-press in which some hanging dresses appeared like women standing. He smoothed his red beard and thrust his cap far back on his thatch of ...
— The Fifth Queen • Ford Madox Ford
... Romulus for perpetrated crimes A sacred refuge made; with this, the shrine Where Pan below the rock had rites divine: Then tells of Argus' death, his murder'd guest, Whose grave and tomb his innocence attest. Thence, to the steep Tarpeian rock he leads; Now roof'd with gold, then thatch'd with homely reeds. A reverent fear (such superstition reigns Among the rude) ev'n then possess'd the swains. Some god, they knew- what god, they could not tell- Did there amidst the sacred horror dwell. Th' Arcadians thought him Jove; and said they saw The mighty Thund'rer with majestic ...
— The Aeneid • Virgil
... Woman! a she hell-cat, a witch! To prove her one, we no sooner set fire on the thatch of her house, but in she came running, as if the devil had sent her in ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... writings on the Trinity were condemned, and he took refuge at Nogent-sur-Seine, near Troyes, under the patronage of the Count of Champagne. He retired to a hermitage of thatch and reeds, the famous Paraclete, but even there students flocked to him, and young nobles were glad to live on coarse bread and lie on straw, that they might taste of wisdom, the bread of the angels. Again his enemies set upon him; he surrendered the Paraclete to Heloise ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... a book of ringing Irish ballads that will stir the heart of every lover of true poetry. "Here and there a verse may be as frankly unadorned as the peasant cabins themselves in their homely cloaks of thatch, but every line rings true to life and home and with the tone, as heartmoving as the Angelus which holds Millet's peasants in its spell," from ...
— A Beautiful Alien • Julia Magruder
... it may be a mere shed. There are also regular log-cabins encountered with locked corners, especially among the southern Tarahumares. Finally, when a Tarahumare becomes civilised, he builds himself a house of stone and mud, with a roof of boards, or thatch, or earth. ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... was better skilled in chemistry, knew how to manufacture gunpowder, that the Spaniard destroyed the Aztec. May not we, who are possessing ourselves of the world and its resources, and gathering to ourselves all its knowledge, may not we nip the Slav ere he grows a thatch to ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... captain, hardly articulating from under his thick, sandy-coloured moustache, which, growing downwards from his nose, looked like a heavy thatch put on to protect his mouth from the inclemency of the clouds above. 'A doosed sight,' ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... Elijah had two feathered tenants, a pair of white owls—the birds he so much resembled. They occupied a small garret at the end of his bedroom, having access to it through a hole under the thatch. They bred there in peace, and on summer evenings one of the common sights of the village was Elijah's owls flying from the house behind the evergreens and returning to it with mice in their talons. At such seasons the threat to the unruly children would be varied to "Old Elijah's ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... sense, he was so full of wiles and cunning that he was the Ulysses of the five, and as such his fame had spread along the whole border, and among the Indian tribes. Hidden perhaps by his lazy manner, but underneath that yellow thatch of his the shiftless one was a thinker, a deep thinker, and a nobler thinker than the one who sat before Troy town, because his thoughts were to ...
— The Keepers of the Trail - A Story of the Great Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... more frost that winter. A fortnight passed before the place looked itself again, and even then congealed snow stood doggedly in the streets, while the country roads were like newly ploughed fields after rain. The heat from large fires soon penetrated through roofs of slate and thatch; and it was quite a common thing for a man to be flattened to the ground by a slithering of snow from above just as he opened his door. But it had seldom more than ten feet to fall. Most interesting of all was the novel sensation experienced as Thrums began ...
— Auld Licht Idyls • J.M. Barrie
... where Alice and her lover had so often loitered hand in hand, a gay party of children and young people were assembled. The cottage had been purchased by an opulent and retired manufacturer. He had raised the low thatched roof another story high—and blue slate had replaced the thatch—and the pretty verandahs overgrown with creepers had been taken down because Mrs. Hobbs thought they gave the rooms a dull look; and the little rustic doorway had been replaced by four Ionic pillars in stucco; and a new dining-room, twenty-two feet by ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Jasper, confidently. "'Ain't got room fer one under his yaller thatch. You wait till you set your lamps on him once before you go to gettin' excited. Why, he ain't one-two-three with our missionary! Gosh! I wish he'd come back an' see ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... grandmother first heard the cries of the villagers: "Fire them, let them both burn together." Franconnette rushed to the door and pleaded for mercy. "Go back," cried the crowd, "you must both roast together." They set fire to the rick outside and then proceeded to fire the thatch of the cottage. "Hold, hold!" cried a stern voice, and Pascal rushed in amongst them. "Cowards! would you murder two defenceless women? Tigers that you are, would you fire and burn ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... the fields, even a hovel may have a certain grace derived from the pure air, the verdure, the open country—a hill, a serpentine road, vineyards, quickset hedges, moss-grown thatch and rural implements; but poverty in Paris gains dignity only by horror. Though recently built, this house seemed ready to fall into ruins. None of its materials had found a legitimate use; they had been collected from the various demolitions which are going on ...
— Colonel Chabert • Honore de Balzac
... deer, and on the next day secured more game, which they cured, concluding now that they had enough to last them indefinitely. Will and the Little Giant, meanwhile, had been working on the house, and Boyd, his hunting over, joined them. The cured skins of the animals were put over the leaf thatch of the floor as they had planned, and as they procured them they intended to hang more on the walls, for the sake ...
— The Great Sioux Trail - A Story of Mountain and Plain • Joseph Altsheler
... timbers of our dwellings. They were held in place by weaving in, basket-wise, a network of briers and vines. Tufts of the long leaves which are the distinguishing characteristic of the Georgia pine (popularly known as the "long-leaved pine") were wrought into this network until a thatch was formed, that was a fair protection against the rain—it was like the Irishman's unglazed window-sash, which "kep' out the ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... only the thatch would burn. For, before the baths were tessellated, I filled the area with alum and water, and soaked the timbers and laths for many months, and covered them afterward with alum in powder, by means of liquid glue. Mithridates taught ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... under his roof of thatch, Smoked thoughtfully and slow; The Slaver's thumb was on the latch, He ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... must be abandoned, but he would take a further revenge upon its owner. He ran quickly to a fire which burned dimly in Challoner's cooking-house, lit a bunch of dried palm leaves, and thrust it into the thatch of the dwelling-house. Then ...
— The Brothers-In-Law: A Tale Of The Equatorial Islands; and The Brass Gun Of The Buccaneers - 1901 • Louis Becke
... one-half. But they are still terrible. Not a breath of wind stirs the air at that season, for the collector cannot choose his time. The boxes are piled on deck; even the pitiless sunshine is not so deadly as the stewing heat below. He has a store of blankets to cover them, on which he lays a thatch of palm-leaves, and all day long he souses the pile with water; but too well the poor fellow knows that mischief is busy down below. Another anxiety possesses him too. It may very well be that on arrival at Savanilla he ...
— About Orchids - A Chat • Frederick Boyle
... considerable extent of ground, they have a very imposing effect, unlike any inhabited by persons of the same rank in England. But close even to the palaces of the most wealthy are to be seen wretched mud huts; and rows of native hovels, constructed of mats, thatch, and bamboos, often rest against their outer walls, while there are avenues opening from the principal streets, intersected in all directions by native bazaars, filled with unsightly articles ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston
... farms of southern France, trimmed neatly by the inch, swept past her. In Brittany came melancholy stretches of brown heath and rain-beaten hills; or great affluent estates, the Manor houses covered with thatch, stagnant pools close to the doors, the cattle breaking through ...
— Frances Waldeaux • Rebecca Harding Davis
... 170 Moscow! thou limit of his long career, For which rude Charles had wept his frozen tear[286] To see in vain—he saw thee—how? with spire And palace fuel to one common fire. To this the soldier lent his kindling match, To this the peasant gave his cottage thatch, To this the merchant flung his hoarded store, The prince his hall—and Moscow was no more! Sublimest of volcanoes! Etna's flame Pales before thine, and quenchless Hecla's tame; 180 Vesuvius shows his blaze,[287] an usual ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... gratitude, but rather the recognition of a certain admiration and awe which she inspires in your Excellency's foolish old servant. She has taken up her abode in a deserted hut, built of dried reeds and thatch, such as they keep cows in, among the olives on the cliffs. She was not there, but about the hut pecked some white pigeons, and from it, startling me foolishly with its unexpected sound, came the eerie bleat of her pet goat.... Among the olives it was twilight ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... walls of a nullah, stretched On naked stones, our Lord spied, as he passed, A starving tigress. Hunger in her orbs Glared with green flame; her dry tongue lolled a span Beyond the gasping jaws and shrivelled jowl; Her painted hide hung wrinkled on her ribs, As when between the rafters sinks a thatch Rotten with rains; and at the poor lean dugs Two cubs, whining with famine, tugged and sucked, Mumbling those milkless teats which rendered nought, While she, their gaunt dam, licked full motherly The clamorous twins, yielding her flank to them With moaning throat, and love stronger ...
— The Light of Asia • Sir Edwin Arnold
... give the Arabs no small amount of trouble to fish them out again. The place was next set on fire in every direction, when the party, each man carrying such booty as he had managed to pick up, left the fort to the destruction awaiting it. The flames spread amid the wooden and thatch-roof buildings, till the surrounding stockades caught fire, and the whole hornets' nest ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... "what here in this strange place? No, that I shall not, I can tell you. I never slept from under the thatch of my father's cottage in my life, but once, and that was at the wedding of my dear, obliging Rovena. But perhaps," added she, "my father and mother will come to me here. So I will even try and be compilable, for I never was obstinate. But indeed ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... Art, in establishing instruments for human life beyond the human body, and moulding outer things into sympathy with inner values, establishes a ground whence values may continually spring up; the thatch that protects from to-day's rain will last and keep out to-morrow's rain also; the sign that once expresses an idea will serve ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... being only a deep hole in the ground, by which meanes, they easily make a passage out from the bottom of it, to carry away all the water, which, if it should remain stagnating therein, would melt the Ice and Snow: but they thatch it with straw, in the shape of a Saucepan-cover, that the rain may not come at it. The sides (supposing it dry) they line not with any thing, as is done in St. Jeames's Park, by reason of the moistness of the ground. This Pit they fill {140} full of Snow or Ice (taking care that ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various
... chance might give her "a sight o' the squire afore he wint out, or afore he wint in;" and after spending her entire day in this idle way, at last the squire made his appearance, and Judy presented her son, who kept scraping his foot, and pulling his forelock, that stuck out like a piece of ragged thatch from his forehead, making his obeisance to the squire, while his mother was sounding his praises for being the "handiest craythur alive—and so ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover
... hombre and his beautiful senora, that they may soon have a hut to shelter them from the rains. It is not good to see so gentle a woman endure hardship within my boundary. Many tules, they will need," he added after a minute, "and it is unlikely that the Senor Seem'son understands the making of a thatch. Diego and Juan are skillful; and the tules they lay upon a roof will let no drop of rain fall within the room. ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... lamp was to be seen; nor in the whole street; nor in the whole town, so far as eye could reach. The house to the right was a roof rather than a house; nothing could be more mean. The walls were of mud, the roof was of straw, and there was more thatch than wall. A large nettle, springing from the bottom of the wall, reached the roof. The hovel had but one door, which was like that of a dog-kennel; and a window, which was but a hole. All was shut up. At the side an inhabited pig-sty told that ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... village, between low wooded hills, with a canal passing through it. Old Japanese cottages, dingy, neutral-tinted, with roofs of thatch, very steeply sloping, above their wooden walls and paper shoji. Green patches on all the roof-slopes, some sort of grass; and on the very summits, on the ridges, luxurious growths of yaneshobu, [1] the roof-plant, bearing pretty ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... a long, low building, with a narrow paving in front from end to end, of stones cast up by the plough. Its walls, but one story high, rough-cast and white-washed, shone dim in the twilight. Under a thick projecting thatch the door stood wide open, and from the kitchen, whose door was also open, came the light of a peat-fire and a fish-oil-lamp. Throughout the summer Steenie was seldom in the house an hour of the twenty-four, ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... trees in the west, The sunset round it glowing, A cottage lies like bird on nest, With thatch roof hardly showing. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... took the bungalow. Unless you knew how Indian bungalows were built you would never have suspected that above the cloth lay the dark three-cornered cavern of the roof, where the beams and the underside of the thatch harboured all manner of rats, bats, ants, ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... and commenced operations by lashing a pole across two trees at about his own height; the others cut sticks and shrubs for roofing. Three young saplings sloped back to the ground as principal rafters, and on these were laid a thatch of brushwood; the open ends of the hut were ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... backbrand in, The green logs steam and spit; The half-awakened sparrows flit From the riddled thatch; and owls begin To ...
— Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... poison, make use of the venom of snakes on the tips of their arrows. The heads of those serpents, from which they extract this deadly substance, are exposed on the sticks, which are thrust into the inside of the thatch of their dwellings as ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... neither dish, nor cup, nor plate, nor even the iron pot in which all the cookery of the Irish cottiers' menage is usually carried on. Beneath his feet was the damp earthen floor, and around him were damp, cracked walls, and over his head was the old lumpy thatch, through which the water was already dropping; but inside was to be seen none of those articles of daily use which are usually to be found in the houses ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... not one of those trim, modern park-lodges, all angles and peaks, which one sees everywhere now-a-days, but a low cottage, with a very thick, wig-like thatch, into which rose two astonished eyebrows over the stare of two half-awake dormer-windows. On the front of it were young leaves and old hips enough to show that in summer it must ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... your proneness to domestication, For he dwells in man's barn, and I build in man's thatch, As we say to each other—but, to our vexation, O'er your safety ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... the broken meats before thou makest a feast. If there should follow a thousand swords to carry my bones away, Belike the price of a jackal's meal were more than a thief could pay. They will feed their horse on the standing crop, their men on the garnered grain, The thatch of the byres will serve their fires when all the cattle are slain. But if thou thinkest the price be fair, — thy brethren wait to sup, The hound is kin to the jackal-spawn, — howl, dog, and call them up! And if thou thinkest the price be high, in ...
— Verses 1889-1896 • Rudyard Kipling
... occupied by a dozen of the plumed warriors who had now snatched up emblazoned shield and polished spear; and stood rigidly at attention. Women of all ages crouched and squatted against the fence and the sides of a large wattle and thatch building. ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al
... so impregnable or so vulgar, but a summer's grass will attempt it. It will try to persuade the yellow brick, to win the purple slate, to reconcile stucco. Outside the authority of the suburbs it has put a luminous touch everywhere. The thatch of cottages has given it an opportunity. It has perched and alighted in showers and flocks. It has crept and crawled, and stolen its hour. It has made haste between the ruts of cart wheels, so they were not too frequent. It has been stealthy ...
— The Colour of Life • Alice Meynell
... a rich man, Or if ever I grow to be old, I will build a house with deep thatch To shelter me from the cold, And there shall the Sussex songs be sung And ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... Christy Mahon. Wait till you lay eyes on her leaky thatch is growing more pasture for her buck goat than her square of fields, and she without a tramp itself to keep in order her place ...
— The Playboy of the Western World • J. M. Synge
... of night peace brooded over the distracted city and the Cyprian stars looked down on the old, sweet story of mother and child—as closely clasped beneath the gilded roof of the royal palace as under the thatch of a peasant shed—smiling, forgetful of the days of anguish that ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... burn any more candles, but mould some; do not paint any more windows, but mend a few where the wind comes in, in winter time, with substantial clear glass and putty. Do not vault any more high roofs, but thatch some low ones; and embroider rather on backs which are turned to the cold, than only on those which are turned to congregations. And you will have your reward afterwards, and attain, with all your flocks thus tended, to a place ...
— Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne - Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work • John Ruskin
... bit the dust I know not, but others always supplied the places of those who fell. Hundreds of balls whistled by our ears and flattened themselves on the stone walls; the plaster was broken from the walls, and the thatch hung from the rafters, and as I turned for the twentieth time to fire, my musket dropped from my hand; I stooped to lift it, but I fell too: I had received a shot in the left shoulder and the blood ...
— The Conscript - A Story of the French war of 1813 • Emile Erckmann
... to the ground. And all the while the horn was a honkin', and Billings was a screechin', and the sand was a flyin'. Sand! Why, say! Do you see that extra bald place on the back of my head? Yes? Well, there was a two-inch thatch of hair there afore ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... species of plantain from which the wine of the country is drawn, and mwani, the wild plant which supplies a substitute for coffee. A collection of some fifty or more circular huts, covered with a flowering thatch, constituted the capital ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... had indeed been slight. One peasant had the reeds and thatch of his low-hanging roof a little singed. In another house the side of bacon left from last winter's pig and still hanging from the beam under the roof had been made to sizzle a bit. At a third, the brushwood that children ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... been part of the Bog itself, there stood—there stands still—a short, square tower, battlemented at top, and surmounted with a pointed roof, which seems to grow out of a cluster of farm-buildings, so surrounded is its base by roofs of thatch and slates. Incongruous, vulgar, and ugly in every way, the old keep appears to look down on them—time-worn and battered as it is—as might a reduced gentleman regard the unworthy associates with which an ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... are built of unburnt clay which hardens in the sun, covered with a beautiful thatch-long, peculiar grass—exhibiting only the walls to the streets, the doors all opening inside of these walls, which are entered by a gate or large doorway; the streets generally irregular and narrow, but frequently agreeably relieved by wider ones, or large, open spaces or ...
— Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party • Martin Robinson Delany
... This pilot was a tall, raw—boned subject, about six feet or so, with a blue face—I could not call it red—and a hawk's—bill nose of the colour of bronze. His head was defended from the weather by what is technically called a south—west, pronounced sow—west,—cap, which is in shape like the thatch of a dustman, composed of canvass, well tarred, with no snout, but having a long flap hanging down the back to carry the rain over the cape of the jacket. His chin was embedded in a red comforter that rose to his ears. His trunk was first of all cased in a shirt of worsted ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... the thatch roofs of those queer little huts—it makes me think of peaked Robinson Crusoe hats. Just see how they're pulled far down over the sun-burnt wall as if to shade their eyes from the ...
— Under the Southern Cross • Elizabeth Robins
... one, intercede for me," pleaded Bakuma, "for more have I none, I, Bakuma, daughter of Bakala, a girl of the hut thatch." ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... resides in it. He is a gentile, and is called Raheni.[203] He has in this place very large and handsome palaces, with numerous courts.... There are also in this city many other palaces of great lords, who live there. And all the other houses of the place are covered with thatch, and the streets and squares are very wide. They are constantly filled with an innumerable crowd of all nations and creeds.... There is an infinite trade in this city.... In this city there are many jewels which are brought from Pegu and ...
— A Forgotten Empire: Vijayanagar; A Contribution to the History of India • Robert Sewell
... last he laid the longest boughs in a row against the side of the fallen tree. This left a little place beneath their slope into which it was possible to creep. Archie smiled with satisfaction, and proceeded to thatch the sloping roof with moss and bits of bark. Then he grubbed up the green cushion and transferred it bodily to ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... stream of fluid behind it as it went spinning down to earth. All that stream of inflammable stuff was aflame. The can itself struck earth and seemed to explode, and the trailing mass of fire was borne onward by the wind and lay across a row of thatch-roofed buildings. An incredible sheet of fire spread out. The stuff in ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... ground, at the rate, I suppose, of a pint of water in a minute. The ferns grew immensely thick there; but someone had thinned out a few of the roots from the ground, leaving the uprooted plant with the ferns still living, to form a rough kind of thatch above a piece of earth big enough for a man's body. In the scented shade of this thatch, with the side of his face turned towards me, a big, rough, bearded man sat, filing away some bright steel ...
— Martin Hyde, The Duke's Messenger • John Masefield
... baldness is creeping insidiously up each side of my head. It is executing flank movements from the temples northward, and some day the two columns will meet and after that I'll be considerably more of a highbrow than I am now. At present I am craftily combing the remaining thatch in the middle and smoothing it out nice and flat, so as to keep those bare spots covered—thinly perhaps, but nevertheless covered. It is my earnest desire to continue to keep them covered. I am not a professional beauty; I am not even ...
— Cobb's Anatomy • Irvin S. Cobb
... massive bole of a breadfruit, a house had come into being. It was not much larger than a big hen-house, but quite sufficient for the needs of two people in a climate of eternal summer. It was built of bamboos, and thatched with a double thatch of palmetto leaves, so neatly built, and so well thatched, that one might have fancied it the production of several ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... old man owned a large rambling Mansion. The pillars were rotten, the galleries tumbling down, the thatch dry and combustible, and there was only one door. Suddenly, one day, there was a smell of fire: the old man rushed out. To his horror he saw that the thatch was aflame, the rotten pillars were catching fire one by one, ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... of clay, and one or two of stone, which were more like cottages. Hardly one had a window two feet square, and many of their windows had no glass. In almost all of them the only chimney was little more than a hole in the middle of the thatch. This rendered the absence of glass in the windows not so objectionable; for, left without ordered path to its outlet, the smoke preferred a circuitous route, and lingered by the way, filling the air. Peat-smoke, however, is both wholesome ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... fly, and next a bright yellow wasp who was telling a friend flying behind him that he knew where there was such a capital piece of wood to bite up into tiny pieces and make into paper for the nest in the thatch, but his friend wanted to go to the house because there was a pear quite ripe there on the wall. Next came a moth, and after the moth a golden fly, and three gnats, and a mouse ran along the dry ground with a curious sniffling ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... to reach the house of Little Black Fox, and this he came to at last. It was a large building; next to the Mission and Agency it was by far the largest house on the Reservation. It was built of logs and thatch and plaster, and backed into a thick clump of shady maple trees. The son was more lavish than the father. Big Wolf had always been content to live in a tepee. He was an older type of chief. The son moved with the times ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... but a number of populous cities, and several hundred thriving agricultural villages. Every foot of land which can be seen from the railroad is cultivated by the most careful spade husbandry, and much of it is irrigated for rice. Streams abound, and villages of grey wooden houses with grey thatch, and grey temples with strangely curved roofs, are scattered thickly over the landscape. It is all homelike, liveable, and pretty, the country of an industrious people, for not a weed is to be seen, but no very striking features or peculiarities arrest one at first ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... a long low cottage with a hipped roof of thatch, having dormer windows breaking up into the eaves, a chimney standing in the middle of the ridge and another at each end. The window-shutters were not yet closed, and the fire- and candle-light within radiated forth upon the thick bushes of box and laurestinus growing ...
— Under the Greenwood Tree • Thomas Hardy
... party cycled to the little wattle-and-thatch Court House at Ikotobong, Miss Slessor being pushed by Dan up the hills. She took her seat at the table in the simplest possible attire. Before her was a tin of toffee, her only refreshment, with the exception of a cup of tea, during a long sitting. The jury, composed of the older and ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... people say 'home,' it's Whitecroft I think of, with its narrow windows and thatch roof and the farm-buildings about it, and the bits of trees all bent one way with the wind from ...
— In Homespun • Edith Nesbit
... During her impurity the wife is fed by her husband apart from the rest of the family, and whenever she has to quit the house she is obliged to creep out on her hands and knees in order not to defile the thatch by her touch.[213] The Kharwars, another aboriginal tribe of the same district, keep their women at such seasons in the outer verandah of the house for eight days, and will not let them enter the kitchen or the cowhouse; during this time the unclean woman may not cook nor even ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... perfumery; the green nut affords a delicious beverage to the thirsty traveler; the fibrous covering of the nut is readily converted into strong and durable cordage, and the polished shells into drinking-cups, ladles and spoons; the leaves are frequently used for thatch, the wood for lathing and musical instruments, and the sap for toddy, an intoxicating drink very common in the East. The tree is graceful and pretty, with a tuft of large pinnated leaves at the top, and nestled cosily in their midst are the clusters ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... Newville, very different; for instance, in London, and in almost all our towns, the houses are mostly brick, with tiles or thatch; but here, they are built of wood, covered with shingles. Your churches are meetinghouses. Queer ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin
... cottage-door it was a cow-path. A natural spring of soft and pleasant water—a rare treasure on the sea-girt peninsula where the Puritan settlement was made—had early induced Matthew Maule to build a hut, shaggy with thatch, at this point, although somewhat too remote from what was then the centre of the village. In the growth of the town, however, after some thirty or forty years, the site covered by this rude hovel had become exceedingly ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... wavering ghost moving in the vapour on the face of the deep. I can hear the far-off murmur of the sea. It is like the humming in a big shell. A bird is singing in the garden and the swallows are twittering in a nest under the thatch. A mist is lying over the meadows, and the tree tops seem to be floating between the earth ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... roof until they rested on the spot directly over his head, where they became fixed, and, at the same time, opened out to a glare, compared to which all his previous glaring was as nothing—for there, in the thatch, looking down upon him, was the angular head of a huge python. The snake was rolled up in a tight coil, and had evidently spent the night within a yard of the professor's head! Being unable to make out what sort of snake ...
— Blown to Bits - The Lonely Man of Rakata, the Malay Archipelago • R.M. Ballantyne
... he was crushed and broken, and pierced in many places with splinters and jagged broken ends of wood. But he had his senses still, and smiled as they cleared the thatch from above his face. ...
— Vrouw Grobelaar and Her Leading Cases - Seventeen Short Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... mentioned before: They are all built in the wood, between the sea and the mountains, and no more ground is cleared for each house, than just sufficient to prevent the dropping of the branches from rotting the thatch with which they are covered; from the house, therefore, the inhabitant steps immediately under the shade, which is the most delightful that can be imagined. It consists of groves of bread-fruit and cocoa-nuts, without underwood, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... But to show a light from the coast meant a hundred pounds fine or twelve months' hard labour. The King slewed round in his chair and looked at the great pile of shavings in the fireplace. A hundred pounds fine with the chance of burning the house-thatch ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... that," said Bunting slowly. "Regular right-down queer. Leetle touched, you know, under the thatch," and, as he tapped his head significantly, both young people burst ...
— The Lodger • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... allowed the negroes to cultivate their crops, and give them a chance to manufacture mats for beds, bark-ropes, wicker- chairs and baskets, earthen jars, pans, and that kind of thing. The huts themselves were primitive to a degree, the floor being earth, the roof, of palm-thatch or the leaves of the cocoa-nut tree, the sides hard-posts driven in the ground and interlaced with wattle and plaster, and inside scarcely high enough for its owner to walk upright. The furniture was scant—a quatre, or bed, made of a platform of boards, with a mat and a blanket, some low stools, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the storm was still raging with unheard-of fury; it swept the palm thatch from many of the houses, and beat the stream with such violence that it was like a surging sea. The full unbroken force of the flood beat again and again on the promontory on which stood the statues of the Imperial couple. Shortly before the first dawn of ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... canted with the wind and flopped about his neck, and would have sailed away down many a mountain brook but for a faithful leather strap that lay buried in the half-moon whiskers and held on for dear life. And from under the rim of this thatch, and half hidden in the matted masses of badly adjusted hair, was a thin, peaked nose, bridged by a pair of big spectacles, and somewhere below these, again, a pitfall of a mouth covered with twigs of hair and an underbrush of beard, while deep-set in the whole tangle, like still ...
— A Gentleman Vagabond and Some Others • F. Hopkinson Smith
... house top-for the house, you must know, was thatched with sods, and a fine crop of grass was growing there. Now their house lay close up against a steep down, and he thought if he laid a plank across to the thatch at the back he'd easily get ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... island. A flirt, and engaged, too, was she? No matter. He wrecked himself with her, and they lived on mussels and edible roots and berries, and some canned stuff from the ship, and he built a hut of "native thatch," and found a deposit of rubies, gathering bushels of them, and he became her affianced the very day the smoke of the rescuing steamer blackened the horizon. And throughout an idyllic union they ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... other three sides by a house and a holly-hedge. The house was the sexton's, who, apprehending the stramash to proceed from a resurrectionary surgeon mistaken in his latitude, thrust out a long duck-gun from a window in the thatch, and swore to blow out our brains if we did not instantly surrender ourselves, and deliver up the corpse. It was in vain to cry out our name, which he knew as well as his own. He was deaf to reason, and would not withdraw his patterero ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... directions by the Paths which go from House to House, so that nothing can be more grateful in a Climate where the sun hath so powerful an influence. They are generally built in form of an Oblong square, the Roofs are supported by 3 Rows of Pillars or posts, and neatly covered with Thatch made of Palm leaves. A middle-siz'd house is about 24 feet by 12, extream heigth about 8 or 9, and heigth of the Eves 3 1/2 or 4. The floors are cover'd some inches deep with Hay, upon which, here and there, lay matts for the conveniency of sitting down; few houses ...
— Captain Cook's Journal During the First Voyage Round the World • James Cook
... having communicated, at length descended from before the altar, to administer the water to such as desired to receive it. Among these, Toussaint bent his head lowest—so low, that the first slanting sunbeam that entered beneath the thatch seemed to rest upon his head, while every other head remained in the shadow of the roof. In after days, the negroes then present recalled this appearance. Jean Francais, observing that General Hermona was making some remark about Toussaint to the officers about him, endeavoured to assume an ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... you,' said the Bat, 'I should go up into the attic where the youngest kitchenmaid sleeps. Feel between the thatch and the wall just above her pillow, and you'll find a little round looking-glass. But come back here before you look ...
— The Magic World • Edith Nesbit
... fragments of richly-carved stone, and Ord, one of the historians of Cleveland, says: 'I have beheld with sorrow, and shame, and indignation, the richly ornamented columns and carved architraves of God's temple supporting the thatch of a pig-house.' ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... sprinkled about: very sleepy, rusty, irregular little places; huts and cattle-stalls huddled down, as if shaken from a bag; much straw, thick thatch and crumbly mud-brick; but looking warm and peaceable, for the Four-footed and the Two-footed; which latter, if you speak to them, are solid reasonable people, with energetic German eyes and hearts, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... become a ruin since I saw it last. The winter's winds had lifted the thatch, and the wall on one side had tumbled in. There was no sign of the old life we lived there. The little window from which the guiding light had shone so often was fallen to pieces. Even the friendly hearth within was ...
— Kilgorman - A Story of Ireland in 1798 • Talbot Baines Reed
... limb of each tree, about four feet from the ground. This was to form the ridge of a lean-to shelter. Poles were now cut and formed into a sloping roof by resting one end upon the ridge pole, the other upon the ground, and the poles covered with a thick thatch of branches to ...
— Troop One of the Labrador • Dillon Wallace
... post standing on a single stone, which is simply laid on the ground, not let into it; the vacancies between the posts and the cross-pieces of framework, are filled up with lath and plaster; and the roof is almost invariably of thatch. They resemble huge stools resting upon stones, to keep the legs from sinking into the earth, and look as if the first breeze would upset them. An earthquake shakes them, and makes them vibrate, but seldom or ever injures them; whereas a brick and mortar ...
— Trade and Travel in the Far East - or Recollections of twenty-one years passed in Java, - Singapore, Australia and China. • G. F. Davidson
... thatch to cover the roofs of the houses, or shelter over their boats. Neatly fastened together with split rattans, they form the walls of the house. From the juice of the tree they make a fermented drink something like sweet beer, also brown sugar. The young shoots are eaten in curries and salads. The fruit ...
— Sketches of Our Life at Sarawak • Harriette McDougall
... down stood a wayside inn; a desolate and villainous-looking lump of lichen-spotted granite, with windows paper-patched, and rotting thatch kept down by stones and straw-banks; and at the back a rambling court-ledge of barns and walls, around which pigs and barefoot children grunted in loving communion of dirt. At the door, rapt apparently in the contemplation of the mountain peaks which ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... and large of his age like his brother. His pale blue eyes were gravely vacant under his thick white thatch; his chin dropped; his mouth gaped with stolid patience. There was no mitigation for his dull task; he was not allowed to keep his vigil on a comfortable branch of a tree with the mossy trunk for a support to his back, lest he might be tempted to eat of the cherries, ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... in the practical head of the gunner. It pushed its way into the upper air under the plain cap of the A.P. It budded under the (slighted tilted) head-dress of Number One, and blossomed forth into a full-blown project under the gilded oak-leaves that thatch the Bloke. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 25, 1919 • Various
... morss the flower-ports Was-I mean were-crusted one and orl; Ther rusted niles fell from the knorts That 'eld the pear to the garden-worll. Ther broken sheds looked sed and stringe; Unlifted was the clinking latch; Weeded and worn their ancient thatch Er-pon ther lownely moated gringe, She only said 'Me life is dreary, 'E ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... the spot and transport to the beach selected for the bivouac. Double rows of these arundos, driven into the sand, formed the partitions of the cabins, for which their interwoven leaves made an appropriate thatch. The green halls with matted vaults were picturesque enough; each peon, seeing how easily they were constructed, chose to have a house for himself; and the Tiger's Beach quickly presented the appearance of a camp disposed in a long straight line, of which the timorous Indians occupied the extremity ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... and, with the exception of the waggon-shed and other outbuildings which were roofed with galvanised iron, that shone and glistened in the rays of the morning sun in a way that would have made an eagle blink, was covered with rich brown thatch. All along its front ran a wide verandah, up the trellis-work of which green vines and blooming creepers trailed pleasantly, and beyond was the broad carriage-drive of red soil, bordered with bushy orange-trees laden with odorous ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... fire, but I knew from the position of the blaze (which was only a few hundred yards from where I stood), that there was no house there, or any combustible that would burn, and what perplexed me most was to see pieces of burning thatch and timber sparks fall hissing into the water at my feet. When the fire seemed at its height the firing appeared to weaken, and when the clear sound of a bugle floated out on the midnight air, it suddenly ceased, and ...
— True Irish Ghost Stories • St John D Seymour
... girls in the wash-house," said Halldis. "All chattering together like starlings on a thatch. All talking at once, and none listening. ...
— Gudrid the Fair - A Tale of the Discovery of America • Maurice Hewlett
... proceeded to stretch a line between two trees; then interlacing the line, on a slant between other trees, he constructed a slight network; upon which, after an excursion amid the surrounding woods, he laid a sort of thatch of boughs. ...
— The Rival Campers Ashore - The Mystery of the Mill • Ruel Perley Smith
... laid on in the same way, the leaves and twigs fitting in so accurately that after a busy two hours they had a strong shed of branches ready for stopping up at one end with thorns and more boughs, while Rob had to climb up the slope and thatch the place with the palm leaves, forming a roof ...
— Rob Harlow's Adventures - A Story of the Grand Chaco • George Manville Fenn
... where night overtook me, was a hamlet of eight or ten houses, some mere stacks of thatch, out of the smoky doorway of which, three feet high, peered the half-naked inmates; others of adobe, large bricks of mud and chopped straw, which could be picked to ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... the red of the tillage is, Green are the pastures, and deep Down in the combes little thatch-covered villages Sleep. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 1st, 1920 • Various
... a priest, who was a sub-lieutenant, out of a wood of snuff-brown shadows and half-veiled trunks. Would it please me to look at a chapel? It was all open to the hillside, most tenderly and devoutly done in rustic work with reedings of peeled branches and panels of moss and thatch—St. Hubert's own shrine. I saw the hunters who passed before it, going to the chase on the far side of the mountain where their ...
— France At War - On the Frontier of Civilization • Rudyard Kipling
... emerged, massively quiet, out of the downward flow of silvery hair, with the striking delicacy of its clear complexion and the powerful width of the forehead. The first cast of his glance fell on you candid and swift, like a boy's; but because of the ragged snowy thatch of the eyebrows the affability of his attention acquired the character of a dark and searching scrutiny. With age he had put on flesh a little, had increased his girth like an old tree presenting no symptoms of decay; and even the opulent, lustrous ripple of white hairs upon his chest ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... had, I was told, been planted only three years ago by Hiraman and Motiram, and I sent for them, knowing that they would be pleased to have their good work noticed by any European gentleman. The trees are now covered with cones of thatch to shelter them from the frost. The merchants came, evidently much pleased, and I had a good deal ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... to expose his soldiers to the violent storms that break out, especially at that season, took up his quarters at Genabum, a town of the Carnutes; and lodged his men in houses, partly belonging to the Gauls, and partly built to shelter the tents, and hastily covered with thatch. But the horse and auxiliaries he sends to all parts to which he was told the enemy had marched; and not without effect, as our men generally returned loaded with booty. The Carnutes, overpowered by the severity of the winter, and the fear of danger, and not daring to continue long ...
— "De Bello Gallico" and Other Commentaries • Caius Julius Caesar
... was only at the head of his own startled and unwilling band of followers that Peter at length sallied forth. Not a word said Peter Rorke until he reached the Clancys' deserted cabin, and with his own hands set fire to the thatch; then falling back a step or two he rubbed ...
— North, South and Over the Sea • M.E. Francis (Mrs. Francis Blundell)
... in addition to the bucks, a lot of women and children there, makin' thatch, cookin', and repairin' the pig-proof fencin'. I stayed a bit, and then came on board again, an' we made snug ...
— The Call Of The South - 1908 • Louis Becke
... The thatch on the roof was as golden, Though dusty the straw was and old, The wind had a peal as of trumpets, Though blowing and barren and cold, The mother's hair was a glory Though loosened and torn, For under the eaves in the ...
— Poems • G.K. Chesterton
... a glance of suspicion at her from under the black thatch of brows that met above his nose and were as ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... season of the year—about August. Having thus discovered a spot on which a number of the sought-for trees grow, he descends, and as rapidly as possible leads his party to it, lest any others on the search should be before them. Huts are now built, roofed with long grass, or the branches of the thatch-palm. His furniture consists of a hammock swung between two posts, and a couple of stones on which his kettle is supported. Stages, on which the axemen stand, are erected round the trees, which are cut down about ten or twelve feet ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... with rhetoric loose, can we check man's brute? Assemblies of men on their legs invoke Excitement for wholesome diversion: there shoot Electrical sparks between their dry thatch And thy waved torch, more to kindle than light. 'Tis instant between you: the trick of a catch (To match a Batrachian croak) Will thump them a frenzy or fun in their veins. Then may it be rather the well-worn joke Thou repeatest, to stop conflagration, and write ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... paragraph of a long, almost incoherent missive must suffice. Even Cranston's lips twitched under the heavy thatch of his moustache as he listened. Even we, who like Mrs. Cranston, must admit it wasn't quite kind in her, no matter how natural, to read it afterward to Agatha Loomis, who, although declining to read, did not quite decline to hear at least a ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... up, they went, and passed a quaint, old, thatch-roofed house. Crazy place to build a house! And the people in it—probably all they could do was to shrug their shoulders in that stupid way when asked ...
— Tom Slade Motorcycle Dispatch Bearer • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... cheese was gone. "A murrain take it!" quoth he. "If I had had this sword, I had had this cheese myself, and now another hath got it!" Also in the smith who took a red-hot iron bar and thrust it into the thatch of his smithy to destroy a colony of wasps, and, of course, burned down the smithy—a story which has done duty in modern days to "point a moral" in the form of a teetotal tract, with a drunken smith in place of ...
— The Book of Noodles - Stories Of Simpletons; Or, Fools And Their Follies • W. A. Clouston
... is her mistake, boy. Let God and our Little Father look to the world. It is none of my work to mend my neighbour's thatch. Why, last winter old Michael was frozen to death in his sleigh in the snowstorm, and his wife and children starved afterwards when the hard times came; but what business was it of mine? I didn't make the world. Let God and the Czar look to it. And then the blight came, and the black plague ...
— Vera - or, The Nihilists • Oscar Wilde
... wall of the garden—a snug comfortable Northumbrian cottage, built of stones roughly dressed with the hammer, and having the windows and doors decorated with huge heavy architraves, or lintels, as they are called, of hewn stone, and its roof covered with broad grey flags, instead of slates, thatch, or tiles. A jargonelle pear-tree at one end of the cottage, a rivulet and flower-plot of a rood in extent in front, and a kitchen-garden behind; a paddock for a cow, and a small field, cultivated with several crops of grain, rather for the benefit of the cottager than ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... little way off the road, and thither, my mother carrying the Little Lady on one arm and holding me by the other, and my father laden with bundles and bandboxes, we proceeded. The cottage was whitewashed, and covered with fresh, thick thatch. In front was the neatest of neat little gardens, surrounded by a well-clipped privet hedge, and the greenest of green gates. Indeed, neatness and order reigned everywhere outside as it did, as I was soon to find, in the interior. The Misses Schank had been expecting us. Three of ...
— Ben Burton - Born and Bred at Sea • W. H. G. Kingston
... ovall, round, And rules Ge'metricall in beards are found. Besides the upper lip's strange variation, Corrected from mutation to mutation; As 'twere from tithing unto tithing sent, Pride gives to Pride continuall punishment. Some (spite their teeth) like thatch'd eves downeward grows, And some growes upwards in despite their nose. Some their mustatioes of such length doe keepe, That very well they may a maunger sweepe: Which in Beere, Ale, or Wine, they drinking plunge, And sucke the liquor up, as 'twere a Spunge; But 'tis a Slovens beastly Pride, ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... Pale yellow thatch on the wheat-ricks becomes a deeper yellow; broad roofs of old red tiles smoulder under it. What can you call it but tawniness?—the earth sunburnt once more at harvest time. Sunburnt and brown—for it deepens into brown. Brown partridges, and pheasants, at a distance brown, their ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... since have made me almost forget all. He sayes there is incomparable fruite there, and that it may be termed the paradise of the world. He says that the spondyles of the backbones of the huge serpents there are used to sit on, as our women sitt upon butts. He taught them to build hovels, and to thatch and wattle. I wish I had a good account of his abode there; he is "fide dignus". I never heard of any man that lived so long among those salvages. A ship then sayling by, a Portughese, he swam to it; and they took him up and made use of ...
— The Natural History of Wiltshire • John Aubrey
... the first horse he met, and rode furiously to the huts at Derncleugh. All was there dark and desolate; and, as he dismounted to make more minute search, he stumbled over fragments of furniture which had been thrown out of the cottages, and the broken wood and thatch which had been pulled down by his orders. At that moment the prophecy, or anathema, of Meg Merrilies fell heavy on his mind. "You have stripped the thatch from seven cottages, see that the roof-tree of your own house stand ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... feed their horse on the standing crop, their men on the garnered grain, 15 The thatch of the byres will serve their fires when all the cattle are slain. But if thou thinkest the price be fair,—thy brethren wait to sup. The hound is kin to the jackal spawn,—howl, dog, and 20 call them up! And if thou thinkest the price be high, in steer and gear and stack, Give me my father's ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... The poorer houses have two rooms, an inner and an outer, both very small (say 6 x 6 feet and 4 x 6 feet respectively, inside measurement), cooking being done in the outer and the inner serving as a sleeping-room. There is no flooring; although the fire is under the roof (grass thatch), no smoke-hole has been thought of, and as there are no window-openings, and the entrance is shut up tight by night and the fire kept up if the weather be cold, the interior is as black as one ...
— The Head Hunters of Northern Luzon From Ifugao to Kalinga • Cornelis De Witt Willcox
... filled with brushwood, fire was set to the hut, and we heard the crackling of the palm thatch, while thick stifling wreaths of white smoke burst in upon ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 472 - Vol. XVII. No. 472., Saturday, January 22, 1831 • Various
... they were, each with a small garden behind it. The two that fronted the west were thatched with golden-coloured straw, and the glass in the little windows was almost as blue as the sky. The two that looked to the east had darker thatch and brown glass windows. The first were for Matty and Nelly, the others for ...
— The Crown of Success • Charlotte Maria Tucker
... its glow. Village after village we passed through, returning the polite salutes of early rising grand-sires who uncovered their grey heads, or wrinkled, pink-faced grandmothers, who waved kerchiefs from gabled windows beneath the thatch and smiled the straight and dry-lipped smile of toothless age as they wished us ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... of heath and gorse but consisted partly of arable cultivated in strips with strict rules of rotation, partly of grazing land and partly of wood and heath. Most people in the village had a right to a strip of arable, to cut firing of brushwood and turf, and rushes for thatch, and to pasture one or more cows, their pigs and their geese. A village cowherd looked after all the animals and brought them back at night. Cobbett in his Cottage Economy (to a new edition of which Chesterton ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... the tints on the thatch too dark, have you not?' as he returned Margaret's to her, and held out his hand for Mr. Lennox's, which was withheld from ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... something hid, In wrappings of wheat-straw winded, and into Sinfiotli's place She cast it all down swiftly; then she covereth up her face And beneath the winter starlight she wended swift away. But her gift do the thralls deem victual, and the thatch on the hall they lay, And depart, they too, to their slumber, now dight was the dwelling ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris
... the darkened room he lay in a deep silence, broken only at intervals by the hurried scampering of lizards darting through the interstices of the dry walls. His uncomprehending eyes were fixed upon the dust-laden thatch of the roof overhead, where droning wasps toiled upon their frail abodes. He lay with the portals of his mind opened wide. Through them, in ceaseless flow, passed two streams which did not mingle. The one, outward ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... some time I might attain this joy—that this book might find shelter beneath roofs of thatch, and that the village girls, as they spin and turn the wheel, humming the while their much-loved verses, of the girl who so loved to make music that while fiddling she lost her geese, or of the orphan, who, fair as the dawn, went to drive ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... my heart. It does not matter whether it means thatched cottage or manor-house, home is home; be it ever so homely, there is no place on earth like it. Green grows the house-leek on the roof forever, and let the moss flourish on the thatch. Sweetly the sparrows chirrup and the swallows twitter around the chosen spot which is my joy and rest. Every bird loves its own nest; the owls think the old ruins the fairest spot under the moon, and the fox is of opinion that his hole ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... and this seems to be the explanation. With the Mali may be classed the Barai, the grower and seller of the pan or betel-vine leaf. This leaf, growing on a kind of creeper, like the vine, in irrigated gardens roofed with thatch for protection from the sun, is very highly prized by the Hindus. It is offered with areca-nut, cloves, cardamom and lime rolled up in a quid to the guests at all social functions. It is endowed by them with great virtues, being supposed to ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... grass, and seeming a mere cart-path, stood a deserted-looking, black and white, timbered cottage, which was half a ruin. Close to it was a dripping spinney, its trees forming a darkling background to the tumble-down house, whose thatch was rotting into holes, and its walls sagging forward perilously. The bit of garden about it was neglected and untidy, here and there windows were broken, and stuffed with pieces of ragged garments. Altogether a sinister and repellent ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... locks wild staring, thatch'd A head for thought profound and clear, unmatch'd: Yet tho' his caustic wit was biting, rude, His heart ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... door of the adjoining room was opened, and little Charlot appeared. He had heard his mother's voice, and came trotting into the apartment in his nightgown to give her a kiss. He was a chubby, pink little urchin, large and strong for his age, with a thatch of curling, straw-colored hair and big blue eyes. Silvine shivered at his sudden appearance, as if the sight of him had recalled to her mind the image of someone else that affected her disagreeably. Did she no ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... bethought him that a few hundred pounds might be raised on his mill. But when he went to look at it, he found "the dam broken, and scarcely a thimbleful of water in the mill-race, and the wheel rotten, and the thatch of the house all gone, and the upper millstone lying flat on the lower one, and a coat of dust and mould over everything." So he made up his mind to borrow a horse and take one more hunt to-morrow and ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... as the Eden Tree—and new as the new-cut tooth— For each man knows ere his lip-thatch grows he is master of Art and Truth; And each man hears as the twilight nears, to the beat of his dying heart, The Devil drum on the darkened pane: "You did it, but was ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... now? She, accustomed to all the luxury that wealth could procure, no longer had any home except a poor thatch-covered hovel, whose walls were not even whitewashed, whose only floor was the earth itself, dusty as the public highway in summer, frozen or ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... are the most obvious things. There are many more; for instance, thatch. The same laying of the straw in the same manner, with the same art, has continued, we may be certain, from a time long before the beginning of history. See how in the Fen Land they thatch with reeds, and how upon the Chalk Downs with straw from the Lowlands. ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... principal subjects of his art. He learned to observe these things as a matter of business and at his father's command; thus we may say that he studied his life-work from his very infancy. All about him were beautiful hedgerows, picturesque cottages with high pitched roofs covered with thatch, and it was these beauties which bred one other great landscape painter besides Constable, of whom we ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon |
